August 3, 2024

Saturday, August 3, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.

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Joe is always busy.

What freedom looks like.

Freed American prisoners arrive at the White House.

One more thing. Or two.

As President Biden said, “ I meant what I said: Alliances make a difference.”

Behind the Prisoner Swap: Spies, a Killer, Secret Messages and Unseen Diplomacy

“The deal that made this possible was a feat of diplomacy and friendship,” Mr. Biden said on Thursday in brief remarks from the White House, flanked by family members of the prisoners. He praised America’s allies, saying that “they stood with us, and they made bold and brave decisions, released prisoners being held in their countries.”

“Mr. Carstens, the hostage negotiator, was in Tel Aviv last November and heard that Roman Abramovich, a Russian oligarch close to Mr. Putin, was in town. The two agreed to meet in a seaside hotel and Mr. Carstens asked whether Mr. Putin would be open to a trade of Mr. Krasikov for Mr. Navalny.

Mr. Abramovich said he did not think so. But then he called back a week later and said that he had checked and that, to his own surprise, Mr. Putin would be open to such a deal.

On Jan. 16, Mr. Biden spoke by phone to Mr. Scholz [German Chancellor] who finally relented, agreeing to include Mr. Krasikov in a prisoner deal as long as it also included Mr. Navalny.

. . . [The] Russian hit man, Vadim Krasikov . . . had been jailed in Germany since 2019 for the murder of a Chechen former separatist fighter in a park in Berlin. He was the prize most sought by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who had publicly praised the killing as an act of patriotism and for years had insisted that Mr. Krasikov be part of any swap.

“For you, I will try to do this,” Mr. Scholz told the president.

At a meeting in the Oval Office on Feb. 9, the two men agreed to pursue the idea, according to an American official.

The optimism would not last long. Mr. Navalny died in a Russian penal colony a week later, before the United States had formally broached the possibility of including him in a prisoner deal with the Russians. With the shock and sadness of Mr. Navalny’s death also came the realization that the deal was now farther away.

That same day, Mr. Sullivan kept a previously scheduled meeting with Mr. Gershkovich’s parents in his office in the West Wing. While Mr. Navalny’s death seemed to extinguish hope for a quick deal, senior American officials remained optimistic in part because Germany had already agreed in principle to give up Mr. Krasikov. It was only a matter of time, these officials felt, before they found another way to structure a deal around him.

“I saw his parents, and I told them that the president was determined to get this done, even in light of that tragic news, and that we were going to work day and night to get to this day,” Mr. Sullivan said on Thursday in recounting his conversation with Mr. Gershkovich’s mother and father.

The White House once again had to work to persuade the German chancellor to include Mr. Krasikov in a revised prisoner deal.

It took weeks to develop the outlines of a proposal shared with the German government, one including numerous people in Russian prisons whom the Germans wanted released, including former associates of Mr. Navalny. The Americans added Vladimir Kara-Murza, another imprisoned Russian dissident, who was also a permanent U.S. resident, as a sort of substitute for Mr. Navalny to appeal to Mr. Scholz’s desire for a moral imperative to justify the release of a Russian assassin.

The proposal also needed commitments from Slovenia, Norway and Poland that Russian spies imprisoned in those countries would be released as part of the deal.

Mr. Scholz approved the deal to include Mr. Krasikov on June 7, and on June 25 the C.I.A. officers made the proposal to the Russians in the Middle East. The deal that the Russians agreed to was largely the same as the June 25 proposal, American officials said. (New York Times).

Touch to watch.👇

Great photo at the airport.

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Kamala is always busy.

“Harris’ campaign and other affiliated committees have $377 million in cash on hand, a $50 million advantage over Trump’s $327 war chest, according to figures released by both campaigns this week. They’ve also raised over $1 billion during the campaign with four more months to go, the fastest to break the 10-figure mark in history, the campaign said on Friday.

Two-thirds of the July total came from first-time donors, and a majority of the total was raised from donations of $200 or less, the campaign said. It also said it had seen growth among Gen Z and millennial donors, a constituency Biden struggled to excite.” (Source. Politico)

“More than 3 million donors made over 4.2 million contributions – with more than 2 million donors making their first donation this cycle” (Simon Rosenberg, Hopium).

Yesterday, Kamala secured the delegate votes needed to secure the Democratic nomination for President.

The delegate count happened virtually yesterday as volunteers counted ballots mailed in by delegates. The official count will happen in person at the Democratic National Convention which starts on August 19th in Chicago.

The link below 👇 is a video of the real time feed that was sent from the Headquarters yesterday.

Some Harris delegates spoke via the video feed. Jaime Harrison, Chair of the Democratic National Committee, spoke via the video feed. Then the Vice President called in, to thank the delegates. “I am honored to be the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party for president of the United States.” She also reminded us, “When we fight, we win.”

Fun to watch and listen.👇

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sHWPDg_814Y&feature=youtu.be

One more thing.

Ready to put in time? or money? for Kamala?👇

Since President Biden stepped down and endorsed Vice President Harris, 36,000 volunteers have signed up.

Volunteer for the Harris Campaign.

Remind Americans to register to vote?👇

Mail postcards to battleground states

Donate . . . For the first time or again? 👇

47 for 47. $4.70 $47 $470?

Harris Victory Fund

Support a Super PAC that supports Kamala.

Future Forward USA

Join one of hundreds of events/calls for Kamala.

Sample call.👇 Join it. Share it.

Seniors for Harris National Organizing Call.The Democratic National Committee

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The Harris Campaign Plays to Win.

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Why is this Convicted, Corrupt Felon even in the running!

Further clarification about Trump’s visit to the National Association of Black Journalists.

Trump spokespeople denied this, of course.

Another Trump corruption scandal begins to unfold.

$10M cash withdrawal drove secret probe into whether Trump took money from Egypt.

Five days before Donald Trump became president in January 2017, a manager at a bank branch in Cairo received an unusual letter from an organization linked to the Egyptian intelligence service. It asked the bank to “kindly withdraw” nearly $10 million from the organization’s account — all in cash.

Inside the state-run National Bank of Egypt, employees were soon busy placing bundles of $100 bills into two large bags, according to records from the bank. Four men arrived and carried away the bags, which U.S. officials later described in sealed court filings as weighing a combined 200 pounds and containing what was then a sizable share of Egypt’s reserve of U.S. currency.

Federal investigators learned of the withdrawal, which has not been previously reported, early in 2019. The discovery intensified a secret criminal investigation that had begun two years earlier with classified U.S. intelligence indicating that Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi sought to give Trump $10 million to boost his 2016 presidential campaign, a Washington Post investigation has found.

Since receiving the intelligence about Sisi, the Justice Department had been examining whether money moved from Cairo to Trump, potentially violating federal law that bans U.S. candidates from taking foreign funds. Investigators had also sought to learn if money from Sisi might have factored into Trump’s decision in the final days of his run for the White House to inject his campaign with $10 million of his own money.

Those questions, at least in the view of several investigators on the case, would never be answered, The Post found.

Within months of learning of the withdrawal, prosecutors and FBI agents were blocked by top Justice Department officials from obtaining bank records they believed might hold critical evidence, according to interviews with people familiar with the case as well as documents and contemporaneous notes of the investigation. The case ground to a halt by the fall of 2019 as Trump’s then-attorney general, William P. Barr, raised doubts about whether there was sufficient evidence to continue the probe of Trump.

The behind-the-scenes drama played out during an especially tense time for the Justice Department, with Trump accusing the agency of pursuing a politically biased “witch hunt” against him in its probe of Russian election interference, his appointees seeking to rein in investigators they saw as partisan, and some career supervisors growing wary of plunging the agency into yet another legal battle with the president.

Barr directed Jessie Liu, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in D.C., to personally examine the classified intelligence to evaluate if further investigation was warranted. Barr later instructed FBI Director Christopher A. Wray to impose “adult supervision” on FBI agents Barr described as “hell-bent” on pursuing Trump’s records, according to people familiar with the exchange. It is unclear what if any actions Wray, who was also appointed by Trump, took in response.

In June of 2020, the prosecutor Barr appointed to take over the office leading the case closed the probe, citing “a lack of sufficient evidence to prove this case beyond a reasonable doubt.”

That conclusion belied the months of internal disagreements over whether investigators had been allowed to go far enough in seeking that evidence.

“Every American should be concerned about how this case ended,” said one of the people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the internal dissension. “The Justice Department is supposed to follow evidence wherever it leads — it does so all the time to determine if a crime occurred or not."

A spokesman for Trump’s presidential campaign did not answer a list of questions from The Post, instead referring to this story as “textbook Fake News.”

“The investigation referenced found no wrongdoing and was closed,” spokesman Steven Cheung said by email. “None of the allegations or insinuations being reported on have any basis in fact. The Washington Post is consistently played for suckers by Deep State Trump-haters and bad faith actors peddling hoaxes and shams.”

An Egyptian government spokesman declined to answer detailed questions sent by The Post. “It is inappropriate to comment or refer to rulings issued by the judiciary system or procedures and reports taken by Justice Departments” in other countries, wrote Ayman Walash, the director of the Egyptian government’s Foreign Press Center. In his email, Walash also emphasized that the Justice Department had closed the investigation without charges.

As he campaigns to return to the White House, Trump has cast himself as a victim of “deep state” plots that sought to undermine his presidency, often focusing his ire on the Russia probe that shadowed much of his time in office.
That investigation did not ultimately find that Trump or his campaign had conspired with Moscow. But it did conclude his team expected the campaign would benefit from Russian interference. Unbeknownst to the public, during the same period, Justice Department officials were investigating whether Trump had received help from the government of another foreign country — Egypt.

In the years since the Egypt case was closed, the Sisi regime’s ambitions to influence senior U.S. government officials have been laid bare by the bribery conviction of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Over the course of his presidency, Trump shifted U.S. policy in ways that benefited the Egyptian leader, a man he once called “my favorite dictator.” In 2018, Trump’s State Department released $195 million in military aid that the United States had been withholding over human rights abuses — a move that had been opposed by his first secretary of state — followed by the release of $1.2 billion more in such assistance.

The Justice Department and the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. declined to answer detailed questions for this report. The FBI declined to answer The Post’s questions or to make Wray available to comment. Barr also declined to answer detailed questions for this report, and Liu did not respond to a similar inquiry.

In an interview, Michael Sherwin, the then-acting U.S. attorney who closed the case and a veteran prosecutor of complicated national security cases, said he had previously closed some where sufficient evidence never materialized. “I made the same decision here and I stand by it,” Sherwin said.

This exclusive account of the Egypt investigation is based on a review of thousands of pages of government records, including sealed court filings and exhibits. The Post also interviewed more than two dozen people with knowledge of the investigation. The individuals spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive probe that ended without criminal charges. Some showed The Post emails, texts and other documents corroborating their accounts.

The investigation was shrouded in secrecy for the entirety of the more than three years the case was open, from 2017 to 2020. It surfaced obliquely in that time only once, when senior judges closed a part of the federal courthouse in D.C. to hide the identities of the parties in a hearing then described as involving a state-owned foreign corporation that was resisting a subpoena. Many observers assumed the corporation was Russian.

In the final weeks of the 2020 presidential race, after the investigation had been closed, CNN revealed that the mysterious courthouse hearing involved an Egyptian bank. The network also reported that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III had led the case, which centered on an informant’s tip that money had flowed through the bank to help fund Trump’s campaign. CNN also reported that, in the end stages of the probe, some prosecutors proposed subpoenaing Trump’s financial records, before “top officials” ultimately concluded that the case had reached a dead-end.

At the time, Trump spokesman Jason Miller rejected the allegation of money flowing to the campaign, saying: “President Trump has never received a penny from Egypt.”

The Post investigation reveals that investigators identified a cash withdrawal in Cairo of $9,998,000 — nearly identical to the amount described in the intelligence, as well as to the amount Trump had given his campaign weeks earlier. A key theory investigators pursued, based on intelligence and on international money transfers, was that Trump was willing to provide the funds to his campaign in October 2016 because he expected to be repaid by Sisi, according to people familiar with the probe.

In pursuing the Egyptian intelligence and other lines of investigation, Mueller’s team looked more deeply into Trump’s finances than has been previously reported. The Post found that investigators obtained bank records for some of the accounts Trump used most frequently when he was a candidate for office, and that debate inside the Justice Department centered on whether investigators could obtain additional records extending into the time Trump was president. Where some career investigators saw evidence that justified digging deeper, Barr and Liu expressed doubts.
Trump’s attorney general did not order the case closed, according to multiple people with knowledge of the events, but his instructions to Liu and, later, his selections to replace her, helped steer it to that end. (The Washington Post).

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Your Daily Reminder.

Trump is a convicted felon.

On May 30th, he was found guilty on 34 felony counts by the unanimous vote of 12 ordinary citizens.

The Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was scheduled to be sentenced on July 11. He will now be sentenced sometime around September 18th.

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Olympics update.

Politics and Cultural Politics in Paris.

The GOAT Simone Biles gets political.

Fear and Loathing at the Paris Games

—Andrew Egger

What a day it was at the Olympics yesterday. Katie Ledecky becoming the most decorated female American Olympian ever. Simone Biles completing her triumphant comeback to win individual all-around gold and (further) cement her legacy as the greatest of all time. It was the kind of stuff that makes you proud to be an American.

But you’d have to forgive the Olympics-watchers in the online MAGAsphere if they happened to miss all that. They had their eyes on an entirely different event: a preliminary matchup in women’s light welterweight boxing between Algeria and Italy.

The Thursday contest between Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Italy’s Angela Carini lasted only seconds. Carini took one punch and put up her hand to forfeit.

That would have been that, except for one detail: Last year, the International Boxing Association—the sport’s highest governing body—had abruptly disqualified Khelif hours before a championship bout, alleging she had failed a gender eligibility test. The specifics of that test are unclear. Some news reports at the time suggested Khelif had elevated levels of testosterone, while the president of IBA alleged in Russian media that the test had found her to have XY chromosomes.

That was enough for right-wing politicians and media personalities—primed by years of crusading against transgender participation in women’s sports—to make Khelif their villain of the day. Donald Trump and JD Vance both posted about the bout, with Vance condemning “a grown man pummeling a woman in a boxing match.”

“The Olympics allow men to beat up women,” wrote Libs of TikTok founder Chaya Raichik.

“Kamala Harris is in favor of women like Angela Carini getting abused and brutalized by men who think they are women,” thundered Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk. Viral posts mockingly recirculated an old tweet from Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro: “Trans women are women, pass it on.”

Lost in all this noise was a simple fact: Khelif is not transgender. She was born a girl and raised as a girl in Algeria. It’s a country not exactly known for its expansive views on LBGT issues: homosexuality is illegal and gender-transition medicine is banned.

What’s actually going on here is difficult to discern. In part, that’s because the IBA isn’t necessarily a reliable narrator: In fact, it is a corrupt enough organization that the International Olympic Committee earlier this year stripped it of its role overseeing boxing at the Paris games. The tests that disqualified Khelif (and another boxer, Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting) last year were highly unusual, coming as they did in mid-competition. And it’s still not totally clear on what criteria they were even tested. The IBA said this week that “the athletes did not undergo a testosterone examination but were subject to a separate and recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential.”

In a statement yesterday, the IOC said the IBA’s testing decision had not given Khelif and Lin appropriate due process. Hence why they were permitted to compete.

“The current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision, which was taken without any proper procedure,” the statement said, “especially considering that these athletes had been competing in top-level competition for many years.”

But even assuming it is true that Khelif was born with XY chromosomes, it would mean not that Khelif is a man, but that she had been born intersex—in other words, with biology not fitting neatly into the male/female binary. Some intersex people—those with Swyer syndrome, for instance—are anatomically female but chromosomally male.

You get the idea: The whole situation is complicated and opaque. If Khelif does have XY chromosomes, it’s perfectly possible she has genetic advantages other women lack, and it’s perfectly reasonable for the bodies overseeing a violent sport like boxing to have rules governing or even limiting such edge cases.

But it’s nothing short of insane to be making Khelif herself—a person who, I cannot stress enough, has lived as a woman from the moment of her birth—into a villain for wanting to participate in women’s sports. Or to argue that a president should be directly intervening in these matters.

Imagine how jarring this week must be for Khelif: You lace up to do the same thing you’ve been doing for years and suddenly find yourself a figure of fear and loathing halfway around the world. The culture war is fast becoming America’s primary export.(The Bulwark).

Brittney Griner reacts to prisoner swap between U.S. and Russia: ‘This is a big win, huge win’

VILLENEUVE-D’ASCQ, France — Team USA center Brittney Griner had just come off the court after her team beat Belgium in group play at the Paris Games when she was asked about her reaction to the news that Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan were part of a massive prisoner swap between Russia and several Western countries.

“It’s a great day,” Griner said. “I am head over heels happy for the families right now. Any day that Americans come home, that’s a win.”

Griner, 33, didn’t disclose who first told her about the prisoner swap but said she was “definitely emotional” upon hearing the news.

“I’m just happy,” she said. “Like this is a big win, huge win.”

On Thursday, Griner also commented on the reacclimatization she experienced upon returning to the U.S.

“I know they have an amazing group of people that are gonna help them out in whatever way they need them, and their families, and I’m glad that I was able to go through that, that program and get reacclimated back into everyday life,” she said.

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