Jack - Episode 7 - Fundraising Fraud

Episode Date: January 15, 2023

Allison and Andy discuss classified document handling; the appointment of Hur; new subpoenas served; and more.Do you have questions? Click here: https://formfaca.de/sm/PTk_BSogJFollow the Podcast on Apple Podcasts:https://apple.co/3BoVRhNCheck out other MSW Media podcastshttps://mswmedia.com/shows/Follow AG on Twitter:Dr. Allison Gill https://twitter.com/allisongillhttps://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrotehttps://twitter.com/dailybeanspodAndrew McCabe isn’t on Twitter, but you can buy his book The Threathttps://www.amazon.com/Threat-Protects-America-Terror-Trump-ebook/dp/B07HFMYQPGWe would like to know more about our listeners. Please participate in this brief surveyhttp://survey.podtrac.com/start-survey.aspx?pubid=BffJOlI7qQcF&ver=shortThis Show is Available Ad-Free And Early For Patreon and Supercast Supporters at the Justice Enforcers level and above:https://dailybeans.supercast.techOrhttps://patreon.com/thedailybeans

I'm Greg Oliar. Four years ago, I stopped writing novels to report on the crimes of Donald Trump and his associates. In 2018, I wrote a best-selling book about it, Dirty Rubels. In 2019, I launched Proveil, a bi-weekly column about Trump and Putin, spies and mobsters, and so many traders! Trump may be gone, but the damage he wrought will take years to fully understand. Join me and a revolving crew of contributors and guests as we try to make sense of it all. This is Preveil. I signed in order appointing Jack Smith. And nobody knows you. And those who say Jack is a finesse.

Mr. Smith is a veteran career prosecutor. Wait, what law have I grew? The events leading up to and on January 6. Classified documents and other presidential records. You understand what prison is. Send me to jail. episode seven of Jack, the podcast for all things special counsel, which I suppose we now have to designate as Merritt Garland has appointed a second special counsel. It is Sunday, January 15th. I'm your host, Alison Gill. And I'm Andrew McCabe. Oh my gosh. We have a ton of news to cover in today's

show, including a massive round of new subpoenas, new information on Rudy Giuliani and his role and fundraising and 30 gigabytes of evidence handed over to the special counsel by the one six committee that wasn't was not at least to the public. But first we, Alison, we have our listener question of the week. I'm, I'm really enthusiastic about the response that we got to this new part of the show. A lot of great questions. It was hard to pick one from all the good ones, But I'm going to go with this one about classified information. I don't have a name, so I can't attribute it to any one of our listeners. But the unnamed listener writes in,

is the US government's oversight of classified documents as sloppy as it appears? I.e. how is it that Trump was able to leave the White House with anything that did not belong to him? Does the government not maintain an inventory of all classified documents and who has them? The empty folders that were found, how could the government not know what was in them? As you can tell, I'm more than a little pissed at the apparent, complete lack of control over material that could be dangerous in the wrong hands. All right, so that covers the gamut of concern about classified information. So I'm gonna try to touch upon a few things about classified and hopefully,

I don't know if I can resolve your concern, but maybe put it in a context that makes it a little more understandable. So as I'm sure most listeners understand, when it comes to classification, there's only three levels of classification in the government. They are confidential, secret, and top secret. And you're to get a clearance, you have to have a background check. And that's how you, once you pass the background check, you get a clearance at one of those three levels. But to access top secret or any of those classified materials, you have

to also have a need to know. Then even though there are only three levels of classification, there are additional limitations on who can see what. And the next big limit is what we call sensitive compartmentalized information or SCI information. You've heard that the Mar-a-Lago documents some of them were stamped SCI. So SCI is a designation given to some top secret information. And it basically says that if something is SCI, it must be maintained in a SKIF or a sensitive, compartmentalized information facility. So when I was working in counterterrorism and the FBI, my office was a SKIF, so we could have T.S. SCI material wherever we were working, but it had to stay there,

couldn't leave the vault as they call it, unless you had authorization to transport it essentially to another skiff. And then beyond SCI information, there's something called code word protected information. So, easiest way to understand this is the most sensitive programs that the federal government, the intelligence community is involved in, are protected by code word. So, any kind of writings or talking about that stuff is covered by a protective code word,

and you have to be on a very small list of people that has access to what they call the cabinet that contains that code word material. Of all these different types of material, the only one that's actually serialized and tracked is code word protected information. That's stuff when it comes to your office. It's usually in the hands of one of your agency's security officers. They make you sign for it before they let you look at it. You can look at it and you typically have to give it right back. Even if you're working in a skiff, that stuff gets taken and stored by security officers in a special place.

And there's a list of all the people who are exposed to that particular code word information at any time. None of the rest of that stuff, beneath code word, is actually serialized and tracked. Now, I know that seems crazy and irresponsible, but essentially there are extensive rules at each level of classification about how you're allowed to transport and store

and work with that information. People receive training on it every year. You have to renew your training if you're in the intelligence community and you have access to this sort of sensitive stuff. And you, you know, the government relies on the responsibility and the dedication of its employees who have been granted this special access to treat the information correctly. So I'll give you one story that maybe puts some of our current conversations about this in context. I had the weird kind of experience of being exposed to this information at many different levels in the FBI, starting as a just mid-level manager and counterterrorism.

I was literally buried in TSSCI information. I worked in a skiff every day. I'd get dozens of TSSI documents delivered to me several times a day, have to read it all. I could carry it out of my office and go show it to someone else. It was typically printed out in a hard copy. I could discuss it with other people because they all had the same clearance and need to know that I had. But at the end of the day, all that stuff stayed in the skiff. It never left there. Fast forward all the way up to being a principal of an agency. So serving as deputy director and then for a while as acting director, I saw it

from a very different perspective. When you are at that level, you basically have a need to be able to access classified and T.S. SEI, this, all the stuff all the time, 24 hours a day. When you're at work, when you're at home, when you travel across the country, even when you travel overseas. And the way that's done is specialized security people on your staff. It is their sole responsibility to take that stuff,

transport it, carry it, store it, protect it, and give it to you when you need it. So while I was buried with it as a mid-level manager at work, as a principal, it's literally following you around everywhere you go. When the director travels overseas, they actually set up a portable skiff in the hotel suite where the director stays. And special security folks are responsible for taking care of all that stuff. So it is not hard for me to understand

how a person like a vice president of the United States who certainly has a need to have access to that sort of material all of the time and staffers are constantly carrying it around and giving it to him to get him ready for the next briefing or phone call with a world leader or something like that. It's following him where he goes. So, hotels to his residents to his office, that sort of thing. And it's also not hard to see how occasionally in this flow of hundreds,

certainly thousands of pages of documents that every once in a while one of them gets put in the wrong folder that doesn't have the right markings on it and can be left behind or misplaced or left in the residence or something like that. There were notorious situations when I was in the FBI of agency folks who were, oh, I don't mean the CIA, I mean government agency writ large, I won't identify which one who were overseas and who left materials like this in hotel rooms, right, in places where we are, you know, interacting with hostile foreign government. So it does happen. There is a ton of this information and the need to be able to work with it is intense and it never ends. Now that being said, people need to be responsible and follow

the rules and their training about how to how to work with this stuff. But mistakes do happen particularly at that level around principles who are constantly trafficking in this stuff, looking at it, carrying it, needing it here, needing it there. It's really not hard for me to understand how mistakes can happen. Now that being said, that's all very different than someone, i.e., a former president, deciding to fight the government for over a year to hold on to things that he, even if there was an invert in his, the way he came into possession of that stuff,

the absolutely new he had, and fought hard and is still fighting hard to hold on to many of those things. So we'll get more into that later. But that is basically a little overview of what it's like kind of in the real world of intelligence community handling classified. And you know, Andrew, well, first of all, since we're on this topic, maybe we should just discuss the appointment of this second special counsel, special counsel 2.0, because his name is Robert Hurr,

I wanna discuss who he is and some of those things. And I also I'm wondering, you know, with after the explanation you just gave about, you know, if you're a principal and you're being followed around with thousands of pages of classified every day to do your job, you could see how it would have inadvertently end up in a wrong folder or somewhere.

And we don't serialize anything unless it's that code word classified stuff, that code word protected information. And I was gonna ask, is this because there's just so much classified information out there, it would be, you would need to hire 8,000 people to serialize it all and follow it and sign it out.

I mean, it seems like a gargantuan task that would actually limit and hinder a national security if that kind of protocol was necessary for a principal to be able to look at this stuff one that needs to be looked at. And there's also some classified material that requires the creator of the document to give permission to anyone to look at the document. I know I was looking really into these different classification markings when we had found all of these classified documents in Trump's desk and in Mar-a-Lago with that photo that came out and I looked up all the little SCI and T.S. and what all these different things mean. And I'd

seen that too. That's Orcon, right? That's the designation Orcon, originator control. You're absolutely right. Yeah. And so I just imagine it would be impossible to serialize all the classified that we use and handle in given situations at all. It's certainly hard for me to think of a way that would be easy to do that. Now, and I will say, I'll give you a caveat.

All these things that I'm telling you, this is consistent with my experience. I left government a couple of years ago, maybe they've changed the way they handle some of these things now. But, and I'm not saying that we shouldn't think about doing it better. And if there is a way to economically

and effectively come up with a way to control this stuff and serialize it, keep track of every single copy to RIFIC. I can't imagine how that would happen. You know, when you receive a T.S. document over your T.S. email, you can print that document out because sometimes you have to, to be able to sit down and work without the people. I got to lug your computer around, you know, into a conference room or something. So there's very real world impacts on doing that. But like you said, or, you know, orcon, originator control material.

So think about this, like, especially in the post 9-11 world, where we have such a premium on information sharing and working with partners, collaborating with, you know, other law enforcement and intelligence agencies, foreign partners, things like that. That has taken the handling of this sort of sensitive information and complicated it in all kinds of ways. But if we pull back our ability to talk about it and transport it and store it, we recede

into that cave of sharing less. And there is risk in doing that as well. So these things are far more complicated than they seem. You know, you think about originator control when you get sensitive classified information from a foreign government, that is very normally originator controlled, right? It should be the foreign government. It's their information. They should before you can share it with someone else or the third party, you have to go back to the foreign government you got it from and ask for their permission. So, you know, these restrictions are necessary, but they also really slow things down in terms of

getting the work done. Yeah, and, you know, maybe someday we'll have the technology where we can have like paper thin GPS control, you know, be able to, you know, find my document on iPhone or whatever. Yeah. Be able to track it that way or some sort of, you know, I'm thinking of just some sort of technology that we would might be able to use. But then of course, that's all hackable and we'd have to think about that.

But I want to talk about the appointment of the special counsel, Robert Herr. He was appointed 10 weeks after Department of Justice knew about there being a few I think fewer than a dozen classified documents found at Biden's Penn office, where I don't think he's been there since 2019. And then additional documents found at his Wilmington Delaware residence in his garage. And it took 10 weeks. And basically what Merrick Garland does is he picked up this guy who's one of the two Trump holdovers of Trump appointees held over as a US attorney.

His name is Laush. And he put Laush in charge of deciding, doing it not an investigation, but a review of the situation. And then what happened is Laus made a recommendation to Merrick Garland that A Special Counsel was warranted in this case. And that is when, I'm sure as soon as that recommendation came over, that's when Merrick Garland decided

to appoint Robert Herr, and we'll talk about him in a moment. And I think, you know, what I'd like to talk about first is I see a lot of folks, including former FBI and Intel folks saying that in order to appoint a special counsel, you must have evidence of a crime. And that's not my reading of the special counsel regulations. Can we talk a little bit about that? Because I feel like, at least having talked to you in prior iterations of special counsel investigations, Mueller, that in order to open an investigation,

there just has to sort of be something weird that you have to determine whether or not there was a crime. Not, you open an investigation to determine whether a crime was committed, and I don't think there's probable cause of a crime required to open an investigation. Can you talk a little bit about that

and this special council regulation because I feel like people are kind of jumping to conclusions and I just wanna straighten it out. Sure. Yeah, so I may take that, I may take your phrasing and dub at the new legal something weird standard. I like, I like that a lot of fits in,

a lot of places here. Something's fishy. Yeah, so my understanding of the special counsel regs is the same as yours. It doesn't require proof of a crime. That would be silly, right? Why are you bringing in a big pro to come in and do your investigation when you've already proven the crime? There isn't a standard kind of burden of proof assigned to it, like preponderance of the evidence or reasonable doubt or anything like that. It is very similar to the FBI standard

for opening a full field investigation. So a full field investigation is the broadest and most powerful, I guess, investigative authority that you could have. Let's use Crossfire Hurricane as an example. Exactly. So in the FBI diag, the domestic investigations and operations guideline, it lays out exactly what the standard is to open a full field investigation.

And it is when you have information that indicates that a crime has occurred or may have occurred, or information that indicates there is a threat to national security or, or maybe a threat to national security. So the special counsel standard is very similar. It's just that you have information that a crime may have been committed. That's not proof. It's something, right? It's a articulable fact or scenario or observation or report, right, a complaint would have you. And that information could be a crime. And that's why you have the special counsel

and to investigate it and figure that out. Yeah, and the special counsel reg, it doesn't even say articularable factor, anything like that. It doesn't go as deep as your dialogue over at the FBI. It just says, if you have determined a criminal investigation is warrant you have determined a criminal investigation is warranted.

And a criminal investigation can be warranted for multiple reasons. It could be for public interest. It could be for conflict of interest. It could be for, I mean, because there were classified documents in the Biden case, in non-skiff areas, that could be a reason to investigate. That doesn't mean it is not a crime to store classified information without corrupt intent in a non-skiff. I think that's how I'm approaching it in my mind.

And Merrick Garland sort of bore that out in his announcement. This is very important that we look into this and get to the bottom of it. There are no conflicts of interest and that we don't favor one party over the other. But there's a huge public interest for this and national security interest as well. That's right. I mean, let's put the special counsel choice aside. The fact that the current president, former vice president has classified documents at his residence in a garage. I mean, obviously investigation is warranted on two levels, right? First, of course,

anytime there is what we refer to as a spill, that's anytime classified information ends up someplace that shouldn't be people in the community refer to it as a spill of classified. So anytime you have a spill, there is going to be a damage assessment. So the information has to be recovered. And somebody, either security professionals or investigators in the any FBI, it would be counterintelligence investigators. Look at it to determine if there's been damaged in national security. Did we expose a source or a method or something like that? So here you have information and classified information and a non-approved, being stored

in a non-approved place. That has to happen. And there's kind of a per se something wrong happened here. If this stuff ended up in that place where it's not supposed to be, of course, you have to have an investigation to figure out how that happened. It doesn't mean anyone's going to be charged with a crime. In fact, I would say most of the time when the FBI gets referrals about spills, those in those inquiries do not end up in in criminal charges. And that's because of this level

of intent. It has to be an intentional mishandling or an intentional removal of national defense information to warrant criminal charges. And oftentimes, most of the time, I would venture, it's very hard to prove that someone had that level of intent. Yeah. And most of the time, because it's, I'm assuming, accidental when some of this just spills, you know. That's right. And, you know, something else I keep hearing a lot about is that this was discovered a couple of days before the election, and a lot of folks are upset that this wasn't announced ahead

of the election, knowing full well that you're not supposed to announce overt investigatory steps within 60 days of an election. And then, you know, I, the push back to that is, well, he wasn't even on the ballot. Do you have to be on the ballot for it to be an impactful to an election, I mean, the whole DOJ went dark 60 days before the midterms with the Trump investigations. Fannie Willis went dark before the elections with the investigation into Trump because even though Trump was not on the ballot, he is the de facto leader of the Republican party and announcing overt investigatory steps into him or any of his allies could be perceived

as having an impact on a national election, even though he's not on the ballot. What do you think about that? I think that's right. I think the policy, the DOJ 60-Day policy, honestly, internally is something that's not really understood with laser-etched specificity. We all know, generally, you're not supposed to do things within that 60 day limit that could impact the results of the election.

So it's not, I don't believe it specifically drafted the light, you can't do it, something to a candidate for office during that period, but that's how it's typically interpreted. This case is different because you're talking about the leader of a party or somebody who's thought at that time, of course, thought to be going to run for president and then next. So it's not 100% black and white, but I do think that in these moments, DOJ typically airs on the side of caution and tries not to do things that would, you know, could be seen as putting a thumb on the scale of the election,

whatever, whoever's running. Yeah. And what is in black and white is a bill bar memo saying that if you're going to open an investigation into a candidate for president or vice president or a sitting president or a vice president. You have to get expressed written consent from the attorney general himself. And I'm assuming if these documents were discovered and handed over the day before an election,

it's gonna take a minute to get all the way up to the attorney general and they're going to have to be discussions. And I don't know exactly when Merrick Garland put Laush on it, but I'm assuming it was pretty soon after. Yeah. I think Laush is assigned by Garland's timeline that he put out yesterday on November 14th.

Okay. Laush was assigned. So, you know, let's, I think you're right. There's no, I mean, look, DOJ and FBI are not in a position where they're going to like immediately tell the world that they've started an inquiry into a matter like this, whether it's before the election or not. I mean, they don't, you know, you don't get public announcements on the opening of investigations. Biden certainly was not under any legal obligation to tell anyone. So it's not a legal issue. It is a political issue. It's an optics issue. I think

that people are rightly concerned about like, did they conceal this intentionally? Did they not? And that's, you know, that's up for people to determine for themselves whether they like the way the White House has handled the messaging around this. I think it's been pretty hackneyed and certainly not very productive. But that's just a political thing. I think it's important to remember that President Biden and his team haven't done anything illegal or improper or an ethical on this saga so far. And I would go the other direction and say, they've actually hurt themselves by leaning so far forward and trying to be incredibly careful and cooperative with the discoveries that they've made. They, of course, did notify the archives immediately on finding the first

tronch of documents at the residence. That's the one that they didn't really reveal in their initial announcement of what was going on. But they were very, very forward leaning with the archives. And then of course they told, you know, they announced it just the other day when they found another document or two with a residence. That leaning forward and trying to be, you know, transparent about it, it creates the impression of like drip, drip, drip, they don't really know what they're dealing with, they haven't completed their searches yet. And so that I think makes them look bad. They're actually kind of punishing themselves a bit publicly in their zeal to be like, okay, look, we found another one. And all of that is actually pretty good compared to the treatment, the archives and DOJ and the FBI have received in the other case, the Merilog O'Kase. Yeah, I mean, we could pull a Mark Meadows and just burn him in a

fireplace and no one would ever know. Yeah, there's always that option. It's not legal. I'm not advising it, but yeah, it's not. It's awesome. Do not take our legal recommendations. Thank you. And then something else that's interesting, I wanted to talk about, how does this impact? Because when the Biden stories first started coming out with the Biden documents, I'm like, oh, is this going to make it more difficult for Jack Smith to indict Trump for these crimes, even though they're totally different, but you know, taking into political considerations, you know, some maybe prosecutorial discretion, I thought no.

And then it occurred to me that the DOJ knew about these documents before Jack Smith was even appointed. And Jack Smith's been going after the Trump's document case hard in the paint. Like, so it doesn't seem like this is impacting his work, but I do think, and I'm interested in your opinion, that the appointment of the Second Special Counsel kind of evens the odds and makes it sort of insulates Jack Smith's work a little bit further,

and you know, whatever comes out of the Robert Her investigation, it's sort of, I don't know if freeze up is the right word or is an assist to Jack Smith, but like, I feel like it allows him to do his work more and, you know, more independently or less political minded than, than if there weren't a special counsel or the, you know, for the, where they, it looked like we were ignoring the Joe Biden documents incident. Well, I think you're, I think, I think that's correct. I think it was absolutely essential for DOJ to appoint a special counsel over the Biden issue. I've been saying that for a couple of days, I'm not surprised that Garland did it. It's completely consistent

with his approach to these things. And so I and I also think it was very important that they started each case kind of on the same footing, giving it the same, you know, resources is the same importance, everything else. And that would mean special counsels in both. From there, the cases are entirely independent. And I think that Jack Smith doesn't give an F what happens in the Biden case. He is laser focused on his case, his facts and his law. And we have seen that he's going to go after a resolution in this thing, one way or the other, whether whoever likes it or not.

Now I do think that at the end of the event now putting on kind of a political hat, I guess, which does not fit me well because I'm not a political analyst, but I think it's better in the long run for, definitely better for DOJs, I've said, but it's also better for the Biden team to have a special council come in. If, if, if what they've said so far is true and accurate, Biden didn't really know about any of these stuff and he had no role in, you know, packing up the office and sending the stuff here and there and everywhere, which I think is likely. And they have nothing to worry about. And the fact that a special counsel,

a guy with hers background and kind of, you know, conservative creds comes in and is ultimately gives him some, some version of a clean bill of health. I think that's better. Yeah. Then having it look like it got swept under the table and got special treatment at a DOJ. So yeah, I mean, does that protect Jack Smith more? Not really. I mean, Smith is gonna get crucified no matter which way he comes in with this thing, whether he pursues an indictment

or issues of declination on it, one side of the other, one side is going to be furious and they're going to go after him hard. Yeah, and before we take a quick break here and after the break, we're going to shift over to these, this huge trance of subpoenas that has just dropped this week, tell me a little bit about what you know about Robert Hurr. I had never heard of him before prior to Merrick Garland's announcement, but I think that you probably have a better handle on who this guy is. Yeah, so I know Rob because I worked with him during the end of my term as

deputy director. You know, honestly, Allison, I've been struggling a little bit with how to answer that question on TV over the last 24 hours because you don't really get a chance to elaborate too much in some of those hits. So, the jackless and errors are going to get what I really think right now, which I haven't really been able to go into. So Rob is an interesting guy. And he is, uh, I would say I would describe it like this, uh, Rob on paper is absolutely perfect for this job. His resume is flawless. You talking about Harvard undergrad, Stanford law,

incredible clerking experiences early in his post law school life. With the rank question, right? Yeah, clirked for rank list. Clirked also for Kuzinsky in the ninth circuit, who is a very controversial guy. I'm sure Rob points more to his clerkship with rank list because it's key at this point. But nevertheless, he worked as a prosecutor in Maryland for a while

under Rod Rosenstein. He did some time in DOJ Maine where he worked for Christopher Ray. Of all people, I think the two of them are probably pretty close. That's right. He was the paydag, principal. Yes, I agree. He turned into general. That's right. He also did some time in King and Spalding, which is the law firm that Chris Ray came from and is the law firm where Rod Rosenstein now now works. So

Rod has very very deep Connections on the he's a Washington lawyer and he's got very deep connections on the conservative side and he was paydag Which is principal assistant deputy attorney general and that's a long crazy title, but essentially you really deputy attorney general and that's a long crazy title. But essentially, you really, not officially, but effectively the number three most powerful person in DOJ. You are the right hand of the deputy attorney general. So Rod Rosenstein has, DAG brought Rob her in as paydag. That's what we call that. And wouldn't that make him, if you were number three, after sessions recused, wouldn't that make him number two in specific cases? I can't think of any off the top of my head. Oh, there was one little case that you've, I think, I know, I think you know a little bit about.

Yeah. So he, and, and I should say that in his own answers to Senate questions around his confirmation for his most recent government job, which was US Attorney for Maryland, he described himself as managing the day-to-day operations of the Department of Justice and FBI. And I think that's an accurate descriptor. So yes, and the Mueller Special Counsel case, Rob was essentially the number two. And this is where I think the kind of perfection

of his resume is great, but let's put that aside and think a little bit deeper here. Rob was part of the Trump DOJ leadership team and that is a team that was involved with a number of decisions and things that I think raise important questions now about Rob's current job. And the first would be the Mueller investigation. So we now know, of course, that Rob,

her was Rod Rosenstein's guy that he used to oversee the special counsel work, Rob, her met with, according to reports, the special counsel team like twice a week. And he was the guy that talked to Mueller and the Mueller team and brought that information back and reported it back to the acting attorney general for that case, who was Rod Rosenstein. We also know that Rod and Rob Herr, presumably very, very carefully and quietly curtailed the investigative scope of that investigation in ways that were not disclosed to the public. We only found that out later on with the infamous second memo telling the telling Mueller how to do his job. So

Yet a lot of interaction with that team. He was involved in kind of keeping it in a lane that everybody was more comfortable with. So I think that's interesting. So he held quote unquote land the plane. Presently. You know, I think that's, I think that, I don't know that for a fact because by that point, I was gone, but I think that's a fair question. And he also, I mean, look, we know there was a lot, I know from my own personal experience

with these guys before I left. There was a lot of, I think what could be described as questionable or uncomfortable, kind of bleed over of White House politics into DOJ operations and decision making. And I think a good example of that is Rob Herb taking the podium at the White House to announce some accomplishments in a big MS-13 arrest.

I mean, that is not done, right? DOJ criminal operations are supposed to be independent of White House political direction. And so that was an act that I thought was really questionable. So I just throw this out there to say, there are some things that stand out in my mind as good questions to keep in the back of your head as we watch Rob Her do his job on this very important case.

And at the end of the day, we'll see. We're going to watch it. We're going to talk to you all about it. We're going to report on it. And we're going to overanalyze everything as we typically do. And we'll see how he does, right? So he certainly is capable of doing a great job there. And I hope that he does.

Yeah, I hope so too. All right, we have a lot more news to get to, but we have to take a quick break. So stick around. We'll be right back. Hi there, Diana Ericsson here, host of the podcast One Sweet Dream, which is a podcast that shines new light on the Beatles, illuminating their story in ways not seen before. This podcast has deep storytelling to get to radical new ideas and insights that transform our understanding of their story.

We've always known the Beatles story was exciting and epic, but there isn't even bigger, better, sexier, and more beautiful story that's been hiding in plain sight. And that's what I want to share with you. The story and say that it takes about 50 years to tell the story of an event properly. And so here we are, a little over 50 years later, and have I got a great story to tell. So, I hope you'll join us at Once We Dream Podcast,

where we explore the dream that was, and is, the Beatles. Episodes will be released every Tuesday and Friday, so please subscribe to Once We Dream, wherever you listen to podcasts. So Renato, do you still have your own podcast? Yeah, it's complicated. What's so complicated about a podcast? That's the name of the podcast, remember?

Oh! Will you still be exploring topics that help us understand the week's news? You bet, but we'll have a new name because we're going to be working together to explore complicated issues that are done in the news. Working together? Yeah, your host is to get with me, remember? Oh, right. Wait, does that mean our podcast is going to have a steam-op segment? Let's not get carried away.

But we'll discuss hot new legal topics, so check out our new episode coming soon to everywhere you get podcasts as well as YouTube. Everybody, welcome back. All right, let's kick off the second half of the show. With the January 6th part of the investigation. And we'll talk about the latest tranche of subpoenas issued by the special counsel's office. And Andrew, this to me, I follow these things very closely. This seems like the broadest and most detailed round of subpoenas we've seen thus far. Yeah, I mean, I've been, I listen, I, I don't think anyone can say they follow these things as closely as you do.

So I mean, I'll, I'll hats off. But I, I've been reading these descriptions of these things as well. And I like, I can't even think of a subpoena in the entirety of my 21 year career at the Bureau that would be similar to this. Like this, this thing must be monstrous. Yeah. And we'll start here. First of all, a copy was received by the Washington Post who got it from a former Trump campaign official who wants to remain anonymous.

It was sent out in early December. It's four pages long, Andrew. It is four pages long. It's a lot of subpoena. And it was sent from what we know so far, at least, to multiple Trump campaign officials. And it seeks two dozen categories of information. And we'll start here. First of all, it asks recipients if anyone is paying their legal fees. And it asks for copies of those retention agreements. And perhaps that might have been fueled

by the Pasantino Cassidy Hutchinson situation that unfolded before our eyes in the January 6th committee hearings, where at first she was represented by Pasantino who was paid for by the Trump Save America Pack. And then she said, this feels gross. I feel like I lied and then gets a new attorney. Jody, is it Jody? No, I a new attorney. Jody, is it Jody?

No, I can't remember. Jody Hunt, that's right. Jody Hunt is her current attorney. Yeah, Stefan Pasatino, one of the things about that blockbuster testimony that really jumped out at me was in that very first meeting when he was explaining to her that she didn't need to worry about who was paying his bill. She wouldn't identify who that was. And when she asked him for a retention agreement,

he refused to give her one, which is, I'll just say, not typical among lawyers, like Holy cow. And so here it is in the subpoena, who's paying your legal bills and show me your retention agreements. I mean, it's almost pulled right out of this. Yeah. And we know Cassidy Hutchin is cooperating with Department of Justice. and show me your retention agreements. I mean, it's almost pulled right out of this, and we know Cassidy Hutchins is cooperating

with Department of Justice. Something else, they want any communications about Dominion and Smartmatic. And I think what they're looking for here, and you know, the all the conspiracy theories about the voting machines, Dominion and Smartmatic, right now, they're a multiple billion dollar, a billion and a half dollar lawsuits against Fox News

and their parent company and Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell for defaming Dominion and Smartmatic. And what I think they're trying to establish here is a lot like what they're trying to establish with the election fraud, right? Like, or the fact that they could have Pence throw out electors and put in his own electors, did they have conversations amongst themselves?

What were those conversations? And do they show that they knew that these were all bogus conspiracy theories? It's a lot like when we got those Manifort texts with Hannity talking about how they knew that the Seth Rich conspiracy theory was a lie. That's right. I'm interested in this.

Yeah, this is a critical element of a very basic fraud in this whole scheme. And the fraud would be, if you're going out there and making public statements about how smartmatic and dominion, you know, flipped the election through some sort of vote machine skulled duggery. And then you use those claims as a basis for asking for money and donations from people. If the government can prove that you knew that that claim was false,

that goes a long way to proving the fraud. The rest is just mechanics that you actually did get paid and you, you know, you took payments through the mail to make it mail fraud or, you know, over the internet to make a wire fraud. What have you? So really drilling down on people's behind the scenes, private comments and statements to each other, those comments could hold those sorts of revelations like, you know, where people admit or acknowledge that they know that there's really nothing wrong with smartmatic and dominion. And I should say also the civil case here helps, helps the government out a lot because the plaintiffs attorneys, the folks representing dominion and smartmatic against a lot of these people,

are doing the same work. In the defamation case, they also want to prove that the defendants knew that the statements that Dominion and Smartmatic claim are defamatory were actually false. That goes a long way to proving defamation. So you can see here the prosecution is kind of in a position to benefit off the work that these very high-speed, well-funded plane of attorneys are doing in the civil case. Yeah, definitely.

And the next demand is what makes me think that this is trying to prove that they defrauded donors because after we go through the communications about Dominion and Smartmatic, they are, the subpoena is seeking documents related to the formation, funding, use of money, employment contracts, and correspondence for multiple Trump entities, including the Save America pack. And those other entities are the Make America Great Again pack, the Save America Joint Fundraising Committee, and the Trump Make America Great Again committee. And they are really now seemingly, and they say elsewhere in this Washington piecepost that

they are really focusing on the money and the fundraising and the emails that went out. And so I feel like that Dominion Smartmatic is a piece of that, right? Totally, totally. So what, and I hate, you know, I hesitate to get too specific about this. But what this feels like to me from an investigator and prosecutor side is, um, Jack Smith's team is gravitating towards these fraud crimes that are much easier to prove. You can put your hands on this fraud. You can understand, you know, you lied to these people in order to trick them into giving you money. The money went into these packs.

That's very tangible. Compare that to how do you prove that, um, you know, Trump allegedly committed, um, you know, conspired to provoke a riot? Cause now you're like, well, what did he say and what, what did he mean? And is that speech protected? Is it first amendment protected? Is it political speech? So those cases while being very significant have all kinds of proof problems and thorny issues in them. These fraud cases, this is what DOJ does every day in a thousand different cases around the country. The very meaty, you can find evidence to easily prove up the

elements of each offense. And so that's why I think these financial cases, which you really weren't thinking about at the beginning of this whole thing, it really emerging to be important as we go forward. Yeah, and that brings up the next little piece of very specific information they mentioned, aside from all the multiple packs and the Dominion and Smartmatic stuff, something that I have been wondering about since I heard it in the January 6th committee when Zo Lofgren brought it to light.

And that is they are demanding documents related to the genesis of the election defense fund. The January 6th committee found that it never actually existed, but the first email. That's a problem. Yeah. And the first emails sent out raising money for the election defense fund went out on November

4th, the day after the election, three days before Biden even was declared the victor. The emails went out for nine weeks, Andy, sometimes 25 a day for the election defense fund. He raised 250 million off this phantom entity that never existed. The money, at least some of it, went to the Save America pack and paid for the January 6th ellipse rally. And this sort of is, I just was watching this report last night about the George Santos shell game that he's been playing with these different entities and, you know, pulling money from one and sticking it into another and having a about the George Santos shell game that he's been playing with these different entities and pulling money from one and sticking it into another

and having a pack that raises money but doesn't spend it on anything. I was like, this seems like just sort of their MO here, but I've always wondered about this election defense fund that apparently was stood up the day after the election but never actually existed. And that seems like an open and shut defrauding donor's case.

Because unlike the Jill Stein recount fund, she said, hey, if I can't get a recount in some states, I'm gonna use this to the pack and we're gonna do this. And she told everybody where it was gonna go. But in these Trump emails, he's just like, help me. We have to stop the steal. We must protect the elections, send me money now. It will go toward fighting this in court.

And that's it. There was no fine print. Yeah. The frenzy to capitalize on the anger and the kind of grievance of the, uh, oh, we're going to lose this election, was all consuming, right? They were just like sprinting out there to get these emails out,

to get these, to say whatever they needed to give people a place to donate, to capitalize on as much anger and grievance as they could at that time. And unfortunately, it looks like once again, they may have sprinted past their lawyers advice and not actually set up the infrastructure you need to do that time. And unfortunately, it looks like once again, they may have sprinted past their lawyers advice and not actually set up the infrastructure you need to do that legally, who knows? We'll see where this where this all goes. But yeah, it's it's these are the

kind of mistakes that bring down conspiracies that prosecutors after the fact will go back and say, but wait a second, you're required to, you know, register here, register with the federal election committee, whatever. And, you know, the kind of expose the mad rush to defraud, rather than, you know, doing something legitimately. Yeah. And so I'm really going to keep my eye on that particular one, because I mean, if you tell people you're raising money to spend in court to fight the election fraud, quote unquote, that you think exists, and then you funnel that money into your pack, give it to yourself, or use it to pay attorneys that are representing witnesses against you.

I mean, it just seems like an open and shut fraud case to me. But we'll see how it goes. A couple other things, and by the way, this isn't everything. These subpoenas are seeking. These are just the big hit points here. Just the highlights. The subpoena seek information on the fraudulent electors scheme and they name over 100 fraudulent electors in seven states. And we know those seven states, right?

Let me see if I can name them off the top of my head. Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Nevada, and Arizona. It asks campaign officials to provide any analysis they did on whether the election was stolen and whether they shared that analysis with others. And this made me think of the Johnny McIntee deposition that was taken by the January 6th select committee where he was told to write up a thing about how Thomas Jefferson did this. And so it's okay. And then give that over to Johnny Eastman

and the president or whatever. And so they're looking for all of that. So this isn't just about the fundraising. This is still going on with the fraudulent elector stuff, just more things that we didn't see asked for in previous subpoenas. And it demands documents about the ellipse rally, including the fundraising, right, which wouldn't we now know has come from some of the packs, the planning and the coordination

with outside groups. And this is where the genitama stuff would come into play because I know that she helped fund rays. I know the Save America pack paid for a lot of the rally. We've seen sort of that evidence come out of the January 6th committee. So this is a huge, like, massive subpoena. I'm waiting for someone to sue to say it's too broad. Yeah, you can count. That's going to happen at some point, but, um, but it's very detailed. It is. It's incredibly detailed. I'm also fascinated about the, the kind of walking towards the

ellipse rally issue, because in the aftermath of reading, I think it was Don Jr.'s testimony to the one six committee, he talks a lot about the different factions of people who were involved in organizing and deciding who would speak when and there were all kinds of As it turns out all kinds of disagreements between different people involved in in that process and making decisions about how the rally would go and where there's disagreement among people There's opportunity for investigators those are the sorts of conflicts that investigators and prosecutors can really take advantage of to find out more information than we currently know.

So who knows, Buckleman, we'll see what comes of it, but that could be really interesting as we go forward. Yeah, I remember the Boris Epstein text where they're like, we got to stick with the cramers and screw that Ali Alexander guy. He's a fraud, you know. And so that sort of infighting is like ripe, right? For investors to be like, really tell us about that Ali Alexander fraud and why he's a fraud. Really? Then come in and talk about it. Yeah. It's like investigating a guy and then finding out that he's in the middle of a divorce. It's like, okay, game on. I have a new, we might have a new source of information here. happened with that cock guy right that that that man I for it wanted to make the secretary the army the d. O. J. I got all sorts of evidence

right from his divorce and he was eventually convicted of bribery. Yeah, that's funny. Um, and then something else that came out this week, Andrew, that I think might have been part of an early discovery of part of this subpoena. But I, you know, this round of subpoenas, but I'm not sure is that Caitlin Polans at CNN reported that Jack Smith's team had subpoenaed Rudy Giuliani asking him to turn over records to a federal grand jury as part of the investigation. And it was sent a month ago, same as these other, this other wide giant subpoenas we just talked about. It came from somebody named David Rodi, who is a former top prosecutor in New York who

specializes in gang and conspiracy cases, who is assisting Jack Smith. And this subpoena, Andrew, for Rudy, asked for disbursements about disbursements from the Save America pack among other things that weren't discussed with Caitlin Poland. So this seems like maybe part of this tranche of of of subpoenas. But do you know David Rode? I don't know who that is. I don't know David Rode. But I'm not surprised that Jack Smith is relying on a guy who is known for his prior experience doing gang cases and violent conspiracy cases, because it's essentially, while it's different in subject matter from what we're looking at here, it's very similar in tactics and in strategy. These are big complicated cases where you're trying to knit together

the conspiracy or the agreement between a group of people, you're trying to prove the existence of an enterprise, you're trying to, you're looking for evidence of an agreement between a group of people, you're trying to prove the existence of an enterprise, you're trying to, you're looking for evidence of an agreement between a group of people that do break the law or commit some sort of crime. You're the same sort of tactics in recruiting cooperators and people who will testify for you in court. So it's a wealth of experience

that could easily translate into this complicated potential financial conspiracy. Yeah, and you know, right now I'm actually trying to look up David Rody here, but I'm not really finding anything like he doesn't have his own wiki page. He was in New York. I the reason I was looking it up is because I was wondering if you had ever worked with or for Rudy Giuliani in New York. The reason I was looking it up is because I was wondering if you had ever worked with or for Rudy Giuliani in New York when you was the U.S. attorney. Like, it was interesting. A gang and conspiracy crime prosecutor from New York who's looking into Rudy Giuliani. Okay.

That's right. That's, you know, talk about the shoe on the other foot, right? Yeah. Although I think most of Rudy's former Southern District colleagues or subordinates, whatever they were, are a bit older than the Jack Smith generation of guys that were dealing with now. So, I'm sure I know all kinds of friends who actually worked under Rudy there, they're probably mad at me right now, but that's okay.

That's okay. Well, you'll be all right. I'll be your friend. Thank you. This last story before we wrap up here is from Kyle Cheney at Politico. Apparently, I remember when we were talking to Mr. Chuck Rosenberg about the release of all the evidence from the January 6th Committee and how he was very displeased because it can inhibit or make it more difficult for prosecutors to do their jobs.

And then, you know, we were like, well, now it looks like the new house Republicans want to release it all. And so maybe it's a good idea to put it out to the public so that they can't cherry pick and make, you know, misrepresented. Yeah, misrepresented. But now we know that all of it's been given over to the archives. And I would imagine that the archives and the executive and the department would be like, we're not handing you over anything pursuant to an open and ongoing criminal investigation.

And then probably go to court and all that other stuff. We'll see how that plays out. But apparently there was about 30 gigabytes worth of evidence that was not released to the public that has been handed over to the Department of Justice and the Department of Justice, presumably the special council's office is currently pouring through this evidence. Let's talk about that a little bit. Yeah, sure. Okay. So now to further date myself, this is for all the for all the genxers and older who are listening right now. What is 30 gigabytes? I love these conversions. It's, it's according to the, the interwebs. It is 120 hours of netflix

streaming, right? So that's a long time to watch Emily in Paris, um, or it could be 1,950,000 pages of word files. That's a lot of pages or 100,000 pages of email. So bottom line is we're looking at a lot of stuff here. 30 gigabytes, I think kind of makes it sound small but it's a big chunk of stuff. I think it's really interesting too because this is really cutting at the heart of what a lot of us chuck and

myself and others were concerned about for the last couple of months. That this material presents a real challenge for DOJ, particularly in the cases that are already ongoing and are on their way to trial. And that, because that's because the government is in possession of this stuff that could fall within their responsibility to turn it over to defendants to meet their discovery obligations in any given prosecution. Yeah. And apparently this actually came out. We've learned about this. Kyle Cheney reported it from a filing by the Department of Justice in the Oath Keepers

trial. Not the first one, the one that's already been convicted. The second Oath Keepers trial because the Oath Keepers wanted to delay the trial because they wanted to be able to review all the January 6th evidence that was released last month and they said there's so much of it. But the Department of Justice argues that there's still outstanding material anyway, and it's also not really relevant to your case. So that's really interesting. But among the materials that have gone unreleased that are now being reviewed by the DOJ, these are the things that were omitted from the January 6th Committee's, you know, the tranche of stuff that they put out after they shut down. They're missing text messages from Ivanka.

Well, they're not missing, but they didn't release text messages from Ivanka Trump, referenced in her January 6th interview, extensive texts between Cassidy Hutchinson and multiple key figures in the Trump administration. And that brings me boom right back to the subpoena with all of the information that they're asking for about whether your lawyers are being paid by the State of America pack and all that stuff and that she's working with the Department of Justice. So I don't know if the DOJ was like, you do not release those Cassidy Hutchinson text messages. Texts between the top pence aid and a Ron Johnson aid.

Remember that when they were trying to get Ron Johnson to just commit a couple of minutes of treason, where they wanted him to hand deliver fraudulent electric certificates to pence himself on the floor of the house or the Capitol. Which Ron Johnson very quickly tried to blame the entire thing on his staffer. Wow, that's courage. Yes. And the entire transcript of Robert Engel, that wasn't released, which apparently is supposed to give us insight into whose testimony was more correct, Cassidy Hutchinson's or Tony Ornato's, right? And then I'm sure he had a lot of other things to say too.

It wasn't just that because that was sort of a side show drama. It was, we knew Trump wanted to go to the Capitol, whether he lunged at somebody or not is sort of irrelevant. I mean, it's flashy. It's an interesting story, but that's not part of the, you know, the intent and trying to process whether or not he was being corrupt at the time or what his intentions were. So anyway, Angles transcript is not there either. So this is very interesting. It's a lot of stuff. And I did just to kind of, I know we've talked about this before, but just to remind folks, so prosecutors, they have discovery obligations and discovery obligations. Basically, our relative to two different types of information. One is any prior statements of a witness, if the

government is in possession of a prior statement of a witness, somebody who's going to testify in the trial, they have to turn that over to the defense and that's so that the events can review it and use it to cross examine that person. And they also are obligated to turn over any information they have that's exculpatory to the defendants and not just like things that say they're a nice guy, but things that contradict the government's case, specifically the prosecution of that person. So it's understandable that the government would say, well, none of this stuff is relevant or it's not discoverable, but honestly, they're in a tough spot. They have a lot of information that they have to pour through. You can easily see how depending on who the government's witnesses are going to be in any one of these cases, like the Proud Boys case that started this week, or that Oath

Keepers round two, a sedition case that's coming up in a little bit. They might decide not to put on particular witnesses because there are these prior statements to the January 6th committee that are that are not good for the witness, that make the witness look, recollections look poor or, you know, maybe untruthful or something like that. That's why it was so important for the Department of Justice to get these transcripts as soon as possible. Again, it wasn't because the Department of Justice didn't feel like doing the interviews themselves. It's because they need to look for inconsistencies in witness testimony so that they cannot be impeached at trial. And then also to not be caught in a Brady problem, a Brady materials problem where you have ex-gulpatory information

over. And so it's going to be interesting to see how the court responds to the Department of Justice saying these aren't really relevant. Maybe the court wants to look at them itself and make it in determination about relevance. I don't know how any of that works, but they are in a tough spot. That's right. Typically DOJ errors on the side of caution as with all things, and they turn over things in discovery that are arguably not even discoverable. They have a pretty broad, you know, they have a lot of discretion to turn them in that.

It drives agents crazy when they're turning over information about the agent's sources that the agents don't think is discoverable. Never the last. And here you're seeing defense attorneys making very predictable, hey, out of an opportunity to delay, hey, there's a lot of stuff out there. And we haven't received it yet. And they can use a sort of objections and motions to the judge to slow things down or just gum up the works. That's what defense attorneys do. Yeah, or to be fair, it's in the portal, right?

Because this is the biggest evident sharing portal of all time with this January 6th stuff. And, you know, there's millions of new pages. It's actually not outside of the realm of, you know, being reasonable to say, hey, can we have another month to look through this stuff to make sure there's nothing exculpatory, but DOJ is arguing against it. So, we'll see how that rolls out and how it, you know,

if they don't allow additional time, if that comes up on appeal, which I'm most certain it would. And we'll see how it goes. I'm sure we will. We will be here to sort through it and talk about it and explain it to the best of our ability and I look forward to doing that.

It's been a crazy week. Who knows? Maybe this time next week we have a third special counsel. You never know. It could happen. Yeah, we'll just get a new special counsel every week until endowments happen. Well, thank you again, Andrew. It's been a great show.

I think we've got a lot of information out. We'll be back next week, same bat times, same bat channel, talking about special counsel, z plural, and we'll see. We'll see what happens. I'm still waiting for that reporting from Zoe Tillman that he's going to make some charging decisions here, possibly within weeks. We're coming up on that, so it'll be interesting to see. That's right. That's right. That's right. Thanks everybody for listening. If you have a question for us, you can send it into us at helloatmullarsheywrote.com. Just put Jack in the subject line, and we'll pick a question of the week.

It has been great. I've been Allison Gil. And I'm Andrew McCabe. And we'll see you next week. much too much. And now they might be giants are playing their breakthrough album full of it. And they still have time for other songs. They're fooling around. Who can stop? They might be giants and their liberal rocket gender. No one. Disadvantaged pay for with somebody else's money. M-S-W-Media media.