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      People Tied to Project Veritas Scrutinized in Theft of Diary From Biden’s Daughter

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      The F.B.I. carried out search warrants in New York as part of a Justice Department investigation into how pages from Ashley Biden’s journal came to be published by a right wing website.The Justice Department searched two locations associated with the conservative group Project Veritas as part of an investigation into how a diary stolen from President Biden’s daughter, Ashley, came to be publicly disclosed a week and a half before the 2020 presidential election, according to people briefed on the matter.Federal agents in New York conducted the court-ordered searches on Thursday — one in New York City and one in suburban Westchester County — targeting people who had worked with the group and its leader, James O’Keefe, according to two of the people briefed on the events. The investigation is being handled by F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors in Manhattan who work on public corruption matters, the people said.After this article was initially published online on Friday, Mr. O’Keefe put out a video confirming that current and former Project Veritas employees had their homes searched on Thursday.He said the group had recently received a grand jury subpoena and acknowledged that Project Veritas had been involved in discussions with sources about the diary. But he offered a lengthy defense of his group’s handling of the diary, saying that he and his colleagues had been operating as ethical journalists.“It appears the Southern District of New York now has journalists in their sights for the supposed crime of doing their jobs lawfully and honestly,” Mr. O’Keefe said, referring to federal prosecutors in Manhattan. “Our efforts were the stuff of responsible, ethical journalism and we are in no doubt that Project Veritas acted properly at each and every step.”Project Veritas did not publish Ms. Biden’s diary, but dozens of handwritten pages from it were posted on a right wing website on Oct. 24, 2020, at a time when President Donald J. Trump was seeking to undermine Mr. Biden’s credibility by portraying his son, Hunter, as engaging in corrupt business dealings. The posting was largely ignored by other conservative outlets and the mainstream media.The website said it had obtained the diary from a whistle-blower who worked for a media organization that refused to publish a story about it before the election. It claimed to know where the actual diary was located and that the whistle-blower had an audio recording of Ms. Biden admitting it was hers.The Trump administration Justice Department, then led by Attorney General William P. Barr, opened an investigation into the matter shortly after a representative of the Biden family reported to federal authorities in October 2020 that several of Ms. Biden’s personal items had been stolen in a burglary, according to two people briefed on the matter.Mr. O’Keefe said in the video that “tipsters” had reached out to Project Veritas in 2020 to alert them to the existence of the diary, saying that they had stayed in a room that Ms. Biden had recently been in. But Mr. O’Keefe said that his group could not authenticate the diary and made an “ethical” decision to not publish it.He said that Project Veritas gave the diary to “law enforcement” and attempted to return it to a lawyer representing Ms. Biden, who he said “refused to authenticate it.” Mr. O’Keefe portrayed the investigation as politically motivated, questioning why the Justice Department under Ms. Biden’s father was pursuing the case.In recent weeks, federal investigators have reached out to at least one person who worked for Project Veritas to question that person about the diary, one of the people briefed on the case said.Project Veritas has a history of targeting Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations, news media and others. The group conducts sting operations, using hidden cameras and fake identities. At one point, Project Veritas relied on a former British spy named Richard Seddon to help train its operatives, teaching them espionage tactics such as using deception to secure information from potential targets.Flyover Media, the company that owns the website that published the pages from the diary, is registered to the same Sheridan, Wyo., address as Mr. Seddon’s company, Branch Six Consulting International. Mr. O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, was once the president of a company that later registered at the same address.Project Veritas has a pending libel suit against The New York Times over a 2020 story about a video the group made alleging voter fraud in Minnesota.Ms. Biden, 40, is Mr. Biden’s youngest child. She has maintained a low profile and attracted far less attention than Hunter Biden, her half brother. In 2019, Mr. Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine at the same time he pressured that country’s president for support in investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings, leading to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment.President Biden hugged his daughter, Ashley, after he was sworn in last year.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesAn F.B.I. spokesman in New York would not comment on the investigation, saying only that agents had “performed law enforcement activity related to an ongoing investigation” at two locations. One of the searches took place in an apartment on East 35th Street near the Midtown Tunnel and the other in Mamaroneck, N.Y., north of New York City.A spokesman for the United States Attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment.In Manhattan, a neighbor a floor above the apartment that was searched on East 35th Street said she was woken out of her sleep early Thursday morning by agents pounding on a door and repeatedly shouting “Open Up!” and “F.B.I.!”“I thought it was a joke,” said the neighbor, Mychael Green, 23. “For 10 minutes they were knocking on his door obviously really loud,” and eventually forced their way into the apartment, Ms. Green said. Hours later, the doorjamb was clearly broken and the door was hanging ajar.Spencer Meads, the longtime Project Veritas operative and confidante of Mr. O’Keefe, has lived in that apartment since 2019, according to public records.Ms. Green said that the agents were yelling “Spencer, open up!”A former Project Veritas employee said that Mr. Meads had been involved in recruiting operatives. A website that tracks Project Veritas operatives said that Mr. Meads had also been involved in undercover operations for the group.Mr. Meads did not respond to an email and a text message seeking comment.The Justice Department finds itself in a highly unusual situation in regards to Mr. Biden’s children. Not only is it investigating the case of Ms. Biden’s diary, but Hunter Biden disclosed last year that Justice Department prosecutors in Delaware were investigating his taxes.The pages were posted online under the byline of Patrick Howley, a reporter who has worked for several conservative outlets in recent years. He was the first to disclose a yearbook photo from the page of Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia that showed one individual in a Ku Klux Klan outfit and another individual in blackface.Mr. Howley also disclosed damaging text messages between Cal Cunningham, a Democrat running for Senate in North Carolina, and a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair.While the disclosure of Ms. Biden’s diary was largely ignored, some far right outlets and supporters of Mr. Trump jumped on the news of the diary as further evidence that Mr. Biden was unfit to be president. Alex Jones, a prominent far right radio host, brought up the diary on an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast.Mr. Trump used Twitter to send or promote positive comments about Project Veritas at least six times in the last two years of his presidency. Mr. Trump boosted Project Veritas content even before he became president, and shortly after he announced his campaign for president in 2015, Mr. O’Keefe visited Trump Tower and showed Mr. Trump footage he was intending to release to damage Hillary Clinton, the most likely Democratic nominee.In 2016, a Project Veritas operative infiltrated Democracy Partners, a political consulting firm, using a fake name, fabricated résumé and made secret recordings of the staff.Democracy Partners later sued Project Veritas. In a ruling last month in the lawsuit, U.S. District Court Judge Paul L. Friedman said that Democracy Partners could refer to the conduct by Project Veritas as a “political spying operation” in the upcoming trial.Kitty Bennett and Matthew Cullen contributed research. More

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      Authorities Arrest Analyst Who Contributed to Steele Dossier

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      Igor Danchenko, a Russia analyst who worked with Christopher Steele, the author of a dossier of rumors and unproven assertions about Donald J. Trump, was taken into custody as part of the Durham investigation.WASHINGTON — Federal authorities on Thursday arrested an analyst who in 2016 gathered leads about possible links between Donald J. Trump and Russia for what turned out to be Democratic-funded opposition research, according to people familiar with the matter.The arrest of the analyst, Igor Danchenko, is part of the special counsel inquiry led by John H. Durham, who was appointed by the Trump administration to scrutinize the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing, the people said.Mr. Danchenko, was the primary researcher of the so-called Steele dossier, a compendium of rumors and unproven assertions suggesting that Mr. Trump and his 2016 campaign were compromised by and conspiring with Russian intelligence officials in Moscow’s covert operation to help him defeat Hillary Clinton.The people familiar with the matter spoke on condition of anonymity because the indictment of Mr. Danchenko had yet to be unsealed. A spokesman for Mr. Durham did not respond to a request for comment.Some claims from the Steele dossier made their way into an F.B.I. wiretap application targeting a former Trump campaign adviser in October 2016. Other portions of it — particularly a salacious claim about a purported sex tape — caused a political and media firestorm when Buzzfeed published the materials in January 2017, shortly before Mr. Trump was sworn in.But most of the important claims in the dossier — which was written by Mr. Danchenko’s employer, Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent — have not been proven, and some have been refuted. F.B.I. agents interviewed Mr. Danchenko in 2017 when they were seeking to run down the claims in the dossier.The interview suggested that aspects of the dossier were misleading: Mr. Steele left unclear that much of the material was thirdhand information, and some of what Mr. Danchenko — who was born in Russia but lives in the United States — had relayed was more speculative than the dossier implied.A 2019 investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general sharply criticized the F.B.I. for continuing to cite material from the dossier after the bureau interviewed Mr. Danchenko without alerting judges that some of what he said had cast doubt on the contents of the dossier.The inspector general report also said that a decade earlier, when Mr. Danchenko worked for the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington think-tank, he had been the subject of a counterintelligence investigation into whether he was a Russian agent.In an interview with The New York Times in 2020, Mr. Danchenko defended the integrity of his work, saying he had been tasked to gather “raw intelligence” and was simply passing it on to Mr. Steele. Mr. Danchenko — who made his name as a Russia analyst by exposing indications that the dissertation of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia contained plagiarized material — also denied being a Russian agent.“I’ve never been a Russian agent,” Mr. Danchenko said. “It is ridiculous to suggest that. This, I think, it’s slander.”Mr. Steele’s efforts were part of opposition research that Democrats were indirectly funding by the time the 2016 general election took shape. Mr. Steele’s business intelligence firm was a subcontractor to another research firm, Fusion GPS, which in turn had been hired by the Perkins Coie law firm, which was working for the Hillary Clinton campaign.Mr. Danchenko said he did not know who Mr. Steele’s client was at the time and considered himself a nonpartisan analyst and researcher.Mr. Durham has been known to be interested in Mr. Danchenko and the Steele dossier saga. In February, he used a subpoena to obtain old personnel files and other documents related to Mr. Danchenko from the Brookings Institution, where Mr. Danchenko had worked from 2005 until 2010.The charges against Mr. Danchenko follow Mr. Durham’s indictment in September of a cybersecurity lawyer, Michael Sussmann, which accused him of lying to the F.B.I. about who he was working for when he brought concerns about possible Trump-Russia links to the bureau in September 2016.Mr. Sussmann, who then also worked for Perkins Coie, was relaying concerns developed by data scientists about odd internet logs they said suggested the possibility of a covert communications channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked financial institution. He has denied lying to the F.B.I. about who he was working for.William K. Rashbaum More

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      FBI Raids Homes Linked to Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska

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      Agents investigating whether Oleg Deripaska violated U.S. sanctions searched homes he has used in New York and Washington, D.C.Agents raided homes that Oleg V. Deripaska had used in New York’s Greenwich Village and on Washington’s Embassy Row, as part of an investigation into whether he violated sanctions the United States imposed on him.Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated PressF.B.I. agents on Tuesday morning searched homes linked to the Russian oligarch Oleg V. Deripaska in New York’s Greenwich Village and on Washington’s Embassy Row as part of an investigation into whether he violated sanctions imposed on him by the United States, according to people with knowledge of the matter and a spokeswoman for Mr. Deripaska.The searches were carried out more or less simultaneously by agents in New York and Washington and were part of an investigation by the F.B.I. and federal prosecutors from the office of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, the people said.Mr. Deripaska, an aluminum magnate with ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, was a client of Paul Manafort, who served for several months as Donald J. Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016 and was convicted in 2018 of financial fraud and other crimes.A spokesman for the F.B.I. office in New York would say only that the agents were “conducting a law enforcement operation pursuant to a law enforcement investigation,” and did not provide details on the nature or scope of the inquiry. A spokesman for the Southern District declined to comment.But a spokeswoman for Mr. Deripaska issued a statement confirming the searches, and saying that the investigation was related to U.S. sanctions.“The F.B.I. is carrying out a search at two houses — located in Washington and New York — belonging to Mr. Deripaska’s relatives,” said the spokeswoman, Larisa Belyaeva. “The searches are being carried out on the basis of two court orders, connected to U.S. sanctions.”The agents searching the Greenwich Village house arrived in the early morning hours in about half a dozen SUVs and were seen leaving the building carrying several large flat rectangular boxes like those used to transport paintings.The raid on the home in Washington was reported earlier by NBC News.In 2018, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions against Mr. Deripaska and his mammoth aluminum company, saying he had profited from the “malign activities” of Russia around the world. In announcing the sanctions, the Trump administration cited accusations that Mr. Deripaska had been accused of extortion, racketeering, bribery, links to organized crime and even ordering the murder of a businessman.Mr. Deripaska denied the allegations supporting the sanctions, and his allies contended that the sanctions were punishment for refusing to play ball with the Americans.The Trump administration lifted the sanctions against Mr. Deripaska’s companies in 2019 under an agreement intended to reduce his control and ownership, though a confidential document showed the deal may have been less punitive than advertised, leaving him and his allies with majority ownership of his most important company.Weeks later, Mr. Deripaska unsuccessfully sued the U.S. government to overturn the sanctions on him, alleging they were levied without due process and were based on unproven smears that fell outside the sanctions program.In the lawsuit, Mr. Deripaska’s lawyers claimed that the sanctions had cost him billions of dollars, made him “radioactive” in international business circles, and exposed him to criminal investigation and asset confiscation in Russia.The sanctions restrict his ability to own property or do business in the United States.Mr. Deripaska’s ability to travel to the United States has also been restricted in the past, though he had managed visits to New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Hawaii before the sanctions, people familiar with his travel said.And he has also been a subject of investigations by the F.B.I. and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn for several years, according to people with knowledge of those inquiries, but it is unclear whether the searches have any connection to those matters.The oligarch also came under scrutiny from the special counsel investigating ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, because of his connections to Mr. Manafort.Mr. Deripaska hired Mr. Manafort and signed his firm to a $10-million-a-year contract in 2006 at least partly to help him with his visa, which the U.S. government revoked. Mr. Deripaska eventually fired Mr. Manafort and his partner and later sued them over an unsuccessful telecommunications venture they had pursued together.Mr. Deripaska was a client of Paul Manafort, who served for several months as Donald J. Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016.Evgenia Novozhenina/ReutersBut after Mr. Manafort joined Mr. Trump’s campaign in 2016, he instructed his deputy to periodically provide confidential Trump campaign polling data to an associate that the deputy understood would be shared with Mr. Deripaska, according to a report issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee. During the campaign, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department unsuccessfully tried to turn Mr. Deripaska into an informant, signaling that they might provide help with his trouble in getting visas for the United States in exchange for information on possible Russian aid to Mr. Trump’s campaign. Mr. Deripaska told the American investigators that he disagreed with their theories about Kremlin collusion in the campaign.Property records show that the homes searched by the F.B.I. on Tuesday — a sprawling mansion in an affluent neighborhood in Northwest Washington and a three-story historic Greenwich Village townhouse that was once a speakeasy called the Pirate’s Den and later home to Mayor Jimmy Walker’s paramour — are owned by opaque limited liability corporations.The L.L.C. that owns the Greenwich Village property is connected to a person identified in British court filings as a cousin of Mr. Deripaska.Nate Schweber More

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      Rep. Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska Indicted in Campaign Finance Case

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      Representative Jeff Fortenberry, Republican of Nebraska, was accused of lying to F.B.I. agents investigating illegal foreign donations. He said he would fight the charges.WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Tuesday charged a Republican member of Congress from Nebraska with lying to the F.B.I. during a campaign finance investigation, an allegation that the lawmaker vowed to fight.The Justice Department accused the lawmaker, Representative Jeff Fortenberry, of lying to the F.B.I. twice about whether he knew that he had received illegal campaign donations, including during an interview with the government that his lawyer attended, according to the federal indictment.Anticipating that the department intended to charge him, Mr. Fortenberry said in a video posted online on Tuesday morning that F.B.I. agents unexpectedly came to his home two years ago to question him about the possibility that he had received illegal campaign donations.“I told them what I knew and what I understood,” Mr. Fortenberry said. “They’ve accused me of lying to them and are charging me with this.” He called the possibility of criminal charges shocking and stunning.The indictment stems from a separate federal investigation into Gilbert Chagoury, a Lebanese Nigerian billionaire who was accused of conspiring to make illegal campaign contributions to American politicians in exchange for access to them.Foreign citizens are prohibited by federal law from contributing to U.S. election campaigns. Mr. Chagoury admitted this year to providing approximately $180,000 to four candidates from June 2012 to March 2016. He said he had used others, including Toufic Joseph Baaklini, a Washington lobbyist, to mask his donations.Mr. Fortenberry, who has served in Congress for 15 years, was one of those politicians. He is not disputing the fact that the donations, ultimately from Mr. Chagoury, were illegal.“Five and a half years ago, a person from overseas illegally moved money to my campaign,” Mr. Fortenberry said in his video. “I didn’t know anything about this.”Gilbert Chagoury, right, is accused of conspiring to make illegal campaign contributions to U.S. political candidates in exchange for access to them.Alexandra Wyman/WireImage, via Getty ImagesMr. Fortenberry is not being accused of helping Mr. Chagoury in his scheme. Rather, prosecutors are looking at whether the congressman lied when they asked him in 2019 whether he was aware that some contributions were illegally made to his campaign in 2016.The government said in court filings that in spring 2018, one of Mr. Fortenberry’s fund-raisers told the congressman that he had funneled $30,000 from Mr. Baaklini to the 2016 re-election event, but that the money “probably did come from Gilbert Chagoury.”The fund-raiser, referred to as Individual H in the indictment, was cooperating with law enforcement when he spoke with Mr. Fortenberry, according to the indictment.Despite the fact that the donations were most likely illegal, Mr. Fortenberry did not take appropriate action, such as filing an amended report with the Federal Election Commission or returning the contributions, the indictment said. It was not until after the Justice Department contacted him in July 2019 that Mr. Fortenberrry returned the contributions, according to the document.In his initial interview with the F.B.I. in 2019, Mr. Fortenberry said that the people who had contributed during his fund-raising event in 2016 were all publicly disclosed, and that he was unaware of any contributions made by foreign citizens, according to the indictment.During a subsequent interview at the office of Mr. Fortenberry’s lawyer, the Justice Department alleged that Mr. Fortenberry “falsely stated that he had not been told by Individual H during the 2018 call that Baaklini had given Individual H $30,000 cash” to funnel into his campaign, and that “he was not aware of any illicit donation made” during the fund-raising event.Mr. Fortenberry told investigators that he had ended the 2018 call with the government’s cooperating witness after that person had made a “concerning comment,” even though the indictment alleged that the witness went on to “repeatedly and explicitly” describe illegal contributions and referred to an illegal contribution from a foreign national.“We will fight these charges,” Mr. Fortenberry said in his video. “I told them what I knew.”He has known about the possible charges for at least the past few weeks; he used the existence of the investigation in an effort this month to raise money for a legal-defense fund. That campaign was first reported by Axios.Prosecutors said in court documents that Mr. Chagoury was advised to donate to “politicians from less-populous states because the contribution would be more noticeable to the politician and thereby would promote increased donor access.”Mr. Chagoury entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department in 2019. Under that agreement, he admitted to wrongdoing. The department can use those admissions in other matters. He also agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in their investigation. In return, the U.S. government agreed to drop the charges. The matter was ultimately resolved this year, when Mr. Chagoury paid a $1.8 million fine. More

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      F.B.I. Official Fired Under Trump Wins Back His Pension

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      Andrew G. McCabe, the former F.B.I. deputy director, will receive his pension and other benefits after settling his lawsuit with the Justice Department.WASHINGTON — Hours before he was scheduled to retire in 2018, Andrew G. McCabe, then the F.B.I.’s deputy director, was fired by the Justice Department, depriving him of his pension and prompting cheers from President Donald J. Trump, who had been hounding him over his role in the Russia investigation.On Thursday, the department reversed Mr. McCabe’s firing, settling a lawsuit he filed asserting that he was dismissed for political reasons. Under the settlement, Mr. McCabe, 53, will be able to officially retire, receive his pension and other benefits, and get about $200,000 in missed pension payments.In addition, the department agreed to expunge any mention of his firing from F.B.I. personnel records. The agreement even made clear that he would receive the cuff links given to senior executives and a plaque with his mounted F.B.I. credentials and badge.The Justice Department did not admit any wrongdoing. But the settlement amounted to a rejection by the Biden administration of how Mr. McCabe’s case had been handled under Mr. Trump, who perceived Mr. McCabe as one of his so-called deep-state enemies and repeatedly attacked him. A notice of the lawsuit’s dismissal was also filed in federal court.“Politics should never play a role in the fair administration of justice and Civil Service personnel decisions,” Mr. McCabe said in a statement. “I hope that this result encourages the men and women of the F.B.I. to continue to protect the American people by standing up for the truth and doing their jobs without fear of political retaliation.”Mr. McCabe thanked his lawyers at the firm of Arnold & Porter, who will receive more than $500,000 in legal fees paid by the government. The firm intends to donate the money to its foundation, which provides scholarships to minority law students, among other things.“What happened to Andrew was a travesty, not just for him and his family, but the rule of law,” said Murad Hussain, one of Mr. McCabe’s lawyers. “We filed this suit to restore his retirement benefits, restore his reputation and take a stand for the rights of all civil servants, and that’s exactly what this settlement does.”The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Jeff Sessions, the attorney general at the time, fired Mr. McCabe on March 16, 2018, after the department’s inspector general said Mr. McCabe had lied repeatedly about a leak to a newspaper about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. The case was referred to prosecutors, who ultimately decided not to charge Mr. McCabe with making false statements to a law enforcement officer.Mr. Sessions acted a day before Mr. McCabe’s retirement was set to take effect, and after months of public criticism of Mr. McCabe by Mr. Trump.With the lawsuit resolved, the Justice Department and F.B.I. avoid the risk that moving toward a trial could produce embarrassing information through the discovery process and depositions. In September 2020, a federal judge rejected the department’s efforts to dismiss the case, allowing the litigation to move forward.Mr. McCabe’s lawyers had planned to question the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, and his former deputy, David L. Bowdich. The lawyers would have also grilled Mr. Sessions and his deputy at the time, Rod J. Rosenstein, as well as others, including the department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz.Mr. McCabe and his lawyers had argued that he was fired because he refused to swear loyalty to the president at the time. He also had been part of F.B.I. leadership that opened an investigation into whether any Trump campaign associates had conspired with Russia in the 2016 presidential election. Mr. Trump repeatedly called the inquiry a witch hunt and fired the F.B.I. director at the time, James B. Comey, after expressing his fury about the investigation.Mr. Trump had urged the Justice Department to get rid of Mr. McCabe. After the news media reported in December 2017 that Mr. McCabe planned to retire, Mr. Trump said on Twitter that “FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is racing the clock to retire with full benefits. 90 days to go?!!!”Mr. McCabe, a graduate of Duke University and of Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, joined the F.B.I. in 1996 as an agent in the New York office and quickly climbed the bureau’s ranks. Mr. Comey appointed Mr. McCabe deputy director in 2016, putting him in charge of operations as the bureau’s senior most agent.Mr. McCabe’s rise in the bureau took a vertiginous turn in January 2018 when Mr. Wray demoted Mr. McCabe without telling him why. Mr. McCabe then elected to take leave until March, when he was eligible for retirement.Nearly a month after he was fired, the inspector general released his findings, issuing a report on Mr. McCabe’s conduct, saying he had failed to be completely honest in answering questions about his role in the news media leak about the Clinton case.Mr. McCabe sued over his dismissal, saying he was a victim of political retaliation. In the suit, he said that Mr. Sessions, Mr. Wray and others “served as Trump’s personal enforcers rather than the nation’s highest law enforcement officials, catering to Trump’s unlawful whims instead of honoring their oaths to uphold the Constitution.”Firing Mr. McCabe “was a critical element of Trump’s plan and scheme” to rid the F.B.I. and Justice Department of those deemed not loyal to the president, his lawsuit said. Mr. McCabe accused the department of retaliation and terminating him for political reasons, which violated agency policies. Mr. McCabe’s lawyer also argued that as a career civil servant, Mr. McCabe should have been given 30 days’ notice before he was fired.Indeed, a series of emails raised questions about whether Mr. McCabe’s firing was fast tracked by the F.B.I. or Justice Department. The emails were obtained by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW.Just after noon on March 5, 2018, Candice M. Will, who oversaw the termination effort for the F.B.I.’s Office of Professional Responsibility, emailed Mr. Rosenstein to let him know that her office had completed its review and was preparing a recommendation.Later that same day, Ms. Will then emailed Mr. Bowdich: “I let the Dept know that we are doing what should be done, not slow walking — we are following the established procedures.”He responded that they would be “second guessed by some every step of the way however this ends up.”Why Ms. Will made the comment about “slow walking” is not publicly known, but Mr. McCabe’s lawyers intended to find out and depose her if the case had moved forward.On March 7, Ms. Will recommended that Mr. McCabe be fired over the inspector general’s report. In a handwritten note accompanying the recommendation, she advised Mr. Wray and Mr. Bowdich: “It seems unlikely that this will reach final resolution before Mr. McCabe’s March 18 retirement date.” But, she said, it was up to the deputy attorney general.She spoke later that day to a top aide of Mr. Rosenstein, which seemed to set off a flurry of activity — including meetings and sensitive calls — among senior department officials scrambling to make sure Mr. McCabe was fired before his planned retirement date. In one instance, Steven A. Engel, the head of the department’s office of legal counsel, emailed one of Mr. Rosenstein’s aides with the F.B.I. guidelines for removing a senior bureau official.After Mr. McCabe was fired, Mr. Trump celebrated on Twitter, calling it “a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI — A great day for Democracy.” More

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      Trump Server's Connections to Alfa Bank Produces Fresh Conflict

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      A recent indictment suggested that researchers who found strange internet links between a Russian bank and the Trump Organization did not really believe their own work. They are pushing back.WASHINGTON — The charge was narrow: John H. Durham, the special counsel appointed by the Trump administration to scour the Russia investigation, indicted a cybersecurity lawyer this month on a single count of lying to the F.B.I.But Mr. Durham used a 27-page indictment to lay out a far more expansive tale, one in which four computer scientists who were not charged in the case “exploited” their access to internet data to develop an explosive theory about cyberconnections in 2016 between Donald J. Trump’s company and a Kremlin-linked bank — a theory, he insinuated, they did not really believe.Mr. Durham’s version of events set off reverberations beyond the courtroom. Trump supporters seized on the indictment, saying it shows that suspicions about possible covert communications between Russia’s Alfa Bank and Mr. Trump’s company were a deliberate hoax by supporters of Hillary Clinton and portraying it as evidence that the entire Russia investigation was unwarranted.Emails obtained by The New York Times and interviews with people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss issues being investigated by federal authorities, provide a fuller and more complex account of how a group of cyberexperts discovered the odd internet data and developed their hypothesis about what could explain it.At the same time, defense lawyers for the scientists say it is Mr. Durham’s indictment that is misleading. Their clients, they say, believed their hypothesis was a plausible explanation for the odd data they had uncovered — and still do.The Alfa Bank results “have been validated and are reproducible. The findings of the researchers were true then and remain true today; reports that these findings were innocuous or a hoax are simply wrong,” said Jody Westby and Mark Rasch, lawyers for David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist and one of the researchers whom the indictment discussed but did not name.Steven A. Tyrrell, a lawyer for Rodney Joffe, an internet entrepreneur and another of the four data experts, said his client had a duty to share the information with the F.B.I. and that the indictment “gratuitously presents an incomplete and misleading picture” of his role.Mr. Durham’s indictment provided evidence that two participants in the matter — Mr. Joffe and Michael Sussmann, the cybersecurity lawyer accused of falsely saying he had no client when he brought the findings of the researchers to the F.B.I. — interacted with the Clinton campaign as they worked to bring their suspicions to journalists and federal agents.A spokesman for Mr. Durham declined to comment. The special counsel’s office issued a fresh grand jury subpoena to Mr. Sussmann’s former law firm, Perkins Coie, sometime after Mr. Sussmann was indicted on Sept. 16, in a development first reported on Thursday by CNN and confirmed by a person familiar with the matter. It is unclear whether the subpoena pertained to Alfa Bank or whether Mr. Durham has finished his investigation into that case.Mr. Durham uncovered law firm billing records showing that Mr. Sussmann, who represented the Democratic National Committee on issues related to Russia’s hacking of its servers, had logged his time on the Alfa Bank matter as work for the Clinton campaign. Mr. Sussmann has denied lying to the F.B.I. about who he was representing in coming forward with the Alfa Bank data, while saying he was representing only Mr. Joffe and not the campaign.Mr. Durham also found that Mr. Joffe had met with one of Mr. Sussmann’s law firm partners, Marc Elias, who was then the Clinton campaign’s general counsel, and researchers from Fusion GPS, an investigative firm Mr. Elias had commissioned to scrutinize Mr. Trump’s purported ties to Russia. Fusion GPS drafted a paper on Alfa Bank’s ties to the Kremlin that Mr. Sussmann also provided to the F.B.I.Mr. Durham was appointed in 2019 to scour the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing.Justice Department, via Associated PressIn the heat of the presidential race, Democrats quickly sought to capitalize on the research. On Sept. 15, four days before Mr. Sussmann met with the F.B.I. about the findings, Mr. Elias sent an email to the Clinton campaign manager, Robbie Mook, its communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, and its national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, whose subject line referred to an Alfa Bank article, the indictment said.Six weeks later, after Slate ran a lengthy article about the Alfa Bank suspicions, the Clinton campaign pounced. Mrs. Clinton’s Twitter feed linked to the article and ran an image stating the suspicions as fact, declaring, “It’s time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia.”The F.B.I., which had already started its Trump-Russia investigation before it heard about the possible Trump-Alfa connections, quickly dismissed the suspicions, apparently concluding the interactions were probably caused by marketing emails sent by an outside firm using a domain registered to the Trump Organization. The report by the Russia special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, ignored the issue.The data remains a mystery. A 2018 analysis commissioned by the Senate, made public this month, detailed technical reasons to doubt that marketing emails were the cause. A Senate report last year accepted the F.B.I.’s assessment that it was unlikely to have been a covert communications channel, but also said it had no good explanation for “the unusual activity.”Whatever caused the odd data, at issue in the wake of the indictment is whether Mr. Joffe and the other three computer scientists considered their own theory dubious and yet cynically went forward anyway, as Mr. Durham suggests, or whether they truly believed the data was alarming and put forward their hypothesis in good faith.Earlier articles on Alfa Bank, including in Slate and The New Yorker, did not name the researchers, and used pseudonyms like “Max” and “Tea Leaves” for two of them. Mr. Durham’s indictment did not name them, either.But three of their names have appeared among a list of data experts in a lawsuit brought by Alfa Bank, and Trump supporters have speculated online about their identities. The Times has confirmed them, and their lawyers provided statements defending their actions.The indictment’s “Originator-1” is April Lorenzen, chief data scientist at the information services firm Zetalytics. Her lawyer, Michael J. Connolly, said she has “dedicated her life to the critical work of thwarting dangerous cyberattacks on our country,” adding: “Any suggestion that she engaged in wrongdoing is unequivocally false.”The indictment’s “Researcher-1” is another computer scientist at Georgia Tech, Manos Antonakakis. “Researcher-2” is Mr. Dagon. And “Tech Executive-1” is Mr. Joffe, who in 2013 received the F.B.I. Director’s Award for helping crack a cybercrime case, and retired this month from Neustar, another information services company.In addition, the Alfa Bank suspicions were only half of what the researchers sought to bring to the government’s attention, according to several people familiar with the matter.Their other set of concerns centered on data suggesting that a YotaPhone — a Russian-made smartphone rarely seen in the United States — had been used from networks serving the White House, Trump Tower and Spectrum Health, a Michigan hospital company whose server had also interacted with the Trump server.Mr. Sussmann relayed their YotaPhone findings to counterintelligence officials at the C.I.A. in February 2017, the people said. It is not clear whether the government ever investigated them.The involvement of the researchers traces back to the spring of 2016. DARPA, the Pentagon’s research funding agency, wanted to commission data scientists to develop the use of so-called DNS logs, records of when servers have prepared to communicate with other servers over the internet, as a tool for hacking investigations.DARPA identified Georgia Tech as a potential recipient of funding and encouraged researchers there to develop examples. Mr. Antonakakis and Mr. Dagon reached out to Mr. Joffe to gain access to Neustar’s repository of DNS logs, people familiar with the matter said, and began sifting them.Separately, when the news broke in June 2016 that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee’s servers, Mr. Dagon and Ms. Lorenzen began talking at a conference about whether such data might uncover other election-related hacking.Ms. Lorenzen eventually noticed an odd pattern: a server called mail1.trump-email.com appeared to be communicating almost exclusively with servers at Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health. She shared her findings with Mr. Dagon, the people said, and they both discussed it with Mr. Joffe.As a candidate in 2016, President Trump publicly called for Russia to hack Hillary Clinton.Todd Heisler/The New York Times“Half the time I stop myself and wonder: am I really seeing evidence of espionage on behalf of a presidential candidate?” Mr. Dagon wrote in an email to Mr. Joffe on July 29, after WikiLeaks made public stolen Democratic emails timed to disrupt the party’s convention and Mr. Trump urged Russia to hack Mrs. Clinton. By early August, the researchers had combined forces and were increasingly focusing on the Alfa Bank data, the people said. Mr. Joffe reached out to his lawyer, Mr. Sussmann, who would take the researchers’ data and hypothesis to the F.B.I. on Sept. 19, 2016.Defense lawyers contend the indictment presented a skewed portrait of their clients’ thinking by selectively quoting from their emails.The indictment quotes August emails from Ms. Lorenzen and Mr. Antonakakis worrying that they might not know if someone had faked the DNS data. But people familiar with the matter said the indictment omitted later discussion of reasons to doubt any attempt to spoof the overall pattern could go undetected.The indictment says Mr. Joffe sent an email on Aug. 21 urging more research about Mr. Trump, which he stated could “give the base of a very useful narrative,” while also expressing a belief that the Trump server at issue was “a red herring” and they should ignore it because it had been used by the mass-marketing company.The full email provides context: Mr. Trump had claimed he had no dealings in Russia and yet many links appeared to exist, Mr. Joffe noted, citing an article that discussed aspirations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Despite the “red herring” line, the same email also showed that Mr. Joffe nevertheless remained suspicious about Alfa Bank, proposing a deeper hunt in the data “for the anomalies that we believe exist.”He wrote: “If we can show possible email communication between” any Trump server and an Alfa Bank server “that has occurred in the last few weeks, we have the beginning of a narrative,” adding that such communications with any “Russian or Ukrainian financial institutions would give the base of a very useful narrative.”Mr. Tyrrell, his lawyer, said that research in the weeks that followed, omitted by the indictment, had yielded evidence that the specific subsidiary server in apparent contact with Alfa Bank had not been used to send bulk marketing emails. That further discussion, he said, changed his client’s mind about whether it was a red herring.“The quotation of the ‘red herring’ email is deeply misleading,” he said, adding: “The research process is iterative and this is exactly how it should work. Their efforts culminated in the well-supported conclusions that were ultimately delivered to the F.B.I.”Michael E. Sussmann during a cybersecurity conference in 2016. He was charged by Mr. Durham with lying to the F.B.I.via C-SPANThe indictment also quoted from emails in mid-September, when the researchers were discussing a paper on their suspicions that Mr. Sussmann would soon take to the F.B.I. It says Mr. Joffe asked if the paper’s hypothesis would strike security experts as a “plausible explanation.”The paper’s conclusion was somewhat qualified, an email shows, saying “there were other possible explanations,” but the only “plausible” one was that Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization had taken steps “to obfuscate their communications.”The indictment suggested Ms. Lorenzen’s reaction to the paper was guarded, describing an email from her as “stating, in part, that it was ‘plausible’ in the ‘narrow scope’ defined by” Mr. Joffe. But the text of her email displays enthusiasm.“In the narrow scope of what you have defined above, I agree wholeheartedly that it is plausible,” she wrote, adding: “If the white paper intends to say that there are communications between at least Alfa and Trump, which are being intentionally hidden by Alfa and Trump I absolutely believe that is the case,” her email said.The indictment cited emails by Mr. Antonakakis in August in which he flagged holes and noted they disliked Mr. Trump, and in September in which he approvingly noted that the paper did not get into a technical issue that specialists would raise.Mr. Antonakakis’ lawyer, Mark E. Schamel, said his client had provided “feedback on an early draft of data that was cause for additional investigation.” And, he said, their hypothesis “to this day, remains a plausible working theory.”The indictment also suggests Mr. Dagon’s support for the paper’s hypothesis was qualified, describing his email response as “acknowledging that questions remained, but stating, in substance and in part, that the paper should be shared with government officials.”The text of that email shows Mr. Dagon was forcefully supportive. He proposed editing the paper to declare as “fact” that it was clear “that there are hidden communications between Trump and Alfa Bank,” and said he believed the findings met the probable cause standard to open a criminal investigation.“Hopefully the intended audience are officials with subpoena powers, who can investigate the purpose” of the apparent Alfa Bank connection, Mr. Dagon wrote.In the end, Mr. Durham came to investigate them. More

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      Michael Sussmann, Lawyer Accused of Lying in F.B.I. Meeting, Pleads Not Guilty

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      A prominent cybersecurity lawyer pleaded not guilty on Friday to a charge of lying to the F.B.I. during a meeting five years ago about possible links between Donald J. Trump and Russia.The lawyer, Michael A. Sussmann, appeared before a magistrate judge in Washington, where he was indicted a day earlier. After a brief hearing, he was released on certain conditions, including travel restrictions.The indictment centers on whether Mr. Sussmann lied about who he was representing at a September 2016 meeting with a top F.B.I. lawyer. At that meeting, Mr. Sussmann provided analysis by cybersecurity researchers who said that unusual internet data might indicate a covert communications channel between computer servers associated with the Trump Organization and with Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked financial institution.The indictment says Mr. Sussmann falsely told the F.B.I. lawyer that he had no clients, but he was really representing both a technology executive and the Hillary Clinton campaign. Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers deny that he ever said he had no clients, and contend that he was there on behalf of only the executive and not Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.The F.B.I. looked into the concerns about Alfa Bank but found insufficient evidence to support them, and the special counsel who later took over the Russia investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, ignored the matter in his final report.Mr. Sussmann is a former computer crimes prosecutor who worked for the Justice Department for 12 years. In 2016, he represented the Democratic National Committee on issues related to Russia’s hacking of its servers.Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers have accused the special counsel, John H. Durham, of seeking an indictment of their client for political reasons. Mr. Durham was tapped in 2019 by Trump administration officials to review the F.B.I.’s investigation after the president and his allies cast doubt on its legitimacy and the Justice Department’s inspector general found major problems with one aspect of the inquiry — wiretapping surveillance applications — and in one related instance, criminal conduct.In the weeks before the presidential election, then-Attorney General William P. Barr appointed Mr. Durham as special counsel, ensuring the inquiry would continue no matter who won the White House. In a news release announcing the indictment on Thursday, the Justice Department said Mr. Durham’s investigation was continuing. More

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      Trump-Era Special Counsel Secures Indictment of Lawyer for Firm With Democratic Ties

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      The defendant, Michael Sussmann, is accused of lying to the F.B.I. in a meeting about Trump and Russia. He denies wrongdoing.WASHINGTON — The special counsel appointed by the Trump administration to scrutinize the Russia investigation obtained a grand jury indictment on Thursday of a prominent cybersecurity lawyer, accusing him of lying to the F.B.I. five years ago during a meeting about Donald J. Trump and Russia.The indictment secured by the special counsel, John H. Durham, also made public his findings about an episode in which cybersecurity researchers identified unusual internet data in 2016 that they said suggested the possibility of a covert communications channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked financial institution.He concluded that the Clinton campaign covertly helped push those suspicions to the F.B.I. and reporters, the indictment shows. The F.B.I. looked into the questions about Alfa Bank but dismissed them as unfounded, and the special counsel who later took over the Russia investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, ignored the matter in his final report.The charging of the lawyer, Michael A. Sussmann, had been expected. He is accused of falsely telling a top F.B.I. lawyer that he was not representing any client at the meeting about those suspicions. Prosecutors contend that he was instead representing both a technology executive and the Hillary Clinton campaign.“Sussmann’s false statement misled the F.B.I. general counsel and other F.B.I. personnel concerning the political nature of his work and deprived the F.B.I. of information that might have permitted it more fully to assess and uncover the origins of the relevant data and technical analysis, including the identities and motivations of Sussmann’s clients,” the indictment said.Mr. Sussmann’s defense lawyers, Sean Berkowitz and Michael Bosworth, have denied the accusation, insisting that he did not say he had no client and maintaining that the evidence against him is weak. They also denied that the question of who Mr. Sussmann was working for was material, saying the FB.I. would have investigated the matter regardless.“Michael Sussmann was indicted today because of politics, not facts,” they said on Thursday. “The special counsel appears to be using this indictment to advance a conspiracy theory he has chosen not to actually charge. This case represents the opposite of everything the Department of Justice is supposed to stand for. Mr. Sussmann will fight this baseless and politically inspired prosecution.”A former computer crimes prosecutor who worked for the Justice Department for 12 years, Mr. Sussmann in 2016 represented the Democratic National Committee on issues related to Russia’s hacking of its servers.He has been a cybersecurity lawyer for 16 years at the law firm Perkins Coie, which has deep ties to the Democratic Party. A colleague of Mr. Sussmann’s, Marc Elias, was the general counsel to the Clinton campaign. He left the law firm last month.The firm said in a statement on Thursday that Mr. Sussmann had also departed: “In light of the special counsel’s action today, Michael Sussmann, who has been on leave from the firm, offered his resignation from the firm in order to focus on his legal defense, and the firm accepted it.”The charge against him centers on a Sept. 19, 2016, meeting with the F.B.I. lawyer, James A. Baker, in which Mr. Sussmann relayed concerns about the odd internet data. Cybersecurity researchers had said it might be evidence of clandestine communications channel between computer servers associated with the Trump Organization and with Russia’s Alfa Bank.The case against Mr. Sussmann turns on Mr. Baker’s recollection that Mr. Sussmann told him he was not at the meeting on behalf of any client — which Mr. Sussmann denies saying. There were no witnesses to their conversation.The indictment says Mr. Baker later briefed another F.B.I. official — apparently Bill Priestap, the bureau’s top counterintelligence official — about the meeting, and that Mr. Priestap’s notes say Mr. Baker recounted that Mr. Sussmann said he was “not doing this for any client.” (It is not clear whether such notes would be admissible at a trial.)In 2017, Mr. Sussmann testified under oath to Congress that he was representing the unnamed technology executive, and his legal team agrees that executive was his client at the meeting — but the only one.Internal law firm billing records, however, show that Mr. Sussmann had been logging his time on Alfa Bank matters to the Clinton campaign, the indictment says, contending that the campaign was his client, too. Those records are said to also show that Mr. Sussmann met or spoke with Mr. Elias about Alfa Bank repeatedly.Seeking to head off any indictment, Mr. Sussmann’s defense lawyers had argued to the Justice Department that the billing records were misleading and that he was not at the meeting at the direction or on behalf of the Clinton campaign, according to people familiar with the case. They also denied that the records could be fairly interpreted as showing that he billed the meeting with Mr. Baker to the campaign, as the indictment accuses him.Mr. Durham is known to have been closely scrutinizing the Alfa Bank episode since last fall, including using a grand jury to subpoena documents and question witnesses in ways that suggested he was pursuing a theory that the data had been manipulated or the analysis of it knowingly torqued.The 27-page indictment disclosed much of what he found, including quoting extensively from internal communications of unnamed researchers.The unidentified technology executive whom Mr. Sussmann represented was not the first researcher to scrutinize the data. But his company had access to large amounts of internet data, and he came to play an important role in driving the research and analysis, which he told Mr. Sussmann about around July 2016, the indictment said.In August of that year, the technology executive outlined to other researchers the goal of the effort, saying that unspecified “VIPs” wanted to find “true” information that would merit closer scrutiny. Noting that Mr. Trump had claimed he had no interactions with Russian financial institutions, the executive wrote that data suggesting that was false “would be jackpot” and would “give the base of a very useful narrative.”The executive also wrote: “Being able to provide evidence of *anything* that shows an attempt to behave badly in relation to this, the VIPs would be happy. They’re looking for a true story that could be used as the basis for closer examination.”But one of the researchers working on the project worried that their analysis had weaknesses and that suggested they all shared anti-Trump sentiment.“The only thing that drive[s] us at this point is that we just do not like” Trump, the indictment quoted one unnamed researcher as writing. “This will not fly in eyes of public scrutiny. Folks, I am afraid we have tunnel vision. Time to regroup?”In early September, the indictment said, Mr. Sussmann met with a New York Times reporter who would later draft a story about Alfa Bank, and also began work on a so-called white paper that would summarize and explain the researchers’ data and analysis, billing the time to the Clinton campaign.On Sept. 12, the indictment said, Mr. Sussmann called Mr. Elias, the Clinton campaign lawyer, and spoke about his “efforts to communicate” with the Times reporter about the Alfa Bank allegations. Both billed the call to the campaign. And three days later, Mr. Elias exchanged emails with top campaign officials about the matter.In the meantime, on Sept. 14, five days before Mr. Sussmann met with the F.B.I., the technology executive emailed three researchers helping him with data. The executive sought to ensure the analysis they were assembling would strike security experts as simply “plausible,” even if it fell short of demonstrably true, prosecutors said.Mr. Sussmann also continued to push the Alfa Bank story to reporters. A month before the election, as Times editors were weighing whether to publish an article the reporter had drafted, Mr. Sussmann told him he should show the editors an opinion essay saying the paper’s investigative reporters had not published as many stories regarding Mr. Trump as other media outlets, the indictment said.Michael E. Sussmann, a lawyer from the firm Perkins Coie, during a cybersecurity conference in 2016.via C-SPANAttorney General William P. Barr appointed Mr. Durham in May 2019 to scour the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing. Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr stoked expectations among Mr. Trump’s supporters that the prosecutors would uncover grave offenses by high-level government officials and support claims that the Russia investigation was a plot concocted by the so-called deep state to sabotage Mr. Trump.To date, Mr. Durham’s investigation has fallen short of those expectations. Out of office, Mr. Trump has repeatedly issued statements fuming, “Where’s Durham?”The current attorney general, Merrick B. Garland, said at his confirmation hearing in February that he would let Mr. Durham continue to work and told Congress in July that he agreed with Mr. Barr’s earlier direction that Mr. Durham should eventually submit a report in a form that could be made public.Funding for most Justice Department operations, like much of the federal government, is controlled by an annual budget that covers a fiscal year that ends on Sept. 30. Spokesmen for Mr. Garland and Mr. Durham have declined to answer questions about whether Mr. Durham’s office has funding approval to continue operating beyond this month.But in announcing the indictment of Mr. Sussmann, the Justice Department said, “The special counsel’s investigation is ongoing.” More