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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
I know for a fact that YOU know for a fact that neither Signy nor I are Russian, SHITSTAIN. Intentionally, knowingly, defaming other people is not a good look for you.

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I recall that you two Russian Trolls discussed sharing a lawyer who would sue me over that point. Then years passed and nothing happened. Go ahead. Do it. Make your threats more real than Trump's honesty, integrity, and sincerity. He'd have a hard time proving he has those qualities in a courtroom:

One of the unique characteristics of Donald Trump's criminal behavior is that, unlike most other criminals, he actually ends up admitting his wrongdoing in public and insisting that there's nothing wrong with it. That was surprisingly well demonstrated on Thursday when he told George Stephanopoulos that he would happily accept and disseminate dirt on his political opponents, which is against the law.

And one of the reasons that Trump is so comfortable making such public confessions is that he knows he has Fox News (aka State TV) to clean up after him. That's what took place on Friday morning when the President did another call-in interview with the devoted Trump-fluffers on Fox and Friends. It was easily predictable that Trump would book this segment following a gaffe that was essentially an admission of treason.

However, even that brownnosing do-over was stepped on by Trump himself with the release of another clip from the Stephanopoulos interview. In this discussion Trump launched into a familiar and tedious denial that he ever sought to have special counsel Robert Mueller fired. That's a claim that has been refuted by several of his close aides, including his White House Counsel, Don McGahn. Stephanopoulos noted that McGahn had testified to Mueller that Trump did ask him to talk to the Justice Department and make it clear to them that Mueller "had to go." Which led to this incriminating exchange (video below):

Trump: I don't care what he said. It doesn't matter. That was to show everyone what a good counsel he was.
Stephanopoulos: But why would he lie under oath to Robert Mueller?
Trump: Because he wanted to make himself look like a good lawyer. Or he believed it because I would constantly tell anybody that would listen, including you, including the media, that Robert Mueller was conflicted.

First of all, when Stephanopoulos asked why McGahn would lie under oath, Trump didn't reject that premise. In fact, he attempted to justify it. So Trump is accusing his White House counsel of committing criminal perjury. It will interesting to see if Attorney General William Barr will now open an investigation into that and issue an indictment for McGahn. (Don't hold your breath). Because either McGahn is guilty of perjury, or Trump is lying about it.

Secondly, Trump's first explanation for McGahn's alleged perjury is that McGahn was seeking to "make himself look like a good lawyer." How? By lying under oath? How does it burnish his credibility to implicate Trump in a scheme to fire Mueller? Trump is apparently conceding that testimony linking Trump to obstruction of justice is the honorable thing to do. Of course it is. Telling the truth would surely cast a positive glow on McGahn or any other witness. But accusing McGahn of doing the right thing is an odd defense from Trump's perspective.

Finally, Trump's other explanation for McGahn's testimony is that McGahn, and "anybody that would listen," were deluged with complaints by Trump that Mueller was conflicted. That assertion has always been a deliberate lie on Trump's part. But his admission here that he has been inundating everyone around him with that allegation could itself be construed as obstruction of justice. He's trying to materially harm the investigation by falsely impugning the integrity of the special counsel.

So Trump is providing a perverse set of arguments in his defense. On one hand, Trump thinks that his White House counsel is a perjurer for having told the truth about him. On the other, Trump is obstructing justice by lying about Mueller. And if you're having trouble figuring that out, or why Trump would be asserting such a preposterous defense, it just means that you're a normal, logical person. Unlike the sociopathic narcissist currently residing in the White House.

www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/6/14/1864866/-Trump-s-BIZARRE-Reasons-fo
r-Accusing-His-White-House-Counsel-Don-McGahn-of-Lying-Under-Oath

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:

Then there's the George Floyd cotton candy. I'm calling it that because I believe - in terms of numbers - this will dissolve like the fluffed up piece of insubstantial nothing it is. Not that I think police misconduct doesn't exist. Or that police are immune from prejudice. But, as Signy points out, nothing will be done about the root causes of what's wrong with society. (SECOND should know about root causes - it's the factor that underlies any failure analysis.) There will be a lot of what I call Kabuki theater instead, which will mollify enough people enough, but go absolutely nowhere.

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Rodney George King Floyd

Empty theater.
Stylized protests. Formalized knee-bending.
Nothing changes here.

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Originally posted by SECOND: blah blah blah ... Trump ... blah blah blah

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Originally posted by SECOND: blah blah blah ... Trump ... blah blah blah

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Originally posted by second:
Signym, rather than you speculating about me, someone who is a figment of your Russian Trolling imagination, speculate about someone who is very fat and soft and real:

Donald Trump’s Increasingly Elaborate Bid to Create His Own America
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/trump-wants-his-own-americ
a.html

His lies and his degradation of reporting have been constant, but as we head toward the election, something more sinister is afoot.

On Tuesday morning, Donald Trump, whose unsurprising character defects still never fail to surprise, tweeted a Russian-sourced conspiracy theory claiming that the 75-year-old peace activist who remains hospitalized after his head was smashed open by Buffalo, New York, law enforcement officers was in fact a tech-savvy “ANTIFA provocateur” who “fell harder than was pushed.” The president also linked to a report from a conservative cable news outlet, One America News Network, for support. That report claimed, with no supporting evidence, that the man “was attempting to capture the radio communications signature of Buffalo police officers.”

The problem for Trump—but actually the problem for all the rest of us—is that we all saw the video. We all saw a peaceful 75-year-old approach the Buffalo police officers, who then push him to the pavement and walk past his bleeding body. In fact, the existence and wide circulation of that video are what forced the Buffalo Police Department, which originally claimed that a person “was injured when he tripped & fell” during a “skirmish involving protestors,” to suspend the two officers. The existence of the video, for all intents and purposes, closed the case, at least in the court of most sentient public opinion.

But closed cases are actually Donald Trump’s specialty. And the more compelling the evidence of a closed case is, the more apt he is to relitigate it. It’s no accident that some of Donald Trump’s most incendiary claims require his true believers to accept that their own eyes cannot be believed. Whether it’s photographic evidence of his lackluster inaugural crowds or hand-altered meteorological maps, almost every Trumpian fictionalized tour de force starts with a false claim—also known as a lie—that is readily disproven or even obviously wrong to the naked eye, and then subverts it. The more overtly false, the better.

But casual lies alone are for amateurs; the real authoritarian move is to construct an entire false reality—an unreality—around those lies.

Indeed, Trump himself has made the Orwellian claim that, among the many entities he insists lie constantly—the media, the FBI, the intelligence community, the entire House of Representatives now that it’s Democrat-led, the nameless and faceless “deep state” conspirators—the lyingest liars out there are our own eyes and ears. In July 2018, Trump, while addressing a Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention in Kansas City, told those assembled that they shouldn’t trust their eyes and ears at all and should instead get their facts from Trump alone. “Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening,” Trump said. “Just stick with us, don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news.” In some ways it’s an old play, presaged by George Orwell in 1984 when he warned that “the Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” It’s a double whammy that demonizes and delegitimizes the media as a whole while also—as Tyler Cowen has argued—wringing loyalty from all those who must then repeat the lie and cover for it. Every repetition of a lie deepens their loyalty.

But casual lies alone are for amateurs; the real authoritarian move is to construct an entire false reality—an unreality—around those lies. That’s what we’re now seeing from Trump and his loyalists. On Wednesday morning, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany made just this move on Fox & Friends. Speaking about the peaceful protester pushed to the ground in Buffalo, host Brian Kilmeade asked, “Does the president think that this guy is part of antifa?” McEnany replied that “the president was raising questions based on a report that he saw, questions that need to be asked, and [in] every case we can’t jump on one side without looking at all of the facts at play.” Trump’s press secretary added, “This individual has some very questionable tweets, some profanity-laden tweets about police officers,” going on to suggest darkly, if baselessly, that “there are a lot of questions in that case.”

By later on Wednesday morning, Miami Beach Commissioner Ricky Arriola was doubling down. He tweeted: “What part of having a guy who is trying to steal police frequency so he can sabotage them is offensive to you? He flopped better than Michael Jordan trying to get a charge foul. Seriously—be objective. This guy is no angel.” Even gravity itself, it seems, is a deep-state actor now. Asked on television to explain how precisely none of what Arriola described was apparent in the video footage we all laid eyes on, Arriola acknowledged that, “apparently, he was pushed by the police. … That was caught on video, so that’s clear, but what’s not clear is the motivation that the gentleman had in even confronting the police, and so I called into question, ‘What’s the real story?’ ”

See what he did there? Arriola claimed that people who saw what they saw were part of a “rush to judgment” and that “everything that is being videotaped nowadays makes it to social media, and right now, there’s a rush to judgment of the police, and I think that is very dangerous.” The act of recontextualizing that which happens clearly in plain sight is dressed up as subtlety and nuance—or, in McEnany’s parlance, as “asking questions.” But what’s actually happening is an effort to persuade the public that they didn’t see what they themselves have seen—or at least that they didn’t understand what they saw, or thought they saw. And most Senate Republicans, caught between amplifying Trump’s lie or calling it out, opted for door No. 3, pretending they were too busy to have seen Trump’s reprehensible tweet, or at least too busy to care. That may not be loyalty per se, but it is certainly complicity.

Trump has already spent years telling Americans to distrust their media, their intelligence community, their law enforcement, their judges, their health professionals, and at least some of their legislators, mayors, and governors. And he’s long told Americans to distrust their own eyes—going right back to his first day as president and his outlandish claims about inaugural crowd size. But now he’s building whole new unrealities, ones in which seeing isn’t believing—ever. We don’t even need to await the era of easily created deepfakes, in which altered images foster fakes that look as real as reality. Donald Trump builds deepfakes in the mind; and, for some audiences, they prove just as durable.

When authoritarians construct their own unreality, they try to stop actual reality from intruding. Trump’s now trying that, too. Recall that the Trump campaign has been suing news organizations for publishing op-eds the campaign finds too critical of Trump—despite the statements targeted in those op-eds actually being true—for a while now. On Wednesday afternoon, the Trump campaign went further. It sent a cease-and-desist letter to CNN demanding that the network retract and apologize for a poll that CNN aired, showing Trump trailing Joe Biden badly in the polls. Never mind that CNN’s poll was quite similar to polling from other leading media platforms and universities. Never mind that the Trump campaign failed to identify what made CNN’s purportedly defective. Never mind any of that. As Trump increasingly concocts his own unreality, he seeks to banish the unwanted intrusion of actual reality. He also sends the message that none of us can trust ourselves to make judgments; his word is reality, instead.

It’s like the slow act of pushing out the fenced perimeter around the White House: Trump is increasingly holding reality at a distance, and trying to move it further and further away. Reality isn’t looking good for Trump—that’s what CNN’s real poll showed—and, more importantly, the reality of Trump’s presidency isn’t looking good for most Americans. That’s why Trump’s latest authoritarian turn is to build, lie by insane lie, a different America, and to demand that his supporters see only that America. It’s why he’s lying about fraud in mail-in balloting and lying about his polling numbers. If Donald Trump has his way, by November, his supporters may not believe the vote tallies or even their election officials. This long into Trump’s presidency, it can become easy to dismiss the crazy little lies, but we are being trained to accept the really big ones. They’re coming at us faster than we may believe.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Tsk, tsk... libeling me again, SECOND?

Well, it won't derail the investigations and it won't stop me from posting about them. 'Cause you sure won't read about it in the M$M!



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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Tsk, tsk... libeling me again, SECOND?

Well, it won't derail the investigations and it won't stop me from posting about them. 'Cause you sure won't read about it in the M$M!



-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

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The Congressional Record will have transcripts of the false accusations made by Republican Senators. Remember Hillary was accused of crimes? It never went anywhere but into the Record. The Republicans were not serious about real indictments, real trials, real imprisonment. It was a fairy tale, all for show, part of Trump's first campaign. Signym's "investigation" is part of Trump's reelection campaign. There won't be real indictments, trials, imprisonment from the "investigation".

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Too bad Dummy Democrats blew their hoax impeachment load so soon, huh?

Going to have to rely on Uncle Joey's quick wit and sharp mind to win the debates against Trump.

lol

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Hillary who?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Hillary who?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Hillary who?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Joe Biden's V.P.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I don't see this Hillary person on Forbes' list.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewsolender/2020/06/08/heres-who-joe-b
iden-is-considering-for-vice-president/#3c8b81ba1c67

Did you mean Hilary Duff?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I don't see this Hillary person on Forbes' list.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewsolender/2020/06/08/heres-who-joe-b
iden-is-considering-for-vice-president/#3c8b81ba1c67

Did you mean Hilary Duff?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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The probability that you'd vote for a Democrat is zero, but maybe there is way to make it less than zero. There is! Hillary Clinton is the way. Whoever Joe Biden chooses will be Harry Truman to Joe's FDR. Joe has a 33% chance of dying in office like FDR did, April 12, 1945 (aged 63).

What are the odds? Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden and the risk assessment of older candidates
www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-bernie-sanders-jo
e-biden-death-20200306-h5v5ddxn3ndd7g6hmsy6bu6hwe-story.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Flynn Case: 85 Lies, Contradictions, Oddities, & Unusual Occurrences
Authored by Petr Svab via The Epoch Times,

The case of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn is inevitably heading toward its conclusion. While the presiding district judge, Emmet Sullivan, is trying to keep it going, there’s only so much he can do, chiefly because there’s nobody left to prosecute the case after the Department of Justice (DOJ) dropped it last month.

In the latest developments, the District of Columbia appeals court set a hearing in the case for tomorrow (June 12), while the DOJ’s solicitor general himself, as well as five of his deputies, urged the court to order the lower-court judge to accept the case dismissal.

“I cannot overstate how big of a deal this is,” commented appellate attorney John Reeves, former assistant Missouri attorney general, in a series of tweets on June 1.

Personal involvement of the solicitor general “is highly unusual and rare,” he said.

“Unusual” seems a fitting euphemism for the Flynn case, which has been filled with contradictions, falsehoods, apparent blunders, extraordinary moves, and strange coincidences.

The Epoch Times has so far counted 85 such instances.

Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency during the Obama administration and former national security adviser to President Donald Trump, pleaded guilty on Dec. 1, 2017, to one count of lying to FBI agents during a Jan. 24, 2017, interview.

The FBI officially opened an investigation on Flynn on Aug. 16, 2016, based on a suspicion that he “may wittingly or unwittingly be involved in activity on behalf of the Russian Federation which may constitute a federal crime or threat to the national security.”

What activity? The case was opened under a broader investigation into whether the Trump 2016 presidential campaign conspired with Russia to steal emails from the Democratic National Committee and release them through Wikileaks.

Flynn was an adviser to the campaign at the time.

By its own admission, the FBI had little reason to suspect the campaign.

The bureau learned from the Australian government that its then-ambassador to the UK, Alexander Downer, spoke with Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos, who “suggested” that the campaign received “some kind of suggestion” that Russia could help it by anonymously releasing some information damaging to Trump’s opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The FBI didn’t know what Papadopoulos actually said or what he was talking about.

Officially, this information was used by the FBI to comb through its databases for information on people associated with the Trump campaign and open investigations on four individuals supposedly linked to Russia.

Because Flynn’s paid speaking engagements in years past included some for Russian companies—one for Kaspersky Lab and one for RT television in Moscow—the FBI decided to open a counterintelligence investigation on the retired three-star general.

But the FBI seemed to have trouble getting its story straight.

1. Comey Contradiction
The FBI officially opened the four individual cases in mid-August 2016.
But former FBI Director James Comey testified to Congress that he was briefed already “at the end of July that the FBI had opened counterintelligence investigations of four individuals to see if there was a connection between any of those four and the Russian effort.”

2. Unlikely Target
Suspecting a man with patriotic bona fides of Flynn’s caliber of having colluded with Russia based on two speaking engagements seemed particularly unusual.
Flynn’s command of military intelligence to aid American troops in combat has earned him great praise.
“Mike Flynn’s impact on the nation’s War on Terror probably trumps any other single person,” wrote then-Brig. Gen. John Mulholland in Flynn’s 2007 performance review.
Mulholland went as far as calling Flynn “easily the best intelligence professional of any service serving today.”

Flynn was driven out of his post in 2014 after he repeatedly embarrassed President Barack Obama by insisting, contrary to the administration’s official stance, that a resurgence of Islamic terrorism in the Middle East was imminent.
Two months after his resignation, the rise of ISIS proved him right.

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3. A Name for the Spotlight
The Russia probe was titled “Crossfire Hurricane” (CH), and Flynn was given the code name “Crossfire Razor.”
This was unusual, according to Marc Ruskin, a 27-year veteran of the FBI and an Epoch Times contributor.
Rank-and-file agents would never pick a name like this, he told The Epoch Times in a previous interview.
“They would mock it as being overly dramatic,” he said.

4. Snooping During Briefing
The day after opening the Flynn case, the FBI participated in a strategic intelligence briefing given to Donald Trump and two of his advisers by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Because Flynn was to be present, the FBI took the extraordinary step of sending in supervisory special agent Joe Pientka to collect intel on Flynn for the investigation. Pientka was to assess Flynn’s “overall mannerisms” and listen for “any kind of admission” that could be used by the bureau, the DOJ’s inspector general (IG) said in a Dec. 9 report on the CH investigation (pdf).
The IG raised the question of whether snooping on officials the FBI is supposed to brief could have a “chilling effect” on any such intelligence briefings in the future.


5. Dossier Coincidence
The FBI directly targeted four Trump campaign aides, opening cases on three of them—Papadopoulos, Carter Page, and Paul Manafort—on Aug. 10, 2016. The IG never received an explanation for why the Flynn case was opened later. Incidentally, Page and Manafort had already been mentioned in the infamous Steele dossier since July 28, 2016. Flynn’s name, however, was only mentioned in the dossier report dated Aug. 10, 2016.

The dossier, which drummed up unsubstantiated allegations of a Trump–Russia conspiracy, was being spread to the media, the FBI, the State Department, the DOJ, and Congress by operatives funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

The CH investigation team members at the FBI told the IG they only received the dossier in September 2016, but there are indications they may have been aware of it earlier.

6. Halper Coincidence
One of the CH case agents, Stephen Somma, happened to have a longstanding relationship with Stephan Halper, a Cambridge professor who was also a longtime political operative and FBI informant.
Somma and another agent met with Halper on Aug. 11, 2016, and learned that, in a stunning coincidence, Halper was already in contact with Page, had known Manafort for years, and “had been previously acquainted with Michael Flynn,” the IG report said
The CH team “couldn’t believe [their] luck,” Somma told the IG.

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7. Halper’s Story
Halper was accused of spreading rumors, starting in late 2016, that Flynn had an affair with a Russian woman while visiting the UK in 2014 for a dinner hosted by the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar co-convened at the time by Halper.
An “established” FBI informant told the CH team that the woman jumped in a cab with Flynn after the dinner and joined him for a train ride to London (pdf).
The woman in question was Svetlana Lokhova, a Cambridge historian of Russian descent. She has denied the rumor, saying that she was picked up after the dinner by her husband.
She said Halper was the one spreading the rumor to the media and the FBI, even though he didn’t actually attend the event. She unsuccessfully sued Halper for defamation in May 2019.
Somehow, Steele also became privy to the rumor and shared it with Adam Kramer, an aide to the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). Kramer testified to Congress that he was in regular contact with Steele between Nov. 28, 2016, and early March 2017.

8. Unmasking
The names of Americans are normally masked—that is, replaced with generic names—in foreign intelligence reports. Many senior government officials have the authority to ask for names to be unmasked for various reasons, such as to understand the intelligence. There were dozens of unmasking requests for reports related to Flynn, between Nov. 8, 2016, and Jan. 31, 2017 (pdf). The number of unmasking requests has been described as alarming by some commentators, while others described it as routine.

9. Non-masking
There are also indications that Flynn’s name was never masked in summaries or transcripts of his calls with then-Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak on Dec. 29, 2016, and in the following days. FBI leaders were distributing the documents to top Obama officials. Even President Barack Obama himself was briefed on them on or before Jan. 5, 2017.

10. Who Briefed Obama?
Comey testified to Congress that it was then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper who briefed Obama on the Flynn–Kislyak calls (pdf). Clapper, however, denied this to Congress.

11. ‘Unusual’
Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, memorialized a Jan. 5, 2017, meeting with Obama, Comey, and then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. Rice wrote in an email to herself that Obama asked Comey whether he should withhold any Russia-related information from the incoming administration and from Flynn in particular.

“Potentially,” Comey replied, adding that “the level of communication” between Flynn and Kislyak was “unusual,” she wrote. There’s no indication Flynn was talking to Kislyak unusually often. He was at the time responsible for laying the groundwork for Trump’s foreign relations as president and was frequently on the phone with foreign dignitaries.

12. Late Memo
Rice’s memo itself is unusual. She emailed it to herself more than two weeks after the meeting took place, on the day of Trump’s inauguration.

13. Strzok Intervention
On Jan. 4, the FBI was already in the process of closing Flynn’s case. But the bureau’s counterintelligence operations head at the time, Peter Strzok, scrambled to keep it open, noting that the “7th floor,” meaning the FBI’s top leadership, was involved.

14. McCabe–Comey Contradiction
Comey testified that he authorized the Flynn case “to be closed at the … end of December, beginning of January.”
But his then-deputy, Andrew McCabe, told Congress that they weren’t in “the closing planning phase” at the time.
“I don’t think a closure would have been soon,” he said.

15. Shaky Theory
FBI documents and Comey’s testimony indicate that the bureau kept the Flynn case open solely based on a legal theory that he may have violated the Logan Act, even though the DOJ made clear that such charges wouldn’t pass muster in court—nobody has ever been successfully prosecuted for a Logan Act violation and the government last tried in 1852.
The law prohibits private citizens from engaging in diplomacy on their own with countries the United States is in dispute with. Not only have questions been raised as to whether the law would pass today’s constitutional scrutiny, which places greater emphasis on First Amendment protections, but also there’s no indication the law was conceived to apply to a president-elect’s incoming top adviser.

16. Call Leaks
In early January, information about Flynn’s calls with Kislyak was leaked to then-Washington Post reporter Adam Entous. He said there was a discussion at the paper about what to do with the information, as it would have been expected of Flynn, given his position, to talk to Kislyak (pdf). In the end, the paper ran a column on Jan. 12 by David Ignatius speculating that Flynn may have violated the Logan Act if he discussed fresh sanctions imposed on Russia during the calls.

Obama imposed the sanctions on Russian entities, including its intelligence services, on Dec. 29, 2016. At the same time, he also expelled 35 Russian intelligence officers.

17. Denial
The calls “had nothing whatsoever to do with the sanctions,” incoming Vice President Mike Pence told CBS News on Jan. 15, 2017, in an interview the network almost wholly dedicated to questions about Russia.
This wasn’t completely true.
Kislyak did bring up the issue of sanctions during the call, though Flynn didn’t engage him in a conversation on the topic.
Flynn raised the issue of the expulsions, which is technically a separate issue from sanctions, though both were announced at the same time. He asked for “cool heads to prevail” and for Russia to only respond reciprocally, as further escalation into a “tit for tat” could lead to the countries shutting down each other’s embassies, complicating future diplomacy.

18. ‘Blackmailable’
Yates said she wanted to inform Trump’s White House about the Kislyak calls as Russia would know that what Pence said wasn’t true and could thus blackmail Flynn with the information, according to an Aug. 15, 2017, FBI report from her interview with the Mueller team.
According to Ruskin, this was hardly a blackmail situation, which ordinarily involves serious compromising information, such as evidence of bribery or sexual misconduct.
Comey acknowledged to Congress in March 2017 that the idea that Flynn was compromised struck him “as a bit of a reach.”

19. Comey Blocked Information
Despite issues with Yates’s argument, informing the White House may have indeed cleared up the situation. However, Comey blocked it, saying it could have interfered with the investigation of Flynn—despite that it appears there was nothing for the bureau to investigate. At that point, the DOJ already had disapproved of the Logan Act idea. In any case, the probe was supposed to be about Russian collusion. The bureau could have closed it and opened a new one on the Logan Act, if it indeed had had sufficient predication. But it never opened such an investigation, the DOJ noted in its motion to dismiss Flynn’s case.

20. Another Comey–McCabe Contradiction
In the days before Jan. 24, 2017, top FBI officials were discussing plans to interview Flynn. Comey said the point of the interview was to find out why Flynn didn’t tell Pence that sanctions were discussed during the call (even though Flynn wasn’t actually the one talking about sanctions).
“My judgment was we could not close the investigation of Mr. Flynn without asking him what is the deal here. That was the purpose,” Comey testified.
McCabe, however, told a different story when then-Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) asked him, “Was [Flynn] interviewed because the Vice President relied upon information from him in a national interview?”
“No. I don’t remember that being a motivating factor behind the interview,” McCabe said.

21. No Mention of Pence
During the interview, the agents didn’t ask Flynn about what he did or didn’t tell Pence—an unusual approach if the point, as Comey said, was to find out why Flynn hadn’t “been candid” with Pence. The FBI, in fact, had no idea what Flynn did or didn’t tell Pence.

22. Slipped-In Warning
Agents regularly warn interviewees that lying to federal officers is a crime. Before the Flynn interview, however, McCabe’s special counsel Lisa Page emailed another FBI lawyer asking how the warning should be given and whether there was a way “to just casually slip that in.”

23. No Warning
In the end, the agents never gave Flynn any such warning.

24. ‘Get Him to Lie … Get Him Fired?’
The FBI officials agreed that the agents wouldn’t show Flynn the transcripts of the calls. If he said something that diverged from them, they would ask again, slipping in some words from the transcript. If that didn’t jog his memory, they were not to confront him about it.
On the day of the interview, then-FBI head of counterintelligence Bill Priestap wrote a note saying he told other officials to “rethink” the approach.
“What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” he wrote, noting, “We regularly show subjects evidence.”
Apparently, his concerns were ignored.

25. Discouraging Having a Lawyer Present
On the day of the interview, McCabe spoke with Flynn on the phone to ask him for the interview. McCabe said he told Flynn he wanted the interview done “as quickly, quietly, and discreetly as possible.” If Flynn wanted anybody to sit in, such as one of the White House lawyers, the DOJ would have to be involved, McCabe told him.
According to Ruskin, that was “egregious” behavior akin to discouraging a subject of an investigation from having a lawyer present for an interview.

26. No White House Notice
An FBI interview of a president’s national security adviser is a big deal. Normally, it would warrant a back-and-forth between the White House and the bureau on the scope, content, purpose, and other parameters. Most likely, multiple White House lawyers would sit in.
Comey, however, said in a public forum that he just sent the agents in, taking advantage of the fact that it was “early enough”—only four days after the inauguration.

27. No Notice Given to DOJ
According to Yates, Comey didn’t consult the DOJ about his intention to interview Flynn, even though the department would usually be involved in such decisions.

28. Not Quite a Denial From Flynn
After the interview, in which Strzok and supervisory special agent Pientka extensively questioned Flynn about his conversations with Kislyak, Comey said that Flynn denied talking to the ambassador about the sanctions. But the agents’ notes indicate that though Flynn denied it at first, he seemed unsure when the agents asked again.
“Not really. I don’t remember. It wasn’t, ‘Don’t do anything,’” he said, according to the notes.
Flynn said in a Jan. 29 declaration to the court that he still doesn’t remember talking to Kislyak about sanctions.
“I told the agents that ‘tit-for-tat’ is a phrase I use, which suggests that the topicof sanctions could have been raised,” he said.

29. UN Vote Denial
Based on the agent’s notes, Flynn did deny asking for Russia to delay a U.N. vote in Israeli settlements. One of the call transcripts indicates he in fact made such a request.
Flynn told the agents he was calling multiple countries regarding the vote, but it was more an exercise of how quickly he could get foreign officials on the phone since there was no way the transition team could convince enough countries to actually change the outcome. Indeed, the vote passed with only the United States abstaining.

30. No Indication of Deception
The agents came back with the impression “that Flynn was not lying or did not think he was lying,” according to Strzok.
Comey seemed on the fence.
“I don’t know. I think there is an argument to be made that he lied. It is a close one,” he testified.

31. Flynn Knew They Knew
According to McCabe, Flynn expressed awareness before the interview that the FBI knew exactly what he said during the Kislyak calls.
“You listen to everything they [Russian representatives] say,” Flynn told him, according to McCabe’s notes from that day.

32. Belated Report
The FBI interview summary, form FD-302, is required to be completed within five days of the interview. Flynn’s, however, took more than two weeks.

33. Rewritten 302
Strzok texted Page on Feb. 10, 2017, he was “trying to not completely rewrite” the 302 “so as to save [redacted] voice.” The redacted name was most likely Pientka’s.

34. Missing Original
Flynn was ultimately provided two draft versions of the 302—one from Feb. 10, 2016, and one from the day after. But based on Strzok’s texts, there should have been at least two draft versions produced on Feb. 10, 2016, or before.
In fact, Judge Sullivan said in a Dec. 17, 2018, minute order that the 302 “was drafted immediately after Mr. Flynn’s FBI interview.” It’s not clear what the judge was basing this assertion on or what happened to the early draft.
Flynn’s current attorney, former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell, later said she’d found a witness who saw an earlier draft and that it said “that Flynn was honest with the agents and did not lie.”

35. No Reinterview
It is common that when the FBI has questions after an interview about the candor of the subject, it would question the person again. But in this case, the FBI showed no interest in doing so.

36. Still Investigating What?
After the interview, Comey promptly agreed to Yates informing the White House about the call transcripts. Flynn was fired two weeks later. But, somehow, the investigation was still not over.
Comey said in his March 2, 2017, testimony that the bureau wasn’t investigating any possible Logan Act violation by Flynn and wouldn’t do so unless the DOJ directed it.
But he said the investigation was “obviously” still ongoing and “criminal in nature.”
McCabe said that “even following the interview on the 24th, we had a lot of work left to do in that investigation.”
By mid-February, the status of the probe wouldn’t have “changed materially” in his belief, he said.
“Like we were pursuing phone records and toll records at that time,” he said. “There were all kinds of really very basic foundational investigative activity that had to take place and we were committed to getting that done.”
It’s unclear what the point of the investigation was.

37. FARA Papers
Around Christmas 2016, Flynn found in the office of his defunct consultancy, Flynn Intel Group (FIG), a letter from the DOJ telling him he may need to file foreign lobbying disclosures under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
The DOJ’s National Security Division (NSD) wanted to know about a job FIG did earlier that year for Turkish businessman Kamil Ekim Alptekin.
It should have been a routine procedure. Washington lobbyists commonly flunk FARA rules and the NSD usually just asks them to register retrospectively because FARA cases are difficult to prosecute. Flynn hired a team from Covington and Burling led by Robert Kelner, a “never-Trumper” and an expert on FARA, to prepare the paperwork.
This time, the NSD was unusually eager. Heather Hunt, then-FARA unit chief herself, was repeatedly prompting the lawyers to expeditiously file the papers.
“We’ve never seen her this engaged in any matter (ever),” Kelner noted in an email to his colleagues.
Even the DOJ’s then-counterintelligence chief, David Laufman, got involved and personally questioned Covington on the FARA filings.

38. Comey Memo
Comey wrote in a personal memo that Trump told him in private in February 2017 that he hoped Comey could “let Flynn go.” Trump denied saying that. Trump’s lawyers have argued that the president didn’t know at the time that Flynn was still under investigation.
Comey’s leaking the content of this and other memos to the media served as a catalyst for then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointing former FBI head Robert Mueller as a special counsel to take over the CH probe.

39. Rosenstein’s Scope Memo Still Alludes to Logan Act
Even though Comey said in March 2017 that the FBI wasn’t investigating Flynn for a Logan Act violation, Mueller received in August 2017 a mandate from Rosenstein (pdf) to probe whether Flynn “committed a crime or crimes by engaging in conversations with Russian government officials during the period of the Trump transition.” That appears to be an allusion to the Logan Act.
Rosenstein testified to Congress that he simply put in the scope of Mueller’s mandate whatever the CH team was investigating at the time.
The scope memo also tasked Mueller with probing whether Flynn lied to the FBI during the interview, whether he failed to report foreign contacts or income on his national security disclosure forms, and whether the Turkey job by his firm meant that he “committed a crime or crimes by acting as an unregistered agent for the government of Turkey.”

40. Lawyers Delay Informing Flynn?
By mid-August 2017, Covington learned that prosecutors were looking at Flynn’s FARA filings. But the lawyers didn’t inform Flynn until weeks later, according to his current lawyer, Powell.

41. Conflict of Interest
Convington faced a conflict of interest in Flynn’s case, because it was in their interest to say any problems with the FARA papers were Flynn’s fault, while it was in Flynn’s interest to say the lawyers were responsible.
Covington and the Mueller team agreed the firm can continue to represent Flynn if they tell him about the conflict and he consents to it. Powell said the conflict was so serious bar rules required the lawyers to withdraw.

42. Lawyers Don’t Take Responsibility
In Flynn’s situation, it would have been the ethical thing to do for the lawyers to take responsibility for any problems with the FARA papers, according to Powell. But they didn’t do that.

43. Lawyers Express Apprehension About Being Targeted Themselves
The Covington lawyers on several occasions expressed concern that Mueller may target them with a crime-fraud order, a measure that allows prosecutors to break through the attorney-client privilege if they get a judge to agree that the client was conferring with lawyers to further a crime or some misconduct. The lawyers were aware Mueller’s team had already used the order against Manafort.
Facing a crime-fraud order would cause bad publicity for Covington, Powell noted. Leading Flynn into the plea allowed the firm to avoid it.

44. Perilous Interviews
In early November 2016, Mueller prosecutors, led by Brandon Van Grack, told Covington that Flynn was facing charges for lying to the FBI and lying on the FARA papers. They asked for Flynn’s cooperation with the broader Russia probe, particularly regarding any communications he or other Trump people had with foreign officials.
Van Grack wanted Flynn to sit down for a series of interviews. He offered Flynn limited immunity, but acknowledged that Flynn could still be charged for lying during the interviews.
The lawyers noted that this could have been dangerous for Flynn, even if he was completely honest.
“To ask someone about meetings and calls during an incredibly busy period of his life as an evaluation of candor is not a particularly attractive option,” Kelner told the prosecutors during a conference call (pdf).
Yet ultimately the Covington lawyers agreed to make Flynn available for the questioning.

45. Belated Consent
Covington only asked Flynn for consent with their conflict of interest in writing on Nov. 19, 2017, after Flynn had already been through two days of interviews with the prosecutors.

46. Wrong Standard
The consent request, sent via email, cited the wrong bar rule for handling of conflicts. The correct rule “creates a much lower threshold at which a lawyer must bow out,” Powell said in a court filing.

47. Innocent but Guilty
The Covington lawyers repeatedly told the prosecutors that they didn’t think Flynn was guilty of a felony. They were also told that Strzok and Pientka “saw no indication of deception” on Flynn’s part and had the impression after the interview that he wasn’t lying or didn’t think he was lying. But the lawyers still convinced Flynn that he should plead guilty to the felony charge.

48. Threat to Son
According to Flynn’s declaration, the Covington lawyers told him that if he didn’t plead, the prosecutors would charge his son (who had a four-month-old baby at the time) with a FARA violation, because the son worked for Flynn’s firm and was involved in the Turkey project. If he did plead, however, his son “would be left in peace,” Flynn said.
The pressure campaign, it seems, was also reflected in media leaks.
“If the elder Flynn is willing to cooperate with investigators in order to help his son … it could also change his own fate, potentially limiting any legal consequences,” NBC News reported on Nov. 5, 2017, referring to “sources familiar with the investigation.”
“To twist the father’s arm with regard to his child is a pretty low thing to do,”Ruskin commented.

49. 302 Not Shared
The prosecutors refused to share with Flynn the 302 from his January interview until shortly before he agreed to plead. Also, they only shared the final version of the report, which was significantly different from its previous drafts, Flynn later learned.

50. Strzok Texts Understatement
Shortly before Flynn signed his plea, the prosecutors disclosed to his lawyers that one of the agents who interviewed Flynn (Strzok) was being investigated by the IG for potential misconduct. They also disclosed that the agent expressed in electronic communications “a preference for one of the candidates for President.”
This was far from covering the bombshell the Strzok texts actually were, Powell noted.
Strzok not only voiced preference for Clinton, but cursed at and repeatedly derided Trump. In one 2016 text, he argued that the FBI needed to take action akin to an “insurance policy” in case Trump won. Strzok later said he was referring to proceeding in the CH probe more aggressively out of a worry that Trump may interfere with it if elected.

51. Lawyers Never Told Flynn?
Flynn said the Convington lawyers never told him that the FBI agents didn’t think he lied. Even after he specifically asked about the agents’ impression, the lawyers didn’t disclose the information and instead told him that “the agents stood by their statement.”
“I then understood them to be telling me that the FBI agents believed that I had lied,” Flynn said, explaining that had he known, he wouldn’t have signed the plea.

52. Statement of Offense Inaccurate
As part of his statement of offense, Flynn affirmed that FIG’s FARA papers contained three false statements and one omission. Yet, on all four points the statement of offense was inaccurate, Powell demonstrated (pdf).
“The prosecutors concocted the alleged ‘false statements’ by their own misrepresentations, deceit, and omissions,” she said in a court filing (pdf).
The FARA papers were “substantially correct” and any deficiencies were the fault of Covington, she said.

53. Lawyers Knew
In an internal email three days before Flynn signed his plea, one of the Covington lawyers pointed out that some of the “false statements” attributed to Flynn in the statement of offense regarding the FARA filings were “contradicted by the caveats or qualifications in the filing.”
It seems the lawyers failed to correct the issue, since the statement of offense remained inaccurate. They also never informed Flynn of the issue, according to Powell.

54. Judge Recusal
Flynn entered his plea on Dec. 1, 2017. Shortly after, the judge who accepted the plea, Rudolph Contreras, recused himself from the case. The apparent but undisclosed reason was likely his personal relationship with Strzok.

55. Strzok Texts Media Coincidence
While the IG had found Strzok’s texts already in June 2017, their first disclosure in the media came from The Washington Post the day after Flynn entered his guilty plea. Powell noted how convenient the timing was for the prosecutors.

56. Side Deal
The prosecutors conveyed to Covington an “unofficial understanding” that they were “unlikely” to charge Flynn’s son in light of Flynn’s agreement to continue to cooperate with the Mueller probe, one of the lawyers said in an internal email.
Such an under-the-table deal is “unethical,” Ruskin said.

57. Avoiding Giglio Disclosure
Another internal Covington email suggests the prosecutors intentionally kept the deal regarding Flynn’s son unofficial to make future prosecutions easier.
“The government took pains not to give a promise to MTF [Michael T. Flynn] regarding Michael [Flynn] Jr., so as to limit how much of a ‘benefit’ it would have to disclose as part of its Giglio disclosures to any defendant against whom MTF may one day testify,” the email reads.
“Giglio” refers to a 1972 Supreme Court opinion that requires prosecutors to disclose to the defense that a witness used by the prosecutors has been promised an escape from prosecution in exchange for cooperation.

58. Questionable Disclosures
After the case was assigned to Judge Sullivan, he entered an order for the DOJ to give Flynn all exculpatory information it had, as the judge does in all cases.
The prosecutors, however, weren’t prompt in revealing the information. The Strzok texts, for instance, were only provided to Flynn after they were released publicly.

59. Business Partner Coincidence
One day before Flynn’s sentencing hearing, his former business partner, Bijan Rafiekian, was charged with a failure to register as a foreign agent in relation to FIG’s Turkey job.
Powell called it a “shot across the bow” which the Mueller team wanted to “leverage” against Flynn.
“Mr. Van Grack used the possibility of indicting Flynn in the Rafiekian case at the sentencing hearing to raise the specter of all the threats he had made to secure the plea a year earlier—including the indictment of Mr. Flynn’s son,” she said in a court filing (pdf).

60. Judge Makes False Accusations, Backtracks
During a Dec. 18, 2018, sentencing hearing, Sullivan questioned the prosecutors about whether they considered charging Flynn with treason.
“Arguably, you sold your country out,” he told Flynn, saying that he acted as an agent of Turkey while in the White House.
That was wrong on multiple levels. Not only does treason not apply to unregistered lobbying, but the Turkey job had virtually no impact on American interests. It prepared a plan to lobby for the extradition of an Islamic cleric, Fethullah Gülen, who lives in exile in the United States, and whom Ankara blamed for instigating a coup attempt in 2016. Almost none of the plan materialized. Most importantly, Flynn shuttered his firm shortly after the election to comply with Trump’s promise of no lobbyists in his administration.
Sullivan corrected himself later in the hearing, but many media outlets still put his original remarks in headlines.

61. MSNBC Coincidence
While Sullivan’s question about treason and his gaffe about the Turkey job seemed to come out of left field, they mirrored MSNBC talking points from days prior.
The day before Flynn’s sentencing hearing, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow claimed Flynn and Rafiekian “disguised” the origins of payments for the Turkey job so they could “secretly work in the interest of a foreign country without anybody knowing it while they were also working high-level jobs in intelligence inside the U.S. government.”
“Flynn really thought he could be a national security adviser, the national security adviser in the White House, and a secret foreign agent at the same time,” Maddow said.
Three days before Flynn’s sentencing hearing, Malcolm Nance, a counterterrorism commentator, said on MSNBC that Flynn “may have been one step away from treason” and “pulled back by cooperating” with Mueller.

62. Judge Fails to Satisfy Plea Rules
Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure state in Rule 11 that “before entering judgment on a guilty plea, the court must determine that there is a factual basis for the plea.”
As such, Sullivan was required to check that Flynn’s alleged lies to the FBI were “material,” meaning relevant enough to potentially affect an FBI investigation.
But the judge acknowledged during the sentencing hearing that he hadn’t done so.
“It probably won’t surprise you that I had many, many, many more questions. … such as, you know, how the government’s investigation was impeded? What was the material impact of the criminality? Things like that,” he said at the conclusion of the hearing.
There’s no indication Sullivan has asked those questions since.

63. Unacceptable Plea
Not only could Sullivan not have accepted Flynn’s plea before determining materiality, there’s evidence he was in fact required to refuse it.
Rule 11 requires the court to “determine that the plea is voluntary and did not result from force, threats, or promises (other than promises in a plea agreement).”
In Flynn’s case, there actually was a threat and a promise left out of the deal—the “unofficial understanding” that his son was “unlikely” to be charged if Flynn cooperated.

64. Lawyers Insisted Flynn ‘Stay on the Path’
Before the sentencing hearing, the Covington lawyers told Flynn to “stay on the path” and to refuse if Sullivan offered him to take his plea back, Flynn said in his court declaration.
“If the judge offers you a chance to withdraw your plea, he is giving you the rope to hang yourself. Don’t do it,” the lawyers said, according to Powell.

65. Unprepared
Flynn said the lawyers only prepared him for a “simple hearing” and not for the extended questioning Sullivan engaged in.
“I was not prepared for this court’s plea colloquy, much less to decide, on the spot, whether I should withdraw my plea, consult with independent counsel, or continue to follow my existing lawyers’ advice,” he said.
In the end, he affirmed his plea during the hearing.

66. Prosecutors Asked for False Testimony?
Flynn was expected to testify against Rafiekian in 2019, but when the moment was to come, prosecutors asked him to say that he signed FIG’s FARA papers knowing there were lies in them. Flynn, who had already fired Convington and hired Powell by that point, refused. He said he only acknowledged in hindsight that the FARA papers were inaccurate, but didn’t know it at the time.

67. Prosecutors Knew?
Powell has argued that the prosecutors knew they were asking for a false testimony. She filed with the court a draft of Flynn’s statement of offense, which shows that the words “FLYNN then and there knew” (pertaining to the FARA registration) were cut from the final version.
Moreover, Powell submitted emails that indicate the words were cut by the prosecutors themselves after the Covington lawyers raised some objections to the draft.

68. Retaliation?
Flynn’s refusal to say what prosecutors wanted angered Van Grack, contemporaneous notes show (pdf). Shortly after, prosecutors tried to label Flynn as a co-conspirator in the Rafiekian case and put Flynn’s son on the list of witnesses for the prosecution. According to Powell, this was retaliation for Flynn’s refusal to lie.


69. Rafiekian Case Collapses
Prosecutors in the Rafiekian case tried to argue that anybody who does something political at the request of a foreign official and fails to disclose it to the DOJ is an “agent of a foreign government” and can be put in prison for up to 10 years.
The presiding judge, Anthony Trenga, rejected the theory, ruling that an “agent”—as used in that context—needs to have a tighter relationship with the foreign government, a relationship that includes “the power of the principal to give directions and the duty of the agent to obey those directions.”
Trenga ultimately tossed the case for a lack of evidence.

70. No Exculpatory Evidence?
Starting in August, Powell started to bombard the prosecutors with demands for exculpatory evidence she was convinced the DOJ possessed. But the prosecutors repeatedly claimed the government already provided all it had and had no more.
The main issue was, Powell noted, that the DOJ had a very narrow view of what is exculpatory.
“If something appears on its face to be favorable to the defense … the government will claim it was said ‘with a wink and a nod,’ and therefore it showed the defendant’s guilt after all,” she complained in an Aug. 30, 2019, filing (pdf).
As it later turned out, the FBI was sitting on a number of documents favorable to the defense.

71. Contradicting Notes
When Flynn finally obtained the hand-written notes Strzok and Pientka took during the interview, it turned out they didn’t quite match the final 302.
The 302, for instance, says that Flynn remembered making four to five phone calls to Kislyak on Dec. 29, 2016. Both sets of notes indicate that Flynn didn’t remember that.
Also, the 302 says that Flynn denied that Kislyak got back to him with the Russian response a few days later. There’s no mention of a Russian response in the notes.

72. Notes Mixup
It took the prosecutors until November 2019 to find out and tell Flynn that the notes they said belonged to Strzok were actually Pientka’s and vice versa.

73. No Date, Name
The notes mixup wasn’t that easy to spot because neither set of notes was signed or dated, even though they should have been, according to Powell.

74. Harsher Sentence
Since his sentencing hearing, Flynn was expected to receive a light sentence, possibly probation. In January 2020, however, the prosecutors indicated that Flynn should be treated more harshly because he reneged on his promise to cooperate on the Rafiekian case.
This was part of the retaliation for Flynn’s refusal to lie for the prosecutors, according to Powell.
Shortly after that, Flynn asked the court to let him withdraw his plea.

75. Hint at Perjury
In February 2020, prosecutors asked for Sullivan to give them access to Flynn’s communications with Covington.
Any limitation the court puts on how the attorney-client information can be used shouldn’t “preclude the government from prosecuting the defendant for perjury if any information that he provided to counsel were proof of perjury in this proceeding,” they said.
It’s not clear what specifically they were referring to.

76. Thousands More Documents
In April, Covington told Flynn they found thousands more documents related to his case that they failed to give to Powell due to “an unintentional miscommunication involving the firm’s information technology personnel.”

77. Van Grack Out
On May 7, 2020, Van Grack withdrew from Flynn’s case as well as others. The reason is not clear.
The same day, the DOJ moved to withdraw the Flynn case.

78. Judge Delays
A government motion to withdraw a case usually marks the end of the case. The court still needs to accept the motion, but there’s not much it can do, since there’s nobody left to prosecute the case.
Sullivan, however, didn’t accept it.

79. Appointing Amicus
On May 13, 2020, Sullivan appointed former federal Judge John Gleeson as an amicus curiae (friend of court) “to present arguments in opposition to the government’s Motion to Dismiss” as well as to “address” whether the court should make the defense explain why “Flynn should not be held in criminal contempt for perjury.”
This was an unusual move. Amici are normally only appointed in civil or higher court cases. Powell has said Sullivan doesn’t have authority to do so.

80. Another Washington Post Coincidence
Just two days earlier, Gleeson co-authored an op-ed in The Washington Post where he accused the DOJ of “impropriety,” “corruption,” and “improper political influence” for dropping the Flynn case.

81. More Delays
On May 19, 2020, Sullivan issued a scheduling order that set an oral argument for July 16, when third parties invited by the judge would get a chance to voice their opinions. As such, the judge set to prolong the case for about two more months and possibly beyond.
Meanwhile, Flynn sent a petition to the District of Columbia appeals court, asking it to order Sullivan to accept the case dismissal.

82. Order for Response
In a rare move, the appeals court ordered Sullivan to respond to Flynn’s petition within 10 days. Usually, the court would appoint an amicus curiae to argue the case on behalf of the judge. Sometimes, the court would invite the judge to respond. Ordering a response is “very rare,” Reeves commented.

83. Sullivan Lawyers Up
In another unusual turn of events, Sullivan hired highly-connected D.C. attorney Beth Wilkinson to respond to the appeals court on his behalf.
Wilkinson has in the past represented major corporations such as Pfizer, Microsoft, and Phillip Morris, as well as Hillary Clinton aides during the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server. She also assisted then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in preparing his 2018 defense against a sexual assault allegation.
Wilkinson is married to CNN analyst David Gregory, the former host of the NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”

84. DOJ Brings Big Guns
In another unusual move, the DOJ’s Solicitor General and five of his deputies responded to the appeals court in support of Flynn’s petition. The Solicitor General usually argues cases on behalf of the DOJ before the Supreme Court. His personal involvement in an appeals court petition “is highly unusual and rare,” Reeves said.

85. Short Notice
On June 2, 2020, the appeals court set a hearing in the case on June 12, giving unusually short notice, Reeves noted.
“For non-lawyers, a ten day notice for oral argument may seem like a long time, but it isn’t. It’s an increidibly [sic] short amount of time,” he said, noting that a call for a hearing “shows that the DC Circuit is gravely concerned about this matter.”

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
And SECOND thinks TRUMP lies???

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Originally posted by second:
Lie lie lie .... Trump ... lie lie lie

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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Originally posted by second:
Lie lie lie .... Trump ... lie lie lie

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FIFY

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Judges are NOT to create arguments on their own, but must solely rule on arguments presented before them, according to 2 recent Supreme Court rulings.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/markchenoweth/2020/05/14/judge-sullivan-d
isregards-two-controlling-precedents-by-appointing-amicus-in-flynn-case/#7cbbc3ce6f0a

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Not at all what my post was about, but keep 'pretending' to be stupid.

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
"So, whether or not one agrees with the Department of Justice’s call to drop its charges against President Trump’s former National Security Advisor, Gen. Michael Flynn, there should be widespread agreement that J. Sullivan has veered way out of line."

But, keep 'pretending' to be stupid.

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British court rules against Christopher Steele, orders damages paid to businessmen named in dossier

Court rules Steele's firm violated Britain's data privacy law by failing to aggressively check allegations in his dossier
By John Solomon

A British judge ruled Wednesday that Christopher Steele violated a data privacy law by failing to check the accuracy of information in his infamous dossier, ordering the former spy’s firm to pay damages to two businessmen he wrongly accused of making illicit payments in Russia.

Justice Mark Warby of the High Court of England and Wales ordered Steele’s firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, to pay a modest 18,000 English pounds – about $22,596 in American currency – each to Petr Aven and Mikhail Fridman as compensation for a violation of Britain’s Data Protection Act 1998 .

Warby ruled that while Steele had a national security interest to share his intelligence with U.S. and British authorities, several of the allegations in Memo 112 of the Steele dossier were “inaccurate or misleading as a matter of fact.”

Aven v Orbis.Judgment Summary.pdf

The judge ruled Steele violated the law by failing to aggressively check the accuracy of one claim accusing Aven and Fridman of making illicit payments to Russia President Vladimir Putin before distributing it to various U.S. and British figures, including the FBI.

“That is an allegation of serial criminal wrongdoing, over a prolonged period. Even in the limited and specific context of reporting intelligence for the purposes I have mentioned, and despite all the other factors I have listed, the steps taken to verify that proposition fell short of what would have been reasonable,” Warby ruled.

“The allegation clearly called for closer attention, a more enquiring approach, and more energetic checking,” the judge added.

The ruling involves a long-discredited claim in Steele’s dossier – repeatedly used by U.S. news media – that Russia’s Alfa Bank, connected to Aven and Fridman, was transmitting secret messages between Moscow and the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.

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The FBI concluded the computer pings were not nefarious messages but rather routine behavior most likely connected to email spam. Special Counsel Robert Mueller told Congress last year he did not believe the allegations.

Fridman hailed the ruling in a statement.

“We are delighted with the outcome of this case and that Mr Justice Warby has determined what we have always known to be the case – that the contents of Memorandum 112 are inaccurate and misleading," he said. "Ever since these odious allegations were first made public in January 2017, my partners and I have been resolute and unwavering in our determination to prove that they are untrue, and through this case, we have finally succeeded in doing so.”

Though a matter of British law, the ruling is likely to have impact as well in the United States, where the Justice Department continues to investigate the actions of the FBI in the Russia collusion probe, including its interactions with Steele and agents' honesty with the FISA court.

The judge ruled that in Memo 112, one of several that made up Steele's dossier, there were six factually inaccurate or unproven claims that Steele provided from his alleged intelligence sources including that:

the businessmen did not do favors for or receive favors from Putin as the memo claimed;
Fridman and Aven did not provide informal foreign policy advice to the Russian leader as Steele alleged;
Fridman did not meet with Putin in September 2016 as claimed by Steele's source;
the businessman did not bribe Putin when he was Deputy Mayor of St Petersburg;
And Fridman and Aven did not do Putin’s political bidding as the dossier alleged.

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The ruling further accentuates that much of the Steele dossier contained unproven Internet rumor or false information, some possible from Russian intelligence, as the Justice Department inspector general concluded last December. Nonetheless, the FBI used evidence from Steele's dossier to support a warrant targeting Trump campaign figures in four occasions, claiming to the court that agents had verified the information.

The judge also concluded that Steele's notes of his first interaction with the FBI about the dossier on July 5, 2016 made clear that his ultimate client for his research project was Hillary Clinton's campaign as directed by her campaign law firm Perkins Coie. The FBI did not disclose that information to the court.

The supposition that the Clinton campaign was the ultimate client "is in line with the FBI Note of 5 July 2016, which records Mr. Steele telling the FBI that Orbis had been instructed by Mr. [Glenn] Simpson of Fusion and 'Democratic Party Associates' but that 'the ultimate client were (sic) the leadership of the Clinton presidential campaign.' The FBI Note also indicates that Mr Steele had been told by that stage that Mrs Clinton herself was aware of what Orbis had been commissioned to do," Warby concluded.

"I have little reliable evidence as to who exactly was the Ultimate Client, but I have enough to find that Perkins Coie were instructed by one or more people or organizations within the upper echelons of the Democratic Party, concerned to ensure Hillary Clinton’s election as President." the judge added.

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John Solomon: Indictments coming in Russia investigation
'My sources tell me there's a lot of activity'

Investigative reporter John Solomon says there's a "lot of activity" in U.S. Attorney John Durham's criminal investigation of the Obama administration's probe of now-debunked claims of Trump-Russia collusion during the 2016 election.

"My sources tell me there's a lot of activity. I'm seeing, personally, activity behind the scenes [showing] the Department of Justice is trying to bring those first indictments," Solomon said in an interview with the Fox Business Network's Lou Dobbs reported by the Washington Examiner.

"And I would look for a time around Labor Day to see the first sort of action by the Justice Department."

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Declassified: Christopher Steele's "Primary Sub-Source" Was His Own Employee;

FBI documents declassified by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) reveal that Christopher Steele's "primary sub-source" for his infamous Clinton/DNC-funded dossier was a 'non-Russian employee of Christopher Steele's firm.'

Per Graham's office:

The document reveals that the primary “source” of Steele’s election reporting was not some well-connected current or former Russian official, but a non-Russian based contract employee of Christopher Steele’s firm. Moreover, it demonstrates that the information that Steele’s primary source provided him was second and third-hand information and rumor at best.
Critically, the document shows that Steele’s “Primary Sub-source” disagreed with and was surprised by how information he gave Steele was then conveyed by Steele in the Steele dossier.

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Meanwhile, a second document released by Graham absolutely shreds a New York Times article authored by Michael Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti, and Matt Apuzzo. Journalist Sharyl Attkisson details how comments made by former FBI agent Peter Strzok revealed the article, entitled "Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contact With Russian Intelligence," was absolute propaganda.

Via Sharylattkisson.com

Claim in NYT article: "Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump's presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials."

Note by Strzok: "This statement is misleading and inaccurate as written. We have not seen evidence of any individuals in contact with Russians (both Governmental and non-Governmental" and "There is no known intel affiliation, and little if any [Government of Russia] affiliation[.] FBI investigation has shown past contact between [Trump campaign volunteer Carter] Page and the SVR [Service of the Russian Federation], but not during his association with the Trump campaign."

Claim in NYT article: "...one of the advisers picked up on the [intercepted] calls was Paul Manafort, who was Mr. Trump's campaign chairman for several months..."

Note by Strzok: "We are unaware of any calls with any Russian government official in which Manafort was a party."

Claim in NYT article: "The FBI has obtained banking and travel records..."

Note by Strzok: "We do not yet have detailed banking records."

Claim in NYT article: "Officials would not disclose many details, including what was discussed on the calls, and how many of Trump's advisers were talking to the Russians."

Note by Strzok: "Again, we are unaware of ANY Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intel officials" and "Our coverage has not revealed contact between Russian intelligence officers and the Trump team."

Claim in NYT article: "The F.B.I. asked the N.S.A. to collect as much information as possible about the Russian operatives on the phone calls..."

Note by Strzok: "If they did we are not aware of those communications."

Claim in NYT article: "The FBI has closely examined at least four other people close to Mr. Trump... Carter Page... Roger Stone... and Mr. Flynn."

Note by Strzok: "We have not investigated Roger Stone."

Claim by NYT: "Senior F.B.I. officials believe... Christopher Steele... has a credible track record."

Note by Strzok: "Recent interviews and investigation, however, reveal Steele may not be in a position to judge the reliability of subsource network."

Claim by NYT: "The F.B.I.'s investigation into Mr. Manafort began last spring [2016]."

Note by Strzok: "This is inaccurate... our investigation of Manafort was opened in August 2016."

Claim by NYT: "The bureau did not have enough evidence to obtain a warrant for a wiretap of Mr. Manafort's communications, but it had the N.S.A. closely scrutinize the communications of Ukrainian officials he had met."

Note by Strzok: "This is inaccurate..."

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Will the New York Times correct their inaccurate reporrting?

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Yates Throws "Rogue" Comey Under The Bus Over Flynn Investigation

Former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates threw former FBI Director James 'higher loyalty' Comey under the bus on Wednesday, telling the Senate Judiciary Committee that the FBI's January, 2017 interview of former national security adviser Michael Flynn was done without her authorization - and she was upset when she found out about it.

"I was upset that Director Comey didn't coordinate that with us and acted unilaterally," Yates said.

We would note that Yates wasn't too upset to warn the incoming Trump administration about Flynn just 48 hours after the FBI launched a perjury trap against him.

Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) asked Yates: "Did Comey go rogue?" - to which Yates replied "You could use that term, yes."

At a Senate hearing on Crossfire Hurricane, @SallyQYates said she was upset @Comey "acted unilaterally" by setting up the interview with @GenFlynn.@LindseyGrahamSC: "Did Comey go rogue?"

Sally Yates: "You could use that term, yes." pic.twitter.com/J0Hvdqapj7
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) August 5, 2020

Yates said she also took issue with Comey for not telling her that Flynn's communications with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak were being investigated and that she first learned about this from President Barack Obama during an Oval Office meeting. Yates said she was "irritated" with Comey for not telling her about this earlier.

That meeting, which took place on Jan. 5, 2017, was of great interest to Graham, who wanted to know why Obama knew about Flynn's conversations before she did. Graham and other Republicans have speculated that Obama wanted Flynn investigated for nefarious purposes. Yates claimed that this was not the case, and explained why Obama was aware of the calls at the time. -Fox News

Yates testified that Obama wanted to find out why the Kremlin suddenly backed down from threats to retaliate against sanctions over 2016 election meddling, leading to the DOJ's discovery of the communications between Flynn and the ambassador, Sergei Kislyak.

"The purpose of this meeting was for the president to find out whether – based on the calls between Ambassador Kislyak and Gen. Flynn – the transition team needed to be careful about what it was sharing with Gen. Flynn," said Yates - who suggested that the meeting was not about influencing an investigation, which she added would have "set off alarms for me."

Logan Act
Yates was also asked whether former VP Joe Biden brought up the 1799 Logan Act at a January 5 Oval Office meeting about the Flynn investigation, which prohibits American citizens from communicating with foreign governments or officials without authorization "in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States."

Yates said she couldn't recall if Biden mentioned it - but had a vague recollection of Comey bringing it up either at the Oval Office meeting or later.

Sen Graham: "Did [former VP Joe Biden] mention the Logan Act?"

Sally Yates: "I don't remember him saying much of anything.”

Sen. Graham: "Did anybody mention the Logan Act?"

Sally Yates: "I have a vague memory of Comey mentioning the Logan Act." pic.twitter.com/h9AyrreGap
— Alex Salvi (@alexsalvinews) August 5, 2020

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FISA Fiasco
Later during testimony, Yates said that she had no idea that the FISA applications to spy on the Trump campaign were riddled with false evidence - and also denied knowledge that her own deputy, Bruce Ohr, had facilitated meetings between the FBI and UK operative Christopher Steele, who assembled the infamous Clinton-funded dossier which was used to support the FISA warrant against former campaign aide Carter Page.

Yates claimed that if she knew this was the case, she wouldn't have signed off on the warrant.

Sally Yates admits that she wouldn’t sign FISA warrant based on Steele Dossier again
“No, if I had known that it contained incorrect information, I certainly wouldn’t have signed it.”pic.twitter.com/aqIrmwATO9
— GOP (@GOP) August 5, 2020

Meanwhile, Sen. Hawley called for a "cleaning of house" at the FBI and DOJ.

After questioning former Deputy AG Sally Yates, Sen. Josh Hawley called for a "cleaning of house" at the FBI and Department of Justice over misleading FISA applications that led to the surveillance of Carter Page—which Yates admitted she now regrets having approved. pic.twitter.com/5V0YpQNux0
— Senator Hawley Press Office (@SenHawleyPress) August 5, 2020

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FBI Lied To FISA Court After Concealing Carter Page's CIA Work: Clinesmith Charging Docs

The FBI was aware that Carter Page was a CIA asset months before the agency concealed that fact from the FISA court, which granted permission to spy on the former Trump campaign aide.

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After withholding this information during the application and two subsequent renewals, top FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith altered documents to specifically say Page wasn't a CIA source during a third warrant renewal, according to a 5-page federal charging document reviewed by The Federalist.

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As The Federalist notes, the MSM was hard at work spinning Clinesmith's guilty plea to suggest that there was "no evidence of a broad anti-Trump conspiracy among law enforcement officials."

Au contraire...

In fact, contrary to the unsubstantiated assertion from the Times, the charging documents highlight that all four of the applications to spy on Carter Page painted a false picture of the Trump affiliate. While the fourth application included outright falsified evidence regarding Page helping the CIA during the relevant time period, the other three withheld that information even though it was known to the Crossfire Hurricane team within days of opening an investigation on the Trump campaign and months before the first application to spy on Carter Page was granted. -The Federalist

... The other key evidence the FBI used to support their warrant applications is the debunked Steele dossier, which the Federalist describes as "a collection of drunken brainstorming and unsubstantiated gossip that was used as part of an anti-Trump operation of the Hillary Clinton campaign."

In other words, the FBI had nothing on Page so they simply lied.

... The Justice Department already admitted that two of the [FISA] application renewals were illicit. Informed observers speculate the first application and first renewal to spy on the Trump ally may suffer the same fate. Durham’s charging document, along with the exhaustive IG report, show that Clinesmith’s deception was part of a broader conspiracy against Page. -The Federalist

Beyond Clinesmith

Also noted by The Federalist is the fact that Horowitz highlighted the errors of many other agents - including "Case Agent 1," which is believed to be agent Steven Somma.

"When Case Agent 1 was explicitly asked in late September 2016 by the Attorney assisting on the FISA application about Page’s prior relationship with this other agency, Case Agent 1 did not accurately describe the nature and extent of the information the FBI received from the other agency," wrote Horowitz.

"Case Agent 1 was primarily responsible for some of the most significant errors and omissions in the FISA applications," the IG report continues - noting Somma's mischaracterization of Steele's prior reporting as credible - as well as omitting the fact that Steele's claim of a "well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between Trump and Russia" were contradicted by statements made by another former Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos. Somma also excluded the fact that Steele's claim that Page met with Russian businessman Igor Sechin and Russian official Igor Divyekin were disputed.

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Mueller Aide Weissmann Urges DOJ Attorneys 'Not' To Help [Durham] On Investigations


Authored by Jonathan Turley,

I recently wrote a column discussing how Democratic leaders, including Vice President Joe Biden, have argued against continuing the investigation by U.S. Attorney John Durham despite growing evidence of misconduct by Justice Department officials and now the first guilty plea by former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith.

Now, Andrew Weissmann, one of the top prosecutors with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, has derided the Clinesmith plea while actually calling on Justice Department attorneys to refuse to help on ongoing investigations that could implicate aspects of his own prior work.

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