Jared Kushner, in his first public comments since the public release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report, on Tuesday downplayed the impact of Russian interference in the 2016 election, which saw his father-in-law win the Oval Office.

“You look at what Russia did, buying some Facebook ads and trying to sow dissent. It’s a terrible thing,” Kushner, who is also one of President Donald Trump’s senior advisers, said at a Time magazine event in New York. “But I think the investigations and all of the speculation that’s happened for the last two years has a much harsher impact on our democracy than a couple Facebook ads.”

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The Justice Department, however, is offering a starkly different assessment of the potential dangers of a Russian intelligence operation for U.S. national security — and argues that it doesn’t take a master spy to do serious harm.

In a little-noticed court filing on Friday, an expert witness for the government, Robert Anderson Jr., a former assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division, outlined how the activities of the Russian gun-rights activist Maria Butina during the election contained all the hallmarks of a sophisticated intelligence operation.

Anderson’s declaration has spawned a new fight between the government and Butina’s lawyers, who countered that it was speculative and blurred the line between informal networking and clandestine intelligence operations.

But the filing also sheds new light on how the Justice Department views the ongoing threat of Russian attempts to influence American politics, and goes well beyond what Mueller’s team was able to say in its 448-page report.

Allowing Russia to “bypass formal channels of diplomacy, win concessions, and exert influence within the United States” by entertaining backchannel lines of communication could result in “commensurate harm to the United States, including harm to the integrity of the United States’ political processes and internal government dealings, as well as to U.S. foreign policy interests and national security,” Anderson wrote.

Butina created a plan called the “Diplomacy Project” in March 2015 aimed at cultivating Republican presidential candidates and their advisers and reporting her progress back to Alexander Torshin, a deputy governor of the Central Bank of Russia.

She also tried to connect members of the National Rifle Association with Kremlin officials in December 2015 during a trip to Moscow, prosecutors say, and held U.S.-Russia “friendship dinners” to “exert the speediest and most effective influence on the process of making decisions in the American establishment,” according to a document she wrote during the election.

Butina pleaded guilty in December to conspiring against the U.S, agreed to cooperate with federal investigators and is in jail awaiting sentencing.

Butina wasn’t the only Russian trying to make inroads outside of formal diplomatic structures during and after the election, however. And she was arguably the least successful.

Mueller confirmed in his report that Paul Manafort, the campaign’s chairman, discussed ways to forge a Russia-Ukraine “peace plan” that would bolster Moscow’s influence over Kiev; that the incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn, discussed sanctions relief with the Russian ambassador before Trump even took office; that Kushner suggested using Russian Embassy facilities to discuss Syria policy during the transition period, thereby evading detection from the U.S. intelligence community; and that a two-page document outlining a U.S.-Russia reset made its way from the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund to then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

The first half of Mueller’s report was laser-focused on answering the question of whether Trump or members of his campaign had engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Russia to hack into Democrats’ emails or influence the election through social media; it ultimately concluded that they had not.

Mueller had little to say about the broader national security implications of Russia’s efforts to cultivate Trump associates. But Andrew Weiss, the vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he oversees research on Russia and Eurasia, noted on Twitter on Monday that, seen against the backdrop of Anderson’s declaration, “it’s clear that the conduct outlined in Volume I of the Mueller Report created enormous damage to US national security.”

Because the U.S. is “Russia’s primary target “for malign and intrusive intelligence operations,” Anderson wrote, the Kremlin is not just looking for classified information or trade secrets. It’s looking for access points and opportunities to influence policy.

“In targeting the United States, Russia works … to collect any information that could, by itself or in conjunction with other efforts, assist the Russian government in increasing its geopolitical power or undermining and harming that of the United States,” he continued.

The special counsel’s counterintelligence findings could illuminate the extent to which people in Trump’s orbit — and the president himself — have been, or remain, compromised. But those findings were largely handed off to the FBI over the course of the 22-month probe and were not enumerated in the final report.

Butina’s lawyers, meanwhile, have argued that the broad theory Anderson put forward — that a foreign national may be acting as an “access agent” when hobnobbing with D.C. operatives and sending information about those dalliances back to their government — “effectively criminalizes all networking behavior if done by a foreign national.” Her lawyers said in another court filing on Tuesday that it could take “months” for them to respond to Anderson’s declaration if the judge declines to strike it, indefinitely delaying Butina’s sentencing hearing. The hearing had originally been set for April 26.

D.C. prosecutors have been aggressive in the Butina case, as evidenced by their assertion early on that she was trading sex for a position in a special-interest organization — an accusation that the government walked back after realizing that it had misinterpreted a piece of evidence.

Prosecutors also recommended an 18-month sentence for Butina, despite her lawyers’ expectation that they would not make a specific recommendation given the 10 months she’s already spent in jail.

Butina’s lawyers also feel the government blindsided them with the last-minute Anderson affidavit that made her look complicit in a Russian intelligence operation.

“The fact that the government used this filing — made late in the evening on Good Friday … less than a week before sentencing — to unveil a complete new theory of the government’s case creates additional due process issues,” they wrote in a motion to exclude and strike Anderson’s declaration.

Disputes over the government’s conduct aside, the Anderson declaration was a striking — and ominous — analysis of the Russian government’s intelligence-collection methods.

“Russia’s efforts targeting the United States take a myriad of forms — it is, in essence, a numbers game,” he wrote. “Not every intelligence campaign needs to be successful for Russia to have achieved its goals.”

Congress

The White House and congressional investigators are hammering each other with legal action and charges of bad faith.

The showdown between the Trump White House and House Democrats reached a new level of hostility this week, as several investigative disputes veered toward federal court amid scathing rhetoric on both sides.

Three dramatic clashes between White House lawyers and congressional Democrats over the past 36 hours have created an atmosphere of total war between the two sides, suggesting that even modest compromise may be impossible and that protracted court fights are likely inevitable.

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House Democrats threatened Tuesday to hold in contempt a Trump official who oversaw security clearances after the White House instructed him not to cooperate with Congress. Later in the day, the Trump administration refused to turn over six years’ worth of President Donald Trump’s personal and business tax returns by a 5pm deadline, instead requesting more time to consult with the Justice Department.

Those moves came a day after Trump took the dramatic step of suing the chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee to block a subpoena for his financial records.

White House lawyers say they are guarding the executive branch’s prerogatives against what they call politically-motivated congressional inquests. But Democrats see an unprecedented—and indefensible—degree of White House defiance.

“It’s a pretty extraordinary and outlandish situation right now,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the House Oversight panel, said in an interview. “It’s like a curtain has fallen down over the White House.”

Since House Democrats took power in January, White House officials have resorted to a range of aggressive tactics — refusing to turn over documents, declining to send witnesses to testify, even going to federal court to protect Trump’s financial records from congressional scrutiny.

“It’s putting forth a constitutional crisis about whether the Congress can effectively perform its oversight duties,” said Morton Rosenberg, who served as legal advisor to the House General Counsel.

Trump’s White House and personal lawyers have repeatedly counterpunched at Democrats in harsh and hostile terms, painting a portrait of a frantic White House under siege from an opposition party out to destroy the president.

“The Democrat Party, with its newfound control of the U.S. House of Representatives, has declared all-out political war against President Donald J. Trump,” Trump’s personal attorneys wrote in a court filing challenging a subpoena for his financial records from an accounting firm. “Democrat Party” is a term often used by conservatives that Democrats consider intentionally disrespectful.

“Instead of working with the president to pass bipartisan legislation that would actually benefit Americans, House Democrats are singularly obsessed with finding something they can use to damage the president politically,” added the attorneys, William Consovoy and Stefan Passantino.

Trump allies have echoed that partisan framing in their arguments that Democrats are making illegitimate requests.

“No one should be surprised that this White House is following a time-honored tradition of ignoring partisan subpoenas,” said a former Trump adviser who remains close to the White House.

In recent days, the White House has begun instructing White House officials, including its former White House personnel security director Carl Kline and former White House Counsel Don McGahn, to not cooperate with Congress, according to two people familiar with the plans.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) subpoenaed McGahn to appear before the panel May 21 as part of its obstruction of justice investigation into Trump. But lawmakers have raised questions about whether Trump is able to claim executive privilege on anything revealed in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report because the report is now a public document. It includes detailed testimony from McGahn, they say, which is effectively an affirmative decision by Trump to waive the privilege.

“As such, the moment for the White House to assert some privilege to prevent this testimony from being heard has long since passed,” Nadler said in a statement Tuesday. “I suspect that President Trump and his attorneys know this to be true as a matter of law—and that this evening’s reports, if accurate, represent one more act of obstruction by an administration desperate to prevent the public from talking about the president’s behavior.”

Still, the White House says Democrats will never be satisfied with whatever they turn over.

“It’s going to be up the attorneys,” White House spokesman Hogan Gildley told reporters at the White House. “But it’s pretty clear what Jerry Nadler and the Democrats are up to. They don’t want to get to the truth….at this point, I don’t know what Jerry Nadler thinks he’s going to get that Robert Mueller didn’t.”

Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said he would schedule a vote to hold Kline in contempt for refusing to comply with the committee’s subpoena for a deposition before the panel, which was scheduled for Tuesday.

Trump’s lawyers aren’t the only ones making their case in acerbic terms. Cummings released a scathing statement on Tuesday ripping the Trump administration for routinely shivving congressional oversight requests.

“It appears that the president believes that the Constitution does not apply to his White House, that he may order officials at will to violate their legal obligations, and that he may obstruct attempts by Congress to conduct oversight,” Cummings said. “It also appears that the White House believes that it may dictate to Congress — an independent and co-equal branch of government — the scope of its investigations and even the rules by which it conducts them.”

Kline is accused of overriding career national security officials to approve security clearances for officials whose applications were initially denied. The allegations against him were revealed to the committee by Tricia Newbold, a whistleblower who told the Oversight Committee that Kline and others put national security at risk by granting security clearances to more than two dozen officials.

“It’s true with all of the committees — the White House is fighting each and every one,” said Ed Passman, Newbold’s lawyer. “This is just another example. It’s really disappointing because my client has come forward at great personal risk.”

In addition to Nadler and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Cummings has emerged as a leadingpersona non grata in Trump world. And now, he’s become the latest in a long line of defendants in a Trump lawsuit.

“Elijah Cummings is a gentlemen who treats everybody with decency and respect,” Raskin added. “And it seems pretty shocking to me that the president has injected this kind of negative personal tone into the whole thing.”

A contempt vote against Kline, who now works at the Defense Department, would be the first since Trump took office. That could lead Congress to ask a judge to force the administration to cooperate. It could also lead the U.S. attorney in Washington to press charges, though that’s unlikely to happen.

“This is as close to anarchy as I have seen,” said Charles Tiefer, former solicitor and deputy general counsel of the House who is now a professor at the University of Baltimore. “The administrations seems to think it has floated off into space and no longer subject to oversight.”

White House deputy counsel Michael Purpura sent a letter Monday asking Kline not to answer questions because it “unconstitutionally encroaches on fundamental executive branch interests.”

Kline’s attorney, Robert Driscoll, wrote a subsequent letter to the committee that Kline would not answer questions. “With two masters from two equal branches of government, we will follow the instructions of the one that employs him,” Driscoll wrote in the letter to the committee.

Democrats had hoped they would quickly receive documents and information about the Trump administration, but it has become clear that a long and frustrating fight with the president’s lawyers lies ahead. The fight could end up in court and could take several months, possibly stretching well into 2020 as the president runs for reelection.

Since 2007, Congress has held two officials in contempt — White House Counsel Harriet Miers during George W. Bush’s tenure and Attorney General Eric Holder during Barack Obama’s presidency — but still failed to receive all the information they’ve requested.

A lawyer who worked in Barack Obama’s White House said a White House requesting an official not cooperate is not unusual but it is unusual to do so without invoking executive privilege, which allows a president to shield certain communications from legislative and judicial branches. “It’s a very difficult situation unless they invoke executive privilege,” the lawyer said.

Nearly every House committee has launched investigations into the Trump administration, on everything from the easing of sanctions on businesses tied to a Russian oligarch to the federal government’s lease with the Trump International Hotel in Washington.

“When faced with choice of cooperation or confrontation, Chairman Cummings picked confrontation,” a spokesman for the Republican side of the Oversight panel said on Tuesday, slamming Cummings for his “insatiable quest to sully the White House.”

In total, the administration has at least 30 times refused or delayed turning over documents to 12 House committees, according to House Democrats. Half dozen officials refused to appear before five committees while two officials have refused to come in for interviews with two other committees, they say.

On Monday, Trump sued Cummings in an effort to block the Oversight Committee’s subpoena to accounting firm Mazars USA. The committee is seeking eight years of Trump’s financial records from the company.

The White House and Driscoll did not respond to a request for comment.

Kyle Cheney and Eliana Johnson contributed to this report.

defense

The service says it has also ‘provided a series of briefings by senior Naval Intelligence officials as well as aviators who reported hazards to aviation safety.’

The U.S. Navy is drafting new guidelines for pilots and other personnel to report encounters with “unidentified aircraft,” a significant new step in creating a formal process to collect and analyze the unexplained sightings — and destigmatize them.

The previously unreported move is in response to a series of sightings of unknown, highly advanced aircraft intruding on Navy strike groups and other sensitive military formations and facilities, the service says.

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“There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years,” the Navy said in a statement in response to questions from POLITICO. “For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report.

“As part of this effort,” it added, “the Navy is updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities. A new message to the fleet that will detail the steps for reporting is in draft.”

To be clear, the Navy isn’t endorsing the idea that its sailors have encountered alien spacecraft. But it is acknowledging there have been enough strange aerial sightings by credible and highly trained military personnel that they need to be recorded in the official record and studied — rather than dismissed as some kooky phenomena from the realm of science-fiction.

Chris Mellon, a former Pentagon intelligence official and ex-staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said establishing a more formal means of reporting what the military now calls “unexplained aerial phenomena” — rather than “unidentified flying objects” — would be a “sea change.”

“Right now, we have situation in which UFOs and UAPs are treated as anomalies to be ignored rather than anomalies to be explored,” he said. “We have systems that exclude that information and dump it.”

For example, Mellon said “in a lot of cases [military personnel] don’t know what to do with that information — like satellite data or a radar that sees something going Mach 3. They will dump [the data] because that is not a traditional aircraft or missile.”

The development comes amid growing interest from members of Congress following revelations by POLITICO and the New York Times in late 2017 that the Pentagon established a dedicated office inside the Defense Intelligence Agency to study UAPs at the urging of several senators who secretly set aside appropriations for the effort.

That office spent some $25 million conducting a series of technical studies and evaluating numerous unexplained incursions, including one that lasted several days involving the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group in 2004. In that case, Navy fighter jets were outmaneuvered by unidentified aircraft that flew in ways that appeared to defy the laws of known physics.

Raytheon, a leading defense contractor, used the reports and official Defense Department video of the sightings off the coast of California to hail one of its radar systems for capturing the phenomena.

The Pentagon’s UFO research office, known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Intelligence Program, was officially wound down in 2012 when the congressional earmark ran out.

But more lawmakers are now asking questions, the Navy also reports.

“In response to requests for information from Congressional members and staff, Navy officials have provided a series of briefings by senior Naval Intelligence officials as well as aviators who reported hazards to aviation safety,” the service said in its statement to POLITICO.

The Navy declined to identify who has been briefed, nor would it provide more details on the guidelines for reporting that are being drafted for the fleet. The Air Force did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Advocates for treating such sightings as a potential national security threat have long criticized military leaders for giving the phenomenon relatively little attention and for encouraging a culture in which personnel feel that speaking up about it could hurt their career.

Luis Elizondo, the former Pentagon official who ran the so-called AATIP office, complained after he retired from government service that the Pentagon’s approach to these unidentified aircraft has been far too blasé.

“If you are in a busy airport and see something you are supposed to say something,” Elizondo said. “With our own military members it is kind of the opposite: ‘If you do see something, don’t say something.’”

He added that because these mysterious aircraft “don’t have a tail number or a flag — in some cases not even a tail — it’s crickets. What happens in five years if it turns out these are extremely advanced Russian aircraft?”

Elizondo will be featured in an upcoming documentary series about the Pentagon UFO research he oversaw. He said the six-part series will reveal more recent sightings of UAPs by dozens of military pilots.

Both Elizondo and Mellon are involved with the To The Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, which supports research into explaining the technical advances these reported UAPs demonstrate.