The Senate Intelligence Committee told TPM on Friday it made a criminal referral to the Department of Justice over “concerns” with Samuel Patten’s testimony.
Committee chairman Richard Burr and Vice Chairman Mark Warner said in a statement:
“We can confirm that Mr. Patten produced documents to the Committee and was interviewed by Committee staff. Due to concerns about certain statements made by Mr. Patten, the Committee made a criminal referral to the Department of Justice. While the charge, and resultant plea, do not appear to directly involve our referral, we appreciate their review of this matter. We will have no further comments on this case at this time.
What does it mean when Burr and Warner say “the charge, and resultant plea, do not appear to directly involve our referral”?
Are they saying,
“We thought he was a criminal, we just didn’t know these aspects of his criminality?”
Maybe they referred him for perjury, not for FARA violations.
Whatever the reason, it’s a surprising revelation.
I read it to indicate that the matter referred is not covered in the current plea agreement so he probably still has criminal liability out there for something. Maybe that will help loosen his lips in upcoming conversations with the SC…
They made a referral for perjury and likely document destruction. That was evidently part of the investigation, but he plead to other crimes. The guy was a walking obstruction of justice case.
The interesting take on this is that Burr allowed this statement out. Burr is clearly off-sides on at least the House R’s at this point, and is sending a single as he continues his investigation that he will go after people who lie to him.
The Republicans put a lot of pressure on Burr to end his investigation and that he has not is a testament to him, and also the fact that he obviously feels that Trump is a crook and he wants to be on the right side when the facts all come out.
Few good guys on the Republican side, but Burr has turned out to be on.
qwerty23’s comment is in the correct direction.
Something - I suspect more a number of things - would have been provided by DoJ to the SIC on Patten, that would have left no doubt with the committee leaders at least that Patten lied to or misled the SCI, probably both.
The thing about today’s plea is that is IN ITSELF a Big Deal, because the 10 year max on violating FARA is actually TWICE the max that applies to ‘bare’ spying on the US on behalf of a foreign government. Somehow, probably due to the efforts of rightwing “journalists” like the folks at the Daily Caller and the Washington Examiner, and certainly we’ve also heard a lot of this on Fox News, msm continues to treat FARA as some breach of regulatory or administrative law. It’s NOT that, at all! Proving requires a significant investment in proving deliberate intent on the part of the defendant to AVOID it becoming known who, what country, he or she is “lobbying” for.
But just from reading the plea agreement from today AND Natasha Bertrand’s long piece on Sam Patten posted at the Atlantic back in April, it’s completely obvious that Sam Patten was operating for years, up to a decade even more, as the Washington DC bureau chief for Manafort-Davis (the larger consultancy under which Manafort-Gates-Kiliminik were operating in Ukraine and Russia).
READ BERTRAND’S PIECE. Sam Patten has a completely fascinating life story, the likes of which David Cornwell (John Le Carre), himself a professional spy for some years, who recognize immediately as Classic Double Agent material.
Hint: among other tidbits, Patten claims 3 fathers - his birth father who he never knew, the man whose last name he bears who raised him with his mother, and his step father JOSEPH BLEEDING ALSOP, the American journalism counterpart to England’s (better writing) Graham Green. Alsop was a spy both for and against the Republican party, as well as a number of conservative organizations loosely under the GOP, AND both the predecessor to the CIA and the CIA itself, and FDR himself,. Like Green, Alsop was able to use his cover as a journalist to spy around the world, using his brother Stewart as an outlet for feeding leaks and propaganda into the Beltway.
So Patten seems to have very much tried to take after his step father in his own career, but without the talent, tho with some very aggressive contacts, such as one expects from being part of the various tributaries feeding into the Manafort-Stone-Gates-Yanukovych-Kiliminik-Putin-Deripaska-Firpash delta.
All of which fits that what we the public see here is “only” a supposedly single count plea to a ‘regulatory’ offense, with the expected allocution - but behind that we can expect ongoing negotiations between Patten’s attorneys and the OSC towards a comprehensive cooperation agreement.
Bear in mind, tho, that Patten has a similar problem to Gates, and, if anything, a WORSE problem than Mickey “Medallions” Cohen: he DELIBERATELY LIED TO AND MISLED CONGRESS on what appears reasonably to be a NUMBER of things. Which means his real value, such as it may be, is only to the extent that whatever he can say about … whoever … is thoroughly corroborated by documents.