Came across a weird claim in @mtaibbi's take on @ggreenwald. The NYT walked back nothing about our reporting that the CIA assessed that Russia offered $ to incentivize killings of US troops, it was in Trump's briefing & the WH developed response options but authorized no action.
When the WH defended its failure to do even a diplomatic warning (which Pompeo and DOD later did) by lying that the CIA's analysis was too iffy to tell Trump, we reported that it was actually in his Feb. 27 written briefing & reported broadly to the intelligence community May 4.
We went on to dig out details of the direct (detainee interrogations) & corroborative ($ transfers/seizures, travel data) evidence & the absence of sigint & explained that the CIA had medium confidence in its assessment based on this while the sigint-focused NSA wasn't as sure.
Very senior DOD officials have chosen to interpret the issue extremely narrowly - is there conclusive "proof" that any *specific* attack resulted in a payment - that allows them to say they don't know & move on w/out getting crosswise w/ Trump or seeming not to care about troops.
And that's where things still stand. The NYT's reporting on the existence of the CIA's assessment and the White House's weird handling of it was and is accurate. The newspaper hasn't distanced itself from anything.

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More from @charlie_savage

27 Oct
Kaplan's ruling that DOJ can't substitute the govt as defendant in Jean Carroll lawsuit accusing Trump of defaming her last year when he denied her claim he raped her in the 1990s. (Substituting the govt = dismissing the case for sovereign immunity.)/1

pacer-documents.s3.amazonaws.com/119/543790/127…
The main part of the ruling is that a president is not an "employee" of a federal department or agency within the meaning of the Federal Tort Claims Act, the law which enables the government to be substituted for a defendant in certain lawsuits. /2
That's a very technical issue, so public discussion will focus on another he addressed as well: even if the FTCA did apply to presidents, comments to press denying accusations about something he did in his personal life before being elected were not part of his official duties./3
Read 6 tweets
21 Sep
And that President Trump's lawyers, Ty Cobb, promised to give Mueller's team advance warning if Trump was about to fire them./4
Or how their worries that Trump would fire them and his DOJ would shred the evidence they had gathered, they started stuffing everything they were learning into their search warrant applications so a copy would be in the courthouse safe, beyond Trump's reach. /5
Weissmann recounts an early shot across the bow from the WH when it somehow learned SCO had subpoenaed DeutscheBank -- for info about Manafort's $, not Trump's, though WH didn't know that -- as pushing them toward timidity in not investigating his finances./6
Read 12 tweets
4 Sep
This WP story about how Bill Barr confidently, even pugnaciously, told CNN viewers about a massive mail-in ballots fraud incident in Texas that never happened, is a reminder of some other things like that. /1
Like that time in July when he said a surge of federal agents sent to Kansas City had made 200 arrests in two weeks, which was false. /2
nytimes.com/2020/07/22/us/…
Like that time in June when he told the public that the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, had resigned, which was false. /3 nytimes.com/2020/06/19/nyr…
Read 6 tweets
3 Sep
It'd be in my lane to write an explainer about the legal context of Trump's memo on purportedly restricting funding to "anarchist" cities like New York, except the White House didn't even bother to try to cite a legal basis. It's just the usual get-a-one-day-headline vacuousness. Image
Remember when Trump said the government would somehow designate the Antifa subculture as a terrorist organization?
Remember when Trump signed an executive order that was styled as going after social-media companies but didn't actually do anything? nytimes.com/2020/05/28/us/…
Read 4 tweets
2 Sep
Psyched to read “Donald Trump v. The United States” by my colleague @nytmike - now out! Image
Here are three interesting nuggets from my colleague @nytmike’s book which I haven't seen people picking up on yet elsewhere. (There's a lot more than these; anyone interested in this stuff should definitely get this book!)
1. When Comey in 2007 told the Senate & the public about the dramatic “Stellarwind" fight in Ashcroft’s hospital room 3 years earlier, he had been fighting stage 3 colon cancer and believed he would die soon and that hearing would be the last time he would testify publicly. 96-99
Read 11 tweets
24 Aug
I read @AndrewCMcCarthy’s nearly 3000 word take (just part 1 of 3!) on the Clinesmith plea. I agree with some of it, but think he is also serving up to readers of NR a distorted picture about certain empirical things. /1 nationalreview.com/2020/08/clines…
As a preliminary matter, tho, I note that McCarthy accurately describes Clinesmith as “a junior officer – support personnel.” Some pro-Trump voices get mad when Clinesmith is described as a lower-level FBI lawyer, so I wonder if they will give him flak for that. /2 Image
In 2008-13 Page was an “operational contact” for CIA, meaning it could contact him & talk to him about his work w/ Russians but not assign him tasks. McCarthy twists this, calling Page a “CIA operative” the agency somehow “authorized for ‘operational contact’ w/ Russians.” /3 ImageImageImage
Read 14 tweets

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