Tag: fbi
Stephen Miller's Latest Loony Claims Of Trump's Immunity From Prosecution

Stephen Miller's Latest Loony Claims Of Trump's Immunity From Prosecution

You’re going to love this: the latest brief in the Mar-a-Lago documents case came from Stephen Miller. Yes, that Stephen Miller, the one who came up with the plan of ripping babies out of the arms of their mothers at the Southern Border. He still defends it as a good idea and has given interviews saying there are plans to repeat the policy of breaking up families if Trump is elected in November.

Miller has another wonderful idea this time -- that it was just fine for Donald Trump to leave the White House in 2021 taking a truckload of top-secret documents with him, because they were Trump’s secrets, not the government’s. Miller’s right-wing legal operation, the America First Legal Foundation – old Stevie just can’t get away from those intimations of the Nazi era, can he? – filed a friend of the court brief with Judge Aileen Cannon down in Florida supporting Trump’s position that the Presidential Records Act (PRA) allows him to do whatever the hell he wants to with his White House papers.

The PRA allows no such thing. The act, passed by Congress after the criminal presidency of Richard Nixon, requires every president to turn over all papers deriving from his time in office to the National Archives. Miller’s little nest of right-wing legal mice say the PRA doesn’t apply to Donald Trump because, well, because Donald Trump says so.

It's a little more complicated than that, but not by much. Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a reply brief to Miller’s 28 pages of legal blatherings. Leaving aside its signature page and certificate of service, Smith’s reply brief is all of five pages long. Smith uses a single word to describe the three contentions of Miller’s legal arguments: Wrong.

Reading the Special Counsel’s brief, you can feel him wearying of replying to Trump’s blizzard of filings in the cases Smith has against him in Washington and Florida. Trump’s basic position, backed up most recently by his loyal underling Miller, is this: Yeah, I did it, but you can’t get me because I’m Donald Trump.

Miller’s brief supporting Trump takes the utterly absurd position that the charges against him in the Mar a Lago case must be dropped because they all derive from a criminal referral by the National Archives, which spent 18 months practically begging Trump to turn over his trove of secrets before they called the FBI. Miller’s legal brief says the National Archives can’t call the FBI because all they are is a records depository and don’t have the statutory authority to report a crime. According to Miller’s MAGA theory, the National Archives needs a “regulation” to be allowed to pick up the phone and report a crime.

Smith, with Job-like patience, points out that if Miller is right, that means if a thief enters the National Archives and starts waving a gun around, it would be impermissible for the Archives to call the cops. Smith’s brief points Judge Cannon to the fact that the National Archives, as an entity of the federal government, has an inspector general on its staff, and by federal regulation, all inspector generals are “required to report expeditiously to the Attorney General whenever the Inspector General has reasonable grounds to believe there has been a violation of Federal criminal law.”

The Special Counsel has had to file response after response to motions made by Donald Trump to dismiss charges against him, and every one of those motions takes the same position. Yeah, he did it, but this is why you can’t go after him. He’s immune from prosecution. The prosecution is “selective and vindictive.” Because everybody else got away with it, so should Trump.

Trump is accused in the Mar-a-Lago case of removing important national security information from the White House and failing to secure it by storing top-secret papers, including some that contained secrets about nuclear weapons, in places like a bathroom and a ballroom. But that’s okay, according to Trump’s lawyers, because according to yet another case against Trump, “the President’s actions do not fall beyond the outer perimeter of official responsibility merely because they are unlawful or taken for a forbidden purpose.”

Judge Tanya Chutkan had it right when she dismissed Trump’s first claim of absolute immunity. What he wants is a get of out jail free card. Reelecting Trump will give him a whole pocketful. Every time he holds a rally, he promises to free “the January 6 hostages” with presidential pardons.

That’s bad enough, but what we’ve really got to be afraid of is his promise to turn around and put his enemies in jail. At his rallies, “lock her up” has turned into a chant of “lock them up.”

Remember, we are them.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Russian Witness Against Biden Received $600K From 'Trump Associates'

Russian Witness Against Biden Received $600K From 'Trump Associates'

I’ll bet you didn’t know that it is possible in this great big world of ours to live a comfortable life being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing basically nothing. Well, not nothing, exactly, but the money you get is unattached to normal stuff we are all familiar with like a job, complete with job-related duties and office hours and a W-2 and maybe even a job title. The money can thus be described by what it is not, which is aboveboard and visible. Instead, this kind of money often ends up in the kinds of accounts said to be “controlled” by you or others, which is to say, accounts which may not, and often do not, have your name on them.

We could describe this kind of money, then, as free floating. It’s just out there. Your function in life, if you are a man like our friend the lying Russian agent and Republican witness Alexander Smirnov, is to make sure that some of it becomes “controlled” by you.

The Guardian published a fascinating story on Thursday in which it connected money paid to Smirnov to firms connected to what the paper called “Trump associates.” It’s not a small amount of free-floating money, either. It’s $600,000, and according to The Guardian, it was paid to Smirnov by a company called Economic Transformation Technologies (ETT) back in 2020, the same year he began his career as a witness against the family of Joe Biden by lying to the FBI.

There’s got to be a whole industry that just has a bunch of people sitting in an office somewhere coming up with company names like Economic Transformation Technologies and selling them to people, almost always men, who are setting up businesses and need something to call them. Note the “ies” on the end of the word “Technology” in the company title. That sort of clever twist – that it isn’t just one technology we’re talking about, but several, maybe even many – is what you’re paying for.

Now why would ETT want to pay $600,000 dollars to a person who has been described as a “criminal, fixer and agent” who has two passports and ends up having connections to Russian intelligence agencies? Six hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money, but in the world of people who traffic in information about, among others, Russian oligarchs, Ukrainian energy companies, and British holding companies with interests in Dubai and elsewhere, maybe it isn’t. Smirnov, when he was arrested recently, was described to the judge considering whether or not to give him bail, as “having access” to as much as $6 million, three million of which was said to be held in accounts “controlled by” his girlfriend.

See where we’re going here? We’re already in the world of accounts “controlled by” people “connected to” other people, and in the case of Smirnov, not by any kind of legal instrument you and I would be familiar with, such as a marriage license that would give you access to the money “controlled” by another person, but simply a “girlfriend” legally unattached to Smirnov but who, according to the Department of Justice, was simply holding as much as $3 million, so Smirnov could have access to it.

Do you live in that world? I’ll bet not. I’ll bet that you have a bank account with your name on it. Maybe it also has your wife’s name on it, and maybe you and she have a joint savings account, or a joint account with a securities brokerage, and I’ll bet you and she have your names on the title and registration of a car – maybe even two cars – and your names are on the title and mortgage of a house or condo or on the lease for an apartment.

But not Smirnov, recipient of $600,000 from a company controlled by people connected to Donald Trump. Smirnov is one of those among us with access to some of the floating-around money that’s out there, money that comes from somewhere and goes somewhere but it isn’t clear why, or how, or through what sort of financial instrument or arrangement.

It would help us if we knew something about the company that arranged to transfer the $600,000 to Smirnov, wouldn’t it? Maybe if we knew what the company does, how it makes money, what its business is, we could better understand why Economic Transformation Technologies decided it would be a good idea to pay, or transfer to, a man who is and has been a fixer and a criminal and an informant and an agent for foreign powers such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia. So, let’s ask ETT what kind of company it is.

On its website, ETT tells us this about what the company does: “ETT’s state-of-the-art platform utilizes advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Data Science, Lexicon Management, and many other workflows in an extremely secure environment, the ETT Platform creates the ‘holy grail’ of Real-Time, Predictive, and Meaningful Data through more than 1,600 APIs - making it one the world most momentous and timely platforms. As a final point, ETT set up the chess board to bring in top notch executives from those sectors to help implement its vision of love and social impact to improve the quality of human existence through the application of ‘New Age’ technologies.”

If that sounds like a word-salad put together, complete with misspelled words, by the kind of boiler room that probably generated the name of the company, well, I agree with you. What they appear to have done is watch some cable TV and read a few newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and maybe even paid attention to a technology site or two, and they came up with a list of buzz words describing what others are doing in what we might call the “technology sector,” and then they threw in a phrase approximating a mission statement, the wonderful sounds-like-it-was-written-by-a-speaker-of-a-second-language, “…implement its vision of love and social impact to improve the quality of human existence through the application of ‘New Age’ technologies.”

I mean, really. If this is what passes for corporate-speak today, woe be unto the world of corporations in general and this one, ETT, in particular.

The Guardian describes the man at the helm of ETT, an American by the name of Christopher Condon, as a one-third shareholder in something called ETT Investment Holding Limited in London, because of course he is, London being the epicenter of all things international when it comes to finance and moving money around. The connections go on, to one Farooq Arjomand, described by The Guardian as “a former chairman and current board member of Damac Properties in Dubai who is also listed as an adviser on ETT’s American website.” And from Farooq, and Dubai, it’s just a short hop and a jump and what do you know, we’re in a Trump branded property in Dubai that paid our former president $5 million in 2017, and the only reason we know about the $5 million is because Trump was elected president in 2016 and had to fill out an FEC financial statement for the first year he was in the White House as a federal employee, 2017.

See what happened there? Donald Trump, for all his carefully curated reputation as a billionaire, which we now know is about as solid as a pile of melting snow along a random roadside, was one of those free-floating-money guys, out there in business-world-land, grabbing $5 million here and a few hundred thousand there and making his own private decisions about how, or whether, he would report the money as income. And then, in 2015, he decided to run for president and what do you know, he was elected and had to start filling out stuff like FEC forms, where it’s not so easy to attribute or even hide money.

While in office, Donald Trump became addicted to perks like Air Force One, on which he repeatedly flew down to Mar a Lago or over to Bedminster to play a round of golf and then flew back. So, he decided after losing the White House to Joe Biden in 2020 that he would like to go back to flying around on Air Force One and decided to run for election again. To this end, he enlisted a gaggle of half-wits in the House of Representatives to engender an impeachment of his rival, President Biden, and they began casting about for “evidence” that “the Biden crime family” had committed the same sort of crimes the Trump crime family had committed.

And out of a crack in a condo in Las Vegas slithered a sneaky snake called Alexander Smirnov to whisper in the ear of his FBI handlers – because of course a fixer/criminal/agent like Smirnov would have handlers – that Joe Biden and his son Hunter took bribes from a company called Burisma in Ukraine. The half-wits in Congress, having failed to come up with any other “evidence” of crimes, glommed onto Smirnov’s assertion of criminal wrongdoing by the Bidens, and off they went.

At least until it emerged that the FBI discovered they had been lied to by Smirnov and charged him with committing several serious crimes, and the whole house of cards of the impeachment investigation began to crumble.

The problem with houses of cards when they fall is that they have to land somewhere, and where the particular card with Smirnov’s name on it landed is a connection right back to Donald Trump, who in 2020 with a tightly contested race against Joe Biden on his mind was looking around for “dirt” on Joe Biden. Friends of Trump’s found Alexander Smirnov slithering out of cracks in Las Vegas, so they threw six hundred grand his way and thus began his years-long construction of the Burisma lie that has now landed him in pre-trial detention awaiting trial on charges of lying to the FBI and generally being a criminal/fixer/agent for foreign powers, including Putin’s Russia.

Funny how that keeps happening with Donald Trump, isn’t it? In 2016, it was yet another itinerant floating-money Russian intelligence-connected guy named Joseph Mifsud, who in Rome spied an eager-beaver young “adviser” to Donald Trump’s campaign named George Papadopoulos and started romancing him by coming up with a Russian honeypot he introduced to young George as “Putin’s niece,” and a Russian think tank executive who was actually an agent for the FSB, and bingo! All of a sudden there is dirt on offer in the form of Hillary’s emails!

The emails, once revealed by the Russian FSB through WikiLeaks, contained nothing criminal or even mildly interesting, but that didn’t matter. They gave Trump something he could yell at his rallies, along with “lock her up,” and that beat Hillary in November, and he won the presidency.

Now, please take your seats and fasten your seat belts because we’re coming in for a landing. The Guardian story delves deeper and deeper into the connections between Smirnov and Dubai guys and a Pakistani-American and a bunch of companies that include a “blank check company” called BurTech Acquisition Group which is connected to Digital World, another “blank check company” that becomes associated with Donald Trump’s Truth Social in a merger that, after problems with the SEC are resolved, may “garner Trump as much as $4 billion in shares.”

The whole thing circles back to ETT and the $600,000 it paid to Smirnov in 2020, which the Wall Street Journal discovered was “in exchange for a stake in an Israel-based crypto trading platform, called Bitoftrade, [that] Smirnov was working on launching.”

You just knew crypto had to be in there somewhere, didn’t you?

But still we’re stuck with the mystery of ETT, the company we’re told is in the business of “implement[ing] its vision of love and social impact to improve the quality of human existence through the application of ‘New Age’ technologies.” Where the hell did ETT come from in the first place, you may ask?

The Guardian figured that out, too. Turns out ETT used to be called Pandora Venture Capital Corp, which was registered in Florida by a Ukrainian-American called Boris Nayflish, who is – you’re going to love this – the ex-husband of Alexander Smirnov’s current “partner,” Diana Lavrenyuk, she of the $3 million that the Department of Justice told a judge that Smirnov “has access to,” because of course he does.

The old hippie phrase comes to mind: what goes around comes around. In the world of free-floating money and blank-check companies and outfits that describe themselves as implementing visions of love and social impact through “new age” technologies, one of the truths of this particular new age is that when it comes to Donald Trump, what goes around keeps coming around to Russian intelligence and fixer/criminals like Alexander Smirnov.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have now landed. Feel free to use your electronic devices, and welcome to the world of sneaky snakey Donald Trump’s America.

Sean Hannity

After Touting Russia's Biden Bribe Tale, Hannity Runs For Cover

Fox News host Sean Hannity has repeatedly tried to downplay what the arrest of FBI informant Alexander Smirnov means for the Republican Party’s impeachment case against President Joe Biden. But Hannity’s current minimization effort belies the central role he assigned Smirnov’s story as he sought to build an impeachment case around the president’s son in 2023.

After the government alleged Smirnov had lied to the bureau in claiming that Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden had each received a $5 million foreign bribe, recorded in a 2020 FBI FD-1023 form, Hannity first responded on his Fox show by calling the informant’s story “a very, very small part of what is the large body of evidence in the Biden impeachment inquiry.” In subsequent broadcasts, he criticized the notion that “this one piece of the puzzle negate[s]” the rest of the GOP’s narrative, and described Smirnov’s tale as “only one tiny piece of the case against what I call the Biden family and the Biden family syndicate.”

But Hannity kept Smirnov’s claims front-and-center from May 3, 2023 — when Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Rep. James Comer (R-KY) launched the story by publicly demanding the FBI produce an FD-1023 “alleging a criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Joe Biden and a foreign national” by an unnamed “whistleblower,” since revealed as Smirnov — through the end of the year, Media Matters data show. During that period, 33 percent of all Hannity segments about Hunter Biden and 50 percent of Hannity’s monologues about the president’s son mentioned Smirnov’s bribe allegation.

On his Fox show the night Grassley and Comer issued their press release, Hannity declared that this “brand-new, legally protected, highly credible whistleblower disclosure might end up being the biggest story of the year.” He touted the “bombshell disclosure” as describing “the very definition of a high crime, also a serious felony, that if proven true could result in impeachment [and] possible imprisonment of Joe Biden, your president.” He went on to describe the form as “smoking-gun evidence.”

Hannity was similarly enthralled when Grassley released a version of the FD-1023 on July 20, 2023.

“There are now real and growing concerns that your president, the president of our country, is compromised,” Hannity said on his Fox show that night, arguing that through the form, Joe Biden had been “very credibly accused of public corruption on a scale this country has never seen before.” Hannity's crony, Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett, went on to accuse Joe Biden of a variety of crimes, including “bribery and treason,” which he stressed “are impeachable offenses in addition to being felonies. So, you know, this is a blockbuster scandal that could doom Biden's presidency.”

The following week, Hannity aired a one-hour special detailing the case against Joe Biden. Here’s how it began:

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): And welcome to the special edition of Hannity this Friday night, “Biden’s bribery allegations.”

Now, tonight, the president of the United States, Joe Biden, has been accused by a credible FBI source of taking foreign cash in exchange for policy decisions. In other words, you call that bribery.

Hannity was so obsessed with Smirnov’s claims because they appeared to support the conspiracy theory he’s been pursuing for the last five years — that Joe Biden, as vice president, forced the Ukrainian government to fire the country’s top prosecutor for personal pecuniary reasons, in this case because of a supposed bribe extended by one of his son’s employers.

The Fox host helped make that bogus narrative — debunked during then-President Donald Trump’s own impeachment — into the heart of the House GOP’s impeachment case. As that case now collapses, they all look like credulous morons at best, and willing partners in a Russian intelligence operation at worst.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Sean Hannity

Fox Promoted Informant's Dubious Tale To Bolster Right-Wing Lies About Ukraine

Fox News credulously promoted an extraordinary story about President Joe Biden taking a $5 million bribe, now described by federal prosecutors as false, because it appeared to confirm a conspiracy theory the network had pursued for years — one that its own research “Brain Room” had warned was “disinformation” back in 2019.

A federal grand jury last week charged Alexander Smirnov, an FBI confidential informant, with lying to the bureau about Biden and his son, Hunter, in an interview memorialized in a 2020 FD-1023 form. Special counsel David Weiss’ indictment alleges that Smirnov fabricated numerous claims purportedly sourced to an official with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings. Smirnov had claimed the official told him — in communications Weiss says never took place — that Burisma hired Hunter Biden to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems,” and that Joe Biden accepted $5 million in bribes from the company. On Tuesday, Weiss filed a detention memo stating that Smirnov had claimed significant ties with Russian intelligence.

Fox had trumpeted the allegations in the FD-1023 memo, with its hosts and contributors citing the purported Biden bribe as evidence of massive corruption and criminality. Prime-time star Sean Hannity led the charge, touting those dubious and since-refuted claims in at least 85 segments in 2023. The network is now flailing in response to Smirnov’s indictment for making it all up, while journalists at other outlets highlight how Fox is implicated in the debacle.

Fox’s propagandists were willing to run with Smirnov’s story without question — even though all they really knew was that an FBI informant had offered it — because it seemed to support a bogus tale they’ve been telling for years: that Biden, as vice president, corruptly forced the Ukrainian government to fire its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, to benefit Hunter’s business interests. In their telling, Biden sought Shokin’s removal in order to halt an investigation Shokin was purportedly conducting into Burisma.

Rudy Giuliani, then Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, launched that lie back in 2018, working with GOP lawyers Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing, Soviet-born con men Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, and pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash. They laundered dubious information through the conservative writer John Solomon and Hannity, whose Fox program became the nexus of the monthslong disinformation campaign. The story eventually attracted the interest of Trump himself, who responded by corruptly seeking to condition military aid to Ukraine on Ukraine’s announcement of an investigation of the Bidens, eventually leading to his first impeachment. Last July’s release of the FD-1023, with its claims that Burisma officials told Smirnov they expected Hunter to “take care” of Shokin’s probe of the company “through his dad” and that father and son had both received large bribes, breathed new life into the story for Fox.

Prosecutors now say that that meeting never happened. But the underlying story Fox was so eager to confirm was wildly wrong all along, according to the testimony of U.S. officials appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents, government documents, and reams of contemporaneous and more recent reporting. In reality, U.S. policy called for firing Shokin, who was viewed as unwilling to prosecute corruption by U.S. diplomats, foreign governments, international bodies, and Ukrainian anti-corruption groups, and his office had not been actively investigating Burisma at the time then-Vice President Biden sought his removal.

Fox’s research department, known internally as the “Brain Room,” warned that this was the case. A leaked memo, most recently updated in December 2019, accused Giuliani, Toensing, diGenova, and Solomon — at the time, all frequent guests on Fox’s most popular programs — of “spreading disinformation” about Biden and Ukraine, and singled out Hannity’s program for particular criticism.

A legitimate news operation would question how it came to be promoting such disinformation and try to ensure it didn’t happen again — but Fox is a Republican propaganda operation. Since that memo was released, the “Brain Room” has been hit with layoffs, while the network has hired former Trump officials and GOP operatives. And Hannity still enjoys his prime-time platform.

So when Republican politicians started promoting the incendiary nature of the FD-1023, Hannity and his allies went to work making it a focus of Fox’s coverage. GOP legislators touted its importance, with Hannity favorite Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) telling him it was the “heart” of the party’s impeachment case. Now they’re scrambling to explain how that case hasn’t been devastated by Smirnov’s indictment.

Hannity and company were working backward from a fatally flawed conclusion, so of course all the evidence they can amass turns out to originate with liars and grifters.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.