The “superseding complaint” adds an obstruction charge, without adding any evidence to support corrupt purpose besides MAGAt fever dreams, an element of that offense. But it substantially appears to be an attempt to clean up one of the shoddiest FBI affidavits I have ever seen and — perhaps most importantly — to swap Byron Militello, who signed the original affidavit,

For Bryan Witt, who wrote this one, which nevertheless remains unsigned, by either him or Zia Faruqui.

Unless DOJ can persuade Magistrate Judge Faruqui that merely presenting a new complaint buys them a few more days before the preliminary hearing scheduled for 11AM, then one of these men can be expected to take the stand and answer for the claims made in the affidavit.

As noted, Militello’s original affidavit was one of the shoddiest affidavits I’ve ever seen, lacking two critical paragraphs that have been added to the affidavit: An explanation of the basis for the affiant’s knowledge:

5. The facts set forth in this affidavit are based at least in part on information I have obtained from my personal involvement in the investigation and from other law enforcement officers who have been involved in this investigation, as well as documents I have reviewed, and on my training and experience. Where I have reported statements made by others or from documents that I have reviewed, those statements are reported in substance and in part, unless otherwise indicated.

And a description of his qualifications:

6. I am a Special Agent with the FBI and have been so employed since in and around January 2002. In and around May 2002, I was assigned to the FBI Phoenix Division, Sierra Vista Resident Agency where I investigated matters involving public corruption, civil rights, human smuggling, domestic terrorism, and drug trafficking. In and around February 2008, I was assigned to the Kansas City Field Office, where I have investigated matters involving public corruption, financial crimes, and civil rights. Prior to my Sierra Vista RA FBI assignment, I participated in a ive-month basic training program at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. At the FBI Academy, I received training in investigating federal criminal offenses, interviewing suspects, tactical operations, and firearms. As a Special Agent, I am authorized to investigate violations of laws of the United States and to execute warrants issued under the authority of the United States.

MAGAts have argued that the search warrant against Ilhan Omar — which was signed by the same Magistrate Judge who signed the original complaint against Floris and Benavides, Matthew Sharbaugh — must be substantive since he approved it. But the fact he approved the complaint against Floris and Benavides without these critical elements pretty much undermines that assumption.

Meanwhile, there are a few telling changes in the affidavit, backing off some (but not all) of the false claims that Militello put his name to.

Just as one example, the superseding affidavit adds a caveat — “apparently” — about whether Hunter Biden really did leave a laptop at John Paul Mac Isaac’s repair shop, though the revised affidavit still falsely claims the FBI only got the contents of the laptop, and not both the actual laptop and a non-matching hard drive of it.

It changed the description of an October 2020 meeting at which Benavides purportedly learned about the laptop — but at which he should have learned, but did not, that the FBI had never validated it — by describing that other Criminal Division personnel described the laptop, not he himself.

Compare this:

At a subsequent meeting in October 2020, FBI Employee 1 confirmed with BENAVIDES and other members of the FITF that the FBI had obtained the contents of the laptop, that the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden, and that it related to the investigations into him.

[snip]

20. On October 22, 2020, BENAVIDES sent an Outlook meeting invitation to FBI Employee 1—of the FBI’s Criminal Division—entitled “To Discuss Laptop,” which FBI Employee 1 accepted. They met in person at FBI headquarters. During the meeting, BENAVIDES, FBI Employee 1, and others discussed the Hunter Biden laptop in detail, including the source of the laptop and the contents of it. Per an October 2026 interview with FBI Employee 1, FBI Employee 1 made clear during the meeting that the FBI was in possession of the contents of the laptop, that the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden, and that evidence relating to the Hunter Biden investigations was on the laptop. [my emphasis]

With this:

10. In October 2020, at a subsequent meeting, FBI Employee 1 was present when personnel from the FBI’s Criminal Division confirmed with BENAVIDES and other members of the FITF that the FBI had obtained the contents of the laptop, that the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden, and discussed the materials that had been reviewed from the laptop in relation to ongoing criminal investigations.

[snip]

33. On October 22, 2020, BENAVIDES sent an Outlook meeting invitation to FBI Employee 1—of the FBI’s Criminal Division—entitled “To Discuss Laptop,” which FBI Employee 1 accepted. They met in person at FBI headquarters. During the meeting, BENAVIDES, FBI Employee 1, and others discussed the Hunter Biden laptop in detail, including the source of the laptop and the contents of it. Per an October 2026 interview with FBI Employee 1, FBI Employee 1 was present when personnel from the FBI Criminal Division made clear during the meeting that the FBI was in possession of the contents of the laptop, that the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden, and that evidence relating to Hunter Biden was on the laptop.  [my emphasis]

FBI Employee 1’s testimony is hearsay as to the “reality” of the laptop, which serves to validate what were basically lies from the trial team.

There are other caveats that go to the core of the charges against Floris and Benavides. The original affidavit claimed they were “at the center” of FITF’s interactions with the Hunter Biden case teams. The revised affidavit says they were only “involved in” such interactions. By itself that caveat largely destroys the claim that Floris’ alleged lies were material, or even that they were lies.

There are similar caveats throughout — enough to question whether Militello, and not Floris and Benavides, are the ones who committed a crime by lying.

My favorite, though, goes right to the core of the fever dream that animates this case, which is part of the same obsession that routinely misrepresents whether 51 former spooks said the hard drive masquerading as a laptop that Rudy Giuliani rolled out in those weeks was an information operation or Russian disinformation.

The original affidavit claimed that the Foreign Interference Task Force discussed “whether information about [Hunter Biden] was Russian disinformation.” The revised affidavit described that it discussed “whether information about him stemmed from Russian disinformation.”

The difference is subtle, to be sure (though given that this is an attempt to rehabilitate Andrii Telizhenko, a favorite source for John Solomon, Chuck Grassley, and Ron Johnson, an important one, because at the time the FBI believed Telizhenko may have been the victim of disinformation). But it goes to the core of misrepresentations in both these affidavits about the purpose of the FITF.

Both these affidavits wildly misrepresent what Floris and Benavides were doing, the scope of their analysis, and their goals. And that misrepresentation goes to the core of how counterintelligence works.

This affidavit still has a number of obvious flaws: It’s still an ever-loving mess, with random mentions of one or another fever dream that don’t relate to the charges. The testimony from Jim Jordan’s committee is still presented as “information shared,” not something his staffer wants to be held accountable for it (the revised affidavit describes the HJC witness as a male who “oversaw” these interviews, which is interesting given that Caroline Nabity “oversaw” the interview of Laura Dehmlow that took place two days before Floris’ interview). The claim Floris lied is based on misrepresentations about what a counterintelligence investigation is, and the claim that Benavides’ inaccurate statements are lies are undermined by exculpatory evidence. The new conspiracy charge lacks the requisite evidence of corrupt purpose.

But at the last minute, the FBI got cold feet about key representations they had made, newly admitting that their central witness is primarily a hearsay witness who repeated the false claims of the Hunter Biden trial team.

Update: I’ve corrected my claim that FBI Employee 1’s testimony was hearsay as to what happened in the meeting. It does, however, serve to “confirm” details about which the investigative team were not fully candid about.

The post FBI Agent Byron Militello Gets Cold Feet on His Indirect Witness in the Floris Case appeared first on emptywheel.

The information accuses Jim Comey of leaking and conspiring to leak signals information, and while it doesn’t say so, it is for this story reporting on a scan request NSA asked Yahoo to do published on October 5, 2016.

As Comey laid out in a motion to dismiss, arguing the statute of limitations expired, DOJ has declined to prosecute it twice already, once after John Durham investigated as a Special Counsel, and again after DC USAO reviewed it. I suspect DOJ used communications Comey had with Dan Richman that they improperly accessed during last year’s prosecution to argue they could charge this case.

But this time around, Trent McCotter and Aakash Singh just … charged it, without a grand jury.

Two days earlier, Aakash Singh had been promoted to Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General.

Comey has been arguing in the EDNC case that Trump keeps rewarding people who’ll charge him with promotions. And we may find that this is the topic of sealed filings there; Judge Louise Flanagan just filed an order in that case last week.

The post Trent McCotter and Aakash Singh’s Star Chamber appeared first on emptywheel.

Todd Blanche is trying to do what Jeffrey Clark aspired to do in 2020, but do it in such a way that avoids the possibility he’ll be standing outside his own home in his underwear while federal agents search it.

On December 27, 2020, Donald Trump called Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Donoghue. After telling them “people will criticize DOJ” if Hunter Biden weren’t investigated “for real,” he went through his false claims of fraud in an election. Then Trump and Rosen had this exchange:

Rosen: We’ll look at whether there were more ballots in Pennsylvania than registered voters — should be able to check on that quickly. But understand that the DOJ can’t and won’t snap its fingers and change the outcome of the election. It doesn’t work that way.

Trump: Don’t need you to do that. Just say the election was corrupt. And leave the rest to me and the Republican Congressmen.

Days later, after being admonished to stay out of the election, Jeffrey Clark promised the White House to send a letter to the states, falsely declaring, “these is evidence of significant irregularities that may have impacted the outcome of the election,” with the specific intent of declaring the Insurrection Act as a result. And briefly, on January 3, the plan worked: Trump decided to reward Clark with his attempt to undermine an election by making him Attorney General so the entirety of DOJ would be recruited in his effort to steal an election, before the entirety of DOJ said they’d quit if Trump carried through with that decision.

And that’s how Jeffrey Clark ended up in his underwear while the FBI searched his home.

Todd Blanche, of course, got rewarded with the Attorney General position by helping Trump dodge accountability for his past attempts to steal an election.

And in the process, John Roberts rubberstamped such corrupt use of DOJ to steal an election, giving the President absolutely immunity for making demands for sham investigations, which the Chief Justice deemed to fit within a President’s official duties.

And the Executive Branch has “exclusive authority and absolute discretion” to decide which crimes to investigate and prosecute, including with respect to allegations of election crime. Nixon, 418 U. S., at 693; see United States v. Texas, 599 U. S. 670, 678–679 (2023) (“Under Article II, the Executive Branch possesses authority to decide ‘how to prioritize and how aggressively to pursue legal actions against defendants who violate the law.’” (quoting TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, 594 U. S. 413, 429 (2021))). The President may discuss potential investigations and prosecutions with his Attorney General and other Justice Department officials to carry out his constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Art. II, §3. And the Attorney General, as head of the Justice Department, acts as the President’s “chief law enforcement officer” who “provides vital assistance to [him] in the performance of [his] constitutional duty to ‘preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.’” Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U. S. 511, 520 (1985) (quoting Art. II, §1, cl. 8).

[snip]

The indictment’s allegations that the requested investigations were “sham[s]” or proposed for an improper purpose do not divest the President of exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials. App. 186–187, Indictment ¶10(c). And the President cannot be prosecuted for conduct within his exclusive constitutional authority. Trump is therefore absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials.

So as Todd Blanche — with frivolous lawsuits in California and Alaska (see Steve Vladeck for the legal background) — attempts to use DOJ to help Trump steal the midterms, he knows exactly how to do so such that the Supreme Court will again bless an attempt to use the presidency, this time with the assistance of DOJ, to steal an election.

First, when Margaret Brennan asked Blanche who Trump told to file the frivolous lawsuit in Alaska, Blanche first accused Brennan of lying because she referred to the second Dan Sullivan as running, and then after those attacks, tried to answer a question other than the one Brennan asked: Not “who did he tell” to file the lawsuit, but “what communications did he have with the President?”

MARGARET BRENNAN: He said quote, “I’m the one that said do it.” Who did he tell to do this? Did he tell you to do this?

[snip]

MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, the ballots are out. There’s a lot of mail-in ballot voting in Alaska. The ballot’s going to look like what we just showed our viewers. They are both on there. In terms of the question I asked you, I asked if it was President Trump who told you to take this action. When the president said, “I’m the one that said do it,” who did he tell to do it?

AG BLANCHE: So I don’t- I will never, ever, ever talk about communications that I have with the president of the United States. I never have, and I never will.

MARGARET BRENNAN: No, the president of the United States said this on camera.

AG BLANCHE: But make sure that you understand that this was not the–

MARGARET BRENNAN: He said, “I told them to do it.” Did he tell that to you?

AG BLANCHE: No, that wasn’t your question. No, no, he didn’t say it on camera.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Yes, he did.

Then Blanche attempted to claim that any kind of research justified this decision.

AG BLANCHE: He said he told them to do that. I said I will not talk ever about- no, that wasn’t your question, I said. I said, what your question was to me is, did he tell me? And I said to you, I will not talk about communications I have with the president of the United States. I haven’t ever, and I won’t ever. But I will tell you this: this is the Department of Justice doing our own research under the law, the Civil Rights Unit in the Department of Justice drafting this lawsuit, and then ultimately we filed the lawsuit.

Blanche similarly attempted to invent some basis for this lawsuit when Bash asked him a similar, albeit less clever, question.

BASH: OK, can we go back to the question I asked about the president? Did he direct you to file this lawsuit?

BLANCHE: So, I talk about this all the time, OK?

I will never talk about any communications I have with the president of the United States. But what I will say is that the president is not shy to the American people and has been very clear with the American people about his concerns about what’s happening in Alaska, and so the fact that — and the Department of Justice has been as well, which is our job.

It’s what we’re supposed to be. And so this lawsuit was a result of the work that the department attorneys did in the civil rights unit that determined that there was a federal law that obligated us to try to step in to stop what — what I think every American views as an injustice.

Like, I mean, you won’t admit it, but it is true that the only reason this man is on the ballot is to confuse voters. I mean, if everybody would start with that premise, then I think the awe and the frustration people are having towards the Department of Justice would dissipate, because we’re doing the right thing.

BASH: OK, I just want to emphasize what you said that you didn’t say, no, that the president didn’t direct you.

Blanche knows that SCOTUS won’t let prosecutors access communications between him and Trump about the specific ask Trump made regarding Alaska, much less use them in a criminal case, so he is trying to give this crime a virgin birth in “research.”

Blanche’s meltdown when Bash asked Blanche whether he was laying the groundwork for political violence was even more obvious. He first attempted to deny that it was a fair question. He did, ultimately, claim the point is not, again, political violence, but all the dodging first makes his deceit clear.

BASH: Can we just — can we just take a step back here? Can we take a step back as to — you were asking why people are asking questions about this.

And let’s just talk turkey, because one of the big questions is whether or not the president is laying the groundwork for a scenario where the — whether it’s Alaska or somewhere else, there is, in your words, a couple of days ago, a doomsday scenario, and we could be in a situation where President Trump tries to overturn the election, and the result of that could be, God forbid, what we saw after January 6. That is one of the fundamental questions.

BLANCHE: I mean, oh, stop it.

BASH: No.

BLANCHE: Oh, you got to stop it with that. You are not being a real person. Come on, man.

BASH: Why are you yelling at me? Oh, come on, man.

BLANCHE: That is crazy.

BASH: It is not crazy.

BLANCHE: Wait. Hold on one second. Hold on one second. Wait, wait, wait. Stop, stop, stop.

BASH: I would have said that before January 6.

BLANCHE: You asked a question. Let me answer it.

BASH: No.

BLANCHE: Hold on. You set me up. You set me up with the following question.

BASH: OK.

BLANCHE: Because the president, because the Department of Justice is concerned that there is an absolute fraud happening in Alaska, and he wants to do something about it, you’re saying, Mr. Attorney General, because the president of the United States wants to stop a fraud and confusion…

BASH: This is a president that has a history…

BLANCHE: … is he going to do something crazy?

That is not — that is not a real question.

BASH: I wish it wasn’t.

BLANCHE: That is not a real question. I’m sorry.

BASH: I wish it wasn’t.

BLANCHE: Well, if you’re in luck then, because it’s not. It’s not.

BASH: But if you’re laying the groundwork for the president to try to overturn an election that he doesn’t like, there is…

(CROSSTALK)

BLANCHE: We’re not laying any groundwork for the president to do that.

BASH: OK.

BLANCHE: So your premise, your question is not true.

What I said, — and so if you — so you have to listen to what I say, or it’s not a fair conversation.

In one of the conversations that SCOTUS told Jack Smith he could not use to prove that Donald Trump attempted to throw out 81 million votes, Pat Philbin warned Jeffrey Clark that his plan to discredit the elections would result in riots in every major city in the US.

[T]he same Deputy White House Counsel tried to dissuade Co-Conspirator 4 from assuming the role of Acting Attorney General. The Deputy White House Counsel reiterated to Co-Conspirator 4 that there had not been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that if the Defendant remained in office nonetheless, there would be “riots in every major city in the United States.” Co-Conspirator 4 responded, “Well, [Deputy White House Counsel], that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”

Clark responded, “that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”

And when Dana Bash asked Blanche if the plan was political violence again, he attacked her, pretending that Trump hasn’t tried precisely this ploy before.

Todd Blanche may well avoid Jeffrey Clark’s fate, thanks in no small part to the corruption of the Supreme Court.

But he couldn’t hide his criminal intent.

The post Todd Blanche, in His Underwear, in Disgrace appeared first on emptywheel.

• Kash Patel has said explicitly this is part of an ongoing FBI effort to criminalize (he said, investigate) the Foreign Interference Task Force (FITF) — to make it illegal to have protected the country from election interference by Russia, China, Iran, and other countries, which will of course chill any efforts to do so going forward.
• Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson treated the charges as part of an effort to excuse their decision to accept dirt from Ukrainian Andrii Telizhenko in 2020, before Trump sanctioned him in 2021; John Solomon has similarly been obsessed with rehabilitating Telizhenko.
• It is, generally, part of an effort to rewrite history, to deny that, in addition to the crimes for which he was prosecuted (for which no one else would have been), Hunter Biden was targeted by a sustained international influence operation.

This is a shoddy propaganda effort, on top of being a weaponization of DOJ.

Before I get too deep into those topics, I want to look at something that has not (yet, at least) shown up in this case.

The charges generally accuse Benavides of lying to the House Judiciary Committee three years after he played a role in responding to the NYPost stories about the hard drive copied from a purported Hunter Biden laptop that Rudy Giuliani got in 2020. In the festering illogic of these frothers, Benavides would have done so to undercut the value of Rudy Giuliani’s October Surprise — and, yeah, the batshit presumption is the FBI should confirm October Surprises rather than preserve the integrity of investigations, much less take October Surprises as reason to reconsider whether foreign spies have exploited US law enforcement.

The only right answer for the frothers is to respond to the NYP article by confirming, without any forensic assessment of what Rudy had in hand, that his hard drive was the same as the laptop that John Paul Mac Isaac had given to the FBI and also to assert that it was “real.” (Spoiler alert: by the time NYP got it, Rudy’s hard drive did not match either the laptop or the copy JPMI had made of the laptop, so even if Hunter Biden did drop off the laptop himself, the Rudy’s hard drive was not “real.”)

Text messages released in the complaint show Benavides first learning about and then trying to understand the significance of John Paul Mac Isaac’s (true) claim that he had given the Hunter Biden laptop to the FBI a year earlier.

Though, the complaint doesn’t get that detail correct, one of a number of details it misstates. The complaint falsely claims FBI only obtained “the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop,” not the laptop itself, plus a hard drive with a non-matching second set of data.

The complaint shows Benavides speaking to his FITF colleague Laura Dehmlow — who would later tell Jim Jordan’s committee that Benavides would have been the one who knew the FBI really did have a copy of the laptop — sometime after the NYPost story came out on October 14, 2020. (Whether out of slovenliness or deceit, the complaint does not include timestamps, which are important.) At that point, neither Benavides nor a witness referred to as “an FBI CID Unit Chief,” who the complaint describes served as “the primary conduit” between FBI’s criminal division and the FITF, knew that the investigative team had gotten those devices from JPMI ten months earlier. That’s important, because a central premise of these charges is that FITF was apprised of key developments in the Hunter Biden investigations (investigations, plural, but the complaint obscures that too).

When a FITF Unit Chief [Laura Dehmlow] asked BENAVIDES whether FITF was tracking the laptop coverage, he replied: “Indeed…I’ve spoken to [initials of FBI Employee 1],” and “I would love to know if a copy exists, and was it provided to anyone…[initials of FBI Employee 1] did not know.

This is actually fairly damning to DOJ’s narrative, because it proves that the investigative team was withholding information that would have been critically important for FITF to know as it attempted to track ongoing efforts to frame Hunter Biden. Further, it completely undercuts the claim that Nikki Floris lied about not being involved in the Hunter Biden investigation (which itself assumes the only investigation(s) were criminal investigations and not counterintelligence ones).

Then, on October 16 — the same day that Benavides and Floris issued a statement that specifically said FITF did not know whether this was Russian disinformation — Benavides asked Alfred Watson, FBI Baltimore’s Assistant Special Agent in Charge, who was on the Delaware investigative team, when the laptop had been obtained. Watson gave a technically inaccurate answer — that there was only one computer — and then described that the Delaware trial team had no fucking clue that the laptop had been shared elsewhere. Turns out it had — another data point showing that the criminal division was not just hiding this from FITF, but also hiding it from each other.

While this was going on, Benavides learned via some other channel that “NY,” which is most likely the Patrick Ho investigative team in SDNY, also got a copy (but remember that Bill Barr got a copy), though it could pertain to an investigation into Andrii Derkach in EDNY.

In testimony this month, per the complaint, Watson found this communication — which exposed that the investigation team had not disclosed the laptop and that the laptop had disseminated further than the investigative team knew — suspect. Which is an interesting observation given that it was the investigative team hiding the laptop from FITF, not vice versa.

Then, on October 22, Benavides invited FBI Employee 1 to a meeting where they discussed the laptop. The meeting itself had to be after 5:35PM, when FBI Employee 1 accepted the invitation.

“To Discuss Laptop,” which FBI Employee 1 accepted. They met in person at FBI headquarters. During the meeting, BENAVIDES, FBI Employee 1, and others discussed the Hunter Biden laptop in detail, including the source of the laptop and the contents of it. Per an October 2026 interview with FBI Employee 1, FBI Employee 1 made clear during the meeting that the FBI was in possession of the contents of the laptop, that the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden, and that evidence relating to the Hunter Biden investigations was on the laptop.

That means whatever FBI Employee 1 told Benavides during that meeting was likely influenced by what the investigative team had decided in a meeting from 10AM to 12:58PM that same day, a meeting convened because the FBI had said they did not know whether the laptop was an information operation, at which point the investigative team realized they had not ever checked if the laptop had been tampered with. Again, a key premise of this complaint is that FBI Employee 1 and FITF were deconflicting various investigations, but this timeline is proof they were not, at least not very well.

Benavides professed to remember none of this in his interview with Jordan’s committee, and that’s the basis for the false statement charges. Though the questions in the complaint were almost entirely about an investigation “related to the laptop,” as opposed to an investigation into money laundering for which the laptop had been seized.

Q. Okay. I just want to clarify, because some of the questions were just so broad and so hypothetical. Like, let’s be really specific. Do you have any knowledge that the FBI has an ongoing criminal investigation related to a laptop purported to belong to Hunter Biden?

A. I do not have firsthand knowledge of that.

Q. Okay. Do you have any knowledge outside of the Wikipedia or media articles that you would have read?

A. No.

Q. Nothing specific to your time in the FBI?

A. No.

Q. And you never had that kind of knowledge, is that fair to say, that was specific to your role in the FBI?

A. In the investigation into a laptop, no. [my emphasis]

The FBI has still never conducted an investigation into this laptop.

Nevertheless, Kash Patel charged Benavides because he claimed not to remember details about an investigation related to the laptop that he did learn during a 8-day period three years earlier and because he didn’t remember, he claimed, (and because Dehmlow had testified Benavides did know about the laptop) had checked Wikipedia before testifying and repeated details he attributed to Wikipedia.

But the complaint does not include what John Solomon considered to be the most important part of Benavides’ testimony when Trump’s favorite disinformation propagandist was granted access in real time three years ago.

[H]e advised his leadership that Hunter Biden’s laptop could be part of a Russian disinformation campaign, apparently unaware his team already knew that the FBI had obtained and corroborated the computer as “real,” according to interview transcripts reviewed by Just the News.

Note, Solomon’s claim that the FBI had “corroborated” the computer is true, but only in the sense that rather than doing the forensic work the FBI would always do in such a case, they had instead found that the same emails were on both the laptop and Hunter Biden’s iCloud, which falls far short of affirming the laptop was “real” in the sense normal people would use the word.

Solomon continues:

“I remember a question being posed broadly if there was a laptop purported to be attributed to Hunter Biden, is it possible that a foreign adversary, like the Russians, could be using that as a way to insert into the U.S. political system false information, bad information, corrupted information, all kinds of things that could be on the laptop? Is it possible, FITF, that the Russians are capable of doing this? And my response would have been yes,” Benavides told the House Judiciary Committee in a Sept. 28 transcribed interview reviewed by Just the News.

[snip]

Benavides said he received a request for his input on the Hunter Biden laptop before the November 2020 election from Executive Assistant Director John Brown, then the No. 3 national security official at the bureau behind the Director and Deputy Director.

“It was broad,” Benavides said of the question Brown asked. “It would have been, is it possible that the Russians had the sophistication, the capabilities to potentially insert a laptop purported to be associated with Hunter Biden? It would have been a broad question based on my recollection.”

Benavides told the committee he had not done any research on the laptop beforehand and never looked further into whether the laptop was real after giving Brown his answer.

“Did you have to take anything back to your team or conduct your own analysis, or you just were able to provide an answer immediately?” the retired agent was asked.

“I would have provided the answer immediately based on my understanding of sophisticated Russian operations,” Benavides answered.

“Did you do anything else after this conversation with him?” he was pressed.

“Not that I immediately recall. Not that I recall,” he answered.

[snip]

“I don’t know what ‘real’ means, and I would need context for that,” he told the committee. “And I can’t put myself in Laura’s testimony to understand what she might have been trying to convey based on the question that was asked to her.”

Committee lawyers pressed further: “Did you have any knowledge of the FBI’s possession of any laptop, regardless of whether the laptop had been authenticated, determined to be Hunter Biden’s laptop, determined to be a version of Hunter Biden’s laptop possibly corrupted, possession of any [] laptop whatsoever connected to this issue?

“I was aware of a public narrative around this generally. I assessed, based on John’s question, that the FBI might be in possession of the laptop. I was never told, nor would I have asked, ‘Does the FBI have this laptop?’ I would not have done that,” he answered.

That latter denial is more directly on point than the statements laid out in the complaint. He did ask “does the FBI have this laptop” and then asked, “who in the FBI has this laptop.” Even though that claim more directly conflicts with the known communications, it is not among the vaguely described false claims laid out in the complaint. It’d sure be nice to have those timestamps!

I fully expect DOJ will argue that Benavides’ claimed non-recall of those other conversations was an attempt to hide a more systematic effort to test whether the laptop was a Russian influence operation. But that would be an investigation into the laptop, one the FBI never did.

Remember, this entire conversation not only assumes that the actual laptop JPMI turned over, the non-matching copy he also turned over, and the still further non-matching hard drive masquerading as a laptop the NYP got are the same thing, which the frothers use the word “real” to describe. It assumes that both in 2020, when Benavides was responding to press questions, and in 2023, when HJC asked him about it, he would have understood all those three devices to be the same thing (even though the record above shows he got an affirmatively misleading comment about there being a hard drive as well).

The One True Tripartite Laptop.

But here’s the thing: It is the biggest scandal of recent FBI history that Benavides didn’t further pursue the laptop, because it was riddled with forensic problems, should never have been used in a criminal case, and in fact could be an influence op packaged up by some combination of foreign actors or right wing rat-fuckers, some of whom with a history of ties to foreign powers, up to and including Roger Stone. Still! The FBI never did the things it would have needed to to rule that out, and still has not!

And as noted, by the time Benavides had that conversation on October 22, the investigative team had admitted that they had never checked whether anything on the laptop could have been inserted onto it, the very question Benavides was asked to consider.

If we lived in a sane time — if the FBI Direct gave a rats ass about national security — the FBI would have done that investigation now. Once they admitted they had not done the most basic due diligence, the FBI should have stopped everything and investigated the provenance of the laptop. Once Rudy — who was soliciting dirt from Russian spies and literally said he considered this laptop to be a continuation of those efforts — came out and revealed he had a tie to the blind computer repairman, Rudy and JPMI should have been investigated for hacking, and Rudy, at least, should have been charged. They should have investigated why Steve Bannon’s spooky buddy Guo Wengui was creating propaganda to insert into a later version of the hacked laptop. They should have gone back to investigate the possibility that a series of Russian or Ukrainian drug dealers and sex workers who had access to Hunter’s laptops and (Hunter claims) stole one from him in August 2018 had a role in packaging all this up. They should have reviewed whether two computers were swapped — one that Hunter had purchased in September 2018 during serial dalliances with a Slavic sex worker who seemed to have access to all his bank accounts that ended up “left behind” in therapist Keith Ablow’s cottage after everything got packaged up on another laptop, and one that first accessed Hunter’s accounts in October 2018 but for which there are no purchase receipts, which ultimately ended up with the blind computer repairman. When prosecutors discovered there was material on the hard drive that wasn’t in their extraction of the laptop on the last day of the trial — effectively discovering five years into this laptop obsession that JPMI’s copy was not what he claimed — they should have done an investigation into why. When I tried to liberate the two cellebrite reports done on the devices, Derek Hines should not have lied about their presumed authenticity. When Lev Parnas claimed they had been floated a laptop in spring 2019 that he expected to collect from Dmitry Fitash on the trip where he was arrested, they should have considered whether Rudy did ultimately get that laptop.

This was the former Vice President’s son, known to be a very ripe target of hostile spooks.

They never checked. And as far as is public, still have never checked.

And instead of checking, we’re going to relitigate why people who are not members of the One True Laptop Faith don’t understand the word laptop in the same way the rabid far right does.

The post The Charges against Brad Benavides Assume an Investigation into the Laptop that Never Happened appeared first on emptywheel.

The existing coverage focused on the response DOJ IG Don Berthiaume sent to Bromwich, stating that Office of Professional Responsibility, not DOJ IG, would have jurisdiction, a dumb jurisdictional that Inspectors General (including Bromwich when he was DOJ IG) have attempted to address going back decades.

(DOI IG’s Director of external affairs basically said, sure, we’ll read your letter.)

But I want to look at something else Bromwich did: Lay out the crimes that Jeanine Pirro and her attorneys may have committed.

It starts in the first letter, where Bromwich not only lays out Pirro’s highly inappropriate press conference and the lies DOJ told in their motion to dismiss, but also described something I was not aware had occurred: when Hearn’s defense expert showed up to inspect the reflecting pool, Pirro mobbed him and pressured him to provide her with his assessment.

Beyond these instances of improper conduct, additional misconduct was committed at the highest levels of the USAO-DC. While the government’s own motion to dismiss places U.S. Attorney Pirro at the Reflecting Pool on July 17, 2026, the motion does not describe what else occurred there. Accompanied by a group of armed government agents who positioned themselves around defense counsel’s expert, the U.S. Attorney personally approached the expert while he was conducting his inspection and questioned him about his conclusions, the results of his work, and why he was present. Even after the defense’s expert advised the U.S. Attorney that he could not speak to her about the matter—and members of her own staff cautioned her not to ask him such questions—the U.S. Attorney repeatedly pressured the defense expert to provide her with information. Defense counsel was given no notice that the encounter would take place and was not present for it, and the government has never produced any report, note, or record of the exchange. A U.S. Attorney who personally interrogates a represented defendant’s testifying expert, surrounded by her own staff and without notice to counsel, is not gathering evidence—she is testing how the defense intends to prove its case, and doing so in a setting that essentially held the expert captive. The DOJ OIG should determine who was present at this encounter; what was said by Ms. Pirro, the defense expert and others; whether the encounter was recorded or reported, and whether anyone in the USAO-DC office considered the propriety of it before or after the fact.

That first letter also reveals there was some kind of discussion between the FBI case agent and the National Park Service witness that, Hearn asserts, lied about what happened, but Hearn got no record of that meeting.

In the second letter, as part of an argument that DOJ IG can investigate if a crime is suspected, Bromwich lists out three DC and two Federal crimes that may have been committed. It describes that Pirro herself may have obstructed the case or made false statements.

Third, U.S. Attorney Pirro’s conduct prior to and at the time of the indictment constitutes evidence of obstruction that must be further explored by an independent investigation. As discussed in our October 6 letter, U.S. Attorney Pirro violated multiple ethical rules governing her conduct during the press conference in which she announced the charge against Mr. Hearn, including falsely characterizing the evidence against Mr. Hearn. Then, on July 17, 2026, Pirro engaged in inappropriate conduct toward the defense’s expert.17 DOJ OIG must explore whether the U.S. Attorney took these actions corruptly with the intent to influence the jury pool and/or witnesses, or otherwise obstruct the due administration of justice.

Finally, in addition to the specific evidence of obstruction described above, the OIG should investigate false statements in the government’s July 31 Motion to Dismiss, in which it represented that its personnel first learned of widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool on July 17, a representation flatly contradicted by the government’s own document production, which indicates that they knew of this information well before July 17, and even before seeking the indictment on July 2.

Then after laying out how this might be a conspiracy, Browmich suggests that DOJ personnel conspired to deprive Hearn of his civil rights, 18 USC 241, a law that has a civil counterpart (albeit its application to things other than race is uncertain).

Moreover, the DOJ OIG should investigate whether DOJ personnel engaged in a conspiracy to deprive Mr. Hearn of his civil rights. Under 18 U.S.C. § 241, it is a crime for two or more persons to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person…in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States or because of his having so exercised the same.”

The evidence developed in the litigation warrants investigation into whether multiple prosecutors, and potentially supervisory and political-level officials, participated in conduct that deprived Mr. Hearn of his due process rights, including through abuse of the grand jury process and in connection with his June 19 arrest. The investigation can and should determine whether DOJ personnel had any role in authorizing his June 19 arrest, and it should fully explore the apparent violations of his right to due process under the 5th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution in connection with the actions of DOJ personnel in securing the indictment. It is now undisputed—by everyone except President Trump—that Mr. Hearn should never have been arrested and certainly should not have been indicted. The OIG must now investigate whether the DOJ personnel responsible for this travesty engaged in misconduct that violated Mr. Hearn’s civil rights.

At the very least, all this is a bowtied package for Congress to untie in January (another of Hearn’s attorneys, Norm Eisen, was one of the House impeachment lawyers on Trump’s first impeachment).

There have been a number of attempts to try to fight back after Trump’s DOJ targets Trump critics. This may turn into a test of possible methods to do so.

The post The Crimes Davey Hearn Claims Jeanine Pirro May Have Committed appeared first on emptywheel.

Listen on Spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)

The post Fridays with Nicole Sandler appeared first on emptywheel.

They said they didn’t know.

On October 16, 2020, BENAVIDES wrote, and FLORIS approved, additions to the FBI Director’s talking points on the laptop for his call with Senator Mark Warner. The Office of Congressional Affairs’ draft stated: “The most I can say is that the FBI is in possession of an item that we lawfully seized.” BENAVIDES responded “This is good…you could add another if asked: Is the information we’re seeing in the press about a laptop containing emails associated with Hunter Biden part of a Russia disinformation effort? I can see from the perspective of anyone consuming this story that they could be concerned this is a Russia disinformation effort similar to what the FBI, ODNI, and other agencies have warned against; however, the FBI has not made that determination in this specific instance and as I stated before, I won’t comment on investigations or investigative actions.” He then wrote “Nikki, thoughts???” FLORIS responded “Looks good!”

So they can’t be the sources for any of a number of conspiracy theories that Jim Jordan, Kash Patel, and … everyone else claim to believe about 2020. They didn’t tell Politico, for example, that the Rudy Giuliani hard drive was Russian disinformation.

The second thing you should know is that the complaint substantiates materiality — an element of the charged offense — of what it claims are lies Floris and Benavides told House Judiciary Committee with what it euphemistically calls “information from a Congressional staffer.”

In connection with this investigation, the FBI has obtained information from a Congressional staffer who was present at the 2023 House Judiciary Committee interviews of BENAVIDES and FLORIS. The staffer confirmed that he or she viewed FLORIS’s statements concerning her involvement in and discussions of the Hunter Biden investigations as materially untrue. The staffer also confirmed that he or she viewed BENAVIDES’s statements on his awareness of and involvement in the Hunter Biden investigations as materially untrue. The staffer further stated that FLORIS’s and BENAVIDES’s answers influenced the Committee’s investigation significantly, including by thwarting investigative follow-up interviews and subpoenas. For example, had FLORIS answered the Committee’s questions concerning her awareness of discussions relating to Hunter Biden at the FITF truthfully, the Committee would have aggressively pursued all relevant information about those communications. Had BENAVIDES been truthful about his involvement in the Hunter Biden investigations, the Committee would have sought additional documents and testimony in furtherance of its investigation.

This “information” is horseshit. The investigation kept pumping out subpoenas and demands. More importantly, this pretends the goal was something other than killing the plea deal Hunter signed that summer, which the investigation achieved.

By treating this as “information” rather than “an interview,” the FBI may be attempting to avoid the necessity of jailing this Jordan staffer instead of Floris and Benavides. But I hope their attorneys insist on plopping that staffer on a stand sooner rather than later, because thus far, that staffer is making shit up to rationalize these charges, and doing so without any legal jeopardy himself.

Another critical detail to understand these charges: Everyone involved believes, as an article of faith, that the hard drive Rudy rolled out on October 2020, is the same thing as the laptop that John Paul Mac Isaac shared with the FBI in December 2019. Just as an example, after showing Benavides saying, on the day the NYPost story came out, “I would love to know if a copy [of the laptop] exists, and was it provided to anyone,” it then scolds that the next day, Benavides asks about the dissemination of the actual laptop.

The same day, BENAVIDES asked the Hunter Biden case team for specifics on the laptop that he already knew existed. BENAVIDES messaged FBI Employee 2 (one line is a separate conversation with another FBI employee redacted for clarity):

We are in the year of 2026, and we know the FBI did not, in 2020, forensically compare the Rudy Giuliani laptop with the one obtained directly from JPMI, and we also know that when introducing various devices into evidence at trial, the Cellebrite reports were substantially different. These are not hash matches. They are not the same device.

It’s not the same forensically. It did not have the same content. It is not the same technically.

And no one in 2020, or even in 2023, when Floris and Benavides allegedly lied, would have assumed the devices were the same! To do so would break every rule of forensic investigation taught at the FBI academy! It would be shoddy FBI work to do what this complaint demands these two FBI agents do.

But this is an article of faith. And like all true believers, one of the greatest law enforcement agencies in the world can no longer think of the Hunter Biden laptop and derivative hard drives as some hardware and some bytes that can be matched or not by forensic processes.

It is the laptop.

And so this criminal complaint treats “the laptop” as if the thing reported in the NY Post interview is as a matter of essence the same thing as the laptop JPMI had handed over a year earlier.

Which is to say, about half of the references to “the laptop” in this complaint are to the JPMI device (to make things worse, in one case the complaint claims that the FBI only got “the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop,” which is false) and about half are references to the Rudy Giuliani hard drive, but the entire complaint treats them as if they are the same thing and — worse — as if Floris and Benavides would share what has become an object of faith 6 years later within hours of the first NYPost story.

Finally, you need to know that this complaint, rushed out 10 days before an election, is really poorly written. Perhaps most fatally, the complaint only belatedly explains the circumstances of the HJC testimony each gave at which they allegedly lied, and even then gives inconsistent explanations about the point of those hearings (which will undermine materiality claims). Which is how, 13 pages into the complaint, it introduces first the Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson investigation (for which it relies on Benavides’ transcript) and then the defensive briefing about Andrii Telizhenko (for which it relies on the Floris transcript), and then having relied on both transcripts, introduces the interviews whence those transcripts were made.

23. In August 2019, Senator Charles Grassley and Senator Ron Johnson opened an investigation into potential conflicts of interest arising from the foreign business ventures of the family of then-Presidential candidate Joe Biden. Ex. 2 (Transcribed Interview of Bradley Benavides Before the H. Comm. on the Judiciary, 118th Cong. 69:6–12 (Sept. 28, 2023) (“Benavides Tr.”). Those alleged conflicts of interest related to, among other things, Hunter Biden’s role on the board of Burisma.

24. On August 6, 2020, FLORIS and BENAVIDES provided two separate defensive briefings to Senators Grassley and Johnson related to intelligence coordinated through the ODNI. Floris Tr. 23:13–24:1. During the briefings, FLORIS and BENAVIDES focused on potential Russian disinformation. Floris Tr. 28:20–29:6. When the House Judiciary Committee asked for specifics on the content of the defensive briefs during her transcribed interview, FLORIS testified that she could not get into specifics because the contents of the briefing were not FBI information—she directed the Committee to the ODNI. E.g., Floris Tr. 28:15–19, 29:13–15.

25. On August 25, 2022, Senators Grassley and Johnson sent a letter to FLORIS and BENAVIDES requesting their appearance to testify regarding FITF and the defensive briefings. The letter referenced previous attempts to obtain records and briefing appearances on August 12, 2020, May 3, 2021, July 25, 2022, and August 11, 2022. According to the Senators, they wanted to interview FLORIS and BENAVIDES “to explain the FBI’s interference in the senators’ Hunter Biden investigation.”

26. To investigate the FBI’s handling of the Hunter Biden investigations and related issues, the House Judiciary Committee interviewed FLORIS and BENAVIDES on July 19, 2023, and September 28, 2023, respectively. See Floris Tr. 3:2–4 (“Chairman Jordan has requested this interview as part of the committee’s oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”); Benavides Tr. 3:1–4 (interview requested “as part of the committee’s investigation of how and the extent to which the executive branch has coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech”). The FBI has since obtained information from a staffer who was involved in and present for the interviews of FLORIS and BENAVIDES. [color coding my own]

There’s an effort afoot by John Solomon who — given the shoddiness of this complaint, may have drafted this — has been trying to resuscitate his Russian asset source, Telizhenko. My post on that is half drafted, but trust me, it is bullshit, like everything else Solomon does. Maybe they included him (and so the defensive briefing) originally but then realized Solomon’s fever dreams are not the stuff of criminal prosecutions? Maybe they want to include Telizhenko in an indictment?

The point is, though, that even on the most basic who, what, why, when, aspects of this complaint (they did get venue, the where, nailed on DC competently enough), it fails basic rules of clarity. Which, again, makes me wonder if Solomon drafted this, because he likes to do that too, leave out the Five Ws.

There are discrepancies in the testimony Benavides, especially, told HJC. But there’s no reason to believe it is a lie, unless you believe the Hunter Biden laptop is, as an article of faith.

According to Sarah Lynch, DOJ tried to stall a preliminary hearing, at which DOJ will need to prove they have a case.

“The alleged conduct happened years ago. The government has had the information about this for years,” said Ron Safer, an attorney for Benavides. He asked Zia Faruqui, the magistrate judge at Friday’s hearing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, to immediately schedule a preliminary hearing “as soon as humanly possible” to review whether there was adequate probable cause that a crime was committed.

The politically charged case was also unsealed just about two weeks before the midterm election — a fact that may raise questions by DOJ veterans about the timing of a case involving testimony to Congress that occurred more than three years ago.

Faruqui said he thought the manner in which the case was charged seemed “strange” and he rejected a request by prosecutors to delay the preliminary hearing for two weeks or more.

He ordered the parties to return at 11 a.m. on Tuesday.

“This is the Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads,” he said. “This will follow them for the rest of their lives.”

But that’s not going to happen. We’ll be back here next Tuesday, a week before an election, to find out how much of this prosecution is really based on the Hunter Biden laptop as a matter of faith.

Update: NYT provides worthwhile background.

The post The Epistemology of Hunter Biden’s “Laptop” appeared first on emptywheel.

Yesterday, Principal Assistant Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter — who got his position by legalizing alleged bribery — and Associate Attorney General Stan Woodward — who got his by attempting to reward pro-Trump terrorists — filed a judicial complaint that they say targets “at least seven” Minnesota judges, but names just two: Judge Patrick Schiltz and Judge John Tunheim. They base that complaint off this NYT story, which described how DOJ’s stupid decisions in January DDOSed (my word) rule of law in MN and — contrary to the complaint’s claim — names several of the other judges who sat for interviews with NYT’s Mattathias Schwartz.

[snip]

So in addition to violating the due process rights of the Cities Church defendants — effectively committing the very crime of which they accuse Judge Schiltz — their complaint consists of three levels of deceit:

• Treating paraphrases as direct quotes without clearly making the distinction clear (and in one case, statements that can be sourced to a public document)
• Quoting those paraphrases out of order
• For their central claimed analogy, completely manufacturing the analogy themselves.

There’s more here to refer Trent McCotter and Stan Woodward for judicial sanctions than Judge Schiltz.

As predicted, Stanley Woodward personally has now moved to recuse the two judges named, Schiltz and John Tunheim. The former case is a habeas case, so the filing is sealed (but you can see where Judge Schiltz scolded Woodward for failing to confer properly).

Stan Woodward, publicity troll, says publicity is unethical

But the Tunheim case is a criminal case — charging someone needing an Afrikaner translator, so likely the kind of white immigrant Stephen Miller approves of, with registering and voting as a non-citizen in 2024. So we can see that the motion to recuse is riddled with the same problems the complaint itself is.

Start with the fact that this recusal — which Woodward is promoting on Xitter like the troll he has become — complains about judges seeking publicity.

Fourth, Judge Tunheim’s participation in the Times article reasonably raises the concern that his desire for favorable media attention may influence his decision making in this case. “Judges should not create the impression that they covet publicity.” White, 585 F.3d at 1140.

Stan Woodward thinks judges are copy editors

Then consider the way that Woodward holds Judge Tunheim accountable for things he could not have read, and in the same breath, invoking the key fabrication he and McCotter engaged in.

a reasonable observer would conclude that Judge Tunheim endorses the other statements in the article, including the highly policial statements of Judge Schiltz. Statements that, for example, compare the Administration to foreign adversaries, flagrantly violate a judge’s ethical duty to maintain the appearance of impartiality.

[snip]

And because Judge Tunheim went on the record, a reasonable observer would conclude that Judge Tunheim endorses Judge Schiltz’s highly partisan comments. That reinforces the appearance of bias in immigrationrelated cases that come before Judge Tunheim.

How could Tunheim have read what Schiltz said to the NYT? News articles don’t work that way, and Woodward knows that.

And, as I said, Woodward repeats the key fabrication from his complaint. Judge Schiltz didn’t compare the Administration to foreign adversaries (including Russia, which is now our ally). That’s a lie, made in a court filing to a judge. Schiltz said the backlog in Minnesota courts created by the flood of immigration cases (and exacerbated by other choices the Trump Administration made, like framing protestors rather than investigating the Renee Good killing) “created a grave threat to rule of law,” without which you have anarchy or authoritarianism.

What they describe as an “outrageous” “analogy” between Trump and Russia (as if that would really bother Trump!) is actually created by taking a comment that appears in the subhed and ¶6, which is not attributed to Trump directly but to the backlog in the courthouse created by Trump’s disregard for orders.

In a rare 90-minute interview seven months later, Judge Schiltz said his order had been prompted by concern that the Trump administration’s disregard for court orders was clogging his courthouse to a near standstill, contributing to rising tensions in the protest-filled city and, ultimately, putting the constitutional order at risk.

What happened in Minnesota’s federal court, he said, “created a grave threat to the rule of law.”

And then lump it together in their complaint, and this paragraph, with this passage, which appears 50-some paragraphs later, at the very end of the story.

At the same time, he said, the violations needed to be taken seriously. The lack of resources led to a result, he said, that should have been anticipated, and that threatened the foundations of the legal system.

Obedience to court orders, Judge Schiltz said, is why people feel secure owning a home, saving money, getting married and having children.

“You walk down the street, and you assume you’re generally safe because of the law,” he said. “It’s the rule of law. If you don’t have it, you have either anarchy or you have authoritarianism. You have Russia or you have China or you have North Korea.

They literally completely fabricate the central argument in their complaint.

Stan Woodward thinks judges are photo editors

Woodward also holds Tunheim responsible for the photos NYT chose to use with the article.

a reasonable observer would conclude that Judge Tunheim understood the nature of the article before it was published—and that the article advances an anti-Trump Administration agenda in the immigration context. To illustrate, the article features a picture of a “federal immigration operations” protest showing numerous signs that read “F*ck ICE” along with similar rhetoric.

The attack is ridiculous in any case. The article includes this photo of Dan Rosen, whose name is on filings in this case.

It includes several pictures of immigration actions, one of which shows protestors, one which shows no protestors, and this picture of ICE goons snatching US citizen Aliya Rahman on her way to a doctor’s appointment.

It also shows two memorials to Alex Pretti, with no ICE goons present (except to the extent they were there, undercover, which given what we’ve seen in the MN-15 case, is likely).

Tunheim would have had no way of knowing what photos would show up in the article — Woodward is relying on time machines to make his case — but Woodward totally misrepresents the various photos used in the article.

Woodward insists ICE snatched dangerous criminals

Particularly given his complaints about the photos (again, showing two memorials to an American citizen ICU nurse gunned down in the street and the snatching of Rahman), it’s perhaps most remarkable that Woodward insists that it was inaccurate for Tunheim to say that, “They weren’t arresting, in my view, people who were dangerous criminals on the street.” The article Woodward is whining about provides evidence that Tunheim was, if anything, understating the problem.

First, Judge Tunheim has engaged in improper political commentary. Indeed, opining that the Administration was not arresting illegal aliens “who were dangerous criminals on the street” is (factually inaccurate and) an unvarnished political opinion.

[snip]

In the same vein, the Times article reports that “the district’s judges said most of the detainees who appeared on their dockets seemed to be ordinary people with homes and jobs.” Schwartz, supra note 1, at 10. This paraphrased summary obviously relates to Judge Tunheim’s comments. Taken separately or collectively, the message is clear: as long as illegal aliens (supposedly) are not “dangerous criminals,” and at least to the extent they “seem[] to be ordinary people with homes and jobs” based on a judge’s uninformed (or informed mainly by an alien’s lawyer) perspective, the immigration laws passed by Congress should be ignored by the Executive. [emphasis original]

But in matters of requests for recusal, actual facts matter. And it would be child’s play for Tunheim not only to show that the cases they were deluged with were not, primarily, dangerous criminals (in part because dangerous criminals were not filing habeas petitions), but in fact were just what Tunheim said. People with families.

By all means, let’s have that discussion, Stan. Because the NYT article you’re wailing about — the pictures that Tunheim couldn’t have predicted, from Dan Rosen to Aliyah Rahman to Alex Pretti — prove your claims about factual inaccuracy are false.

Update: I was reminded on Bluesky that it is law of gravity so I changed the title.

The post Stan Woodward Defies Law of Gravity to Attack Minnesota Judges appeared first on emptywheel.

There are multiple reasons to be cautious about this story. One is the attenuated nature via which Cole describes learning of the key detail in this excerpt, that Jared had use of two billion dollar slush funds to engage in covert activities.

Cole explains that he heard from one source that Russia had hacked Jared’s phone, and after the Dutch flipped a GRU spy, the Dutch partially — but only partially — replicated the hack. Via that partial hack, the Dutch saw money being transferred from a bank in Azerbaijan, spending it on warlords and a hit man. Some years after learning about the hack, Cole spoke to someone else in the Middle East about whether such an account existed, and that person confirmed the story.

A story relying on what the Dutch learned via GRU is precisely what led to the conspiracy theory that Hillary was behind the whole 2016 operation. And this feels similar.

And even assuming the Dutch did learn of some of this, the Dutch didn’t learn all aspects of it, leaving unexplained what provenance there is for other parts of the story.

A shallow audit, as the Dutch tried while monitoring Kushner’s iPhone, revealed nothing more than what appeared to be an Azerbaijani government–linked bank account that sent hundreds of millions of dollars to an account in Dubai. But there was another aspect of the Alpha account that the Dutch couldn’t see or understand, one that helped reveal the secret purpose of the money. Kushner did not own the bank account at First Abu Dhabi Bank. He was a signatory for an account managed and owned by an Emirati charity.

So on the key allegation — that Jared had access to two secret bank accounts via which he was conducting his own covert operations — is really tenuous.

Plus, Cole seems to have taken denials this operation was approved as confirmation it existed.

Instead, Kushner was overseen only by his father-in-law, who, according to four senior Trump administration officials—two national security advisors, a White House chief of staff, and a former CIA director—were unaware of any presidential authorization for Kushner to access a foreign government bank account. (Kushner’s counsel, however, said Kushner did not make any agreements or arrangements with leaders or officials in foreign countries that were not agreed to by the President of the United States and in the best interests of the United States.)

There’s a lot of reason to be cautious about this story.

Still, there is a core of it we know to be true, described this way:

Kushner, UAE ruler Mohamed bin Zayed (MBZ) and Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) of Saudi Arabia, converged at an auspicious moment. MBS wanted to be crown prince. MBZ wanted to blow up Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, and Kushner wanted both to help him force the Palestinians into a deal that Israel would accept. Despite the perception of his wealth, Kushner was not entirely financially independent of his parents, and the family business, Kushner Companies, faced a billion-dollar loan coming due on their trophy property, the Manhattan office building at 666 Fifth Avenue.

Abundant evidence for all this was aired in Tom Barrack’s prosecution, which alleged that after Trump’s old Epstein buddy installed Paul Manafort as campaign manager in 2016, Barrack started catering US policy to UAE and the Saudis, playing an absolutely central role in consolidating Mohammed bin Salman’s hold on power and leveraging the Qataris, in exchange for which Barrack got hundreds of millions in investment from the Emiratis.

DOJ was considering indicting some of Barrack’s not-yet indicted co-conspirators as late as June 2022; that definitely included Steve Bannon, though Jared’s treatment in this prosecution was less clear. Ultimately, Barrack was acquitted, not by denying that he had catered US policy to the Emirates, but by arguing Trump knew about it, and Barrack did it because he thought it was the best policy.

And also, critically for this claim Cole makes in his piece, Barrack was acquitted because Foreign Agent laws were in flux at the time and have largely been abandoned.

Any efforts he made to shape US policy that came from a foreign government that had provided him with money would make him an agent of a foreign power. US law requires citizens who lobby on behalf of a foreign power to declare themselves and the country they are working on behalf of to the Justice Department.

Some of what this excerpt describes is real. Some of it is sketchy.

But now it is in print, which makes it exceedingly likely there’ll be legal follow-up.

As the story broke out yesterday, Chad Mizelle, an ethically suspect Trump lawyer in his own right, claimed to be Jared’s lawyer and, after some delay, promised legal action against Cole. He posted the answers Jared gave to three letters Cole sent (though at least the first response letter was from Alejandro Brito, Trump’s now-sanctioned defamation lawyer).

The answers to most questions were categorical denials. Several of the ones that were not pertain to Qatar’s rescue of Jared’s disastrous 666 Fifth Avenue investment (note, too, that the response does not include the full question).

Assertion 3:

The book described includes . . . your knowledge and arrangement to receive a bailout of 666 Fifth Ave by the Qatari government in exchange for blocking any further punitive measures by UAE, KSA et al during their blockade . . . .

Response 3:

During Mr. Kushner’s time in government, he never communicated with any member, affiliate, agent, employee, associate, or representative of the Qatari government regarding the divestment of his interests in the real property commonly known as 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10019, nor was he involved in, nor does he have any knowledge of, any alleged quid pro quo with the Qatari government. The referenced transaction occurred after Mr. Kushner had divested his interest in 666 Fifth Avenue and took place without his knowledge or involvement. Furthermore, the transaction was led by Brookfield, one of the largest and most respected asset managers in the world, from a fund in which Qatar is a passive investor. There has been no evidence that this investment was directed by Qatar or that it was not done for purely commercial purposes by Brookfield. Any suggestion of Mr. Kushner’s involvement in the transaction or of a quid pro quo with the Qatari government is false and defamatory.

[snip]

7. Was the president aware that Doha paid for 666?

Response 12:

See Response 3. Doha did not pay for 666 Fifth Avenue. Again, Brookfield made a commercial investment in 666 Fifth Avenue via a fund in which Qatar was an investor, and Mr. Kushner was not aware of this investment at the time and is aware of no evidence that Qatar impacted the investment decision. Any suggestion of his involvement in the transaction or any allegation of quid pro quo with the Qatari government is false and defamatory. This would be like alleging that one of KKR’s investors is directing KKR to force Simon & Schuster to write a good or bad book. It is a lazy, strained accusation bereft of any factual support.

It’s not that Qatar didn’t bail out Jared’s disastrous real estate deal. It’s that it just happened while the Trump Administration was screwing them over but with no involvement from any of the parties involved in the screwing.

Some of the questions — and therefore some of the content of the book — appears to extend into Jared’s role destroying the Iran negotiations this year.

54. Did President Trump authorize you to make direct calls to Mr. Netanyahu during your Iran negotiations in Geneva?

Response 66:

The premise of this question is false. Mr. Kushner did not speak to Netanyahu during the negotiations in Geneva. See Response 34. Mr. Kushner has conducted all of his volunteer activities in support of the President’s requests consistent with the applicable laws and requirements and has worked at all times alongside and in support of the U.S. Government employees and representatives leading the peace negotiations.

So if this does go to a lawsuit, it may well disclose the kinds of questions that might explain how the Emirates purchased the second Trump term via crypto corruption.

Which is to say, I’m not convinced the story as told is right: But we might get more of the known real story if this does turn into another of Trump’s fabulous lawsuits.

Update: Corrected that the piece does not say Jared transferred these funds. Transfers were visible via Jared’s hacked phone.

The post Jared’s Account appeared first on emptywheel.

Some of you know my life is a little complicated; I haven’t been able to write and post much lately though there have been topics SCREAMING for attention.

Imagine my relief when Elizabeth Spiers wrote the piece for The Nation that I’ve wanted to write here for months:

Can James Carville Please Just Be Quietly Wrong Somewhere Else?
The omnipresent consultant-cum-tantrum-thrower has long outlived whatever relevance he once had, but cable producers, podcast hosts, and Democratic campaigns haven’t got the memo.

Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU. I have lost all patience with this doddering old yelling-at-clouds dude who is stuck in the amber of the 1990s, frozen in thinking that no longer works for the Democratic Party.

Spiers tackled the most egregious thing Carville said recently:

He recently appeared with Bill Kristol on a podcast hosted by The Bulwark and stated that he’d rather Republicans keep the House by a five-member majority after the midterms than have Democrats win, because then “they’re hostage to the DSA.” The Daily Beast, long tethered to a clickbait-through-faux-outrage business model, ran an account of Carville’s comments under the sensationalistic headline “Top Dem Strategist Makes Shock Midterms Wish.” Unfortunately, though, the fact that Carville is bashing progressives and suggesting they’re worse than Republicans is not shocking at all: He’s been doing that for years now, at every opportunity.

We are up against a fascist regime intent on rolling out a Christian fundamentalist autocracy, already deep in constitutional crises, and Carville thinks it’s best to give the autocracy’s enablers the ball in the end zone?

Fuck all the way off, Carville. Eat a bag of dicks large enough to muffle your gob.

The man would give the Nazis control by five seats to prevent inconveniently leftist representatives from winning the majority. This is just completely untethered rationale.

Not to mention Carville has no fucking clue who the Democratic Socialists of America are. He has literally embraced all the far right’s talking points about DSA, appears not to have read anything DSA has published.

In short, Carville has a problem with this:

At the root of our socialism is a profound commitment to democracy, as means and end. As we are unlikely to see an immediate end to capitalism tomorrow, DSA fights for reforms today that will weaken the power of corporations and increase the power of working people. For example, we support reforms that:

• decrease the influence of money in politics
• empower ordinary people in workplaces and the economy
• restructure gender and cultural relationships to be more equitable.

We are activists committed to democracy as not simply one of our political values but our means of restructuring society. Our vision is of a society in which people have a real voice in the choices and relationships that affect the entirety of our lives. We call this vision democratic socialism — a vision of a more free, democratic and humane society.

We are socialists because we reject an international economic order sustained by private profit, alienated labor, race and gender discrimination, environmental destruction, and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo.

We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane international social order based both on democratic planning and market mechanisms to achieve equitable distribution of resources, meaningful work, a healthy environment, sustainable growth, gender and racial equality, and non-oppressive relationships.

(source: https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/)

Oh my lawd in heaven we can’t have an equitable democratic society! No! The Nazis, I mean, the GOP *must* win a 5-seat majority or poor Hakeem Jeffries will be forced to be pro-democracy!

We’re living in a country with many concentration camps filled by a death squad which has also killed American citizens and detained at least 500 more citizens.

We’re living in a country which has launched an unnecessary and poorly executed war because the president is easily manipulated by other countries because of his transactional nature, malignant narcissism, and dementia.

We’re facing deepening food insecurity and worsening health because Americans are having to choose between paying for gas to get to work, or buying food, or paying rent, or getting health care.

But Carville thinks the faction of the left under the Democrats’ big tent advocating for what Sen. Edward Kennedy called fair prosperity and a just society is a road too far.

*face palm*

Carville’s crusty old centrist schtick is just so nauseatingly revolting. I have long had a filter on my email so that anything matching “James Carville” hits my email box it’s automatically deleted.

I’ve had a filter on my social media to filter out posts with the same criteria.

But I’m glad for once something slipped by my firewall with Carville’s name on it. This one piece was worth the breach. Now I can stress out about the other stuff I can’t get around to writing.

~ ~ ~

This is an open thread, with one caveat: DO NOT DO THE WORK OF THE RIGHT-WING HERE. If you’re going to bitch about any faction on the left, save it for Bluesky shit posting. The only slack you’ll be cut is bitching about Nazi-apologist Carville. Don’t test me, I will spike your crap if it in any way helps the GOP.

UPDATE: Spiers has furnished a free link to her essay at her site if you aren’t a subscriber of The Nation — https://www.elizabethspiers.com/james-carville-please-go-away-a-column-by-me/

The post Open Thread: Someone’s Not Living in Fascist Reality with Us appeared first on emptywheel.