Judge Paul Engelmayer has rejected Todd Blanche’s bid to unseal Ghislaine Maxwell grand jury materials — but not for the reason I expected (Maxwell’s still-pending appeal).

Instead, he’s rejecting the request because Blanche was lying when he insinuated there’d be anything of substantial public interest. As Engelmayer laid out, anyone who followed the trial would be familiar with everything in the transcripts and exhibits.

A member of the public familiar with the Maxwell trial record who reviewed the grand jury materials that the Government proposes to unseal would thus learn next to nothing new. The materials do not identify any person other than Epstein and Maxwell as having had sexual contact with a minor. They do not discuss or identify any client of Epstein’s or Maxwell’s. They do not reveal any heretofore unknown means or methods of Epstein’s or Maxwell’s crimes.

Engelmayer did consider unsealing the material for another reason: to expose the government’s attempt at diversion. But he decided that the government has already conceded that point.

The one colorable argument under that doctrine for unsealing in this case, in fact, is that doing so would expose as disingenuous the Government’s public explanations for moving to unseal. A member of the public, appreciating that the Maxwell grand jury materials do not contribute anything to public knowledge, might conclude that the Government’s motion for their unsealing was aimed not at “transparency” but at diversion—aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such. And there is precedent—In re Biaggi, the fountainhead of the Second Circuit’s “special circumstances” doctrine—permitting a court to order the release of grand jury testimony to correct a movant’s misleading public characterization of it.

[snip]

This Court gave careful consideration to unsealing the Maxwell grand jury materials on a similar rationale. But with the Government having now conceded that the information it proposes to release is redundant of the public record—that this information was “made publicly available at [Maxwell’s] trial or has otherwise been publicly reported”—the public interest in testing the Government’s bona fides does not require the extraordinary step of unsealing grand jury records. Dkt. 800 at 3. Without any need to review the grand jury materials, the public can evaluate for itself the Government’s asserted bases for making this motion. [my emphasis]

He goes onto call out Blanche’s haste, sloppiness, and ignorance about the proceeding, and his inattention to the concerns of the victims.

Second, any argument that the Government’s motion to unseal merits substantial deference is weakened by a host of irregularities with respect to that motion. That motion was not made, nor has it been joined in, by any member of the Government’s trial team—the DOJ lawyers presumably most familiar with the Maxwell case and the broader Epstein-Maxwell investigation. The motion was filed by the DAG alone, without any signatory from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in this District. And it was made under circumstances suggestive of haste rather than reflective deliberation. The motion was three-and-a-half pages in length; there were no supporting materials filed, under seal or otherwise; the motion did not disclose (or reflect awareness of) the summary-witness nature of the Maxwell grand jury testimony; and the motion was made without advance notice to Epstein’s and Maxwell’s victims, a fact which, as reviewed below, has alarmed numerous victims. Only after the Court inquired on that point was notice to victims given. See Dkt. 789; Dkt. 796 at 9. Finally, the Government’s highlighting of the grand jury transcripts did not suggest close familiarity with the Maxwell trial record, because a number of details that it identified as non-public in fact had been testified to during the trial. See note 16, supra.

This was a stunt. Now exposed as a stunt.

Donald Trump, who was charged for obstructing the certification of Joe Biden’s vote on January 6, 2021 and who pardoned 1,500 of his fellow Jan6ers — hundreds of whom assaulted cops — on his first day on the job, will hold a press conference today to announce he will put criminals in DC in jail where they belong. “The Criminals, you don’t have to move out. We’re going to put you in jail where you belong. It’s all going to happen very fast.”

Trump also promises to evict the unhoused — people like Taylor Taranto, who was living out of his van when he took the address for Barack Obama that Trump posted on Truth Social and started stalking Obama’s Kalorama neighborhood. Trump pardoned Taranto’s January 6 trespassing charges, but not the weapons charges tied to Obama.

Trump must, then, be promising to oust Cory Mills.

Back in February, police responded to a call at Congressman Mills’ home and found (one of) Mills’ girlfriends with “visible injuries.”

The first police report, provided to News4 by a source and confirmed by a second source familiar with the investigation, said: “(Her significant other for over a year) grabbed her, shoved her, and pushed her out of the door.” The report says she showed the officer “bruises on her arm which appeared fresh.”

The first report goes on to note that during a phone call between the significant other and alleged victim, she “let officers hear Subject 1 [now identified by MPD as Mills] instruct her to lie about the origin of her bruises … Eventually, Subject 1 made contact with police and admitted that the situation escalated from verbal to physical, but it was severe enough to create bruising.”

When police arrived, the woman was in the lobby of the Salamander hotel next door. The report says an officer was “able to immediately identify [the alleged victim] out of all other patrons in the lobby by her demeanor: physically shaking and scared.”

According to the report, the responding police officer told the subject he would be placed under arrest. But then the woman approached police and recanted the details, including where the bruises came from. News4 reached out to the responding officer but has not heard back.

After the girlfriend, Sarah Raviani, backed off the allegations, the US Attorney’s Office — then led by Eagle Ed Martin– refused to sign an arrest warrant.

A spokesperson for MPD said Monday the department sent the U.S. Attorney’s office a warrant for Mills’ arrest, but that warrant was never signed.

When asked about it, Eagle Ed — who was made head of DOJ’s weaponization after Republicans refused to confirm him as US Attorney, has espoused a “name” and “shame” approach for Trump’s political enemies who cannot be charged — declined to comment, stating, “it is improper to discuss cases before criminal charges are filed.”

Cory Mills denies the assault allegations in DC.

The assault allegations in DC led another of his then-girlfriends, Lindsey Langston, to break up with Mills. In a complaint filed in Florida, she alleges that Mills has threatened to release revenge porn against her.

Mills continued to harass Langston for months, she reported to police last month, despite repeated requests to be left alone. As part of a police report she made on July 14, 2025, she provided local and state investigators with timestamped digital evidence to support her allegations, which she also shared with Drop Site.

“The threats from Cory intensified over time,” she told Drop Site. “From emotional manipulation, to physical violence against whoever I date in the future, to threats of having me stripped of the Miss United States crown… something I worked extremely hard for and a dream that was placed in my heart long before I even knew who Cory Mills was.”

The evidence covers months of interactions and includes text messages in which Mills—who says he separated from his wife in 2022—warned Langston he posed a threat to anyone she wanted to date in the future (“Strap up, cowboy,” he said in one text) and threatened to release private images shared in the context of their relationship. Langston submitted the evidence to back up an incident report she filed with the Columbia County sheriff’s office last month.

“Since February 20th of 2025 Cory has contacted Lindsey numerous times on numerous different accounts threatening to release nude images and videos of her, to include recorded videos of her and Cory engaging in sexual acts,” the police report says.

Drop Site sent a detailed comment request to Mills, who said the accusations were untrue. Before he replied to Drop Site, Mills called Langston from Raviani’s number, then sent several text messages asking her to take back her allegations, saying, “Only you can stop this,” and “I understand you [sic] mom is going through a lot of mental health issues.”

Trump mostly is making today’s announcement because Ed “Big Balls” Coristine was assaulted recently after some teenagers attempted to steal his girlfriend’s car.

DC’s Metropolitan Police did arrest two of Big Balls’ alleged assailants.

But if Trump wants to pretend to care about crime in DC — the kind of crime he has personally stoked — then surely he’ll at least oust Cory Mills?

On May 20, 2022 — a year after John Durham had obtained evidence showing that the draft SVR report that he always claimed was the basis of his investigation was based on “composite” emails, and as such, proof that the SVR was framing Hillary Clinton — his lead prosecutor, Andrew DeFilippis, openly defied a judge’s order. DeFilippis instructed Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager, Robby Mook, to read a quote from Jake Sullivan about the Alfa Bank anomalies saying, “This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia. It certainly seems the Trump Organization felt it had something to hide, given that it apparently took steps to conceal the link when it was discovered by journalists.”

The quote seemed to confirm the conspiracy theory that Durham had otherwise failed to substantiate, that Hillary had a plan to frame Donald Trump.

The inclusion of the Tweet as trial evidence immediately created a firestorm among credulous journalists, leading right wingers, including Elon Musk, to claim this was proof of “an elaborate hoax about Trump and Russia.”

DeFilippis’ stunt introducing prejudicial hearsay he had just been ordered to exclude led to a redaction of the transcript and Tweet he contemptuously had Mook read. But, as Sussmann’s lawyer complained after Durham’s team pulled several more stunts like this, “the bell” of hearing prohibited testimony, “can never be unrung.” By cheating, Durham’s team presented six elements of the conspiracy theory based on the SVR attack on Hillary to the jury, in spite of rulings prohibiting them from doing so.

It didn’t help his case; less than two weeks later, a jury returned a humiliating acquittal, the first of two.

Yet Durham broke the rules to tell his manufactured story, and it worked in the public sphere.

Trump prosecutors already staged show trials

The prosecution of Michael Sussmann should never have gotten that far. Once Durham had the evidence to conclude that the emails behind the draft SVR report he claimed to be working off of were “composites,” he should have closed up shop. Instead, he charged Michael Sussmann and Igor Danchenko in an effort to sustain the story imagined by Russian spies five years earlier anyway.

Durham’s goals with Danchenko were modest (and fairly pathetic): to attempt to rewrite the genesis of the Steele dossier to make the business networking of a Democrat — and not Russian sources — the author of key claims in the dossier, and to attempt to turn Sergei Millian into the victim of the Steele dossier. After the judge in the case threw out one charge because Durham had charged Danchenko for lying about the pee tape in a literally true response he gave to an FBI question, the jury acquitted on four other counts pertaining to Millian.

Durham’s goals with Sussmann were far more ambitious: to use a single invented false statement as a lever to get inside Democratic networks to find the conspiracy that — even after concluding that the genesis of his entire investigation was an SVR fabrication — Durham nevertheless still believed had to exist.

It was utter madness. It was an egregious abuse of Sussmann’s rights — as I said here, Durham committed the precise crime that he claimed to be hunting. And it serves as a roadmap for where the sequel investigation Pam Bondi just announced might go.

In part because it serves as a roadmap for the stunt prosecutions Trump is ordering up, I want to take two posts to describe what happened. This post will use known interviews and my coverage of both cases — see also this earlier post attempting a similar project — to review the tactics Durham used to get this case to trial. In a follow-up, I hope to show how Durham’s show trials failed.

Pivot

What should have been the two final interviews on Durham’s Clinton conspiracy conspiracy theory investigation — the July 21 interview in which Julianne Smith disclaimed any knowledge of the Clinton plan and a July 8 2021 grand jury appearance where Peter Strzok denied receiving a referral mentioning it — happened almost five years after the events in question. The clock on any 5-year state of limitation was ticking.

So Durham pivoted.

The closest Durham came in his report to offering an explanation for why he continued after concluding these documents were fabricated came from speculation offered up by Brian Auten, the lead analyst on the team (and a MAGAt target ever since). At a time Durham knew he had no proof that the CIA referral to FBI had actually gotten to the Crossfire Hurricane team, he invited Auten to speculate.

Auten stated that it was possible he hand-delivered this Referral Memo to the FBI, as he had done with numerous other referral memos,419 and noted that he typically shared referral memos with the rest of the Crossfire Hurricane investigative team, although he did not recall if he did so in this instance. 420

[snip]

For example, Brian Auten stated that he could not recall anything that the FBI did to analyze, or otherwise consider the Clinton Plan intelligence, stating that it was “just one data point.”423

419 OSC Report of Interview of Brian Auten on July 26, 2021 at 13.

420 Id.

[snip]

423 OSC Report of interview of Brian Auten on July 26, 2021 at 13.

That interview was on July 26, 2021, at precisely the moment Durham should have packed up and gone home.

But consider the circumstances of that interview. At the Danchenko trial, Danchenko’s attorney Danny Onorato started his cross-examination of Auten by getting the FBI analyst to recall how — after his testimony in numerous other investigations was deemed credible — Durham started his first interview with Auten by informing him he was considered a subject of the investigation. (In that interview and one shortly thereafter, Durham seems to have used the threat of charges relating to the Carter Page FISA warrants to threaten Auten and one of the Crossfire Hurricane agents, precisely the theory of criminality that his investigation started to violate in those days.)

Q Does July 26 of 2021 sound fair?

A Yes, it does.

Q Okay. And when you met with them for the first time after you were meeting with people for 25 or 30 hours, did your status change from a witness to a subject of an investigation?

A Yes, it did.

Q Okay. And in your work for the FBI, has anyone ever told you that you are a subject of a criminal inquiry? A No.

Q Was that scary?

A Yes.

Hours later, after having walked Auten through a long list pertinent things Durham had not shown Auten when soliciting specific answers that incriminated Danchenko, including part of Auten’s own notes that he had underlined, Onorato got Auten to concede that his opinion about the credibility of Danchenko on the topic of Sergei Millian changed after that July 26, 2021 interview, in which he had been named a subject.

Yet even in that context, under threat of prosecution, Auten had no real memory of the referral and treated it as a data point if he actually did share it with Crossfire Hurricane. That’s what Durham rebuilt his debunked investigation on.

And having thus scripted an excuse to continue, Durham charged Sussmann on the very last day possible, September 16, 2021; he charged Danchenko in early November. As I wrote in those contemporaneous posts, both used ticky tack alleged lies to spin networked materiality claims insinuating a conspiracy that led sloppy journalists to adopt larger claims of conspiracy.

The belated investigation into false statements charged as a conspiracy

In the Sussmann case, Durham had been poring through subpoenaed documents from participants he imagined had played a part in his theory of conspiracy for over a year, but neither that nor immunized testimony from David Dagon in August had confirmed key premises of his conspiracy. Having failed to substantiate a conspiracy, then, Durham charged a different crime, a false statement charge. Such a belated change in prosecutorial strategy might explain how epically unprepared Durham was to prosecute the crime he actually charged. In the weeks and months that followed, Durham would serially confess he hadn’t taken some of the most basic investigative steps before indicting Sussmann, including:

• Interviewing any full-time Clinton campaign staffer before accusing Sussmann of coordinating with the campaign (he would interview Jennifer Palmieri, Jake Sullivan, Victoria Nuland, James Clapper, John Podesta, and — just days before jury selection — Hillary Clinton in the eight months that followed); Durham’s report doesn’t reflect a Robby Mook interview; he was called as a defense witness at trial
• Repeating FBI’s 2016 errors in belated interviews of DNS-related service providers
• Testing the story Sussmann told Congress, under oath: that he reached out to the FBI to alert them to a story before the NYT covered it, which turned out to be confirmed by documentary records Durham only belatedly found at FBI
• Learning how closely the FBI worked with Rodney Joffe on DNS-related issues
• Checking how closely Michael Sussmann worked with the FBI, especially on the response to the Russian hacks; this was especially egregious as it debunked one of the ways he tried to implicate Julianne Smith in a made-up plot
• Finding the January 31, 2017 CIA meeting record at which Sussmann clearly explained he was sharing an allegation at the request of a client
• Finding notes from a May 2017 that debunked Durham’s accusations
• Asking DOJ IG for evidence from their closely related investigation
• Discovering a similar DNS tip that Sussmann had anonymously shared with DOJ IG on behalf of Rodney Joffe
• Obtaining two James Baker phones, one of which Durham had been informed about years earlier
• Subpoenaing or seizing Baker’s iCloud account for the text which would debunk Baker’s early memories and confirm Sussmann’s explanation
• Searching FBI records for evidence that someone else — someone who once claimed to work for a Russian front company — had played a role Durham attributed to his conspirators

In short, Durham had little to sustain his 27-page indictment beyond theories of conspiracy that assumed as true the conspiracy theory he should have abandoned in July.

It really seems like, before that, Durham believed he would eventually find witnesses to a conspiracy who would confirm what only he believed to be true, and as a result never took the investigative steps that might — and did — debunk his conspiracy theory.

After embracing Russian disinformation, Durham embraced Russian grievances

One way Durham attempted to compensate for his failure to take very basic investigative steps was to embrace what Russians were peddling.

There were always hints that Durham went seeking (dis)information from Russians or people assumed to be Russian-assets involved in this operation. They was the famous junket to Italy looking for Joseph Mifsud. There were Ukrainians, who remain unnamed, but whose identity might explain why Durham reacted oddly when Andrii Derkach’s allies were sanctioned in early 2021. There’s even an email showing that future Charles McGonigal defense attorney Seth DuCharme treated Andrew McCabe request for help from Oleg Deripaska as an investigative lead, an email that might explain why Durham suppressed Deripaska’s centrality in this story.

But after he charged these flimsy indictments, Durham made purportedly aggrieved Russians a key prong of his strategy to turn a debunked Russian effort to frame Hillary into criminal prosecutions.

On the Danchenko prosecution, Durham insanely initially relied solely on Sergei Millian’s Tweets to substantiate the four charges associated with Millian. He did so without first interviewing George Papadopoulos, whom Millian seemed to be cultivating in precisely the period when Durham’s conspiracy theory was born and for months thereafter. As soon as I noted how problematic that was, Millian started getting squirrely.

Durham did eventually interview Millian, three months after charging Danchenko. But Millian refused to show up and answer questions under oath.

That left Durham stuck trying to admit inadmissible evidence, without which he was left with no substantive evidence for those four charges. All the while, Millian was ginning up the frothers, including (as we’ll see in my follow-up), to spin up Durham’s own misleading claims.

When Onorato introduced evidence of Millian’s communications with Papadopoulos at trial, Durham protested, “it certainly sounds creepy.” Nevertheless, Durham built four charges of an indictment around the Twitter claims of a guy involved in creepy outreach even before SVR’s imagined Clinton conspiracy was born, creepy outreach that by itself debunked the Russian conspiracy theory.

The way Millian handed Durham his ass would be funny if it didn’t totally upend Danchenko’s life.

But the way Durham piggybacked on Alfa Bank’s lawfare (lawfare pursued long after Mueller described how Vladimir Putin would make demands of oligarchs like Alfa Bank’s Petr Aven) is more troubling. In dual lawsuits in FL and PA, Alfa Bank purported to be trying to figure out who allegedly faked DNS records to make it look like Alfa was in contact with Trump back in 2016 so it could sue those people. Rather than finding anyone to sue, however, it instead spent its time subpoenaing experts to learn as much as it could about how the US tracks DNS records to prevent cyberattacks by — among other hostile countries — Russia.

After the Sussmann indictment, Alfa deposed several people targeted in the Sussmann investigation, including Fusion GPS tech person Laura Seago (from whom Durham ultimately obtained immunized testimony at trial) and Rodney Joffe (who was one of Durham’s key targets). Durham used that information as a sword in later privilege fights, but ignored sworn denials of key parts of his conspiracy theory. When Alfa pushed to accelerate this process even in spite of the ongoing criminal investigation, DC Superior Judge Shana Frost Matini observed that claims in the Alfa Bank lawsuit and Durham’s indictment see like, “they were written by the same people in some way.”

[R]ight now, given the — if the closeness of Alpha’s allegations, I mean, quite frankly, it’s — reading Alpha’s submissions and what the — and that compared to the indictment, there’s — it’s almost like they were written by the same people in some way. [Alpha misspelling original]

In the Sussmann case, Durham seemed to be delaying steps he took much earlier in the Danchenko prosecution, as if he was waiting for Alfa Bank to do that work for him.

All that ended with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the sanctioning of Alfa Bank, which seemed to lead Durham to adopt a new strategy.

The Rodney Joffe statute of limitation

Two pieces of background are useful — particularly if Sussmann’s prosecution serves as a lesson of how Pam Bondi might try to wrench new prosecutions out of these same old tired events.

First, Durham went to great lengths to sustain his ability to charge Rodney Joffe, the source of the DNS records in question, which led Judge Charles Cooper to make a shitty ruling preventing Sussmann from calling Joffe to provide testimony that would entirely exonerate him. Durham was doing so, transparently, in hopes he might charge Joffe for a crime with a longer statute of limitations than lying: defrauding DOD.

But the successful bid to keep Joffe off the stand implicated something else: Durham’s attempt to suppress things he had discovered about the DNS data in question.

The month before Durham charged Sussmann, by mid-August, 2021, Durham’s team learned that the data Rodney Joffe and others used to conduct their research was absolutely real. In addition to debunking the most simplistic “DNC fabrication” theories Durham was chasing, the discovery made it impossible for Durham to continue to rely on the expert his team had been using.

The first thing Durham did in response was ask one of the two FBI agents who had fucked up the investigation in 2016 — the other of whom is a possible source of Durham’s false claim that the SVR conspiracy theory about Hillary claimed she was going to fabricate evidence against Trump — to serve as an expert to replace the one who knew Durham’s theories were false.

DeFilippis. How familiar or unfamiliar are you with what is known as DNS or Domain Name System data?

A. I know the basics about DNS.

[snip]

Berkowitz. And then, more recently, you met with Mr. DeFilippis and I think Johnny Algor, who is also at the table there, who’s an Assistant U.S. Attorney. Correct?

A. Yes.

Q. They wanted to talk to you about whether you might be able to act as an expert in this case about DNS data?

A. Correct.

Q. You said, while you had some superficial knowledge, you didn’t necessarily feel qualified to be an expert in this case, correct, on DNS data?

A. On DNS data, that’s correct.

After that, Durham sought out another (legit) expert, but asked him to do a review that deliberately blinded him to what Joffe, through Sussmann, had shared with the government.

The only thing the FBI’s top experts offer to debunk, other than the Tor node claim that the FBI knew the researchers had dropped, was a complaint about visibility. But their complaints about visibility were entirely manufactured by the scope of the review Durham requested and possibly by the curious status of the Blue Thumb Drive, as well as (if Durham is telling the truth about these being the same experts) willful forgetting of a review they had done on related issues less than a year earlier.

Durham created this blindness. By ensuring all the experts remain blind to visibility, Durham ensured the review would conclude that the researchers didn’t have the visibility that, the FBI knew well, they had.

So in parallel with Durham’s efforts to sustain an SVR hoax he had debunked in July 2021, he went to great length to invent false claims about real data to sustain a judgement from the two FBI Agents who fucked up this investigation in the first place. He did so at the last minute, long after he should have finalized his plans for expert witnesses.

Abusing privilege

He did one more thing at the last minute: he asked Judge Cooper to review a documents for privilege.

As NYT reported back in 2023, Durham started playing games with his DC grand jury not long before he concluded the entire SVR thing was a fabrication. After then-Chief Judge Beryl Howell rejected a bid to get a warrant for Leonard Benardo’s emails, they obtained them via the Open Society Fund directly, perhaps on threat of subpoena.

Mr. Durham set out to prove that the memos described real conversations, according to people familiar with the matter. He sent a prosecutor on his team, Andrew DeFilippis, to ask Judge Beryl A. Howell, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in Washington, for an order allowing them to seize information about Mr. Benardo’s emails.

But Judge Howell decided that the Russian memo was too weak a basis to intrude on Mr. Benardo’s privacy, they said. Mr. Durham then personally appeared before her and urged her to reconsider, but she again ruled against him.

Rather than dropping the idea, Mr. Durham sidestepped Judge Howell’s ruling by invoking grand-jury power to demand documents and testimony directly from Mr. Soros’s foundation and Mr. Benardo about his emails, the people said. (It is unclear whether Mr. Durham served them with a subpoena or instead threatened to do so if they did not cooperate.)

Rather than fighting in court, the foundation and Mr. Benardo quietly complied, according to people familiar with the matter. But for Mr. Durham, the result appears to have been another dead end.

A month before trial (and just weeks after the newly sanctioned Alfa Bank gave up its lawsuits), as part of a request that Cooper review the privilege claims that the Democrats, Joffe, and Fusion had made, Durham revealed he had been bypassing Howell.

In response, Sussmann accused Durham of abusing the same grand jury process he abused with Benardo (abuse, ironically, that debunked Durham’s conspiracy theory).

First, the Special Counsel’s Motion is untimely. Despite knowing for months, and in some cases for at least a year, that the non-parties were withholding material as privileged, he chose to file this Motion barely a month before trial—long after the grand jury returned an Indictment and after Court-ordered discovery deadlines had come and gone.

Second, the Special Counsel’s Motion should have been brought before the Chief Judge of the District Court during the pendency of the grand jury investigation, as the rules of this District and precedent make clear.

Third, the Special Counsel has seemingly abused the grand jury in order to obtain the documents redacted for privilege that he now challenges. He has admitted to using grand jury subpoenas to obtain these documents for use at Mr. Sussmann’s trial, even though Mr. Sussmann had been indicted at the time he issued the grand jury subpoenas and even though the law flatly forbids prosecutors from using grand jury subpoenas to obtain trial discovery. The proper remedy for such abuse of the grand jury is suppression of the documents.

Fourth, the Special Counsel seeks documents that are irrelevant on their face. Such documents do not bear on the narrow charge in this case, and vitiating privilege for the purpose of admitting these irrelevant documents would materially impair Mr. Sussmann’s ability to prepare for his trial.

He also revealed that some of those privilege claims went back to August — that is, the weeks after Durham should have closed up shop.

Email from Andrew DeFilippis, Dep’t of Just., to Patrick Stokes, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, et al. (Aug. 9, 2021) (requesting a call to discuss privilege issues with a hope “to avoid filing motions with the Court”); Email from Andrew DeFilippis, Dep’t of Just., to Patrick Stokes, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, et al. (Aug. 14, 2021) (stating that the Special Counsel “wanted to give all parties involved the opportunity to weigh in before we . . . pursue particular legal process, or seek relief from the Court”). And since January— before the deadline to produce unclassified discovery had passed—the Special Counsel suggested that such a filing was imminent, telling the DNC, for example, that he was “contemplating a public court filing in the near term.” Email from Andrew DeFilippis, Dep’t of Just., to Shawn Crowley, Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP (Jan. 17, 2022). [my emphasis]

In a hearing on May 4, right before trial, Joffe’s lawyer revealed they had demanded Durham press a legal claim much earlier, in May 2021.

MR. TYRRELL: So if they wanted to challenge our assertion of privilege as to this limited universe of documents — again, which is separate from the other larger piece with regard to HFA — they should have done so months ago. I don’t know why they waited until now, Your Honor, but I want to be clear. I want to say without hesitation that it’s not because there was ever any discussion with us about resolving this issue without court intervention.

THE COURT: That was my question. Were you adamant a year ago?

MR. TYRRELL: Pardon me?

THE COURT: Were you adamant a year ago that —

MR. TYRRELL: Yes. We’ve been throughout. We were not willing to entertain resolution of this without court intervention.

THE COURT: Very well.

Ultimately, Cooper did bow to Durham’s demand, but prohibited them from using those documents at trial.

That didn’t prevent DeFilippis from attempting to use the privileged documents to perjury trap his one Fusion witness, the kind of perjury trap that might have provided a way to continue the madness indefinitely.

There must have been nothing interesting there: most of the Fusion documents were utterly irrelevant to the Sussmann charges, but could implicate the Danchenko ones, but Durham didn’t use them there, nor did he explain their content in his final report.

Scripting witnesses

I’ll end where I begin: How Durham managed to coach witnesses testimony by threatening them with charges.

In addition to Auten, Durham did this, over and over again, with his star Sussmann witness Jim Baker.

Perhaps most interestingly, he did it in the weeks before trial with witnesses who, documentary evidence showed, had been informed or would have assumed that Michael Sussmann was representing the DNC, the key thing Durham claimed Sussmann could have credibly lied to hide.

The first time FBI Agent Ryan Gaynor testified to John Durham in October 2020, for example, he told prosecutors that the DNC was the source of the allegation.

Q. Okay. So in your first meeting with the government, you — this is October of 2020, correct?

A. Yes.

Q. You told them multiple times that you believed that the Democratic National Committee was the source of the allegations of connections between Alfa-Bank and Russia, correct?

A. Correct, which was wrong.

Q. Okay. But you said that you thought the Democratic party itself was who provided the information, correct?

A. I did say that in the meeting.

That’s even what he wrote in a briefing document he kept in Fall 2016.

At the end of that October 2020 interview, prosecutors threatened Gaynor with prosecution.

In trial prep testimony, however, starting on May 13, 2022, he came to claim to believe that Sussmann was representing himself, because otherwise his client would have been material — precisely the materiality claim Durham needed to make the charges stick.

More striking was how Durham’s star cyber witness (one of the guys who botched the investigation in September 2016 without examining the data closely) explained why the text he received from his boss, Nate Batty, referring to the white paper as a “DNC report” on September 21, 2016, didn’t amount to notice that Sussmann brought the report on behalf of the DNC.

At trial, Michael Sussmann lawyer Sean Berkowitz asked Hellman how it could be that he would see a reference to a DNC report and not take from that it was a DNC report. Hellman described “the only explanation that … was discussed” — which is that it was a typo.

Q. What’s your explanation for it?

A. I have no recollection of seeing that link message. And there is — have absolutely no belief that either me or Agent Batty knew where that data was coming from, let alone that it was coming from DNC. The only explanation that popped or was discussed was that it could have been a typo and somebody was trying to refer to DNS instead of DNC.

Q. So you think it was a typo?

A. I don’t know.

Q. When you said the only one suggesting it — isn’t it true that it was Mr. DeFilippis that suggested to you that it might have been a typo recently?

A. That’s correct.

Q. Okay. You didn’t think that at the time. Right?

A. I did not. I had never seen it or had any memory of seeing it ever before it was put in front of me.

With some prodding, Hellman admitted that when he referred to “discussing explanations,” he meant doing so with Andrew DeFilippis. This exchange was, quite literally, Berkowitz eliciting Hellman to describe that DeFilippis told him what to think about evidence that should have sunk his case years earlier.

As I said, DeFilippis cheated. With lesser attorneys or more exhausted witnesses, it might have worked.

And they’re about to try again.

As I’ve been showing, the Durham classified annex goes to significant lengths to hide that a Russian email discussing creating a conspiracy theory about the American Deep State, which he dates to July 26, precedes the draft SVR memo he claims has animated his years-long hunt, which dates to July 27 or later.

You can date the draft SVR memo (Durham doesn’t provide its date at all in the unclassified report, and if he does here, the date has been redacted) by tracking the inputs (red arrows) into the fake emails on which the draft memo is purportedly based (blue arrows), as I lay out here.

You can review a live copy of this (without the arrows) at this link.

The fake email integrated into the memo itself — bearing the date of July 25 but mentioning the Olympics — derives from the Thomas Rid story and the real Tim Maurer email — but it appears to have been altered to add the reference to the Olympics on July 27 (because a copy without the Olympics mention is attached to an email dated July 27).

And the fake email, bearing the date of July 27, claiming that Hillary approved a plan on July 26 appears to derive from the real July 27 Julianne Smith email soliciting a totally innocuous letter condemning Trump’s attack on NATO. We might learn more about its creation, except the email to which it is attached is entirely redacted in the annex.

That is, so long as his claim that the Deep State memo is dated “the day after” two emails purporting to be dated June 25 is accurate, then the emails and draft report that guided his entire investigation were the conspiracy theory proposed on July 26. Durham did the work of Russian spies for four years.

If this is, indeed, the timeline, then Durham — as well as John Ratcliffe and Kash Patel — should have recognized they were pursuing an investigation of Hillary Clinton based off a deliberate Russian spy hoax.

There’s one more thing that supports this argument — and reveals how problematic it is for Durham (who continued his investigation for two more years after he would have concluded the emails were “composites”) and the others: the extent to which he, as well as the person who redacted this for release, tried to obscure all this in the classified annex.

This kind of deceit was not remotely unusual for Durham (as I’ll return to when I review what Durham did do after concluding he was using a clear Russian hoax as his excuse to investigate Hillary Clinton). Andrew DeFilippis, especially, did this kind of stuff all the time. Here, where he used email timestamps in two different time zones to falsely suggest that Fusion was the source for a public link about the Alfa Bank anomalies, is just one such example.

The list below is overwhelming. The most important detail, however, is how Durham treats the real email from Julianne Smith asking people to sign onto some totally innocuous letter criticizing Trump’s attacks on NATO. Durham obtained one copy of the email from the SVR trove and another from a subpoena, presumably to Smith or CNAS, where she worked.

The annex separates the disclosure that Julianne Smith had also been hacked (noted in footnote 27) from the discussion of the email she sent on July 27, obscuring that Durham obtained two copies of that email, one from the SVR collection (cited in the annex as Document Classified Appendix Document 9, which also includes the Maurer email), and one via subpoena (cited in the unclassified report as XXXX-0014561). He does that even though discussion of the “certain emails, attachments, and documents that contain language and references with the exact same or similar verbiage to the materials referenced above” precedes that discussion. In the unclassified report, he treats this email differently, effectively treating it as corroboration for the claims in the fake report, rather than a source used to fabricate it (though he later uses it as corroboration after concluding that the underlying emails are composites based on … that email).

In either case, however, if he is treating Smith’s July 27 email as a source (and that’s one place it appears in his report), then the draft memo must post-date the July 26 Deep State email.

On July 26, Russian spies decided it’d be cool to start a conspiracy theory about the Deep State. And on July 27, having stolen that Smith email, they decided to claim that Hillary — as opposed to some other Deep State entity — decided to smear Donald Trump.

And everyone involved in this is working really hard to hide that they knew that.

Update: On the topic of Smith’s email, I’ve been puzzling over the redaction in this passage; I wondered if Durham expressed some obnoxious opinion about her.

It was suggested to me, however, that that redaction might hide Durham speculating about what Russian spooks thought — maybe something like, “it is a logical deduction that [Russian spies believed that]”… The mention of the spies would therefore justify classification on classification bases. But holy hell if it were something like that, it would mean Durham was trying to rationalize why Russian spooks fabricated emails to make up this claim.

Durham’s deceits

By July 2021, John Durham had evidence to conclude the emails behind a draft SVR memo on which his entire investigation rested were “composites,” that is, fabrications. But he continued on for two more years, attempting and failing to create evidence to substantiate that Russian disinformation by prosecuting Michael Sussmann and Igor Danchenko. To hide that he had done that, he engaged in a great deal of deceit in both his unclassified and classified reports.

• Durham frames his focus around three bullets John Ratcliffe included in his 2020 memo sending these materials to Lindsey Graham. The first bullet claims to focus on “Russian intelligence analysis,” suggesting that his focus was on a draft SVR report that leads the narrative in the classified appendix, but is actually the last document temporally. But the second bullet refers to John Brennan notes that quote not the purported end analysis, but an email advancing the plot to frame Hillary.
• The two exhibits — Brennan’s notes and a referral from the CIA that he couldn’t prove ever got sent to FBI — include redactions that obscure the actual content of both. Importantly, witnesses were not shown the full exhibits, though Brennan correctly stated that Durham misrepresented what his notes were about.
• Durham misrepresented how many witnesses (and who) testified that they had not seen the referral memo.
• Thereafter in the unclassified report, Durham referred to “Clinton Plan intelligence” as if it focused on that discreet claim or even the draft memo, when it referred to the larger body of intelligence obtained via the Dutch, and so in context the plan to frame Hillary. In the classified report, Durham referred to Clinton campaign plan, rather than the intelligence asserting it.
• Durham mentioned two Leonard Benardo emails early in the annex (there were actually four documents claiming to be emails in the report), then discussed the earlier, apparently finished, intelligence from earlier 2016 implicating Loretta Lynch, suggesting they were the emails. He returns to this strategy later in the appendix.
• Then, the beginning of the section focused on the SVR documents starts with the draft memo, not the specific emails. He keeps moving the ball.
• The date of the draft memo appears nowhere in the unclassified report and may not appear in the classified report either (if it is there, it is redacted).
• The annex separates the disclosure that Julianne Smith had also been hacked (noted in footnote 27) from the discussion of the email she sent on July 27, obscuring that Durham obtained two copies of that email, one from the SVR collection (cited in the annex as Document Classified Appendix Document 9, which also includes the Maurer email), and one via subpoena (cited in the unclassified report as XXXX-0014561). He does that even though discussion of the email appears after the introduction, “certain emails, attachments, and documents that contain language and references with the exact same or similar verbiage to the materials referenced above.” In the unclassified report, he treats this email differently, effectively treating it as corroboration for the claims in the fake email, rather than a source used to fabricate it (though he also uses it as corroboration after concluding that the underlying emails are composites based on … that email). In either case, however, if he is treating Smith’s July 27 email as a source, then the draft memo must post-date the July 26 Deep State email talking about ginning up a conspiracy theory.
• After introducing the Benardo emails, the annex discloses there were several versions of the July 25 one, which helps to obscure that one copy of the earliest version was attached to a July 27 email, which in turn suggests the reference to the Olympics was added on July 27. As noted, the redactions exacerbate this sleight of hand.
• The annex hides that the Deep State email predates the draft memo by discussing the two versions of the July 25 Benardo email in-between.
• The annex doesn’t appear to explain that one of two copies of the first fake July 25 email (without the Olympics) is considered part of the same document as the July 27 “vilify” email.
• The description that the real Tim Maurer email is the same date as the fake July 25 emails gives the impression that they were made the same day, when at least the revisions of the fake email probably happened on July 27.
• Durham provides a description of this (then-dated) article about a voting hacker for hire, but does not provide a description of the Thomas Rid article discussed in the email, which is not only a clear source for the draft memo, but should make analysts look twice at the Russian idiom in English in the fake Benardo email, because Rid discusses the language games behind the Guccifer 2.0 persona at some length.
• When Durham concedes the emails to which the draft memo is sourced are composites, he does not name CNAS, where Smith worked, even though earlier in the section he says she was hacked too.

Lying with redactions

• The introduction to the draft memo redacts details about what is in it, most notably the emails the entire annex purports to focus on.
• That continues in the redactions after the draft memo. This obscures which email was incorporated into the draft memo: the one referring to the Olympics. The redaction introducing the first fake July 25 email further obscures this, making it harder to figure out that Classified Appendix Document 6 is a July 27 email with one of the first versions of the July 25 email (that is, before the Olympics were added) attached.
• The redaction of the email after the July 27 “vilify” one obscures that the July 27 Benardo email discussing Hillary’s approval is attached to that redacted email and not the “vilify” one, further obscuring that the emails dated July 25 were likely revised on July 27, to add the Olympics reference.

Listen on spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)

The America We’re Losing

I have a fond memory of dropping my barely school-aged child off with a friend for babysitting. My friend, Simone, took my daughter’s hand and said “You’re going to learn the right way to misuse a roman candle!” I held up my hands, and shouted “ten!” to indicate how many fingers I wanted my child to have when I picked her up. Simone waved me away while she whisked my child off to learn about using small explosives in creative ways.

The classic, very us, meme

My child grew up in a community of lovable dorks, weirdos, hackers, and burners. I grew up in the kind of family were we shot beer cans off fences. We did unwise things with cars that got rebuilt in a driveway, which no shock absorber in the universe could hope to cushion. We were very much a ‘hold my beer’ family, and we had the scars to prove it. But more important, we had the stories.

These stories are part of being American; they can even sometimes rise above the violent cut lines of our fractured society. Black, white, native, Afghan, Chinese, whatever, we all bring our stories, we tell them loudly and lovingly to each other, across generations, neighborhoods, and communities. Sometimes we tell them laughing, crying, or both.

Americans love a good story so much we will go out and make them, even if it costs a fingertip, or a bit of foot. It absolutely gets out of hand. We regret it sometimes. You can’t always stop before you’ve gone a bit too far. This is also why so many great American stories are about apologizing.

“Hold my beer” is what you say to your cousin on the raft right before you try shooting the fish that haven’t been taking the bait. It’s what you say right before you try to grab an alligator by the snout, because you saw someone do it on YouTube. It’s what comes right before you cliff jump into a pond, get on an improvised zip line, or try cocaine for the first time.

You can call us stupid, because we definitely are. But nobody denied that Americans were fun. When an American says hold my beer, someone inevitably reaches over to take it, and steps back to observe the mayhem from a safe(r) distance. We may end up with scars, but we’ll get a story to go with them.

But that fun, that’s getting complicated in these, the waning days of the American spirit.

In the last few decades the very American desire to have some fun ran smack-dab into the carceral state, the cost of healthcare, and now, the rise of fascism. It has been all part of a long slow slide into not at all fun things. It’s continuously squeezing the whimsy out of being American. It is starting to hurt, really hurt, and not in a way that’s fun to tell people about later.

Americans were always known to be a little stupid about the rest of the world, but mostly that’s because the world is so far away. It’s a very big country with two very distant borders for most of the people. I now live on a continent where I have gone on a hike and accidentally crossed an international border. The frame of reference is different enough that it’s hard for Americans to understand the lives of others, but equally it’s hard for others to understand the lives of Americans.

There’s not much to tell us when we’re moving the wrong way, we struggle with out a larger frame of reference. Americans can’t imagine a healthcare system that just works, and almost no one else can imagine one that works as terribly as ours does.

I’ve traveled all over this lovely little blue marble, and when I tell people I’m American, they so often say the same thing: We hate the American government. But the Americans themselves? Americans are OK. Some Americans are great, one is even Snoop Dogg! (Everyone loves Snoop.)

When I assure them that I also hate the American government, and I’ve had to deal with it a lot more than they have, we all high five and go get drinks together.

50s style Florida man shows us how it’s done, whatever it is.

Whatever people have thought about the USA, Americans were always considered fun, even when we were still kind of English. We’ve been the good time people since before we were a country. Our reputation for partying was global before globalization.

In the 17th to 19th centuries, whaling ships that sailed out of Boston and other east coast ports would head out for years at a time, running around the world doing what we didn’t know at the time was a very bad deed – killing and harvesting whales. When American ships would pull up to cities anywhere around the world for some shore leave, it was Party Time. We bought the drinks, danced, sang, got in fights, and demanded mainly that everyone have a a good time, often on our shilling, or dollar, or whatever.

In writer and museum educator SJ Costello’s description, “The business of whaleships was welcome in such ports because the economies became so linked to their presence, but the whalers themselves could cause havoc in the few days they occupied the land. This was largely due to the dynamics of the crew and the lifestyle aboard: a bunch of young 18, 19, 20-something year-old men are let loose for a few days liberty after months on an often heavily-disciplined ship. Many of them have the twin goals of get drunk, have sex.”

We were memorable visitors.

The Americans would buy a few rounds, and come up with terrible ideas. The sailors of the whaling ships were the good time guys of the 17th to 19th century, and that set a lot of the tone for how people saw America and Americans in the early days of the nation. Partying sailors never impressed the good and great of any nation, but rarely did anyone turn down an American good time. And we never stopped being hold-my-beer crazy.

We eventually stopped whaling, but we didn’t stop the fun. We moved our fun into many things, but maybe most importantly, media and technology.

From the 20th to the 21st century, we made radio big, then TV, and finally Marvel movies. We even accidentally the memes when we made a whole internet. We’re not always the world’s favorite people, but that’s true for us, too. We’ve even made plenty of self-critical media. Take the Fallout franchise — it’s a classic example of the fact that even when we go hard on ourselves, were truly self-critical, we were still fun.

We’ve never really lost our reputation of bringing a good time. We’re adventurous and unguarded. We’re stupid and oblivious. Even when we’re trying to be guarded and sneaky, we just don’t manage it the way a Russian or a Chilean can. Eventually we just say something loud, weird, or funny, and blow our cover. We are the world’s goofy motherfuckers.

But this is changing now. And if we’re honest, it’s been changing for a while.

It’s harder to have some fun. The police seem to be everywhere, news reports about ICE are daily. Be careful, we tell each other. We say this because we care for each other. We say this, even though we know it is giving ground to the enemies of fun; and maybe our freedom, maybe even our human dignity.

The police are increasingly secret. They have gone from faces and badge numbers you could write down to body armor, camo, and masking. Sometimes they bare no markings beyond their air of malice, gaiter covered faces, sunglasses, and of course, their guns. This isn’t to protect them, they’re not really in much danger. It’s to install police in our minds as well as on our streets.

You never know who might be looking these days. You never know who might take your picture and put it online.

The Donut has been secured.

I wanted to believe that authoritarianism is antithetical to the American character, but not because we’re freedom loving. All people love being free, just as all people love their communities and children. All people want to live in a system of justice, peace, and hope.

No, the way in which I hoped we were incompatible with fascism is that I believed that Americans were just too goofy to be ruled that way. We do crazy shit to see what happens. We just aren’t self preserving enough to obey in advance.

We point roman candles at each other, giggling, even though our health insurance sucks. We do things just to see if they hurt. We do things to see how much they hurt. We do things that hurt just so we can tell the story of when we did that thing, and how much it hurt.

But maybe it turned out some things just hurt too much. Or they hurt too deep.

It’s changing now. Sometimes people just disappear. So many of us are obeying in advance, pointing out the vulnerable, telling the police about our neighbors.

And the others, those neighbors, the ones who may be unwanted, they’re hiding. They don’t go out much. Some of them don’t go to work anymore. Some assure their friends they can work at home, so they’ll be OK. Don’t worry, they won’t answer the door.  Some of our friends don’t leave the house anymore at all. They’re scared, maybe because they’re vulnerable to ICE raids or because they don’t “look American” enough.

Or sometimes they’re not scared, just realistic. Just adapting to the slow and steady unpersoning of everyone Trump doesn’t like, who isn’t white enough, servile enough.

We might still be up for fighting the po-po in Downtown LA, but can we really keep it up? Will they take us away, one by one, put us in some camp, and no one will ever hear from us again?

Will anyone go looking?

Even the Trump supporters are trapped in their support. They can’t question or criticize anything without risking losing their standing, maybe their livelihood. For the rest of us, it’s worse. What happens if we try to cross the border, in or out? Will we be harassed? Will our devices be taken, our online lives rifled through like an underwear drawer?

Will some social media rant against the Trump administration be put down on a table in front of us by men with guns?

We look at each other differently. Any of these white roughneck men could be police, or their sympathizers.. The police could come from anywhere, and steal my friends, my neighbors, my family, away. We hear about Kilmar Abrego Garcia sometimes, but almost nothing of the hundreds who flew with him to El Salvador, in defiance of a legal court order.

We only hear of the vanished when a court case says they shouldn’t have been sent to South Sudan. How many Americans can find South Sudan on a map? We only carry the weight of these souls in their absence, but they are getting heavier every day. The law is for you, not for the rulers. Not for Trump.

Fascism always burdens the guilt of living for the not yet dead. It carries the fear of joy for anyone outside of the circle of the followers. And what they have is not joy – it’s gleeful cruelty, and it must be maintained at all costs. Don’t doubt. Keep your head down. Your favorite color will always be gray, whatever name they’re giving gray this week.

In a way, the most universal right we’re losing under the Trump regime is the right to be different, to be weird, to be ourselves, to be from somewhere, to not fit in, to be stupid, to make stories about the times we did those crazy things. To hand someone our beer and be a glorious American idiot. Maybe we need to be scared because we’re foreign, or gay, or need help in some way. Nobody can be sure they’re safely inside the circle of the authoritarian’s allowance all the time.

Hold my beer no more, America. We have murdered fun, and we will no longer be foolish and brave. Wondering why your neighbors disappeared isn’t fun. I keep wondering if I write the wrong thing, will someone (possibly even me), get hurt? The fun that binds up all our cares, our stories, our bold hope, we have traded it for a small and guilty existence, full of worry and what will our neighbors think of us? Will they report us?

It becomes a torrent, hard to hold in one’s head. Will we allow it all to happen, and worse, again? And again? The kids in cages, families destroyed by the Trumpian violence. The Salvadorian mega prison, but also all the overloaded prison camps full of who knows who, or even where. Some in southern Florida, Texas, filled and more than filled, waiting on a hurricane season NOAA can’t track like it used to.

Will they ever come home? Will their mothers look for their bones one day? Will the ones that didn’t speak up deny it happened? Just refuse to talk about it?

Will we become timid people?

I wonder who is allowed to have fun in America now. But also, who is required to look like they’re having fun.

Detainees in Texas spelling out “SOS” with their bodies.

A friend — an expert — recommended this David Graham column purporting to respond to Trump’s latest claim of a Russian hoax. It is solid enough.

It goes through all the assessments about the Russian attack on 2016 (notice how we never focus on Russia’s even more overt assistance for Trump in 2020 and 2024?), and describes that, “perhaps because” there’s so much evidence, Trump dismisses it as a hoax.

In spite of all of this evidence, or perhaps because of it, Trump has loudly insisted that it’s all a hoax.

Where it goes hopelessly off the rails is in this paragraph, in which Graham uses the passive voice to describe how three things — the focus on Carter Page, the Alfa Bank anomalies, and the Steele dossier — “assisted” Trump in instilling doubt.

His attempts to instill doubt have been assisted by the fact that some of the wilder rumors and reports concerning his campaign didn’t turn out to be true. Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser, was a bit of an eccentric character but not a traitor, as some suggested, much less the key to unraveling any grand conspiracy. Trump was probably not communicating with a Russian bank via a mysterious server. He was almost certainly not a longtime Russian-intelligence asset. The so-called Steele dossier was full of falsehoods. I argued at the time that BuzzFeed’s decision to publish it was a grievous error, and it warped conversation about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

With that passive voice, Graham dodges the agency involved in these things, at least one of which goes back to a deliberate and apparently successful attempt to fill the dossier with disinformation, and another of which has been stoked by years of lawfare (and, as I suggested here, also had help from someone I believe was involved in the Russian operation).

Graham then describes an SVR plan* — concocted in advance of, but within a week of, the founding moment in the Steele narrative — to frame Hillary Clinton, a plan that right wingers have adopted as their own for years, this way:

A special counsel appointed by Barr during Trump’s first term, with the goal of ferreting out political skulduggery in the Russia investigation, found that messages about Clinton being treated as a smoking gun were, in fact, likely concocted by the Russians.

Again, the passive voice. Not, “the Russians concocted a hoax that a Bill Barr-appointed Special Counsel chased as if it were true for four years, two of those after he had concluded it was a fabrication,” but that that “Special Counsel ‘found’ that the document was concocted by Russians.”

And as a result, this column participates in the polarization about this debate that was baked in from the start. Graham presents claims, all true, and in the process pits actual facts against Trump’s necessary faith in the Hillary hoax. It’s a good column. But I’m not sure where it gets us.

I’d like to attempt to reconceive the 2016 election operation, not in terms of the judgments that spooks and prosecutors have come to (on which Graham focuses), but instead on what it achieved. I laid out some of this last year with LOLGOP, but this scheme adds the SVR hoax built into the process.

Network within the attention economy: First, in the election during which the attention economy became the medium in which elections (and politics generally) are contested, Russia tapped into that economy in a way that networked with right wingers. I’m in no way saying that Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s troll operation had an effect on the outcome (I’m less sure about the hack-and-leak operation). I believe now, as then, that the effect of the trolling operation was like throwing a few matches onto a flaming bonfire. But the trolls proved they could get Trump’s closest buddies to treat fakes like TEN_GOP as one of their own; Trump’s closest propagandists still prove to be easy, if pricier, marks. They also got Trump’s now Chief of Staff to treat them as real. It’s also likely that the chat rooms in which Trump’s allies orchestrated their own attention campaigns, starting with the one that a Nazi living in Eastern Europe helped to professionalize, were influenced by Russian-linked figures; chat rooms are a wonderful way to cultivate people with plausible deniability. Perhaps most importantly, the hack-and-leak campaign proved not just that Trump was happy to rely on Russian props for his own exploitation of the attention economy, but would even do really stupid things in pursuit of such props. Russia discovered they could get Trump and all his allies to chase what they were offering.

Impede Hillary: Ginger Rogers had to do everything backwards and in heels. So did Hillary. But she also had fend off a persistent wave of hacks (the effect of this on a campaign was overlooked). And her own attempts to function within that attention economy were not just drowned out by the algorithmically boosted efforts of Trump, but were corrupted by Russian disinformation.

Dangle various quid pro quos: Russia also offered a number of inducements they might collect on in case of a Trump win: An impossibly lucrative Trump Tower deal, relying on GRU ties and sanctioned banks, to Trump’s personal attorney. Advance notice of the campaign and maybe energy deals to the Coffee Boy. Dirt for sanctions relief to the failson. Advance notice of the hack-and-leak campaign in exchange for a pardon for Julian Assange to the rat-fucker. Campaign assistance and millions in payment or debt relief in exchange for a plan to carve up Ukraine from the campaign manager. *** Importantly, Trump said yes — or at least, maybe — to every single one of these dangles. What disrupted them was the investigation — first the discovery of Mike Flynn’s intervention to undermine sanctions, then the exposure of the June 9 meeting, and ultimately the August 2 meeting exchanging campaign assistance in the context of a plan to eviscerate Ukraine. The Mueller investigation showed that every one of these men (save Don Jr, who wisely dodged the grand jury) lied to cover up these dangles. And Trump pardoned most of them, thereby affirming the import of those lies.

Entail complicity in destroying the Deep State: I’m largely alone in this, but I believe that at least one of those quid pro quos raised the stakes of the inducements. If it is true — as I laid out here — that the Shadow Brokers operation dumping NSA exploits used the same infrastructure as the Guccifer 2.0 operation, it would mean the acceptance of the latter involved tacit participation in the former. More concretely, by the time Roger Stone started pursuing a Julian Assange pardon in October 2016, WikiLeaks was already sitting on the CIA hacking tools stolen by Joshua Schulte, tools that Schulte himself recognized would make it easy for Russia to identify CIA’s operations and assets; by the time Stone started intervening at the “highest levels of Government” for Assange, Trump’s own CIA Director had dubbed WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence service. In other words, well before he was elected, Trump unwittingly entered a deal that would make him a participant in the willful destruction of the US security establishment to deliver on his side of the bargain.

Stoke conspiracies about the Deep State: As I said here, that SVR plan, apparently birthed on July 26, 2016, to do …

something about a task from someone, I don’t know, some dark forces, like the FBI for instance, or better yet, Clinton sympathizers in the IC, Pentagon, Deep State (or somewhere else?) about American websites deploying a campaign to demonize the actions of Russia’s GRU

… was probably no more than spaghetti at the wall. Not everything Russia tried that year worked. But that one did, because it weaponized Trump’s venality — his enthusiasm for all those inducements and therefore his anger that something (the investigation) prevented him from collecting them — and his narcissism. Consider: We know that Trump was all too happy to use the stolen files published at WikiLeaks to drive his information economy. We know that Trump was all too happy to use Hunter Biden — some parts of which came from Russia no matter where the actual laptop did — to drive his information economy. But the claims of a Hillary hoax, all built in from the start, remain his go-to distraction. To get out of his own Russian trouble, Trump used the dossier disinformation to take out one after another Russian expert at the FBI. At the moment Trump needed to reclaim his ability to distract and redirect attention from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, he turned back to his Russia Russia Russia grievance, a grievance that built on the disinformation injected in the dossier and — we now know — an SVR fabrication that gave him an excuse to corrupt the Justice Department and spin his adversaries as the enemy, which increasingly entailed relying, secretly, on Russia as his enabler.

At every step, Trump’s reliance on the Hillary hoax entailed more and more destruction of the US security establishment.

This is why I’m making such a big deal out of this redaction, one that attempts to hide that this was an SVR plot from the start and how obvious that should have been and likely was to Durham before he chose to continue his witch hunt pursuing Trump’s adversaries for two more years.

The redaction hides Durham’s efforts to obscure all that in an annex he likely assumed would be buried forever; the temporal games the annex play resemble ones Andrew DeFilippis repeatedly used during the Michael Sussmann trial. But it also attempts to hide that Trump’s top spies — the ones resuscitating a claim two of them first championed in an earlier attempt to distract and redirect — know that Durham attempted to obscure it. As I said, the people to whom this is obvious are Putin’s spies.

Over the years, Trump’s serial adherence to that Hillary hoax — out of necessity to avoid narcissistic injury, as his favorite tool to leverage the attention economy, and increasingly as a measure of loyalty of right wingers to him — has always depended on the continued cooperation of Putin’s spies. That’s how Trump came out of a meeting in Helsinki with Putin and declared the Russian spies were right. And that’s how we got to this place, where all three of Trump’s top spies are reading right from a script written by Russian spies nine years ago. They can’t reveal the plot. Trump can’t reveal the plot.***

The answer to the question, “What exactly is the “Russia hoax’?” is not all the proof that Russia interfered in our election to 2016, hoping to help Trump win. The answer is that the “Russia hoax” is a ploy Russian spies seeded all those years ago to leverage Trump’s narcissism to polarize the US on competing sides of a grievance that would have the effect of destroying the US Deep State.

* SVR is Russia’s foreign intelligence service. Under the moniker APT 29, they were hacking Hillary-related targets long before Russia’s military intelligence did so, under the moniker APT 28, during the election. This post provides more background.

Update: I have removed mention of sanctions relief — and business deals generally — in conjunction with Kirill Dmitriev at the asterisks, at the demand of RDIF. I apologize for the original misrepresentation.

On July 29, 2016, two days after SVR crafted the draft memo falsely claiming Hillary Clinton had a Deep State plan to smear Donald Trump that would stoke investigations for much of the last decade, Christopher Steele reached out to Bruce Ohr, then in charge of transnational crime at DOJ. Steele was going to be in DC on short notice. Would he like to meet for breakfast?

The meeting between the two is one of the most curious details of the right wing conspiracy theory that has animated the right wing since.

According to Ohr’s notes and his subsequent testimony, he and Steele spoke about a number of things: a claim sourced to SVR that Russia had Trump over a barrel, both details about Carter Page from the dossier and notice of it, Russian doping, and Oleg Deripaska’s plan to start pressuring Manafort for the money Deripaska claimed he was owed.

Mr. Ohr. So Chris Steele provided me with basically three items of information. One of them I’ve described to you already, the comment that information supposedly stated and made by the head, former head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.

He also mentioned that Carter Page had met with certain high-level Russian officials when he was in Moscow. My recollection is at that time, the name Carter Page had already been in the press, and there had been some kind of statement about who he had met with when he went to Moscow. And so the first item that I recall Chris Steele telling me was he had information that Carter Page met with higher-level Russian officials, not just whoever was mentioned in the press article. So that was one item.

And then the third item he mentioned was that Paul Hauser, who was an attorney working for Oleg Deripaska, had information about Paul Manafort, that Paul Manafort had entered into some kind of business deal with Oleg Deripaska, had stolen a large amount of money from Oleg Deripaska, and that Paul Hauser was trying to gather information that would show that, you know, or give more detail about what Paul Manafort had done with respect to Deripaska.

[snip]

Q Were there any other topics that were discussed during your July 30, 2016, meeting?

A Yes, there were. Based on my sketchy notes from the time, I think there was some information relating to the Russian doping scandal, but I don’t recall the substance of that.

The right wing has pointed to this meeting as the founding moment of what they call Hillary Clinton’s hoax — Steele’s efforts to find side channels via which to share the dossier, which they claim was part of a Hillary plot to frame Trump, though it was one Hillary didn’t know about or sanction.

But they always ignore the Deripaska part. Indeed, even though most Republican members of Congress who have pursued the dossier concluded it was filled with Russian disinformation, even though the DOJ IG Report says (using the moniker Oligarch-1 for Deripaska) that Deripaska had the knowledge and means to do that by the time of this meeting, Deripaska’s potential role has disappeared from all right wing obsession on the dossier (indeed, at the time it did disappear in 2018, well past the time members of Congress were focused on the SVR documents that included the Hillary memo, multiple right wing propagandists were claiming references to Deripaska was really Trump).

Of course, the right wing really wants to say nothing of the way this founding moment of their imagined dossier operation interacts with Konstantin Kilimnik’s role, including a meeting with Trump’s campaign manager he was setting up on those very days, to discuss how to win, how to get Manafort paid, and how to carve up Ukraine. Or the way that Manafort came back from a meeting with a Deripaska aide the following January and started pushing the attack on the dossier.

Oleg Deripaska was playing a brutal double game, but rather than admit that, Republicans would rather join in the Hillary side of it.

But at that moment in July 2016, Russian spooks had already decided it’d be fun to exploit the tensions caused by the election operation by framing Hillary Clinton, and by doing so, discrediting the investigation and giving a malignant narcissist cause for grievance.

I’m not saying that Deripaska was acting on the memo itself (though I find the addition of the Olympics in the memo, matching Steele’s mention of it to Ohr, to be notable). And his 2018 Daily Caller column stoking dossier grievance reads from the same script.

What has been inelegantly termed the “Deep State” is really this: shadow power exercised by a small number of individuals from media, business, government and the intelligence community, foisting provocative and cynically false manipulations on the public. Out of these manipulations, an agenda of these architects’ own design is born.

There was a larger plan to frame Hillary, as evidenced by the Seth Rich attack that started two weeks earlier and got picked up by Julian Assange and Roger Stone two weeks later.

I’m saying the Hillary hoax was built into the operation from the start.

Nor am I saying that Russia expected it would destroy the United States.

It was just one strand of spaghetti they threw at the wall in 2016.

But boy did it stick.

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

I’m going to let this collection of snapshots speak for themselves. Links to these stories will be furnished at the bottom of the post; some publication times are overseas and may not be the first publication time but an unspecified update time.

\

I know, I know — I screwed up and should have parked the two August 6 10:48 AM ET stories side by side. You get the drift; those two and the story between them are listed in Google News as published 19 hours ago from approximately 9:00 AM ET when I started pulling these together.

How conveniently the story about Vance’s canoe trip popped up just about the time the Epstein conspiracy meeting was making too much trouble for Trump and his conspirators, just about the time Team Trump was desperate enough to think about compromising one of their Epstein skeptics to change the direction of media and public attention.

UPDATE — 10:40 AM —

I want to point out KATV changed the headline as well as the lede of their story. The image above shows the original headline which is still evident in the story’s URL. The update changes the impetus of the story completely.

What I can’t tell is how long it takes for Google News to swap the original headline for the “updated” version of a story. Clearly it didn’t happen between 5:42 PM ET when the story was “updated” by The National News Desk and refreshed at KATV, and roughly 9:00 AM ET this morning when I took a screen capture from Google News.

What’s interesting is the “updated” story angle — Vance’s denial about the Epstein files meeting — emerged almost in tandem with the Ohio River story.

This may not be the only “updated” story out there.
___________________

Top Trump officials will discuss Epstein strategy at Wednesday dinner hosted by Vance
Updated Aug 6, 2025, 3:46 PM ET
PUBLISHED Aug 5, 2025, 10:04 AM ET
By Alayna Treene, Josh Campbell, Paula Reid, Kristen Holmes, Kaitlan Collins
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/05/politics/trump-blanche-epstein-maxwell-vance-bondi-patel-meeting

Trump Officials to Discuss Handling of Jeffrey Epstein Case: Report
Published Aug 05, 2025 at 11:07 PM EDT
By Anna Commander
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-officials-discuss-handling-jeffrey-epstein-case-report-2109432

Top Trump administration officials will meet to strategize on Epstein, Maxwell, CNN says [1]
Wed, August 6th 2025 at 10:26 AM Updated Wed, August 6th 2025 at 5:42 PM
By RAY LEWIS | The National News Desk
https://katv.com/news/nation-world/top-trump-administration-officials-will-meet-to-strategize-on-epstein-maxwell-cnn-says

Vance, Bondi, Patel to huddle at VP residence for meeting amid Epstein fallout [2]
By Breanne Deppisch, David Spunt, Jake Gibson
Published August 6, 2025 10:48am EDT | Updated August 6, 2025 2:07pm EDT
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/vance-bondi-patel-huddle-vp-residence-epstein-strategy-meeting

Vance expected to host Epstein strategy dinner with Bondi, Blanche, Patel
August 6, 2025, 3:32 PM
By Katherine Faulders
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/vance-expected-host-epstein-strategy-dinner-bondi-blanche/story?id=124407326

Vance To Hold Epstein Strategy Meeting With Top FBI, DOJ Officials
August 06, 2025 10:48 AM ET
By Reagan Reese
https://dailycaller.com/2025/08/06/jd-vance-fbi-doj-strategy-meeting-epstein-fallout-ghislaine-maxwell/

JD Vance’s Epstein strategy dinner with Kash Patel today: ‘Missing from this group is….’
TOI World Desk / TIMESOFINDIA.COM / Updated: Aug 06, 2025, 22:24 IST
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/jd-vances-epstein-strategy-dinner-with-kash-patel-today-missing-from-this-group-is-/articleshow/123145846.cms

JD Vance to host Epstein strategy dinner with top Trump officials, including AG Bondi, FBI boss Kash Patel
Published Aug. 6, 2025, 12:47 p.m. ET
By Breanne Deppisch, David Spunt, Jake Gibson
https://nypost.com/2025/08/06/us-news/vance-to-host-epstein-strategy-dinner-with-bondi-patel-blanche/

JD Vance to meet with top Trump officials to plot Epstein strategy – report
Wed 6 Aug 2025 13.20 EDT
By Anna Betts-New York
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/06/jeffrey-epstein-jd-vance-trump-meeting

JD Vance denies convening Trump’s top team to discuss Epstein
Wednesday August 06 2025, 7.25 pm BST, The Times
By Lara Spirit-Washington DC
https://www.thetimes.com/us/american-politics/article/epstein-strategy-dinner-jd-vance-maxwell-xrmvz7qjt

JD Vance’s team had water level of Ohio river raised for family’s boating trip
Wed 6 Aug 2025 17.46 EDT
By Stephanie Kirchgaessner and David Smith
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/06/jd-vance-ohio-lake-water-levels

Trump Makes JD Vance Awkwardly Deny Secret Epstein Crisis Talks
Updated Aug. 6 2025 8:31PM EDT
Published Aug. 6 2025 8:02PM EDT
By Farrah Tomazin
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-makes-jd-vance-awkwardly-deny-secret-epstein-crisis-talks/

Planned dinner for Trump officials to discuss Epstein appears to have been moved amid media scrutiny
Updated Aug 6, 2025, 9:38 PM ET
PUBLISHED Aug 6, 2025, 3:55 PM ET
By By Kristen Holmes, Alayna Treene
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/06/politics/jd-vance-dinner-epstein-scandal

Trump team looking to Joe Rogan for help amid lingering Epstein-Ghislaine Maxwell fallout, report says
Thursday 07 August 2025 14:41 BST
By Oliver O’Connell
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-epstein-joe-rogan-vance-maxwell-dinner-news-live-b2803187.html

[1] See update at bottom of post above
[2] Headline from embedded video appears in Google News; article headline is different
___________________

*** NEED FROM YOU *** Any story about the Epstein files should be archived because they are subject to change. At least two of the stories above may have been manipulated so that the original headline doesn’t now appear in Google News.

To archive in the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive:
• Copy the URL of the news story.
• Go to https://web.archive.org/
• Paste the URL into the Save Page Now field at the lower right of the site and click on Save Page button
• When next page opens, click on Save Page, check the box to include error messages (this will tell readers when the page may have gone bad/been pulled)

Don’t let them try to sweep coverage under the digital rug!

###

In this post, I reviewed the two premises of John Durham’s investigation into Hillary Clinton:

• Documents stolen from Russian spies claimed Hillary Clinton had a plan to smear Donald Trump because of his ties to Russia (to which Durham added a plan that she would fabricate evidence against Trump)
• The FBI should have taken that into consideration before they relied on the Steele dossier or investigated the Alfa Bank anomalies

I also showed that Durham was lying about what document he built that premise off of, which he claimed was a draft SVR report, the date of which he never disclosed (but which appears to date to July 27). In fact, the notice that CIA gave to FBI of that alleged plan was almost certainly a different one, one which made it clear that Hillary didn’t have a plan to frame Trump, but instead that SVR had a plan to frame Hillary.

As part of that argument, I showed how the referral memo — a memo CIA drafted to send to the FBI in early September 2016, but which appears never got sent — doesn’t actually match the draft SVR report (reporting that Hillary would smear Trump), but instead matches emails that show SVR would frame Hillary.

I noted that the memo refers to “an exchange,” not a draft memo.

But I also noted that there was a redaction pertaining to Guccifer 2.0 that, in 2020 — two years after Robert Mueller indicted GRU for Guccifer 2.0 — John Ratcliffe didn’t want to share publicly.

That’s where I may have misstated. I claimed that the report had nothing that could match that kind of Guccifer 2.0 reference. But it actually may. There’s a redaction in the excerpted report in the Durham annex right after a discussion of Guccifer 2.0 (the only reference to Guccifer in the declassified material), which then picks back up with questions of attribution that had been the subject of discussion of one of the only real emails found to be quoted in the report.

In other words, I could be wrong that Guccifer does not feature prominently in this report. It may be that Durham hid it, just like John Ratcliffe hid it in the referral memo.

Still, what’s clear is that the Deep State email that almost certainly launched this effort did tie Guccifer to Hillary.

Effectively, this exchange says, “fuck, they’re onto Guccifer, let’s start a conspiracy theory about Hillary! dark forces!! Deep State!!!” And then the follow-up email describes the conspiracy theory in terms of “vilifying” Putin and Trump.

And that matters because shortly after this email, Russia launched a sustained, two-fold campaign, both to undermine the attribution of Guccifer 2.0 and to frame Hillary Clinton. Indeed, just days after SVR set out to frame Hillary Clinton, the effort to debunk the Guccifer attribution expanded, not least with Roger Stone, who reversed course on the Russian attribution over a matter of days in early August 2016, as if he were reading right from the SVR script.

A few days after that, Julian Assange picked up the Seth Rich conspiracy started, a conspiracy theory that provided an alternative source for the documents stolen by GRU, one that played on dark forces involved with the Clintons.

And where did that come from?

SVR reports purporting to date back to July 13 — the very same stash of documents that fabricated a plan by Hillary Clinton to smear Donald Trump.

ISIKOFF: Exactly. She was puzzled about all the conspiracy theories swirling around the case that she was investigating. So she finally turns to the U.S. intelligence community. She had a security clearance as a assistant U.S. attorney. She asked them to help her figure out, where’s all this stuff coming from? And they come back with a bombshell. They provide Sines with copies, English translations of copies of intelligence bulletins that were circulated by the Russian SVR – that’s Russia’s version of the CIA – just three days after Seth Rich’s death, July 13, 2016. In the intel – that first intelligence bulletin, the SVR suggests – it doesn’t suggest – asserts that Seth Rich was on his way to talk to the FBI that early Sunday morning when he was gunned down by a squad of assassins working for Hillary Clinton.

And this was, as far as we can tell, the first time that a conspiracy theory about Seth Rich’s death was put out there. That very same day, July 13, it pops up on an obscure website, called whatdoesitmean.com, which, when you look at it and examine it, it’s filled with all sorts of stories attributed to Russian intelligence officials, Russian foreign ministry officials, Russian press reports. It’s effectively a vehicle for Kremlin propaganda. And they apparently took this SVR bulletin that had been intercepted by U.S. intelligence officials and used it to put out this wild conspiracy theory that played right into that far-right conspiratorial meme I mentioned before about the Clintons’ – a Clinton body count and assassins working for the Clintons who go around rubbing out inconvenient people in their political path.

The efforts to undermine the Guccifer 2.0 attribution didn’t much survive the other public attributions, including confirmation in the Intelligence Community Assessment, to say nothing of the Mueller indictment of GRU.

Except, of course, for this guy.

I actually suspect that Durham’s team aspired to include the whole muddle. After all, when interviewing Manos Antonakakis in the days after Durham should have given up his conspiracy theory, Andrew DeFilippis attacked the DNS researcher for deigning to try to attribute Guccifer 2.0.

Finally, I will leave you with an anecdote and a thought. During one of my interviews with the Special Counsel prosecutor, I was asked point blank by Mr. DeFilippis, “Do you believe that DARPA should be instructing you to investigate the origins of a hacker (Guccifer_2.0) that hacked a political entity (DNC)?” Let that sync for a moment, folks. Someone hacked a political party (DNC, in this case), in the middle of an election year (2016), and the lead investigator of DoJ’s special council would question whether US researchers working for DARPA should conduct investigations in this matter is “acceptable”! While I was tempted to say back to him “What if this hacker hacked GOP? Would you want me to investigate him then?”, I kept my cool and I told him that this is a question for DARPA’s director, and not for me to answer.

So the effort to frame Hillary Clinton had to be spun free of the effort to muddle attribution of Guccifer 2.0.

But not when SVR first launched this campaign.