“According to a source close to Cohen, Cohen has told friends that he expects to be arrested any day now. (Reached for comment, Cohen wrote in a text message, “Your alleged source is wrong!”) The specter of Cohen flipping has Trump advisers on edge,” reportsVanity Fair.
Cohen, whose New York office was raided by the FBI in April, is under investigation for crimes ranging from campaign finance violations to bank fraud.
Following the raid, Stephen Ryan, an attorney for Cohen said in a statement that the raid was conducted based on a referral from special counsel Robert Mueller.
“The decision by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York to conduct their investigation using search warrants is completely inappropriate and unnecessary,” said Raid. “It resulted in the unnecessary seizure of protected attorney-client communications between a lawyer and his clients.
“These government tactics are also wrong because Mr. Cohen has cooperated completely with all government entities, including providing thousands of non-privileged documents to the Congress and sitting for depositions under oath,” he added.
Shortly after the raid, President Trump called the law enforcement action “disgraceful,” while flanked by members of his Cabinet.
TheBeat w/Ari Melber
✔@TheBeatWithAri
Breaking: Trump responds to Michael Cohen raid “It’s a disgrace… it’s an attack on our country”
“It’s frankly, a real disgrace. It’s an attack on our country in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand for,” the president said.
“It’s a total witch hunt. I’ve been saying it for a long time. I’ve wanted to keep it down. We’ve given, I believe, over a million pages worth of documents to the special counsel.
“They continue to just go forward, and here we are talking about Syria… and I have this witch hunt constantly going on, for over 12 months now, and actually much more than that. You could say it was right after I won the nomination, it started. And it’s a disgrace. It’s frankly, a real disgrace. It’s an attack on our country in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand for,” he added.
Last week, reports indicated Stefan Halper, a Cambridge professor and longtime aide to some of Washington’s most powerful figures, was outed as an FBI informant planted inside Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The New York Post writes:
Halper made his first overture when he met with Page at a British symposium. The two remained in regular contact for more than a year, meeting at Halper’s Virginia farm and in Washington, DC, as well as exchanging emails.
The professor met with Trump campaign co-chair Sam Clovis in late August, offering his services as a foreign-policy adviser, The Washington Post reported Friday, without naming the academic.
…
Days later, Halper contacted Papadopoulos by e-mail. The professor offered the young and inexperienced campaign aide $3,000 and an all-expenses-paid trip to London, ostensibly to write a paper about energy in the eastern Mediterranean region.
Here are a few fast facts about Halper’s history in politics.
Got His Start in Nixon/Ford Years
The Stanford and Oxford-educated Halper started his career in government in 1971 as a member of President Richard Nixon’s Domestic Policy Council. The foreign policy expert served as the Office of Management and Budget’s Assistant Director of Management and Evaluation Division between 1973-1974. Halper then served as an assistant to all three of President Gerald Ford’s Chief of Staffs — Alexander Haig, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney — until 1977.
Accused of Leading a Spy Ring Inside Jimmy Carter’s Presidential Campaign
The Reagan-Bush presidential campaign hired Halper to serve as Director of Policy Coordination in 1980 and would later be embroiled in the Debategate affair, a scandal in which CIA operatives were accused of leaking the Carter campaign’s foreign policy positions to the Republican ticket.
Four decades ago, Halper was responsible for a long-forgotten spying scandal involving the 1980 election, in which the Reagan campaign – using CIA officials managed by Halper, reportedly under the direction of former CIA Director and then-Vice-Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush – got caught running a spying operation from inside the Carter administration. The plot involved CIA operatives passing classified information about Carter’s foreign policy to Reagan campaign officials in order to ensure the Reagan campaign knew of any foreign policy decisions that Carter was considering.
Halper also worked as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs during President Ronald Reagan’s first term.
Had a Stint as a Bank Executive
In 1984, Halper was chairman of three financial institutions — National Bank of Northern Virginia, Palmer National Bank, and George Washington National Bank. White House official Oliver North wired loaned funds from the Palmer National Bank to a Swiss bank account, which were later used to aid the contras.
Believed Hillary Clinton Would Be a Better Steward for U.S.-UK Relations
In March 2016, Halper told Russia’s Sputnik News that he believed then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton would prove to be a steadier hand in preserving the “special relationship” enjoyed by the United States and Britain.
“I believe Clinton would be best for US-UK relations and for relations with the European Union. Clinton is well-known, deeply experienced and predictable. US-UK relations will remain steady regardless of the winner although Clinton will be less disruptive over time,” Halper said.
Could The Snitch Be Mitch McConnell And His Chinese Friends?
House Republicans are again battling with the Justice Department over information related to the Russia investigation, this time over documents the intelligence community said involves a top-secret source who has provided information to the CIA and FBI.
The mysterious source has also gathered information that was given to Special Counsel Robert Mueller as part of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to The Washington Post.
WaPo reported Justice Department and intelligence community officials issued a stark warning to the White House on May 2 against a request from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes. Nunes had submitted a subpoena to the Justice Department on April 24 for records related to the Russia probe.
Justice Department and intelligence community officials argued to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly that complying with the subpoena would reveal the identity of a top-secret source and would undermine protocol regarding intelligence sources, according to WaPo.
WaPo provided one small clue about the source: he or she is American.
Kelly discussed the issue with Trump, who sided with the intelligence officials. WaPo noted that it is unclear whether Trump knew that information from the source has been shared with Mueller. Trump has been heavily critical of the Mueller probe, which he has described as a “witch hunt.”
On Thursday, the day after the White House meeting, the Justice Department told Nunes that the agency was “not in a position to provide information responsive to your request regarding a specific individual.”
“Disclosure of responsive information to such requests can risk severe consequences, including potential loss of human lives, damage to relationships with valued international partners, compromise of ongoing criminal investigations, and interference with intelligence activities,” Stephen Boyd, the assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s office of legislative affairs, wrote to Nunes.
Nunes shot back in a statement to WaPo, saying that the Justice Department is “citing spurious national security concerns to evade congressional oversight while leaking information to The Washington Post ostensibly about classified meetings.”
Nunes threatened to hold Attorney General Jeff Sessions in contempt of Congress for failing to provide the documents on Sunday.
The standoff is not the first between Nunes and the Justice Department. The Republican has battled the agency over other records related to the Russia investigation, including surveillance warrants granted to the Justice Department to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
The FBI and Justice Department relied heavily on the unverified Steele dossier to obtain the spy warrants, according to documents provided to the House Intel panel.
Nunes also recently threatened to subpoena the Justice Department for the FBI document that laid out the initial rationale for the bureau’s counterintelligence investigation into possible collusion. The investigation was opened on July 31, 2016 based on information about then-Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos.
The Australian government reportedly passed information to the U.S. government about a barroom conversation that Papadopoulos had in London in May 2016 with Alexander Downer, the former Australian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. Downer reportedly relayed that Papadopoulos claimed to have learned the Russian government had obtained stolen Hillary Clinton emails. (RELATED: In Private, George Papadopoulos Denies Collusion)
The Daily Caller News Foundation has reported that Papadopoulos was introduced to Downer by Erika Thompson, another Australian diplomat.
Two weeks before that meeting, Papadopoulos met in London with Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor and diplomat who is suspected of being a Russian operative. Papadopoulos pleaded guilty on Oct. 5 to lying to FBI agents about the timing of his encounters with Mifsud and with two Russian nationals. He told the special counsel’s office that Mifsud said in that meeting that a Russian government official told him about stolen Clinton-related emails.
Halper, who works closely at Cambridge with Sir Richard Dearlove, a former MI6 chief, contacted Papadopoulos about writing a policy paper on Israeli and Cypriot energy issues. Halper, an American, paid Papadopoulos $3,000 for the paper and covered the cost of his room, board, and a flight to London. Papadopoulos met with Halper and one of his assistants for several days in London.
During one of their meetings, Halper asked Papadopoulos about Russia and emails, according to sources close to Papadopoulos’s version of the encounters.
TheDCNF also learned that Halper approached two other Trump campaign advisers, including Carter Page. Halper invited Page to attend a symposium at Cambridge in July 2016.
Another campaign official told TheDCNF they were contacted by and met with Halper several days before Halper’s initial outreach to Papadopoulos. That official, who did not want to be identified, said they were surprised to learn of the Papadopoulos encounter.
Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and John Kerry both hate America.
The Boston Globe reported on Friday that former Secretary of State John Kerry has been secretly working with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif to save the Iran nuclear deal, which the Trump administration has strongly criticized and might renegotiate or cancel within the next two weeks.
The Boston Globe describes Kerry’s activities as “shadow diplomacy” and an “aggressive yet stealthy” effort to save “one of his most significant accomplishments”:
John Kerry’s bid to save one of his most significant accomplishments as secretary of state took him to New York on a Sunday afternoon two weeks ago, where, more than a year after he left office, he engaged in some unusual shadow diplomacy with a top-ranking Iranian official.
He sat down at the United Nations with Foreign Minister Javad Zarif to discuss ways of preserving the pact limiting Iran’s nuclear weapons program. It was the second time in about two months that the two had met to strategize over salvaging a deal they spent years negotiating during the Obama administration, according to a person briefed on the meetings.
With the Iran deal facing its gravest threat since it was signed in 2015, Kerry has been on an aggressive yet stealthy mission to preserve it, using his deep lists of contacts gleaned during his time as the top US diplomat to try to apply pressure on the Trump administration from the outside. President Trump, who has consistently criticized the pact and campaigned in 2016 on scuttling it, faces a May 12 deadline to decide whether to continue abiding by its terms.
Kerry also met last month with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and he’s been on the phone with top European Union official Federica Mogherini, according to the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal the private meetings. Kerry has also met with French President Emmanuel Macron in both Paris and New York, conversing over the details of sanctions and regional nuclear threats in both French and English.
Boston Globe Deputy Washington Bureau Chief Matt Viser sought to capture how both sides of the partisan divide are responding to the news of Kerry’s “unusual” activities:
As John Kerry seeks to save the Iran deal, supporters see unflagging energy even amid potential failure. Critics may see something else: a former officeholder working with foreign officials to potentially undermine policy aims of a current administration.
As Seth Mandel of the New York Post pointed out, the “supporters” half of Viser’s formulation is a matter of partisan opinion, while the “critics” half is a literal description of what Kerry is actually doing. One suspects mainstream media coverage of, say, Condoleeza Rice jetting around Europe to secretly undermine Barack Obama’s foreign policy in 2010 would not have praised her “unflagging energy.” The Obama administration veterans and sympathizers quoted in the Boston Globe piece sound an awful lot like people either ignoring the results of a presidential election or seeking to nullify it.
There is also the question of whether Kerry’s activities violate the Logan Act, that highly controversial and almost completely ignored piece of 18th-century regulation that expressly forbids private citizens from undermining U.S. foreign policy. The relevant U.S. Code reads as follows:
Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
The Logan Act is something of a joke among legal scholars and political analysts, who often call for it to be repealed as obsolete rubbish because no one has ever been convicted under it… but it recently was employed as the pretext for action against President Trump’s first National Security Adviser, Gen. Mike Flynn.
Flynn was not actually charged under the Logan Act, but he pled guilty to making false statements during an investigation based upon it, as CNN explained in December 2017:
In court filings, Michael Flynn acknowledged he lied to the Federal Bureau of Investigation about calls with foreign officials, including the Russian ambassador, to try to influence the outcome of a UN resolution in December 2016 while a member of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team.
Michael Zeldin, a former prosecutor who was a special assistant to Mueller in the Justice Department, said the outreach to foreign governments by Trump’s team at the time the Obama administration was in dispute with Israel over the vote is “facially” a violation of the Logan Act.
Flynn’s contact with the Russian ambassador “seems to violate what the Logan Act intended to prevent,” Zeldin said. He added that even though the Logan Act hasn’t been used successfully “it doesn’t mean that Mueller wouldn’t consider using it to pressure defendants.”
The New York Times reported in February 2017 that Obama advisers heard about Flynn’s conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and “grew suspicious that perhaps there had been a secret deal between the incoming team and Moscow, which could violate the rarely enforced, two-century-old Logan Act barring private citizens from negotiating with foreign powers in disputes with the United States.”
In December 2017, the NYT ran an op-ed from Daniel Hemel and Eric Posner that took the Logan Act very seriously indeed, and warned the Trump team they should “fear” it:
The statute, which has been on the books since the early days of the republic, reflects an important principle. The president is — as the Supreme Court has said time and again — “the sole organ of the nation in its external relations.” If private citizens could hold themselves out as representatives of the United States and work at cross-purposes with the president’s own diplomatic objectives, the president’s ability to conduct foreign relations would be severely hampered.
Hemel and Posner dismissed the argument that the Logan Act could be ignored because it has never been successfully prosecuted before, arguing that both Flynn and whoever directed his actions — they suggested President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner — should be jailed, and even suggested impeachment proceedings for Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
“If the phrase ‘high crimes or misdemeanors’ means anything, it includes violation of a serious criminal statute that bars citizens from undermining the foreign policy actions of the sitting president,” they declared.
As Dan McLaughlin points out at National Review at the end of an argument for repealing the Logan Act, Kerry has potentially set himself up for more serious charges under the law than Flynn, who was “apparently acting for a duly-elected incoming presidential administration” when he committed his alleged transgression. Kerry can make no such claim.
Chief political correspondent Byron York makes the same case that investigating Flynn under the Logan Act but giving Kerry a free pass is illogical:
Have often argued that 1799 Logan Act, used as pretext to question Michael Flynn, is dead. So IMHO it’s dead for John Kerry, too. But if you believe Logan Act was used legitimately against Flynn, you’ve got to want a DOJ/FBI Kerry investigation…
York noted in December 2017 that the Logan Act was the reason Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, an Obama administration holdover, decided to interrogate Flynn:
Yates described the events in testimony before a Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee on May 8, 2017. She told lawmakers that the Logan Act was the first concern she mentioned to McGahn.
“The first thing we did was to explain to Mr. McGahn that the underlying conduct that Gen. Flynn had engaged in was problematic in and of itself,” Yates said. That seems a clear reference to the Logan Act, although no one uttered the words “Logan Act” in the hearing at which Yates testified. “We took him [McGahn] through in a fair amount of detail of the underlying conduct, what Gen. Flynn had done.”
Yates and the aide returned to the White House the next day, Jan. 27, for another talk with McGahn. McGahn asked Yates “about the applicability of certain statutes, certain criminal statutes,” Yates testified. That led Sen. Chris Coons, who had called for an investigation of the Trump team for Logan Act violations months before, to ask Yates what the applicable statutes would be.
“If I identified the statute, then that would be insight into what the conduct was,” Yates answered. “And look, I’m not trying to be hyper-technical here. I’m trying to be really careful that I observe my responsibilities to protect classified information. And so I can’t identify the statute.”
While Yates became reticent in the witness chair, the public nevertheless knows from that “official familiar with her thinking” that Yates believed Flynn might have violated the Logan Act, a suspicion she shared with other Obama administration officials.
The coda to the Mike Flynn Logan Act saga is that a House Intelligence Committee report released on Friday made it clear that the FBI agents who interviewed Flynn “didn’t think he was lying.”
Trump Criticized Obama Over Syria And He Does The Same Thing.
President Donald Trump announced that he had ordered precision missile strikes on Syria in reaction to the use of chemical weapons by Bashar al-Assad.
“These are not the actions of a man, but crimes of a monster,” Trump said, condemning Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons against his people.
The president made his remarks at the White House on Friday evening.
He described al-Assad’s actions an “evil and despicable attack”
Trump indicated that the United States was teaming up with Britain and France to launch the strikes.
He described their attacks as “righteous power” employed the “barbarism and brutality” of chemical weapons.
The president confirmed that these attacks would be greater than last year, and would last longer than his limited strike in 2017.
“We are prepared to sustain this response until the Syrian regime stops its use of prohibited chemical agents.”
The president called out Russia and Iran for supporting Assad in Syria.
“To Iran and to Russia I ask what kind of a nation wants to be associated with a mass murder of innocent men, women and children?”
Trump specifically called out Russia for their support of Assad, urging them to stop backing the Syrian dictator.
“Russia must decide whether it will continue down this dark path,” Trump
I thought the Russians were suppose to be in Collusion with Donald Trump.
Russian internet trolls not only used social media accounts to promote President Donald Trump’s election bid, they also operated accounts supporting the candidacies of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued an indictment for 13 Russian nationals affiliated with three Russian companies suspected of interfering in the 2016 election. The goal of their campaign was to sow discord in the U.S. political process.
The indicted Russians operated both pro- and anti-Trump social media accounts, and accounts were also used to support Democratic presidential candidate Sanders and Green Party candidate Stein.
Russians named in the indictment also set up a “Blacktivists” Instagram account that promoted the message: “Choose Peace and Vote for Jill Stein. Trust me, it’s not a wasted vote.” They also used the Instagram account “Woke Blacks” to encourage people not to vote.
“A federal grand jury in the District of Columbia returned an indictment on Feb. 16, 2018, against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities accused of violating U.S. criminal laws in order to interfere with U.S. elections and political processes,” special counsel spokesman Peter Carr said in a statement.
“The indictment charges all of the defendants with conspiracy to defraud the United States, three defendants with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and five defendants with aggravated identity theft,” Carr said.
Mueller’s indictment, however, does not allege any of the Russian online activities in any way altered the outcome of the 2016 election.
TheBeat w/Ari Melber
