The Richard Kleindienst precedent for prosecuting Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III

Well, that didn’t take long. Once GOP Congressional leaders began calling for our “Confederate rebel” Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III to recuse himself from the Trump-Putin campaign investigations on Thursday, as the New York Times editorializes, Jeff Sessions Had No Choice but to recuse himself, something he should have taken the pledge to do at his Senate confirmation hearings.

A number of GOP leaders are now asserting that Session’s recusal solves the problem, he will simply “amend” his statements to the Senate to “clarify” his remarks, and avoid charges of failure to provide accurate information to Congress or perjury.

These Tea-Publican apologists (IOKIYAR) need to step into Mr. Peabody’s WAYBAC Machine and set the dial to 1972 for the historical precedent of another Attorney General who lied to Congress during his confirmation hearings: Richard Kleindienst.

Richard Painter, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who was the chief White House ethics lawyer from 2005 to 2007, explains at the New York Times why Jeff Sessions Needs to Go:

In the wake of Wednesday’s revelation that Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke with Russia’s ambassador to the United States while working with the Trump campaign, despite denying those contacts during his confirmation hearings, Mr. Sessions recused himself from overseeing any Justice Department investigation into contacts between the campaign and the Russian government. Some members of Congress are saying that’s not enough; they want him to resign.

It’s a bombshell of a story. And it’s one with a clear and disturbing precedent.

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Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III lied under oath to the Senate about communications with the Russian ambassador

Our “Confederate rebel” Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is already in hot water for having lied under oath during his Senate confirmation hearings about communications with the Russian government during the 2016 campaign.

The Washington Post reports, Sessions met with Russian envoy twice last year, encounters he later did not disclose:

Then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) spoke twice last year with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Justice Department officials said, encounters he did not disclose when asked about possible contacts between members of President Trump’s campaign and representatives of Moscow during Sessions’s confirmation hearing to become attorney general.

One of the meetings was a private conversation between Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that took place in September in the senator’s office, at the height of what U.S. intelligence officials say was a Russian cyber campaign to upend the U.S. presidential race.

The previously undisclosed discussions could fuel new congressional calls for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russia’s alleged role in the 2016 presidential election. As attorney general, Sessions oversees the Justice Department and the FBI, which have been leading investigations into Russian meddling and any links to Trump’s associates. He has so far resisted calls to recuse himself.

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Latest on the Trump-Putin campaign investigations

Te big news leading off this week is the investigative report by Evan Osnos, David Remnick, and Joshua Yaffa at The New Yorker, Trump, Putin and the New Cold.

The investigative report describes how the former Soviet Union, and now Russia, employs “active measures”—aktivniye meropriyatiya—unlike classic espionage, which involves the collection of foreign secrets, active measures aim at influencing events—at undermining a rival power with forgeries, front groups, and countless other techniques honed during the Cold War (excerpts):

The 2016 Presidential campaign in the United States was of keen interest to Putin. He loathed Obama, who had applied economic sanctions against Putin’s cronies after the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of eastern Ukraine . . . Clinton, in Putin’s view, was worse—the embodiment of the liberal interventionist strain of U.S. foreign policy, more hawkish than Obama, and an obstacle to ending sanctions and reëstablishing Russian geopolitical influence. At the same time, Putin deftly flattered Trump, who was uncommonly positive in his statements about Putin’s strength and effectiveness as a leader. As early as 2007, Trump declared that Putin was “doing a great job in rebuilding the image of Russia and also rebuilding Russia period.” In 2013, before visiting Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant, Trump wondered, in a tweet, if he would meet Putin, and, “if so, will he become my new best friend?” During the Presidential campaign, Trump delighted in saying that Putin was a superior leader who had turned the Obama Administration into a “laughingstock.”

For those interested in active measures, the digital age presented opportunities far more alluring than anything available in the era of Andropov. The Democratic and Republican National Committees offered what cybersecurity experts call a large “attack surface.” Tied into politics at the highest level, they were nonetheless unprotected by the defenses afforded to sensitive government institutions. John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and a former chief of staff of Bill Clinton’s, had every reason to be aware of the fragile nature of modern communications. As a senior counsellor in the Obama White House, he was involved in digital policy. Yet even he had not bothered to use the most elementary sort of defense, two-step verification, for his e-mail account.

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The Kremlin’s handler for Trump, Michael Flynn resigns under pressure

National Security Advisor and former commentator for Russia Today (RT), retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, resigned on Monday evening. Michael Flynn Resigns as National Security Adviser:

Michael T. Flynn, the national security adviser, resigned on Monday night after it was revealed that he had misled Vice President Mike Pence and other top White House officials about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

Mr. Flynn, who served in the job for less than a month, said he had given “incomplete information” regarding a telephone call he had with the ambassador in late December about American sanctions against Russia, weeks before President Trump’s inauguration. Mr. Flynn previously had denied that he had any substantive conversations with Ambassador Sergey I. Kislyak, and Mr. Pence repeated that claim in television interviews as recently as this month.

But on Monday, a former administration official said the Justice Department warned the White House last month that Mr. Flynn had not been fully forthright about his conversations with the ambassador. As a result, the Justice Department feared that Mr. Flynn could be vulnerable to blackmail by Moscow.

Wait, the White House sat on this hoping that no one would notice until someone leaked the information to the media last week? “It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup.”

In his resignation letter, which the White House emailed to reporters, Mr. Flynn said he had held numerous calls with foreign officials during the transition. “Unfortunately, because of the fast pace of events, I inadvertently briefed the vice president-elect and others with incomplete information regarding my phone calls with the Russian ambassador,” he wrote. “I have sincerely apologized to the president and the vice president, and they have accepted my apology.”

“I am tendering my resignation, honored to have served our nation and the American people in such a distinguished way,” Mr. Flynn wrote.

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Election security is now a national security issue

Some commenters on this blog have been dismissive of the Russian hacks of the DNC, the DCCC, Hack of Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ‘Similar’ to DNC Breach, and a Clinton campaign analytical program. Computer Systems Used by Clinton Campaign Are Said to Be Hacked, Apparently by Russians, largely on the grounds that the United States engages in cyber spying against the rest of the world, so “what’s the big deal?

First of all, cyber spying is the foundation of national security in the modern world. The United States would be grossly negligent if it was not doing cyber spying, when every other major country in the world is doing it. How often have we heard since September 11, 2001 “why didn’t our intelligence agencies know this was coming?” This false equivalency argument strikes me as a “blame America first” argument, that the United States deserves it for its own actions. This is not a way to ingratiate yourself with your fellow American citizens.

DieboldSecondly, I’m guessing that many of the people making this argument just a few years ago had their hair on fire about electronic voting machines being hacked to rig elections. (Oh, you know you were).  What makes you think that these Russian hackers will stop with attacks on the Democratic Party? We still have electronic voting systems that are vulnerable to hacking.

Security technologist Bruce Schneier writes, By November, Russian hackers could target voting machines:

Russia was behind the hacks into the Democratic National Committee’s computer network that led to the release of thousands of internal emails just before the party’s convention began, U.S. intelligence agencies have reportedly concluded.

The FBI is investigating. WikiLeaks promises there is more data to come. The political nature of this cyberattack means that Democrats and Republicans are trying to spin this as much as possible. Even so, we have to accept that someone is attacking our nation’s computer systems in an apparent attempt to influence a presidential election. This kind of cyberattack targets the very core of our democratic process. And it points to the possibility of an even worse problem in November — that our election systems and our voting machines could be vulnerable to a similar attack.

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