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  • Pulitzers rejects Trump demand to revoke WaPo, NYT awards

    The Pulitzer Prize board on Monday rejected requests from former President Trump to revoke national reporting awards given to The Washington Post and The New York Times.

    Trump had repeatedly asked the board to rescind the 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting, which were awarded to the staffs of the two outlets for their reporting examining Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

    The Pulitzer board commissioned a review of the winning works, but found no reason to pull back the awards.

    “The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes,” the board said in a statement.

    “The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand,” the statement continued.


    The board said the review followed an established, formal process to review complaints against winning entries.

    Trump has pressed for the Pulitzers to be revoked since October, labeling the winning stories “totally incorrect reporting” that “have become worthless and meaningless.”

    The board said the requests from Trump and others, who they did not name, prompted the reviews, which were conducted by individuals with no connection to the two papers or each other.

    The former president has repeatedly lambasted reporting of Russian interference in the 2016 election as a hoax, writing to the board in May that the outlets’ winning work was “a distortion of fact and a personal defamation.”

    Trump also said at the time he would file litigation if the board did not “do the right thing on its own.”

    The Hill has reached out to a Trump spokesperson for comment.
    ____________

    lol such a fucking crybaby loser
    “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

    Comment


    • Russia probe memo wrongly withheld under Barr, court rules
      The Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr improperly withheld portions of an internal memo Barr cited in announcing that then-President Donald Trump had not obstructed justice in the Russia investigation, a federal appeals panel said Friday.

      The department had argued that the 2019 memo represented private deliberations of its lawyers before any decision was formalized, and was thus exempt from disclosure. A federal judge previously disagreed, ordering the Justice Department to provide it to a government transparency group that had sued for it.

      At issue in the case is a March 24, 2019, memorandum from the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and another senior department official that was prepared for Barr to evaluate whether evidence in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation could support prosecution of the president for obstruction of justice.

      Barr has said he looked to that opinion in concluding that Trump did not illegally obstruct the Russia probe, which was an investigation of whether his campaign had colluded with Russia to tip the 2016 election.

      A year later, a federal judge sharply rebuked Barr’s handling of Mueller’s report, saying Barr had made “misleading public statements” to spin the investigation’s findings in favor of Trump and had shown a “lack of candor.”

      Friday’s appeals court decision said the internal Justice Department memo noted that “Mueller had declined to accuse President Trump of obstructing justice but also had declined to exonerate him.” The internal memo said “the Report’s failure to take a definitive position could be read to imply an accusation against President Trump” if released to the public, the court wrote.

      The Justice Department turned over other documents to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington as part of the group’s lawsuit, but declined to give it the memo. Government lawyers said they were entitled under public records law to withhold the memo because it reflected internal deliberations before any formal decision had been reached on what Mueller’s evidence showed.

      Sitting presidents are generally protected from criminal charges on grounds it would undermine their ability to perform the office’s constitutional duties. The Justice Department, like Mueller, “took as a given that the Constitution would bar the prosecution of a sitting President,” the appeals court wrote, which meant the decision that Trump wouldn’t be charged had already been made and couldn’t be shielded from public release.

      Had Justice Department officials made clear to the court that the memo related to Barr’s decision on making a public statement about the report, the appellate panel wrote, rulings in the case might have been different.

      “Because the Department did not tie the memorandum to deliberations about the relevant decision, the Department failed to justify its reliance on the deliberative-process privilege,” wrote the panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

      Appellate judges also noted that their ruling was “narrow,” saying that it should not be interpreted to “call into question any of our precedents permitting agencies to withhold draft documents related to public messaging.”

      Attorneys for the Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to an email message seeking comment. The department can appeal the ruling to the full appeals court.

      ___

      Fucking shocking!
      “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

      Comment



      • What a shock!?!!?


        The Durham probe isn't turning out how Donald Trump said it would - CNNPolitics



        The Durham probe isn't turning out how Donald Trump said it would





        Updated 9:42 AM ET, Thu September 15, 2022
        Special counsel John Durham and former President Donald Trump(CNN)After then-Attorney General Bill Barr appointed attorney John Durham in December 2020 to look into the origins of the FBI investigation of Russia's meddling in the 2016 election, Donald Trump insisted that the probe would uncover widespread wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton and Democrats.

        "What they did was so illegal, at a level that you've rarely seen before,"
        Trump said in November 2021. "Now, in all fairness, it looks to me like this is just the early building blocks."
        By February of this year, he was going even further. "It looks like this is just the beginning, because, if you read the filing and have any understanding of what took place, and I called this a long time ago, you're going to see a lot of other things happening, having to do with what, really, just is a continuation of the crime of the century,"
        Trump told Fox News. "This is such a big event, nobody's seen anything like this."All of which makes the news that the Durham probe appears to be wrapping up its work all the more impactful. CNN reported that one of the top prosecutors working with Durham has left the Justice Department for a job in the private sector. And The New York Times reported that a grand jury empaneled by Durham has expired, with no plans for another one to be revived.To date, the Durham probe has led to three prosecutions -- none of which even come close to the grandiose claims made by Trump that Clinton and her associates would somehow be implicated in the investigation. As CNN noted:


        "There are reports that Durham's team also looked into a wide range of other matters that ... Trump has publicly complained about -- without bringing any charges. This includes potential wrongdoing by the CIA and other parts of the US intelligence community, on topics related to Russia's pro-Trump interference in the 2016 election."


        It's also worth remembering here what the FBI's original counter-intelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election actually found: That Russia actively sought to meddle in our election, with the express purpose of helping Donald Trump and harming Hillary Clinton. They did so because they believed Trump would be better for their interests.That was the conclusion of not just special counsel Robert Mueller, who conducted a probe into the matter, but also of a
        bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee.

        Now it's worth noting that the Durham probe is not, in fact, over just yet. And that we have not seen the final report that Durham will produce on his findings. (It will be up to top Justice Department officials how much of the final report is made public. Attorney General Merrick Garland has said he would like to release
        "as much as possible.")
        So, it's not over until it's over -- and all that.

        But what seems plain is that all of Trump's hype of the Durham probe has been empty. Three low-level prosecutions is not the "crime of the century," as Trump has called it. Nothing that has come out to date suggests that Hillary Clinton or anyone remotely in her orbit had anything to do with the start of the FBI's counterintelligence operation to look into Russia's meddling in the 2016 election.These facts will, of course, not get in the way of Trump's continued obsession. He has, of late, used his Truth Social platform to villainize the Department of Justice and, if the Durham probe winds up being a total nothing burger, will likely insist that it's because the department has been weaponized against him.

        His proof of that claim? Nonexistent. But that won't keep his base from believing him. Just like they did about the Durham probe being the thing that would blow the lid off of the whole grand conspiracy of people out to get him -- or something.

        “Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”
        Mark Twain

        Comment


        • ABC Host Reveals Major Red Flag He Missed In 2016 Trump Interview Meltdown

          ABC’s George Stephanopoulos recalled a 2016 incident with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump that should’ve been the “biggest tell in the world” for what would come in the following years.

          During an interview Wednesday on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” Stephanopoulos looked back on an interview he did with Trump in Colorado during the 2016 campaign.

          “We started to talk, and I asked him a question about ― remember this gold star mother, the Muslim woman whose son was killed ― and he attacked her,” he said. “And he just went after her. And I was, like, I guess the interview’s over. He just ended his campaign.”

          “But we kept on going,” he said, “and I started to ask him about his relationship with Vladimir Putin, which he never gave a straight answer to.”

          “So I asked him about three or four times just, you know, just tell us what the relationship was. And I was just asking factual questions.”


          He said Trump ended the interview, walked out the door and called over a producer.

          “And I could hear the yelling in the hallway,” Stephanopoulos said, recalling that Trump then sent his communications director, Hope Hicks, back into the interview room to “get me and walk me into the hall.”

          “And then he started yelling at me, going on and on and on and on and on. Because I asked him about Vladimir Putin. Which should have been the biggest tell in the world back in 2016,” he said.

          Trump’s behavior in that interview ― lashing out at a journalist for asking questions that he didn’t want to answer ― was indicative of many future exchanges to come. Trump continued to berate, insult and undermine the press throughout his presidency, particularly when he was asked difficult questions.

          Trump also continued to show deference to Putin and other dictators throughout his presidency and afterward. Multiple investigations found that Russia worked to help Trump’s campaign and hurt his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. Several top Trump advisers were convicted of felonies in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

          New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman reported on Stephanopoulos’ interview incident in her new book. According to her reporting, Trump screamed expletives at ABC producer John Santucci, complaining that Stephanopoulos asked “eight fucking follow-ups” about Russia.

          “It’s like asking me if I beat my wife,” Trump reportedly shouted. “You ask me once, I say ‘fuck no,’ and we move on. You don’t then ask if I hit her with a fucking baseball bat or a fucking golf club! That was bullshit and you better fucking fix it in the edit.’”
          ______

          Russia Russia Russia....Guilty Guilty Guilty
          “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

          Comment


          • Originally posted by snapper View Post
            I would not sleep well if I were Trump as he has now admitted firing Comey because of the "great pressure' he was under due to Comey's investigation of his links to Moscow. So what he told the American people - that Comey was fired for matters related to the Clinton inquiry was rubbish yet to his Muscovite pals he admits interfering in the course of an FBI investigation for his own benefit...
            Originally posted by National_Review
            23 January 2023
            Ex-FBI Official Involved in Trump-Russia Probe Indicted for Working on Behalf of Sanctioned Russian Oligarch
            by Ari Blaff

            Click image for larger version  Name:	charles-mcgonigal.jpg Views:	0 Size:	433.3 KB ID:	1596370
            Former FBI official Charles McGonigal, who led the agency's counterintelligence division in New York, exits Manhattan federal court after being arrested on charges for violating U.S. sanctions on Russia in New York City, January 23, 2023. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)

            Charles McGonigal, a former FBI official involved in the investigation of Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, has been charged with violating sanctions and collaborating with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, the Department of Justice announced Monday.

            According to federal prosecutors, McGonigal received “concealed payments” from a Russian intelligence officer in exchange for his help in having sanctions targeting Deripaska lifted. McGonigal is being charged by the Federal District in Manhattan with additional counts relating to money laundering and conspiracy.

            “Charles McGonigal, a former high-level FBI official, and Sergey Shestakov, a Court interpreter, violated U.S. sanctions by agreeing to provide services to Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch. They both previously worked with Deripaska to attempt to have his sanctions removed, and, as public servants, they should have known better,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams wrote in a statement released Monday.

            As chief of counterintelligence in the bureau’s New York City field office, McGonigal was among the first FBI officials to learn of the fateful conversation between a senior Trump campaign adviser and a foreign diplomat over the topic of Hillary Clinton’s emails, the Washington Free Beacon noted. Knowledge of that interaction proved crucial to the federal agency opening an investigation into the matter, which ultimately found there was no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

            Deripaska, a well-known aluminum magnate and close friend of President Vladimir Putin, was reportedly a client of Paul Manafort, an attorney and former Trump presidential campaign consultant.

            Deripaska was recently the subject of a 60 Minutes segment alongside other prominent Russian oligarchs known for laundering illicit funds through the European Union member country of Cyprus. According to the investigation, Deripaska arranged for a child of his to be born in the United States in an attempt to bypass the sanctions imposed upon him.

            The indictment, which also outlined charges against FBI interpreter Sergey Shestakov, prompted the federal agency to release a statement condemning the abuse of power.

            “Russian oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska perform global malign influence on behalf of the Kremlin and are associated with acts of bribery, extortion, and violence,” FBI Assistant Director in Charge Michael Driscoll noted in a statement. “There are no exceptions for anyone, including a former FBI official like Mr. McGonigal.”

            McGonigal legal team, headed by Seth DuCharme, remained adamant about his client’s innocence.

            “Charlie served the United States capably, effectively, for decades,” DuCharme told the New York Times. “We have closely reviewed the accusations made by the government and we look forward to receiving discovery so we can get a view on what the evidence is upon which the government intends to rely.”

            DuCharme added that McGonigal plans to enter a plea of not guilty before a federal court appearance in Manhattan later Monday.

            McGonigal was arrested at JFK Airport in New York City on Saturday upon returning from recent travels to Sri Lanka.
            ...








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            Comment


            • Trump Suggests, Yet Again, He Trusts Putin Over U.S. Intelligence 'Lowlifes'


              Trump Suggests, Yet Again, He Trusts Putin Over U.S. Intelligence 'Lowlifes'


              Donald Trump has issued his intermittent reminder that he trusts Russian President Vladimir Putin more than intelligence agencies for the government he once led.

              The former president posted on his Truth Social platform Monday criticizing U.S. intelligence officials as “misfits” and “lowlifes” while sharing an article about Chris McGonigal, who led the FBI’s New York counterintelligence division before his 2018 retirement. McGonigal was arrested earlier this month over his alleged ties to a Russian oligarch and other charges, including money laundering.

              In the post, Trump recalled the 2018 Helsinki summit where he infamously sided with Putin over U.S. intelligence when asked about Russian interference in the 2016 election.

              In Monday’s post, Trump reminded followers he stands by what he said.


              Donald Trump's post on Truth Social.

              “Remember in Helsinki when a 3rd rate reporter asked me, essentially, who I trusted more, President Putin of Russia, or our ‘Intelligence’ lowlifes,” Trump wrote.

              “My instinct at the time was that we had really bad people,” he added, rallying off the names of several former top FBI officials he routinely targets. “Now add McGonigal & other slime to the list. Who would you choose, Putin or these Misfits?”

              It’s not the first time Trump has reiterated the controversial comment. In 2021, he said “it should be obvious” who he trusts between Russia and American intelligence. In fact, throughout his presidency and beyond, the former president repeatedly stunned U.S. officials by aligning himself with the Russian dictator.

              Last year, after Russia invaded Ukraine, Trump attracted fierce backlash after he said Putin’s strategy was “genius” and declined prompts to call the dictator evil, though he did eventually say the invasion was a mistake.
              ______

              It’s surprising that Trump would even bring up Helsinki for any reason. Trump cowered in front of Putin on the world stage.
              It was the most embarrassing moment a U.S. president ever had on foreign soil.

              Trump didn’t even act like a man, more like a whipped little bitch.
              “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

              Comment


              • Trump Is Still a Putin Stooge and a Traitor to His Country



                As the late great poet Maya Angelou might have said had she thought it was necessary, “When someone shows you over and over and over again that they are a traitor, believe them.”

                For further, completely appropriate emphasis, she might have elaborated: “When someone shows you over and over and over again, for their entire lives, in business and in government, that they are not only traitors, but corrupt, ignorant, pathologically dishonest, coup-plotting, racist, misogynist traitors, then seriously, I’m not kidding about this, believe them!”

                But, of course, as we have all witnessed during the past half-century of Donald Trump’s life (unless we were among the few who got to witness him bully his classmates at school, bullshit his way into college, and cheat his way out of the military), this menace to society has managed to slither his way from scandal to scandal—and yet somehow always remain center stage.

                Indeed, here we are in 2023, two years after his attempted coup and his second impeachment, and he is still, according to recent polls, the Republican frontrunner to occupy an office he defiled more than any other of its previous occupants in our two-and-a-half-century history.

                Given how dangerous this is, how could any nominally patriotic American still support this man? To put it plainly, he’s repeatedly demonstrated that he’s an existential threat to the country, made flesh.

                In a social media post that coincided with Trump’s official 2024 campaign kickoff, the ex-president once again declared that he values the opinion of Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin more than those of the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities. He wrote, in part, “Remember in Helsinki when a 3rd rate reporter asked me, essentially, who I trusted more, President Putin of Russia or our ‘intelligence’ lowlifes.” He then characterized U.S. intelligence and law enforcement leadership as consisting of “really bad people.” He also used the word “slime” to describe them. And then he concluded “Who would you choose, Putin or these Misfits?”



                As he acknowledged in his statement, this is not the first time he has made such a shocking public statement. And to be sure, recent developments concerning former senior FBI counter-intelligence official Charles McGonigal—who prosecutors allege was paid by a Russian oligarch he was supposed to be investigating—have been a black eye for the bureau. It is still early days in the investigation, but some respected observers—such as Yale history professor Timothy Snyder and former FBI agent Asha Rangappa—have suggested it is quite possible that when all the details are ultimately revealed, it might not look great for Trump.

                We also recently discovered that when Trump hijacked the Department of Justice and tried to cook up an investigation to prove he was being unfairly attacked by the intel and justice communities, it didn’t work out as planned. The investigation led by Special Counsel John Durham came up with nothing… except more leads about Trump corruption.




                There’s also the issue that Trump’s pal Putin has spent the past year making the sound case that he is one of the world’s worst monsters, a war criminal, author of a brutal illegal war, and an outright enemy of the United States, our NATO allies, and everything they stand for. Going to bat for Putin as Trump did (checks notes) this week (!) is far more repulsive than it even was the first time he did it back in 2018 in Helsinki.

                By and large, the Republican establishment has remained silent on Trump’s latest betrayal of his country. The GOP-led House is continuing with its plans to launch a committee investigating the “weaponization” of government that will seek to undo, bury, or discredit investigations, such as those into Trump’s Russia ties.

                And over in the fever swamps of MAGA social media, voices that echo Trump’s views on Russia (and those attacking the positions of the U.S. government in Ukraine) are gaining prominence. This pro-Putin, pro-Trump chorus has the effect of validating what Trump peddles, no matter how outrageous—including wild attacks on Western policies that come straight from Russian government talking points, such as this long thread arguing why the West is “really” providing tanks to Ukraine. (Yep, there’s a loony, long-ago disproven conspiracy theory underneath the whole thing.)

                Consequently, while Trump may have skated on tax fraud in the past (because he donated to the right political campaigns) and never paid any meaningful price for his serial sexual abuse (because there are a ton of sexist assholes in America), to continue to support America’s enemies and seemingly get away with it takes a village. He has his own social media platform, the benefit of other alt-right-controlled social media platforms, Fox News, virtually the entire Republican Party, and the entire Russian propaganda machine to keep him afloat in situations that would have undone virtually any other traitor in our history.



                There is of course, a grave danger in this. Trump’s flacking for Putin strengthens our enemy and puts our national security at risk. As the U.S. government mulls whether to shut down TikTok because it might someday serve as a Chinese propaganda platform, it’s fair to ask whether the same kind of scrutiny is due Truth Social, Twitter, or other platforms where the influence of Kremlin sympathizers (or worse) is already evident and doing damage.

                Given the reality that such moves are unlikely in the current political climate, however, we must see Trump’s statement for what it is: not just a reminder of who he is and the danger he poses, but of the grave risk we face if the de facto leader of one of the United States’ two parties continues to elevate and empower our enemies, their allies, and all those who aid and abet them, either actively or through their silence.
                ________
                “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                Comment


                • Russia's Prigozhin admits links to what U.S. says was election-meddling troll farm

                  (Reuters) - Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia's Wagner mercenary group, said on Tuesday that he founded and financed and the Internet Research Agency, a company Washington says is a "troll farm" which meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

                  Prigozhin, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, spent years operating on behalf of the Kremlin in the shadows, but has emerged in recent months as one of the most high profile figures connected with Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

                  He has previously admitted interfering in U.S. elections, but his statement on Tuesday appears to go further than before in outlining his specific links to the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA).

                  "I was never just the financier of the Internet Research Agency. I thought it up, I created it, I managed it for a long time," Prigozhin said in a post shared on social media by the press service of his Concord catering group.

                  "It was created to protect the Russian information space from the West's boorish and aggressive anti-Russian propaganda," Prigozhin said.

                  Prigozhin was first sanctioned by the United States over his links to the Internet Research Agency in 2018 and charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States.

                  Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on his inquiry into Russia’s role in the 2016 U.S. election said that Internet Research Agency sought to sow discord in the United States through "information warfare."

                  It sought to sway the 2016 election in favour of Trump, Mueller’s report said.

                  "The campaign evolved from a generalized program designed in 2014 and 2015 to undermine the U.S. electoral system, to a targeted operation that by early 2016 favored candidate Trump and disparaged candidate [Hillary] Clinton,"
                  the report said.

                  "IRA employees also traveled to the United States on intelligence-gathering missions."

                  Prigozhin, who spent the final decade of the Soviet Union in prison for robbery and fraud, was for years an associate of Putin. His catering group swept up government contracts, earning him the nickname of "Putin's Chef", while he deployed Wagner mercenaries to fight alongside Russian servicemen in Syria and to conflicts across Africa to advance Russia's geopolitical interests.

                  After years of denials, he last year admitted his links to Wagner and said he had interfered in U.S. elections.

                  Having rapidly built his public profile both in Russia and abroad since Russia invaded Ukraine, analysts say the Kremlin has moved to clip his wings more recently, concerned about the outspoken businessman's growing stature and high-profile criticism of the defence ministry.
                  ________
                  “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                  Comment


                  • In case you thought the Durham Report was an exoneration of Trump et al...

                    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1...116393986.html
                    “Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”
                    Mark Twain

                    Comment


                    • Details in Mueller Report Draw Interest of Special Counsel in Trump Classified Documents Case


                      Former President Donald Trump watches from a box on the 18th green during the LIV Golf Invitational - DC at Trump National Golf Club on May 26, 2023 in Sterling, Virginia.

                      As Jack Smith, a special counsel for the Justice Department, closes in on the end of an investigation into former President Donald Trump’s possession of hundreds of classified documents, his team has made use of the work of another special counsel who previously investigated Trump’s ties to Russia, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

                      A lengthy section of the Mueller Report, which examined ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, has been instructive to the current inquiry’s prosecutors, who are viewing Trump’s actions around federal requests to return the classified documents as part of a broader pattern, the person said.

                      Robert Mueller, a former director of the FBI, released his highly anticipated report in April 2019, shortly after then-Attorney General William Barr released a short summary of the report that was viewed by many in hindsight as downplaying the report’s findings.

                      Prosecutors have looked closely at Section II of the Mueller report, titled “Factual Results of the Obstruction Investigation.” That 142-page section goes into vivid detail, with extensive footnotes and copies of emails and text messages, about Trump taking steps to thwart the work of federal prosecutors investigating Russia’s effort to influence the 2016 election.

                      That part of the report details how Trump tried to get the FBI to drop its investigation of Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security advisor, for lying to FBI agents about meetings he had with Russia’s Ambassador to the U.S. weeks before Trump took office. Flynn eventually pled guilty to lying to the bureau and was later pardoned by Trump.

                      The section also showed Trump deciding to fire his first FBI director, James Comey, who was overseeing the investigation into the campaign’s ties to Russia, because Comey would not say publicly that Trump himself wasn’t under investigation. But Trump instructed his press office to falsely tell reporters that it was senior leaders at the Department of Justice who had first recommended Comey be fired.

                      The report also detailed Trump’s efforts to fire Mueller as special counsel after press reports showed that Mueller was investigating whether Trump obstructed the investigation.

                      And it illustrated how Trump responded in June 2017 when he learned about an email from his 2016 campaign setting up a meeting for Trump’s son Don Jr. with Russians. Those Russian nationals were claiming to offer negative details about Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” according to an email to Don Jr. As he flew aboard Air Force One back to Washington from a summit in Germany, Trump dictated a statement to his aide Hope Hicks to be attributed to Don Jr. saying that the meeting was about Russia’s policy toward Americans adopting Russian children.


                      It is unclear if the special counsel’s office has decided to use any material from Mueller’s investigation in building their case. There are limits to how prosecutors can use evidence from prior investigations. Called 404(b) evidence, information from a previous criminal investigation can be used to show a target’s motive, intent or that an action wasn’t a mistake or accident. But, under the Federal Rules of Evidence, prosecutors cannot submit evidence from previous bad actions in order to show that a person acted consistent with certain character traits.

                      The Mueller investigation would be helpful for prosecutors in learning how to deal with Trump, said a former federal prosecutor who worked on a similar case, and requested anonymity to speak more freely. But using evidence from the Mueller investigation or pointing out sections of the Mueller Report to grand jurors could be an unnecessary tangent, given how heated the political debate around Mueller’s investigation became. “Any association with Mueller is not going to be helpful for Jack Smith,” the former prosecutor said.

                      Even before the Mueller report was released, Trump’s allies pointed to Barr’s summary of it to insist that Trump had done nothing wrong. But Mueller did not rule out that Trump committed a crime in obstructing his investigation. His report established that even a person who wasn’t guilty of a crime being investigated could still have committed a criminal act by interfering with the investigation.

                      Mueller’s report concluded that then-President Trump “launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private, the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.” Mueller also said his investigation “found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations.”

                      A lawsuit seeking the unredacted version of the Mueller report led a federal judge in 2020 to criticize Barr’s actions around the report’s release. Judge Walton, an appointee of President George W. Bush, said the differences between the report and Mr. Barr’s public description of it raised questions as to “whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller report to the contrary.”

                      Trump currently faces four separate criminal investigations. In addition to the classified documents case, Special Counsel Smith is also running a separate investigation into Trump’s role in trying to overturn his 2020 election loss and the violent siege of the Capitol Building on Jan. 6.

                      Trump was indicted in April by the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg and pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts related to hush-money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels during his 2016 campaign. That trial is scheduled to begin in March 2024. Trump is also being investigated by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Atlanta over his alleged effort to pressure Georgia state officials to reverse his loss in that state.

                      On top of that, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit in September against Trump alleging he lied to insurers and bank lenders by overvaluing his properties.

                      Trump has called these inquiries “scams and witch hunts” and, without evidence, said they are part of a broad campaign of “election interference” to hurt his effort to win back the White House in 2024.

                      Trump’s criticisms of the classified documents investigation and others echo those he made during the Mueller investigation. In recent public court filings, he has attacked the classified documents investigation as politically motivated, contradicted his earlier statements, and seemingly admitted that he withheld government documents when asked repeatedly by the federal government to return them.

                      Others have noted a similarity between Trump’s pattern of actions responding to the classified documents investigation and how he acted when he was under investigation by Mueller.

                      During an interview on CBS Mornings on Tuesday, Barr said that Smith’s investigation “is the most dangerous legal risk” facing Trump, and that risk has been compounded by Trump’s actions after federal officials asked for the classified documents to be returned.

                      “This would have gone nowhere had the President just returned the documents, but he jerked them around for a year and a half,” Barr said. “The question is did he deceive them?”

                      Trump wants to feed his ego, Barr said, by “conducting risky, reckless acts to show that he can sort of get away with it.”

                      “It’s part of asserting his ego and he’s done this repeatedly at the expense of all the people who depend on him to conduct the public’s business in an honorable way,” he added.

                      Trump’s actions have been in contrast to Mike Pence’s response when classified documents were found in his possession. Pence contacted authorities and allowed federal investigators to conduct a search without a lengthy negotiation. The Department of Justice said in a statement in May that Pence will not be charged.

                      President Biden is also under investigation for his handling of classified documents at a University of Pennsylvania office he used in DC after he was Vice President, and at his home in Wilmington, Del.

                      Smith is currently convening two separate grand juries—one in Washington, D.C., and another in Florida—related to the Trump classified documents investigation, according to The Washington Post. After a separate report on Wednesday alleged that prosecutors had notified Trump that he was a target of their investigation and was likely to be indicted soon, Trump wrote on his Truth Social site, “No one has told me I’m being indicted, and I shouldn’t be because I’ve done NOTHING wrong.”
                      _________
                      “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

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                      • Trump lawyers cite Russian interference he decried as a "hoax" as defense in D.C. criminal case
                        Trump repeatedly rejected claims Russian interference in 2016. Now his attorneys are citing it in court filing


                        Former President Donald Trump speaks to a crowd of supporters at the Fort Dodge Senior High School on November 18, 2023 in Fort Dodge, Iowa.

                        Donald Trump's worldview over the last seven years, according to Washington Post columnist Philip Bump, has revolved around two core beliefs: First, that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 presidential election, but even if it or someone else had, it didn't matter because Trump won on his own merit. And second, that Trump's loss of the 2020 election "was not a function of his personal failures but, instead, of systems rigged against him in the abstract or directly altered to his detriment."

                        But that perspective — and the false claims of a stolen election Trump has been pushing alongside it — Bump argues, has presented the former president with a significant problem: a federal indictment brought by special counsel Jack Smith hinged on his efforts to overturn his electoral defeat that his attorneys have been battling in a Washington, D.C. federal court since it dropped in August.

                        In a court filing this week, Trump's attorneys argued that the former president is not at fault because others believed the election may have been undermined. They asserted instead that Russian election interference in 2016, the same subversion that Trump often deems "the Russia hoax," was at least in some part to blame for the distrust of the 2020 election results.

                        Politico's Kyle Cheney noted the irony in the filing, which centers on efforts of Trump's legal team to acquire materials they believe will be useful for their defense. Among those requested materials is the classified version of an Intelligence Community Assessment titled, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections.” The document, an unclassified version of which was released to the public shortly before Trump took office, assessed the scope of Russia's attempts to influence the 2016 election and American politics.

                        This document, Trump's lawyers argue, contains “information relating to a ‘significant escalation’ of foreign influence in the 2016 election motivated then-President Trump and his Administration to focus on foreign influence and cyber risks, as reflected in Executive Order 13848, and to be skeptical of claims about the absence of foreign influence in the 2020 election.”

                        Trump signed Executive Order 13848 in September 2018, shortly ahead of that year's midterms, the first federal election after the 2016 contest in which Russia had sought to forge significant influence. The order doesn't mention Russia specifically, nor does it indicate that it was a product of Trump's interest in countering Russia's actions. The order instead allowed for the government to respond to similar, general actions.

                        The Department of Justice announced shortly after the 2018 midterms that no significant interference had been seen in that election and insisted that “Efforts to safeguard the 2020 elections are already underway.”

                        "But you see why this is useful to Trump’s team," Bump writes. "Here’s a document suggesting that there was a risk from foreign interference — something that would understandably make Trump worried about 2020, at least in theory."

                        A frustrating moment for the former president came in the wake of the 2020 election when his administration Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other agencies announced on Nov. 5, 2020, that there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised” during the presidential election. Trump fired back on social media, dubbing the statement “highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud.”

                        "There was no evidence for Trump’s claim, since it was not true. But this is the sort of 'skeptical' response his lawyers have to address," Bump writes, arguing that the lawyers, in this week's filing, spun the response as they demanded the classified ICA.

                        “Whereas the Special Counsel’s Office falsely alleges that President Trump ‘erode[d] public faith in the administration of the election,’” Trump's attorneys wrote, “the 2016 Election ICA uses strikingly similar language to attribute the origins of that erosion to foreign influence — that is, foreign efforts to ‘undermine public faith in the US democratic process.’”

                        But that assertion isn't entirely correct, Bump notes, The unclassified version of the ICA makes a more specific claim than what Trump's legal team outlined: that “Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency,” and that “We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

                        Trump's lawyers omitted those details.

                        Having the full ICA, they continue, will provide “the detailed information supporting [its] conclusions … in order to demonstrate to the jury that [Trump] did not create or cause the environment that the prosecution seeks to blame him for.”

                        But the environment Trump is being accused of fostering is pushing the idea that the 2020 election was tainted due to widespread voter fraud, like in the claim he made in response to CISA rejecting the idea that there was no election interference in 2020 and the unfounded claims he's repeated since.

                        ICA language also doesn't state that Russia succeeded in creating the environment of skepticism around the elections, just that it sought to. The effort to introduce skepticism around the election was successful almost certainly among those who wanted Trump to lose in 2016, not his supporters, Bump points out. Critics of the former president still say that his victory was a product of Russian interference, while his supporters, echoing his views, have long argued that Russia did nothing at all or that their efforts didn't affect anything.

                        "The fact that Trump supporters responded to 2020 by insisting that there was an environment of eroded confidence in the election was very obviously not because they had lost confidence because of Russia’s 2016 efforts," Bump writes. "It was because of Trump."

                        The former president didn't make much effort to hold Russia accountable for the actions of 2016, even going on to deny two months before signing Executive Order 13848 (with Russian President Vladimir Putin at his side) that Russia had interfered at all. Now, however, the notion that he, his administration and his supporters widely questioned the integrity of American elections as a result of interference has become a useful defense in the face of criminal charges.

                        "So now, it seems, he’s at last willing to concede that Russia interfered," Bump concludes. "Or at least, his attorneys are."
                        ______________

                        Russia Russia Russia!
                        “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

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