“The Trump Justice Department secretly obtained Washington Post journalists’ phone records and tried to obtain their email records over reporting they did in the early months of the Trump administration on Russia’s role in the 2016 election, according to government letters and officials.

In three separate letters dated May 3 and addressed to Post reporters Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller, and former Post reporter Adam Entous, the Justice Department wrote they were “hereby notified that pursuant to legal process the United States Department of Justice received toll records associated with the following telephone numbers for the period from April 15, 2017 to July 31, 2017.” The letters listed work, home or cellphone numbers covering that three-and-a-half-month period.

Greg Miller (l), Ellen Nakashima and Adam Entous (Credit: public domain)

(…) The phone records in question include who called whom when, and how long the call lasted, but do not include what was said in those phone calls. Investigators often hope such records will provide clues about possible sources the reporters were in contact with before a particular story published.

(…) The letter does not state the purpose of the phone records seizure, but toward the end of the time period mentioned in the letters, those reporters wrote a story about classified U.S. intelligence intercepts indicating that in 2016, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) had discussed the Trump campaign with Sergey Kislyak, who was Russia’s ambassador to the United States. Justice Department officials would not say if that reporting was the reason for the search of journalists’ phone records. Sessions subsequently became President Donald Trump’s first attorney general and was at the Justice Department when the article appeared.

(Sessions discussed Trump campaign matters with Russian ambassador, according to intercepts)

About a month before that story published, the same three journalists also wrote a detailed story about the Obama administration’s internal struggles to counter Russian interference in the 2016 election. (Read more: Washington Post, 5/07/2021)  (Archive)

“The Biden administration’s newest addition to the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, Susan Hennessey, is a Russia collusion hoaxer who deleted hundreds of tweets boosting lies about the Trump administration before she announced her new position.

I’ll still have this account, in a personal capacity. But things will be a bit quieter around here.

— Susan Hennessey (@Susan_Hennessey) May 10, 2021

Hennessey, who formerly worked for Democrat think tank and Russia collusion hoax organization the Brookings Institution, deleted hundreds of rants peddling lies about Michael Flynn, Carter Page, and FISA, boosting the Steele dossier, and pushing other leftist collusion talking points.

Not only did Hennessey openly adopt and echo corporate media narratives alleging that former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election, but she also accused the Republican and his team of lying to the public while encouraging trust in the Intelligence Community that falsified information on spy warrant applications.

“The FBI officials were telling the truth.”

The FISA court said warrants against Carter Page were illegal, and one of Mueller’s FBI lawyers who compiled the FISA applications was convicted of falsifying information in those FISA applications.

This nutjob now works at DOJ. pic.twitter.com/JDgKJikcuK

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) May 10, 2021

(Read more: TheFederalist, 5/10/2021) (Archive)

Saagar Enjeti gives his thoughts on the selection of Susan Hennessey to head the NSA at the Department of Justice.

“Today, the Biden administration announced that CAP President and CEO Neera Tanden has been appointed as senior adviser to President Joe Biden. John Podesta, founder and director of CAP, released the following statement:

Neera Tanden (c), president of the Center for American Progress, with co-founder John Podesta (l), and Hillary Clinton, poses during a gala celebrating the 10th anniversary of the center on October 24, 2013. (Credit: Chip Somodavilla / Getty Images)

Neera’s intellect, tenacity, and political savvy will be an asset to the Biden administration as she assumes a new role as senior adviser to the president. While we will be sorry to lose her considerable policy expertise and leadership at the Center for American Progress—an organization which we founded together in 2003—I am exceptionally thrilled to see her step into a new position serving this White House and the American people.

In a few short months, the White House has made remarkable progress combating numerous once-in-a-generation challenges—from vaccinating millions of Americans, to delivering real economic relief from the coronavirus pandemic, to strengthening the Affordable Care Act,  to tackling climate change, and more. Many of these bold policy solutions, which have bipartisan support from voters across the country, were developed and led by Neera at CAP over many years. The administration’s efforts will be magnified with Neera Tanden on the team, and I am excited to see what she will achieve in the role of senior adviser and in the years to come.

In addition to serving as president and CEO of CAP, Tanden also served as CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. In those roles, she focused on how both organizations can fulfill their missions to expand opportunity for all Americans. Tanden has also served in both the Obama and Clinton administrations as well as on presidential campaigns.” (Read more: American Progress, 5/14/2021)  (Archive)

Glenn Simpson (Credit: New York Times)

“There’s a fight brewing in a DC federal court over Fusion GPS’s internal correspondence and records. And they’re losing.

Background

In 2017, the owners of Alfa Bank (we’ll call them Alfa Bank for the purposes of this article) sued Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson for their publication of false statements accusing Alfa Bank of “bribery, extortion, and interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.”

Now, the Alfa Bank is on offense. They have filed a motion to compel, asking the Court to require Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson to produce nearly 500 critically important documents improperly withheld as privileged.

Fusion/Simpson have fought the production of the documents, arguing that they are subject to the “attorney-client privilege” and otherwise privileged and not subject to production.

These are weak legal arguments – and the attorneys for Alfa Bank recognize it. First, Fusion/Simpson previously admitted the purpose of their work was political, and not for the purposes of any ongoing litigation.

Alfa Bank further observes that Glenn Simpson has even testified that the purpose of his work was pure politics, saying his goal was,  “to expose an opponent’s vulnerabilities, provide source material for the media, and feed attack ads.”

As their motion argues:

Perkins Coie did not engage Defendants to perform legal or litigation-focused work; rather, Defendants have admitted (and publicly boasted) that Perkins Coie engaged Defendants in a “political context” to perform “political work.”

Second, even if these 500 documents were subject to the attorney-client privilege (and they most certainly are not), that privilege was waived when Simpson/Fusion leaked their research to third parties, including the media and government officials.

One has to be curious about exactly why Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson are putting up such a fight to keep these 500 documents hidden. We think it’s because thus far, the public hasn’t seen the communications between Perkins Coie and Fusion GPS/Glenn Simpson or the internal Fusion GPS correspondence.” (Read more: Techno Fog, 5/25/2021)  (Archive)

Jonathan Turley testifies May 15, 2019, before Nadler’s House Judiciary Committee and warns them not to pursue this ridiculous action of trying to hold Barr in contempt via the courts, because they would be heading into a “world of hurt if they do” (Credit: YouTube)

“The long-awaited, though partial, release of a memorandum from the Justice Department this week left many “frustrated,” as predicted by the Washington Post, in Washington. The reason is what it did not contain.  Critics had sought the memo as the “smoking gun” to show how former Attorney General Bill Barr scuttled any obstruction charges against Donald Trump. Instead, the memo showed the opposite. The staff of the OLC actually found that the allegations did not meet the standard of obstruction even without any defenses or privileges related to Trump’s office.

The issue of obstruction of justice ran throughout Barr’s second term as Attorney General. Before his confirmation hearing, a memo was released that Barr wrote to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The memo discussed flaws in the use of the most likely federal provision on obstruction of justice against Trump. Barr was hammered by Democratic senators on his view of obstruction, as was I when I testified the next day as a witness. I agreed with many of the flaws noted by Barr in the memo.

Barr’s more nuanced arguments were drowned out by a long litany of experts like Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe who publicly insisted that obstruction was not only clearly established (with a long litany of other crimes) but that Barr’s rejection of that crime was evidence of his raw partisanship. In a public letter to me, Ralph Nader, Lou Fisher, and Bruce Fein stated that his rejection of obstruction was akin to “a papal encyclical that President Trump was innocent of obstruction of justice” that ignored Mueller’s “chronicle [of] multiple instances of evidence of obstruction.”

Throughout this never-ending barrage, Barr remained largely silent on the internal review of the matter and declined to release the full OLC memo. That only increased speculation that Barr must be hiding countervailing conclusions of legal staff. We know now that (at least the now disclosed portion of) the memo supports Barr’s prior view and, despite that fact, he withheld the information out of concern for the confidentiality of the internal deliberations.

It turns out that the review and debate over the obstruction allegations began before Barr started as Attorney General. The memo also confirms that the Mueller staff was part of that analysis with career prosecutors at Main Justice. The memo states that the prosecutors reviewed the Mueller evidence and concluded that the evidence “examined by the Special Counsel could not, as a matter of law, support an obstruction charge under the circumstances. Accordingly, were there no constitutional barriers, we would recommend, under the Principles of Federal Prosecution, that you decline to commence such a prosecution.” In plain English, that means that the prosecutors came to the same conclusion as Barr that the alleged conduct did not satisfy the elements of this crime. Moreover, it stated that it would reject such a charge even without consideration of any constitutional barriers presented by Trump’s office.” (Read more: Jonathan Turley, 5/26/2021)  (Archive)