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Russiagate Prosecutor Calls Audible On 'Grand Conspiracy'

Zero Rss
1 month 3 weeks ago
Russiagate Prosecutor Calls Audible On 'Grand Conspiracy'

Authored by Paul Sperry via RealClearWire,

Although Donald Trump's defenders describe the Russia hoax and other efforts to frame the president as a "grand conspiracy," RealClearInvestigations has learned that the man now leading the probe of that scandal is pursuing multiple conspiracy prosecutions that are smaller and more manageable, according to several sources with direct knowledge of the probe.

Since taking over the Justice Department's far-flung investigation in April, veteran prosecutor Joseph diGenova and his team quickly concluded that combining all of the alleged wrongdoing, which ranges from falsifying evidence and committing perjury to leaking classified information and obstructing justice, into one unified plot and trying them together as a single case would be unmanageable.

"You'd have 50 defendants in the courtroom," said a well-placed source familiar with diGenova's thinking.

Before diGenova took over the investigation two months ago, its contours were ill-defined as it lurched ahead in fits and starts for more than a year. But according to the sources, diGenova is tackling the case with a new, disciplined focus and in so doing is giving it the direction it's lacked.

But this is a change in tactics, not the theory of the case. The sources say his operating assumption is that Trump's enemies in the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, the Obama and Biden administration, some Democrats in Congress, and their like-minded accomplices across several government agencies - including the CIA and the FBI - joined in one continuous conspiracy over almost a decade to deny Trump his civil rights, derail his political campaigns, and undermine his presidency.

Holistic Review

Where other investigators have looked at specific pieces of the effort Trump's defenders now call "Russiagate" after its original origins, diGenova is launching the first holistic look at the entire scandal. A well-placed source said it is looking at events from June 2015 when Trump first came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy through the 2022 FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago after he left office.

Insider sources provided RCI with an exclusive look into the specially assigned prosecutor's office and its recent legal maneuvers.

They said two separate grand juries in South Florida are now collecting and hearing evidence in what could become a series of conspiracy cases brought against people who served in the highest reaches of government, including former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former FBI Director James Comey.

Since much of the government's alleged corrupt anti-Trump activity took place in 2016, prosecuting the cases as conspiracies is the only way to get around the five-year federal statute of limitations.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche tapped diGenova, a longtime denizen of Washington, D.C., who was a U.S. attorney during the Reagan administration, to helm the sprawling investigation into what Blanche views as a series of baseless and seditious prosecutions and impeachments of Trump. The acting attorney general has created a special position for diGenova with the title "counselor to the attorney general."

DiGenova has moved into an office in Fort Pierce, Fla., where one federal grand jury is actively hearing evidence in the case. Another grand jury has been convened in Miami, where Jason Reding Quinones, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, is based. He is said to be working closely with diGenova.

DiGenova and his team are confident that the jury pool and judges in South Florida will give them a fair hearing, as opposed to Washington, D.C., where they are no longer utilizing a third grand jury.

"It's dead in D.C. Everything is in South Florida now," a red jurisdiction more sympathetic to Trump, said a senior U.S. official briefed on the matter.

As a former federal prosecutor and independent counsel, diGenova is known for using grand juries, which are comprised of 16 to 23 citizens who hear a prosecutor's case, to aggressively collect evidence by issuing subpoenas for documents and witnesses.

The sources say a fresh round of grand jury subpoenas is expected to go out in early July.

New Documents & Whistleblowers

These well-placed sources also say that diGenova has cultivated several new witnesses, including whistleblowers from the intelligence community and the FBI, and that his team has also uncovered significant new evidence, including a massive FBI document spanning several hundred pages that reportedly exposes new malfeasance in the bureau's probe of Trump's alleged ties to Russia, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, which was begun before the 2016 election.

They note that diGenova traveled to D.C. earlier this month to meet with both Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel to discuss the newly discovered internal FBI document and map out new investigative leads as well as a new overall case strategy.

Led by former FBI chief Comey, Crossfire investigators targeted the 2016 Trump campaign for colluding with the Kremlin and illegally wiretapped at least one Trump adviser based on political opposition research from the Hillary Clinton campaign. After Trump won the election, the same now-debunked research, known as the Steele dossier, was used by Comey and then-CIA Director John Brennan in a U.S. intelligence report known as the "ICA" to recast his victory as the product of Kremlin espionage.

By laundering the dossier - the heart of the Russia collusion scheme - through the U.S. intelligence community, the outgoing Obama administration was able to give it a gloss of credibility. By design, this false information made its way into the media, which in turn prompted Congress to open inquiries and the DOJ to appoint Robert Mueller as special counsel to continue the investigation on a larger scale. DiGenova, sources say, is examining whether Mueller's team engaged in prosecutorial abuses against Trump officials and associates.

Comey and Brennan were subpoenaed earlier this year regarding their roles in the ICA and are key targets in the conspiracy investigation. Both have denied any wrongdoing, publicly and through their lawyers.

Now in command of the entire investigation, diGenova has his own budget and is rapidly "staffing up" office, including hiring a large team of deputy prosecutors, investigators, analysts, and researchers, said a DOJ official with eyes into his operation.

The Justice Department official told RCI that his Florida team will not move forward with indictments without confidence that they can prevail in a court of law.

"We're not going to bring indictments just to make ourselves feel good only to lose and give the bad guys a victory," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. "So it's a lot of work. But that's what we're doing."

Currently, no indictments are under seal, the official said.

Past Probes

The official said that diGenova's team now has "all the files" collected by Special Counsel John Durham, who conducted a multiyear criminal investigation of the FBI's Russia probe. These include long-sought notes from several hours of interviews with Brennan about his role in the ICA and Crossfire Hurricane.

One DOJ official told RCI that diGenova's investigation is necessary, in part, because Durham "took a dive." The official noted that Durham only secured a single conviction during his four-year probe - of former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith, who pleaded guilty to a felony false-statement offense in connection with his admittedly falsifying government records in pursuit of a wiretap on former Trump adviser Carter Page.

Although Durham sought up to six months in prison, arguing that Clinesmith, a liberal Democrat, acted out of "political or personal bias" against Trump, D.C. District Judge Jeb Boasberg spared him any jail time and let him work off his probationary sentence by helping edit a D.C. homeless-advocacy journal he followed. The D.C. Bar reinstated his law license soon after.

Trump's supporters say Durham's record shows he did not pursue his investigation vigorously, while Trump's critics say his largely dead-end case proves the Russia probe was justified and done by the book.

"DiGenova has been appointed to investigate a made-up deep-state plot," said Harvard attorney and legal analyst Anna Bower.

While the legal strategy may have changed, diGenova and his team are still following the same theory of the case and pursuing potential charges under the same conspiracy statutes, the sources say - namely Sections 371 and 242 of the U.S. criminal code.

Weaponizing Justice

They believe high-ranking officials in the Obama and Biden administrations, acting under color of law, unlawfully weaponized the U.S. justice system and intelligence community against Trump and his advisers in a seditious plot to derail his candidacy and presidency and subvert the will of the American electorate.

Adding to the case's complexity is the FBI's disparate treatment of Hillary Clinton, who was personally exonerated by Comey in the bureau's investigation of her emails, codenamed Midyear Exam. The move cleared legal hurdles for her just weeks before her nomination at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. At the same time, recently declassified FBI documents reveal that Comey's deputy, Andrew McCabe, scuttled the FBI's Clinton Foundation probe and other investigations tied to Clinton.

Soon after letting Clinton off the hook, according to the operating theory of the case, they opened the Crossfire Hurricane espionage case on Trump as an alleged "insurance policy" in the unlikely event that Clinton lost the election, suggesting an illegal plan to abuse law enforcement to frame the Republican candidate. Recently declassified documents reveal Comey was aware of the Clinton plan to set up Trump as a Russian conspirator. Nonetheless, the FBI went after Trump based on a narrative they knew to be politically motivated and most likely bogus, which proved to be the case.

The sources confirmed that diGenova and his team are looking closely at the FBI's apparent double standard of justice employed during the 2016 campaign. And they have already found "fertile ground" there for possible conspiracy charges.

Another central focus of diGenova's team, according to an insider briefed on the matter, is the Obama-ordered ICA and the seeming political manufacturing of U.S. intelligence to frame the incoming president as a Kremlin puppet in early 2017.

The intelligence assessment's post-election conclusion that Russia interfered in the election to help Trump, which happened to be the key allegation of the Clinton-funded dossier, contradicted the intelligence community's own pre-election finding that Russia had not favored Trump and instead sought to sow discord in the American electoral process.

Comey and Brennan pushed for inclusion of the dossier in the ICA over the objections of career analysts.

In addition to Comey and Brennan, a Florida grand jury has subpoenaed McCabe's top aide, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok, the counterintelligence official who led the Crossfire probe and who also interacted with the CIA during the drafting of the ICA. Both have maintained their innocence.

Also in the crosshairs, the sources say, is James Clapper, who spearheaded the ICA as former President Obama's intelligence czar and who has received a subpoena. So, too, is Lisa Monaco, who served as a top Obama aide in the White House before former President Biden appointed her deputy AG, where she oversaw the raid of Mar-a-Lago. Neither responded to requests for comment.

Persons of Interest

Key witnesses and subjects in the Florida-based grand jury investigations, the sources say, include: FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten, who was instrumental in several Trump-related investigations and rubber-stamped the dossier's use in applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants targeting Carter Page; Celeste Wallander, a top Obama White House aide and Russian analyst later appointed to the Pentagon by President Biden; former CIA analyst and Biden aide Eric Ciaramella, who secretly worked with then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) on the first impeachment of Trump as the so-called "anonymous whistleblower;" former Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who worked with Ciaramella and Schiff to facilitate the first impeachment; former Clapper aide Vinh Nguyen, who helped craft the sections of the ICA dealing with Russian cyber threats; and former National Security Agency Director Adm. Mike Rogers, who clashed with Brennan and Clapper during the manufacturing of the ICA.

As a cooperating witness, Rogers has already told investigators some alarming new information, according to the sources. In April, ODNI issued criminal referrals to DOJ for both Ciaramella and Atkinson over their role in the first Trump impeachment concerning Ukraine in 2019.

DiGenova, who is licensed to practice law in D.C. but not Florida, won't likely argue any cases in court and will assume a supervisory role as cases are litigated. A Republican, diGenova got his start in Washington in the 1970s as a lawyer working on the Church Committee, a select Senate committee tasked with investigating CIA and FBI abuses. In the 1980s, he served as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, where he supervised numerous public corruption and national security cases and earned a reputation as a results-oriented prosecutor.

In 1992, diGenova was appointed independent counsel to investigate the Bush administration's possibly illegal search of Bill Clinton's passport. After two years on the case, he brought no criminal charges. In 1996, he and his wife founded the diGenova & Toensing law firm in Washington.

At 81, the gravel-voiced, mustachioed diGenova still appears spry. Colleagues told RCI they are cautiously optimistic that he will get results.

"He is totally sharp and hard-charging," said DOJ Pardon Attorney Ed Martin, who until recently also ran the anti-weaponization task force at DOJ.

However, the clock is ticking. DiGenova will have to secure convictions or guilty pleas before January 2029, when a Democratic administration could take over the DOJ and quash any indictments and prosecutions.

The DOJ official close to diGenova's office said the appointment of a special prosecutor to ride herd on the wide-ranging investigation should have been done a year ago, but then-Attorney General Pam Bondi was reluctant to take such risks.

"She was frightened by the entire thing," he said. "She was way out of her depth."

RCI has reached out to Bondi for comment. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami did not respond to requests for a statement.

Tyler Durden Sat, 06/27/2026 - 16:20
Tyler Durden

Apple Wants To Buy Memory From China As Soaring Chip Prices Spark Inflation Shock

Zero Rss
1 month 3 weeks ago
Apple Wants To Buy Memory From China As Soaring Chip Prices Spark Inflation Shock

Last Thursday, in the aftermath of Apple's biggest one day plunge since Liberation Day, and second biggest single-day drop ever...

.... when the company lost over a quarter trillion dollars in market cap after the company's unprecedented price increase announcement  which for some products was as much as 50% as Apple decided to pass on soaring component costs to consumers, following similar moves from other consumer electronics companies....

...  and which Apple blamed on "unsustainable" prices by the memory cartel - namely SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron and Sandisk - who have been flooded with unprecedented demand from hyperscalers (freshly funded with hundreds of billions in newly-issued investment grade debt) we predicted that "China's memory makers are waiting by the phone" for a disgruntled Tim Cook to call, demanding bulk, cheaper RAM.

*APPLE SHARES CLOSE DOWN 6.1% IN BIGGEST DROP SINCE APRIL 2025

China's memory makers are waiting by the phone

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 25, 2026

To be sure, Apple wasn't alone: just hours later Microsoft also announced it was raising Xbox prices, in effect launching an avalanche of memory-driven price increases across the industry, now that it has been normalized to pass on soaring memory prices to consumers.

This, in turn, takes place following a series of reports - initially on this website almost a month ago which showed that the recent surge in core inflation is largely due to runaway chip/memory prices as Apple has since confirmed...

At what point does Trump start raging at soaring memory prices

PPI Electronic Components is pulling entire core index higher pic.twitter.com/v9ufHmx0gG

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 11, 2026

... followed last week by the WSJ also joining the chorus by reporting that "the Data-Center Boom is sparking a third wave of inflation."

Fast forward to this morning when with AI stocks tumbling as "check/capex payers", including AAPL, get crushed, while "check/capex receivers" soar...

Hyperscalers vs Chips pic.twitter.com/qtYEDM8lQ7

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 25, 2026

... the abovementioned Chinese memory makers did not have long to wait, and overnight the FT reported that Apple is lobbying the Trump administration for clearance to buy memory chips from CXMT, a Chinese company that the Pentagon as put on a blacklist because of alleged connections to the People’s Liberation Army. 

As we expected, the iPhone maker has been waging a lobbying campaign to get the White House’s blessing in order to ease the financial pressure of the rise in memory chip prices. A person told the FT that Apple approached the commerce department more than a month ago, but the tech company has been targeting other officials across the administration and allies in Washington.

Apple is not barred from buying chips from China's DDR giant CXMT, or YMTC, another Chinese memory chipmaker which focuses on NAND memory and has been growing its market share aggressively, having caught up to Sandisk, and set to become the world's 3rd largest maker of flash memory as soon as this quarter 

But the Pentagon has put both companies on its Chinese Military Company blacklist. The so-called 1260H list contains dozens of Chinese groups with alleged ties to the PLA that undermine US national security.

Securing CXMT as a memory supplier would help remedy a situation in which the tech giant is being squeezed by its own suppliers, a position in which Apple has never been before .

The lobbying campaign comes after President Donald Trump met his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Beijing last month. Ahead of the summit, and in the months ahead of their previous meeting in South Korea in October, the US has held back from introducing new technology-related export controls that would affect Chinese companies.

As the FT notes, the Pentagon’s 1260H list creates reputational risk for companies, but in most cases it has no legal ramifications. We said as much just hours earlier when we said that those "worried about Chinese memory roadblocks by the US govt to ease memory inflation forget Trump undid 40 years of Iranian sanctions to lower the price of oil." And now that oil price inflation is contained, Trump has memory-driven cost-push inflation to fix ahead of the midterms, and whether he wants to or not, the only option his Admin has - besides imposing a price ceiling on memory (which may still come) - is to agree with Apple's request.

Last year, when memory prices were far lower and domestic producers did not have their customers by the throat with record chip prices and chip inflation was not yet the biggest driver of core prices, the commerce department added CXMT to a package of Chinese groups it intended to place on a trade blacklist called the “Entity List”. But the White House told it to hold off on new export controls because the administration was in the middle of tough negotiations with China to try to reach a truce in the trade war.

In any case, the FT notes that it remains unclear if Apple would get any guarantee from the administration, especially a promise that the US would not later put CXMT on the Entity List. Trump last year agreed to let Nvidia sell advanced H200 chips to China, a move many of his officials opposed.

In February, the Pentagon updated the 1260H list before withdrawing it within an hour. Several people said it was removed because the White House was angry that someone at the Pentagon had taken CXMT and YMTC off the list. When the Pentagon re-released it this month, both of the Chinese memory chip manufacturers had been reinstated.

“Apple choosing to partner with a Chinese military company would be a grave mistake,” John Moolenaar, the Republican chair of the House China committee, told the FT. However, he expect that the Republican will rapidly change his tune once there is public outcry in a the next few weeks against soaring electronic component prices, which will ultimately be blamed on runaway memory costs. 

“Helping the [Chinese Communist Party] succeed in its plans to dominate critical supply chains will make our country’s tech industry and economy more dependent on China at a time when we must build secure tech supply chains with our allies,” Moolenaar said, seemingly unaware that by not using Chinese components, he is allowing South Korea's memory cartel dictate not only US inflation but also the country's monetary policy, now that even Fed officials are pointing to AI/memory prices as key inflation drivers.

  • *KASHKARI: INFLATION DRIVEN BY SUPPLY ISSUES, INCLUDING AI-BUILD

Readers may recall that back in 2022 - when the world's faced another major surge in chip and component prices due to the logistical nightmare following covid - Apple faced a backlash when it considered buying memory chips from YMTC for iPhones to be sold in China. Marco Rubio, who was then the top Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, told the FT that “Apple was playing with fire”. Back then Rubio added that Apple would be “subject to scrutiny like it has never seen from the federal government” if it proceeded to procure YMTC chips. However, back in 2022, memory hadn't emerged as the biggest source of rising core inflation. It has now, and should Rubio refuse to pivot on his position, he would promptly become the target of public ire over surging consumer goods prices. 

Yet even with Tim Cook, and soon all other US consumer electronics products makers pushing hard for alternative memory sources, the memory lobby won't give up easily on the (temporary) oligopolistic position the commodity makers have achieved. “It makes no sense for the administration to decouple America’s reliance on critical minerals from China, only to approve new dependencies in a field as critical as AI,” said Michael Sobolik, a security expert at the Hudson Institute. 

One former official warned the US risked losing another industry by letting Apple buy memory from a group that receives Chinese subsidies. “Trump can show the courage to keep American memory alive for our security and our competitiveness or pour it down the drain so [Apple chief executive] Tim Cook can squeeze out a few more points of margin.”

It wouldn't surprise us if the "unnamed former official" is on South Korea's payroll because while China is still a modest actor in the memory space, the actual giants are all located in South Korea: Apple relies on US chipmaker Micron in addition to South Korea’s Samsung and SK Hynix for the DRAM memory used in its devices.

Meanwhile, in advance of a historic flood of orders that could send its market cap soaring, we reported that China's DRAM giant CXMT has received regulatory approval to list in Shanghai for the largest mainland IPO since 2022 as the Chinese national champion positions itself to challenge the DRam incumbents. The IPO of its domestic NAND peer, YMCT, is set to follow just weeks later 

Oh, and for those confused what happens when a commodity price surges, the post-covid case study should serve well: in 2023, DRAM prices because of a supply glut. This was a boon for buyers such as Apple, which was able to secure massive amounts of cheap inventory. 

But the AI boom of the past three years has seen a reversal in fortunes for the memory suppliers. As hyperscalers spent hundreds of billions of dollars for AI infrastructure, demand for advanced DRam — known as HBM — has led to a protracted shortage of traditional memory for consumer electronics. 

However, now that the market has shown it will no longer reward ridiculous amounts of hyperscaler capex spending - a U-turn from the market's reaction function for much of the past year - especially now that most of the big chip spenders no longer generatepositive cash flow and forced to issue billions in new debt for every incremental order of memory...

... in the end it won't be Trump that decides the fate of memory prices: it will be hyperscalers' own shareholders who will eagerly punish their management teams for incremental capex spending, forcing these companies to come up with new and creative ways to use and optimize existing Ram (likely in the form of many more Software-driven TurboQuant moments) to come up with more efficient and faster models.

In any case, after soaring into the stratosphere for the past year courtesy of all Hyperscaler free cash flow and hundreds of billions in on and off balance sheet debt, the party is finally ending and the memory bubble is about to burst. 

Tyler Durden Sat, 06/27/2026 - 15:10
Tyler Durden

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