"Shifty" does not give up: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new
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One day the market will collapse, as it has in the past. No one knows when and what will cause it.
I believe it is always something that comes from left field and is unpredicatble but I do believe it will have two components.
One, the enormous federal deficit will eventually overwhelm us, and
Two, there will be too much financial leverage which will help to propel the market down as the ripple effect takes hold.
Markets have two kind of doors. When it goes up the door is wide and when it declines the door narrows. Both conditions are dangerous but for different reasons. The market is propelled by greed and fear.
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Why Trump does not connect the cost of additional security will partly/mostly pay for itself by reducing illegal immigration and all the associated costs ? (See 1 and 1a below.)
The other side of the issue. (See 1b below.)
You Decide.
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Yesterday Hillary went to Georgetown University and continues to blame everyone for her failure while taking full responsibility for her decisions. One day she will learn to own her mistakes but then that may kill her.
She has more baggage than that under he eyes,
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Dick
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1) The Cost of Illegal Immigration
By Ruthie Blum
- “At the federal, state, and local levels, taxpayers shell out approximately $134.9 billion to cover the costs incurred by the presence of more than 12.5 million illegal aliens, and about 4.2 million citizen children of illegal aliens.” — Matt O'Brien and Spencer Raley.
- It is also rather more than the single payment of $25 billion that it will cost to build a wall — five and a half times more, and every year.
- “Undocumented immigrants are at least 142% more likely to be convicted of a crime than other Arizonans. They also tend to commit more serious crimes…” — John R. Lott.
- In 2015, included in the DEA's drug-threat assessment was the fact that drug overdoses killed more people in the United States than car accidents or guns. Many of these drugs [were] smuggled in large volumes by drug cartels.”
In his State of the Union address on January 30, US President Donald J. Trump referred to the brutal murder of two 16-year-old girls from Long Island in December 2016 by members of the “savage MS-13 gang,” responsible for a spate of other gruesome killings in the area, as well.
Many of these gang members, he explained, had entered the United States illegally. “For decades, open borders have allowed drugs and gangs to pour into our most vulnerable communities,” he said.
Calling on Congress “to finally close the deadly loopholes that have allowed… criminal gangs to break into our country,” he listed the four pillars of his immigration-reform proposal:
- A path to citizenship for 1.8 million illegal immigrants who were brought to America by their parents.
- The construction of a “great wall on the southern border” and enforcement by agents patrolling and securing the border.
- Ending the visa lottery, “a program that randomly plans out green cards without regard for skill, merit, for the safety of American people.”
- Ending the “current, broken system” of chain migration of distant relatives, and limiting sponsorships to spouses and minor children.
Although he did not specify this in his speech, Trump reportedly is seeking $25 billion from Congress to fund the wall. Opponents of the wall have been arguing that illegal immigrants do not commit crimes at a higher rate than legal immigrants or native-born Americans; that illegal immigration has been a boon to the economy, rather than a drain on it; and that the cost both of deportation and a wall far exceeds the benefits of both. These claims are repeatedly voiced by the Trump administration's detractors, as part of their campaign to accuse the president of racism; but what are the facts?
To set the record straight, let us take a look at a number of those that have been obscured or ignored by the media.
As far as the cost of the wall is concerned, a study released in September 2017 by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) reveals that, “At the federal, state, and local levels, taxpayers shell out approximately $134.9 billion to cover the costs incurred by the presence of more than 12.5 million illegal aliens, and about 4.2 million citizen children of illegal aliens.” This, the report says, is a nearly $3 billion increase in the cost since 2013. It is also rather more than the single payment of $25 billion that it will cost to build a wall – five and a half times more, and every year.
Pictured: The US-Mexico border fence near San Diego, California. (Image source: US Customs and Border Protection)
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The same goes for the cost of deporting illegal immigrants. According to Steven A. Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies,
“…The average cost of a deportation is much smaller than the net fiscal drain created by the average illegal immigrant,” in part due to the fact that “illegal immigrants overwhelmingly have modest levels of education — most have not completed high school or have only a high school education…creating more in costs for government than they pay in taxes.”
The question of the rates of criminality among illegal aliens vs. those of legal immigrants and American-born citizens has been examined by John R. Lott, Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, using Arizona's prison population as a microcosm for study. According to Lott, the ability to measure the crime-rate among illegal immigrants in the U.S. has been difficult, due to many factors, including the lack of a national data base and “primitive” methodology – such as “simple, cross-sectional analysis to see whether areas with higher immigrant populations have higher crime rates,” and “a purely time series approach… look at the United States as a whole and note that crime has decreased since 1990 as immigration has increased.” The advantage of the Arizona Department of Corrections study, Lott says, is that
“over our 32.5-year period, we know each prisoner who entered the prison system, their criminal convictions history, and whether he is a documented or undocumented immigrant. The only mystery is why this type of data has not been utilized until now.”
Peter Kirsanow wryly solved the mystery in National Review, writing:
“Unfortunately, almost every public official not named Jeff Sessions guards against disclosure of illegal-immigrant crime data more tenaciously than disclosure of nuclear launch codes.”
According to Lott, whose research spans 1985-2017:
“Arizona's prison population data allow us to compare undocumented immigrants' share of the prison population with their estimated share of the state population…For the first time, we break down the data to examine differences between US citizens, undocumented immigrants, and legal permanent residents. One advantage of using convictions rather than just reported crimes is that convictions depend on a 'beyond a reasonable doubt' standard of evidence and thus are much less likely to count innocent people.”
The findings are unequivocal, as the following summary illustrates:
“Undocumented immigrants are at least 142% more likely to be convicted of a crime than other Arizonans. They also tend to commit more serious crimes and serve 10.5% longer sentences, more likely to be classified as dangerous, and 45% more likely to be gang members than U.S. citizens…There are dramatic differences between in the criminal histories of convicts who are U.S. citizens and undocumented immigrants…“[Y]oung undocumented immigrants commit crime at twice the rate of young U.S. citizens. These undocumented immigrants also tend to commit more serious crimes. If undocumented immigrants committed crime nationally as they do in Arizona, in 2016 they would have been responsible for over 1,000 more murders, 5,200 rapes, 8,900 robberies, 25,300 aggravated assaults, and 26,900 burglaries.”
These numbers do not even include the cost to American taxpayers of the toll taken on America's children by illegally imported drugs. Although available information on this is at best spotty, the key finding from the DEA's 2017 National Drug Threat Assessment is that the “most commonly reported greatest drug threat was heroin, at 44.1 percent of law enforcement responses… This was followed by 29.8 percent of respondents indicating methamphetamine was their greatest drug threat, 9.3 percent reporting controlled prescription drugs…”
This tells us something about the extent of the problem, but not enough. The 2010 drug-threat assessment, released a year after the previous administration took office, revealed that,
“From January through November 2009, U.S. seizures of illegal drugs in transit exceeded 1,626 metric tons, indicating that DTOs succeed in moving several thousand tons of cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana, heroin, and MDMA into the United States annually. There are unique smuggling and transportation methods…”
In 2015, included in the DEA's drug-threat assessment was the fact that drug overdoses killed more people in the United States than car accidents or guns. As was noted by the BBC at the time, “Many of these drugs are smuggled in large volumes by drug cartels…”
The late Democrat Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” His successors in Congress would do well to remember this while debating the issue of illegal immigration. They certainly need to keep it in mind when voting on the administration's proposed plan.
Ruthie Blum is the author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the 'Arab Spring.'”
1a) James Comey: Connecting the Dots
If Rep. Trey Gowdy, R- S.C., really believes the House Intelligence Committee’s FISA memo does not vindicate President Trump, then he must also believe it does not answer the question of when Donald Trump stopped beating Melania. Gowdy made that claim, among others, in a series of tweets on Friday and in a “Face the Nation” interview on Sunday:
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said the release of the controversial FISA memo by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee does not discredit Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation.Ah, but it does. President Trump was mocked when he said that Trump Tower was wiretapped and he and his team were being spied on by their own government. Now we know, confirmed by the FISA memo, that it not only happened, but also that it happened at the behest of the opposition DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign colluding with a corrupt DOJ and FBI that used FISA warrant requests based on a Russian-linked dossier they paid for.
In a series of tweets on Friday, Gowdy said the memo, which alleges government surveillance abuse targeting at least one member of the Trump campaign, raises concerns about the FISA process and is of interest to the American people.
Despite that, Gowdy said he remains confident in Mueller and the "overwhelming majority" of the men and women serving at the FBI and Justice Department…
In an interview on "Face the Nation" on Sunday, Gowdy said he understands that the president is "frustrated," but he reiterated he doesn't think the memo "has any impact on the Russia probe."
What does this FISA abuse have to do with the Russia collusion probe? Consider that the corruption of the FBI regarding the Hillary email probe, the Russia-Uranium One investigations, the FISA abuses occurred largely under FBI directors named Robert Mueller and James Comey. Comey had the fix in for Hillary Clinton and when Trump fired him for usurping the role of attorney general and publicly exonerating her, Comey, by criminally leaking memos on a private conversation in the Oval Office, arranged for the appointment of a special counsel, his good friend Robert Mueller.
While putting the fix in for Hillary to keep her out of prison, Comey was also part of the cabal trying to keep Trump out of the White House. His deputy was Andrew McCabe, forced out of his post as a result of the FISA memo’s description of his corrupt activities. Peter Strzok, a leader of the FBI resistance to Trump, as well as McCabe and his paramour Lisa Page, worked for Comey. Strzok, the lead investigator in the Hillary probe, went on to work for Mueller in the Russia collusion probe. A few dots for Trey Gowdy to connect.
Consider that Comey, in testimony given under oath in June 2017, said the Steele dossier was “salacious and unverified”. Yet Comey signed off on at least one, if not four, FISA warrant applications based on that “salacious and unverified” dossier. Either he was lying to Congress or he was lying to the FISA court judge. In any event, he was out to get Trump and the FISA abuse and his plot to set up Robert Mueller as a special counsel without a crime to investigate or any evidence of collusion were both parts of his conspiracy to get Trump.
Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., says that McCabe testified that if it weren’t for material from British spy Christopher Steele’s fraudulent dossier, there would have been no FISA requests and no surveillance of Team Trump:
Congressman Lee Zeldin (R-NY) took to Twitter following the release of the memo detailing FISA abuse and misconduct against the Trump campaign and asserted that former-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s statements regarding the dossier were recorded during his sworn testimony.
His tweets nuked the claims of CNN’s “anonymous sources” that said McCabe never made the statements laid out in the memo.
As Democrats frantically attempted to discredit the memo, Zeldin wrote that McCabe testified under oath that there would not have been a warrant without the dubious Christopher Steele dossier which was commissioned by Fusion GPS and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.
“McCabe did in fact testify under oath that there would not have been a FISA warrant if not for the dossier. It was recorded,” Rep. Zeldin tweeted.
Without Comey’s FBI submitting false FISA requests, including at least one signed off by Comey himself. there would have been no surveillance of Team Trump. On Comey’s watch, McCabe and Strzok hatched their plot to unseat Trump, with at least one session held in “Andy’s office.” Without Comey’s actions there would have been no special counsel’s office staffed with Hillary Clinton donors and Democratic activists. Again, connect those dots.
Without Comey, the only justification for a special counsel would have been the conversation between George Papadopolous, briefly a foreign policy adviser for Team Trump, and an Australian diplomat in a bar:
The FBI reportedly decided to open its investigation into the Trump campaign after George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser for the Trump team, drunkenly admitted to an Australian diplomat the Russians had damaging information on Hillary Clinton, an admission that came weeks before WikiLeaks began publishing its tranche of hacked emails.
Papadopoulos made the revelation in May 2016 to Alexander Downer, the top Australian diplomat in Britain, while he was drinking at the Kensington Wine Rooms in London. Three weeks earlier, a professor with ties to the Russian government told Papadopoulos the Russians had emails that would be damaging to Clinton, according to the New York Times.
Australian officials notified American officials about Papadopoulos’s statements two months later when WikiLeaks began publishing the hacked emails from Democratic officials, American and foreign officials told the New York Times.
Hearsay is inadmissible in a court of law. This is third or fourth-hand hearsay involving a drunken Trump hanger-on in a bar who passed on information to an Australian diplomat from a professor with ties to the Russian government. This is an awfully thin reed to hang an investigation on. Wasn’t the dossier also put together by someone with links to the Russian government, one Christopher Steele?
There is a link between the FISA abuse by the FBI and the Mueller investigation – the man who had it in for Trump after obstructing Justice n the Hillary Clinton email probe. That link is James Comey.
Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.
Life can become a nightmare for those targeted by federal prosecutors in search of scalps. Ask General Michael Flynn. After reading two excellent books on federal prosecutors who have been willing to cross the line into misbehavior, I am having nightmares, too.
Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice (2014) is written by Sidney Powell, a defense
attorney and former federal prosecutor Three Felonies A Day: How The Feds target the innocent (2011 is by Harvey Silverglate, campus rights activist, attorney and prolific author. Both tell you the dark side of the US Law enforcement system, at the DOJ and FBI, and among career prosecutors and investigators who become miscreants and hacks.
Powell and Silverglate write about the horror faced by regular, even prominent citizens whom the FBI and DOJ destroyed, or tried to destroy, using their unlimited resources and the trust of the courts and the public. From the very beginning of the prosecution when the affidavits for charges are submitted to the court, the honesty and fairness of the prosecutors is tested, and all too often, ambitious and aggressive prosecutors betray that trust.
Most of all, these books warn that the character and virtue of prosecutors are the critical factor in the proper conduct of a prosecution, the choice of target, the charge made, and the conduct of the discovery and the trial. Prosecutors have all the cards, and if they don’t conduct an honest and fair prosecution, innocent people are harmed, destroyed by their striving for conviction at any cost, even by cheating or by abuse of the process.
With Robert Mueller on a general warrant fishing expedition to take down a president, its time to face the menace, the monster of mendacious and malicious prosecutors on the hunt with the resources of the government and the advantage of the assumption by the courts that they are reliable and honest, dedicated to justice.
Some of the prosecutors featured in the two books are people whom Robert Mueller hired for his special counsel office. The poster boy for abusive prosecutors is Andrew Weissmann, Mueller’s number one boy, a longtime ally who was in charge of the Enron prosecutions and the Arthur Anderson debacle that resulted in multiple appellate court reversals of convictions. Unfortunately, Weissmann had already destroyed the large accounting firm and damaged the lives and fortunes of its more than 10,000 employees.
Powell discusses others in the DOJ who were arrayed against her in the Enron and Arthur Anderson matters, who ended up in prestigious positions in the private sector or promoted with the DOJ after the dishonest and predatory prosecutions and other stunts. Senator Ted Stephens lost his political career to a corrupt prosecution that was eventually nullified.
Harvey Silverglate relates his own experience of Mueller attempting to entrap him into suborning perjury when he was defending a Mueller target. As Silverglate said in an interview for WGBH (Boston TV) news, he wouldn’t trust Mueller, who has the attitude of a Grand Inquisitor, not the choirboy Marine portrayed by his leftist allies in the press. Mueller has an uneven, sometimes incompetent record -- for example his Anthrax Letters investigation, the failure to convict Hell’s Angels on drug trafficking and his role during the Eric Holder time as Attorney General.
Prosecutors in the American system are charged to be exemplary in their role -- they are not mercenary destroyers, but rather represent the government and are tasked to be fair and judicious in their decisions to prosecute. They are also supposed to be guarantors of a fair trial; but unfortunately the incentives make some prosecutors unethical and low down mean, malignant, and mendacious in their practices and tactics.
Ms. Powell quotes The Center for Prosecutor Integrity list of misconduct that can terrorize targets of government prosecution, even if they are innocent:
Charging with more offenses and more serious offenses than warranted.
Withholding or delaying the release of exculpatory evidence.
Deliberately mishandling, mistreating or destroying evidence.
Allowing witnesses they know are not truthful to testify.
Pressuring defense witnesses not to testify.
Relying on fraudulent forensic experts.
During plea negotiations, overstating the strength of the evidence.
Making statements to the media that are designed to arouse public indignation.
Making improper or misleading statements to the jury.
Failing to report prosecutor misconduct when it is discovered.
In the real world of imperfect humans prosecutors are subject to a variety of pressures that make them forget their special status in the legal system as guarantors of justice. Incentives such as gratitude of victims, favorable media coverage, career promotions for successful prosecutions, appointments to judgeships or election to high office can tempt stepping over these lines.
These two books narrate in relentless and compelling detail the misconduct by hack prosecutors, and the low down “sharp” tactics used to get convictions. Too often, the FBI and DOJ cheating that was apparent and even asserted to the court by the defense, subject to some inquiry, was allowed by a acquiescent court, sometimes motivated, it appears, by political pressure to allow a rogue prosecution. That was clearly a factor in the Enron cases, but if politics enters, it can impact all kinds of cases and judges we would only hope to be impartial are partisans.
Ms. Powell and Mr. Silverglate detail many cases of FBI and DOJ cheating on investigations and prosecutions, for example misrepresentations of affidavits to charge crimes and investigative interview summaries, called 302 reports, to the court. I was most alarmed to see that judges are not inclined to properly supervise and test the claims of prosecutors, even after their deceptions were pointed out or whouls have been. Courts offer great leniency to miscreant and dissembling government prosecutors for various reasons.
Mr. Silverglate's book focuses on the problem of vague statutes that ensnared innocent people in prosecutions that were wretched examples of government prosecutor misconduct. His examples come out of the panoply of federal statutes that are so vague that prosecutors and courts can invent crimes out of whole cloth. You probably never heard of the despicable statute that creates a crime based on loss of honest services, There are wire fraud and drug regulations cases that result in prosecutions of business and professional people engaged in what should be considered normal activities. Silverglate relates stories of physicians, businessmen, and politicians conducting normal activities or routine affairs who were accused under arcane and tortured interpretations of fraud and corruption laws that were poorly written.
Both Powell and Silverglate narrate with wrenching and horrific details in multiple cases. I recommend that you read these riveting and revolting stories of prosecutor and law enforcement misconduct, purely evil stuff that ruined people’s lives. But look under the bed and keep a light on.
Note: due entirely to an editing error, General Michael Hatden's name was used in place of General Michael Flynn's. Our apologies to rederrs and both men.
John Dale Dunn MD JD is an emergency physician, inactive attorney, Policy Advisor to the American Council on Science and Health of NYC and the Heartland Institute of Illinois.
1b)
PRESIDENT TRUMP CLAIMED in a tweet over the weekend that the controversial Nunes memo “totally vindicates” him, clearing him of the cloud of the Russia investigation that has hung over his administration for a year now.
Ms. Powell quotes The Center for Prosecutor Integrity list of misconduct that can terrorize targets of government prosecution, even if they are innocent:
Charging with more offenses and more serious offenses than warranted.
Withholding or delaying the release of exculpatory evidence.
Deliberately mishandling, mistreating or destroying evidence.
Allowing witnesses they know are not truthful to testify.
Pressuring defense witnesses not to testify.
Relying on fraudulent forensic experts.
During plea negotiations, overstating the strength of the evidence.
Making statements to the media that are designed to arouse public indignation.
Making improper or misleading statements to the jury.
Failing to report prosecutor misconduct when it is discovered.
In the real world of imperfect humans prosecutors are subject to a variety of pressures that make them forget their special status in the legal system as guarantors of justice. Incentives such as gratitude of victims, favorable media coverage, career promotions for successful prosecutions, appointments to judgeships or election to high office can tempt stepping over these lines.
These two books narrate in relentless and compelling detail the misconduct by hack prosecutors, and the low down “sharp” tactics used to get convictions. Too often, the FBI and DOJ cheating that was apparent and even asserted to the court by the defense, subject to some inquiry, was allowed by a acquiescent court, sometimes motivated, it appears, by political pressure to allow a rogue prosecution. That was clearly a factor in the Enron cases, but if politics enters, it can impact all kinds of cases and judges we would only hope to be impartial are partisans.
Ms. Powell and Mr. Silverglate detail many cases of FBI and DOJ cheating on investigations and prosecutions, for example misrepresentations of affidavits to charge crimes and investigative interview summaries, called 302 reports, to the court. I was most alarmed to see that judges are not inclined to properly supervise and test the claims of prosecutors, even after their deceptions were pointed out or whouls have been. Courts offer great leniency to miscreant and dissembling government prosecutors for various reasons.
Mr. Silverglate's book focuses on the problem of vague statutes that ensnared innocent people in prosecutions that were wretched examples of government prosecutor misconduct. His examples come out of the panoply of federal statutes that are so vague that prosecutors and courts can invent crimes out of whole cloth. You probably never heard of the despicable statute that creates a crime based on loss of honest services, There are wire fraud and drug regulations cases that result in prosecutions of business and professional people engaged in what should be considered normal activities. Silverglate relates stories of physicians, businessmen, and politicians conducting normal activities or routine affairs who were accused under arcane and tortured interpretations of fraud and corruption laws that were poorly written.
Both Powell and Silverglate narrate with wrenching and horrific details in multiple cases. I recommend that you read these riveting and revolting stories of prosecutor and law enforcement misconduct, purely evil stuff that ruined people’s lives. But look under the bed and keep a light on.
Note: due entirely to an editing error, General Michael Hatden's name was used in place of General Michael Flynn's. Our apologies to rederrs and both men.
John Dale Dunn MD JD is an emergency physician, inactive attorney, Policy Advisor to the American Council on Science and Health of NYC and the Heartland Institute of Illinois.
1b)
BOB MUELLER’S INVESTIGATION IS LARGER—AND FURTHER ALONG—THAN YOU THINK
ByGarrett M. Graff, Wired
PRESIDENT TRUMP CLAIMED in a tweet over the weekend that the controversial Nunes memo “totally vindicates” him, clearing him of the cloud of the Russia investigation that has hung over his administration for a year now.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, if anything, the Mueller investigation appears to have been picking up steam in the past three weeks—and homing in on a series of targets.
Last summer, I wrote an analysis exploring the “known unknowns” of the Russia investigation—unanswered but knowable questions regarding Mueller’s probe. Today, given a week that saw immense sturm und drang over Devin Nunes’ memo—a document that seems purposefully designed to obfuscate and muddy the waters around Mueller’s investigation—it seems worth asking the opposite question: What are the known knowns of the Mueller investigation, and where might it be heading?
The first thing we know is that we know it is large.
We speak about the “Mueller probe” as a single entity, but it’s important to understand that there are no fewer than five (known) separate investigations under the broad umbrella of the special counsel’s office—some threads of these investigations may overlap or intersect, some may be completely free-standing, and some potential targets may be part of multiple threads. But it’s important to understand the different “buckets” of Mueller’s probe.
As special counsel, Mueller has broad authority to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” as well as “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation,” a catch-all phrase that allows him to pursue other criminality he may stumble across in the course of the investigation. As the acting attorney general overseeing Mueller, Rod Rosenstein has the ability to grant Mueller the ability to expand his investigation as necessary and has been briefed regularly on how the work is unfolding. Yet even without being privy to those conversations, we have a good sense of the purview of his investigation.
Right now, we know it involves at least five separate investigative angles:
1. Preexisting Business Deals and Money Laundering.Business dealings and money laundering related to Trump campaign staff, including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former campaign aide Rick Gates, are a major target of the inquiry. While this phase of the investigation has already led to the indictment of Gates and Manafort, it almost certainly will continue to bear further fruit. Gates appears to be heading toward a plea deal with Mueller, and there is expected to be a so-called “superseding” indictment that may add to or refine the existing charges. Such indictments are common in federal prosecutions, particularly in complicated financial cases where additional evidence may surface. Mueller’s team is believed to have amassed more than 400,000 documents in this part of the investigation alone. There have also been reports—largely advanced through intriguing reporting by Buzzfeed—about suspicious payments flagged by Citibank that passed through the accounts of the Russian embassy in the United States, including an abnormal attempted $150,000 cash withdrawal by the embassy just days after the election.
2. Russian Information Operations. When we speak in shorthand about the “hacking of the election,” we are actually talking about unique and distinct efforts, with varying degrees of coordination, by different entities associated with the Russian government. One of these is the “information operations” (bots and trolls) that swirled around the 2016 election, focused on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, possibly with the coordination or involvement of the Trump campaign’s data team, Cambridge Analytica.
Presumably these so-called active measures were conducted by or with the coordination of what’s known colloquially as the Russian troll factory, the Internet Research Agency, in St. Petersburg. The extent to which these social media efforts impacted the outcome of the election remains an open question, but according to Bloomberg these social media sites are a “red hot” focus of Mueller’s team, and he obtained search warrants to examine the records of companies like Facebook. In recent weeks, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have begun working to notify more than a million users they suspect interacted with Russian trolls and propaganda.
3. Active Cyber Intrusions. Separate from the trolls and bots on social media were a series of active operations and cyber intrusions carried out by Russian intelligence officers at the GRU and the FSB against political targets like John Podesta and the DNC. We know that Russian intelligence also penetrated the Republican National Committee, but none of those emails or documents were made public. This thread of the investigation may also involve unofficial or official campaign contacts with WikiLeaks or other campaign advisers, like Roger Stone, as well as the warning—via the Australian government—that former foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos appeared to have foreknowledge of the hacking of Democratic emails.
Western intelligence, specifically the Dutch intelligence service AIVD, has evidently been monitoring for years the “Advanced Persistent Threats”—government-sponsored hackers who make up the Russia teams known as Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear, which were responsible for the attacks on Democratic targets. AIVD even evidently managed to penetrate a security camera in the workspace of Cozy Bear, near Red Square in Moscow, and take screenshots of those working for the team. According to The Wall Street Journal, there are at least six Russian intelligence officers who may already be identified as personally responsible for at least some of these intrusions. Bringing criminal charges against these individuals would be consistent with the practices established over the past five years by the Justice Department’s National Security Division, which indicted—and in some cases even arrested—specific government and military hackers from nation-states like Iran, China, and Russia.
4. Russian Campaign Contacts. This corner of the investigation remains perhaps the most mysterious aspect of Mueller’s probe, as questions continue to swirl about the links and contacts among Russian nationals and officials and Trump campaign staff, including Carter Page, the subject of the FISA warrant that was the focus of the Nunes memo. Numerous campaign (and now administration) officials have lied about or failed to disclose contacts with both Russian nationals and Russian government officials, from meetings with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak to government banker Sergey Gorkov to the infamous Trump Tower meeting arranged by Donald Trump Jr. with Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer Natalia V. Veselnitskaya.
At least two members of the campaign—Papadopoulos and former national security adviser Michael Flynn—have already pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about these contacts. But many other Trump aides face scrutiny, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, White House adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump Jr. Some of these contacts may go back years; Page himself originally surfaced in January 2015 as “Male #1” in the indictment of three Russian SVR agents, working undercover in New York City, who had tried to recruit Page, an oil and gas adviser, as an intelligence asset, only to decide that he was too scatterbrained to be a useful source.
5. Obstruction of Justice. This is the big kahuna—the question of whether President Trump obstructed justice by pressuring FBI director James Comey to “look past” the FBI’s investigation of Michael Flynn and whether his firing in May was in any way tied to Comey’s refusal to stop the investigation. This thread, as far as we know from public reporting, remains the only part of the investigation that stretches directly into the Oval Office. It likely focuses not only on the President and the FBI director but also on a handful of related questions about the FBI investigation of Flynn and the White House’s statements about the Trump Tower meeting. The president himself has said publicly that he fired Comey over “this Russia thing.”
There’s fresh reason to believe that this is an active criminal investigation; lost amid the news of the Nunes memo on Friday was a court ruling in a lawsuit where I and a handful of other reporters from outlets like CNN and Daily Caller are suing the Justice Department to release the “Comey memos”: The ruling held that, based on the FBI’s private testimony to the court—including evidence from Michael Dreeben, one of the leaders of the special counsel’s office—releasing the memos would compromise the investigation. “Having heard this, the Court is now fully convinced that disclosure ‘could reasonably be expected to interfere’ with that ongoing investigation,” the judge wrote in our case.
Even the most generous interpretation of the Nunes memo—which has been widely debunked by serious analysts—raises questions only around the fourth thread of this investigation, insofar as it focuses on Carter Page, the one-time foreign policy adviser who appears to be ancillary to most of the rest of the Russia probes. All of the other avenues remain unsullied by the Nunes memo.
The second thing that we know is that large parts of the investigation remain out of sight. While we’ve seen four indictments or guilty pleas, they only involve threads one (money laundering) and four (Russian campaign contacts). We haven’t seen any public moves or charges by Mueller’s team regarding the information operations, the active cyber intrusions, or the obstruction of justice investigation.
We also know there’s significant relevant evidence that’s not yet public: Both Flynn and Papadopoulos traded cooperation and information as part of their respective plea deals, and none of the information that they provided has become public yet.
We also know that, despite the relative period of quiet since Flynn’s guilty plea in December, Mueller is moving fast. While parts of the case will likely unfold and continue for years, particularly if some defendants head for trial, Mueller has in recent weeks been interviewing senior and central figures, like Comey and Sessions. He’s also begun working to interview President Trump himself. Given that standard procedure would be to interview the central figure in an investigation last—when all the evidence is gathered—it seems likely that such interest means that Mueller is confident he knows what he needs to know for the obstruction case, at least.
All of these pieces of public evidence, the “known knowns,” point to one conclusion: Bob Mueller has a busy few weeks ahead of him—and the sturm und drang of the last week will likely only intensify as more of the investigation comes into public view.
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