Rapper Lil Wayne is expected to be one of up to 100 people to receive last-minute commutations or pardons before US President Donald Trump leaves office this week, but WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is likely to miss out.

Multiple US media outlets have reported that Trump is preparing an expansive list to be released on Tuesday or possibly even Wednesday (US time) the morning of Joe Biden's inauguration but that the President has opted not to take the extraordinary step of issuing a pardon for himself or any members of his family.

Fox News reports a White House meeting was held on Sunday afternoon to finalise the growing list, with rapper Lil Wayne (real name Dwayne Carter) making the cut but former Trump adviser Steve Bannon being described as "TBD" (to be decided).

Lil Wayne, who supported Trump for re-election, pleaded guilty last year to illegally possessing a gold-plated handgun while travelling to Florida in a private jet in 2019, which was not allowed due to a prior felony conviction. His bag also contained cocaine, ecstasy and oxycodone.

Bannon, who was booted from the White House in 2017, was charged last year with defrauding donors to a crowd-funding campaign to build a wall between the US and Mexico. The wire fraud and money laundering charges each carry a maximum of 20 years in prison.

He pleaded not guilty was released on a $US5 million ($7m) bond ahead of a May 2021 trial date. Trump has repeatedly distanced himself from the project, tweeting last year that it was "not my wall", but adding: "Totally unrelated, but I think Steve will be just fine."

And despite an aggressive campaign by WikiLeaks, Fox News reports Trump is unlikely to grant a pardon to its Australian founder. Julian Assange is currently in the UK fighting US attempts to extradite him to face espionage charges, which carry a maximum of 175 years in prison.

A British court earlier this month blocked the extradition after a judge found Assange's mental health was so fragile he posed a suicide risk if he was sent overseas. The US is appealing the decision.

According to the New York Post, it also remains unclear whether Trump will issue a pardon for mass surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden, who has been living in Russia ever since leaking troves of data on the National Security Agency's highly secretive spying programmes.

The President last year told the newspaper he was "very strongly" looking at the possibility of a pardon for Snowden, despite describing him in a 2014 tweet as a "traitor and a disgrace". The issue is said to be a source of fierce disagreement among Trump's inner circle.

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The New York Post reports that among the lesser-known people expected to receive clemency are several people serving long prison sentences under Biden's 1994 crime bill, which critics of the president-elect have said unfairly punished African-Americans for drug-related offences.

At least two men serving life in prison for dealing marijuana under the law's three-strikes provisions Corvain Cooper and Michael Pelletier have previously asked Trump to release them.

It comes after a report in The New York Times claimed a number of Trump's allies were collecting huge amounts of money for access to the President from people seeking pardons, with one ex-CIA officer jailed in 2012 allegedly told by an associate of Rudy Giuliani that a presidential pardon was "going to cost $US2m ($2.8m)".

The President has already used his final days in office to issue scores of pardons to his closest allies, including several people caught up in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's three-year investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which ultimately found no evidence of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

Last month he pardoned former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was facing seven-and-a-half years in jail after being convicted of unrelated financial crimes including tax evasion and money laundering.

Roger Stone, a long-time Trump ally who had already received a commutation of his prison sentence for lying to Congress, was also granted a pardon, along with former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos and lawyer Alex van der Zwaan both of whom the White House said had been charged with "process-related" crimes by the Mueller investigation.

That came after Trump pardoned his former national security adviser Mike Flynn, who was also charged by the Mueller probe with lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the 2016 transition.

The Department of Justice had been attempting to drop its prosecution of General Flynn since May last year after an independent review ordered by Attorney-General Bill Barr uncovered prosecutorial misconduct.

Also among the recent controversial pardons have been several former Republican Congressmen facing prison sentences for fraud and other charges, and four former private security contractors who were convicted in connection with the massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square, Baghdad, in 2007.

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Donald Trump expected to pardon Lil Wayne but Julian Assange, Steve Bannon may miss out - New Zealand Herald

President Trumps last days in office offer a final opportunity to declassify critical information on the Russia investigation that engulfed his lone term.

Voluminous public records including investigative reports from Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Congress and the Justice Departments inspector general have established that Trump and his associates were targeted with a baseless Russian collusion allegation. The fraudulent claim originated with the Hillary Clinton campaign, was fueled by a torrent of false or deceptive intelligence leaks, and was improperly investigated by the FBI, potentially to the point of being criminal. Despite these disclosures, key questions remain about the origins and the spread of the conspiracy theory.

Before he leaves office on Jan. 20, Trump could use his declassification authority to help clear up some critical issues of the Russiagate saga.

A version of this piece initially appeared Jan. 10 at RealClearInvestigations.com

The FBI says it opened its Trump-Russia investigation on July 31, 2016 after learning of a potential offer of Russian assistance to junior Trump campaign volunteer George Papadopoulos. It later emerged that the offer came from a Maltese academic named Joseph Mifsud, whom U.S. officials have suggested was acting as a Russian cutout.

Muellers team depicted Mifsud as having extensive contacts with Russia. Yet Mifsuds closest public ties had been to Western governments, politicians, and institutions, including the CIA, FBI, and British intelligence services. Despite Mifsuds central role in the investigation, the FBI conducted only one brief interview with him in February 2017. The Mueller team later claimed that Mifsud gave false statements to FBI agents yet, conspicuously, did not indict him for lying. The FBIs notes on the interview show that Mifsud denied having any advance knowledge of Russian hacking.

Why didnt the FBI grill Mifsud about his sources, methods and contacts? What other efforts, if any, were made to surveil him?

A highly placed Kremlin mole was the main source of the core claim in CIA Director John Brennans hastily produced 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that Russian President Vladimir Putin intervened in the 2016 election to help defeat Clinton and support Trump.

The ICAs claim was widely portrayed as the consensus view of U.S. spy agencies, but in reality it was the conclusion drawn by a small group of CIA analysts, closely managed by then-Director Brennan. Paul Sperry of RealClearInvestigations revealed that Brennan overruled two senior analysts who disagreed with it.

Multiple outlets have already outed the mole, Oleg Smolenkov, and the circumstances of his exit from Russia in June 2017. This supposed betrayer of the Kremlins secrets was found to be living under his own name in a Virginia suburb.

After the FBIs collusion probe got underway in July 2016, it purportedly did not rely on the Steele dossier, a series of opposition-research memos prepared by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. In his testimony to Congress in July 2019, Mueller claimed that the dossier was outside my purview.

Yet the FBI did extensively rely on the Steele dossier, most egregiously to obtain a surveillance warrant on Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page.

There may be more evidence, as suggested in recently declassified documents, that the Steele material played a bigger role in the Mueller investigation than previously known. Further declassification could shed additional light on whether Muellers disavowal of Steele aligns with the conduct of his investigators.

In June 2016, CrowdStrike, a private company, accused Russian government hackers of infiltrating the Democratic National Committees servers. This assessment was presented as direct evidence of Russian interference in the presidential election and was later endorsed by the FBI and Muellers team.

CrowdStrikes highly consequential allegation has been contradicted by subsequent disclosures. Like Steele, CrowdStrike was a Democratic Party contractor whose version of events dovetailed with the Clintons campaigns apparent desire to muddy Trump with Russia connections. In a stunning admission, U.S. prosecutors told a court in June 2019 that CrowdStrike had submitted reports of a forensic analysis of its servers to the government in draft, redacted form.

The Crowdstrike reports would indicate whether the FBI and Muellers team were on solid ground in asserting Russia hacked the DNC and stole its emails.

Given the importance of the hacking allegation, and if its evidence is non-classified, why shouldnt Trump direct the U.S. intelligence community to release all of it?

The January 2017 ICA assessed with high confidence that a Russian intelligence agency, the GRU, used the Guccifer 2.0 persona to release the stolen DNC files. In its July 2018 indictment of GRU officers, the Mueller team also strongly suggested that Guccifer transferred the stolen DNC emails to WikiLeaks.

The special counsels final report, issued in March 2019, quietly acknowledged that it cannot rule out that stolen documents were transferred to WikiLeaks through intermediaries an admission that it has no hard evidence that Guccifer 2.0 was WikiLeaks source. It does not identify who those intermediaries might have been. Also missing from Muellers account is the evidence used to identify Guccifer 2.0 as a Russian intelligence front.

The Russia investigation remains a bitterly partisan issue, but its worth remembering that in November 2016, Clinton campaign chair John Podesta called on the U.S. government to declassify information around Russias roles in the election and to make this data available to the public. His purposes were different, of course. Nonetheless, disclosing such information now would give Americans a fair understanding of an unprecedented investigation into a sitting president as well as the conduct of the intelligence officials who it carried out.

This article was adapted from RealClearInvestigations.

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Op-Ed: Its Trumps last chance to declassify these secrets of the Russia collusion dud - The Center Square

Before Donald Trump began his run for president, there was a war against journalism in the United States. President George W. Bush used the Espionage Act and sought to jail reporters who refused to give up their sources, not to mentionkillingjournalists in war zones. When President Barack Obama, a constitutional law scholar, came to power, he did so claiming that he and Joe Biden would represent the most transparent administration in history. But then reality set in. During his eight years in power, Obamas Justice Department used the Espionage Act against whistleblowers more than all of Obamas predecessors combined. They continued the Bush Justice Departments war on journalists, includingthreatening to jail then-New York Times reporter James Risen if he did not testify against his alleged source.

Despite its prosecutions of whistleblowers, Obamas administration understood that use of the Espionage Act was controversial and widely denounced by press freedom organizations. Attorney General Eric Holder sought to implement some guardrails against spying on journalists, though the administration maintained it had the right to do so in some circumstances. Still, Obama commuted whistleblower Chelsea Mannings draconian 35-year prison sentence. During Trumps tenure Manning was jailed again for nearly a year for refusing to testify in front of a Grand Jury. Obamasadministration also declined to indict WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and at least one other alleged whistleblower accused of leaking documents about the drone assassination program. Trumps administration dug both cases out and moved forward with espionage prosecutions, which remain active.

Cyclists pass a truck with a protest sign reading #FreeSpeech with pictures of Chelsea Manning, left, and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, right, in Washington, D.C., on April 16, 2019.

Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Trump came to power following a political campaign in which he attacked the free press, adopted fascist slogans to denounce reporters, and denied that basic facts were true. Trump harbored a Nixonian hatred of the press and lived in constant fear of leaks, particularly about his personal finances.

In a clear effort to send chills through the government and as a warning to any would-be whistleblowers, Trumps Justice Department went on a rampage using the Espionage Act. Its first major prosecution was against a National Security Agency contractor named Reality Winner. The Justice Department accused Winner of leakingtoa news outlet an NSA documentthat showed Russian efforts to penetrate software used in some U.S. voting systems in 2016. Othernews organizations have stated that the outlet was The Intercept.Winner accepted a plea agreement to one count of felony transmission of national defense information and was sentenced to five years, the longest prison term of any whistleblower convicted under the Espionage Act. It was an unconscionable act by a vindictive administration.

The Trump Justice Department weaponized its indictment of Winner in an effort to smear The Intercept and to encourage the media to focus on other journalists rather than the contents of the NSA document in question or the unjust use of the Espionage Act. Unfortunately, many publications took the bait and played into Trumps malignant anti-press crusade.

When indictments of whistleblowers happen and FBI investigations are launched, journalists should scrutinize and confront the actions of intelligence and law enforcement agencies and assess what these attacks mean for the freedom of the press. Instead, so many media outlets seemed to want to aid the Trump administration in making this about what journalists did or did not do making the publication the target, instead of focusing on the secrets that whistleblowers exposed or the dangerous weaponizing of the Espionage Act by both Democratic and Republican presidents.

I believe that The Intercept made serious errors in its editorial process on theRussia story, and I advocated both publicly and internally for The Intercept to explain exactly what happened. I believe that some of these mistakes were preventable. At the same time, there were serious legal concerns that anything The Intercept said in public could be used against Winner and other sources, and our attorneys implored The Intercepts editors to say nothing. I understood the legal logic. Our editor-in-chief ended up making a statement acknowledging that we had failed to live up to our standards and taking responsibility for the institutionalfailure.

This was a complicated situation, and I believe the facts make clear that Winner would likely have been arrested regardless of any mistakes made by The Intercept. She was one of just six people in the entire U.S. national security apparatus to print the document in question and the only one to use a government computer to send emails (which were unrelated to the Russia story) to The Intercept. That doesnt absolve The Intercept, but it is an important part of this story that is seldom mentioned. And we all know the Trump administration prioritized punishing leakers and was willing to use the full force of the state to do so. It was disturbing that the overwhelming focus of the reporting on Winner bysome media outlets was not on the contents of the document she allegedly revealed or that the Trump administration was wielding the Espionage Act like a weapon in order to threaten any would-be whistleblowers. The lead prosecutor made the outrageous statement that Winner was the quintessential example of an insider threat. The Intercept deserved criticism and scrutiny, but the problem was that it often came at the expense of holding the chief villains of the story accountable.

Joe Biden speaks with the press before departing Charlotte, N.C., on Sept. 23, 2020.

Photo: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

President Joe Biden has an opportunity to right some of these wrongs. He should publicly commit to ending the use of the Espionage Act against whistleblowers. Congress could also amend or repeal the act so that it cannot be used for such purposes. Biden should also take actions to end the persecution of Assange and return to the Obama-era position that Assange should not be prosecuted by the United States. We thought it was a dangerous precedent to prosecute Assange for something that reporters do all the time,saidMatthew Miller, an Obama Justice Department spokesperson. The Espionage Act doesnt make any distinction between journalists and others, so if you can apply it to Assange, theres no real reason you couldnt apply it to [the New York Times]. Biden should immediately pardon Winner and secure her release from a coronavirus-infested prison. He also should drop the case against former intelligence contractor and war veteran Daniel Hale, who is facing trial under the Espionage Act for allegedly leaking documents on the U.S. drone and assassination programs.

We have just seen the end of a dangerous administrationthat openly waged war against journalism. For four years, the president of the United States used the Justice Department as his personal law firm and a political cudgel against his perceived enemies, including the press. Even if Biden doesnt agree with the principles I am advocating, he could declare these Espionage Act indictments to be the toxic fruit of the poisonous and discredited Trump Justice Department. And media outlets should remember the next time a whistleblower is arrested that the most important task for journalists is to hold those in power to account rather than allow themselves to be used in a government distraction campaign.

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Biden Should End Espionage Act Prosecutions of Whistleblowers and Journalists - The Intercept

A controversial star of a Netflix documentary and a rapper are among the high-profile names in line for a last-minute presidential pardon before Donald Trump leaves the White House.

Before Christmas, Mr Trump issued a number of controversial pardons and he is set to do so again.

The outgoing president is widely expected to use his final full day in office to issue approximately 100 presidential pardons andcommutations.

Joe Exotic, star of the Netflix documentary series Tiger King is one of the more controversial pardons believed to be on the cards.

The 57-year-old, whose real name isJoseph Maldonado-Passage, is serving a 22 year jail sentence for plotting to kill his rival Carole Baskin, as well as several counts of animal abuse charges.

FILE - In this Aug. 28, 2013, file photo, Joseph Maldonado-Passage, also known as Joe Exotic, is seen at the zoo he used to run in Wynnewood, Okla.

AP

A stretch limo was seen outside the Fort Worth Prison in Texas on Wednesday, where he is serving his sentence.

Rapper Lil Wayne is also in line for a presidential pardon, according to The New York Times.

The rapper, whose real name isDwayne Michael Carter Jr, pleaded guilty last month to possession of a gold-plated handgun in Miami and is facing up to 10 years in prison.

He is a known supporter of Mr Trump and has previously tweeted out his support and met with the outgoing president.

A number of high-profile figures are reportedly set to miss out on a pardon.

These include Mr Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who has not been charged with any crime but could receive a pre-emptive pardon ahead of expected legal difficulties.

Mr Trump's former White House Strategist Steve Bannon will likely miss out, despite facing charges of defrauding donors to Mr Trump's "Build the Wall" campaign. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

There has also been intense lobbying from supporters of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for Mr Trump to grant him clemency in his finals days in office.

Mr Assange is facing extradition to the United States to face charges of espionage and conspiring to hack US government computers.

Despite praising Wikileaks during his 2016 campaign for their release of emails damaging to his Democratic then-rival Hillary Clinton, Mr Trump is not expected to grant Mr Assange a pardon.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

AAP

There have also been calls from those directly charged over the 6 January Capitol Hill riots for Mr Trump to grant them pardons.

The president hasn't given any indication that he plans to pardon the rioters, who face a range of charges, including violent entry into a restricted building and disorderly conduct.

With legal and financial woes waiting for him outside of the Oval Office, there are questions that Mr Trump could attempt to pardon himself.

Legal and constitutional experts are split about whether the President even has the power, but Mr Trump has previously stated that he believes he does.

Many scholars have said a self-pardon would be unconstitutional because it violates the basic principle that nobody should be the judge in their own case.

Mr Trump is facing several financial and sexual harassment lawsuits and may also end up in legal trouble over the incitement of rioters just prior to the Capitol Hill attack.

However, US media widely reported on Wednesday that Mr Trump wasn't planning on pardoning himself as it would be seen as an admission of guilt for crimes he believes he hasn't committed.

Likewise, Mr Trump is not planning on granting pardons to any of his children, or his son-in-law Jared Kushner.

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Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani and Lil Wayne. Who is, and isn't, in line for a pardon from Donald Trump - SBS News