January 6 Committee And Justice Department Tangle Over Evidence. Don't Let Them Fight!
Work that shit out, fellas, we got a country to save.
Is there a kerfuffle afoot between the January 6 Select Committee and the Justice Department? Will Liz Cheney and Merrick Garland settle the matter in a televised cage match available exclusively on C-SPAN After Dark? And will that be what finally causes Americans to give a shit about the fact that the GOP tried to overturn a free and fair election and are planning to do it again in 2024?
Yes, no, and we fucking wish.
Yesterday the New York Times was first to report that the Justice Department has asked the Committee for transcripts of witness interviews that “may contain information relevant to a criminal investigation we are conducting.”
But according to Politico, Committee Chair Bennie Thompson says NFW: “My understanding is they want to have access to our work product. And we told them, no, we’re not giving that to anybody."
It's a little bit difficult to understand what's going on here, and you kind of have to read all the coverage and try to squint your way to a reasonable guess.
The Times says prosecutors sent a letter requesting that the Committee “provide to us transcripts of these interviews, and of any additional interviews you conduct in the future." It cites a source who claims this is part of ongoing negotiations whereby the DOJ could get witness transcripts to bolster its hundreds of ongoing prosecutions of January 6 defendants, and the Committee could get its hands on whatever evidence the DOJ has from witnesses willing to blow off Congress but not Johnny Law.
The paper also notes that the Justice Department and the Committee appear to be treading the same ground, investigating whether the plot to swear in fake Trump electors and get them substituted for the Biden electors chosen by the voters amounts to a crime.
Politico says, "The department has been expanding its investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and homing in on figures in former President Donald Trump’s orbit, particularly those associated with organizing 'Stop the Steal' events that preceded the attack on the Capitol."
And CNN reports that Thompson isn't foreclosing the possibility of sharing the transcripts, excerpts of which the Committee itself has published in various legal filings and subpoena letters.
Here's that Thompson quote again: "If they want to come in and say, 'we want to look at something,' that's fine. But my understanding is they want to have access to our work product. And we told them no, we're not giving that to anybody," he said.
"They wanted access to depositions," he added later. "But my understanding is they didn't tell us specifically what transcripts or anything like that."
If we had to make a guess as to what's going on here, the Justice Department is trying to play it close to the vest, asking for the broadest possible category of documents to avoid tipping off the Committee as to its current lines of inquiry. And considering that the Committee routinely engages in some, um, strategic leaking, that seems like a pretty smart plan.
On the other side, the Committee is about to start holding public hearings, and it doesn't want DOJ to come in and say, "actually, we'd like you not to use this because it might interfere with an ongoing investigation or prosecution."
Or maybe it's a cage match refereed by Chief Justice John Roberts. It's 2022, so any crazy thing is possible.
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Mark Esper Has Measured Himself, And Found That He Is A Hero
Slow f*ckin' clap, dude.
The Mark Esper redemption tour continues apace, with the former secretary of Defense telling anyone and everyone that, while it might have appeared that he was participating in an orgy of corruption that weakened US alliances and emboldened Russia and China, he was actually saving America for democracy.
"If I spoke out at the time, I would be fired, number one. And secondly, I had no confidence that anybody that came in behind me would not be a real Trump loyalist. And Lord knows what would've happened then," he told CBS's Norah O'Donnell in response to a question about why he remained in service to a president he describes as patently unfit to lead.
In an excerpt from his upcoming book published this morning at Politico, Esper describes an August 2019 meeting about the proposed pullout from Afghanistan. Naturally the meeting took place in a "security tent" erected in an unused banquet hall at the president's New Jersey golf club. Sec. State Mike Pompeo, NSA John Bolton, VP Mike Pence, CIA Director Gina Haspel, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford, and Esper all tried to persuade Trump that it was a terrible idea. But Trump figured if he could just get the Taliban and then-Afghan president Ashraf Ghani together in a room with him, his magnetic statesmanship and the orange glow of his spray tan would convince them to work something out. Trump's grand plan involved inviting the parties to Camp David, on the anniversary of September 11.
Eventually the slumber party fell through after the Taliban and the Ghani government asked for guarantees before coming to the table. But Trump's erratic behavior at the meeting was a big wakeup call for Esper.
"I knew right then and there that this job would be far more challenging than I had anticipated, to say the least," he writes about his realization in 2019, after years of insane shit tweets and "very fine people" and "Russia if you're listening" and windmill cancer and playing footsie with every dictator from Putin to Duterte, that maybe this Trump guy wasn't really on the up and up.
Esper praises his own dogged effort to get congressionally allocated defense funds for Ukraine released, and claims no knowledge that the president was withholding them as part of an effort to extort President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for dirt on Joe Biden. He also claims to have been shocked at Trump's obsession with LTC Alexander Vindman, who raised hell about the blackmail effort, writing, "It was surprising how animated one Army lieutenant colonel was able to make the leader of the free world. I never understood it.”
The Vindman family is extremely not here for Esper's version of events, wherein he doggedly protected Vindman and his twin brother Yevgeny Vindman, then a member of the National Security Council.
"Unfortunately by not supporting @AVindman (and me), Esper allowed our actions to be politicized, ensuring that our prospects in the @DeptofDefense were meager. That’s why almost 2 years to the day from when Alex retired I will also retire this summer," Yevgeny tweeted this morning.
Rachel Vindman, Alexander's wife, was less restrained.
Somehow @MarkTEsper is both the hero and the victim of the story that completely upended and changed our lives. \n\n@AVindman was not taken care of and we were not okay. No one checked in on him regularly or told him what was going on.pic.twitter.com/mUt1r6fLCh— Rachel Vindman \ud83c\udf3b (@Rachel Vindman \ud83c\udf3b) 1652200182
But Mark Esper didn't come here to criticize his own conduct. He came to tell you how much the Republic owes to this former Raytheon lobbyist and Heritage Foundation chief of staff.
"I come up with this idea," he told O'Donnell. "Actually, Mark Milley and I discuss it-- what we call the 'Four No's'. The four things we had to prevent from happening between then and the election. And one was no strategic retreats, no unnecessary wars, no politi-- politicization of the military, and no misuse of the military. And so, as we went through the next five to six months, that became the metric by which we would measure things."
And by his own metric, he has measured himself, and found that he is a hero.
Oh, sure, there was that little ethical hiccup when he and Milley allowed themselves to be used for a photo op after Trump tear-gassed peaceful protestors so he could molest a Bible while trespassing at a church. But Esper more than made up for it — at least according to his own calculations — by saying that there was no justification to invoke the Insurrection Act.
"The Republic felt wobbly," he told O'Donnell, "and that's what prompted me to decide to-- to go before the podium at the Pentagon on June 3rd and say what I said."
Yes, it did feel "wobbly." In fact it felt more than wobbly, for four straight years, and it almost toppled on January 6, 2021. And Esper assuring Fox's Bret Baier that he won't vote for Trump again, although he refused to vote for Joe Biden, is many dollars short and days late.
Esper could have quit. He could have told the American people what he knew before the election. Instead he stayed and lent his skills and gravitas to a patently corrupt and dangerous man, and now he'd like to be rewarded with a payout for writing a tell-all book.
We're not buying it! And neither should you.
OPEN THREAD.
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Italygate Election Conspiracy Theory Takes Kansas By Storm!
It is always and forever 2020.
Italygate is back, baby! And it's taking Kansas by storm!
If none of those words mean anything to you, congratulations, your brain has unfucked itself from the Trump administration. But the mommybloggers at Your Wonkette are not so lucky. And so we are thrilled to visit one of the more hilariously batcrap episodes of 2020 electoral fuckery, wherein chief of staff Mark Meadows told the DOJ to look into a theory that Barack Obama used $40 million to bribe Italy's former prime minister Giuseppe Conti to use Italian space lasers to hack Dominion voting machines.
MAMMA MIA! Trump DOJ Meatballs ... Actually Refused To Do Coups!
Oddio! Crackpots Now Convinced Italy Stole Election From Trump!
Sounds coco loco, right? Yeah, that's what the DOJ thought, with Deputy Attorney General Rich Donoghue writing to his boss Jeff Rosen "Pure insanity." And yet this thing lit up like a Jewish space laser, with #ItalyDidIt trending for a hot second.
Behind the scenes, the conspiracy theory was being flogged by some weirdo named Brad Johnson, who claims to be former CIA. But two other women, Michele Roosevelt Edwards and Maria Zack, played a more forward-facing role in spreading this lunacy.
Michele Roosevelt Edwards, AKA Michele Ballarin, AKA Michele Golden, AKA Amira Ballarin, also styled herself a covert CIA operative, as well as the Great White Hope of the Somali people.
They call me the 'Mother of Somalia,'" she told the Washington Post in 2013, adding later that the entire country clamored for her. "It's like when you leave your 2-year-old in the day-care center, and he wants you to come back. I have 9 million children."
Edwards/Ballarin/Golden gave us this, the most wonderful image of 2021, when she appears to have used her real estate license to gain access to an unoccupied Virginia mansion, where her "private chef" unwrapped a box of coffee from CVS in a disastrous attempt to convince an Icelandic reporter that she was the secret owner of Icelandair.
How bountiful art thy blessings, o Lord!
SPICY MEATBALLS! Remember Italygate? Turns Out People Behind It About As Authentic As Pasta With Ketchup
Princess Amira of Somalia was joined by a woman named Maria Zack in peddling the Italian drivel, if not the Icelandic variant.
Let's let USA Today describe Zack's theories, shall we?
"The theft of the election was orchestrated in the Rome Embassy, on the second floor of Via Veneto, by an employee, Stefano Serafini, foreign service officer of over 20 years," she said. "Stefano Serafini coordinated with a General Claudio Graziano."
"General Graziano is on the board of Leonardo — the defense contractor, Leonardo SPA," Strollo Zack continued. "Leonardo used their military satellite uplink to load the software and transfer it over to change the votes from Trump to Biden."
She also alleged that recent arrests of employees at Leonardo were related to the incident, and that the plan was orchestrated by former President Barack Obama, with help from former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and the CIA.
Renzi? Conte? Honestly, that discrepancy is the least of the problems here.
Anyway, as TPM pointed out this morning, Zack is still screeching incoherently about this whole Italian space laser thing. And in March, she showed up to brief Kansas legislators on it. Yes, Kansas, where Trump beat Biden by 15 points.
“Why Kansas? Because Kansas was a pro-Trump victor of electors,” Zack said. “But, I would argue, you don’t know. You do not know the real result of your election. You also probably have not been made aware of what was occurring in Italy.”
She then made them aware of "what was occurring in Italy" in excruciating detail. You can watch the whole thing on Rumble if you've got an hour to spare. Or you could spend that hour huffing glue — the result will be the same.
“I may not make it much longer,” she said, implying that she might be assassinated for telling her theories to Special Counsel John Durham. “So this is my way of telling the world exactly what is happening; I will die for my country and I hope everyone in this room will as well, because we owe it to every military person around the world who has sacrificed the same, and today we are faced with that same challenge.”
But the GOP's appetite for that shit is insatiable, and the more bugfuck, the better. So instead of asking if Zack needed to be put on a 72-hour hold, they got to work.
On April 22, the Kansas Legislative Post Audit Committee published this proposal to pay four people to spend seven months, or however long it may take, to figure out how to make sure Italy doesn't poke its space lasers into Kansas's elections going forward. Well, to be fair, it doesn't mention Italy specifically. But they are going to expend an enormous amount of taxpayer money to audit Kansas's election procedures, despite zero credible allegations of widespread fraud.
TL, DR? We live in a country full of crazy people. And this Italy shit is hilarious, and also, not funny at all.
OPEN THREAD!
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Acting DHS Head Chad Wolf Buried Memo On Russian Election Interference To Help Trump. Yeah, Don't Faint.
We will never get to the bottom of the corruption.
Hold on to your hats, kids! Turns out Trump's Department of Homeland Security was a hot mess of corruption, and not just because they were beating protesters and disappearing people into the back of vans for the crime of being on the street dressed in black.
The latest revelation came in an Inspector General's Report that focuses on the politicization of one particular memo about Russian election interference to damage then-candidate Joe Biden. The episode was alluded to in a whistleblowers report by Brian Murphy, the former head of the Homeland Security Department’s intelligence branch, published by the New York Times in September 2020. Murphy described a shocking pattern of rot at the top of DHS, under both Kirstjen "Baby Cager" Nielsen and her successor Chad Wolf, AKA "Acting Chad," who was never confirmed and whose appointment was subsequently declared illegal.
During the campaign, the Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) observed the objective reality that Russian actors were seeding social media with lies about Joe Biden's health. Much the same way they spent 2016 pretending that Hillary Clinton was at death's door, while a guy who can't walk down a flight of stairs was treated like a perfect specimen of virility and acumen. Russia, if you're listening ...
There is a process for I&A to produce intelligence memos, and it does not involve editing by the acting head of DHS. Nevertheless, when Murphy presented a memo for distribution to intelligence agencies saying that Russia was interfering to harm the Democratic nominee, Acting Chad told him to fix it so it wouldn't upset Poppy Trump by acknowledging the reality that he was once again the beneficiary of Russian electoral interference.
In June, Murphy was told to find examples of foreign election interference to help Joe Biden.
In an internal I&A email, the I&A official who authored the product described why providing examples of influence efforts targeting candidates from both major political parties might be difficult, because: [REDACTED]
In the document it looks like this:
Let's go out on a limb here and guess that it might be difficult to find counterexamples of foreign election interference to hurt Trump because America's adversaries were only delighted to watch the United States tear itself apart for four years under the leadership of a lunatic who bullied our allies, cozied up to dictators, and started massively destructive trade wars.
Anyway, Acting Chad wasn't going to put out a product that made Trump look bad during the election, so at a July 8 meeting he ordered I&A to put the kibosh on it. According to notes of the meeting, probably taken by Murphy, Acting Chad said the memo "will hurt POTUS -- kill it per his authorities."
The memo was eventually released, but with a "tone box" that suggested some parity between Russian efforts to promote lies about Biden's mental health and supposed efforts by China and Iran to denigrate Donald Trump.
LOL, remember when the entire federal government tried to help Trump get elected by pretending there was a plague of vote fraud, cities were on fire under Democratic leadership, and the real electoral interference was coming from Iran and GIIIIIIIIINA?
Fun times!
Anyway, the IG Report lays the blame for inappropriately politicizing the intelligence process and delaying the release of information regarding ongoing election interference on Acting Chad:
The Department of Homeland Security did not adequately follow its internal processes and comply with applicable Intelligence Community policy standards and requirements when editing and disseminating an Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) intelligence product regarding Russian interference in the 2020 U.S. Presidential election. For example, I&A employees during the review and clearance process changed the product’s scope by making changes that appear to be based in part on political considerations, potentially impacting I&A’s compliance with Intelligence Community policy. Additionally, the Acting Secretary participated in the review process multiple times despite lacking any formal role in reviewing the product, resulting in the delay of its dissemination on at least one occasion.
It's always the ones you most suspect!
In response, Acting Chad insists that he was just violating internal DHS rules to stop Murphy from embarrassing himself, huffing that "the product I saw in July was written at the Fifth-Grade level. I expect more out of our component leaders." He neglects to mention that Murphy had just accused him of perjuring himself before Congress about the family separation policy, and that on August 1 he demoted Murphy, in what sure as hell looks like retaliation, sending an all-staff email saying that Murphy "had gathered and disseminated intelligence reports identifying reporters and other members of the press."
So, yeah, it's really fucking bad, just as we all suspected at the time. At the very moment when Trump was pretending that Joe Biden had bent America's foreign policy toward Ukraine in a cockeyed plot to help his son, and enlisting the Justice Department to investigate Rudy Giuliani's ridiculous allegations, his intelligence agencies were corruptly burying information that might hurt Trump's campaign.
But her emails, amirite?
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