Former FBI Director James Comey revealed in closed-door testimony with House Republicans on Friday that he deliberately concealed an explosive memorandum about his one-on-one Oval Office meeting with President Trump in February 2017 from top Department of Justice officials.
The former FBI head also acknowledged that when the agency initiated its counterintelligence probe into possible collusion between Trump campaign officials and the Russian government in July 2016, investigators “didn’t know whether we had anything” and that “in fact, when I was fired as director [in May 2017], I still didn’t know whether there was anything to it.”
His remarks square with testimony this summer from former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, whose anti-Trump texts became a focus of House GOP oversight efforts. Page told Congress in a closed-door deposition that “even as far as May 2017” — more than nine months after the counterintelligence probe commenced — “we still couldn’t answer the question” as to whether Trump staff had improperly colluded with Russia.
Comey further testified on Friday that he and his aides were “all very concerned” about how the president had spoken of the probe into fired National Security Adviser Michael Flynn in a private Oval Office meeting, according to a 235-page transcript of his remarks released as a part of an agreement between House Republicans and Comey.
Former FBI Director James Comey testifies in closed-door interview on the Hill; chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge reports.
The fired FBI director wrote in his memorandum that Trump had told him, “I hope you can let this go,” amid reports that Flynn had lied to the FBI and senior White House officials about his contacts with Russia’s government.
But despite that concern, Comey told Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, that he and his team made a “judgment call” not to tell then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions or his lieutenants about Trump’s comments, saying he thought Sessions would recuse himself “in a matter of days” from the Russia probe.
“We agreed that we ought to hold it very close, not brief the investigative team at this point and not go over and talk to the leadership of the Department of Justice, to hold onto it until we got a new deputy attorney general and they sorted out how they were going to supervise the Russia investigation,” Comey said.
Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, at center, pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. (AP)
Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was later fired for leaking a self-serving story to the press and lying about it to Comey and federal investigators, was among the brain trust Comey sat down with to discuss his options. The two were joined, Comey said, by then-FBI General Counsel James Baker and Comey’s chief of staff, James Rybicki.
Comey told lawmakers that others may have been present as well, including FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich (who was an associate deputy director at the time), National Security Branch Executive Director Carl Ghattas, and FBI counterintelligence head Bill Priestap, who recently announced he would leave the agency by year-end. Comey said that he did not believe anti-Trump FBI Agent Peter Strzok or former FBI lawyer Lisa Page were in the room.
Comey testified: “We believed that the Attorney General, Mr. Sessions, was on the cusp of recusing himself from anything related to Russia, so it didn’t make any sense to brief him on it, and that there was no deputy attorney general at that point.” (Sally Yates, a holdover from the Obama administration, was terminated by Trump in late January 2017 after she refused to defend the administration’s ban on travel from several Muslim-majority nations in court.)
“We agreed that we ought to hold it very close.”
— Former FBI Director James Comey
Sessions recused himself from Russia-related matters shortly afterward, in early March 2017 — a decision that Trump has since called a “terrible mistake,” although it was recommended by career Justice Department officials in part because Sessions had met with Russian dignitaries while assisting with the Trump campaign. But Jordan pressed Comey on why he decided not to tell the next-in-command at the DOJ.
Lawmakers release transcript of testimony from former FBI Director James Comey; reaction from Rep. Jim Jordan, Republican member of the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees.
“I don’t know who was No. 3 at that point,” Comey responded. “There was an acting — there was a U.S. Attorney acting as the deputy attorney general, who we knew would be in the seat only until Rod Rosenstein was confirmed,” he added, in an apparent reference to former Acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente, who served until Rosenstein took the job in April 2017.
Comey continued that “it made sense to hold onto it” because “we saw no investigative urgency.”
But unredacted sections of Comey’s other memoranda documenting his conversations with Trump apparently demonstrate that he later did inform Boente and other top DOJ officials about other sensitive matters concerning his conversations with the president.
In a memorandum documenting his phone conversation with Trump on March 30, 2017, about how to “lift the cloud” of the Russia investigation from the White House, Comey wrote, “I called the acting attorney general and relayed the substance of the above and said I was telling him so he could decide what guidance to give me, if any.”
In a call from the White House that day, Comey wrote that Trump had asked him “several times” to “find a way to get out” to the public that he was not actively under investigation as part of the ongoing federal probe into possible Russia collusion with his team. Comey assured Trump, and congressional leaders, that the president was not being investigated at the time.
Former FBI Director James Comey, with his attorney, David Kelley, right, speaks to reporters after a day of testimony before the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Friday, Dec. 7, 2018. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) (Associated Press)
House Republicans are set to have another opportunity to question Comey before they lose majority status when the new Congress is seated in January. The fired FBI director told reporters his return visit for more testimony will likely come the “week after next.”
Comey largely frustrated GOP lawmakers during Friday’s session, in large part because his lawyers urged him not to answer numerous questions. On Twitter after his testimony, Comey sharply criticized what he characterized as Republicans’ “desperate attempt to find anything that can be used to attack the institutions of justice investigating this president.”
But while Comey insisted in the interview that “we never investigated the Trump campaign for political purposes,” the transcript shows he claimed ignorance or memory lapses in response to questions concerning key details and events in the Russia investigation, which some GOP lawmakers continue to claim was improperly conducted.
The transcript reveals lawmakers’ frustration with his lack of specifics. Asked if he recalled who drafted the FBI’s “initiation document” for the July 2016 Russia investigation, Comey said, “I do not.” He again claimed not to know when asked about the involvement in that initiation of Peter Strzok, whose anti-Trump texts later got him removed from the special counsel’s probe.
When asked if the FBI had any evidence that anyone in the Trump campaign conspired to hack the DNC server, Comey gave a lengthy answer referring to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation as to why he couldn’t answer.
Early Sunday, Trump slammed Comey’s testimony repeatedly on Twitter, deriding him as “Leakin’ James Comey.”
On 245occasions, former FBI Director James Comey told House investigators he didn’t know, didn’t recall, or couldn’t remember things when asked. Opened investigations on 4 Americans (not 2) – didn’t know who signed off and didn’t know Christopher Steele. All lies!
Leakin’ James Comey must have set a record for who lied the most to Congress in one day. His Friday testimony was so untruthful! This whole deal is a Rigged Fraud headed up by dishonest people who would do anything so that I could not become President. They are now exposed!
But there was a time when Comey, by his own accounting, didn’t think of himself as the kind of person who would leak information behind the president’s back.
In a Jan. 28, 2017, dinner with Trump in the White House’s Green Room, Comey wrote in a since-released memorandum that he told the president, “I don’t do sneaky things, I don’t leak, I don’t do weasel moves.“
James Comey Admits FBI Was Still Probing ‘Pee’ Dossier Until Day He Was Fired
At the time James B. Comey was fired as FBI director, his agency was still attempting to corroborate claims made in the infamous, largely-discredited anti-Trump dossier, Comey admitted.
In testimony to the House Judiciary Committee on Friday, Comey described an effort “to try to replicate, either rule in or rule out, as much of that collection of reports that’s commonly now called the Steele dossier as possible, and that that work was ongoing when I was fired.” Trump dismissed Comey from the FBI on May 9, 2017.
A transcript of Comey’s testimony was released on Saturday. During one exchange with lawmakers, Comey said that FBI efforts to probe the dossier given to the agency by former British spy Christopher Steele started “sometime in ’16” almost immediately after Steele provided the charges.
The timing is instructive. In previous testimony, Comey admitted that he pushed back against a January 2017 request from President Donald Trump to possibly investigate the origins of the claims made inside the Steele dossier.
Comey’s latest testimony shows that even while he was cautioning Trump against ordering a probe of the dossier claims, Comey’s own FBI was quietly conducting an ongoing investigation into the wild content of that very dossier.
During prepared remarks for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, delivered on June 8, 2017, Comey related how he pushed back against a suggestion from Trump to investigate the dossier claims.
The former FBI chief stated that following a January 6 Oval Office meeting with Intelligence Community leaders, Comey “remained alone with the President Elect to brief him on some personally sensitive aspects of the information assembled during the assessment.”’
It is clear Comey was referring to the dossier since he writes the “salacious and unverified” material was about to be publicly reported by the news media. Four days after that briefing, the dossier was published by BuzzFeed.
In his statement summarizing his conversation with Trump, Comey refers to Russian prostitutes, a key component of the dossier:
He said he had nothing to do with Russia, had not been involved with hookers in Russia, and had always assumed he was being recorded when in Russia.
In a private White House dinner with Trump on January 27, Comey says the topic of the “salacious material” again came up and he reveals that Trump was considering asking the FBI to investigate the origins of the claims. Comey pushed back against that idea.
Comey writes:
During the dinner, the President returned to the salacious material I had briefed him about on January 6, and, as he had done previously, expressed his disgust for the allegations and strongly denied them. He said he was considering ordering me to investigate the alleged incident to prove it didn’t happen. I replied that he should give that careful thought because it might create a narrative that we were investigating him personally, which we weren’t, and because it was very difficult to prove a negative. He said he would think about it and asked me to think about it.
The Steele dossier was reportedly funded by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) via the Perkins Coie law firm.
A House Intelligence Committee memo released last February documented that as FBI director, Comey signed three FISA applications to spy on former Trump adviser Carter Page with the dossier serving as part of the basis for the warrant requests.
Comey signed the applications without telling the FISA court that the dossier was financed by Trump’s primary political opponents, the memo related.
“Neither the initial application in October 2016, nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior and FBI officials,” the memo states.
The GOP memo also relates that after Steele was terminated months earlier as an FBI source a “source validation report conducted by an independent unit within FBI assessed Steele’s reporting as only minimally corroborated.” Still, Comey saw fit, according to the Republican and Democrat memos, to utilize the dossier in the FISA documents. He also briefed Trump and then-President Barack Obama on the dossier contents.
Here we go, from Russia with love, to campaign finance with love.
Why was Michael Cohen investigated? Because the “Steele dossier” had him making secret trips to meet with Russians that never happened, so his business dealings got a thorough scrubbing and, in the process, he fell into the Paul Manafort bin reserved by the special counsel for squeezing until the juice comes out. We are back to 1998 all over again, with presidents and candidates covering up their alleged marital misdeeds and prosecutors trying to turn legal acts into illegal ones by inventing new crimes.
The plot to get President Trump out of office thickens, as Cohen obviously was his own mini crime syndicate and decided that his betrayals meant he would be better served turning on his old boss to cut the best deal with prosecutors he could rather than holding out and getting the full Manafort treatment. That was clear the minute he hired attorney Lanny Davis, who does not try cases and did past work for Hillary Clinton. Cohen had recorded his client, trying to entrap him, sold information about Trump to corporations for millions of dollars while acting as his lawyer, and did not pay taxes on millions.
The sweetener for the prosecutors, of course, was getting Cohen to plead guilty to campaign violations that were not campaign violations. Money paid to people who come out of the woodwork and shake down people under threat of revealing bad sexual stories are not legitimate campaign expenditures. They are personal expenditures. That is true for both candidates we like and candidates we do not. Just imagine if candidates used campaign funds instead of their own money to pay folks like Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about affairs. They would get indicted for misuse of campaign funds for personal purposes and for tax evasion.
There appear to be two payments involved in this unusual agreement. Cohen pleaded guilty to a campaign violation for having “coordinated” the American Media payment to Karen McDougal for her story, not for actually making the payment. He is pleading guilty over a corporate contribution he did not make. Think about this for a minute. Suppose ABC paid Stormy Daniels for her story in coordination with Michael Avenatti or maybe even the law firm of the Democratic National Committee on the eve of the election.
By this reasoning, if the purpose of this money paid, just before the election, would be to hurt Trump and help Clinton win, this payment would be a corporate political contribution. If using it not to get Trump would be a corporate contribution, then using it to get Trump also has to be a corporate contribution. That is why neither are corporate contributions and this is a bogus approach to federal election law. Note that none of the donors in the 2012 John Edwards case faced any legal issues and the Federal Election Commission ruled their payments were not campaign contributions that had to be reported, both facts that prosecutors tried to suppress at trial.
Now, when it comes to Stormy Daniels, Cohen made a payment a few days before the election that Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani says was reimbursed. First, given that this payment was in October, it would never have been reported before the election campaign and so, for all intents and purposes, was immaterial as it relates to any effect on the campaign. What is clear in this plea deal is that, in exchange for overall leniency on his massive tax evasion, Cohen is pleading guilty to these other charges as an attempt to give prosecutors what they want, which is a Trump connection.
The usual procedures here would be for the Federal Election Commission to investigate complaints and sort through these murky laws to determine if these kinds of payments are personal in nature or more properly classified as campaign expenditures. On the Stormy Daniels payment that was made and reimbursed by Trump, it is again a question of whether that was made for personal reasons, especially since they have been trying since 2011 to obtain agreement. Just because it would be helpful to the campaign does not convert it to a campaign expenditure. Think of a candidate with bad teeth who had dental work done to look better for the campaign. His campaign still could not pay for it because it is a personal expenditure.
Contrast what is going on here with the treatment of the millions of dollars paid to a Democratic law firm which, in turn, paid out money to political research firm Fusion GPS and British spy Christopher Steele without listing them on any campaign expenditure form, despite crystal clear laws and regulations that the ultimate beneficiaries of the funds must be listed. This rule was even tightened recently. There is no question that hiring spies to do opposition research in Russia is a campaign expenditure, yet no prosecutorial raids have been sprung on the law firm, Fusion GPS or Steele. The reason? It does not “get” Trump.
So, Trump spends $130,000 to keep the lid on a personal story and the full weight of state prosecutors comes down on his lawyer, tossing attorney-client privilege to the wind. Democrats spend potentially millions on secret opposition research and no serious criminal investigation occurs. Remember that the feds tried a similar strategy against Democratic candidate Edwards six years ago and it failed. As Gregory Craig, a lawyer who worked both for President Clinton and Edwards, said, “The government theory is wrong on the facts and wrong on the law. It is novel and untested. There is no civil or criminal precedent for such a prosecution.” Tried it there anyway and it failed.
Let us also not forget that President Clinton was entrapped into lying about his affairs and, although impeached, was acquitted by the Senate. The lesson was clear: We are not going to remove presidents for lying about who they had affairs with, nor even convict politicians on campaign finance violations for these personal payments.
With Cohen pleading guilty, there will be no test of soundness of the prosecution theories here, and it is yet another example of the double standards of justice of one investigation that gave Clinton aides and principals every benefit of the doubt and another investigation that targeted Trump people until they found unrelated crimes to use as leverage. Prosecutors thought nothing of using the Logan Act against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, but they are using obscure and unsettled elements of campaign finance law against Trump lawyer Cohen to manufacture crimes in what is a naked attempt to take Trump down and defeat democracy.
Trump should do a better job of picking aides who pay their taxes, but he is not responsible for their financial problems and crimes. These investigations, essentially based on an opposition dossier, were never anything other than an attempt to push into a corner as many Trump aides and family members as possible and shake them down until they could get close enough to Trump to try to take him down.
That is why so many of his aides, lawyers, and actions in the campaign and in the White House have undergone hour by hour scrutiny to find anything that could be colored into a crime, leaving far behind the original Russia collusion theory as the fake pretext it was. Paying for nondisclosure agreements for perfectly legal activities is not a crime, not a campaign contribution as commonly understood or ruled upon by the Federal Election Commission. Squeezing guilty pleas out of vulnerable witnesses does nothing to change those facts.
BuzzFeed News, which published the infamous dossier, is refusing to comment on recent comments from Lanny Davis, the Clinton-connected lawyer representing Michael Cohen
Davis is emphatically stating that the dossier’s allegations about Cohen are “100 percent” false. Davis claims that Cohen “never, never, ever” went to Prague, as the dossier alleges
The dossier is Exhibit A in Trump critics’ collusion conspiracy theory
For nearly 20 months, the allegations made in the infamous Steele dossier have hung like a cloud over the Trump administration and several of his former advisers.
The salacious 35-page document has become Exhibit A in President Donald Trump critics’ conspiracy theory that the campaign colluded with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election. Numerous news outlets, pundits and lawmakers have also pushed the theory.
But the dossier arguably suffered its heaviest blow on Wednesday after Clinton-connected lawyer Lanny Davis emphatically denied one of the document’s most intriguing allegations.
Davis said the dossier’s claims that his client, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, traveled to Prague in August 2016 as part of a conspiracy with the Kremlin are “100 percent” false.
Davis’ comments received little attention from the both the mainstream press and the entities that have pushed the dossier.
“We have no comment on Mr. Davis’s statements,” said Matt Mittenhal, a spokesman for BuzzFeed News, which published the dossier on Jan. 10, 2017.
Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that commissioned the dossier on behalf of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, has also not weighed in. Joshua Levy, a lawyer for the firm, did not respond to a request for a response to Davis’ comments.
The DNC did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Marc Elias, the attorney who hired Fusion GPS on behalf of the Clinton campaign and DNC.
McClatchy News, which in April reported that special counsel Robert Mueller has evidence that Cohen did travel to Prague, says that it is sticking by its report. The article, written by reporters Greg Gordon and Peter Stone, breathed new life into the dossier’s claims about Cohen, but it has never been corroborated.
“We stand by our reporting,” said Jeanne Segal, a spokeswoman for McClatchy.
***
Denials about the dossier’s claims are as old as the salacious document itself.
Then President-elect Trump called the dossier “crap” during a press conference a day after BuzzFeed published the report. Cohen vehemently denied the allegations, as did former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Page is alleged in the dossier of being the Trump campaign’s conduit to the Kremlin. Though the allegations remain unverified, the FBI relied heavily on the dossier to obtain four surveillance warrants against Page.
Davis’ statements would seem to add substantial weight to Cohen’s denials, largely because he is far from a Trump supporter.
Davis is close friends with former President Bill and Hillary Clinton. He held an unofficial role as a surrogate for the Clinton campaign, which partnered with the DNC to pay Fusion GPS $1 million for the dossier.
Davis has also made it his mission over the past couple of months to discredit Trump regarding hush money payments to women who claimed to have had affairs with the former real estate mogul. The 74-year-old PR guru gave CNN an audio clip earlier this month of Cohen speaking with Trump about payments to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy playmate who claimed to have an affair with Trump in 2006.
Cohen pleaded guilty to a series of charges on Tuesday, including some that are related to the payoff to McDougal and Stormy Daniels. He also pleaded guilty to tax evasion and bank fraud.
***
Cohen last publicly disputed the dossier on June 28, when he wrote on Twitter that the “dossier misreports 15 allegations about me.”
“My entire statement must be quoted – I had nothing to do with Russian collusion or meddling!” he said.
It had been unclear if Cohen planned to maintain those denials in the wake of guilty plea earlier this week. But Davis answered the question in a series of interviews on Wednesday.
“Thirteen references to Mr. Cohen are false in the dossier, but he has never been to Prague in his life,” Davis said Wednesday in an interview on Bloomberg.
“Never, never in Prague. Did I make that? Never, never, ever. Ever,” Davis told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd.
“And the reason, just to let your viewers know, what we’re talking about is that the dossier, so-called, mentions his name 14 times, one of which is a meeting with Russians in Prague. Fourteen times false,” he continued.
Davis was even more emphatic in an interview with BBC Newsnight.
“The answer is 100 percent ‘no.’ Never has he ever been in Prague. And the 13 other references to my client in the so-called dossier are false,” Davis said in the interview, pounding the table to underscore each specific denial.
BBC Newsnight
✔@BBCNewsnight
“I told you I’m an Anglophile and you asked me the question I wanted you to ask me” Lanny Davis, Michael Cohen’s lawyer speaks to Evan Davis.@LannyDavis | @EvanHD | @BBCTwo | #newsnight
BuzzFeed and other news outlets ignored Davis’ statements (CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other major outlets have not picked up the story as of this writing), however, an attorney for another dossier target is weighing in.
“The one thing that we’ve always know for certain is that the allegations concerning Gubarev, Webzilla, and XBT are completely false, and to the extent that those allegations overlap with allegations concerning Mr. Cohen we knew those had to be false as well,” said Evan Fray-Witzer, a lawyer for Aleksej Gubarev, a Russian tech executive suing BuzzFeed over the dossier.
Cohen and Gubarev are both mentioned in the 17th and final dossier memo, dated Dec. 13, 2016. The memo alleges that Cohen traveled to Prague to pay hackers for cyber attacks against the Democratic National Committee.
The memo then claims that Gubarev’s companies infiltrated the DNC’s computer networks using viruses, bots and malware.
“The special counsel indicted the people involved in the hacking and those people aren’t our clients. We may never know precisely how Gubarev, Webzilla, and XBT ended up in the Dossier, but we do know that after more than a year of trying, Buzzfeed has no evidence to support the allegations that they published about them,” Fray-Witzer told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
On Monday’s edition of CNN’s New Day, Chris Cuomo repeatedly accused the Russian state of waging “war” against America via “election hacking” in 2016. He offered his analysis while reporting from Helsinki, Finland, in anticipation of a meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Cuomo said “meddling” is an insufficiently severe word to describe “election hacking.”
“The big, ugly white elephant in the room will be the U.S. election hacking,” said Cuomo. “We’ve been calling it meddling, but I’m trying to stay away from the word because it’s just way too mild. This is an act of war.”
Cuomo further framed his narrative of “election hacking” as “the truth”: “How does [Donald Trump] raise the act of war of the hacking and different attacks during the U.S. election when Vladimir Putin knows damn well that President Trump doesn’t really believe the truth and doesn’t put a whole lot of stock in the event itself?”
Putin’s mere arrival in Helsinki amounted to a “win” for the Russian president, assessed Cuomo: “It’s a win for Putin the moment he landed safely on the ground because he’s been given legitimacy by the U.S. president. Literally the world is waiting on him to get here. But the easy win for Putin is this happening at all. He’s been given legitimacy on the world stage. End of story.”
“Animus should be directed towards the Russian president [by Trump],” added Cuomo.
New Day co-anchor Alisyn Camerota implicitly advised Trump to publicly denounce Putin towards unspecified ends: “President Trump refused to condemn Putin as a ruthless leader or a foe in this new interview with ITV. … Furthermore, you know, he hasn’t really called Putin a bad guy. In other words, he doesn’t necessarily think that Putin’s a bad guy. In fact, I mean, here’s where his mindset was this morning.”
CNN International’s Christiane Amanpour concurred with Cuomo’s assertions of “election hacking” and “war.” She said, “Yes, it is an act of violation of sovereignty of the United States and the other European countries that have been cyber hacked on their electoral matters.”
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins appraised Trump’s rejection of the “election hacking” narrative as amounting to “repeating exactly what the Kremlin wants to hear.”
At no point did any of CNN’s anchors, correspondents, analysts, or guests qualify “election hacking.”
CNN markets itself as a non-partisan and politically objective news media outlet, branding itself “The Most Trusted Name In News.”
Rod Rosenstein looks like a creepy child molester. But were is the Trump and Russian collusion?
Twelve Russian military intelligence officers hacked into the Clinton presidential campaign and Democratic Party, releasing tens of thousands of stolen and politically damaging communications, in a sweeping conspiracy by the Kremlin to meddle in the 2016 U.S. election, according to a grand jury indictment announced days before President Donald Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The indictment stands as special counsel Robert Mueller’s first allegation implicating the Russian government directly in criminal behavior meant to sway the presidential election.
U.S. intelligence agencies have said the meddling was aimed at helping the Trump campaign and harming the election bid of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. The effort also included bogus Facebook ads and social media postings that prosecutors say were aimed at influencing public opinion and sowing discord on hot-button social issues.
The indictment lays out a broad, coordinated effort starting in March 2016 to break into key Democratic email accounts, such as those belonging to the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Among those targeted was John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman.
The Kremlin denied anew that it tried to sway the election. “The Russian state has never interfered and has no intention of interfering in the U.S. elections,” Putin’s foreign affairs adviser, Yuri Ushakov, said Friday.
But the indictment identifies the defendants as officers with Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff, also known as GRU. It accuses them of covertly monitoring the computers of dozens of Democratic officials and volunteers, implanting malicious computer code known as malware and using phishing emails to gain control of the accounts of people associated with the Clinton campaign.
By June 2016, the defendants began planning the release of tens of thousands of stolen emails and documents, the indictment alleges. The messages were released through fictitious personas like DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0.
The charges come as Mueller continues to investigate potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign to influence the presidential election. The indictment does not allege that Trump campaign associates were involved in the hacking efforts or that any American was knowingly in contact with Russian intelligence officers.
The indictment also does not allege that any vote tallies were altered by hacking.
Still, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said the internet “allows foreign adversaries to attack Americans in new and unexpected ways. Free and fair elections are hard-fought and contentious and there will always be adversaries who work to exacerbate domestic differences and try to confuse, divide and conquer us.”
A White House statement offered no condemnation of the alleged Russian conspiracy. Instead it focused on the fact that no Trump campaign officials or Americans were implicated in the new indictment. Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said on Twitter that it was time to end the Mueller investigation since “no Americans are involved.”
But with Mueller still investigating, it’s not known whether further indictments are taking shape or will.
Before Friday, 20 people and three companies had been charged in the Mueller investigation. The 20 are four former Trump campaign and White House aides, three of whom have pleaded guilty to different crimes and agreed to cooperate, and 13 Russians accused of participating in a hidden but powerful social media campaign to sway U.S. public opinion in the 2016 election.
If the involvement of the GRU officers in the hacking effort is proved, it would shatter the Kremlin denials of the Russian state’s involvement in the U.S. elections.
The GRU, which answers to the Russian military’s General Staff, is part of the state machine and its involvement would indicate that the orders to interfere in the U.S. election came from the very top.
One attempt at interference noted in the indictment came hours after Trump, in a July 27, 2016, speech, suggested Russians look for emails that Clinton said she had deleted from her tenure as secretary of state.
“Russia, if you’re listening,” Trump said, “I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”
That evening, the indictment says, the Russians attempted to break into email accounts used by Clinton’s personal office, along with 76 Clinton campaign email addresses.
Hours before the Justice Department announcement, Trump complained anew that the special counsel’s investigation is complicating his efforts to forge a better working relationship with Russia. Trump and Putin are scheduled to hold talks Monday in Finland, a meeting largely sought by Trump.
After the indictments were announced, top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer called on Trump to cancel his meeting with Putin until Russia takes steps to prove it won’t interfere in future elections. He said the indictments are “further proof of what everyone but the president seems to understand: President Putin is an adversary who interfered in our elections to help President Trump win.”
Trump complained about “stupidity” when asked about Mueller’s probe earlier Friday, at a news conference in Britain with Prime Minister Theresa May.
“We do have a — a political problem where — you know in the United States we have this stupidity going on,” he said. “Pure stupidity. But it makes it very hard to do something with Russia. Anything you do, it’s always going to be, ‘Oh, Russia, he loves Russia.'”
“I love the United States,” Trump continued. “But I love getting along with Russia and China and other countries.”
Where is the collusion investigation on Christopher Steele a spy from Britain?
The former British spy who wrote the infamous dossier has been ordered to appear for a deposition in a lawsuit over the salacious document filed in the U.S.
A British court ordered Christopher Steele to testify about his role in compiling the dossier, which alleges that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Steele’s report was funded by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee. BuzzFeed News published the 35-page document in Jan. 2017.
Aleksej Gubarev, a Russian businessman named in the dossier, is suing BuzzFeed in Florida and Steele in London. The dossier claims that Gubarev was recruited as a Russian spy and that his web hosting companies were used to infiltrate the DNC’s computer systems.
Gubarev’s lawyers have tried for months to force the London-based Steele to provide a deposition for the lawsuit against BuzzFeed, which is being heard in federal court in Florida.
Steele has resisted the efforts to provide a deposition, arguing that Gubarev’s lawyers are attempting to use his deposition in the BuzzFeed case in order to collect information for use in the lawsuit pending against him in the U.K.
But a British judge sided against that argument.
A judge on the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court in London ruled, “it is obvious that the author of the paragraph complained of in the Florida proceedings would be a relevant witness in defamation proceedings which are entirely based on the allegations in that paragraph, in a jurisdiction where the plaintiffs have to prove that the allegations are false,” Fox News reported.
Evan Fray-Witzer, a lawyer for Gubarev, praised the decision.
“We’re thrilled that the English Court has ordered Mr. Steele to sit for his deposition,” Fray-Witzer said. “It was always amazing to us that he could talk as freely as he has to reporters around the world about the dossier, yet refuse to sit for a deposition about the same topics.”
Fray-Witzer told The Daily Caller News Foundation a date has not been set for the deposition, but will likely be held within the next 4-6 weeks.
Fray-Witzer says that his team recently narrowed the scope of the information it sought from Steele. The former MI6 officer has asserted that his deposition could put dossier sources in danger.
Fray-Witzer says that his team has agreed not to ask Steele about his sources. He also says that Steele has chosen not to appeal the decision. “Buzzfeed published information about Mr. Gubarev and his companies that was unverified and untrue and they seem to be hoping to scuttle the deposition of the person most positioned to testify to those facts,” he told TheDCNF.
