WTF Just Happened Today

Monday, November 4, 2019

Subscribe: Get the Daily Update in your inbox for free

1/ Interview notes from Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation were released after CNN and BuzzFeed News sued the government to see all the work that Mueller's team kept secret. In response to a court order, the Justice Department released the first installment of documents, known as 302s, which memorialize interviews conducted by the office with witnesses and include hundreds of pages of FBI interview summaries. Per the judge's order, the Justice Department will continue to release new tranches of Mueller's investigative notes every month for at least the next eight years. (CNN / BuzzFeed News)

• ⚡️ Takeaways from the memos:

• Paul Manafort pushed the unproven theory that Ukrainians might have been responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee at least five months before the 2016 election. Deputy campaign manager Rick Gates told Robert Mueller's office in an April 2018 interview that Manafort had shared his theory that Ukraine, not Russia, was responsible for hacking the DNC with him and other campaign aides shortly after the stolen emails were published in June 2016. Gates said Manafort's theory echoed one that had been pushed by Konstantin Kilimnik, a Ukrainian businessman that Mueller's office said had ties to Russian intelligence. Three years later, Trump brought up the same conspiracy theory during his July 2019 call with the Ukrainian president when he asked for a "favor," which is now at the heart of Democrats' impeachment inquiry. (BuzzFeed News / New York Times / Washington Post)

• Michael Cohen "had to keep Trump out of the messaging related to Russia" in preparation for his testimony to Congress under oath and that the false testimony was "not his idea." Cohen later pleaded guilty in 2018 to lying to Congress about when discussions related to the Trump Tower Moscow deal had ended.

• Rick Gates said the campaign was "very happy" when a foreign government helped release the hacked DNC emails. After the hacked DNC emails, Trump told Gates that "more leaks were coming." (BuzzFeed News)

• READ: Interview notes from Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation. (CNN / DocumentCloud)

2/ The former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine told House impeachment investigators that she felt "threatened" by Trump and his suggestion to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during the July 25 phone call that she would be "going to go through some things." Marie Yovanovitch, who was abruptly recalled by Trump in May, told investigators that Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman were working with Rudy Giuliani to smear her and had orchestrated her removal as ambassador to Kiev. The revelation comes after House Democrats released the first two interview transcripts with Yovanovitch and Michael McKinley, a former senior State Department adviser. McKinl...

Visit WTF Just Happened Today? for more news and headlines, brought to you by Matt Kiser. The WTFJHT Podcast is narrated and produced by Joe Amditis.