The Founding Fantasy of Durham’s Prosecution of Michael Sussmann: Hillary’s Successful October Surprise

Thanks to those who’ve donated to help defray the costs of trial transcripts. Your generosity has funded the expected costs. If you appreciate the kind of coverage no one else is offering, we’re still happy to accept donations for this coverage — which reflects the culmination of eight months work.

I’m still waiting on the second transcript from the Michael Sussmann trial, after which point I’ll lay out what Andrew DeFilippis already did to give Sussmann cause for appeal, if he were to lose.

Until then, I want to share the unbelievably crazypants belief that Durham’s prosecutors are attempting to sell to a jury. AUSA Brittain Shaw laid out the framework Durham’s team will use this way:

So what will the evidence show? The evidence will show that defendant’s lie was all part of a bigger plan, a plan that the defendant carried out in concert with two clients, the Hillary Clinton Campaign and Internet executive Rodney Joffe. It was a plan to create an October surprise on the eve of the presidential election, a plan that used and manipulated the FBI, a plan that the defendant hoped would trigger negative news stories and cause an FBI investigation, a plan that largely succeeded.

How did the defendant execute this plan? Through his two clients.

First, the Clinton Campaign. You’re going to hear that in the summer of 2016, as the presidential election was heating up, the defendant was working at a major D.C. law firm which was acting as legal counsel for the Clinton Campaign. You’re also going to find as part of — hear that as part of their campaign efforts they were hired and were paying an investigative firm called Fusion GPS that was hired to do what’s called opposition research.That’s where the defendant’s plan took shape, and the evidence will show that the plan had three parts: a look, a leak, and a lie.

[claims about Fusion GPS and Rodney Joffe’s efforts, the latter of which, especially, are badly wrong]

First the look. The evidence will show that as Sussmann and Joffe met and coordinated with representatives of the Clinton Campaign and Fusion GPS, they looked for more data. You will hear that Joffe instructed people at his companies to scour Internet traffic for any derogatory information they could find about Trump or his associates’ online Internet activities, including potential ties to Alfa-Bank or to Russia. And you will see that Fusion GPS did the same using their access to other information.

Second, the leak. You will hear from the evidence that the defendant and Joffe then leaked the Alfa-Bank allegations to a reporter at the New York Times with the hope and expectation that he would run a story about it.

Third, the lie. You will see that when the reporter didn’t publish this story right away, the defendant and others decided to bring this information to the FBI and to create a sense of urgency, to also tell the FBI that a major news organization was running a story within days. That’s when the defendant requested the meeting with the FBI general counsel and told him that he was not doing this for any client.

The evidence will show you that the defendant had at least two reasons to lie.

First you’re going to hear that the defendant was a cyber security lawyer who had been hired earlier that year by the Democratic National Committee to represent them in relation to a computer hack where they’d been the victim. Because of this, the defendant was in frequent contact with the FBI about the hack investigation. They considered him to be the DNS — I mean, the DNC attorney for that matter. Because they viewed him as the DNC lawyer for the hack, the defendant knew that if he came in and told them that he was representing a political candidate at this time, weeks before an election, they might not meet with him right away, let alone open an investigation.

Second, the defendant knew that if he could get the FBI to investigate the matter and reach out to the press to try to stop the story, that that would make the story more attractive to the press, and they would report on it. [my emphasis]

I get that this is supposed to be catchy for jurors. But this is a child’s fantasy (and Sussmann’s lawyer, Michael Bosworth, noted that Sussmann going to the FBI was, “The exact opposite of what the Clinton Campaign would want”).

Start with Shaw’s claims about “the look.” Not only is it false that Joffe was looking for new information after such time as Sussmann was aware of it, not only won’t the witnesses Durham plans to call explain all of where the data came from, but already, DOJ has submitted two exhibits showing that the focus on late data gathering was on Alfa Bank, not Trump. And those late data collection efforts even included dcleaks (I’m virtually certain that Durham has not provided Sussmann discovery on all the things, such as the FBI’s suspicions that Roger Stone had advance awareness of the dcleaks operation, for them to submit evidence about it).

Next, Shaw calls sharing information with a journalist who had called a lawyer known to be grappling with serial hacks by Russia and asked about Russian hacks, “a leak,” as if there’s something untoward about sharing information with the press, as if Sussmann would “leak” information and then go tell the FBI about “leaking” it, which he did. This is just word salad!

Then Shaw claimed that Sussmann lied to provide urgency to the story. Based on my understanding, Shaw is wrong about the NYT’s plans for publication of the story. My understanding is that Dean Baquet would have happily published the story in September, when Eric Lichtblau was ready to publish and when Sussmann helped kill the story, but by October, he would only publish if reporters could prove substantive communications had taken place. That’s consistent with what Dexter Filkins reported.

The F.B.I. officials asked Lichtblau to delay publishing his story, saying that releasing the news could jeopardize their investigation. As the story sat, Dean Baquet, the Times’ executive editor, decided that it would not suffice to report the existence of computer contacts without knowing their purpose. Lichtblau disagreed, arguing that his story contained important news: that the F.B.I. had opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian contacts with Trump’s aides.

So none of her basic claims are true.

But the thing that is breathtakingly ridiculous is Shaw’s claim that Sussmann’s purported plan to create, “an October surprise on the eve of the presidential election … largely succeeded.”

What Sussmann got for his troubles of helping to kill the story in September was a story at Slate rather than NYT, immediate pre-election pushback from several entities (including me), and a NYT story that made multiple claims that were true at the time but that we now know to be false.

The story claimed there was no tie between Trump and the Russian government; but Trump and Michael Cohen were lying to cover up (among other things) a call with the Kremlin about doing a real estate deal with a sanctioned bank and a former GRU officer.

The story claimed there was no secret email communication between Trump and Russia, but Trump’s rat-fucker was communicating with the GRU persona behind the hack and (as noted) may have had advance knowledge of precisely the information operation that Joffe and the researchers were investigating in August 2016.

The story claimed that Russia hacked Trump only to disrupt the election, when subsequent reports have concluded Russia had by that point come to favor Trump (though, I suspect, that was partly because they knew how damaging Trump would be for the country).

Democrats I know place varying blame for Hillary’s loss. Virtually all put the FBI’s sabotage of her campaign as the most important cause (of which Devlin Barrett’s October Surprise, the successful leak of a criminal investigation into Hillary as compared to the opposite here, was a small part). Shaw asserted that, “the FBI is our institution that should not be used as a political tool for anyone,” and yet the Clinton email investigation, the Clinton Foundation investigation, and Durham’s own investigation are all more obvious — and wildly more successful — efforts to use the FBI as a political tool than sharing an anomaly with the FBI and helping to kill a story about it.

But no matter who Democrats blame for Hillary’s loss, most point to that NYT story as one of the most damaging stories of the campaign.

And Durham’s entire prosecution is based on the opposite, that the story that most infuriates Democrats was, instead, entirely the point.

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62 replies
  1. Peterr says:

    Save this post, Marcy. I think you’ve basically written the closing argument for Sussmann’s lawyers, flipping Shaw’s opening statement on its head. I hear it going like this . . .

    “AUSA Shaw told you about “the look” but as you’ve seen, his claims don’t hold up to actual evidence. . . .

    “AUSA Shaw told you about “the leak” but as you’ve seen, there’s no “leak” involved in any of this by my client. It was an ordinary conversation of a citizen with law enforcement about what they feared was a national security threat, as a time when electronic attacks on political figures and organizations were already publicly known to be under investigation. . . .

    “AUSA Shaw told you about “the lie” but as you’ve seen, his claims about this fall apart when set next to the facts . . .

    “AUSA Shaw told you about a look, a leak, and a lie. But when you look at the evidence, when you examine the so-called leak, you see the real lie laid in front of you: my client did not do what he is charged with doing, and anyone who says otherwise is . . . lying.

  2. Ginevra diBenci says:

    And in this morning’s Post piece, Devlin Barrett never points out the obvious rebuttal to prosecution’s charge that the Clinton campaign’s nefarious plan was “largely successful”–that rebuttal of course being that Clinton lost the election.

    • Rayne says:

      I’m still laughing about this:

      … It was a plan to create an October surprise on the eve of the presidential election, a plan that used and manipulated the FBI, a plan that the defendant hoped would trigger negative news stories and cause an FBI investigation, a plan that largely succeeded.

      Quick, let’s get President Hillary Clinton on the phone for her take on this argument undermining the legitimacy of her election to the presidency achieved when the October 2016 surprise ‘largely succeeded’.

      Swear to gods this POS special counsel investigation is merely DARVO for the entirety of the Russia-Trump relationship.

  3. harpie says:

    Thank you for dissecting this, Marcy. I find that I STILL cannot read/think about this without becoming sick to my stomach and blindingly ANGRY.

    • Savage Librarian says:

      Me too, harpie. I’m also still mad about the 2000 election. And my experience with white supremacists and an intransigent local Republican government in the mid 1990’s. Why was it that nobody cared much then?

      Sometimes I think it was somewhat related to everyone’s preoccupation with events outside the US and also the snake charm allure of technology that focused American minds elsewhere. But now that technology has finally alerted the comatose masses to the very real threats they have long overlooked.

      • Spencer Dawkins says:

        Savage Librarian, I feel your pain. I’m also bitter about 1972, 1980, 2000, and 2004, all for variations of the same reason …

        • Traveller says:

          Dear Savage and Spencer:

          The real October Surprise was Comey’s announcement re continuing investigation of Ms. Clinton….I was supervising an outreach phone bank, mainly Michigan and Pennsylvania and suddenly people were not taking our calls…and there was also some push-back to our friendly calls…it was terrible for my crew…and I will never be able to forgive Comey and the FBI, (espc the FBI office in Lower Manhattan that insistently pushed this false narrative and may have forced Comey’s hand).

          I feel you pain…maybe even more…I can barely type this over my agony even thinking about it. (interestingly, as I consider this, I’ve worked one way or another all recent elections, but not Biden’s….curious).

          Best Wishes, Traveller

    • Savage Librarian says:

      Harpie, Spencer & Traveller,

      This is a case about gobbledygook, hide and seek, and a fly in the ointment.

    • harpie says:

      Thanks, everyone! I do KNOW I’m not alone,
      but sometimes it’s nice to get actually see/feel that.

  4. harpie says:

    I knew we’d get an amazing post from Marcy as soon as I read this tweet this morning,
    [and I am NOT disappointed!]:

    https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1526864558362599425
    5:57 AM · May 18, 2022

    […] Also, Hellman appears to make another error with the dates, one Durham has internalized, which is central to Durham’s conspiracy theory.

    DURHAM has internalized an error with dates.
    This ERROR is the FOUNDATION of DoJ’s case.
    It is also the FOUNDATION of MAGA-World’s entire BELIEF system.

    [As an aside, I want to make a donation supplemental to my monthly one,
    but have no idea how to go about doing that. I’ll keep experimenting.]

    • mass interest says:

      Harpie, I mailed a check last year to the TX address provided. It was not cashed within the 6-month effective period, so I stopped payment on it. Figured DeJoy’s shenanigans had everything to do its disappearance.

      Don’t know whether anyone else here has experienced same, but thought I’d mention it.

      • Hopeful says:

        I plan on sending a check to the Houston address. If that is not reliable, please let me know and I will try another route.

    • Ravenclaw says:

      I think if you click on the “support” button in the upper-right region, you can make a one-time donation by selecting PayPal (rather than one of the subscription options).

    • harpie says:

      I’ve finally got the monthly donation and the single donation figured out! I’m such a dunderhead. Anyway, Ravenclaw was right about how to do the single payment. I just hadn’t originally signed up for the subscription the right way…and it took me all day to figure things out. UGGGG!

      Also, to Mass Interest, I too had checks unpaid after 3 and 6 months. That’s when I decided to try to overcome my reluctance about giving out personal information on line and modernize into the internet age.

      Now I’m relieved, but exhausted, LOL!

  5. bawiggans says:

    So, the AUSA specifies in her opening statement that the FBI was well aware that Sussman was “the DNC lawyer for the hack” but, being innocent of the ways of the wicked world, took him at his (alleged – if Baker remembers correctly, that is) word that his tip was conveyed on behalf of no client and especially not the DNC. The jury is meant to believe that the FBI took him at his (alleged – if Baker remembers correctly, that is) word that he had no other axe to grind. The materiality claim now seems dependent on selling the jury the notion that our premier, domestic, investigative law enforcement and counterintelligence agency is really a collection of incompetent, credulous naïfs.

    • Desider says:

      “Because no one could have predicted bad actors would try to pass bad info to the FBI” – Condi Rice II
      Presumably the FBI maintains a degree of professional disbelief & skepticism for any source to prevent the obvious, that a Butina or Galkina could innocuously ingratiate herself and pass on all sorts of disinfo. Even for a trusted repeat source like Sussmann, he could have gotten a bad source of info despite good intentions, so things have to be vetted. And how many people puff themselves up to be more than they are – “I represent the Crown Prince of the Emirates!!!” Are we charging every puffedup blowfish while overlooking those who actually affected the election? It’s all so topsy-turvy.

    • Fraud Guy says:

      Well, they were all looking for Antifa during Jan 6 to protect the peaceful protestors…

  6. Zinsky says:

    I read a summary of and excerpts from Durham’s teams’ opening statements and was also astonished at how it re-shaped Mr. Sussman’s innocent sharing of troubling national security information with a professional acquaintance into some kind of grandiose, byzantine, world-wide conspiracy! They try to paint Sussman as a devious mastermind playing 12 dimensional chess and Hillary as some sort of insidious Mata Hari, weaving webs of intrigue to snatch victory from the strong, resilient ever-noble Donald Trump. It was the most bizarre, supreme gaslighting presentation I have ever had the displeasure to read! Keep up the great work Marcy, as this trial progresses. Those of us less familiar with the legal system and national security apparatus, appreciate your insights and rely on your commentary!

  7. Leu2500 says:

    October surprises are crimes?

    I don’t know how that opening statement was received by the jurors, but my eyes were rolling.

    • Traveller says:

      Really great links, Harpie, thank you. (I don’t like to comment too much…but these were important summaries directly from the trial, so thanks again!). Best Wishes, Traveller

  8. Chuck.E. says:

    Thank you for all of your hard work, you’re write-ups are always insightful and I appreciate the hard work that goes into them. In the modern era of mass communication, your page is one of the bright beacons that people can rely on for truth and in-depth investigation. All the best!

  9. Rugger9 says:

    As if any more proof were needed to show this case is more about publicity than prosecution the opening statements fulfilled that requirement. As noted above and in many other posts / comments across our site here the defense team had already debunked these claims in their court filings which usually have the ‘penalty of perjury’ statements tied to them. With evidence. With other evidence showing hanky-panky by Durham’s team trying to game the system or outright manufacture a case out of thin air, which is ‘Red Scare’ stuff from the ’20s (Palmer), the ’50s (McCarthy, et al) and the current BLM/Antifa scare. As EW did point out there was a case to be made albeit flimsy, but it’s clear Durham and his team can’t go there now unless it’s a surprise witness or two. It also highlights a point I made a couple of posts back which I suspect will be borne out by the defense opening: do you want Durham’s scatterbrained bootlicking lackeys or Sussmann’s professionals on your side?

    So, I’ll be looking for a couple of things here:
    1. How long it takes the RWNM to blow this all over the media as dispositive, starting with the “three dolts on the divan” (h/t Charlie Pierce). I don’t patronize Faux if I can avoid it.
    2. How long it takes the defense to shred this to pieces. I had mentioned about my first jury service in a comment some time ago, and note that when the state rested we looked at each other and asked ourselves “that was it?”. I see none of the government witness surviving cross-examination with their claims intact.
    3. What the jury makeup is in general terms (if Cooper is as smart as I think he is the names are under seal) to figure out if there would be a MAGA holdout to force a mistrial and retrial (because of the added time for publicity).

  10. Stacy (Male!) says:

    Shaw’s opening is yet one more instance of the GOP’s tactic of proclaiming gibberish (e.g., Joe Biden/corruption/Ukraine/Hunter) and counting on the stupidity and mean-spiritedness of the audience to sell it. Insulting people’s intelligence may play in Plano, but I don’t think it will fool 12 Washingtonians.

    • Desider says:

      They will win even if they lose – “the system failed them”. There’s no downside to Durham’s team spouting bullshit – I read a bs WSJ article this morning, and almost all the comments are so full of alternate reality, and the review of the article thinks that Durham has “already won” via the sensationalist PR route expanding his grand unified conspiracy theory. He should thus be censured for prosecutorial misconduct, but that won’t happen. *This* is our tilted playing field – using the courts+MSM for partisan purposes, but IOKIYAR.

  11. Joe Stewart says:

    As others have noted, “The Look, The Leak, The Lie” may well haunt Durham. But, Sussman needs to be super simple to win the jury. As in, “There was no look, there was no leak, there was no lie.” Or, zero in on the specifics of the charge and come up with the equivalent to “If the glove don’t fit, you can’t convict.” riffing off the OJ murder defense. Juries are not stupid, but we can all get confused and defer to the authority in the room….

  12. BobCon says:

    “a NYT story that made multiple claims that were true at the time but that we now know to be false.”

    To clarify, the story made multiple claims that were *unprovable* at the time, not true. And what is almost certainly the case is that the FBI — at least at the most reliable level — was not telling the Times meaningful details about whether they were true or false, only that they were carrying out investigations which had not been closed.

    It would have been acceptable for the Times given what they knew to simply not publish until clearer confirmation was available. That was a practice they often follow.

    It also would have been acceptable, although would have exposed the Times to GOP sniping, to follow the standard they were using for Clinton, which was to report on the existence of investigations in a “raises questions” framework.

    But what Baquet (and possibly others at the Times) did was manufacture an exoneration for Trump that violated basic reporting principles. They either took standard FBI reluctance to provide details as a conclusion of no wrongdoing, despite knowing better, or they leaned on sources with known bias to spin a story of Trump’s redemption.

    And along the way they confirmed the existence of the Alfa Bank investigation, which was potentially useful to Russia, while attacking its validity, which was definitely useful to Trump.

    This is not a case of a single fact being misunderstood. As MW points out, this is multiple points being systematically misreported. This was not a simple screwup, it was a compound failure and I personally suspect Baquet is hiding more than just his own role in cooking this up.

    • Rugger9 says:

      The NYT has a lot to answer for here, despite the occasional scoop and some good reporters/columnists (i.e. Krugman). The problem is that the editors decide what runs (and for stuff as powerful as these stories were, that means Baquet) and they are all quite conservative in their views. It also appears that the NYT was no fan of HRC but I do not know how pervasive that attitude was with the editors.

      I’m not holding my breath for a mea culpa from the Grey Lady.

      • BobCon says:

        Publisher AG Sulzberger is a horrible combination of insulated, vain, and dumb.

        AG thought that when Trump assailed the Times last December with the old malignant antisemitic trope of “Jew York Times” his best move was to listen to only a narrow set of fawning insiders and then say… nothing.

        AG sets the tone. Insulated, vain and dumb is the only way to survive there.

        As the Fed Soc judges start descending on the Times like ever-narrowing, circling vultures, wielding ridiculous orders on defamation cases, screaming about prior restraint, and bankrupting his reporters, AG Sulzberger will be greasing the skids. He thinks his reporters and his paper deserve it, after all.

  13. Yohei72 says:

    It’s arguably worth noting (just barely) that I saw some low-level frother on Twitter make the following statement yesterday, in the context of this trial: “Knowledge of what transpired is the most important element. The fates of those executing the scheme, while very important may not be the most important.”

    In other words, he proudly admits the point of this prosecution is to get the conspiracy theories into the official record, and having a solid criminal case against an individual defendant is of secondary importance.

  14. notjonathon says:

    Sent a little in response to your plea. Keep up the good work!

    That opening statement–claiming that Sussman told the FBI so that the FBI would prevent publication, which in turn would make the newspapers more eager to publish–wackadoodle.

  15. harpie says:

    https://twitter.com/evanperez/status/1526948886106996739
    11:32 AM · May 18, 2022

    Day 2 of the Sussmann trial. DOJ has called Marc Elias, fmr Clinton 2016 campaign lawyer, to the witness stand.

    12:06 PM · May 18, 2022
    Elias delivering a jovial chatty performance on the stand. Peppering his testimony in response to prosecutors with blasts from the past: like the time Trump asked Russia to release Clinton’s emails.

    LOL!

    Marcy: https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1526957797115670528
    12:08 PM · May 18, 2022

    Told ya all a jury would finally hear about Trump asking Russia to hack his opponent.

    • harpie says:

      From the Lynch thread, 3:00 PM · May 18, 2022

      ELIAS to SUSSMAN lawyer [Berkowitz ?]:
      “Donald Trump was a bully who used litigation as a tactic.”

  16. Cosmo Le Cat says:

    My all-time favorite sentence written by emptywheel (from Twitter):

    “Reading the transcript: Durham’s team claimed that Hillary’s purported attempt to get an October surprise was largely successful which is glue-sniffing levels of crazypants batshittery.”

  17. greenbird says:

    question:
    marcy seems to be a prolific source of RECAP documents (i’m guessing) and surely shares links to pdf docket entries.
    do transcripts appear on dockets through the same RECAP ‘portal’ ?
    here’s their twitter main link: https://twitter.com/FreeLawProject (donations welcome there, too)
    “Providing access to primary legal materials, developing legal research tools, and supporting academic research on legal corpora”
    sibling projects:
    1) Extensions for your browser that improve PACER while building a public repository of court filings.
    Use PACER? Install RECAP. https://twitter.com/recapthelaw
    2) Searchable court opinions, oral arguments, the RECAP Archive and more. Follow us.
    https://twitter.com/courtlistener

  18. Fancy Chicken says:

    Somewhere in one the comments to a recent post of Dr. Wheeler’s someone had posted they wanted to make an additional one off payment to help with the costs of the transcripts and additional work Dr. Wheeler is doing on the Sussmann trial but they weren’t sure how to do that-

    If you download the Cash app that is linked to on the SUPPORT page on the top right hand of the site, it is very easy to make a one off payment via your debit card to help with the additional costs Dr. Wheeler is facing.

    No one wants to ask for money, so I have no problem speaking out on behalf of emptywheel as a long time reader but new commenter to encourage other readers to use this very simple tool to help out and support the amazing analysis you can only get here.

  19. Concerned Reader says:

    Hey, this is from one of the emails in the email dump that only Kit Klarenberg is reporting on that I can see so far. Richard Dearlove reports on his meeting with Durham, March 2020. I’ve honestly no idea how this fits in with any of lines pursued on here, but would love to hear if it seems authentic or interesting at all. Sorry for wall of text as per original!

    > I met this morning with John Durham (google him, there is a mass of material about him on line) in person plus an assistant attorney from the DOJ Nora Dannehy and an FBI officer Bill Oldenburg. JD did 90% of the talking and was very courteous and considerate. I thought he was impressive and lived up to his reputation. Our meeting lasted two and a half hours in a private room at the Ritz Carlton which they had booked.

    > They mainly wanted to talk to me about my knowledge of Chris Steele, his business partner Chris Burrows, when I learned of the dossier, what advice I had given them and so on. A lot of other names came up, such as Steph Halper, Mike Flynn and others who were involved with me around that time. I don’t think I had much to tell them they did not already know, but they were keen to have my account of the atmospherics around those events.

    > I had however made it clear at the start that there was a quid pro quo for my cooperation and that I wanted to talk to them about your case, which we did for almost an hour. I made the point that it was not entirely irrelevant to their investigation as it involved Comey, and has a strong Russian dimension. They clearly knew in advance that it was going to be about your case, and they would have known from having me on watch when I entered to US en route to Aspen that we were staying at your address. I would not say they were informed about your case but they were certainly familiar with it.

    > I made all the points which you would have wanted me to make. Principally that there had been a miscarriage of justice, that the two key DoJ witnesses had lied and had been thoroughly discredited and that European air traffic control records proved that the alleged bribery conversation could not have happened on the alleged date, that Farrell had been involved in the compromise of a British diplomat on behalf of the Russians, that Schinlen herself had clearly eventually had deep reservations about about the DoJ case, that it was illogical that Kozeny had not been extradited from the Bahamas on grounds of stealing as opposed to an FCPA violation and so on. They actually got quite animated in discussion of the issues that I raised and promised to read the book about your case prepared by your lawyers for that meeting with Comey. I left them with two copies plus the covering note.
    For good measure I also alerted them to Immunolight and the belief amongst those scientists involved in your research that you had developed a new cure for cancer which could well disrupt the whole pharma industry in this crucial medical area and that news of this could well emerge in the press in the coming months. Such an event would catalyse renewed interest in your case which would be subject to a lot of scrutiny. There therefore was a case for the DoJ themselves to revisit the case first.
    It is of course impossible to say whether my conversation will have any consequences at all. However Durham did say that he would definitely read the book and make further inquiries in the DoJ, as did Ms Dannehy as well. Oldenburg was also taking notes whilst I spoke.

    • Dopey-o says:

      “ belief amongst those scientists involved in your research that you had developed a new cure for cancer which could well disrupt the whole pharma industry in this crucial medical area …”

      March 2020 to May 2022, 26 months and we’re still waiting for news of this revolutionary cancer cure.

      It’s all gibberish! What is it doing here?

    • Rayne says:

      This is your third known comment at this site; it’s sketchy from the get-go because of the reference to a journalist whose bylines have appeared at RT and Sputnik, mentioned here without any skepticism whatsoever. Your comment is also not structured in a way which clearly indicates you’ve excerpted material, where the excerpts begin and end, without a link to the source from which you obtained the excerpt.

      Future comments need more concision, links to excerpted sources, and a fucking point relevant to the post instead a dump-and-demand.

      • Concerned Reader says:

        Hi, apologies for referencing the Sputnik guy. The email is not published by him afaik, however, but from an email dump which I found (and I think anyone else can still find) after googling: “eve farr” “caroline bell” two of the names in their story, out of curiosity.

        It’s a large (~5G), unredacted dataset. I don’t think this particular email has been mentioned anywhere else.

        As I say, I’m still curious about whether this is genuine data. I haven’t followed the intricacies of the Durham proceedings *at all*, in fact I hadn’t heard of it before finding these emails.

        I noticed your site has covered it, and remembered it had a lively and friendly comments section, so I thought it might be of interest here, and I might get some opinion about the validity.

        Apologies if I’ve touched a nerve. Please feel free to delete my comments if they contravene a policy. It’s a bit frustrating that with a potentially significant leak like this, only the one dubious site is attempting any coverage!

        • Concerned Reader says:

          Sorry, I should have mentioned, in relation to “linking” I don’t want to put a direct link to the source, but my previous comment allows it to be found.

      • Concerned Reader says:

        Oh, also, I should clarify the excerpt is from the first ‘>’ to the end of the comment. I missed a couple of paras where I should have inserted ‘>’ characters.

      • Desider says:

        I was giving context to odd comment by Concerned Reader re Kozelny in Bahamas, Bourke in jail, etc.
        Longstanding Amy Goodman/Democracy Now case of concern.
        Reply got mispositioned during moderation i think.

        • Rayne says:

          No. Moderation did NOT affect position of your reply; the only thing which happened in moderation was approval for publication.

      • Concerned Reader says:

        The comment is regards the email I quoted in my first comment on this thread, I think

Comments are closed.