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      Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was an FBI informant

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      Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys extremist group, has a past as an informer for federal and local law enforcement, repeatedly working undercover for investigators after he was arrested in 2012, according to a former prosecutor and a transcript of a 2014 federal court proceeding obtained by Reuters.In the Miami hearing, a federal prosecutor, a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent and Tarrio’s own lawyer described his undercover work and said he had helped authorities prosecute more than a dozen people in various cases involving drugs, gambling and human smuggling.Tarrio, in an interview with Reuters on Tuesday, denied working undercover or cooperating in cases against others. “I don’t know any of this,’” he said, when asked about the transcript. “I don’t recall any of this.”Law enforcement officials and the court transcript contradict Tarrio’s denial. In a statement to Reuters, the former federal prosecutor in Tarrio’s case, Vanessa Singh Johannes, confirmed that “he cooperated with local and federal law enforcement, to aid in the prosecution of those running other, separate criminal enterprises, ranging from running marijuana grow houses in Miami to operating pharmaceutical fraud schemes”.Tarrio, 36, is a high-profile figure who organizes and leads the rightwing Proud Boys in their confrontations with those they believe to be antifa, short for “anti-fascism”, an amorphous leftist movement. The Proud Boys were involved in the deadly insurrection at the Capitol on 6 January.The records uncovered by Reuters are startling because they show that a leader of a far-right group now under intense scrutiny by law enforcement was previously an active collaborator with criminal investigators.Washington police arrested Tarrio in early January when he arrived in the city two days before the Capitol Hill riot. He was charged with possessing two high-capacity rifle magazines, and burning a Black Lives Matter banner during a December demonstration by supporters of Donald Trump. The DC superior court ordered him to leave the city pending a court date in June.Though Tarrio did not take part in the Capitol insurrection, at least five Proud Boys members have been charged in the riot. The FBI previously said Tarrio’s earlier arrest was an effort to pre-empt the events of 6 January.The transcript from 2014 shines a new light on Tarrio’s past connections to law enforcement. During the hearing, the prosecutor and Tarrio’s defense attorney asked a judge to reduce the prison sentence of Tarrio and two co-defendants. They had pleaded guilty in a fraud case related to the relabeling and sale of stolen diabetes test kits.The prosecutor said Tarrio’s information had led to the prosecution of 13 people on federal charges in two separate cases, and had helped local authorities investigate a gambling ring.Tarrio’s then lawyer Jeffrey Feiler said in court that his client had worked undercover in numerous investigations, one involving the sale of anabolic steroids, another regarding “wholesale prescription narcotics” and a third targeting human smuggling. He said Tarrio helped police uncover three marijuana grow houses, and was a “prolific” cooperator.In the smuggling case, Tarrio, “at his own risk, in an undercover role met and negotiated to pay $11,000 to members of that ring to bring in fictitious family members of his from another country”, the lawyer said in court.In an interview, Feiler said he did not recall details about the case but added, “The information I provided to the court was based on information provided to me by law enforcement and the prosecutor.”An FBI agent at the hearing called Tarrio a “key component” in local police investigations involving marijuana, cocaine and MDMA, or ecstasy. The Miami FBI office declined comment.There is no evidence Tarrio has cooperated with authorities since then. In interviews with Reuters, however, he said that before rallies in various cities, he would let police departments know of the Proud Boys’ plans. It is unclear if this was actually the case. He said he stopped this coordination after 12 December because the DC police had cracked down on the group.Tarrio on Tuesday acknowledged that his fraud sentence was reduced, from 30 months to 16 months, but insisted that leniency was provided only because he and his co-defendants helped investigators “clear up” questions about his own case. He said he never helped investigate others.That comment contrasts with statements made in court by the prosecutor, his lawyer and the FBI. The judge in the case, Joan A Lenard, said Tarrio “provided substantial assistance in the investigation and prosecution of other persons involved in criminal conduct”.As Trump supporters challenged the Republican’s election loss in often violent demonstrations, Tarrio stood out for his swagger as he led crowds of mostly white Proud Boys in a series of confrontations and street brawls in Washington DC, Portland, Oregon and elsewhere.The Proud Boys, founded in 2016, began as a group protesting against political correctness and perceived constraints on masculinity. It grew into a group with distinctive colors of yellow and black that embraced street fighting. In September their profile soared when Trump called on them to “Stand back and stand by.”Tarrio, based in Miami, became the national chairman of the group in 2018.In November and December, Tarrio led the Proud Boys through the streets of DC after Trump’s loss. Video shows him on 11 December with a bullhorn in front of a large crowd. “To the parasites both in Congress, and in that stolen White House,’” he said. “You want a war, you got one!” The crowd roared. The next day Tarrio burned the BLM banner.Former prosecutor Johannes said she was surprised that the defendant she prosecuted for fraud is now a key player in the violent movement that sought to halt the certification of President Joe Biden.“I knew that he was a fraudster, but had no reason to know that he was also a domestic terrorist,” she said. More

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      Joe Biden hits the ground running by outlining national Covid strategy

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      Joe Biden began his first full day as president confronting a host of major crises facing his fledgling administration, starting with a flurry of actions to address his most pressing challenge: the raging Covid-19 pandemic.At a White House event on Thursday afternoon, Biden unveiled a new national strategy to combat the coronavirus, which has killed more than 404,000 Americans and infected more than 24 million since it first began spreading across the US one year ago, by far the highest totals in the world.“For the past year, we couldn’t rely on the federal government to act with the urgency and focus and coordination we needed,” Biden said, referring to the administration of Donald Trump, which ended at midday the day before.“And we have seen the tragic costs of that failure,” he said.Biden again braced the nation for continued hardship, saying “it’s going to get worse before it gets better” and predicting the death toll could rise to 500,000 by the end of next month.Outlining his approach, Biden told Americans: “Help is on the way.”The actions on Thursday included an order to require mask-wearing on federal property, in airports and on many flights, trains, ships and long-distance buses, and also a huge push to speed up vaccinations, which have fallen far behind the government’s own schedule.“Mask up,” he said, waving a face mask. “For the first 100 days.”Even as he charted an aggressive approach to gain control of the virus, he was met with more bad news about the economy as another 900,000 people filed for unemployment benefits last week and he inherited the worst jobs market of any modern-day president.Biden and Harris began their day joined by family at the White House, where they virtually attended an inaugural prayer service held by the Washington National Cathedral, a tradition that has been reshaped by the pandemic.The president, members of his family as well as his vice-president, Kamala Harris, and her husband sat physically distanced in the Blue Room of the White House to stream the interfaith service. Many of the speakers extended prayers and blessings to the new leaders.The Rev William Barber, a preacher from North Carolina and civil rights leader who leads an anti-poverty campaign, delivered the homily, calling on the new administration to address what he called the “five interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation/denial of healthcare, the war economy, and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism”.“No, America has never yet been all that she has hoped to be,” Barber said. “But right here, right now, a third reconstruction is possible if we choose.”And on Thursday morning John Kerry warned, in his first remarks as the US’s new climate envoy, that the world was lagging behind the required pace of change needed to avert catastrophic impacts from the climate crisis.Kerry, the former US secretary of state in the Obama-Biden administration, acknowledged that America had been absent from the international effort to contain dangerous global heating during Donald Trump’s presidency but added: “Today no country and no continent is getting the job done.”The FBI director, Christopher Wray, will remain in the role, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said on Thursday. During her first press briefing on Wednesday, Psaki raised speculation that his job was in jeopardy when she declined to publicly state whether Biden had confidence in him.“I caused an unintentional ripple yesterday, so wanted to state very clearly President Biden intends to keep FBI Director Wray on in his role and he has confidence in the job he is doing,” she said in a tweet on Thursday.Wray took the helm at the agency in 2017 after Trump fired his predecessor, James Comey, just four years into what is traditionally a 10-year term. Wray’s future had been in doubt for much of the past year, as Trump openly criticized the director and the agency.Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, Biden’s nominee for transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, appeared at his Senate confirmation hearing while the House prepared to initiate Trump’s second impeachment trial.In an opening statement, Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who ran against Biden for the Democratic nomination, said there was a “bipartisan appetite for a generational opportunity to transform and improve America’s infrastructure”.The Senate, which officially switched to Democratic control on Wednesday after the swearing-in of three new senators, two from Georgia, has never held an impeachment trial for a former president.Some Republicans have argued that it is not constitutional to try an official who has left office, but many scholars disagree. Democrats say they are ready to move forward as negotiations continue between the chambers over the scope and timing of a trial.After impeaching Trump for an unprecedented second time last week, the House has yet to transmit to the Senate the article charging Trump with “incitement of insurrection” over his role in encouraging a crowd of loyalists that attacked the US Capitol on 6 January in an effort to stop the certification of his defeat.At a press conference on Thursday, Pelosi refused to say when the House would send the article beyond that it “won’t be long”. More

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      US lawmakers ask FBI to investigate Parler app's role in Capitol attack

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      American lawmakers have asked the FBI to investigate the role of Parler, the social media website and app popular with the American far right, in the violence at the US Capitol on 6 January.Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House oversight and reform Committee, asked the FBI to review Parler’s role “as a potential facilitator of planning and incitement related to the violence, as a repository of key evidence posted by users on its site, and as a potential conduit for foreign governments who may be financing civil unrest in the United States”.Maloney asked the FBI to review Parler’s financing and its ties to Russia.Maloney cited press reports that detailed violent threats on Parler against state elected officials for their role in certifying the election results before the 6 January attack that left five dead. She also noted numerous Parler users have been arrested and charged with threatening violence against elected officials or for their roles in the attack.She cited justice department charges against a Texas man who used a Parler account to post threats that he would return to the Capitol on 19 January “carrying weapons and massing in numbers so large that no army could match them”.The justice department said the threats were viewed by other social media users tens of thousands of times.Parler was launched in 2018 and won more users in the last months of the Trump presidency as social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook cracked down more forcefully on falsehoods and misinformation.The social network, which resembles Twitter, fast became the hottest app among American conservatives, with high-profile proponents like Senator Ted Cruz recruiting new users.But following the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol, Google banned it from Google Play and Apple suspended it from the App Store.Amazon then suspended Parler from its web hosting service AWS, in effect taking the site offline unless it could find a new company to host its services.The website partially returned online this week, though only displaying a message from its chief executive, John Matze, saying he was working to restore functionality, with the help of a Russian-owned technology company.Reuters reported this week that Parler partially resumed online operations.The FBI and Parler did not immediately respond to requests for comment.More than 25,000 national guard troops and new fencing ringed with razor wire were among the unprecedented security steps put in place ahead of Wednesday’s inauguration of President Joe Biden. More

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      FBI vets thousands of troops amid fears of insider attack on Biden inauguration

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      Thousands of military personnel guarding Joe Biden’s inauguration as US president on Wednesday are being vetted by the FBI amid fears of an insider attack.The biggest ever security operation for a presidential transition has turned swaths of Washington into a fortress, barricades, razor wire and 7ft fences erected to prevent a repeat of the deadly 6 January attack on the US Capitol by a mob incited by Donald Trump.National guard personnel train part-time while holding civilian jobs or attending college. Some 25,000 members – more than double the number at previous inaugurations – are pouring into Washington from across the country, at short notice.There are concerns that some of the very people assigned to protect the city could present a threat to the incoming president and other dignitaries, the Associated Press reported. Their names will be fed through an FBI database for any evidence of connections to investigations or terrorism or other red flags.Ryan McCarthy, the army secretary, told the AP guard members were receiving training on how to identify potential insider threats, although no hard evidence had come to light.“We’re continually going through the process, and taking second, third looks at every one of the individuals assigned to this operation,” he said, adding: “We need to be conscious of it and we need to put all of the mechanisms in place to thoroughly vet these men and women who would support any operations like this.”At least two active-duty service members or national guard members have been arrested in connection with the Capitol assault. Video footage from inside the building suggests some rioters had military training and that there was a significant level of planning and coordination.The Pentagon received 143 notifications of extremism-related investigation last year from the FBI, 68 of which were related to current and former service members, the Washington Post reported.The national guard played down fears of extremism in its ranks. Maj Gen William Walker, commanding general of the DC national guard, told MSNBC: “I don’t have any concerns because it’s a layered scrub. The FBI is scrubbing, the Secret Service gives out the credentials and then we have other agencies helping with the scrub as well. We really are pretty sure we know who is out here supporting us.”But Washington remains on edge amid fears of attacks by far-right militants, white supremacists and other radical groups encouraged by Trump’s claims that the election was rigged – claims repeatedly tossed out of court and rejected by the US Department of Justice and Republican election officials in battleground states.Five people including a Capitol police officer died in the mayhem on 6 January, which included chants for the death of Vice-President Mike Pence as he presided over the certification of Biden’s victory.Pence will attend the inauguration, with former presidents Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama and their wives. Lady Gaga and Jennifer Lopez will be among the performers. Attendance will be scaled down because of the coronavirus pandemic.The Secret Service is in charge of security but a wide variety of military and law enforcement personnel are also involved, from the national guard and FBI to three police departments.The Capitol was temporarily closed on Monday after a fire broke out at a homeless encampment, Capitol police said. All participants in a rehearsal for the inauguration were evacuated into the building, Reuters reported, before the Secret Service said there was no threat to the public.State capitols across the US stayed on alert. Weekend protests were calm and thinly attended but some pro-Trump demonstrators carried weapons. On Monday Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic governor of New York, said he would skip the inauguration to guard against the possibility of violence in his state capital, Albany.On Monday – a public holiday celebrating the birthday of Martin Luther King – Trump remained behind closed doors at a mostly deserted White House. Biden, wearing black cap, dark glasses, black mask and blue and yellow gloves, stood at a conveyor belt packing beans and rice for a food bank in Philadelphia.Trump was reportedly planning to issue more than 100 pardons as his last major act in office. The president met his son-in-law Jared Kushner, daughter Ivanka Trump and senior advisers on Sunday to thrash out a lengthy list of requests, the Post reported.Trump will be the first outgoing president to skip his successor’s swearing-in since Andrew Johnson did not attend the inauguration of Ulysses S Grant in 1869. Johnson, like Clinton, was impeached. Trump is the only president to be impeached twice.Trump has requested a departure ceremony at Joint Base Andrews with a military band and red carpet, ABC News reported.He will then head to his luxury estate, Mar-a-Lago, in West Palm Beach, Florida, to begin an uncertain future. Impeached by the House of Representatives for inciting violence against the US government, he is awaiting a trial in the Senate and a potential ban from running for office.By the time Biden takes the stage on Wednesday, the death toll from coronavirus in the US will in all likelihood have passed 400,000. The pandemic is among “four crises” identified by the new president – along with the economy, climate change and racial injustice.Biden is set to hit the ground running by reversing many of Trump’s most contentious policies with a flurry of executive orders, returning the US to the Paris climate agreement and Iran nuclear deal, accelerating the delivery of Covid-19 vaccines and canceling an immigration ban on some Muslim-majority countries.Kamala Harris, the vice-president-elect, resigned her Senate seat on Monday. She will be replaced by the California secretary of state, Alex Padilla. More

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      'I had no qualms': The people turning in loved ones for the Capitol attack

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      Sign up for the Guardian Today US newsletterWhen Alison Lopez discovered her uncle’s sister had been part of the mob that breached the Capitol doors on 6 January, she immediately reported her to the FBI. “I had no second thoughts,” she said.Lopez found out about her in-law’s participation when the woman in question called her aunt from inside the Capitol to brag about “taking back the election”. Lopez, who is 42, said she had known the relative her whole life but had “no qualms” about reporting her.“If I saw my grandmother making bombs in her basement, or my aunt breaking into a home, I would have to intervene as well – it’s just about doing what’s right,” she said.In the week after the attacks on the Capitol, there has been a concerted effort to “unmask” rioters online, with self-styled detectives investigating who’s who in videos and photos posted from the attack. Outing family members – either online or to authorities – has marked a new frontier of the rift Trumpism has created in the US.Lopez said she was horrified but not surprised to see a loved one participate in the riot. Over the last four years she has watched helplessly as members of her family became increasingly entrenched in the world of hateful rightwing conspiracy theories.“These are people who never really identified with politics before, and now they have just let this consume their lives,” Lopez said, adding she does not consider herself a Democrat and has voted for Republican candidates in the past.If I saw my grandmother making bombs in her basement … I would have to intervene as well – it’s about doing what’s rightMore than 140,000 people have sent tips to the FBI reporting participants in the riots on the Capitol on 6 January, resulting in at least 200 arrests. The vast majority of those, according to the Department of Justice, come from friends, family, and other acquaintances of those involved in the attacks.The Massachusetts teen Helena Duke received a flood of support this week when she posted a video outing her own mother, aunt and uncle as having attended the Capitol protests.The 18-year-old said her mother, who appears to be harassing a Black woman in the video shared, previously condemned her for attending Black Lives Matter protests. “If I did nothing, I felt I was as bad as them,” Duke told Good Morning America.The decision to report a family member or publicly out them as espousing dangerous views can make a huge impact in stopping the spread of hate speech, said Talia Lavin, an expert in extremism and white supremacist groups and the author of Culture Warlords.“I applaud the bravery of people who have called out people in their own families for this kind of radicalization,” she said. “When people experience ostracization or disavowal from one’s own family, it can lead to a kind of cooling of extremist sentiment, because individuals are for the very first time experiencing a consequence for what they have so proudly engaged in for so long.”Online sleuthing is not new, especially among hate speech and extremism investigators, who have for years hunted down and outed racists and fascist agitators to employers in hopes to foster accountability. But in the aftermath of the insurrection, the practice has gone more mainstream, with journalists, activists and the FBI tweeting out photos and videos of the riot and encouraging followers to investigate them.Online sleuthing has its drawbacks: a Chicago firefighter faced harassment after being falsely identified as the killer of a Capitol police officer through a blurry video image. Another photo was falsely traced to a man pictured on an Antifa website, a tie that has been definitively disproven.But the chance of mistaken identity is much lower when the accusation comes from a family member or loved one. Leslie, a woman in Chicago who asked that her last name not be used in this story, said she and her sister both submitted screenshots of images their mother posted on social media from the steps of the Capitol during the riots to the FBI.Leslie, who considers herself far left politically, said she had watched in horror as vigilantes stormed the Capitol on 6 January, only to learn days later her estranged mother was one of them.“I almost passed out,” she said of the moment she saw the images. “I was really shocked, she was on the scaffolding we saw people climbing on TV. It was such a helpless, horrifying feeling.”Leslie said she and her three siblings all stopped speaking to their parents after they got sucked into QAnon, movement surrounding a disproven conspiracy theory that Donald Trump is saving the world from a secret cabal of child abusers. She said she watched her evangelical mother go from being a devout Christian to posting hate speech on Facebook and aligning herself with the far right.“I am really, really angry that I have essentially lost my family to a cult,” she said. “I am angry that people were not taking the rise of QAnon more seriously. People kept saying, ‘nobody is actually going to do anything, it is just a bunch of idiots online’.”“Well, the people at the Capitol are the people who were looking at this online,” she said. “This is what happens when you don’t do anything.”Leslie is not alone: support groups have emerged in recent years for the countless Americans who have lost loved ones to the conspiracy theory.Leslie said she is hoping a call from the FBI could serve as “kind of wake up call for them”, she said.“Maybe if she gets a call from the authorities she will realize this is not just a game, this is not just something playing out on Facebook. This is real and people got killed,” she said. More

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      Russia and Iran obtained US voter data in bid to sow unrest before election, FBI warns

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      Russia and Iran have obtained some US voting registration information and are attempting to sow unrest in the upcoming election, the government’s national intelligence director said in a rare news conference Wednesday night.“We have already seen Iran sending spoofed emails, designed to intimidate voters, incite social unrest and damage President Trump,” said John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence.The FBI director, Chris Wray, also spoke, saying the US will impose costs on any foreign countries interfering in the 2020 US election.Wray also warned against buying into misinformation about election results. “You should be confident your vote counts. Early unverified claims to the contrary should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism,” said Wray.Democrats immediately took issue with Ratcliffe’s emphasis that Iran was sowing disinformation to harm Trump, characterizing the intelligence director as a “partisan hack”. Ratcliffe is a former Republican congressman and Democrats have been critical of his choice to selectively declassify documents to help Trump.Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, said on Wednesday night that during a classified briefing he received on the interference “I had the strong impression it was much rather to undermine confidence in elections and not aimed at any particular figure, but rather to undermine the very wellspring of our Democracy.”“I’m surprised that DNI Radcliff said that at this press conference,” he told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.Trump and many of his supporters have been among those spreading misinformation that votes aren’t going to be counted and alleging baselessly that ballots can easily be thrown out.Ratcliffe said Iran is also distributing video content “to imply that individuals could cast fraudulent ballots, including from overseas” – and warned Americans not to believe the disinformation. “These actions are desperate attempts by desperate adversaries,” he said.The news conference was held as Democratic voters in at least four battleground states, including Florida and Pennsylvania, have received threatening emails, falsely claiming to be from the far-right group Proud Boys, that warned “we will come after you” if the recipients didn’t vote for Trump.The voter-intimidation operation apparently used email addresses obtained from state voter registration lists, which include party affiliation and home addresses and can include email addresses and phone numbers. Those addresses were then used in an apparently widespread targeted spamming operation. The senders claimed they would know which candidate the recipient was voting for in the 3 November election, for which early voting is ongoing.Federal officials have long warned about the possibility of this type of operation, as such registration lists are not difficult to obtain.“These emails are meant to intimidate and undermine American voters’ confidence in our elections,” Christopher Krebs, the top election security official at the Department of Homeland Security, tweeted Tuesday night after reports of the emails first surfaced.He urged voters not to fall for “sensational and unverified claims”, reminding them that ballot secrecy is guaranteed by law in all states. “The last line of defense in election security is you – the American voter.”While state-backed Russian hackers are known to have infiltrated US election infrastructure in 2016, there is no evidence that Iran, which cybersecurity experts consider to be an inferior actor in online espionage, has ever done so.Before the FBI news conference began, the top members of the Senate intelligence committee released a statement warning: “As we enter the last weeks before the election, we urge every American – including members of the media – to be cautious about believing or spreading unverified, sensational claims related to votes and voting.”The statement came from Marco Rubio, a Republican of Florida, and Mark Warner, a Democrat of Virginia.“State and local election officials are in regular contact with federal law enforcement and cybersecurity professionals, and they are all working around the clock to ensure that election 2020 is safe, secure and free from outside interference,” they said.Foreign misinformation campaigns are far from the only source of confusion and chaos as the US heads to the polls. Concerns of voter disenfranchisement have been widespread, with Republicans scoring victories Wednesday in their ongoing efforts to restrict voting rights. In a Wednesday night decision, the Supreme Court allowed Alabama officials to ban curbside voting.The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union and other challengers of the ban said that curbside voting would help the state slow the spread of Covid-19 while allowing those most vulnerable to the disease to vote safely.The plaintiff in that case, Howard Porter Jr, is a Black man in his 70s with asthma and Parkinson’s disease. “So many of my [ancestors] even died to vote,” he testified to a District Court. “And while I don’t mind dying to vote, I think we’re past that – we’re past that time.”The Iowa Supreme Court also upheld a Republican-backed law that could prevent election officials from sending thousands of mail-in ballots, by making it more difficult for auditors to correct voter applications with omitted information.Agencies contributed reporting More

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      'Unmasking' inquiry ordered by Barr finds no wrongdoing by Obama officials – report

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      A federal prosecutor handpicked by the attorney general, William Barr, to investigate whether Obama administration officials had mishandled classified intelligence relating to the Russia investigation has wrapped up his work without finding wrongdoing or considering charges, according to the Washington Post.The conclusion of an investigation by US attorney John Bash into the so-called “unmasking” of names in intelligence reports by Obama officials was seen as a defeat for Donald Trump and Barr, who appeared to be fishing for damaging information that could be used against former vice=president Joe Biden.“Unsurprising. What a politically-driven waste of [justice department] resources,” tweeted Sam Vinograd, an adviser to the national security council under Barack Obama.A second federal investigation launched by Barr into Obama-era investigations of Russian election tampering, in this case led by US attorney John Durham of Connecticut, likewise has failed to bear political fruit before the presidential election.Durham continues to investigate the origins of investigations into Russian election meddling and Trump campaign contacts with Russian operatives. Trump asserts the Trump-Russia investigation was a political hit job.But the Russia investigation, led by special counsel Robert Mueller resulted in the indictment of 34 individuals and criminal charges against half a dozen Trump associates, including multiple guilty pleas.Barr told a group of Republican lawmakers earlier this year that Durham would not file a report – much less any charges – before the presidential election, dashing what appeared to be increasingly desperate hopes inside the Trump administration for a Biden-related scandal.Officials in the executive branch routinely move to “unmask” names in classified intelligence documents in order to better understand the documents, the Post reported.The “unmasking” conducted during the Obama administration revealed that former national security adviser Michael Flynn, a key figure in the 2016 Trump campaign, was in the crosshairs of the Russia investigation, which had picked up contacts between Flynn and Russian operatives that Flynn later lied about.That revelation proved to be politically damaging to Trump. The emergence of Flynn’s deep ties to Russian operatives, which he later admitted falsely denying, led to his resignation as national security adviser and was an early blow for the Trump administration.Trump at the time asked the then FBI director, James Comey, to “go easy” on Flynn, in a scene that would become a central piece of evidence against Trump in Mueller’s investigation of possible obstruction of justice by the president.That investigation would in turn fuel demands for Trump’s impeachment, after it was revealed that the US president had pressured the Ukrainian president to generate negative headlines about Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.Trump was impeached in December 2019, and acquitted by the Senate in early 2020, but the key players in the scheme that led to his impeachment remained active in trying to fabricate a scandal attached to Biden’s son in advance of the election. More