Trump and Putin, behind the scenes

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When Robert Mueller spoke before reporters last Wednesday (yes, it’s only been a week), the special counsel iterated key sections of his report that appeared to undermine the narrative offered by Attorney General William Barr during his press conference last month. Wednesday, the national security law and policy blog Just Security published a side-by-side chart comparing statements made by Barr and Mueller, and provided corresponding analysis about the statements’ differences

Legal expert’s devastating side-by-side comparison of Barr and Mueller statements shows exactly how the AG did Trump’s bidding – Alternet.org

Senate Republicans blocked legislation on Thursday that would force campaigns to notify the Federal Election Commission and the FBI about attempts by foreign nationals to influence an election.  Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, tried to pass the Foreign Influence Reporting in Elections (FIRE) Act by unanimous consent.  "This legislation is pretty simple, even for this body, it would require any presidential campaign that receives offers of assistance from an agent of a foreign government, has an obligation to report that offer of assistance to law enforcement, specifically the FBI," Warner said from the Senate floor.

Senate GOP blocks bill to require campaigns report foreign election assistance | TheHill

Senate Republicans on Tuesday blocked an attempt by Democrats to pass legislation aimed at bolstering the country's election infrastructure despite a stalemate in the chamber on the issue.   Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), the top Democrat on the Rules Committee, tried to call up the Election Security Act, which would require backup paper ballots and provide election security grants to states, before it was blocked.

Senate GOP blocks election security bill | TheHill

President Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort will reportedly not be transferred to the Rikers Island jail complex in New York City after Justice Department officials intervened to stop the move.

Justice Department intervenes, keeps Manafort from being sent to Rikers Island: report | TheHill

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The Trump administration has not imposed a second round of sanctions on Russia over the poisoning of an ex-Russian spy in Britain more than eight months after telling Congress that Moscow had triggered them. State Department officials have repeatedly insisted the United States intends to impose new sanctions, which are required under a law passed by Congress in 1991 on eliminating chemical and biological weapons. But several months have passed without news, and members of Congress say they have heard little from the administration on the topic. A former government official familiar with the matter told The Hill that the State and Treasury departments finalized a proposed sanctions package by March at the latest, but top officials have yet to sign off. “Options have been ready to go for several months at this point and senior folks in the administration haven’t made the decision or given the green light to roll them out,” the former official said.

Mystery surrounds elusive sanctions on Russia | TheHill

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One of the biggest points that former Special Counsel Robert Mueller made during his House testimony on Wednesday was about Russian election interference: He warned that it was a major problem in 2016 and emphasized that it could be just as bad in 2020. “Over the course of my career, I’ve seen a number of challenges to our democracy,” Mueller said. “The Russian government’s effort to interfere in our election is among the most serious.” Senate Republicans, however, seemingly weren’t listening. Shortly following Mueller’s appearance in the House on Wednesday, Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA), Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) sought to leverage his testimony and urged a vote on a package of election security bills, including the FIRE Act, which would require all political campaigns to report contact from a foreign government to the FBI. Each bill they proposed was quickly shut down by Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS). This is, of course, not the first time Republicans have blocked Democratic efforts to put stronger election security restrictions in place as the 2020 election rapidly approaches.

Republicans are still blocking election security bills after Mueller’s testimony - Vox

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This is pretty terrible, one should read the whole article, but here is the gist of it:

In any conflict, there is one factor that is certain to destroy any possibility of a fair resolution: asymmetrical information. Asymmetrical information is just what it sounds like, It’s when one side of a conflict has more or better information than the other. That information gives that side an advantage in both tactics and strategy. Now look at what Trump and Attorney General William Barr are doing, and have been doing, step by step, for months.

Trump hasn’t voluntarily provided a witness to Congress since Democrats took control of the House in January. He hasn’t turned over one page of documentation. Instead, Trump has ordered witnesses not to obey requests. Then to ignore congressional subpoenas. Then to ignore contempt citations. He has even extended this denial to former members of his staff, to members and former members of other areas of the executive branch far removed from direct contact with his office, and to members of his transition team. In addition to denying Congress witnesses, or documents subpoenaed along with those witnesses, Trump has sued Congress to prevent the release of his personal information. He has continued to challenge the outcomes of those lawsuits. And he has ordered members of his Cabinet and their staff to ignore plain law in refusing to hand over information.

Should the situation ever reach the point where the Supreme Court orders Trump to produce the information, there is little doubt about what he will do. After all, this week has been a vivid reminder that, according to the Department of Justice, Donald Trump cannot be indicted. So why should he listen to any court? Should any of the witnesses Congress is seeking to interview ever be found in contempt, Trump has an answer for that. He can pardon them, just as he has his other friends and political supporters. Or Barr can claim privilege. In any case … no one is talking. At the same time, Barr has expanded on Trump’s already expansive view of executive privilege. That’s included throwing a blanket over all source materials for the Mueller report, and even over the sort of ordinary data from agencies that was previously given to Congress as a matter of course.

The net result is that Congress is absolutely starved for information. Does the House seem indecisive and confused? Is there a frustrating schism within the Democratic Party? Yes. That’s because they are walking around in the dark, absolutely unable to get the information that usually fuels their decisions. Cautious representatives, used to checking every box in triplicate before making a move, feel suffocated by the lack of data, and frightened by the willingness of others to jump forward. In short, they’re afraid it’s all a trap. And it could be—both because they don’t have the information they want, and because Barr can create any information he wants. Trump has authorized Barr to look at all classified information, no matter the context. And to selectively share that information with whomever he pleases. Trump explicitly included sharing information with Republicans in Congress, such as Devin Nunes.

Because Barr is authorized to release only what he wants, he can select the bits and pieces that support Trump, leaving any information that might be harmful to Trump hidden. Because he can share it with whomever he wants, the result is a massive imbalance of information. Not only do Trump and Barr hold all the cards, but they own the places where the cards are printed. The ability to selectively release any information out of context is indistinguishable from the ability to simply make things up. Trump, Barr, or anyone they are feeding information to can make any claim without being disputed. Against anyone. If Barr were to announce tomorrow that the DOJ inspector general’s report found that James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, and others were involved in a “deep state” conspiracy against Trump … how could it be disputed? Where would anyone turn for the truth?

If Nunes were to hold a press conference and say he had information connecting the Democratic campaign in 2018 straight to the Kremlin … how could it be countered? Would the House issue subpoenas? Would the DOJ take action? This asymmetrical information war has already proceeded very nearly to the point where the truth is whatever Nunes says it is. Which is whatever Barr says it is. Which is whatever Trump says it is. Because they’ve completely isolated any source of information that might counter their claims.

There is a strategy behind Trump’s madness — and it’s already much later than you think – Alternet.org

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The missing third volume of the Mueller report, the counterintelligence investigation is still ongoing, as Mueller revealed in his testimony, with Michael Flynn still under investigation.

The fruits of this inquiry may never be seen in public because its primary mission isn’t to investigate and prosecute crimes. The job of FBI counterintelligence was and is to neutralize the threat posed by foreign intelligence—which, in this case, means dealing with what the special counsel’s report called Russia’s “sweeping and systematic” effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. But the investigation’s low visibility shouldn’t diminish its importance, which is no less than a probe into whether the president himself was acting on behalf of Russia’s interests.

The FBI, as the lead agency for exposing, preventing, and investigating intelligence activities on U.S. soil, sent officials with the bureau’s Counterintelligence Division to meet regularly with members of the special counsel’s team. For more than a year, FBI agents were embedded in Mueller’s office. Their purpose, according to a little-noticed section of the special counsel’s report, was “to review the results of the investigation and to send—in writing—summaries of foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information to FBIHQ and FBI Field Offices.” But not all of the information in those summaries appeared in Mueller’s final report.

Sometimes a counterintelligence investigation can lead to criminal charges. Michael Flynn’s lies about his communications with the Russian ambassador were indeed criminal—he pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the FBI—but, as the Wednesday hearing underscored, they also posed a counterintelligence threat. The Russians obviously knew that Flynn had lied, and that left the president’s top national security aide exposed to blackmail by a hostile foreign power. This deeply worried Justice Department officials in the early days of the Trump administration, but the president was less concerned. Even though the White House was informed of Flynn’s potential problem by acting Attorney General Sally Yates just days after the inauguration, it took another 18 days for Trump to fire his national security advisor.

The FBI’s Trump-Russia Investigation Continues | The New Republic

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Robert Mueller built a failure machine because he defined his job as punishing crimes rather than discovering the truth. If he found something that was very bad, but not criminal, he ignored it. If he could not establish a crime beyond a reasonable doubt, the criminal got away with it. If the crime was committed by the president, he in effect protected it. Mueller’s logic was amazingly self-defeating: Because the president cannot be indicted, he will never be heard in court; because the president will never be heard in court, it is unfair even to present evidence of crimes that will never be litigated. Impeachment busts out of this ridiculous trap.

A Realist's Guide to Impeachment - The Atlantic

President Trump reportedly told two senior Russian officials in an Oval Office meeting in 2017 that he was unconcerned about Moscow’s election interference the previous year, saying the U.S. did the same thing to other countries. Three former officials with knowledge of the matter told The Washington Post that Trump’s comments sparked alarm among White House staffers, prompting them to restrict access to the remarks to an unusually small number of people with the highest security clearances to prevent the conversation from being leaked.

Trump told Russian officials in 2017 he was unconcerned about Moscow's election interference: report | TheHill

• Of course he was unconcerned, they helped him to get elected
  

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Days before the Group of 7 industrialized nations summit, President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that it’s “appropriate” to readmit Russia to the gathering. “I could certainly see it being the G8 again,” Trump told reporters. Russia was expelled from the G8 its 2014 annexation of Crimea, a move that the US, and other nations, harshly condemned. Late on Tuesday, a senior administration official told CNN that French President Emmanuel Macron told Trump over the phone that he too supports letting Russia back in. The claim is surprising. One day earlier, Macron told Putin he wouldn’t support inviting Russia back into the group until it helps promote peace in Ukraine.

Trump is pushing to let Russia re-join the G7, and the White House claims that France approves

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Donald Trump disputed that Russia was behind the attempted murder of a former Russian spy in a tense call with Theresa May, it has emerged. Despite the widespread conclusion that Vladimir Putin’s regime was behind the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia last year, the US president is said to have spent 10 minutes expressing his doubts about Russian involvement.

Trump told Theresa May he doubted Russia was behind Skripal poisoning | US news | The Guardian

• Leaving no opportunity unused to defend his buddy, amazing..
  

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Meanwhile, the EU has reckoned with the profound ill will of the Trump administration. The New York Times this week quoted an EU official who reported that Sondland told a dinner party that he hoped “to destroy the European Union.” In January, the German magazine Der Spiegel published a scathing account of the isolation of Trump’s ambassador among officials in Berlin. He had not made himself any better liked by the time I arrived in September...

The sources of Trump’s hostility toward the EU are not economic, and they are not strategic. At best, they might reveal how he has osmotically absorbed the ideology of the European far right. At worst, they might again display Trump’s subservience to Russian foreign policy. Breaking up the European Union into small, weak states that can be bullied serves Vladimir Putin’s interests—and all the more so if Russia can lever the U.S. away from its former friends altogether.

The U.S. Goes AWOL on Brexit - The Atlantic

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At the same time, overshadowed by the publicity around the impeachment, is the ever-broadening investigation by William Barr, the attorney general, which the White House sees as a game-changer. An investigation which is seeking nothing less than to overturn the conclusion of the US intelligence services and special counsel Robert Mueller that Russia interfered in the last US presidential election. This has now been designated a criminal investigation with power of subpoena and the possibility of prison sentences for those who have been allegedly involved in criminal actions, although exactly what these criminal actions entail remains unclear. It may also seem odd that Trump, having repeatedly claimed that the Mueller report was a “complete and total exoneration” of him over Russiagate, is now going to such lengths to try and discredit it... 

The attorney general is focusing on the theory, aired on far-right conspiracy sites, and raised by Trump and Giuliani, that Ukraine framed Vladimir Putin over the US election in a complex triple-cross operation by impersonating Russian hackers. Trump and Barr have also been asking other foreign governments for help in investigating the FBI, CIA and Mueller investigators. The US president has called on the Australian prime minister Scott Morrison for assistance, while the attorney general has been on similar missions to the UK and Italy.

And the information being requested has left allies astonished. One British official with knowledge of Barr’s wish list presented to London commented that “it is like nothing we have come across before, they are basically asking, in quite robust terms, for help in doing a hatchet job on their own intelligence services”...

The Trump followers’ counternarrative is that US intelligence and security services had deliberately, and wrongly, concluded that the Russians were behind the hacking. The real culprit, they allege, was a private company, Crowdstrike, which is run with an anti-Russian agenda. Crowdstrike was a security firm hired by the Democratic Party to investigate the data breach and was the first of many, including western intelligence agencies, to find that Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, had carried it out.

According to the conspiracy theories, Crowdstrike has a Ukrainian base, and its founder Dmitri Alperovitch is a Ukrainian who set up Putin in revenge for invading his homeland. But Alperovitch, in real life, is of Russian extraction and is a US citizen whose family came to America in the Soviet era. Crowdstrike is based not in Kiev, but California. Every aspect of the Crowdstrike conspiracy tale has been disproved. But this has not stopped Trump from demanding that Zelensky looks into it, albeit in a somewhat incoherent manner, in the now infamous 25 July call to the Ukrainian president.

‘It’s like nothing we have come across before’: UK intelligence officials shaken by Trump administration’s requests for help with counter-impeachment inquiry | The Independent