https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...93a6ca-de38-11e9-8dc8-498eabc129a0_story.html Trump ordered hold on military aid days before calling Ukrainian president, officials say President Trump told his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to hold back almost $400 million in military aid for Ukraine at least a week before a phone call in which Trump is said to have pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate the son of former vice president Joe Biden, according to three senior administration officials. Officials at the Office of Management and Budget relayed Trump’s order to the State Department and the Pentagon during an interagency meeting in mid-July, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. They explained that the president had “concerns” and wanted to analyze whether the money needed to be spent. Administration officials were instructed to tell lawmakers that the delays were part of an “interagency process” but to give them no additional information — a pattern that continued for nearly two months, until the White House released the funds on the night of Sept. 11. Murdoch not liking those tariffs https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-defends-conversation-with-ukraine-leader-11568993176 Trump Repeatedly Pressed Ukraine President to Investigate Biden’s Son Interactions under focus amid whistleblower complaint on U.S. president’s dealings with a world leader President Trump in a July phone call repeatedly pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden ’s son, according to people familiar with the matter, urging Volodymyr Zelensky about eight times to work with Rudy Giuliani on a probe that could hamper Mr. Trump’s potential 2020 opponent. “He told him that he should work with [Mr. Giuliani] on Biden, and that people in Washington wanted to know” if his lawyer’s assertions that Mr. Biden acted improperly as vice president were true, one of the people said. Mr. Giuliani has suggested Mr. Biden’s pressure on Ukraine to fight corruption had to do with an investigation of a gas company for which his son was a director. A Ukrainian official this year said he had no evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Biden or his son Hunter Biden.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/24/us/politics/bijan-kian-michael-flynn.html Judge Throws Out Conviction of Michael Flynn’s Business Partner WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Tuesday threw out the conviction of a business associate of the former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, saying prosecutors had failed to offer enough evidence to sustain their charges that he had secretly lobbied on behalf of Turkey. Judge Anthony J. Trenga of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia wrote in a lengthy opinion that there was no evidence of “any actual or implied agreement” between Mr. Flynn’s partner, Bijan Kian, and the government of Turkey. “The government has failed to offer substantial evidence from which any rational juror could find beyond a reasonable doubt” that Mr. Kian had acted as an agent of a foreign power without notifying the Justice Department as required by law, Judge Trenga said. On March 24, 2017, Trenga was the first federal judge to rule in favor of the Trump administration's executive order that limits travel from six Muslim-majority countries.[5] On May 16, 2019, Trenga incarcerated the famed whistle-blower Chelsea Manning after she refused to testify before a federal grand jury by holding her in contempt and sending her back to prison a second time, also adding the threat of daily fines of up to $500 a day after 30 days and rising to $1000 a day after 60 days. This return to captivity occurred days after Manning was freed from sixty-two days of incarceration for allegedly committing the same offense before another federal grand jury.[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...ce907e-deea-11e9-be96-6adb81821e90_story.html Tony Podesta, Vin Weber say they were told Justice Department dropped probe into whether they violated foreign lobbying rules
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...0a8bc8-e159-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html Trump told Russian officials in 2017 he wasn’t concerned about Moscow’s interference in U.S. election President Trump told two senior Russian officials in a 2017 Oval Office meeting that he was unconcerned about Moscow’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election because the United States did the same in other countries, an assertion that prompted alarmed White House officials to limit access to the remarks to an unusually small number of people, according to three former officials with knowledge of the matter. The comments, which have not been previously reported, were part of a now-infamous meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, in which Trump revealed highly classified information that exposed a source of intelligence on the Islamic State. He also said during the meeting that firing FBI Director James B. Comey the previous day had relieved “great pressure” on him. A memorandum summarizing the meeting was limited to all but a few officials with the highest security clearances in an attempt to keep the president’s comments from being disclosed publicly, according to the former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. The White House’s classification of records about Trump’s communications with foreign officials is now a central part of the impeachment inquiry launched this week by House Democrats. An intelligence community whistleblower has alleged that the White House placed a record of Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s president, in which he offered U.S. assistance investigating his political opponents, into a code-word classified system reserved for the most sensitive intelligence information.
Trump just says stuff. Especially that early on in his presidency. A lifetime of spewing BS is a hard habit to break. That's just the way he is. He's a non-stop bullshitter. He just says things like that, its his style. When he made those remarks his brain was thinking: "lets just keep the peace for now.... just say some BS and change the subject." I'd bet a million dollars if you asked him 1/2 hour later what he said to the Russian guys... he wouldn't even remember. Unfortunately that doesn't fly in the Oval Office, as he has learned. Those remarks were harmless af. Trump being Trump.
Tell that to all intelligence officers who are aware of the Russians interfering in the democracy they were sworn in to protect.
I mean yeah, you're right. But Trump's brain.... right or wrong... is always thinking several steps ahead. This is the way he's built. Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending anything here, I am only analyzing the person. So with that in mind, it is very typical of people like that to just say things in the moment to acknowledge whoever they are interacting with while their brain is pondering something else. His brain is always plotting. Conniving. Because of that, his mouth being in the present oftentimes says stupid things. This was one of those times.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/01/politics/mueller-fbi-witnesses/index.html Justice Department told to produce 500 pages of interview memos from Mueller investigation Washington (CNN)The Justice Department will produce 500 pages of memos documenting what witnesses told special counsel Robert Mueller's office and the FBI during their investigation next month. The documents, known as 302s, memorialize interviews conducted by the office and form the backbone of much of the Mueller report. CNN and BuzzFeed News had sued for the documents under the Freedom of Information Act, and on Tuesday, a federal judge in Washington, DC, ordered the Justice Department to produce their first tranche of documents by November 1. The 500 pages could shed new light on what key government cooperators like former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former White House counsel Don McGahn told federal investigators, but represents only a fraction of the underlying interview records that Mueller's office made: there were a total of 800 302 forms created by the special counsel's office, potentially numbering some 44,000 pages, Justice Department attorney Courtney Enlow said at a hearing Tuesday morning. Enlow said the FBI had already begun to process the records but said a host of potential exemptions that had to be considered before their release, including national security implications, certain privileges, and exposure to ongoing prosecutions and investigations. "We have been going through 302s line by line," Enlow said. "It's a very intensive process." The future production schedule for the remaining interview forms, as well as other records requested by the news outlets, is a matter of contention. Judge Reggie B. Walton lamented the Justice Department's suggested rate of 500 pages per month -- which Enlow said was routine for the FBI -- calculating that it would take years for all of the 302s to reach the public. Walton, a veteran of the bench first appointed by President George W. Bush, criticized the Trump administration for not providing ample resources to the government divisions working to comply with transparency requests, and ordered the Justice Department to determine what efforts the administration had made to keep up with an "explosion" of FOIA litigation. Trump came into office as a "disruptor" and should have expected the volume of requests for internal documents that he's been receiving, Walton said. "Otherwise, they're just totally thumbing their nose at the objective of FOIA," he said. "The American public is going to become totally disillusioned." Walton said he hoped to issue a ruling on another transparency request aimed at Mueller's office -- for the release of an underacted version of the report -- by next month, when another status hearing in the cases is scheduled.
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/10/lindsey-graham-trump-hoax-call-043991 Lindsey Graham dishes on Trump in hoax calls with Russians But it wasn’t the Turkish defense minister at all. Instead, it was Alexey Stolyarov and Vladimir Kuznetsov, Russian pranksters with suspected ties to the country’s intelligence services who go by “Lexus and Vovan.” The duo have become notorious in recent years for their cold calls to unwitting, high-profile Western politicians, including Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, leading some to suspect that they’ve had help from the Kremlin, according to The Guardian. (A Schiff spokesman said at the time that the House Intelligence Committee “informed appropriate law enforcement and security personnel of the conversation.”) But Graham also expressed sympathy for Turkey’s “Kurdish problem” and described the Kurds as a “threat.” Those private comments appear to contradict his public statements this week, in which he criticized Trump’s decision to pull U.S. troops out of northern Syria because it’s “wrong to abandon the Kurds, who have been strong allies against” the Islamic State. The pranksters managed to get Graham on the phone again a few days after the first call. In the second call, Graham says he met with Trump to discuss what the “defense minister” had told him. “We want a better relationship with Turkey. That’s exactly what he wants,” Graham said, referring to Trump and again urging Turkey to rethink the S-400 purchase. “And this case involving the Turkish bank, he’s very sensitive to that,” Graham said of Trump. “The president wants to be helpful, within the limits of his power.”
https://thehill.com/regulation/cour...erly-redacted-court-filing-related-to-mueller Judge rules DOJ improperly redacted court filing related to Mueller probe The Department of Justice improperly redacted a court filing related to the Mueller investigation and must reveal the names of two individuals who figured prominently in the probe, a federal judge in Washington ruled on Thursday. Judge Beryl Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said in her opinion that the department erroneously redacted a portion of a document after invoking grand jury secrecy protections, even though the two names that were concealed belonged to individuals who did not testify before a grand jury during the Mueller probe. "DOJ's assertion that identifying individuals who did not testify before the grand jury as part of the Mueller investigation would reveal 'a matter occurring before the grand jury' is without merit and rejected," Howell wrote. According to the judge, who was appointed by former President Obama, both of the people whose names were redacted "figured in key events examined in the Mueller Report." https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-brie...-jr-did-not-testify-before-mueller-grand-jury DOJ: McGahn, Trump Jr. did not testify before Mueller grand jury The Department of Justice (DOJ) in a filing made public Sunday confirmed that neither former White House counsel Don McGahn nor President Trump's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., testified before former special counsel Robert Mueller's grand jury. "Don McGahn did not testify before the grand jury. Indeed, none of the witnesses for whom the Committee requested FBI Interview Reports in Volume II of the Mueller Report, tyuestified before the grand jury, with the exceptions of [redacted]," the DOJ notice states. "Donald Trump, Jr. also did not testify before the grand jury." The line in the DOJ filing was unredacted Sunday after an order by Chief Judge Beryl Alaine Howell of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, who was responsible for overseeing the grand jury in the Mueller investigation. The report released by Mueller's office relied in large part on interviews with McGahn. Trump reportedly attempted to persuade McGahn to fire Mueller as well as pressure McGahn to deny that he had made the request.