Setting a Perjury Trap for Trump

by Gaius Publius

A "perjury trap" is a prosecutorial maneuver and a form of entrapment in which "a prosecutor calls a witness to testify with the intent to base a perjury charge on their statements, not to indict them for a previous crime." If a prosecutor calls a witness for only that purpose, rather than to get information to further an investigation, the law is clear — it's forbidden.

Perjury traps are most easily executed when the prosecutor has prior knowledge of the matter about which the witness is questioned but doesn't reveal having that knowledge. In practice perjury traps can be executed while furthering an investigation and still be traps. A prosecutor can ask investigatory questions and set a perjury trap at the same time. Thus, since perjury traps are forbidden in law only in restricted circumstances, they are difficult to avoid.

If the questions leaked to the New York Times and presented as what Robert Mueller would ask Donald Trump in an official interview, are indeed Mueller's questions (regardless of who leaked them), Mueller may be setting a perjury trap for Trump.

Michael Flynn's Perjury Trap

Witness the situation of Michael Flynn, about which investigative reporter Robert Parry wrote just weeks before his death:

Russia-gate enthusiasts are thrilled over the guilty plea of President Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI about pre-inauguration conversations with the Russian ambassador, but the case should alarm true civil libertarians.

What is arguably most disturbing about this case is that then-National Security Adviser Flynn was pushed into a perjury trap by Obama administration holdovers at the Justice Department who concocted an unorthodox legal rationale for subjecting Flynn to an FBI interrogation four days after he took office, testing Flynn’s recollection of the conversations while the FBI agents had transcripts of the calls intercepted by the National Security Agency.

In other words, the Justice Department wasn’t seeking information about what Flynn said to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak – the intelligence agencies already had that information. Instead, Flynn was being quizzed on his precise recollection of the conversations and nailed for lying when his recollections deviated from the transcripts.

Seems like entrapment to me, regardless of what you think of Michael Flynn.

Bill Clinton's Perjury Trap

If you're not fond of Michael Flynn, consider Bill Clinton, of whom many have kinder thoughts. In 1998 Jeffrey Rosen wrote this in The New Yorker about Ken Starr's attempt to prove Bill Clinton perjured himself by denying his affair with Monica Lewinsky (emphasis added):

Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr has claimed that his 7-month investigation of President Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky, which seeks to prove that Clinton and Lewinsky lied under oath in the Paula Jones sexual harrassment case against Clinton, is about lies, not sex. But the public appears to recognize instinctively what the law has long acknowledged: that lies vary in degree and in kind, and that they should be treated accordingly. The President's aides fear that Starr will try to set a so-called perjury trap in order to catch the President in lies told directly to the grand jury. Perjury traps have become a popular tactic among independent counsels: if they can't prove the alleged crime they were appointed to investigate, they indict suspects for lying to investigators. But the traps are effective only because independent counsels have succeeded over the past few decades in expanding the lying laws far beyond their historical roots.

The U.S. is a prosecutorial nation, and has been for some time. How else do we explain the popularity of shows like Judge Judy, Jerry Springer and the many like them, shows in which the "unworthy" are subjected to public humiliation? How else do we explain our acceptance of having the largest prison population in the world?

How Will the Next "Rogue" President Be Taken Down?

Perhaps you're fine with this use of prosecutorial power. Perhaps, even though you'd hate it if these tactics were used against you, and hated it when they were used against Bill Clinton, you now love them when used against Trump and his team.

But whatever your view of either man, Donald Trump or Bill Clinton, keep this in mind:

     1. This is the way prosecutors regularly do business in our "in love with prosecution" state. 

     2. This is one way Mueller is trying to get rid of Donald Trump — this and the blackmail opportunity his investigation of Trump's finances will inevitably offer.

And thanks to Democrats, who opposed these tactics when used against Clinton's presidency, and now cheer their use against Trump's, we see that:

     3. These techniques have now been "blessed" (legitimized) by both parties and the mainstream press, and

     4. They can and will be used freely against any sitting president who falls seriously out of favor with our ruling Establishment.

Do you think a President Sanders would be any more loved, or any less hated, by the DC and press Establishment than Donald Trump is? Imagine a Sanders-like presidency. Remember MSNBC's behavior to Sanders during the 2016 primary. Remember the Party's behavior during that time. What do you think would be done to "delegitimize" him, or anyone like him, by both parties and the press, with both parties' consent?

What if he adopted a federal jobs guarantee proposal? Such a program, properly executed, would force wages to rise through the entire private sector and affect the bottom line of every corporation with employees in the U.S. What if he starts such a program under current executive power? Now imagine that the program has huge popular support, which means it represents a real legislative threat to our decades-old, comfortable, bipartisan neoliberal Establishment.

Would such a program be allowed by that Establishment to go forward? What if it could not be stopped in any other way than by bringing down ("delegitimizing") the Sanders presidency itself?

Anyone who attempts to overturn four decades of Establishment neoliberal rule would not be treated kindly by anyone in DC. The bipartisan takedown of a President Sanders would look different than the takedown of Trump, but all of the same actors would participate and all the same tools would be in play.

Please, as you cheer the takedown of President Trump (if you do), keep a president like Sanders in mind.

The NSA Already Knows the Answers to Mueller's Collusion Questions

Back to Mueller's questions for Donald Trump. The dirty little secret — which is only "secret" because everyone in the country is pretending it isn't so — is that the NSA already knows all or most of what Mueller reportedly wants to find out in his questions for Donald Trump.

Ex-intelligence officers Ray McGovern and William Binney wrote about this at Robert Parry's Consortium News (h/t email correspondent Kevin Fathi for the link; emphasis added):

Mueller does not need to send his team off on a “broad quest” with “open-ended” queries on an “exhaustive array of subjects.” If there were any tangible evidence of Trump campaign-Russia collusion, Mueller would almost certainly have known where to look and, in today’s world of blanket surveillance, would have found it by now. It beggars belief that he would have failed, in the course of his year-old investigation, to use all the levers at his disposal — the levers Edward Snowden called “turnkey tyranny” — to “get the goods” on Trump.

Here’s what the “mainstream” media keeps from most Americans: The National Security Agency (NSA) collects everything: all email, telephone calls, texts, faxes — everything, and stores it in giant databases. OK; we know that boggles the mind, but the technical capability is available, and the policy is to “collect it all.” All is collected and stored in vast warehouses.  (The tools to properly analyze/evaluate this flood of information do not match the miraculous state of the art of collection, so the haystack keeps growing and the needles get harder and harder to find.  But that is another story.)

How did collection go on steroids? You’ve heard it a thousand times — “After 9/11 everything changed.”  In short, when Vice President Dick Cheney told NSA Director and Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden to disregard the Fourth Amendment, Hayden saluted sharply. [James Comey, hero of the #Resistance, saluted sharply too, except for that one little time when he asked for changed first.]

And so, after 9/11, NSA’s erstwhile super-strict First Commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Collect Information on Americans Without a Court Warrant,” went the way of the Fourth Amendment. (When this became public, former NSA Director Adm. Bobby Ray Inman stated openly that Hayden violated the law, and former NSA Director Army Gen. William Odom said Hayden ought to be courtmartialed.  The timorous “mainstream” media suppressed what Inman and Odom said.)

And yes, the NSA does indeed spy on everyone, with the help and connivance of Barack Obama:

On January 17, 2014, when President Barack Obama directed the intelligence community to limit their warrantless data searches for analysis/evaluation to two “hops,” either he did not understand what he was authorizing or he was bowing, as was his custom, to what the intelligence community claimed was needed (lest anyone call him soft on terrorism).

Intelligence directors were quite happy with his decision because, basically, it authorized them to spy on anyone on the planet.

"Collect it all," NSA chief Keith Alexander famously said. And if whistle-blower Russell Tice is to be believed, the NSA's been doing just that since 2001, including getting wiretaps of Barack Obama in 2004, just as he was emerging onto the national political scene. Tice once claimed in an interview to have held those orders in his hand. He also claimed that similar orders applied to all important judges, including FISA judges, and all Pentagon officers of three-star rank and above. (For conspiracy fans, note that this would have included General Patraeus.)

Setting a Perjury Trap for Trump

To end where we began, here's what I think we're about to see next in the Mueller-Trump story. Mueller is attempting to bait Trump into giving an interview. Trump's former lawyer John Dowd quit recently, reportedly over Trump's interest in granting Mueller an interview, which Dowd strongly (and wisely) opposed. Trump recently hired Rudy Guilani, reportedly to negotiate a Trump-Mueller interview with clear boundaries and with it an end to the investigation.

It looks like Trump favors doing the interview. So what will happen if Trump sits down with Mueller? Will he stay on the script his lawyers prepared for him, or will he freelance?

If he freelances, will he lie?

It's impossible to imagine an undisciplined Trump not freelancing and not lying. If he lies, he will be charged with perjury and Mueller will have succeeded.

Whether that brings him down, however, is anyone's guess. (Mine is, it won't.) After all, the House would still have to impeach him, and even Nancy Pelosi has said impeachment is off the table (again).

Maybe it's all just one club after all.

GP
 

U.S. Involvement in Yeltsin’s Russia: From "America’s Colony" to "Number One Threat"

Veteran Moscow reporter Mark Ames discusses American encouragement and complicity in what I call the oligarch's "rape of Russia" under Boris Yeltzin, and how that led to the rise of Putin

by Gaius Publius

I'm going to keep the reading part of this piece short and encourage you to listen to the above interview, with veteran reporter Mark Ames. His main point and mine — the U.S. is responsible for what I call "the rape of Russia" (or "extreme privatization," a classic Bill Clinton goal) by Boris Yeltzin and the newly created oligarchs because it suited U.S. policy and ideology.

Needless to say, like much of American foreign interference, it worked until it didn't, and everyone in Russia remembers. The history, well detailed in the video above, is fascinating and eye-opening.

Ames provides excellent detail on how that went down, who benefited and why. About Ames:

Mark Ames (born October 3, 1965) is a writer known for his work as a Moscow-based expatriate American journalist and editor. He is the founding editor of the biweekly the eXile in Moscow, to which he regularly contributed before he returned to the U.S. Ames has also written for the New York Press, The Nation, Playboy, The San Jose Mercury News, Alternet, Птюч Connection, GQ (Russian edition), and is the author of three books.

At the eXile, Ames and Matt Taibbi were co-editors until Taibbi left Russia to return to the U.S. (When you read Taibbi's comments below, keep in mind his deep familiarity with Russia and its political system.)

The description of the video reads (my emphasis):

The increased aggression towards Russia from US politicians and media is made more clear when taking into account the real history of the post-Soviet period. The hidden story of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency explains how deeply the US government, along with Western capitalist institutions, cheered, shaped and exploited the country after the fall of the Soviet Union, paving the way for the political system they all condemn today.

To uncover just how much the US Empire has interfered in Russia’s political evolution, Abby Martin interviews Mark Ames, an American journalist who spent a decade reporting from Yeltsin’ and Putin’s Russia and witnessed the country’s transformation from an American “colony” to it’s “number one threat.”

Again, please do give it your attention. You will get this information in few other places. Ames is an easy person to listen to, and the interview goes by quickly. It's also good through to the end.

As always with post-WWII U.S. foreign relations, it's impossible to understand an event without understanding how we were involved in what lead up to it. Case in point (one of a great many): It's impossible to understand the Iranian Revolution of 1979 without understanding the role of the U.S., the Dulles brothers, Winston Churchill, and British Petroleum in the 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government under Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.

If you want to stop here and just listen, please do. My main point is in the interview. Everything below is gloss.

Ray McGovern and Matt Taibbi on the "Russian Hacking" Case

Regarding the "Russian Hacking" case, I've written about that somewhat extensively — see "Who’s Blackmailing the President & Why Aren’t Democrats Upset About It?" — but I want to add a few comments by former U.S. intelligence officer Ray McGovern and veteran reporter Matt Taibbi. Just a short quote from each, which hopefully will lead you to the source articles for more (h/t the excellent link aggregation site Avedon's Sideshow for both).

First, Ray McGovern writing recently at Consortium News, "Obama Admits Gap in Russian 'Hack' Case:

Oops. Did President Barack Obama acknowledge that the extraordinary propaganda campaign to blame Russia for helping Donald Trump become president has a very big hole in it, i.e., that the U.S. intelligence community has no idea how the Democratic emails reached WikiLeaks? For weeks, eloquent obfuscation - expressed with 'high confidence' - has been the name of the game, but inadvertent admissions now are dispelling some of the clouds."

Does the Russian government hack, as many other governments do? Of course. Did it hack the emails of the Democratic National Committee? Almost certainly, though it was likely not alone in doing so. In the Internet age, hacking is the bread and butter of intelligence agencies. ...

What remains to be demonstrated is that it was “the Russians” who gave those emails to WikiLeaks. And that is what the U.S. intelligence community doesn’t know.

At President Obama’s Jan. 18 press conference, he admitted as much: “the conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to whether WikiLeaks was witting or not in being the conduit through which we heard about the DNC e-mails that were leaked.” [Emphasis added by author]

Matt Taibbi, writing in Rolling Stone, "The Russia Story Reaches a Crisis Point:

Have we ever been less sure about the truth of an urgent news story?

Three days into the 'Russian dossier' scandal, which history will remember by a far more colorful name, we still have no clue what we're dealing with. We're either learning the outlines of the most extraordinary compromise to date of an incoming American president by a foreign power, or we're watching an unparalleled libel and media overreach." [emphasis mine]

Taibbi expands on this "either-or" statement with his usual clarity and prose.

Again, though, the meat of this piece is in the video, the history of  U.S. involvement in what I call "the rape of Russia" by Yeltsin and the oligarchs — how we encouraged it, enabled it, and benefited enormously from it — until we didn't.

I guarantee that few in this country do know this story. I guarantee that few in Russia don't know it.

GP
 

Who Are The Bad Guys In Ukraine?

Russians have occupied more than a few NATO capitals including Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest, Berlin and even Paris. No one wants to see that happen again. And yet the West seems to be pushing Russia up against a wall right now with devastating sanctions that are crippling the Russian economy and roiling the country's politics. And nuclear-armed Russia is a lot stronger militarily than the U.K. Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Turkey and the rest of the European NATO allies combined.

After I broke a couple of ribs and punctured a lung, I had to have physical therapy to get back in some semblance of shape. Following a debilitating two week hospital stay I've been having a physical therapist come over twice a week to help with balance and strengthening exercises. He's an American, originally from Ukraine, and speaks fluent Ukrainian and Russian. He also listens to the radio and reads reports on what's going on there in both languages. "It's been," he told me a couple weeks ago, "a brilliant move by the CIA to destabilize Russia at no cost to America." That's certainly not the perspective you get from U.S. media. The mainstream media in the U.S., for example, doesn't let on how hated the Kiev regime is in the eastern parts of the country, nor even attempt to provide any historical context. Most American media consumers probably think Ukraine was once a country. It never was. Is Ukrainian a real language? We'll... Ukrainian is to Russian kind of like what California English is to Australian English.

Last last year we looked at the mounting evidence that the whole mess in Ukraine started with a CIA coup on behalf of a claque of anti-Russian fascists and oligarchs. Eric Zuesse: "How many Americans know that the current regime in Ukraine was installed in a very bloody February 2014 coup d'etat, that was planned in the U.S. White House, and overseen by an Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, and run by the CIA, and carried out for the White House by one of Ukraine's two racist-fascist, or nazi, political parties, whose founder and leader still controls Ukraine though not officially, even these many months after his coup, and which nazi party has been up to their elbows since then in a genocidal policy to exterminate the people in the region of Ukraine that had voted approximately 90% for the man whom Obama and those nazis overthrew in February?"

The video up top is former Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) voicing his own distrust of the American role in Ukraine. "I'm not pro-Russia, I'm not pro-Putin," he said. "I'm pro-facts." Unlike the CIA-- or a large bipartisan contingent of irresponsible saber-rattling Members of Congress, who are demanding that Obama arm the crumbling Ukrainian army.

My physical therapist told me some of the Russian political analysts are absolutely brilliant and that it's a shame we don't get to hear them here in English. In October, though, The Guardian published a Russian perspective on the conflict with an interview of former Russian spy chief Nikolai Patrushev by Ivan Egorov for Rossiyskaya Gazeta. Egorov starts with a question: "The last few months have witnessed a coup d’état in Ukraine, military operations by the Ukrainian authorities against the people of Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts and rabidly anti-Russian policies on the part of Kiev. Was it possible to predict this turn of events just a year ago?"

Nikolai Patrushev: Our experts warned that a worsening of the situation in Ukraine was likely under conditions of political and economic instability, particularly in the case of outside influence. But I have to admit that the possibility of a sudden seizure of power in Kiev, relying on armed units of self-proclaimed Nazis, hadn’t then been considered. It’s worth remembering that until that coup, Moscow fulfilled all its obligations to Kiev in full.

Without the material and financial help that we constantly supplied, Ukraine wouldn’t have been able to deal with its economic problems, which had become chronic. To help our neighbour, we marshalled material and financial resources worth tens of millions of dollars. For many people in Ukraine, this help came to seem so routine that they simply forgot how important it was for the survival of the country.

But if you’re talking about longer-term predictions, the Ukraine crisis was a totally predictable outcome of the actions of the US and its closest allies.

For the last quarter of a century, these actions were designed to wrest Ukraine and other former Soviet republics away from Russia and to redesign the post-Soviet space in America’s interests. The US created the conditions and pretexts for the coloured revolutions and financed them lavishly.

Victoria Nuland, the US assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, has said that her country spent $5bn between 1991 and 2013 “supporting the aspirations of the people of Ukraine for a stronger, more democratic government.” Even open sources, such as congressional documents, show that government spent no less than $2.4bn on various American “aid” programmes to Ukraine between 2001 and 2012. That’s comparable to the annual budget of some small states. The US Agency for International Development spent around half a billion dollars, the State Department nearly half a million and the Pentagon more than $370m.

...[Egorov:] Some experts believe that the Ukraine crisis served simply as a pretext for the west to escalate relations with Russia. Is that true?

Nikolai Patrushev: Yes, if the catastrophe in Ukraine had not occurred, another pretext would have been found to activate the policy of “containment” towards our country. This policy has been followed religiously for many decades: only the forms and tactics by which it has been realised have changed.

It is well known that after the second world war, the confrontation between the Soviet Union and the west, headed by the US, took the form of a cold war. The military-political element of this conflict rested with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), which was established on 4 April 1949 at the initiative of the US. An analysis of Nato’s actions shows that, having created the alliance, the US pursued two main goals.

First, a military bloc formed under American leadership, aimed against the USSR.

Victoria Nuland-- a bridge too far

Second, Washington pre-empted the emergence in western Europe of an independent group of states that could have competed with the US. It is worth remembering that although, essentially, the US exerted unilateral control over its allies, its territory was not included in Nato’s sphere of responsibility.

After the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, which united the socialist countries of Europe and whose very existence was regarded by Nato as a grave danger, the bloc was not only not dissolved, it grew further, both numerically and militarily.

...The coup in Kiev, which was clearly carried out with the help of the US, conformed to a classical model worked out in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. But never before had such a coup impinged on Russia’s interests so directly.

Analysis shows that by provoking Russia into retaliatory measures, the Americans are pursuing the very same goals as in the 1980s vis-a-vis the USSR. Just like back then, they are trying to define our country’s “weak points.” At the same time, of course, they are neutralising economic competitors in Europe who have grown too close to Moscow, as they see it.

It’s worth remembering that Washington always strived to exert leverage over Russia. In 1974, the well-known Jackson Vanik amendment was passed, limiting trade with our country. To all appearances, it became obsolete the moment the USSR fell but it nevertheless remained in force right up until 2012, when it was replaced by the so-called Magnitsky list.



The current sanctions are part of the same trend. The actions of the American administration during the Ukraine crisis are part of a new current in White House foreign policy designed to preserve America’s position of leadership in the world by containing the growing power of Russia and other centres of power. What is more, Washington is actively using the possibilities that Nato offers to exert political and economic pressure on its allies and partners and thereby prevent them from wavering.

[Egorov:] Why is the American elite pursuing the right to control foreign (countries’) raw materials so tenaciously at a time when experts in the west are stressing the importance of developing alternative sources of energy that are supposedly capable of replacing oil and gas in double quick time?

Nikolai Patrushev: Specialists are convinced, in fact, that a real alternative to fossil fuels as the basis of energy production won’t appear in the next few decades. What is more, the dominant belief in the west is that the combined power generated by nuclear, hydro, wind and solar can satisfy no more than a fifth of world demand.

Don’t forget another important point. In the world today, there is a growing shortage of food and drinking water for the planet’s rising population. Lacking the most basic means of survival, desperate people turn to extremism, terrorism, piracy and criminality. This accounts, in part, for the sharp disparities between countries and regions, as well as for mass migration.

A shortage of water and irrigable land often causes discord, not least between the republics of Central Asia. Water represents an acute problem for a range of other countries in Asia and, especially, in Africa.

Many American experts, including the former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, claim that Moscow ended up with such vast swathes of territory that it is incapable of exploiting it all: this territory does not, therefore, “serve the interests of humanity as a whole.” We continue to hear claims that (the world’s) natural resources were divided up “unfairly” and that (Russia) must grant foreign states “free access” to them.

The Americans are convinced that many other people reason in the same way, especially in the states bordering Russia, which are already banding together to support such claims on our country and will continue to do so in future. As in the case of Ukraine, they propose to solve problems at Russia’s expense and without taking its interests into account.

Even during periods of relative détente between Russia/USSR and the US, such statements always held true.

That is why, whatever the nuances of American behaviour, or that of its allies, this challenge will remain forever present before Russia’s leaders: to guarantee the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the homeland, to protect and multiply its wealth and to dispose of that wealth sensibly in the interests of the multinational people of the Russian Federation.

People ask how it's possible that so many Jews are in top positions in a Ukrainian government dominated by nationalists (and fascists) whose slogan is that they will drown Russians in Polish and Jewish blood.That they are Jewish or half Jewish takes a back seat to the corruption of oligarchy-- and the ability to loot the country-- which is what this whole mess, tragically, is really all about.




UPDATE: Victoria Nuland, A Dangerous Embarrassment To America

The Cold War throwback driving America's messed up policies in Ukraine is Victoria Nuland, Kerry's Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. Her husband is notorious neocon Robert Kagan. In her glory days she was principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. Lately she's been in the news again for this phone call. CNN bleeped out "Fuck," as in "Fuck the E.U."