In 2018, @a_cormier_ & I wrote about a series of suspicious financial transactions that was reported to FinCEN involving Emin and Aras Agalarov that immediately preceded & followed the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 #FinCENfiles
We now know that Mueller didn't really follow through on the revelations we disclosed in 2018
A month after @a_cormier_ & I reported about the suspicious financial transactions involving the Agalarovs, the US bank accounts used by their business, Crocus, were shut down
BIG SCOOP: I obtained the 266-page transcript of the intv Special Counsel Robert Hur's team conducted with Biden's ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, during their probe into Biden's handling of classified records
Portions of Zwonitzer’s testimony were briefly mentioned in Hur’s final report, but the transcript fleshes out the narrative of how he ended up entangled in the high-profile investigation and reveals what he told Hur's team
Zwonitzer was fiercely protective of Biden. He noted more than once that Biden’s memory was sound – in stark contrast to Hur’s own conclusions –and that much of what ended up in his book came from the president’s diaries and recollections.
NEW in this week's FOIA Files newsletter: I just obtained docs from NARA and it doesn’t disappoint. It’s about the discovery of ... wait for it... a stolen document that’s been missing for two decades! Plus, another internal report I obtained shows how NARA’s internal watchdog investigated a series of disturbing threats sent to former President Barack Obama at his presidential library bloomberg.com/news/newslette…
I’ve never made it a habit of requesting documents that pertain to the inner workings of NARA itself, which is how I wield the FOIA when I’m looking to open up a government agency. But my approach changed after news broke about the agency’s yearlong effort to recover boxes of presidential records that Trump took to Mar-a-Lago. Since then, I’ve filed dozens of requests and have liberated some really interesting records about what took place behind the scenes.
A few weeks ago, the agency’s inspector general sent me another batch of documents: reports of various internal investigations that haven’t been previously disclosed.
One in particular is fascinating and it’s a twist on the suddenly relevant theme of missing documents. It’s related to the work of a special unit called the Archival Recovery Team that’s tasked with tracking down missing records and artifacts that were lost or stolen from NARA facilities.
A couple of years ago, I obtained a transcript of an off the record discussion Obama had with progressive journalists about Trump as he was leaving office.
This is what he told them. 21 page transcript linked in the story.
“I think that four years is okay,” Obama said. “Take on some water, but we can kind of bail fast enough to be okay. Eight years would be a problem. I would be concerned about a sustained period in which some of these norms have broken down and started to corrode.”
“I think his basic view -- his formative view of foreign policy is shaped by his interactions with Malaysian developers and Saudi princes, and I think his view is, ‘I’m going to go around the world making deals and maybe suing people,’” Obama said. “But it’s not, ‘let me launch big wars that tie me up.’ And that’s not what his base is looking from him anyway.”
NEW FOIA Files🧵: The FBI just sent me a set of docs that’s directly related to Trump’s hush money trial. They're business records from First Republic Bank, where Trump’s former atty Michael Cohen opened an account to pay off adult film star Stormy Daniels.
The details around the bank activity have been widely reported, but many of the underlying financial documents haven’t surfaced. And since cameras aren’t allowed in the courtroom, the public largely hasn’t seen the evidence at the center of the trial
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How I got these documents is kind of a long story. Five years ago, I filed a FOIA lawsuit against the FBI. It was for all the interview summaries – or ‘302s’ as they’re known – from key witnesses questioned during the Mueller probe
Since Cohen was a witness, I’m now in possession of 25-pages of his supplemental interview material
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A little backstory on this week's FOIA Files newsletter 🧵
Not long after Russia launched airstrikes in Ukraine in 2022, I started seeing tweets that said some of Russia’s targets were labs where Ukraine had secretly been developing bio weapons w/the help of the US govt 1/
The allegations seemed to be an obvious attempt to justify the invasion. They garnered thousands of retweets. Soon Fox News was amplifying the claims.
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The stories had a huge impact. One poll in late March of that year found that more than a quarter of Americans believed the US-Ukraine bioweapons theory.
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NEW FOIA Files newsletter is out with a SCOOP based on 2500 pages of docunents about how a Defense Dept office struggled to fend off a "Russian lie" related to biolabs in Ukraine after the February 2022 invasion
The documents provide a rare behind-the-scenes look into an escalating disinformation war during a critical two-month period after the Ukraine invasion
It took me more than a year to liberate these records from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the division that was targeted by Russia's disinformation campaign
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One name that stands out prominently in the cache is Robert Pope, the director of DTRA’s Cooperative Threat Reduction program. Pope said he’d suspected that his agency would eventually wind up in Russia’s crosshairs.