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real-human



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PostPosted: Sun Jul 31, 2022 8:19 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

if this is accurate those who did not make this public should be tried for treason. We need to set an example to and of these wacked out people. again if this would have been a liberal trying this the media would be putting this front page forever... we have no liberal media..

Quote:
Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell met with Trump, and crafted an Executive Order for Trump to sign that would give the Defense Secretary 60 days of assessment. The DOD could then keep Trump in power until at least Feb. 2021. Why didn't Trump sign it?
Both the DOD and DOJ informed trump when he ordered them through Mark Meadows to keep him in power that there would be mass resignations. Several people warned him that if 5000 Federal staff including the entire JCS, every General above three stare rank, every member of the DOJ with a classified (above 15) pay rank, all of state and interior, and better than half of treasury and Homeland of the upper ranks would leave their posts then Trump would be left ordering toilets to be cleaned in the National Parks and the military and law enforcement absolutely would not return his calls, he backed down.

Milley let him know that he may stay in the White House, but he would do so with a a battalion of Military police around him, no power or communications, and anyone who walked out would be arrested on the spot. Trump blinked first.

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real-human



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PostPosted: Sun Jul 31, 2022 7:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

my goodness the witness tampering that went on and is going on... pardon me...

I have said this before we need an amendment passed that no President may pardon anyone he has known personally or someone who commits a crime in his name or to his benefit.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/add-witness-tampering-to-matt-gaetz-s-legal-problems-legal-experts/ar-AA108wEU?ocid=winp2sv1plus&cvid=e0bb35de003f44a6b52cdf10c393cdf4


add witness tampering to Matt Gaetz’s legal problems: legal experts


Quote:
Legal experts on Saturday weighed in on the bombshell report that GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida was caught on tape discussing a pardon for Roger Stone if he did not testify against Donald Trump.

"As Roger Stone prepared to stand trial in 2019,complaining he was under pressure from federal prosecutors to incriminate Donald Trump, a close ally of the president repeatedly assured Stone that 'the boss' would likely grant him clemency if he were convicted, a recording shows," The Washington Post reported.

On July 10th, Stone told journalist Howard Fineman that Trump "knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t.”

Trump commuted Stone's sentence later that day.

Related video: 'Be offended': Gaetz stands by controversial comments on female abortion rights protesters


“The boss still has a very favorable view of you,” Gaetz said in the new recording. "I don’t think the big guy can let you go down for this.”

Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance said, "sounds like how mobsters talk."

"The Republican Party was — and is — mobbed up," said longtime GOP operative Bill Kristol, who served as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle.

Prominent conservative lawyer George Conway attempted to translate the tweet into full mob talk to make his point.

Conway said, "our friend, you know, da big guy, da big orange guy in da big house, he'll take care of it, you know, that thing, not that thing, de udder thing, you know, the one wid the guy wid da badge."

But Art Acevedo, who served as chief of police in Austin and Houston, didn't find it funny.

"Mobsters, the whole lot. It’s past time they are all held accountable like everyday Americans," Acevedo said. "The rule of law should be applied equally to all, regardless of societal status."

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real-human



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PostPosted: Tue Aug 02, 2022 7:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

wow, lock um up...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/jan-6-texts-of-trump-defense-officials-wiped-clean-by-pentagon-court-filing-shows/ar-AA10eTm5?ocid=winp2sv1plus&cvid=b432f73942fa4554bda7b4b72df3aff3


Jan. 6 texts of Trump Defense officials wiped clean by Pentagon, court filing shows


Quote:
Text messages received and sent by top Pentagon officials who were part of the Trump administration on Jan. 6, 2021, have been wiped from their government-issued phones, according to a court filing that cites statements by the Defense Department and Army.
The text messages from that day, the same day that a mob of Trump supporters invaded the U.S. Capitol, "were not preserved, and therefore could not be searched," according to that filing.
The watchdog group American Oversight asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to open an investigation into the Pentagon's "failure to preserve the communications."
Aerial view of the United States military headquarters, the Pentagon.
© Provided by CNBC
Aerial view of the United States military headquarters, the Pentagon.
Text messages received and sent by top Pentagon officials who were part of the Trump administration on Jan. 6, 2021, have been wiped from their government-issued phones, according to a federal court filing that cites statements by the Defense Department and Army.

The text messages from that day — when a mob of Trump supporters invaded the U.S. Capitol — "were not preserved, and therefore could not be searched," according to that filing.

The filing in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., was a joint status report from lawyers involved in a lawsuit by the watchdog group American Oversight against the Defense Department and Army, which seeks records related to Jan. 6 from a group of former Pentagon officials.

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real-human



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PostPosted: Mon Aug 15, 2022 11:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

ain't this telling about the cover up club of criminals....

and we have wieslburg covering up too.. put him in a jail with the worst of the worst...


https://abcnews.go.com/US/longtime-trump-organization-cfo-expected-plead-guilty-tax/story?id=88416077


Longtime Trump Organization CFO expected to plead guilty to tax charges, say sources


Quote:
The Trump Organization's longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, is expected to plead guilty to tax charges as soon as this week, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

Weisselberg, 75, is currently scheduled to go on trial in the fall, but a hearing in the case is now scheduled for this Thursday, in what could be a sign that he could change his plea then.

An attorney for Weisselberg declined to comment when contacted by ABC News.
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real-human



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PostPosted: Wed Aug 24, 2022 12:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/trump-s-team-told-ice-officials-to-wipe-all-data-from-their-phones-before-leaving-their-jobs-report-says/ar-AA10ZWeh?ocid=winp2sv1plustaskbarhover&cvid=d20e63708f09434fbb7019574cb788a3


Trump's team told ICE officials to wipe all data from their phones before leaving their jobs, report says
wrojas@insider.com (Warren Rojas) - 13h ago


Quote:
Trump administration aides deleted official records from their government-issued gadgets.
The latest instance involves texts and emails wiped by immigration officials.
"We cannot stand by as agency after agency admits that it destroys public records," say watchdogs.
Trump-era immigration officials scrubbed work-related information from their cell phones just before leaving office, a practice watchdog group American Oversight is raising the alarm about, following similar reports about widespread data wiping at the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the US Secret Service.

"We cannot stand by as agency after agency admits that it destroys public records," American Oversight executive director Heather Sawyer told CNN, adding that text messages "often contain crucial information on what federal employees are doing and why they are doing it."

"The obligation to retain these records is not optional — it is the law," Sawyer said in a statement.

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PostPosted: Thu Sep 08, 2022 10:56 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-and-barr-s-corruption-of-the-justice-department-was-worse-than-we-knew/ar-AA11BYhw?ocid=winp2sv1plustaskbar&cvid=8d533eb36901421295b6e07ab511fea6


Trump and Barr’s Corruption of the Justice Department Was Worse Than We Knew


Quote:
The conventional wisdom regarding Donald Trump’s presidency is that the system works. Yes, Trump may have raged on Twitter about locking up his enemies and shutting down all the investigations, but when the smoke cleared, Robert Mueller was able to complete his work, Hillary was not locked up, and adults like William Barr were able to land the plane.


Geoffrey Berman’s inside account from the Justice Department deeply undercuts this comforting belief. Berman, who served as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York until Barr sacked him, describes constant pressure to go easy on Trump’s cronies while bringing charges against anybody who opposed him. That is hardly a surprise; Trump blurted out his belief that the Justice Department was his personal weapon all the time, and a stream of underlings has affirmed that he made these demands loudly and repeatedly behind closed doors.

The truly novel revelations brought forward by Berman is that Trump’s pressure campaign frequently succeeded. Officials loyal to Trump successfully pressured the Department of Justice to bring charges against Gregory Craig, a Democratic lawyer, for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Berman responded that, after investigating the matter, he believed Craig was innocent, but his deputy told him to “even things out” — a reference to previous cases charging Republicans — by indicting Craig.

When Trump began publicly demanding the Department charge John Kerry for violating the Logan Act by trying to persuade Iran not to build a nuclear weapon, Trump began publicly calling him a criminal. Trump’s demands made their way down to Berman, who was forced to investigate Kerry, and faced complaints that he wasn’t moving quickly enough.

Recommended video: Former Attorney General Bill Barr Says The Dept. Of Justice Is Close To Having Enough Evidence To Indict Donald Trump

technical case against Trump for his handling of sensitive documents
Berman also notes that Barr’s deputies tried to remove any references to illegal behavior by Trump from the indictment of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. Barr tried and failed to stifle the investigation into the violations of campaign-finance laws Cohen had undertaken at Trump’s behest. Trump was never charged.


What Berman reveals is that the pressure to weaponize the Justice Department against Trump’s enemies (and to protect him and his criminal friends) did not always fail, and it did not merely come from Trump himself. Barr and other officials in the Department frequently applied pressure to advance Trump’s corrupt ends. Barr successfully intervened several times to help Trump, by reducing sentences for Roger Stone and attempting to drop its prosecution of Michael Flynn.

It is true that Barr was only willing to go so far, and when Trump’s attempt to secure an unelected second term devolved into conspiracy theories so bizarre they couldn’t win a court case, Barr was ready to concede defeat. Even then, however, he left quietly and wrote an obsequious note praising Trump rather than warn the country that the president had gone stark raving mad.

Berman got his job because he had worked on Trump’s campaign. The system “worked” to the extent that Barr was less deranged than, say, a Rudy Giuliani. It did not protect either the process or the outcome of the Justice Department’s nonpolitical integrity.

What is perhaps most notable is the conclusions the relevant Republican actors have drawn from the experience. The Republican Establishment has decided Barr is a hero. Trump has decided he needed an attorney general even more loyal than Barr. And virtually the entire GOP believes the Justice Department is currently being corrupted, and that Merrick Garland is only investigating Trump’s stolen documents because Joe Biden wants to help the Democratic midterm campaign.

The system did not work under Trump. And every indication is that the next time Trump or any other Republican gains control over it, the outcome will be worse.
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PostPosted: Thu Sep 15, 2022 11:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

should have been noted while in office..

https://news.yahoo.com/john-kelly-read-assessments-trumps-035911613.html


John Kelly Read Assessments About Trump's Mental Health: Book


Quote:
Trump administration chief of staff John Kelly studied experts’ dire assessments of Donald Trump’s mental health to help him learn how to cope with the erratic behavior of his boss, according to a shocking revelation in an upcoming book.

Trump’s behavior was so disturbing that members of his own Cabinet tentatively discussed utilizing the 25th Amendment to force him out of office just months into his term, according to “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021.” The book, written by Peter Baker of The New York Times and Susan Glasser of The New Yorker, is due out next week.

But Cabinet members opted not to take action because they feared flaws in the amendment could make Trump more dangerous if they failed to get him out of the White House, according to the book.

As for Kelly, he secretly purchased “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” the first year Trump was in office. The book featured 27 mental health experts who warned that Trump was unfit for the presidency.

Kelly, a retired Marine general, consulted the book as he “sought help to understand the president’s particular psychoses” as he ran the White House, which Kelly referred to as “Crazytown,” according to “The Divider,” a copy of which was obtained by The Guardian.

“Kelly told others that the book was a helpful guide to a president he came to consider a pathological liar whose inflated ego was in fact the sign of a deeply insecure person,” reported Baker and Glasser.

Other unnamed senior officials reportedly shared Kelly’s view. “The Divider” quotes one as saying: “I think there’s something wrong with [Trump]. He doesn’t listen to anybody, and he feels like he shouldn’t. He just doesn’t care what other people say and think. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

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PostPosted: Mon Sep 19, 2022 8:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

look at the section I bolded the fix is in...

we need a special prosecutor just for this cast of very high crimes seem to have been committed by a top judge....
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/us/politics/trump-lawyers-herschmann.html


Trump’s Team of Lawyers Marked by Infighting and Possible Legal Troubles of Its Own


Quote:
To understand the pressures, feuds and questions about competence within former President Donald J. Trump’s legal team as he faces potential prosecution on multiple fronts, consider the experience of Eric Herschmann, a former Trump White House lawyer who has been summoned to testify to a federal grand jury.

For weeks this summer, Mr. Herschmann tried to get specific guidance from Mr. Trump’s current lawyers on how to handle questions from prosecutors that raise issues of executive privilege or attorney-client privilege.

After ignoring Mr. Herschmann or giving him what he seemed to consider perplexing answers to the requests for weeks, two of the former president’s lawyers, M. Evan Corcoran and John Rowley, offered him only broad instructions in late August. Assert sweeping claims of executive privilege, they advised him, after Mr. Corcoran had suggested that an unspecified “chief judge” would ultimately validate their belief that a president’s powers extend far beyond their time in office.

Mr. Herschmann, who served on Mr. Trump’s first impeachment defense team but later opposed efforts to reverse the results of the 2020 election, was hardly reassured and sounded confused by the reference to a chief judge.


“I will not rely on your say-so that privileges apply here and be put in the middle of a privilege fight between D.O.J. and President Trump,” Mr. Herschmann, a former prosecutor, responded in an email, referring to the Justice Department. The exchange was part of a string of correspondence in which, after having his questions ignored or having the lawyers try to speak directly with him on the phone instead, Mr. Herschmann questioned the competence of the lawyers involved.

The emails were obtained by The New York Times from a person who was not on the thread of correspondence. Mr. Herschmann declined to comment.

Mr. Herschmann’s opinion was hardly the only expression of skepticism from current and former allies of Mr. Trump who are now worried about a turnstile roster of lawyers representing a client who often defies advice and inserts political rants into legal filings.

Mr. Trump’s legal team just won one round in its battle with the Justice Department over the seizure of documents from his residence and private club in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, and it is not clear whether he will face prosecution from the multiple federal and state investigations swirling around him even as he weighs another run for the presidency.


A Red-Hot Affair With a Younger Man, and the Writing It Kindled
Mr. Trump has also just brought on a well-regarded lawyer, Christopher M. Kise, the former solicitor general of Florida, to help lead his legal team, after being rejected by a handful of others he had sought out, including former U.S. attorneys with experience in the jurisdictions where the investigations are unfolding.



Mr. Kise agreed to work for the former president for a $3 million fee, an unusually high retainer for Mr. Trump to agree to, according to two people familiar with the figure. Mr. Kise did not respond to an email seeking comment.

What to Know About the Trump Investigations
Card 1 of 6
Numerous inquiries. Since former President Donald J. Trump left office, he has been facing an array of federal, state and congressional investigations into his business dealings and political activities. Here is a look at some notable cases:

Classified documents inquiry. The F.B.I. searched Mr. Trump’s Florida home as part of the Justice Department’s investigation into his handling of classified materials. The inquiry is focused on documents that Mr. Trump had brought with him to Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence, when he left the White House.

Jan. 6 investigations. In a series of public hearings, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack laid out a comprehensive narrative of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. This evidence could allow federal prosecutors, who are conducting a parallel criminal investigation, to indict Mr. Trump.

Georgia election interference case. Fani T. Willis, the Atlanta-area district attorney, has been leading a wide-ranging criminal investigation into the efforts of Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia. This case could pose the most immediate legal peril for the former president and his associates.

New York State civil inquiry. Letitia James, the New York attorney general, has been conducting a civil investigation into Mr. Trump and his family business. The case is focused on whether Mr. Trump’s statements about the value of his assets were part of a pattern of fraud or were simply Trumpian showmanship.

Manhattan criminal case. Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, has been investigating whether Mr. Trump or his family business intentionally submitted false property values to potential lenders. But the inquiry faded from view after signs emerged suggesting that Mr. Trump was unlikely to be indicted.

But Mr. Trump’s legal team has been distinguished in recent months mostly by infighting and the legal problems that some of its members appear to have gotten themselves into in the course of defending him.

In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, Taylor Budowich, said that “the unprecedented and unnecessary weaponization of law enforcement against the Democrats’ most powerful political opponent is a truth that cannot be overshadowed and will continue to be underscored by the vital work being done right now by President Trump and his legal team.”

Two members of the Trump legal team working on the documents case, Mr. Corcoran and Christina Bobb, have subjected themselves to scrutiny by federal law enforcement officials over assurances they provided to prosecutors and federal agents in June that the former president had returned all sensitive government documents kept in his residence and subpoenaed by a grand jury, according to people familiar with the situation.

That assertion was proved to be untrue after the search of Mar-a-Lago in August turned up more than 100 additional documents with classification markings.

What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.

Learn more about our process.
Investigators are seeking information from Ms. Bobb about why she signed a statement attesting to full compliance with the subpoena, and they have signaled they have not ruled out pursuing a criminal inquiry into the actions of either Ms. Bobb or Mr. Corcoran, according to two people briefed on the matter.

The attestation was drafted by Mr. Corcoran, but Ms. Bobb added language to it to make it less ironclad a declaration before signing it, according to the people. She has retained the longtime criminal defense lawyer John Lauro, who declined to comment on the investigation.



It is unclear whether the authorities have questioned Ms. Bobb yet or whether she has had discussions with Mr. Trump’s other lawyers about the degree to which she would remain bound by attorney-client privilege.

Mr. Corcoran and Mr. Rowley did not respond to emails seeking comment.

Mr. Corcoran, a former federal prosecutor and insurance lawyer, represented the former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon in his recent trial for refusing to comply with a subpoena issued by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. In that case, Mr. Bannon claimed he believed he had immunity from testimony because of executive privilege; Mr. Trump later said he would not seek to invoke executive privilege for Mr. Bannon.

Mr. Corcoran, the son of a former Republican congressman from Illinois, has told associates that he is the former president’s “main” lawyer and has insisted to colleagues that he does not need to retain his own counsel, as Ms. Bobb has.

But several Trump associates have said privately that they believe Mr. Corcoran cannot continue in his role on the documents investigation. That view is shared by some of Mr. Trump’s advisers, who have suggested Mr. Corcoran needs to step away, in part because of his own potential legal exposure and in part because he has had little experience with criminal defense work beyond his stint as a federal prosecutor for the U.S. attorney in Washington more than two decades ago.

Mr. Trump has at least 10 lawyers working on the main investigations he faces. Mr. Corcoran, Ms. Bobb and Mr. Kise are focused on the documents case, along with James M. Trusty, a former senior Justice Department official. Three lawyers on the team — Mr. Corcoran, Mr. Rowley and Timothy Parlatore — represent other clients who are witnesses in cases related to Mr. Trump’s efforts to stay in power.

To the extent anyone is regarded as a quarterback of the documents and Jan. 6-related legal teams, it is Boris Epshteyn, a former campaign adviser and a graduate of the Georgetown University law school. Some aides tried to block his calls to Mr. Trump in 2020, according to former White House officials, but Mr. Epshteyn now works as an in-house counsel to Mr. Trump and speaks with him several times a day.

Mr. Epshteyn played a key role coordinating efforts by a group of lawyers for and political allies of Mr. Trump immediately after the 2020 election to prevent Joseph R. Biden Jr. from becoming president. Because of that role, he has been asked to testify in the state investigation in Georgia into the efforts to reverse Mr. Biden’s victory there.


Mr. Epshteyn’s phone was seized by the F.B.I. last week as part of the broad federal criminal inquiry into the attempts to overturn the election results and the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. That prompted alarm among some of Mr. Trump’s allies and advisers about his remaining in a position of authority on the legal team.

It is not clear how much strategic direction and leadership Mr. Kise may provide. But he is joining a team defined by warring camps and disputes over legal issues.

In his emails to Mr. Corcoran and Mr. Rowley, Mr. Herschmann — a prominent witness for the House select committee on Jan. 6 and what led to it — invoked Mr. Corcoran’s defense of Mr. Bannon and argued pointedly that case law about executive privilege did not reflect what Mr. Corcoran believed it did.

Mr. Herschmann made clear in the emails that absent a court order precluding a witness from answering questions on the basis of executive privilege, which he had repeatedly implored them to seek, he would be forced to testify.

“I certainly am not relying on any legal analysis from either of you or Boris who — to be clear — I think is an idiot,” Mr. Herschmann wrote in a different email. “When I questioned Boris’s legal experience to work on challenging a presidential election since he appeared to have none — challenges that resulted in multiple court failures — he boasted that he was ‘just having fun,’ while also taking selfies and posting pictures online of his escapades.”

Mr. Corcoran at one point sought to get on the phone with Mr. Herschmann to discuss his testimony, instead of simply sending the written directions, which alarmed Mr. Herschmann, given that Mr. Herschmann was a witness, the emails show.

In language that mirrored the federal statute against witness tampering, Mr. Herschmann told Mr. Corcoran that Mr. Epshteyn, himself under subpoena in Georgia, “should not in any way be involved in trying to influence, delay or prevent my testimony.”



“He is not in a position or qualified to opine on any of these issues,” Mr. Herschmann said.

Mr. Epshteyn declined to respond to a request for comment.

Nearly four weeks after Mr. Herschmann first asked for an instruction letter and for Mr. Trump’s lawyers to seek a court order invoking a privilege claim, the emails show that he received notification from the lawyers — in the early morning hours of the day he was scheduled to testify — that they had finally done as he asked.

His testimony was postponed.

Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting.

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Correction: Sept. 16, 2022
An earlier version of this article misstated a position once held by Eric Herschmann, the former White House lawyer. He was a prosecutor for New York State, not a federal prosecutor.

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PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2022 2:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

ya like a right wing state will prosecute a right winger for vote fraud?

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/voter-fraud-investigation-takes-serious-turn-mark-meadows-rcna61648?cid=eml_maddow_20221214&user_email=e73377d3e40790eecbf6a99203e1476ea2a23c644c2045abd739b8f9e629a73b&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=TRMS%2012/14/22&utm_term=Rachel%20Maddow%20Show

Voter fraud investigation takes a serious turn for Mark Meadows


Quote:
At roughly this time a decade ago, Mark Meadows was probably feeling pretty good about his career in North Carolina politics. The Republican had just easily won his first congressional campaign in the state, and the future appeared bright. Local voters proceeded to re-elect him by wide margins in the next three election cycles.

Following up on our earlier coverage, the former congressman’s position in the Tar Heel State has taken a significant turn for the worse. The Associated Press reported:

The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation said it has submitted to state prosecutors the findings of its voter fraud probe into Mark Meadows, a former White House chief of staff to President Donald Trump, who was simultaneously registered to vote in North Carolina and two other states earlier this year. The State Bureau of Investigation announced Tuesday that it has turned over the case file detailing its investigation into Meadows’ North Carolina voter registration and listed residence to Attorney General Josh Stein’s office.

In a statement, the North Carolina Bureau of Investigation said prosecutors with the state attorney general’s office will determine whether to file criminal charges in the case.

In case anyone needs a refresher — the bureau’s investigation took roughly eight months — let’s review how we arrived at this point.

Before and after Election Day 2020, Meadows talked quite a bit about voting irregularities. Like so many members of Donald Trump’s team, the Republican was heavily invested in the demonstrably false idea that there was widespread fraud.

“Do you realize how inaccurate the voter rolls are, with people just moving around?” Meadows asked in August 2020. He later complained in his memoir about some people casting ballots despite not being “an actual resident of the state they were voting in.”

It was against this backdrop that the public learned that Meadows himself appears to have cast a ballot from his former home state of North Carolina, despite having moved away and no longer being an actual state resident.

A local district attorney referred the matter to the state attorney general’s office, which asked North Carolina’s Bureau of Investigation to look into Meadows’ voter registration. We now know that investigators have submitted their findings to state prosecutors.

Based solely on publicly available information, it appears Meadows will be facing questions that might be difficult to answer. As regular readers know, Meadows and his wife owned a home in North Carolina, but he sold his house in March 2020 and lived in a condo near Washington, D.C.

That wouldn’t be especially notable — it’s common for political insiders to move to the D.C. area — except Meadows continued to vote from North Carolina.

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PostPosted: Thu Jan 26, 2023 8:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

barr and Durham need to be investigated by a special prosecutor...

long article but both were so corrupt. so many of their top right wing prosecutors quit and lashed out at them making sure people knew how un-ethical barr and Durham were in the office.

and the tipper was their cover up of what the Italian gov said trump was involved in that they were aware of and how they covered this up till now that the house is republican for political reasons. so corrupt barr and durham are.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/barr-pressed-durham-to-find-flaws-in-the-russia-investigation-it-didn-t-go-well/ar-AA16M9x9?ocid=winp2fptaskbarhover&cvid=7efe51e12cf748ebbdc4b0bc2c87c54c

Barr Pressed Durham to Find Flaws in the Russia Investigation. It Didn’t Go Well.


Quote:

WASHINGTON — It became a regular litany of grievances from President Donald J. Trump and his supporters: The investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia was a witch hunt, they maintained, that had been opened without any solid basis, went on too long and found no proof of collusion.

The veteran prosecutor John H. Durham was given the job of determining whether there was any wrongdoing behind the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
The veteran prosecutor John H. Durham was given the job of determining whether there was any wrongdoing behind the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
© Samuel Corum for The New York Times
Egged on by Mr. Trump, Attorney General William P. Barr set out in 2019 to dig into their shared theory that the Russia investigation likely stemmed from a conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. To lead the inquiry, Mr. Barr turned to a hard-nosed prosecutor named John H. Durham, and later granted him special counsel status to carry on after Mr. Trump left office.

But after almost four years — far longer than the Russia investigation itself — Mr. Durham’s work is coming to an end without uncovering anything like the deep state plot alleged by Mr. Trump and suspected by Mr. Barr.

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Moreover, a monthslong review by The New York Times found that the main thrust of the Durham inquiry was marked by some of the very same flaws — including a strained justification for opening it and its role in fueling partisan conspiracy theories that would never be charged in court — that Trump allies claim characterized the Russia investigation.

Interviews by The Times with more than a dozen current and former officials have revealed an array of previously unreported episodes that show how the Durham inquiry became roiled by internal dissent and ethical disputes as it went unsuccessfully down one path after another even as Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr promoted a misleading narrative of its progress.

Attorney General William P. Barr took office in 2019 with suspicions about the origins of the Russia investigation.
Attorney General William P. Barr took office in 2019 with suspicions about the origins of the Russia investigation.
© Doug Mills/The New York Times
■ Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in the fall of 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump. The specifics of the tip and how they handled the investigation remain unclear, but Mr. Durham brought no charges over it.

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■ 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 financier and philanthropist who is a favorite target of the American right and Russian state media. Mr. Durham used grand jury powers to keep pursuing the emails even after a judge twice rejected his request for access to them. The emails yielded no evidence that Mr. Durham has cited in any case he pursued.

■ There were deeper internal fractures on the Durham team than previously known. The publicly unexplained resignation in 2020 of his No. 2 and longtime aide, Nora R. Dannehy, was the culmination of a series of disputes between them over prosecutorial ethics. A year later, two more prosecutors strongly objected to plans to indict a lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign based on evidence they warned was too flimsy, and one left the team in protest of Mr. Durham’s decision to proceed anyway. (A jury swiftly acquitted the lawyer.)

President Donald J. Trump openly suggested that Mr. Durham should charge his adversaries with crimes.
President Donald J. Trump openly suggested that Mr. Durham should charge his adversaries with crimes.
© Doug Mills/The New York Times
Now, as Mr. Durham works on a final report, the interviews by The Times provide new details of how he and Mr. Barr sought to recast the scrutiny of the 2016 Trump campaign’s myriad if murky links to Russia as unjustified and itself a crime.

Mr. Barr, Mr. Durham and Ms. Dannehy declined to comment. The current and former officials who discussed the investigation all spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the legal, political and intelligence sensitivities surrounding the topic.

A year into the Durham inquiry, Mr. Barr declared that the attempt “to get to the bottom of what happened” in 2016 “cannot be, and it will not be, a tit-for-tat exercise. We are not going to lower the standards just to achieve a result.”

Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, found no evidence that the F.B.I.’s actions in opening the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia were politically motivated.
Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, found no evidence that the F.B.I.’s actions in opening the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia were politically motivated.
© Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times
But Robert Luskin, a criminal defense lawyer and former Justice Department prosecutor who represented two witnesses Mr. Durham interviewed, said that he had a hard time squaring Mr. Durham’s prior reputation as an independent-minded straight shooter with his end-of-career conduct as Mr. Barr’s special counsel.

“This stuff has my head spinning,” Mr. Luskin said. “When did these guys drink the Kool-Aid, and who served it to them?”

An Odd Couple

A month after Mr. Barr was confirmed as attorney general in February 2019, the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III ended the Russia investigation and turned in his report without charging any Trump associates with engaging in a criminal conspiracy with Moscow over its covert operation to help Mr. Trump win the 2016 election.

Mr. Barr later wrote that his relationship with Mr. Trump eroded because his “failure to deliver scalps in time for the election.”
Mr. Barr later wrote that his relationship with Mr. Trump eroded because his “failure to deliver scalps in time for the election.”
© Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times
Mr. Trump would repeatedly portray the Mueller report as having found “no collusion with Russia.” The reality was more complex. In fact, the report detailed “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign,” and it established both how Moscow had worked to help Mr. Trump win and how his campaign had expected to benefit from the foreign interference.

The Durham inquiry looked for evidence that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign had conspired to frame Donald J. Trump.
The Durham inquiry looked for evidence that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign had conspired to frame Donald J. Trump.
© Doug mills/The New York Times
That spring, Mr. Barr assigned Mr. Durham to scour the origins of the Russia investigation for wrongdoing, telling Fox News that he wanted to know if “officials abused their power and put their thumb on the scale” in deciding to pursue the investigation. “A lot of the answers have been inadequate, and some of the explanations I’ve gotten don’t hang together,” he added.

Nora R. Dannehy in 2009. A longtime aide to Mr. Durham, Ms. Dannehy resigned from his team in 2020 after disputes with him over prosecutorial ethics.
Nora R. Dannehy in 2009. A longtime aide to Mr. Durham, Ms. Dannehy resigned from his team in 2020 after disputes with him over prosecutorial ethics.
© Mark Wilson/Getty Images
While attorneys general overseeing politically sensitive inquiries tend to keep their distance from the investigators, Mr. Durham visited Mr. Barr in his office for at times weekly updates and consultations about his day-to-day work. They also sometimes dined and sipped Scotch together, people familiar with their work said.

In some ways, they were an odd match. Taciturn and media-averse, the goateed Mr. Durham had spent more than three decades as a prosecutor before Mr. Trump appointed him the U.S. attorney for Connecticut. Administrations of both parties had assigned him to investigate potential official wrongdoing, like allegations of corrupt ties between mafia informants and F.B.I. agents, and the C.I.A.’s torture of terrorism detainees and destruction of evidence.

Cracks formed in Mr. Durham’s team as the scope of his investigation shifted.
Cracks formed in Mr. Durham’s team as the scope of his investigation shifted.
© Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press
By contrast, the vocal and domineering Mr. Barr has never prosecuted a case and is known for using his law enforcement platform to opine on culture-war issues and politics. He had effectively auditioned to be Mr. Trump’s attorney general by asserting to a New York Times reporter that there was more basis to investigate Mrs. Clinton than Mr. Trump’s “so-called ‘collusion’” with Russia, and by writing a memo suggesting a way to shield Mr. Trump from scrutiny for obstruction of justice.

Mr. Durham accused Michael Sussmann of lying in a meeting with an F.B.I. official. He was acquitted.
Mr. Durham accused Michael Sussmann of lying in a meeting with an F.B.I. official. He was acquitted.
© Samuel Corum for The New York Times
But the two shared a worldview: They are both Catholic conservatives and Republicans, born two months apart in 1950. As a career federal prosecutor, Mr. Durham already revered the office of the attorney general, people who know him say. And as he was drawn into Mr. Barr’s personal orbit, Mr. Durham came to embrace that particular attorney general’s intense feelings about the Russia investigation.

‘The Thinnest of Suspicions’

At the time Mr. Barr was confirmed, he told aides that he already suspected that intelligence abuses played a role in igniting the Russia investigation — and that unearthing any wrongdoing would be a priority.

In May 2019, soon after giving Mr. Durham his assignment, Mr. Barr summoned the head of the National Security Agency, Paul M. Nakasone, to his office. In front of several aides, Mr. Barr demanded that the N.S.A. cooperate with the Durham inquiry.

Referring to the C.I.A. and British spies, Mr. Barr also said he suspected that the N.S.A.’s “friends” had helped instigate the Russia investigation by targeting the Trump campaign, aides briefed on the meeting said. And repeating a sexual vulgarity, he warned that if the N.S.A. wronged him by not doing all it could to help Mr. Durham, Mr. Barr would do the same to the agency.

Mr. Barr’s insistence about what he had surmised bewildered intelligence officials. But Mr. Durham spent his first months looking for any evidence that the origin of the Russia investigation involved an intelligence operation targeting the Trump campaign.

Mr. Durham’s team spent long hours combing the C.I.A.’s files but found no way to support the allegation. Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham traveled abroad together to press British and Italian officials to reveal everything their agencies had gleaned about the Trump campaign and relayed to the United States, but both allied governments denied they had done any such thing. Top British intelligence officials expressed indignation to their U.S. counterparts about the accusation, three former U.S. officials said.

Mr. Durham and Mr. Barr had not yet given up when a new problem arose: In early December, the Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, completed his own report on the origins of the Russia investigation.

The inspector general revealed errors and omissions in wiretap applications targeting a former Trump campaign adviser and determined that an F.B.I. lawyer had doctored an email in a way that kept one of those problems from coming to light. (Mr. Durham’s team later negotiated a guilty plea by that lawyer.)

Mr. Durham’s prosecution of Igor Danchenko, a Russia analyst who was a researcher for the Steele dossier, ended in acquittal.
Mr. Durham’s prosecution of Igor Danchenko, a Russia analyst who was a researcher for the Steele dossier, ended in acquittal.
© Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
But the broader findings contradicted Mr. Trump’s accusations and the rationale for Mr. Durham’s inquiry. Mr. Horowitz found no evidence that F.B.I. actions were politically motivated. And he concluded that the investigation’s basis — an Australian diplomat’s tip that a Trump campaign adviser had seemed to disclose advance knowledge that Russia would release hacked Democratic emails — had been sufficient to lawfully open it.

The week before Mr. Horowitz released the report, he and aides came to Mr. Durham’s offices — nondescript suites on two floors of a building in northeast Washington — to go over it.

Mr. Durham lobbied Mr. Horowitz to drop his finding that the diplomat’s tip had been sufficient for the F.B.I. to open its “full” counterintelligence investigation, arguing that it was enough at most for a “preliminary” inquiry, according to officials. But Mr. Horowitz did not change his mind.

That weekend, Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham decided to weigh in publicly to shape the narrative on their terms.

Minutes before the inspector general’s report went online, Mr. Barr issued a statement contradicting Mr. Horowitz’s major finding, declaring that the F.B.I. opened the investigation “on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient.” He would later tell Fox News that the investigation began “without any basis,” as if the diplomat’s tip never happened.

Mr. Trump also weighed in, telling reporters that the details of the inspector general’s report were “far worse than anything I would have even imagined,” adding: “I look forward to the Durham report, which is coming out in the not-too-distant future. It’s got its own information, which is this information plus, plus, plus.”

And the Justice Department sent reporters a statement from Mr. Durham that clashed with both Justice Department principles about not discussing ongoing investigations and his personal reputation as particularly tight-lipped. He said he disagreed with Mr. Horowitz’s conclusions about the Russia investigation’s origins, citing his own access to more information and “evidence collected to date.”

But as Mr. Durham’s inquiry proceeded, he never presented any evidence contradicting Mr. Horowitz’s factual findings about the basis on which F.B.I. officials opened the investigation.

By summer 2020, it was clear that the hunt for evidence supporting Mr. Barr’s hunch about intelligence abuses had failed. But he waited until after the 2020 election to publicly concede that there had turned out to be no sign of “foreign government activity” and that the C.I.A. had “stayed in its lane” after all.

An Awkward Tip

On one of Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham’s trips to Europe, according to people familiar with the matter, Italian officials — while denying any role in setting off the Russia investigation — unexpectedly offered a potentially explosive tip linking Mr. Trump to certain suspected financial crimes.

Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham decided that the tip was too serious and credible to ignore. But rather than assign it to another prosecutor, Mr. Barr had Mr. Durham investigate the matter himself — giving him criminal prosecution powers for the first time — even though the possible wrongdoing by Mr. Trump did not fall squarely within Mr. Durham’s assignment to scrutinize the origins of the Russia inquiry, the people said.

Mr. Durham never filed charges, and it remains unclear what level of an investigation it was, what steps he took, what he learned and whether anyone at the White House ever found out. The extraordinary fact that Mr. Durham opened a criminal investigation that included scrutinizing Mr. Trump has remained secret.

But in October 2019, a garbled echo became public. The Times reported that Mr. Durham’s administrative review of the Russia inquiry had evolved to include a criminal investigation, while saying it was not clear what the suspected crime was. Citing their own sources, many other news outlets confirmed the development.

The news reports, however, were all framed around the erroneous assumption that the criminal investigation must mean Mr. Durham had found evidence of potential crimes by officials involved in the Russia inquiry. Mr. Barr, who weighed in publicly about the Durham inquiry at regular intervals in ways that advanced a pro-Trump narrative, chose in this instance not to clarify what was really happening.

By the spring and summer of 2020, with Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign in full swing, the Durham investigation’s “failure to deliver scalps in time for the election” began to erode Mr. Barr’s relationship with Mr. Trump, Mr. Barr wrote in his memoir.

Mr. Trump was stoking a belief among his supporters that Mr. Durham might charge former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. That proved too much for Mr. Barr, who in May 2020 clarified that “our concern of potential criminality is focused on others.”

Even so, in August, Mr. Trump lashed out in a Fox interview, asserting that Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden, along with top F.B.I. and intelligence officials, had been caught in “the single biggest political crime in the history of our country” and the only thing stopping charges would be if Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham wanted to be “politically correct.”

Against that backdrop, Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham did not shut down their inquiry when the search for intelligence abuses hit a dead end. With the inspector general’s inquiry complete, they turned to a new rationale: a hunt for a basis to accuse the Clinton campaign of conspiring to defraud the government by manufacturing the suspicions that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia, along with scrutinizing what the F.B.I. and intelligence officials knew about the Clinton campaign’s actions.

Mr. Durham also developed an indirect method to impute political bias to law enforcement officials: comparing the Justice Department’s aggressive response to suspicions of links between Mr. Trump and Russia with its more cautious and skeptical reaction to various Clinton-related suspicions.

He examined an investigation into the Clinton Foundation’s finances in which the F.B.I.’s repeated requests for a subpoena were denied. He also scrutinized how the F.B.I. gave Mrs. Clinton a “defensive briefing” about suspicions that a foreign government might be trying to influence her campaign through donations, but did not inform Mr. Trump about suspicions that Russia might be conspiring with people associated with his campaign.

Dubious Intelligence

During the Russia investigation, the F.B.I. used claims from what turned out to be a dubious source, the Steele dossier — opposition research indirectly funded by the Clinton campaign — in its botched applications to wiretap a former Trump campaign aide.

The Durham investigation did something with parallels to that incident.

In Mr. Durham’s case, the dubious sources were memos, whose credibility the intelligence community doubted, written by Russian intelligence analysts and discussing purported conversations involving American victims of Russian hacking, according to people familiar with the matter.

The memos were part of a trove provided to the C.I.A. by a Dutch spy agency, which had infiltrated the servers of its Russian counterpart. The memos were said to make demonstrably inconsistent, inaccurate or exaggerated claims, and some U.S. analysts believed Russia may have deliberately seeded them with disinformation.

Mr. Durham wanted to use the memos, which included descriptions of Americans discussing a purported plan by Mrs. Clinton to attack Mr. Trump by linking him to Russia’s hacking and releasing in 2016 of Democratic emails, to pursue the theory that the Clinton campaign conspired to frame Mr. Trump. And in doing so, Mr. Durham sought to use the memos as justification to get access to the private communications of an American citizen.

One purported hacking victim identified in the memos was Leonard Benardo, the executive vice president of the Open Society Foundations, a pro-democracy organization whose Hungarian-born founder, Mr. Soros, has been vilified by the far right.

In 2017, The Washington Post reported that the Russian memos included a claim that Mr. Benardo and a Democratic member of Congress, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, had discussed how Loretta E. Lynch, the Obama-era attorney general, had supposedly promised to keep the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s emails from going too far.

But Mr. Benardo and Ms. Wasserman Schultz said they had never even met, let alone communicated about Mrs. Clinton’s emails.

Mr. Durham set out to prove that the memos described real conversations, according to people familiar with the matter. He sent a prosecutor on his team, Andrew DeFilippis, to ask Judge Beryl A. Howell, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in Washington, for an order allowing them to seize information about Mr. Benardo’s emails.

But Judge Howell decided that the Russian memo was too weak a basis to intrude on Mr. Benardo’s privacy, they said. Mr. Durham then personally appeared before her and urged her to reconsider, but she again ruled against him.

Rather than dropping the idea, Mr. Durham sidestepped Judge Howell’s ruling by invoking grand-jury power to demand documents and testimony directly from Mr. Soros’s foundation and Mr. Benardo about his emails, the people said. (It is unclear whether Mr. Durham served them with a subpoena or instead threatened to do so if they did not cooperate.)

Rather than fighting in court, the foundation and Mr. Benardo quietly complied, according to people familiar with the matter. But for Mr. Durham, the result appears to have been another dead end.

In a statement provided to The Times by Mr. Soros’s foundation, Mr. Benardo reiterated that he never met or corresponded with Ms. Wasserman Schultz, and said that “if such documentation exists, it’s of course made up.”

Internal Strife

As the focus of the Durham investigation shifted, cracks formed inside the team. Mr. Durham’s deputy, Ms. Dannehy, a longtime close colleague, increasingly argued with him in front of other prosecutors and F.B.I. agents about legal ethics.

Ms. Dannehy had independent standing as a respected prosecutor. In 2008, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey assigned her to investigate whether to charge senior Bush administration officials with crimes related to a scandal over the firing of U.S. attorneys; she decided in 2010 that no charges were warranted.

Now, Ms. Dannehy complained to Mr. Durham about how Mr. Barr kept hinting darkly in public about the direction of their investigation. In April 2020, for example, he suggested to Fox News that officials could be prosecuted, saying that “the evidence shows that we are not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness. There is something far more troubling here.”

Ms. Dannehy urged Mr. Durham to ask the attorney general to adhere to Justice Department policy and not discuss the investigation publicly. But Mr. Durham proved unwilling to challenge him.

The strains grew when Mr. Durham used grand jury powers to go after Mr. Benardo’s emails. Ms. Dannehy opposed that tactic and told colleagues that Mr. Durham had taken that step without telling her.

By summer 2020, with Election Day approaching, Mr. Barr pressed Mr. Durham to draft a potential interim report centered on the Clinton campaign and F.B.I. gullibility or willful blindness.

On Sept. 10, 2020, Ms. Dannehy discovered that other members of the team had written a draft report that Mr. Durham had not told her about, according to people briefed on their ensuing argument.

Ms. Dannehy erupted, according to people familiar with the matter. She told Mr. Durham that no report should be issued before the investigation was complete and especially not just before an election — and denounced the draft for taking disputed information at face value. She sent colleagues a memo detailing those concerns and resigned.

Two people close to Mr. Barr said he had pressed for the draft to evaluate what a report on preliminary findings would look like and what evidence would need to be declassified. But they insisted that he intended any release to come during the summer or after the Nov. 3 election — not soon before Election Day.

In any case, in late September 2020, about two weeks after Ms. Dannehy quit, someone leaked to a Fox Business personality that Mr. Durham would not issue any interim report, disappointing Trump supporters hoping for a pre-Election Day bombshell.

Stymied by the decision not to issue an interim Durham report, John Ratcliffe, Mr. Trump’s national intelligence director, tried another way to inject some of the same information into the campaign.

Over the objections of Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, Mr. Ratcliffe declassified nearly 1,000 pages of intelligence material before the election for Mr. Durham to use. Notably, in that fight, Mr. Barr sided with Ms. Haspel on one matter that is said to be particularly sensitive and that remained classified, according to two people familiar with the dispute.

Mr. Ratcliffe also disclosed in a letter to a senator that “Russian intelligence analysis” claimed that on July 26, 2016, Mrs. Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal tying Mr. Trump to Russia.

The letter acknowledged that officials did “not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.” But it did not mention that there were many reasons that suspicions about the Trump campaign were arising in that period — like the diplomat’s tip, Mr. Trump’s flattery of President Vladimir V. Putin, his hiring of advisers with links to Russia, his financial ties to Russia and his call for Russia to hack Mrs. Clinton.

The disclosure infuriated Dutch intelligence officials, who had provided the memos under strictest confidence.

‘Fanning the Flames’

Late in the summer of 2021, Mr. Durham prepared to indict Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer who had represented Democrats in their dealings with the F.B.I. about Russia’s hacking of their emails. Two prosecutors on Mr. Durham’s team — Anthony Scarpelli and Neeraj N. Patel — objected, according to people familiar with the matter.

Five years earlier, Mr. Sussmann had relayed a tip to the bureau about odd internet data that a group of data scientists contended could reflect hidden communications between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank of Russia. The F.B.I., which by then had already launched its Russia investigation, briefly looked at the allegation but dismissed it.

Mr. Durham accused Mr. Sussmann of lying to an F.B.I. official by saying he was not conveying the tip for a client; the prosecutor maintained Mr. Sussmann was there in part for the Clinton campaign.

Mr. Scarpelli and Mr. Patel argued to Mr. Durham that the evidence was too thin to charge Mr. Sussmann and that such a case would not normally be prosecuted, people familiar with the matter said. Given the intense scrutiny it would receive, they also warned that an acquittal would undermine public faith in their investigation and federal law enforcement.

When Mr. Durham did not change course, Mr. Scarpelli quit in protest, people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Patel left soon after to take a different job. Both declined to comment.

The charge against Mr. Sussman was narrow, but the Durham team used it to make public large amounts of information insinuating what Mr. Durham never charged: that Clinton campaign associates conspired to gin up an F.B.I. investigation into Mr. Trump based on a knowingly false allegation.

Trial testimony, however, showed that while Mrs. Clinton and her campaign manager hoped Mr. Sussmann would persuade reporters to write articles about Alfa Bank, they did not want him to take the information to the F.B.I. And prosecutors presented no evidence that he or campaign officials had believed the data scientists’ complex theory was false.

After Mr. Sussmann’s acquittal, Mr. Barr, by then out of office for more than a year, suggested that using the courts to advance a politically charged narrative was a goal in itself. Mr. Durham “accomplished something far more important” than a conviction, Mr. Barr told Fox News, asserting that the case had “crystallized the central role played by the Hillary campaign in launching as a dirty trick the whole Russiagate collusion narrative and fanning the flames of it.”

And he predicted that a subsequent trial, concerning a Russia analyst who was a researcher for the Steele dossier, would also “get the story out” and “further amplify these themes and the role the F.B.I. leadership played in this, which is increasingly looking fishy and inexplicable.”

That case involved Igor Danchenko, who had told the F.B.I. that the dossier exaggerated the credibility of gossip and speculation. Mr. Durham charged him with lying about two sources. He was acquitted, too.

The two failed cases are likely to be Mr. Durham’s last courtroom acts as a prosecutor. Bringing demonstrably weak cases stood in contrast to how he once talked about his prosecutorial philosophy.

James Farmer, a retired prosecutor who worked with Mr. Durham on several major investigations, recalled him as a neutral actor who said that if there were nothing to charge, they would not strain to prosecute. “That’s what I heard, time and again,” Mr. Farmer said.

Delivering the closing arguments in the Danchenko trial, Mr. Durham defended his investigation to the jury, denying that his appointment by Mr. Barr had been tainted by politics.

He asserted that Mr. Mueller had concluded “there’s no evidence of collusion here or conspiracy” — a formulation that echoed Mr. Trump’s distortion of the Russia investigation’s complex findings — and added: “Is it the wrong question to ask, well, then how did this get started? Respectfully, that’s not the case.”

The judge interrupted him: “You should finish up, Mr. Durham.”

William K. Rashbaum and Julian E. Barnes contributed reporting.

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