House Judiciary committee refers former CIA Director John Brennan to Justice Department for prosecution

[Maximum Overkill]

In a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi Tuesday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, referred former CIA Director John Brennan to the Justice Department for allegedly making false statements to Congress.

Jordan accused Brennan of lying in his 2023 Judiciary Committee testimony by denying that the CIA used the Steele dossier in prepping the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian election interference, and falsely claiming the CIA opposed including it.

Declassified documents reportedly show Brennan approved the decision to include the dossier, despite objections from senior CIA officials.

 

[weepaws]

Heck , if one can get in trouble for lying, trump would be in prison for fifty, if stupid votes didn’t vote for the liberal.  

[Frozenbeernuts]

2 hours ago, weepaws said:

Heck , if one can get in trouble for lying, trump would be in prison for fifty, if stupid votes didn’t vote for the liberal.  

You should take more English classes

[Ron_Artest]

Weaponization of the DOJ continues.

It's almost like he's a king.

[Tree of Knowledge]

2 minutes ago, Ron_Artest said:

Weaponization of the DOJ continues.

It's almost like he's a king.

Treason has consequences.  

[Ron_Artest]

1 minute ago, Tree of Knowledge said:

Treason has consequences.  

Sure, as long as there are people as stupid as you, treason gets rewarded with a presidency.

[Maximum Overkill]

46 minutes ago, Ron_Artest said:

It's almost like he's a king

[Tree of Knowledge]

2 hours ago, Ron_Artest said:

Sure, as long as there are people as stupid as you, treason gets rewarded with a presidency.

Good one Corky.  

[SaintsInDome2006]

NYT: DiGenova appointed to go get Brennan

- Here we go again.

[SaintsInDome2006]

<<<

Mr. diGenova, 81, who served as a U.S. attorney in the Reagan era, has been given the title of counselor to the attorney general and detailed to the Southern District of Florida, where the U.S. attorney, Jason A. Reding Quiñones, another Trump loyalist, is supervising the inquiry.

Mr. diGenova’s appointment comes after Maria Medetis Long, a senior career prosecutor in Miami who had been in charge of the investigation, was abruptly removed from the case. Ms. Medetis Long, who leads national security investigations for Mr. Quiñones’s office, is said to have objected to moving forward with a portion of the inquiry focused on John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director.>>>

- This is an old familiar pattern we’ve seen with the Comey & James prosecutions.

- It’s hilarious how the Trump2 administration is loathe to use special counsels or rely on their own totally committed prosecutors over & over again.

[SaintsInDome2006]

<<<

Because Judge Cannon is the only federal jurist in the Fort Pierce courthouse, she could be in a position to make critical decisions if Mr. diGenova uses the grand jury there to subpoena documents or witness testimony and the recipients balk, asking her to quash the demands.

Judge Cannon was criticized by an appeals court in 2022 after she effectively stalled the investigation into Mr. Trump’s mishandling of classified documents by appointing a so-called special master to sort through reams of materials seized from Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida. Later, Mr. Trump praised her lavishly, calling her “strong” and “brilliant,” after she tossed out the indictment altogether, ruling that Jack Smith, the special counsel who filed the charges, had been improperly appointed.

In another unusual move, Christopher-James DeLorenz, who worked as a law clerk for Judge Cannon during the documents case and later served as an aide to Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, was sent from the Justice Department’s headquarters in Washington to Mr. Quiñones’s office earlier this year and is working on the portion of the inquiry that is focused on Mr. Brennan, the official said.

Mr. diGenova will work on the Brennan matter, too, but also the broader inquiry.

Last year, Mr. Trump’s allies began pushing for what they referred to as a “grand conspiracy” case that would portray all of the criminal inquiries of Mr. Trump as a unified plot to violate his constitutional rights. The conspiracy, by their telling, began with the investigation into Russia and its potential ties to the 2016 Trump campaign, then extended to the classified documents and 2020 election indictments.

That far-fetched theory would allow the Justice Department to scrutinize in a single case matters that would normally be barred by the five-year statute of limitations. It would also give Mr. diGenova and Mr. Reding Quiñones the authority to scrutinize events that took place in Washington from their jurisdiction in Florida.

The Justice Department has also given Mr. Reding Quiñones special authority under a statute known as Section 515, the official said. That would enable him to bring indictments in jurisdictions where he is not the U.S. attorney.

While many details remain unknown, Mr. diGenova is inheriting an inquiry whose most developed portion appears to be focused on trying to find a basis to charge Mr. Brennan with lying to Congress over a January 2017 intelligence community assessment. It concluded, among other things, that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election in part because Moscow hoped to improve Mr. Trump’s chances of winning.

As the top federal prosecutor in Washington in the 1980s, Mr. diGenova secured an espionage conviction against Jonathan Pollard, a former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who passed sensitive information to Israel. He later became a political commentator who gravitated toward Mr. Trump during his first term in the White House.

Mr. diGenova has claimed the Russia investigation was a law-enforcement plot to frame Mr. Trumpand keep him out of the White House during his first presidential campaign. In 2020, as part of the legal team for the Trump campaign, Mr. diGenova said that Christopher Krebs, a cybersecurity official who had contradicted false pro-Trump claims of election fraud, should be “shot.” (Mr. diGenova later apologized.)

A special counsel appointed by Attorney General William P. Barr in Mr. Trump’s first term, John H. Durham, already scrutinized the actions of senior law enforcement and intelligence officials involved in the early stages of the Russia investigation.

When that inquiry began in 2019, Mr. diGenova was among the Trump supporters who celebrated, telling Fox News that he believed people like Mr. Brennan, James R. Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, and James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, would go to prison.

“James Comey, Brennan and Clapper have said to themselves, ‘Which one of us is going to pay the Barr bill?’” Mr. diGenova said, adding, “This conspiracy began with John Brennan and ends with John Brennan.”

But Mr. Durham, who completed his investigation in 2023, did not find a basis to prosecute any of them, and Mr. Barr later said the Durham investigation found that the C.I.A. had “stayed in its lane.”

Grand jury subpoenas already issued under Mr. Reding Quiñones have sought records related to the 2017 intelligence community assessment. The effort appears focused on trying to build a perjury case against Mr. Brennan over a 2023 deposition to Congress. At the time, he discussed the relationship between the assessment and the Steele dossier, a compendium of later-discredited political opposition research making various claims about Mr. Trump and Russia.

The F.B.I. had wanted to include information from the dossier in the intelligence community assessment, but C.I.A. analysts balked. Mr. Brennan, in his testimony, told lawmakers that “the C.I.A. was very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the Steele dossier in the intelligence community assessment.” Ultimately, as a compromise, a summary of the dossier was attached to the assessment as an appendix, as Mr. Brennan had long said.

Documents the Trump administration declassifiedlast year complicated that account by showing that a sentence in the main body of the assessment alerted readers to the existence of the appendix, although they also showed the appendix had a header stating that its claims did not contribute to the judgment. Released files also showed that C.I.A. analysts had objected to the appendix, too, but portrayed Mr. Brennan as having pushed back in support of the compromise arrangement with the F.B.I.

Last October, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and a Trump ally, made a criminal referral, saying Mr. Brennan’s statement about the C.I.A.’s opposition amounted to a false statement. Mr. Brennan’s lawyer, Kenneth L. Wainstein, has said it did not.

Last December, Mr. Wainstein wrote to the chief federal judge in South Florida, Cecilia M. Altonaga,urging her to block the Justice Department from steering the case to Judge Cannon. The Justice Department, he wrote, appeared to be planning to “manipulate grand jury and case-assignment procedures” to put the investigation under her.

It has not been clear whether Judge Altonaga took any action. But the broader investigation has since expanded, including with subpoenas issued earlier this year for documents about the F.B.I.’s investigation into ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.>>>

[SaintsInDome2006]

<<<

In public hearings over the last two weeks, American diplomats and national-security officials have laid out in detail how Mr. Trump, at the instigation and with the help of Mr. Giuliani, conditioned nearly $400 million in direly needed military aid on Ukraine’s announcing investigations into Mr. Biden and his son, as well as a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

But interviews with the two Ukrainian oligarchs — Dmitry Firtash and Ihor Kolomoisky — as well as with several other people with knowledge of Mr. Giuliani’s dealings, point to a new dimension in his exertions on behalf of his client, Mr. Trump. Taken together, they depict a strategy clearly aimed at leveraging information from politically powerful but legally vulnerable foreign citizens.

In the case of Mr. Firtash, an energy tycoon with deep ties to the Kremlin who is facing extradition to the United States on bribery and racketeering charges, one of Mr. Giuliani’s associates has described offering the oligarch help with his Justice Department problems — if Mr. Firtash hired two lawyers who were close to President Trump and were already working with Mr. Giuliani on his dirt-digging mission. Mr. Firtash said the offer was made in late June when he met with Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, both Soviet-born businessmen involved in Mr. Giuliani’s Ukraine pursuit.

Mr. Parnas’s lawyer, Joseph A. Bondy, confirmed that account and added that his client had met with Mr. Firtash at Mr. Giuliani’s direction and encouraged the oligarch to help in the hunt for compromising information “as part of any potential resolution to his extradition matter.”

Mr. Firtash’s relationship to the Trump-allied lawyers — Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova — has led to intense speculation that he is, at least indirectly, helping to finance Mr. Giuliani’s campaign. But until now he has stayed silent, and many of the details of how and why he came to hire the lawyers have remained murky.

In the interview, Mr. Firtash said he had no information about the Bidens and had not financed the search for it. “Without my will and desire,” he said, “I was sucked into this internal U.S. fight.” But to help his legal case, he said, he had paid his new lawyers $1.2 million to date, with a portion set aside as something of a referral fee for Mr. Parnas.

And in late August, Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova did as promised: They went to the Justice Department and pleaded Mr. Firtash’s case with the attorney general, William P. Barr.>>>

<<<

Help to Fight an Extradition

The pair fared better with Mr. Firtash.

For several years, Mr. Firtash’s most visible lawyer had been Lanny Davis, a well-connected Democrat who also represented Mr. Trump’s fixer-turned-antagonist, Michael Cohen. In a television appearance in March, Mr. Giuliani had attacked Mr. Davis for taking money from the oligarch, citing federal prosecutors’ contention that he was tied to a top Russian mobster — a charge Mr. Firtash has denied.

Now, however, Mr. Giuliani wanted Mr. Firtash’s help. After being largely rebuffed by a member of the oligarch’s legal team in early June, he hit upon another approach, according to Mr. Parnas’s lawyer: persuading Mr. Firtash to hire more amenable counsel.

There was a brief discussion about Mr. Giuliani’s taking on that role himself, but Mr. Giuliani said he decided against it. According to Mr. Parnas’s lawyer, that is when Mr. Giuliani charged Mr. Parnas with persuading the oligarch to replace Mr. Davis with Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova. The men secured the June meeting with Mr. Firtash in Vienna after a mutual acquaintance, whom Mr. Firtash declined to name, vouched for them.

In the interview, Mr. Firtash said it had been clear to him that the two emissaries were working for Mr. Giuliani. The oligarch, a major player in the Ukrainian gas market, said Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman initially pitched him on a deal to sell American liquefied natural gas to Ukraine, via a terminal in Poland. While the deal didn’t make sense financially, he said, he entertained it for a time, even paying for the men’s travel expenses, because they had something else to offer.

“They said, ‘We may help you, we are offering to you good lawyers in D.C. who might represent you and deliver this message to the U.S. D.O.J.,” Mr. Firtash recalled, referring to the Justice Department.

The oligarch had been arrested in Vienna in 2014, at the American authorities’ request, after his indictment on charges of bribing Indian officials for permission to mine titanium for Boeing. Mr. Firtash, who denies the charges, was free on bail but an Austrian court had cleared the way for his extradition to the United States.

In hopes of blocking that order, Mr. Firtash and his Vienna lawyers had filed records showing that a key piece of evidence — a document known as “Exhibit A” that was said to lay out the bribery scheme — had been prepared not by Mr. Firtash’s firm, but by the global consultancy McKinsey & Company. But Mr. Firtash’s legal team had been unable to persuade federal prosecutors to withdraw it. McKinsey has denied recommending “bribery or other illegal acts.”

Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova, the Giuliani emissaries told him, “are in a position to insist to correct the record and call back Exhibit A as evidence,” Mr. Firtash recalled.

He hired the lawyers, he said, on a four-month contract for a singular task — to arrange a meeting with the attorney general and persuade him to withdraw Exhibit A. He said their contract was for $300,000 a month, including Mr. Parnas’s referral fee. A person with direct knowledge of the arrangement said Mr. Parnas’s total share was $200,000; Ms. Toensing declined to discuss the payment but has said previously that it was for case-related translation.

There was one more piece to Mr. Parnas’s play. “Per Giuliani’s instructions,” Mr. Parnas’s lawyer said, his client “informed Mr. Firtash that Toensing and diGenova were interested in collecting information on the Bidens.” (It was the former vice president who had pushed the Ukrainian government to eliminate middleman gas brokers like Mr. Firtash and diversify the country’s supply away from Russia.)>>>

2019 NYT

[seafoam1]

5 hours ago, SaintsInDome2006 said:

<<<

In public hearings over the last two weeks, American diplomats and national-security officials have laid out in detail how Mr. Trump, at the instigation and with the help of Mr. Giuliani, conditioned nearly $400 million in direly needed military aid on Ukraine’s announcing investigations into Mr. Biden and his son, as well as a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

But interviews with the two Ukrainian oligarchs — Dmitry Firtash and Ihor Kolomoisky — as well as with several other people with knowledge of Mr. Giuliani’s dealings, point to a new dimension in his exertions on behalf of his client, Mr. Trump. Taken together, they depict a strategy clearly aimed at leveraging information from politically powerful but legally vulnerable foreign citizens.

In the case of Mr. Firtash, an energy tycoon with deep ties to the Kremlin who is facing extradition to the United States on bribery and racketeering charges, one of Mr. Giuliani’s associates has described offering the oligarch help with his Justice Department problems — if Mr. Firtash hired two lawyers who were close to President Trump and were already working with Mr. Giuliani on his dirt-digging mission. Mr. Firtash said the offer was made in late June when he met with Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, both Soviet-born businessmen involved in Mr. Giuliani’s Ukraine pursuit.

Mr. Parnas’s lawyer, Joseph A. Bondy, confirmed that account and added that his client had met with Mr. Firtash at Mr. Giuliani’s direction and encouraged the oligarch to help in the hunt for compromising information “as part of any potential resolution to his extradition matter.”

Mr. Firtash’s relationship to the Trump-allied lawyers — Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova — has led to intense speculation that he is, at least indirectly, helping to finance Mr. Giuliani’s campaign. But until now he has stayed silent, and many of the details of how and why he came to hire the lawyers have remained murky.

In the interview, Mr. Firtash said he had no information about the Bidens and had not financed the search for it. “Without my will and desire,” he said, “I was sucked into this internal U.S. fight.” But to help his legal case, he said, he had paid his new lawyers $1.2 million to date, with a portion set aside as something of a referral fee for Mr. Parnas.

And in late August, Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova did as promised: They went to the Justice Department and pleaded Mr. Firtash’s case with the attorney general, William P. Barr.>>>

<<<

Help to Fight an Extradition

The pair fared better with Mr. Firtash.

For several years, Mr. Firtash’s most visible lawyer had been Lanny Davis, a well-connected Democrat who also represented Mr. Trump’s fixer-turned-antagonist, Michael Cohen. In a television appearance in March, Mr. Giuliani had attacked Mr. Davis for taking money from the oligarch, citing federal prosecutors’ contention that he was tied to a top Russian mobster — a charge Mr. Firtash has denied.

Now, however, Mr. Giuliani wanted Mr. Firtash’s help. After being largely rebuffed by a member of the oligarch’s legal team in early June, he hit upon another approach, according to Mr. Parnas’s lawyer: persuading Mr. Firtash to hire more amenable counsel.

There was a brief discussion about Mr. Giuliani’s taking on that role himself, but Mr. Giuliani said he decided against it. According to Mr. Parnas’s lawyer, that is when Mr. Giuliani charged Mr. Parnas with persuading the oligarch to replace Mr. Davis with Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova. The men secured the June meeting with Mr. Firtash in Vienna after a mutual acquaintance, whom Mr. Firtash declined to name, vouched for them.

In the interview, Mr. Firtash said it had been clear to him that the two emissaries were working for Mr. Giuliani. The oligarch, a major player in the Ukrainian gas market, said Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman initially pitched him on a deal to sell American liquefied natural gas to Ukraine, via a terminal in Poland. While the deal didn’t make sense financially, he said, he entertained it for a time, even paying for the men’s travel expenses, because they had something else to offer.

“They said, ‘We may help you, we are offering to you good lawyers in D.C. who might represent you and deliver this message to the U.S. D.O.J.,” Mr. Firtash recalled, referring to the Justice Department.

The oligarch had been arrested in Vienna in 2014, at the American authorities’ request, after his indictment on charges of bribing Indian officials for permission to mine titanium for Boeing. Mr. Firtash, who denies the charges, was free on bail but an Austrian court had cleared the way for his extradition to the United States.

In hopes of blocking that order, Mr. Firtash and his Vienna lawyers had filed records showing that a key piece of evidence — a document known as “Exhibit A” that was said to lay out the bribery scheme — had been prepared not by Mr. Firtash’s firm, but by the global consultancy McKinsey & Company. But Mr. Firtash’s legal team had been unable to persuade federal prosecutors to withdraw it. McKinsey has denied recommending “bribery or other illegal acts.”

Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova, the Giuliani emissaries told him, “are in a position to insist to correct the record and call back Exhibit A as evidence,” Mr. Firtash recalled.

He hired the lawyers, he said, on a four-month contract for a singular task — to arrange a meeting with the attorney general and persuade him to withdraw Exhibit A. He said their contract was for $300,000 a month, including Mr. Parnas’s referral fee. A person with direct knowledge of the arrangement said Mr. Parnas’s total share was $200,000; Ms. Toensing declined to discuss the payment but has said previously that it was for case-related translation.

There was one more piece to Mr. Parnas’s play. “Per Giuliani’s instructions,” Mr. Parnas’s lawyer said, his client “informed Mr. Firtash that Toensing and diGenova were interested in collecting information on the Bidens.” (It was the former vice president who had pushed the Ukrainian government to eliminate middleman gas brokers like Mr. Firtash and diversify the country’s supply away from Russia.)>>>

2019 NYT

Biden is to old and feeble to prosecute. He hasn't known what is going on around him for the past 10 years. Throw the kid in prison and throw away the key. 

He deserves a cat 6 prison stay. 

[SaintsInDome2006]

Subpoenas were issued in probe of Russia ‘conspiracy,’ then DOJ clawed them back, sources say ~~~ The Justice Department sent subpoenas to witnesses, and then withdrew them, in its investigation of former CIA Director John Brennan for his role in the Russia investigation.

<<<

The Justice Department on Monday night began withdrawing several subpoenas that had been issued just days prior in a criminal probe of former CIA Director John Brennan and a purported conspiracy by the Obama administration to embarrass President Donald Trump, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The dramatic shift in plans revealed some confusion and disorder in the controversial Justice Department investigation, which career prosecutors have privately criticized as lacking evidence and being politically motivated to please Trump.  

The subpoenas, which were served over the weekend, had sought the scheduled testimony of witnesses purportedly with knowledge of the Obama administration’s decision to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election. The subpoenas were touted by Trump administration allies as a sign of progress the Justice Department was making in a top political priority for the president: to go after the architects of the Russia probe that eventually became special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump’s campaign and Trump himself. 

The subpoenas had ordered that former government officials and some current and former intelligence agency officials appear in coming weeks for questioning before a grand jury in Washington, where Trump’s Justice Department is looking to charge Brennan with making false statements about his and the CIA’s role in launching the Russia probe. FBI agents involved in the probe told lawyers for witnesses that they believe the investigation will now seek voluntary interviews from the officials instead, according to two of the people, who requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of an ongoing probe. …>>>

[SaintsInDome2006]

“If only we could find someone to do the corruption.”