Tag Archives: Steele dossier

Mueller indicts some Russians … and the noose tightens

17 Saturday Feb 2018

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By Frank Bowman

Yesterday, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced that Robert Mueller’s team had obtained an indictment against thirteen Russian persons and three Russian firms charging them with a variety of crimes committed in the course of an integrated scheme by the Russian government to swing the 2016 presidential election to Mr. Trump.  I’m not going to discuss the details of the indictment here; they are well-covered elsewhere, including in the New York Times and Slate, and anyone who reads this blog will surely  have devoured the particulars.  For now, I’ll make only a couple of points:

  • This is an important development. It puts into the public realm the particulars of the long-reported conclusions of every U.S. intelligence agency that Russia meddled in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf, and stamps those conclusions with the imprimatur of a federal grand jury.  Mr. Trump, who rarely lets facts constrain his private musings or public utterances, may keep doubting Russian interference.  But except in the more fever-haunted corners of the right-wing media, the fact of Russian meddling on Trump’s behalf now becomes impossible to deny.
  • Ardent Trump opponents will doubtless be disappointed that the indictment does not charge any affiliates of the Trump campaign with knowingly aiding Russians in their nefarious activities.  It does say that Trump campaign affiliates cooperated with Russians in various ways, but is careful to describe such persons as “unwitting individuals affiliated with the Trump campaign.” The key point here, as numerous commentators have observed, is that the particular activities specified in the indictment are of a sort that required concealing Russian involvement.
  • However, this indictment does not address the events most likely to have included knowing collusion with Russians by Trumpists, most notably the multiple efforts by high-level Trump campaign operatives, including Donald Trump, Jr., to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton from Russians; Donald Trump Sr.’s public encouragement of Russian theft of Clinton e-mails; possible contacts between Trump operatives and Wikileaks (which in turn probably got dirt on Secretary Clinton from the Russians); etc.  And this indictment has nothing to say about the possibility that Russia may have secured compromising information about Mr. Trump, thus giving them the sort of leverage over him that would help explain their enthusiasm for his candidacy.
  • Accordingly, the claim by Trump spokesmen that this indictment clears Mr. Trump of “collusion” is nonsense.  All one can say is that this indictment does not address that issue.  Whether subsequent indictments will do so is an entirely different question.

The more intelligent among Mr. Trump’s defenders should be very worried by this indictment.  For these reasons:

  • By laying out in surgical detail a calculated foreign assault on American democracy, it shreds the notion that the Mueller investigation is a partisan “witch hunt.”  In light of the facts laid out in the indictment, the Trumpist effort to blame the whole investigation on a convoluted conspiracy between Democrats and Russians to manufacture the Christopher Steele dossier becomes facially absurd.  That’s not to say Trump allies won’t keep flogging Mr. Steele.  They surely will. But to anyone with even a hint of objectivity, the idea that the Mueller investigation is all about a “dodgy dossier” is now untenable.
  • The indictment makes plain that the Russians were not merely intervening against Hillary Clinton, but were working for Mr. Trump, uniquely among Republican candidates. Among the indictment’s nice details is the fact that the Russians campaign  disparaged not only Secretary Clinton, but also Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.  This fact gives rise to the obvious question — why Trump?  There are two possible answers, neither of them happy for Trump fans.  Either the Russians simply thought of Trump as the chaos candidate, a man whose ascendance would disrupt American democracy (a sadly prescient notion), or in a more sinister vein, they really do have something “on” Trump in the sense of possessing information about either his personal or business affairs that would render him amenable to Russian pressure.
  • This indictment makes it materially harder for Mr. Trump to fire Mueller and stop his investigation.  To fire Mueller now would halt an investigation into a demonstrated national security threat, something all but the most degraded congressional Republicans would find hard to swallow. Moreover, by choosing to personally announce the Mueller indictment, Deputy AG Rosenstein signaled that the Justice Department as an institution is standing behind Mueller’s work.  Rosenstein is saying, as plainly as if he put up a sign, “To get to Mueller, you have to take me out first.” What’s more, I read this as not merely a personal declaration, but as Rosenstein throwing down the gauntlet on behalf of career federal prosecutors unwilling to be cowed by the bluster of a president under suspicion.  This doesn’t mean Trump won’t go on a firing spree anyway.  But I think this indictment makes that less probable and makes the political cost of such a spasm much higher.
  • Which leads me to the last, and perhaps most critical point. Had Mr. Trump fired Mueller last week, he could (and would) have tried to excuse it as stepping in to stop a frivolous politically-motivated fraud. With this indictment, the Mueller investigation has irrefutably become a matter of protecting national security.  Should Mr. Trump shut the whole thing down now, that alone would, in my judgment constitute an impeachable offense and one that would resonate across party lines.  It would be bad enough for a president to fire a special counsel to protect his personal or political interests.  That would be impeachable behavior, to be sure, but Trump’s apologists could try to justify the firing as mere self-protection against the corrupt activities of evil Democrats and the nefarious “Deep State.”  But for Mr. Trump to shut Mueller down now would be to abrogate, openly and unapologetically, the president’s basic responsibility to protect the country and constitutional democracy itself from foreign enemies.  Even if the degraded specimens who now represent the Republican Party on the House Judiciary Committee were unwilling to move against Trump in such a case, a Democrat-controlled House would view the matter differently.  And I suspect, or at least hope, that a good number of honest Republicans would agree.

THE MEMO!!!! A tragicomic face-plant by Congressman Nunes

02 Friday Feb 2018

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By Frank Bowman

Well, after much angst, the Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee were able to get THE MEMO released.  Here it is, if you haven’t already seen it.

This document was supposed to reveal a scandal bigger than Watergate!  It was supposed to prove that officials in the Justice Department and the FBI criminally abused surveillance laws to undermine the Trump Administration!  It was supposed to expose a deep, nefarious conspiracy against the rule of law itself!

Instead, what we have is a whimpering anticlimax.  A document so devoid of substance and so transparently doctored for partisan effect that, in any other era, it would be instantly and universally branded as a cynical farce and its authors driven out of public life as embarrassments to the republic.

Stripped of the folderol, this is what the memo says:

It asserts that the Justice Department applied for and obtained a FISA surveillance warrant allowing interception of communications with Russians by Carter Page, a former affiliate of the Trump campaign, and that DOJ based its application for the warrant in some (unspecified) part on information derived from a “dossier” of material compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele.

The GOP letter does not identify which information derived from the dossier was used in the warrant application. Critically, the letter does not describe the rest of the information in the warrant application or describe how information from the dossier relates to the application as a whole.  The letter does not reveal whether, and if so to what extent, information derived from the dossier and included in the warrant was corroborated by other sources. In fact, the letter does not even claim that the information from the dossier used in the warrant application was inaccurate.  Indeed — and incredibly — the letter does not claim that any information in the dossier was inaccurate.

The sole argument of the letter is that the Justice Department should have revealed to the FISA court which issued and renewed the warrant information suggesting political bias on the part of Mr. Steele.  In particular, the letter argues that the application should have disclosed that Mr. Steele’s research effort was — at one point during his work — funded by attorneys working with the Democratic National Committee. (Of course, the GOP letter rather comically omits the fact that Steele’s firm was first engaged by Trump’s Republican opponents.) Similarly, the letter reports that, by the fall of 2016, Mr. Steele had become “passionate” about Mr. Trump not becoming president and implies that this should have been told to the court.  That’s it.  That’s the whole bowl of bananas.  That’s all Nunes and friends have got.

To be as fair as possible to Mr. Nunes, it’s generally a good idea to include in warrant applications some information about the possible biases of one’s sources.  It helps a reviewing court assess the strength of the evidence in support of the application. In a case where the warrant application turns entirely on the credibility of a single witness, that’s especially crucial.  But in Mr. Steele’s case, it’s essential to note that (so far as I know) he is not himself a witness and indeed is not an actual source for any of the information in the dossier.  He is merely the owner of a firm that collected information from other sources. In such a case, far more important than the possible bias of the collector of information is independent corroboration of the facts he collected.  Of course, in that capacity, he could, in theory, falsify or misreport information.  But the GOP letter never claims that he did.

Critically, the GOP letter conspicuously omits any discussion of the degree to which the FBI independently verified the dossier’s information, either in general or as it related to this warrant application. And Mr. Nunes and his GOP fellow travelers have blocked the release of all the information that would be necessary to determine if their reading of this affair is correct,

The bottom line of the GOP letter is this transparently faulty syllogism:

  • Some information derived from the Steele dossier was used in a FISA surveillance warrant for Trump campaign operative Carter Page.
  • The warrant application didn’t specify that Steele’s firm was paid by Democrats (and Republicans) who did not want Donald Trump to be president, or that, after investigating Trump for some months, Steele concluded that he did not want Trump to be president.
  • Therefore, no information originating in the dossier can be believed, the warrant should not have been issued, no one should remember to ask what the surveillance of Page actually uncovered, and we should all dismiss the entire investigation into Trump-Russia collusion as a political witch hunt by traitorous conspirators in the Deep State.

The whole business is yet another example of  the strange, logically inverted, world into which Mr. Trump and his abettors would lead us. In Trump World, the mere fact that one opposes Mr. Trump (or is simply insufficiently slavish in one’s devotion) is conclusive proof that one cannot be believed. Perhaps the most revealing line in the GOP’s letter is its breathless recitation of the fact that, in September 2016, Mr. Steele confessed his “passionate” opposition to a Trump presidency.  The letter’s authors apparently view this sentiment as proof of irrational bias, which if disclosed to the FISA court would have discredited all Mr. Steele’s work.

They have it exactly backwards.  A far more plausible view is that, by September 2016, Mr. Steele had discovered so much about Trump’s Russia connections that the prospect of his occupancy of the White House evoked nothing but horror.  Certainly that’s the way I would have read the statement had I been on the FISA court.  As such, even though it would have been prudent to identify the funding sources for Mr. Steele’s intelligence efforts, the omission of Steele’s personal views about Trump from the FISA warrant application  was, if anything, a laudable exercise of professional restraint.

The bottom line here is that THE LETTER is, as the British say, a damp squib.  Its only consequence lies in the possibility that Mr. Trump will use it as an excuse to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and thereafter Robert Mueller.  Were that to happen, we will cross into uncharted and dangerous ground.