Category: Audio Posts: Selected Articles

We’re days, maybe hours, before another attack by the Iranians, one that could be worse than the onslaught a month ago. We’re days, maybe hours, before senior officials at the Prime Minister’s Office are grilled in two cases involving security issues.

Against this backdrop, Benjamin Netanyahu chose to fire Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

This was a transparent (and admittedly successful) attempt to distract the media from its investigation into suspicions that minutes of meetings at the Prime Minister’s Office were falsified – meetings on security issues. The announcement of Gallant’s ouster was orchestrated for 7:55 P.M., five minutes before the evening news, because that’s what Netanyahu’s people do best: They dominate the television news.

• Netanyahu is a clear and present danger to Israel. Now defense chiefs face a dire dilemma
• Gallant is fourth defense minister to be fired or resign over disputes with Netanyahu
• Israeli hostage relatives: Gallant’s firing ‘another attempt by Netanyahu to block deal’

On Tuesday the connection between the latest developments was exposed – and it’s terrifying, to a degree we’ve never known. We didn’t know it, but for months Netanyahu has been up to his neck – again – in investigations. The first is the Shin Bet security service’s probe into the theft of a document and its leak to German tabloid Bild.

Even if Netanyahu didn’t know the exact details, it’s hard to imagine that he didn’t fear that at least his people would be investigated. Let’s not even get into the other possibility, the terrifying one: He not only knew but was the mastermind and prepared for an inquiry.

Then there’s the second investigation. In May, Avi Gil left his job as Netanyahu’s military secretary and complained to Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara about a serious crime, the falsification of minutes, after the war broke out on October 7, 2023. (Nadav Eyal first reported this in Yedioth Ahronoth the following July; the public forgot but Baharav-Miara did what she needed to do and sent the police into action.)

Over the weekend, for the first time in history (as journalist Guy Peleg reported Tuesday), police investigators visited the Prime Minister’s Office in order to investigate that office.

Under the radar, a detailed list of all of Bahara-Miara’s actions against the government was sent out to the toxic cogs of Netanyahu’s poison machine. Openly, there was a cabinet meeting in which Baharav-Miara’s role, the target of an ambush, was dictated in advance.

This wasn’t the usual kind of attack by Israel’s ministers, including the prime minister. It was a threat against Baharav-Miara because of the investigation into his office.

“She’s a contrarian, an enemy; deal with it,” Netanyahu ordered, as if he were a mafia don ordering his consigliere to “deal with” a prosecutor. The next day, news of this reached the public and Gallant was immediately fired.

Then the media was told that Gallant’s scalp was only the first and that everyone was a target now – the military chief of staff, the Shin Bet chief, the attorney general. It’s only a matter of time. (As usual, this was denied minutes after the statement was provided.)

Target No. 1: the army commander during a war who, with rare courage and integrity, has striven to defend the military against toxic political influences. Target No. 2: the head of the agency investigating alleged crime in the prime minister’s inner sanctum. Target No. 3: the courageous attorney general who ordered a probe into yet another stinking affair at the most lawless Prime Minister’s Office in the nation’s history.

This affair attests to the complete chaos in the most important place in the country, against the backdrop of the longest and most complex war in the country’s history. This is what a dictatorship looks like, so on Tuesday night, the demonstration on Tel Aviv’s Kaplan Street and elsewhere around the country quickly doubled in size, at least.

Feelings are running high. In a press release accompanying the letter dismissing Gallant, Netanyahu said: “I made attempts to bridge the gaps [with Gallant], but they kept getting wider. They also became known to the public in an unacceptable way, and worse, they became known to the enemy. Our enemies drew satisfaction and greatly benefited from this.”

In other words, it was Gallant who widened the gaps, leaked information against Netanyahu and played into the enemy’s hands. But oddly enough, Gallant and the people in his office aren’t being investigated by the police and the Shin Bet.

In March 2023, the last time Gallant was fired, it was because he warned of “a clear and present danger to the country’s security” if the government’s effort to weaken the judiciary continued. On Tuesday night, he was fired once again, partly because he thwarted Netanyahu’s plan to let ultra-Orthodox men evade the draft.

When during a war in which hundreds of soldiers have been killed and thousands wounded, Israel’s defense minister is fired for the benefit of a bunch of shirkers in a putrid political deal, it’s a direct blow to the country’s security.

But we’ve gotten used to this. We’ve gotten used to the insanity of a prime minister eroding the country’s security in 1,001 ways, like a spokesman who failed a security check and is now suspected of handling sensitive security matters, like the suspected falsifying of minutes in the first days of the war, like the prolonging of a war in Gaza that’s taking a heavy toll in blood nearly every day, like abandoning the hostages in Hamas’ tunnels as a second winter sets in.

Also, firing Gallant has been the Netanyahu family’s obsession for over a year now. Throughout the war, he has been the main enemy on the social media platforms operated by Yair Netanyahu and the other clones in the cult. Gallant has been targeted more than opposition leaders Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz – and more than bumped-off Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

It’s quite possible that Netanyahu timed the act in honor of his wife’s birthday. Maybe the only person Sara hates more than Gallant is Gideon Sa’ar, who now has been appointed foreign minister.

And as Sa’ar tweeted on that dramatic night of March 26 last year, when the first attempt to offload Gallant failed: “Netanyahu’s decision to fire the defense minister is an act of madness that reflects a total lack of good judgment. Netanyahu is determined to send Israel into the abyss. Every day he serves in his role endangers Israel and its future.”

Sa’ar sold his soul to the devil in exchange for the cushy foreign minister’s post. Even if he’s not part of the darker scenarios, it’s hard to see how he aligns with the political foundation of Gallant’s dismissal: offering a sacrifice to ultra-Orthodox leaders Yitzchak Goldknopf, Moshe Gafni and Arye Dery and replacing the hand that refused to sign off on the draft-dodging bills.

Gallant’s firm stance on the draft issue reflects a bit of courage in the governing coalition. It might just foil another sop for the ultra-Orthodox community, the so-called day care bill (already on its last legs) and similar legislation in the future.

Sa’ar’s silence is disgraceful. He has a hand in the corrupt deal in which Foreign Minister Israel Katz becomes defense minister and a law has been promised to exempt the ultra-Orthodox from the draft and save the coalition.

Netanyahu’s only real goal is to keep his messianic and racist coalition afloat until October 2026, by when an election must be held. He aims to reach this date after putting together the pieces for another judicial overhaul to secure his reelection.

That’s the aim; damn the hostages, the dead soldiers, the evacuees from the south and the north, the collapsing economy, the unraveling society, the crumbling international standing, and the celebrations in the Arab world over the firing of the defense minister who was a thorn in its side.

Amid Netanyahu’s corruption trial, dramatic security investigations into his office and troops dying in large numbers, Netanyahu fires the defense minister. This is what countless soldiers, including reservists, will have in mind when heading to battle.

Many of them feel that for nearly two years their country has been stolen and driven to collapse. Many of them may soon ask themselves: Who and what are we fighting for? Then they’ll act in accordance with their consciences.

The opposition leaders – Lapid and Gantz, Avigdor Lieberman and Yair Golan – held a press conference. The opposition leader who’s not in parliament, former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, broke his silence Tuesday and declared in a video statement: “We have an insane, sick leadership. Change is on the way.”

Now it’s time to turn words into action.

An alarming deterioration in recruitment standards for the FBI has been exposed in a report delivered to the House Judiciary Committee by an alliance of retired and active-duty agents and analysts. 

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) requirements pushed by FBI Director Chris Wray have degraded recruitment standards in all areas including “physical fitness, illicit drug use, financial irregularities, mental health, full-time work experience and integrity,” and pose a threat to the FBI’s ability to protect America from harm, say the authors. 

The report cites cases of new agents who are so fat and unfit, they can’t even pass the new relaxed standards for fitness; who are illiterate and need remedial English lessons; who don’t want to work weekends or after hours; have serious disabilities or mental-health issues, and “create drama.” 

The FBI is no longer recruiting the “best and brightest” to be special agents, but selecting candidates based on “race, gender and/or sexual orientation.” 

The alliance of anonymous FBI reformers includes senior former executives and agents from the counterintelligence and counterterrorism branches who warn that today’s FBI “lacks the fortitude and skills warranted to defeat [existential] threats . . . 

“And if the current trajectory of FBI Special Agent recruitment and selection continues — using DEI as the primary and sole measure — our homeland security efforts will be significantly hampered.” 

An increasing number of “lower-quality candidates — described by one source as ‘breadcrumbs’ because they were rejected by other federal law-enforcement agencies” — are applying to become FBI special agents; and are being recruited because they “satisfy the FBI’s priority to meet Diversity, Equity and Inclusion mandates.” 

‘Fewer applying’ 

Flying in the face of Wray’s boast to Congress last year that recruitment numbers are soaring, especially in red states, the report finds that FBI’s special-agent hiring numbers are down, “likely due to the decline in the nation’s trust in the FBI and a corresponding decrease in the number of individuals interested in applying to the FBI for employment.” 

A former senior counterintelligence agent involved with writing the report said controversies engulfing the FBI in the Trump era have had the perverse effect of attracting recruits who want to be “agents of social change versus protecting the country.” 

Recruitment has become “self-destructive” and is setting up the FBI for “generational failure.” 

Another former agent who helped draft the report said: “Why are we funding a new FBI headquarters if you’re hiring second-rate people?” 

The report is written as if it were an official FBI intelligence product, with code names given to sources and sub-sources who anonymously provided firsthand knowledge of FBI recruitment and selection practices.

They include instructors and counselors at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., application coordinators and assessors from FBI field offices across the country, and supervisors and executives from FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC. 

They reveal a farcical situation with new recruits: 

Veteran supervisor special agent SIERRA 72 disqualified a black female applicant because she was more than 50 pounds overweight using the FBI’s body-fat index and could not pass the physical fitness test.

But FBI HQ ordered SIERRA 72 to push the candidate through the recruitment process. 

Other supervisors say a high percentage of candidates fail the mandatory fitness test, despite the fact that standards have been relaxed.

They “simply quit in the middle of the 1.5-mile run.” 

One veteran agent who works as a recruitment coordinator, codenamed SIER­RA 87, said the drug policy for new agents has been “liberalized to include applicants who had a lifestyle of using drugs.” 

A candidate who “was arrested and fought with police officers” was not disqualified. Nor are candidates with driving-under-the-influence convictions, or people with “documented mental illness.”

Nor are candidates who lie during the recruitment process. 

SIERRA 72 disqualified a special-agent applicant because their only work experience was “working two years as a coffee-shop barista and having a bachelor’s degree in art history.”

But FBI HQ ordered SIERRA 72 to push the applicant through. 

SIERRA 23, a special agent for four years in counterterrorism, observed that most new agents “disappear during the day, go home early, or never want to work late for after-hours operations. SIERRA 23 does not trust most of the agents with his/her life since they have questionable competence, tactical abilities and work ethic.” 

SIERRA 22 said one applicant recently rejected by a local police department and one who was a long-term unemployed “gamer” were pushed through by FBI HQ for non-special-agent positions despite objections from the field office. 

Other recruits have to be given remedial English classes because they are not capable of writing basic reports “in a coherent manner [and] often fail to utilize proper capitalization, punctuation and sentence structure.” 

In one case, training agent SIERRA 11 “advised a new agent that his/her writing skills needed improvement and that the new agent needed to pay attention to detail.”

The new agent complained to the supervisor that SIERRA 11 was “too difficult and expecting too much.” 

A female minority recruit “could not compose a simple FD-302,” the standard FBI interview report,” said SIERRA 79, a criminal investigator of four decades.

“The agent never made a case or wrote an affidavit and had to be pulled along to support investigations [and] could not be trusted in court.”

During the agent’s probationary period, her supervisor went up the chain of command to request that her employment be terminated but was told “we need minority female agents.” 

An FBI-agent recruit “stuttered and appeared to have Tourette syndrome or other tic disorder that hindered [his/her] ability to communicate,” said SIERRA 32, a veteran supervisor at the academy who wondered how this recruit “would function in a high-threat, hostile environment.” 

Ivy League graduates were being hired fresh out of college and placed in high-level positions to do “strategic planning . . . responsible for establishing policy, procedures and goals with counterproductive results.” 

Recruiters are required to host “Diversity Applicant Recruitment” events based on race, gender and sexual orientation.

“Straight white males may not attend. If a recruiter chose not to attend a Pride Parade or fly the Pride flag . . . the recruiter would most likely be removed immediately.” 

The report urges the House Judiciary Committee to order a 90-day audit of the FBI’s recruitment practices, to introduce legislation to strengthen the oath of office for FBI special agents, and to call Director Wray to testify before Congress over whether he is “willfully lying to conceal significant deficiencies” in recruitment or has been misinformed by subordinates. 

A spokesman for committee Chairman Jim Jordan said the panel was evaluating the report: 

“We are thankful that these brave FBI officials have come forward with this report that described some of the ridiculous things happening at the bureau. We will continue to work with these officials . . . so we can further implement the proper legislative changes.” 

The authors want to remain anonymous because those still serving know they will be “crushed” like whistleblowers before them, says one of the authors. 

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Embarrassing photos of Donald Trump may have been taken and confiscated from Jeffrey Epstein’s safe by “Trump’s FBI,” according to a journalist’s latest book on the former president.

Author and journalist Michael Wolff alleged in an episode of his podcast “Fire and Fury” Thursday discussing excerpts of his new book that Epstein would take photos out of his safe of Trump with women at his house in Palm Beach when he previously interviewed him.

“And the young girls are topless, and in some of the pictures, they’re sitting on his lap. And then there’s one I especially remember where there’s a telltale stain on the front of Trump’s pants, and the girls are pointing at him and laughing,” Wolff said.

Wolff went on to add, “And I would say it was likely that they would have been there when the FBI, Trump’s FBI at that point, not to put too fine a point on it, raided Epstein’s house and took the contents of the safe in 2019.”

Wolff detailed the former president’s relationship with Epstein heavily in the podcast episode. He claimed to have “100 hours of Epstein talking about the inner workings of the Trump White House and about his long standing, deep relationship with Donald Trump.”

The journalist claimed that Epstein served as a “key source” for his previous reporting on Trump.

Karoline Leavitt, the national press secretary for Trump’s campaign, said in a statement to the Daily Beast, “Michael Wolff is a disgraced writer who routinely fabricates lies in order to sell fiction books because he clearly has no morals or ethics. He waited until days before the election to make outlandish false smears all in an effort to engage in blatant election interference on behalf of Kamala Harris. He’s a failed journalist that is resorting to lying for attention.”

© 2024 Latin Times. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

Donald Trump has said those who consider him “a friend of Russia” are “sick,” in an interview with controversial far-right commentator Tucker Carlson in Arizona on Oct.31.

“They love to say that I was a friend of Russia. I worked for Russia, I was a Russian spy — these people are sick,” he said.

According to journalist Bob Woodward’s new book, Trump secretly spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin as many as seven times after he left office.

Trump has repeatedly backed and praised Putin and rarely criticized him. He described Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “genius” and “savvy” in 2022.

Later, Trump blamed President Volodymyr Zelensky and U.S. President Joe Biden for Moscow’s all-out war.

In 2018, Trump accepted Putin’s denial of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election over an assessment from his own intelligence services.

The interview with Carlson comes less than a week before the U.S. presidential election, when Trump will face the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris.

On the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly said he could end Russia’s war within 24 hours if elected president, without elaborating on how he plans to achieve it.

A recent article by the Financial Times (FT) claims that Trump aims to effectively freeze the war and reject Ukraine’s NATO membership in the foreseeable future, at least “until Putin leaves the stage.”

In an interview with Carlson, Trump claimed actions he took related to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline showed he wasn’t friendly with Russia.

Under Trump, the U.S. government  imposed sanctions against Russian companies and the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany.

“I killed. Nobody would kill it but me. I stopped it,” Trump claimed.

With Donald Trump threatening to retake the U.S. presidency next week in the face of Russia’s ongoing aggression in Ukraine, it’s time to take stock of a deeply unsettling fact. After years of investigations by U.S. government bodies from the Justice Department to the FBI to Congress, the American public has no idea if Russian President Vladimir Putin has “something” on Trump—in other words, some compromising information about the would-be 47th president’s past, or what the Russians call kompromat.

Eight years after the FBI first began probing Trump’s Russia connections in mid-2016, national security officials are still puzzled by the former U.S. president’s unrelenting deference to Putin, as well as the enduring mystery of Trump’s decades-old relationship with Russian and former Soviet investors and financiers, some of whom helped save his failing businesses years ago.

So we’re asking the same questions we were asking eight years ago. Is Trump some sort of Manchurian candidate—or in this case, perhaps a Muscovian candidate—controlled by or beholden to Moscow in ways that we don’t know and likely will never know? Or is Trump’s persistently fawning treatment of Putin mainly just a manifestation of his often-expressed admiration of autocrats around the world, including Chinese President Xi Jinping and ​​Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban?

Trump himself has long denied that there is any collusion between him and the Kremlin. But among key U.S. officials who were involved in these earlier investigations, there is no small amount of frustration over this disturbing question.

What has emerged from interviews in recent weeks is an idea of just how ugly and unresolved the disputes remain among the investigators, some of whom are kicking themselves for not going deeper in their probes back then. In many cases, former senior officials at the FBI and Justice Department are still blaming each other for falling short—especially when it comes to the investigation by former special counsel Robert Mueller of Russian election interference and ties between Trump officials and the Kremlin during the Trump administration.

“Here we are in 2024, and over the years since the special counsel started their work in 2017, all we have gotten is more questions, more evidence, more situations that point toward very serious questions about Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia and specifically with Vladimir Putin,” said Andrew McCabe, the former acting director of the FBI who first pushed for the Mueller probe, in a phone interview with Foreign Policy. “And none of those questions have ever been answered,” he added. “Likely because there’s never been a thorough and legitimate investigation of them.”

And that’s unlikely to change if Trump takes office on Jan. 20, 2025.

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Russian interference in the November U.S. election—all apparently in support of Trump—is already more widespread and intense than in 2016, U.S. officials say. Deploying new methods such as deep fakes and paid-for news sources, Russia’s activities “are more sophisticated than in prior election cycles,” a senior official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told reporters in September.

According to the Washington Post, the official cited the use of artificial intelligence as well as “authentic U.S. voices” to “launder” Russian government propaganda and spread socially divisive narratives through major social media and fake websites posing as legitimate U.S. media organizations. Moscow is targeting U.S. swing states “to shape the outcome in favor of former president Donald Trump,” the newspaper said.

Perhaps the most crucial swing state that could decide the election is Pennsylvania, and on Oct. 25, U.S. officials announced that “Russian actors” were behind a widely circulated video falsely depicting mail-in ballots for Trump being destroyed in a critical county of that state—in an apparent effort to justify Trump’s regular rants about election fraud.

In late September, the U.S. Justice Department accused two employees of RT, the Kremlin’s media arm, of funneling nearly $10 million to a company that media outlets later identified as Tenet Media, a Tennessee-based company that has hosted right-wing pro-Trump commentators with millions of subscribers on YouTube and other social media platforms. The Biden administration also announced the seizure of 32 internet domains used in Russian government-directed foreign malign influence campaigns called “Doppelganger.”

According to Attorney General Merrick Garland, “Putin’s inner circle, including [First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office] Sergei Kiriyenko, directed Russian public relations companies to promote disinformation and state-sponsored narratives as part of a campaign to … secure Russia’s preferred outcome in the election.”

“In some respects, this payment of media sources to put out stories is even more brazen than some of the activities we investigated,” said Andrew Goldstein, a former senior Justice Department lawyer and the co-author of a new book titled Interference: The Inside Story of Trump, Russia, and the Mueller Investigation.

“Americans should be concerned about the fact that Russia interfered in a very substantial way in 2016 on Trump’s behalf, and they’re doing it again by every measure we’ve been able to see publicly,” Goldstein added. “People should be continuing to try to get the bottom of that.”

The most urgent issue, these former officials say, is what might happen if Trump gets elected and follows through on his promise to resolve the Ukraine war quickly. Trump has hinted that he will give Putin at least some of what the Russian president wants—in particular, the parts of Ukraine that he has conquered as well as a pledge to keep Ukraine out of NATO.

“On a foreign-policy level, that is clearly the biggest concern,” McCabe said. “His promise to end it [the war in Ukraine] in one day can only possibly end it one way, and that will be an absolute travesty that could spell the end of NATO, and on and on. There’s a million other things, though. He’s the only president to ever have repeated one-on-one unmonitored, unwitnessed interactions with Vladimir Putin who then gets up in front of the world and tells them he believes Putin over his own intelligence agency.”

Those conversations with Putin continued after Trump left the presidency, according to a new book by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, titled War. Woodward reported that Trump spoke to Putin as many as seven times after he left the presidency and that at one point, in 2024, Trump told a senior aide to leave the room at his mansion in Mar-a-Lago so “he could have what he said was a private phone call” with the Russian leader.

According to Goldstein, “given the difference in the candidates’ views of the war in Ukraine, there is an even greater incentive now for Russia to intervene, wanting Trump to win and not wanting [Democratic nominee and Vice President Kamala] Harris to win.”

Trump himself, asked to confirm the Woodward account of his alleged conversations with Putin since he left the White House during an interview with Bloomberg editor in chief John Micklethwait in mid-October, responded: “I don’t comment on that. … But I will tell you that if I did, it’s a smart thing. If I’m friendly with people, if I can have a relationship with people, that’s a good thing and not a bad thing in terms of a country.”

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So what do we actually know about Trump’s ties to Russia? A great deal. But while there is a great deal of smoke, it’s still difficult to find any fire—that is, any kind of hard evidence of a tit-for-tat relationship that would cause Trump to side with Putin. The investigations simply didn’t go far enough to know if there is one.

What’s clear is that some three decades ago, when Trump’s businesses were buckling under failure after failure and repeatedly declaring bankruptcy—causing him to be toxic to U.S. banks—foreign money played a significant role in reviving his fortunes.

In particular, Trump benefited from investment by wealthy people from Russia and the former Soviet republics, some of them oligarchs linked to Putin. The overseas money came initially in the form of new real-estate partnerships and the purchase of numerous Trump condos—but Trump also benefited from help from the Bayrock Group, run by Tevfik Arif, a Kazakhstan-born former Soviet official who drew on unknown sources of money from the former Soviet republic; and Felix Sater, a Russian-born businessman who pleaded guilty in the 1990s to a massive stock-fraud scheme involving the Russian mafia. Some of the overseas banks and investment groups that Trump used also had alleged ties to the Kremlin and Russian money launderers linked to Putin, according to U.S. officials.

Trump’s own family has acknowledged his dependence on Russian money, without ever saying where in Russia it came from. In September 2008, at the “Bridging U.S. and Emerging Markets Real Estate” conference in New York, his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., said: “In terms of high-end product influx into the United States, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. … We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Trump’s former longtime architect, the late Alan Lapidus, confirmed this in a 2018 interview with me, saying that in the aftermath of Trump’s earlier financial troubles, “he could not get anybody in the United States to lend him anything. It was all coming out of Russia. His involvement with Russia was deeper than he’s acknowledged.”

In the view of U.S. investigators, these historical connections to Russia looked suspicious and helped to explain why during the 2016 presidential campaign, some of the people in Trump’s orbit—including Trump’s son, daughter, and son-in-law—were contacted by at least 14 Russians at a time when it was clear that the Kremlin was interfering in the U.S. election in Trump’s favor. Parts of this relationship were hyped as open collusion by the so-called Steele dossier produced by a former British intelligence agent, Christopher Steele, which was later mostly debunked.

All those suspicions in turn led to the FBI probe and then the Mueller investigation, along with a massive bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee that identified a close associate of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort—Konstantin Kilimnik—as a Russian intelligence officer.

“Manafort’s high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik and associates of [Russian oligarch] Oleg Deripaska, represented a grave counterintelligence threat,” read the 2020 Senate report. The report also delved into Trump’s relationships with women in Moscow during his trips there starting in the mid-1990s.

But the Senate investigation was limited by partisan infighting and insufficient subpoena power, and the FBI and Justice Department never followed through fully as the narrowly focused Mueller probe got under way.

One key reason why we don’t know more about Trump’s ties to Russia appears to be that Trump and his lawyers aggressively interfered with the Justice Department investigation—and in particular, reports suggest that they pressured former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who was overseeing the Mueller probe.

Trump’s efforts to obstruct the investigation were extensively detailed in the Mueller report itself, which came out in April 2019. According to McCabe and others, Trump and his team were intent on ensuring that the president’s past financial ties to Russia did not become part of the probe, and they made that clear to Rosenstein, who was described in several accounts as rattled by the pressure and unsure what to do.

“I think Rod desperately didn’t want to get fired. I think Rod navigated a lot of those pressure situations with his first and strongest eye on self-preservation,” McCabe told me.

Some of these tactics were reported in a 2020 book by New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt, Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President. Schmidt wrote that Rosenstein quietly curtailed the investigation by making it strictly about whether Trump or his campaign officials committed criminal offenses through colluding with Russia or by covering up such collusion. Apparently bowing to pressure from Rosenstein, Mueller dropped the original counterintelligence probe into Trump’s long-term business ties to Russia—in other words, ignoring any questions about what might have motivated Trump to favor or collude with Moscow.

McCabe said he was unaware that Rosenstein was doing this. “Had I known at the time that there would be no investigation of the counterintelligence concerns, I would have continued that work at the FBI,” he said.

Andrew Weissmann, another member of the Mueller team and a former FBI general counsel, also wrote in a 2020 book that fears of dismissal—and unrelenting pressure from the White House—had a lot to do with the limits on the investigation. Trump had already fired then-FBI Director James Comey, partly for pursuing the Russia probe, and behind the scenes, the president was threatening to get rid of Mueller as well, according to several news accounts as well as the final Mueller report.

In his book Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation, Weissmann wrote that the Mueller team “was put on notice” that “a broad-based financial investigation might lead to our firing.” He wrote that at one point, Mueller told his investigators, “if the president were in the tank with Putin, ‘It would be about money’—that is, that Trump was motivated by money and his fawning behavior toward Putin could be explained by his seeking to make a buck in Russia. We all knew we had to dig deeper.”

They never did dig deeper, and even now, they are still arguing about why that never happened. Weissman blames Aaron Zebley, Mueller’s chief deputy and a co-author, with Goldstein, of Interference. Weissmann accused Zebley of fretting about retribution from Trump and the White House if the Mueller team dared, for example, to subpoena the president or his son Donald Trump Jr. as part of the inquiry. (They never did.) In the end, Weissmann wrote, the Mueller probe was doomed by its reluctance to fully examine Trump’s financial history and ties to Russia.

“The inability to chase down all financial leads, or to examine all crimes, gnawed at me, and still does,” Weissmann wrote. “Our investigation and report do not resolve those issues once and for all. But we, as a country, are entitled not to have to wonder what the facts would have revealed.”

In interviews with me in the past month, Zebley and Goldstein denied that they were ever directly pressured to narrow the investigation.

“There were definitely no red lines,” Zebley told me. “There was never any sort of decision not to examine something financial, or anything else, when there was cause to do so.” Nonetheless, those who worked with Mueller acknowledge that the special counsel was directed only to conduct a purely criminal investigation, dispensing with the counterintelligence component that McCabe wanted to pursue.

Rosenstein, who is now in private law practice, responded to a request for comment by indicating, in an email, that he did not wish to comment about the scope of the investigation. But he said that he “did what I thought was right and consistent with my oath to faithfully execute the duties of the office, which often angered Trump and some of his key allies.” Defenders of Rosenstein say he did his best to keep the investigation going—even as he was under constant threat of being fired by Trump.

“He was incredibly concerned about what Trump might be up to from both the counterintelligence and the criminal side,” said McCabe, who confirmed an earlier report that at several points during the probe, Rosenstein even offered to wear a wire to the White House to help the investigation into Trump. “That really says it all. Rod is a sphinx. He is a survivor, a guy who is capable one day of writing the memo that justifies the firing of Jim Comey and two days later asking me for Comey’s cell phone number because he desperately wanted to talk to him to get his advice on what to do.”

Early on, Rosenstein did defy Trump by appointing Mueller as special counsel, leading to angry reactions by the president and his GOP defenders, who called the probe a “witch hunt.” But in the end, Rosenstein also appeared to bow to the Trump administration’s wishes by endorsing Attorney General Robert Barr’s controversial statement on March 24, 2019—after the Mueller report was completed but before it was released the following month—saying that the Mueller team had found no evidence of crimes by the president.

As the journalist Jeffrey Toobin described it in his book True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump, Barr’s statement “was an obvious and unjustified act of sabotage against Mueller and an extraordinary bequest to the president.”

It is true that the 22-month investigation led by Mueller did not find sufficient evidence to justify criminal charges that the Trump campaign coordinated with Moscow to tip the election, nor that Trump tried to cover up his own role. But the Mueller investigators were also explicit in saying that enough evidence existed to make it impossible for them to exonerate Trump.

That part of their conclusion was ignored by Barr and Rosenstein. Contradicting Trump’s claims that Russian interference on his behalf was a “hoax,” the Mueller report concluded that Russian interference was “sweeping and systematic” and “violated U.S. criminal law,” resulting in the indictment of at least 26 Russian citizens and three Russian organizations.

The Trump White House sought to quash other inquiries into his past as well. In 2019, when the House Financial Services Committee tried to subpoena Deutsche Bank’s records on Trump, the president sued and ultimately won a decision from the Trump-aligned Supreme Court saying the subpoena was not justified. Deutsche Bank, one of the few major banks that would still lend to Trump after his financial debacles, has been heavily fined by U.S. and U.K. regulators for sham trades that could have been used to launder billions of dollars out of Russia.

Most of these former officials believe that a second Trump term would certainly involve fresh threats of dismissal against any Justice Department or FBI officials who don’t fall into line, whether on Russia or Trump’s threats to use the Justice Department to go after his domestic political enemies.

“One thing we learned about Donald Trump in our investigation: What you see is what you get,” Zebley said. “There aren’t two Donald Trumps. If he says he’s going to behave in a particular way, that’s what he’s going to do.”

McCabe agreed. “He’s said it repeatedly many different ways,” he said. “He’s committed to this revenge tour. He’s committed to using the lever of power for his own purposes, whatever those might be, whether lawful or unlawful, now cloaked with immunity from the Supreme Court.” (In a historic but controversial July 1 decision, the Supreme Court granted Trump and future presidents broad immunity from prosecution.)

And that means the FBI and Justice Department will likely go along with whatever a newly elected President Trump wants, McCabe added. “The question is whether people will break within my old organization or the [Justice] Department. Of course they will. At some point they will.”

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During all this time, Trump has consistently defended Putin—or at least refused to criticize him. This goes back to that infamous moment at their first formal summit in Helsinki in July 2018, when Trump took Putin’s point of view after he was asked whether he believed the Russian president or his own intelligence agencies about the allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election (which have since been amply documented).

“President Putin says it’s not Russia” that is meddling, Trump replied. “I don’t see any reason why it would be.” Later, in November of that year, when his own U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, condemned Putin’s violent intervention in Ukraine after Russian ships fired upon, wounded, and seized Ukrainian sailors—Haley called it “yet another reckless Russian escalation”—the then-U.S. president also declined to criticize Putin personally.

Instead, Trump appeared to blame both sides. “Either way, we don’t like what’s happening, and hopefully, it will get straightened out,” Trump said.

Even on the day of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine four years later, Trump actually praised the Russian leader for his aggression. “I said, ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine … as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful,” Trump told a right-wing radio program on Feb. 22, 2022.

And this September, asked at his only debate with Harris whether he wanted Ukraine to win, Trump answered simply: “I want the war to stop.”

Even Trump’s former director of national intelligence, Dan Coats—also a former conservative congressman—admitted that he was worried by the former president’s consistently positive views of the Russian dictator. “His reaching out and never saying anything bad about Putin. For me … it’s scary,” Coats told Woodward.

It is entirely possible, of course, that Trump’s fawning attitude toward Putin is simply another manifestation of his career-long habit of praising people who flatter him and buy his products, no matter what else they might have done, as well as his open admiration for “strong” autocrats.

By his own admission, Trump tends to favor anyone who invests in his businesses, including foreigners. As he said about the Saudis at a campaign rally in 2015: “Saudi Arabia, I get along with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them?”

It was hardly a surprise that even after the CIA blamed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Trump appeared to absolve the crown prince as readily as he often does Putin. In a statement, Trump quoted Saudi officials as describing Khashoggi as an “enemy of the state” and said only, “The world is a very dangerous place!”

“The problem with every one of these things is that there is, in the background, a reasonable or nonnefarious explanation,” said McCabe. “Like the massive inflow of Russian money buying up these high-priced condos, that’s also happening all over in places with safe currency, so it’s hard to disaggregate. Is it throwing him [Trump] a financial lifeline, or is it just him benefiting from this trend in high-end real estate?”

In other words, is Trump just a narcissistic former businessman who caters to his investors—some of whom may now represent the United States’ rivals and adversaries? Or is the explanation far more nefarious than that?

We may never know. And if Trump is elected, many new questions are likely to emerge.

“How on earth can we share human source-derived intelligence about Russia with a president who we think might have an inappropriate relationship with Russia?” said McCabe. “How do you do that without putting those people’s lives in jeopardy? But as president, he has the right to access any of that information. So how do we manage the potential risk there?”

CNN
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Diddy’s legal troubles keep growing.

In the past 11 months, music magnate Sean “Diddy” Combs has faced crescendoing allegations of abuse and sexual assault, culminating in at least 10 civil lawsuits, a federal human trafficking probe and his arrest and indictment.

Prosecutors unsealed the three-count indictment against Combs on September 17, accusing the artist of orchestrating “a criminal enterprise” through his business empire that engaged in sex trafficking, forced labor, kidnapping and decades of physical abuse against women, among other allegations.

Combs pleaded not guilty to each count: racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution. If convicted, he faces a sentence of up to life in prison. He remains in federal custody, held without bail, with his next court appearance scheduled for October 9.

Dozens of witnesses to Combs’ alleged abuses have cooperated in the federal investigation, which led to the dramatic raids of Combs’ Los Angeles and Miami homes in March, prosecutors said.

In addition to Combs’ legal troubles, he has been dealt several personal and public blows in reaction to the accusations, including being stripped of his honorary Howard University degree and symbolic key to New York City.

Here’s a timeline of the key events and allegations against Diddy over the past year.

November 16, 2023: Combs’ former girlfriend, Casandra “Cassie” Ventura, files a lawsuit against the producer claiming he raped and physically abused her. She also claimed Combs inflicted years of emotional abuse on her and sought to control all aspects of her personal life, according to the filing in New York City federal court.

The lawsuit accuses Combs and other defendants of sex trafficking, human trafficking, sexual assault, gender-motivated violence, sexual harassment, gender discrimination and a hostile work environment.

Combs’ attorney at the time, Ben Brafman, said in a statement that “Mr. Combs vehemently denies these offensive and outrageous allegations” and that the suit was “riddled with baseless and outrageous lies.”

The suit described an altercation in a hotel hallway in March 2016 in which Diddy allegedly “grabbed at her,” beat her and threw glass vases at her. Earlier this year, CNN published hotel surveillance video from 2016 which shows Combs grabbing and beating Ventura and throwing an object at her.

November 17, 2023: Just a day after it was filed, Combs and Ventura agree to settle the lawsuit. Both musical artists released statements saying the matter was resolved “amicably.”

Combs’ attorney, Brafman, said the settlement was “in no way an admission of wrongdoing.”

November 23, 2023: Two more women accuse Combs of sexual assault in lawsuits filed in New York Supreme Court on the eve of the expiration of the state’s Adult Survivors Act.

The first woman, Joi Dickerson-Neal, had appeared with Combs in a music video and alleged in her suit that the artist drugged and sexually assaulted her in 1991, when she was a Syracuse University student. She also accuses Combs of filming the assault and showing the video to others, in what the suit calls “revenge porn.”

The second woman, Liza Gardner, accused Combs and Aaron Hall, a member of the R&B group Guy, of battery and sexual assault in 1990, when she was 16 years old. Gardner initially filed the suit anonymously but later amended the complaint to include her name and additional allegations.

Combs denied claims made against him by multiple women in a December 2023 Instagram post, writing, “Sickening allegations have been made against me by individuals looking for a quick payday. Let me be absolutely clear: I did not do any of the awful things being alleged. I will fight for my name, my family and for the truth.”

December 6, 2023: An anonymous woman using the name “Jane Doe” files a federal lawsuit against Diddy and two other defendants in the Southern District of New York accusing Combs of sex trafficking and gang rape, among other allegations. She was 17 at the time of the alleged assault in 2003.

The suit claims Combs involved the high school student in a sex trafficking scheme that involved “plying her with drugs and alcohol and transporting her by private jet to New York City where she was gang raped by the three individual defendants at Mr. Combs’ studio,” Douglas H. Wigdor, her attorney, said in a statement, “The depravity of these abhorrent acts has, not surprisingly, scarred our client for life.”

Combs posted a sweeping denial of the growing allegations against him in his December Instagram post, claiming the accusers who had stepped forward were attempting to “assassinate my character, destroy my reputation and my legacy.”

February 26: Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones, a former videographer and music producer for Combs, accuses Combs in a federal lawsuit of racketeering, sexual assault, sex trafficking and “grooming.”

Among other allegations, Jones claims Combs forced him to procure and interact with sex workers, threatened him and served alcoholic beverages laced with drugs to house party guests. He claims to have video and audio recording of the musician and his staff “engaging in serious illegal activity,” according to a complaint filed in New York federal court.

Combs’ attorney at the time, Shawn Holley, denied the allegations and called Jones’ accounts “pure fiction.” He added, “We have overwhelming, indisputable proof that his claims are complete lies.”

March 25: Heavily armed teams of federal agents – some in armored vehicles and tactical gear – execute dramatic raids of Combs’ homes in Los Angeles and the Miami area.

The searches were carried out by Homeland Security Investigations as part of an ongoing sex trafficking investigation, a law enforcement source told CNN at the time.

March 26: Aaron Dyer, a now-former attorney for Combs, criticizes the raids of the producer’s homes as a “gross overuse of military-level force.”

April 4: Combs is named as a defendant in a lawsuit brought against his son, Christian Combs, in Los Angeles. In the complaint, former yacht crew member Grace O’Marcaigh accuses Christian Combs of sexually assaulting her in December 2022, when she was working on a boat chartered by the Combs family.

Diddy is not accused of sexual assault in the lawsuit but is included in allegations of liability and aiding and abetting.

Dyer said in a statement they believe the lawsuit contains “manufactured lies and irrelevant facts,” and they will seek to “dismiss this outrageous claim.”

May 17: CNN publishes hotel surveillance video from 2016 that shows Combs brutally beating Ventura – a striking revelation following Combs’ repeated denials of Ventura’s past claims he had assaulted her.

The video, taken at the now-closed InterContinental Hotel in Century City, Los Angeles, shows Combs running down a hallway after Ventura with a towel wrapped around his waist. He grabs Ventura by the back of the neck, throws her to the floor and kicks her, video shows. The video goes on to show Combs dragging Ventura on the floor and throwing an object at her.

Ventura, who reached an undisclosed settlement with Combs in her lawsuit against him, declined to comment on the video.

Wigdor, an attorney for Ventura, told CNN: “The gut-wrenching video has only further confirmed the disturbing and predatory behavior of Mr. Combs. Words cannot express the courage and fortitude that Ms. Ventura has shown in coming forward to bring this to light.”

May 19: Combs apologizes for physically assaulting Ventura in the video published by CNN two days prior. In a video statement, the producer calls his behavior “inexcusable” and says he takes “full responsibility” for the actions show in the surveillance footage.

“I was disgusted then when I did it. I’m disgusted now,” he added. “I went and I sought out professional help. I got into going to therapy, going to rehab. I had to ask God for his mercy and grace. I’m so sorry. But I’m committed to be a better man each and every day. I’m not asking for forgiveness. I’m truly sorry.”

The apology video has since been removed from Combs’ Instagram.

The same day, Ventura’s attorney, Meredith Firetog, said in a statement that Combs’ apology was “more about himself than the many people he has hurt.”

“When Cassie and multiple other women came forward, he denied everything and suggested that his victims were looking for a payday. That he was only compelled to ‘apologize’ once his repeated denials were proven false shows his pathetic desperation, and no one will be swayed by his disingenuous words,” Firetog added.

May 21: Crystal McKinney, a former model and MTV competition show winner, files a federal lawsuit accusing Diddy of drugging and sexually assaulting her following a Men’s Fashion Week event in New York City. She was 22 at the time.

CNN sought comment from Combs’ attorneys but did not receive a response.

May 23: April Lampros, who met Diddy in 1994 when she was a student at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, files a lawsuit in New York Supreme Court accusing Diddy of sexual assault, battery, assault, negligent infliction of emotional distress and violation of the victims of gender-motivated violence protection law.

Lampros accuses Combs of four instances of sexual assault from the mid-1990s to the early-2000s.

CNN sought comment from Combs’ attorneys but did not receive a response.

May 29: CNN reports federal investigators are preparing to bring Combs’ accusers before a grand jury, citing two sources familiar with the probe – a move that would mark a significant escalation of the government’s investigation into Combs.

Additional sources told CNN that most of the plaintiffs who had filed civil lawsuits against Combs had been interviewed by federal investigators. Some were handing over evidence they believed could assist investigators, one source said.

A spokesperson for Homeland Security Investigations declined to comment on the existence of a grand jury at the time, but noted the investigation remained ongoing.

June 10: Combs returns his symbolic key to New York City after Mayor Eric Adams sent a letter to Combs requesting he do so. Adams wrote that he was “deeply disturbed” by the video published by CNN showing Combs physically assaulting Ventura.

June 7: Howard University’s Board of Trustees votes unanimously to revoke the honorary degree given to Combs in 2014, saying the artist is “no longer worthy to hold the institution’s highest honor.” The university said it would also return Combs’ $1 million contribution and terminate a $1 million pledge agreement from the Sean Combs Foundation.

July 3: Adria English, a former adult film actress, accuses Combs of sex trafficking and sexual assault in a federal lawsuit filed in New York. The suit alleges Combs and other defendants used English as “a sexual pawn for the pleasure and financial benefit of others” during parties at several of the producer’s homes.

The complaint also alleges Combs forced English to “engage in prostitution and sex work” between 2006 and 2009.

“No matter how many lawsuits are filed it won’t change the fact that Mr. Combs has never sexually assaulted or sex trafficked anyone,” Jonathan Davis, an attorney for Combs said in a statement in response to the lawsuit.

September 11: Singer Dawn Richard, a former member of the musical group Danity Kane, files a suit accusing Combs of sexual battery, sexual harassment and false imprisonment, among other allegations. She also claims to have seen Combs “brutally beat” Ventura while the pair were dating in the 2000s.

Erica Wolff, Combs’ attorney, denied the allegations in a statement to CNN and accused Richard of having a financial motive. “It’s unfortunate that Ms. Richard has cast their 20-year friendship aside to try and get money from him, but Mr. Combs is confidently standing on truth and looks forward to proving that in court,” the statement said, in part.

September 16: Combs is arrested in New York City after a grand jury voted to indict him on charges of racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution.

Combs had relocated to New York several days before the arrest in anticipation of the charges, his attorney said. Negotiations for his surrender had been ongoing, according to a source familiar with the talks.

September 17: A wide-ranging indictment against Combs is unsealed, publicly revealing the three charges against him and accusing the music mogul of creating a “criminal enterprise” whose members and associates engaged in and attempted to engage in, among other crimes, sex trafficking, forced labor, kidnapping, arson, bribery and obstruction of justice.

Prosecutors allege Combs perpetrated decades of abuse and coercion against women and others in his network to “fulfill his sexual desires, protect his reputation, and conceal his conduct,” the indictment states. In addition to allegations of physical abuse against women, prosecutors accuse Combs of orchestrating extended, drug-fueled sex performances called “Freak Offs” between victims and sex workers.

Combs appears in court hours after the indictment is unsealed and pleads not guilty.

He is denied bail and Judge Robyn Tarnofsky rules he will remain in custody as the case plays out, a decision that Combs’ attorneys appeals.

September 18: In a hearing appealing his detention, prosecutors ask the judge to keep Combs behind bars, telling the court he has attempted to tamper with witnesses. His defense asks him to be released until trial and submits a bail package that included a $50 million bond.

Judge Andrew Carter sides with prosecutors and agrees to detain Combs ahead of trial. “My bigger concern deals with the danger of obstruction of justice and the danger of witness tampering,” Carter said.

September 24: Thalia Graves files a lawsuit in federal court in New York accusing Combs and his bodyguard of drugging and sexually assaulting her and filming it in 2001.

The bodyguard, Joseph Sherman, denies the accusations and says he has never met her and was not working with Combs at the time. Combs has not yet responded to the suit.

CNN’s Nicki Brown, John Miller, Eric Levenson, Alli Rosenbloom, Kristina Sgueglia, Lisa Respers France and Sandra Gonzalez contributed to this report.