Once, in his days as New York’s chief federal prosecutor and later as the city’s mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani was a master of releasing damaging leaks aimed at the kneecaps of opponents. Sometimes, they were true.
.. witnesses told the inspector general that a fear of leaks from within the F.B.I. drove the agency’s former director, James Comey, to break with established policy against opening or discussing investigations in the run-up to an election.
.. The former attorney general, Loretta Lynch, told investigators that Mr. Comey “said, ‘It’s clear to me that there is a cadre of senior people in New York who have a deep and visceral hatred of Secretary Clinton.’ And he said, ‘It is deep.’”
.. Mr. Comey said he found it “stunning,” Ms. Lynch told the investigators. She replied to him: “I’m just troubled that this issue — meaning the, the New York agent issue and leaks — I am just troubled that this issue has put us where we are today with respect to this laptop.”
.. On Oct. 25, 2016, three days before Mr. Comey’s stunning announcement, Mr. Giuliani appeared on a Fox morning television show.
“We got a couple of surprises left,” Mr. Giuliani said.
He chortled, and when asked to expand on the subject, replied, “And I think it’ll be enormously effective.”
On Thursday, Oct. 27, Mr. Giuliani appeared on another Fox show and said he was talking about “pretty big surprises.” He added, “We’ve got a couple of things up our sleeve that should turn this thing around.”
The news of the reactivated email inspection arrived the following day
.. Upon inspection by the F.B.I., the emails on the laptop turned out to be much ado about hardly anything — many of them had already been reviewed, and the authorities decided they did not warrant changing the conclusion
.. In interviews this week, including on Fox, Mr. Giuliani said that the “surprise” he was talking about in 2016 had nothing to do with the email investigation, but was a speech that Mr. Trump was going to give right before the election blasting Mrs. Clinton.
It’s hard to imagine that anyone, Mr. Giuliani included, would have classified a Trump campaign speech as a “pretty big surprise.”
.. On the day of Mr. Comey’s announcement in 2016, Mr. Giuliani was so pleased that he blurted out a description of his sources for inside information on the email case.
“The other rumor that I get is that there’s a kind of revolution going on inside the F.B.I. about the original conclusion being completely unjustified, and almost a slap in the face of the F.B.I.’s integrity,” Mr. Giuliani said in a radio interview with Lars Larson, the conservative talk show host.
“I know that from former agents. I know that even from” — Mr. Giuliani paused, then continued — “a few active agents who obviously don’t want to identify themselves.”
.. And now Mr. Giuliani is telling a new version. All his predictions were just speculation by retired agents, he said on Fox Business recently.
“We knew just by instinct,” he said, “that the New York office was enraged.”
Michael Avenatti is using Trump tactics to battle Trump, a strategy that comes with risks
“Nothing he has been doing in the last four to six weeks with his multiple television appearances advances the interests of his client in the California action,” said Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor who specializes in ethics. “He’s catapulted himself to be the story. There are dangers when a lawyer becomes so publicly vocal.”
Gillers described Avenatti’s media presence as highly unusual for an American lawyer, not only because of his frequent television appearances but also because his arguments are more sweeping than his client’s narrow complaint. “I really cannot think of an equivalent,” he said.
.. Last week, Cohen said that because Avenatti published his private banking transactions, he should not be permitted to represent Daniels in a federal court in New York. Daniels is seeking to intervene in the case
.. “He comes across as consistent and credible and single-minded in his concern for his client’s interest.”
.. Mark Penn, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton, last week asked in the Hill publication whether Avenatti is truly representing his client as a lawyer or “just using her as cover to wage a political operation.” Fox News host Laura Ingraham asked the same question on her show, all but accusing Avenatti of acting as a Democratic operative.
.. Perhaps his most unorthodox move involved the decision to publicize the details of Cohen’s banking transactions. Under the old rules of Washington, a lawyer might have leaked that sensitive information to a trusted journalist who would vet it and publish it, perhaps in a way that could not be traced to the lawyer.
But this is the Trump era. Avenatti turned to Twitter.
.. Cohen’s lawyers noted in their court filing, the dossier contained mistakes, including several transactions by other Michael Cohens. That meant Avenatti had publicized details about the banking histories of people who had nothing to do with Daniels.
.. Not unlike Trump, Avenatti is loath to apologize.
.. He has declined to identify the source of his information. The Treasury Department inspector general is investigating whether the confidential Suspicious Activity Reports that banks submit to the federal government were leaked.
.. Unlike journalists, he said, lawyers may not use or disclose documents that they know were illegally obtained even if the lawyer does nothing unlawful to get them.
.. While in college and later in law school, Avenatti spent five years working for a political consulting firm run by Rahm Emanuel
.. After law school, Avenatti worked for lawyer Daniel Petrocelli, who had represented the family of victim Ron Goldman in the O.J. Simpson case
The ‘DO NOT CONGRATULATE’ leak shows the White House is panicking
the taxonomy of White House leakage is a worthy study. A surprising number of leaks are the result of simple vanity — the desire to appear in the know. Other leakers are trying to embarrass or sabotage a rival. Some leaks result from deviousness — the attempt to box the president in on a policy matter.
The Trolling of the American Mind
The real scandal involves the Russian hacking operation against the Democratic National Committee. This was a genuine crime, a meaningful theft, which led to a series of leaks that were touted by the Republican nominee for president often enough that we can assume that Donald Trump, at least, thought they contributed something to his victory. The fact that members of his family and inner circle were willing and eager to meet with Russians promising hacked emails, the pattern of lies and obfuscation from the president and his team thereafter, and the general miasma of Russian corruption hanging around Trump campaign staff — all of this more than justifies Robert Mueller’s investigation, and depending on what his team ultimately reports it might even justify impeachment.
.. the broader ambition of widening our internal fissures, inflaming our debates, making our imperium more ungovernable at home and thus weaker on the global stage.
.. Such conduct is certainly worthy of indictment, legal and rhetorical. What it is not worth is paranoia and hysteria, analogies to Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11 attacks, and an “America under attack”/“hacking our democracy” panic that give the Russian trolls far too much credit for cleverness and influence and practical success... Because on the evidence we have, nothing they did particularly mattered. The D.N.C. hack was genuinely important because it involved a real theft and introduced a variable into the campaign that would not otherwise have been present. But the rest of the Russian effort did not introduce anything to the American system.. The protests and counterprotests they ginned up after the election were marginal imitations of the all-American crowds that showed up for Trump rallies and later for the Women’s Marches... on the evidence we have most fake news is political pornography for hyperpartisans — toxic in its own way, deserving of concern, but something driven more by panting, already polarized demand.. the people obsessing about how Russian influence is supposedly driving polarization and mistrust risk becoming like J. Edgar Hoover-era G-men convinced that Communist subversives were the root cause of civil rights era protest and unrest... the proper question should still be: How was it that close to begin with?.. Should this re-emergent nationalism be conciliated and co-opted, its economic grievances answered and some compromises made to address its cultural and moral claims?Or is it sufficiently noxious and racist and destructive that it can be only crushed, through gradual demographic weight or ruthless polarized mobilization?
.. it does us no good to pretend the real blow came from outside our borders, when it was clearly a uniquely hot moment in our own cold civil war.