Last week, Kash Patel established precedent for releasing damaging — potentially even fabricated — accusations against prominent private citizens, a precedent that demolishes the excuse DOJ and FBI made less than a month ago to bury the Epstein files.
There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.
[snip]
Perpetuating unfounded theories about Epstein serves neither of those ends.
To that end, while we have labored to provide the public with maximum information regarding Epstein and ensured examination of any evidence in the government’s possession, it is the determination of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.
After all, in releasing the declassified Durham annex — a document, like the Epstein files, in the custody of FBI and DOJ — Kash released not just information on several prominent uncharged third parties, but unsealed and disseminated “unfounded theories” about them, most notably Julianne Smith, the woman John Durham suspected of entering into a conspiracy to frame Donald Trump.
In 2016, when Russian spies tried to frame her, Smith was a private citizen.
At the time, Smith worked at the Center for New American Security (“CNAS”) and was serving as a Clinton campaign foreign policy advisor. OSC Report of Interview of Julianne Smith on July 21, 2021 at 1. She advised investigators that she never received notification that her account was hacked, but was aware that CNAS was “regularly challenged by China and Russia.”
At the time of her Durham interview in July 2021, she was serving as an advisor to Tony Blinken, awaiting confirmation to serve as NATO Ambassador. But she is, as far as I understand, once again a private citizen.
In the unclassified Durham Report, Smith is referred to as “Foreign Policy Advisor-1.” I actually made some efforts to discover who this was when the report came out, asking senior Clinton people, to no avail (and the frothers got the identity wrong); even they had no idea.
But in the appendix — an appendix that indicates, without saying explicitly, that Russian hackers stole the same email soliciting criticism of Trump’s attacks on NATO that Smith turned over to Durham herself — Durham chose to name her, thereby deviating from the approach adopted by Michael Horowitz with his Hillary Report classified annex.
We are writing to enlist your support for the attached public statement. Both of us are Hillary Clinton supporters and advisors but hope that this statement could be signed by a bipartisan group[.] Donald Trump’s repeated denigration of the NATO Alliance, his refusal to support our Article 5 obligations to our European allies and his kid glove treatment of Russia and Vladimir Putin are among the most reckless statements made by a Presidential candidate in memory. 438
The same email sourced to an apparent subpoena return obscuring her name in the unclassified report, XXXX-0014561, is described as Classified Appendix Document-9 in the appendix.
This real document, doing nothing more than criticizing Trump for stances he did not hide, a criticism Hillary had been making for months, is one of the nuggets on which John Durham built a false conspiracy theory, which in turn built off a plan by Russian spies to gin up a conspiracy theory about,
I don’t know, some dark forces, like the FBI for instance, or better yet, Clinton sympathizers in IC, Pentagon, Deep State (or somewhere else), about American websites deploying a campaign to demonize the actions of Russia’s GRU.
As I have repeatedly shown, Durham took affirmative proof that Smith was not conspiring with his imagined chief conspirator Michael Sussmann and turned it into “oil to put into his fire.” Durham included texts between Smith and another Hillary advisor, reflecting her attempts to ask senior Obama officials (apparently including Lisa Monaco) yet failing to get answers about whether anyone was even investigating the Russian hack. Durham insanely judged that a hack victim, trying to find out of the FBI was investigating the hack, was part of a plot to frame Donald Trump.
Advisor-1 ‘s text message exchange with Foreign Policy Advisor-2 supports the notion that at least some officials within the campaign were seeking information about the FBI’s response to the DNC hack, which would be consistent with, and a means of furthering, the purported plan. Moreover, the campaign’s funding of the Steele Reports and Alfa Bank allegations as described in greater detail in Sections IV.D. l.b.ii and IV.E. l.b provide some additional support for the credibility to the information set forth in the Clinton Plan intelligence.
By the time Durham wrote this tripe, Michael Sussmann had forced Durham to obtain records about how persistently he had spoken to the FBI about the hacks, including records showing that FBI failed to consult with him before making its first public statement about the DNC hack.
It is wildly inconsistent to point to Smith’s unsuccessful attempts to get top national security officials to assuage her concerns about an investigation as proof of a conspiracy in which Michael Sussmann, who would have been the ring-leader, had been in weekly contact with the FBI about the investigation since they first alerted the FBI.
It’s not just that John Durham never charged Smith in his conspiracy conspiracy theory. It’s that his case was grotesquely stupid.
And, he himself concluded that his conspiracy conspiracy theory was based on composite emails — pretending to be raw intelligence — that the SVR fabricated into an attempt to frame Smith. As I show here, even the premise of his investigation involved treating SVR claims as Smith’s own.
Under DOJ guidelines — under the pretext that DOJ and FBI adopted less than a month ago — Smith is the kind of private citizen whose name you continue to mask, as Durham did in the public release two years ago. Certainly, there’s far less public interest in knowing the ID of someone the SVR framed 9 years ago than knowing why the President is making overt efforts to silence the sexual predator who, by his own confession, “stole” underage girls from his spa, recruiting at least one into sex slavery.
But Kash chose not to do that.
Kash chose to make the name of someone who had been framed — with his help — by Russian spies public.
Which pretty much demolishes his excuse for hiding details about what Trump knew about Ghislaine Maxwell stealing his girls.
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By July 2021, John Durham had virtually all the evidence he needed to know that both premises of his investigation — that Hillary Clinton had a plan to frame Donald Trump, and FBI learned about that plan but ignored it when they relied on the Steele dossier and accepted the Alfa Bank allegations — were false. Yet he continued going for two more years anyway, pursuing prosecutions of Michael Sussmann and Igor Danchenko, both of which resulted in acquittals.
You might be forgiven, more than two years after John Durham closed up shop, if you’ve forgotten why he even spent four years chasing what is now clear was Russian disinformation, effectively investigating people because they had been hacked by Russian spies who framed them as part of a plan to, “put more oil into the fire.”
There are several explanations “why” Durham conducted this investigation, including:
Bill Barr determined, before he even saw the evidence acquired by Mueller (if he ever did), there should be an investigation to avenge the Russian investigation
Durham got snookered into chasing Russian conspiracy theories designed to stoke polarization, doing great damage in the process
In 2020, John Ratcliffe reported a referral from the CIA to the FBI
Durham’s report misleadingly suggests it was the last one: the declassification of the SVR report that John Ratcliffe did — first a report about the SVR allegation, then two exhibits about it — in September and October 2020. By that point, Durham had done at least four interviews focused primarily on the SVR allegation: a September 17, 2019 interview with the FBI analyst who knew that collection best, a February 27, 2020 interview with some kind of spook, two July 8, 2020 interviews with some IC officers, and an interview with another IC officer the day Ratcliffe released the exhibits. (Given that Ratcliffe boasted about how many times he met with Durham, that October 7 interview could well be Ratcliffe himself.)
The Office also considered as part of its investigation the government’s handling of certain intelligence that it received during the summer of 2016. That intelligence concerned the purported “approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.” 391 We refer to that intelligence hereafter as the “Clinton Plan intelligence.” DNI John Ratcliffe declassified the following information about the Clinton Plan intelligence in September 2020 and conveyed it to the Senate Judiciary Committee:
In late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee. The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.
According to his handwritten notes, CIA Director Brennan subsequently briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials on the intelligence, including the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.”
On 07 September 2016, U.S. intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral to FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok regarding “U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private mail server.” 392
The Clinton Plan intelligence was relevant to the Office’s investigation for two reasons.
First, the Clinton Plan intelligence itself and on its face arguably suggested that private actors affiliated with the Clinton campaign were seeking in 2016 to promote a false or exaggerated narrative to the public and to U.S. government agencies about Trump’s possible ties to Russia. Given the significant quantity of materials the FBI and other government agencies did in fact receive during the 2016 presidential election season and afterwards that originated with and/or were funded by the Clinton campaign or affiliated persons (i.e., the Steele Dossier reports, the Alfa Bank allegations, and the Yotaphone allegations), the Clinton Plan intelligence prompted the Office to consider (i) whether there was in fact a plan by the Clinton campaign to tie Trump to Russia in order to “stir[] up a scandal” in advance of the 2016 presidential election, and (ii) if such a plan existed, whether an aspect or component of that plan was to intentionally provide knowingly false and/or misleading information to the FBI or other agencies in furtherance of such a plan. 393
Second, the Clinton Plan intelligence was also highly relevant to the Office’s review and investigation because it was part of the mosaic of information that became known to certain U.S. officials at or before the time they made critical decisions in the Crossfire Hurricane case and in related law enforcement and intelligence efforts. Because these officials relied, at least in part, on materials provided or funded by the Clinton campaign and/or the DNC when seeking FISA warrants against a U.S. citizen (i.e., the Steele Dossier reports) and taking other investigative steps, the Clinton Plan intelligence had potential bearing on the reliability and credibility of those materials. Put another way, this intelligence-taken at face value-was arguably highly relevant and exculpatory because it could be read in fuller context, and in combination with other facts, to suggest that materials such as the Steele Dossier reports and the Alfa Bank allegations (discussed below and in greater detail in Section IV.E. l) were part of a political effort to smear a political opponent and to use the resources of the federal government’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies in support of a political objective. The Office therefore examined whether, and precisely when, U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials became aware of the Clinton Plan intelligence; whether they vetted and analyzed the intelligence to understand its potential significance; and whether those officials, in turn, incorporated the intelligence into their decision-making regarding the investigation of individuals who were part of the Trump campaign and had possible ties to Russian election interference efforts.
I’ll come back to the significance of precisely what Ratcliffe and Kash declassified.
Durham depends on a different conspiracy theory in each report
For now, consider how each of his two volumes (unclassified, classified) confess that one of these two prongs — Clinton had a plan, and the FBI ignored that she did — was false, but then obscures that the other was, too.
Falsely claimed the Russian intelligence report alleging Hillary had a plan to smear Trump about his ties to Russia did — or would even have to — rely on false information
Misrepresented the nature of the report about Hillary, thereby misrepresenting the dissemination of SVR intelligence within the Intelligence Community
Only found any confirmation for his Clinton conspiracy conspiracy theory from witnesses whose memories had been radically altered by the threat of criminal prosecution; everyone else disclaimed every shred of Durham’s Clinton conspiracy conspiracy theory
There are just a few things structurally that seeing the classified annex adds. Here’s how the two sections map.
Both tell the story of the SVR Report (just the classified annex describes the underlying documents or concedes they were fabricated). Both describe how none of Hillary’s people knew anything about Durham’s Clinton conspiracy conspiracy theory. Both point to true things — reliance on an accurate Franklin Foer story that Durham miscites, interest in whether the FBI was investigating, and an effort to condemn Trump for his attacks on NATO — to bolster Durham’s case that his Clinton conspiracy conspiracy theory is true, though in the classified annex, Durham puts these details in his “The authenticity of the Benardo emails” section.
Both include a section that points to some other part of his (or the right wing’s) obsessions to bolster the Clinton conspiracy conspiracy theory. The unclassified report has a section that misrepresents both Fusion’s dissemination of the Steele dossier and Clinton’s media push of the Alfa Bank allegations (in the process, conflicting with other parts of his report and the results of his investigations) to buck up his theory. The classified annex has a section (after the conclusion that the emails were “composites” and a section describing other times the US Intelligence Community treated these SVR documents as authentic) pointing to Loretta Lynch’s “odd” reaction to a briefing on the two SVR reports claiming she was intervening in the Clinton email investigation. It’s the inclusion of that briefing (Durham conveniently ignores both that the FBI found these documents to be “objectively false” and the reference to Jim Comey throwing the election for Republicans) that allows Durham to decide that, while the emails on which the report was based were probably “composites,” the Clinton plan might be true (this is the conclusion Sean Davis and with him FBI Director Kash Patel cling to) and so his investigation into the FBI’s purported receipt of a report about it legitimate.
The other remarkable difference between the unclassified and classified report is in the way Durham describes his certainty that what he calls a referral ever got to the FBI — or more specifically, Peter Strzok — in the first place. His unclassified report includes an entire paragraph describing that no one on the Crossfire Hurricane team remembered seeing it.
The Office showed portions of the Clinton Plan intelligence to a number of individuals who were actively involved in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Most advised they had never seen the intelligence before, and some expressed surprise and dismay upon learning of it. For example, the original Supervisory Special Agent on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, Supervisory Special Agent-1, reviewed the intelligence during one of his interviews with the Office. 428 After reading it, Supervisory Special Agent-1 became visibly upset and emotional, left the interview room with his counsel, and subsequently returned to state emphatically that he had never been apprised ofthe Clinton Plan intelligence and had never seen the aforementioned Referral Memo. 429 Supervisory Special Agent-1 expressed a sense of betrayal that no one had informed him ofthe intelligence. When the Office cautioned Supervisory Special Agent-1 that we had not verified or corroborated the accuracy of the intelligence and its assertions regarding the Clinton campaign, Supervisory Special Agent-1 responded firmly that regardless of whether its contents were true, he should have been informed of it. 430
During Durham’s testimony to Congress, Strzok revealed that 1) contrary to Durham’s insinuations, he had spoken with with Durham’s investigators and 2) the copy of the referral that Durham’s team showed him was not an FBI copy, suggesting that Durham also had no proof the document ever made it to the FBI.
So in the unclassified report, Durham confesses his entire premise — that the FBI received this report and didn’t respond as he thinks they should have — may be utter bullshit, because they never received it.
Yet in his classified report, he states as fact, threedifferenttimes, that it was sent to the FBI. He says this twice in the section purporting to validate the import of this report because the Intelligence Community responded to it, section 4 above.
In addition, as described in the unclassified report, on September 7, 2016, the CIA sent the FBI an “investigative referral” memorandum that referred to, among other information, the purported Clinton campaign plan.
[snip]
The DNI also declassified a portion of former CIA Director Brennan’s handwritten notes that describe the August 3, 2016 meeting with President Obama and the CIA Referral Memorandumsent to Director Comey and Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok. [my emphasis]
And then in the conclusion — the one Davis is impressed with — finding that even though the email on which this conspiracy theory was based is a composite, nevertheless it was important because the CIA sent a referral memo that he falsely suggests actually arrived at its destination.
Moreover, in early September 2016, the CIA prepared a referral memorandum on the information regarding the purported “plan” that went to the FBI [my emphasis]
So looking at these two together, the classified annex concludes that the emails behind the report that launched this whole project are “composites,” but because the CIA sent the FBI a referral memo, argues it was a legitimate exercise to review how the FBI responded to that referral memo. Then the unclassified report concedes it has no proof the CIA referral ever made it to the Crossfire Hurricane team, but the investigation was legitimate because Clinton may have shared knowingly false allegations about Trump with the FBI.
John Ratcliffe committed the crime John Durham was hunting
Now consider how those Ratcliffe declassifications cabined the investigation.
He describes that in interviews with Clinton and FBI people (to the extent that he’s not covering up FBI interviews that don’t help him), he used the declassified files with people who lacked clearance (including, with Jennifer Palmieri, the referral document rather than the report itself) and used a redacted version of the emails with people who had clearance, as well as Leonard Benardo. So his question about “Clinton plan” all focused on how fevered right wingers defined it.
I’ve already talked about the blind spots built into John Brennan’s notes. These notes span the fifth and sixth pages of Brennan’s notes, meaning a whole lot of the briefing was more important. They’re described as offering insight into “Russian activities,” not Hillary’s (the CIA couldn’t investigate Hillary’s in any case). The first redacted paragraph likely describes the SVR targets in question.
But there’s a bullet before the description of the purported Hillary plan, and who knows how much after it.
Now check out where the word, “vilify” appears in the known SVR documents. The actual draft report — the purported subject of this investigation — used the word, “smear.” The two emails dated July 25 using a Russian idiom, along with the email between spooks discussing starting a conspiracy theory, use the word, “demonize.” The purported July 27 email from Benardo doesn’t use any such word.
The word “vilify” appears in this email between spooks — the one that follows the one in which they discuss a plan to start a conspiracy theory about the Deep State.
Even in the classified appendix, Durham provides very little of the email, and half of what is there is redacted.
Now look at the referral memo.
It refers to “an exchange,” not a draft memo, which is what the memo in question is. It’s hard to imagine, at this point, what could be behind that redaction about Guccifer. And while there’s a mention in the report itself to Guccifer, that doesn’t pertain to Hillary. It’s a claim about what the FBI has discovered:
Clinton’s supporters in the FBI lack conclusive irrefutable evidence of the Russian Federation’s involvement in the scandal, tied to the theft of the DNC’s correspondence. In the meantime, during the launched investigation, there has been a multitude of circumstantial evidence that the alias of Guccifer 2.0 (the name of the hacker who accepted responsibility for the incident) was, in fact, used to cover up a special unit of the GRU of the Russian Federation Defense Ministry’s General Staff.
The email between the two spooks — which could fairly be called “an exchange” — ties the attribution to Guccifer directly to the plan to start a conspiracy theory about Hillary.
Effectively, this exchange says, “fuck, they’re onto Guccifer, let’s start a conspiracy theory about Hillary! dark forces!! Deep State!!!” And then the follow-up email describes the conspiracy theory in terms of “vilifying” Putin and Trump.
Both these reports — the Brennan notes and the CIA referral to FBI — appear to refer not to the draft report about Hillary’s claimed plan, but instead to communications between the Russian spooks reflecting a plan to invent a conspiracy theory about Hillary to muddle the Guccifer attribution (which is precisely what Roger Stone immediately did).
If that’s right, it means it was never a Clinton plan, it was an SVR plan. That makes sense; after all, John Brennan wouldn’t be permitted to investigate Hillary Clinton’s plans to do oppo research, but he would be permitted to investigate SVR’s plans to frame Hillary. And that’s what he told Durham: he was focused not on Hillary’s plan but Russia’s.
When interviewed, Brennan generally recalled reviewing the materials but stated he did not recall focusing specifically on its assertions regarding the Clinton campaign’s purported plan. 400 Brennan recalled instead focusing on Russia’s role in hacking the DNC. 401
And having apparently mischaracterized what actually elicited CIA attention, Durham then spent paragraphs and paragraphs talking about how if the FBI had simply factored in a conspiracy theory invented by SVR to muddle the GRU attribution, then they might not have relied on the Steele dossier (itself being injected with Russian disinformation) or accepted the Alfa Bank allegations.
Indeed, Durham actually considered whether Peter Strzok committed a crime by ignoring his misrepresentation of the referral that he had no evidence Strzok ever received.
Whether these failures by U.S. officials amounted to criminal acts, however, is a different question. In order for the above-described facts to give rise to criminal liability under federal civil rights statutes, the Office would need to, for example, identify one or more persons who (i) knew the Clinton campaign intended to falsely accuse its opponent with specific information or allegations, (ii) intentionally disregarded a particular civil right of a particular person (such as the right to be free of unreasonable searches or seizures), and (iii) then intentionally aided that effort by taking investigative steps based on those allegations while knowing that they were false.
[snip]
Although the evidence we collected revealed a troubling disregard for the Clinton Plan intelligence and potential confirmation bias in favor of continued investigative scrutiny of Trump and his associates, it did not yield evidence sufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that any FBI or CIA officials494 intentionally furthered a Clinton campaign plan to frame or falsely accuse Trump of improper ties to Russia.
But Durham never factors into his own investigation those other two emails between spooks, both of which likely precede the report he claimed he was investigating. He never mentions them at all. Had he factored those in, all of this would have been shut down in 2021.
And after claiming that Clinton had a plan to falsely accuse her opponent rather than that SVR had a plan to falsely accuse Hillary, Durham used all this to get warrants targeting Michael Sussmann and Igor Danchenko. He, “intentionally disregarded a particular civil right of [Sussmann and Danchenko] (such as the right to be free of unreasonable searches or seizures), and (iii) then intentionally aided that effort by taking investigative steps based on those allegations while knowing that they were false.”
Once you see those two other emails between the Russian spooks — the one linking Guccifer directly to the plan to talk about the Deep State and the one using the word “vilify,” both of which Durham disregarded — then you have evidence that Kash, Ratcliffe, and Durham himself knew the SVR intended to falsely accuse Hillary, then took investigative steps based on those allegations that were clearly fabricated.
They took four whole years of investigative steps.
No wonder Durham allegedly tried to bury all this in burn bags.
Update: Remember that Kash, at a time he was a private citizen, was making claims making insinuations about Hillary making a plan in July 2016.
Update: And Ratcliffe was similarly making false claims on this topic while a private citizen.
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I want to talk about one paragraph that appears in this screed from Matty “Dick Pics” Taibbi, written after Matty declared the Durham classified annex is proof he’s been right for years, responding to Charlie Savage’s explainer on the import of the discovery that the emails — from which Russian spies purportedly wrote a report claiming Hillary was going to politicize Trump’s ties with Russia — were manufactured. The rest of the rant boils down to “NYT wah wah wah NYT NYT” and is of course riddled with errors.
But this short paragraph is a piece of work, even for MattyDickPics.
Matty dismisses the import that the emails behind the report that he and the right wing have chased for years were “assembled by Russian spies.” He claims this is just about a “pair” of emails, but that dodges what was really there:
An email between two Russian spooks, which Durham describes to be dated July 26, talking about ginning up a conspiracy theory about the Deep State
Another email purportedly dated July 27 containing the imagined smoking gun that Clinton approved this alleged plan; the email was attached to an email between spooks that seems to reference their plan to gin up a conspiracy theory
The report itself, the date of which Durham has always hidden and we still don’t know (but it is either dated July 27, incorporating that email purportedly dated July 27, or it precedes the date of the main piece of evidence supporting the claim in the report)
It’s enough, for Matty, that the emails were “likely pulled by Russians from other real American victims of hacking.” Nevermind that only one other email reflecting the language of the email has been found, and that other email was largely unrelated to Hillary Clinton and, oh, also pertained to Russian rat-fucking and language play. It’s enough for Matty that these Russian spies cut-and-pasted from something else they stole to justify treating the claims based on that purported email as “true.”
You see, Matty wants to separate those emails (admittedly Savage refers to them as a pair, just like Matty, but it matters that there are two drafts of the July 25 one) from the larger cache — the existence of emails in English using a Russian idiom dated around the same time as some Russian spies decided to gin up a conspiracy theory, this conspiracy theory, the one Matty has monetized for years.
To dismiss the fact that conspiracy theory he has monetized for years is based on a report based on manufactured emails incorporating a Russian idiom in English, Matty says it doesn’t matter, first, because there are numerous other American “victims,” scare quotes. The sheer breadth of Russian hacking stands in for accuracy for Matty, and he’s happy to dismiss the plight of the victims if he has to.
He also claims that the larger SVR collection “has been described in multiple other reports as real.” Matty is conflating — as other Russian propagandists have — “real” for “accurate.” Here’s what those other reports have said:
2020 John Ratcliffe email: Ratcliffe’s initial disclosure of this report explains, “The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.”
2020 HPSCI Report: The right wing report incorporated a great number of SVR reports, without any discussion of whether the things they claimed about Hillary Clinton — such as that she has Type 2 diabetes — match known reality. More importantly, to sustain their claim that these are “real,” they ignore the part of one of the Lynch reports stating that Jim Comey would draw out the Clinton email investigation to help Republicans, which is what actually happened, and so if true would mean Trump didn’t win without help. We know with certainty that the authors of that report cherry-picked what was available to serve their needs. (Indeed, we know they ignored the email between Russian spooks about ginning up a conspiracy theory.)
So, no, Matty. While other reports describe these documents as authentically obtained from SVR, those other reports either dodge the question, raise real questions about accuracy, or declare several “objectively false.”
Nothing in this performance from Matty — his utter disinterest in provenance, a disdain for “victims” of Russian aggression, and a conflation of “authentic” for “true” — is new.
It’s just a really condensed example of his grift, written in response to the exposure that his nine-year grift was always built on a deliberate conspiracy theory ginned up by Russian spies exploiting people just like him.
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I really don’t think enough people are getting the pee-your-pants humor — at least if you’re Russian and want to destroy the United States — at the core of the classified annex from the Durham Report.
Durham describes that, in a May 21, 2021 interview with Leonard Benardo, Durham showed the Open Society Foundation Executive an email purportedly stolen from him in 2016 and asked him if he wrote it. Benardo told Durham, “he would not have used certain terms, such as ‘oil into the fire.'”
Durham, you see, was pretty aroused by the term, “put more oil into the fire,” because he was chasing a conspiracy theory that Hillary framed Donald Trump by paying for a dossier that — unbeknownst to her — was likely riddled with Russian disinformation, thanks to Oleg Deripaska, and also — unbeknownst to her — got shared with the FBI, and because – unbeknownst to her — Michael Sussmann brought allegations about a DNS anomaly to the FBI (one that the guy I went to the FBI about had a role in inflaming just weeks later). So that phrase, “put more oil into the fire,” looked like paydirt. It seemed to confirm the exact same conspiracy theory Durham was chasing: that Hillary intended to frame Trump at the FBI (even though the FBI had already announced their investigation).
Durham doesn’t quote what Benardo said directly. It may well have been more colorful than that he wouldn’t have used that term. Benardo has lived in Moscow and other parts of the former Soviet Union, and so he surely recognizes the phrase not only is not one most Americans would use — they would say, “pour fuel on the fire” or “add fuel to the fire.” They definitely wouldn’t use “oil.”
But he would recognize it as a Russian idiom.
And to be clear, while Chuck Grassley and Tulsi Gabbard are redacting most details about the provenance of these documents, the introduction says, “the above-referenced [SVR] memorandum included the English text of a document … the document contained a purported email from Benardo” on which, a redacted passage from Durham suggests, the SVR report “was partially based.”
That appears to confirm that this text appeared in the intelligence report that Durham chased like a toddler for four years in English. That is, it’s not a problem of translation — English to Russian back into English. A document that Durham spent years trying to verify as authentic uses a Russian idiom to describe the chaos that might ensue as a result of the FBI investigation that was publicly confirmed the very date of the email, July 25, 2016.
And this is one reason why the timing of these documents matters, which Grassley and Gabbard aggressively obscure. This is as close as we can establish:
July 25, 11 to 11:35AM: Smith texts other people trying to figure out if there was any investigation of the hack, and then discovering the FBI has just announced such an investigation (as I noted here, Durham doesn’t disclose anywhere in his report that during the Michael Sussmann prosecution, Sussmann forced him to obtain these emails that show FBI releasing a statement without consulting with the Dems, the victims of the hack, which goes a long way to debunking his conspiracy theory).
July 25, undisclosed time: Maurer responds to the Rid story
July 25, undisclosed time, but the date could be made up: Two drafts of purported Benardo emails
July 26: Email between two Russian spooks suggesting “doing something about a task from someone”
July 27: Email between two Russian spooks about illuminating Hillary’s attempts to vilify Trump and Putin that links to a purported July 27 Benardo email which among other things reports that Hillary has “approved Julia’s idea”
July 26 to July 28: A draft Russian spy memorandum claiming that on July 26, Hillary Clinton approved a plan to smear Donald Trump, citing July 25 emails purportedly from Benardo
July 27: Email from Smith soliciting signers for a letter condemning Trump’s attack on NATO
Importantly, Durham describes that this email between two Russian spooks was “dated the following day” from the email with the Russian idiom in the English text, so July 26.
This email between two Russian spooks says, let’s do something “about a task from someone, I don’t know, some dark forces, like the FBI, or better yet, Clinton sympathizers in IC, Pentagon, Deep State (or somewhere else?), about American websites deploying a campaign to demonize the actions of Russia’s GRU.” This email between two Russian spooks effectively says, “Let’s do something about a campaign to demonize Trump.”
That’s why the date of the report — the one Durham never disclosed in his entire unclassified report and which he either didn’t disclose here or Grassley and Gabbard are covering up — matters.
Because even if you believed the emails from Benardo were real, the one with the Russian idiom dated July 25 and one dated July 27 — the very same day Trump would ask Russia to hack Hillary some more and Russian hackers would almost immediately comply, the same day Trump lied about chasing business interests in Russia, a lie Putin’s top people had proof was a lie, the same day Trump said he might recognize Crimea (in the days immediately following, Roger Stone attempted to script pro-Russian tweets from Trump) — even if you believed those emails were true, you’d have to notice that a key part of the SVR report, the detail that Hillary had, past tense, approved “a campaign to demonize the actions of Russia’s GRU” only appears in the July 27 email, not the July 25 one.
And that email, also in “English,” was attached to a follow-up email discussing the plan to “‘illuminate’ how Clinton was attempting to ‘villif[y] Moscow.'”
That all seems to suggest that the intelligence report itself — the one claiming to confirm that Hillary had approved a campaign to demonize Russia? — appeared the day after two Russian spooks said, “wouldn’t it be cool, now that we know the FBI is looking, to claim that Hillary was seeking to frame Trump?” Let’s pour fuel on the fire, as it were.
Durham ultimately concluded that these emails were “composites” of other emails — though he only identifies one, an email about an article from one of America’s foremost intelligence disinformation scholars, Thomas Rid, who is nowhere near as high up on Putin’s list of adversaries as Benardo surely is, but certainly someone it’d be hilarious to mock.
Durham doesn’t bother to discuss what Rid said, but much of what Rid did say conflicts with what the purported intelligence report does. Perhaps more importantly, Rid discussed how one of the early Guccifer documents included the signature of Felix Dzerzhinsky: “one dumped document was modified using Russian language settings, by a user named ‘Феликс Эдмундович,’ a code name referring to the founder of the Soviet Secret Police.” Likewise, it might have been worth mentioning that in the article whence this “composite” email came, Rid commented on the shitty English of Guccifer 2.0. “Guccifer 2.0’s English initially was also weak, but in subsequent posts the quality improved sharply.”
Had Durham actually looked these things: the apparent timing — including the coincidence with Donald Trump’s overtly pro-Russian statements, to say nothing of his lies about Russian business ties — had Durham actually considered all of this, that “English” phrase, “put more oil into the fire,” in shitty English, he might have gotten the joke.
Because honestly, it is fucking hilarious. Well-played, Russian spy dudes. Well-fucking-played.
But instead of seeing how he had been made a laughingstock — and really, the entire US intelligence community, especially the FBI that these conspiracy theories have serially destroyed — Durham instead doubled down, indicting two more men he hoped would fulfill his conspiracy theories, first destroying US DNS capabilities targeting Russia and then chasing Sergei Millian’s uncorroborated tweets, for years.
Nine years into this influence operation, that phrase, “put more oil into the fire,” a phrase that someone at the FBI should have recognized as a Russian idiom at least five years ago, is still ripping the country to pieces.
And somewhere, some Russian spies are peeing their pants in laughter.
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Judging from the chronology of his interview transcripts, John Durham first started chasing his conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton by September 17, 2019 (a detail I’ll return to). This list shows all the interviews cited in both Durham’s unclassified report and the annex; the italicized ones appear only in his classified annex (meaning they likely focus on the SVR intelligence at the core of that material).
In early September, Bill Barr’s office was micromanaging what Durham should investigate, including feeding him a binder of material. On September 16, he met with a partisan Cyber Agent named Nate Batty; he’s the guy who bolloxed the investigation of the Alfa Bank allegations, knowing that they came from Democrats. Then, on September 17, he met with “HQ Analyst-3” and she explained the nature of the SVR collection.
That September 17 interview is the only one exclusively listed in the annex. But it’s not the only interview Durham did with her. Between the unclassified report and the annex, Durham cited five interviews with this analyst, starting a month earlier, on August 14, 2019. In that interview, she described checking the SVR materials for information on the people prosecuted by Robert Mueller, a question he returned to twice more, in December 2019 and February 2020.
Where this analyst played the most significant role in his report, though, was in finding — in “significant intelligence information that first became available for the FBI to review in 2018” (perhaps not coincidentally after the DOJ IG investigation into the SVR material raised concerns about whether it had been sufficiently consulted during the Hillary email investigation) — “that as a result of [Russia’s access to sensitive U.S. government information”], Steele’s subsources could have been compromised by the Russians at a point in time prior to the date of the first Steele dossier report.”
It’s possible this analyst is Brittany Herzog, who testified about Steele’s subsources at the Igor Danchenko trial, though she left the FBI in 2019 to start grad school.
The bulk of what Durham included from this analyst pertained to how, in fall 2018, after she found evidence that Steele’s subsources had been identified before the first report in 2016, senior officials at FBI told her to stop documenting her work. She escalated the problem, ultimately to David Bowdich. Durham doesn’t discuss what happened then, even though his investigation continued past the time Bowdich departed.
We’ve never heard the results of that — except, perhaps, in questions by DOJ IG why the FBI didn’t unpack the possibility that Oleg Deripaska had injected disinformation in the dossier.
Having interviewed Analyst-3 about what was in the SVR files, he cited the DOJ IG report (by way of the SSCI Report) to affirm that Oleg Deripaska knew of the Steele project by July 2016. But then in a totally separate section, he casually asserted (citing NYT) that Steele worked for Deripaska (something he could, and should, have cited to Bruce Ohr’s 302s).
The FBI would have multiple reasons not to want to chase the disinformation in the Steele dossier, first in 2018, and then — after Mueller had established that Manafort was trying to get debt forgiven by him when he shared how the campaign planned to win and then discussed how to carve up Ukraine, another reason when Bowdich got that briefing. Over and over again, however, people serving Trump’s disinformation purposes never seem to want to pull the threads of Deripaska’s relationship with Steele and the possibility that Russia was sending disinformation coming and going.
Incidentally, Analyst-3 was not among the people who backed Durham’s theory that the Leonard Benardo emails were authentic.
Cited testimony
August 14, 2019: SVR didn’t have anything regarding regarding any Trump election campaign conspiracy with the Russians, nor did she see anything in FBI holdings regarding Carter Page, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, or Paul Manafort, though there was material on Manafort that was not connected to the election or the presidential campaign.
September 17, 2019: Timing of SVR hacks. Victims targeted.
December 10, 2019: Timing of SVR hacks. Victims targeted. The three things obtained: emails about hacking, analysis of hacked documents, and the stolen emails hacked. Hypothesis that the reference to “special services” in the SVR report was a reference to Christopher Steele. Details of the SVR report. Probable description of the compromise of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. SVR didn’t have anything regarding regarding any Trump election campaign conspiracy with the Russians, nor did she see anything in FBI holdings regarding Carter Page, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, or Paul Manafort.
February 19, 2020: The review team initially briefed Counterintelligence and Cyber executive management about their findings on the compromise of Steele’s sources during a conference call. Following the call, while driving home, Headquarters Analyst-3 was called by Acting Section Chief-2. Acting Section Chief-2 told Headquarters Analyst-3 that they appreciated the team’s work, but no more memorandums were to be written. A meeting was then held with Assistant Director Priestap and others. During that meeting, the review team was told to be careful about what they were writing down because issues relating to Steele were under intense scrutiny. SVR didn’t have anything regarding regarding any Trump election campaign conspiracy with the Russians, nor did she see anything in FBI holdings regarding Carter Page, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, or Paul Manafort.
December 2, 2021: Moreover, significant intelligence information that first became available for the FBI to review in 2018 showed that the Russians had access to sensitive U.S. government information years earlier that would have allowed them to identify Steele’s subsources. Indeed, an experienced FBI analyst assessed that as a result of their access to the information, Steele’s subsources could have been compromised by the Russians at a point in time prior to the date of the first Steele dossier report. Two weeks later, the Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence, Dina Corsi, met with the review team and directed them not to document any recommendations, context, or analysis in the memorandum they were preparing. The instructions, which Headquarters Analyst-3 described as “highly unusual,” concerned the team because analysis is what analysts do. Headquarters Analyst-3 was so concerned about the failure to fully exploit the materials involving Steele subsource information (and the possible need to bring information already exploited to the attention of the FISC) that she raised her concerns about the FBI’s lack of action in an email to her supervisor in the hope of having the issues explored further. See FBI-0009265 (Email from Headquarters Analyst-3 to FBI employees dated 10/17/2018). Although the team did not fully adhere to that instruction because of the need to provide context to the team’s findings, they did tone down their conclusions in the final memorandum. Headquarters Analyst-3 recalled that a separate briefing on the review was eventually provided by the team in the Deputy Director’s conference room, although Headquarters Analyst-3 could not recall if Deputy Director David Bowdich attended the briefing. Headquarters Analyst-3 did know that Bowdich was aware of the review itself. [T]here is reason to believe that even earlier in time [Russia] had access to other highly sensitive information from which the identities of Steele’s sources could have been compromised.
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The most important passage of the classified annex of the Durham Report is this one — though you won’t hear it from the frothy mob, in significant part because Chuck Grassley and Tulsi Gabbard are hiding what these documents are. Durham describes that it is “dated the following day” just after discussing an email dated July 25, so July 26.
Go ahead and read it once. But before I explain why it is so important, first let me illustrate how Chuck Grassley and Tulsi Gabbard are obscuring the provenance of these documents.
As I explained here, these documents were stolen from Russian foreign intelligence (SVR) by another country’s intelligence service (understood to be the Dutch). The documents themselves generally consist of two different kinds of documents:
Emails and other raw intelligence that SVR stole from victims, including US think tanks, State Department, and the Executive Office of the President
Discussions among SVR — mostly intelligence analysis — about the files they stole
Sometimes the victim files the Russians stole would be attached to the reports, sometimes they would be incorporated into the reports. Sometimes the Russians would translate the English-language documents they stole, other times they would not. So the game of telephone that most of these documents entail looks like this:
SVR steals documents
SVR translates documents
SVR analyzes documents
Dutch intelligence steals documents from SVR
Dutch intelligence shares documents with CIA and/or FBI
CIA and/or FBI translate the Russian bits
CIA and/or FBI analyze what they found
CIA sends what they think they found to FBI
But that’s not all. For the key documents in this collection, they report the speech of one or another Hillary Clinton associate, which means the game of telephone looks like this:
Debbie Wasserman Schultz or Julianne Smith talk with Think Tank guys (primarily Open Society’s Leonard Benardo, but also OSF’s Jeffrey Goldstein, as well as unidentified people at Atlantic Council and Carnegie Endowment)
Think tank guys write what they learned from DWS or Julianne Smith
SVR steals documents from Think Tank guys
SVR translates documents from English to Russian
SVR analyzes documents
Dutch intelligence steals documents from SVR
Dutch intelligence shares documents with CIA and/or FBI
CIA and/or FBI translate the Russian bits to English
CIA and/or FBI analyze what they found
CIA sends what they think they found to FBI
Best as I can tell, that path is the one involved in the documents Durham claims are the most important in his appendix, the ones that claim to report what Smith said about a Hillary Clinton plan to smear Donald Trump.
Here’s what FBI lawyer Tricia Anderson wrote about the problems with this game of telephone in a memo:
The reports likely reflected multiple levels of hearsay given that they were based on purported communications between Wasserman Schultz and potential donors, not any underlying communications between Lynch and Clinton campaign staff;
Wasserman Schultz’ communications may have contained exaggerations designed to reassure potential donors who were concerned by news about the FBI investigation;
The [Russians] who drafted the reports may have injected opinion, editorialization, or exaggeration into the reports; and
Translation errors may have contributed to the potential for unreliability
Durham provided just a summary of this assessment, but a fair one (in part because he’s more focused on later documents that don’t involve DWS but do involve all those levels of reported speech).
Here’s how the purported smoking gun was introduced (note, if Durham provided the date, it is redacted, but it reports something that happened on July 26, so it can be no later than then but could be July 27).
There was additional analysis about the provenance following the text.
There are a number of things conveyed in these redactions:
The classification marks
That CIA received these documents
The dates the Dutch passed them on
Presumably (though given Durham’s practice elsewhere in his report, not definitely) the date of the underlying memo
A description of the people at SVR they were obtained from
The import of all the other think tanks
The nature of the incorporated messages purported to be from Benardo
I don’t contest some of those redactions. But the amount of redaction, and lack of context elsewhere, obscure what the purported smoking gun is: a draft SVR report that in some way incorporates language attributed to Leonard Benardo. We have no clue whether it is dated July 26, 27, or 28 (by which date CIA had a copy). The section that most frothers are quoting (just like the section of other SVR reports released in recent weeks) is not an email itself, it is a Russian discussion about purported emails.
Durham follows the actual SVR report with the text attributed to Benardo; the description of how this text is incorporated in the document is redacted.
He follows it with another similar (raw) email attributed to Benardo (which should make evident whom Benardo sent the email to, or at what time, but Durham didn’t share that).
John Durham does not mention, at all, that the language of those first two purported Benardo emails — the ones with a date of July 25 — in no way supports the claim made in the SVR Report, that on,
26 July 2016, Clinton approved of a plan of her policy advisor, Julianna Smith … to smear Donald Trump. by magnifying the scandal tied to the intrusion by the Russian special services in the pre-election process to benefit the Republican nominee.
As envisioned by Smith, raising the theme of “Putin’s support for Trump” to the level of the Olympics scandal would divert the constituents’ attention from the investigation of Clinton’s compromised electronic correspondence.
He does note in a footnote that the SVR report got Julianne’s first name wrong, Juliana. He simply asserts that the “Julie” referred to in the purported Benardo emails is Julianne; he doesn’t note that in the purported follow-up Benardo email the name used is “Julia,” not the kind of thing a colleague would normally do. Durham interviewed Benardo, who specifically said he didn’t know who “Julie” (or “Julia”) was.
The only corroboration at all that the language in the Benardo email was real, was evidence it was not: an email sent by someone else, a Carnegie Endowment cyber guy named Tim Maurer, discussing this article on attribution from Thomas Rid. Durham says less about the Rid article than another cited in this correspondence, which is telling, because Rid discussed the Democrats’ decision, back in June, to go public with the hack.
This was big. Democratic political operatives suspected that not one but two teams of Putin’s spies were trying to help Trump and harm Clinton. The Trump campaign, after all, was getting friendly with Russia. The Democrats decided to go public.
Rid also discussed the Guccifer persona at length, which is important for reasons I’ll explain in a follow-up.
As noted, ultimately Durham concludes that the emails themselves — documents that are supposed to be raw collection — are instead “composites,” including from a totally different guy, Maurer.
The Office’s best assessment is that the July 25th and July 27th emails that purport to be from Benardo were ultimately a composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian intelligence hacking of the U.S.-based Think Tanks, including the Open Society Foundations, the Carnegie Endowment, and others. Indeed, as discussed above, language from Tim Maurer’s email of July 25th is identical to language contained in Benardo’s purported email of the same date.
Durham is hedging wildly here. I think the NYT overstates when it says, “Mr. Durham concluded that the email from July 27, 2016, and a related one dated two days earlier were probably manufactured.” That would be the conclusion sane normal people would draw, that if emails purporting to be from Benardo were actually cut-and-pasted language from Maurer, but Durham doesn’t make that conclusion (perhaps because he continued to chase this conspiracy theory for another two years after he interviewed all these people, indicting two more men only to discover his theories about them, too, were made up). Indeed, in an almost entirely redacted (and therefore useless) passage, Durham claims that in what must be July 2017, the CIA still maintained that the report and at least some of the purported emails were not fabrications. He also cites interviews he did with people who thought the Benardo emails were authentic.
But yeah, if the emails themselves are “composites,” it means they’re made up, not even attributing the author correctly. In fact, if they’re composites, we have no reason to believe the emails dated July 25 weren’t in fact “composited” on July 26 or 27.
Now’s a good time to mention that Durham is obscuring the sequence of the documents here (not least by withholding the metadata of the real email he obtains, but also thanks to the redactions from Grassley and Tulsi). The sequence looks something like this, but we can’t be sure:
July 25, 11 to 11:35AM: Smith texts other people trying to figure out if there was any investigation of the hack (as I noted here, Durham doesn’t disclose anywhere in his report that during the Michael Sussmann prosecution, Sussmann forced him to obtain these emails that show FBI releasing a statement without consulting with the Dems, the victims of the hack.
July 25, undisclosed time: Maurer responds to the Rid story
July 25, undisclosed time, but the date could be made up: Two drafts of purported Benardo emails
July 26: Email between two Russian spooks suggesting “doing something about a task from someone”
Unknown date: A draft Russian spy memorandum claiming that on July 26, Hillary Clinton approved a plan to smear Donald Trump, citing July 25 emails purportedly from Benardo
July 27: Email between two Russian spooks about illuminating Hillary’s attempts to vilify Trump and Putin that links to a purported Benardo email, in what Durham describes as English but is … probably not written by a native English speaker
July 27: Email from Smith soliciting signers for a letter condemning Trump’s attack on NATO
Narratively, Durham puts the draft report, incorporating a July 25 email attributed to Benardo, then citing another July 25 email attributed to Benardo, and describing Hillary approving a plan on July 26, before the email between two Russian spooks, which by description is dated July 26. But I’ve been staring at it for an hour (and reviewing Durham’s unclassified report and now realizing he never provides the date there, either) and for the life of me, I’m not sure if we know whether the two spooks email precedes the draft intelligence report or not (note, too, that it starts, “Great!” by responding to something, suggesting there’s an even earlier one Durham suppressed). If my read that it is dated July 26 is correct, it would have been written on the same day as the purported approval by Hillary, of a plan to smear Donald Trump. But the only email attributed to Benardo reflecting Hillary’s approval is written July 27, meaning it’s more likely it was written on July 27.
So we don’t know. I am still searching but I believe Durham never revealed the date of that memo. But based on what we can see, SVR didn’t “have” an email reflecting Hillary approving this plan until July 27, the day after (at least by Durham’s description) two Russian spooks discussed telling stories about the Deep State.
If that’s right, Russian spooks were discussing “making” such a report before they “found” an email in stilted English that Durham couldn’t match describing Hillary approving this plan.
Based on interviews (italicized here) that appear only in this annex, John Durham first started chasing this conspiracy theory no later than September 2019 (the day after meeting with Nate Batty, the politicized FBI Agent who killed the Alfa Bank investigation). After interviews done by July 2021, Durham should have come to the conclusion he states here: that the purported emails were “compiled” from emails of entirely different people. And yet all the while, the IC was in possession of documents showing one Russian spook suggesting that another one, “do something about a task from someone, I don’t know, some dark forces, like the FBI for instance, or better yet, Clinton sympathizers in IC, Pentagon, Deep State.”
Durham tried to bury all that, that he created precisely the chaos the Russian spooks were trying to manufacture, in this classified annex and — if you believe Kash Patel — burn the proof.
The Russians told you what they were up to.
And yet you fell for it anyway.
Update: Fixed spelling of Benardo’s last name.
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I’ll return to the substance of the Durham Appendix.
The Tl;dr is that Durham made false claims in the appendix contradicted in the unclassified version, and ignored totally basic details about the 2016 election as well as evidence in his own possession to sustain his Clinton Conspiracy Theory, which I addressed at length here.
But the short version of the story is that in addition to the two SVR documents involving Loretta Lynch I described here, Durham reviewed two more SVR documents. So in sum total, this scandal is about:
A January 2016 intelligence memo purporting to describe what Debbie Wasserman-Schultz said about the Clinton email investigation and also stating that Jim Comey intended to keep the scandal running “to jeopardize the chance of the DP to win the presidential race.”
A March 2016 intelligence memo claiming that the Hillary’s political director, Amanda Renteria, regularly receives updates from Loretta Lynch and that Hillary was reviewing Trump’s ties with Russian oligarchs (including Aras Agalarov), “with support from special services.”
A July 2016 “draft memo” relaying that the Soros Foundation had evidence that on July 26, Hillary approved a plan from her policy advisor, Juliane Smith, “to smear Donald Trump by magnifying the scandal tied to the intrusion by the Russian special services in the pre-election process to benefit the Republican candidate.” This was, in part, an effort to get the White House to be more confrontational with Russia. (There’s a reference to “PC” that Durham takes to be “Political Convention” and not “Principals Committee”). It claimed (remember, this purports to be what Smith said) that the FBI lacked irrefutable evidence of Russia’s involvement in the scandal. The July 2016 memo then says that the campaign Hillary purportedly approved on July 26 was launched in June 2016, and also claimed that Hillary lacked direct evidence (which they of course did have). The appendix cites five more somethings of emails (the report redacts the description) purportedly from Leonard Bernardo, dated July 25 to July 27, that say “the FBI will put more oil into the fire,” most of which are in Russian.
Durham obtained records from many of the think tanks involved and he “was unable to locate in the records from the Think Tanks any exact versions of the Bernardo emails obtained” from their source. Instead, he found some real emails, “contain language and references with the exact same verbiage to the materials.” One was a discussion about Thomas Rid’s analysis of the DNC hack. Another was an email Smith actually sent soliciting bipartisan experts to condemn Trump’s attacks on NATO. As noted in my earlier post, Durham focused on Smith’s efforts to get a public statement about the actual hack released, which had no tie to Trump (as also noted, Durham omits a great deal of context to make that look damning).
None of the people involved in the purported emails said they sent them. None of Hillary’s staffers said there was a plan. Durham ultimately concludes that the emails on which he predicated a five year investigation were merely “a composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian intelligence hacking.” The rest of his opinion is stupid for the reasons I laid out in my earlier post, but will return to.
From that, the right wing is treating the things in the Russian intelligence reports as true. And treating the desire to make political hay of an election year hack as a criminal conspiracy.
Curiously, though, none of them are treating as true that Jim Comey would draw out the investigation into Hillary until the end of the election to help Trump win, even though that is what happened.
And none of them are accusing Jim Jordan (or anyone else) of trying to make political hay about the Iran hack of Donald Trump last year — the exact equivalent of the worst insinuations about what Smith did.
Today, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent a letter to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray requesting an unclassified briefing on the Iranian hack of President Trump’s campaign. According to reporting, Iran emailed the illegally obtained information to at least three advisers on the Democratic presidential campaign and emailed stolen information, including at least three major media outlets—Politico, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.
The Committee is requesting the briefing to address questions including:
What material did Iran obtain from President Trump’s campaign?
To whom at the Biden for President or the Harris for President campaigns did the hackers send information and materials?
On what date did the FBI learn there had been a hack and exfiltration of nonpublic information from President Trump’s campaign?
On what date(s) did Iran provide the stolen documents to the Biden for President campaign or the Harris for President campaign?
On what date did the FBI first inform President Trump’s campaign it had been hacked?
Did the FBI use any Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorities to surveil President Trump’s campaign?
Excerpts of the letter to Director Wray:
“On September 18, 2024, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency announced that in ‘late June and early July,’ the Islamic Republic of Iran attempted to interfere with the upcoming presidential election by ‘sen[ding] unsolicited emails to individuals then associated with the Biden-Harris campaign that contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign . . . .’ Since then, Iran has continued ‘to send stolen, non-public material’ from President Trump’s campaign to the media. Iran’s actions raise serious concerns about foreign election interference targeting President Trump’s campaign to support President Biden’s and Vice President Harris’s campaigns. We write to request information about this serious matter.
Look, if you really believe that these documents represent the transparent truth, then you believe that Jim Comey threw the election to Donald Trump and Jim Jordan must go to prison.
But if you’re ignoring those bits (as well as John Durham’s silence that the DOJ IG report quoted FBI as saying some of the SVR memos were “objectively false”), then you’re simply chasing conspiracy theories to drown out the Epstein scandal.
Pick. Either send Jim Jordan to prison or shut your yap.
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It serves its purpose — because a broad swath of very stupid people are currently frothing madly about it on Xitter.
What Tulsi purports to show is that the FBI didn’t back expansive claims of Russian involvement in election interference in September and October 2016, refused to participate in a assessment in December, only for Obama to order a new assessment, after which — Tulsi claims — the assessment changed to reflect more confidence in Putin’s involvement.
In general, Tulsi accomplishes the circus trick of getting stupid people to buy her narrative by conflating whether spooks thought Russia hacked the US voting tabulation infrastructure with Intelligence Community confidence that Russia was involved in the hack of the DNC and DCCC and then involved in the dissemination of files stolen from it.
So:
Voting infrastructure
Hack and leak
Not the same things
Tulsi assumes her rubes won’t notice she’s doing that and — lo and behold!! — she’s right!!
As one example of how transparently shoddy Tulsi’s “work” is, note how she misquotes a story (which she attributes to spooks but which might come from Congress) talking about the larger Russian intelligence operation in 2016, claiming it pertains exclusively to the “U.S. Election Hack.”
Tulsi doesn’t link the underlying story, for good reason, because reading the story gives away her game.
While it does use the word “hack” in the title, it includes two details that undermine Tulsi’s information operation.
U.S. Officials: Putin Personally Involved in U.S. Election Hack
New intelligence shows that Putin became personally involved in the computer breach, two senior U.S. officials say.
Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used. The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies, the officials said.
[snip]
The latest intelligence said to show Putin’s involvement goes much further than the information the U.S. was relying on in October, when all 17 intelligence agencies signed onto a statement attributing the Democratic National Committee hack to Russia.
Most importantly, the story describes that the Intelligence Community got new information. Wow! An explanation for why the assessment changed in December 2016!!!! All readily available if you just check Tulsi’s sources!!
Just as importantly, nothing in the article addresses tampering with the voting infrastructure, the topic of almost all the other screen caps in Tulsi’s propaganda, in her effort to conflate the voting infrastructure, the hack and leak, and the larger information operation.
There are a slew of other problems with Tulsi’s book report. It ignores:
The Russian investigation into Trump didn’t arise out of this intelligence. It arose out of Mike Flynn’s efforts to undermine the Obama sanctions on Russia in response, and Trump’s efforts to undermine the investigation of Flynn.
The Russian investigation discovered abundant new evidence, including proof that Trump’s campaign learned of Russia’s operation in advance. Trump’s Coffee Boy, Campaign Manager, National Security Advisor, personal lawyer, and rat-fucker were all eventually adjudged to have lied to cover up aspects of Trump’s involvement in the Russian investigation. And through their confessions, we learned that Russia dangled an impossibly lucrative real estate deal, told a Trump campaign official and his rat-fucker about their operation, got campaign data and strategy — possibly in exchange for millions of dollars and involvement in a plan to carve of Ukraine — and then undermined Obama’s foreign policy to help Russia.
After all these 2016 assessments, the NSA later developed evidence — according to the document Reality Winner leaked — that showed Russia did attempt to and had some success in hacking voting infrastructure.
Which is to say, Tulsi’s entire little book report is unrelated to the Russian investigation into Trump and her claims about hacking the election infrastructure were eventually revised.
But her report is not without interest.
If her story is true — if there is a shred of truth to her claims that Obama tried to alter the intelligence in 2016 — then evidence to that fact was available in 2020, when Kash Patel was reviewing precisely the same intelligence while serving as Ric Grenell’s handler, and that evidence was available from 2019 through 2023, when John Durham reviewed it all and determined that the spooks did nothing wrong.
In other words, if Tulsi’s allegations are true, it means Kash Patel and John Durham are part of the Deep State plot against Donald Trump!!!!
It means Trump’s hand-picked FBI Director was part of a sustained effort to cover-up Obama’s devious intervention in 2016.
If Tulsi’s allegations have any merit, then Pam Bondi must fire Kash Patel and include him, right along with all the nefarious actors Tulsi targets, because Kash covered this up when he could have helped Trump win the 2020 election.
Update: Corrected how long the primary document collection is.
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There comes a time in almost every Trump legal scandal where evidence comes out that Trump insiders believe they manipulated Maggie Haberman to serve Trump’s interests.
Evidence that both Roger Stone and Rick Gates used Maggie for various purposes came out in the Mueller investigation files, as when Gates claimed leaking Trump’s foreign policy speech to Maggie was a way to share it with Stone.
At Trump’s NY trial, Michael Cohen described how he deliberately misled Maggie about the nature of the payments he made to Stormy Daniels.
Perhaps the most damning example came in Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony, where she described how, after her last appearance before the January 6 Committee while still represented by Stefan Passantino, he took a call from Maggie and confirmed that Hutchinson had just finished testifying to the committee.
His phone is ringing.
I look down at his phone. It’s Maggie Haberman calling him. And I looked at Stefan, and I said, “Stefan, did you tell Maggie Haberman that we were meeting with the committee today?”
And he’s like, “No, no. Maybe that’s not what she’s calling me about.”
And I said, “Stefan, did you tell Maggie that we were meeting with the committee today?
And he said, “No, no, but I should probably answer to see if she knows, right? I should answer.”
And said, “Stefan, no. I don’t think you should answer that call. She probably wants to know if we met with the committee today.”
He said, “Cass, I’m just going to answer. It will just be 2 seconds. I just want to find out what she’s going to talk to me about.”
He answers.
I can’t hear what she’s saying, but I hear Stefan say, “Yeah, yeah, we did just leave her third interview. You can put it out, but don’t don’t – don’t – don’t make it too big of a deal. I don’t think she’ll want it to be too big of a deal. All right. Thanks.”
And I said, “Stefan, was that Maggie Haberman asking about my interview?”
And he said, “Yeah, but don’t worry. She’s not going to make it a big deal.”
I said, “Stefan, I don’t want this out there.”
He said, “Don’t worry. Like, Maggie’s friendly to us. We’ll be fine.”
So I was just like, “Whatever.” I was annoyed.
Hutchinson went on to describe how, even as Passantino was discouraging Hutchinson from reviewing documents in a SCIF that would allow a follow-up appearance, Passantino and Alex Cannon spent the weekend talking to Maggie about Hutchinson’s testimony.
So I reached out to him on Monday, May 23rd: “Has [redacted] reached out about the SCIF?”
And then he was just kind of being wishy-washy with it.
He also let me know on that phone conversation that Maggie Haberman, quote, “got a story from the committee about my third interview,” end quote, and he spent he, Stefan, spent the whole weekend with Alex Cannon convincing Maggie Haberman not to publish the story that she got from the committee about my third interview.
Hutchinson described her particular disinterest in sharing her story with Maggie (and Josh Dawsey, another Trump whisperer).
And s0 now we’re moving into the phase of you know, I did my best throughout this whole period — I don’ like talking to reporters. Reporters would text me during this period. Ninety-nine percent of reporter texts always go unresponded to. I don’t like talking to reporters. I think there are some that I have, like, a friendship/working relationship with that I knew from being on the Hill and at the White House, but, like, Josh [Dawsey], Maggie Haberman, all those people, I stay very clear from.
But Josh [Dawsey], for example, had started reaching out to me and saying that he heard that the committee was in talks with Stefan about bringing me in for a SCIF interview and a live testimony; where did I stand on that with Stefan?
Say what you will about Maggie’s role in all this: Assuming it was her on Passantino’s phone (Hutchinson does not name the journalist in her book), she was just chasing a big story.
But there’s no doubt that one source of Hutchinson’s distrust of Passantino in the period leading up to her decision to get new lawyers stemmed from his willingness to share details of her testimony with Maggie — at least as she portrayed it — against her wishes.
“I don’t think you should answer that call,” Hutchinson said.
“Don’t worry,” the attorney representing Hutchinson but paid by a Trump entity said. “Like, Maggie’s friendly to us. We’ll be fine.”
None of that shows up in NYT’s faux savvy review of the game behind Barry Loudermilk’s referral of Liz Cheney for criminal investigation for allegedly intervening in Hutchinson’s legal representation at the time. NYT doesn’t bother to disclose to readers that, as Hutchinson described it, Maggie — who is bylined — played as significant a role in the breakup of the relationship between Passantino and Hutchinson as Cheney did.
Having failed to disclose Maggie’s alleged role in all that, here’s how — starting 28¶¶ in — NYT ultimately describes Loudermilk’s report and the claims within it.
The House report on Ms. Cheney, prepared by a Republican-led subcommittee on oversight, was specifically focused on the former representative, who broke with her G.O.P. colleagues over their ongoing support of Mr. Trump in 2021. But she has also infuriated Mr. Trump not only because she helped to lead the congressional investigation into him, but because she crossed party lines in the election and campaigned against him in support of Ms. Harris.
The report claimed that Ms. Cheney may have violated “numerous federal laws” by secretly communicating with Cassidy Hutchinson, a star witness for the Jan. 6 committee, without the knowledge of Ms. Hutchinson’s lawyer.
When Ms. Hutchinson was first approached to provide testimony to the committee, she was represented by a lawyer who had once worked in the Trump administration’s White House Counsel’s Office.
After meeting with Ms. Cheney, she hired a different lawyer and her subsequent public testimony was damaging to Mr. Trump. It included allegations that he had been warned his supporters were carrying weapons on Jan. 6, but expressed no concern because they were not a threat to him.
The report asked the F.B.I. to investigate whether Ms. Cheney’s dealings with Ms. Hutchinson were carried out in violation of a federal obstruction statute that prohibits tampering with witnesses. The report also accused Ms. Hutchinson of lying under oath to the committee several times and suggested that investigators examine whether Ms. Cheney had played any role in “procuring another person to commit perjury.” [my emphasis]
There’s a lot that’s misleading in this description. As I’ve noted, the section of the report describing DOD’s failures is actually longer (39 pages as compared to 36) than the section on Cheney and Hutchinson. Particularly given Loudermilk’s silence about Kash Patel’s role in what Loudermilk claims was DOD misconduct, to claim the report was “specifically focused” on Cheney is particularly misleading.
Maggie, writing with Alan Feuer, takes as proven the timeline Loudermilk lays out, which overstates what the evidence shows. While Cheney did communicate directly with Hutchinson, that was in June 2022, hours after Passantino had advised Hutchinson to take the “small element of risk to refus[e] to cooperate” with the committee any further in light of DOJ’s declination to press contempt charges against Mark Meadows. Hutchinson initiated the communication with Cheney and did so because, as she told Passantino, “I don’t want to gamble with being held in contempt.”
NYT asserts that what was damning about Hutchinson’s testimony after she ditched Passantino was Trump’s knowledge that people were refusing to go through magnetometers, but he wasn’t concerned because they wouldn’t hurt him. Hutchinson did tell that story publicly on June 28, 2022 (and J6C played earlier video testimony she had provided). But that thread of testimony started in her first interview in February 2022 and continued in her May 2022 interview, both of which Passantino attended. It all stemmed from texts she exchanged with Tony Ornato (texts that also make clear Trump “kept mentioning [a trip to the Capitol] before he took the stage” to give his speech).
To the extent this is among the things Loudermilk claimed Hutchinson lied about, Loudermilk’s case is based on word games, conflating formal intelligence with notice from Secret Service manning the rally that rally goers had (at least) flagpoles that were triggering the mags, misrepresenting a conversation Hutchinson claims she and Tony Ornato had with Mark Meadows, and ignoring that one of Ornato’s denials amounted to a claim he didn’t remember.
Plus, Hutchinson always emphasized that Trump’s concern was “get[ting] the shot,” packing enough bodies into the audience to make it look crowded, and not about ensuring that his supporters could keep their weapons before they marched to the Capitol. The claim that Trump knew his supporters were armed was legally damaging; it meant he knew the risk when he riled them up further about Mike Pence. But that’s not how Hutchinson spun it and it was testimony rooted in what she said in Passantino’s presence.
A reader might expect some assessment of Loudermilk’s claims in an article that boasts, as the headline of this does, that “Republicans Map a Case Against Liz Cheney.” No they didn’t. They floated a number of flimsy claims that don’t amount to a crime. You’re reporters. Act like it. Make that clear (as Philip Bump did here), rather than pretending Loudermilk’s claims aren’t mere whitewash.
The report neither links nor shows much understanding of the report itself. Even where it quotes lawyers about the viability of the charges, it doesn’t mention (for example) that the Jack Smith investigation resulted in a new Speech and Debate opinion that would apply to Cheney’s actions.
The real sin with the four-paragraph description of Loudermilk’s case, however, is one closely tied to Maggie’s own undisclosed role in it. NYT claims that Passantino was merely a former Trump White House Counsel. That’s not the issue. The issue, which goes to the core of the dispute and the reason Hutchinson replaced him, is that he was paid by entities associated with Trump, and Hutchinson came to believe he represented Trump’s interests over her own.
Loudermilk packages up as a crime actions Cheney took to give Hutchinson confidence her attorney was representing her interests, not Trump’s. Loudermilk packages up as a crime Hutchinson’s effort to avoid what even Passantino depicted as a risk of a contempt referral.
When Passantino told Hutchinson that it was okay for him to share information against her wishes because, “Maggie’s friendly to us,” was he also expecting that Maggie might misrepresent his role in all this (and leave his name unmentioned)?
That’s why you disclose such things.
The rest of this column (NYT bills it as analysis and claims the reporters who wrote it have “deep experience in the subject,” which is one way you might describe involvement in the story you’re telling) focuses on describing how delivering this report after Trump’s public demands, “reliev[es] Mr. Trump of the potentially fraught step of explicitly ordering the inquiry himself.”
A “friendly to us” reporter treats Trump’s word games as if they absolve him of responsibility.
¶¶4-14 describe Trump’s contradictory claims, including an uncorrected quote from Trump’s spox that “the nation’s ‘system of justice must be fixed and due process must be restored for all Americans.'”
¶¶15-23 describe Trump’s efforts to gin up investigations into his adversaries in his first term and going forward. The section includes multiple grossly misleading claims. First, it falsely insinuates that Trump never got the investigation of Hillary he demanded.
During his first presidential campaign, he often joined crowds at his rallies in chanting, “Lock her up!” — a reference to his opponent Hillary Clinton, whom he and other Republicans believed should have been investigated for using a private email server while she was secretary of state. After he won that election, however, Mr. Trump appeared to soften his stance, telling The New York Times editorial board that he did not want to “hurt the Clintons.”
But Mr. Trump, facing a special counsel investigation of his own, changed his mind again in 2018, telling his White House counsel that he wanted to order the Justice Department to investigate Mrs. Clinton.
[snip]
While the White House counsel ultimately declined to approve his plans to investigate Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump made clear on social media during his years in office that he believed various people should be prosecuted.
NYT simply ignores the Clinton Foundation investigation predicated in significant part on Bannon-associated oppo research that (as NYT reported) continued throughout Trump’s first term.
More problematic, given the suggestion that someone stopped Trump from getting a Special Counsel investigation into Hillary, it ignores that Special Counsel John Durham not only insinuated two false statement indictments against people associated with Hillary — both of which ended in acquittal — were conspiracies, but fabricated a claim about Hillary to which he dedicated an 18-page section in his final report.
NYT goes onto to — again — falsely suggest that Trump never got a special counsel investigation into Joe Biden.
Mr. Trump has called for Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought two criminal cases against him last year, to be “thrown out of the country.” And after he was arraigned on the first of Mr. Smith’s indictments, he said that, as president, he would appoint “a real special prosecutor” to “go after” President Biden and his family. (He has since backed away from his position on specifically investigating the Bidens.)
NYT’s “friendly” journalists would have you to believe they are ignorant that:
Trump extorted Ukraine for dirt on Hunter and Joe Biden
During Trump’s first impeachment, his personal attorney solicited such dirt from known Russian agents
Bill Barr set up a side channel via which Rudy could share that dirt obtained from Russian agents and others
Somehow, an FBI informant willing to frame Joe Biden came to share a claim that Mykola Zlochevsky bribed Biden that got laundered to the Biden investigation via that side channel
Trump spoke directly to both Barr and Jeffrey Rosen about the investigation into the Bidens
After David Weiss announced a plea deal with Hunter Biden, Trump attacked Weiss, contributing to threats against Weiss’ family
After Barr made public representations about the false bribery allegation, Weiss reneged on Hunter’s plea deal and obtained Special Counsel status and chased the bribery allegation, only to discover it was false
Trump already got his Special Counsel to investigate Joe Biden, and just in time for election season. And while it flopped when Weiss discovered Scott Brady’s vetting failed to find obvious problems with the bribery claim, it nevertheless led to felony charges against Hunter and a humiliating trial in June.
Suggesting Trump didn’t get a Special Counsel to investigate the Bidens is propaganda, just as suggesting he didn’t get one to pursue Hillary is.
But I guess that’s what Trump’s people know they’ll get when they work with a journalist “friendly to us.”
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Folks, I know this is bad timing, but in about 20 minutes, I’m going to temporarily shut down comments here, as we’re going to do some planned maintenance. Hopefully it won’t take too long.
It came at the end of Durham’s testimony after delivering his report, in which Durham said a lot of inflammatory things, but ultimately concluded that the allegations of Russian interference should have been investigated, but should have been opened at a lower level of investigation.
After four years, Durham blamed Hillary Clinton for things Russians (like those suspected of filling the Christopher Steele dossier with disinformation) had done. But he hadn’t done the one thing Republicans needed him to do: assert that the Russian investigation was a hoax.
At the end of it, Jim Jordan adopted a tactic he has come to use in his hearings. He took a break for votes, giving staffers a half hour to prepare a rebuttal. And then three Republican members took turns, including Matt Gaetz for his second turn, unrebutted by any Democratic member.
He came prepared.
Gaetz cued up video from Robert Mueller’s July 2019 testimony, showing Jim Jordan grilling Mueller about Joseph Mifsud. Jordan asserted that Bill Barr and John Durham were trying to find out what Mifsud was doing. After Durham responded that they did try to pursue that angle, Gaetz asserted that Durham’s investigation was “an op.”
You had years to find out the answer to what Mr. Jordan said was the seminal question, and you don’t have it. It just begs the question whether or not you were really trying to find that out. Because it’s one thing to criticize the FBI for their FISA violations, to write a report. They’ve been criticized in plenty of reports. Some have referred to your work as just a repackaging and regurgitation of what the Inspector General already told us. So if you weren’t going to do what Mr. Jordan said you were going to do in that video, and give us the basis for all of it, what’s this all been about?
Now, in point of fact, who Mifsud really was was never the seminal question. Or rather, he only ever became a question via conspiracy theories Jordan and Mark Meadows laundered through a sham Congressional appearance from George Papadopoulos. Under their direction, the Coffee Boy provided no primary documentation with which staffers could hold him to account. Instead, Papadopoulos laundered conspiracy theories first posted in right wing propaganda outlets.
Q Okay. So, and Mifsud, he presented himself as what? Who did he tell you he was?
A So looking back in my memory of this person, this is a mid-50’s person, describes himself as a former diplomat who is connected to the world, essentially. I remember he was even telling me that, you know, the Vietnamese prime minister is a good friend of mine. I mean, you have to understand this is the type of personality he was portraying himself as.
And, you know, I guess I took the bait because, you know, usually somebody who — at least in Washington, when somebody portrays themselves in a specific way and has credentials to back it, you believe them. But that’s how he portrayed himself. And then I can’t remember exactly the next thing that happened until he decided to introduce me to Putin’s fake niece in London, which we later found out is some sort of student. But I could get into those details of how that all started.
Q And what’s your — just to kind of jump way ahead, what’s your current understanding of who Mifsud is?
A My current understanding?
Q Yeah. A You know, I don’t want to espouse conspiracy theories because, you know, it’s horrifying to really think that they might be true, but just yesterday, there was a report in the Daily Caller from his own lawyer that he was working with the FBI when he approached me. And when he was working me, I guess — I don’t know if that’s a fact, and I’m not saying it’s a fact — I’m just relaying what the Daily Caller reported yesterday, with Chuck Ross, and it stated in a categorical fashion that Stephan Roh, who is Joseph Mifsud’s, I believe his President’s counsel, or PR person, said that Mifsud was never a Russian agent.
In fact, he’s a tremendous friend of western intelligence, which makes sense considering I met him at a western spying school in Rome. And all his interactions — this is just me trying to repeat the report, these are not my words — and when he met with me, he was working as some sort of asset of the FBI. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I’m just reporting what my current understanding is of this individual based on reports from journalists.
[snip]
Q And then at what point did you learn that, you know, he’s not who he said he was?
A Like I said, I don’t have the concrete proof of who this person is. I’m just going with reports. And all I can say is that I believe the day I was, my name was publicly released and Papadopoulos became this person that everyone now knows, Mifsud gave an interview to an Italian newspaper. And in this newspaper, he basically said, I’m not a Russian agent. I’m a Clinton supporter. I’m a Clinton Foundation donor, and that — something along those lines. I mean, don’t quote me exactly, you could look up the article yourself. It is in La Republica. And then all of a sudden, after that, he disappears off the face of the planet, which I always found as odd.
[snip]
I guess the overwhelming evidence, from what I’ve read, just in reports, nothing classified, of course, because I’m not privy to anything like that, and considering his own lawyer is saying it, Stephan Roh, that Mifsud is a western intelligence source. And, I guess, according to reports yesterday, he was working with the FBI. [my emphasis]
And that’s what led Barr and Durham to jump on a plane together and chase Papadopoulos’ conspiracy theories — without ever interviewing Papadopoulos directly. Mifsud’s own lawyer — the one who couldn’t help Durham figure out how to subpoena him — who started the conspiracy theory that Mifsud worked for Western, not Russian, spies.
Durham and Barr did more than just chase Papadopoulos’ conspiracy theories together. Durham fabricated a key part of the theory of his case. He ignored key events — most notably, Trump’s invitation for Russia to hack his opponent — that made all the actions of Hillary’s people make sense. He relied on a Twitter account as the foundation of his indictment against Igor Danchenko, then whined when such communications were deemed inadmissible without a witness to introduce them.
Yet ultimately, the rules of criminal procedure and some very very good defense attorneys (no doubt paid with life savings) managed to thwart Durham’s efforts to spin from his own fevered imaginations a conspiracy implicating Hillary Clinton.
For that, Matt Gaetz accused Durham of “inoculating” the FBI.
Your report seems to be less an indictment of the FBI and more of an inoculation — lower case I, of course. And like many inoculations, it may have worse consequences down the road. It’s just hard to pretend as though this was a sincere effort. When you don’t get to the fundamental thing that started the whole deal.
Because reality ultimately debunked Durham’s conspiracy theories, Gaetz deemed him to be part of the Deep State.
I get that Matt Gaetz’ nomination is one of the most likely to be rejected by the Senate. I get that there’s still a chance this guy — the guy who proclaims even a fellow conspiracist part of the Deep State if he permits himself to discover that reality doesn’t back his fever dreams — won’t be Attorney General.
But this is what it means that Trump wants to take a hammer to DOJ and FBI: not just that they’ll avoid any investigations implicating Trump or his allies, but they will find a way to meld reality to their own myth.
As it was, Bill Barr’s DOJ added post-it notes to evidence in ways that happened to feed Trump’s myth of grievance. They claimed travel records of the informant with something akin to a Let’s go Brandon cap matched his claims about Joe Biden accepting a bribe when, purportedly, the opposite is true.
Bill Barr’s DOJ already made shit up to feed Trump’s myth.
Since then, a Trump judge admitted a laptop full of evidence at a criminal trial with little more validation than an access to an iCloud account to which multiple outsiders had access, and an email sent to a publicly available email address.
But whoever Trump installs atop DOJ will take all this one step further. No longer will it be a select crony US Attorneys who forget to remove post-it notes with erroneous but convenient dates or claim travel records say the opposite of what they actually say. It will be the litmus test from the top: Donald Trump’s myths cannot fail, they can only be failed.
Update: Gaetz has withdrawn from consideration.
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