Thread by @benjaminwittes

Interesting development. washingtonpost.com/national-secur…

I called #BabyCannon and asked about it. He took the call poolside in Cancun.

“Boom!” he said cheerfully.

Ok, what can we say about this story? Let’s read it carefully together.

Let’s start with the byline. The lead reporter is @CarolLeonnig, who is consistently superb. The others on the byline are all experienced serious reporters too. The story thus has important initial indicia of credibility and seriousness.

Next let’s take a look at the lede, which reports that the department “is investigating President Donald Trump’s actions as part of its criminal probe of efforts to overturn the 2020 election results” and is attributed to “four people familiar with the matter.”

The story is a bombshell because it reports for the first time that Trump is the subject of a criminal investigation for his individual conduct in the wake of the 2020 election.

Now let’s look at the sourcing. For a general guide to sourcing in news stories about this kind of investigation, I refer you to this piece I wrote during the Mueller investigation. lawfareblog.com/how-read-news-…

The key principle here is Rule #3: “It Is Ethical and Legal for Defense Lawyers to Dish on Matters About Which Prosecutors Cannot Appropriately Talk.” See the article for the details.

Bottom line: this is clearly information coming from defense witnesses and their lawyers.

Ok, now let’s move beyond the first sentence. Look at the second sentence in particular. This sentence reports that prosecutors are asking witnesses before the grand jury—“including two top aides to Vice President Mike Pence”—about Trump’s conduct.

This strongly suggests that this disclosure is coming from the Pence camp. It is a crime for prosecutors or FBI agents to disclose what Pence aides were asked by prosecutors. It is perfectly legal for the aides or their lawyers to talk about it. Assume the leak is from witnesses.

This is one of the most interesting passages in the story and I am confident that this group of reporters would not have written the highlighted words glibly or without specific information to support them. This is very detailed information about grand jury questioning.

This is also interesting. Note specifically that the reporters here are pushing back against the notion that all of this is merely DOJ having had a fire lit under its ass by the 1-6 Committee. Score one on this point for @ktbenner, @emptywheel and @SeamusHughes—all of whom have

pushed back hard against the notion that the Justice Department has been sleepy in the wake of the insurrection. For my own thoughts on the matter from last week, see the attached:
lawfareblog.com/defense-justic…

The reporters here are being modest—which is actually rare in this business. The technical term for the amount of new information in this story is “shitload.” And the quality of the information is very high. This is how high-stakes reporting on big investigations should look.

Blah blah blah
Boilerplate

Boilerplate
Background

Okay this is very interesting. The two grand jury witnesses both “declined to comment.” This can mean one of two things: either that they declined to comment *for the record* but may still be the sources of the story or that they declined to talk to the Post at all but that

people close to them—aka their lawyers—likely are the sources. Different newspapers have different policies on this kind of thing, and I confess I do not know for sure what the Post’s current policy is. If this were the Wall Street Journal, I would confident that Jacob’s and

Short we’re not among the four sources. Here is how I described the matter in my rules for reading these stories.

This is a very interesting passage suggesting that both the bottoms-up approach about which Attorney General Garland has spoken about publicly and the Jan 6 Committee’s theory of the case may be bearing fruit. This point is vague but stated authoritatively. Worth watching.

Another interesting passage. Note the time references. The fake elector scheme becomes a major focus “this year.” It is not clear why or when that happened but it appears, based on the reporting above, to have been before the Committee forced the issue.

Bottom line. This is a really meaty story packed with a lot of new stuff. Other reporters will be chasing and building on for the next several days.

Congrats to @CarolLeonnig, @jdawsey1 @DevlinBarrett and @hsu_spencer!

That’s all I got—for now.

Important correction. Apologies for the error and thanks to @emptywheel for flagging the point for me.

https://twitter.com/benjaminwittes/status/1552275960539537409?s=20&t=QyLmKlFCn3rk1Mw8Zm9dOQ

@emptywheel's point actually induces an additional thought about the story's sourcing, which is increasingly possible to trace. The Post says it has four sources supporting the lede. It has two sources supporting the discussion of grand jury testimony by Short and Jacobs.

Assuming that this disclosure did not come from prosecutors or the FBI (which would be a serious crime), it's safe to assume that the disclosures about the grand jury testimony likely came from either Jacobs or Short themselves or, perhaps more likely, from attorneys for them.

Marcy's point is entirely convincing that Meadows himself is one of the sources for the material about his phone records.

That leaves the question of who the fourth source is.