Buzzfeed Gets 500 of 18 Billion Pages From Mueller Investigation

From Buzzfeed:

"Beginning last April, BuzzFeed News has pursued five separate Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to pry loose all the subpoenas and search warrants that Mueller’s team executed, as well as all the emails, memos, letters, talking points, legal opinions, and interview transcripts it generated. In short, we asked for all the communications of any kind that passed through the special counsel’s office. We also requested all of the documents that would reveal the discussions among Attorney General Bill Barr, former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, and other high-ranking officials about whether to charge President Donald Trump with obstruction.

Justice Department lawyers said the volume of records at issue could total 18 billion pages and could take centuries to produce. . .

Today, in response to a court order, the Justice Department has released the first installment of documents: 500 pages of summaries of FBI interviews with witnesses, available here for the first time. Another installment will be released every month for at least the next eight years."

They ask readers to look through the documents and send tips to one of their reporters, Jason Leopold.

So I browsed a little.   Thought I'd skip toward the end.  But scrolling down I landed in the middle.  There was an email from Steve Bannon to Jared Kushner warning him off of Paul Manafort a few days before the 2016 election:

"We need to avoid this guy like the plague
They are going to try and say the russians worked with wiki leaks to give this victory to us
Paul is a nice guy but can't let word get out he is advising us.
Get Outlook for IOS."

This is on page 238.  But when I went back and read the rest of the Buzzfeed article, they'd already highlighted this email and several others in the range of pages I was looking at.


But here's one on page 286, that is ironically interesting.  It's an email from Sergei Millian, the head of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce to Catherine Belton, a reporter for the Financial Times.  She had sent him questions and he was answering them one by one.

Sorry, It was hard getting clear copies.

This is Sept 2016.  This Russian-American promotor of business between the US and Russia is telling the reporter that Obama built favorable business climate.  Was this what he really thought or was this a way to make him not seem a Trump supporter?

And here he warns that policies such as 'using trade as a threat'  are the instruments of "politically weak minds."  Again, are these his real thoughts or his Chamber of Commerce pitch?I Or is this prescient jab at Trump?

I picked up my handy guide to all the players in the Mueller and Impeachment investigations, Seth Abramson's Proof of Conspiracy.  The index gives me "Millian, Sergei, 36-37."

There we learn that Millian, "a Kremlin-linked Russian national, Soviet-born businessman Sergei Millian - who will shortly "offer to serve as a go-between for a Belarusian author with ties to the russian government and the Trump campaign" - contacts George Papadopoulos and says he has "inside knowledge and direct access to the top hierarchy in Russian politics,"  Later he contacts him via Facebook "telling him he wants to 'share with [him] a disruptive technology that might be instrumental in your political work for the campaign."

[I'd note that in an earlier page to Belton, he denied being Russian.  Is this an error in Abramson's source?  He was from Belarus, and would have been born into the Soviet Union, not Russia.]

Abramson also says that "Millian is later revealed to be a key source - if an 'unwitting' one - for much of the dossier complied by former M16 Russia desk chief Christopher Steele in 2016 an published in January 2017 by Buzzfeed News.


There's a lot in just the 500 pages.  And Buzzfeed says after this first 500 page document

"Another installment will be released every month for at least the next eight years."

Here's the link to the documents.


I'd note that emptywheel says this is just the DOJ releasing documents just before and pertinent to the Donald Stone trial and that it will be a way to hide other information.  I didn't quite understand how it puts other info out of reach of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).