Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Giuliani to Cuomo: Mueller agreed to limit Trump interview

CNN
Published on May 18, 2018

In an interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo, the newest member of President Trump's legal team Rudy Giuliani said
that special counsel Robert Mueller's team has agreed to limit the scope of his interview with President Trump.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xOJ48JdNK8

Lots of fresh Giuliani in there. Like, Trump told Mueller he wasn't getting
the top FBI job, and that's why Mueller ended up spe\cial counsel some 4 days later.

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F.B.I. Used Informant to Investigate Russia Ties to Campaign, Not to Spy, as Trump Claims

.. image ..

By Adam Goldman, Mark Mazzetti and Matthew Rosenberg
May 18, 2018

WASHINGTON — President Trump accused the F.B.I. on Friday, without evidence, of sending a spy to secretly infiltrate his 2016 campaign “for political purposes” even before the bureau had any inkling of the “phony Russia hoax.”

In fact, F.B.I. agents sent an informant to talk to two campaign advisers only after they received evidence that the pair had suspicious contacts linked to Russia during the campaign. The informant, an American academic who teaches in Britain, made contact late that summer with one campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, according to people familiar with the matter. He also met repeatedly in the ensuing months with the other aide, Carter Page, who was also under F.B.I. scrutiny for his ties to Russia.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/us/politics/trump-fbi-informant-russia-investigation.html

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What the law says about James Comey’s leaked memos

"Part 35, some of..."

By John Kruzel on Tuesday, April 24th, 2018 at 4:03 p.m.
[...]
An Obama-era executive order lays out the standards for classifying information. Under the rule, information should be classified if releasing it to the public could be expected to damage national security, either by revealing military plans, foreign government information, sources and methods or some other highly-sensitive subject matter.

Timothy Edgar, a senior fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute and a former national security and intelligence official, said the government’s tendency to hew toward secrecy means it’s possible none of Comey’s memos have been properly classified in the first place.

"We don't really know if any of the information in the Comey memos met this standard," Edgar said. "Over-classification is a huge problem, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if none of it was properly classified."
[...]
According to Edgar, the broadest law to punish leakers of classified information is the Espionage Act. But a prosecutor would have a hard time convicting Comey of violating this law, he said.

"Not all leaks of classified information are criminal," Edgar said. "It only applies to ‘national defense information’ — which these memos probably do not contain — and, even then, requires proof that the disclosure was made ‘to the advantage of a foreign nation.’ That’s a standard that is unlikely to be met here."

Separately, federal law bans the disclosure of classified information. In an ironic twist, the same statute that governed the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state — and which Comey announced Clinton had not violated — could be relevant in Comey’s case.

"As Director Comey himself has explained, the key issue there will likely be one of intent," Edgar said. "You would need something like a ‘smoking gun’ that shows Comey knows that he is sharing classified information improperly and is doing so on purpose without regard to the rules."
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2018/apr/24/what-law-says-about-james-comeys-leaked-memos/

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6 Takeaways From the James Comey Memos
By Michael S. Schmidt April 20, 2018
[...]
Mr. Comey depicts Mr. Trump as a man engrossed to the point of distraction with political rivalries and fears
that bureaucrats and government officials, including in the F.B.I., were trying to undermine his legitimacy.
[Read the memos here.]
The president responded late Thursday by insisting that the memos showed no collusion with Moscow’s election interference and that Mr. Comey had erred by leaking classified information. The memos were reviewed by Justice Department officials before being released.
[...]
Early on, as they discussed whom Mr. Comey’s point of contact should be at the White House, Mr. Trump said that “Reince doesn’t know we are having dinner” but that Mr. Comey should plan to go to him.

But as Mr. Comey was preparing to leave the White House that night, Mr. Trump told him: ”Reince knows we are having dinner’ (the opposite of what he said earlier),” according to one memo.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/20/us/politics/comey-memos-takeaways.html