.. the suggestion that Mr. Stone knew in advance, or predicted, that John D. Podesta, the campaign chairman of the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, would be hacked or his emails released. Not long before Mr. Podesta’s emails were released last fall, Mr. Stone wrote on Twitter that “it will soon” be the chairman’s “time in the barrel.”
His prepared remarks, however, said that Mr. Stone was merely referring to his expectation that Mr. Podesta’s business connections to Ukraine would soon come to light, based in part on opposition research.
.. Mr. Stone is also expected to tell the House panel that he was never in direct communication with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, and therefore did not know in advance about emails that were stolen from the Democratic National Committee during the campaign. Rather, according to Mr. Stone’s prepared remarks, he learned about them on Twitter and later asked a journalist who knew Mr. Assange to confirm the report.
.. The statement does not dispute that Mr. Stone communicated with Guccifer 2.0, an online persona who American officials believe was a front in the Russian hacking efforts. But it does say he believed that the interactions were entirely “benign,” and it casts doubt on American intelligence concluding that the online account was a Russian intelligence front.
Kushner used private email to conduct White House business
The senior adviser set up the account after the election. Other West Wing officials have also used private email accounts for official business.
Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, set up their private family domain late last year before moving to Washington from New York, according to people with knowledge of events as well as publicly available internet registration records. At the time, Kushner — who served as a senior campaign adviser — was expected to be named to a White House role, while Ivanka Trump was publicly saying she didn’t plan to work in her father’s administration.
.. People familiar with the account say it was primarily set up for Kushner’s personal communications, but he has used it to communicate with acquaintances outside the White House about matters relating to Trump and the administration, according to people who have received messages, as well as with his White House colleagues... Private email traffic among White House aides — some of it sent between personal email accounts rather than to or from government addresses — could skirt the requirements of the Presidential Records Act, which requires all documents related to the president’s personal and political activities to be archived... Other White House officials have also sometimes used personal accounts to correspond with Kushner and with each other, according to emails seen by POLITICO and people familiar with Kushner’s correspondence. They have also used encrypted apps like Signal and Confide that automatically delete messages, prompting former press secretary Sean Spicer in February to issue a warning to communications staffers that using such apps could violate the Presidential Records Act... The use of personal email accounts in the Trump White House has been somewhat common, even though the president has been a harsh critic of Clinton’s private email habits, frequently leading “lock her up” chants as he traveled across the country on the campaign trail... If emails related to Trump aren’t saved, it could be difficult for historians, according to Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University. Zelizer said that historians can provide a richer history of how administrations work — and historians have feared for years that the proliferation of email will lead some people to do their business in ways in which the records can’t be archived. Zelizer said it could also make the job more difficult for investigators seeking to understand parts of the White House.
Donald Trump’s Dominatrix
But Trump doesn’t meet his audiences on their terms. He uses each as a sounding board for his vanities, insecurities, delusions and fixations. Clinton factors mightily into all of these. She’s his psychological dominatrix.
.. Many political observers have noted Trump’s hyperconsciousness of Barack Obama, who was also mentioned in those remarks to the boy scouts, which were so inappropriately political and self-centered that parents actually lodged complaints.
.. While he merely itches to erase Obama from the history books, he’s desperate to keep her at the center of every page. Beneath all of his braggadocio about the genius of his campaign strategy and the potency of his connection to blue-collar Americans, he knows that he made it to the White House largely because many voters didn’t want her there and he was Door No. 2.
So he reminds them of that. Over and over again.
.. They whisper sweet nothings. She saves him from damnation.
Don’t look at his campaign’s relationship with Russia. Look at hers with Ukraine! Don’t focus on Don Jr.’s incriminating emails. Focus on her missing ones! And while you’re at it, tally up how many of her donors are on Robert Mueller’s staff and take fresh note of her big-dollar speeches. Seldom has a scapegoat grazed in such a profusion of pastures.
.. He’s more or less back to chanting “lock her up,” as if it’s early November all over again.
.. During the second of their three debates, he was accused of shadowing her onstage, but that was nothing next to the way he pursues her now. His administration slips further into chaos; he diverts the discussion to her. She’s the answer to evolving scandals. She’s the antidote to a constipated agenda — or so he wagers. What stature he has inadvertently given her. And what extraordinary staying power.
James Comey Is Maxwell Smart
How Comey’s botched mission to safeguard a Hillary presidency elected Trump.
It’s far more likely that Mr. Comey conceived of his intervention as a counterintelligence operation. Hillary would win. Russia’s fake email about Ms. Lynch conspiring to prevent a Hillary indictment would become public and be used by Trump partisans and America’s adversaries to discredit her victory. Therefore he would neutralize this Russian threat by clearing Mrs. Clinton himself. In doing so, it now appears he accidentally secured Mr. Trump’s win.
Free yourself from any hindsight bias. All actors at the time were convinced Hillary would win; for U.S. officials, the urgency was to protect Mrs. Clinton’s inevitable presidency from Russian dirty tricks.
.. Mr. McAuliffe, in last month’s podcast, opined flatly that Russia also expected Mrs. Clinton to win and wanted to destabilize her presidency.
Mr. Comey himself, in public testimony, gave mumbly assent to the “intelligence community’s” now-claim that Russia wasn’t just trying to weaken Mrs. Clinton but elect Donald Trump, arguing that in a two-person race, hurting one necessarily helps the other.
Such sophistries aside, this is implausible. Against all polling, Russia would not have thought trying to elect Mr. Trump a good investment. In effect, this claim about Russian motives is another counterintelligence operation by our own intelligence community to distract from its botched counterintelligence operation that elected Mr. Trump.
To be clear, we’re not talking about a conspiracy exactly, but about intelligence leaders adjusting their statements and emphases on the fly to pretty up an embarrassing picture.
.. Hillary and her surrogates tirelessly flogged an apparent Trump-Putin affinity to her advantage. Mrs. Clinton’s mistake was devoting too many of her resources to the wrong states.
.. It’s useful to recall that what the FBI handed over to Special Counsel Robert Mueller was a “counterintelligence investigation”—an inquiry into the facts of Russia’s meddling, not a criminal investigation seeking something, anything to pin on Donald Trump.
If Mr. Mueller does not see the importance of coming clean on the Comey intervention (whether or not he wants to acknowledge that the Comey intervention may have elected Mr. Trump), then Mr. Mueller is part of the stonewall.