Russian Interference in 2016 US Elections and Ties to Trump Associates

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      After Biden Meets Putin, U.S. Exposes Details of Russian Hacking Campaign

      by

      The revelations, which dealt with a Russian espionage campaign, came after President Biden demanded that President Vladimir V. Putin rein in more destructive ransomware attacks.WASHINGTON — Two weeks after President Biden met President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and demanded that he rein in ransomware attacks on U.S. targets, American and British intelligence agencies on Thursday exposed the details of what they called a global effort by Russia’s military intelligence organization to spy on government organizations, defense contractors, universities and media companies.The operation, described as crude but broad, is “almost certainly ongoing,” the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, known as GCHQ, said in a statement. They identified the Russian intelligence agency, or G.R.U., as the same group that hacked into the Democratic National Committee and released emails in an effort to influence the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald J. Trump.Thursday’s revelation is an attempt to expose Russian hacking techniques, rather than any new attacks, and it includes pages of technical detail to enable potential targets to identify that a breach is underway. Many of the actions by the G.R.U. — including an effort to retrieve data stored in Microsoft’s Azure cloud services — have already been documented by private cybersecurity companies.But the political significance of the statement is larger: It underscored the scope of hacking efforts out of Russia, which range from the kind of intelligence gathering engaged in by the G.R.U. and the intelligence agencies of many states to the harboring of criminal groups like the one that brought down Colonial Pipeline. The company provides much of the gasoline, jet fuel and diesel used on the East Coast, and when it was attacked, it shut down the pipeline for fear that the malicious code could spread to the operational controllers that run the pipeline.Ever since the pipeline attack, the Biden administration’s focus on cyberattacks shifted, homing in on the potential for disruption of key elements of the nation’s economic infrastructure. It has focused on Russia-based criminal groups like DarkSide, which took credit for the Colonial attack, but then announced it was shutting down operations after the United States put pressure on it. The F.B.I. later announced it had recovered some of the more than $4 million in ransom that Colonial paid the hackers to unlock the company’s records.Whether those ransomware attacks abate will be the first test of whether Mr. Biden’s message to Mr. Putin at the summit in Geneva sunk in. There, Mr. Biden handed him a list of 16 areas of “critical infrastructure” in the United States and said that it would not tolerate continued, disruptive Russian cyberattacks. But he also called for a general diminishment of breaches originating from Russian territory.“We’ll find out whether we have a cybersecurity arrangement that begins to bring some order,” Mr. Biden said at the end of the meeting, only minutes after Mr. Putin declared that the United States, not Russia, was the largest source of cyberattacks around the world. Mr. Biden also repeatedly said that he was uncertain Mr. Putin would respond to the American warning or the series of related financial sanctions imposed on Moscow over the past five years.According to administration officials, the White House or intelligence agencies did not intend the advisory as a follow-up to the summit. Instead, they said, it was released as part of the National Security Agency’s routine warnings, said Charlie Stadtlander, an agency spokesman, “not in response to any recent international gatherings.”But that is unlikely to matter to Mr. Putin or the G.R.U., as they try to assess the steps the Biden administration is willing to take to curb their cybercampaigns — and in what order.For now, it is the ransomware attacks that have moved to the top of the administration’s agenda, because of their effects on ordinary Americans.Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, said days after the summit that it might take months to determine whether the warning to Mr. Putin resulted in a change in behavior. “We set the measure at whether, over the next six to 12 months, attacks against our critical infrastructure actually decline coming out of Russia,” he said on CBS. “The proof of the pudding will be in the eating, so we will see over the course of months to come.”It was unclear from the data provided by the National Security Agency how many of the targets of the G.R.U. — also known as Fancy Bear or APT 28 — might be on the critical infrastructure list, which is maintained by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. At the time of the attacks on the election system in 2016, election systems — including voting machines and registration systems — were not on the list and were added in the last days of the Obama administration. American intelligence agencies later said Mr. Putin had directly approved the 2016 attacks.But the National Security Agency statement identified energy companies as a primary target, and Mr. Biden specifically cited them in his talks with Mr. Putin, noting the ransomware attack that led Colonial Pipeline to shut down in May, and interrupted the delivery of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel along the East Coast. That attack was not by the Russian government, Mr. Biden said at the time, but rather by a criminal gang operating from Russia.In recent years, the National Security Agency has more aggressively attributed cyberattacks to specific countries, particularly those by adversarial intelligence agencies. But in December, it was caught unaware by the most sophisticated attack on the United States in years, the SolarWinds hacking, which affected federal agencies and many of the nation’s largest companies. That attack, which the National Security Agency later said was conducted by the S.V.R., a competing Russian intelligence agency that was an offshoot of the K.G.B., successfully altered the code in popular network-management software, and thus in the computer networks of 18,000 companies and government agencies.There is nothing particularly unusual about the methods the United States says the Russian intelligence unit used. There is no bespoke malware or unknown exploits by the G.R.U. unit. Instead, the group uses common malware and the most basic techniques, like brute-force password spraying, which relies on passwords that have been stolen or leaked to gain access to accounts.The statement did not identify the targets of the G.R.U.’s recent attacks but said that they included government agencies, political consultants, party organizations, universities, and think tanks.The attacks appear to mostly be about gathering intelligence and information. The National Security Agency did not specify ways that the Russian hackers damaged systems.The recent wave of G.R.U. attacks has gone on for a relatively long time, beginning in 2019 and continuing through this year. Once inside, the G.R.U. hackers would gain access to protected data and email — as well as to cloud services used by the organization.The hackers were responsible for the primary breach of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 which resulted in the theft, and release, of documents meant to damage the campaign of Hillary Clinton.On Thursday, the National Security Agency released a list of evasion and exfiltration techniques the G.R.U. used to help information technology managers identify — and stop — attacks by the hacking group.That lack of sophistication means fairly basic measures, like multifactor authentication, timeout locks and temporary disabling of accounts after incorrect passwords are entered, can effectively block brute force attacks. More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      With Putin, Biden Tries to Forge a Bond of Self-Interest, Not Souls

      by

      Theirs seems likely to be a strained and frustrating association, one where the two leaders may maintain a veneer of civil discourse even as they joust on the international stage.No one peered admiringly into anyone’s soul. No one called anyone a killer. By all appearances, President Biden’s much-anticipated meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was not warm, but neither was it hot. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      F.E.C. Dismisses Case Against Democrats Over Outreach to Ukraine

      by

      The Federal Election Commission voted 4 to 2 not to pursue accusations that Democrats in 2016 sought help from Ukraine to damage Donald J. Trump’s campaign.The Federal Election Commission has dismissed a complaint by an ally of President Donald J. Trump accusing the Democratic Party and one of its former consultants of violating campaign finance laws by working with Ukraine to help Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign by damaging Mr. Trump’s.An unusual bipartisan combination of members of the commission voted against pursuing a complaint filed in 2017 by Matthew G. Whitaker, a former federal prosecutor and staunch defender of Mr. Trump who was later appointed acting attorney general.He filed the complaint after Mr. Trump and his White House began publicly calling for investigations of the matter in an effort to deflect attention from revelations that Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. and other campaign advisers met with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign.Mr. Whitaker claimed in his complaint that the Democratic National Committee and a consultant who had worked for it, Alexandra Chalupa, violated a prohibition on foreign donations by soliciting damaging information and statements from Ukrainian government officials about Paul Manafort, who was Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman at the time.The commission — which is composed of three members selected by each party — voted 4 to 2 in April that there was not probable cause to believe that Ms. Chalupa and the Democratic National Committee broke the law, according to documents released Wednesday.The four commissioners voted against a recommendation by the commission’s general counsel to find probable cause that Ms. Chalupa and the Democratic National Committee violated the foreign donation ban by trying to arrange an interview in which Petro O. Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president at the time, might say something critical about Mr. Manafort.While the four commissioners issued statements disputing the general counsel’s characterization that Ms. Chalupa’s communications with the embassy prompted the ban, they also offered very different ideological concerns.The three Republican commissioners said in a statement accompanying the decision that they had “grave constitutional and prudential concerns” about the general counsel’s reading of the law, which they cast as an overreach. Ms. Chalupa’s communication with the embassy, they wrote, “did not ask that Ukrainian officials convey a thing of value within the meaning of a ‘contribution’ to the D.N.C.”The Republicans were joined in voting against probable cause by Ellen L. Weintraub, a Democratic commissioner since 2002, who cited concerns about Russian disinformation as a basis for her vote.Bipartisan votes have become more rare in commission enforcement matters in recent years, as Democratic commissioners who tend to favor stricter campaign finance rules have sometimes found themselves at loggerheads with their Republican colleagues, who tend to oppose campaign finance restrictions as burdensome infringements on free speech.The result has been deadlocked votes that effectively block the pursuit of cases.The dismissal of the complaint by Mr. Whitaker came amid a flurry of deadlock votes as the commission works its way through a backlog of matters related to the 2016 presidential election.Mr. Whitaker’s complaint, which was filed in his capacity as the executive director of a conservative watchdog group called the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, asserted that the Trump Tower meeting presented “comparable circumstances” to the Ukrainian matter.The complaint was based on an article in Politico revealing that Ms. Chalupa had discussions with officials in the Ukrainian embassy in Washington about Mr. Manafort’s work for Russia-aligned Ukrainian politicians.Mr. Trump and his allies seized on the report, with the president suggesting on Twitter that his attorney general should investigate the matter, and his press secretary telling reporters, “If you’re looking for an example of a campaign coordinating with a foreign country or a foreign source, look no further than the D.N.C., who actually coordinated opposition research with the Ukrainian Embassy.”Andrii Telizhenko, a former official at the embassy who was quoted in the article discussing Ms. Chalupa, was penalized in January by the Treasury Department for being part of what it called “a Russia-linked foreign influence network” that spread “fraudulent and unsubstantiated allegations” about President Biden during the 2020 campaign.While the Treasury Department did not accuse Mr. Telizhenko of spreading disinformation during the 2016 campaign, Ms. Weintraub said in a statement that the assertions by the Treasury Department and others “completely undermined the credibility of the complaint” based on his claims.Mr. Telizhenko, who provided testimony to commission staff, said in an interview that he stood by his claims, and rejected claims of connections to the Russian influence network cited by the Treasury Department.Nonetheless, the F.E.C.’s handling of the matter is something of a repudiation to Mr. Trump, particularly given that Republican commissioners he nominated voted that there was not probable cause to believe a violation had been committed.Ms. Chalupa, the Democratic National Committee and the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust did not respond to requests for comment. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Where Biden’s Justice Department Isn’t Breaking From Trump

      by

      Democratic gripes are increasing, as some critics worry that the department is rubber-stamping Trump-era policies.The political news cycle hit home in rare fashion on Monday as the attorney general, Merrick B. Garland, met with newsroom leaders from The Times, CNN and The Washington Post to discuss how the administration was responding to revelations that Donald J. Trump’s Department of Justice had secretly sought information on reporters and their sources.When a Justice Department gets into the business of seizing reporters’ phone records and trying to track down leakers, while putting gag orders on the news organizations whose records it’s seizing, it’s hard not to wonder about the health of the First Amendment.So with the revelations now public, Mr. Garland vowed to act. Speaking to members of the Senate Appropriations Committee at a budget hearing last week, he pledged that he would institute new policies that were “the most protective of journalists’ ability to do their jobs in history.”In Monday’s meeting, the leaders of the news organizations pushed Mr. Garland to pursue accountability for the administration officials who had worked to target journalists and whistle-blowers; Mr. Garland’s responses were kept off the record.But legal watchdogs and advocates of criminal justice reform say this is far from the only area of concern. They are pointing to a few major areas in which Mr. Garland’s Justice Department has elected to defend Trump-era policies, particularly those orchestrated by former Attorney General William P. Barr.Mr. Garland has stepped up enforcement of civil rights laws, and he is leading investigations into some major municipal police departments suspected of systematic misconduct. He announced last week that he would take aggressive steps to protect voting rights.But on a range of other issues, there are gripes coming from within the president’s own party. Some critics have expressed worry that his Department of Justice was rubber-stamping policies that sought to expand the president’s legal immunities, turn back progressive action on racial justice and restrict immigrants’ ability to enter the country legally.Trump, E. Jean Carroll and presidential protectionsDuring Mr. Trump’s presidency, Mr. Barr sought to help Mr. Trump try to fight off a sexual assault accusation from the journalist and advice columnist E. Jean Carroll.After she publicly made the allegation, in 2019, Mr. Trump said in an interview from the Oval Office that Ms. Carroll was “not my type,” and that he’d never assaulted her. She then filed suit, accusing him of slandering her.Mr. Barr argued in court that Mr. Trump had been acting as an employee of the federal government when he made the comments, and was therefore shielded from charges of slander and libel.The case was still pending when President Biden took office. And this month, Mr. Garland’s Justice Department lamented Mr. Trump’s “crude and disrespectful” remarks, but it said that his administration had been right to argue that he could not be sued over them.Mueller’s findings and the ‘Barr memo’Prominent Democrats had also urged Mr. Garland not to fight a federal judge’s ruling demanding that a classified report that Mr. Barr had requested be made public. Known as the “Barr memo,” the document argues that he should tell the public that Mr. Trump’s efforts to impede the Russia investigation — as lain out in the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III — cannot be charged as obstruction of justice, and offers legal analysis in support of that claim.Mr. Trump’s foes scored a major victory last month, when, in a blistering decision, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court in Washington ordered the memo to be made public, accusing the Trump administration of “disingenuous” reasoning. In a public letter last month, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee asked Mr. Garland not to appeal Judge Jackson’s decision, “in order to help rebuild the nation’s trust” in the Justice Department.But Mr. Garland soon announced that he would indeed appeal it, seeking to keep secret most of the memo — the portion laying out the legal analysis for why none of potential obstruction episodes in the Mueller report rose to a chargeable crime — and citing “the irreparable harm that would be caused by the release of the redacted portions of the document.”Much like Barack Obama’s choice, in 2009, not to systematically pursue accountability for members of the Bush administration over their invasive surveillance policies, or the mistreatment of military prisoners during the war on terror, the Biden administration’s move on the Barr memo was seen as an attempt to protect the narrow institutional interests of the Justice Department and to move on.Gun prosecutions in D.C.Many proponents of racial justice were dismayed this spring when Mr. Garland’s Justice Department announced it would continue Mr. Trump’s policy of using the federal courts to prosecute gun crimes in the District of Columbia, not the city’s own justice system.That policy, enacted in 2019, had reversed decades of tradition in the nation’s capital, where the lead prosecutor is a federal appointee but most crimes are typically tried in city courts.At a moment when the D.C. Council had been passing laws to undo the effects of mass incarceration, the Trump administration’s move disproportionately affected African-American men, as Black people account for a vast majority of those brought up on gun charges in the nation’s capital. Average sentences for these crimes are roughly twice as high in the federal court system.“That’s why it’s so surprising that the administration stuck with it: because this is an issue that touches on mass incarceration, racial injustice and D.C. rights,” Andrew Crespo, a Harvard Law School professor who has been involved in the effort to roll back the Trump policy, said in an interview.A group of 87 former federal prosecutors signed a letter in May urging the Justice Department to abandon the practice, but so far it hasn’t changed its position.Immigration policiesMr. Garland’s Justice Department has also continued some Trump policies that prevent immigrants trying to enter the U.S. from having access to certain legal rights.One policy, which was enacted at the end of Mr. Trump’s presidency by the department’s immigration review office, concentrates decision-making power underneath a political appointee and can prevent immigrants seeking to remain in the U.S. from presenting certain evidence that could help them from being deported.Lawyers for Mr. Garland’s Justice Department have repeatedly argued to uphold the rule, resisting lawsuits from proponents of immigration rights in two separate district courts.Biden administration lawyers have also argued in court on behalf of a policy that prevents immigrants with temporary protected status from gaining green cards with the support of their employer. The Biden administration has also sought to end protected status for hundreds of thousands of people from El Salvador and other countries.Lee Gelernt, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, pointed to the fact that Mr. Garland’s Justice Department had agreed to defend former members of the Trump administration, including Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller, in lawsuits seeking damages for harm caused by the family-separation policy.It is customary for former federal officials to have access to Justice Department representation, but Mr. Gelernt said that the family-separation policy went beyond the pale, and suggested a need to re-examine old precedent where some of the Trump administration’s policies are concerned.“For the Biden D.O.J. to choose to represent the people who did the family-separation practice is deeply troubling,” he said. A voting rights coalition urges corporations to stop funding ALEC, the conservative group.A coalition of more than 300 voting rights groups, civil rights advocates and labor leaders has written a letter to multiple major corporations in the U.S. demanding that they cease their financial support of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, an influential conservative group funded by businesses.The three-page letter accuses the group of engaging in partisan gerrymandering and of playing a central role in the crafting of legislation in states across the country that would introduce a raft of new voting restrictions.“Your continued financial support of ALEC is an active endorsement of these efforts to create more barriers to the freedom to vote and weaken representation for the American people in government,” the letter states. “Intended or not, the money your company is contributing to ALEC helps fund this modern Jim Crow effort.”The letter comes as multiple groups seeking to slow the attack on access to the ballot have sought to pressure major businesses to take a more proactive role in pushing back on new voting laws. In Georgia, a coalition of faith leaders called for a boycott of Home Depot after it did not actively oppose the state’s new voting law.But even as some businesses have spoken up, it has rarely had a significant impact. A broad coalition of major corporations last month called on Texas to expand voting access, only to see the state’s Legislature continue to work toward a final bill of voting restrictions.The letter on Monday focusing on funding for ALEC, a regular target of liberal groups, signals a broadening of the activism aimed at weakening or halting new voting bills, taking the battle beyond state legislatures and members of Congress and to the broader ecosystem that has been powering the monthslong push to enact new voting laws.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Reality Winner, Who Leaked Government Secrets, Is Released From Prison

      by

      Out on good behavior, the former National Security Agency contractor was sent to a halfway house.WASHINGTON — Reality L. Winner, a former National Security Agency contractor who was the first person prosecuted during the Trump administration on charges of leaking classified information, has been released to a halfway house, her lawyer announced on Monday.Ms. Winner’s case was the subject of an intense public campaign to win her a pardon or clemency. But it was her good behavior in prison, not the outside advocacy or a compassionate release process, that shortened her 63-month sentence, her lawyer said.While her good-behavior release was not unusual, her lawyer, Alison Grinter Allen, said she and Ms. Winner’s family were worried that the government would find a reason to extend her prison stay.“When we knew release was imminent, there were a lot of anxieties that it would be denied to her,” Ms. Allen said in an interview.Ms. Winner was released on June 2 from Federal Medical Center, Carswell, a prison in Fort Worth, Texas, said Emery Nelson, a Bureau of Prisons spokesman.The San Antonio Residential Re-entry Management Office will oversee her “community confinement,” Mr. Nelson added. Ms. Winner is in a halfway house, where she will have access to the outdoors and be able to meet with her family, and then will be under supervised release, Ms. Allen said. She could be transferred to home confinement before her full release from custody in November.While in prison, Ms. Winner was held under difficult conditions. The prison lost power and heat during last winter’s ice storms in Texas, and a number of fellow inmates died of Covid-19.Her communications were closely monitored, and the government refused until now to move her to a less secure facility, Ms. Allen said.“It was a terrible, terrible time,” Ms. Allen said. “Not that there is any great time to be in prison.”A former Air Force linguist, Ms. Winner entered a guilty plea in 2018, after being prosecuted for leaking classified information. She had been arrested in 2017 and charged with sending a classified report about election interference to reporters at The Intercept.The report described hacks by Russian intelligence operatives against local election officials and a company that sold software related to voter registration.As Ms. Winner began to petition for a pardon or a commutation, Ms. Allen was added to her legal team because her other lawyers were banned from speaking publicly about the case.Ms. Winner, now 29, sought clemency from President Donald J. Trump, with her legal team submitting thousands of letters in an effort to get him to intervene in her case.There had been some cause to think Mr. Trump could commute Ms. Winner’s sentence. In 2018, he called her sentence “so unfair” and said that what she had done was “small potatoes.” But Mr. Trump never acted on the commutation request.Despite Mr. Trump’s apparent ambivalence, the case was an early example of a campaign against leaks by his Justice Department.While many of the Trump-era leak investigations moved slowly, the Justice Department announced the charges against Ms. Winner an hour after The Intercept published the article.The Intercept came under criticism for how it reported the article, including by Ms. Winner’s mother. Ms. Winner had mailed the document to the publication anonymously, but the reporters showed a copy of it to the National Security Agency’s public affairs office and published the document to the internet, including markings that helped officials identify Ms. Winner.In 2017, The Intercept acknowledged its practices fell short and said it should have taken more steps to ensure the identity of the person leaking the document was protected.Ms. Winner could move relatively quickly from the halfway house to home confinement, where she could live with her family. Because of the pandemic, visitation had been cut off from the federal prison for the last 18 months and Ms. Winner had spoken to her family only on phone calls and occasional video calls. During her time in prison, Ms. Winner became an aunt and is looking forward to meeting her new family members, Ms. Allen said.Once Ms. Winner is released from the halfway house, she will still not be able to talk about any of the documents she reviewed while working at the National Security Agency, but she will be able to speak broadly about issues that concern her.“It would surprise me if advocacy and activism was not a part of her life going forward,” Ms. Allen said, “whether it be about the conditions and the state of mass incarceration or political prosecutions or election integrity.” More

    • 138 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Apple Says It Turned Over Data on Donald McGahn in 2018

      by

      The company notified Donald F. McGahn II last month that it had been subpoenaed for his account information three years ago.WASHINGTON — The Justice Department subpoenaed Apple for information in February 2018 about an account that belonged to Donald F. McGahn II, President Donald J. Trump’s White House counsel at the time, and barred the company from telling him about it, according to two people briefed on the matter.Apple told Mr. McGahn about the subpoena last month, said one of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter. Mr. McGahn’s wife also received a similar notice from Apple, the person said.It is not clear what F.B.I. agents were investigating, whether Mr. McGahn was their specific focus or whether he was swept up in a larger net because he had communicated with someone who was under scrutiny. As the top lawyer for the 2016 Trump campaign and then the White House counsel, Mr. McGahn was in contact with numerous people who may have drawn attention either as part of the Russia investigation or a later leak inquiry.Still, the disclosure that agents had collected data of a sitting White House counsel, which they kept secret for years, is extraordinary.And it comes amid a political backlash after revelations that the Trump administration secretly seized the personal data of reporters and Democrats in Congress from phone and tech companies while investigating leaks.Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill on Sunday ratcheted up pressure on the Justice Department and former officials to provide a fuller accounting of events. They called on the head of the Justice Department’s national security division, John C. Demers, and the former deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, to testify before Congress along with the former attorneys general Jeff Sessions and William P. Barr.A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, as did a lawyer for Mr. McGahn. An Apple representative did not respond to a request for comment.Apple told Mr. McGahn that it had complied with the subpoena in a timely fashion but declined to tell him what it had provided the government, according to a person briefed on the matter. Under Justice Department policy, gag orders for subpoenas may be renewed for up to a year at a time, suggesting that prosecutors went to court several times to prevent Apple from notifying the McGahns earlier.In investigations, agents sometimes compile a large list of phone numbers and email addresses that were in contact with a subject, and seek to identify all those people by using subpoenas to communications companies for any account information like names, computer addresses and credit card numbers associated with them.Apple told the McGahns that it had received the subpoena on Feb. 23, 2018, according to a person briefed on the matter.Under federal law, prosecutors generally need to obtain permission from a federal judge in order to compel a company like Apple to delay notifying people that their personal information has been subpoenaed, said Paul M. Rosen, a former federal prosecutor and a partner at Crowell and Moring.“There is a lot here we don’t know, including the facts and circumstances surrounding the request for the delay and what was presented to the judge,” Mr. Rosen said. But, he added, prosecutors typically need to prove that either notifying the person “would endanger someone’s safety, risk the destruction of evidence or intimidation of witnesses, or seriously jeopardize an investigation.”The subpoena was issued by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia, the other person familiar with the matter said.It is not clear why prosecutors obtained the subpoena. But several notable developments were unfolding around that time.The federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia was the center of one part of the Russia inquiry led by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, that focused on Paul Manafort, a former chairman of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.Because Mr. McGahn had been the top lawyer for the Trump campaign in 2016, it is possible that at some earlier point he had been among those in contact with someone whose account the Mueller team was scrutinizing in early 2018.Notably, Mr. Manafort had been hit with new fraud charges unsealed in the Eastern District of Virginia the day before the subpoena. Subsequent developments revealed that Mr. Mueller’s investigators were closely scrutinizing some of his communications accounts in the following days.On the other hand, the Manafort case was largely handled in the District of Columbia, where he faced separate charges. Still, the Mueller team was also working with federal prosecutors in Virginia during that period on an unregistered foreign agent case related to Turkey and a business partner of Michael T. Flynn’s, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser who had also advised him during the 2016 campaign.It was also around that time that Mr. McGahn was involved in another matter related to the Russia investigation, one that included a leak.In late January 2018, The New York Times reported, based on confidential sourcing, that Mr. Trump had ordered Mr. McGahn the previous June to have the Justice Department remove Mr. Mueller, but Mr. McGahn had refused to do so and threatened to resign. The Washington Post confirmed that account soon after in a follow-up article.The Mueller report — and Mr. McGahn in private testimony before the House Judiciary Committee this month — described Mr. Trump’s anger at Mr. McGahn after the Times article and how he had tried to persuade Mr. McGahn to make a statement falsely denying it. Mr. Trump told aides that Mr. McGahn was a “liar” and a “leaker,” according to former Trump administration officials. In his testimony, Mr. McGahn said that he had been a source for The Post’s follow-up to clarify a nuance — to whom he had conveyed his intentions to resign — but he had not been a source for the original Times article.There are reasons to doubt that Mr. McGahn was the target of any Justice Department leak investigation stemming from that episode, however. Information about Mr. Trump’s orders to dismiss Mr. Mueller, for example, would not appear to be a classified national-security secret of the sort that it can be a crime to disclose.Yet another roughly concurrent event was a Justice Department investigation into unauthorized disclosures of information about the Russia inquiry. As part of that investigation, prosecutors sent Apple a subpoena on Feb. 6, 2018, for data on congressional staff members, their families and at least two members of Congress. Apple only recently informed those targeted because it had been prohibited from disclosing the subpoena at the time.Among those whose data was seized were two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee: Representatives Eric Swalwell and Adam B. Schiff, both of California. Mr. Schiff, a sharp political adversary of Mr. Trump, is now the panel’s chairman. The Times first reported on that subpoena last week.Many questions remain unanswered about the events leading up to the subpoenas, including how high they were authorized in the Trump Justice Department and whether investigators anticipated or hoped that they were going to sweep in data on the politically prominent lawmakers. The subpoena sought data on 109 email addresses and phone numbers.In that case, the leak investigation appeared to have been primarily focused on Michael Bahar, then a staff member on the House Intelligence Committee. People close to Mr. Sessions and Mr. Rosenstein, the top two Justice Department officials at the time, have said that neither knew that prosecutors had sought data about the accounts of lawmakers for that investigation.It remains unclear whether agents were pursuing a theory that Mr. Bahar had leaked on his own or whether they suspected him of talking to reporters with the approval of lawmakers. Either way, it appears they were unable to prove their suspicions that he was the source of any unauthorized disclosures; the case has been closed, and no charges were brought.Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday called for Mr. Barr, Mr. Sessions and Mr. Rosenstein to testify before Congress about the subpoenas. She said that what the Justice Department did under Mr. Trump went “even beyond Richard Nixon” but declined to say whether a congressional committee would compel their testimony.“Let’s hope they will want to honor the rule of law,” she said. “The Justice Department has been rogue under President Trump.”Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, called for anyone potentially involved in the subpoenas, including Mr. Demers, to testify before Congress. “The sins of the Trump administration just continue to pile up,” he said at a news conference in New York.“This was nothing less than a gross abuse of power, an assault on the separation of powers,” Mr. Schumer said, warning that if the men would not testify, lawmakers would subpoena them.He also called on Senate Republicans to join Democrats in voting for congressional subpoenas to compel testimony.On CBS, Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, called the allegations “serious” but said only that she was backing an investigation into the matter by the Justice Department’s independent inspector general that was announced on Friday.Katie Benner More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Hunting Leaks, Trump Officials Seized Records of Democrats

      by

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

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      McGahn Affirmed That Trump Tried to Oust Mueller

      by

      The former White House counsel testified behind closed doors last week about the former president’s attempts to interfere with the Russia investigation.WASHINGTON — Donald F. McGahn II, who served as White House counsel to former President Donald J. Trump, has told lawmakers that episodes involving him in the Russia report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, were accurate — including one Mr. Trump has denied in which the president pressed him to get the Justice Department to remove Mr. Mueller.A 241-page transcript of Mr. McGahn’s closed-door testimony from last week, released on Wednesday by the House Judiciary Committee, contained no major revelations. But it opened a window on Mr. McGahn’s struggles to serve as the top lawyer in a chaotic White House, under a president who often pushed the limits of appropriate behavior.“They don’t teach you this in law school,” Mr. McGahn said of one episode he witnessed in which Mr. Trump was trying to get his attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, to resign because he had recused himself from the Russia investigation.Mr. McGahn was a major witness to many of the episodes outlined in the second volume of the Mueller report, which focused on actions Mr. Trump took to obstruct the investigation. After then-Attorney General William P. Barr — who said none of those episodes amounted to a chargeable crime — released most of the report in 2019, Democrats subpoenaed Mr. McGahn, hoping for a dramatic televised hearing.But the Trump Justice Department fought to block the subpoena, leading to a protracted and complex court battle. It came to an end when the Biden Justice Department struck a deal with House Democrats to permit Mr. McGahn to testify, but under strict limits: It would take place in private, and he could only be asked about information in the public portions of the Mueller report.While the testimony was belated and limited, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, portrayed it as important.“Mr. McGahn provided the committee with substantial new information,” Mr. Nadler said in a statement accompanying the transcript release. He added, “All told, Mr. McGahn’s testimony gives us a fresh look at how dangerously close President Trump brought us to, in Mr. McGahn’s words, the ‘point of no return.’”Mr. McGahn used that phrase when a staff lawyer for House Democrats grilled him at length about Mr. Trump’s efforts to get him to tell the deputy attorney general at the time, Rod J. Rosenstein, to remove Mr. Mueller over a dubious claim that the special counsel had a conflict of interest — which Mr. McGahn refused to do, believing it could “cause this to spiral out of control.”After Mr. Trump called him at home on a Saturday in 2017 to pressure him again to tell Mr. Rosenstein to oust Mr. Mueller, for example, Mr. McGahn testified, he was deeply concerned.“After I got off the phone with the president, how did I feel?” he said. “Oof. Frustrated, perturbed, trapped. Many emotions.”Fearing that conveying the directive might instead prompt Mr. Rosenstein to resign and touch off a crisis akin to President Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre during the Watergate scandal, Mr. McGahn instead prepared to resign if Mr. Trump did not relent. He told several colleagues at the White House about his intention, although not Mr. Trump himself. But the crisis instead blew over for a time.In his testimony, Mr. McGahn acknowledged that he was afraid that if Mr. Trump removed Mr. Mueller or otherwise interfered with the investigation, the action would be used to accuse the president of obstruction of justice. But he was also careful to frame his concerns as being about public relations, without acknowledging that any legal lines were ever crossed.“It didn’t mean the president was meddling, but certainly it would be easily made to look that way,” Mr. McGahn said.The internal furor over Mr. Trump’s previous attempt to oust Mr. Mueller reignited in January 2018, when The New York Times and then The Washington Post reported on the encounter.Mr. Trump was enraged and pushed Mr. McGahn to make a statement denying that the episode had happened, but he refused to do so — because, he said, The Times story was substantially accurate. (Mr. McGahn said that The Post’s follow-up to The Times story was clearer on one issue — whether he had conveyed his threat directly to Mr. Trump — because Mr. McGahn had been a source for The Post in order to explain that nuance.)Mr. McGahn had by then also already told Mr. Mueller’s team about the event — Mr. Trump had ordered him to cooperate with the special counsel — and he feared that Mr. Mueller would consider charging him with making a false statement to law enforcement officials if he contradicted his account.Mr. McGahn also called Mr. Trump’s claim that he never even suggested firing Mr. Mueller “disappointing,” because Mr. Trump “certainly entertained the idea. Certainly seemed to ask a number of people about it. Certainly had a number of conversations with me about something along those lines.”The fight over whether Mr. McGahn would falsely say that Mr. Trump had never asked him to have the special counsel removed by Mr. Rosenstein also led to a vivid moment in the Mueller report where Mr. Trump chastised Mr. McGahn for keeping notes of their conversations, saying it was not something that Roy M. Cohn — a notorious lawyer who was disbarred for unethical conduct, but who Mr. Trump admired — would have done. Cohn died in 1986.“I didn’t really respond,” Mr. McGahn said. “I’ve made my point. And this was not the first time that Roy Cohn has sort of — the ghost of Roy had come into the Oval Office, so it didn’t seem to be a point worth responding to and, you know, he’s the president, he gets the last word.” More