AP News: Trump campaign’s Russia contacts ‘grave’ threat, Senate says

WASHINGTON — Reality L. Winner, a former National Security Agency contractor who was the first person prosecuted during the Trump administration on charges of leaking classified information, has been released to a halfway house, her lawyer announced on Monday.

Ms. Winner’s case was the subject of an intense public campaign to win her a pardon or clemency. But it was her good behavior in prison, not the outside advocacy or a compassionate release process, that shortened her 63-month sentence, her lawyer said.

While her good-behavior release was not unusual, her lawyer, Alison Grinter Allen, said she and Ms. Winner’s family were worried that the government would find a reason to extend her prison stay.

“When we knew release was imminent, there were a lot of anxieties that it would be denied to her,” Ms. Allen said in an interview.

Ms. Winner was released on June 2 from Federal Medical Center, Carswell, a prison in Fort Worth, Texas, said Emery Nelson, a Bureau of Prisons spokesman.

The San Antonio Residential Re-entry Management Office will oversee her “community confinement,” Mr. Nelson added.

Ms. Winner is in a halfway house, where she will have access to the outdoors and be able to meet with her family, and then will be under supervised release, Ms. Allen said. She could be transferred to home confinement before her full release from custody in November.

While in prison, Ms. Winner was held under difficult conditions. The prison lost power and heat during last winter’s ice storms in Texas, and a number of fellow inmates died of Covid-19.

Her communications were closely monitored, and the government refused until now to move her to a less secure facility, Ms. Allen said.

“It was a terrible, terrible time,” Ms. Allen said. “Not that there is any great time to be in prison.”

A former Air Force linguist, Ms. Winner entered a guilty plea in 2018, after being prosecuted for leaking classified information.

She had been arrested in 2017 and charged with sending a classified report about election interference to reporters at The Intercept.

The report described hacks by Russian intelligence operatives against local election officials and a company that sold software related to voter registration.

As Ms. Winner began to petition for a pardon or a commutation, Ms. Allen was added to her legal team because her other lawyers were banned from speaking publicly about the case.

Ms. Winner, now 29, sought clemency from President Donald J. Trump, with her legal team submitting thousands of letters in an effort to get him to intervene in her case.

There had been some cause to think Mr. Trump could commute Ms. Winner’s sentence. In 2018, he called her sentence “so unfair” and said that what she had done was “small potatoes.” But Mr. Trump never acted on the commutation request.

Despite Mr. Trump’s apparent ambivalence, the case was an early example of a campaign against leaks by his Justice Department.

While many of the Trump-era leak investigations moved slowly, the Justice Department announced the charges against Ms. Winner an hour after The Intercept published the article.

The Intercept came under criticism for how it reported the article, including by Ms. Winner’s mother. Ms. Winner had mailed the document to the publication anonymously, but the reporters showed a copy of it to the National Security Agency’s public affairs office and published the document to the internet, including markings that helped officials identify Ms. Winner.

In 2017, The Intercept acknowledged its practices fell short and said it should have taken more steps to ensure the identity of the person leaking the document was protected.

Ms. Winner could move relatively quickly from the halfway house to home confinement, where she could live with her family.

Because of the pandemic, visitation had been cut off from the federal prison for the last 18 months and Ms. Winner had spoken to her family only on phone calls and occasional video calls. During her time in prison, Ms. Winner became an aunt and is looking forward to meeting her new family members, Ms. Allen said.

Once Ms. Winner is released from the halfway house, she will still not be able to talk about any of the documents she reviewed while working at the National Security Agency, but she will be able to speak broadly about issues that concern her.

“It would surprise me if advocacy and activism was not a part of her life going forward,” Ms. Allen said, “whether it be about the conditions and the state of mass incarceration or political prosecutions or election integrity.”

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Two veteran Republican campaign operatives — including one who got a pardon from then-President Donald Trump one month before he left office — are charged in a new federal indictment with funneling $25,000 from a Russian national into the Trump campaign in 2016.

Jesse Benton, 43, and Doug Wead, 75, made brief appearances Monday at a video hearing in U.S. District Court in Washington, pleading not guilty to six felony charges including facilitating a campaign contribution by a foreign national, acting as a straw donor and causing the filing of false campaign finance reports.

The grand jury indictment alleges that Benton and Wead worked together to accept $100,000 from an unidentified Russian national in order to get the foreigner a meeting with then-candidate Trump at a fundraiser in Philadelphia on Sept. 22, 2016.

Neither Trump nor his campaign are mentioned by name in the indictment, but details in the 19-page document make clear that the scheme involved seeking the donation in connection with the Trump event and an opportunity to get face to face with him.

For example, the indictment’s reference to a $25,000 donation on Oct. 27, 2016, to a political committee by Benton — allegedly to cover up the foreign source of the money — lines up with a donation of the same size and date to Trump’s political committee attributed to a “Jesse Bentor,” which prosecutors said is a garbling of Benton’s name.

There is no indication in the indictment that Trump or his campaign aides were aware that the money originated with the Russian donor. The charges say that Benton and Wead “concealed” the arrangement from Trump, and that part of the scheme involved getting the political committees to “unwittingly” file reports indicating that Benton was actually the source of the funds.

The indictment suggests that Benton and Wead hoped to make money from the scheme and did — taking $100,000 from the Russian, but paying only $25,000 to Trump Victory, a joint venture between the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee.

Benton, a veteran of Kentucky and presidential politics, had previously faced federal campaign finance charges for payments to a key Iowa state lawmaker who switched endorsements from Michelle Bachman to Ron Paul in the 2012 presidential GOP primary. Trump, just before leaving office, pardoned Benton for the crimes he was convicted of. Benton is also an in-law and former adviser to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who is Ron Paul’s son. Benton previously led Sen. Mitch McConnell’s 2014 reelection campaign before stepping down amid legal scrutiny.

In pardoning Benton and another associate, Trump indicated that the move had the support of Rand Paul and former FEC Chair Lee Goodman.

The new indictment alleges that Benton was carrying out the foreign-donation scheme in the days just before and after he was sentenced to two years’ probation on the Iowa-related campaign finance case.

Wead is a conservative commentator and activist who co-authored a book with then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, published just before Bush became president in 1989. Wead also enjoyed close access to the Trump White House during his presidency.

Wead is represented in the case by two former attorneys for Trump when he was president, Jay Sekulow and Jane Raskin.

Asked about the charges, Sekulow said in a statement: “Doug Wead is a respected author and supporter of charitable causes. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges and will continue to respond appropriately in court.”

The case against Benton and Wead has been assigned to Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee.

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The U.S. Senate campaign by Republican former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt is facing fallout from two indicted associates of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

"Well, that didn't take long. Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman are now officially haunting Adam Laxalt's U.S. Senate campaign. This past week, Politico first reported that prosecutors plan to call Laxalt to testify in the upcoming trial of Parnas, who is charged with violating federal straw and foreign donor bans in connection with contributions to 2018 state and federal political campaigns," John L. Smith reported for the Nevada Independent. "That included a pair of $5,000 contributions from Parnas running mate Fruman to Laxalt's unsuccessful run for governor."

The report noted an image of Fruman, Laxalt and Parnas that the publication had previously described as "a picture worth a thousand headaches for Laxalt."

"Those pass-through contributions were punctuated by a cringe-worthy grip-and-grin photo of Parnas and Fruman flanking a smiling Laxalt. The picture places Laxalt in infamous company given the roles Parnas and Fruman played in assisting former President Donald Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani in a fruitless search for Ukrainian dirt on Joe Biden. The resulting scandal led to Trump's second impeachment," the publication reported.

Laxalt also pushed the "Big Lie" that resulted in Trump's second impeachment.

"He fought valiantly against the Election Fraud, which took place in Nevada," Trump falsely claimed in an August endorsement emailed to reporters.

Laxalt was ridiculed for being suckered by the Giuliani associates.

"But at least take time to acknowledge that, at the time of their indictment, the political tell about Parnas and Fruman was painfully obvious: They were more stooges than sages. Anyone who bothered to look might have noticed that," Smith reported. "If Laxalt was slow to pick up on the ham-handed Lev-and-Igor hustle, it raises the issue of whether Nevadans want to send a carnival rube to the Senate. If he had suspicions about the pair's political provenance and declined to act, it would put him in an even worse light."


Read the full analysis.

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The former acting Under Secretary for the Office of Intelligence and Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security revealed how the Trump administration muzzled intelligence information during the 2020 presidential election.

MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace interviewed Brian Murphy, who had previously led counterterrorism at the FBI, about the multiple whistleblower complaints he filed.

The host played a clip of Rep. Jaime Raskin (D-MD).

"The whole world watched the storm troopers of violent white supremacy act as the vanguard of a massive violent political insurrection against the government of the United States, that smashed our windows, invaded our capitol, wounded and injured more than 140 Capitol Police officers and Metropolitan Police Department officers and left several people dead," Raskin said. "Let's be clear that the most dangerous threat facing America today comes from the forces that attacked our government on January 6th."

Wallace described the greatest threat as "domestic extremism fueled by disinformation and the disgraced ex-president's lies about the insurrection. Federal agencies under Donald Trump down played right wing extremism in order to avoid embarrassing Donald Trump."

For analysis, Wallace interviewed Murphy.

"I want to start with Russia," Wallace said. "There was a sense after the Mueller investigation ended that Donald Trump acted, conducted himself in a more emboldened manner. But what's amazing about your complaint is the effort to suppress anything bad about Russia seemed to intensify and especially as it pertained to the 2020 election. Could you tell us what that was like and what exactly they didn't want to get out?"

Murphy noted he filed three whistleblower complaints, with the final one filed in September of 2020 after "the pressure hit a tipping point."

"The question you're asking is really important, it's got to be put in the context where there was pressure on a number of fronts to suppress intelligence. Russia was probably the biggest of them as we get closer to the election, but it wasn't just Russian disinformation. It was all of those threats happening at the same time," Murphy said.

"Moving forward in 2020, at that time we knew full well that [Vladimir] Putin had identified President Trump as someone to support and denigrate the Democratic candidates who were out there. Trying to get that information out across the intelligence community and law enforcement, there were just systemic barriers and people were intimidated," he explained.

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WASHINGTON — The charge was narrow: John H. Durham, the special counsel appointed by the Trump administration to scour the Russia investigation, indicted a cybersecurity lawyer this month on a single count of lying to the F.B.I.

But Mr. Durham used a 27-page indictment to lay out a far more expansive tale, one in which four computer scientists who were not charged in the case “exploited” their access to internet data to develop an explosive theory about cyberconnections in 2016 between Donald J. Trump’s company and a Kremlin-linked bank — a theory, he insinuated, they did not really believe.

Mr. Durham’s version of events set off reverberations beyond the courtroom. Trump supporters seized on the indictment, saying it shows that suspicions about possible covert communications between Russia’s Alfa Bank and Mr. Trump’s company were a deliberate hoax by supporters of Hillary Clinton and portraying it as evidence that the entire Russia investigation was unwarranted.



A spokesman for Mr. Durham declined to comment. The special counsel’s office issued a fresh grand jury subpoena to Mr. Sussmann’s former law firm, Perkins Coie, sometime after Mr. Sussmann was indicted on Sept. 16, in a development first reported on Thursday by CNN and confirmed by a person familiar with the matter. It is unclear whether the subpoena pertained to Alfa Bank or whether Mr. Durham has finished his investigation into that case.



Six weeks later, after Slate ran a lengthy article about the Alfa Bank suspicions, the Clinton campaign pounced. Mrs. Clinton’s Twitter feed linked to the article and ran an image stating the suspicions as fact, declaring, “It’s time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia.”

The F.B.I., which had already started its Trump-Russia investigation before it heard about the possible Trump-Alfa connections, quickly dismissed the suspicions, apparently concluding the interactions were probably caused by marketing emails sent by an outside firm using a domain registered to the Trump Organization. The report by the Russia special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, ignored the issue.

The data remains a mystery. A 2018 analysis commissioned by the Senate, made public this month, detailed technical reasons to doubt that marketing emails were the cause. A Senate report last year accepted the F.B.I.’s assessment that it was unlikely to have been a covert communications channel, but also said it had no good explanation for “the unusual activity.”

Whatever caused the odd data, at issue in the wake of the indictment is whether Mr. Joffe and the other three computer scientists considered their own theory dubious and yet cynically went forward anyway, as Mr. Durham suggests, or whether they truly believed the data was alarming and put forward their hypothesis in good faith.

Earlier articles on Alfa Bank, including in Slate and The New Yorker, did not name the researchers, and used pseudonyms like “Max” and “Tea Leaves” for two of them. Mr. Durham’s indictment did not name them, either.

But three of their names have appeared among a list of data experts in a lawsuit brought by Alfa Bank, and Trump supporters have speculated online about their identities. The Times has confirmed them, and their lawyers provided statements defending their actions.

The indictment’s “Originator-1” is April Lorenzen, chief data scientist at the information services firm Zetalytics. Her lawyer, Michael J. Connolly, said she has “dedicated her life to the critical work of thwarting dangerous cyberattacks on our country,” adding: “Any suggestion that she engaged in wrongdoing is unequivocally false.”

The indictment’s “Researcher-1” is another computer scientist at Georgia Tech, Manos Antonakakis. “Researcher-2” is Mr. Dagon. And “Tech Executive-1” is Mr. Joffe, who in 2013 received the F.B.I. Director’s Award for helping crack a cybercrime case, and retired this month from Neustar, another information services company.



Separately, when the news broke in June 2016 that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee’s servers, Mr. Dagon and Ms. Lorenzen began talking at a conference about whether such data might uncover other election-related hacking.

Ms. Lorenzen eventually noticed an odd pattern: a server called mail1.trump-email.com appeared to be communicating almost exclusively with servers at Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health. She shared her findings with Mr. Dagon, the people said, and they both discussed it with Mr. Joffe.

“Half the time I stop myself and wonder: am I really seeing evidence of espionage on behalf of a presidential candidate?” Mr. Dagon wrote in an email to Mr. Joffe on July 29, after WikiLeaks made public stolen Democratic emails timed to disrupt the party’s convention and Mr. Trump urged Russia to hack Mrs. Clinton.

By early August, the researchers had combined forces and were increasingly focusing on the Alfa Bank data, the people said. Mr. Joffe reached out to his lawyer, Mr. Sussmann, who would take the researchers’ data and hypothesis to the F.B.I. on Sept. 19, 2016.

Defense lawyers contend the indictment presented a skewed portrait of their clients’ thinking by selectively quoting from their emails.

The indictment quotes August emails from Ms. Lorenzen and Mr. Antonakakis worrying that they might not know if someone had faked the DNS data. But people familiar with the matter said the indictment omitted later discussion of reasons to doubt any attempt to spoof the overall pattern could go undetected.

The indictment says Mr. Joffe sent an email on Aug. 21 urging more research about Mr. Trump, which he stated could “give the base of a very useful narrative,” while also expressing a belief that the Trump server at issue was “a red herring” and they should ignore it because it had been used by the mass-marketing company.

The full email provides context: Mr. Trump had claimed he had no dealings in Russia and yet many links appeared to exist, Mr. Joffe noted, citing an article that discussed aspirations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Despite the “red herring” line, the same email also showed that Mr. Joffe nevertheless remained suspicious about Alfa Bank, proposing a deeper hunt in the data “for the anomalies that we believe exist.”

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The Senate Judiciary Committee released its over 300-page report Thursday that sheds light on efforts between President Donald Trump's administration and Justice Department staffers to overturn the 2020 election. In response to the report, Republicans have published their own statement, attempting to justify Trump's subterfuge by saying that he didn't trust the DOJ and that's why he tried to intervene.

Columnist Philip Bump in the Washington Post claimed that the excerpt, buried in the GOP's assessment, is absurdly false and mischaracterizes poor decisions to justify more poor decisions.

"Based on past experiences, President Trump's skepticism of the DOJ's and FBI's handling of election fraud allegations does not appear unreasonable. During the 2016 election, the FBI used an unsubstantiated research dossier, funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and which was known by the FBI to be filled with Russian disinformation, to file a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) application and to obtain FISA warrants against a Trump campaign volunteer," the GOP claimed.

He explained that even if someone didn't know anything about the Russia findings, anyone reading that is supposed to believe that Trump was concerned about the election because he didn't think he could trust the FBI, not because he wanted to win the 2020 election.

"There are a few factually incorrect or misleading aspects of the paragraph as written. The target of the FISA warrants, Carter Page, was not simply a "volunteer"; he was a foreign policy adviser announced as part of Trump's team in March 2016 as the then-candidate sought to bolster his credibility on the subject," Bump explained. "The target was also someone who had already been on the radar of law enforcement after a suspected Russian spy was recordedspeaking about potentially recruiting Page as an agent. He also traveled to Moscow in July 2016, in the middle of the campaign, where he spoke briefly with a Russian official."

Basically, the idea that Carter Page was some kind of target for no reason is flawed. He also had resigned once the time warrants were issued. Also, the Steele dossier wasn't used to get the warrant targeting Page.

Finally, Bump explained that the FBI was actually looking into the claims about the 2020 election and there is evidence to prove it.

Somehow, however, the conspiracy theory made its way into the official GOP statement that had nothing to do with that conspiracy. Then-acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue explained it in an email that was turned over. Former acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen also told Republicans he'd be "amenable" to considering the questions Trump had when testifying before the committee in August. Then there's the matter for former Attorney General Bill Barr, one of Trump's most dedicated loyalists, who made it clear before he left in December that there was no fraud, indicating that they'd looked.

Bump explained that it's only in the minority "report's" fine print because it's the GOP's nod to conservative media that the Russia probe was a scam all along. Claiming that he was paranoid about the Justice Department after four years of appointing and staffing it is correct to draw skepticism, he explained.

"The pattern is the same, over and over," he concluded. "Trump says something without any evidence. His allies scramble to create something with the outward appearance of evidence for his claim and then amplify one another's creations. Trump and the rest of them then declare that the evidence exists and Trump was right all along. And now, in this example, we see an effort to rationalize Trump's behavior on Jan. 3 using as evidence cobbled-together claims from a prior rationalization effort."

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NEW YORK — Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani are not on trial, but their names will likely feature prominently in Manhattan Federal Court as their former associate Lev Parnas faces a jury of his peers beginning Tuesday.

Parnas, a Soviet-born businessman and onetime Republican fundraiser, is charged with orchestrating two complex campaign finance schemes, one of which overlapped with Trump and Giuliani’s 2019 quest to find political dirt on then-presidential candidate Joe Biden in Ukraine.

The Parnas trial is expected to include so many references to Trump and Giuliani that Judge Paul Oetken said last week that he will quiz prospective jurors on their political beliefs to weed out any candidates with strong views about the divisive ex-president and former New York City mayor.

Joseph Bondy, Parnas’ lawyer, launched an unusual publicity tour roughly two years ago portraying his client as a whistleblower being prevented from telling the truth about corruption in the Trump administration.

Prosecutors, meanwhile, are likely to portray him as a run of the mill fraudster who shared photos with Trump and Giuliani to make himself look like a bigshot.

Jury selection is set to start Tuesday morning.

Prosecutors will then present their convoluted case against Parnas and his co-defendant Andrey Kukushkin, both of whom have pleaded not guilty.

The feds say Parnas, 49, and his former co-defendant, Igor Fruman, made unlawful political donations to two pro-Trump super PACs and former Republican Texas Rep. Pete Sessions in 2018, totaling more than $350,000.

Fruman pleaded guilty to an unrelated charge last month to avoid trial.

Around the time of the donations, Parnas and Fruman were working for Giuliani and Trump, who wanted then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch ousted because she was refusing to help unearth compromising information in Ukraine about Biden, Trump’s Democratic challenger in the 2020 presidential election.

Trump’s eventual axing of Yovanovitch in May 2019 became a key aspect of his first impeachment on charges that he tried to pressure Ukraine’s government into helping him cheat in the 2020 election. Parnas’ trial could shed more light on that shady chapter in American history, though prosecutors have vowed to avoid the Yovanovitch allegations to “streamline” the case.

The trial could also raise issues for Giuliani, who remains under investigation by the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office over scrutiny that some of his own activities in Ukraine violated foreign lobbying laws. Giuliani has denied wrongdoing and said he knew nothing about Parnas’s alleged wrongdoing.

Alongside the dizzying Ukraine saga, Parnas faces a separate set of charges that he, Fruman and another associate, David Correia, funneled cash from Russian investor Andrei Muraviev to U.S. politicians in several states in a bid to secure licenses for selling recreational marijuana.

Like Fruman, Correia will avoid trial because he pleaded guilty to charges associated with the alleged weed plot. He’s serving one year behind bars.

Kukushkin, a California businessman who will appear alongside Parnas in Manhattan Federal Court this week, is accused of serving as Muraviev’s intermediary to Parnas, Fruman and Correia.

In consultation with Kukushkin, Parnas, Fruman and Correia doled out Muraviev’s cash to American politicians without disclosing the Russian was the source — a violation of laws barring campaign contributions from foreigners, according to prosecutors.

While both Kukushkin and Parnas maintain their innocence, they have wildly different explanations for why the failed cannabis venture didn’t break the law.

Parnas’ has sought to cast doubt over prosecutors’ claim that the donations actually came from Muraviev.

Kukushkin, meanwhile, has claimed Parnas and Fruman deceived him about where the money was going.

“Parnas and Fruman only pretended to be interested in pursuing a joint cannabis venture,” Kukushkin’s attorneys wrote in court papers last month. “It was their sole intention to use Mr. Muraviev’s money to pay their debts, fund their own separate business, promote their own personal interests, support their lifestyle and sustain themselves until they could find another victim. And that is exactly what occurred.”

Though the pot portion of the trial is not expected to focus heavily on Trump or Giuliani, prosecutors will hear testimony from ex-Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt — a major Trump ally who allegedly received some of Muraviev’s money.

In discussing the breadth of evidence expected at the trial, Oetken admitted at last week’s hearing that he was stunned.

“I’ve never had a trial quite like this,” said Oetken, who has been on the bench since 2011.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe has won back his full pension as part of a settlement of his lawsuit arising from his firing during the Trump administration more than three years ago, his lawyers announced Thursday.

McCabe, a frequent target of then-President Donald Trump’s ire, was fired in March 2018 after the Justice Department’s inspector general concluded he had authorized the release of information to a newspaper reporter and then misled internal investigators about his role in the leak. The termination by Jeff Sessions, the attorney general at the time, came hours before McCabe was due to retire, denying the FBI official his pension.

The settlement agreement vacates that decision, expunges from his personnel folder any references to having been fired and entitles McCabe, who joined the FBI in 1996, to his full pension.

“Politics should never play a role in the fair administration of justice and civil service personnel decisions,” McCabe said in a statement. He added that he hopes “this result encourages the men and women of the FBI to continue to protect the American people by standing up for the truth and doing their jobs without fear of political retaliation.”

McCabe has denied intentionally deceiving anyone, was never criminally charged and has blasted his firing as politically motivated and part of the Trump administration’s “ongoing war on the FBI.” Trump, who at the time was relentlessly railing against the FBI for its investigation into ties between Russia and his 2016 presidential campaign, called the termination a “great day for Democracy” shortly after it was announced.

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McCabe sued in 2019, saying his firing was part of an effort by Trump to purge the FBI of officials he perceived as disloyal. McCabe had become acting director of the FBI in May 2017 after Trump fired James Comey amid the bureau’s Russia investigation, a termination that was examined by special counsel Robert Mueller for potential obstruction of justice.

As part of the settlement, the federal government has agreed to rescind and vacate McCabe’s firing, deem him as having retired in good standing and restore his full retirement pension. He is also entitled to other benefits afforded to retiring FBI senior executives, including special cufflinks and “official FBI credentials, badge, and time-in-service award keys mounted in the format typically provided to retiring FBI Deputy Directors” and other senior officials, according to the settlement.

“For 140 years, civil servants like Andrew McCabe have been the federal government’s backbone, pledging their loyalty to the Constitution rather than to any politician or political party,” Murad Hussain, a lawyer for McCabe, said in a statement.

“This settlement and the district court’s rulings make clear that attempts to corrupt the federal workforce through partisan intimidation and improper political influence will not go unanswered,” he added.

A spokesperson for the Justice Department, which did not admit any wrongdoing as part of the settlement, did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

Though the settlement restores McCabe’s pension, it does not undo the inspector general’s finding that McCabe had displayed a lack of candor under questioning from investigators.

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NEW YORK, Oct 15 (Reuters) - A former candidate for Nevada's governorship testified on Friday that former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani introduced him to Lev Parnas, a onetime Giuliani associate now on trial for alleged campaign finance law violations, who facilitated a contribution to the candidate.

Adam Laxalt, who lost his bid for the governorship, said he ultimately received a $10,000 donation from Parnas associate Igor Fruman shortly before the Nov. 6, 2018 election, But he said his campaign did not accept the funds because of doubts about the true source and concerns the contribution was illegal.

Prosecutors called Laxalt to testify in Parnas' Manhattan federal court trial. The Ukraine native has been charged with illegally funneling money from a Russian businessman to the campaigns of candidates for office in states where Parnas, Fruman and associates were seeking licenses to run cannabis businesses. read more

Laxalt said he met Giuliani, who was then personal attorney for former President Donald Trump, at the Trump International Hotel in Washington two months before the 2018 state election. Laxalt, a Republican, said he then accompanied Giuliani to a balcony at the hotel, where a group including Parnas were smoking cigars and drinking.

Parnas "immediately offered to help my campaign," Laxalt told the jury in the case overseen by U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken.

There was no suggestion that Giuliani did anything illegal by introducing Laxalt to Parnas. Prosecutors are separately probing whether Giuliani violated lobbying laws while working as Trump's lawyer. Giuliani has not been charged with any crime and has denied wrongdoing.

The case has drawn attention because of Parnas' and former co-defendant Fruman's roles helping Giuliani investigate President Joe Biden's activities in Ukraine. Biden, a Democrat, defeated Trump in the Republican's 2020 bid for re-election.

Giuliani's lawyer has said Parnas' case and the lobbying probe are unrelated.

Parnas pleaded not guilty. Belarus-born Fruman pleaded guilty in September.

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Intelligence expert Malcolm Nance spoke to MSNBC about the ways in which the Russian government are able to wage a war against a country without even firing a shot.

Host Maria Teresa Kumar noted that President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans seem to have taken up the playbook of Russia and created their own propaganda machine. As a Russia propaganda expert, Nance agreed, saying that the plot Russia concocted in the early 2000s, the Gerasimov Doctrine, handed Trump and his team the plan.

Nance explained that it was a tactic Russians used where they combined an information warfare strategy where they flood a country with so much misinformation that a country would welcome an invasion without a war.

"That didn't really happen" in the United States, Nance explained. "What the Russians did in the year 2016 is they created an information bubble in which the Trump campaign was seen as friendly and then, the Trump data team took that information, including stolen information from the Democratic National Committee, and created their own information sphere. Once the Russian bubble was popped after the 2016 election, the Trump team took the ball and ran with it. The Russians barely have to do anything."

Nance explained that the Trump team and their control over conservative television stations like Fox News and OAN enabled them to indoctrinate their own followers into believing some of the most insane things ever crafted, "to the point where they view it."

He talked about a kind of radicalization that gives Trump's supporters the confidence their actions are not only patriotic but that "violence is the only solution and they're carrying out a second Lexington, a second Concord, as your other guests said, 1776 2.0."

"They think they're restoring the United States, despite the fact they are physically attacking the United States, and believe me, the way that ammunition prices went up within the last year on the public market, I think these people really believe they're going to affect the revolution at some point," said Nance.

Earlier in the conversation, Nance addressed Virginia Republican Glenn Youngkin holding up the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol as a "peaceful protest" and treating items used in the attack as their own kind of religious relic or a "talisman" as Nance characterized. "As if it's going to give them some connection deeper to Donald Trump."

"It all flies in the face of their own storyline, their story arc in which it was Antifa and Black Lives Matter that carried out the attack," said Nance. "Now, on some signs, we see them actually not only recognizing that they've carried out this event but, as I said in the video, a peaceful protest at the Capitol and now carrying an American flag, which took part in that. It's absolutely disgraceful that any of this is happening. But what you're seeing, it is a strategy by the Republicans and Trump play out where they're now embracing the popularism of that violence."

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hanimmal said:

Breaking News (MSNBC) FBI activity at Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska's home.

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FBI at Washington home of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska

The FBI is conducting "law enforcement activity" at the Washington, DC, home of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to an FBI spokesman.

www.cnn.com

hanimmal said:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-politician-testifies-he-met-donor-through-giuliani-trump-hotel-2021-10-15/View attachment 5010834

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schuylaar said:

FBI at Washington home of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska

The FBI is conducting "law enforcement activity" at the Washington, DC, home of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to an FBI spokesman.

www.cnn.com

they're taking stuff out.

'details were not given however this is linked to another case in NY'

Dear Vlad..at the time and place of our Presidents choosing

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Fogdog said:

This FBI raid on Deripaska. Reminds me of an article I read a while back. It's a dodgy story, not sure if it could stand on it's own merits but then again, the FBI did meet with her while she was in a Thai jail on charges of sex work without a license. According to the story, she didn't get what she wanted from the US but a flunky working for Putin managed to help her, in exchange for what, is not said.

Belarusian model: I gave info on Trump to Russian tycoon
By NATALIYA VASILYEVAFebruary 1, 2019 GMT

MOSCOW (AP) — A Belarusian model who claims to have information on ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s election campaign told The Associated Press on Friday that she has turned that material over to Russian billionaire businessman Oleg Deripaska.

Anastasia Vashukevich fueled speculation around possible ties between Trump and the Kremlin last year when she posted a video from a police van, saying she had 16 hours of audio and video proving ties between Russian officials and the Trump campaign that influenced the 2016 U.S. elections.

Deripaska denied the allegations and even went to court to seek to remove the video Vashukevich posted in which he discusses U.S.-Russia ties with a senior Russian government official.

When pressed Friday by the AP about her previous claims, Vashukevich said she had emailed “everything I had” to Deripaska and dodged a question of whether she kept a copy for herself.

“Oleg (Deripaska) has it all. If he wants to make any of it public, if he thinks that it’s a good idea, he can do it himself,” she said.

But that's not all:

Russian publications The Bell and Proyekt last year pointed to another high-profile visitor who Vashukevich caught on tape spending time with Deripaska.

One video posted on her YouTube account showed a meeting between Deripaska and Adam Waldman, a U.S. lobbyist who has been working for Deripaska and who has had repeated meetings with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The reported January 2017 meeting was several days before Waldman’s visit to Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

I hope she stays away from open windows in high rises.

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