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      Hunting Leaks, Trump Officials Seized Records of Democrats

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      The Justice Department seized records from Apple for metadata of House Intelligence Committee members, their aides and family members.WASHINGTON — As the Justice Department investigated who was behind leaks of classified information early in the Trump administration, it took a highly unusual step: Prosecutors subpoenaed Apple for data from the accounts of at least two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, aides and family members. One was a minor.All told, the records of at least a dozen people tied to the committee were seized in 2017 and early 2018, including those of Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, then the panel’s top Democrat and now its chairman, according to committee officials and two other people briefed on the inquiry. Representative Eric Swalwell of California said in an interview Thursday night that he had also been notified that his data had subpoenaed.Prosecutors, under the beleaguered attorney general, Jeff Sessions, were hunting for the sources behind news media reports about contacts between Trump associates and Russia. Ultimately, the data and other evidence did not tie the committee to the leaks, and investigators debated whether they had hit a dead end and some even discussed closing the inquiry.But William P. Barr revived languishing leak investigations after he became attorney general a year later. He moved a trusted prosecutor from New Jersey with little relevant experience to the main Justice Department to work on the Schiff-related case and about a half-dozen others, according to three people with knowledge of his work who did not want to be identified discussing federal investigations.The zeal in the Trump administration’s efforts to hunt leakers led to the extraordinary step of subpoenaing communications metadata from members of Congress — a nearly unheard-of move outside of corruption investigations. While Justice Department leak investigations are routine, current and former congressional officials familiar with the inquiry said they could not recall an instance in which the records of lawmakers had been seized as part of one.Moreover, just as it did in investigating news organizations, the Justice Department secured a gag order on Apple that expired this year, according to a person familiar with the inquiry, so lawmakers did not know they were being investigated until Apple informed them last month.Prosecutors also eventually secured subpoenas for reporters’ records to try to identify their confidential sources, a move that department policy allows only after all other avenues of inquiry are exhausted.The subpoenas remained secret until the Justice Department disclosed them in recent weeks to the news organizations — The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN — revelations that set off criticism that the government was intruding on press freedoms.The gag orders and records seizures show how aggressively the Trump administration pursued the inquiries while Mr. Trump declared war on the news media and perceived enemies whom he routinely accused of disclosing damaging information about him, including Mr. Schiff and James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director whom prosecutors focused on in the leak inquiry involving Times records.Former President Donald J. Trump repeatedly attacked Representative Adam B. Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times“Notwithstanding whether there was sufficient predication for the leak investigation itself, including family members and minor children strikes me as extremely aggressive,” said David Laufman, a former Justice Department official who worked on leak investigations. “In combination with former President Trump’s unmistakable vendetta against Congressman Schiff, it raises serious questions about whether the manner in which this investigation was conducted was influenced by political considerations rather than purely legal ones.”A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, as did Mr. Barr and a representative for Apple.As the years wore on, some officials argued in meetings that charges were becoming less realistic, former Justice Department officials said: They lacked strong evidence, and a jury might not care about information reported years earlier.The Trump administration also declassified some of the information, making it harder for prosecutors to argue that publishing it had harmed the United States. And the president’s attacks on Mr. Schiff and Mr. Comey would allow defense lawyers to argue that any charges were attempts to wield the power of law enforcement against Mr. Trump’s enemies.But Mr. Barr directed prosecutors to continue investigating, contending that the Justice Department’s National Security Division had allowed the cases to languish, according to three people briefed on the cases. Some cases had nothing to do with leaks about Mr. Trump and involved sensitive national security information, one of the people said. But Mr. Barr’s overall view of leaks led some people in the department to eventually see the inquiries as politically motivated.Mr. Schiff called the subpoenas for data on committee members and staff another example of Mr. Trump using the Justice Department as a “cudgel against his political opponents and members of the media.”“It is increasingly apparent that those demands did not fall on deaf ears,” Mr. Schiff said in a statement. “The politicization of the department and the attacks on the rule of law are among the most dangerous assaults on our democracy carried out by the former president.”He said the department informed him in May that the investigation into his committee was closed. But he called on its independent inspector general to investigate the leak case and others that “suggest the weaponization of law enforcement,” an appeal joined by Speaker Nancy Pelosi.Early Hunt for LeaksSoon after Mr. Trump took office in 2017, press reports based on sensitive or classified intelligence threw the White House into chaos. They detailed conversations between the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time and Mr. Trump’s top aides, the president’s pressuring of the F.B.I. and other matters related to the Russia investigation.The White House was adamant that the sources be found and prosecuted, and the Justice Department began a broad look at national security officials from the Obama administration, according to five people briefed on the inquiry.While most officials were ruled out, investigators opened cases that focused on Mr. Comey and his deputy, Andrew G. McCabe, the people said. Prosecutors also began to scrutinize the House Intelligence Committee, including Mr. Schiff, as a potential source of the leaks. As the House’s chief intelligence oversight body, the committee has regular access to sensitive government secrets.Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director in 2017.Al Drago/The New York TimesJustice Department National Security Division officials briefed the deputy attorney general’s office nearly every other week on the investigations, three former department officials said.In 2017 and 2018, a grand jury subpoenaed Apple and another internet service provider for the records of the people associated with the Intelligence Committee. They learned about most of the subpoenas last month, when Apple informed them that their records had been shared but did not detail the extent of the request, committee officials said. A second service provider had notified one member of the committee’s staff about such a request last year.It was not clear why family members or children were involved, but the investigators could have sought the accounts because they were linked or on the theory that parents were using their children’s phones or computers to hide contacts with journalists.There do not appear to have been similar grand jury subpoenas for records of members or staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, according to another official familiar with the matter. A spokesman for Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee did not respond to a question about whether they were issued subpoenas. The Justice Department has declined to tell Democrats on the committee whether any Republicans were investigated.Apple turned over only metadata and account information, not photos, emails or other content, according to the person familiar with the inquiry.After the records provided no proof of leaks, prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington discussed ending that piece of their investigation. But Mr. Barr’s decision to bring in an outside prosecutor helped keep the case alive.A CNN report in August 2019 about another leak investigation said prosecutors did not recommend to their superiors that they charge Mr. Comey over memos that he wrote and shared about his interactions with Mr. Trump, which were not ultimately found to contain classified information.Mr. Barr was wary of how Mr. Trump would react, according to a person familiar with the situation. Indeed, Mr. Trump berated the attorney general, who defended the department, telling the president that there was no case against Mr. Comey to be made, the person said. But an investigation remained open into whether Mr. Comey had leaked other classified information about Russia.Revived CasesIn February 2020, Mr. Barr placed the prosecutor from New Jersey, Osmar Benvenuto, into the National Security Division. His background was in gang and health care fraud prosecutions.Through a Justice Department spokesman, Mr. Benvenuto declined to comment.Mr. Benvenuto’s appointment was in keeping with Mr. Barr’s desire to keep matters of great interest to the White House in the hands of a small circle of trusted aides and officials.William P. Barr brought a trusted prosecutor in from New Jersey to help investigate leak cases.Al Drago for The New York TimesWith Mr. Benvenuto involved in the leak inquiries, the F.B.I. questioned Michael Bahar, a former House Intelligence Committee staff member who had gone into private practice in May 2017. The interview, conducted in late spring of 2020, did not yield evidence that led to charges.Prosecutors also redoubled efforts to find out who had leaked material related to Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser. Details about conversations he had in late 2016 with the Russian ambassador at the time, Sergey I. Kislyak, appeared in news reports in early 2017 and eventually helped prompt both his ouster and federal charges against him. The discussions had also been considered highly classified because the F.B.I. had used a court-authorized secret wiretap of Mr. Kislyak to monitor them.But John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence and close ally of Mr. Trump’s, seemed to damage the leak inquiry in May 2020, when he declassified transcripts of the calls. The authorized disclosure would have made it more difficult for prosecutors to argue that the news stories had hurt national security.Separately, one of the prosecutors whom Mr. Barr had directed to re-examine the F.B.I.’s criminal case against Mr. Flynn interviewed at least one law enforcement official in the leak investigation after the transcripts were declassified, a move that a person familiar with the matter labeled politically fraught.The biweekly updates on the leak investigations between top officials continued. Julie Edelstein, the deputy chief of counterintelligence and export control, and Matt Blue, the head of the department’s counterterrorism section, briefed John C. Demers, the head of the National Security Division, and Seth DuCharme, an official in the deputy attorney general’s office, on their progress. Mr. Benvenuto was involved in briefings with Mr. Barr.Mr. Demers, Ms. Edelstein, Mr. Blue and Mr. Benvenuto are still at the Justice Department. Their continued presence and leadership roles would seem to ensure that Mr. Biden’s appointees, including Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, would have a full understanding of the investigations. More

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      U.S. Put Gag Order on Times Executives Amid Fight Over Email Logs

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      A push by prosecutors to secretly seize data about four Times reporters’ emails began in the Trump administration and continued under Biden.WASHINGTON — In the last weeks of the Trump administration and continuing under President Biden, the Justice Department fought a secret legal battle to obtain the email logs of four New York Times reporters in a hunt for their sources, a top lawyer for the newspaper said Friday night.While the Trump administration never informed The Times about the effort, the Biden administration continued waging the fight this year, telling a handful of top Times executives about it but imposing a gag order to shield it from public view, said the lawyer, David McCraw, who called the move unprecedented.The gag order prevented the executives from disclosing the government’s efforts to seize the records even to the executive editor, Dean Baquet, and other newsroom leaders.Mr. McCraw said Friday that a federal court had lifted the order, which had been in effect since March 3, freeing him to reveal what had happened. The battle was over an effort by the Justice Department to seize email logs from Google, which operates the Times’s email system, and which had resisted the effort to obtain the information.The disclosure came two days after the Biden Justice Department notified the four reporters that the Trump administration, hunting for their sources, had in 2020 secretly seized months of their phone records from early 2017. That notification followed similar disclosures in recent weeks about seizing communications records of reporters at The Washington Post and CNN.Mr. Baquet condemned both the Trump and Biden administrations for their actions, portraying the effort as an assault on the First Amendment.“Clearly, Google did the right thing, but it should never have come to this,” Mr. Baquet said. “The Justice Department relentlessly pursued the identity of sources for coverage that was clearly in the public interest in the final 15 days of the Trump administration. And the Biden administration continued to pursue it. As I said before, it profoundly undermines press freedom.”There was no precedent, Mr. McCraw said, for the government to impose a gag order on New York Times personnel as part of a leak investigation. He also said there was no precedent for the government to seize the Times’s phone records without advance notification of the effort.A Google spokeswoman said that while it does not comment on specific cases, the company is “firmly committed to protecting our customers’ data and we have a long history of pushing to notify our customers about any legal requests.”Anthony Coley, a Justice Department spokesman, noted that “on multiple occasions in recent months,” the Biden-era department had moved to delay enforcement of the order and it then “voluntarily moved to withdraw the order before any records were produced.”He added: “The department strongly values a free and independent press, and is committed to upholding the First Amendment.”Last month, Mr. Biden said he would not permit the Justice Department during his administration to seize communications logs that could reveal reporters’ sources, calling the practice “simply, simply wrong.” (Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department had gone after such data in several leak investigations.)The letter this week disclosing the seizure of phone records involving the Times reporters — Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eric Lichtblau and Michael S. Schmidt — had hinted at the existence of the separate fight over data that would show whom they had been in contact with over email.The letters said the government had also acquired a court order to seize logs of their emails, but “no records were obtained,” providing no further details. But with the lifting of the gag order, Mr. McCraw said he had been freed to explain what had happened.Prosecutors in the office of the United States attorney in Washington had obtained a sealed court order from a magistrate judge on Jan. 5 requiring Google to secretly turn over the information. But Google resisted, apparently demanding that the Times be told, as its contract with the company requires.The Justice Department continued to press the request after the Biden administration took over, but in early March prosecutors relented and asked a judge to permit telling Mr. McCraw. But the disclosure to him came with a nondisclosure order preventing him from talking about it to other people.Mr. McCraw said it was “stunning” to receive an email from Google telling him what was going on. At first, he said, he did not know who the prosecutor was, and because the matter was sealed, there were no court documents he could access about it.The next day, Mr. McCraw said, he was told the name of the prosecutor — a career assistant United States attorney in Washington, Tejpal Chawla — and opened negotiations with him. Eventually, Mr. Chawla agreed to ask the judge to modify the gag order so Mr. McCraw could discuss the matter with the Times’s general counsel and the company’s outside lawyers, and then with two senior Times executives: A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher, and Meredith Kopit Levien, the chief executive.“We made clear that we intended to go to court to challenge the order if it was not withdrawn,” Mr. McCraw said. Then, on June 2, he said, the Justice Department told him it would ask the court to quash the order to Google at the same time that it disclosed the earlier phone records seizure, which he had not known about.He described the position he was in as “untenable,” especially when it came to talking with Times reporters about chatter involving some kind of fight involving Google and a leak investigation related to The Times.The Justice Department has not said what leak it was investigating, but the identity of the four reporters who were targeted and the date range of the communications sought strongly suggested that it centered on classified information in an April 2017 article about how James B. Comey Jr., the former F.B.I. director, handled politically charged investigations during the 2016 presidential campaign.The article included discussion of an email or memo by a Democratic operative that Russian hackers had stolen, but that was not among the tranche that intelligence officials say Russia provided to WikiLeaks for public disclosure as part of its hack-and-dump operation to manipulate the election.The American government found out about the memo, which was said to express confidence that the attorney general at the time, Loretta Lynch, would not let an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server go too far. Mr. Comey was said to worry that if Ms. Lynch made and announced the decision not to charge Ms. Clinton, Russia would put out the memo to make it seem illegitimate, leading to his unorthodox decision to announce that the F.B.I. was recommending against charges in the matter.The Justice Department under then-President Donald Trump, who fired Mr. Comey and considered him an enemy, sought for years to see whether it could find evidence sufficient to charge him with the crime of making unauthorized disclosures of classified information — a push that eventually came to focus on whether he had anything to do with The Times learning about the existence of the document Russian hackers had stolen.The long-running leak investigation into Mr. Comey was seen inside of the Justice Department as one of the most politicized and contentious, even by the standards of a department that had been prevailed upon in several instances to use leak investigations and other policies concerning book publication to attack former officials who criticized Mr. Trump.Throughout last year, prosecutors talked about whether or not to close the leak investigation into Mr. Comey, according to two people familiar with the case, in part because there seemed to be little evidence to show that the former FBI director had shared classified information with the press.Last fall, department officials discussed whether the investigation had run its course and prosecutors should draft a declination memo that would explain why Mr. Comey would not be prosecuted, one of the people said. But the F.B.I. and the career prosecutors working on the case wanted to keep the investigation open, the people said, and in January prosecutors obtained a special court order to require Google to turn over data on the reporters’ emails.With Mr. Trump soon to be out of office, the order was controversial among some inside of the department, according to two people with knowledge of the case. It was seen as unusually aggressive for a case that would likely end in no charges. During the transition from the Trump to the Biden administration, at least one official wrote in a memo that the case should be closed, according to a person familiar with the transition.In the court filings seeking to compel Google to turn over logs of who was communicating with the four reporters who wrote that story, the Justice Department persuaded the judge that the secrecy was justified because, as the judge wrote on Jan. 5, “there is reason to believe that notification of the existence of this order will seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation, including by giving targets an opportunity to destroy or tamper with evidence.”The Jan. 5 document does not acknowledge that the existence of the leak investigation into Mr. Comey and its subject matter was by then already known, because The Times had reported on it almost a year earlier. It is not clear whether the Justice Department told the judge about that article, or instead suggested that the inquiry was still a well-kept secret. More

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      The Intelligence on Russia Was Clear. It Was Not Always Presented That Way.

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      A newly declassified intelligence report made clear that government agencies long knew of Russia’s work to aid Donald Trump, but he and allies muddied the waters.WASHINGTON — Representative Jason Crow listened during a classified briefing last summer while a top intelligence official said that Russia was hurting Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign to help President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Crow, Democrat of Colorado, held up an intelligence agency news release from days earlier and demanded to know why it said nothing about Russia’s plans.“‘When are you going to come out publicly and correct this record?’” Mr. Crow recalled asking the official, William R. Evanina. “‘Because there’s a massive disconnect between what is in your news releases and what you’re saying publicly — because of the pressure of the president.’”A report released Tuesday made clear that the intelligence community believed that Russia had long attacked Mr. Biden for the benefit of Mr. Trump. But throughout 2020, senior officials bowed to Mr. Trump’s hostility toward any public emphasis of the threat from Russia, and they offered Congress and the public incomplete or misleading portraits of the intelligence on foreign influence in the election.The picture is complicated. While Mr. Trump’s enmity toward the intelligence community loomed, and his political appointees emphasized the threat from China and Iran, not Russia, career officers did also get key findings about Russian intelligence declassified and disclosed last year.Soon after that briefing to Congress, Mr. Evanina released details about Kremlin-backed operatives denigrating Mr. Biden, fulfilling the demands of Mr. Crow and other lawmakers. In an interview, Mr. Evanina credited Congress for pushing for more information, but said it took time and effort to get other intelligence officials to declassify the information.Once made public, the information broke new ground in describing Russian activity, but it also angered the White House.“We were out there on our island,” Mr. Evanina said. “The White House was unhappy with us, and so were the Democrats.” After Mr. Evanina’s disclosure, Mr. Trump and senior administration officials worked to play down the intelligence about Russian interference or to redirect focus to China’s work.Their efforts allowed Americans to dismiss a widely accepted intelligence assessment as politics, deepening distrust and division among the electorate, current and former officials said, adding that a divided country was vulnerable to foreign interference.“We’re so polarized,” Mr. Evanina said, “we’re going to be even more susceptible for this kind of activity moving forward.”Former Trump administration officials defended their public assessments of the intelligence. Some administration officials saw intelligence analysts, particularly the C.I.A.’s Russia experts, as presenting an overly dramatic analysis of the Kremlin’s intentions.The newly released report, former Trump administration officials argued, blurs the definitions of influence and interference. Russia’s effort was always more about spreading misinformation and propaganda, the former officials said, and there was no evidence that the Kremlin changed votes, the report’s definition of interference.“There is zero evidence,” said Richard Grenell, the former acting director of national intelligence. “Key judgment No. 1 is that no one interfered. This is influence vs. interference.”Throughout 2020, current and former intelligence officials privately expressed concern about how the White House characterized intelligence. Inside the intelligence agencies, officers continued to develop classified information on Russian interference and worked to present it honestly. For example, the designated election security czar, Shelby Pierson, was consistent in how she portrayed Russian actions in briefings to Congress, according to people familiar with her testimony.“We’re so polarized, we’re going to be even more susceptible for this kind of activity moving forward,” said William R. Evanina, a former top intelligence official.Joshua Roberts/ReutersBut one of her briefings, in which Ms. Pierson told lawmakers Russia favored Mr. Trump and was working for his re-election, prompted outrage among Republicans and contributed to the ousting of Joseph R. Maguire as the acting director of national intelligence. Mr. Evanina was then put in charge of briefing Congress, a role he was abruptly thrust into with little preparation, officials said.For Mr. Evanina’s first meeting with lawmakers on election security last March, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, then run by Mr. Grenell, prepared a document that tried to temper Ms. Pierson’s February warning by cautioning that officials had not concluded that Russia was backing Mr. Trump.“The I.C. has not concluded that the Kremlin is directly aiding any candidate’s re-election or any other candidates’ election,” an unclassified summary given to lawmakers said, using shorthand for the intelligence community. “Nor have we concluded that the Russians will definitely choose to try to do so in 2020.”Mr. Grenell privately pushed intelligence officials to provide evidence to back up their conclusion that Russian disinformation activity was about influencing the elections, rather than simply an effort to stoke divisive debates in the United States. He has in the past defended the March briefing as an accurate summary of the intelligence.But the intelligence community ombudsman said in January that there were substantive differences between talking points for briefing Congress and what the intelligence community really thought.The newly declassified report showed that the March briefing was at best misleading to Congress and backed Ms. Pierson’s February testimony.The report laid out how the Russian strategy of attacking Mr. Biden goes back to 2014, before Mr. Trump was a serious candidate for office. While some senior intelligence officials have suggested that intelligence on Russia was in flux at various points in 2020, the new report made clear that the intelligence community’s view on President Vladimir V. Putin’s support for Mr. Trump was little changed from 2016 to 2020.Senior Trump administration officials’ comments about China were also at odds with the report.John Ratcliffe, Mr. Trump’s final director of national intelligence, said publicly before and after the election that China was the greatest national security threat. In a letter to Congress, he said the intelligence community was not applying the same definition to Chinese influence operations as it was to Russia’s.Some intelligence officials defended Mr. Ratcliffe’s comments on China, noting that Beijing was the most serious long-term threat to the United States and that it clearly tried to influence how it was viewed in America and elsewhere. The January ombudsman report did find merit in Mr. Ratcliffe’s critique of how intelligence on Chinese influence operations was handled.Mr. Grenell said his successor was right to focus on China, and that it was wrong to dismiss his critique of the intelligence agencies because analysts used different standards when looking at China’s influence operations compared with Russia’s. “China is a crisis,” Mr. Grenell said. “Russia is a problem.”Still, in appearances on Fox News, Mr. Ratcliffe’s relentless focus on China, rather than Russia, had the effect of leaving the impression, particularly with the president’s most enthusiastic supporters, that China was the most urgent threat to the 2020 election.The new report rejected that assertion.“Trying to equate, or at times suggest that, China was actually more actively interfering than Russia, it just wasn’t true,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “I certainly tried to call them out on it at the time but wasn’t able to hold up the classified intelligence document to show how misleading they had been. But I think this report makes it very clear.”Even if China is a long-term national security threat, Russia will continue to be the larger threat in the next few elections, Mr. Evanina said.“There’s some political speak about China being a bigger, more existential threat,” Mr. Evanina said. “Sure they are, but not when it comes to elections.” More

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      Putin Authorized Russian Interference in 2020 Election, Report Says

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      The assessment was the intelligence community’s most comprehensive look at foreign efforts to interfere in the election.WASHINGTON — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia authorized extensive efforts to hurt the candidacy of Joseph R. Biden Jr. during the election last year, including by mounting covert operations to influence people close to President Donald J. Trump, according to a declassified intelligence report released on Tuesday.The report did not name those people but seemed to refer to the work of Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, who relentlessly pushed accusations of corruption about Mr. Biden and his family involving Ukraine.“Russian state and proxy actors who all serve the Kremlin’s interests worked to affect U.S. public perceptions,” the report said.The declassified report represented the most comprehensive intelligence assessment of foreign efforts to influence the 2020 vote. Besides Russia, Iran and other countries also sought to sway the election, the report said. China considered its own efforts but ultimately concluded that they would fail and most likely backfire, intelligence officials concluded.A companion report by the Justice and Homeland Security Departments also rejected false accusations promoted by Mr. Trump’s allies in the weeks after the vote that Venezuela or other countries had defrauded the election.The reports, compiled by career officials, amounted to a repudiation of Mr. Trump, his allies and some of his top administration officials. They reaffirmed the intelligence agencies’ conclusions about Russia’s interference in 2016 on behalf of Mr. Trump and said that the Kremlin favored his re-election. And they categorically dismissed allegations of foreign-fed voter fraud, cast doubt on Republican accusations of Chinese intervention on behalf of Democrats and undermined claims that Mr. Trump and his allies had spread about the Biden family’s work in Ukraine.The report also found that neither Russia nor other countries tried to change ballots themselves. Efforts by Russian hackers to gain access to state and local networks were unrelated to efforts by Moscow to influence the presidential vote.The declassified report did not explain how the intelligence community had reached its conclusions about Russian operations during the 2020 election. But the officials said they had high confidence in their conclusions about Mr. Putin’s involvement, suggesting that the intelligence agencies have developed new ways of gathering information after the extraction of one of their best Kremlin sources in 2017.Foreign efforts to influence United States elections are likely to continue in coming years, American officials said. The public has become more aware of disinformation efforts, and social media companies act faster to take down fake accounts that spread falsehoods. But a large number of Americans remain open to conspiracy theories pushed by Russia and other adversaries, a circumstance that they will exploit, officials warned.“Foreign malign influence is an enduring challenge facing our country,” Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement. “These efforts by U.S. adversaries seek to exacerbate divisions and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions.”While it was declassified by the Biden administration, the report is based on work done during the Trump administration, according to intelligence officials, reflecting the vastly different views that officers had from their political overseers, who were appointed by Mr. Trump.The report rebutted yearslong efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to sow doubts about the intelligence agency’s assessments that Russia not only wanted to sow chaos in the United States but also favored his re-election.“They were disingenuous in downplaying Russia’s influence operations on behalf of the former president,” Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, who leads the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview. “It was a disservice not to level with the public and to try to fudge the intelligence in the way they did.”Some of the report’s details were released in the months leading up to the election, reflecting an effort by the intelligence community to disclose more information about foreign operations during the campaign after its reluctance to do so in 2016 helped misinformation spread.During the 2020 campaign, intelligence officials outlined how Russia was spreading damaging information about Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, in an attempt to bolster Mr. Trump’s re-election chances. It also outlined efforts by Iran in the final days before the election to aid Mr. Biden by spreading letters falsely purporting to be from the Proud Boys, a far-right group.Accusations of election interference have been some of the most politically divisive in recent years. The intelligence report is akin to a declassified assessment in early 2017 that laid out the conclusions about Russia’s efforts in Mr. Trump’s electoral victory, further entrenched the partisan debate over his relationship with Moscow and cemented his enmity toward intelligence and law enforcement officials.With Mr. Trump out of office and the new report’s conclusions largely made public in releases during the campaign, the findings were not expected to prompt as much partisan fury. But elements of the report are likely to be the subject of political fights.Its assessment that China sat on the sidelines is at odds with what some Republican officials have said. In private briefings on Capitol Hill, John Ratcliffe, Mr. Trump’s last director of national intelligence, said Chinese interference was a greater threat in 2020 than Russian operations.The declassified documents released on Tuesday included a dissenting minority view from the national intelligence officer for cyber that suggested that the consensus of the intelligence community was underplaying the threat from China.In a letter in January, Mr. Ratcliffe wrote in support of that minority view and said that the report’s main conclusions about China “fell well short of the mark.” He said the minority conclusion was more than one analyst’s view and argued that some intelligence officials were hesitant to label Chinese actions as influence or interference. Privately, some officials defended the consensus view, saying their reading of the intelligence supported the conclusions that China sought some level of influence but avoided any direct efforts to interfere in the vote.The most detailed material in the assessment was about Russia, which sought to influence how the American public saw the two major candidates “as well as advance Moscow’s longstanding goals of undermining confidence in U.S. election processes.”Moscow used Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russian member of Ukraine’s Parliament, to undermine Mr. Biden, the report confirmed. Mr. Derkach released leaked phone calls four times to undermine Mr. Biden and link him to Ukrainian corruption. The report said Mr. Putin “had purview” over the actions of Mr. Derkach, who had ties to Russian intelligence.Citing in one instance a meeting between Mr. Derkach and Mr. Giuliani, intelligence officials warned Mr. Trump in 2019 that Russian intelligence officers were using his personal lawyer as a conduit for misinformation.Mr. Giuliani also provided materials from Ukraine to American investigators to push for federal inquiries into Mr. Biden’s family, a type of operation that the report mentioned as an example of Russia’s covert efforts without providing names or other identifying details.The report also named Konstantin V. Kilimnik, a former colleague of Mr. Trump’s onetime campaign manager Paul Manafort, as a Russian influence agent. Mr. Kilimnik took steps throughout the 2020 election cycle to hurt Mr. Biden and his candidacy, the report said, helping pushed a false narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, was responsible for interfering in American politics.During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Manafort shared inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served, according to a bipartisan report last year by the Senate Intelligence Committee.“Kilimnik was back at it again, along with others like Derkach,” Mr. Schiff said. “And they had other conduits for their laundered misinformation, including people like Rudy Giuliani.”Neither Mr. Giuliani nor his representatives returned a request for comment.Collecting intelligence to feed to Mr. Trump’s allies and use against Mr. Biden was a priority for Russian intelligence. Moscow’s military intelligence unit, the G.R.U., conducted a hacking campaign against a Ukrainian energy firm, Burisma, in what was most likely an attempt to gather information about Mr. Biden’s family and their work for the company, the report confirmed.In the closing weeks of the campaign, intelligence officials also said that Russian hackers had broken into state and local computer networks. But the new report said those efforts were not aimed at changing votes.Unmentioned in this report was the wide-ranging hacking of federal computer systems using a vulnerability in software made by SolarWinds. The absence of a concerted effort by Russia to change votes suggests that Moscow had refocused its intelligence service on a broader effort to attack the U.S. government.Earlier in 2020, American officials thought Iran was likely to stay on the sidelines of the presidential contest. But Iranian hackers did try a last-minute effort to change the vote in Florida and other states. Iranian hackers sent “threatening, spoofed emails” to Democratic voters that purported to be from the Proud Boys, the report said. The group demanded that the recipients change their party affiliation and vote for Mr. Trump. They also pushed a video that supposedly demonstrated voter fraud.The Iranian effort essentially employed reverse psychology. Officials said Iranian operatives hoped the emails would have the opposite effect of the message’s warning, rallying people to vote for Mr. Biden by thinking Mr. Trump’s supporters were playing dirty campaign tricks. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, authorized the campaign, the report said. More

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      Biden Administration Urged to Drop Julian Assange Case

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCivil-Liberties Groups Ask Biden Justice Dept. to Drop Julian Assange CaseA Friday deadline in the London extradition case may force the Biden administration to decide whether to keep pursuing a Trump-era policy.The Trump administration had sought to have the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange extradited to the United States to face a trial on potentially precedent-setting Espionage Act charges.Credit…Matt Dunham/Associated PressFeb. 8, 2021Updated 3:58 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — A coalition of civil liberties and human rights groups urged the Biden administration on Monday to drop efforts to extradite the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from Britain and prosecute him, calling the Trump-era case against him “a grave threat to press freedom.”The coalition sent a letter urging a change in course before a Friday deadline for the Justice Department to file a brief in a London court. American prosecutors are due to explain in detail their decision — formally lodged on Jan. 19, the last full day of the Trump administration — to appeal a ruling blocking their request to extradite Mr. Assange.The litigation deadline may force the new administration to confront a decision: whether to press on with the Trump-era approach to Mr. Assange, or to instead drop the matter.Democrats like the new Biden team are no fan of Mr. Assange, whose publication in 2016 of Democratic emails stolen by Russia aided Donald J. Trump’s narrow victory over Hillary Clinton. But the charges center instead on his 2010 publication of American military and diplomatic documents leaked by Chelsea Manning, and they raise profound First Amendment issues.“The indictment of Mr. Assange threatens press freedom because much of the conduct described in the indictment is conduct that journalists engage in routinely — and that they must engage in in order to do the work the public needs them to do,” the letter said, adding: “News organizations frequently and necessarily publish classified information in order to inform the public of matters of profound public significance.”The Freedom of the Press Foundation organized the letter. Other signers — about two dozen groups — included the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Demand Progress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, the Project on Government Oversight and Reporters Without Borders.“Most of the charges against Assange concern activities that are no different from those used by investigative journalists around the world every day,” Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said in a separate statement. “President Biden should avoid setting a terrible precedent by criminalizing key tools of independent journalism that are essential for a healthy democracy.”For now, the Justice Department remains committed to appealing the denial of its request to extradite Mr. Assange, said Marc Raimondi, a spokesman for its National Security Division.The deadline to either continue working to extradite Mr. Assange by filing the brief or drop the matter reflects a common legal policy dilemma when a new administration takes over and confronts matters inherited from its predecessor. Newly installed officials face too many issues to make careful decisions on all at once, so some get punted.But litigation calendars can force early decisions about whether to proceed or shift direction in some cases. It is often easier to stay the course, based on an argument that the issue can be revisited later when there is more time. But once the new administration has started down that path, it owns the policy as a matter of political and bureaucratic reality and so can effectively get locked in.Complicating matters for making any decision to keep or jettison the Trump-era policy to go after Mr. Assange with criminal charges, the Biden administration’s intended leadership team is not yet in place at the Justice Department. The Senate has yet to confirm Mr. Biden’s nominee to be attorney general, Judge Merrick B. Garland.In the meantime, the department is being temporarily led by a caretaker career official, Monty Wilkinson, the acting attorney general to whom the letter was addressed.After Mr. Assange published the documents provided by Ms. Manning in 2010, the Obama administration engaged in extensive deliberations under Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. over whether to prosecute Mr. Assange but never charged him with a crime.By contrast, Ms. Manning, a low-level Army intelligence analyst who downloaded the archives of documents and sent them to WikiLeaks, was convicted at a court-martial trial in 2013 of leaking the documents and sentenced to 35 years in prison. President Barack Obama commuted most of the remainder of her sentence in 2017.But law enforcement officials under Mr. Obama shied away from bringing charges against Mr. Assange. They feared that there was no legally meaningful way to distinguish his actions from those of conventional investigative national-security journalism as practiced by mainstream news organizations like The New York Times. The Obama team did not want to create a precedent that could chill or cripple traditional journalism, according to people familiar with its deliberations.In March 2018, however, under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Trump Justice Department obtained a grand jury indictment against Mr. Assange. It initially sidestepped press freedom issues by narrowly accusing him of participating in a hacking-related criminal conspiracy with Ms. Manning, rather than focusing on his publication of government secrets.That indictment was unsealed in April 2019, when Mr. Assange was dragged out of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London and arrested. (He had taken refuge there in 2012, initially to avoid extradition to Sweden to face questions about sexual assault accusations, which he has denied. Sweden had rescinded its arrest warrant for Mr. Assange in 2017.)The Justice Department — by then under Attorney General William P. Barr — then obtained a superseding indictment expanding the charges against Mr. Assange to include allegations that his journalistic-style activities violated the Espionage Act. A second superseding indictment later added more allegations related to the notion of a hacking conspiracy.Notably, there is some overlap in personnel from earlier internal debates about the dilemma raised by Mr. Assange. The top national security official in the Trump Justice Department, John C. Demers, remains in place atop its National Security Division for now; the Biden transition asked him to temporarily stay on for continuity purposes even as most other Trump political appointees resigned.Mr. Demers’s predecessor from 2013 to 2016, John Carlin, has returned to the Justice Department and is currently serving as the acting deputy attorney general. Mr. Carlin’s predecessor, Lisa O. Monaco, who ran the National Security Division from 2011 to 2013, is Mr. Biden’s nominee to be deputy attorney general but has not yet been confirmed.The letter from the rights groups portrayed the Trump-era Justice Department’s decision to proceed against Mr. Assange as jeopardizing journalism “that is crucial to democracy” more broadly, and noted that the Trump administration had “positioned itself as an antagonist to the institution of a free and unfettered press in numerous ways.”They added: “We are deeply concerned about the way that a precedent created by prosecuting Assange could be leveraged — perhaps by a future administration — against publishers and journalists of all stripes.”Since the original indictment was unsealed, lawyers for Mr. Assange have fought the extradition request, arguing that the United States was prosecuting him for political reasons.A British judge in January largely rejected those arguments, holding that he had been charged “in good faith.” But she denied his extradition anyway — citing harsh conditions for security-related prisoners in American jails and the risk that Mr. Assange might be driven to commit suicide. It is that rationale that the brief due on Friday would appeal.Elian Peltier More

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      With Trump Presidency Winding Down, Push for Assange Pardon Ramps Up

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesHouse Moves to Remove TrumpHow Impeachment Might WorkBiden Focuses on CrisesCabinet PicksAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWith Trump Presidency Winding Down, Push for Assange Pardon Ramps UpSupporters of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have enlisted a lobbyist with connections to the president and filed a clemency petition with the White House.The effort comes at a delicate moment for Julian Assange; the Justice Department announced last week that it would appeal a British judge’s ruling blocking his extradition to the United States.Credit…Henry Nicholls/ReutersJan. 10, 2021, 6:53 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Allies of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have ramped up a push for a last-minute pardon from President Trump, enlisting a lobbyist with connections to the administration, trying to rally supporters across the political spectrum and filing a clemency petition with the White House.The effort comes at a delicate moment for Mr. Assange and during a period of tension between the United States and Britain over a case that his supporters say has substantial implications for press freedoms.The Justice Department announced last week that it would appeal a British judge’s ruling blocking the extradition of Mr. Assange to the United States to face trial on charges of violating the Espionage Act and conspiring to hack government computers. The charges stemmed from WikiLeaks’s publication in 2010 of classified documents related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.Mr. Assange’s supporters had been optimistic about the prospects of a pardon from Mr. Trump, who has issued dozens of contentious clemency grants since losing his re-election bid. But they now worry that pressure over his supporters’ ransacking of the Capitol last week could derail plans for additional clemencies before he leaves office on Jan. 20.As unlikely as the prospect of a pardon from Mr. Trump might be, Mr. Assange’s supporters are eager to try before President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. takes office.As vice president, Mr. Biden called the WikiLeaks founder a “high-tech terrorist.” Some of his top advisers blame Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks for helping Mr. Trump win the presidency in 2016 by publishing emails from Democrats associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which U.S. officials say were stolen by Russian intelligence to damage her candidacy. Mr. Trump has long downplayed Russia’s role in the 2016 election.For Mr. Assange’s supporters and press freedom advocates, though, the issues at stake transcend him or politics.“This is so much bigger than Julian,” said Mark Davis, a former journalist who worked with Mr. Assange in Australia, where they are from. If Mr. Assange is prosecuted, “it will have a chilling effect on all national security journalism,” Mr. Davis said, adding: “If we can get Julian off, then the precedent hasn’t been set. If Julian goes down, then it’s bad for all of us.”Mr. Davis, who is now a lawyer specializing in national security and whistle-blower cases, is on the board of Blueprint for Free Speech, an Australia-based nonprofit group that advocates for press freedoms and whistle-blower protections. The group, which was started by Suelette Dreyfus, a former journalist who is an old friend and collaborator with Mr. Assange, signed a pro bono contract on Saturday with the lobbyist Robert Stryk to seek a pardon for Mr. Assange.During Mr. Trump’s presidency, Mr. Stryk, who is well connected in Trump administration circles, has developed a lucrative business representing foreign clients in precarious geopolitical situations.He has worked for a jailed Saudi prince who had fallen out of favor with his country’s powerful de facto leader, as well as the administration of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, which the Trump administration considers illegitimate. Mr. Styrk also worked for Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of Angola’s former president, who is accused of embezzling millions of dollars from a state oil company she once headed, as well as the government of the former Congolese president Joseph Kabila, which had faced American sanctions for human rights abuses and corruption.Mr. Stryk said that he was representing Blueprint for Free Speech to seek a pardon for Mr. Assange without pay because of his belief in free speech, and that he would continue pushing for the pardon in the Biden administration if Mr. Trump did not grant it.“This is not a partisan issue,” Mr. Stryk said.The contract, which he said he had disclosed to the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, calls for his company, Stryk Global Diplomacy, to “facilitate meetings and interactions with the president and the president-elect’s administrations” to “obtain a full pardon” for Mr. Assange.Mr. Davis said Mr. Stryk had been chosen partly because of his entree into Mr. Trump’s administration, which the group sees as its best chance to secure a pardon.Mr. Davis noted that Mr. Assange, 49, was indicted during Mr. Trump’s presidency. “We are unabashedly reaching out to the Republican Party on this issue in the final weeks to correct something before it’s too late, and before it become part of Trump’s legacy,” Mr. Davis said.He said, “If Joe Biden is sympathetic, that’s well and good, and we certainly hope he is.” But, he added, “it’s a far simpler process for an outgoing president than an incoming president.”Mr. Assange’s cause has been taken up by a range of media freedom and human rights organizations, public officials and celebrities, including the actress Pamela Anderson.Blueprint for Free Speech is working to harness some of that support, including from Ms. Anderson, a friend of Mr. Assange, who said in an interview that she had been trying to connect with Mr. Trump to plead the case. “I just hate to see him deteriorate in jail right now,” she said of Mr. Assange, describing the pardon push as “a last-ditch effort for all of us who are Julian Assange supporters.”Asked about the effort by Blueprint, Jennifer Robinson, a lawyer representing Mr. Assange, said he “is encouraged by and supports efforts” by a variety of prominent supporters around the world.Mr. Davis stressed that Blueprint’s push was independent of parallel efforts by Mr. Assange’s family and his lawyers, though Mr. Stryk has been in contact with Barry J. Pollack, Mr. Assange’s Washington-based lawyer, who is representing him against the criminal charges.Prosecutors have argued that Mr. Assange unlawfully obtained secret documents and put lives at risk by revealing the names of people who had provided information to the United States in war zones.Mr. Assange’s lawyers have framed the prosecution as a politically driven attack on press freedom.Last month, Mr. Pollack filed a petition for a pardon with the White House Counsel’s Office, which has been vetting clemency requests for Mr. Trump, arguing that Mr. Assange was “being prosecuted for his news gathering and publication of truthful information.”Mr. Pollack declined to comment on the petition, which was obtained by The New York Times, except to say that it was pending.The petition appears to be geared toward appealing to Mr. Trump, who has wielded the unchecked presidential clemency power to aid people with personal connections to him or whose causes resonate with him politically, including a handful of people ensnared in the special counsel’s investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and ties to his campaign.The petition highlighted that the charges against Mr. Assange stemmed from WikiLeaks’s publication of material that “exposed misconduct committed in Iraq and Afghanistan during wars initiated by a prior administration.” And it notes that the Democratic emails published by WikiLeaks in 2016, which showed some in the party apparatus conspiring to sabotage the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont and Mrs. Clinton’s rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, resulted in the resignations of party officials.The petition does not address the United States government’s findings about Russia’s role in the theft of the emails as part of its effort to undermine Mrs. Clinton, which has long been a sore spot for Mr. Trump.The petition notes that the sentence of Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who provided the military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks that led to the charges against Mr. Assange, was commuted by President Barack Obama in the final days of his term.Like Mr. Assange’s lawyers in Britain, Mr. Pollack’s petition raises concerns about Mr. Assange’s health, noting that the prison in which he is being held has been under lockdown after a coronavirus outbreak.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Trump Was Briefed on Uncorroborated Intelligence About Chinese Bounties

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTrump Was Briefed on Uncorroborated Intelligence About Chinese BountiesThe unverified intelligence echoes a similar report, deemed credible by the C.I.A. but dismissed by the president, that Russian military agents had offered payments for attacks on Americans in Afghanistan.President Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, this month at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington.Credit…Erin Scott for The New York TimesDec. 30, 2020President Trump was briefed this month about intelligence reports that China had offered to pay bounties to fighters in Afghanistan who attacked American soldiers there, but the information was uncorroborated and comes months after Mr. Trump dismissed as a “hoax” a C.I.A. assessment that Russia had paid for such attacks.It is unclear whether the intelligence on China shows that any bounties were paid, or whether any attacks on American personnel were even attempted. United States intelligence agencies collect enormous amounts of information, much of which turns out to be false or misleading.The information, included in the president’s written briefing on Dec. 17 and relayed verbally by the national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien — was earlier reported on Wednesday night by Axios and confirmed by U.S. officials.It comes at a time when Trump administration officials, including the director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, have sought to put more pressure on China, partly in the hope of limiting any plans by the incoming Biden administration to ease tensions with Beijing.Mr. Trump, Mr. Ratcliffe and other officials have also sought to direct attention toward Chinese misbehavior in areas where other American officials consider Russia to be a greater threat, including computer hacking and the use of disinformation to disrupt American politics.After the disclosure this month that the United States government had been subjected to a huge cyberbreach that American officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, confidently attributed to Russia, Mr. Trump angrily cast doubt on that notion and sought to implicate Beijing. “Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter, charging that the news media avoids “discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!).”The Axios report said on Wednesday that the underlying intelligence on the bounties, about which it obtained no further details, would be declassified, although it was unclear why or for whom. White House officials would not elaborate but did not dispute that the intelligence was uncorroborated.Although tensions between the United States and China have escalated significantly during the Trump era, Beijing is not known to provide substantial support to anti-American proxies in combat zones like Afghanistan, and some national security experts were initially skeptical that Beijing would support attacks on Americans. By contrast, many considered similar reports about Russian bounties to be credible.If confirmed, and particularly if traced to political leaders in Beijing, such an action by China would constitute a grave provocation that might demand a response by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. after he takes office in January.A Biden transition official would not say on Wednesday night whether Mr. Biden, who now receives official daily intelligence briefings, had been presented with the same information as the president.But the official said that the Biden team would seek to learn more about it from the Trump administration and that it underscored the importance of a fully cooperative transition process, including with the Defense Department, which Mr. Biden on Monday accused of “obstruction.”“Right now,” Mr. Biden said in Wilmington, Del., “we just aren’t getting all the information that we need from the outgoing administration in key national security areas.”Months before the report involving China, the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies were investigating reports collected this year, and first reported by The New York Times, that Russian military intelligence agents had offered to pay Taliban-linked fighters in Afghanistan for the killing of American soldiers there.The C.I.A. assessed with medium confidence that Russia had covertly offered and paid the bounties to a network of Afghan militants and criminals. The National Security Agency placed lower confidence in the intelligence. But Mr. Pompeo, for one, took the reports seriously enough to issue a stern face-to-face warning this summer to his Russian counterpart.Mr. Trump was similarly provided with a written briefing on that intelligence, but publicly he dismissed it as “fake news” and an extension of what he called the “Russia hoax,” including the investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to the Kremlin. At the same time, the president suggested that subordinates had not done enough to draw the report about Russia to his attention.“If it reached my desk, I would have done something about it,” Mr. Trump said in July. United States officials have said that the assessment regarding Russia was included in his written intelligence brief in February, but that he rarely reads that document.In multiple subsequent conversations with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Trump did not raise the matter.Many questions are outstanding about the unverified intelligence regarding China, including when such bounties were said to be offered, by whom and to whom. The United States and its coalition partners in Afghanistan are fighting not only the Taliban but also Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and various other militant and criminal groups.The reportedly planned release of more information comes at a time when Democrats and many career intelligence officials are concerned that Trump officials like Mr. Ratcliffe have sought to selectively declassify intelligence for political purposes, like the Russia investigation and election interference.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Trump Administration Is Criticized Over Proposal to Split Cyberoperations Leadership

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