Hoo Boy! Monday wasn’t a good day in MAGA land.
Donald Trump’s magic bullet investigation that would for sure prove the Deep State was out to get him came out, and it was a dud.
Details emerged from a lawsuit against sidekick and former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. Seventy pages of details, to be exact. And the plaintiff recorded large parts of it all, because she was told to save her boss’ comments for posterity. OMG!
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Special counsel John Durham spent four years looking for the origins of the FBI’s investigation into alleged collaboration between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Ruskies.
His final report spanning 306 pages was released on Monday. Durham was critical of how the investigation started and…. That’s about it.
Durham was appointed by Atty General Bill Barr in the context of former President Trump’s anger over Mueller’s findings.
Though Mueller did not charge any Trump aide with working with Russia to tip the election, it did find that Russia interfered on Trump's behalf and that the campaign welcomed, rather than discouraged, the help.
Mueller’s investigation produced 37 indictments; seven guilty pleas or convictions; and compelling evidence that the president obstructed justice on multiple occasions. He also uncovered and referred 14 criminal matters to other components of the Department of Justice.
The Mueller Report stated that if the Special Counsel’s Office felt they could clear the president of wrongdoing, they would have said so. Instead, the Report explicitly stated that it “does not exonerate” the President, explaining that the Office of Special Counsel “accepted” the Department of Justice policy that a sitting President cannot be indicted,
Durham’s investigation focused on whether the FBI’s actions during and after the 2016 presidential campaign were justified, following up on the White House assertion that the investigation was politically motivated.
FYI– The Department of Justice Inspector General also investigated this and found no evidence of political bias in the launch of the initial FBI investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign
Durham filed charges three times during his tenure, but only one resulted in a conviction — and that was for a case referred to him by the Justice Department inspector general.
The special counsel’s report did not recommend any further action against individuals or the promised “wholesale changes” in how the FBI handles politically charged investigations.
From the Guardian:
Durham’s investigation was recorded as costing about $6.5m as of last December. Durham, a longtime federal prosecutor who was the US attorney in Connecticut during the Trump administration, was allowed to stay in his role by the current attorney general until the completion of his work.
Two cases that Durham took to court ended in failure. Last year, a jury found cybersecurity lawyer Michael Sussman not guilty of lying to the FBI. A jury also found Danchenko not guilty of making false statements to the FBI in October, in a case argued personally by Durham.
Durham extracted a guilty plea from Clinesmith, who was sentenced to one year of probation after admitting in a 2020 plea agreement that he had altered a government email that a colleague then used to justify to a secret surveillance court the wiretap of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
Trump apparently trusted somebody who’d scanned the first pages of the report that were critical of the FBI and initially claimed it was a resounding victory for his side.
A short while later, the former President was lashing out about “cockroaches” in Washington DC, sending out an all-caps social media post saying “TREASON!!! THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY!”
Although he’d suggested many times that the Durham investigation would prove a deep state conspiracy, and being not-so-shy about dropping the names of who he thought would be jailed, the final Durham report provided nothing of the sort.
Durham’s lack of leadership led to near-constant turmoil within the investigation even as he switch lines of inquiry after coming up short
From the New York Times:
In January, a report by The New York Times, based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former officials, showed how Mr. Durham’s inquiry became roiled by internal dissent over prosecutorial ethics, leading two prosecutors on his staff to resign in protest.
The article also described how Mr. Durham used Russian intelligence memos — suspected by other U.S. officials of containing disinformation — to gain access to emails of an aide to George Soros, the liberal philanthropist who is a target of the American right and Russian state media. Mr. Durham shifted to using grand jury powers to obtain the information after a judge twice rejected his request for an order as legally insufficient.
The article also revealed that in the fall of 2019, Italian officials unexpectedly gave Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham a tip about suspected financial crimes linked to Mr. Trump. While the tip was unrelated to the Russia investigation, Mr. Barr had Mr. Durham investigate the matter rather than referring it to another prosecutor. Mr. Durham brought no charges.
Mr. Durham’s report did not mention any of those matters.
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A lawsuit’s details emerging yesterday about Rudy Giuliani are simply awful. Some of the allegations made in a 70 page document are so perverse I’m reluctant to quote it. (If it’s making my gut churn, I can’t imagine what those words would do to somebody who’s suffered through abuse and/or being constantly sexually assaulted.)
The crimes outlined in the brief began in January 2019 when Rudy Giuliani hired Noelle Dunphy to manage his media presence.
Here’s Heather Cox Richardson in today’s Letters from an American substack, with a condensed version that doesn’t make me want to barf:
He promised her a salary of $1 million a year but said he couldn’t pay her until his divorce was final and, ultimately, paid her only small amounts of cash. In her account, he seemed to become obsessed with her, forcing her into sex and trying to dominate her. She is suing Giuliani, his companies, and 10 unidentified individuals over “unlawful abuses of power, wide-ranging sexual assault and harassment, wage theft, and other misconduct” and is asking for $10 million in compensation and damages.
The story of her time with Giuliani, whom she describes as a chronically alcoholic sexual abuser prone to racist and sexist outbursts, is bad enough—and she claims to have recordings—but her other allegations are politically incendiary. She claims to have heard Giuliani say that he was selling presidential pardons for $2 million a pop, splitting the proceeds with Trump, and that Giuliani told her on February 7, 2019, “about a plan that had been prepared for if Trump lost the 2020 election.” Specifically, Giuliani told Ms. Dunphy that Trump’s team would claim that there was ‘voter fraud’ and that Trump had actually won the election…. That same day, Giuliani had Ms. Dunphy sit in on a speakerphone conversation about a potential business opportunity involving a $72 billion dollar gas deal in China.”
Also of note is her claim that, since part of her job was managing emails, Giuliani gave her access to his email account. The system stored at least 23,000 emails on her own personal computer, including “privileged, confidential, and highly sensitive” emails from, to, or concerning Trump, his children Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Eric Trump; Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; Trump’s lawyers and advisors; media figures including Rupert Murdoch, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson; and so on.
Anybody who saw Rudy Giuliani’s cameo in the Borat movie should have a general idea of what his MO was, get women drunk and go in for the kill.
Such a nasty pervert was on the front lines of the ‘family values’ party not long ago!
Via Daily Kos:
As noted by former Federal Prosecutor Renato Mariotti today, “Noelle Dunphy has presented more serious evidence of criminal activity in a civil complaint than John Durham uncovered after a nearly four-year investigation.”
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Notes from My Morning Readings:
Gianforte signs bill banning state agencies from analyzing climate impacts Via the Montana Free Press. (It’s easy to get distracted when clowns like FLa Gov. DeSantis are banning books; remember these nutz can be found everywhere ruled by the GOP.)
Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte has signed into law a bill that bars the state from considering climate impacts in its analysis of large projects such as coal mines and power plants.
GOP Oversight Chair Says He’s Lost Track of His Biden Corruption Informant Via the Daily Beast. Another GOP blockbuster fizzles with a ‘dog ate my homework’ excuse.
On Wednesday, Comer—the chairman of the House Oversight Committee—held a much-hyped press conference in which he promised to expose the preliminary findings of four months’ worth of scrutiny into the Biden family’s business dealings. Publicized as a “judgment day” for President Joe Biden, the conference ultimately proved anticlimactic, largely consisting of Comer throwing around vague, unsubstantiated accusations and failing to link the president to any of his relatives’ alleged “influence peddling.”
But on Fox’s Sunday Morning Futures, Comer offered up what appeared to be a partial excuse: The probe’s primary informant had flown the coop.
George Santos’ New “Mission”: Freeing an Accused Fraudster Who Tried to Overturn the 2020 Election Via Mother Jones
Game recognizes game. And the far right scene in New York City is kind of a small world. So it’s weird, but not particularly surprising, that just days before being indicted on federal fraud charges, fabulist Congressman George Santos appeared on a livestream produced by devotees of Guo Wengui—an exiled Chinese mogul who allegedly orchestrated of a massive international fraud and is also a prodigious purveyor of misinformation.
Guo, who also uses the name Miles Guo, is a longtime patron and professional partner of Steve Bannon. And Bannon’s allies in places like the fanatical New York Young Republicans Club are also big Santos backers. These ties likely explain how Santos showed up Friday at a cavernous, sparsely furnished Mahwah, NJ, mansion to tacitly back Guo supporters’ kooky conspiracy theory that their leader has been framed by the FBI at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party.
Conservative pundits are increasingly open about who they think should be killed Via Media Matters. I believe THIS is where they’re headed. With so many examples to choose from, I picked a quote from Daily Wire host Matt Walsh.
“We don't have to make choices. We can execute all of them,” he continued. “We should be able to, anyway. Execute all the worst people, all of the worst criminals. Just execute them all. And this is the right first step. There's a lot more that needs to be done. I mean, this is actual criminal justice reform.”
Walsh further justified his desire to drastically ramp up executions on the grounds that the people he wants killed are drains on society, and he argued that their sentences should be carried out with no appeals process.
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