Indictments incoming?

Bentleyspop said:

The fly is about to be indicted....

https://twitter.com/RandPaul/status/1314029601958617088?s=19

josevolution said:

Paraphrasing here, I will only debate in person, my doctor will clear me! lol how about you test negative 1st you idiotic imbecile...

The Juggler said:

So they're pushing the Durham report back to after the election (spoiler alert--there's not a whole lot there) and now they quietly announce they found no evidence of wrong doing regarding the masking nonsense?

Where art thou, devout Trumpists? You, who were clinging to these conspiracies to swing the election? Why so silent?
@BS44325
@RoleModelsinBlood31

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/barr-unmasking-review-no-charges/2020/10/13/0f63fd2e-0d67-11eb-8074-0e943a91bf08_story.html

This is faaaar from over, we all know that.  Unlike democrats, republicans hold these things close to the chest and don’t leak (even falsities) to the media to “help” them.  His investigation has gotten much bigger than was originally expected, that much is obvious.

If I was leading this investigation, I would want to run those down before I started to “show my cards” to my targets by making indictments public.  I expect when an indictment is filed — and I believe one will be filed — it will include an extraordinarily detailed conspiracy count — maybe more than one conspiracy count — laying out the evidence against named and unnamed co-conspirators.  A conspiracy charge includes a section describing the “manner and means” of the conspiracy — how the group planned and executed the objectives of the conspiracy — and a lengthy factual statement of the “overt acts” committed by individual co-conspirators “in furtherance of the objectives” of the conspiracy.

To be legally sufficient, an indictment only needs to describe one overt act.  Historically there was a “practice” of minimizing the number of overt acts set forth in the indictment so as to not provide more information to the defense than the law required.  In the past couple decades the practice has changed, and federal prosecutors now draft what are called “speaking indictments” which are sometimes wildly “over-inclusive” in describing the overt acts.  The reason for doing this is the indictment is a “public record”, and anything in the indictment can be discussed in a press release or at a press conference announcing the case. A classic example of this was the Troll Farm and Russian GRU indictments announced by the Special Counsel’s Office. 

They have all learned how the democrats operate, and it is to lie, cheat, and use any means necessary to attain political power: the US media, foreign assets, their own FBI, DOJ, etc.  republicans are much smarter at this game, and we’ll see indictments come

December or early January, just before the inauguration of Trump.

RoleModelsinBlood31 said:

The Juggler said:

So they're pushing the Durham report back to after the election (spoiler alert--there's not a whole lot there) and now they quietly announce they found no evidence of wrong doing regarding the masking nonsense?

Where art thou, devout Trumpists? You, who were clinging to these conspiracies to swing the election? Why so silent?
@BS44325
@RoleModelsinBlood31

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/barr-unmasking-review-no-charges/2020/10/13/0f63fd2e-0d67-11eb-8074-0e943a91bf08_story.html

This is faaaar from over, we all know that.  Unlike democrats, republicans hold these things close to the chest and don’t leak (even falsities) to the media to “help” them.  His investigation has gotten much bigger than was originally expected, that much is obvious.

If I was leading this investigation, I would want to run those down before I started to “show my cards” to my targets by making indictments public.  I expect when an indictment is filed — and I believe one will be filed — it will include an extraordinarily detailed conspiracy count — maybe more than one conspiracy count — laying out the evidence against named and unnamed co-conspirators.  A conspiracy charge includes a section describing the “manner and means” of the conspiracy — how the group planned and executed the objectives of the conspiracy — and a lengthy factual statement of the “overt acts” committed by individual co-conspirators “in furtherance of the objectives” of the conspiracy.

To be legally sufficient, an indictment only needs to describe one overt act.  Historically there was a “practice” of minimizing the number of overt acts set forth in the indictment so as to not provide more information to the defense than the law required.  In the past couple decades the practice has changed, and federal prosecutors now draft what are called “speaking indictments” which are sometimes wildly “over-inclusive” in describing the overt acts.  The reason for doing this is the indictment is a “public record”, and anything in the indictment can be discussed in a press release or at a press conference announcing the case. A classic example of this was the Troll Farm and Russian GRU indictments announced by the Special Counsel’s Office. 

They have all learned how the democrats operate, and it is to lie, cheat, and use any means necessary to attain political power: the US media, foreign assets, their own FBI, DOJ, etc.  republicans are much smarter at this game, and we’ll see indictments come

December or early January, just before the inauguration of Trump.

The Predication of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Investigation

Both Barr and Durham have contested one of the main conclusions from the Justice Department inspector general’s December 2019 report: that Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos’s comment to a foreign official that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton was an adequate predicate to open a counterintelligence investigation into Russian election interference and links to the Trump campaign. In one interview, Barr called the incident “a very slender reed to get law enforcement intelligence agencies involved in investigating the campaign of one’s political opponent” and confirmed that Durham was looking at the matter.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report does not explicitly address the FBI’s decision to open an investigation. But it does, in considerable detail, analyze Papadopoulos’s communications with foreign nationals throughout 2016. Based on those contacts, the committee concluded:

Papadopoulos’s efforts introduced him to several individuals that raise counterintelligence concerns, due to their associations with individuals from hostile foreign governments as well as actions these individuals undertook. The Committee assesses that Papadopoulos was not a witting cooptee of the Russian intelligence services, but nonetheless presented a prime intelligence target and potential vector for malign Russian influence. (Emphasis added.)

The report also found that “Papadopoulos likely learned about the Russian active measures campaign as early as April 2016 from Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic with longstanding Russia ties, well before any public awareness of the Russian effort.” The committee described Papadopoulos’s contacts with Mifsud and another individual named Sergei Millian, both of whom “have significant ties to Russian government and business circles,” as “highly suspicious.” Still, the full picture is not public as a subheading of the report titled “Counterintelligence Concerns about Papadopoulos’s Interactions” remains almost entirely redacted.

Additionally, the committee determined that while it did not have affirmative evidence that Papadopoulos communicated his knowledge that the Russians had compromising information on Clinton to Trump campaign officials, “the Committee finds it implausible that Papadopoulos did not do so.”

It is also noteworthy that the Senate investigators concluded that on April 26, 2016, the date Papadopoulos met Mifsud, there was minimal “public awareness of the Russian effort [to interfere with the election].” That is, Mifsud mentioned the emails to Papadopoulos before the issue became a major story—suggesting that Mifsud may have received his information directly from the actors involved. Offering a different view of roughly the same time period, Barr has described Papadopoulos’s comment to the diplomat as unremarkable since “at that time in May 2016 there was rampant speculation going on in the media, on the blogosphere, and in political circles that Hillary Clinton’s email server had in 2014 been hacked, and therefore the Russians might have those emails.”

The Senate report’s findings are of only limited value in assessing whether the FBI’s investigation was adequately predicated because when the FBI launched its investigation, it did not know about any of Papadopoulos’s activities beyond the comment to the foreign diplomat. Nonetheless, the report suggests that Papadopoulos’s conduct around the time the FBI launched the investigation raised real counterintelligence concerns, and this conclusion offers some amount of confirmation that the FBI’s judgement was reasonable. Crucially, the report’s determination that Papadopoulos’s conduct was in fact suspect makes it unlikely that Barr and Durham possess undisclosed evidence that demonstrates that the FBI’s investigation lacked a predicate. Or, at least, if Barr and Durham possess that information, they did not share it with the committee.