Bill Barr Got Some Splainin' To Do About All These Wire Tapps!
This is some crazy Nixon shit!
Attorney General Merrick Garland will meet today with representatives from the New York Times, CNN, and the Washington Post to explain how their reporters wound up having their phone and email records swept up via secret subpoena in an apparent attempt by the White House to root out leakers. It promises to be an unpleasant conversation, but not nearly as unpleasant as the grilling the AG will face when Congress eventually gets to ask how Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell and 71 staffers and members of their families wound up under state surveillance.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is some crazy Nixon shit. Or maybe even worse, which is probably why Jeff Sessions, Rod Rosenstein, and Bill Barr all raced to the nearest reporter to deny knowing anything about it.
"What the administration did, the Justice Department, the leadership of the former President, goes even beyond Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon had an enemies list. This is about undermining the rule of law," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told CNN's Dana Bash.
Leave aside for the moment whether anyone should believe that sitting members of Congress were surveilled without sign-off at the highest levels of the Justice Department. That all three of these guys felt the need to run, not walk, to get out in front of this story, when they've consistently asserted executive privilege over other internal deliberations at DOJ, is a pretty good indication they know it's really bad.
Not that we needed further proof. If DOJ took as a given that the universe of possible leakers or leak-ees on the House Intelligence Committee included only Democrats, then it's basically prima facie evidence they engaged in a politically motivated witch hunt. Or WITCH HUNT, as the wingers like to scream. Particularly since one Republican on that committee had a widely reported track record of receiving classified data from the White House that he later made public. And it cannot be a coincidence Trump's favorite media targets were the ones targeted by his own law enforcement apparatus.
But this weekend a new wrinkle in the story emerged when the Times reported that DOJ also obtained a secret subpoena for White House Counsel Don McGahn's phone logs back in 2018. McGahn's subpoena was issued by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia, the same jurisdiction that housed part of the Mueller prosecution of Paul Manafort. The article notes that "It is not clear what F.B.I. agents were investigating, whether Mr. McGahn was their specific focus or whether he was swept up in a larger net because he had communicated with someone who was under scrutiny."
What is clear, though, is that it was standard operating procedure for DOJ to engage in secret TAPPS of media and political targets throughout the Trump administration, with documented initial subpoenas between 2017 and 2020, and multiple annual renewals of the gag order spanning the tenures of Sessions, Barr, and Matthew "Big Dick Toilet" Whitaker. This is a sharp break with prior practice, and it frankly beggars belief that it was done without the knowledge of anyone at the White House, where Trump screeched about leakers on Twitter on the daily.
CNN's Executive Vice President and General Counsel David Vigilante describes receiving an order from a federal magistrate judge in EDVA demanding information on reporter Barbara Starr's emails. Vigilante doesn't mention if a grand jury was involved, but does say he was threatened with obstruction charges if he told anyone besides his legal team about the demand to hand over data stored on CNN's servers. CNN fought the subpoena and managed to get a US district judge to narrow the scope.
And Apple and Microsoft probably would have had a similar result if the companies had stuck up for their own customers the way Twitter did when DOJ tried to unmask one of the Devin Nunes parody accounts. But they didn't.
"In this case, the subpoena, which was issued by a federal grand jury and included a nondisclosure order signed by a federal magistrate judge, provided no information on the nature of the investigation and it would have been virtually impossible for Apple to understand the intent of the desired information without digging through users' accounts," Apple said last week of the subpoena signed by a federal magistrate judge in DC on February 6, 2018. "Consistent with the request, Apple limited the information it provided to account subscriber information and did not provide any content such as emails or pictures."
In Apple's telling, it had no idea who Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell were and could not have figured that out "without digging through users' accounts." Which is about as credible as Sessions, Barr, and Rosenstein saying they didn't know about the subpoenas in the first place.
Microsoft put out a similarly nonsensical statement about its own compliance with a request for data on an account held by a congressional staffer.
"In 2017 Microsoft received a subpoena related to a personal email account," the statement said. "As we've said before, we believe customers have a constitutional right to know when the government requests their email or documents, and we have a right to tell them. In this case, we were prevented from notifying the customer for more than two years because of a gag order. As soon as the gag order expired, we notified the customer who told us they were a congressional staffer. We then provided a briefing to the representative's staff following that notice. We will continue to aggressively seek reform that imposes reasonable limits on government secrecy in cases like this."
And by "continue," presumably the company means it will start fighting the government, since it appears to have done exactly nothing for four straight years as the government sought and obtained three renewals of the gag order. How shitty is that Bing search engine that Microsoft couldn't even plug in the staffer's name and find his or her LinkedIn page?
In summary and in conclusion, this is fucking crazy. Trump's DOJ was wilding out and trampling the First and Fourth Amendments of reporters and Congress, and the tech companies did fuck all to stop it. And speaking of tech companies, seems like a big one is thusfar missing from this conversation.
What gives, Zuck? Did you hand over the deets on those DMs, or what? We are just asking questions.
OVERSIGHT. NOW.
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Is Bill Barr LYING? Or Does He Just Think We're All Idiots?
Trick question, it is both.
Did Bill Barr lie to reporters just a tiny? Was he less than perfectly honest about his role in wire-tapping Congressmen Schiff and Swalwell in a leak investigation? Would our saintly former attorney general stoop to telling fibs to protect his own reputation?
You bite your tongue for even thinking it!
Although ... well, let's compare.
Here's how the New York Times described Barr's role in the inquiry:
But William P. Barr revived languishing leak investigations after he became attorney general a year later. He moved a trusted prosecutor from New Jersey with little relevant experience to the main Justice Department to work on the Schiff-related case and about a half-dozen others, according to three people with knowledge of his work who did not want to be identified discussing federal investigations.
And here's what he told Politico after the story broke:
In a phone interview, Barr said he didn't recall getting briefed on the moves.
Uh huh.
NYT:
A CNN report in August 2019 about another leak investigation said prosecutors did not recommend to their superiors that they charge Mr. Comey over memos that he wrote and shared about his interactions with Mr. Trump, which were not ultimately found to contain classified information.
Mr. Barr was wary of how Mr. Trump would react, according to a person familiar with the situation. Indeed, Mr. Trump berated the attorney general, who defended the department, telling the president that there was no case against Mr. Comey to be made, the person said. But an investigation remained open into whether Mr. Comey had leaked other classified information about Russia.
And Politico:
Barr also said that while he was attorney general, he was "not aware of any congressman's records being sought in a leak case." He also said Trump never encouraged him to target the Democratic lawmakers in this case.
"He was not aware of who we were looking at in any of the cases," he said. "I never discussed the leak cases with Trump. He didn't really ask me any of the specifics."
UH HUH.
Look, sometimes two things can both be true. But sometimes someone is lying his pathetic ass off and crossing his fingers that the Inspector General will drag this thing out for three years before issuing a report, by which time we'll all have lost interest. Hell, maybe he hopes to draw a straight flush and Merrick Garland will throw a blanket of privilege over the whole thing, and no one will ever find out. Which is bloody cheeky for a guy who just threw career law enforcement officials under the bus by forcing disclosure of every piece of paper the DOJ had on Michael Flynn, despite the DOJ's own lawyers and the court agreeing that they were not discoverable.
As for the contention that Barr had NO IDEA whether Trump wanted the DOJ to tapp Schiff and Swalwell's wires, that's horseshit on its face.
"Little Adam Schiff, who is desperate to run for higher office, is one of the biggest liars and leakers in Washington, right up there with Comey, Warner, Brennan and Clapper! Adam leaves closed committee hearings to illegally leak confidential information. Must be stopped!" Trump tweeted on February 5, 2018.
And he was still at it two years later on February 22, 2020, snarking, "Just another Shifty Schiff leak. Isn't there a law about this stuff?"
The man spent his entire presidency howling about leakers and accusing everyone who ever worked for him of revealing classified information based on his own cracked theory that all his utterances were state secrets. Remember that time when the DOJ sued Melania's former BFF for writing a mean book about her? Are we supposed to believe that Bill Barr never discussed it with anyone at the White House, deciding to devote Department resources to such a pissant garbage claim all on his own? Really? (The suit has since been dropped by Merrick Garland, BTW.)
Barr is the one who parked New Jersey gang prosecutor Osmar Benvenuto over at the national security division so he could work on the leak investigations, and the Times says Benvenuto personally briefed Barr on his progress. Is Jowly Roy Cohn really going with the line that he dispatched this guy to do something, but he had no idea what it was and they never discussed it again?
COME THE FUCK ON, ASSHOLE! Your Wonkette was born on a Tuesday, but it wasn't last Tuesday.
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Bill Barr Did Wire Tapps To Adam Schiff? LOCK HER UP!
Goddamn these corrupt sons of bitches!
Remember when that asshole accused Obama of sticking wire tapps up his voluminous ass to spy on him? Well, hold on to your hats, kids, because it turns out that the guy using the Justice Department to spy on his political enemies was actually ...
You'll never guess ...
Just kidding, it was Trump. Which you knew, because we all lived through the past five years, watching a madman promise to LOCK HER UP Hillary Cinton, then burn down the firewall between the White House and the DOJ and shred every norm meant to ensure unbiased federal law enforcement. The real surprise would be if this gang of corrupt sonsabitches didn't turn into J. Edgar Hoover once they got their hands on the keys to the Hoover Building.
And yet, the New York Times scoop last night about the DOJ subpoenaing phone records from multiple sitting members of Congress including House Intelligence Committee members Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, their aides, and even one of their minor children is still shocking. Both in its brazenness, and the duration of the investigation, which stretched from Jeff Sessions's tenure as attorney general, softening under Counselor Masculine Toilet (sorry not sorry), and wound up as a pet project of Bill Barr.
According to the Times, prosecutors secured a warrant for the "Apple data" of at least 12 people during 2017 and 2018 in an effort to find out who was leaking information about the Russia investigation to the media. The preposterousness of a White House which leaked like a sieve accusing sitting members of Congress of divulging classified information is only topped by the fact that Trump himself torpedoed the leak cases by forcing the DOJ to declassify all the evidence. Pretty hard to claim that someone else jeopardized national security by talking to reporters about Michael Flynn's contacts with the Russians when Trump poodle John Ratcliffe got himself confirmed as Director of National Intelligence and then published it himself in an attempt to prove that the whole Russia investigation was a Deep State plot.
But let's go back to 2017, perhaps the most chaotic time in the Trump administration. Remember when no one had a security clearance and Bannon was in the back room with Stephen Miller cooking up those batshit executive orders? Fun times!
With Trump fulminating that every time he took a piss it wound up on the front page of the Post before he got his fly zipped up, AG Sessions dutifully announced that he was opening eleventy hundred leak investigations. Only a handful ever came to fruition, of course — this is Ol' Butterscotch Sessions we're talking about here. But four years later, we're finally finding out about all the crazy shit that Elmer Fudd did trying to git that rascally, leakin' rabbit. As with the recent revelations about secret subpoenas for journalists' emails at the Times, the Post, and CNN, Sessions routinely used "last resort" investigative tools, designated to be deployed in important cases, and only when all other avenues had been exhausted. In a sense, he was hunting rabbits with dynamite.
Please keep this in mind when the wingers scream bloody murder about the DOJ raiding Rudy Giuliani's law office or howl about FISA warrants on Carter Page. Ditto for claims that Congress can't subpoena the executive branch because of separation of powers — the DOJ can spy on individual members of Congress, but the DOJ is itself immune from subpoena? REALLY?
And speaking of hypocrisy, do you see Senators Rand Paul or Ben Sasse, supposed Fourth Amendment stalwarts, objecting to what Sessions and Barr did and demanding to see the predicate for these warrants? LOL, we are silly on Fridays.
Worse still, not only did the government seek and obtain warrants for these communications, but it persuaded the court to impose a gag order so that Apple couldn't tell Schiff, Swalwell, and the rest of the targets that they were under state surveillance. And with no one to contest the subpoenas, the court continued to authorize them. (Bad court!)
Contrast this with Twitter, which stood up to the DOJ when it tried to unmask the identity of the @NunesAlt account. Because of the gag order, the account holder couldn't contest the subpoena, so Twitter stepped in — albeit at a time when it was clear the Trump administration was coming to an end. Staring down three more years of regulatory negotiations with a vengeful loon, Apple made a different choice. Which was probably a smart business move, but also it's something to keep in mind when Tim Cook brags about his company's commitment to user privacy. The fact that Apple eventually notified Schiff et al. in May of 2021 when the gag orders finally expired is cold bloody comfort.
The investigation came to nothing, of course, and under (acting) AG Matthew "Big Dick Toilet" Whitaker, it "languished."
"We did nothing but our jobs, and we followed the rules we were supposed to follow," Rep. Swalwell told the Post's Greg Sargent. "I'm not above the law, just like no one else is above the law, but to go after this many people, boy, that feels like a Donald Trump-driven investigation and I don't have a lot of faith in his ability to fairly interpret the law."
But Bill Barr was confident in his ability to interpret the law, or at least to twist it to justify any intrusion on the privacy of his political enemies. Yeah, don't faint — the guy who only closed the Hillary Clinton email investigation in 2019, a full six years after she'd left the State Department; the guy who kept the James Comey leak investigation open because he was too chickenshit to tell the president he'd come up empty; the guy who proceeded with a leak prosecution of former (acting) FBI director Andy McCabe that was so shoddy he couldn't even get a grand jury to indict — that guy was hot to trot on this POS investigation from 2017.
So in February 2020, Barr stuck his crony Osmar Benvenuto on the National Security Division to keep an eye on the Schiff/Swalwell case. Benvenuto, who made his bones doing gang and healthcare fraud prosecutions in New Jersey, had no particular national security or leak expertise. But he was loyal to Barr, and that was apparently enough.
The Times reports that Benvenuto hauled in Michael Bahar, a House Intelligence Committee staffer who'd left government service in May 2017, to shout ARE YOU LEAKER? at him. Shockingly, the answer was NO. But still high-level attorneys in the Department devoted substantial time last year to tracking down the source of those three-year-old leaks, even though they were pretty busy blowing up the Michael Flynn and Roger Stone cases. Busy ratfucking bees!
Were Bill Barr and his merry band of hacks trying to bolster their boss's re-election prospects? Perish the very thought! Although we can't help but notice that one of the lawyers on the case was John Demers, head of the DOJ's National Security Division, and known to readers of this here mommyblog for his role in burying the Ukraine whistleblower report.
Demers, Benvenuto, and several other lawyers involved in this plot, as well as the surveillance of reporters, are still on the DOJ payroll. The Times notes cryptically that "Their continued presence and leadership roles would seem to ensure that Mr. Biden's appointees, including Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, would have a full understanding of the investigations."
In plain English, that means that they probably have to cooperate with the inevitable Inspector General investigation of this insane clusterfuck. Although we wouldn't be surprised if Demers and Benvenuto announce their departure in the next 10 minutes, putting themselves conveniently beyond the ability of the IG to compel their testimony.
President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland have vowed to quit surveilling reporters. Presumably they will also agree to quit spying on members of Congress. Thanks a bunch, fellas! But they don't seem particularly inclined to make a clean breast of it and explain how things went so totally off the rails at the DOJ in the past four years. Schiff and Swalwell told the Post that they're getting zero information from the Department other than assurances that the cases are now closed.
Meanwhile Democrats in Congress are out for blood.
"We expect that our Republican colleagues will join us in getting to the bottom of this serious matter," Senators Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin said today. "Former Attorneys General Barr and Sessions and other officials who were involved must testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee under oath. If they refuse, they are subject to being subpoenaed and compelled to testify under oath."
Republican cooperation to root out Republican corruption? Yeah, don't hold your breath.
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Six Three Percenters Indicted For Conspiracy In Capitol Insurrection, So What's That 18% Of?
Haha, math does not work like that.
A grand jury has indicted six "Three Percenter" loons from California on conspiracy charges for their part in trying to overthrow the 2020 election results on January 6, the first time that particular anti-government militia crowd has been charged in the insurrection. (So far, it's mostly been Proud Keepers and Oath Boys, plus a variety of militia creeps who didn't belong to any formal group but sure wanted to overthrow democracy to preserve America.) And what a nice bunch of patriots they appear to be!
According to the indictment, the six dudes conspired on the encrypted Telegram app to drive a rented SUV loaded with weapons to Washington DC so they could participate in Donald Trump's wild rumpus, and planned to storm the Capitol. One of the gents, Derek Kinnison, was very excited about saving America from its elected representatives, writing, "I personally want to be on the front steps and be one of the first ones to breach the doors!"
Two of the guys, Alan Hostetter and Russell Taylor, seem like quite the "characters," as the New York Times explains. The two had founded a group during the pandemic that they called "the American Phoenix Project," so we'll assume they couldn't wait to burn everything down and restore Liberty. The group sought to
fight the "fear-based tyranny" of coronavirus-related restrictions. The group later embraced former President Donald J. Trump's lies about a stolen election, and helped organize a well-attended rally outside the Supreme Court on Jan. 5, where the speakers included Roger J. Stone Jr., a former adviser to Mr. Trump.
Not that hanging around with Stone is so much a crime as just tacky as fuck.
Hostetter, a former La Habra police chief turned Orange County yoga instructor whose brain seems to have broken during the pandemic, or possibly before, used his group to "advocate violence against certain groups and individuals that supported the 2020 election results," according to the indictment. He posted a YouTube video in late November 2020 in which he offered some very patriotic sentiments, explaining that
...some people at the highest levels need to be made an example of with an execution or two or three. Because when you commit treason against this country and you disenfranchise the voters of this country and you take away their ability to make decisions for themselves, you strip them of their Constitution rights. That's not hyperbole when we call it tyranny, that's fucking tyranny. And tyrants and traitors need to be executed as an example.
Hostetter also gave a speech at a Huntington Beach "Stop the Steal" rally in December where he said there "must, absolutely must, be a reckoning" and that the
enemies and traitors of America both foreign and domestic must be held accountable. And they will. There must be long prison terms, while execution is the just punishment for the ringleaders of this coup.
We should probably point out here that the conspiracy charges Hostetter and the others face have a maximum 20 year sentence, which seems a lot fairer than what he was calling for those awful Deep State people to get.
In some of the messages the Gang of Six that Couldn't Shoot Straight exchanged, they explicitly discussed the kinds of weaponry they planned to take to Washington, along with the sort of hilarious "kidding on the square" that's so typical of these very clever fellows:
a. HOSTETTER texted "I'll be heading to DC on 12/31. Let's hook up on 12/30 so you can give me your backpack," followed by three hatchet emojis.
b . TAYLOR responded, "Oh shiz. I need to pack that up. Alan are you bringing firearms?
c. HOSTETTER texted back, "NO NEVER (Instagram now monitors all text messages this has been a public service announcement)," followed by three emojis of faces laughing with tears coming out of their eyes.
The other four doofuses also took part in the planning, with all the usual militia-clown fake military jargon you'd expect ("I think we should clear all text in this chat the morning of the 5th just in case for opsec purposes"), AND discussing what weapons they would bring along (possibly a "shotty" and "another long iron," plus discussions of making sure to bring a gun short enough to be "stashed under the seat" of the SUV). if you don't mind, we'll skip the movie adaptation of their road trip to DC.
Now, it's worth noting that of the six, the feds don't accuse Hostetter or Taylor of invading the Capitol, although they were allegedly in the mob outside, and helped push around some Capitol Police. Taylor posted to rightwing messaging app Telegram that night that he had been "pushing through traitors all day today" and exulted, "WE STORMED THE CAPITOL! Freedom was fully demonstrated today!"
The Times suggests that the indictment may be fairly significant since it may mean that
prosecutors have started to pay attention not only to those who directly took part in the Capitol attack, but also to those who helped foment the assault.
That seems like a pretty good idea! You know what we do with ringleaders in this country? We charge them appropriately and try them in a court of law, instead of trying to incite a mob to lynch them.
[Reuters / NYT / Justice Department / Indictment (PDF) via NYT]
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