UPDATED: Andrew Weissmann Out To Settle Scores?

Andrew Weissmann's book is out tomorrow.  “Where the Law Ends”. Search it at Amazon if you're interested.

The book is basically an account of how everyone else on Team Mueller--but especially Mueller's chief of staff, Aaron Zebley--screwed up and prevented Weissmann from saving the country. Commenter Mike Sylwester has linked to an interview Weissmann did with The Atlantic: The Inside Story of the Mueller Probe’s Mistakes. I haven't read it, but Shipwreckedcrew has, and he says the interview is "a doozy."

In the past I've written about Weissmann, pointing out that after the ethical shambles of the Enron case, resulting in a 9-0 and strongly worded reversal from the SCOTUS for Weissmann, Weissmann become a pariah at DoJ. It was Bob Mueller who twice gave Weissmann a landing place at FBI, "to lick his wounds" as SWC puts it.

SWC, however, has far more of a DoJ insider's perspective on Weissmann than I ever had, and he explains what's going with Weissmann's holy war against Zebley.

Here are a few samples.

Obstruction--And Barr's Strategy

We all know that the Mueller Dossier is divided into two parts: The Russia Hoax proper, which is to say, the "collusion" narrative, and obstruction--which necessarily flowed from the Russia Hoax but took on a life of its own. In the past I've maintained at great length that the legal basis for the Russia Hoax--the Crossfire Hurricane enterprise counterintelligence investigation--in fact lacked the necessary predication for a Full Investigation under the Guidelines that govern all FBI investigations. The corollary to that fact is that, ipso facto, the Mueller inquisition--which explicitly continued the Crossfire Hurricane (CH) investigation--also lacked the necessary predication. Yes, an argument could be made that facts developed between the inception of CH (end of July, 2016) and the authorization of the Mueller inquisition (mid May, 2017) could have offered a belated predicate--improper as that would have been. However, as we have also seen (and will note once again), that was not what happened. There were no new facts. In fact, the entire basis of CH--largely the Steele "dossier"--had for practical predicating purposes been entirely debunked at that point.

Many who have followed this scandal have drawn from this the conclusion that the Mueller inquisition was therefore never about "collusion"--it was always only about setting an ongoing "obstruction trap" for Trump. I have also argued that this fails to do justice (!) to the true extent of the lawlessness that was being perpetrated in the effort to oust Trump--once the effort to prevent his inauguration fell through. In fact, Team Mueller was determined to use the pretext of a "collusion" investigation to discover or, if need be, manufacture, chargeable offenses, whether related to Russia or not. I think every single case brought by Team Mueller witnesses to this lawless intent. At the same time, they were determined to set the obstruction trap and keep it baited for as long as possible. Which brings us to our topic for today.

Let's step back for a moment. We began by pointing out that CH lacked a factual predicate as required for any FBI investigation.

Recently a remarkable statement came to my attention. The statement was made by James Rybicki, chief of staff to the disgraced former Director of the FBI, James Comey, as well as for Chris Wray, until January, 2018. The context is an interview that Rybicki gave to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel or “OSC,” not to be confused with the office of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller (the OSC is a permanent office that investigates Hatch Act violations. Comey was under investigation for trying to influence the 2016 Presidential election). In the course of that interview Rybicki was questioned at length about the FBI's handling of the Midyear Exam case--the Hillary email case. In the course of the questioning a comparison was made to the handling of the "Russian influence" investigation--Crossfire Hurricane. Here's what Rybicki told OSC--in heavily redacted form:

Briefly Noted: Robert Mueller, Aaron Zebley, Hillary's Emails

The Boston Herald has an interesting tidbit on Robert Mueller's long time chief of staff, Aaron Zebley. It appears in a longer article--Mueller collapse raises more questions: John Durham may tie up loose ends. It appears that Zebley both ran the day to day operations of Team Mueller and also had represented a key defendant in the Hillary email case:

... reports are surfacing that reveal that Mueller was a no-show and others may have run the investigation and authored the report. According to the New York Times, Mueller, “Kept noticeably shorter hours than he had as FBI Director,” and he “Seemed to cede substantial responsibility to his top deputies, including Aaron Zebley, who managed day-to-day operations.”

Zebley was in private practice in 2015 and 2016, and he represented a man named Justin Cooper. Cooper was an adviser to the Clinton Foundation and an IT expert who set up and maintained Hillary Clinton’s private email server. According to the FBI, “Cooper did recall two instances where he destroyed Clinton’s old mobile devices by breaking them in half or hitting them with a hammer.”

Unbelievable.

It is becoming clear that the Mueller report is a partisan document, carefully crafted to cut around nefarious activity perpetuated by Clinton et al., and focus on the most salacious moments of the Trump presidency.

I'm not familiar with DoJ internal guidelines, but I find it hard to impossible to believe that the way Team Mueller was staffed did not violate ethical rules/guidelines.

Briefly Noted: DoJ Opposes Congressional Testimony By Mueller Aides

Reuters is reporting: U.S. Justice Department trying to quash Mueller team testimony -report:

WASHINGTON, July 10 (Reuters) - The Justice Department is trying to prevent two former members of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team from testifying behind closed doors as Mueller prepares for a public appearance before lawmakers next week, the New York Times reported on Wednesday. 

The department said last week it opposed testimony by Aaron Zebley and James Quarles before the Democratic-led House of Representatives' Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, a senior congressional official told the newspaper. A Justice Department official confirmed the account and had instructed the men not to appear, the paper said. 

A person familiar with the matter told Reuters the former Mueller team members were in negotiations to testify before the two panels behind closed doors. The person could not confirm the Justice Department had instructed them not to testify. 

Mueller is to testify in open session before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees on July 17. Testimony from his two aides could provide lawmakers with new information on the report and the two-year investigation. 

Justice Department representatives were not immediately available for comment on the Times' report.

I guess we'll see. My off the cuff opinion--subject to correction--is that DoJ can instruct former employees not to answer questions regarding matters that they worked on.

In context, "DoJ" obviously means "Bill Barr."

Mueller And The FISA MoU Revisited

It seems like a long time ago, but it was only May 25, 2019, that I published a fairly detailed summary of what was known about the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the FBI and the CIA that the two agencies entered into in 2012. By the terms of the MoU the FBI gave the CIA permission to FBI resources to access NSA databases, opening up CIA access to information on Americans within the US. In other words, the MoU allowed the CIA--using private contractors--to "spy on" (h/t AG Bill Barr) Americans within the US, and most people would suppose that this was the FBI conducting their legitimate counterintelligence (CI) business. Of course, the terms of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) forbade the CIA from accessing such data. This occurred while Robert Mueller was Director FBI. At CIA this would have happened either under Acting Director Mike Morrell or Director David Petraeus. The point is that this likely happened in time for the Presidential election of 2012, facilitating--and here's that word again--"spying" on the Romney campaign. Thus, I titled that post Obama Almost Certainly Spied On Willard. I'll be republishing that post, below--for a reason.

As I've mentioned several times, I've been ploughing through the archives of articles on the Russia Hoax by J. E. Dyer. Last night I came across one that contained a reference to a visit Robert Mueller made to the White House in April, 2016, nearly three years after leaving the FBI. While Dyer doesn't relate Mueller's visit directly to the MoU--in fact she frankly states that the visit is a bit of a mystery--I believe that a nexus with the MoU is the easiest way to make sense of that visit. The nature of the MoU and the role that it plays in explaining the full extent of Obama's domestic spying (with Mueller's cooperation) was the subject of the post I just linked. I drew heavily on research published at CTH in that post, but here I intend to add that one crucial explanatory element that Dyer mentions--Mueller's visit to the White House. (Dyer gives credit to "Katica", which is where I first saw this visit mentioned.)

So, below, I'll append the linked post so that all the details will be in one spot, but to lead up to that I'll provide details regarding Mueller's visit to the White House. That visit will be placed within a timeline, but the timeline itself is quite simple, consisting of only three dates--although a few contextualizing dates will be added. So, let's begin.

We've already seen that the MoU between the FBI and the CIA was entered into in 2012. Details on the legal significance of this MoU can be found below. For our purposes, at this point, just bear in mind (as FISC Chief Judge Rosemary Collyer noted) that an MoU that violates the law is simply ... illegal. If FISA forbade CIA access to this type of information, Robert Mueller had no authority to allow the CIA to use FBI resources to circumvent the provisions of FISA. The existence of this MoU came to Judge Collyer's attention on March 9, 2016, as a result of oversight by "DoJ personnel conducting a minimization review"--a review for compliance with minimization rules that are a key part of FISA. Apparently the DoJ oversight personnel found a large number of violations and, when they pressed the FBI for an explanation, discovered that there was more going on than simple bureaucratic mistakes. Here is how Judge Collyer describes the beginning of the inquiry that she became a key part of: