Despite claims from former FBI director James Comey to the opposite, hundreds of thousands of former-Rep. Anthony Weiner’s correspondences were reportedly not examined for potentially classified information as part of the agency’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
Only 3,077 of the nearly 700,000 emails discovered on a laptop Weiner shared with wife and top Clinton staffer Huma Abedin were reviewed, according to a report from RealClearInvestigations. The examination was done during a marathon 12-hour session the day before Comey said Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, should not be recommended for criminal charges.
The search that was completed uncovered additional instances of Clinton transmitting and receiving classified information via her private, unauthorized email account, according to one U.S. law enforcement official.
President Trump tweeted about the findings on Saturday, threatening to interject himself into an investigation into corruption at the FBI.
“Big story out that the FBI ignored tens of thousands of Crooked Hillary Emails, many of which are REALLY BAD. Also gave false election info. I feel sure that we will soon be getting to the bottom of all of this corruption. At some point I may have to get involved!,” he posted.
Top Clinton allies say Comey’s controversial decision to reopen the email investigation weeks before the election following the discovery of Weiner’s laptop was a key reason why Trump won in a surprise victory.
Weiner, who last year was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison for sending lewd messages to a minor, did not have security clearance but reportedly received classified information on his personal email account on two occasions.

WASHINGTON, February 2. /TASS/. Washington has suspended its entry ban for Russian security chiefs, so that they could travel to the United States for consultations with their US colleagues, US Department of State Spokesperson Heather Nauert said.
The director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergey Naryshkin, Federal Security Service (FSB) chief Alexander Bortnikov and chief the Russian General Staff’s Main Intelligence Directorate Igor Korobov visited Washington last week, according to US media reports.
“I can tell you in a general – in a general matter, if something is considered to be in the national security interest of the United States, just like other countries, we have the ability to waive that so that people can come in to the United States,” Nauert said.
“It is no secret that despite our many, many differences <…> with the Russian Government, we also have areas where we have to work together, and one of those is combating terrorism and ISIS (Islamic State terrorist group, outlawed in Russia),” she continued.

The spokesperson gave no details about the visit, saying that information regarding visa decisions is protected under the US law.
“I know it’s a matter that’s frustrating to a lot of reporters – visa applications and those types of things are something that we are not able to discuss. That is considered private information under the federal law. Like it or not, that is just the law and so we have to adhere to that,” she said.
The United States has earlier imposed unilateral sanctions, which include entry ban, on Naryshkin, Bortnikov and Korobov, along with other senior Russian officials.

Russia’s military intelligence agency, known as the GRU‍, is getting blamed for all sorts of things these days. Robert Mueller indicted 12 GRU officers for hacking into computers of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The GRU allegedly was behind the recent poisonings of four peoplein Britain, including former GRU officer Sergei Skripal, who survived, and a woman accidentally exposed to the powerful nerve agent used, who died.
The 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine has been laid at the door of the GRU. And recently there were reports that GRU hackers are directing their efforts at the U.S. power grid. Russian mercenaries serving in Syria and in Africa are largely drawn from GRU ranks. Three Russian journalists investigating their activities were murdered last month.

Igor Korobov, the head of the GRU, was singled out personally for U.S. Treasury sanctions in March, along with his organization, even though he had already been sanctioned by the Obama administration in late 2016 for interference in our elections.
Maybe Trump’s people felt they had to make the point after Korobov was invited, along with chiefs of other Russian secret services, to Washington, D.C., in late January—just weeks before the new sanctions were announced. The visit was supposed to be a secret, but the Russians leaked it. The others in attendance were Sergei Naryshkin, the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and Aleksandr Bortnikov, director of the Federal Security Service (FSB).

Steven Hall, a former CIA station chief in Moscow, told Radio Free Europe it is always considered a “big political win” when a Russian spy chief meets one-on-one with his U.S. counterpart, because it puts them on equal footing.
The intelligence chiefs reportedly discussed with the Americans their mutual struggle against global terrorism, but it would be remarkable if the talks were limited to that subject. As a veteran of the FSB explained to a TV audience in Russia, “Many questions cannot be discussed by phone. It was necessary to look each other in the eye and talk about issues that threaten us and the Americans.”
Hall had a different take: “Given the political conditions in the United States now, it’s flabbergasting, to be honest. I can’t imagine who would have signed off on that.”
At home in Russia meanwhile, Korobov is riding high. In 2017, conceivably for his work helping to get Trump elected, Korobov was promoted to colonel-general, and Putin bestowed on him the highest state honor—Hero of the Russian Federation.
It is hard to believe that just a few years ago there was widespread talk in the Russian media about the GRU being on its last legs, perhaps even about to be disbanded. In November 2010, at a celebration of the anniversary of the founding of the GRU in 1918, GRU officers one after another toasted mournfully “to the bright memory” of their agency. The new 70,000-square-meter GRU headquarters, built in 2006 on Khoroshevskoye Shosse, was emptying out, they said.
By one estimate, of the 7,000 GRU officers working in the Soviet era, only 2,000 remained. This included a 40-percent reduction among GRU staff at foreign embassies. The GRU’s famed special combat brigades, the so-called Spetsnaz units, supposedly were going to be transferred to the regular army.
Lt. Gen. Dmitry Gerasimov, who had directed the GRU’s special-purpose brigades, told The New Times: “I am deeply convinced that the GRU special forces are completely devastated. Of the 14 brigades and two GRU training regiments, at best there are not more than four brigades left.” There was also talk of placing GRU signals intelligence systems under the command of the SVR, the foreign intelligence service.

There were several reasons for the GRU’s decline. In the 2008 conflict with the Republic of Georgia, it failed to alert the Russian military that Georgia had received anti-aircraft missiles from Ukraine. Moreover, in Moscow’s intramural spy-vs.-spy rivalries, the GRU had its own channel of information on corruption and money-laundering by the Russian elite that represented a threat to the interests of the FSB and SVR.
According to this analysis, there was a shadow intelligence network, consisting of a clan close to Putin from the FSB, the SVR, and the regular police that was running the country. And this group did not like having a competitor agency capable of independent comparative analysis. Significantly, the chiefs of both the FSB and the SVR sit on Putin’s National Security Council, but not the GRU head, who reports only to the armed forces general staff.
Miraculously, however, the GRU bounced back after Igor Sergun became chief of the agency in 2011. According to security expert Mark Galeotti, writing in War on the Rocks, Sergun was “an able, articulate, and effective champion of his agency’s interests… He was particularly good at managing relations with Putin and those to whom the president listens.”
Sergun managed to have several Spetsnaz units transferred back to the GRU. These troops are roughly comparable to U.S. special operations forces. They perform reconnaissance, diversion, and combat operations in various hot spots where there is ethnic strife, such as Chechnya, where they were widely deployed.
Then came the Crimean invasion and the Ukrainian conflict.
As Galeotti pointed out: “The chaos in Ukraine was a boon for the GRU, which was one of the lead agencies both in the seizure of the Crimea in 2014 and the subsequent destabilization of the Donbas [Eastern Ukraine]. If the future means more ‘hybrid war’ operations, more interactions with warlords, gangsters, and insurgents, then this is much more the forte of the GRU than the SVR.”
Some members of GRU units became mercenaries in private military companies like the Wagner Group, under the command of reserve GRU Lt. Col. Dmitry Utkin. In 2014-15 Wagner was one of the main forcesin battles fought on the territories of Donetsk and Lugansk in eastern Ukraine. Subsequently Wagner moved to Syria, where it has played a vital role as the Kremlin’s proxy force supporting Syrian government military offensives.
When some of its operatives were involved in an attack on oil installations controlled by U.S. allies on the ground, the Americans counterattacked from the air, allegedly killing several Wagner personnel. In April, a Russian reporter writing about Wagner operations and casualties died under mysterious circumstances, supposedly falling accidentally from the balcony of his fifth floor apartment.

Wagner also runs significant operations as far afield as the Central African Republic, where it bolsters government forces, negotiates with rebels, and guards valuable diamond, gold, and other mineral deposits—activities being investigated by the Russian journalists murdered there.
These ad hoc GRU operations have had some negative repercussions for Moscow. A joint Australian and Dutch investigation determined that the missile used to down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014 originated from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile brigade, a unit of the Russian army from Kursk in the Russian Federation. The respected Bellingcat group has now found that the order to fire the missile was approved by GRU Gen. Oleg Vladimirovich Ivannikov, who supervised several divisions of fighters in Donetsk, including those of Ukrainian separatists and the Wagner Group.
Korobov got off to a rocky start when he assumed the post of GRU chief in early 2016. For starters, there were questions raised about the sudden death in January that year of his predecessor, Sergun.
Officially, Sergun died of natural causes in Moscow, but there were reports that he perished in Lebanon. The decision to appoint Korobov took an entire month, reportedly because of a conflict within the Kremlin elite over who should get the job from a choice of four candidates. A group that was allied with the FSB and the SVR, led by Sergei Ivanov (then head of the presidential administration and an old KGB colleague of Putin), wanted one of their own to head the GRU, while those representing Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu were pushing for Korobov.
The army clan, proponents of an aggressive, confrontational approach toward the West in Ukraine and elsewhere, won out, and within several months Ivanov would lose his Kremlin job.
It is said that Korobov, who specialized in strategic military intelligence, is a pragmatist who is not interested in Kremlin politics and just wants to get the job done, whatever that might be. So it must be unsettling for Korobov to be the only high-level Russian official with staff members under indictment in the United States.
In fact, back in 2006, at the opening of the new GRU headquarters, a journalist asked a GRU generalwhether U.S. elections were a topic that was followed by their intelligence analysts. The general responded, “That is primarily a task for the SVR. We follow [the elections] but to a much lesser extent than the SVR.””
So how to explain that 12 years later the GRU is in the forefront of election meddling in the U.S.?
According to Vadim Birstein, an authority on the Russian security services, “In the past, the ‘active measures’ deployed for decades by the KGB/SVR against the West referred mainly to HUMINT (human intelligence) and disinformation campaigns in the media, rather than cyber warfare operations which are a new level in intelligence wars.”
Although the SVR has cyber weapons—and in fact was reported to be behind the initial 2015 attack on the DNC under the guise of “Cozy Bear”—the GRU, Birstein says, “has more technical resources to conduct operations like those described in the Mueller indictment.”
A persistent question is how Mueller’s team got the information detailed in the indictment. As Alexei Venediktov, editor of Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow) radio, noted: “When you read parts of the indictment you just freak out. Because they [Mueller’s team] know everything—time, place, login, password, career. And this supposedly just by remote methods.” As Venediktov and others say, the FBI must have had insider information.
Where did the leak come from? Putin obviously wants to know. When he spoke at a news conference with Trump in Helsinki on July 16, he suggested that Russia and the U.S. cooperate in the investigation by having members of Mueller’s team come to Russia and take part in questioning the GRU officers. (As The Daily Beast reported, this is not nearly as generous as it sounds. When British investigators looking into the murder of former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko went to Moscow, they found themselves thwarted and put under surveillance.)

Although it is the job of the FSB, as a counterintelligence agency, to find spies and potential traitors within the military, there is some speculation that FSB officers passed information about the GRU’s hacking operations to American intelligence.
Back in December 2016, by which time the GRU had been exposed, some high-level FSB officers in the FSB’s cybersecurity unit were arrested and charged with treason. (One, Sergei Mikhailov, was physically removed from a meeting with a black sack over his head.) The treason case has been kept a closely guarded secret, but Russian insiders suggest that Mikhailov and his colleagues were motivated by the long-standing rivalry between the FSB and the GRU to betray the GRU. According to some sources, money was also a motive.
Of course, the GRU is no stranger to defections and international scandal. The first major spy case to erupt after World War II, igniting the Cold War, occurred in 1945 when a GRU cipher clerk from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa defected, taking with him reams of secret documents that showed the Soviets had an atomic spy ring in North America.
Then there was the infamous GRU Gen. Oleg Penkovsky, who tipped off Britain that the Soviets had missiles in Cuba—and was executed for treason in 1963. Much later, Sergei Skripal, who for several years cooperated with MI6, provided hundreds of names of his fellow GRU agents before he was caught in 2006 and charged with treason. In 2010 he was handed over to Britain as part of a spy swap, and earlier this year he was poisoned.
British authorities are now saying that the GRU carried out the U.K. murder attempt on Skripal, apparently because Skripal betrayed the agency. Investigators reportedly have evidence that the GRU hacked into the email of Skripal’s daughter, Yulia. But revenge against traitors is traditionally up to the FSB. Recall that the 2006 poisoning of Litvinenko in London, shown by the British High Court Inquiry to be the work of the FSB, was preceded by the July 2006 enactment of a new Russian law that specifically authorized the FSB to carry out assassinations abroad.
But maybe we in the West should stop trying to figure out which Russian security service has been doing what to us. After all, the buck stops in the Kremlin. Putin is a hands-on leader—a KGB veteran himself—who calls the shots on just about everything from assassinations of alleged traitors to revenge against Western politicians he resents, like Hillary Clinton. As the widow of Alexander Litvinenko told me once, “with Putin everything is personal.”

Vladimir Putin has done his best Bear Grylls impression in a series of shots released by the Kremlin from his hiking holiday.
The Russian leader has been enjoying himself on holiday in  Siberia with his defence minister and the head of the Federal Security Service,the FSB in the Tuva region of southern Siberia over the weekend.
The photographs show 65-year-old Putin showing off his more intrepid side and posing in a khaki outfit and hat, carrying binoculars and trekking poles and hiking in forested mountains for a series of posed shots.
Previous outdoor snapshots of Putin on holiday released by the state, including images of him fishing and sunbathing shirtless, appear intended to demonstrate his robust physical health and vigour as he wrestles with the affairs of the country.
Putin took the break on his way to the Siberian city of Kemerovo, a coal mining hub, where he attended a meeting with government officials and top managers of energy companies on Monday.
“The president, on his way to Kemerovo, decided to fly out earlier and spend Saturday and Sunday in Tuva, on the Yenisei River. He walked in the mountains, admired the beautiful views,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

A picture taken on August 26, 2018, shows Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu (R) looking at vegetation during a short vacation in the remote Tuva region in southern Siberia. Alexey Nikolsky / AFP

But if the Senator was macho and angry, Washington’s mood in the 1950’s under the fatherly President Dwight D. Eisenhower was rather flaccid. Some of the liberal intellectuals on the fringes of the Government were going through their famous agony of conscience about the Soviet Government. When Senator McCarthy fulminated about loyalty, there were some people who asked themselves, loyalty to what? It was an emotional word applied to an intellectual decision. In some circles, ambivalence toward our Government, even our country, had come to be regarded as a civil right.
Though Mr. Oshinsky does his best to be fair to McCarthy, the Senator inevitably emerges as the bad guy in ”A Conspiracy So Immense.” He hurt people, disrupted the Government and disgraced us in the eyes of other countries. But if he was the bad guy, it is not so easy to find the good guys in the story of those years. President Eisenhower was not commanding, brave or tactically ingenious in dealing with the Senator from Wisconsin. Both John and Robert F. Kennedy maintained a discreet detachment after an initial period of friendship with McCarthy. And everybody else seemed reluctant to tangle with a man who was a master at dirty fighting.
There are few periods in our history when our Federal Government seemed so impotent. Even the indefatigable Mr. Oshinsky cannot fully explain why no coalition or group was formed to bring the Senator under control. It was as if he were a drunk misbehaving at a party where everyone was too polite to throw him out.
Though what we call psychohistory has not been conspicuously successful, it does seem as though Mr. McCarthy’s case cries out for some sort of psychological speculation. He apparently had no further political ambitions, but because his incessant attacks won him at least as many enemies as friends, it would seem that the answer to his behavior lay buried in his personality. One wishes Mr. Oshinsky had allowed himself to speculate a little more in this direction.
Though we all followed the story of Senator McCarthy’s rise and fall on television and in newspapers and magazines, it still makes very vivid reading in Mr. Oshinsky’s capable hands. There’s even an element of pathos in the way the Senator went down to defeat. It was his mysterious loyalty to his assistant Roy Cohn that led to the censure vote that effectively ended his career. This loyalty didn’t make him noble – just consistent or stubborn or arrogant.
Whatever his faults, though, he taught us something about ourselves. In some ways, we may be soft – not necessarily about Communism, or any other ism – but about political realities. And perhaps this is inevitable, a doubt or hesitation built into the democratic process. If this is the case, it’s a valuable lesson for us to learn.
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In early March, President Trump sent four tweets accusing his predecessor of wiretapping the phones in Trump Tower in the months before the 2016 election. The tweets were just the latest manifestation of Trump’s preoccupation with eavesdropping and surveillance—one that can be traced back decades. As BuzzFeed’s Aram Roston reported last summer, during the mid-two-thousands, Trump kept a telephone console in his bedroom at his Mar-a-Lago resort, in Palm Beach, that allowed him to listen in on phone calls between his employees and, sometimes, staff and guests. (Trump denied this.) In the mid-nineteen-eighties, Trump allowed Tony Schwartz, his ghostwriter, to listen in on his private phone calls with bankers, lawyers, and developers, as Schwartz wrote “The Art of the Deal.” And, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, many of Trump’s private conversations with his late mentor, the lawyer Roy Cohn, were eavesdropped on by Cohn’s longtime switchboard operator and courier, whose activities were later exposed.
Cohn, who had been an aide to Senator Joe McCarthy, in the nineteen-fifties, was a political fixer and lawyer who represented New York power brokers, from the Yankees owner George Steinbrenner to the mob boss Carlo Gambino. Trump was one of his favorite clients; before Cohn’s death, of AIDS-related complications, in 1986, the two men talked up to five times a day and partied together at Studio 54 and other night clubs. “Roy was brutal, but he was a very loyal guy,” Trump told the writer Tim O’Brien, in 2005. “He brutalized for you.”
Christine Seymour had recently graduated from Sarah Lawrence College when she started working at the back of Cohn’s office as a switchboard operator, connecting calls with clients including Nancy Reagan, Gloria Vanderbilt, and the mobsters Gambino and Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno. “She listened in to all of them,” Susan Bell, Cohn’s longtime secretary, recalled recently. “Not at his direction, but he knew.” A pretty brunette, Seymour was, according to her brothers, brash and funny, with a gossipy sense of humor. Cohn had his reasons for tolerating her behavior. “She was very efficient, and he liked that about her,” Bell said. “She would work anytime, day or night. She was always at his beck and call.”
After Cohn died and his law firm dissolved, Seymour left the city and moved to Florida. She settled in Key Colony Beach, a sleepy town at the bottom of the Keys, where, in the early nineties, she started writing a book, “Surviving Roy Cohn,” based on her notes on the eavesdropped calls. It must have seemed an ideal moment for a project that promised to take the reader inside the town house of one of the most scandalous figures in recent New York history. In 1993, James Woods was nominated for an Emmy for his portrayal of Cohn in an HBO biopic, “Citizen Cohn,” and “Angels in America,” Tony Kushner’s play dramatizing Cohn’s struggle with AIDS, had débuted to acclaim on Broadway.
On the morning of May 5, 1994, the New York Post ran a column by Cindy Adams with the headline “Savvy Chris Spills the Beans on Roy Cohn.” In her characteristically breezy manner, Adams wrote about Seymour’s book project, listing the secrets she would expose. (“How a porno flick was filmed in the office and business was conducted while someone was being whipped”; “How Sen. Joe McCarthy hid the fact that he was gay. . . .”) “Chris taped conversations,” she wrote. “She kept a log—three spiral notebooks a day—of transactions.” Adams wrote that Seymour “monitored every call in or out, knew everything, everyone, knew where all the bodies were buried.” The story ricocheted through the city, and Cohn’s former law partners and staffers received phone calls from several other anxious clients, worried that their secrets would be revealed.
Five months later, on October 20, 1994, Seymour was driving her blue two-door Yugo on a highway in Florida at dusk when she collided head-on with a tractor-trailer and was instantly killed. She was forty-six, and the book was still unfinished. Seymour’s collaborator on the book, an author and literary agent named Jeffrey Schmidt, was at home on Long Island when he got the call from Seymour’s mother, Adele, who lived in nearby Shoreham. As he recalled recently, on hearing the news of Seymour’s death, he panicked, took a box of the notebooks, and burned them.
As for the recordings, none of Cohn’s former employees can confirm that Christine made any. But Christine’s brother, Brian, who once worked as a crew member on Cohn’s eighty-foot yacht, Defiance, told me that when Christine moved to Florida, she had handed him three small reel-to-reel tapes that she claimed she had made. The tapes were, he recalled, “in god-awful shape, spooled and unspooled and crinkled.” He stored them in his mother’s attic, where he later found them, in 2009, after she passed away. “We just tossed them in the trash,” he told me. In the spring of 1995, Schmidt told the syndicated columnist Liz Smith that some tapes still existed and would soon be the basis for a Broadway musical, written by Seymour and Schmidt, with music by Jeanette Cooper. “Nothing Sacred” is really Seymour’s story; her eavesdropping is at the heart of the drama. The play kicks off with Cohn’s voice “heard over the telephone wire.” On one of her first days, she tells a colleague that Cohn is on the phone with Nancy Reagan, adding, “Oh, I wish I could hear what they’re saying.” The office manager replies, “Go ahead and listen. Roy doesn’t mind.” Later, she adds, “Some of the most important conversations of the twentieth century have come through the switchboard. And they’re all on tape.” One of the first songs includes the line, “This damn phone, needs a chaperone / Someone who’ll defend, the fortress of a friend / In exchange she’ll learn things she would never know.” After one staged reading of “Nothing Sacred,” in the winter of 1997, at the Dicapo Opera Theatre, on the Upper East Side, Schmidt got caught up in other projects, he said, and the play was never produced.
Schmidt still lives in Stony Brook, on Long Island, where he runs NYCreative Management, a literary agency. Last September, we met at the Strand one afternoon and then walked across the street for a cup of coffee. It was a warm afternoon, but Schmidt was wearing a black suit with a bright yellow tie. He handed me a yellow packing envelope, containing “some things left behind in Roy’s office.” Inside the envelope were several floppy disks, a cassette tape, the “Nothing Sacred” screenplay, a 1981 invitation to a Ronald Reagan Presidential Inauguration party, the consent form to participate in an AIDS drug trial, a few faded photographs, and dozens of notes, some of them stained, written in Seymour’s hasty longhand. The notes contain lists of the clients who called Cohn’s office, including their personal phone numbers; Seymour’s reminiscences of her experience working with Cohn, including lunch orders for pepper-sausage-and-mushroom pizza slices; and her description of Cohn’s conversations with Trump, Steinbrenner, Vanderbilt, and Nancy Reagan, among others, and what appear to be direct quotes from some of those phone calls—although it’s almost impossible to know how much of Seymour’s account in the notebooks and script is true.

One of Seymour’s notes describes Cohn’s efforts to advance the judicial career of Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, who served as a federal appeals-court judge for decades, until stepping down soon after Trump assumed the Presidency: “Roy got the White House to give her her judgeship,” Seymour writes. “Roy was out and the call came in to tell her she got it. I took the call and called her to tell her. Ten minutes later, Donald called to say thank you.” (Barry did not respond to requests for comment.)

Seymour also describes some of Cohn’s political dirty tricks, including that he had researched Geraldine Ferraro, the 1984 Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee, with the assistance of Trump’s adviser Roger Stone. (“Roger Stone—worked with Roy very heavily before and after elections. Was the one with Roy to find out the dirt on the Ferraros.”) Stone, who first met Trump through Cohn, initially did not think much of the brash young real-estate developer, Seymour’s notes indicate. “Roger did not like Donald Trump or his new house, told me they were losers, but if Roy used them, he would, too,” she writes. When I recently asked Stone about this, he said the “notes make no sense,” adding, “I was very impressed with Donald Trump when I met him.”
According to Seymour’s notes, Cohn’s frequent phone pals included Nancy Reagan and the former C.I.A. director William Casey, who “called Roy almost daily during [Reagan’s] 1st election.” Cohn also enlisted his friend and the owner of the New York Post, Rupert Murdoch, to help bring down Ferraro’s campaign: “Whenever Roy wanted a story stopped or item put in, or story exploited, i.e Ferraro—and her family, Roy called Murdoch.” Cohn killed stories that would hurt his friends. When he found out that “60 Minutes” was about to do a negative story about Reagan’s potential Vice-President, Senator Paul Laxalt, of Nevada, “Roy called the producer of 60 Minutes and asked him to take it off the schedule.” The longtime “60 Minutes” producer Lowell Bergman, who didn’t talk to Cohn himself, confirms that the story never aired amid pressure from lawyers, including Cohn.
Another note says, “Donald was the last one Roy spoke to on the phone,” perhaps referring to Cohn’s last days, in 1986. Seymour also noted that Trump could be “two-faced,” and described how he had once heard from an assistant that a lawyer working for Cohn wanted to leave his firm and immediately told Cohn about the treachery. Trump “did things like that always. Roy’s line on him: ‘He pisses ice water!’ ” It appears that Trump was aware of her eavesdropping; Seymour claims that Trump told Cohn that she was listening in on the phone calls. Seymour’s jottings also suggest that she had eavesdropped on the call between Cohn and his doctor on November 4, 1984, when Cohn was told that he had been diagnosed with AIDS. A poignant note records that, when he got the news, Cohn responded, “Should I commit suicide now or later?”
Some of Seymour’s claims in the notes are disputed by Bell, who says that Cohn rarely called the White House, though he was friendly with Nancy Reagan. Bell also doubts that Cohn’s last conversation was with Trump, who, she said, abandoned his lawyer when he found out that Cohn was H.I.V.-positive.“They were so close, they talked at least several times a week,” she said. “And as soon as he found out, he took all his cases away from Roy except for one and got new lawyers. After all they’d been through together.” But the notes, and the lingering mystery of what secrets were contained in the lost notebooks, continue to inspire rumors and, perhaps, a legacy of paranoia. Brian Seymour told me that Christine had a photographic memory, but he can’t say for sure what is true and what isn’t. “She probably knew a lot about a lot of things, but she’s not here anymore,” he said.

A homeless man suspected of stabbing another transient outside a Fremont BART station early Thursday was arrested within 24 hours of the attack, officials said.
Joshua Fecker, 21, was arrested Thursday night at the Richmond Station after a BART police officer recognized him from a photo the transit agency had circulated during the day, according to BART.
Authorities received a report at 2:18 a.m. Thursday that a man was down with what appeared to be stab wounds to the chest and buttocks. The stabbing occurred on BART property after the Warm Springs Station had closed, officials said.
Chris Filippi, a BART spokesman, said the victim was at a hospital Friday morning and had been stabilized.
The stabbing came a month after the July 22 fatal stabbing of Nia Wilson at MacArthur Station in Oakland. Wilson’s sister was also injured in the unprovoked attack, which was the third homicide in a week on the BART system and led to an arrest.
A double stabbing occurred Aug. 3 at MacArthur Station, and a suspect in that incident was also identified with the help of surveillance footage.
BART police circulated Fecker’s photo Thursday to the public and other law enforcement agencies.
Filippi said the station’s cameras have been an invaluable “extra set of eyes” in tracking crime suspects as BART deals with an understaffed police force that has resulted in officers working mandatory overtime, six shifts a week.
“That’s just one of the reactions to what’s happened over the last few weeks,” Filippi said.
Violent crimes on BART properties have increased by 66 percent in the last five years, records show.
BART Police Chief Carlos Rojas is “dedicated to using all the resources he can to make sure passengers feel as safe as possible,” Filippi added. “It’s good that we’re able to resolve these cases.”
Josh Koehn is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: josh.koehn@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Josh_Koehn

A barrister who claimed that German spies were plotting to attack the Queen with a nuclear weapon at the London Olympics has been found guilty of communicating false information.
Michael Shrimpton, 57, called a close colleague of former Defence Secretary Philip Hammond in April 2012 to say that a nuclear warhead had been stashed in an east London hospital and was going to be used to attack either the Queen, the Olympic Stadium, or the opening ceremony.
He also claimed his house in Wendover, Buckinghamshire, was a ‘bona fide’ HQ for an international intelligence network – but he is today facing jail after being found guilty at Southwark Crown Court.
A jury of nine men and three women found Shrimpton guilty of two counts of communicating false information after more than six hours of deliberation, with majority 11-1 verdicts.
Sentencing will take place in February of next year after Judge Alistair McCreath QC ordered that Shrimpton be sent for psychiatric evaluation.
Judge McCreath said: ‘The sentence that I pass upon you will have to reflect that gravity of the conduct of which you have been convicted.
‘But if, as may be the case, there is some underlying reason for it, then it seems to me important that I be informed of that underlying reason and I am therefore minded to order that you undergo psychiatric examination.’
Shrimpton, author of ‘Spyhunter: The Secret History of German Intelligence’, replied he had ‘no objection’ to the order.
In April 2012, just as preparations for the London Olympics were entering their final phase, Shrimpton contacted Barry Burton, the principal private secretary to Philip Hammond.
He told Mr Burton that spies from ‘a covert and rather sinister’ Germany agency had sabotaged Russian submarine Kursk, which sank in 2000, and stole four nuclear warheads.
The lawyer boasted of ‘credible European sources’, name-dropped members of parliament, and said intelligence had been blocked through official channels because the Germans had infiltrated MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.
During the 20-minute call Shrimpton said he had gathered intelligence from his own network of volunteers that one warhead was being stored in a hospital in London to avoid detection.
Mr Burton suspected that the call had been a hoax, but was forced to pass the information over to the Olympic security team and the police.
The following day Shrimpton phoned the Aylesbury Conservative Association and asked to speak with MP David Lidington about the threat, which he described as being in the style of American TV show ’24’.
The call was reported to a colleague at Parliament, and Shrimpton was arrested the same day.

Shrimpton claimed his arrest was a ‘colossal cock-up’, blamed the Germans and demanded a ‘nice lunch with MI5’.
In interview at Aylesbury police station he boasted he was a ‘national security specialist’ with hundreds of intelligence contacts who acted as a back channel between governments.
Representing himself at his two-week trial, he told jurors he worked on the investigation into Madeleine McCann’s disappearance and the case of Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet.

He read extracts from his address book with a number of ‘contacts’ in the CIA, FBI, MI6, the Pentagon, Chinese intelligence and Parliament.
Shrimpton said: ‘I admit that the stuff I deal with is bound to sound strange, high falutin, incredible and fantastic.It’s my world, welcome to my world.’
Shrimpton claimed he has rubbed shoulders with royalty, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and listed a number of famous names including Richard Branson and Steven Forbes.
Giving evidence he boasted of meeting Prince Philip twice in a social context and claimed to have to Royal’s phone number.

Among his other claims were that he was consulted by the makers of TV show Spooks on his specialist knowledge, that the CIA had allowed him to enter the U.S. carrying a weapon, and that the LA Sheriff’s Department had discussed terror attacks with him over a cup of coffee.
He also insisted he has the authority to issue a Defence Advisory Notice on behalf of the government to stop British media from publishing stories that could compromise national security.
He said he wanted to prevent the News of the World from blowing his intelligence, and added they were ‘very cooperative’.
Shrimpton told jurors that there had been an assassination attempt against him by the Chinese authorities who wanted to ‘whack’ him.
In response, prosecutor Alan Blake said: ‘The information was extraordinary and dramatic, in essence Mr Shrimpton announced that a nuclear weapon stolen from the sunken Russian submarine the Kursk a number of years ago, that such a nuclear weapon had been smuggled into the UK and was being stored in a London hospital in preparation to be used during the Olympic games.
‘With the benefit of hindsight the information may seem outlandish, perhaps even laughable.
‘Before being too dismissive do recall the position in 2012 when those calls were made.’

At that stage, surface to air missiles had just been installed on the tops of a number of blocks of flats and it was feared terrorists could infiltrate G4S staff after the security company began frantically hiring after announcing a staff shortage, the court heard.
Mr Blake said Shrimpton was a ‘respected professional man’ who has ‘superficial plausibility’.
He added: ‘It is the prosecution’s case that the information provided by Mr Shrimpton was false and that when he communicated those threats he didn’t honestly or genuinely believe that they were true or rather knew or believed that they were false.’
Shrimpton was granted conditional bail ahead of sentencing on February 6.

Barrister and author Michael Shrimpton was jailed in London today. He is to serve one year in prison for what has been wrongly termed a “bomb threat.” It is quite possible, more than quite possible, that Shrimpton is being punished for coming too close to the truth, that there was really a nuclear bombing threat against the 2012 London Olympics, one of Britain’s biggest secrets of the last 100 years.
The crown’s case is predicated primarily on the impossibility of nuclear weapons being used, stolen or transported and, secondly, that the organization Shrimpton believes responsible, the mysterious DVD, or Deutsches Verteidigungs Dienst, actually exists.
Shrimpton himself is an enigmatic character, closely aligned politically with America’s neocons, a strong backer of Netanyahu and all causes “right wing.” He lives in a world filled with freemason conspiracies and the belief that German intelligence agencies working with the Bush family are still active in world affairs, albeit drug running and terrorist conspiracies.
For someone inside the intelligence community, his beliefs are roughly within the range of the “unspoken norm.” The Bush family does have a well-established history of supporting Nazi Germany, as laboriously documented by historian Webster Tarpley and it is also a well-established fact that Western intelligence agencies turned to the Nazi Gehlen operatives who led MI 6 and the CIA throughout the Cold War.
Former OSS operative and CIA director, Allen Dulles, along with his brother, former US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, were at the center of this “conspiracy,” if one were to choose to call it that. Allen Dulles was fired by President John Kennedy for his involvement in planning the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Kennedy had made pronouncements of “Denazifying” the CIA and was killed soon after. Shrimpton has only been imprisoned for a year on what any American attorney, or any military or intelligence professional would consider “trumped up charges.” Shrimpton may well be considered a political prisoner.
What did Shrimpton do?
We have been able to confirm these facts:

• Shrimpton met with an intermediary with a background in intelligence that told him a story. This story involved the theft of a nuclear weapon and of its transport by submarine to Britain.
• Shrimpton tried to use back channels through a former Defense Ministry official, Phillip Hammond, to pass this story on.
• Shrimpton also called the public tip line of MI 6, Britain’s version of the CIA. The number he phoned is listed online and is specifically designated for passing on rumors and unsubstantiated threats. This fact was withheld at trial.
• Theories about a German based secret agency, akin to “SPECTRE” out of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels (Fleming had worked for MI 6), were not included in the information Shrimpton received.
• After Shrimpton’s computers were seized, he was charged with possession of child pornography. When forensic examination of the material showed it to have been dated and/or downloaded after the equipment was in police custody, these charges were reduced and pushed “under a rug.”

The issue of law is a simple one as are the fact in the case:

• If Shrimpton received the information he indicates, and this fact has not been questioned, would he be equally culpable were he to have failed to act exactly has he has? The answer to this, according to British law is an astounding “yes!”
• It is not the responsibility of any private citizen neither to vet information they overhear nor to investigate information of criminal activity but only to pass such information on to authorities. Investigative agencies, police and security, exist only to receive such information, as much of it as possible. This is called “intelligence.”
• Failure to investigate altered evidence, were the case to be tried in the US, would represent “obstruction of justice,” criminal acts themselves, one count for every downloaded image.
• As Shrimpton, author of Spyhunter, and known confidant of directors of more than one US intelligence agency, has clear access to this grade of intelligence, confirmed as true or not, it would be as likely that this case results from a need to silence or discredit Shrimpton as to discourage others from bringing information to British police or security organizations. Do you see where this is going?

Let me put this in a personal perspective. There are many private intelligence contracting groups, now a $20 billion dollar industry. I run one of those groups and, as part of my normal employment meet with defense and intelligence officials, attend conferences and have information cross my desk hourly that could affect events.
By corporate standards, and yes, intelligence collection and analysis is now “big business,” Shrimpton’s behavior is irresponsible. In a corporate environment, we would meet and discuss the information given, even if that information involved midget submarines and atomic bombs. We might quietly pass the information on, if we deemed it unreliable, perhaps with a bit of humor or, worse still, we might well do nothing at all if we deemed warning the relevant government to be potentially damaging to stockholder interests.
Shrimpton may well have been trying to engage in a similar process when he phoned Phillip Hammond, who might well have advised him to remain silent.
What we do know about Shrimpton’s situation is the both the National Security Agency in the US and Israel’s Mossad have followed Shrimpton’s arrest. Rumors, and I am forced to term them that, are that due to the extreme nature of the threat passed on, neither agency would contact MI 6 on Shrimpton’s behalf. Both were asked to and I can state categorically that the Israelis did respond sympathetically.
There is another even “stickier” point. Was any of what Shrimpton claimed true? This should now and always have been the preeminent concern. In order to learn whether Shrimpton was making this up, I went to one of my friends, a nuclear physicist and former investigator with the IAEA who has worked in Moscow. The IAEA or International Atomic Energy Agency is a UN group tasked with investigating nuclear proliferation issues including the theft of nuclear materials.
My friend told me that he had attended and acted as a presenter at a security conference for oil and defense executives in Tulsa, Oklahoma in March 2013. At that conference, attended by dozens of prominent industry leaders and Washington “insiders,” a story deeply paralleling Shrimpton’s was told by a member of the Russian delegation.
No one laughed.
The story involved a midget submarine that picked up a stolen nuclear weapon in Bremerhaven, Germany, and transported it to waiting agents at an undisclosed location along the Thames estuary. The story, as it goes on, told of the weapon being placed in a warehouse only a few miles from the Olympic Stadium. The rationale, we are told, was to affect some change in British policy, using both the presence of this weapon and this demonstration of capability, as leverage.
I then asked, “What happened to the weapon?”
I was told, “American Nuclear Emergency Security Teams (NEST) at the orders of President Obama entered Britain and recovered the weapon. The British government is extremely upset at President Obama.”
We were told America acted because it couldn’t allow a key NATO partner, a “nuclear partner” to be blackmailed and compromised.
Tonight, Barrister Michael Shrimpton will sleep in a prison cell while hundreds of prominent British citizens, some former ministers and MPs, complicit in sex crimes against children and even murder do not. This is a story of British priorities and justice, a very sad story.
Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”