Russian Interference in 2016 US Elections and Ties to Trump Associates

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Scottish Group Seeks Source of Trump’s Funds for Golf Courses

      by

      The Trump Company invested hundreds of millions in the properties during a time when the former president was reporting heavy losses on his income tax returns.LONDON — A Scottish judge on Wednesday opened a path to a possible investigation into the purchase of Donald Trump’s two golf courses in Scotland, in a ruling that could force the former president to explain how he funded the deals.The Scottish government had resisted pressure to demand financial details from Mr. Trump through an “unexplained wealth order,” a powerful legal instrument usually deployed against leading figures in organized crime or drug trafficking.But on Wednesday a judge ruled that Avaaz, an online campaign group, should be given the right to challenge the government’s rejection of calls for such a move.Nicknamed “McMafia orders,” unexplained wealth orders were introduced in 2018 to strengthen the government’s armory against organized crime. Those subject to them can ultimately be forced to forfeit their assets if they are unable to explain satisfactorily how they were purchased.Though it remains far from clear that such an investigation will ever arise in this case, Wednesday’s court decision is nonetheless a setback for Mr. Trump, whose financial and tax dealings are under investigation in the United States.“This was a hurdle we had to jump, and we can now proceed to the substance,” said Nick Flynn, legal director of Avaaz, welcoming the ruling.“If you don’t think there is reasonable suspicion over these purchases then I don’t think you’ve been paying attention,” he added. “It’s the collective responsibility of Scottish ministers to act on this.”Mr. Trump bought a golf course near Aberdeen in 2006. But campaigners have focused more of their questions on the purchase of the larger and more prestigious Turnberry property for $60 million in 2014 — a time when he was reporting substantial losses on his income tax returns. Despite the Trump Organization’s investment of nearly $300 million, none of the Scottish properties have turned a profit.Though Eric Trump once said that most of the company’s financing came from Russia in those years, he has since said that the golf course investments were financed with company funds. Mr. Trump himself has denied that the money came from Russia.On Wednesday, Sarah Malone, executive vice president of Trump International Scotland, described the push to investigate the funding of the organization’s golf courses as “political game-playing at its worst and a terrible waste of taxpayers’ money which further damages Scotland’s reputation as a serious country to invest in and do business.”“We have developed and operate two globally acclaimed, multi-award winning visitor destinations in Scotland and make a significant contribution to the Scottish leisure and tourism economy. This latest attempt to undermine that investment is an utter disgrace,” Ms. Malone said in a statement.Scottish ministers initially rejected the idea of issuing an unexplained wealth order, and there was a dispute over whose responsibility it would be to authorize such an investigation. In February, Scotland’s Parliament voted against a motion, brought by the Scottish Green Party, that would have pressed for more details on the source of the Trump Organization’s money.But on Wednesday in the Court of Session, Scotland’s highest civil court, the judge, Lord Sandison, sided with Avaaz, saying that its legal claim “had real prospects of success” and there was “a sensible legal argument to be had on the matters raised by the petition.” He also rejected Scottish government arguments that the petition had been filed too late to proceed.The decision was welcomed by the co-leader of the Scottish Greens, Patrick Harvie, who said in a statement that he was “glad we are a step forward in getting some clarity over why Trump’s business dealings in Scotland haven’t been investigated. It should never have got to the stage of a legal challenge from a nongovernmental organization for the Scottish government to confirm or deny whether they will seek a ‘McMafia order.’”In a statement, the Scottish government said that “it would be inappropriate for us to comment on an ongoing legal action.” More

    • 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