What’s Putin’s Puppet hiding?

[Pete F.]

The Senate has *unanimously* agreed to Schumer's resolution calling for the whistleblower complaint to be turned over the intelligence committees immediately.

Reminder: Coming from this White House, neither transcripts nor weather maps can be trusted
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[Got Stripers]

Time to cover their political arses.
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[Pete F.]

Wow, @HeidiNBC reporting that Trump called Pelosi today and asked “if they could work something out on this whole whistleblower thing.”
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[spence]

Originally Posted by Pete F.

Wow, @HeidiNBC reporting that Trump called Pelosi today and asked “if they could work something out on this whole whistleblower thing.”
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It's called desperation.

[Pete F.]

Implicated in this mess so far:

POTUS
VPOTUS
SecState
WH COS
OMB director
AG

... Who else am I forgetting?
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[spence]

Originally Posted by Pete F.

The Senate has *unanimously* agreed to Schumer's resolution calling for the whistleblower complaint to be turned over the intelligence committees immediately.

Reminder: Coming from this White House, neither transcripts nor weather maps can be trusted
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At least we might have the chance for the whistle blower to confirm the contents of the complaint. I don’t trust at all the WH to release an accurate transcript. Maybe we’ll even see Barr give another one of his interpretations in advance
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[Pete F.]

As senior director of the WH Situation Room, I managed POTUS head-of-state calls. So, what light can I shed on the Trump-promised phone transcript?
First off: unless this administration has changed procedures in place for many years, there are no WH tapes of this phone call. As I used to say, the WH became averse to taping Presidential phone calls in about 1974.
Could there be recordings made by the foreign head-of-state's government or a foreign intelligence service? Sure, particularly when the call is made over a non-secure phone.
Could there be recordings made by the US Intelligence Community? No. Law, regulation, and practice forbids such collection of USG officials. Besides, there's no foreign intelligence value in doing so, as the US official is aware of the call's contents.
Yes, there should be transcripts of the call. It is a long-standing practice, intended to not only memorialize the call but to protect the President against the foreign leader/gov't making egregious claims about the call.
The White House Situation Room and the responsible NSC directorate develop the transcript. WHSR, which monitors the call, develops a verbatim working transcript which is reviewed and finalized by the NSC directorate and captured in a memorandum of conversation (MEMCON).
This MEMCON can vary greatly from a lightly edited full transcript to a vaguely worded summary of the call. Sharing of the MEMCON outside of the WH and across gov't has varied from Admin to Admin and the sensitivity of the call, but has always been very limited.
Who in the USG listens to the call as it happens? This varies from call to call. I managed the very rare call in which only myself and WHSR heard the actual call. In most cases, the call was listened to live by several people.
Call participants often included the Nat'l Sec Advisor or his/her deputies, the WH Chief of Staff, an appropriate NSC Sr Director and members of his/her staff. Extremely rare for a non-WH person to be present for the call and we never looped in anyone outside the 18 acres.
As to the foreign side of the call, we assumed similar participation.
Could the President make calls on his own directly to a foreign head of state? Sure, but these are very busy people who aren't always available for impromptu calls. The procedures were developed over time for both the convenience and the protection of the President.
Posted on Twitter by Larry Pfeiffer Former Director WH Situation Room
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[scottw]

hopefully he wasn't promising any terrorist regimes planeloads of cash in secret...that would be awful

[scottw]

can we investigate this guy too?



Earlier this month, during a bipartisan meeting in Kiev, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) delivered a pointed message to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

While choosing his words carefully, Murphy made clear — by his own account — that Ukraine currently enjoyed bipartisan support for its U.S. aid but that could be jeopardized if the new president acquiesced to requests by President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate past corruption allegations involving Americans, including former Vice President Joe Biden’s family.

Murphy boasted after the meeting that he told the new Ukrainian leader that U.S. aid was his country’s “most important asset” and it would be viewed as election meddling and “disastrous for long-term U.S.-Ukraine relations” to bend to the wishes of Trump and Giuliani.


"I told Zelensky that he should not insert himself or his government into American politics. I cautioned him that complying with the demands of the President's campaign representatives to investigate a political rival of the President would gravely damage the U.S.-Ukraine relationship. There are few things that Republicans and Democrats agree on in Washington these days, and support for Ukraine is one of them," Murphy told me today, confirming what he told Ukraine's leader.

The implied message did not require an interpreter for Zelensky to understand: Investigate the Ukraine dealings of Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and you jeopardize Democrats' support for future U.S. aid to Kiev.

The Murphy anecdote is a powerful reminder that, since at least 2016, Democrats repeatedly have exerted pressure on Ukraine, a key U.S. ally for buffering Russia, to meddle in U.S. politics and elections.

And that activity long preceded Giuliani’s discussions with Ukrainian officials and Trump’s phone call to Zelensky in July, seeking to have Ukraine formally investigate whether then-Vice President Joe Biden used a threat of canceling foreign aid to shut down an investigation into $3 million routed to the U.S. firm run by Biden’s son.

[scottw]

and this?


"as early as January 2016, when the Obama White House unexpectedly invited Ukraine’s top prosecutors to Washington to discuss fighting corruption in the country.

The meeting, promised as training, turned out to be more of a pretext for the Obama administration to pressure Ukraine’s prosecutors to drop an investigation into the Burisma Holdings gas company that employed Hunter Biden and to look for new evidence in a then-dormant criminal case against eventual Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, a GOP lobbyist.


U.S. officials “kept talking about how important it was that all of our anti-corruption efforts be united,” said Andrii Telizhenko, the former political officer in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington who organized and attended the meetings.

Nazar Kholodnytsky, Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, told me that, soon after he returned from the Washington meeting, he saw evidence in Ukraine of political meddling in the U.S. election. That's when two top Ukrainian officials released secret evidence to the American media, smearing Manafort. "

[Pete F.]

Originally Posted by scottw

Peto...you should try to appreciate....that wile you consume thousands of words to say absolutely nothing...others can efficiently and concisely use only a few words to convey succinct messages....

I see you’ve learned how to cut and paste.
Who controlled the House and Senate, then also the WH during that time?
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[Pete F.]

Manafort was convicted of massive and systemic tax evasion, smeared himself.
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[scottw]

Originally Posted by Pete F.

I see you’ve learned how to cut and paste.
Who controlled the House and Senate, then also the WH during that time?
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pretty sure obama was president

[Pete F.]

It says, perhaps not clearly enough (Then also)

Foreign Policy mag draws a different conclusion than The Hill.
In what top Democratic lawmakers called a “political hit job,” U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch has been recalled by the Trump administration two months early following political attacks by right-wing media figures and a senior Ukrainian official.

Yovanovitch, an experienced career diplomat who has served in Republican and Democratic administrations and has been ambassador to Ukraine since 2016, will leave her post later in May, two months before she was scheduled to step down. The attacks, which four current and former U.S. officials who spoke to Foreign Policy said are unfounded, drew the attention of top Democratic lawmakers, who urged U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a private letter last month to publicly defend her.

Now, those lawmakers are bringing their concerns into the public. “The White House’s outrageous decision to recall her is a political hit job and the latest in this Administration’s campaign against career State Department personnel,” said Democratic Reps. Steny Hoyer, House majority leader, and Eliot Engel, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a joint statement made public Tuesday. “It’s clear that this decision was politically motivated, as allies of President Trump had joined foreign actors in lobbying for the Ambassador’s dismissal.”

Yovanovitch’s early dismissal will leave the U.S. Embassy in Kiev without a top diplomat at an important juncture in Ukraine, during the transition of newly elected President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Yovanovitch, who was outspoken about the need to crack down on corruption in the country, was thrust into the spotlight in March when Ukraine’s top prosecutor claimed, without evidence, that the ambassador had outlined a list of people he should not prosecute when he first met her. The U.S. State Department called the claim by Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko an “outright fabrication.” In April, he walked back the statement in a separate interview.

Lutsenko’s allegations about Yovanovitch came two weeks after she issued scathing remarks about Ukraine’s anti-corruption efforts and called on the authorities to fire special anti-corruption prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky. In wiretapped phone conversations, Kholodnytsky allegedly coached suspects on how to avoid corruption charges.

Lutsenko made his claim against Yovanovitch in an interview with Hill.TV’s John Solomon, which aired on March 20. That same day, the Hill published two further pieces based off what appears to be the same interview with Lutsenko, in which the prosecutor said he had opened a probe into alleged attempts by Ukrainian law enforcement to tip the 2016 U.S. presidential election in favor of Hillary Clinton by leaking financial ledgers with details of payments made to Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort by former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Coming weeks before special counsel Robert Mueller published his report on Russian election interference in the 2016 election, Lutsenko’s allegation about Ukrainian interference was seized upon by Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, with the president tweeting out the headline to the Hill article, “John Solomon: As Russia Collusion fades, Ukrainian plot to help Clinton emerges.”

Yovanovitch then faced a slew of criticism from Fox News personalities and other right-wing media figures, who accused her of denigrating the president in private conversations. In March, Fox News host Laura Ingraham said that former Republican Rep. Pete Sessions sent a letter to Pompeo in May 2018 calling for the “expulsion” of Yovanovitch as ambassador to Ukraine “immediately.” The then-congressman said that he had evidence the ambassador had been critical of the Trump administration in private, though the current and former U.S. officials who spoke to Foreign Policy say that claim was unfounded.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/05/07...ats-diplomacy/
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[scottw]

Originally Posted by Pete F.

In what top Democratic lawmakers called a “political hit job,”

we know they are full of crap

[Pete F.]

Meet Rudy's team

Two Soviet-born Florida businessmen — one linked to a Ukrainian tycoon with reputed mafia ties — are key hidden actors behind a plan by U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s personal attorney to investigate the president’s rivals.

Trump’s attorney, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, said in May that he planned to visit then-incoming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to win support for probes into potentially damaging claims raised by senior Ukrainian officials.

Among them was the misleading contention that Trump’s main 2020 Democratic rival, Joe Biden, improperly pressured Ukraine’s government to fire a top prosecutor; that American diplomats in Ukraine had exhibited pro-Democrat bias; and that local officials conspired to undermine Trump’s presidential campaign and help Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Giuliani set off a firestorm in the conservative media by promoting the allegations.

“We’re not meddling in an election; we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do,” he told the New York Times.

The claims he was pressing have since largely been debunked, but remain politically potent as the next U.S. elections approach.

investigations/Fruman-Trump.jpg
Igor Fruman with U.S. President Donald J. Trump.
Credit: Campaign Legal Center
Within days of announcing the planned trip to Ukraine, Giuliani called it off amid a storm of criticism that he was inappropriately interfering in U.S. relations with a foreign country. His efforts in Ukraine, however, have continued.

At the center of Giuliani’s back-channel diplomacy are the two businessmen, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who Giuliani has publicly identified as his clients.

Until now, the men have escaped detailed scrutiny. But a joint investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and BuzzFeed News, based on interviews and court and business records in the United States and Ukraine, has uncovered new information that raises questions about their influence on U.S. political figures.

Both men were born in the Soviet Union and immigrated to the United States. Parnas came with his family at the age of four. Fruman first arrived as a young adult in the 1980s, but later moved to Ukraine and established a series of businesses. Both now live in South Florida.

Since late 2018, the men have introduced Giuliani to three current and former senior Ukrainian prosecutors to discuss the politically damaging information.

The effort has involved meetings in at least five countries, stretching from Washington, D.C. to the Israeli office of a Ukrainian oligarch accused of a multi-billion dollar fraud, and to the halls of the French Senate.

Parnas and Fruman’s work with Giuliani has been just one facet of their political activity.

Since early last year, the men have emerged from obscurity to become major donors to Republican campaigns in the United States. They have collectively contributed over half a million dollars to candidates and outside campaign groups, the lion’s share in a single transaction that an independent watchdog has flagged as a potential violation of electoral funding law.

The men appear to enjoy a measure of access to influential figures. They’ve dined with Trump, had a “power breakfast” with his son Donald Jr., met with U.S. congressmen, and mixed with Republican elites.

Months before their earliest known work with Giuliani, Parnas and Fruman also lobbied at least one congressman — former U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican — to call for the dismissal of the United States’ ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch. She stepped down a year later after allegations in the conservative media that she had been disloyal to Trump.

While setting up meetings for Giuliani with Ukrainian officials, the men also promoted a business plan of their own: Selling American liquefied natural gas to Ukraine to replace Russian imports disrupted by war.

In a series of interviews, Parnas said he and Fruman weren’t paid by anyone for their work in Ukraine and that he and his partner have done nothing illegal.

investigations/Power-breakfast.jpg
Parnas and Fruman meet with the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and Republican fundraiser Tommy Hicks Jr. in Beverly Hills in May 2018.
Credit: Deleted Facebook post
“All we were doing was passing along information,” he said. “Information coming to us — either I bury it or I pass it on. I felt it was my duty to pass it on.”

He said their political activities were motivated by sincere conviction that they had uncovered wrongdoing that should be investigated.

“We’re American citizens, we love our country, we love our president,”he said.

The men make for unlikely back-channel diplomats. Parnas, 47, is a former stockbroker with a history of unpaid debts, including half a million dollars owed to a Hollywood movie investor. Fruman, 53, has spent much of his career in Ukraine, and has ties to a powerful local businessman reputed to be in the inner circle of one of the country’s most infamous mafia groups.

Giuliani and Fruman didn’t respond to multiple requests for interviews or to written questions. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Kenneth McCallion, an ex-federal prosecutor who has represented former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko in U.S. court, said that Parnas and Fruman were “playing with fire” by lobbying in the United States and Ukraine without registering as foreign agents.

“Trump has either authorized Giuliani to engage in private diplomacy and deal-making, or even worse, remains silent while Giuliani and his dodgy band of soldiers of fortune engage in activities that severely undermine U.S. credibility and are contrary to fundamental U.S. interests,” McCallion said.

‘It Opened Giuliani’s Eyes’
Parnas and Fruman’s work with Giuliani has largely centered on efforts to connect the president’s personal attorney with current and former senior Ukrainian prosecutors believed to hold information harmful to Trump’s rivals.

In late 2018, Parnas and Fruman organized a Skype call between Giuliani and Viktor Shokin, who served as Ukraine’s prosecutor general until he was dismissed by parliament in 2016 amid allegations he was blocking anti-corruption efforts.

Parnas and Giuliani visited the French Senate building, where Giuliani attended a meeting that included Nazar Kholodnitsky, the head of Ukraine’s Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, according to social media posts and interviews. (Kholodnitsky has faced calls to step down after wiretaps in his office last year allegedly caught him interfering in corruption cases.)

By the new year, Parnas said, he and Fruman had also connected Giuliani with Shokin’s replacement as top prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko. The Ukrainian official and Giuliani met in New York in January and again in Warsaw the following month.

“[Lutsenko] brought documentation, verification. It opened Giuliani’s eyes,” Parnas said.

Shortly after their February meeting in Poland, both Lutsenko and Giuliani began airing a series of allegations in the U.S. media.

In March and April, the online publication The Hill published a series of opinion pieces largely based on an interview with Lutsenko. The articles relayed the allegations about the Bidens, and went further.

Lutsenko also claimed that officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv had worked with Ukrainian law enforcement to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election by coordinating the disclosure of the so-called “black ledger,” a document that appeared to detail millions of dollars in secret payments from Ukraine’s former ruling party to Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign manager. Some of those payments were later verified to be real.

The revelation of the black ledger in 2016 contributed to Manafort’s resignation from the Trump campaign, and helped lead to his prosecution and conviction by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Since then, prominent Trump supporters have used allegations that the ledger’s disclosure was motivated by anti-Trump bias to cast doubt on the origins of Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

investigations/Lutsenko.jpg
Ukrainian General Prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko.
Credit: Vadim Chuprina, Creative Commons
Lutsenko also told The Hill that Yovanovitch, who was still the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, had handed him a “do not prosecute” list at their first meeting. The Hill characterized the claim as evidence that Yovanovitch was favoring Democrats in the middle of a presidential election because the purported list contained the names of supposed Democrat allies in Ukraine’s parliament and civil society groups.

The State Department has forcefully rejected the claims. In a statement, the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv told reporters: “The allegation of a ‘do not prosecute’ list is an outright fabrication. Such allegations only help the corrupt.”

Still, the allegations caught like wildfire in U.S. conservative media, and were amplified by Giuliani in a series of interviews with cable news and newspapers.

Trump called claims that Ukrainian officials had helped Clinton’s candidacy “big” and “incredible” in an April interview with Fox News, and said that he would leave it to Attorney General William Barr to decide whether to look into them. Barr announced a probe into the origins of the Mueller investigation — in which Manafort’s Ukrainian work became a focus — the following month.

Parnas said he expected all the information he and Fruman had helped advance to become an important part of Barr’s inquiry, and that it would dominate the debate in the run-up to the 2020 election.

“It’s all going to come out,” he said. “Something terrible happened and we’re finally going to get to the bottom of it.”

Debunked But Not Dead
Experts have largely dismissed most of the allegations raised by the prosecutors and relayed by Giuliani as being at best unfounded, and at worst deliberate disinformation.

Both Shokin and Lutsenko are widely viewed among Ukrainian reformers as lacking credibility, and civil society groups have accused them of covering for suspects in major corruption cases.

Joe Biden had indeed pushed for Shokin’s dismissal, threatening that the U.S. would withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees if he remained.

“I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden recounted in a 2018 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”

However, Biden was not alone in his disdain for Shokin. The former top prosecutor was dismissed by parliament after a chorus of criticism by European diplomats and international organizations, and even street protests calling for his resignation.

Local anti-corruption activists had become convinced Shokin was quashing investigations into Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, and other oligarchs, said Daria Kaleniuk, the director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, a Ukrainian transparency group.

“Shokin was not dismissed because he wanted to investigate Burisma,” Kaleniuk said. “Quite the contrary. He was dismissed because of a lack of willingness to investigate this particular case as well as other important cases involving high-level associates of [ousted former President Viktor] Yanukovych.”

As for Lutsenko, Kaleniuk said his claims were likely motivated by a desire to hold on to his job as top prosecutor with the incoming Zelensky administration, as well as to find friends in the United States government, where he has long been viewed as toxic.

“He wanted to become a person with whom people in the United States wanted to talk, and then probably he found Giuliani and found a sexy story that fit into the Giuliani agenda,” Kaleniuk said.

Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma, however, still raises eyebrows in Ukraine. The younger Biden’s paid tenure on Burisma’s board came at a time the company and its owner faced multiple corruption investigations. He was likely hired simply to impart his famous last name, Kaleniuk said.

“I think [working for Burisma] was wrong from an ethical point of view,” she said.

In a statement, Hunter Biden defended his previous position on Burisma’s board, saying he worked to help reform the company’s “practices of transparency, corporate governance and responsibility.”

“At no time have I discussed with my father the company’s business, or my board service. Any suggestion to the contrary is just plain wrong,” Biden said.

There is also no known documentary evidence that U.S. officials had worked with Ukrainians to release the black ledger.

Though Giuliani’s visit was canceled and many of his claims debunked, the allegations emerging from Ukraine remain very much alive in the lead-up to the 2020 U.S. election.

The accusation that Yovanovitch had exhibited political bias was reported to be behind her stepping down as ambassador in May.

Lutsenko and Shokin did not respond to requests for interviews. Reporters were unable to reach Yovanovitch.

From the Black Sea to Boca
The previous business dealings of both Parnas and Fruman raise serious concerns about their newfound access to senior American political figures.

A resident of upscale Boca Raton, Parnas once ran an electronics business that was successfully sued for its role in a fraudulent penny stock promotion scheme. He has also worked for three brokerages that later lost their licenses for fraud and other violations. He has never been personally charged.

Court records also show that judges have awarded a series of default judgements against Parnas for multiple unpaid debts. These include over $500,000 he owes to an investor in a Hollywood movie that he had promoted but was never made. He has also been sued a dozen times over the last decade for failing to pay rent on various Palm Beach County properties and has been evicted from two homes.

Fruman’s backstory is even more colorful.

More to come

[Pete F.]

His network of businesses extends from the United States to the city of Odesa, a Ukrainian Black Sea port notorious for corruption and organized crime.

Reporters found that Fruman has personal ties to a powerful local: Volodymyr “The Lightbulb” Galanternik, a shadowy businessman commonly referred to as the “Grey Cardinal” of Odesa.

Galanternik is described by local media and activists as a close associate of Gennadiy Trukhanov, the mayor of Odesa who was shown in the late 1990s to be a senior member of a feared organized criminal group involved in fuel smuggling and weapons trading.

Galanternik also owns a luxury apartment in the same London building as the daughter of another leader in the gang, Aleksander “The Angel” Angert, OCCRP has previously reported.

Vitaly Ustymenko, a local civic activist, describes Galanternik as an overseer of the clique’s economic domination of the city.

“[Galanternik] is not ‘one of the’ — he is actually the most powerful guy in Odesa, and maybe in the region,” Ustymenko said.

Fruman’s recent ex-wife, Yelyzaveta Naumova, is the self-declared best friend of Galanternik’s wife, Natasha Zinko, according to her Instagram posts. Galanternik and Zinko also celebrated the New Year in 2016 with the Frumans in South Florida, according to a photo posted online by an acquaintance of Fruman.

Galanternik’s name is seldom tied directly to his businesses. Instead he operates via a network of offshore companies and trusted proxy individuals. But there are signs that either Fruman or his long-standing local partner, Serhiy Dyablo, may have a business relationship with Galanternik via two Odesa firms (see box).

🔗FRUMAN’S ODESA TIES
Ukrainian records show what appears to be overlap between the web of businesses belonging to Fruman and his partner Dyablo and Galanternik’s empire.

Companies linked to Fruman include a New York-registered business, F.D. Import & Export. In Ukraine, Fruman jointly established a series of companies with Dyablo. Largely grouped under the brand name Otrada, the companies include a hotel, apartment buildings, a series of luxury boutiques, and a beach club on Odesa’s shoreline called “Mafia Rave.” Fruman is listed on Otrada Luxury Group’s website as its president and CEO.Fruman, Dyablo, and F.D. Import & Export previously held controlling stakes in many of these companies, but local registry documents show those holdings are mostly now under the ownership of Fruman’s ex-wife Naumova, Dyablo’s wife Inna, and a 74-year-old woman, Lyudmila Kalmykova.

Kalmykova appears to be a proxy shareholder. A reporter who visited several of the Otrada businesses found that employees had never heard of her, instead identifying Dyablo as their boss. Her relationship with the other shareholders is unknown, although members of Dyablo’s family are among her relatively low number of Facebook friends.

On paper, Kalmykova is in business with two long-standing business partners of Galanternik.

The two Galanternik partners are co-owners, along with Kalmykova, of a warehousing company on the outskirts of Odesa. One of those partners is also a co-owner, along with Kalmykova and another person, of a property development company that is registered in the same Odesa building as several of Fruman and Dyablo’s companies. That company began winding up in early July.

Reporters were unable to reach Kalmykova for comment.

In an interview, Parnas said that Fruman and Galanternik knew each other through their wives, but said there were no business connections between the two men.

Galanternik and Fruman did not respond to written questions. Neither Dyablo nor Naumova responded to multiple requests for interviews.

“Where is the money coming from?”
Parnas and Fruman’s work with Giuliani was just one part of a broader foray into U.S. politics.

In 2018, the men made hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to Republican causes while enjoying VIP access to party and Trump administration circles.

Filings with the U.S. Federal Election Commission (FEC) show that Fruman and Parnas spread their money widely.

Fruman kicked off the effort on Feb. 20, giving $2,700 each to two pro-Trump groups, Trump Victory and Donald J. Trump for President.

Less than two weeks later, Fruman and Parnas attended a fundraiser for Trump’s re-election at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.

This was followed by a several-month-long spree of donations — of a total value of at least $576,500 — to campaigns including the successful 2018 Senate bid of former Florida governor Rick Scott, and the re-elections of Texas Representative Pete Sessions and South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson. All are Republicans.

The lion’s share of these donations, however, was just one $325,000 payment, made on May 17, 2018, to America First Action. The group is one of the largest pro-Trump Super Political Action Committees (commonly known as Super PACs), a kind of outside campaign organization that is allowed to raise unlimited funds in support of a candidate, but is barred from working directly with their campaign.

That payment was declared as coming from a Delaware company, Global Energy Producers LLC, set up by Fruman and Parnas just weeks before as part of their plan to sell gas to Ukraine.

The donation is subject to an ongoing complaint to the FEC by the Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group, alleging the company is likely a shell intended to hide other donors.

Parnas said the complaint was unfounded. “We have a real business,” he said.

Parnas said the contributions were designed to get the attention of key lawmakers at a time he and Fruman were launching their gas export business. “We’ve got a business. We just want to get recognized,” he said.

However, Parnas and Fruman’s plans to sell American gas to Ukraine has so far not borne fruit. In response to inquiries, Naftogaz, Ukraine’s natural gas monopoly, said that Global Energy Producers has not participated in any tenders to sell gas to Ukraine and has concluded no contracts. The company’s website contains only a countdown timer that has already reached zero.

The donation ascribed to Global Energy Producers in fact came from the bank account of another company belonging to Parnas. Days earlier, that company had received a wire transfer of $1.26 million from the trust fund of a Florida lawyer who specializes in real estate, court records show.

Parnas said that money came from the sale of a Florida condominium, but did not provide documents to back up his claim.

Within months of Parnas and Fruman’s six-figure donations, and even as their work with Giuliani began, allegations emerged in a public lawsuit in Florida that they had jilted an early investor in their Ukraine gas venture.

Felix Vulis, the head of Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation, a firm owned by a trio of Kazakhstani oligarchs, asserted that Parnas and Fruman had failed to repay a two-month $100,000 loan he had given to Global Energy Producers earlier in the year. The two men had boasted about their relationship with Guiliani and other influential figures while asking for the loan, according to the complaint.

Vulis has yet to be paid, according to his lawyer, Robert Stok.

The men said “they had all this influence,” Stok said. “They said Trump and his associates were going to back their company. That they had direct access to the White House.”

Tony Andre, a Florida lawyer who has been trying to collect the $500,000 movie deal judgement against Parnas, also expressed astonishment at what he sees as the businessman’s brazenness.

“Someone takes a half million dollars from you and he’s hanging with the president and the president’s lawyer,” Andre said.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “Where is the money coming from?”

Dinner with the President
Amid their donation spree, Parnas and Fruman took part in an impressive series of meetings with senior Republicans.

On or about May 1, 2018, while staying at the Trump International Hotel in the U.S. capital, both men had dinner with the president in a meeting documented by Parnas in a now-deleted Facebook post.

Later that month, the two men had a “power breakfast” in Beverly Hills with Donald Trump Jr. and Tommy Hicks Jr., who has since become co-chair of the Republican National Committee, according to a now-deleted Facebook post by Parnas. At the time, Hicks was head of America First Action, which had received the men’s $325,000 donation in the same month.

Parnas also had meetings in May on Capitol Hill with several Republican congressmen.

Among them was Sessions, the Texas Republican, according to a now-deleted May 9 Facebook post by Parnas. In a meeting also attended by Fruman, the two men urged the dismissal of the United States’ ambassador in Kyiv, Marie Yovanovitch.

On the same day that Parnas posted pictures of the meeting, Sessions wrote a private letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calling for Yovanovitch’s dismissal.

Parnas said he and Fruman told Sessions that Yovanovitch was disloyal to the president and questioned whether she should serve. “She was bad-mouthing our president about getting impeached,” said Parnas.

Sessions, however, said he had been the one to bring up concerns about Yovanovitch with Parnas and Fruman, but that he could not remember when or where the discussion took place.

“I do know both these gentlemen,” Sessions said. “They are Republicans. They are people who have an interest in foreign affairs. They have a strong interest in America not backing away from Ukraine.”

The next month, Parnas and Fruman donated a total of $5,400 to Sessions’ unsuccessful 2018 re-election campaign, FEC records show.

Yovanovitch stepped down this May following a flurry of negative stories about her in the conservative media, which included the publication in The Hill of a leaked copy of Sessions’ letter. The press blitz also included frequent reference to Lutsenko’s inflammatory allegations against the ambassador.

THE YOVANOVITCH FALLOUT
Ambassador Yovanovitch’s departure from Kyiv was politically charged.

According to the State Department, her rotation in Ukraine had simply ended. But Congressional Democrats and veterans of the diplomatic corps have said she had become a partisan target who was pulled from her job two months early.

The affair hurt the United States’ relationship with Ukraine, said Nina Jankowicz, a Global Fellow at the Kennan Institute.

"[Yovanovitch’s retirement] was a clear indication Trump was using Ukraine as a political football and that he wasn’t concerned about its democratic future,” Jankowicz said.

“To take the word of a corrupt foreign prosecutor general over a career diplomat — one who has served both Republicans and Democrats — is an affront to the Foreign Service and undermines the credibility of our diplomats everywhere.”

Given Parnas and Fruman’s relationships with senior Ukrainian officials and their business interests in the country, their lobbying against a U.S. ambassador raises questions about their compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

The act requires Americans operating on behalf of a foreign entity in the United States to declare their work to the Department of Justice. Parnas and Fruman did not do so.

Their lobbying of Sessions raises “the thorniest red flag,” said Ron Oleynik, a Washington attorney who advises clients on FARA compliance. “That, to me, is clearly trying to influence an office of the United States toward Ukraine.”

Parnas, however, said they acted on their own accord.

“I just kept hearing [about Yovanovitch] from different people,” he said.

Introduction to an Oligarch
After setting up meetings between Giuliani and Ukrainian prosecutors, Parnas and Fruman set their sights on connecting with Ukraine’s new president, former television comic Zelensky.

As Zelensky stormed to a landslide victory in the April election, Parnas and Fruman flew to Israel to meet Ihor Kolomoisky, a Ukrainian oligarch who is alleged to have stolen $5.5 billion from the country’s largest private bank. Earlier that month, the Daily Beast reported that Kolomoisky, who is a key Zelensky backer, was under FBI investigation for financial crimes.

Fruman and Parnas were introduced to the oligarch by Alexander Levin, another pro-Trump Ukrainian-American businessman, on the pretence that they wanted to talk about their plan to sell gas to Ukraine, Kolomoisky said in an interview.

However, once inside the meeting, the two men told Kolomoisky that they wanted his help getting in touch with Zelensky, in order to help set up a meeting between Giuliani and the president-elect.

Offended, Kolomoisky said, he then stormed out of the meeting.

“I told them I am not going to be a middleman in anybody’s meetings with Zelensky,” Kolomoisky said. “Not for them, not for anybody else. They tried to say something like, ‘Hey, we are serious people here. Giuliani. Trump.’ They started throwing names at me.”

In response to inquiries, Levin said of Parnas and Fruman: “I met these gentlemen for the first time in March of 2019. I have no information about what they have done in the past, or what they have done since they met with me. I plan no involvement with them in the future.”

“I broke no laws and any suggestion otherwise constitutes slander.”

Despite the debacle in Israel, Parnas and Fruman continued their efforts to connect Giuliani with Zelensky. By mid-May, in the lead-up to Zelensky’s inauguration, both men were in Kyiv, staying in the city’s Hilton as they set up appointments around town.

The official reason for Giuliani’s visit was to give a paid speech for American Friends of Anatevka, a New York-based charity run by Fruman that supports the reconstruction of a Jewish village outside of Kyiv that was the setting of the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” The meeting with Zelensky was intended to take place on the sidelines of the event.

Though Giuliani cancelled his trip, Parnas and Fruman managed to hold meetings with two figures close to Zelensky: Serhiy Shefir, who has since been appointed as an aide to the president, and Ivan Bakanov, now acting head of Ukraine’s secret police. The meetings failed to lead to a meeting between Giuliani and Zelensky.

The two men also held a meeting with Ukraine’s national gas monopoly, Naftogaz, in order to pitch their plan to sell liquified natural gas (LNG) to the country, company spokeswoman Aliona Osmolovska confirmed in response to reporters’ questions.

“Among other initiatives, we had meetings with a number of potential suppliers of LNG. In this context, we have been approached by Mr. Parnas and Mr. Furman [sic], and met them,” Osmolovska wrote.

While Parnas and Fruman were in Kyiv, Kolomoisky, who had just returned from years of exile abroad, gave an impromptu interview to a local media outlet where he denounced the men as “scammers” and said he would take them “into daylight soon.”

Giuliani responded quickly. In a series of tweets, he labeled Kolomoisky a “notorious oligarch.”

“This is real test for President [Zelensky],” Giuliani tweeted. “Will [Kolomoisky] be arrested?”

Parnas and Fruman responded by filing a criminal complaint with Ukrainian police, alleging that Kolomoisky had threatened their lives. They also lodged a defamation suit against the oligarch, their lawyer Alina Samarets said.

Giuliani personally joined at least one call to discuss the case, Samarets said.

Despite these setbacks, Parnas told reporters that his and Fruman’s work in Ukraine would continue.

“It’s all going to come out.”

From reporting by Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project

https://www.occrp.org/en/investigati...ump-in-ukraine

[spence]

Transcript out. Not looking good.

[Pete F.]

Attached is a portion of the memorandum of telephone conversation, remember this is not a transcript. There is a difference. It is also not the whistleblowers complaint which is alleged to consist of multiple instances.

Of course they could not provide an electronic document, probably don't have the technology. Here's part and the link for the image.

•t:�;'HP) The· President: I would like you to do us a favor though
because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a
lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with
this whole si�uation with Ukraine, they s_ay Crowdstrike ... I guess
you have one of your weal thy people... The server, they say
Ukraine has.it� There- are a lot. of things that went on, the·
:whole situation .. I think you 1 re _surrounding yourse·lf with some
of the same people. I .
would like to have the Attorney General
call you or your people and I would like you t� ·get to the
bottom of it�. As you sa� yest�rday, that whole nonsetise ended
with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mue�le_r, an
incompetent performance-, _but they. say a lot of it started with
Ukraine. Whatever you can do, ·it's very important that· you. do it
if that's possible.

(l!l-,'HP) President Zelenskyy: Yes it is. very important for me and
everything that you just mentioned earlier. For me as a
President,-· it is very important and we are open for any future
cooperation. We are ready to· open a new page on �ooperation in
. relations between the United· States and Ukraine.· For that·
purpose, I just recalled our.ambassador from United States and
he will be replaced by a very competent and very experienced
ambassador who wtll work hard on making sure that our two
nations are getting clciser. I would also like and hope to see
him having your trust and y9ur .confidence and _ have persona·1
relations·with you so we c�n cooperate even �ore so. I·
wili.
personally tell you that one· of my assistants· spoke with Mr.
Giuliani just.recently and we are hoping very much that Mr.
G1uliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and. we will meet once
· he co�es to Ukraine. I just wanted to assure you once again_that
you _have nobody but friends around-us. I w.ill make sure -that-I
surro�nd myself with the best and most experienced people._ I
also· wanted to ·tell you that we are friends. We are great·
friends and you Mr. President have. friends -in our country so we
can continue our strategic·�artn�rship. I also plan to surround
· myself with great people ·and in addition to that investigation,
I guarantee as the President of Ukraine that all the
investigations.will be done_openly and candidly .. That I can assure you ..

(:9/MF� The Pre·sident: Good because I· heard you had a prosecutor
who· was very·good and he was shut down and that's really unfair.
_·A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your
�ery good prosecutor down and you had some �ery bad people
involved. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the_
mayor bf New York Ci:ty, a great mayor, and I would like him tocall you. I will ask him to call yoti along with the Attorney·_
·· General.· :Rudy very much knows what's happening and he is a very
capable guy. If you could _speak to him that would be great. The
former ambassador from the United $tates,· the woman., was bad
news �nd th� people she was dealing with in .the Ukraine .were bad
news so I jtist wan� to_let you know that� The ot�er thing,
There's a lot 6f. talk about Biden's son,. that Eiden stopped the
prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so
whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great.
Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if
you ·can look into it ... It sounds horrible to me.
(S;'ti!F) President Zelenskyy: I wanted to tell ·you about the
prosecutor� First df �11 I understand arid I'm kn6wledgeable
.abotit the situation. Sine� we ha�e �on· the ab�olute majority in
our Parliament; the next prosecutor .general will be 100%_ my
person, my c'andidate, who will be approved, by the parliament and
will start. a_s a new prosecutor in September. He or she will look.
into the situation, specifically to the company that you
-mentioned in :this issue. The issue of the investigation of the
case is �ctually the issui of �aking sure to res�o�e the honesty
so we will take care of.that and wi11·wo:tk on the investigation
of the case. On top of that, I would kindly ask you if you have
any additional information that you can provide ·to µs, it would_
be very helpful · for the investigation t·o make· su.re that we
administer justice i':r1 our country with regc:ird: to the Ambassador
to the United States from Ukraine as far as I recall her name
was Ivanovicli. It was great that you were the first one. who told
me that she was a bad ambassador because I agree·with you 100%.
Her attitude to.wards me was far from the best as she admired the
previous President and she was on his· side. She would not accept
�e as a new President· well enough.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-conten...ied09.2019.pdf


As John Gotti would say: "You know that thing with Mikey, yeah he's a good kid, but it might be a good idea if , you know, if he has a drink with Vinny, you remember Vinny, yeah, & that thing you were worried about will go away forever you know what I mean"

[Jim in CT]

Originally Posted by spence

Transcript out. Not looking good.

it’s not good that trump
asked them to look into possible corruption? but it was great when Biden explicitly threatened to withhold money unless they cracked down on corruption?

so it’s noble to insist that ukraine get tough on corruption, unless doing so makes democrats look bad. is that about right?

i guess your side realizes the prospects of winning the next election aren’t great, so they’re obsessing with undoing the results of the previous one.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device

[spence]

Originally Posted by Jim in CT

it’s not good that trump
asked them to look into possible corruption? but it was great when Biden explicitly threatened to withhold money unless they cracked down on corruption?

I can't believe you just said that.

[Jim in CT]

Originally Posted by spence

I can't believe you just said that.

i take that as a compliment.

Spence, i’m not saying that trump
didn’t have self serving, political reasons for asking ukraine to investigate biden. obviously he did.

but if the goal is to reduce corruption in ukraine, i’m sorry to tell you that only hard-core liberal zealots ( and you have to admit you qualify), would conclude that the Biden - Ukraine connection doesn’t look fishy.

look, selfishly i hope that impeachment proceedings proceed, because i believe they’ll
hurt democrats. Flame on!

And Biden is toast. You asked why i said that, i said it because (1) that party isn’t going to nominate an 85 year old, rich white guy, and (2) he’s tanking in the polls. the nominee will likely be from the progressive wing.

if the dems were rational, they’d go with Harris, or at least with someone who can get blacks to come out in the numbers Obama did. Reduced black support hurt Hilary. I don’t see blacks, especially black women, rallying behind Princess Lies Through Her Teeth.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device

[Pete F.]

Originally Posted by Jim in CT

it’s not good that trump
asked them to look into possible corruption? but it was great when Biden explicitly threatened to withhold money unless they cracked down on corruption?

so it’s noble to insist that ukraine get tough on corruption, unless doing so makes democrats look bad. is that about right?

i guess your side realizes the prospects of winning the next election aren’t great, so they’re obsessing with undoing the results of the previous one.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device

As John Gotti would say: "You know that thing with Mikey, yeah he's a good kid, but it might be a good idea if , you know, if he has a drink with Vinny, you remember Vinny, yeah, & that thing you were worried about will go away forever you know what I mean"

[Pete F.]

Originally Posted by Jim in CT

i take that as a compliment.

Spence, i’m not saying that trump
didn’t have self serving, political reasons for asking ukraine to investigate biden. obviously he did.



Trump: A lot of the European countries are the same way so I think it's.something you want to look at but the United States has been very very good to Ukraine. I wouldn't say that it's reciprocal necessarily because things are happening that are not good but the United States has been very very good to Ukraine.

Trump: We do a lot for Ukraine.

Zelenskyy: We are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes.

Here's the quid pro co


Trump: I would like you to do us a favor though.

Trump: I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike.…

The other thing, there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do…

I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say
Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on the whole situation ..

but if the goal is to reduce corruption in ukraine, i’m sorry to tell you that only hard-core liberal zealots ( and you have to admit you qualify), would conclude that the Biden - Ukraine connection doesn’t look fishy.

Just when did Trump's goal become the ending of corruption? There was no mention of it in this memo or any other time prior to the other day.

Asking Ukraine to go after Biden/Trump's political opponents is NEARLY THE ONLY THING TRUMP TALKED ABOUT IN THE PHONE CALL (after he got done saying how much the US government does for Ukraine).

look, selfishly i hope that impeachment proceedings proceed, because i believe they’ll
hurt democrats. Flame on!

And Biden is toast. You asked why i said that, i said it because (1) that party isn’t going to nominate an 85 year old, rich white guy, and (2) he’s tanking in the polls. the nominee will likely be from the progressive wing.

if the dems were rational, they’d go with Harris, or at least with someone who can get blacks to come out in the numbers Obama did. Reduced black support hurt Hilary. I don’t see blacks, especially black women, rallying behind Princess Lies Through Her Teeth against the most honest President ever
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device

Trump used US taxpayers’ money to try to gather dirt on his electoral opponent.

REMINDER: The whistleblower complaint reportedly is NOT just about the Ukraine phone call - there are additional bad (possibly criminal) things Trump and Bill Barr did. That's why Trump and Barr are still fighting to cover it up.

House Dems can now subpoena Giuliani and his phone records, because Giuliani held up his cell on Fox News and said it contained evidence that the State Department told him to solicit Ukrainian meddling in our election for Trump

[Jim in CT]

Originally Posted by Pete F.

Trump used US taxpayers’ money to try to gather dirt on his electoral opponent.

REMINDER: The whistleblower complaint reportedly is NOT just about the Ukraine phone call - there are additional bad (possibly criminal) things Trump and Bill Barr did. That's why Trump and Barr are still fighting to cover it up.

House Dems can now subpoena Giuliani and his phone records, because Giuliani held up his cell on Fox News and said it contained evidence that the State Department told him to solicit Ukrainian meddling in our election for Trump

wow, a lot to digest. you’re opposed to using taxpayer
money to get dirt on a political opponent. how about using political dirt in an opponent, get get a FISA warrant to spy on an american citizen, how does that sit with you?

the democrats are probably getting ready to step on another rake.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device

[Pete F.]

Are you speaking of the often investigated Carter Page. Who appointed the judge that sat on that FISA warrant?

Speaking of rake stepping

When Justice Department officials examined whether Trump’s call w/Zelensky violated campaign-finance laws—and concluded it didn’t—they didn’t take into consideration that Trump was withholding aid to Ukraine, officials told reporters.
.

[Jim in CT]

Originally Posted by Pete F.

Are you speaking of the often investigated Carter Page. Who appointed the judge that sat on that FISA warrant?

Speaking of rake stepping

When Justice Department officials examined whether Trump’s call w/Zelensky violated campaign-finance laws—and concluded it didn’t—they didn’t take into consideration that Trump was withholding aid to Ukraine, officials told reporters.
.

so no comment on using fabricated political dirt to get a fisa warrant? that’s a good use of taxpayer dollars in your mind?
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device

[Pete F.]

Originally Posted by Jim in CT

wow, a lot to digest. you’re opposed to using taxpayer
money to get dirt on a political opponent. how about using political dirt in an opponent, get get a FISA warrant to spy on an american citizen, how does that sit with you?

the democrats are probably getting ready to step on another rake.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device

That is what happens when you are suspected of doing something illegal, I'd find interesting what they found in their investigation to continue it, even after Page left the campaign. That is why the request grows each time and is renewed.

If you take the time to read this perhaps you'll understand what a FISA warrant is and is not.

One of the two concrete findings from the Mueller report made public thus far, in a letter by Attorney General William Barr, is that Mueller’s “investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” Presumably that extends to Page, who briefly served as a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign. On face, that would seem to imply that the evidence before Mueller was insufficient to demonstrate that Page was an “agent of a foreign power,” as the FBI had asserted to the FISA court in seeking its surveillance order.

If that’s true, it wouldn’t necessarily mean the FBI acted improperly in obtaining that initial order. Sometimes intelligence agencies follow leads based on information from sources they assess to be reliable, and that information turns out to be wrong. We know, for example, that only a very tiny fraction of the “assessments” the FBI opens each year blossom into full-blown investigations, but it’s impossible to know how many of those full-blown investigations similarly come up empty. FISA orders, unlike criminal wiretap warrants, are designed to gather intelligence, and not intended to lead to criminal prosecution in most cases. Even when they do, the government is typically reluctant to introduce FISA intercepts in court if they can make a case with other evidence. That means there’s no good way to evaluate the success of intelligence investigations by looking at prosecution statistics. Moreover, the public statistics on FISA orders, do not distinguish between new orders and extensions, which means there’s no good way to even approximately gauge how commonly FISA wiretaps are abandoned as dead ends.

Yet in Carter Page’s case, the FBI clearly did not believe they had hit a dead end. A FISA warrant targeting a United States person must be renewed every 90 days, as Page’s was on three separate occasions, by three different FISA Court judges. Those renewal applications would not merely have recited the evidence supporting the initial order: They would have been expected to describe the fruits of previous surveillance, and justify continued monitoring by showing that useful intelligence was being gathered—or, at the very least, that there was good reason to expect some in the future.

Though almost all of the new information added to the renewal applications remains redacted, the length of the applications increased substantially over time: The initial submission the the FISC totaled 66 pages, while the final renewal application had grown to 101 pages. While presumably not all of the additional 35 pages concerned the information gleaned from wiretapping Page, some significant portion must have. So what was the FBI telling the FISC to justify continuing surveillance? And how do we square that with Mueller’s inability to establish coordination between Trump associates and Russia? It is unfortunate, but probably inevitable, that the government will sometimes target people for surveillance and discover that their suspicions were mistaken. If, however, the government conducts nine months of intrusive electronic surveillance, persuades a court that their suspicions have been confirmed, and still proves to have been wrong, that is at least a prima facie indication of something wrong with the system.

The trouble for those wedded to the idea of an anti-Trump Deep State conspiracy is, precisely, that it suggests something wrong with the system. A vendetta against Trump does little to explain why investigators would continue spying on Page well into 2017, long after he’d left the campaign and Trump had been sworn in as president, nor why Trump appointee Rod Rosenstein would sign off on that final renewal application. If Page had never been a foreign agent after all, then the fact that Republican officials signed off on those applications, and FISC judges—all chosen by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts—approved them, would instead raise troubling questions about the larger process designed to oversee and check intelligence wiretaps. Yet relatively few of the Republican lawmakers expressing concern about potential FISA abuse have shown any interest in reforming the broader framework of intelligence surveillance—preferring to focus on the purported misconduct of a handful of supposed bad apples.

[Jim in CT]

Originally Posted by Pete F.

That is what happens when you are suspected of doing something illegal, I'd find interesting what they found in their investigation to continue it, even after Page left the campaign. That is why the request grows each time and is renewed.

If you take the time to read this perhaps you'll understand what a FISA warrant is and is not.

One of the two concrete findings from the Mueller report made public thus far, in a letter by Attorney General William Barr, is that Mueller’s “investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” Presumably that extends to Page, who briefly served as a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign. On face, that would seem to imply that the evidence before Mueller was insufficient to demonstrate that Page was an “agent of a foreign power,” as the FBI had asserted to the FISA court in seeking its surveillance order.

If that’s true, it wouldn’t necessarily mean the FBI acted improperly in obtaining that initial order. Sometimes intelligence agencies follow leads based on information from sources they assess to be reliable, and that information turns out to be wrong. We know, for example, that only a very tiny fraction of the “assessments” the FBI opens each year blossom into full-blown investigations, but it’s impossible to know how many of those full-blown investigations similarly come up empty. FISA orders, unlike criminal wiretap warrants, are designed to gather intelligence, and not intended to lead to criminal prosecution in most cases. Even when they do, the government is typically reluctant to introduce FISA intercepts in court if they can make a case with other evidence. That means there’s no good way to evaluate the success of intelligence investigations by looking at prosecution statistics. Moreover, the public statistics on FISA orders, do not distinguish between new orders and extensions, which means there’s no good way to even approximately gauge how commonly FISA wiretaps are abandoned as dead ends.

Yet in Carter Page’s case, the FBI clearly did not believe they had hit a dead end. A FISA warrant targeting a United States person must be renewed every 90 days, as Page’s was on three separate occasions, by three different FISA Court judges. Those renewal applications would not merely have recited the evidence supporting the initial order: They would have been expected to describe the fruits of previous surveillance, and justify continued monitoring by showing that useful intelligence was being gathered—or, at the very least, that there was good reason to expect some in the future.

Though almost all of the new information added to the renewal applications remains redacted, the length of the applications increased substantially over time: The initial submission the the FISC totaled 66 pages, while the final renewal application had grown to 101 pages. While presumably not all of the additional 35 pages concerned the information gleaned from wiretapping Page, some significant portion must have. So what was the FBI telling the FISC to justify continuing surveillance? And how do we square that with Mueller’s inability to establish coordination between Trump associates and Russia? It is unfortunate, but probably inevitable, that the government will sometimes target people for surveillance and discover that their suspicions were mistaken. If, however, the government conducts nine months of intrusive electronic surveillance, persuades a court that their suspicions have been confirmed, and still proves to have been wrong, that is at least a prima facie indication of something wrong with the system.

The trouble for those wedded to the idea of an anti-Trump Deep State conspiracy is, precisely, that it suggests something wrong with the system. A vendetta against Trump does little to explain why investigators would continue spying on Page well into 2017, long after he’d left the campaign and Trump had been sworn in as president, nor why Trump appointee Rod Rosenstein would sign off on that final renewal application. If Page had never been a foreign agent after all, then the fact that Republican officials signed off on those applications, and FISC judges—all chosen by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts—approved them, would instead raise troubling questions about the larger process designed to oversee and check intelligence wiretaps. Yet relatively few of the Republican lawmakers expressing concern about potential FISA abuse have shown any interest in reforming the broader framework of intelligence surveillance—preferring to focus on the purported misconduct of a handful of supposed bad apples.

requests to violate the privacy of citizens, should be based on accurate reasonable suspicion. not fabricated political dirt. you disagree?
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device

[spence]

Originally Posted by Jim in CT

requests to violate the privacy of citizens, should be based on accurate reasonable suspicion. not fabricated political dirt. you disagree?
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device

FBI had worked with Steele in the past and thought he was credible, the Dossier wasn't fabricated, like much raw intel some of it is wrong, some of it is right. Besides, it was only a small part of the FISA warrant.