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.
Share this entry
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Deripaska_Oleg_September_2020_cropped.jpg13431024emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-08-08 04:50:162025-08-08 05:30:07The Russia Russia Russia Grievance Was Built Into Russian Attack from the Start
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.
After making Canada, Japan, Vietnam, and Switzerland go to the US and making the EU go to Trump’s golf course in Scotland to negotiate tariffs, Trump sent his real estate developer buddy, Steve Witkoff, to Moscow to negotiate tariffs with Vladimir Putin.
I would have low expectations that Witkoff, who has gotten his ass handed to him at every turn, would negotiate a reasonable deal with Russia in any case.
All the more so given the politicized release of old documents on Russia that Tulsi Gabbard has orchestrated in recent weeks.
Consider just this redaction in the classified Durham appendix that Chuck Grassley released last week.
As I laid out here, the redaction is designed to fool readers in several ways.
First, it helps to sustain a fiction that the draft SVR memo purporting to report Hillary Clinton approving a plan to smear Donald Trump is the first document in a series, and not the last. That, in turn, serves to suggest that what I call the Deep State memo, laying out a plan by SVR to frame Hillary came after the draft memo, rather than laid out a plan to fabricate the memo, complete with fabricated emails including Russian idioms attributed to Leonard Benardo.
But that’s not right. The Deep State email was, Durham described, sent on July 26. The draft SVR email incorporates an email fabricated on July 27.
Indeed, after this Deep State email, Russian spies talked about “mak[ing] [something]” — that is, fabricating emails — to “illuminate” how Clinton wanted to “vilif[y]” Trump and Putin, proposing an initial fabricated July 25 email promising to, “put more oil into the fire,” but not yet adding reference to the doping scandal that was contemporaneously a very sore subject for Russia. The email with the reference to the Olympics, dated July 25 but almost certainly fabricated on July 27, is the one that was incorporated into the draft SVR memo.
In response, those Russian spies said … we don’t know what, but we do know that they attached the fabricated July 27 email purporting to reflect Hillary approving that plan on July 26.
I’d love to know what that email says; it may make it more clear that this was all a great plan to frame Hillary Clinton, or it may reveal other parts of the plan, possibly pertaining to Guccifer 2.0. But I don’t need to know what it says to know that the email gives Putin great leverage over Donald Trump at the moment that Trump finally tries to assert a strong hand with the Russian dictator.
By hiding that email in an attempt to hide that what Trump has claimed for eight years was an effort by Hillary to frame Trump was — is, still — a wildly successful attempt by SVR to frame Hillary, Trump’s top spies — Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director and Useful Idiom John Ratcliffe, and FBI Director Kash Patel — have all sustained a secret with Russia’s spies, a secret Kash has been chasing all that time, a secret that could legally implicate at least Ratcliffe and Kash (not least because they sustained this campaign during the time they were private citizens) in a crime.
Trump’s top spies are keeping a secret: the secret that for the last eight years Trump has carried out precisely the plan to frame Hillary Clinton that those SVR spies first ginned up on July 26, 2016.
And here’s the thing. Putin’s spies know much of what is behind that redaction. They can reverse engineer it because the footnote to it shows that the email in question is the one to which those Russian spies attached that fake July 27 email, nine years ago. They still have that email. Hell, it’s probably hanging in a gilt-edged frame somewhere, Putin’s trophy from a wildly successful attempt to compromise the Main Enemy.
So that redaction is not, as a classification redaction should, keeping any secrets from our adversaries. The Russian spies know what is too embarrassing for Grassley and Tulsi and Kash and Ratcliffe to release.
But we don’t.
And that’s why this entire frenzy to release more secrets just in advance of this meeting with Putin has made Trump far, far weaker.
Donald Trump cares more about his claims of grievance, a fake grievance that has always gotten him out of jams, than he does about America, to say nothing of Ukraine.
And Chuck Grassley’s willful protection of this secret between Putin’s spies and Trump’s has only served to give Putin leverage over Trump and over the United States.
Share this entry
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Screenshot-2025-08-06-at-2.36.41-PM.png528646emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-08-06 10:21:582025-08-07 09:56:07How Chuck Grassley’s Politicized Redactions Gave Putin Leverage over Trump
CNN has a story about how Trump’s impeachment defense attorney, his criminal defense attorney, the flunkie who helped frame Hillary Clinton, and his Chief of Staff will go to JD Vance’s home — where he is raising three children under the age of 10 — to discuss how to make Donald Trump’s sex trafficking problem go away.
They apparently believe that Todd Blanche can hold his own in an interview with Joe Rogan, who has long smelled the rat in this cover-up.
The administration’s handling of the Epstein case, as well as the need to craft a unified response, is expected to be a main focus of the dinner, three sources familiar with the meeting told CNN. The meeting will include White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Vice President JD Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and Blanche.
With the exception of Vance, the White House considers those officials the leaders of the administration’s ongoing strategy regarding the Epstein files, two of the sources said.
The meeting comes as Trump’s administration is considering releasing the contents of Blanche’s interview last month with Maxwell. Two officials told CNN that the materials could be made public as early as this week.
There have also been internal discussions about Blanche holding a press conference or doing a high-profile interview, possibly with popular podcaster Joe Rogan, according to three people familiar with the discussions, though those conversations are preliminary. Rogan, who endorsed Trump on the eve of last fall’s election, has been highly critical of the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein case and previously called their refusal release more information about Epstein a “line in the sand.”
To be fair to Blanche, though, he has managed to serve his client, and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, well so far.
Yesterday, Maxwell’s attorney, David Markus, submitted his — well-justified — opposition to releasing the grand jury materials for Ghislaine Maxwell’s case, the ones that would feature a broad swath of victims. He as much as conceded that this might have provided a way to review the grand jury files (another benefit Blanche tried to offer), but now that Judge Paul Engelmeyer denied that request, he’s opposed to the unsealing request.
Although the government did not oppose allowing the defense to review the grand jury material to assess whether to object to its release, the Court denied that request. As a result, Ghislaine Maxwell has not seen the material and cannot take an informed position. Given that she is actively litigating her case and does not know what is in the grand jury record, she has no choice but to respectfully oppose the government’s motion to unseal it.
Maxwell’s opposition is likely enough, by itself, to rule against release of the Maxwell transcripts, which would include far more detail than Epstein’s would.
Little noticed is the line in the DOJ filing describing DOJ telling third parties — not victims — if they appear in the grand jury transcripts.
In addition, the Government is in the process of providing notice to any other individuals identified in the transcripts.
Meanwhile, DOJ confessed yesterday that they have still not notified all the victims identified in the transcripts, and only just started to notify the victims covered under the relevant victim notification law.
Seventh, regarding the Government’s approach to victim notification of the instant proceedings, as noted in its July 29 submission, the Government has provided notice of the unsealing motions to all but one of the victims who are referenced in the grand jury transcripts at issue in the motions. The Government still has been unable to contact that remaining victim. With respect to victims who are not identified in the grand jury transcripts but who have previously received victim notifications in the Maxwell and Epstein matters, the Government will over the coming days alert those victims to the fact of the unsealing motions.
That letter was posted the same day as this letter from Brad Edwards, who likely represents the largest number of known victims. He accuses the government of violating the Crime Victims’ Rights Act generally, as well as losing track of some victims who are likely implicated in the Epstein and Maxwell grand juries but only came to be represented by Edwards after their testimony. He describes that “yesterday” (that is, Monday), he contacted the government about the other victims and they responded, which suggests this newfound focus on other victims is a response to Edwards’ efforts.
Given our history fighting for the enforcement of the CVRA on behalf of Jeffrey Epstein’s many victims, we were quite surprised to learn that the government sought the unsealing of grand jury materials before this Court without first conferring with the victims or their counsel, a step required by the CVRA and reinforced by Doe v. United States, 08-80736 (S.D. Fla.). That case, litigated pro bono by undersigned counsel for more than a decade, arose precisely because the government previously violated the rights of many of these very same victims. It is especially troubling that, despite the outcome of that litigation, the government has once again proceeded in a manner that disregards the victims’ rights—suggesting that the hard-learned lessons of the past have not taken hold. This omission reinforces the perception that the victims are, at best, an afterthought to the current administration.
Of significant concern, the same government that failed to provide notice to the victims before moving this Court to unseal the grand jury materials is now the government representing to this Court that it has provided appropriate notice to the victims or their counsel and has conducted a proper review and redaction of the materials it seeks to release. Several clients have contacted us expressing deep anxiety over whether the redactions were in fact adequate. Consequently, we requested yesterday that the government identify which of our clients were referenced to the grand jury. The government responded promptly and provided clarification. However, we have strong reason to believe that additional individuals—whom we also represent—were likely referenced in those materials but were not identified to us by the government.
It remains unclear whether notice was instead provided to prior counsel, whether their omission was a government oversight, whether the government does not consider them to be victims, or whether these individuals were, in fact, not mentioned to the grand jury. Regardless of the explanation, this ambiguity raises a serious issue that must be resolved before any materials are publicly released. [my emphasis]
You know who wouldn’t have fucked up this process? The prosecutor Pam Bondi fired on Trump’s authority just as this cover-up began, Maurene Comey.
The asymmetric treatment is pissing off the victims. Annie Farmer’s attorney describes that the intent to redact third party names “smacks of a cover up.”
Any effort to redact third party names smacks of a cover up. The Government does not elaborate on what protocol it is using to redact other “third party” names or which types of individuals it seeks to protect in this way. To the extent the Government for some reason seeks to redact the names of other Epstein and Maxwell affiliates on the basis that these individuals “neither have been charged or alleged to be involved” in their crimes, the Court should exercise its independent authority to ensure that any redactions are tailored to serve compelling interests. See generally Brown v. Maxwell, 929 F.3d 41, 50 (2d Cir. 2019) (even if materials are not considered judicial documents to which a presumption of public access applies, “a court must still articulate specific and substantial reasons for sealing such material”).
I have a feeling Judge Richard Berman (who has been posting victim letters as they come in) will not take kindly to a grand jury unsealing in which people like Donald Trump and Prince Andrew get notice, but the victims do not.
This may change as Congress gets involved. Perhaps in an attempt to stave off the Massie-Khanna bid for true transparency that will ripen over the August recess, James Comer announced a bunch of subpoenas for people not named Alex Acosta or Donald Trump.
Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) announced that he was summoning nearly a dozen former officials to appear for depositions on the Epstein investigation — a list that includes former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Former U.S. Attorneys General William Barr, Alberto Gonzales, Jeff Sessions, Loretta Lynch, Eric Holder and Merrick Garland, as well as former FBI Directors Robert Mueller and James Comey were also tapped to give testimony in connection to the case.
Comer was required to send the subpoenas after a Democratic-led subcommittee vote in July.
The move is the latest in a broader battle over the Epstein files, which took the Trump administration by storm last month as anger boiled over from within MAGA circles about the administration’s handling of the case.
The committee’s subpoena of Bill Clinton in particular seems more symbolic than substantive. No former president has ever testified to Congress under the compulsion of a subpoena — and lawmakers have tried only twice before: once in 1953, when the House Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed Harry Truman, and once in 2022, when the Jan. 6 select committee subpoenaed Donald Trump.
But as Lisa Rubin describes, there’s also a subpoena to DOJ — the price of the Clinton testimony — that does make demands that would, among other things, cover the transcript of the Ghislaine Maxwell interview.
By ABC’s description, Blanche got Ghislaine to perform like a trained seal, asking her to describe what he did in her presence, but not asking her about what he did when he learned she had “stolen” one of Trump’s spa girls and forced her into sex slavery.
During her nine hours speaking with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche last month, Ghislaine Maxwell said nothing during the interview that would be harmful to President Donald Trump, telling Blanche that Trump had never done anything in her presence that would have caused concern, according to sources familiar with what Maxwell said.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, is considering publicly releasing the transcripts from the interview, multiple sources familiar with the internal discussions told ABC News.
There are a lot of moving parts.
Including Ghislaine, to her new cozier digs, where the other inmates, including one whose daughter was trafficked, are already expressing disgust that Todd Blanche put a sex trafficker among their midst.
Julie Howell, 44, who is serving a one-year sentence for theft, told The Telegraph that “every inmate I’ve heard from is upset she’s here”.
“This facility is supposed to house non-violent offenders,” she added. “Human trafficking is a violent crime.”
[snip]
Inmates at FPC Bryan are worried about their own safety, given the widespread threats against Maxwell and lack of tight security on the prison grounds.
Howell said: “We have heard there are threats against her life and many of us are worried about our own safety because she’s here.”
Her comments will only fuel concern that could be targeted at the facility, preventing her testimony about Epstein from ever seeing the light of day.
Maxwell was allegedly moved under the cover of darkness because she had been “bombarded” with death threats from rapists who accused her of being a “snitch”, according to the Mail on Sunday.
Multiple outlets, including that CNN story, report that Trump’s close advisors think they’ve weathered this crisis because their mobsters — people like Charlie Kirk and Benny Johnson — have been distracted by other things.
One official told CNN that some of the conversation within the White House has focused on whether making the details from the interview public would bring the Epstein controversy back to the surface. Many officials close to Trump believe the story has largely died down.
We shall see.
As I wrote here, Trump and Blanche have the power to silence Maxwell, if the rapists calling her a snitch don’t get to her first.
But the moving parts and sheer cynicism of the cover-up may backfire.
Share this entry
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Screenshot-2025-08-06-at-12.02.25-PM.png20201606emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-08-06 09:08:032025-08-06 09:23:40Planning for a Cover-Up in a House with Small Children and Other Stories of How Todd Blanche Is Helping a Sex Trafficker
These people are so incompetent that each new release only does more damage to their case.
The dossier appendix didn’t help in 2020
Grassley released the appendix along with John Ratcliffe’s cover letter, dated June 10, 2020, explaining to Grassley and Ron Johnson that, “I am writing in response to your 22 May 2020 letter seeking the declassification” of the dossier annex and the March 2018 version of the 2020 HPSCI report released weeks ago.
Grassley and Johnson asked Ratcliffe to declassify these things the day after he was confirmed, the day Ratcliffe resigned from the House where (among other things) he served on HPSCI. Ratcliffe turned around the ICA annex just over two weeks after he was sworn in, but noted that the HPSCI Report was a Congressional Report not in custody of ODNI, and he would have to ask the HPSCI Chair — then Adam Schiff — to turn it over.
The right wing has complained that Schiff, possibly with then-CIA Director Gina Haspel, didn’t release the HPSCI Report.
But Ratcliffe released the ICA appendix during the period when Senators were releasing similar documents (including, via Mike Flynn’s attempt to renege on his plea agreement). And no one bothered to release this publicly. And when HPSCI Republicans updated their Report months later, they didn’t bother to include the Appendix itself in the 10-page section of their report attacking the dossier.
This is not an example of transparency. It’s an example of suppression.
The ICA annex proves right wing lies now
It’s clear why Grassley never released the document.
There are several things in the ICA annex — as opposed to the dossier — that right wingers misrepresent. As I noted, the GOP neglected to mention the caveat in the first paragraph, noting that the dossier was “highly politically sensitive information” for which US spooks had “only limited corroboration” and so “did not use it to reach the analytic conclusions of the CIA/FBI/NSA assessment.” It turns out the 2-page annex is barely a page-and-a-half (which means between HPSCI and I we’ve written far more about this document than exists in the document itself). HPSCI might rightly complain that the appendix didn’t describe that Steele had been closed for cause, but they misrepresent several other parts of their complaint, notably that Steele “collected this information on behalf of private clients and was not compensated for it by the FBI” and that “multiple Western press organizations” started printing it (they got the date wrong but to get to the larger scope of Steele’s press blitz, HPSCI did over a year of persistent investigation). The GOP complained that this section had classification markers, but the most substantive ones come in the 3-bullet section that compares the dossier content to existing intelligence (and besides, when the ICA was published on January 5, 2017, Steele’s identity was not yet publicly confirmed).
Perhaps most egregiously, the HPSCI Report misrepresents what is in the ICA appendix.
It claims “the dossier’s most significant claims–that Russia launched cyber activities to leak political emails–were little more than a regurgitation of stories previously published by multiple media outlets prior to the creation of a dossier.” I pointed out how that is wildly, affirmatively false. The most immediately apparent problem with the dossier were its claims about hacking conflicted with known details of the Russian campaign.
As pertaining to hacking, though — their primary focus — it’s actually not that the dossier parroted things that were public.
It’s that they affirmatively rebutted the most obvious conclusions from the ongoing hack-and-leak. For example, the first and several reports completed after that all suggested that the Kompromat that Russia had on Hillary was decades old material from when she traveled to Russia, not the hack-and-leak campaign rolling out in front of our eyes. A July 26, 2016 report, released after the DNC release and almost a year after the first public attributions of the APT 29 hack of State and DOD to Russia, claimed that Russia wasn’t having much success at hacking Western targets, a claim that anyone briefed on those APT 29 hacks (including the Republicans so taken with the SVR reports stolen in those hacks) would know was laughable. The most incendiary December 13 post attributed the troll campaign to Webzilla, not Yevgeniy Prigozhin. That is, the dossier wasn’t just delayed; it affirmatively contradicted most of the publicly known details about the election interference campaign and even more of the details that the ICA addressed closely.
But that claim was about the dossier, not the ICA annex, which included the following:
A 3-bullet section describing things in the dossier that “is consistent with the judgments in this assessment,” including
A bullet on Moscow’s aim, which was the excuse HPSCI used to put the dossier in the section it appears in at all
A single bullet on the dossier’s claims about the hack-and-leak, focused on Russian attempts to direct coverage of the WikiLeaks material
A bullet describing the dossier’s claim that Russia backed off its influence campaign as the election approached
A 4-bullet section about Steele’s claims about Trump’s flunkies, pitched as a defensive briefing
The defensive briefing section includes this complaint (it is just one of the several places where they complain how widely this disseminated, without recognizing most of that dissemination took place under Trump):
I’m unclear what right wingers want from Carter Page. By the time of the ICA, the FBI knew (from Stefan Halper) that Carter Page was hoping to set up a pro-Russian think tank with funding from Russia. And if you believe Konstantin Kilimnik, Page had been wandering around Moscow just weeks earlier, claiming to speak for Trump on Ukraine.
The near-miss looks like a direct hit
But here’s the most remarkable thing about the ICA appendix — which likely explains why Grassley didn’t release it in 2020.
Here’s that defensive briefing section:
I’ve long described (here’s a post from 2018) that, to the extent Russia managed to fill the dossier with disinformation, they larded it with near-misses which would discomfort Trump, but help to provide cover for or deniability for the things that actually did happen. As a result, when you make a list of things that appear in the dossier but leave off the names, it looks utterly prescient (but was not). Take these bullets one by one:
The Kremlin had cultivated Trump for at least five years and fed him and his team intelligence agreed to use WikiLeaks in exchange for policy considerations. Moscow had cultivated Trump at least since the 2013 beauty pageant, far longer if you believe Craig Ungar. And not only did Russia give his campaign advance notice that they would drop emails on Hillary and offer his failson dirt on Hillary, Roger Stone credibly claimed to have advance access to WikiLeaks files (including specific files on John Podesta) and as Roger was arranging that, Manafort met with alleged spy Konstantin Kilimnik to share his strategy for winning swing states, a plan to get Manafort paid, and a plan to carve up Ukraine.
Russian authorities possessed compromising material on Trump from when he was in Russia. The SSCI Report found several claims of a sex tape and Russia knew Trump was lying to cover up Michael Cohen’s pursuit of that Trump Tower deal.
There were secret meetings between the Kremlin and Trump’s advisors, and at least one was offered financial renumeration. Cohen spoke with the Kremlin directly about an impossibly lucrative Trump Tower deal. And the Kilimnik meeting with Manafort fulfills all the claims of coordination and renumeration.
In other words, once you take the names out, Steele’s near-miss reports were direct hits, just in a way that distracted from the principals.
Update: WaPo describes that Tulsi released the HPSCI Report in much less redacted form than CIA wanted.
Share this entry
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Screenshot-2025-08-06-at-12.21.00-PM.png6841088emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-08-06 07:51:142025-08-06 14:26:24Old Man Transparency Chuck Grassley Confesses He Covered Up the ICA Annex for Five Years
John Ratcliffe keeps going on propaganda channels to parrot Russian idioms (and make false claims) shamelessly. Whichever Russian spy wrote that disinformation package years ago must have gotten a new dacha to reward him for how he has turned America’s CIA Director into an unabashed useful idiom for Russia.
Ratcliffe might want to rein in his boisterousness, however. Because Chuck Grassley and Tulsi Gabbard — or whoever actually did the declassification of the Durham appendix — left just enough breadcrumbs to suggest there’s a material difference between the FBI and some other government agency’s translation of the Deep State email reflecting an SVR plan to frame Hillary Clinton. Ratcliffe may not realize just how clear it is that John Durham framed Hillary Clinton, with Ratcliffe’s help.
I started down this rabbit hole when I puzzled through this footnote, revealing that there are multiple translations of “some” of the items in question.
So I made a table of all the documents identified as exhibits to the appendix, showing which footnote referred to which document and the language of the document.
The first thing this exercise disclosed were two missing documents — or rather, documents the discussions of which are entirely redacted.
The first appears in a discussion of a 2017 CIA review that concluded these SVR reports — it’s not clear whether the report reviewed just the Loretta Lynch ones, or all of them; I have a hunch this report also discusses Oleg Deripaska — were not fabrications. Note missing footnote 76 here.
The second is more interesting–but it’s part of a far more important discovery. At least according to the footnotes, the redactions in these two passages (which bracket the draft report that Durham falsely claims was the basis of his investigation) serve to obscure which fake Leonard Benardo email was incorporated into which SVR document.
The reference to “The above-referenced [SVR] memorandum included the English text of a document” pertains to the Benardo email that appears second in the appendix — the one with the (stupid, obviously Russian) references to the Olympics.
There are at least two versions of the Benardo email (identified as Appendix Documents 5 and 6 in footnote 36) that lack the Olympics reference.
And one of those, Appendix Document 6, is what was attached to the July 27 email described in the unredacted passage here.
The fake Benardo email dated July 27 — which these redactions tried hard to suggest was attached to the email mentioning “vilif[ying] Moscow” — was actually attached to another communication completely obscured by this redaction, the second missing document. Footnote 40 and footnote 41 both cite Classified Appendix Document 8.
This clarifies the process by which the draft report that Durham falsely claimed was the basis of his investigation was made.
The first email in the chain is the July 26 Deep State one — the one saying it’d be cool to frame Hillary.
The second is that July 27 email — basically a discussion about how they were going to frame Hillary, attaching one of the fake Benardo emails without mention of the Olympics. Again, that’s what got mentioned in John Brennan’s notes, not the report. At that point, one of the spies must have thought it would be cute to make a reference to what appears to be the Olympics doping scandal, which was ongoing at the time, something that mattered to the Russians but probably not Benardo or Julianne Smith, and so they altered the fake Benardo email for inclusion in the eventual report, to add the Olympics.
And then a third email between Russian spies — the one that is completely redacted — attached the fake Benardo email, dated July 27, claiming Hillary had approved this plan. The email reflecting approval came after the spies decided to frame Hillary (not like it matters since the emails were all fake anyway).
Now, as I keep saying, the report that Durham falsely claimed was the basis of his investigation had to come after that missing email, because that’s what they fabricated to claim that Hillary had actually approved the plan. The report was the last document, not the first, as Durham misleadingly suggested by putting it at the beginning of his discussion. The unredacted report would make clear that both the approval and the Olympics reference were deliberately added to take Benardo emails, and then incorporated in the draft report itself.
Which brings me back to where I started. Aside from two documents of little interest here (a document on Benardo that could be a SVR profile of him or could just be his bio, Classified Appendix Document 1) and the entirely redacted reference associated with the 2017 CIA review (Classified Appendix Document 10), there are six documents in Russian:
The January 2016 report mentioning Loretta Lynch and Jim Comey
The March 2016 report mentioning Loretta Lynch
The July 26 Deep State email discussing framing Hillary
The July 27 email, to which one of the fake July 25 Benardo emails that did not mention the Olympics was attached
The missing document, to which the fake July 27 Benardo email was attached
The draft report, to which the fake July 25 Benardo email that mentioned the Olympics was incorporated
The January and March reports are actually the same document, Classified Appendix Document 2. Durham describes both were “in Russian,” with the discussion of translation redacted; this discussion tracks the DOJ IG Report closely, and so may have used those same versions.
As you can see above, the discussion about who translated the July 27 email and the missing one is entirely redacted. The same is true of the draft report itself.
Not the July 26 Deep State email, though.
The intro to that states clearly that Durham used an FBI translation: “The FBI’s translation of this email is as follows.”
In other words, the July 26 Deep State email showing that Russian spies decided to frame Hillary before they fabricated emails supporting their effort exists in at least two versions.
And John Ratcliffe, rattling off Russian idioms on every Fox show, may not know that.
Update: I’m reviewing the Michael Sussmann case, and Andrew DeFilippis played a similar temporal gimmick twice during that trial.
Share this entry
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Screenshot-2025-08-05-at-6.01.54-PM.png6021104emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-08-05 13:15:542025-08-07 06:28:07Russia’s Useful Idiom, John Ratcliffe: Lost in Two Translations
Last week, Kash Patel established precedent for releasing damaging — potentially even fabricated — accusations against prominent private citizens, a precedent that demolishes the excuse DOJ and FBI made less than a month ago to bury the Epstein files.
There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.
[snip]
Perpetuating unfounded theories about Epstein serves neither of those ends.
To that end, while we have labored to provide the public with maximum information regarding Epstein and ensured examination of any evidence in the government’s possession, it is the determination of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.
After all, in releasing the declassified Durham annex — a document, like the Epstein files, in the custody of FBI and DOJ — Kash released not just information on several prominent uncharged third parties, but unsealed and disseminated “unfounded theories” about them, most notably Julianne Smith, the woman John Durham suspected of entering into a conspiracy to frame Donald Trump.
In 2016, when Russian spies tried to frame her, Smith was a private citizen.
At the time, Smith worked at the Center for New American Security (“CNAS”) and was serving as a Clinton campaign foreign policy advisor. OSC Report of Interview of Julianne Smith on July 21, 2021 at 1. She advised investigators that she never received notification that her account was hacked, but was aware that CNAS was “regularly challenged by China and Russia.”
At the time of her Durham interview in July 2021, she was serving as an advisor to Tony Blinken, awaiting confirmation to serve as NATO Ambassador. But she is, as far as I understand, once again a private citizen.
In the unclassified Durham Report, Smith is referred to as “Foreign Policy Advisor-1.” I actually made some efforts to discover who this was when the report came out, asking senior Clinton people, to no avail (and the frothers got the identity wrong); even they had no idea.
But in the appendix — an appendix that indicates, without saying explicitly, that Russian hackers stole the same email soliciting criticism of Trump’s attacks on NATO that Smith turned over to Durham herself — Durham chose to name her, thereby deviating from the approach adopted by Michael Horowitz with his Hillary Report classified annex.
We are writing to enlist your support for the attached public statement. Both of us are Hillary Clinton supporters and advisors but hope that this statement could be signed by a bipartisan group[.] Donald Trump’s repeated denigration of the NATO Alliance, his refusal to support our Article 5 obligations to our European allies and his kid glove treatment of Russia and Vladimir Putin are among the most reckless statements made by a Presidential candidate in memory. 438
The same email sourced to an apparent subpoena return obscuring her name in the unclassified report, XXXX-0014561, is described as Classified Appendix Document-9 in the appendix.
This real document, doing nothing more than criticizing Trump for stances he did not hide, a criticism Hillary had been making for months, is one of the nuggets on which John Durham built a false conspiracy theory, which in turn built off a plan by Russian spies to gin up a conspiracy theory about,
I don’t know, some dark forces, like the FBI for instance, or better yet, Clinton sympathizers in IC, Pentagon, Deep State (or somewhere else), about American websites deploying a campaign to demonize the actions of Russia’s GRU.
As I have repeatedly shown, Durham took affirmative proof that Smith was not conspiring with his imagined chief conspirator Michael Sussmann and turned it into “oil to put into his fire.” Durham included texts between Smith and another Hillary advisor, reflecting her attempts to ask senior Obama officials (apparently including Lisa Monaco) yet failing to get answers about whether anyone was even investigating the Russian hack. Durham insanely judged that a hack victim, trying to find out of the FBI was investigating the hack, was part of a plot to frame Donald Trump.
Advisor-1 ‘s text message exchange with Foreign Policy Advisor-2 supports the notion that at least some officials within the campaign were seeking information about the FBI’s response to the DNC hack, which would be consistent with, and a means of furthering, the purported plan. Moreover, the campaign’s funding of the Steele Reports and Alfa Bank allegations as described in greater detail in Sections IV.D. l.b.ii and IV.E. l.b provide some additional support for the credibility to the information set forth in the Clinton Plan intelligence.
By the time Durham wrote this tripe, Michael Sussmann had forced Durham to obtain records about how persistently he had spoken to the FBI about the hacks, including records showing that FBI failed to consult with him before making its first public statement about the DNC hack.
It is wildly inconsistent to point to Smith’s unsuccessful attempts to get top national security officials to assuage her concerns about an investigation as proof of a conspiracy in which Michael Sussmann, who would have been the ring-leader, had been in weekly contact with the FBI about the investigation since they first alerted the FBI.
It’s not just that John Durham never charged Smith in his conspiracy conspiracy theory. It’s that his case was grotesquely stupid.
And, he himself concluded that his conspiracy conspiracy theory was based on composite emails — pretending to be raw intelligence — that the SVR fabricated into an attempt to frame Smith. As I show here, even the premise of his investigation involved treating SVR claims as Smith’s own.
Under DOJ guidelines — under the pretext that DOJ and FBI adopted less than a month ago — Smith is the kind of private citizen whose name you continue to mask, as Durham did in the public release two years ago. Certainly, there’s far less public interest in knowing the ID of someone the SVR framed 9 years ago than knowing why the President is making overt efforts to silence the sexual predator who, by his own confession, “stole” underage girls from his spa, recruiting at least one into sex slavery.
But Kash chose not to do that.
Kash chose to make the name of someone who had been framed — with his help — by Russian spies public.
Which pretty much demolishes his excuse for hiding details about what Trump knew about Ghislaine Maxwell stealing his girls.
Share this entry
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Screenshot-2025-08-04-at-2.57.53-PM.png10121080emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-08-04 10:22:282025-08-04 10:22:28By “Vilifying” SVR Victim Julianne Smith, Kash Patel Establishes Precedent to Share the Epstein Files
There was a fake story circulating the Intertoobz that in some kind of Turkish broadcast, Dmitry Medvedev said:
“Trump should not think that the video archive of his past immoralities is only in the hands of Mossad.”
The fake, as good fakes do, plays on something real about the moment, even while confirming what people want to be true.
After, earlier in the summer, giving Putin the time he wanted to finish whatever he wants in Ukraine, Trump has reversed course, sort of. He has been trying to stop Putin from doing what Putin was going to do anyway, wagging but not imposing sanctions. Five days ago, Trump declared he was imposing a ten day deadline on Putin or else he will stop the car (just like Dad used to threaten on long roadtrips).
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that Russia must agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine by Aug. 8 or risk sanctions, accelerating a deadline that was previously up in the air.
Trump in July set a 50-day deadline for the agreement with Ukraine, threatening tariffs if a deal was not made. On Monday, during his meeting with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, he said he was shortening this deadline to “10 or 12 days.”
Aboard Air Force One on Tuesday, on his way back to the United States, Trump said the clock was ticking and it was “10 days from today.”
“And then we’re going to put on tariffs,” Trump added, “and I don’t know if it’s going to affect Russia, because he wants to, obviously, probably keep the war going.”
The president has flipped on his views on the war in Ukraine throughout his second administration, recently expressing he is “disappointed” with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
He said Tuesday he has not yet heard from Russia about the new timeline.
Then Trump — still targeting Medvedev — claimed he was sending out his nukes.
Based on the highly provocative statements of the Former President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, who is now the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, I have ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that. Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Russian experts, however, mostly noted Russia yawning.
Could this be the first time in history a social media spat triggers nuclear escalation?
President Donald Trump, offended by posts by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, says he’s ordered two nuclear submarines to move closer to Russia.
So, how will Moscow respond? Are we on a path to a nuclear standoff between America and Russia? An internet-age version of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis?
I doubt it, judging by initial reaction in Russia.
Russian news outlets have been rather dismissive of Trump’s announcement.
Speaking to the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper, a military commentator concluded that Trump was “throwing a temper tantrum”.
A retired lieutenant-general told Kommersant that the US president’s talk of submarines was “meaningless blather. It’s how he gets his kicks”.
Then Putin — not Medvedev — made it known that Trump has misunderstood the scope of Putin’s ambition.
“All disappointments arise from inflated expectations,” Putin said, in an apparent reference to Trump’s “disappointment” with the Russian leader for not bringing an end to the war.
[snip]
Speaking on Friday at the Valaam Monastery on an island in north-western Russia, Putin said he expected negotiations with Ukraine to continue, adding that he viewed “negotiations positively”.
But in a veiled reference to growing pressure from Ukraine and its Western allies to agree to a long-term ceasefire, he said: “As for any disappointments on the part of anyone, all disappointments arise from inflated expectations.
Both Putin and Medvedev are making Trump look weak — or rather exposing that he is weak. My guess is they have good reason to know Trump’s is scared of exercising any real leverage over Putin, and for reasons that go well beyond any similarity to “Sleepy Joe.”
This fake Medvedev interview plays into that, suggesting that Russia has leverage because they have the Epstein files.
The claim is not remotely outlandish. Craig Unger has been focusing on the Russian aspects of Epstein’s past, including Svetlana Pozhidaeva, the woman trained as Russia trains its spies, who opened a modeling agency and then got a bunch of funding from Epstein to fund other things, as well as Masha Drokova, the pro-Russian activist who first served as Epstein’s publicist and then infiltrated Silicon Valley. More important, perhaps (since this is a fake Medvedev speech), is John Dougan, who was a West Palm Beach cop before he became — and still is — a Russian disinformation operative, one who overtly crafted anti-Harris disinformation in last year’s election.
His story begins in 2005 when Palm Beach authorities began investigating Epstein’s sex crimes. That meant the Epstein case had entered the court system, which in turn meant that his computers and videos became evidence, and new people—detectives, police, lawyers, and the like— suddenly had access to his secrets.
Enter John Mark Dougan, who had served as a deputy in the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office (PBSO) from 2002 to late 2008. With his shaved head and the sturdy build of a former Marine, Dougan is the sort of macho antihero of highly questionable reliability one encounters in the comic Florida crime fiction of Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard. His patchy job history has taken him laterally from police work to horse transportation to database design to piloting. In interviews with me in 2020, he presented himself as a hapless and Quixotic underdog who has been taking on the powers that be in Palm Beach County since he resigned in 2009.
But now he is an operative for Russian intelligence.
[snip]
In October, just before the election, Catherine Belton reported in The Washington Post that Dougan was directly working with the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, that he was being mentored by Alexander Dugin, a far-right ideologue sometimes known as “Putin’s brain,” and that his posts smearing Tim Walz and Kamala Harris had reached at least 64 million people.
I know separately that, as recently as June, Dougan was trying to resuscitate the ghost of Seth Rich.
As Unger explains, Dougan has told both him and Julie Brown that the real investigator behind the Epstein case left files with Dougan for safekeeping.
So, Dougan said, Recarey came over to his office in Palm Beach with a cartful of boxes. “One of the boxes was a bunch of DVDs— the blank kind that you record your own media on,” Dougan recalled. “They were labeled by date and spanned from 1994 to 2005 or so.”
Recarey didn’t elaborate about the contents of the boxes, but he said they were related to the Epstein case. In addition, Dougan told me, Recarey explained that his investigation was being sabotaged by both Epstein and his powerful allies, and he wanted to make sure he had copies in case they tried to make the originals disappear.
Dougan also told me that he later found out that Recarey’s disk contained 478 sex tapes of Epstein’s friends having sex with young girls, many of whom were underage.
But both Unger and Brown found the claim lacked merit.
The thing is, even if Dougan’s claims to have had Epstein tapes back in 2020 were false, it’s certainly possible that Russia has obtained copies now. That’s because Pam Bondi is an incompetent dipshit, and had 1,000 people do a rushed review of the Epstein materials on a SharePoint server.
Among other tasks, the lawyers were instructed to flag any mentions of Mr. Trump and other celebrities, including former President Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew, in the documents, according to one of the former officials familiar with the process. The references were recorded in a Microsoft SharePoint online collaborative file.
At the very least, those files would likely have been easy for any of several Elon DOGE boys to steal. And it’s possible the SharePoint server itself would have been vulnerable to the recently identified zero day that made certain kinds of SharePoint servers easily accessible.
Now, it’s certainly possible that Russia believes Trump won’t push too hard because they have precisely the same incriminating information that Todd Blanche is busy covering up.
But as has been the case for years, it was never the pee tapes that would most worry Trump. It’s the proof that Trump owes his presidency — now, both of them — to Russia. Remember how, days after Trump won, Nicolay Patrushev warned Trump that, this time, he better deliver on the promises , on precisely this issue, Ukraine.
In his future policies, including those on the Russian track US President-elect Donald Trump will rely on the commitments to the forces that brought him to power, rather than on election pledges, Russian presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev told the daily Kommersant in an interview.
“The election campaign is over,” Patrushev noted. “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”
He agreed that Trump, when he was still a candidate, “made many statements critical of the destructive foreign and domestic policies pursued by the current administration.”
“But very often election pledges in the United States can [d]iverge from subsequent actions,” he recalled.
Republican Donald Trump outperformed the candidate from the ruling Democratic Party, Vice President Kamala Harris, in the US elections held on November 5. Trump will take office on January 20, 2025. During the election campaign Trump mentioned his peace-oriented, pragmatic intentions, including in relations with Russia.
And while it is absolutely the case that Trump has been releasing Russia Russia Russia documents in the last several weeks in a desperate — and only partially successful — bid to get his mob refocused away from his sex trafficking scandal, I have been wondering all that time whether Trump wasn’t also trying to lay the groundwork for capitulation to Putin by preempting any claim that he’s a Russian agent by reminding his mob that their foundational belief is that Trump was wronged by the Russian investigation that showed that his Coffee Boy, National Security Advisor, Campaign Manager, personal lawyer, and rat-fucker were all adjudged to have lied to cover up his Russian ties.
Mind you, even that effort is having only limited success. Kash Patel and John Ratcliffe are so fucking incompetent they have instead disclosed proof that they’ve been carrying water for Russian spies for at least the last five years, and in Kash’s case, almost as soon as some Russian spooks thought it’d be fun to, “put more oil into the fire.”
Still, Trump is rousing the muscle memory of his base to view each and every capitulation Trump makes to Russia as proof of Democratic corruption. And he’s been doing so at the moment when he would have to prove his strength in front of the man who has played him so well for a decade.
Update: Fixed spelling of Unger’s last name.
Share this entry
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Screenshot-2025-08-04-at-06.44.30.png4601076emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-08-04 07:55:002025-08-06 10:51:53Donald Trump’s Parallel Ghislaine Maxwell and Vladimir Putin Problems
By July 2021, John Durham had virtually all the evidence he needed to know that both premises of his investigation — that Hillary Clinton had a plan to frame Donald Trump, and FBI learned about that plan but ignored it when they relied on the Steele dossier and accepted the Alfa Bank allegations — were false. Yet he continued going for two more years anyway, pursuing prosecutions of Michael Sussmann and Igor Danchenko, both of which resulted in acquittals.
You might be forgiven, more than two years after John Durham closed up shop, if you’ve forgotten why he even spent four years chasing what is now clear was Russian disinformation, effectively investigating people because they had been hacked by Russian spies who framed them as part of a plan to, “put more oil into the fire.”
There are several explanations “why” Durham conducted this investigation, including:
Bill Barr determined, before he even saw the evidence acquired by Mueller (if he ever did), there should be an investigation to avenge the Russian investigation
Durham got snookered into chasing Russian conspiracy theories designed to stoke polarization, doing great damage in the process
In 2020, John Ratcliffe reported a referral from the CIA to the FBI
Durham’s report misleadingly suggests it was the last one: the declassification of the SVR report that John Ratcliffe did — first a report about the SVR allegation, then two exhibits about it — in September and October 2020. By that point, Durham had done at least four interviews focused primarily on the SVR allegation: a September 17, 2019 interview with the FBI analyst who knew that collection best, a February 27, 2020 interview with some kind of spook, two July 8, 2020 interviews with some IC officers, and an interview with another IC officer the day Ratcliffe released the exhibits. (Given that Ratcliffe boasted about how many times he met with Durham, that October 7 interview could well be Ratcliffe himself.)
The Office also considered as part of its investigation the government’s handling of certain intelligence that it received during the summer of 2016. That intelligence concerned the purported “approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.” 391 We refer to that intelligence hereafter as the “Clinton Plan intelligence.” DNI John Ratcliffe declassified the following information about the Clinton Plan intelligence in September 2020 and conveyed it to the Senate Judiciary Committee:
In late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee. The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.
According to his handwritten notes, CIA Director Brennan subsequently briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials on the intelligence, including the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.”
On 07 September 2016, U.S. intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral to FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok regarding “U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private mail server.” 392
The Clinton Plan intelligence was relevant to the Office’s investigation for two reasons.
First, the Clinton Plan intelligence itself and on its face arguably suggested that private actors affiliated with the Clinton campaign were seeking in 2016 to promote a false or exaggerated narrative to the public and to U.S. government agencies about Trump’s possible ties to Russia. Given the significant quantity of materials the FBI and other government agencies did in fact receive during the 2016 presidential election season and afterwards that originated with and/or were funded by the Clinton campaign or affiliated persons (i.e., the Steele Dossier reports, the Alfa Bank allegations, and the Yotaphone allegations), the Clinton Plan intelligence prompted the Office to consider (i) whether there was in fact a plan by the Clinton campaign to tie Trump to Russia in order to “stir[] up a scandal” in advance of the 2016 presidential election, and (ii) if such a plan existed, whether an aspect or component of that plan was to intentionally provide knowingly false and/or misleading information to the FBI or other agencies in furtherance of such a plan. 393
Second, the Clinton Plan intelligence was also highly relevant to the Office’s review and investigation because it was part of the mosaic of information that became known to certain U.S. officials at or before the time they made critical decisions in the Crossfire Hurricane case and in related law enforcement and intelligence efforts. Because these officials relied, at least in part, on materials provided or funded by the Clinton campaign and/or the DNC when seeking FISA warrants against a U.S. citizen (i.e., the Steele Dossier reports) and taking other investigative steps, the Clinton Plan intelligence had potential bearing on the reliability and credibility of those materials. Put another way, this intelligence-taken at face value-was arguably highly relevant and exculpatory because it could be read in fuller context, and in combination with other facts, to suggest that materials such as the Steele Dossier reports and the Alfa Bank allegations (discussed below and in greater detail in Section IV.E. l) were part of a political effort to smear a political opponent and to use the resources of the federal government’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies in support of a political objective. The Office therefore examined whether, and precisely when, U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials became aware of the Clinton Plan intelligence; whether they vetted and analyzed the intelligence to understand its potential significance; and whether those officials, in turn, incorporated the intelligence into their decision-making regarding the investigation of individuals who were part of the Trump campaign and had possible ties to Russian election interference efforts.
I’ll come back to the significance of precisely what Ratcliffe and Kash declassified.
Durham depends on a different conspiracy theory in each report
For now, consider how each of his two volumes (unclassified, classified) confess that one of these two prongs — Clinton had a plan, and the FBI ignored that she did — was false, but then obscures that the other was, too.
Falsely claimed the Russian intelligence report alleging Hillary had a plan to smear Trump about his ties to Russia did — or would even have to — rely on false information
Misrepresented the nature of the report about Hillary, thereby misrepresenting the dissemination of SVR intelligence within the Intelligence Community
Only found any confirmation for his Clinton conspiracy conspiracy theory from witnesses whose memories had been radically altered by the threat of criminal prosecution; everyone else disclaimed every shred of Durham’s Clinton conspiracy conspiracy theory
There are just a few things structurally that seeing the classified annex adds. Here’s how the two sections map.
Both tell the story of the SVR Report (just the classified annex describes the underlying documents or concedes they were fabricated). Both describe how none of Hillary’s people knew anything about Durham’s Clinton conspiracy conspiracy theory. Both point to true things — reliance on an accurate Franklin Foer story that Durham miscites, interest in whether the FBI was investigating, and an effort to condemn Trump for his attacks on NATO — to bolster Durham’s case that his Clinton conspiracy conspiracy theory is true, though in the classified annex, Durham puts these details in his “The authenticity of the Benardo emails” section.
Both include a section that points to some other part of his (or the right wing’s) obsessions to bolster the Clinton conspiracy conspiracy theory. The unclassified report has a section that misrepresents both Fusion’s dissemination of the Steele dossier and Clinton’s media push of the Alfa Bank allegations (in the process, conflicting with other parts of his report and the results of his investigations) to buck up his theory. The classified annex has a section (after the conclusion that the emails were “composites” and a section describing other times the US Intelligence Community treated these SVR documents as authentic) pointing to Loretta Lynch’s “odd” reaction to a briefing on the two SVR reports claiming she was intervening in the Clinton email investigation. It’s the inclusion of that briefing (Durham conveniently ignores both that the FBI found these documents to be “objectively false” and the reference to Jim Comey throwing the election for Republicans) that allows Durham to decide that, while the emails on which the report was based were probably “composites,” the Clinton plan might be true (this is the conclusion Sean Davis and with him FBI Director Kash Patel cling to) and so his investigation into the FBI’s purported receipt of a report about it legitimate.
The other remarkable difference between the unclassified and classified report is in the way Durham describes his certainty that what he calls a referral ever got to the FBI — or more specifically, Peter Strzok — in the first place. His unclassified report includes an entire paragraph describing that no one on the Crossfire Hurricane team remembered seeing it.
The Office showed portions of the Clinton Plan intelligence to a number of individuals who were actively involved in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Most advised they had never seen the intelligence before, and some expressed surprise and dismay upon learning of it. For example, the original Supervisory Special Agent on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, Supervisory Special Agent-1, reviewed the intelligence during one of his interviews with the Office. 428 After reading it, Supervisory Special Agent-1 became visibly upset and emotional, left the interview room with his counsel, and subsequently returned to state emphatically that he had never been apprised ofthe Clinton Plan intelligence and had never seen the aforementioned Referral Memo. 429 Supervisory Special Agent-1 expressed a sense of betrayal that no one had informed him ofthe intelligence. When the Office cautioned Supervisory Special Agent-1 that we had not verified or corroborated the accuracy of the intelligence and its assertions regarding the Clinton campaign, Supervisory Special Agent-1 responded firmly that regardless of whether its contents were true, he should have been informed of it. 430
During Durham’s testimony to Congress, Strzok revealed that 1) contrary to Durham’s insinuations, he had spoken with with Durham’s investigators and 2) the copy of the referral that Durham’s team showed him was not an FBI copy, suggesting that Durham also had no proof the document ever made it to the FBI.
So in the unclassified report, Durham confesses his entire premise — that the FBI received this report and didn’t respond as he thinks they should have — may be utter bullshit, because they never received it.
Yet in his classified report, he states as fact, threedifferenttimes, that it was sent to the FBI. He says this twice in the section purporting to validate the import of this report because the Intelligence Community responded to it, section 4 above.
In addition, as described in the unclassified report, on September 7, 2016, the CIA sent the FBI an “investigative referral” memorandum that referred to, among other information, the purported Clinton campaign plan.
[snip]
The DNI also declassified a portion of former CIA Director Brennan’s handwritten notes that describe the August 3, 2016 meeting with President Obama and the CIA Referral Memorandumsent to Director Comey and Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok. [my emphasis]
And then in the conclusion — the one Davis is impressed with — finding that even though the email on which this conspiracy theory was based is a composite, nevertheless it was important because the CIA sent a referral memo that he falsely suggests actually arrived at its destination.
Moreover, in early September 2016, the CIA prepared a referral memorandum on the information regarding the purported “plan” that went to the FBI [my emphasis]
So looking at these two together, the classified annex concludes that the emails behind the report that launched this whole project are “composites,” but because the CIA sent the FBI a referral memo, argues it was a legitimate exercise to review how the FBI responded to that referral memo. Then the unclassified report concedes it has no proof the CIA referral ever made it to the Crossfire Hurricane team, but the investigation was legitimate because Clinton may have shared knowingly false allegations about Trump with the FBI.
John Ratcliffe committed the crime John Durham was hunting
Now consider how those Ratcliffe declassifications cabined the investigation.
He describes that in interviews with Clinton and FBI people (to the extent that he’s not covering up FBI interviews that don’t help him), he used the declassified files with people who lacked clearance (including, with Jennifer Palmieri, the referral document rather than the report itself) and used a redacted version of the emails with people who had clearance, as well as Leonard Benardo. So his question about “Clinton plan” all focused on how fevered right wingers defined it.
I’ve already talked about the blind spots built into John Brennan’s notes. These notes span the fifth and sixth pages of Brennan’s notes, meaning a whole lot of the briefing was more important. They’re described as offering insight into “Russian activities,” not Hillary’s (the CIA couldn’t investigate Hillary’s in any case). The first redacted paragraph likely describes the SVR targets in question.
But there’s a bullet before the description of the purported Hillary plan, and who knows how much after it.
Now check out where the word, “vilify” appears in the known SVR documents. The actual draft report — the purported subject of this investigation — used the word, “smear.” The two emails dated July 25 using a Russian idiom, along with the email between spooks discussing starting a conspiracy theory, use the word, “demonize.” The purported July 27 email from Benardo doesn’t use any such word.
The word “vilify” appears in this email between spooks — the one that follows the one in which they discuss a plan to start a conspiracy theory about the Deep State.
Even in the classified appendix, Durham provides very little of the email, and half of what is there is redacted.
Now look at the referral memo.
It refers to “an exchange,” not a draft memo, which is what the memo in question is. It’s hard to imagine, at this point, what could be behind that redaction about Guccifer. And while there’s a mention in the report itself to Guccifer, that doesn’t pertain to Hillary. It’s a claim about what the FBI has discovered:
Clinton’s supporters in the FBI lack conclusive irrefutable evidence of the Russian Federation’s involvement in the scandal, tied to the theft of the DNC’s correspondence. In the meantime, during the launched investigation, there has been a multitude of circumstantial evidence that the alias of Guccifer 2.0 (the name of the hacker who accepted responsibility for the incident) was, in fact, used to cover up a special unit of the GRU of the Russian Federation Defense Ministry’s General Staff.
The email between the two spooks — which could fairly be called “an exchange” — ties the attribution to Guccifer directly to the plan to start a conspiracy theory about 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.
Both these reports — the Brennan notes and the CIA referral to FBI — appear to refer not to the draft report about Hillary’s claimed plan, but instead to communications between the Russian spooks reflecting a plan to invent a conspiracy theory about Hillary to muddle the Guccifer attribution (which is precisely what Roger Stone immediately did).
If that’s right, it means it was never a Clinton plan, it was an SVR plan. That makes sense; after all, John Brennan wouldn’t be permitted to investigate Hillary Clinton’s plans to do oppo research, but he would be permitted to investigate SVR’s plans to frame Hillary. And that’s what he told Durham: he was focused not on Hillary’s plan but Russia’s.
When interviewed, Brennan generally recalled reviewing the materials but stated he did not recall focusing specifically on its assertions regarding the Clinton campaign’s purported plan. 400 Brennan recalled instead focusing on Russia’s role in hacking the DNC. 401
And having apparently mischaracterized what actually elicited CIA attention, Durham then spent paragraphs and paragraphs talking about how if the FBI had simply factored in a conspiracy theory invented by SVR to muddle the GRU attribution, then they might not have relied on the Steele dossier (itself being injected with Russian disinformation) or accepted the Alfa Bank allegations.
Indeed, Durham actually considered whether Peter Strzok committed a crime by ignoring his misrepresentation of the referral that he had no evidence Strzok ever received.
Whether these failures by U.S. officials amounted to criminal acts, however, is a different question. In order for the above-described facts to give rise to criminal liability under federal civil rights statutes, the Office would need to, for example, identify one or more persons who (i) knew the Clinton campaign intended to falsely accuse its opponent with specific information or allegations, (ii) intentionally disregarded a particular civil right of a particular person (such as the right to be free of unreasonable searches or seizures), and (iii) then intentionally aided that effort by taking investigative steps based on those allegations while knowing that they were false.
[snip]
Although the evidence we collected revealed a troubling disregard for the Clinton Plan intelligence and potential confirmation bias in favor of continued investigative scrutiny of Trump and his associates, it did not yield evidence sufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that any FBI or CIA officials494 intentionally furthered a Clinton campaign plan to frame or falsely accuse Trump of improper ties to Russia.
But Durham never factors into his own investigation those other two emails between spooks, both of which likely precede the report he claimed he was investigating. He never mentions them at all. Had he factored those in, all of this would have been shut down in 2021.
And after claiming that Clinton had a plan to falsely accuse her opponent rather than that SVR had a plan to falsely accuse Hillary, Durham used all this to get warrants targeting Michael Sussmann and Igor Danchenko. He, “intentionally disregarded a particular civil right of [Sussmann and Danchenko] (such as the right to be free of unreasonable searches or seizures), and (iii) then intentionally aided that effort by taking investigative steps based on those allegations while knowing that they were false.”
Once you see those two other emails between the Russian spooks — the one linking Guccifer directly to the plan to talk about the Deep State and the one using the word “vilify,” both of which Durham disregarded — then you have evidence that Kash, Ratcliffe, and Durham himself knew the SVR intended to falsely accuse Hillary, then took investigative steps based on those allegations that were clearly fabricated.
They took four whole years of investigative steps.
No wonder Durham allegedly tried to bury all this in burn bags.
Update: Remember that Kash, at a time he was a private citizen, was making claims making insinuations about Hillary making a plan in July 2016.
Update: And Ratcliffe was similarly making false claims on this topic while a private citizen.
Share this entry
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Screenshot-2025-08-03-at-5.31.00-PM-1.png12401422emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-08-03 13:50:292025-08-05 05:54:19John Ratcliffe and Kash Patel — and Durham Himself — Committed the Crime John Durham Was Hunting
I want to talk about one paragraph that appears in this screed from Matty “Dick Pics” Taibbi, written after Matty declared the Durham classified annex is proof he’s been right for years, responding to Charlie Savage’s explainer on the import of the discovery that the emails — from which Russian spies purportedly wrote a report claiming Hillary was going to politicize Trump’s ties with Russia — were manufactured. The rest of the rant boils down to “NYT wah wah wah NYT NYT” and is of course riddled with errors.
But this short paragraph is a piece of work, even for MattyDickPics.
Matty dismisses the import that the emails behind the report that he and the right wing have chased for years were “assembled by Russian spies.” He claims this is just about a “pair” of emails, but that dodges what was really there:
An email between two Russian spooks, which Durham describes to be dated July 26, talking about ginning up a conspiracy theory about the Deep State
Another email purportedly dated July 27 containing the imagined smoking gun that Clinton approved this alleged plan; the email was attached to an email between spooks that seems to reference their plan to gin up a conspiracy theory
The report itself, the date of which Durham has always hidden and we still don’t know (but it is either dated July 27, incorporating that email purportedly dated July 27, or it precedes the date of the main piece of evidence supporting the claim in the report)
It’s enough, for Matty, that the emails were “likely pulled by Russians from other real American victims of hacking.” Nevermind that only one other email reflecting the language of the email has been found, and that other email was largely unrelated to Hillary Clinton and, oh, also pertained to Russian rat-fucking and language play. It’s enough for Matty that these Russian spies cut-and-pasted from something else they stole to justify treating the claims based on that purported email as “true.”
You see, Matty wants to separate those emails (admittedly Savage refers to them as a pair, just like Matty, but it matters that there are two drafts of the July 25 one) from the larger cache — the existence of emails in English using a Russian idiom dated around the same time as some Russian spies decided to gin up a conspiracy theory, this conspiracy theory, the one Matty has monetized for years.
To dismiss the fact that conspiracy theory he has monetized for years is based on a report based on manufactured emails incorporating a Russian idiom in English, Matty says it doesn’t matter, first, because there are numerous other American “victims,” scare quotes. The sheer breadth of Russian hacking stands in for accuracy for Matty, and he’s happy to dismiss the plight of the victims if he has to.
He also claims that the larger SVR collection “has been described in multiple other reports as real.” Matty is conflating — as other Russian propagandists have — “real” for “accurate.” Here’s what those other reports have said:
2020 John Ratcliffe email: Ratcliffe’s initial disclosure of this report explains, “The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.”
2020 HPSCI Report: The right wing report incorporated a great number of SVR reports, without any discussion of whether the things they claimed about Hillary Clinton — such as that she has Type 2 diabetes — match known reality. More importantly, to sustain their claim that these are “real,” they ignore the part of one of the Lynch reports stating that Jim Comey would draw out the Clinton email investigation to help Republicans, which is what actually happened, and so if true would mean Trump didn’t win without help. We know with certainty that the authors of that report cherry-picked what was available to serve their needs. (Indeed, we know they ignored the email between Russian spooks about ginning up a conspiracy theory.)
So, no, Matty. While other reports describe these documents as authentically obtained from SVR, those other reports either dodge the question, raise real questions about accuracy, or declare several “objectively false.”
Nothing in this performance from Matty — his utter disinterest in provenance, a disdain for “victims” of Russian aggression, and a conflation of “authentic” for “true” — is new.
It’s just a really condensed example of his grift, written in response to the exposure that his nine-year grift was always built on a deliberate conspiracy theory ginned up by Russian spies exploiting people just like him.
Share this entry
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Screenshot-2025-08-03-at-1.53.47-PM.png362906emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-08-03 09:11:012025-08-03 16:24:38MattyDickPics Taibbi Doesn’t Like When Charlie Savage Takes Away His Russian Spy Toys
