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John Ratcliffe and Kash Patel — and Durham Himself — Committed the Crime John Durham Was Hunting

August 3, 2025/11 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

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.

This post, which explains Durham’s Clinton conspiracy conspiracy theory, holds up very well (if I do say so myself) even after the annex was declassified. It shows that Durham:

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, three different times, 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 Memorandum sent 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.

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Think of the HPSCI Report as a Time Machine to Launder Donald Trump’s Russia Russia Russia Claims

July 27, 2025/8 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

On July 11, 2017, I noted that we had proof that Trump’s claims he had been wiretapped were false. That’s because, if the Intelligence Community had found an exchange like the one Don Jr released that day — in which someone working for Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov offered Don Jr, “very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump” and he responded, “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” then the confidence level for the Intelligence Community Assessment that Russia had affirmatively tried to help Donald Trump get elected would have been high, even for the NSA (which said it only had moderate confidence).

And yet we’re still arguing over whether that judgement was fair eight years later.

The HPSCI report released the other day — which is dated September 18, 2020, but which right wing HPSCI Chair Rick Crawford misleadingly released alongside a statement pretending it was done in January 2017, and which the architect of the case for the Iraq War, Fred Fleitz, says was done in 2018 — seems to have been a response to a more rigorous SSCI Report released weeks earlier that confirmed Putin did want Trump to win. (Indeed, Fleitz offers a garbage explanation to claim this HPSCI Report is more credible than the SSCI one.)

The HPSCI report manages to challenge the SSCI conclusion by revisiting a different question: Not, did Russia take actions to help Trump win the election that created a grave counterintelligence threat (the SSCI report included, but went far beyond, the evidence released in the Mueller Report) but, did the IC claim that Putin did want Trump to win, made in a rushed report published in the first days of 2017, have enough evidence behind it at the time?

The report accuses John Brennan of having made up his mind to that question, yes, Putin aspired to help Trump, and thereby influenced the result. Fair enough (though as I read it I wondered whether Brennan knew of the advance notice of the email leak that George Papadopoulos got, and so had a source of confidence not reflected in the report; and the nature of the claim in the HPSCI report differs from the nature of the claim in a report John Ratcliffe released last week). But the HPSCI report does the exact same thing, delivering up the result that Donald Trump wanted, and it did so, in part, by intentionally remaining dumb to many, but not all, of the things that had been learned since.

Just as one example, the report asserts,

[T]he available intelligence showed: No Putin orders directing or suggesting operations intended to elect Trump (by contrast, Intelligence on Russian operations on German elections specifically mentioned Putin’s goal of defeating Chancellor Merkel).

This refers to this ICA judgment predicting that Germany would be the next country in whose elections Russia would interfere. Only, that judgement turned out to be wrong; Russia conducted the same kind of hack-and-leak campaign targeting Emmanuel Macron in May 2017 (with the help of pro-Trump influencers), so while that might be a good argument in January 2017, it fails after May 2017, to say nothing of September 2020.

More importantly, it only references the intelligence available through December 29, 2016, so wouldn’t include the damning email to Don Jr disclosed in July 2017. Because the ICA didn’t include ongoing FBI investigations, it wouldn’t include Papadopoulos’ brags about Russian interference that the FBI knew about, but didn’t, couldn’t, include in the report. It wouldn’t include the intercepts between Mike Flynn and Sergei Kislyak discovered in that very period as the IC sought to explain why Putin decided not to retaliate against US sanctions.

The HPSCI report concluded there was not enough intelligence to back a high confidence conclusion that Putin wanted to help Trump win by focusing only on the time before FBI started looking in earnest.

In any case, as I’ll show, in several places, the report breaks the conceit that they’re evaluating only the information available to the IC on December 29, 2016.

The HPSCI Report, then, is not so much a useful piece of analysis, but a time machine, an attempt, weeks before the 2020 election, to set the clock back for candidate Donald Trump to the time before it became clear he really did benefit from help from Russia.

And it doesn’t even do that very well.

The report structure

As laid out below, the report doesn’t hide that its sole goal is to erase the judgment that Putin wanted to elect Trump. Its first finding is that everything else in the ICA is sound, followed by seven poorly-organized findings ostensibly explaining why the assessment that Putin aspired to help Trump was unsound.

Finding 1: The bulk of the ICA judgements were sound.
Finding 2: Significant tradecraft failures cast doubt on the ICA judgments of Putin’s intentions, claiming that only on the judgment that Putin aspired to help Trump, the ICA tradecraft failed.
Finding 3: The ICA failed to acknowledge that key judgements were based on raw intelligence that did not meet tradecraft standards: This claims that of 15 sources behind the judgment, 12 were unremarkable, but three “contained flawed information and these became foundational” to the claim Putin aspired to help Trump win.
- One was a fragment, claiming that Putin “counted on” a Trump win, that John Brennan overruled professionals to include.
- A second was a substandard (Ukrainian) report from an unknown subsource about a February 2016 Russian plan recommending engagement with Trump.
- A third was a another substandard source from an unknown source. It claimed that Russia preferred Republicans over Democrats because they didn’t care about human rights.
Finding 4: The ICA excluded significant intelligence that contradicted its judgment. This section discusses Russia explaining why there were downsides to both candidates.
Finding 5: The ICA disregarded Russian behavior that undermined its judgment that Putin aspired to help Trump win. This section, which notes that Moscow was receiving reports on US polling but doesn’t mention (!!!) that some came from Trump’s campaign manager, argues that since the election got close in its final weeks, you would have expected Putin to dump all the other derogatory intelligence he had on Hillary. That argument provides an opportunity to parrot the SVR documents discussed here. It also looked at what it claimed were Russian leaks (really, just one) that it said made Trump look bad. Finally, it ludicrously suggested that the disparate hacking of Hillary is just attributed to her being an easier target.
Finding 6: The ICA misrepresented documents on Putin’s intention. This pertains significantly to advice Putin got (it may also rely on the SVR documents). A 10-page attack on the dossier is put in here for contrived reasons, which I’ll return to in another post.
Finding 7: The ICA failed to consider alternate explanations. This section significantly revisits the SVR documents.
Finding 8: The ICA was unnecessarily rushed.

Some of this is quite reasonable. For example, Finding 4 notes that Russia was going to be unhappy with either candidate; I think Trump opponents often forget that Putin didn’t want a strong Trump, he wanted a Trump whose narcissism would create more problems than Hillary.

In Finding 8, sure this report was rushed. It had to be.

Some of the criticism of Brennan — if accurate, but as noted the complaint here is different from the complaint in more recent reports — seems fair.

The flawed reports (Finding 4)

In several other areas, the analysis only survives by relying on that time machine effect.

The report claims that of 15 pieces of intelligence to back the Putin finding, three were not just substandard, but were pushed through by Brennan.

The first I address here. Brennan pushed to include a report that Putin approved the DNC leak because he was “counting on” a Trump victory. The CIA, years later, stands by the quality of the source and the fact that the interpretation in the ICA, “was most consistent with the raw intelligence.”

The second of these three reports is far more interesting. It describes a report from Kyiv (the Republicans spell it Kiev) laying out a plan, starting in February 2016, to place someone pro-Russian on Trump’s campaign team. The analysis of this lead focuses on questionable sourcing and potential Ukrainian bias.

But the time machine effect of this report frees Republicans from accounting for the fact that Trump, starting in February 2016, in fact did place a pro-Kremlin official on his “election team,” Paul Manafort, and Manafort sought to monetize his role there by getting pro-Russian Ukrainians and a Russian oligarch to pay him.

And Konstantin Kilimnik, in Ukraine, seemed to know of that plan before Manafort was installed. This report may have looked problematic for inclusion in December 2016 (though by that point Manafort’s cover-up of his Russian ties was public). But it looked prescient by 2020.

The third report is similar. HPSCI’s response begins a long focus of the report attempting to debunk the underlying intelligence — a claim that Russia perceived Republicans to be less supportive of human rights — with a bunch of whataboutism. How dare you call the party of torture less supportive of human rights, the right wingers wail. Did you know that Reagan said, “tear down this wall”? All the while ignoring that Trump ran on an affirmatively pro-torture platform.

“They’re both poison” (Finding 5, 7)

In other words, a central pillar of the report is to complain that intelligence analysts didn’t consider alternative explanations for the intelligence they were looking at.

This was about the stage of reading this report where I could get not get the scene from Princess Bride where Vizzini attempts to outsmart the Dread Pirate Roberts out of my head.

That’s true because some of the arguments — and they go on for pages and pages — sound just as stupid as Vizzini does. Republicans tie themselves in knots trying to come up with alternative explanations. Republicans refuse to consider that the SVR hacks, which I wrote about here, were meant for intelligence collection but the foot-stomping GRU ones were not. They treat all the SVR reports — including the ones that, FBI had decided years before 2020 were objectively false or the one that Ratcliffe released days before this report warning it “may reflect exaggeration or fabrication” — as true and damning. They obsess about the derogatory claims about Hillary’s health and mental fitness without even considering the report Hillary released in real time after her pneumonia scare. They actually believe a claim that European leaders doubted Hillary could lead. These reports obviously play on right wing biases, and sure enough HPSCI’s Republicans cling to those Russian spy claims in the report, just as they have since Tulsi emphasized them. In a report that wails mightily (and correctly in at least one case, cited the parallel CIA report) about leaving out contrary information, HPSCI simply leaves out the Jim Comey allegation in one of the SVR reports, which if true, would explain why Putin wouldn’t have to (and didn’t) dump damning intel close to the election: Because Putin believed that “Comey is leaning more to the [R]epublicans, and most likely he will be dragging this investigation until the presidential elections,” something that turned out to be true. In other words, they cherry pick which Russian spy products they choose to parrot, one of the sins they accuse the ICA team of, but they do so with years of hindsight that made clear how foolish that was.

This report has an entire section on how Putin would have tracked polling and so knew he could get Trump over the line if he dumped opposition late in the campaign (which, of course, he did), without blushing about one source for that polling: Manafort’s regular provision of it via Kilimnik, something that became public between the ICA release in 2017 and this HPSCI report in September 2020.

Their claims get more ridiculous from there. Even in the face of the non-stop flood of Hillary emails released in 2016, right wingers cling to the single report from Colin Powell calling Trump “a national disgrace” as proof Putin doesn’t love Trump.

I mean, it’s pretty funny to me. But then ultimately it gets back to what Wesley, the Dread Pirate Roberts, said when Buttercup concluded that Wesley had put the poison in his own cup. He didn’t. He put poison in both glasses.

All the ICA did — and it’s worth reading how the “aspired to” section includes a lot of explanation as to why Putin would prefer Trump to which right wingers didn’t and don’t object, such as Trump’s willingness to partner with Russia on terrorism or make deals — all the ICA did was say that Putin wanted Trump to win. And right wingers have gone to all lengths, up to and including parroting Russian spies in the White House, to degrade the strength of that claim as it was made from high to moderate confidence years after it became clear the judgment was correct.

Ultimately the effort was intended and bound to drive more polarization. Which point the right wingers make but — oh my goodness look how they do it?!?! They point to the IRA’s activities after the election that claimed to oppose Trump’s election.

But they source that to the Robert Mueller IRA indictment, dated February 16, 2018, over a year after the ICA was completed.

By February 2018, there was abundant public evidence that Putin preferred Trump, including that letter to Don Jr as well as the guilty pleas of George Papadopoulos and Mike Flynn. By 2020, the date of this report, court filings were public describing Manafort’s lies that, Amy Berman Jackson judged, he told to cover up what happened at an August 2, 2016 meeting with alleged Russian spy where they discussed how Trump planned to win, how Manafort would get paid by pro-Russian Ukrainians and debt relief from Oleg Deripaska, and a plan to carve up Ukraine. But only here, only amid their desperate attempt to find proof that Vladimir Putin does too hate Donald Trump, do they confess they’ve read any of the charging documents from Mueller.

That is, the time machine was fake, just an attempt to make all the evidence laid out in the SSCI report go away.

As I’ll show, what HPSCI did with the dossier was even worse — so much worse I had to break it out as its own post. There, they don’t even try to maintain the illusion they were dumb to everything they learned since the ICA.

But as to their main report, claiming to assess the treatment of the intelligence in 2017 — a feigned ignorance that is central to their rebuttal of one of three “substandard” intelligence reports — they can’t even maintain that ploy as they attempt to whatabout proof that Putin wanted to help Trump win.

Links

A Dossier Steal: HPSCI Expertly Discloses Their Own Shoddy Cover-Up

Think of the HPSCI Report as a Time Machine to Launder Donald Trump’s Russia Russia Russia Claims

Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe Reveal Putin “Was Counting on” a Trump Win

Tulsi Gabbard Teams Up with Russian Spies to Wiretap and Unmask Hillary Clinton

The Secrets about Russia’s Influence Operation that Tulsi Gabbard Is Still Keeping from Us

Tulsi Gabbard Accuses Kash Patel of Covering Up for the Obama Deep State

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Trump’s Slop and Ouch First Week

January 26, 2025/102 Comments/in Biden Administration, emptywheel, Trump 2.0 /by emptywheel

Trump’s failson practically wet himself with a Tweet bragging about what CIA Director John Ratcliffe accomplished on his first day at the office.

Given John Brennan’s 2023 testimony that stood by the opinion expressed in the letter, Jr’s claim he “lied” may well be legally actionable (and Brennan said then, as he did the other day, that the only reason he retained his clearance was for intelligence officials to be able to consult with him). Plus, many if not most of the people from whom Ratcliffe “strip[ped] security clearances” didn’t have them; the most impotent kind of signaling possible. But it worked for Trump’s failson!

Jr also makes a big deal of the fact that John Ratcliffe, without explaining the meaning of a “low confidence” assessment, released a report that his predecessor, William Burns, ordered up.

Jr was, like mediocre men are wont to do, grading Ratcliffe on a curve. And that was his idea of a big win.

Trump has overtly pitched a claim he’s engaged in Shock and Awe (and, given the widespread adoption of the term, seems to be pushing a similar campaign to the press). While the attention on Trump’s attack on rule of law and marginalized people is absolutely merited, in addition to wowing a captive press, Trump’s declaration of Shock and Awe has shifted the focus away from ways that Trump has affirmatively hurt Americans, including, undoubtedly, a great number of his own supporters, what I’m dubbing his Slop and Ouch campaign.

Trump halt on NIH funding literally shut down cancer treatment already in process (ironically, since Trump claimed he was attacking Joe Biden’s “cancer” when signing many of his Executive Orders). Cancer doesn’t doesn’t discriminate against MAGAts. Shutting down cancer trials may literally be taking away a Trump’s supporter’s latest hope of a cure.

Trump’s attacks on Biden’s efforts to lower drug prices may lead to higher costs for generic prices and could even lead to higher prices for diabetes drugs (setting aside any impact threatened tariffs on Denmark would have on Ozempic prices).

Trump reversed access to wind power, which has become cheaper than fossil fuels. This will force American consumers to pay more for dirtier fuel. Foreign competitors are already licking their lips about the competitive advantage it gives them.

Trump’s attack on programs focused on environmental justice will harm poor rural communities.

And after spending four years declaring one after another infrastructure week only to have Joe Biden deliver it right away, Trump is threatening the funding for bridge and road projects already underway. He’s taking away what he promised — but failed to deliver — during his first term.

His rescission of job offers throughout government (though Veterans groups were able to get a reversal on VA care) has left thousands stuck with their lives in limbo, with movers arriving but no job to move to on the other end.

Trump’s attack on public health even as Avian Flu threatens to snowball will exacerbate the already increasing price of eggs — which Trump himself made a key campaign plank.

And because he is choosing to pursue his deportation policy in the stupidest way possible, it is creating problems. HCI detained three people in a Newark raid with out a warrant, reportedly including a Puerto Rican and a veteran. And Mexico refused a landing request for a deportation flight on a military plane (it accepted four others that were on chartered flights, which cost less to run and may have greater capacity; also, Colombia has since blocked a military transport flight); military flights to Guatemala avoided Mexican airspace, suggesting Mexico refused overflight requests as well. Trump is also claiming repatriation flights are instead deportation flights in false claims that he’s delivering on his promise of mass deportation. And the single stay stats many are boasting about aren’t higher than some days during 2022. Despite his claims of Shock and Awe, Trump has had to lie to support his claims he succeeded in doing the one thing he has prioritized most.

And all that’s before the inflationary effect of deporting those who pick America’s food and build her homes.

None of this takes away from the grave damage Trump did in his first week, particularly to those like Trans people and migrants he is trying to treat as unpersons.

I don’t mean to minimize the ways this is going to get far worse. It will get far worse. It will devastate the lives of a lot of vulnerable people.

There’s nothing good about the fact that, in addition to all the people Trump has deliberately targeted for cruelty, Trump has also inflicted real damage on his own supporters. But it’s a sign of one direction where this could head, particularly as a dumbing down of government hires in favor of sycophants starts degrading efficacy.

An ideology that places grievance above all else — an ideology that is willing to hurt America if that’s what it takes to reverse the successes of the Biden Administration — is an ideology guaranteed to impose pain far beyond those targeted for spectacle and cruelty.

Underneath Trump’s Shock and Awe that is doing grave damage to the Constitution and Trump’s marginalized targets, there’s a Slop and Ouch that targets everyone this side of his billionaire friends. And that needs to remain visible, too.

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“Embarrassingly Wrong:” The Ongoing Misinformation Campaign about the Hunter Biden Hard Drive

January 24, 2025/28 Comments/in 2020 Presidential Election, 2024 Presidential Election, Trump 2.0 /by emptywheel

Trump’s Executive Order stripping 51 former spooks of clearance for writing a true letter expressing their opinion that Rudy Giuliani’s claims to have Hunter Biden’s emails “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” has led to inevitable false claims about the hard drive people falsely call a laptop.

Shockingly, it comes from Shane Harris, who at least while at WaPo would not make the kinds of errors he makes in this piece.

Harris states as fact that the 51 spooks were “embarrassingly wrong” and as proof, asserts that “the emails really did turn out to belong to Hunter Biden.”

But they were wrong. Embarrassingly wrong. The emails really did turn out to belong to Hunter Biden, and they raised legitimate concerns that he was trying to profit from his father’s political position. No evidence ever surfaced that Russia had played a role in bringing the emails to light. Intelligence experts sometimes make bad calls. This was one of those times.

[snip]

Some of the signatories still defend their work by noting, correctly, that they said the emails might be part of some Russian trick, not that they definitely were. That too-cute defense does not absolve them of bad judgment.

Except, as John Brennan noted in an interview on MSNBC, one thing they posited in the letter is that the information might be “accurate information,” noting that Russia did just that in the 2016 presidential election.

Such an operation would be consistent with some of the key methods Russia has used in its now multi-year operation to interfere in our democracy – the hacking (via cyber operations) and the dumping of accurate information or the distribution of inaccurate or misinformation. Russia did both of these during the 2016 presidential election. [my emphasis]

Harris knows this stuff! While the Guccifer 2.0 persona altered some of the documents stolen from the DNC and misrepresented others and Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s trolls engaged in outright fabrication, the emails stolen from John Podesta were authentic. The operation nevertheless succeeded in sucking up all the attention in the last several weeks of the election, with scandals manufactured out of inconclusive emails, just like the ones used in the NYPost story.

So claiming that the spooks were wrong because the emails really did turn out to be Hunter’s simply misrepresents both the letter and the mechanism of information operations.

As for Harris’ claim that, “No evidence ever surfaced that Russia had played a role in bringing the emails to light”?

Even ignoring Lev Parnas’ testimony that Rudy was offered a laptop hacked with the assistance of Russian spies in 2019 (while unverified, that is evidence, and Mykola Zlochevsky got the legal relief from Trump’s DOJ that Parnas claimed Rudy was offering at the time), the available record shows that the FBI didn’t do the most basic work they would have had to do to check for such evidence.

Remember, the currently operative story is that someone claimed to be Hunter Biden dropped off three devices at John Paul Mac Isaac’s store in April 2019. JPMI kept one to made a copy of the data. But no one ever retrieved the laptop or a hard drive on which JPMI stored the data. So after snooping through it all, months later, JPMI’s father offered up the laptop to the FBI. In December 2019 — days after Rudy traveled to Kyiv to meet with Andrii Derkach and the same month when DOJ shut down an investigation into Mykola Zlochevsky — FBI obtained both the hard drive and a laptop using a subpoena referencing a money laundering investigation that is not referenced in the warrant from the known tax investigation.

But there’s little evidence that the FBI checked that story. Indeed, the public evidence suggests there’s something fishy about the hard drive, which was the basis for all the other copies, including the one Rudy got.

Mac Isaac’s own description of his actions does not match that of the FBI. On top of timeline discrepancies (including about whether FBI accessed the device before obtaining the known warrants), that includes misidentifying the devices dropped off at his shop and falsely claiming the laptop ultimately turned over to FBI did not have a removable hard drive (which was JPMI’s explanation for why he copied the laptop in the way he did).
A March 31, 2020 email documented concerns, “about quality and completeness of imaged/recovered information from the hard drive” that “for a variety of reasons [USAO] thought they needed to keep it from the agents” who might testify at trial.
Ten months after obtaining the laptop, the FBI had never checked the creation date of the files on it and the FBI never indexed the laptop (nor did it Bates-stamp the files they used at trial).
Hunter Biden’s laptop data was not introduced at trial via an expert witness. Rather, a summary witness introduced the data, and she clearly testified she had not been asked to check for signs of tampering. The only things she mentioned at trial that validated the laptop is that the laptop matched subpoena information for Hunter’s iCloud (which may mean no more than that it accessed the account) and Hunter’s publicly available iCloud email account had received an email from John Paul Mac Isaac. Those sworn claims were far short of the things investigators had earlier claimed tied Hunter to the laptop: an exchange of calls, a local purchase, and “other intelligence.”
The expert validation used in lieu of expert testimony does not identify the device(s) it validated and only refers to a single extraction report even though two separate extractions (one of the hard drive, another of the laptop) were done.
According to prosecutors, the Cellebrite report of the hard drive from which (according to JPMI) all subsequent copies were made is 62% larger, by page count, than the Cellebrite report of the laptop itself.

FBI’s thin validation of the laptop could not rule out involvement of others, not least because of Hunter’s otherwise erratic behavior in the period.

At least seven different laptops had accessed Hunter’s iCloud account in the years leading up to Mac Isaac obtaining it; Zoe Kestan testified that Hunter would do business from her laptop and she had access to his bank account via that laptop.
Kestan also testified that Hunter would give her and his drug dealers one time codes so they could access his bank accounts.
In January 2019, Hunter claimed that his Russian drug dealer had stolen a laptop (this may actually have been an iPad) from him in August 2018; this was the same period when new devices accessed Hunter’s Venmo account from two different cities within 12 minutes of each other. David Weiss appears to have made an error in the Tax Indictment about a closely related Venmo transaction.
The access to the laptop in FBI custody does not match Hunter’s normal pattern after obtaining a new device of logging into his iCloud account and at least one of his Google accounts in fairly quick succession.
The days before Hunter bought the laptop that would eventually end up in Fox News pundit Keith Ablow’s custody, he paid a Slavic sex worker over $8,000 via four different transactions and different bank accounts, an outlier both in amount and the multiple payment methods.
The laptop itself has an inexplicable collection of data, much of which is unavailable from the iCloud backups obtained with warrants in 2019.

Hunter Biden was an addict. As such he had almost no control over his own devices, and both Kestan’s testimony and his own memoir describe that he routinely lost devices. Particularly given the known access he provided others and the number of devices that accessed his iCloud account, it would be child’s play for nefarious actors to package up Hunter’s data on a laptop.

And, at least as late as David Weiss made that error in the tax indictment, no one at FBI or DOJ appears to have tried to check what happened to Hunter Biden’s devices (I think the Kestan testimony may have been based on interviews just before the June gun trial). By all appearances, DOJ had no plan to use evidence from the laptop had the tax case gone to trial.

In his testimony for Jim Jordan’s investigation regarding the letter, James Clapper repeatedly said he’d like a statement about the FBI’s forensic analysis of the laptop. At Kristin Wood’s interview by the Committee, Trump’s OMB Deputy designee (and then Congressman) Dan Bishop said, “If, in fact, the FBI has not conducted a forensic investigation, or has conducted a forensic investigation and has suppressed the results, should the American people continue to defer to the FBI?” Yet when I tried to liberate that forensic report last year, DOJ successfully fought its release.

I’m not saying that this was a Russian operation. I’m saying that, based on the public record, the FBI did scandalously little to even test whether it could be; there’s no evidence they took the steps they would have needed to rule it out and plenty of reason to believe they did not.

The FBI never even indexed the laptop, not over the course of four years of reliance on it. They’re in no position to make claims about its provenance.

And so, Shane Harris is in no position to lecture spooks about them being “embarrassingly wrong.”

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“This is a rush job, as it needs to get out as soon as possible:” Jim Jordan-Led Investigation Discredits John Ratcliffe

July 3, 2024/27 Comments/in 2020 Presidential Election, 2024 Presidential Election, emptywheel, Hunter Biden, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

In his latest effort to use the House Judiciary Committee as a goon squad to intimidate Donald Trump’s enemies, Jim Jordan actually developed proof that John Ratcliffe — and not the 51 former spooks he was after — inappropriately politicized intelligence to manufacture debate props.

And then Jordan did it himself.

I have the perfectly curated Xitter account to learn when Jim Jordan has released his latest installment of weaponization against democracy.

Last week, he issued his latest attempt to make a scandal out of the true free speech of the 51 former spooks who wrote a letter saying that the release of a Hunter Biden laptop days before the election “had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” My replies were overrun with trolls chanting incoherent claims.

Of course the trolls in my Xitter feed didn’t know the most basic details of the letter or known facts about the copy of a hard drive referred to as a Hunter Biden laptop:

The former spooks didn’t say this was disinformation, no matter how many times Jordan or Glenn Greenwald lie and say they did. In fact, they specifically caveated that they didn’t know if the emails were genuine and did not have evidence of Russian involvement.
Nothing revealed about the laptop or the hard drives purportedly based on the laptop rules out Russian involvement. That’s true, in part, because the FBI never bothered to test the laptop to see if anything had been added, never indexed it, and when introduced at trial, the summary witness specifically said she had not looked for signs of tampering. Plus, there were enough Russian drug and sex workers in close proximity to earlier Hunter Biden laptop compromises to allow for a role, particularly in packaging up the device.
As the Democratic rebuttal notes, the 51 spook letter couldn’t have caused the social media companies to throttle the original New York Post story without a time machine, as Twitter and Facebook had stopped throttling the story several days before the letter was published. Linear time. It’s like magic to these trolls.

Even though Jordan’s latest report substantiates absolutely no misconduct, the trolls nevertheless yapped and yapped about it. Jordan showed:

While Mike Morrell did target the letter to the last debate (the same one where Trump invited Tony Bobulinski to make claims that have not held up), the other participants were not doing this for the Biden campaign; they were doing it to speak out against Russian interference in the 2020 election
The former spooks couldn’t have leaked classified information because none of them were read into pertinent information regarding the Russian spies cultivating Rudy Giuliani
The former spooks got preclearance to publish the letter via the normal process
After preclearance, the letter was forwarded for Gina Haspel’s attention, but neither she nor anyone else thought it was more important than vaccinating the CIA workforce
Some of the people involved were private citizens with contracts that did not strip them of their free speech

In other words, the 51 spooks followed the rules, and Jordan was stuck trying to turn it into a scandal.

The Jordan report was only 31 pages and, like a college freshman composition paper, blew entire pages with big screen caps repeating the complaints of two random spooks complaining about “random signatures” on the letter and some discussion of Mark Polymeropoulos getting something excluded from a follow-up.

Polymeropoulos’ attorney, Mark Zaid, explained that CIA redacted two lines, which had nothing to do with Hunter Biden, from the Polymeropoulos follow-up — but that was precisely how preclearance is supposed to work.

Mr. Polymeropolous submitted to the PCRB a two page talking points memo about the subject matter. Obviously, he knew that there was going to be media attention concerning the issue and he wanted to be properly prepared to address the topic if asked. He followed the standard procedure for review of information intended to be made public. No different than any other individual who has a prepublication review requirement. As part of its review, which was handled in the normal timely fashion for such a short document, CIA redacted two lines of information as being classified. Those two lines had nothing to do with the Hunter Biden laptop specifically and concerned Mr. Polymeropolous’ background experience with Russia and a comment concerning that country’s activities generally. Of course, that information was properly protected by Mr. Polymeropolous and never used. To say that this constituted an attempt to use classified information is farcical and reflects a complete lack of understanding how the prepublication review process works. The system operated exactly how it was supposed to and is being distorted for political purposes.

That’s it. That’s the best Jordan could rush out to give Trump something to complain about in a presidential debate over and over.

To think that I would, in front of generals and others, say suckers and losers – we have 19 people that said it was never said by me. It was made up by him, just like Russia, Russia, Russia was made up, just like the 51 intelligence agents are made up, just like the new thing with the 16 economists are talking.

It’s the same thing. Fifty-one intelligence agents said that the laptop was Russia disinformation. It wasn’t. That came from his son Hunter. It wasn’t Russia disinformation. He made up the suckers and losers, so he should apologize to me right now.

[snip]

I’ve dealt with politicians all my life. I’ve been on this side of the equation for the last eight years. I’ve never seen anybody lie like this guy. He lies – I’ve never seen it. He could look you in the face. So – and about so many other things, too.

And we mentioned the laptop, We mentioned “Russia, Russia, Russia,” “Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine.” And everything he does is a lie. It’s misinformation and disinformation. The “losers and suckers” story that he made up is a total lie on the military. It’s a disgrace.

This was Trump’s prepackaged answer to attempt to projection his own lying onto Biden. It was barely more vigorous than Biden’s rebuttals.

As flimsy as it was, though, Trump’s use of the 51-spook letter was part of a larger effort, one designed to bully those who speak up against Russian disinformation, disinformation generally, or in favor of rule of law. As John Brennan described, it created a furor about the letter that distracted from Russian intervention, which in turn serves to divide the country.

I think the firestorm, the furor has been created responding to the letter as opposed to the letter itself, as I responded to one of the Congressmen earlier. So it’s unfortunate that this is taking up all your time, it’s taking up my time, and it is, again, further dividing the country.

And, by design, it has chilled speech that talks about Russian interference.

One after another of the spooks interviewed confessed they or others would be chilled by the precedent of Jordan investigating private citizens for their free speech. Kristin Wood described how Mike Flynn put out all their names on a Telegram chat, leading to stalking and death threats.

Several ways. First of all, I’ve received death threats. I’ve received vicious calls, texts, emails from all sorts of random people. Mike Flynn — General Flynn posted on Telegram all of our names and said, you know, let them know how we feel. It unleashed this viciousness that had several other folks calling the police, calling the Threat Management Unit at CIA, to let them know what was happening.

And so for the first time ever, I looked at getting a gun and getting a concealed carry permit because it’s not just that people have been mean or say horrific things, but we’ve seen them take action. And so that feeling of vulnerability for speaking, exercising a First Amendment right, and for saying what I thought was as obvious as there’s air in — there’s air. Let’s just let the FBI do their work.

It has a profound effect on health as well. I’ve been to the emergency room for stress because of all of this. And so when you ask would I do this again, I would insist on a little more precision of language. But it has the effect of censoring people who have more than a thousand years of experience in this topic. And I would think the focus would be on stopping Russia and not on what feels like persecution.

Several of the spooks admitted the mob treatment would lead them to decline further involvement in anything political. Most described that it would chill others.

At that level, the spooks are just like the disinformation experts Jordan also targeted, those who tracked efforts to muddy reason and truth. Their lives have been upended because they attempted to track Russian disinformation that served Republican interests, and the personal and financial cost is shutting down those efforts during an election year.

But then something funny happened.

House Republicans kept pushing the spooks, arguing — notwithstanding the public reporting on Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to solicit dirt from known Russian agent Andrii Derkach — that the spooks should have known, somehow, that the hard drive called a Hunter Biden laptop wasn’t Russian disinformation (which, as noted, the spooks didn’t claim).

Republicans — often Jordan himself — kept asking whether the spooks knew that John Ratcliffe had claimed the laptop was not disinformation (which, again, was not what the letter claimed).

Chairman Jordan. Were you aware of Mr. Ratcliffe’s statement on the morning of the 19th, prior to the letter being sent, where he said in an interview on FOX News that morning that this is not part of the Russian disinformation campaign?

And that led multiple witnesses to explain why Ratcliffe simply wasn’t credible. Wood described that a proper counterintelligence investigation takes longer than would have transpired (no one knew how long the FBI had had the laptop).

Ms. Wood. So, I think what I would say in response to that is that the letter — the purpose of the letter was to say, Let’s not rush to judgment. Everyone, regardless of who they are as Americans, deserves due process. Let’s let the FBI do their work. And when DNI Ratcliffe said that — so as you have seen from all of these investigations, right, they take a very long time to do, to do the considered judgment of 17 or 18 intelligence agencies, and to come up with that to do the exhaustive search of asking new sources, of pulling in every bit of signals intelligence, there’s just no way that’s possible to have been done in the timeframe in which that statement was made. So our whole point was to say, Be careful here. Let us — we don’t know if this is all real. We don’t know if all the emails are real, and we don’t know if this is tied to the Russians. Let’s let the process work

James Clapper described that, not only didn’t he consider Ratcliffe a reliable source, but that he made the statement before any investigation of the laptop.

Mr. Clapper. Well, if the Department of Justice or the FBI or some other legitimate credible source of — who had done a credible forensic analysis — certainly I would accept that. That’s why I suggested that would be a good — would have been a good fix — a good addition to the letter had we said that.

Mr. Gaetz. Are you aware of Director Ratcliffe, the DNI at the time, contradicting the thrust of this letter you signed?

Mr. Clapper. Well, okay. He said that statement before, I think, an investigation had begun of the laptop. So I don’t know where he’s coming from making a statement like that.

In response to a follow-up question from the Minority, Clapper also agreed that Ratcliffe himself was making public statements in anticipation of the debate.

Q It’s an article reporting on Ratcliffe’s remarks, and it’s dated October 19th, 2020, 1:49 p.m. And we’re just introducing it for the fact of the date. The New York Post story in question was released on October 14th, correct?

A Yes.

Q So that would have been 5 days before Ratcliffe made his remarks?

A Right.

Q And I think you said earlier he couldn’t have even begun an investigation in that time period. Is that correct?

A Correct.

Q And can you explain what you mean by that?

A Well, I don’t know how — what his basis for making that statement is when the laptop itself hasn’t been investigated. The DNI, Office of the Director National Intelligence, has no organic forensic analysis capability at all. So they’re dependent on other components of the intelligence community, in this case the FBI, to render such a judgment, which hadn’t been rendered. So I don’t know how he could make that statement.

Q Okay. And even assuming that Ratcliffe — sorry. Withdraw that. And he made these remarks on October 19th, which was the day before the second debate, correct? The second Presidential debate was the 20th.

A Uh-huh.

Q So isn’t it possible that Ratcliffe also made his remarks in the hope that they would impact the debate?

A Well, one could conclude that, yes.

John Brennan was even more disdainful of Ratcliffe’s actions. He described that Ratcliffe’s release of his briefing notes, for the first 2020 debate, made it clear that Ratcliffe was involved in politics.

Chairman Jordan. Director, were you aware of what Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said on the morning of October 19th regarding this Biden laptop story, where he said that it wasn’t a Russian disinformation operation?

Mr. Brennan. I don’t know if I was aware of it at the time, but I would have dismissed it anyway.

Chairman Jordan. Why would you have dismissed it?

Mr. Brennan. Because I don’t think John Ratcliffe was an independent, objective leader of the intelligence community at the time.

Chairman Jordan. So you would dismiss the statement from the Director of National Intelligence — the Acting — the Director of National Intelligence at the time, in the administration, getting intelligence in real-time, you would just dismiss that out of hand?

Mr. Brennan. Not out of hand, but I think it was — a week or two prior to that, there was a selective release of information that included my briefing notes to President Obama in the White House Situation Room that was misrepresenting, in fact, the facts, where it was pushed out in redacted version. And I did think that was a very, very unfortunate, unprofessional, unethical engagement on the part of the Director of National Intelligence in a Presidential election.

Mr. Gaetz. So your dismissing Mr. Ratcliffe was somehow payback for the fact that you thought that your briefing to President Obama had been mischaracterized?

Mr. Brennan. No, that’s not what I said.

Mr. Gaetz. Okay. Well, I’m trying to understand how this event that seems to have aggrieved you regarding the briefing to President Obama impacted your view of the Ratcliffe assessment.

Mr. Brennan. It didn’t aggrieve me. It just indicated to me that John Ratcliffe was not going to be an independent, nonpartisan, apolitical actor.

Brennan is referring to the notes he got about materials found among hacked documents in Russia, which Republicans and John Durham spun up, first of all, as true (rather than suspected Russian disinformation), and then misrepresented to claim that Hillary had a plan to frame Donald Trump.

Not only did Brennan see this as an election season stunt (which I observed at the time), but he described that Ratcliffe “misrepresent[ed] the facts” about the materials.

Jim Jordan has been searching for a former spook to accuse of politicizing intelligence in 2020 for years, and he finally found one! Trump’s hand-picked Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, who was doing precisely what Jordan falsely accused the former spooks of doing, but did so while still an employee of the Intelligence Community.

Update: Corrected that the “laptop” was not just a “hard drive,” but in fact a copy of another hard drive.

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Hillary’s Revenge: Trump Promised Voters He Would Protect Classified Information

June 10, 2023/108 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, 2020 Presidential Election, 2024 Presidential Election, Leak Investigations /by emptywheel

According to NBC news, Jack Smith prosecutor David Harbach, not Jay Bratt, was at the Miami courthouse on Thursday as a grand jury indicted the former President.

That was a surprise to me. While Harbach has post-DOJ ties to Jack Smith from the Hague, at DOJ, he was primarily a corruption prosecutor.

A seasoned trial lawyer, Harbach has tried more than 35 cases to verdict in federal and state courts. He has also conducted some of the nation’s highest profile public corruption trials, including cases against former U.S. Senator John Edwards and former Virginia Governor Robert F. McDonnell.

Harbach was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York from 2005 to 2010, and for four years beginning in 2015, Harbach was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia. In 2016, he was appointed Managing Assistant U.S. Attorney and Criminal Supervisor of the Richmond Division office, overseeing 21 prosecutors.

From 2014 to 2015, Harbach served on detail as Special Counsel to FBI Director James Comey. Before his work with the FBI, Harbach served as a Trial Attorney in the DOJ Criminal Division’s Public Integrity Section, earning the Deputy Chief title after two years.

By all appearances, Smith had a corruption prosecutor present the Trump indictment to the jury, not DOJ’s head of counterintelligence Jay Bratt.

I didn’t even know Harbach was working this case! I thought he was working the January 6 case. I thought he was working on holding Trump accountable for defrauding a bunch of MAGA supporters, claiming they were paying for election integrity when instead it all went to paying staffers at his post-election office (including Walt Nauta).

Perhaps Bratt flew back to DC after attending the grand jury appearance for Taylor Budowich on Wednesday to deal with Stan Woodward’s accusations of ethical abuse. Perhaps Smith figured that, until that allegation is resolved, someone else should have their name on the official documents.

But Harbach’s apparent role in presenting the indictment is one of the things that made me look at two of my favorite passages differently. There’s this passage, which I call “Hillary’s Revenge.” It collects five of the instances in 2016 where Trump distinguished himself from Hillary Clinton by boasting of his purported concern for classified information.

22. As a candidate for President of the United States, TRUMP made the following public statements, among others, about classified information:

a. On August 18, 2016, TRUMP stated, “In my administration I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law.”

b. On September 6, 2016, TRUMP stated, “We also need to fight this battle by collecting intelligence and then protecting, protecting our classified secrets. . . . We can’t have someone in the Oval Office who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word confidential or classified.”

c. On September 7, 2016, TRUMP stated, “[O]ne of the first things we must do is to enforce all classification rules and to enforce all laws relating to the handling of classified information.”

d. On September 19, 2016, TRUMP stated, “We also need the best protection of classified information.”

e. On November 3, 2016, TRUMP stated, “Service members here in North Carolina have risked their lives to acquire classified intelligence to protect our country.”

Andrew Kaczynski put together all the instances of it.

Donald Trump has repeatedly called for lengthy jail sentences for those who he claimed mishandled classified information. My report tonight on @OutFrontCNN, pic.twitter.com/D4P3EGhzj9

— andrew kaczynski (@KFILE) June 10, 2023

In an Espionage Act indictment, this paragraph serves the function of demonstrating Trump’s awareness of the importance of classified information.

Then there’s this passage, which I call “Brennan’s Revenge.” It’s a statement that Trump issued to justify stripping John Brennan of his security clearance in 2018.

23. As President of the United States, on July 26, 2018, TRUMP issued the following statement about classified information:

As the head of the executive branch and Commander in Chief, I have a unique, Constitutional responsibility to protect the Nation’s classified information, including by controlling access to it. . . . More broadly, the issue of [a former executive branch official’s] security clearance raises larger questions about the practice of former officials maintaining access to our Nation’s most sensitive secrets long after their time in Government has ended. Such access is particularly inappropriate when former officials have transitioned into highly partisan positions and seek to use real or perceived access to sensitive information to validate their political attacks. Any access granted to our Nation’s secrets should be in furtherance of national, not personal, interests.

The circumstances around the statement are fascinating. Trump started publicly considering stripping security clearances after Rand Paul, fresh off a trip as a back channel to Putin, pitched it to Trump with two other unnamed people on July 23. Trump announced it on August 15, but then Brennan threatened to sue as obvious retaliation. The next year, NYT reported that Trump never did file the paperwork to strip the clearance.

Still, at least on first appearances, that background is not why this paragraph is in the indictment. Rather, it shows Trump’s awareness that you can’t take your privileged access to “our Nation’s secrets” with you after you leave.

But, presented by a public integrity prosecutor rather than a counterintelligence one, that last bit may prove to be the most important. Read that way, this paragraph is a declaration by the Commander in Chief that one cannot use classified information in furtherance of personal interests. That kind of declaration by the Commander in Chief has a certain kind of force.

And presented by a public integrity prosecutor rather than a counterintelligence one, the Hillary’s Revenge paragraph reads like someone engaged in fraud, getting elected on a promise he will use the office to protect classified information, only to use it, instead, to steal classified information.

Let me suggest the Mar-a-Lago indictment might actually be a public corruption indictment wrapped up inside an Espionage Act indictment.

To be sure: there’s little discussion in this indictment of why Trump stole these documents. Significantly, what is in there happened as uncharged conduct in Bedminster. There’s the meeting at which Trump used a stolen Iran document to badmouth Mark Milley.

34. Upon greeting the writer, publisher, and his two staff members, TRUMP stated, “Look what I found, this was [the Senior Military Official’s] plan of attack, read it and just show . . . it’s interesting.” Later in the interview, TRUMP engaged in the following exchange:

TRUMP: Well, with [the Senior Military Official]—uh, let me see that, I’ll show you an example. He said that I wanted to attack [Country A]. Isn’t it amazing? I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him. They presented me this—this is off the record, but—they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him.

WRITER: Wow.

TRUMP: We looked at some. This was him. This wasn’t done by me, this was him. All sorts of stuff—pages long, look.

STAFFER: Mm.

TRUMP: Wait a minute, let’s see here.

STAFFER: [Laughter] Yeah.

TRUMP: I just found, isn’t that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know.

STAFFER: Mm-hm.

TRUMP: Except it is like, highly confidential.

STAFFER: Yeah. [Laughter]

TRUMP: Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this. You attack, and—

Robert Costa had a really fascinating thread on the background to this, a description of an ongoing obsession with Milley.

This is precisely the kind of conduct of which Trump accused Brennan, the use of secrets he learned while he had access to secrets to suggest (falsely in this case) to have dirt on one of his political adversaries.

Then there’s the instance where Trump showed one of his PAC representatives a classified map and claimed that some ongoing conflict was not going very well, presumably to suggest that Joe Biden wasn’t doing as well as Trump had.

In August or September 2021, when he was no longer president, TRUMP met in his office at The Bedminster Club with a representative of his political action committee (the “PAC Representative”). During the meeting, TRUMP commented that an ongoing military operation in Country B was not going well. TRUMP showed the PAC Representative a classified map of Country B and told the PAC Representative that he should not be showing the map to the PAC Representative and to not get too close. The PAC Representative did not have a security clearance or any need-to-know classified information about the military operation.

Still, all the conduct describing Trump putting classified information to personal use happened in Bedminster, where two sets of classified documents went, never to be seen again.

Indeed, that’s one part of the existing indictment that surprised me: I had expected Smith would charge the document showing that Trump compiled one confidential and one secret document into a larger one including messages from a pollster, a faith leader, and a book author. The FBI found that document in a drawer in Trump’s desk at Mar-a-Lago.

I similarly expected Smith might charge the Presidential schedules that Chamberlain Harris loaded onto her laptop. Again, another instance of documents that were comparatively less sensitive, which Trump put to use for his PAC.

But maybe all this will show up in some other place. After all, one of the last things that Jay Bratt did before indicting was that Budowich interview, in which the head of Trump’s current PAC described the foreknowledge that he and others had early last year that Trump wasn’t turning over all the documents.

I proposed that this indictment might be understood as a public integrity indictment wrapped up inside an Espionage Act indictment.

But I don’t rule out we’ll see an Espionage Act indictment wrapped up inside a public integrity indictment.

Update: Over on Twitter, Yale HillBillionaire JD Vance points out why it is so important for a political candidate to be honest about whether they intend to uphold classification or intend to steal documents in bulk. I’m really grateful that Vance has laid out why Trump engaged in fraud here.

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Columbia Journalism Review–and Now Columbia School of Journalism–Have a Russian Intelligence Problem

April 8, 2023/31 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, emptywheel, Press and Media /by emptywheel

On Tuesday, Columbia Journalism Review quietly staged the Zoom conference intended to address the many problems with Jeff Gerth’s series on “Russiagate” [sic], which I wrote about in a long series. After they rescheduled the original date because of an illness, they did not alert those who had previously signed up, meaning a number of people missed it. Nor did they record the event. It had the feel of a formality designed to claim they had listened, without actually doing so.

Nothing demonstrates the inadequacy of the event so well as the fact that no one — not moderator and Berkeley School of Journalism Dean Geeta Anand, not Columbia Journalism School Dean Jelani Cobb, and not CJR Editor Kyle Pope — addressed the fact that Jeff Gerth had cited an unreliable Russian intelligence product as part of his attack on Hillary Clinton without informing readers he had done so.

I described that he had done so in this post, but I’m going to try to simplify this still further in hopes Columbia will understand how inexcusable this is — how badly this violates every tenet of ethical journalism.

As part of his description of Hillary’s response to being victimized in a hack-and-leak campaign, Gerth described that Clinton approved a plan to vilify Trump by making Russian interference itself a scandal.

The disclosures, while not helpful to Clinton, energized the promotion of the Russia narrative to the media by her aides and Fusion investigators. On July 24, Robby Mook, Hillary’s campaign manager, told CNN and ABC that Trump himself had “changed the platform” to become “more pro-Russian” and that the hack and dump “was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump,” according to unnamed “experts.”

Still, the campaign’s effort “did not succeed,” campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri would write in the Washington Post the next year. So, on July 26, the campaign allegedly upped the ante. Behind the scenes, Clinton was said to have approved a “proposal from one of her foreign-policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services,” according to notes, declassified in 2020, of a briefing CIA director John Brennan gave President Obama a few days later. [my emphasis]

The claim is a central part of Gerth’s narrative, which adopts many of the theories John Durham floated in his two failed prosecutions, suggesting that the press’ concerns about Trump and Russia stemmed exclusively from efforts — the dossier and the Alfa Bank anomaly — generated by Hillary, and not by Carter Page’s weird behavior in Moscow, Paul Manafort’s ties to oligarchs with ties to Russia, or all the lies Trump’s people told in 2017 about their own ties to Russia.

The claim is a central part of Jeff Gerth’s narrative, and it is based on a Russian intelligence product of uncertain reliability.

These are the notes of Brennan’s briefing to Obama. Here, though not in an earlier part of this section, Gerth quotes directly from the notes (though Gerth cuts the words “alleged approval”).

This is the letter John Ratcliffe wrote to Lindsey Graham about the briefing before he declassified the notes themselves. The letter quotes the notes and unlike Gerth, he does not cut the words, “alleged approval,” so there can be no doubt that that’s what Ratcliffe was addressing. Ratcliffe’s letter explicitly says that the Intelligence Community “does not know the accuracy of the allegation” or whether it was “exaggeration or fabrication.”

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, former Central Intelligence Agency 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.”

It’s bad enough that Gerth takes out the use of “alleged” included in the notes itself and in Ratcliffe’s description of the report.

But it is inexcusable that Gerth does not tell readers this claim comes from a Russian intelligence report, one that even John Ratcliffe warned might not be reliable, might even be a fabrication! Gerth describes that “Clinton was said” to have formulated this plan, without telling readers that Russian spooks were the ones who said it. He simply adopts the accusation made by Russian spies without notice he had done so.

Before writing this up, I asked Kyle Pope about this twice, first in my general list of questions, then in a specific follow-up.

Finally, you did not answer this question.

Do you believe your treatment of the John Brennan briefing should have revealed the briefing was based on a Russian intelligence document? Do you believe you should have noted the John Ratcliffe warning that, “The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication”? Is there a reason you’re certain the date was July 26 when it’s not clear whether it says 26 or 28?

Is it your view that CJR owes its readers neither notice that it is relying on a Russian intelligence report for its interpretations about Hillary Clinton’s motives nor reveal that the IC would not vouch for the accuracy of that report?

I got no answer. Since Tuesday’s event, I’ve since asked for comment from Dean Cobb, who provided no response, as well as Dean Anand (whose assistant said she may get back to me later).

Jeff Gerth, and through him, CJR, and through CJR, the Columbia Journalism School apparently believe it is sound journalism, in a piece that demands greater transparency from others commenting on sloppy reporting about Russia’s campaign to interfere in the 2016 election, to quote from a description of a Russian intelligence report that may have been part of that campaign to interfere in the 2016 election, without disclosing that he was doing so.

There are unretracted clear errors throughout Gerth’s piece that also went unremarked in Tuesday’s event; rather than explaining why those errors remain uncorrected in a piece complaining about the errors of others, Gerth twice claimed his was a, “very factual chronological story” with no pushback. When I asked about them before doing my piece, Pope dismissed those errors as merely a matter of opinion.

But about this undisclosed use of a Russian intelligence product that could be a fabrication, there is no dispute. It’s right there in the warning Ratcliffe gave before he released the notes. “The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.” But that didn’t stop Gerth from using it. He used it anyway, with no disclosure about who made this allegation or the IC warning about its uncertain reliability.

And Columbia University’s journalism establishment stubbornly stands by that non-disclosure.

Links

CJR’s Error at Word 18

The Blind Spots of CJR’s “Russiagate” [sic] Narrative

Jeff Gerth’s Undisclosed Dissemination of Russian Intelligence Product

Jeff Gerth Declares No There, Where He Never Checked

“Wink:” Where Jeff Gerth’s “No There, There” in the Russian Investigation Went

Columbia Journalism Review–and Now Columbia School of Journalism–Have a Russian Intelligence Problem

Dear Jeff Gerth: Peter Strzok Is Not a Media Critic

My own disclosure statement

An attempted reconstruction of the articles Gerth includes in his inquiry

A list of the questions I sent to CJR

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Hillary Clinton’s Devious Plot to Get Oleg Deripaska to Install Paul Manafort as Trump’s Campaign Manager

May 1, 2022/69 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

Out of curiosity and a good deal of masochism, I listened to the latest podcast of “The Corner,” the frothy right wingers who spend their time spinning conspiracy theories about the Durham investigation.

It was painful.

At every step, these men simply assert evidence must exist — like a Democratic order to bring dirt to the FBI — for which there’s no evidence. They ignore really basic facts, such as that Sussmann was necessarily working with the FBI because his client was being systematically hacked, and therefore it wasn’t just Christopher Steele who had ongoing ties to the Bureau. They make a huge deal about the fact that the US government’s Russian experts know each other, and that Christopher Steele persistently reported on topics — like Rosneft — that really were and are important to British and US national security and on which he had legitimate expertise.

They’re already starting to make excuses for Durham (such as that Durham chose not to obtain privileged emails the same way Mueller and SDNY did, without noting that Mueller had probable cause of a crime, which Durham admits he does not, much less that Mueller got them in a different way and a different time then they believe he did).

They keep making much of the coincidence of key dates in 2016 — “We continue to have a very, very tight timeline that that accelerates” — but never mention either the WikiLeaks dump of the DNC emails or Trump’s request that Russia hack Hillary some more, a request that was followed closely by a new wave of attacks. Those two events in July 2016 explain most of the actions Democrats took in that period, and these men don’t even exhibit awareness (or perhaps the belief?) that the events happened.

Worse still, they are ignorant of, or misrepresent, key details.

For example, all but Hans Mahncke assert that John Brennan must have been acting on some kind of corrupt intelligence in July 2016, rather than real intelligence collected from real Russian sources. They do so even though Billy Barr described in his book bitching at Trump after Trump complained that Durham found that, “the CIA stayed in its lane in the run-up to the [2016] election.”

Emblematic of the fraying relationship between the President and me was a sharp exchange at the end of the summer in the Oval Office. To give the President credit, he never asked about the substance of the investigation but just asked pointedly when there might be some sign of progress. On this occasion, we had met on something else, but at the end he complained that the investigation had been dragging on a long time. I explained that Durham did not get the Horowitz report until the end of 2019, and up till then had been look- ing at questions, like any possible CIA role, that had to be run down but did not pan out.

“What do you mean, they didn’t pan out?” the President snapped.

“As far as we can tell, the CIA stayed in its lane in the run-up to the election,” I said.

The President bristled. “You buy that bullshit, Bill?” he snarled. “Everyone knows Brennan was right in the middle of this.”

I lost it and answered in a sarcastic tone. “Well, if you know what happened, Mr. President, I am all ears. Maybe we are wasting time do- ing an investigation. Maybe all the armchair quarterbacks telling you they have all the evidence can come in and enlighten us.”

Durham looked for this evidence for years. It’s not there (and therefore the intelligence Brennan viewed is something other than the dossier or even the Russian intelligence product that the frothers also spin conspiracies on).

All but Fool Nelson misrepresent a July 26, 2016 email from Peter Fritsch to WSJ reporter Jay Solomon, which says, “call adam schiff, or difi for that matter. i bet they are concerned about what page was doing other than giving a speech over 3 days in moscow,” suggesting that that must be proof the top Democrats on the Intelligence Committees had the Steele dossier, rather than proof that it was a concern to see an advisor to a Presidential campaign traveling to Russian and saying the things Page was saying. (Jeff Carlson makes the same complaint about former Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul’s observations about something that all experienced Russia watchers believed was alarming in real time.)

They get the evidence against Carter Page wrong, among other ways by misstating that all his time in Moscow had been accounted for and that the rumor he met with Igor Sechin was ever entirely debunked. “Of course it’s impossible. He was chaperoned. He had a hotel. He had a driver. Without people noticing.” For example, the son of the guy who brought Page to Russia, Yuval Weber, told the FBI that they weren’t with Page 100% of the time and there was a rumor that he had met with Sechin.

In July, when Page had traveled to give the commencement speech at NES, Weber recalled that it was rumored in Moscow that Page met with Igor Sechin. Weber said that Moscow is filled with gossip and people in Moscow were interested in Page being there. It was known that a campaign official was there.

Page may have briefly met with Arkady Dvorkovich at the commencement speech, considering Dvorkovich was on the board at NES. But Weber was not aware of any special meeting.

[redacted] was not with Page 100% of the time, he met him for dinner, attended the first public presentation, but missed the commencement speech. They had a few other interactions. Page was very busy on this trip.

This testimony was consistent with Mueller’s conclusion about Page’s trip: given boasts he made to the campaign, “Page’s activities in Russia — as described in his emails with the Campaign — were not fully explained.”

They badly misrepresent emails between a handful of journalists and Fusion GPS, spinning real skepticism exhibited by journalists as journalists somehow conspiring with Fusion. Indeed, they repeatedly point to an email from WaPo’s Tom Hamburger pushing back on the Sechin claim, “That Page met with Sechin or Ivanov. ‘Its bullshit. Impossible,’ said one of our Moscow sources.” They claim that Hamburger nevertheless reported the story after that. They’re probably thinking of this story, which reported Page’s 2014 pro-Sechin comments, not that he had met with the man in 2016.

After the Obama administration added Rosneft Chairman Igor Sechin to its sanctions list in 2014, limiting Sechin’s ability to travel to the United States or do business with U.S. firms, Page praised the former deputy prime minister, considered one of Putin’s closest allies over the past 25 years. “Sechin has done more to advance U.S.-Russian relations than any individual in or out of government from either side of the Atlantic over the past decade,” Page wrote.

In other words, they’re claiming journalists doing actual journalism and not reporting what Fusion fed them is somehow corrupt, when it is instead an example, among many, of failed attempts by Fusion to get journalists to run with their tips.

They complain that Fusion was pointing journalists to Felix Sater, in spite of the fact that Sater really was central to tying Trump Organization to Russian funding and really did pitch an impossibly lucrative real estate deal in the year before the campaign that involved secret communications with the Kremlin and sanctioned banks and a former GRU officer, a deal that Michael Cohen and Trump affirmatively lied to cover up for years.

They grossly misrepresent a long text to Peter Strzok reflecting someone else’s early inquiries on the DNS allegation to Cendyn, imagining (the redaction notwithstanding) that it reflects the FBI concluding already at that point that there was nothing to the DNS allegations and not that the FBI inquiry instead explains why Trump changed its own DNS records shortly thereafter (addressing one but not both of the questions raised by NYT reporting).

Obviously, none of them seem interested in the nearly-contemporaneous text from Strzok noting that “Russians back on DNC,” presumably reflecting knowledge of the serial Russian effort to steal Hillary’s analytics stored on an AWS server, a hack that — because it involved an AWS server, not a DNC-owned one — not only defies all the favorite right wing claims about what went into the Russian attribution, but also explains why Sussmann would be so concerned about seeming evidence of ongoing covert communication between Trump and a Russian bank. The Russians kept hacking, both in response to Trump’s request in July, and in the days before and after Sussmann met with James Baker in September.

Crazier still, none of these men seem to have any understanding of two details of the back-and-forth between Sussmann, the FBI, and NYT, one that is utterly central to the case against Sussmann. They conflate a request FBI made to NYT days after Sussmann’s meeting with the FBI to kill the story — one made with the assent of Sussmann and Rodney Joffe — with later follow-up reporting by the NYT reporting that the FBI had not substantiated the DNS allegation. Those were at least two separate calls! Durham had chased down none of them before he indicted Sussmann. It wasn’t until almost six months after charging Sussmann that Durham corroborated Sussmann’s HPSCI testimony that Sussmann and Joffe agreed to help kill the initial NYT story, which provides a lot of weight to Sussmann’s explanation for his meeting with James Baker, that he wanted to give the FBI an opportunity to investigate the allegation before the press reported on it. As a result, Mahncke states as fact that Sussmann’s September 18 text telling Baker, “I’m coming on my own – not on behalf of a client or company – want to help the Bureau,” (even ignoring the temporal problem it creates for Durham’s charge) proves Sussmann lied, when in fact, his and Joffe’s efforts to help the Bureau kill the story strongly supports Sussmann’s public story.

If you don’t know that Sussmann and Joffe helped the FBI to kill what would have been a damning story about Trump, you’re not assessing the actual evidence against Sussmann as opposed to Durham’s conspiracy theories.

All that said, laying out all the ways the supposed experts on the frothy right prove they’re unfamiliar with the most basic details about events in 2016 and since is not why I wrote this post.

I wrote this post because of the way Fool attempted to explain away the inconvenience of Paul Manafort to his narrative. Fool went on at length showing how (a possible Russian fabrication claiming) Hillary’s plan to focus on Trump’s ties to Russia must have predicated an investigation that started before that point. He ignored, entirely, that an FBI investigation had already been opened on Page by then (and all four frothers ignore that Fusion started focusing on Page when Paul Singer was footing the bill). But Fool does acknowledge that the money laundering investigation into Manafort had already been opened before Crossfire Hurricane started. He treats Manafort’s very real corrupt ties to Putin-backed oligarchs as a lucky break for what he imagines to be Hillary’s concocted claims, and not a fact that Trump ignored when he hired the man to work for him “for free.” “Luckily, I don’t know if this was a coincidence or not, Manafort joined the Trump campaign and that gave them a reason to look deeper.” In other words, Fool suggests Manafort’s hiring might be part of Hillary’s devious plot, and not the devious plot of Oleg Deripaska to get an entrée to Trump’s campaign or the devious alleged plot of Mohammed bin Zayed to direct Trump policy through Tom Barrack.

Because I expect the circumstances of Manafort’s hiring may become newsworthy again in the near future and because Deripaska was pushing an FBI investigation into Manafort before Hillary was, I wanted to correct this detail.

According to Gates, the effort to install Manafort as campaign manager started earlier than most people realize, in January 2016, not March.

In January 2016, Gates was working mostly on [redacted] film project. Gates was also doing some work on films with [redacted] looking for new DMP clients, and helping Manafort pull material together to pitch Donald Trump on becoming campaign manager. Roger Stone and Tom Barrack were acting as liaisons between Manafort and Trump in an effort to get Manafort hired by the campaign. Barrack had a good relationship with Ivanka Trump.

Tom Barrack described to Mueller how Manafort asked for his help getting hired on Trump’s campaign in that same month, January 2016.

But Manafort may have started on this plan even before January 2016. Sam Patten told SSCI Kilimnik knew of the plan in advance. Patten’s explanation of his involvement in the Mueller investigation describes Ukrainian Oligarch Serhiy Lyovochkin asking him about it in late 2015.

In late 2015, Lyovochkin asked me whether it was true that Trump was going to hire Manafort to run his campaign. Just as I told Pinchuk that Putin’s perception of America’s capabilities was ridiculous, I told Lyovochkin that was an absurd notion; that Trump would have to be nuts to do such a thing.

In any case, even before his hiring was public, on March 20, Manafort wrote his Ukrainian and Russian backers to let them know he had installed himself with the Trump campaign. He sent one of those letters to Oleg Deripaska, purportedly as a way to get the lawsuit Deripaska had filed against Manafort dropped.

Gates was shown an email between Gates and Kilimnik dated March 20, 2016 and four letters which were attached to this email. Gates stated he was the person who drafted the letters on Manafort’s behalf. Manafort reviewed and approved the letters.

Manafort wanted Gates to draft letters announcing he had joined the Trump Campaign. Manafort thought the letters would help DMP get paid by OB and possibly help confirm that Deripaska had dropped his lawsuit against Manafort. Manafort wanted Kilimnik to let Deripaska know he had been hired by Trump and he needed to make sure there were not lawsuits against him.

Gates was asked why Manafort could not have employed counsel to find out of the Deripaska lawsuit had been dropped. Gates stated Manafort wanted to send Deripaska a personal note and to get a direct answer from Deripaska. Gates also thought this letter was a bit of “bravado on Manafort’s part.”

Gates was asked if the purpose of the letter to Deripaska was to determine if the lawsuit had been dropped, why didn’t the letter mention the lawsuit. Gates stated that Manafort did not want to put anything about the lawsuit in writing.

This explanation, true or not (and it’s pretty clear the FBI didn’t believe it), is critical to the frothers because even before Christopher Steele started collecting information on Trump, he was collecting information on Manafort at the behest of Deripaska in conjunction with this lawsuit. And Steele was feeding DOJ tips about Deripaska’s lawsuit before he started feeding the FBI dirt paid for by Hillary’s campaign. The first meeting at which Steele shared dossier information with Bruce Ohr, for example, Steele also pushed the Deripaska lawsuit, and not for the first time.

Either the Deripaska lawsuit was a cover story Manafort used consistently for years (including through his “cooperation” with Mueller in 2018), or it was real. Whichever it was, it bespeaks some kind of involvement by Deripaska long before Hillary got involved. Viewed from that perspective, the dossier (and Deripaska’s presumed success at filling it with disinformation) was just part of a brutal double game that Deripaska was playing with Manafort, one that led Manafort to share campaign strategy and participate in carving up Ukraine, another event the frothers are trying to blame on the ever-devious Hillary. Whichever it is, the process by which a bunch of Putin allies in Ukraine knew Trump was going to hire Manafort before Trump did is a big part of the story.

But according to the frothers, Hillary Clinton is just that devious that she orchestrated all of this.

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John Durham Won’t Charge Any of Trump’s Favorite Villains

August 16, 2021/54 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, emptywheel, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

On Friday, WSJ had an article that might have been titled, “John Durham won’t charge any of Donald Trump’s favorite villains.” It reported that Durham is still considering charges against people outside of government and “lower-level FBI employees.”

Mr. Durham has been examining potential criminal charges against several lower-level Federal Bureau of Investigation employees, and people who aren’t in government, according to people familiar with the matter.

But it doesn’t note that, even if Durham does charge those involved in the dossier, it will still mean that many of Trump’s claims about the Russian investigation were investigated for longer than Mueller took, only to fall short of the crimes Trump claimed had happened.

Jim Comey was the FBI Director, not a low-level employee. In spite of Durham’s effort to prove that Comey leaked details of Trump’s efforts to protect Mike Flynn to get a Special Counsel appointed, if Durham is contemplating charges only against “lower-level” FBI employees, he has not found proof that Comey broke the law.

Andrew McCabe was the FBI Deputy Director, not a low-level employee. In spite of Durham’s apparent effort to insinuate that McCabe micromanaged the Russian investigation, pushing investigative steps FBI Agents didn’t support, if Durham is contemplating charges only against “lower-level” FBI employees, he has not found proof that McCabe broke the law.

Bill Priestap was the Assistant Director for Counterintelligence, not a low-level employee. In spite of Durham’s effort to interpret Priestap’s notes as proof that the FBI set up Mike Flynn, if Durham is contemplating charges only against “lower-level” FBI employees, he has not found proof that Priestap broke the law.

Peter Strzok was the Deputy Assistant Director when he opened Crossfire Hurricane, not a low-level employee. In spite of Durham’s extended efforts to suggest that Strzok sustained an investigation into Donald Trump out of some kind of animus or perhaps compensation for his role in Hillary Clinton’s defeat, in spite of Durham’s seeming efforts to suggest that Strzok pushed others to obtain legal process he refused to approve earlier in the investigation, if Durham is contemplating charges only against “lower-level” FBI employees, he has not found proof that Strzok broke the law.

Lisa Page was the Counselor to the Deputy Director, not a low-level employee. In spite of Durham’s efforts to suggest Page had some role in the investigation that DOJ IG already said she didn’t, if Durham is contemplating charges only against “lower-level” FBI employees, he has not found proof that Lisa Page broke the law.

Durham has interviewed few if any of these senior people, who’ve been targeted for years. Without even hearing their side, apparently, Durham has decided they’re not the villains Trump made them out to be.

But Trump’s chief villains aren’t the only targets that — if this report is correct — will not be charged.

The WSJ notes that Durham won’t charge anyone for concluding that Russia not only wanted to defeat Hillary, but affirmatively wanted Trump in power.

Beyond the role of outside tipsters, Mr. Durham’s investigation examined how the FBI first came to open the investigation, as well as a separate 2017 U.S. intelligence report that concluded Moscow interfered in the presidential election in part to help then-candidate Trump.

Mr. Durham’s team isn’t expected to bring any criminal charges in connection with that intelligence assessment, some of the people said.

So John Brennan won’t be getting charged either, in spite of calls for that to happen.

Then there are all the other hoaxes Republicans invented: Durham will not charge anyone for spying on Trump before the opening of the investigation, because it didn’t happen. Durham will not charge the FBI or CIA for setting Joseph Mifsud up to entrap George Papadopoulos, because it didn’t happen.

In spite of the seeming confirmation that four years of insinuations about these people were wrong, the right wing has responded to the seeming news that Peter Strzok won’t be charged with delight.

High Gaslighter Catherine Herridge posted the same partially unsealed footnote (footnote 350 discussed in this post) twice as well as a passage about what the FBI had learned by September 2017, three months after the last FISA order targeting Carter Page.

Jonathan Turley (who ignores the WSJ description that any FBI targets are low-level) claims that Durham’s current focus could “implicate some of the most powerful figures in politics” in his final report, while getting a slew of details (about Bruce and Nellie Ohr, especially) wrong.

The report in The Wall Street Journal said Durham is presenting evidence against FBI agents and possibly others in the use of false information or tips at the start of the Russia investigation in 2016. Those “others” could include a virtual who’s who of Washington politics, and even if they are not indicted, Durham could implicate some of the most powerful figures in politics in his final report, expected in the coming months.

[snip]

This cross-pollination between the campaign and the Justice Department was evident in the strange role of Bruce Ohr, a senior Justice official who was later demoted for concealing his meetings with people pushing the Steele dossier; his wife, Nellie Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS as a researcher on Trump’s purported connections to Russia. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz subsequently found that Bruce Ohr acted improperly and committed “consequential errors in judgment.”

[snip]

Durham also is reportedly looking into information concerning Alfa Bank, a privately owned commercial bank in Russia. That information led to possible access to the Trump campaign server. The Alfa Bank controversy is likely to make a number of powerful people particularly uneasy. Clinton campaign-linked figures such as Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson allegedly pushed the debunked claim that the Trump campaign had a server linked directly to the bank, which in turn was linked to Vladimir Putin and his cronies. The Alfa Bank conspiracy reportedly was pitched to the Justice Department, including in contacts with Bruce Ohr.

Glenn Greenwald, after spending years mocking the prosecutions of Trump’s Campaign and Deputy Campaign Manager, his personal lawyer, his National Security Advisor, a foreign policy advisor, and his rat-fucker — four for covering up what happened in 2016 — and after pushing the Hunter Biden laptop allegedly funneled to a different Trump personal lawyer who is currently being investigated for influence peddling with Russian assets — speaks gleefully of “already one guilty plea: seems like more criminal charges are coming.”

The pseudonymous TechnoFog[gy] highlights the claims of a Russian, Olga Galkina, who — if the dossier was indeed filled with disinformation (and I believe it was) — was the source for much of it, while complaining, in the same breath as they magnify Galkina’s claims, that Igor Danchenko might not be aware that those like Galkina who fed him garbage were doing so for Russian intelligence.

More and more, Durham appears to be chasing what an elaborate lawfare effort from the Alfa Bank oligarchs are throwing out. The effort, like the dossier itself, is transparently problematic, particularly given that FBI debunked it early. The dossier had little to do with the investigation of anyone but Carter Page; the Alfa Bank allegations were entirely a distraction from the investigation. If Durham wants to stake his report on that, it has the potential of making it an easily discredited piece of Russian propaganda.

A focus on the disinformation in the dossier and the way that some ways the Alfa Bank claim was packaged up has a real potential to backfire for Durham, because it can only shine a light on how Russia obfuscated its efforts to get Trump elected in 2016 with disinformation about efforts to get Trump elected.

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Palace Intrigue: Trump Prepares His Consolation Prize for Vladimir Putin

November 11, 2020/137 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, 2020 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

In the last two days, Trump has prepared a coup of sorts. First, he fired Mike Esper and replaced him with Christopher Miller; several of Esper’s top deputies went with him. Then, Trump installed three different Devin Nunes flunkies at several places in the DOD bureaucracy:

Mike Ellis — the guy who hid the Ukraine transcript and one source for the unmasking hoax — to NSA as General Counsel
Ezra Cohen-Watnick — a key Mike Flynn loyalist and another source for the unmasking hoax — to DOD Undersecretary of Intelligence
Kash Patel — who ensured that no HPSCI Republicans got sound intelligence during their Russian investigation, then pretended to be a Ukraine expert during impeachment, and then served to conduct a purge in the Office of Director of National Intelligence — to DOD Chief of Staff

To be clear, unlike these others, Christopher Miller, the Acting Secretary of Defense, reportedly does care about US security, even if he’s several ranks too junior for the job and got appointed over a Senate confirmed Deputy.

But the Nunes flunkies are there, serving as gate-keepers for the hoaxes favored by Trump and Nunes, as they have done so successfully throughout Trump’s term.

Spook-whisperer David Ignatius reports that these changes come amidst a sustained debate about what to do with a piece of likely Russian disinformation that — Trump and feeble-minded partisans like Lindsey Graham believe — will prove that Russia didn’t prefer Trump over Hillary.

President Trump’s senior military and intelligence officials have been warning him strongly against declassifying information about Russia that his advisers say would compromise sensitive collection methods and anger key allies.

An intense battle over this issue has raged within the administration in the days before and after the Nov. 3 presidential election. Trump and his allies want the information public because they believe it would rebut claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin supported Trump in 2016. That may sound like ancient history, but for Trump it remains ground zero — the moment when his political problems began.

CIA Director Gina Haspel last month argued strongly at a White House meeting against disclosing the information, because she believed that doing so would violate her pledge to protect sources and methods, a senior congressional source said. This official said a bipartisan group of Republican and Democratic senators has been trying to protect Haspel, though some fear that Trump may yet oust her.

Rumors have been flying this week about Haspel’s tenure, but a source familiar with her standing as CIA director said Tuesday that national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows had both “assured her that she’s good,” meaning she wouldn’t be removed. Haspel also met personally with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) Tuesday. She sees him regularly as a member of the “Gang of Eight” senior congressional leaders. But Tuesday’s visit was another sign of GOP support.

Haspel’s most unlikely defender has been Attorney General William P. Barr, who opposed a pre-election push to declassify the sensitive material, according to three current and former officials. At a showdown meeting at the White House, Barr pushed back against revealing the secret information.

Gen. Paul Nakasone, who heads U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, has also argued vehemently against disclosure, according to a senior defense official and the senior congressional source. Like Haspel, Nakasone took the unusual step of directly opposing White House efforts to release the intelligence, because he feared the damage that disclosure would cause.

With the new changes, General Nakasone reports through Cohen-Watnick and Patel and will have to rely on the legal “advice” of Ellis. So not only does this move put more senior votes in favor of declassifying this intelligence, but it puts them in places where Nakasone might be forced to accede to these demands.

Reporting suggests that Trump is seeking to make the full intelligence behind the reports described here available. Fundamentally, the intelligence shows that the US government obtained a Russian intelligence report that stated in late July 2016 — John Ratcliffe says it was July 26 but by handwriting it appears to be July 28 — Hillary approved of a plan to vilify Trump for his dalliance with Russian intelligence.

Already, this is a stupid hoax from the Republicans. It is public that, in the wake of the DNC release on July 22 — and particularly after Trump’s “Russia are you listening” comment on July 27 — Hillary started focusing on Trump’s coziness with Russia. In other words, the crack Russian analysts would have to do no more than read the paper to come to this conclusion. Nor would there be anything scandalous about Hillary trying to hold Trump accountable for capitalizing on an attack on her by a hostile foreign country.

I think Republicans are trying to suggest — by altering a date (July 26 instead of July 28) again and breathing heavy — that former government official Hillary Clinton was the reason why the FBI opened an investigation into Trump, rather than the Australians informing the US about Coffee Boy George Papadopoulos bragging about Russia offering help back in May. There’s not a shred of evidence for it, of course, but that has never stopped the frothy right.

The far more interesting part of this intelligence comes in the report that Peter Strzok wrote up, which is dated September 7. It makes it clear that Hillary’s alleged attack pertained to Russian hackers, notably Guccifer 2.0.

So a Russian intelligence report the US stole from Russia in late July 2016 claimed that, on July 26 0r 28, Hillary approved an attack on Trump pertaining to having help from Russian hackers, a report that did not get formally shared with the FBI until September 7. And either the report itself or FBI’s interpretation of it focuses on Guccifer 2.0.

Somehow this is the smoking gun — that over a month after opening up Crossfire Hurricane the FBI started investigating a claim that, starting on July 26 or 28, Hillary thought Trump was cuddling up with Russian hackers, interpreted by someone to be Guccifer 2.0 — the FBI learned that fact.

When I first wrote this up, I hadn’t started my Rashomon Rat-Fucker series, to say nothing of my report to the FBI that an American I knew may have served as an American cut-out for the Guccifer 2.0 operation (I’m jumping ahead of myself, but I’m certain the FBI investigated that claim for at least a year). At the time, I focused on how prescient the frothers were making Hillary look for anticipating that Roger Stone would first start doing propaganda for Guccifer 2.0 on August 5; best case for the frothers in this situation is that Stone somehow learned of the Russian report before the FBI did.

But now that I’ve written those posts, it’s clear that not only did the FBI have strong circumstantial evidence that Stone knew of the Guccifer 2.0 operation even before the first Guccifer 2.0 post, because he was searching for it on June 15 before the WordPress site went public, but that Stone probably had a face-to-face meeting with someone at the RNC from whom he got advance notice of the DNC drop.

In July 2016, this report is only mildly interesting, amounting to showing that the Russians read the newspaper like everyone else.

In 2020, after details from the Mueller investigation have become public, the Russian report makes far more sense as deliberate disinformation, an attempt to turn a direct contact with Stone into a hoax about Hillary.

Which makes Trump’s apparent determination to liberate this document all the more telling. It suggests that he wants to make public something, anything, he can use to counter what will be very damning allegations when this all becomes clear.

And, given how shoddy the actual intelligence itself is (at best showing that Russian intelligence officers read public sources and more credibly showing that Russia was building plausible deniability for contacts with Roger Stone in real time), Trump’s insistence on it, whether intentional or not, would serve to blow highly sensitive collection for a third-rate hoax.

I can see why Trump would prioritize this intelligence on his way out that the door. It comes at a time when he can be easily manipulated to burn the IC in ways that can only serve Russian interests.

In other words, one of Trump’s top priorities for the Lame Duck period is to give Vladimir Putin a consolation prize.

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