Inb4 apologists say separation of powers is bad https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/08/tru...write-comey-firing-memo-mccabe-book-says.html Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein said Trump ordered him to write the memo justifying James Comey's firing, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe writes Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has said he did not plan to write the memo justifying former FBI Director James Comey's firing and was ordered to do it, ex-FBI deputy Director Andrew McCabe writes in an upcoming book. Rosenstein complained about having to write the document, which is now part of a probe into whether the president obstructed justice by ousting Comey, McCabe writes, according to The Guardian.
https://nypost.com/2019/02/14/mccabe-says-he-launched-probe-into-trump-after-comey-firing/ McCabe says he launched probe into Trump after Comey firing Andrew McCabe, the former acting director of the FBI, revealed he launched counterintelligence and obstruction of justice investigations into President Trump and his possible links to Russia after speaking to the commander-in-chief about his firing of James Comey. McCabe, who was fired by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions in May 2018, said he wanted the probes documented so that they couldn’t be scuttled without raising red flags. “I was very concerned that I was able to put the Russia case on absolutely solid ground in an indelible fashion that were I removed quickly and reassigned or fired that the case could not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace. I wanted to make sure that our case was on solid ground,” McCabe told CBS’ “60 Minutes” in an excerpt of the interview that will air Sunday. “And if somebody came in behind me and closed it and tried to walk away from it, they would not be able to do that without creating a record of why they’d made that decision,” he said in the snippet released Thursday. McCabe said he was “troubled” by the conversation he had with Trump. “I was speaking to the man who had just run for the presidency and won the election for the presidency and who might have done so with the aid of the government of Russia, our most formidable adversary on the world stage. And that was something that troubled me greatly,” said McCabe, who was named acting director after Trump fired Comey in May 2017. The next day, he launched the probes. “I met with the team investigating the Russia cases. And I asked the team to go back and conduct an assessment to determine where are we with these efforts and what steps do we need to take going forward,” he said. McCabe’s book, “The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump,” will hit bookstores Tuesday.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/14/tru...-has-enough-senate-votes-to-be-confirmed.html Senate confirms Trump's attorney general pick William Barr, who will now oversee Mueller probe President Donald Trump's nominee for attorney general, William Barr, was confirmed in the Senate on Thursday to take over the Justice Department. Barr, 68, was confirmed by the Senate in a 54-45 vote that largely fell along party lines. Barr was widely expected to be confirmed by the Republican-majority Senate, but he faced scrutiny over how he would handle special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/muell...al-stone-directly-interacted-with-guccifer-20 Mueller: Search Warrants on GRU Reveal Stone ‘Directly’ Interacted With Guccifer 2.0 In a late Friday court filing, Mueller cited a series of search warrants against GRU-controlled online accounts as the genesis of his indictment last year charging 11 Russian officers with hacking the DNC and the Clinton campaign. Those search warrants, according to Mueller, also revealed that “[a] fictitious online persona they created, Guccifer 2.0, also interacted directly with Stone concerning other stolen materials posted separately online.” Stone, for his part, has admitted to having friendly chats with “Guccifer 2.0” back when he thought the account belonged to an innocent Romanian hacktivist, and last year he released what he says is the full transcript of his conversations. Mueller’s filing also confirms that Stone communicated privately with Wikileaks.
https://www.kyivpost.com/russia/reuters-third-suspect-in-skripal-poisoning-is-russian-gru-agent.html Reuters: Third suspect in Skripal poisoning is Russian GRU agent LONDON (Reuters) - A third man suspected of involvement in the nerve agent poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in England last year is a high-ranking Russian military intelligence agent, the investigative website Bellingcat said on Thursday. Last September, British prosecutors charged two Russians - known by the aliases Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov - with attempted murder in their absence. Bellingcat was the first to identify the men as Alexander Yevgenyevich Mishkin and Anatoly Chepiga, both of whom worked for Russia’s GRU intelligence services.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/15/politics/sarah-sanders-robert-mueller/index.html Exclusive: WH press secretary Sarah Sanders interviewed by special counsel's office "The President urged me, like he has everyone in the administration, to fully cooperate with the special counsel. I was happy to voluntarily sit down with them," Sanders said in response to a question from CNN. The interview is one of the final known interviews by Mueller's team. It was conducted late last year, around the same time as the special counsel interviewed then-White House chief of staff John Kelly, well after a number of other senior officials, including former White House communications director Hope Hicks and former press secretary Sean Spicer, were brought in for questioning. The White House did not immediately agree to grant the special counsel an interview with Sanders, according to one of the sources. Similarly, as CNN reported in December, White House lawyers initially objected to Mueller's request to interview Kelly, who ultimately responded to a narrow set of questions from special counsel investigators.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ex-f...-backed-trump-probes-003936483--politics.html Ex-FBI official: 'Crime may have been committed' by Trump ERIC TUCKER Associated PressFebruary WASHINGTON (AP) — Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said in an interview that aired Sunday that a "crime may have been committed" when President Donald Trump fired the head of the FBI and tried to publicly undermine an investigation into his campaign's ties to Russia. McCabe also said in the interview with "60 Minutes" that the FBI had good reason to open a counterintelligence investigation into whether Trump was in league with Russia, and therefore a possible national security threat, following the May 2017 firing of then-FBI Director James Comey.