MAJOR BREAKING NEWS: Senate Intel Committee Informed DOJ in mid-2019—on a Bipartisan Basis—That It Believed Seven Persons Tied to Trump May Have Committed Crimes: Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Erik Prince, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, Sam Clovis and Hope Hicks latimes.com/politics/story…
1/ I've too many thoughts on this to readily organize them quickly at this time of night, except to say that here on the feed, and in the Proof series, I've sought to establish through a marshaling of well-sourced evidence that Trump Jr., Kushner, and Prince all committed crimes.
2/ We have also discussed here Trump's National Security Advisory Committee—the 2016 body responsible for much of the Trump-Russia collusion—and how it was conceived and staffed by Sam Clovis. And we've tracked how Hope Hicks seems to have lied about Trump's acts of obstruction.
3/ And I've written extensively on the evidence that Bannon lied about his pre-election contacts with Prince. So let's break down what THE LOS ANGELES TIMES is reporting. First the SIC thinks 3 men definitely committed crimes—Bannon, Prince and Clovis. They're in their own class.
4/ Three of the other four people—Trump Jr., Kushner and Hicks—gave different answers to the Senate than they gave to the FBI/DOJ operation Mueller was running, which on its face means a crime was likely committed. As to these three, the SIC wants the DOJ to sort out the details.
5/ Manafort is in a different category, as *everyone* knows that he broke his DOJ cooperation deal to hide additional crimes—and *everyone* knows Trump *wanted* him to break that deal to hide additional crimes—and therefore there is a general assumption the crimes involved Trump.
6/ In other words, Manafort lied to *everyone*, and therefore the SIC referred Manafort's lies to DOJ in 2019 largely a way of underscoring that Manafort breaking his DOJ cooperation deal should have led—and may have led—to continued investigations of him in and out of Congress.
7/ It's *not* a good sign the SIC sent this letter to DOJ in July 2019, apparently, yet AG Barr—while recently doing an interview circuit to talk about the Durham investigation—still has never even *hinted* he's heard from the SIC. It creates the stench of *another* Barr coverup.
8/ It *is* a good sign that this comes from the Senate Intelligence Committee, as many of us have been publicly demanding since April '19 to get some inkling of what the *counterintelligence* side of the Trump-Russia probe—as opposed to Mueller's criminal-probe side—has revealed.
9/ Needless to say, it's risible Barr sat on this referral for over a year—and amazing it didn't leak until now—as he's literally crossed oceans to try to inculpate FBI agents who investigated Trump-Russia ties but apparently done nothing whatsoever as to these seven Trump aides.
10/ Barr's inaction let Trump Jr. and Kushner continue working with/within the administration; Prince to be the subject of a shady deal with Ukraine that Trump is pushing (see Proof of Corruption for more); Hope Hicks to get rehired by Trump... when all may have committed crimes.
11/ Presumably, we're hearing about this now because the Senate Intelligence Committee is undergoing a negotiation process with the ODNI to declassify its final report on Trump-Russia ties. In other words the referral was about to come out no matter what—it just got leaked early.
12/ I fear some will conflate this breaking news with the forthcoming Senate Intelligence Report ("Volume 5"). The fact that this referral was made a year ago doesn't mean that the report will detail the underlying crimes (as opposed to lies covering up crimes) by these 7 people.
13/ That last point bears unpacking. In July '19, the SIC had enough intel—note, 10 months before even finishing its counterintelligence report—to know that 7 Trump aides probably committed a federal crime by lying to Congress. It doesn't appear it referred the crimes themselves.
14/ There's no reason for us to get a leak, today, of a referral for *lying* about potential crimes if what SIC actually has now—and put in its report—is the details on the underlying events these seven lied to cover up. What it suggests, sadly, is SIC never got the "real" story.
15/ So tomorrow you'll see certain feeds—incredibly irresponsible ones—crowing to America that this news means the forthcoming SIC report (volume 5 of its five-volume master report, i.e. the one focusing on counterintelligence components of the Trump-Russia case) is a bombshell.
16/ More likely, what we're learning is a) Barr squelched at least seven *additional* Trump-related criminal probes beyond those we already know about, b) the Senate was never able to get the truth about the events it believes these seven Trump aides lied to Congress to obscure.
17/ That said, this LOS ANGELES TIMES story does give us details that—when added to items already discussed on this feed and in the Proof series *and* in other locations in media and on social news websites—paint a picture of some of that underlying conduct. I'll give an example.
18/ Per the TIMES, the Senate Intelligence Committee believes Bannon lied about his interactions with Rick Gerson, a *Kushner* pal who the evidence in Proof of Conspiracy (2019) strongly suggests negotiated with the Russians on Trump's behalf in the Seychelles in January of 2017.
19/ Kushner and Gerson have both told stories about why Gerson was in the Seychelles that are laughably false, so it's almost impossible not to see the criminal referral of Bannon as also giving us some insight on what the referral involving *Kushner* relates to (the Seychelles).
20/ Just so, one of the other two known criminal referrals is Prince—who we previously thought was, with George Nader, Trump's chief negotiator with Russia/MBZ in the Seychelles. So Kushner—and the still-unnamed Gerson—seem likely to be linked to the Bannon and Prince referrals.
21/ What this underscores is how even these seven referrals (already a large number) would have—*if Barr had followed up on them*—spiraled into a much *larger* number of implicated parties. Kushner, Bannon and Prince cast a long shadow on the still-unnamed/unreferred Rick Gerson.
22/ By the same token, Hope Hicks has much she could've lied about, but the publicly reported lies appear connected to the Trump-dictated (false) statement about the infamous June 2016 Trump-Russia meeting at Trump Tower. But Hicks isn't the only one on the hook in that instance.
23/ Hope Hicks worked on the false statement not just with Trump himself, but in some consultation with then-Trump spokesman Mark Corallo, who shortly thereafter left the Trump campaign. He now works for Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, two major Trump-Ukraine co-conspirators.
24/ Had Barr followed up on the Hicks referral, it would've not only led to possible post-presidency (or impeachable) charges against Trump, but *also* would have broken into the diGenova-Toensing nest of criminality via Corallo. Hicks is a domino that knocks over other dominoes.
25/ Upshot: you don't lie to Congress unless you did something bad. There are underlying crimes by all 7 people here, *and* those to whom they're tied—a group of 10 to 12 others. We now have reason to think the Senate couldn't get to those truths, and that Barr has done nothing.
CONCLUSION/ Exactly as I and many others have been saying—exactly as the 12,000 major-media citations in the Proof series detailed—there was collusion and criminality in the Trump-Russia case. What remains to be seen is who *in government*—outside books—will detail and punish it.
PS/ Yes, this makes the GOP forcing Burr off the SIC seem shady—as he agreed to these referrals of top Trump aides in July '19. Yes, this means if Biden wins we're likely to see *many* new prosecutions—and some deals and confessions that damn others—that are presently impossible.
