>A Team
is tonight the longest night?
PETER STRZOK: Whether intentionally or not, when you look at the balance of those pages, they have subtle dog whistles to these pro-Trump conspiracy theories, statements like “the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign relied on certain things.”
Well, there was never an FBI investigation of the Trump campaign. Unless you listen to some kind of far-extreme-right commentators or of folks in Congress who assert there was, but that’s nonsense.
https://twitter.com/petestrzok/status/1473004185557811204
"[Trumps]’s anger largely mirrors the kind of expletives he once directed at the Russia inquiry and [Mueller]. But the rapidly accelerating investigation…appears to be unnerving him deeply."
Almost as if – what did he say about Mueller? – "I'm f*cked."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/20/capitol-attack-investigation-closes-in-trump
Why Trump appears deeply unnerved as Capitol attack investigation closes in
Donald Trump is increasingly agitated by the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, according to sources familiar with the matter, and appears anxious he might be implicated in the sprawling inquiry into the insurrection even as he protests his innocence.
The former president in recent weeks has complained more about the investigation, demanding why his former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, shared so much material about 6 January with the select committee, and why dozens of other aides have also cooperated.
Trump has also been perturbed by aides invoking the Fifth Amendment in depositions - it makes them look weak and complicit in a crime, he has told associates - and considers them foolish for not following the lead of his former strategist Steve Bannon in simply ignoring the subpoenas.
When Trump sees new developments in the Capitol attack investigation on television, he has started swearing about the negative coverage and bemoaned that the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, was too incompetent to put Republicans on the committee to defend him.
The former president’s anger largely mirrors the kind of expletives he once directed at the Russia inquiry and the special counsel investigation when he occupied the White House. But the rapidly accelerating investigation into whether Trump and top aides unlawfully conspired to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory at the 6 January joint session appears to be unnerving him deeply.
The portrait that emerges from interviews with multiple sources close to Trump, including current and former aides, suggest a former president unmoored and backed into a corner by the rapid escalation in intensity of the committee’s investigation.
A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to requests for comment.
But as Trump struggles to shield himself from the select committee, with public hearings next year and the justice department said to be tracking the investigation, the path ahead is only likely to be more treacherous.
The former president is especially attuned to his potential for legal exposure, even as he maintains he did nothing wrong in conferring about ways to overturn the 2020 election and encouraging supporters to march on the Capitol. He has expressed alarm to associates about repeated defeats in court as he seeks to stop the select committee obtaining some of the most sensitive of White House documents about 6 January from the National Archives, on grounds of executive privilege.
The reality is that with each passing day, the committee seems to be gathering new evidence about Trump’s culpability around the Capitol attack that might culminate with recommendations for new election laws – but also for prosecutions.
“I think that the justice department will keep a keen eye on what evidence the committee has accumulated, as well as looking out for witnesses for a potential case,” said Ryan Goodman, a former special counsel at the Department of Defense now a law professor at New York University.
“One of the outcomes of the committee’s work and the public hearings will be to demonstrate individuals who might be wanting to come forward as witnesses and that’s got to be very important to justice department prosecutors,” Goodman said.
House investigators are expected to soon surpass more than 300 interviews with Trump administration officials and Trump political operatives as part of a process that has yielded 30,000 documents and 250 tips via the select committee’s tip line.
The flurry of recent revelations – such as the disclosure of Meadows’s connection to a powerpoint outlining how Trump could stage a coup, as first reported by the Guardian – raises the specter that the select committee is swiftly heading towards an incriminating conclusion.
Trump’s associates insist they are not worried, at least for the moment, since the select committee has yet to obtain materials covered by executive privilege either through Meadows or the National Archives that could ensnare Trump personally.
The former president’s defenders are correct in that respect – the committee does not have messages that show Trump directing an attack on the Capitol, one source said – and Trump has vowed to appeal the National Archives case to the supreme court.
But no one outside the select committee, which is quietly making progress from a glass office on Capitol Hill with boarded-up windows and electronically secured doors, knows exactly what it has uncovered and whether the inquiry ends with a criminal referral.
The material Meadows turned over alone depicts an alarming strategy to stop Biden’s certification on 6 January, involving nearly the entire federal government and lieutenants operating from the Willard hotel in Washington.
One member on the select committee described the events around 6 January as showing a coalescence of multiple strategies: “There was a DoJ strategy, a state legislative strategy, a state election official strategy, the vice-president strategy. And there was the insurrection strategy.”
The text messages Meadows received on his personal phone implicate Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr, and Republican members of Congress. Texts Meadows turned over to the committee might also be used by an enterprising prosecutor as evidence of criminal obstruction to stop a congressional proceeding if the White House knew election fraud claims to be lies but still used them to stop Biden’s certification.
While Meadows never testified about the communications, a cadre of top Trump officials, from former acting national security adviser Keith Kellogg to Pence’s former chief of staff Marc Short, have moved to cooperate with House investigators.
The trouble for Trump – and part of the source of his frustration, the sources said – is his inability, out of office, to wield the far-reaching power of the executive branch to affect the course of the inquiry.
The limited success of strategies he hoped would stymie the committee – ordering aides to defy subpoenas or launching legal challenges to slow-walk the release White House records – has been jarring for Trump.
“I think what he’s finding is that as the ex-president, he has a lot less authority than he did as president. But his playbook doesn’t work if he’s not president,” said Daniel Goldman, former lead counsel in the first House impeachment inquiry into Trump.
In a reflection of dwindling legal avenues available to undercut the investigation, Trump has returned to launching attacks-by-emailed-statement on the select committee, stewing over his predicament and what he considers an investigation designed only to hurt him politically.
“The Unselect Committee itself is Rigged, stacked with Never Trumpers, Republican enemies, and two disgraced RINOs, Cheney and Kinzinger, who couldn’t get elected ‘dog catcher’ in their districts,” Trump vented last month.
In private, Trump is said to have reserved the brunt of his scorn for Meadows, furious with his former White House chief of staff for sharing sensitive communications on top of all the unflattering details about Trump included in his book this month.
Trump’s associates, however, have focused more on questioning the legitimacy of the select committee and its composition, arguing the fact that the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, appointed both Republican members reduces the investigation to a partisan political endeavor.
They also argue that none of the revelations to date – like the Guardian’s reporting on Trump’s call to the Willard hotel, during which he pressed operatives to stop Biden’s certification from taking place entirely – amounts to criminal wrongdoing.
But in the meantime, Trump is left with little choice but to wait for the committee’s report.
“The justice department seems to be more reactive than proactive,” Goodman said. “They might be waiting for the committee to wrap up its work to make criminal referrals.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/us/politics/igor-danchenko-arrested-steele-dossier.html
Authorities Arrest Analyst Who Contributed to Steele Dossier
Igor Danchenko, a Russia analyst who worked with Christopher Steele, the author of a dossier of rumors and unproven assertions about Donald J. Trump, was indicted as part of the Durham investigation.
Nov. 4, 2021
WASHINGTON — An analyst who was a key contributor to Democratic-funded opposition research into possible links between Donald J. Trump and Russia was arrested on Thursday and charged with lying to the F.B.I. about his sources.
The analyst, Igor Danchenko, was a primary researcher for claims that went into the so-called Steele dossier, a compendium of rumors and unproven assertions suggesting that Mr. Trump and his 2016 campaign were compromised by and conspiring with Russian intelligence officials to help him defeat Hillary Clinton.
In a 39-page indictment obtained by the special counsel, John H. Durham, a grand jury accused Mr. Danchenko of five counts of making false statements to the F.B.I. about his sources for certain claims in the dossier.
The indictment showed that two and a half years after then-Attorney General William P. Barr appointed him to scour the Trump-Russia investigation for any wrongdoing, and a year after Mr. Trump lost re-election, Mr. Durham continues to press ahead.
“The special counsel’s investigation is ongoing,” the Justice Department said in a release that described the indictment but provided no direct statement from Mr. Durham.
Mr. Danchenko appeared before a magistrate judge at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., on Thursday afternoon, wearing a white shirt and dark green pants and standing with his hands behind his back as he listened to the proceeding. His defense lawyer tried to enter a plea of not guilty, but the judge said that was premature before releasing Mr. Danchenko on bond. The lawyer declined to make a statement to reporters afterward.
The dossier has played a vivid role in the Trump-Russia affair, but was largely peripheral to the official inquiry. The F.B.I. had already opened its counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia before the Steele dossier reached the agents working on that matter. The special counsel who eventually took over the inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election, Robert S. Mueller III, did not rely upon it in his final report.
But some claims from the dossier made their way into an F.B.I. wiretap application targeting a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page, in October 2016, and three renewal applications the following year. And other portions of it — particularly a salacious claim about a purported blackmail tape — caused a political and media firestorm when BuzzFeed published the materials in January 2017, shortly before Mr. Trump was sworn in.
Most of the important claims in the dossier — a series of reports written by Mr. Danchenko’s employer, Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent — have not been proven, and some have been refuted, including by Mr. Mueller. F.B.I. agents interviewed Mr. Danchenko several times in 2017 when they were seeking to run down the claims.
The first false statement charge in the indictment concerns Mr. Danchenko's interactions with a person the indictment describes as a public relations executive with strong ties to the Democratic Party.
The indictment said Mr. Danchenko falsely told the F.B.I. that he had not discussed the claims in the dossier with the public relations executive. But, the indictment said, the executive — who in his professional career frequently interacted with Eurasian clients, with a particular focus on Russia — was a source for some of the claims, including gossip about the ouster of Paul Manafort as Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman.
The indictment did not name the person it called “PR Executive-1,” but its description matched the career of Charles Dolan Jr., who was the state chairman of the Clinton-Gore campaigns in Virginia in 1992 and 1996 and was appointed to a position in the State Department in the Clinton administration.
Mr. Dolan was earlier named in a declaration by Olga Galkina, one of Mr. Danchenko’s sources, as someone to whom Mr. Danchenko had introduced her; the indictment also said that the executive and a source who appears to be Ms. Galkina had regular interactions, including in ways that indicated they supported Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.
Mr. Dolan’s lawyer, Ralph D. Martin, confirmed in an email that his client was the executive named in the indictment, but said that Mr. Dolan, as a potential witness in the case, would have no comment.
The indictment linked Mr. Dolan to Mr. Danchenko in several other ways. It said he had lunch with Mr. Danchenko in Moscow in June 2016. At the time, Mr. Dolan was staying in the same Moscow hotel where the dossier claimed that Russian intelligence made a blackmail tape involving Mr. Trump and prostitutes.
Mr. Dolan toured the presidential suite, the indictment said, and a hotel staff member told him that Mr. Trump had stayed there — but Mr. Dolan and another person on the tour told the F.B.I. that the staff member did not mention any salacious activity.
Given that Mr. Dolan was present at places and events where Mr. Danchenko collected information for the dossier, the indictment said, the researcher’s “subsequent lie” about Mr. Dolan’s connection to it “was highly material to the F.B.I.’s investigation of these matters.”
The other four false-statement charges concern Mr. Danchenko’s claims to the F.B.I. about purported interactions with Sergei Millian, a former president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, as a potential source for the dossier. (The indictment did not explicitly name Mr. Millian, who has previously said that Mr. Danchenko reached out to him but that he never responded or spoke with the researcher.)
Mr. Danchenko told the F.B.I. that he received a phone call in late July 2016 from a Russian-sounding person who did not identify himself but whom Mr. Danchenko took to be Mr. Millian, and that he had arranged to meet the businessman in New York but Mr. Millian did not show up.
But the indictment said it was not true that Mr. Danchenko believed he had spoken to Mr. Millian in late July. It cited an email Mr. Danchenko sent to Mr. Millian in August, following up on an earlier email to which Mr. Millian had apparently not responded. The wording of that August email was inconsistent with the claim of a recent phone call, the indictment said.
The flaws in the Steele dossier and Mr. Danchenko’s 2017 interviews with F.B.I. agents played a central role in a high-profile 2019 report by the Justice Department’s inspector general.
That report cited ways in which Mr. Danchenko’s description of his sourcing suggested the material was thinner and more speculative than how Mr. Steele later drafted them, and it faulted the F.B.I. for continuing to cite material from the dossier in wiretap renewal applications without alerting judges that a reason had arisen to doubt its credibility.
The inspector general report also said that a decade earlier, when Mr. Danchenko — who was born in Russia but lives in the United States — worked for the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington think-tank, he had been the subject of a counterintelligence investigation into whether he was a Russian agent.
“I’ve never been a Russian agent,” Mr. Danchenko said. “It is ridiculous to suggest that. This, I think, it’s slander.”
The indictment did not accuse Mr. Danchenko of working for Russian intelligence, although Mr. Durham did quote a June 2016 email from the public relations executive to an acquaintance in which the executive said he thought Mr. Danchenko had worked for a Russian intelligence agency “since he told me he spent two years in Iran. And when I first met him, he knew more about me than I did.” The line was followed by a winking emoticon.
Mr. Steele’s efforts were part of opposition research that Democrats were indirectly funding by the time the 2016 general election took shape.
His business intelligence firm was a subcontractor to another research firm, Fusion GPS, which originally began researching Trump-Russia ties during the primary election on behalf of a conservative who opposed Mr. Trump’s campaign. When it was clear that Mr. Trump would be the Republican nominee, the original funder dropped the effort, but Fusion GPS was hired to keep going by the Perkins Coie law firm, which was working for the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Mr. Danchenko has said he did not know who Mr. Steele’s client was at the time and considered himself a nonpartisan analyst and researcher.
In February, Mr. Durham used a subpoena to obtain old personnel files and other documents related to Mr. Danchenko from the Brookings Institution, where Mr. Danchenko had worked from 2005 until 2010.
The charges against Mr. Danchenko follow Mr. Durham’s indictment in September of a cybersecurity lawyer, Michael A. Sussmann, which accused him of lying to the F.B.I. about who he was working for when he brought concerns about possible Trump-Russia links to the bureau in September 2016.
Mr. Sussmann, who then also worked for Perkins Coie, was relaying concerns from data scientists about odd internet logs that they said suggested the possibility of a covert communications channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked financial institution. He has denied lying to the F.B.I. about who he was working for.
>Alex Jones sues Pelosi
>Welcome to the White House, Commander
The Ministry of Defense has been hit by a serious cyber attack. Some of the ministry's activities were paralyzed for several days.
"Defence on Thursday discovered an attack on its computer network with internet access," said a military spokesman. Quarantine measures were quickly taken to isolate the affected areas. The priority is to keep the Defense network operational.'
The attack is the result of a security hole in Apache 's widely used software Log4j , according to Defense. The vulnerability emerged just before the weekend and poses a significant risk to corporate networks worldwide, as many well-known apps use the affected software to keep "logs".
"All weekend our teams have been mobilized to control the problem, continue our activities and warn our partners," said Commander Olivier Séverin.
The Ministry of Defense does not want to comment on the origin of the serious cyber attack.
Software
Tech companies keep an eye on whether their applications are working properly via Log4j. If there is a malfunction somewhere in a program, an error message is sent via Log4j to the maker, who can then find out whether a repair is needed somewhere. Amazon, Apple, Cloudflare, Tesla, Minecraft and Twitter, among others, use Log4j.
According to Israeli cybersecurity solutions provider Check Point Software Technologies, a group of hackers associated with the Iranian regime called Charming Kitten or APT 35 exploited the flaw in Log4j to launch attacks against seven targets in Israel, including government sites. .