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Hello and welcome to the Daily beans for Thursday, September 15, 2022. Today, Pillow Man Mike Lindell says the FBI seized his phone at a restaurant. Meta Judge Amit Meta Bench slapped Stuart Rhodes again. And the Durham investigation into the oranges of the Trump Russia investigation is winding down. I'm your host, Alison Gill. Hey, y', all, we got a little bit of an abbreviated show today. I'll be traveling back to the left coast, to the best coast, and I'll be in the air most of the day. So I'm just going to give you what headlines we have so far this morning. And, you know, maybe, maybe we'll get another airplane update from me when we're in the air. Who knows, There could be a lot more news still to come today. We'll know later. But for now, oh, by the way, little bit later in this show, I'm going to be talking with the author of the new book Servants of the Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump and the Corruption of Justice. So that's David Enrich. You do not want to miss that interview. Okay, now let's hit the hot notes. Hot notes. And speaking of servants of the damned, giant law firm's Donald Trump and the Corruption of Justice. When John Durham was assigned by the Justice Department in 2019, Bill Barr to examine the oranges, the origins of the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign's ties to Russia. Don Trump and his supporters expressed a belief that the inquiry would prove that a deep state conspiracy, including top Obama era officials, had worked to sabotage him. And all of the MAGA heads thought for sure Obama and Hillary and all of them would end up in gitmo. Well, now Mr. Durham appears to be winding down his three year investigation without anything close to the results Trump wanted. The grand jury that Durham has recently used to hear evidence has expired. And while he could convene another, there are currently no plans to do so. Mr. Durham and his team are working to complete a final report by the end of the year, they say. And one of the lead prosecutors on his team is leaving for a job with a prominent law firm. Over the course of his inquiry, Durham has developed a case against two people accused of lying to the FBI in relation to outside efforts to investigate purported Trump Russia ties. But he has not charged any conspiracy, nor put any high level officials on trial. The recent developments suggest the chances of any more indictments are slim to none. After Durham's team completes its report, it will be up to Attorney General Merrick Garland to decide whether to make its findings public. The report will be Mr. Durham's opportunity to present any evidence or conclusions that challenged the Justice Department's basis for opening the investigation in 2016 into the links between Trump and Russia. And it will also be full of propaganda and lies, I'm sure, as most of his filings have been. We've covered these. The Justice Department has declined to comment. Durham and his team used a grand jury in Washington to indict Mike Sussman, a prominent cybersecurity lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton's campaign. Sussmann was indicted last year on a charge of making one false statement to the FBI at a meeting, which he shared a tip about a potential connection between Alpha bank servers and the ones in Trump Tower. Sussmann was acquitted, just like we knew he would be. It was a weak charge. There was no material lie and there was only one witness in his story. He had three different ones anyway. A grand jury based in the Eastern District of Virginia last year indicted a Russian analyst who who worked with Chris Steele, a former British spy who was the author of the dossier. As we know and now, the dossier played no role in the FBI's decision to begin examining the ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. It was used as an application to obtain a search warrant to surveil a Trump campaign associate, Carter Page. The analyst, Igor Danchenko, who was accused of lying to federal investigators, goes on trial next month in Alexandria. Probably going to be acquitted, too. He's trying to get Sergei Milian to fly in from Russia and testify, and he's not. It's a shit show of a case. Now, in a third case, Durham's team negotiated a plea deal with an FBI lawyer whom an inspector general had accused of doctoring an email used in preparation for a wiretap renewal application. That's the Carter Page FISA application. The plea deal resulted in no prison time. Mr. Trump and his allies have long hoped that Durham would prosecute former FBI and intelligence officials responsible for the Russia investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane. Trump has described the investigation as a witch hunt. And accused the FBI of spying on his presidential campaign. And last month, in the days after the FBI obtained a search warrant to seize boxes of classified documents at his house, Trump used social media to amplify the unsubstantiated idea that Durham had uncovered a vast political conspiracy by the Obama administration and the intelligence community to damage him. He even sued Hillary Clinton and Andy McCabe and Pete Strzok, and that lawsuit was thrown out by a Southern District Florida judge. He was actually trying to get Eileen Cannon for that case, but he didn't. Now, at the same time, the former president seemed to acknowledge a lowering of expectations, though, when on his social media, there's a vast criminal underground, deep state conspiracy involving all the people that I sued and everybody and everyone's connected to the Hillary campaign. But he also said the public is, you know, he sort of tamped down expectations because he knows there's fucking nothing there. The public is waiting with bated breath for the Durham report, which should reveal corruption at a level never seen before in our country, he wrote. It's probably not going to do that. And if Garland doesn't release it, they'll say they're covering it up. And if he does release it, they'll say we somehow doctored it or there's missing stuff. It's. Or they'll take what's in there that, you know, Durham has spun and make big deals out of it Anyway, next up Tuesday, the FBI apparently paid a visit, as Peter Navarro puts it, to the Pillow man and served him with a grand jury subpoena for the contents of his phone as part of an investigation into a Colorado election security breach. Lindell shared on social media and conservative media copies of a subpoena he said he was served by the FBI. In an interview with cnn, Lindell said agents asked him questions about Tina Peters, the Mesa County, Colorado, clerk who's facing state charges connected to a scheme that allegedly allowed an unauthorized person to access voting machines. Peters has pled not guilty. And we knew that. I knew that the day was coming for Pillow man here in the Tina Peters case because it was his cyber symposium that those data were put on public screens. Remember when the kid, the hacker guy, as he was talking about this voter, stolen voter data being shown on screen, he had got a call from his lawyer while he was, like, doing the cyber symposium, and his lawyer told him to hang up the phone, get off the video, and leave the thing immediately. That data was stolen, and it was stolen by Tina Peters, who helped. And now we've got, I mean, there's, there's video of the same kind of behavior going on down in Georgia as well. So this is. Lindell was the next obvious step. The FBI is also investigating the security breach episode that CNN has reported. Lindell said the FBI encounter occurred Tuesday afternoon while he was in his car to drive through at a Hardee's restaurant in Minnesota. Blow it out your hair do because you work at Hardee's. On his Internet show, the Lindell Report, he said cars pulled up in front of us, to the side of us and behind us. And I said, these are either bad guys or the FBI. Well, it turns out they were the FBI. Lindell told CNN the agents presented him with a subpoena and asked for his phone. On his Internet show, Lindell said he goes, well, I got some bad news. He goes, we're taking your cell phone. We have a warrant for your cell phone. So it wasn' twas it a subpoena or a warrant? I'm confused. Lindell initially objected and consulted his attorney, but then relented and provided the device to agents. I want to say this. They were pretty nice guys. None of them had an attitude, pillow man said. Lindell told CNN he initially believed agents were serving him with a subpoena as part of a large sweep of investigative activity in recent days relating to the 16 investigation. Agents told him it was unrelated. I said, come on, bring me to January 6, he said he told the agents, I want to be a part of that show. Hmm. Lindell said the subpoena warned against disclosure. They thought they were in. They thought they were there to intimidate me. They won't intimidate me is what Lindell said an FBI spokesperson told cnn. Without commenting on specific matters, I can confirm the FBI was at that location executing a search warrant authorized by a federal judge. So it was a search warrant. There's your answer. CNN has reached out to Peter's attorney for any comment, but they haven't gotten any. And a federal judge in D.C. found it mystifying that Oath Keepers leader Stuart Rhodes would make a last ditch request for the appointment of a special with trial just a couple weeks away. This is Judge Amit Mehta. He began pretrial conferences Wednesday after 9:30am by saying he hoped to address the motions filed in recent days by Rhodes and to talk about jury selection and courtroom space ahead of the September 27th seditious conspiracy trial. Mehta, who's an Obama appointee, explained that he denied the request to appoint a special master because he had no idea what the purpose would be. He also denied a trial delay, noting the government has consistently been providing discovery. The judge, pushing back on Rhodes contention that there's not been adequate time to prepare for a trial, noted that the issue of the trial date has been settled since May. The request for a Special master filed by Rhodes attorney Edward Tarpley as Rhodes attempted to part ways with his attorney Philip Linder and James Bright, creating a dueling defense lawyer scenario on the docket. Bright confirmed Tarpley is not the lead attorney on the case, but Judge Mehta allowed him to join and can file his own motions. In one such motion, Tarpley insisted there simply hasn't been enough time to prepare the most massively complicated case in history. It would be like a Little League team facing the Yankees. Tarpley further asserted that a special master was needed to help manage discovery, a discovery his client claims has been sorely lacking. But Meta was clear. He said you've been receiving electronic discovery in a way no other defendant has. I reject it out of hand completely, meta said of the notion that Rhodes hasn't had access to discovery. Questioning the good faith of the motion, Mehta said that a special master request filed for no apparent purpose and for no apparent reason a week before trial is mystifying. He also said he didn't know what was meant by the request for a special master to administer digital discovery in the case. And he further suggested it was an odd decision for Rhodes to hire a Louisiana lawyer to assist with a purported discovery access issue. You told me last week you were here in good faith. I'm starting to question that, the judge said. All right, we'll be right back with David Enrich. You don't want to miss it. Stick around after these messages.