Judge rejects secrecy in suit over Kushner-owned apartments

A federal judge has rejected a bid by companies connected to President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner to keep secret details in a pending lawsuit claiming that Maryland apartment complexes owned or managed by Kushner's companies collected illegal fees from tenants.

Two Kushner-linked firms caught up in the suit wanted to file details on their ownership structure with the court under seal, but in a ruling Friday U.S. District Court Judge James Bredar sided with five news organizations who urged that the businesses be required to provide those details on the public record.

"The Defendants are no doubt correct that the presence of the Kushner (and therefore Trump) families in this case has raised its profile and attracted significant, though perhaps not 'unprecedented,' media attention," Bredar wrote. "But increased public interest in a case does not, by itself, overcome the presumption of access. In fact, it would logically strengthen it, particularly when the interest is due to the presence of important public figures in the litigation."

Bredar, an appointee of President Barack Obama, ordered the limited liability companies in question to file details of their ownership and members on the public record within two weeks.

The class-action suit, filed in a local court in Baltimore in September, argues that Westminster Management and related firms charged excessive or improper late fees in violation of Maryland law. Some tenants were illegally threatened with eviction as a result of the fee-charging practices, the suit alleges.

The firms transferred the case to federal court on the grounds that some of the defendants are residents of other states. Bredar, however, said clarifying that issue requires him to know more about how the companies are structured.

An attorney for the companies, Cynthia Maskol, did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on the ruling.

Nathan Siegel, a lawyer for the news outlets that prevailed Friday, said he welcomed the judge's opinion.

“The decision recognized the important principle that the courts are open to the public, especially in cases involving major public figures," Siegel said in a statement.

The news organizations who protested the firms' attempt to file a secret pleading in the case were The Baltimore Sun, ProPublica, The Washington Post, WMAR-TV (Baltimore's ABC affiliate), and The Associated Press.

Errant court filing suggests feds had informant at Manafort firm

A document that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's attorneys appear to have accidentally filed in court Wednesday suggests that federal investigators had an informant inside Manafort's consulting firm who provided information about his financial dealings.

The one-page memo submitted along with a routine scheduling motion seems to have been prepared by a defense lawyer or investigator trying to assemble information that could support a claim by Manafort's defense of improper contacts between the prosecution team — now headed by special counsel Robert Mueller — and the media.

The document, titled "DOJ, OSC and the Press," says that a reporter appeared to have obtained access to internal documents from the firm Manafort founded, Davis Manafort Partners International.

The memo indicates that an affidavit for a seizure warrant obtained by prosecutors on the same day Manafort was indicted in October says that a Davis Manafort staffer acknowledged allowing a journalist to look at the firm's digital records.

"In the Winter of 2017 (sic 2016) employee of DMI—CS-1 permitted the reporter to view material on a hard drive copy of DMI's electronic files," the document reads, using a standard FBI acronym for a confidential source. "Government obtained warrant for the hard drive."

Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni had no comment on the memo. Manafort's lead defense attorney, Kevin Downing, did not respond to a message seeking comment.

A spokesman for Mueller's office declined to comment. On Oct. 27, 2017, Manafort and one of his key associates at DMI, Rick Gates, were indicted on charges including money laundering and failing to register as foreign lobbyists for their Ukraine-related work. Both men entered not guilty pleas. No trial date has been set.

The memo doesn't name any reporter, but it mentions The Associated Press and cites an April 12, 2017, AP story that reported DMI's records confirmed receipt of some alleged payments to Manafort discovered in a so-called "black ledger" obtained by Ukrainian anti-corruption investigators.

"Financial records newly obtained by The Associated Press confirm that at least $1.2 million in payments listed in the ledger next to Manafort’s name were actually received by his U.S. consulting firm," said the story, published under a joint byline by reporters Jack Gillum, Chad Day and Jeff Horwitz.

Citing the same seizure warrant affidavit, the notes filed by Manafort's defense team also relates that The Associated Press gave Maloni copies of two memos Manafort wrote to a Ukranian oligarch in 2005 about work for Ukraine's Party of Regions. The defense filing suggests the memos came from the one of the reporters who wrote the April 12 AP story.

Time gap suggests FBI tried questioning espionage suspect before arrest

A gap in a newly released affidavit about the arrest of Jerry Lee, the espionage suspect and former Central Intelligence Agency officer, suggests that the FBI tried to question him before arresting him on Monday.

The statement from FBI Agent Kellie O’Brien indicates that Lee was not immediately arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York when he stepped off Cathay Flight 830 from Hong Kong, which had pulled up at the gate just before 12:30 p.m.

Instead, the FBI allowed Lee to proceed through customs and into the terminal. Even then, agents didn’t move to arrest him, despite the fact that they’d gotten a warrant to take him into custody for retaining classified information after he left the CIA in 2007.

“I called out to the defendant by his name and he responded affirmatively,” O’Brien wrote in the affidavit, which was filed Tuesday in federal court in Brooklyn and released Wednesday. “Later that same day, I placed the defendant Jerry Chun Shing Lee under arrest.”

O’Brien’s statement doesn’t say how much time elapsed between when she approached Lee and when he was actually arrested. A Justice Department news release issued Tuesday said Lee “was arrested after arriving at” JFK.

The fact that agents didn’t immediately arrest O’Brien before he went through customs is another indication that they wanted to question him. Doing so in the customs area when he was not free to leave might have rendered statements he made inadmissible unless the FBI gave him Miranda warnings, which undoubtedly would have alarmed him.

It’s unclear whether Lee was traveling with family members, which also might have played a role in the timing of the arrest.

An FBI spokesperson declined to comment, as did spokespeople for the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Lee, 53, who has been living in Hong Kong, is charged with retaining and failing to return two small notebooks containing classified information about the true names of CIA “assets,” their contact information and details on their meetings with CIA personnel, including Lee. The charge dates to episodes in 2012 when court-authorized searches of Lee’s luggage at hotels in Hawaii and Northern Virginia turned up the notebook and datebook containing the allegedly classified information.

Lee has also come under suspicion in a broader investigation of how China killed or arrested about two dozen individuals who served as CIA sources, according to former officials. He has not been charged with espionage or with disclosing classified information to anyone.

A current U.S. intelligence official acknowledged that there is more to the case than the single charge against Lee, in light of the disruption of the U.S. spying network in China.

“Given the broader questions about China and the alleged network of spies, one charge of possessing classified information doesn’t fully answer the scope of what was alleged to have happened,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss ongoing cases.

O’Brien’s new affidavit refers to an “underlying investigation” but doesn’t elaborate on its focus. She does indicate that she “previously interviewed the defendant.” She doesn’t say when, but the criminal complaint says the FBI questioned Lee at least five times in 2013.

O’Brien appears to be a key agent for the FBI on China-related counterintelligence matters. She’s assigned to the Washington Field Office and was also deeply involved in a case filed last year against Candace Claiborne, a veteran State Department employee charged with making false statements and obstruction of an official proceeding for her alleged efforts to cover up payments she and an associate took from Chinese agents in exchange for information about activities at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

Court unseals details on Stuxnet leak probe

A federal court has unsealed new details about how investigators tried to track down suspected sources for New York Times reporter David Sanger's book discussing how the U.S. and Israel used a computer virus known as "Stuxnet" to sabotage Iran's nuclear program.

Documents made public Thursday on the order of a federal magistrate judge indicate that investigators obtained court orders in 2012 to receive information about messages sent and received by at least two former officials on their private email accounts: retired Marine Gen. James Cartwright and another official whose name was not disclosed by the court.

Cartwright pleaded guilty in 2016 to a single felony count of lying to the FBI, although he also acknowledged to the court that he had provided and confirmed top-secret information to Sanger as he was reporting for his book, "Confront and Conceal." The former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was facing a potential sentence of up to five years in prison before President Barack Obama issued him a pardon three days before leaving office last January.

The court records show prosecutors got a court order in September 2012 to examine data from Cartwright's Gmail account, such as whom he was emailing and when. The order did not permit investigators to see the content of the messages, but they likely got that information eventually through a search warrant.

"A witness told investigators that General Cartwright communicated with David Sanger concerning Confront and Conceal," then-U.S. Attorney for Maryland Rod Rosenstein and Assistant U.S. Attorney Leo Wise wrote in applying for the order. "The United States obtained, via Grand Jury subpoena, telephone records for a cell phone owned by General Cartwright. Those records show that General Cartwright called Mr. Sanger on January 18, 2012 and spoke to him for 39 minutes and called him on March 9, 2012 and spoke with him for 31 minutes. Both calls occurred prior to publication of Confront and Conceal in June 2012."

A bit more mystery surrounds the second order, which suggests that the target of that directive fell under suspicion in part due to an email exchange with a White House official.

The court records say that on June 1, 2012, the day an excerpt from Sanger's book appeared in the Times outlining the Stuxnet operation against Iran, a former government official emailed an ex-colleague at the White House about the disclosures.

"Sanger clearly says that I would not talk about what happened while I was in government and I frankly didn't know (until today of course) what happened after I left," the former official wrote.

The White House official forwarded the message to a colleague, who replied, according to the court filing: "That's not what Sanger told me."

While the former official's name and the names of the others involved in the exchange were redacted by the court, the only source cited in Sanger's article saying that he could not talk about what happened while he was in government is former Central Intelligence Agency Director Michael Hayden, a retired Air Force General who also headed the National Security Agency under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Reached Thursday evening, Hayden declined to comment on whether the email message was his. However, he expressed support for the FBI's work on the matter.

"It looks like the bureau was both thorough and respectful of the rule of law," Hayden told POLITICO.

Sanger declined to comment on the specifics of the FBI's quest to expose his sources and said the redactions obscured both the identities of those involved in the White House email exchange and their meaning.

However, the veteran Times national security reporter said the unsealing of the court filings revealing investigators' focus on his June 1 article, "Obama order sped up wave of cyberattacks against Iran," amounted to the closest the U.S. government has come to owning up to its role in the campaign to disrupt Iran's nuclear infrastructure.

"You can't tell from these legal documents who's talking about what, but it does show you the government was going to extraordinary lengths to find the sources of the story of the first known, sophisticated American cyberattack on a foreign nation — and these documents are about as close as this government has come to acknowledging the facts in the story," Sanger said Thursday night.

Then-Attorney General Eric Holder assigned Rosenstein to conduct the leak investigation into Sanger's Stuxnet reporting, although authorities' public statements at the time about precisely what was being investigated were extremely vague.

Four years elapsed between the issuance of the email-related orders released Thursday and the filing of the charge against Cartwright.

The Trump administration has announced a review of guidelines governing investigations involving the media. Rosenstein, now deputy attorney general, has cited the Cartwright probe as an example of the often-protracted delays in leak cases.

However, published reports suggest that the bulk of the delay in that case stemmed not from protections for journalists, but difficulties coordinating the case with Israeli officials, who were concerned about potential additional public disclosures of intelligence secrets.

The court records were made public as a result of a court application filed last year by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which sought more details about how the FBI and prosecutors investigate leak cases.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Deborah Robinson agreed on Tuesday to unseal the records with the concurrence of prosecutors. She issued the 2012 order focused on the former official's America Online account, while U.S. Magistrate Judge Alan Kay issued the order aimed at Cartwright's Gmail.

It is unclear how Robinson determined what portions of the orders should remain sealed or why most names were deleted from the documents made public. Her orders unsealing the filings remain under seal.

DISCLOSURE: Gerstein is a member of the Reporters Committee's steering committee.

White House plans to destroy Trump election fraud commission's voter data

The White House intends to destroy voter data collected by the election fraud commission recently shut down by President Donald Trump, the Justice Department said in a court filing Tuesday night.

White House Director of Information Technology Charles Herndon said in a declaration submitted to a federal court in Washington that officials plan to erase the information, rather than transfer it to the Department of Homeland Security or the National Archives and Records Administration.

Herndon also indicated that White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders' comment last week that the commission's "preliminary findings" were being sent to DHS was inaccurate.

"The Commission did not create any preliminary findings," Herndon wrote in the declaration, which was part of the Justice Department submission.

Earlier Tuesday, lawyers for one of the former commission's members, Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, asked U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly to halt any effort to move or copy the voter data to another federal agency.

"The state voter data will not be transferred to, or accessed by, DHS or any other agency, except to the National Archives and Records Administration ('NARA'), pursuant to federal law, if the records are not otherwise destroyed," Herndon wrote. "Pending resolution of outstanding litigation involving the Commission, and pending consultation with NARA, the White House intends to destroy all state voter data."

As the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity was ramping up last June, the panel's vice chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, asked all 50 states to submit their voter rolls. Kobach also asked for information such as partial Social Security numbers and criminal conviction data.

Kobach stressed that the commission was seeking only publicly available data. Still, dozens of states pushed back against the request, saying they planned to reject it in whole or in part.

The commission was also hit by eight lawsuits, some of which charged that the panel was violating the law in collecting or handling the data.

When Trump disbanded the commission last week, he cited the suits as well as the refusal of many states to cooperate with the group's work.

Kobach told POLITICO last week that he expected officials in or overseeing Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement branch would take over the voter fraud probe, matching state voter rolls against federal databases of legal and illegal immigrants.

However, Herndon's statements suggest that if DHS or ICE wants to undertake an effort to examine illegal voting, they will have to start from scratch, at least when it comes to obtaining the voter data.

Judge: Drive to recover Colin Powell's emails could be fruitful

A federal judge has rejected the federal government's bid to toss out a lawsuit demanding official action to recover emails former Secretary of State Colin Powell sent during his four years as America's top diplomat more than a decade ago.

In a ruling Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Trevor McFadden called "anemic" the efforts the State Department and National Archives have made to obtain the messages, which Powell sent via an America Online account.

McFadden didn't immediately order State or the Archives to take further action, but he said that a conservative watchdog group — Cause of Action Institute — can proceed with its suit despite the Justice Department's arguments that the litigation is fruitless.

Lawyers for the State Department noted that Powell's representative told the agency that there were no emails left from the period in Powell's AOL account, which had been closed for several years. AOL's general counsel told a House committee that AOL's system had no emails from Powell's tenure as secretary from 2001 to 2005.

However, drawing in part on the FBI and State Department's success in retrieving of thousands of emails former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent on a private account during her time at Foggy Bottom, McFadden said he believes there's a "substantial likelihood" an investigation by the Justice Department "will yield access to at least some of Secretary Powell's emails."

"Here, all they have done has been to ask Secretary Powell to seek the emails himself, and then declare 'mission accomplished' when Secretary Powell's representative informed them that AOL believed the emails no longer exist," wrote McFadden, an appointee of President Donald Trump. "If AOL were to be contacted directly by the Government, rather than by Secretary Powell's representatives, perhaps they would undertake a more thorough search for Secretary Powell's account, or the servers on which it was stored."

The judge also suggested that State and the Archives may have a legal obligation to refer the issue to Attorney General Jeff Sessions for his review.

McFadden pointed to a federal appeals court ruling from late 2016 in which the D.C. Circuit held that a judge was too quick to dismiss similar suits pressing State and the Archives to do more to recover Clinton's emails.

"Even if AOL's representations are accepted as truthful, the Court is still left without any knowledge of how AOL went about researching the question, and the extent to which Secretary Powell's emails have been permanently erased or perhaps merely deleted," McFadden wrote.

Powell's assistant declined to comment. A Justice Department spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment and a State Department spokeswoman had no immediate comment.

When Powell's email practices drew public attention amid the Clinton email controversy in 2016, Powell defended his email use as part of an effort to try to bring the State Department into the internet era in the early part of the previous decade. He noted that he boasted in his memoir about using his AOL account to that end.

"I was not aware at the time of any requirement for private, unclassified exchanges to be treated as official records," Powell said.

The State Department inspector general eventually found some messages sent to Powell's private account and concluded that two of them contained classified information, although it was unclear whether they should have been treated as classified at the time they were sent by ambassadors and forwarded to Powell by his staff.

In an interview with POLITICO two years ago, Powell dismissed the classification claims.

"They’re fairly innocuous and very benign, and neither ambassador classified them at the time. They were merely information memos sent to State.gov," Powell said. "Now, 11 or 12 years later, as part of a whole process of reviewing things, somebody in the department says, 'Well, they're classified.' My response to that is, no they were not. ... You can say your judgment is they should have been classified, but at the time they were not classified."

An official with the Cause of Action Institute welcomed McFadden's ruling.

"Agencies must take their responsibility to secure federal records seriously," said John Vecchione, the group's president and CEO. "For too long, agencies have allowed federal employees to use personal email accounts without ensuring those records are recovered and maintained in accordance with the law. We are encouraged that the court recognized that agencies must do more to recover lost records."

Fusion GPS: Trump-appointed judge has conflicts, should recuse

The private investigation firm behind the so-called Trump dossier — Fusion GPS — is arguing that a Trump-appointed federal judge has so many conflicts of interest that he should recuse himself from a legal case stemming from BuzzFeed's publication of the dossier earlier this year.

Fusion's lawyers say the impartiality of U.S. District Court Judge Trevor McFadden is open to question because he represented a firm owned by a Russian businessman who claims he was libeled by publication of the dossier and he was a top lawyer at the Justice Departments Criminal Division last year when Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley requested an investigation into Fusion.

Fusion's attorneys also say that "perhaps" the most significant conflict is McFadden's work as a "vetter" on Trump's transition team. That service is problematic because of repeated comments Trump has made on Twitter challenging the accuracy of the dossier, calling for release of details on how it was funded and suggesting that Fusion was involved in wrong doing.

"President-elect Trump began making public statements expressing his animosity toward Fusion GPS and its work related to the Trump Dossier during the transition," Fusion GPS lawyers William Taylor, Steven Salky and Rachel Cotton wrote in a letter to McFadden last week urging recusal. "Mr. Trump has continued making such statements on a regular basis as President, until the president day. Indeed, the President's adversity to Fusion has been repeatedly expressed by his spokesperson and has become an element of his political agenda."

Fusion also alluded to financial donations McFadden made to the Trump campaign. Federal Election Commission records show a total of $1,000 McFadden gave to Trump's presidential bid last October.

Fusion's letter to McFadden was not immediately placed in the court's public files, but McFadden released it Monday and said he "would welcome briefing regarding potential recusal." He said if Fusion or any other party wants him to recuse it should file a motion to that effect by next Monday.

Trump nominated McFadden, a former partner at Baker & McKenzie, to the U.S. District Court in Washington last June. He was confirmed in October and serves as one of three Trump-appointed judges on the district court in the nation's capital.

The dossier, a compilation of intelligence reports about Donald Trump's ties to Russia, was assembled by British intelligence operative Christopher Steele at the request of Fusion GPS during the 2016. Some of Steele's initial research was paid for by a conservative news outlet, the Washington Free Beacon. Fusion and Steele continued on the project with funding from lawyers working for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

The compendium became the focus of attention from the FBI last year. In recent months, Republicans have grown convinced that the FBI used the dossier's accurate, inaccurate, unverified, and, in some instances, salacious, claims to seek surveillance warrants and take other investigative steps that led to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

While the dossier has spawned a morass of lawsuits in Washington, Miami, New York and London, the litigation before McFadden is an offshoot of a case pending in federal court in Miami where a Russian internet entrepreneur mentioned in the dossier is suing BuzzFeed over its publication of the documents.

The Russian businessman, Aleksej Gubarev, has subpoenaed Fusion GPS for records and testimony related to the dossier. Fusion, which is based in Washington, chose to move in federal court in D.C. to quash the subpoena.

Fusion's letter doesn't allege that McFadden or Baker & McKenzie worked for Gubarev, but says they did represent a company called VimpelCom in a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigation. That firm is controlled by Mikhail Fridman, who is suing Fusion GPS and one of its co-founders, Glenn Simpson, for libel stemming from production and dissemination of the dossier. That suit, separate from the Florida one, is pending before U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon in Washington. Leon was appointed by former President George W. Bush.

The dossier-related subpoena dispute McFadden is being pressured to recuse from was originally before a judge appointed by President Barack Obama, Tanya Chutkan. She recused from the case in December without public explanation and the matter was randomly reassigned to McFadden.

Judge: Trump tweets don't require more disclosure on dossier

President Donald Trump's tweets dismissing a dossier of intelligence claims about his ties to Russia don't indicate that the FBI has explored the issue and can't be used to force federal agencies to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests for records about the compilation, a federal judge has ruled.

U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled Thursday that Trump's repeated characterizations of the dossier as "fake" or "discredited" could simply be his reaction to media accounts and may not reflect any interest in the subject by the U.S. government.

"Plaintiffs point to no case law that expands the presumption to official statements such that, absent contrary evidence, courts must presume that an official statement is premised upon documents in the government’s possession," wrote Mehta, an Obama appointee.

"None of the tweets inescapably lead to the inference that the President’s statements about the Dossier are rooted in information he received from the law enforcement and intelligence communities ... The President’s statements may very well be based on media reports or his own personal knowledge, or could simply be viewed as political statements intended to counter media accounts about the Russia investigation, rather than assertions of pure fact," the judge added in a 37-page decision responding to a Freedom of Information Suit filed on behalf of this reporter.

During the litigation, the Justice Department conceded that Trump's Twitter statements are official statements of the president. However, Mehta ruled that none of them were specific enough to preclude the FBI from refusing to confirm or deny that it has a two-page synopsis of the dossier or to keep various agencies from refusing to say whether they have reached any conclusions about the document's accuracy.

"A presidential tweet could satisfy the stringent requirements of the official acknowledgement doctrine. But it does not follow that just because a tweet is an 'official' statement of the President that its substance is necessarily grounded in information contained in government records," the judge wrote.

The so-called dossier is a collection of accurate, inaccurate and unverified claims about Trump prepared by a former British intelligence operative, Christopher Steele, at the request of a Washington-based private investigation firm, Fusion GPS. The firm commissioned the report for a law firm representing Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

A lawyer who pressed the case for release of the records, Brad Moss, said an appeal is under consideration. He also said the decision seems to suggest Trump's statement should be given less weight than public comments by other senior officials, like heads of Cabinet agencies.

"We are disappointed in the Court’s ruling and are evaluating the possibility of an appeal. Of far more concerning significance is the legal implication of this ruling, in so much as it reduces official statements by the President of the United States into little more than random musings by a proverbial carnival barker who just happens to also serve as the Chief Executive," Moss said. "It is difficult to envision a scenario in which it is in the national interest of this country for the President’s statements to be so cavalierly disregarded in this manner.”

Homeland Security deployed ‘crisis action team’ to enforce first Trump travel ban

When protests and widespread confusion broke out at airports across the U.S. after President Donald Trump issued his first travel ban executive order last January, White House officials scoffed at the scenes of turmoil and insisted the president’s plan was smoothly moving into place.

“It really is a massive success story in terms of implementation on every single level,” a senior administration official told reporters two days after Trump signed the directive. Top Trump adviser Stephen Miller boasted to CBS that the roll-out was “efficient, orderly [and] enormously successful.”

However, Department of Homeland Security records obtained by POLITICO reflect confusion on the front lines about how to implement the order and show that DHS officials deemed the situation a “crisis” requiring a high-level response.

“The National Operations Center (NOC) Crisis Action Team (CAT) activated at 0800 this morning to assist in facilitating DHS response and reactions to the Presidential Executive Order Protecting the Nation from Terrorist Attacks by Foreign Nations,” an email sent to senior DHS officials on Jan. 29 and released last week in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit said.

Asked about DHS declaring a “crisis” over implementation of Trump’s initial order banning travel to the U.S. by citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries, a DHS official said his agency followed its protocols for handling complex events.

“The crisis action team (CAT) is a mechanism to ensure efficient coordination and communication during events and matters that involve multiple federal, state, local, or private sector response efforts,” said the official, who requested anonymity. “The CAT is activated in response to a large-scale response effort to provide information and decision products to senior leadership.”

White House spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment on whether the administration’s public messaging was at odds with what was taking place behind the scenes.

A previously released but unreported message from then-DHS chief of staff Kirstjen Nielsen to other top DHS officials referred twice to a “war room” handling issues related to the Jan. 27 order, which was partially blocked by judges within hours of its issuance and largely halted worldwide by a more sweeping order issued by a federal judge in Seattle on Jan. 29.

After a stint as deputy White House chief of staff, Nielsen was confirmed in October as secretary of homeland security.

Some of the records released in response to the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by a POLITICO reporter and the pro-transparency James Madison Project depict internal confusion about the application of the initial executive order to various groups like U.S. green card holders, Canadian residents who are citizens of the restricted countries and refugees holding approved travel documents, but no passports.

As airlines pressed DHS for answers on behalf of passengers trying to board flights in the days after the order, officials grumbled that they were sometimes receiving contradictory guidance from top Trump administration officials.

"We got a memo from the White House saying one thing and now the Press Secretary said another," a senior Customs and Border Patrol official wrote to an American Airlines executive in a Feb. 1 email explaining why the agency had just abruptly withdrawn guidance sent to major international air carriers.

DHS emails show that officials dealing with airlines and airports were told to direct all questions to a single phone number in Washington, D.C., but at least one airline executive said the hotline was unresponsive.

“The number was not answered yesterday all day and is now ‘busy’ continuously (not in use?) – so unfortunately not helpful,” an official with Swiss-based PrivatAir complained to a contact at the Transportation Security Administration.

A report by DHS’ internal watchdog on implementation of the first travel ban order is currently being blocked from public release by DHS management.

Shortly before retiring late last year, Inspector General John Roth told lawmakers that he wanted to release the report to Congress and the public, but DHS officials cited concerns that the review contains information that could invade privileged attorney-client conversations and intrude on executive branch policy deliberations.

DHS officials said they’ve referred the disclosure and privilege issues to the Justice Department for its input.

Roth did disclose his top-line findings, which asserted that Homeland Security officials violated two court orders issued in response to Trump’s directive and that a lack of notice to top Customs and Border Protection managers left them “caught by surprise” as they scrambled to implement the order.

DHS spokesman Tyler Houlton defended the agency’s effort to carry out the directive and to comply with court orders emerging from a flurry of lawsuits.

“The department’s many officials conducted themselves professionally, and in a legal manner, as they implemented an executive order issued by the president," Houlton said in November, reacting to Roth’s letter about the unreleased report.

After failing to get the key injunction against the first travel ban lifted, Trump decided to withdraw the original directive and issue a new one.

The revamped order, announced in March, dropped Iraq, but kept Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen on the restricted list. Large swaths of that order were also blocked nationwide by federal judges in Hawaii and Maryland.

In June, the Supreme Court partially lifted those injunctions, allowing Trump to deny visas to travelers without family, business or educational ties to the U.S., but leaving those with such connections exempt from the ban.

In September, Trump issued yet another order imposing a varied set of “tailored” travel restrictions on citizens of eight countries, six of which are majority-Muslim.

Litigation over the September order is continuing, but the Supreme Court issued a temporary ruling last month allowing the administration to implement the new directive in its entirety while the legal battle plays out.

Judge: Cruise line isn't an internet provider under surveillance law

A cruise line doesn't amount to an internet provider under a key federal surveillance law, according to a court ruling released Tuesday.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Deborah Robinson rejected arguments from federal prosecutors in Washington that Royal Caribbean Cruises is "a provider of an electronic communication service" because of the internet connections it makes available to guests.

"If this proposition were carried to its logical conclusion, then every entity which now offers free WiFi would be rendered a 'provider'" under the surveillance law, the Stored Communications Act, Robinson wrote in a Nov. 29 order. "The undersigned cannot conclude that such a result would be consistent with the intent of Congress in enacting the Stored Communications Act."

"Indeed, free WiFi is provided in this very courthouse," Robinson added in a footnote. "A contention that the United States District Court for the District of Columbia therefore is a 'provider of electronic communication service' or a 'provider of remote computing service' likely would be viewed with disbelief."

Robinson denied a request prosecutors first made in July for a court order requiring disclosure of "subscriber and transactional" records normally available from internet providers. The records made public give no hint what the underlying investigation is about, although the lead prosecutor on the matter is from the cyber unit of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington.

While the ruling may sound like a victory for privacy advocates, legal experts said the contrary may actually be true. By declaring that cruise lines, and presumably restaurants, stores and other businesses, are not covered by that law, the magistrate may be giving prosecutors a green light to get the same kinds of records with a grand jury subpoena, which requires no court order at all.

"It's hard to assess without more facts. But if the judge is right, that means the government doesn't need a court order to get the records," said George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr. "The government only needs a court order under 2703(d) if Royal Carribbean is acting as a provider of electronic communication service or remote computing service. If it's not acting in that way, a subpoena to get the records, with no judicial review, is all that is required."

Others said that while the government could get some information through a subpoena, it might not be entitled to everything it could get through the court order it was denied.

"I think that certain 'transactional' records related to an IP address should be considered content (e.g. web logs revealing sites and pages visited)," so not available under the Stored Communications Act, said Alan Butler of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. He also noted that if the law in question doesn't cover those providing WiFi as a convenience, it also doesn't protect the privacy of such a business' customers.

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office referred questions to the Justice Department. A spokeswoman there declined to comment.

A spokesman for the cruise line said the firm was unaware of the dispute.

"We were not a party to this proceeding so we are not aware of the nature of the case and are in no position to comment," Royal Caribbean spokesman Owen Torres said.

Russian oligarch Deripaska drops libel suit against Associated Press

A Russian oligarch whose business dealings have come under scrutiny by investigators probing Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election has dropped a libel suit against The Associated Press.

Lawyers for aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, who worked closely with indicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort several years ago, joined with the news service Tuesday in a joint court filing dismissing appeals of a judge's decision in October tossing out the defamation lawsuit.

Deripaska's suit, filed in May, alleged that an AP story published two months earlier falsely implied that Deripaska was paying Manafort for work aimed at advancing the goals of the Russian government and Russian president Vladimir Putin.

The suit also said the article created the false impression that Deripaska's dealings with Manafort were intertwined with the Trump campaign, despite the fact that the two men ended their work together by 2009.

U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle dismissed the lawsuit, finding that the Russian businessman was "a limited purpose public figure" under U.S. libel law. That determination meant Deripaska needed to plausibly assert that the AP knew its story was false at the time it published it, something the judge found the complaint in the case failed to lay out.

Both sides appealed, with the AP objecting to a ruling from Huvelle that denied the news outlet the right to recover its attorneys fees under a D.C. law aimed at discouraging lawsuits designed to mute public debate.

The notice filed with the D.C. Circuit Tuesday dropping the appeals offered no explanation for the decision, but said both sides had "agreed" to dismiss their appeals.

AP spokeswoman Lauren Easton welcomed the development.

"The Associated Press is pleased that the appeal has been dismissed. As we have said, we stand by our reporting and we will continue to pursue important stories of public interest," Easton said Tuesday.

Easton added later that there had been no settlement or payment by the AP.

"There was no settlement or agreement between the parties," she said. "Deripaska unilaterally dismissed his appeal, and upon hearing it, we agreed to dismiss ours and close the case."

Lawyers for Deripaska, Jonathan Schiller and Jonathan Sherman of law firm Boies Schiller, did not respond to requests for comment. A Moscow-based spokeswoman for Deripaska did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Since the suit was filed, several developments may have made the litigation less attractive for the Russian oligarch.

In September, The Washington Post reported that while Manafort was managing the Trump campaign he urged an associate to set up a briefing for Deripaska, in what appeared to be a bid to collect money Manafort believed he was owed by the wealthy Russian. It's unclear whether the offer ever reached Deripaska.

In October, Manafort and business partner Rick Gates were indicted on charges of money laundering and failing to register as lobbyists for Ukraine. The indictment obtained by special counsel Robert Mueller claims Manafort laundered and hid tens of millions in income from their overseas work through a series of offshore companies. Deripaska was not charged in the case.

Manafort and Gates pleaded not guilty to the charges. No trial date has been set.

Trump administration takes DACA documents fight to Supreme Court

The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to block a judge's demand that the government compile a broad set of records about how officials decided to shut down the program offering quasi-legal status and work permits to so-called Dreamers.

In an unusual emergency filing at the high court Friday, Justice Department lawyers said orders from San Francisco-based U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup threaten to intrude on confidential executive branch deliberations and are already causing a major diversion of federal resources to review more than 1.6 million documents potentially responsive to the judge's orders.

"The White House, DHS, and DOJ will have been required to collect, review, and make privilege determinations as to thousands of additional documents; numerous deliberative materials will have been made public; various privileges, including executive privilege, will have been breached based on the district court’s existing erroneous privilege rulings (and any more that follow); and high-ranking government officials will have been deposed," Solicitor General Noel Francisco wrote in a stay application filed with the justices. "Even if subsequently narrowed, further discovery is extremely likely to impose considerable burdens and thereby impair the performance of other essential DHS and DOJ functions."

The Justice Department filed an "administrative record" of just 256 pages of documents, all of which had been previously released, in response to a series of lawsuits challenging the September decision to wind down the the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Alsup ruled that the limited set of documents was inadequate and that parties seeking to preserve the program are entitled to see memos and legal analyses that led to the cancellation of DACA.

The Justice Department's formal request to the Supreme Court to take up the records issue paints Alsup's decision as deeply flawed.

"This petition is addressed ... to that court’s extraordinary departure from bedrock principles governing judicial review of federal agency action," Francisco wrote.

“The Trump Administration continues to refuse to release records that would shed light on its decision to rescind DACA, asking court after court to give it a free pass, so it can keep the information underlying its decision secret. What is the Trump Administration trying so hard to hide? said Xavier Becerra, who is pursuing one of the San Francisco-based suits on behalf of the State of California.

While President Donald Trump gave officials the go-ahead to shut down the DACA program, the official decision was made by acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke at the urging of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Sessions said the program, created by President Barack Obama's administration in 2012, was an illegal overreach by the executive branch and was vulnerable to being abruptly shut down by a threatened lawsuit from attorneys general conservative states.

However, the administration's conviction about Sessions' legal conclusion was thrown into doubt when Trump tweeted that if Congress didn't pass legislation to accommodate the Dreamers in the coming months he will "revisit the issue."

The Justice Department asked the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to block an order from Alsup to file the expanded set of records, but in a 2-1 ruling last month, the appeals court panel assigned to the case declined.

DACA backers sought to head off a Supreme Court battle over the document issue by agreeing to defer the deadline until Dec. 22. However, Alsup made clear he wants the federal government ready to file the records on that date because he wants to resolve the suits in time to allow for an appeal well before March 5, the date when large numbers of DACA recipients will begin to see their permits expire without the possibility of renewal.

Justice Department attorneys say the monthlong reprieve the judge granted doesn't solve the problem because they're still obligated to invest massive resources in reviewing the records in order to be prepared to file them later this month.

A similar battle has played out on the East Coast, with a federal judge in Brooklyn ordering administration officials to submit to questioning about the DACA cancellation and to respond to document requests on the subject.

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily halted those orders, but that court has not issued a final ruling on the issue.