Lazy Caturday Reads: Counterintelligence and Cats in High Places

Good Afternoon!!

Cover-Up General Barr’s redacted version of the Mueller Report is out; and despite Barr’s attempts to soften the blow it make Trump look really bad. Interestingly, there is nothing in the report about the counterintelligence investigation that was begun after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. It appears that investigation is ongoing.

Ken Dilanian of NBC News reports this morning: The counterintelligence investigation of the Trump team and Russia hasn’t stopped.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s criminal investigation may be over, but the FBI’s efforts to assess and counter Russian efforts to influence the U.S. political system — including the Trump administration — is continuing, current and former U.S. officials say.

The FBI and other intelligence agencies are pursuing a counterintelligence effort to thwart Russian influence operations in the U.S. and stymie an anticipated Russian effort to interfere in the 2020 election, the officials tell NBC News.

The FBI and other intelligence agencies are pursuing a counterintelligence effort to thwart Russian influence operations in the U.S. and stymie an anticipated Russian effort to interfere in the 2020 election, the officials tell NBC News.

As part of that mission, analysts will continue to drill down on exactly how the Russians interfered in the 2016 election, whether any Americans helped them unwittingly, and whether any American continues to be compromised by Russia, experts say.

These are different questions than whether crimes were committed, which is what Mueller explored in his 448-page report. Mueller’s report is silent on some of the key counterintelligence issues raised in his probe. It doesn’t mention, for example, the counterintelligence investigation the FBI opened into the president — an inquiry former acting director Andrew McCabe said was designed to examine whether he was compromised by Russia. Nor does the report cite the counterintelligence briefing the Trump campaign is said to have received from the FBI, warning that Russia and other adversaries would seek to infiltrate the campaign.

“The fact that it’s not present in the report tells me the ball is now and remains in the court of the FBI and the intelligence community,” said Frank Figliuzzi, an NBC News contributor and former head of counterintelligence at the FBI.

It’s unclear whether the counterintelligence investigation into Trump remains open. An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment.

Read the rest at the link. It’s long and interesting. I’d be willing to bet that they are still looking at whether Trump is compromised. I hope the House Intelligence Committee will request a briefing on this matter ASAP. They have apparently offered to brief the Gang of Eight at least.

Yesterday The New York Times published an important op-ed about this by Joshua Geltzer and Ryan Goodman: Mueller Hints at a National-Security Nightmare.

The Mueller report isn’t actually close to a full account of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller. That’s not just because of the redactions. When he was hired, Mr. Mueller inherited supervision of an F.B.I. counterintelligence investigation. That is the missing piece of the Mueller report.

President Trump may claim “exoneration” on a narrowly defined criminal coordination charge. But a counterintelligence investigation can yield something even more important: an intelligence assessment of how likely it is that someone — in this case, the president — is acting, wittingly or unwittingly, under the influence of or in collaboration with a foreign power. Was Donald Trump a knowing or unknowing Russian asset, used in some capacity to undermine our democracy and national security?

The public Mueller report alone provides enough evidence to worry that America’s own national security interests may not be guiding American foreign policy.

The counterintelligence investigation is not necessarily complete, but from the glimpses we see in the Mueller report, it should set off very serious national security alarm bells.

What would this counterintelligence investigation look like?

An intelligence assessment makes two determinations: a conclusion about the type of influence a foreign power may have over an individual and the degree of confidence in that conclusion. For example, when Mr. Trump boasted to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in the Oval Office that he had fired the F.B.I. director, it raised only the possibility — a “circumstantial inference,” as it’s called in counterintelligence — that the president was wittingly working on behalf of the Russians.

This apparent desire to please these officials indicates a high level of Russian influence and, in the context of other actions that pleased Mr. Putin, like his sudden decision to withdraw American troops from Syria — could support a modest to high level of confidence in that conclusion.

The authors explain that we don’t have a “smoking gun” that would indicate “high confidence,” because that “would require something we don’t have and would not expect to have, like an email from Vladimir Putin ordering Mr. Trump to fire the F.B.I. director James Comey.” But we do have many indications that Trump and his associates are working against U.S. national interests. Examples from the article:

— The former Trump adviser Roger Stone directly communicates with the Russia-linked actor Guccifer 2.0 and coordinates with WikiLeaks to get Mr. Trump elected — and he is likely aware that one is a Russian front organization and the other is working with the Russians.

== A Trump campaign national security adviser is informed by a Russian intelligence operative that the Kremlin has stolen Hillary Clinton-related emails and could assist the Trump campaign through “anonymous release” of derogatory information; the campaign then works on setting up backdoor meetings with senior Russian government officials (though the meetings do not materialize).

— Members of the Trump transition team conduct secretive, back channel meetings with Putin operatives.

— Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin speak alone in Helsinki, then Mr. Trump accepts Mr. Putin’s claim that he didn’t meddle in the 2016 election and repudiates the intelligence community’s assessments to the contrary.

Those incidents raise the possibility that Mr. Trump has wittingly sought to advance Russian interests, but the evidence is merely circumstantial and consequently suggests low to moderate confidence in that assessment….

But unwitting assets pose their own dangers. They have significant vulnerabilities that can be exploited with minimal actual coordination. In other words, they look and act more like puppets.

I’ve quoted a great deal from the article, because it’s so significant. I hope you’ll read the rest at the NYT.

Read more by Geltzer and Goodman on the counterintelligence investigation at Just Security: The Missing Piece of the Mueller Investigation.

Another New York Times op-ed by former FBI counterintelligance agent Asha Rangappa: How Barr and Trump Use a Russian Disinformation Tactic.

On Nov. 9, 2016, according to the Mueller report, some redacted figure wrote to a Russian regime crony, “Putin has won.” Based on the assessment of the intelligence community and the findings of Robert Mueller, President Vladimir Putin of Russia did indeed succeed in his efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump.

But Mr. Putin’s ultimate victory may have come on Thursday morning, during Attorney General Bill Barr’s news conference. By seamlessly conflating the terms “collusion” and “conspiracy,” and absolving President Trump of both, Mr. Barr revealed that the Russian information warfare technique of “reflexive control” has officially entered American public discourse — and threatens, with his recent allegations of campaign “spying,” to stay there for a while.

Reflexive control is a “uniquely Russian” technique of psychological manipulation through disinformation. The idea is to feed your adversary a set of assumptions that will produce a predictable response: That response, in turn, furthers a goal that advances your interests. By luring your opponent into agreeing with your initial assumptions, you can control the narrative, and ultimate outcome, in your favor. Best of all, the outcome is one in which your adversary has voluntarily acceded. This is exactly what has happened with much of the American public in the course of Mueller’s investigation.

The assumptions that culminated in Mr. Barr’s conclusions began almost two years ago, when the White House, Trump supporters and the media characterized the focus of the special counsel’s investigation as “collusion.” The word “collusion” does not appear anywhere in Mr. Mueller’s appointment letter: His mandate was to investigate any “links and/or coordination” between the Trump campaign and Russia. There is a good reason for this: “Collusion” is the legal equivalent of Jell-O. Outside of specific factual contexts — such as price fixing in antitrust law — the word “collusion” has no legal meaning or significance. In fact, in his report, Mr. Mueller explicitly stated that his conclusions were not about collusion, “which is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the United States code.”

Read more at the link. It’s fascinating.

Here’s an interesting take on the Mueller Report from The Washington Post’s book critic: The Mueller report isn’t just a legal document. It’s also the best book on the Trump White House so far.

The Mueller report is that rare Washington tell-all that surpasses its pre-publication hype.

Sure, it is a little longer than necessary. Too many footnotes and distracting redactions. The writing is often flat, and the first half of the book drags, covering plenty of terrain that has been described elsewhere. The story shifts abruptly between riveting insider tales and dense legalisms. Its protagonist doesn’t really come alive until halfway through, once Volume I (on Russian interference) gives way to Volume II (on obstruction of justice). The title — far too prosaic, really — feels like a missed opportunity. And it hardly helps that the book’s earliest reviewer, Attorney General William Barr, seems to have willfully misunderstood the point of it; he probably should not have been assigned to review it at all.

Yet as an authoritative account, the Mueller report is the best book by far on the workings of the Trump presidency. It was delivered to the attorney general but is also written for history. The book reveals the president in all his impulsiveness, insecurity and growing disregard for rules and norms; White House aides alternating between deference to the man and defiance of his “crazy s—” requests; and a campaign team too inept to realize, or too reckless to care, when they might have been bending the law. And special counsel Robert Mueller has it all under oath, on the record, along with interviews and contemporaneous notes backing it up. No need for a “Note on Use of Anonymous Sources” disclaimer. Mueller doesn’t just have receipts — he seems to know what almost everyone wanted to buy.

Read the rest at the WaPo.

What else is happening? What stories have you been following?

Tuesday Reads: Impeachment Is Our Only Hope

Good Afternoon!!

I’m feeling despairing today. I’m already so sick of the 2020 election that I just want to throw out my TV and hide in my apartment reading escapist novels for the rest of 2019. Bernie Sanders is determined to destroy all of the actual Democrats who are running in order to reelect Trump, and much of the mainstream media is rooting for him to succeed.

I’m convinced that our only hope to save this country from autocracy is impeachment, because the media has learned nothing from their horrendous mistakes in 2016. They will continue to hammer Democrats and support Bernie Sanders’ effort to divide the party because they would rather gain click from publishing gossip than use their considerable power to help save our democracy.

I can’t understand why The New York Times especially is supporting Bernie’s efforts to destroy the Democratic Party. Do they really believe Trump won’t find a way to control the press if he wins a second term? This morning the Times published a stunningly unethical hit piece on Bernie’s latest target, Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden. I’m including the headline because it demonstrates the Times’ deliberate venom against Democrats and, of course, Hillary Clinton. The authors are Elizabeth Williamson and Ken Vogel.

The Rematch: Bernie Sanders vs. a Clinton Loyalist

The bad blood started early.

In 2008, Neera Tanden, then a top aide on Hillary Clinton’s first presidential campaign, accompanied Mrs. Clinton to what was expected to be an easy interview at the Center for American Progress, the influential group founded by top Clinton aides. But Faiz Shakir, the chief editor of the think tank’s ThinkProgress website, asked Mrs. Clinton a question about the Iraq war, an issue dogging her candidacy because she had supported it.

NYT gossip Elizabeth Williamson

Ms. Tanden responded by circling back to Mr. Shakir after the interview and, according to a person in the room, punching him in the chest.

“I didn’t slug him, I pushed him,” a still angry Ms. Tanden corrected in a recent interview.

Ms. Tanden now leads the Center for American Progress, Mr. Shakir runs Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign and the enmity between the two camps burst into the open last weekend. Mr. Sanders, angry about a video produced by ThinkProgress that ridicules his new status as one of the millionaires he has vilified on the campaign trail, sent a scorching letter to the center’s board, accusing Ms. Tanden of “maligning my staff and supporters and belittling progressive ideas.”

The blowup is another reflection of the ideological divisions among Democrats, this time between a legacy Clinton organization and a liberal wing trying to move the party to the left to harness the energy of millennials. Mr. Sanders’s team remains convinced that the Democratic establishment worked behind the scenes to deprive him of the party’s nomination in 2016; his campaign has cast the group as beholden to corporate interests set on thwarting him in 2020.

I wish NYT would explain how the “Democratic establishment” could have “rigged” the primary for Bernie. Primary voters choose the nominee, and even without the superdelegates that Bernie railed against in 2016, Hillary would have beaten him handily. Bernie had little chance to win after Super Tuesday in 2016. He made no effort to win black votes, and no Democrat can win without them, especially in the South. Bernie also publicly disparaged the South in 2016.

NYT gossip Ken Vogel

But back to the disgraceful NYT story. The authors, Elizabeth Williamson and Ken Vogel took advantage of Tanden’s mother to attack her as an “aggressive” woman (horrors!)

Ms. Tanden’s mother, Maya Tanden, says that her daughter “can be very aggressive.”

“She’s not going to let anyone rule over her,” she said, “and she has loyalty to Hillary because Hillary is the one who made her.”

“Those Bernie brothers are attacking her all the time, but she lets them have it, too,” Maya Tanden said. “She says Sanders got a pass” in 2016, “but he’s not getting a pass this time.” [….]

Ms. Tanden, whose salary was $397,000 in 2018, was an unpaid adviser to Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign while running the think tank, and was considered a candidate for a top White House job had Mrs. Clinton won the presidency. Ms. Tanden says she has founded six new policy-intensive groups as the center’s president and increased its annual budget by 25 percent.

“That’s what she does — she shows up at rich people’s places because she needs funds from them,” Ms. Tanden’s mother said. “That place runs on Neera Tanden.”

Neera’s mom is rightfully proud of her. She’s not involved in politics, and she believed the reporter was writing a nice story about her daughter. She had no idea she was being used to promote Bernie Sanders in his childish feud against CAP and Think Progress. When she realized what was happening, she called back and the reporter who had called her, Elizabeth Williamson, explain that the quotes had been “on the record.” Tanden’s mother Maya didn’t know what that meant.

That’s a joke of course. The NYT fired their ombudsman and eliminated the job.

Williamson send out a nasty tweet about her story, but then deleted it after the overwhelmingly negative response on Twitter.

We’ve learned quite a bit about Cover-Up General Bill Barr’s history in the past couple of weeks, but I didn’t know he had connections to Russia.

Cristina Maza at Newsweek: Should William Barr Recuse Himself From Mueller Report? Legal Experts Say Attorney General’s Ties to Russia Are Troubling.

…some experts argue that Barr’s previous work in the private sector could conflict with his continuing supervision of the investigation into Russian tampering in the 2016 election campaign.

Why? A few of Barr’s previous employers are connected to key subjects in the probe. And some argue that, even if Barr didn’t break any rules, his financial ties to companies linked to aspects of the Russia investigation raise questions about whether he should—like his predecessor, Jeff Sessions—recuse himself.

“The legal standard is really clear about these issues. It’s not about actual conflict, it’s about the appearance of a conflict, about the appearance of bias,” Jed Shugerman, a professor at Fordham University’s School of Law and an expert on judicial and government ethics, tells Newsweek . “The problem is that we have so many flagrant conflicts that are so obvious, we get distracted from what the legal standard is.”

This much is known: On Barr’s public financial disclosure report, he admits to working for a law firm that represented Russia’s Alfa Bank and for a company whose co-founders allegedly have long-standing business ties to Russia. What’s more, he received dividends from Vector Group, a holding company with deep financial ties to Russia.

“All of this raises the need for further inquiry from an independent review, not a Department of Justice investigation,” Michael Frisch, ethics counsel for Georgetown University’s law school and an expert in professional ethics, tells Newsweek . Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project for Government Oversight, says that Barr is probably playing within the rules. But that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t recuse himself.

“He’s not doing anything illegal. [But] is it good practice, given that he might have been involved with these entities in private practice? Probably not,” Amey added.

Read many more details at Newsweek.

If we can’t count on the media to to it’s “fourth estate” job, who can we turn to? Right now, our only hope is the House Democrats.

Brad Miller at The Daily Beast: Here’s How the House Can Finally Nail Trump.

President Trump may complain on Twitter or Fox News that congressional investigations are a “partisan witch hunt,” “presidential harassment,” and a “disgrace,” but few judges will want to hear it.

Of course House Democrats have the legal power to obtain President Trump’s tax returns. And the full, un-redacted Mueller report. And records of Trump’s financial relations with Deutsche Bank and other lenders. And much more.

House Democrats need not ask meekly for information about Trump’s finances and the Mueller report and accept whatever Trump voluntarily provides. The power of the House and of the Senate to compel the disclosure of documents and testimony to inform the exercise of their constitutional powers is very, very well-established. “The power of the Congress to conduct investigations is inherent in the legislative process. That power is broad,” the Supreme Court said in Barenblatt v. United States. “It encompasses inquiries concerning the administration of existing laws as well as proposed or possibly needed statutes.”

“The power of inquiry has been employed by Congress throughout our history, over the whole range of the national interests concerning which Congress might legislate or decide upon due investigation not to legislate; it has similarly been utilized in determining what to appropriate from the national purse, or whether to appropriate,” the Supreme Court said in Watkins v. United States. “The scope of the power of inquiry, in short, is as penetrating and far-reaching as the potential power to enact and appropriate under the Constitution.”

Citizens are required to comply with congressional subpoenas “to testify fully with respect to matters within the province of proper investigation” just as they are required to comply with judicial subpoenas.

Read the rest at the link.

I’ll end this post with some powerful remarks from the woman who really should be our president.

What stories are you following today?