-
Moments of Russiagate Truth
It’s sometime a very sad moment when truth is all that’s left. Suspicions of infidelity become credit card receipts from the no-tell motel. A Facebook post tells of a meal shared when a business trip was scheduled. It is ugly, especially the now certainty that you were lied to by someone you once trusted. Two such instances passed through the MSM this week with barely a notice that deserve notice.
The first is Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, through the MSM, lied Russiagate. Hillary, et al, paid experts to create two data sets, one showing Russian cellphones accessing Trump WiFi networks, and another showing a Trump computer in contact with a mystery Alfa Bank server in Russia. The latter was supposedly how Trump communicated incognito with his handlers in Moscow Center. Neither happened, both were lies, and both were made up for and paid for by Hillary. How do we know this with certainty?
Former Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias on the stand May 18, 2022 in the trial of his former partner, Michael Sussmann swore to it under oath. Special Counsel John Durham brought Sussmann to trial for allegedly lying to the FBI, denying he was working for a client when he was representing the Clinton campaign. Elias testified he and Sussmann worked for the Clinton campaign, and had engaged Fusion GPS to acquire dirt on candidate Donald Trump. He also admitted that he had briefed Clinton campaign officials about the fake information, including contacts with Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, campaign chair John Podesta, spokesperson Jennifer Palmieri, and policy director Jake Sullivan, now Joe Biden’s national security adviser and who aggressively pushed the Alfa Bank server story in the media. Elias said he also spoke with Hillary Clinton and was involved in meetings where she was present.
Does this have to really be so ugly? Do we have to hear it in her own words? Somethings it takes that harsh splash of cold water. Yes. Hillary tweeted on October 31, 2016 Trump had a secret server and it was communicating with Russia. She knew it was false at that moment because her campaign paid to create that information. The only thing left for the trial to prove or disprove is whether Sussmann lied about working for the campaign when he met with the FBI. He pleaded innocent but is a very bad liar; Sussmann billed the Clinton campaign for his meeting with the FBI. The material facts otherwise have been demonstrated — she lied. Cold and simple. No one colluded with Russia (as the Mueller Report later concluded.)
The next splash of water require you to wallow so deep in hypocrisy and lies if it was all water you’d drown. After refusing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story except to label it Russian disinformation in autumn 2020, the same NBC news headlined a story May 18, 2022, almost two years after the laptop story first broke, reporting “analysis of Hunter Biden’s hard drive shows he took in about $11 million from 2013 to 2018” from Ukrainian and Chinese companies for dubious consulting work. NBC reports this as breaking news, and made no mention whatsoever that they sat on the story.
To understand why NBC spiked the story for almost two years, one needs to go back to 2020 as the laptop tale was breaking elsewhere. Almost in real time more than 50 former senior intelligence officials signed a letter claiming the emails “have all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” With absolutely no evidence, the signers said their national security experience made them “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” “If we are right,” they added, “this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”
The letter was evil brilliance in that it played off earlier prejudices created by Hillary Clinton in 2016, that the Russians sought to manipulate American elections. In fact, most of the key signatories — James Clapper and John Brennan among them — had misdirected public opinion around the whole of Russiagate. In the hands of the MSM the meme quickly morphed into “the laptop is fake,” a parallel to “but her emails!!!”
NBC News wrote in 2020 U.S. intelligence agencies suspected Trump associate Rudy Giuliani, who had been shopping the laptop contents to various media organizations, had been in contact with alleged Russian intelligence agents. The FBI was “looking into whether the Russians played any role, and no official has ruled that out,” said NBC. Twitter also blocked the Hunter laptop story after intelligence officials shared Russian hack rumors.
NBC also claimed in 2020 the laptop was not “newsworthy” as it contained no smoking gun, and because despite any ethical lapses by Hunter “Trump… is ethically challenged when it comes to appearing to use the power of his office to enrich himself and his family.” NBC in 2022 offers no explanation why the same laptop contents which it deemed not newsworthy days before Joe Biden’s election to the presidency are suddenly newsworthy in the middle of his second year in office.
The takeaway is NBC News did not pursue the Hunter laptop story in 2020, when it mattered most, because it acted in collusion with the U.S. intelligence community to make the story go away during the election. As Hunter has publicly paid millions in back taxes and the New York Times among others validated the laptop contents, there’s no need to pretend the story is not newsworthy or Russian trickery.
It is easy enough to say “so what?” at this point. Most people who did not support her long ago concluded Hillary Clinton was a liar and untrustworthy. Her supporters know she’ll never run for public office again, hence the claims that none of this matters. As for NBC, the last days before the election were confusing times, and the Hunter laptop story after all was out there for anyone who wanted to read it at the NY Post or Fox. So that doesn’t really matter either, right?
Wrong. What matters is less the details of Hillary’s lie but that as someone very close to being elected she would lie about such a thing, claiming her opponent was working for Russia against the interests of the United States he would soon swear an oath to. As for NBC (and Twitter) its journalistic slovenliness laid bare news organizations work with the intelligence community to manipulate elections. Both of this week’s revelations are bombshells if you blow the smoke away, and both threaten to make a second run at our democracy in 2024.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
New Durham Finding Reveals CIA Info on Michael Sussman, Alfa Bank/Yota Phone
If you still dismiss “Russiagate,” the Dossier, Alfa Bank, and the Yota Russian smartphone events surrounding Donald Trump, the 2016 campaign, and the Mueller investigation, you may want a second cup of coffee. The latest filing by Special Consul Robert Durham suggests the rabbit hole goes a bit deeper. I hate to sound like Rachel Maddow, but it is just that much more likely the walls are closing in.
Durham filed a new, 34-page motion on April 15, 2022, in answer to defendant Michael Sussman’s request to dismiss the case against him. Durham accused Sussmann of lying to the FBI about his working for the Clinton Campaign while he was trying to sell the Bureau on opening an investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia, focusing on alleged Internet pings between a Trump server and the Russian Alfa Bank. Sussmann’s claims included a number of pings against Trump Tower WiFi and later White House WiFi by a Russian-made Yota cellphone. Sussmann’s motion basically called Durham case garbage, which pressed Durham to explain to the court why the case needed to proceed, hence the new motion (the court subsequently ruled against Sussmann and the trial will commence soon.)
But as he has done in the past, Durham used the required motion filing as a chance to tip over a few of the cards he is holding. It looks like aces.
Durham previously established CIA knew about what we’ll call “Russiagate” as of at least July 2016 and briefed President Obama on the same only five days before the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane full-spectrum investigation into Trump/Russia began. The new filing adds the next chapter. Sussmann met with unknown persons at CIA to tell them a Russian Yota cellphone seemed to be following Trump around, attempting to log into the WiFi network wherever he was. This included Trump Tower and later the White House. At January and February 2017 CIA meetings Sussmann claimed the phone “appeared” in April 2016 (coincidentally right around the time the DNC hack supposedly took place) and even “appeared with Trump in Michigan” when he was interviewing a future Cabinet secretary. Sussmann went on to disingenuously claim to CIA the Yota smartphone model used is often gifted to Russian officials. He also claimed his client was a Republican.
The problem was the information Sussmann passed to the FBI was fake. Phony. Made -up. Fabricated, much like the Dossier. CIA “concluded in early 2017 Russian Bank-1 data [Alfa] and Russian Phone Provider-1 [Yota] data was not “‘technically plausible,’ did not ‘withstand technical scrutiny,’ ‘contained gaps,’ ‘conflicted with [itself]’ and was ‘user created and not machine/tool generated.’” Reuters‘ own tech people also said they could not authenticate the data and passed on the story. While CIA declined to open an investigation based on such data, the FBI did, leaving open additional questions on whether or not the FBI was technically unschooled, or in on the greater conspiracy.
This new information also begs the question of why Robert Mueller or DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz did not ask why the FBI was so easily fooled when their cousins across the river (and some journalists) saw through the grift. The FBI were warned — on September 7, 2016 the CIA sent FBI Director James Comey and Peter Strzok a warning Hillary Clinton approved a plan to tie Trump to Russia to distract from her email scandal. Then only 12 days later Sussmann approached the FBI, who despite the heads-up, took the hook. About a month later the courts issued the first FISA warrant. Hillary Clinton tweeted “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.”
This would also raise questions about Michael Sussmann and his role representing the Democratic National Committee and the DNC server hack. Careful research by retired NSA persons suggested the server was accessed from inside the U.S., not hacked from Russia as widely alleged. If there is truth to that, would the same people who fabricated complex DNS and WiFi log data (i.e., good enough to fool the FBI) have been capable of making a local hack look international? One hates to go down the conspiracy road, but is Julian Assange, whose Wikileaks released some of the DNC emails, imprisoned in part because he could prove his source for the hacked emails was not Russian, as he has claimed?
Who knows, right? Maybe Researcher-2 (identified elsewhere as David Dagon of Georgia Tech, whose research focus is Botnets.) Dagon previously bragged of using a “bag of tricks” to prove Trump-Russia collusion.) Durham granted Researcher-2 immunity to “uncover otherwise-unavailable facts underlying the opposition research project.” Durham also granted immunity to someone at Fusion GPS, the front organization that moved money from the DNC/Clinton Campaign to both Dossier author Christopher Steele and Alfa/Yota pitchman Michael Sussmann. The Fusion person is likely Laura Seago. Seago helped sell the fake Alfa data to Slate.
Earlier articles established the Alfa/Yota conspiracy mirrored the Dossier conspiracy in style, funding, and execution. This new information from Durham adds now as with the Dossier, the Alfa/Yota data was faked. The commonalities between the two as yet legally unlinked conspiracies strongly suggests a common backstage element. We spoke with a former U.S. intelligence officer about what would be involved in managing an operation this size, Alfa, Yota, Dossier, etc., liaison with the FBI, all the media planted bells and whistles, but just the admin side, not the actual spy work. She said it would be a very large job, likely bigger than many overseas stations would take on, something that would need its own working group in Washington. She said keeping the finances clean but covert alone would be a near full-time job.
So what does it all mean? Special Counsel Durham is revealing a relentless effort by Democrats to sell the Russia collusion narrative across the U.S. government from CIA to the FBI, to the point where in the absence of derogatory information they created it. The Democrats then enlisted (to date…) Christopher Steele and Michael Sussman to peddle the false information across Washington in hopes of stirring someone in the intelligence community to turn their vast resources on Trump to find actual dirt. The whole venture failed in the initial sense — Trump was elected and completed his term — but large numbers of Americans still believe in whole or in part Trump is somehow allied with the Russians, a hangover likely to last into the next election.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Arguing About Durham and Hillary Spying
1) Special Counsel John Durham dropped a new filing in his Russiagate investigation. Fox says it means one thing, and CNN says something almost the opposite…
The whole filing is only 13 pages; the juicy stuff about “spying” is only a few paragraphs. Just read it.
2) I’m kinda busy, so could you just give me the gist?
All the quotes below are from the filing text. The new filing is at its heart legal housekeeping, asking that a waiver be considered to allow indicted Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann to retain his current law firm. A potential conflict of interest exists because Sussmann’s representative works for a law firm which also represents others Durham may be going after, and may have been involved in the larger events under investigation, perhaps as witnesses. Sussman is under indictment for lying to the FBI. He brought the Trump-Alfa bank accusations to the FBI pretending to be a patriotic citizen, when he was actually working on Clinton’s behalf trying to get the FBI to investigate Trump.
While the conflict of interest issue is interesting in itself, what is news worthy in Durham’s latest filing are allegations tech company Neustar and its executive Rodney Joffe (who was also a law client of Michael Sussmann) accessed “dedicated servers for the Executive Office of the President of the United States (EOP).” Joffe then “exploited this arrangement by mining the EOP’s DNS traffic and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.”
Joffe also “enlisted the assistance of researchers at a U.S.-based university” (likely Georgia Tech) who had access to “large amounts of Internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract.” This would have been how Joffe got access to data from Trump’s private computers. “[Joffe] tasked these researchers to mine Internet data to establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’ tying then-candidate Trump to Russia,” he added. “In doing so, [Joffe] indicated that he was seeking to please certain ‘VIPs,’ referring to individuals at Law Firm-1 and the Clinton campaign.”
3) What’s all the DNS stuff mean?
Remember metadata, the info about a communication Edward Snowden showed us the NSA gathers? This is like that. Metadata shows, among other things, when and where a communication started, and where it ended up. DNS data, a kind of metadata, comes from a Dynamic Name Server. When you use a smartphone or type www.theamericanconservative.com into your browser, it contacts a DNS server, which translates those English words into the numbers the Internet actually runs on. Same thing for email, Tik Tok, anything online. If you have access to DNS data, such as Joffe did, you know who the White House and Trump were communicating with. DNS data is a road map and if you have enough of it, patterns, such as perhaps regular communication with Russia, emerge. That’s why the NSA does the same thing against its enemies or competitors.
4) So is that “spying?” Durham never uses the word in his filing.
What word would you use to describe secretly and likely illegally collecting information about enemies or competitors to use against them? Durham is writing a legal document, and must use precise words, so of course he would not use a blunt term like spying. But it is pretty hard to call what actually happened anything else.
5) How is what Joffe/Neustar did illegal? They did not hack into any servers. They had access to them.
There were two sources of DNS information, let’s take them separately. The first was DNS servers actually inside the White House. Neustar provided these servers under a contract with the government. Contractors like Neustar and Joffe working on sensitive data systems do not own the data they see. Their scope of usage is very specific to the job they were hired to do. It does not include exploiting high-security government contracts for political purposes, personal gain or to help Hillary. Sort of like your doctor, who knows your medical information but cannot just share it with his brother-in-law who sells insurance.
Joffe also monitored the DNS data from Trump Tower and other Trump properties. He got this data via Georgia Tech. They got it (along with a gazillion other DNS records) as part of an unrelated contract with the Pentagon. Georgia had no obvious right to share data with Joffe and he had no right to use the shared data for political purposes. There has got to be a crime in there somewhere.
6) But Joffe and others never read any Trump email or listened in on calls. So it’s not spying.
Time to update the definition of spying from 1945. In Joffe’s case, he was trying to establish a pattern of communications between Trump and Russia. Michael Sussman was then to take that pattern pulled from the DNS data to the FBI and CIA as a patriotic bystander, and those agencies would be able to go in deep reading individual emails with a flick of a switch. The NSA does this all the time, looking at who one terrorist contacts in order to target another. It is the core of modern spying and it looks like the Clinton campaign was doing it, and then using Michael Sussmann as a false front to peddle it to the FBI and CIA. We know the FBI took the bait.
7) But I heard all this DNS monitoring of the White House started under Obama.
Neustar got the contract and installed the DNS servers in the White House during the Obama administration. This may have been for some legitimate cybersecurity task and/or to establish a baseline of “normal” White House-Russia communications. Joffe continued his DNS monitoring of the White House into February 2017, after Trump took office. Having failed to stop his campaign, the data was lined up to aid in driving him out of office. The other monitoring, of Trump’s personal and business DNS data, took place during the campaign, which of course meant it was while Obama was in the White House.
8) This guy Joffe seems right out of Better Call Saul.
In quid pro quo, Joffe was offered a top cybersecurity job in the future Hillary Clinton administration. But his background goes deep. Among other things, Joffe’s other company, Packet Forensics, sells wiretapping equipment that allows federals to spy on private web-browsing through fake Internet security certificates. This lets agents see an individual’s online transactions without obtaining a warrant. This is not to imply, at least not yet, that Joffe could have easily used his access to the White House servers to install his product and then monitor everything. Joffe’s company has done $40 million in federal contracts, including with the FBI (in 2013, FBI Director James Comey gave Joffe an award recognizing his work on a case) and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA.) Joffe’s firm also monitors the computers of other government officials for threats, including in the office of Justice Department watchdog Michael Horowitz, who investigated the FBI for Russiagate wrongdoing. He is one guy in position to know a lot.
Joffe started out as a direct mail marketing scammer in the 1980s. In the 90s he sat on the board of PlasmaNet, which then operated FreeLotto.com, an scammy online sweepstakes game. And small world– Joffe’s company Packet Forensics landed a recent Pentagon contract to manage Internet domains. The bid was awarded the day Joe Biden was inaugurated president.
9) What’s next?
Indictments by Durham against Joffe are almost certain. Durham may also get curious why the FBI and CIA did not question where Sussmann got his data, given that it could have only come from White House servers. In addition, if researchers at Georgia Tech who were being paid by the U.S. government via a DARPA grant were freelancing the data they collected to help the Clinton campaign smear Trump, that would be another area Durham will be looking into. Durham might also seize the Neustar-provided DNS servers if they haven’t been wiped and see if any data reading software was ever installed.
One of Durham’s earlier indictments, former FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, has already been found guilty of falsifying data on a FISA application to enable wiretapping Trump staffer Carter Page. The case against Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann is ongoing, as is the third publicly-known indictment, against Igor Danchenko, a Russian émigré living in the United States. Danchenko made up most of what he told Christopher Steele for his dossier.
Keep your eye on Charles Dolan, a long-time Clinton hack. Dolan has close ties not only to the Clintons but to the Russians as well; he and the public relations firm where he worked represented the Russian government and were registered as foreign agents for Russia. Dolan is credited with, among other things, making up the pee tape and otherwise using cut-outs to feed false info about Trump into the dossier.
10) Anyone going to jail?
Durham’s filings are lightening flashes, briefly and unpredictably illuminating part of the whole. One thing seems clear, however. The statute of limitations on many of the process crimes Durham is pursuing, like perjury, is short. Any strategy of using little fish to catch bigger fish is likely to time out, at least as far as actual prosecutions. Instead, Durham seems intent more on exposing the larger conspiracy, to include the Russia dossier and now electronic, well, spying, by the Clinton campaign. He may also expose more fully the intelligence community’s role in all this, turning a blind eye on the sources and methods (which effect credibility) and accepting anything peddled to them about Trump. One can imagine future hearings in a Republican-controlled House showing what Hillary knew, never mind potentially Obama and Biden.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Connecting the Dots of Durham, Russiagate, the FBI, and Clinton
Let’s connect the dots among Durham, Russiagate, the FBI, and Clinton. They show the Clinton campaign ran a sophisticated, multi-prong coordinated intelligence operation against Trump with either the active or tacit support of the FBI.
In the case of prong one, the dossier, the Clinton campaign hired MI6 intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The hiring was through its law firm, Perkins Coie, who hired Fusion GPS, who hired Steele to hide the funding source. The use of the law firm as a cut out allowed Hillary during the campaign to deny she funded the dossier, and the media to claim for a year or more that it was actually the Republicans themselves who paid for it. This set up the he said/she said cover Clinton would use throughout the operation.
Once they had hired Steele, the Clinton campaign and its allies found Russians and others who would feed lies to Steele. Steele was paid to use his credibility to hide the non-credibility of his pushed-sources. They were taken seriously only because Steele was taken seriously, albeit only because he was paid by Clinton to do so. You could not achieve much putting a thug like Igor Danchenko himself on CNN. This is known as embellishing your sources.
Here are some of Steele’s sources and connections. See if they connect any dots: one of Steele’s key sources is the now-Durham indicted Igor Danchenko. Steele was introduced to Danchenko by Fiona Hill. Hill would go on to play a key role driving the Ukraine impeachment. When Danchenko did not make up stuff himself, he was spoon-fed lies by Charles Dolan, a long-time Clinton hack (it was Fiona Hill who introduced Dolan to Danchenko). Dolan had close ties not only to the Clintons but to the Russians as well; he did PR work for the Russian government and was registered as a foreign agent for Russia. Dolan also fed bogus info to Olga Galkina, another Russian who fed info to Danchenko for inclusion in the dossier. Galkina expected Dolan to get her a job in the Hillary administration.
Steele then took his dossier down two tracks. He used his role as a former FBI informant to push the info deep into the Bureau and help trigger the Crossfire Hurricane investigation which would ultimately feed the Mueller Report. When cracks in Steele’s dossier appeared early on, they were taken care of. For example, one of those Trump staffers Steele accused of being a Russian agent, Carter Page, was actually a CIA agent. Yet when the FBI sought a FISA warrant, the FBI deleted his association with CIA from the application. Special Counsel Robert Durham prosecuted the man who did that, Kevin Clinesmith, who was found guilty, albeit years after the warrant was issued. Steele was worth his weight in gold to Clinton: he got the FBI to launch a full-spectrum investigation that included eavesdropping, use of a honey pot dangle, and foreign agents, all of which lead to three years of Mueller and right to the door of impeachment.
Steele’s second track was the media. Steele set himself up as a source to compliant media about the dossier without revealing to them he was the author of the dossier. This information loop made it appear a second entity was confirming the contents of the dossier, when in fact it was Steele surreptitiously confirming himself. It’s an old spy trick, getting inside, becoming your own corroborating source. In intelligence work, for the receiver of information, this is known as cross-contamination, an amateur error the FBI seemed OK with. The scam also generated cover for all the politicians and intelligence operatives. They could go to their bosses and say the New York Times has found a source which confirms what we’re hearing from Steele.
Every element of the dossier job is present in prong two of the broader operation, Clinton’s electronic spying on Trump. As with the dossier, it begins with the statement of work that Trump is connected with Russia and the job is to create something plausible enough to “confirm” that connection. A cut out was again used to fund things, in this case Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann and again the firm Perkins Coie. Sussmann, with the lure of a big job in the Hillary administration, recruited Rodney Jaffe, a tech guy whose company Neustar had a contract with the Obama administration to provide DNS servers to the White House. Joffe also had connections deep into the DNS community, and used them to gain access to DNS data from Trump Tower and other properties (see what you can do with DNS data.)
Though the DNS data is no more credible than the dossier, Sussmann follows Steele’s playbook. Sussmann first takes his story as an anonymous source to the NYT in late August 2016. He then goes to the FBI and CIA on September 16, 2016, mispresents himself as not working for the Clinton campaign (he is currently under Durham indictment for that) and pitches them the story Trump and the Russian Alfa Bank have set up some sort of backdoor communications. Sussmann later added another unproven tale, that Russian smartphones were connecting regularly with the White House.
Concurrent with Sussmann’s pitch to the FBI, the Alfa story made the press in October 2016 when Slate wrote an anonymous “benevolent posse of computer scientists spurred by a sense of shared idealism” had discovered data showing secret communications between Trump and Alfa. Even after the FBI had largely abandoned the investigation as fruitless, in October 2018 the New Yorker revived it, attributing the story to anonymous “self-appointed guardians of the Internet.” The source for the latter article was Joffe, who did not disclose he was working with Sussmann who was working with Fusion GPS who was working for Clinton. That no Alfa connection was ever found is irrelevant; the story Trump was with the Russians was headlines for months. Despite knowing it was not true as the ultimate source of the false info, Hillary herself pushed it.
There will be more. But what is clear even at this point is the Clinton campaign used textbook modern espionage techniques to build a wholly-false narrative about Trump and the Russians. They deployed this campaign against Trump the candidate and still got beaten. Clinton then kept it alive, in part with the FBI and Crossfire Hurricane as a proxy, even after Trump took office. Was that simple vengeance, or part of some even more elaborate campaign that would somehow end with Hillary in the Oval Office?
We also know the FBI was likely either in the conspiracy, or at best a willful idiot alongside it. Signs the dossier was garbage appeared instantly, and even the slightest investigative efforts by the FBI would have revealed how weak Steele’s sources and methods were, and that Steele was being paid by Clinton. Indeed, when the FBI found one crack, that Carter Page was an American CIA agent, they simply covered that up. The same with Sussmann and his DNS data; it would have been obvious White House DNS data could have only come from inside the White House, yet there are no signs the FBI questioned how Sussmann, supposedly a private citizen, came to possess it. And was the FBI really unable to determine Sussmann was paid by Clinton? It is chilling to remember FBI agents and illicit lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page exchanged texts saying “Page: ‘Trump’s not ever going to become president, right?’ Strzok: ‘No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.’”
“The fact pattern that John Durham is methodically establishing shows what James Comey and Andrew McCabe likely knew from day one, that the Steele dossier was politically-driven nonsense created at the behest of the Clinton campaign,” said Kevin Brock, the FBI’s former intelligence chief. “And yet they knowingly ran with its false information.”
A sophisticated, multi-prong coordinated intelligence campaign was run with either the active or tacit support of the FBI. It suggests why Robert Mueller walked so close to the edge of indictment and backed off. If his indictments failed under court scrutiny, the person in charge of all this would have been exposed. Beyond Clinton and Trump, Mueller was protecting someone in his beloved FBI. This goes deep.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
What John Durham Really Said About Hillary Spying
There is a word for secretly collecting information about enemies or competitors to use against them.
According to the latest court filing by Special Counsel John Durham, the Hillary Clinton campaign surreptitiously and likely illegally reached into protected White House and Trump communications data to try and show some link between Trump and Russia. The Clinton campaign during the election hid from FBI, CIA, and the media that it was the source of the information gathered. Durham doesn’t use the word “spy” but that in no way changes what happened.
The recent filing relates to Durham’s September indictment of Michael Sussmann, an attorney who represented the Clinton campaign while at the Perkins Coie law firm. Sussmann is accused of lying to the FBI at a September 2016 meeting when he presented documents claiming to show Internet communications between Trump and Russia-based Alfa Bank. The indictment says Sussmann falsely told the FBI he was presenting this information as a good citizen, purposely hiding his ties to Clinton. The allegations about the bank were false.
The new filing is at its heart legal housekeeping, asking that a waiver be considered to allow Sussmann to retain his current law firm. A potential conflict of interest exists because Sussmann’s representative works for a law firm which also represents others Durham may be going after, and may have been involved in the larger events under investigation, perhaps as witnesses. While that is interesting in itself, what is news worthy are broader details of what really happened around Russiagate that potentially point to crimes on a Watergate scale.
The filing says tech company Neustar executive Rodney Joffe (who was also a law client of Michael Sussmann) worked with the indicted Clinton campaign lawyer to access “dedicated servers for the Executive Office of the President of the United States (EOP).” Joffe then “exploited this arrangement by mining the EOP’s DNS traffic and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.”
Joffe also “enlisted the assistance of researchers at a U.S.-based university” (likely Georgia Tech) who had access to “large amounts of Internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract.” This would have been how Joffe got access to data from Trump’s private computers. “[Joffe] tasked these researchers to mine Internet data to establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’ tying then-candidate Trump to Russia,” he added. “In doing so, [Joffe] indicated that he was seeking to please certain ‘VIPs,’ referring to individuals at Law Firm-1 and the Clinton campaign.”
Some nerd stuff. Remember metadata, the info about a communication Edward Snowden showed us the NSA gathers? This is like that. Metadata shows, among other things, when and where a communication started, and where it ended up. DNS data, a kind of metadata, comes from a Domain Name Server. When you use a smartphone or type www.spectatorworld.com into your browser, it contacts a DNS server, which translates those English words into the numbers the Internet actually runs on.
DNS is like a phone lookup; you want to speak with Mom, who the phone knows only as 212-555-1212. Same thing for email, Tik Tok, anything online. If you have access to DNS data, such as Joffe did, you know who the White House and Trump were communicating with. DNS data is a road map and if you have enough of it, patterns, such as perhaps regular communication with Russia, emerge. That’s why the NSA does the same thing against its enemies or competitors.
The Clinton people got access to all this information via a private contractor, Joffe’s Neustar, which provided the actual DNS servers to the White House. Durham wrote, starting in July 2016, Joffe’s company “exploited this arrangement by mining the EOP’s DNS traffic and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.” In quid pro quo, and despite a fraud-laden past, Joffe was offered a top cybersecurity job in the future Clinton administration.
The data gathering on the Trump campaign began while Obama was still in office (and the EOP portion could have been to establish a baseline of “normal” White House-Russia communications) and continued into February 2017, after Trump took office and all attention turned to impeachment. Having failed to stop his campaign, the data was lined up to aid in driving him out of the White House.
But no one stole or hacked the data, right? Not so fast. Contractors working on sensitive data systems do not own the data they see. Their scope of usage is very specific to the job they were hired to do. It does not include exploiting high-security government contracts for political purposes and personal gain. Sort of like your doctor, who knows your medical information but cannot just share it with his brother who sells life insurance.
Indictments by Durham against Joffe are sure to be coming. It is also curious FBI and CIA did not question where Sussmann got his data, given that it could have only come from White House servers. In addition, if researchers at Georgia Tech who were being paid by the U.S. government via a DARPA grant were freelancing the data they collected to help the Clinton campaign smear Trump, that would be another area Durham will be looking into.
Back to Michael Sussmann, the Clinton lawyer. As he tried to get the FBI interested in the Trump-Alfa Bank tale in September 2016, Sussmann went to the CIA (“Agency-2”) on February 9, 2017 and “provided an updated set of allegations — including the Russian Bank-1 data and additional allegations relating to Trump.”
Sussmann also “claimed lookups demonstrated that Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House.” Durham says this is unsupported, though as recently as October the New York Times was still defending it. The Durham filing also maintains Sussmann lied again to CIA about having any affiliation with his paying clients Joffe and the Clinton campaign.
So call it what you will — spying, hacking, infiltrating, a rebut to but her emails – but here is what it is: Durham asserts Neustar, on behalf of the Clinton campaign, gathered data likely illegally and certainly surreptitiously from White House and Trump computers, seeking a connection to Russia. Lawyer Michael Sussmann, hiding his connection to Clinton and Joffe, brought false conclusions drawn from this data to FBI and CIA (and perhaps the DOJ Inspector General) in hopes they would turn their enormous resources toward investigating Trump. The con worked with the FBI.
This would mean Hillary and her lawyers masterminded a coordinated electronic conspiracy against Trump when he was a candidate and later president, while simultaneously perpetuating the dossier hoax. As with the dossier, everything Clinton peddled was fake. There was no pee tape, no payoffs from Putin, no connection to Alfa Bank, and no Russian-made smartphones. But this is not a fake scandal. Durham has potentially uncovered the most destructive political assassination attempt since Kennedy.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Russiagate: Proof It was Hillary All Along
It was Hillary all along. The indictment by Special Counsel John Durham of Igor Danchenko for lying to the FBI demonstrates conclusively the Steele dossier was wholly untrue. Clinton paid for the dossier to be created and Clinton people supplied the fodder. Steele, working with journalists, pushed the dossier into the hands of the FBI to try to derail the Trump campaign. When that failed, the dossier was used to attack the elected president of the United States. The whole thing was the actual and moral equivalent of a Cold War op where someone was targeted by the FBI with fake photos of them in bed with a prostitute.Start with a quick review of what Durham uncovered about the most destructive political assassination since Kennedy.
Christopher Steele, paid by the Clinton campaign (after Clinton’s denial, it took a year for congressional investigators to uncover the dossier was commissioned by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, working for the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, paid through the Perkins-Coie law firm) did no investigative work. Instead, his reputation as a former British intelligence officer was purchased to validate a dossier of lies and then to traffic those lies to the FBI and journalists.
Durham’s investigation confirms one of Steele’s key “sources” is the now-arrested Danchenko, a Russian émigré living in the U.S. Steele was introduced to the Russian by Fiona Hill, then of the Brookings Institute (Hill would go on to play a key role in the Ukraine impeachment scam.) Danchenko completely made up most of what he told Steele about Trump-Russian collusion. What he did not make up himself he was spoon fed by Charles Dolan, a long-time Clinton hack and campaign regular. Ironically, Dolan had close ties not only to the Clintons but to the Russians as well; he and the public relations firm where he worked represented the Russian government and were registered as foreign agents for Russia. Dolan is credited with, among other things, making up the pee tape episode. Dolan also fed bogus info to Olga Galkina, another Russian who passed the information to Danchenko for inclusion in the dossier. Galkina noted in e-mails she was expecting Dolan to get her a job in the Hillary administration. Steele, a life-long Russia and intelligence expert, never questioned or verified anything he was told.
In short: Clinton pays for the dossier, Steele fills it with lies fed to him by a Clinton PR stooge through Russian cutouts, and the FBI swallowed the whole story. There never was a Russiagate. The only campaign which colluded with Russia was Clinton’s. And Democrats, knowing this, actually had the guts to claim it was Trump who obstructed justice.
That the dossier was a sham was evident to anyone who ever read a decent spy novel. It was a textbook information op and The American Conservative, without any access to the documents Durham now has, saw through it years ago, as did many other non-MSM outlets. See here (2/5/2018). Here (2/15/2018). Here (6/15/2018.) Here (3/25/2019.) Here (12/11/2019) and more. What was obvious from the publicly available information was, well, obvious to everyone but the FBI.
The dossier was the flimsy excuse the FBI used to justify a full-on investigation unprecedented in a democracy into the Trump campaign. That included electronic surveillance (obtained by the FBI lying directly to the FISA court and presenting Steele’s lies as corroborating evidence,) the use of undercover operatives, false flag ops with foreign diplomats and case officers, and prosecution threats over minor procedural acts designed to legally torture low level Trump staffers (Carter Page, who the FBI knew was a CIA source, and George Papadopoulos) into “flipping” on the candidate.
Page in particular was a nobody with nothing, but the FBI needed him. Agents “believed at the time they approached the decision point on a second FISA renewal that, based upon the evidence already collected, Carter Page was a distraction in the investigation, not a key player in the Trump campaign, and was not critical to the overarching investigation.” They renewed the warrants anyway, three times, due to their value under the “two hop” rule. The FBI can extend surveillance two hops from its target, so if Carter Page called Michael Flynn who called Trump, all of those calls are legally open to monitoring. Page was a handy little bug used for a fishing expedition.
What’s left is only to answer was the FBI really that inept that they could not see a textbook op run against them or that the FBI knew early on they had been handed a pile of rubbish but needed some sort of legal cover for their own operation, spying on Trump, and thus decided to look the other way at the obvious shortcomings of Steele’s work.
“The fact pattern that John Durham is methodically establishing shows what James Comey and Andrew McCabe likely knew from day one the Steele dossier was politically-driven nonsense created at the behest of the Clinton campaign,” said Kevin Brock, the FBI’s former intelligence chief. “And yet they knowingly ran with its false information to obtain legal process against an American citizen. They defrauded not just a federal court, they defrauded the FBI and the American people.”
The 2019 Horowitz Report, a look into the FBI’s conduct by the Justice Department Inspector General, made clear the FBI knew the dossier was bunk and purposefully lied to the FISA court in claiming instead the dossier was backed up by investigative news reports, which themselves were secretly based on the dossier. The FBI knew Steele, who was on their payroll as a paid informant, had created a classic intel officer’s information loop, secretly becoming his own corroborating source, and gleefully looked the other way because it supported their goals.
How bad was it? At no point in handling info accusing the sitting president of being a Russian agent, what would have been the most significant political event in American history, did the FBI seriously ask themselves “So exactly where did this information come from, specific sources and methods please, and how could those sources have known it?” Were all the polygraphs broken? The FBI learned Danchenko was Steele’s primary source in 2017, via the Carter Page tap, and moved ahead anyway.
From the FBI’s perspective, turning a blind eye was not even that risky a gambit. They were so certain they would succeed (FBI agents and illicit lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page exchanged texts saying “Page: “Trump’s not ever going to become president, right? Strzok: No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”) and Hillary would ascend to the Oval Office that they felt they would have top cover for their evil. After Trump won and the FBI’s coup planners shifted to impeachment, they held on to their top cover as James Comey presented himself as the man on the cross, aided by a MSM which cared only about a) ending Donald Trump and b) cranking up their ratings with dollops of the dossier’s innuendo. A mass media that bought lies about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and then promised “never again” did it again.
If a genie granted me a wish, I would want a conversation with Robert Mueller under some sort of truth spell. Did Mueller “miss” all the lies in his lengthy investigation, hoping to protect his beloved FBI? Or did he see himself as a reluctant white knight, having realized during his investigation the real crime committed was coup planning by the FBI and thinking that by ignoring their actions but clearing Trump he would bring the whole affair to its least worst conclusion?
I suspect Mueller realized he had been handed a coup-in-progress to either abet (by indicting Trump on demonstrably false information) or bury. He could not bring himself to destroy his beloved FBI. But the former Marine could also not bring himself to become the Colin Powell of his generation, squandering his hard won reputation to validate something he knew was not true. Mueller split the difference, and kept silent on the FBI and left Trump to his own fates.
This is the third indictment by Durham. Danchenko’s indictment, Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann’s, and FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith’s depict criminal efforts to get Trump. The arrest of Danchenko makes clear Durham knows the whole story. What will he do with it? Will he walk his indictments up the ladder ever-closer to Hillary? Will he proceed sideways, leaving Hillary but moving deeper into the FBI? Maybe see if Fiona Hill connects the failed Russiagate coup she played a pivotal role in with the failed Ukrainegate impeachment she played a pivotal role in? Or will he use the stage of Congressional hearings as a way to bypass Joe Biden’s Justice Department and throw the real decision making back to the voters?
History will record this chapter of America’s story as one of its more sordid affairs. Only time however will tell if the greater tale is one of how close we came to ending our democracy via an intelligence agency coup, or whether Russiagate was just a nascent practice run by the FBI, on a longer road which led to our demise a president or two later. For those who belittled the idea of the Deep State, this is what it looks like exposed, all pink and naked.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Buy Peter’s Books on Amazon!
