"In many—if not all—U.S. jurisdictions that use grand juries, prosecutors often have a choice between seeking an indictment from a grand jury and filing a charging document directly with the court. Such a document is usually called an information, accusation, or complaint, to distinguish it from a grand-jury indictment. To protect the suspect's due-process rights in felony cases (where the suspect's interest in liberty is at stake), there is usually a preliminary hearing, at which a judge determines whether there was probable cause to arrest the suspect who is in custody. If the judge finds such probable cause, he or she binds, or holds over, the suspect for trial." wiki on indictment in the US
————
A question has arisen of whether or not a grand jury in the District of Columbia will indict officials of the government who were allies of the Obama Administration. DC is a heavily Democratic place.
This wiki makes it clear that a "true bill" indictment from a grand jury is not necessary for prosecution. Such an indictment is merely customary in most cases from respect for our English Common Law heritage.
IMO it is doubtful that a petit jury in DC would convict during actual trials.
Alternatively, this difficulty as well as the one with the grand jury could be overcome by changing the venue of the proceeding to the Eastern Federal Court District for Virginia where IMO both an indictment and conviction would be very likely. The demographics and politics are much different on this side of the Potomac in a district that covers the whole eastern half of the Commonwealth of Virginia. pl
Unveiling of more dodgy Western law enforcement:
“The conscientious judges of the European Court of Human Rights published a judgement a fortnight ago which utterly exploded the version of events promulgated by Western governments and media in the case of the late Mr Magnitskiy. Yet I can find no truthful report of the judgement in the mainstream media at all.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/09/the-magnitskiy-myth-exploded/
Federal courts require an indictment absent the consent of the accused. Some states don’t require an amendment. A trial of U.S. v McCabe would require an indictment. From Wikipedia “The requirement of an indictment has not been incorporated against the states; therefore, even though the federal government uses grand juries and indictments, not all U.S. states do.[11]”
I sat on a Special Federal Grand Jury for a year around 2007. If I recall correctly, we did indeed indict a salami sandwich. If the prosecutor declines prosecution, the fix must be in.
The name of the deli meat has been changed, to preserve the secrecy of the proceedings.
Colonel,
Speaking of CI:
https://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-russia-carried-out-a-stunning-breach-of-fbi-communications-system-escalating-the-spy-game-on-us-soil-090024212.html?soc_src=hl-viewer&soc_trk=tw
J
The question has been raised rather U.S. Attorney General William Pelham Barr has the Will to carry out a Vigerous and Prolonged Investigation into this matter of Criminal Acts and Abuses of Office by Various Government Officials and Employees Starting with The FBI..and Possibly All the Way Up to John Brennen and Officals with in the Barack Obama Administration..and all the Questions asked about Who Knew What…When..and What was Authorized..and Who was Illegally Protected..My Thinking is The Answer to that is YES…William Barr..The Justice Deprtment..and U.S. Attorney John Henry Durham.will Leave No Stone Unturned..and The Results will Be the Most Dramatic..and Stunning in the History of the United States..With Many Indictments and Charges being Brought against many of those Now Know by The American People..to Be Involved.. I have No Doubt that Attorney General William P, Barr will see to That…an Rightly So..and The Word..JUSTICE will Once again..Have Meaning…Justice For ALL…
Jim
I will be shocked if what you believe happens. It will be so uncharacteristic of the deep corruption in our nations capital. The revolving door and personal enrichment and a two-tier justice system has got to the point of brazenness.
Jim Ticehurst, Jack,
I would not even go so far as to hazard a guess as to whether Attorney-General Barr has the will to expose all these cans of worms, on both sides of the Atlantic.
On the other hand, it seems clear to me that Ed Butowsky has. Whether he has the capability to do so is another matter, but the material in the suits filed on his behalf by Ty Clevenger and Steven S. Biss looks pretty strong.
Among other things, I have been reflecting on the implications of the claim in the Second Amended Complaint in the suit Butowsky filed against Michael Gottlieb, various other prominent legal organisations and individuals, and prominent MSM organisations and individuals, about the sourcing of the information about Seth Rich provided to him by Seymour Hersh.
(See https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txed.188353/gov.uscourts.txed.188353.101.0.pdf )
In paragraph 57, it is asserted that in a ‘phone call separate from that of which the audio has long been available on the internet, Hersh told Butowsky that ‘he obtained his information about Seth Rich from Mr. McCabe, the deputy FBI director.’
(For the audio, see https://bigleaguepolitics.com/audio-seymour-hersh-states-seth-rich-wikileaks-source/ ; for a – very inadequate – transcript, see https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6r2dpf/rough_transcript_seymour_hersh_on_seth_rich/ . If anyone knows of a better transcript, I would be glad to hear.)
This claim by Butowsky obviously puts the account Hersh gives in a quite different light.
It would seem there is every reason to suspect that McCabe was providing a ‘limited hangout’, at a point when there was every reason to doubt that it would be possible to cover up the fact that the materials from the DNC had been leaked by Seth Rich, rather than hacked by the Russians.
The conversation suggests that Hersh did not see the FBI report referred to, but instead had to rely upon McCabe’s account of it.
So we have both a question as to whether the document was accurately described to him, and that of whether it accurately reported the results of the investigation.
Where we have every reason to suspect that distortion has entered in, I think, is in the claim that it was some time in late spring or early summer – Hersh takes the dividing line between the two to be at 21 June – that Rich first made contact with WikiLeaks.
A natural construction of the version which McCabe is producing, moreover, is that he is trying to disseminate a ‘narrative’ according to which the FBI had no knowledge of Rich’s involvement in supplying this material to WikiLeaks until their best cyber people examined his computer following his murder, which was on 10 July.
There is then a quite baffling passage. Apart from confusing FBI and NSA, I think the transcript accurately reproduces what Hersh says:
‘I don’t know how he dealt with the Wikileaks and the mechanism but he also, the word was passed according to the FBI report, “I’ve also shared this box with a couple of friends so if anything happens to me it’s not going to solve your problem”. OK. I don’t know what that means.’
Now, there is no point in trying to preserve oneself by making it clear that one’s death will not prevent disclosure, but rather make matters worse, rather than better, for possible assassins, if the information is not communicated to the people who might be tempted to resort to extreme measures.
So – what is being suggested – that after he had supplied the materials to the Dropbox to which he gave WikiLeaks the password, Rich told people at the DNC that he had done so?
It really is very unclear.
What however the ‘Second Amended Complaint’ seems to make clear is that Butowsky no longer believes the version he was given by Hersh.
From paragraph 40:
‘According to an article in Esquire magazine, DNC officials found out on May 5, 2016 that the DNC’s servers had been breached. According to the article, the servers had been breached by Russian hackers, and the DNC asked an internet security company, CrowdStrike, Inc., to investigate the breach. In reality, Perkins Coie had hired CrowdStrike on behalf of the DNC, just like it hired Fusion GPS on behalf of the Clinton campaign, and it did so for the purpose of creating a diversion. Contrary to the Esquire story, the DNC had discovered prior to May 5, 2016 that one of its own employees had been leaking emails (the DNC likely did not know the identity of the employee at that time, but they knew the leak was internal). The DNC also knew that the emails would soon become public, and it knew that the emails would be very damaging to Mrs. Clinton’s political campaign.’
My suspicion has long been that the fact that some indications of the negotiations between Rich and ‘WikiLeaks’ were identified quite early on, through surveillance of what was coming in to the latter – and Assange personally – rather than what was going out of the DNC.
And it has seemed to me quite likely that GCHQ and/or MI6 were involved in the initial discovery.
It is often the case with disinformation, that it provides a ‘cocktail’ of falsehood and truth, so that it is sometimes possible to, as it were, distil the latter by ‘evaporating out’ the former.
A quite likely possibility would seem to be that ‘CrowdStrike’ were indeed brought in on 6 May, as the ‘Esquire’ article states, but as part of an investigation to establish who was likely to be leaking the material, and/or, preparations to blame the Russians.
The calling in of the laptops of the DNC staff is reported to have been done on 10 June. It has long seemed to me quite likely that this calling in was not to ensure cybersecurity but to trace the leaker.
And, if the laptop which Rich was using to handle his negotiations with ‘WikiLeaks’ was the same as the one he used in the office, he might have been identified as a result of this.
But then, he might well not have been.
What I do think likely is that the dramatic escalatory moves in the campaign to save Hillary in early May 2016 – these are described in the ‘Second Amended Complaint’, with a reference to Larry’s piece here in May 2019 entitled ‘The Campaign to Paint Trump as a Russian Stooge Started on May 4, 2016’ – were a response to the discovery of the leak.
(See https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/05/the-campaign-to-paint-trump-as-a-russian-stooge-started-on-may-4-2016-by-larry-c-johnson.html .)
And this, it now seems to me likely, was what the ‘limited hangout’ provided to Hersh by McCabe was designed to obscure.
A critical point is that if people could be persuaded that the top figures in the FBI only realised after 10 July 2016 that Rich was the source of the DNC leaks, then awkward questions, which could both be about the responsibility for his killing, and about responsibility for failing to prevent it, could be avoided.
Here, a key sentence in paragraph 42 of the ‘Second Amended Complaint’ is relevant: ‘Mr. Butowsky does not know whether the murder is related to Mr. Rich’s role in leaking DNC emails.’
My view is that, although I do not know it was related, I think it extremely likely that it was, in some way.
However, there is quite a wide range of people who, for a quite a wide range of motives, might, had they learned that Rich had leaked these materials, thought they stood to gain by removing him, as it were, from circulation (on this point, he may have been naive.)
A problem for the ‘Clintonistas’, however, might have been that they were well aware that, if the actual facts came out, a great many people would have concluded that Rich was ‘Arkancided’ – whatever the facts of the matter actually were.
D Habakkuk –
Thanks for this update on the twists and turns of the little-covered investigation into Seth Rich’s involvement in leaking DNC emails to Wikileaks. It appears that most news media prefer to leave it a settled question that “the Russians did it.”
Your suggestion that British intelligence first discovered the leak, while monitoring Assange, seems reasonable.
On August 16, 2016 the NYT reports that the DNC discovered the leak in April. However, the earlier 6/14 NYT story, which is cited, only reports that a second group “appeared to have attacked in April.” It does not say that the attack was detected in April. (This is the 6/14 story in present form. As others have surely noted, NYT stories tend to morph online.) As you say, the timeline is sketchy.
A curiosity, looking backwards – the June story emphasizes chiefly that the second intrusion took “troves of opposition research” on Trump. And it concludes by reminding us that Chinese hackers are believed to have hacked into both Obama and McCain campaigns in 2008. (Thus,SOP? HRC and DNC cannot be faulted?)
Since DNC never allowed FBI to screen its computers, we may never learn what in fact was there. However, it seems a realistic possibility that Russian hackers did dive into poorly protected DNC systems. Why wouldn’t they? But, just as in 2008, even if they did this, where is the evidence that information they might have collected ever went beyond the Kremlin?
On the other hand, there seems to be some evidence that the emails were provided by someone in D.C. with direct access to DNC computers. To cite a few bits:
1)In Dec 2016, Craig Murray said that he traveled to Washington to get some of the documents from a source, and that the source was a Democratic insider, not Russians.
2) VIPS report in Jan 2017, based on analysis of metadata in Guccifer downloads. (Guccifer claiming to be the Wikileaks source) The VIPS report found the download speed was too fast for available internet speeds. Only direct access to DNC computers would make the speed possible. Also, found that files had been tampered with to add Russian stamps. (No proof has been offered that Guccifer is the actual leaker, but it is part of the official attribution of leaks to Russia.)
The Nation has one of the better reports of these VIPS findings.
https://www.thenation.com/article/a-new-report-raises-big-questions-about-last-years-dnc-hack/
3) McCabe report to Hersh
To make the official government account of Russian interference credible, FBI needs to provide some hard evidence that Russia passed this information to Wikileaks. Given the recent government track record of distortion and poor analysis, “trust us” no longer works for much of the public. Or perhaps endless media repetition, with a garnish of fear mongering, does eventually wear down public resistance?
I cannot imagine a rational reason that eliminating Seth Rich would benefit DNC or Clinton, when the cat was already out of the bag. Just the opposite, as you infer. So it seems, to me, unlikely that they were responsible for his death. Still, the coincidence of the timing of the murder, after the breach was disclosed and before publication, is unsettling. As you say, there may have been others, who had different interests.
A final question: Has anyone been named as the source of Podesta emails? Is there any specific work of attribution, apart from the broad claim that all Wikileaks data on Clinton were provided by Russian hacks?