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The war between Trump and the CIA

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  • TopHatter
    replied
    Judge allows Durham to move forward with Sussmann prosecution
    A federal judge on Wednesday ruled that Special Counsel John Durham can proceed with his office’s prosecution against a lawyer with ties to Democrats for making a false statement to the FBI in 2016.

    U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper denied a motion from Michael Sussmann to dismiss the single charge against him, which stems from a 2016 meeting with the FBI’s top lawyer to present evidence supposedly linking then-presidential candidate Donald Trump to a Russian bank.

    Cooper, who was appointed by former President Obama, said in his decision Wednesday that the legal challenges raised by Sussmann’s lawyers against the Durham indictment may have some merit but cannot be fully ruled on in the pretrial stage.


    “The battle lines thus are drawn, but the Court cannot resolve this standoff prior to trial,” the judge wrote in a six-page decision.

    Trial is set to begin next month over Durham’s allegation that Sussmann lied during the 2016 meeting by telling the FBI’s general counsel that he was not acting on behalf of any clients in presenting the evidence when in fact he was there in his capacity as an attorney for Rodney Joffe, a cybersecurity executive.

    Sussmann has pleaded not guilty and his legal team has denied that he misrepresented what capacity he was acting in when he met with the bureau official.

    His lawyers have argued that Durham’s case is extraordinarily thin because it is based on what was said in a relatively informal one-on-one meeting and that there’s little evidence the statement in question materially affected the FBI’s decision to open an investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign.

    Cooper wrote on Wednesday that Sussmann may be right as a matter of law regarding the materiality arguments, but “the Court is unable to make that determination as to this alleged statement before hearing the government’s evidence. Any such decision must therefore wait until trial.”

    Prosecutors with Durham’s office may have bolstered their case earlier this month when they revealed in a court filing that the day before the 2016 meeting, Sussmann had texted James Baker, the FBI general counsel at the time, saying, “I’m coming on my own – not on behalf of a client or company – want to help the Bureau.”

    An attorney for Sussmann did not immediately respond when asked for comment.
    _________

    Mercy sakes alive, looks like we got us a PROCESS CRIME!

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  • TopHatter
    replied
    Saudis Give $2 Billion To Jared Kushner's Fund After Cozy Trump Ties: Report

    A fund led by the Saudi crown prince contributed over $2 billion to Jared Kushner’s new $2.5 billion investment fund in the wake of cozy ties with the Trump administration, The New York Times reported Sunday.

    Saudi Arabia’s $620 billion Public Investment Fund made the move despite serious concerns about risks investing in Kushner’s fledgling Affinity Partners investment organization, which he set up last year, according to the Times. Before father-in-law Donald Trump brought him on as a White House senior adviser, Kushner worked as a real estate developer, not an investment fund manager.

    Kushner secured the money six months after leaving the White House. But the Saudi panel that supervises investments for the sovereign wealth fund expressed significant concerns about a number of issues, including the “inexperience of the Affinity Partners management” and other “unsatisfactory” aspects of the new company, according to documents obtained by the Times.

    The panel was overruled by de facto Saudi leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, friend of Kushner and recipient of significant Trump administration benefits.


    The lucrative money ties between the Saudis and Kushner raise serious ethics issues, particularly if Trump becomes president again, but there’s nothing illegal about the relationship.

    Trump developed close bonds with the Saudi leadership during his administration while Kushner continued to cultivate a friendship with the crown prince.

    Kushner arranged for Trump to make his first trip abroad to a summit in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. Kushner also helped negotiate a hugely controversial agreement for Saudi Arabia to buy billions of dollars worth of American weapons while the nation was bombing civilians in Yemen.

    Trump defended bin Salman after the murder and dismemberment of Saudi Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.

    Trump suggested “rogue killers” could have been involved in Khashoggi’s death, and never condemned the crown prince — despite a conclusion by American intelligence that he was responsible for the murder.

    I saved his ass,” Trump said of the crown prince in an interview with Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward for his book “Rage.” “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone.”

    Bin Salman “will always say that he didn’t do it,” Trump told Woodward. “He says that to everybody, and frankly I’m happy that he says that.”


    Trump and his supporters have made much of Hunter Biden’s international work and investments while his father was vice president. But Kushner’s chunk of Saudi money dwarfs anything Hunter Biden is reputed to have collected. Kushner also worked in the White House while he cultivated ties with the Saudis that profited him while he was representing the American public and using taxpayer funds.

    A spokesperson for Kushner told the Times that Affinity Partners is “proud” to have the Saudi Public Investment Fund as an investor.
    ___________

    No idea where to put this, guess this thread is as good as any

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  • TopHatter
    replied
    New Hunter Biden revelations raise counterintelligence questions

    Patrick Ho hardly seemed the profile of a big-time international fixer. A short, pudgy man, affectionately known to friends as “Fat Ping,” Ho had been a Harvard-trained ophthalmologist and a Hong Kong government minister. Yet in the fall of 2017, after landing at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City, he was arrested by FBI agents and charged in an audacious plot to dole out millions of dollars in bribes to African leaders in exchange for major energy contracts that appeared to advance Chinese government interests.

    What emerged in his indictment and later trial and conviction in federal court was a revealing portrait of Chinese influence peddling that included allegations that Ho arranged to broker arms deals — including the sale of rocket and grenade launchers — to countries in war zones in Africa and the Middle East.

    There was one noteworthy detail, however, about Ho’s global wheeling and dealing that went unmentioned in federal court documents or Justice Department press releases at the time. During the same period that he was being pursued by the FBI for his role in the global bribery scheme, Ho and his boss, Ye Jianming, a billionaire oil tycoon with past ties to a front for the People’s Liberation Army, had entered into a business relationship with two members of the Biden family — President Biden’s son Hunter Biden and the president’s brother, James Biden.

    As Yahoo News first reported, when Ho was arrested by agents at JFK, the first call he made was to James Biden. (The president’s brother later told the New York Times that he believed the call was intended for his nephew Hunter.) At the time, Ho’s connection to the Bidens was unclear. But emails on a damaged laptop that Hunter Biden left at a computer repair store in Wilmington, Del. — many of which have since been authenticated by the Washington Post and the Times — as well as bank records and other documents uncovered by Senate Republican investigators, reveal a high-dollar money trail that flowed from Chinese interests to Hunter and James Biden and which now appears to be at the heart of an ongoing Justice Department criminal investigation. (George Mesires, a lawyer for both Hunter and James Biden, did not respond to requests for comment from Yahoo News. A lawyer for Ho declined to comment.)


    President Joe Biden with first lady Jill Biden, his son Hunter Biden and daughter Ashley Biden after being sworn-in as president, Jan. 20, 2021. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)

    The documents show that over a 14-month period in 2017 and 2018, a Chinese firm, CEFC China Energy, which was founded by Ye and whose nonprofit wing was run by Ho, paid $4.8 million to an investment vehicle controlled by Hunter Biden. During that same time frame, Hunter Biden’s firm transferred $1.4 million to James Biden’s consulting firm, according to bank records and a report released by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, ranking minority member on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

    Moreover, in September 2017, just two months before the Chinese businessman’s arrest, Hunter Biden (who is a lawyer) signed a retainer agreement to represent Ho, according to emails found on his laptop and since authenticated by the Washington Post. Grassley separately obtained bank records showing $1 million was paid to Biden in March 2018 for the representation, although it is not clear what work, if any, he did for Ho. Court records of Ho’s criminal case show no indication that Biden or his law firm at the time, Boies Schiller Flexner, participated in Ho’s legal defense. (Among the questions that Yahoo News submitted to Mesires, the Bidens’ lawyer, were what work Hunter Biden did for the $1 million retainer and what work James Biden did for the $1.4 million paid to his consulting firm. He did not respond.)

    But there are indications that Hunter Biden had good reason to suspect the Chinese intelligence connections of Ho and Ye. In a May 11, 2018, audio recording of a conversation with an unidentified woman found on the laptop, a copy of which has been obtained by Yahoo News, Hunter Biden complained about getting a phone call from a New York Times reporter asking about his representation of Ho. He is “literally the f***ing spy chief of China,” Biden says to the woman, clearly overstating Ho’s role. (It is unclear why the conversation, which was recorded by the woman, was on the laptop.)

    In the same conversation, Biden also talked about phone calls he had gotten from his father about media inquiries into his business affairs. And he complains that Ye, who he refers to as “my partner” and “the richest man in the world” had recently gone missing in China and he was unable to get in touch with him. (Ye, who apparently ran afoul of Chinese President Xi Jinping, has not been publicly seen or heard from since.)

    Dr. Patrick Ho. (AP)

    None of the details about Hunter and James Biden’s business dealings with Chinese interests implicate President Biden in any wrongdoing. But the depth and breadth of the Bidens’ financial ties with Ho and Ye raise new questions as to whether they were targets of a Chinese influence operation that, separate and apart from an ongoing criminal probe into Hunter Biden for alleged tax fraud and potentially foreign lobbying violations, represents a counterintelligence threat.

    “There’s no question that Chinese intelligence services look for every possible opportunity to get close to family members of high-ranking officials,” said Frank Figliuzzi, former chief of the FBI’s counterintelligence division. In the past, Figliuzzi had expressed skepticism about stories in conservative media about Hunter Biden. But now, he adds, “I believe that the information we’ve learned is something that merits a review by the counterintelligence arm of the FBI.” (A FBI spokeswoman said the bureau would have no comment on whether it has initiated a counterintelligence inquiry into the Bidens’ Chinese connections similar to the one it launched into then candidate Donald Trump and his campaign in the summer of 2016.)

    There’s “no doubt Hunter presents CI [counterintelligence] vulnerabilities,” says another former senior FBI official, who asked not to be identified by name discussing sensitive matters relating to the Bidens. But those issues received less scrutiny during the Trump years because Trump and his own family had multiple business interests with foreign governments, which he used his power as president to bolster.

    “Trump and all the hangers-on were so bad that I think some legitimate questions about Hunter have been covered less rigorously than they should have been,” said the former official. Still, if Trump’s children such as Donald Trump Jr. or Eric Trump were doing the same things, “many more people would be howling.”


    Getty Images

    Alleged Chinese political influence schemes in the U.S. go back decades. In the 1990s, a campaign finance scandal known as “Chinagate” erupted over illicit donations by Chinese backers with ties to the country’s intelligence service to the Democratic National Committee and Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign.

    More recently, suspected Chinese agents have tried to sidle up to prominent politicians including California Democrats Sen.Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Eric Swalwell, prompting the FBI to give both lawmakers a “defensive briefing.” (After being alerted by the bureau, Feinstein fired the staffer alleged to be working for Chinese intelligence. Swalwell cut his ties to the suspected Chinese agent who had been raising money for his campaign.) Scions of prominent Republican families, like Neil Bush — son of former President George H.W. Bush and the brother of former President George W. Bush — have also been criticized for their connections to Chinese organizations running influence efforts.

    But a full picture of the Chinese business ties of the Bidens has only emerged in fits and starts, with much that is still unknown. Although many of the details have circulated in conservative media circles for some time, they were largely ignored by mainstream news organizations in part because they initially surfaced on a laptop that wound up, through circuitous means, in the hands of Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer who is prone to making factually dubious claims, and the accuracy of its contents was hard to verify.

    Playing on those concerns and the memory of the Russian hack-and-dump campaign that targeted 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, 51 former U.S. intelligence officials (many of whom had clashed with Trump and were publicly backing Biden) released a statement claiming that the email dump “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian influence operation.” The intel officials who signed the letter acknowledged they had no evidence of Russian involvement in the laptop, and none has surfaced since then.


    Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

    Still, signs of Hunter Biden’s efforts to do business in China — and his willingness to use his proximity to his father to further those deals — had been public for some time. In 2013, Hunter Biden accompanied his father, then the sitting vice president, aboard Air Force 2 on a trip to Beijing. While his father engaged in five-and-a-half hours of talks with Xi, the Chinese leader, the younger Biden met with Jonathan Li, a Chinese banker with whom he had just formed a Chinese private equity firm. (The Chinese business license for the firm was issued by Shanghai authorities 10 days after the trip and Hunter Biden was named a member of the board, according to NBC reporter Jonathan Lederman, then with the Associated Press, who accompanied the Bidens on the trip.)

    What became of that venture — and how much it netted Hunter Biden — is still fuzzy. But by 2017, as his father was starting to plot his campaign for president, Hunter Biden began forming new ventures with problematic new partners. He met with Ye, the chief of CEFC, for dinner in Miami and discussed a $40 million investment in a liquified natural gas venture in Louisiana, according to an account in the New Yorker. That summer, Ye also informed Hunter Biden that his deputy, Ho, was under criminal investigation by federal prosecutors in New York and asked the younger Biden to assist in his defense — a request that led to the $1 million retainer payment the following year.

    As those relationships solidified, the FBI was intensifying its pursuit of Ho. Court documents later revealed that the bureau had gotten a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to secretly intercept Ho’s communications, an action the FBI can only be granted for targets suspected of being an agent of a foreign power or a terrorist organization.


    A courtroom sketch from March 2019 shows Patrick Ho, center, being sentenced to three years in prison after being convicted of paying bribes to the presidents of two African countries. (Elizabeth Williams/AP)

    The case that prosecutors ultimately brought against Ho revolved around claims that he used CEFC’s U.S.-based nonprofit, the China Energy Fund Committee, to shell out $2.5 million in bribes to senior African officials to win oil contracts for Ye’s Shanghai-based energy conglomerate.

    Ho was not formally accused of acting on behalf of the Chinese government. But when it comes to Beijing’s influence operations, the line between freelancing businessmen and de facto agents of the state can be thin, sometimes by design, according to former U.S. intelligence officials. Indeed, Ho’s own defense lawyers argued that his actions were “in furtherance of the Chinese state’s agenda” by promoting Belt and Road, Xi’s signature initiative to expand Chinese economic power around the world through infrastructure investment.

    Besides his bribes, prosecutors also introduced evidence of other misdeeds by Ho. He had, they charged, sought to facilitate a sanctions-busting scheme on behalf of Iran, plotting with an Iranian agent how to wash frozen Iranian funds so Tehran could covertly purchase precious metals. He also sought to “leverage his connections and power” by brokering arms deals — including the sale of mortar rounds and rocket, anti-tank and grenade launchers — to Libya, Chad, South Sudan and Qatar, according to a sentencing memo filed by the prosecutors.

    Ho’s “actions were corrupt and they were criminal, and he knew it,” said Douglas Zolkind, an assistant U.S. attorney during the former Hong Kong minister’s trial at federal court in Manhattan. “That’s why he carried out these schemes from his perch as the head of a nonprofit NGO, where he could gain access to world leaders under the guise of someone interested in humanitarian goals.”

    Ho was convicted of seven counts for money laundering, conspiracy and foreign lobbying violations in December 2018 and sentenced to three years in federal prison.
    ______________

    Didn't Glenn Fry do a song about this?

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  • zraver
    replied
    Latest Durham filings reveal GJ subpoenas of the DNC and HFA.

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  • TopHatter
    replied
    Trump’s Judge-Shopping Flop
    Cynicism, mendacity, and incompetence rolled into one.

    Donald Trump has what might charitably be called a poor relationship with judges. It’s not clear that he even understands what they do. Recall Trump’s claim that, in light of his campaign pledge to take a hard line on immigration, a judge of “Mexican heritage” could not hear a case involving his defunct “university.” (“I’m building a wall,” Trump said; “it’s an inherent conflict of interest.”) More recently, he has expressed disappointment in the three justices he placed on the Supreme Court, none of whom voted to hear a lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 election.

    Trump has been especially critical of Brett Kavanaugh. “I saved his life,” he complains. “Where would he be without me?” The comment is a telling one. In Trump’s mind, it would seem, a judge must be loyal to the president to whom he “owes” his seat. Trump would have been glad, in the weeks after the 2020 election, to have seen his three appointees rule in his favor in a lawsuit attacking the election’s outcome.

    Bear that in mind as we pick at a curious aspect of Trump’s latest legal publicity stunt, a civil racketeering action in which the former president alleges that Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, John Podesta, and James Comey, among many others, conspired to rig the 2016 election. The curious thing is that Trump’s lawyer (about whom more later) chose to file the complaint in Fort Pierce, Florida.

    Now, the nation’s federal trial courts are divided into 94 districts. Many districts, in turn, are split into divisions. The Southern District of Florida, for instance, contains five of them. The Miami division is the largest of these, and has many judges. There is also a West Palm Beach division, home to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort; it has two active judges. The last division worth mentioning, the Fort Pierce division, has one judge.

    The two judges in West Palm Beach were appointed by Presidents Clinton and Obama. The judge in Fort Pierce was appointed by President Trump. You see where this is going.

    The lawyers of southern Florida are instructed to sue in the division where the “incident” underlying their lawsuit “occurred,” or, failing that, in the one where their client lives. Trump is sure to have a theory as to why the pertinent “incident” in his case “occurred” throughout the country, enabling him to sue where he likes. (Put to one side the very real problem of whether the court has personal jurisdiction over the defendants.) Regardless, it is impossible to shake the suspicion, Trump being who he is, that filing in Fort Pierce was a calculated decision. Trump apparently wanted a judge appointed by Trump.

    It didn’t work out that way. Sometimes, usually to balance caseloads, a court shifts filings in one division to a judge sitting in another. That happened here, and Trump drew Judge Donald Middlebrooks, who is stationed back in Trump’s Palm Beach stomping ground. In a delicious bit of irony—assuming that plaintiff Donald Trump indeed reached for a Trump-appointed judge—the lawsuit is now before a judge appointed by the husband of defendant Hillary Clinton.

    This is when your average county-court hustler would see that the plan had backfired, shrug it off, and proceed to some new scheme. Trump’s legal team did not do this. Instead, they moved to disqualify Judge Middlebrooks. That the judge was appointed by Bill Clinton “amounts,” they contended, “to prejudice so virulent or pervasive as to constitute bias” against Trump.

    The words “virulent” and “pervasive” appear to have been plucked from cases involving more extreme situations, such as when a judge’s prejudice is revealed not by a conflict of interest but by his hostility in the courtroom. In throwing around such terms, Trump’s lawyers set an unnecessarily high bar for themselves. They actually needed to show only that the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned.

    This is not the most satisfying test. A judge’s attitude toward the parties at the outset of a case generally does not lend itself to demonstration. What is clear, however, is that Trump’s motion was baseless. Consider that Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, both appointed to the Supreme Court by President Clinton, took part in an appeal related to Paula Jones’s claim that Clinton had sexually harassed her—and joined the unanimous ruling against him. Likewise, three justices appointed by President Nixon joined a decision ordering the release of Nixon’s Oval Office tape recordings. And of course, two justices appointed by Trump helped resolve his appeals in cases about his tax records—and not in the way he wanted them resolved.

    If there really were some colorable ground for recusal, Trump’s attorneys could be relied on to miss it. The motion contained nothing that could fairly be called a reasoned argument. No one with viable mental faculties proofread it. It was filed before any of the defendants even appeared in the case. (Seeking rulings before the other side can respond would be a sound move, were it your goal to bias a judge against you.) Cynicism hitched to indolence—an alliance of mendacity and incompetence—drove the filing of this motion.

    That Trump’s lawyers are this bad tells you all you need to know about the lawsuit itself. As Ken White, a former federal prosecutor best known as Twitter’s Popehat, put it:

    “I’m going to file the most important RICO case ever, a historic case about political crimes eclipsing Watergate, and even though I’m a multi-millionaire with powerful connections in conservative lawyering, I’m going to pick a cadre of obscure misfits to file it.” Ok brah.

    The attorney who signed the complaint has repeatedly been suspended from practicing law. At his website—no kidding: www.legalbrains.com—you will find a selection of his poetry (“Momentary anguish and I walk away / To fall in love ten times a day”). You will also learn that he devotes his time to the usual practices of a country lawyer—family law, personal injury, estates and trusts—which props up one’s surmise that, when the task at hand is taking down the arrayed forces of the Deep State, he does not receive the first phone call. Yet this is Trump’s man on the spot. This is the best advocate that a former president of the United States, at this point, can get.

    In a succinct order issued last night, Judge Middlebrooks declined to recuse himself. Along the way, he remarked on Trump’s decision to file in Fort Pierce. He noticed too that when Trump “is a litigant before a judge that he himself appointed, he does not tend to advance these same sorts of bias concerns.” So ends (one would hope) a bizarre gambit in which the Trumpian ethos of litigation found full expression.

    The good news, for those of us at risk of becoming numb to Donald Trump’s legal antics, is that Trump and his lawyers invariably find fresh and unexpected ways to fall on their faces.
    ________

    "www.legalbrains.com"Yet more evidence that that this is yet another pathetic publicity stunt by Trump. Poor stupid ambulance chaser won't see a dime in legal fees from Trump.

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  • TopHatter
    replied
    Judge dismisses Trump's request for recusal from Hillary Clinton RICO lawsuit, says the cases cited in Trump's motion 'do not appear to support his arguments'

    A federal judge on Wednesday rejected former President Donald Trump's request that he recuse himself from overseeing Trump's sweeping lawsuit against Hillary Clinton, people linked to her campaign, and former FBI and DOJ officials.

    Trump's lawyers said in their motion for recusal that US District Judge Donald Middlebrooks should step aside because he was appointed to the federal bench by then-President Bill Clinton.

    "Due to the fact that Judge Middlebrooks has a relationship to the Defendant, HILLARY CLINTON's husband, by way of his nomination as Judge to this Court, this amounts to prejudice so virulent or pervasive as to constitute bias against a party," their filing said.

    Middlebrooks in his Wednesday ruling acknowledged that Bill Clinton appointed him to the court. "Although former President Clinton is not a party to this lawsuit, I will give Plaintiff the benefit of the doubt and equate the interests of the Clintons for the sake of analysis here," the filing said.

    Even so, the judge found that Trump's argument doesn't hold water, writing that "to warrant recusal, something more must be involved than solely my appointment to the bench twenty-five years ago by the spouse of a litigant now before me."

    He also pointed out that the three cases that were cited in Trump's motion for recusal "compel no different conclusion, and indeed do not appear to support his arguments."

    In an accompanying footnote, Middlebrooks said that in the first case, Hamm v. Members of Board of Regents of Florida, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals "held that a district court judge did not exhibit bias sufficient to warrant recusal based on certain statements he made at trial."

    None of the cases cited "discussed whether judicial appointment by a party, without more, would cause a reasonable person to suspect bias on the part of the presiding judge," Middlebrooks wrote. And the ruling in one of them "emphasized that, to establish bias justifying disqualification, a party must demonstrate 'such pervasive bias and prejudice that it constitutes bias against a party' — a showing that certainly has not been made here."

    In all, "the law is well settled" that merely being appointed to the bench by a litigant does not "create in reasonable minds ... a perception that [the judge's] ability to carry out judicial responsibilities with integrity, impartiality, and competence [would be] impaired," Middlebrooks concluded, quoting the judicial code of conduct.

    Wednesday's ruling was widely expected given that, as Politico reported, it's exceedingly rare for courts to grant motions seeking the recusal of judges based on the political party of the president who nominated them.

    Middlebrooks also made that point, writing, "Every federal judge is appointed by a president who is affiliated with a major political party, and therefore every federal judge could theoretically be viewed as beholden, to some extent or another."

    "As judges, we must all transcend politics," he continued. "When I became a federal judge, I took an oath to 'faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all duties ... under the Constitution and laws of the United States' ... I have done so for the last twenty-five years, and this case will be no different."

    Trump's sweeping racketeering lawsuit against Clinton and the other defendants accused them of conspiring to fabricate evidence during the 2016 campaign tying him to "a hostile foreign sovereignty."

    It dismissed any "contrived Trump-Russia link." It also recycled other claims Trump has made about former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into the Trump campaign and the 2016 election.

    Specifically, it said Mueller exonerated "Donald Trump and his campaign with his finding that there was no evidence of collusion with Russia." And it said the "Mueller Report demonstrated that, after a two-year long investigation coming on the heels of a year-long FBI investigation, the Special Counsel found no evidence that Donald Trump or his campaign ever colluded with the Russian government to undermine the 2016 election."


    Mueller concluded in 2019 that the Russian government interfered with the 2016 US election to damage Clinton and propel Trump to the Oval Office. But his final report specified that investigators evaluated the relevant events from "the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of 'collusion.'"

    Prosecutors ultimately determined that there was not "sufficient evidence" to charge anyone on the Trump campaign with conspiring with Moscow. But they noted that the campaign "expected it would benefit electorally" from Russia's efforts.


    Hillary Clinton's spokesman Nick Merrill said in an earlier statement to Insider that the lawsuit was "nonsense."
    ________

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  • TopHatter
    replied
    First the Feds Fined Clinton. Now It Might Be Trump’s Turn.
    The FEC recently fined Hillary Clinton and the DNC for a violation that Donald Trump and the RNC seem guilty of on a whole other level.

    When it came out last week that the Federal Election Commission fined Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee for misreporting political payments in 2016 that funded the explosive Steele dossier, the news attracted plenty of media attention. The penalties themselves, however, had nothing to do with the actual content, creation, or distribution of that infamous document.

    Instead, the FEC dinged the Democrats on a clerical issue. And the real loser might actually be Donald Trump.

    By coincidence, the same day the Clinton news broke, a watchdog group sued the FEC for taking no action on its complaint alleging that Trump’s 2020 campaign committed the exact same clerical violation. In both cases, the campaigns allegedly reported payments to a pass-through that actually went to another entity, concealing the money’s true recipient and purpose from the public.

    But there’s a big difference. The alleged Clinton and DNC shell payments totaled less than a million dollars, combined. The Trump campaign’s arrangement allegedly concealed nearly $800 million.

    For the FEC’s critics, the timing couldn’t have been better.

    The FEC—specifically its three Republican commissioners, those critics say—appears congenitally incapable of acting against the former president. Data suggests there’s more than a kernel of truth to that claim.

    Just last month, a Daily Beast investigation found that the FEC had never taken action on a stunning 43 complaints against Trump. Along the way, the Republican commissioners frequently rejected their own general counsel, who often found reason to believe that violations had indeed occurred. In many cases, the GOP refused even to open an investigation.

    Dan Weiner, a former counsel at the FEC who now directs the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program, said the Republican commissioners will have to contend with this precedent.

    “The FEC isn’t exactly overzealous about enforcement, but you’ve got to have some modicum of accuracy,” Weiner told The Daily Beast. “You can’t describe something as ‘legal services’ when it’s nothing like legal services.”

    Weiner continued that the decision “set an interesting precedent” that commissioners will have to grapple with.

    “Historically both sides have placed some emphasis on consistency, and it will put some constraint on the commissioners to reconcile any refusal to go forwards in the Trump case,” he said. “That’s one of the risks when you have such sporadic enforcement of the law.”

    While it’s inescapable that the three Republican commissioners are far more averse to action than the Democrats, there’s debate over whether the rift is political or purely ideological. The conservatives may not specifically be in the bag for their own party, some observers argue—just less inclined to enforcement generally.

    However, the votes in the Clinton case were 4-2, with one Republican joining the FEC’s two Democrats and one independent in ruling against the campaign and DNC. (In a previous case, all three Republican commissioners voted not to take action against Clinton.)

    But perhaps this particular chance may have been too hard to pass up, as the dossier has for years been a perennial font of intrigue and anger across the political spectrum.

    The Clinton complaint had leveled a number of allegations, including campaign finance violations by research firm Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele himself. It also claimed the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee had “conspired with foreigners” in violation of “both federal campaign finance law and basic decency.”

    The FEC, however, dismissed those accusations outright. The agency also found nothing wrong with the actual payments—$175,000 from the campaign and about $783,000 from the DNC, to law firm Perkins Coie, which then contracted the research work to Fusion GPS.

    The problem, the commission said, was clerical, and misrepresented the sub-vendor relationship. The committees had reported the expenses as “legal services” to Perkins Coie, instead of the final product, which was the “opposition research” from Fusion GPS.

    In other words, the campaign and DNC appeared to have concealed the payments’ true nature and recipient. The campaign conceded to an $8,000 fine, and the DNC settled for $105,000, though neither committee admitted wrongdoing in its conciliation agreement.

    But Republicans might want to read the complaint itself before they celebrate.

    According to that complaint, which the right-leaning Coolidge Reagan Foundation first brought in 2018, the Perkins Coie “straw man intermediary” allowed the Clinton campaign and DNC to “mask their relationship to Fusion GPS from the public,” in “direct violation of federal campaign finance law.” This arrangement created a buffer, the complaint said, allowing the committees to “disavow any potentially embarrassing or controversial activities.”

    A Campaign Legal Center complaint currently before the FEC accuses the 2020 Trump campaign of these same violations, just on an exponentially larger scale.

    The filing alleges that the Trump campaign laundered about $770 million in expenses to an unknown number of vendors through a single shell company. According to news reports, that company—American Made Media Consultants—was designed by members of Trump’s inner circle (with Trump’s blessing) specifically to conceal campaign payees from the public.

    Like the Clinton complaint, CLC said the Trump arrangement “has hidden the identities of other sub-vendors” and the details of payments to those sub-vendors.

    CLC filed that initial complaint more than 600 days ago, but, according to Adav Noti, a former FEC attorney and current vice president at CLC, there has been “no indication” that the FEC has taken any action. So purely by coincidence, the same day that the Clinton news leaked to the press, Noti filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to order the FEC to move.

    Noti told The Daily Beast that the two cases share legal similarities, and cite the exact same statute.

    “The law requires campaigns to disclose where they spend money and what they spend it on, because voters deserve to know where their money goes,” he explained. “But there’s a growing problem in federal political campaigns of running spending through shell corporations to hide where it’s going. We’ve seen it now in multiple election cycles, and campaigns for all federal offices.”

    Noti observed that the Trump campaign’s $771 million shell game was “particularly egregious.”

    “It seems the reason they used it was that the campaign was spending millions of dollars that went to Trump family members, close friends, some people with an unsavory reputation,” he said, adding that “we still don’t know where it ended up except through anecdotal reports.”


    “If the FEC were to act against the Trump campaign for that, it would deter others,” Noti said. (The Daily Beast has reported on shady vendor arrangements with GOP online fundraising platform WinRed, as well as Kanye West’s 2020 presidential campaign.)

    Weiner, of the Brennan Center, made a similar broad point.

    “In both these cases, the reporting is mostly about embarrassment and covering up untoward conduct. But today you have more and more ‘scam PACs’ formed to bilk donors out of money, and who are just paying themselves and disguising it through their sub-vendors,” he said.

    “The FEC may not be the most stern cop on the beat, but if you don’t enforce this you just make it easier for people to fleece others,” Weiner said.

    _________

    Leave a comment:


  • TopHatter
    replied
    Originally posted by Parihaka View Post

    Yeah I was unsure. It's odd that after declaring it fake russian news disinformation blah blah, suddenly all the outlets who declared that are running it simultaneously. Like they are trying to get it out of the way before mid-terms. I'll leave it to your discretion...
    The answer is usually "Whatever garners the most ratings", I would assume. I'll move it over to the Trump CIA thread.

    Leave a comment:


  • Parihaka
    replied
    Originally posted by TopHatter View Post

    Was this intended for the Trump Vs CIA thread?

    Should we start a Hunter Biden thread, yea or nay?
    Yeah I was unsure. It's odd that after declaring it fake russian news disinformation blah blah, suddenly all the outlets who declared that are running it simultaneously. Like they are trying to get it out of the way before mid-terms. I'll leave it to your discretion...

    Leave a comment:


  • TopHatter
    replied
    Originally posted by DOR View Post

    Maybe just a whack-job conspiracy theory thread?
    I dunno, the Hunter Biden story appears to have genuine legs of one kind or another. Like I said, it's amazing what happens when government investigators aren't stymied at every turn by the President of the United States protecting himself and his criminal brood.

    Leave a comment:


  • DOR
    replied
    Originally posted by TopHatter View Post

    Was this intended for the Trump Vs CIA thread?

    Should we start a Hunter Biden thread, yea or nay?
    Maybe just a whack-job conspiracy theory thread?

    Leave a comment:


  • TopHatter
    replied
    Originally posted by Parihaka View Post

    Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. Follow him on Twitter @JonathanTurley.
    Was this intended for the Trump Vs CIA thread?

    Should we start a Hunter Biden thread, yea or nay?

    Leave a comment:


  • Parihaka
    replied
    "We absolutely stand by the president’s comment.” With those words, White House communications director Kate Bedingfield reaffirmed that President Biden maintains his son Hunter Biden did “nothing [that] was unethical” and never “made money” in China.

    Those claims appear demonstrably false — and they make the positions of both the media and Attorney General Merrick Garland absolutely untenable.

    For the media, the ongoing investigation of Hunter Biden by U.S. Attorney David Weiss in Delaware has presented a growing danger of self-indictment over its prior coverage (or noncoverage). Weiss has called a long line of witnesses before a grand jury, and there is growing expectation of criminal charges against Hunter Biden.

    Nothing concentrates the mind as much as a looming indictment.

    Thus, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and other media faced the embarrassing prospect of an indictment based on a story they previously suggested was either a nonstory or Russian disinformation. Suddenly, in recent days, they all rushed to declare the story legitimate, 18 months after the New York Post reported it in October 2020.

    What quickly emerged, though, was a new narrative: None of this implicates President Biden. On CNN, White House correspondent John Harwood declared, “There is zero evidence that Vice President Biden, or President Biden, has done anything wrong in connection with what Hunter Biden has done.” Anchor Brianna Keilar then added for emphasis that Harwood was making “an important distinction.”

    It was important, but not because it was true. While many media figures now willingly admit the legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s abandoned-laptop story, they are avoiding what the emails found on that laptop actually contain. Hundreds of emails appear to detail a multimillion-dollar influence-peddling enterprise by the Biden family, including Hunter Biden and his uncle James Biden.

    Influence peddling has long been the way Washington’s elite enriches itself. This common source of political corruption involves the relatives of powerful government figures who shake down corporations or countries for access and influence.

    The Bidens would seem to be standouts in this common practice, engaging in a virtual family business. James Biden has been accused of marketing his connection to his brother. And in the emails discovered on his abandoned laptop, Hunter Biden practically sold timeshares of his father by dangling meetings and dinners for investors.

    The key in any influence peddling scheme is to protect the principal. People apparently were told to avoid directly referring to President Biden. In one email, Tony Bobulinski, then a business partner of Hunter’s, was instructed by Biden associate James Gilliar not to speak of the former veep’s connection to any transactions: “Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u [sic] are face to face, I know u [sic] know that but they are paranoid.”

    Instead, the emails apparently refer to President Biden with code names such as “Celtic” or “the big guy.” In one, “the big guy” is discussed as possibly receiving a 10 percent cut on a deal with a Chinese energy firm; other emails reportedly refer to Hunter Biden paying portions of his father’s expenses and taxes.

    Despite President Biden’s repeated claims he knew nothing about these dealings, Bobulinski has said he personally met with the senior Biden to discuss Hunter Biden’s business activities. Bobulinski had been selected by the family to handle these deals.

    As vice president, Joe Biden flew to China on Air Force Two with Hunter Biden, who arranged for his father to meet some of his business interests. Hunter Biden’s financial interest in a Chinese-backed investment firm, BHR Partners, was registered within weeks of that 2013 trip. Yet, President Biden repeatedly insisted that he never discussed such dealings with his son, a claim Hunter Biden has contradicted.

    There are emails of Ukrainian and other foreign clients thanking Hunter Biden for arranging meetings with his father. There are photos from dinners and meetings that tie President Biden to these figures, including a 2015 dinner with a group of Hunter Biden’s Russian and Kazakh clients.

    It is important to note that when these foreign interests were clamoring to give Hunter Biden millions of dollars, he was, by his own admission, a hopeless addict. In his 2021 memoir, Hunter Biden admits he was “drinking a quart of vodka a day” and “smoking crack around the clock,” up until his father’s 2020 presidential campaign began. So why would Russian, Chinese and other foreign figures give Hunter Biden all of this money, if not to influence his father?

    The new narrative suggests that, while Hunter Biden maintained one of the largest influence-peddling schemes in recent history, it did not involve the object of that scheme — his father.

    Even if President Biden was not influenced by all of this, it’s hard to believe he didn’t know his son was selling access. In his book, Hunter Biden claims his father repeatedly intervened due to his addictions — and yet we are to believe that Joe Biden did not express curiosity about how his addicted son was raking in millions from foreign sources?

    The point is that President Biden really did not have to ask: Hunter Biden had nothing to sell butinfluence. All President Biden had to do to facilitate such schemes was to be accessible — to allow his family to deliver face-to-face meetings and photo ops.

    And that brings us to the untenable position of Garland.

    It is hard to imagine a stronger case for a special counsel. Any effort to investigate Hunter Biden’s dealings will lead investigators to encounter repeated references to the president and how he may have benefited from those schemes. At the same time, the president is “absolutely” standing by his denial that his son did anything wrong or made any money from China.

    The White House statement this week serves as a reminder to investigators that the president is heavily invested in this narrative and his denial of now-established facts.

    This is not to say that Weiss, the U.S. Attorney investigating Hunter Biden, will not be independent in his efforts. However, the concern is the appearance of how a conflict might affect the investigation or limit the scope of any potential charges. Moreover, absent a special counsel, there is unlikely to be a report on these apparent influence peddling schemes.

    Garland pledged to protect the Justice Department from such conflicts and to avoid even the appearance of political influence. He now has a president stating that alleged wrongdoing by his son is “absolutely” untrue, including dealings possibly impacting the president personally and financially. If Garland declines to appoint a special counsel, he will absolutely fail on his pledge.
    Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. Follow him on Twitter @JonathanTurley.

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  • Parihaka
    replied
    In Carter Page's lawsuit vs. Comey et al, the DOJ has submitted its reply arguing for dismissal.

    In a cacophony of irony during a statute of limitations argument, the Biden DOJ cites the Nunes memo as evidence that Page knew about FISA misconduct by the FBI since 2018, validating Nunes memo in the process.

    Yes we lied, yes what Nunes said was all true, Page knew about it then because of Nunes, so he's passed the time he can sue.

    Linky thing.

    Leave a comment:


  • DOR
    replied
    Just a short bit about that Washington Post report …

    “The Post did not find evidence that Joe Biden personally benefited from or knew details about the transactions with CEFC, which took place after he had left the vice presidency and before he announced his intentions to run for the White House in 2020.”
    Emphasis added.

    Editorial comment: "Oops."

    (and, contrary to some folks, I post my sources: https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...-china-laptop/




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