I’m used to Mike Schmidt ignoring Trump’s weaponization of DOJ against his rivals during the first term. I’m used to Devlin Barrett credulously writing down propaganda that right wing law enforcement sources tell him to write down as if it were true.
But this, from the two of them, is a remarkable exercise in disinformation in service of a weaponized investigation.
They describe that a fox is in the hen house, but are so ignorant, naive, or corrupt that they describe the fox, instead, as a guard dog.
The factual details the story describes are:
Kash Patel is investigating his claim that he found burn bags full of classified documents which, he claims, is proof people intended to destroy them (but which sources for the story explain is really dumb because any documents found in a burn bag would be on digital servers too)
Paul Abbate (who was considered a candidate to be Director of FBI after Jim Comey was fired) is a subject of the investigation
Kash put the investigation in WDVA, basing venue on a storage facility there, to avoid DC grand juries
The US Attorney for WDVA, Todd Gilbert, recently resigned shortly after being appointed
“One of the documents investigators have been asking about…was declassified in 2020, while Mr. Trump was in office”
The men describe the Durham Report as Devlin described it in 2023 when he credulously parroted Durham’s claimed findings, without mentioning how badly the report itself undermined Durham’s claims.
Mr. Durham ultimately concluded that the F.B.I.’s work on the Russia investigation suffered from “confirmation bias” against Mr. Trump.
Mr. Durham brought two separate cases to trial on charges that people lied to the F.B.I. in the course of its Russia investigation, but both trials ended in quick acquittals.
Such a description was sloppy in 2023 but is inexcusable now, in the wake of the declassification of the classified annex. The classified annex showed that by July 2021, Durham should have concluded that the premise of his entire investigation was based on documents fabricated by Russian spies to frame Hillary.
Here’s the NYT story on that, in case Devlin and NYT Mike have difficulties learning about this.
Once you understand that the classified annex disclosed that John Durham and Jack Eckenrode knowingly spent years investigating Hillary’s people based off a Russian fabrication — literally committing the crime they were investigating — then Kash’s burn bag claim would most immediately implicate Durham and his team, including Eckenrode. Durham went to great lengths to obscure that he had been chasing Russian disinformation, even in his classified annex. Such an effort bespeaks guilty conscience, the kind of guilty conscience that might lead someone to attempt to destroy evidence.
If this were a real investigation, Eckenrode would be a suspect, not the lead investigator.
Worse still, if Kash imagines (or claims to imagine) he’s found new, hard copy versions of what he himself helped declassify in 2020 — documents that included a report about the SVR documents bearing John Ratcliffe’s name (but undoubtedly written with Kash), heavily redacted notes from John Brennan, and a somewhat redacted version of the CIA version of a referral to the FBI — then the steps that Durham’s team (that is, Eckenrode) took to access those documents in 2019 and afterwards would likewise be a central focus of any credible investigation.
Indeed, the apparent fact that Durham — that is, Eckenrode — never presented an FBI version of a September 7, 2016 referral purportedly sent to the FBI, which none of the FBI witnesses remember seeing, would be a central issue in any investigation.
That referral is something that, if it exists in hard copy, if it exists at all, might present new investigative leads.
But also would raise still more questions about the criminal conduct of Eckenrode and Durham — their willing quest to chase disinformation created by Russian spies to frame Hillary Clinton.
And it would raise real questions about whether, after chasing a Russian fabrication for years, Kash’s FBI decided to start fabricating evidence themselves.
This is an investigation led by someone who should be a chief suspect. Such investigations never turn out well.
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https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Screenshot-2025-08-27-at-09.09.23.png410424emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-08-27 05:16:362025-08-27 05:23:07Devlin Barrett and Mike Schmidt Mistake the Fox in the Henhouse for a Guard Puppy
On May 20, 2022 — a year after John Durham had obtained evidence showing that the draft SVR report that he always claimed was the basis of his investigation was based on “composite” emails, and as such, proof that the SVR was framing Hillary Clinton — his lead prosecutor, Andrew DeFilippis, openly defied a judge’s order. DeFilippis instructed Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager, Robby Mook, to read a quote from Jake Sullivan about the Alfa Bank anomalies saying, “This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia. It certainly seems the Trump Organization felt it had something to hide, given that it apparently took steps to conceal the link when it was discovered by journalists.”
The quote seemed to confirm the conspiracy theory that Durham had otherwise failed to substantiate, that Hillary had a plan to frame Donald Trump.
The inclusion of the Tweet as trial evidence immediately created a firestorm among credulous journalists, leading right wingers, including Elon Musk, to claim this was proof of “an elaborate hoax about Trump and Russia.”
DeFilippis’ stunt introducing prejudicial hearsay he had just been ordered to exclude led to a redaction of the transcript and Tweet he contemptuously had Mook read. But, as Sussmann’s lawyer complained after Durham’s team pulled several more stunts like this, “the bell” of hearing prohibited testimony, “can never be unrung.” By cheating, Durham’s team presented six elements of the conspiracy theory based on the SVR attack on Hillary to the jury, in spite of rulings prohibiting them from doing so.
It didn’t help his case; less than two weeks later, a jury returned a humiliating acquittal, the first of two.
Yet Durham broke the rules to tell his manufactured story, and it worked in the public sphere.
Trump prosecutors already staged show trials
The prosecution of Michael Sussmann should never have gotten that far. Once Durham had the evidence to conclude that the emails behind the draft SVR report he claimed to be working off of were “composites,” he should have closed up shop. Instead, he charged Michael Sussmann and Igor Danchenko in an effort to sustain the story imagined by Russian spies five years earlier anyway.
Durham’s goals with Danchenko were modest (and fairly pathetic): to attempt to rewrite the genesis of the Steele dossier to make the business networking of a Democrat — and not Russian sources — the author of key claims in the dossier, and to attempt to turn Sergei Millian into the victim of the Steele dossier. After the judge in the case threw out one charge because Durham had charged Danchenko for lying about the pee tape in a literally true response he gave to an FBI question, the jury acquitted on four other counts pertaining to Millian.
Durham’s goals with Sussmann were far more ambitious: to use a single invented false statement as a lever to get inside Democratic networks to find the conspiracy that — even after concluding that the genesis of his entire investigation was an SVR fabrication — Durham nevertheless still believed had to exist.
It was utter madness. It was an egregious abuse of Sussmann’s rights — as I said here, Durham committed the precise crime that he claimed to be hunting. And it serves as a roadmap for where the sequel investigation Pam Bondi just announced might go.
In part because it serves as a roadmap for the stunt prosecutions Trump is ordering up, I want to take two posts to describe what happened. This post will use known interviews and my coverage of both cases — see also this earlier post attempting a similar project — to review the tactics Durham used to get this case to trial. In a follow-up, I hope to show how Durham’s show trials failed.
Pivot
What should have been the two final interviews on Durham’s Clinton conspiracy conspiracy theory investigation — the July 21 interview in which Julianne Smith disclaimed any knowledge of the Clinton plan and a July 8 2021 grand jury appearance where Peter Strzok denied receiving a referral mentioning it — happened almost five years after the events in question. The clock on any 5-year state of limitation was ticking.
So Durham pivoted.
The closest Durham came in his report to offering an explanation for why he continued after concluding these documents were fabricated came from speculation offered up by Brian Auten, the lead analyst on the team (and a MAGAt target ever since). At a time Durham knew he had no proof that the CIA referral to FBI had actually gotten to the Crossfire Hurricane team, he invited Auten to speculate.
Auten stated that it was possible he hand-delivered this Referral Memo to the FBI, as he had done with numerous other referral memos,419 and noted that he typically shared referral memos with the rest of the Crossfire Hurricane investigative team, although he did not recall if he did so in this instance. 420
[snip]
For example, Brian Auten stated that he could not recall anything that the FBI did to analyze, or otherwise consider the Clinton Plan intelligence, stating that it was “just one data point.”423
419 OSC Report of Interview of Brian Auten on July 26, 2021 at 13.
420 Id.
[snip]
423 OSC Report of interview of Brian Auten on July 26, 2021 at 13.
That interview was on July 26, 2021, at precisely the moment Durham should have packed up and gone home.
But consider the circumstances of that interview. At the Danchenko trial, Danchenko’s attorney Danny Onorato started his cross-examination of Auten by getting the FBI analyst to recall how — after his testimony in numerous other investigations was deemed credible — Durham started his first interview with Auten by informing him he was considered a subject of the investigation. (In that interview and one shortly thereafter, Durham seems to have used the threat of charges relating to the Carter Page FISA warrants to threaten Auten and one of the Crossfire Hurricane agents, precisely the theory of criminality that his investigation started to violate in those days.)
Q Does July 26 of 2021 sound fair?
A Yes, it does.
Q Okay. And when you met with them for the first time after you were meeting with people for 25 or 30 hours, did your status change from a witness to a subject of an investigation?
A Yes, it did.
Q Okay. And in your work for the FBI, has anyone ever told you that you are a subject of a criminal inquiry? A No.
Q Was that scary?
A Yes.
Hours later, after having walked Auten through a long list pertinent things Durham had not shown Auten when soliciting specific answers that incriminated Danchenko, including part of Auten’s own notes that he had underlined, Onorato got Auten to concede that his opinion about the credibility of Danchenko on the topic of Sergei Millian changed after that July 26, 2021 interview, in which he had been named a subject.
Yet even in that context, under threat of prosecution, Auten had no real memory of the referral and treated it as a data point if he actually did share it with Crossfire Hurricane. That’s what Durham rebuilt his debunked investigation on.
And having thus scripted an excuse to continue, Durham charged Sussmann on the very last day possible, September 16, 2021; he charged Danchenko in early November. As I wrote in those contemporaneous posts, both used ticky tack alleged lies to spin networked materiality claims insinuating a conspiracy that led sloppy journalists to adopt larger claims of conspiracy.
The belated investigation into false statements charged as a conspiracy
In the Sussmann case, Durham had been poring through subpoenaed documents from participants he imagined had played a part in his theory of conspiracy for over a year, but neither that nor immunized testimony from David Dagon in August had confirmed key premises of his conspiracy. Having failed to substantiate a conspiracy, then, Durham charged a different crime, a false statement charge. Such a belated change in prosecutorial strategy might explain how epically unprepared Durham was to prosecute the crime he actually charged. In the weeks and months that followed, Durham would serially confess he hadn’t taken some of the most basic investigative steps before indicting Sussmann, including:
Interviewing any full-time Clinton campaign staffer before accusing Sussmann of coordinating with the campaign (he would interview Jennifer Palmieri, Jake Sullivan, Victoria Nuland, James Clapper, John Podesta, and — just days before jury selection — Hillary Clinton in the eight months that followed); Durham’s report doesn’t reflect a Robby Mook interview; he was called as a defense witness at trial
Testing the story Sussmann told Congress, under oath: that he reached out to the FBI to alert them to a story before the NYT covered it, which turned out to be confirmed by documentary records Durham only belatedly found at FBI
Learning how closely the FBI worked with Rodney Joffe on DNS-related issues
Checking how closely Michael Sussmann worked with the FBI, especially on the response to the Russian hacks; this was especially egregious as it debunked one of the ways he tried to implicate Julianne Smith in a made-up plot
Searching FBI records for evidence that someone else — someone who once claimed to work for a Russian front company — had played a role Durham attributed to his conspirators
In short, Durham had little to sustain his 27-page indictment beyond theories of conspiracy that assumed as true the conspiracy theory he should have abandoned in July.
It really seems like, before that, Durham believed he would eventually find witnesses to a conspiracy who would confirm what only he believed to be true, and as a result never took the investigative steps that might — and did — debunk his conspiracy theory.
After embracing Russian disinformation, Durham embraced Russian grievances
One way Durham attempted to compensate for his failure to take very basic investigative steps was to embrace what Russians were peddling.
There were always hints that Durham went seeking (dis)information from Russians or people assumed to be Russian-assets involved in this operation. They was the famous junket to Italy looking for Joseph Mifsud. There were Ukrainians, who remain unnamed, but whose identity might explain why Durham reacted oddly when Andrii Derkach’s allies were sanctioned in early 2021. There’s even an email showing that future Charles McGonigal defense attorney Seth DuCharme treated Andrew McCabe request for help from Oleg Deripaska as an investigative lead, an email that might explain why Durham suppressed Deripaska’s centrality in this story.
But after he charged these flimsy indictments, Durham made purportedly aggrieved Russians a key prong of his strategy to turn a debunked Russian effort to frame Hillary into criminal prosecutions.
On the Danchenko prosecution, Durham insanely initially relied solely on Sergei Millian’s Tweets to substantiate the four charges associated with Millian. He did so without first interviewing George Papadopoulos, whom Millian seemed to be cultivating in precisely the period when Durham’s conspiracy theory was born and for months thereafter. As soon as I noted how problematic that was, Millian started getting squirrely.
Durham did eventually interview Millian, three months after charging Danchenko. But Millian refused to show up and answer questions under oath.
That left Durham stuck trying to admit inadmissible evidence, without which he was left with no substantive evidence for those four charges. All the while, Millian was ginning up the frothers, including (as we’ll see in my follow-up), to spin up Durham’s own misleading claims.
When Onorato introduced evidence of Millian’s communications with Papadopoulos at trial, Durham protested, “it certainly sounds creepy.” Nevertheless, Durham built four charges of an indictment around the Twitter claims of a guy involved in creepy outreach even before SVR’s imagined Clinton conspiracy was born, creepy outreach that by itself debunked the Russian conspiracy theory.
The way Millian handed Durham his ass would be funny if it didn’t totally upend Danchenko’s life.
But the way Durham piggybacked on Alfa Bank’s lawfare (lawfare pursued long after Mueller described how Vladimir Putin would make demands of oligarchs like Alfa Bank’s Petr Aven) is more troubling. In dual lawsuits in FL and PA, Alfa Bank purported to be trying to figure out who allegedly faked DNS records to make it look like Alfa was in contact with Trump back in 2016 so it could sue those people. Rather than finding anyone to sue, however, it instead spent its time subpoenaing experts to learn as much as it could about how the US tracks DNS records to prevent cyberattacks by — among other hostile countries — Russia.
After the Sussmann indictment, Alfa deposed several people targeted in the Sussmann investigation, including Fusion GPS tech person Laura Seago (from whom Durham ultimately obtained immunized testimony at trial) and Rodney Joffe (who was one of Durham’s key targets). Durham used that information as a sword in later privilege fights, but ignored sworn denials of key parts of his conspiracy theory. When Alfa pushed to accelerate this process even in spite of the ongoing criminal investigation, DC Superior Judge Shana Frost Matini observed that claims in the Alfa Bank lawsuit and Durham’s indictment see like, “they were written by the same people in some way.”
[R]ight now, given the — if the closeness of Alpha’s allegations, I mean, quite frankly, it’s — reading Alpha’s submissions and what the — and that compared to the indictment, there’s — it’s almost like they were written by the same people in some way. [Alpha misspelling original]
In the Sussmann case, Durham seemed to be delaying steps he took much earlier in the Danchenko prosecution, as if he was waiting for Alfa Bank to do that work for him.
All that ended with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the sanctioning of Alfa Bank, which seemed to lead Durham to adopt a new strategy.
The Rodney Joffe statute of limitation
Two pieces of background are useful — particularly if Sussmann’s prosecution serves as a lesson of how Pam Bondi might try to wrench new prosecutions out of these same old tired events.
First, Durham went to great lengths to sustain his ability to charge Rodney Joffe, the source of the DNS records in question, which led Judge Charles Cooper to make a shitty ruling preventing Sussmann from calling Joffe to provide testimony that would entirely exonerate him. Durham was doing so, transparently, in hopes he might charge Joffe for a crime with a longer statute of limitations than lying: defrauding DOD.
But the successful bid to keep Joffe off the stand implicated something else: Durham’s attempt to suppress things he had discovered about the DNS data in question.
The month before Durham charged Sussmann, by mid-August, 2021, Durham’s team learned that the data Rodney Joffe and others used to conduct their research was absolutely real. In addition to debunking the most simplistic “DNC fabrication” theories Durham was chasing, the discovery made it impossible for Durham to continue to rely on the expert his team had been using.
The first thing Durham did in response was ask one of the two FBI agents who had fucked up the investigation in 2016 — the other of whom is a possible source of Durham’s false claim that the SVR conspiracy theory about Hillary claimed she was going to fabricate evidence against Trump — to serve as an expert to replace the one who knew Durham’s theories were false.
DeFilippis. How familiar or unfamiliar are you with what is known as DNS or Domain Name System data?
A. I know the basics about DNS.
[snip]
Berkowitz. And then, more recently, you met with Mr. DeFilippis and I think Johnny Algor, who is also at the table there, who’s an Assistant U.S. Attorney. Correct?
A. Yes.
Q. They wanted to talk to you about whether you might be able to act as an expert in this case about DNS data?
A. Correct.
Q. You said, while you had some superficial knowledge, you didn’t necessarily feel qualified to be an expert in this case, correct, on DNS data?
A. On DNS data, that’s correct.
After that, Durham sought out another (legit) expert, but asked him to do a review that deliberately blinded him to what Joffe, through Sussmann, had shared with the government.
The only thing the FBI’s top experts offer to debunk, other than the Tor node claim that the FBI knew the researchers had dropped, was a complaint about visibility. But their complaints about visibility were entirely manufactured by the scope of the review Durham requested and possibly by the curious status of the Blue Thumb Drive, as well as (if Durham is telling the truth about these being the same experts) willful forgetting of a review they had done on related issues less than a year earlier.
Durham created this blindness. By ensuring all the experts remain blind to visibility, Durham ensured the review would conclude that the researchers didn’t have the visibility that, the FBI knew well, they had.
So in parallel with Durham’s efforts to sustain an SVR hoax he had debunked in July 2021, he went to great length to invent false claims about real data to sustain a judgement from the two FBI Agents who fucked up this investigation in the first place. He did so at the last minute, long after he should have finalized his plans for expert witnesses.
Abusing privilege
He did one more thing at the last minute: he asked Judge Cooper to review a documents for privilege.
As NYT reported back in 2023, Durham started playing games with his DC grand jury not long before he concluded the entire SVR thing was a fabrication. After then-Chief Judge Beryl Howell rejected a bid to get a warrant for Leonard Benardo’s emails, they obtained them via the Open Society Fund directly, perhaps on threat of subpoena.
Mr. Durham set out to prove that the memos described real conversations, according to people familiar with the matter. He sent a prosecutor on his team, Andrew DeFilippis, to ask Judge Beryl A. Howell, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in Washington, for an order allowing them to seize information about Mr. Benardo’s emails.
But Judge Howell decided that the Russian memo was too weak a basis to intrude on Mr. Benardo’s privacy, they said. Mr. Durham then personally appeared before her and urged her to reconsider, but she again ruled against him.
Rather than dropping the idea, Mr. Durham sidestepped Judge Howell’s ruling by invoking grand-jury power to demand documents and testimony directly from Mr. Soros’s foundation and Mr. Benardo about his emails, the people said. (It is unclear whether Mr. Durham served them with a subpoena or instead threatened to do so if they did not cooperate.)
Rather than fighting in court, the foundation and Mr. Benardo quietly complied, according to people familiar with the matter. But for Mr. Durham, the result appears to have been another dead end.
A month before trial (and just weeks after the newly sanctioned Alfa Bank gave up its lawsuits), as part of a request that Cooper review the privilege claims that the Democrats, Joffe, and Fusion had made, Durham revealed he had been bypassing Howell.
In response, Sussmann accused Durham of abusing the same grand jury process he abused with Benardo (abuse, ironically, that debunked Durham’s conspiracy theory).
First, the Special Counsel’s Motion is untimely. Despite knowing for months, and in some cases for at least a year, that the non-parties were withholding material as privileged, he chose to file this Motion barely a month before trial—long after the grand jury returned an Indictment and after Court-ordered discovery deadlines had come and gone.
Second, the Special Counsel’s Motion should have been brought before the Chief Judge of the District Court during the pendency of the grand jury investigation, as the rules of this District and precedent make clear.
Third, the Special Counsel has seemingly abused the grand jury in order to obtain the documents redacted for privilege that he now challenges. He has admitted to using grand jury subpoenas to obtain these documents for use at Mr. Sussmann’s trial, even though Mr. Sussmann had been indicted at the time he issued the grand jury subpoenas and even though the law flatly forbids prosecutors from using grand jury subpoenas to obtain trial discovery. The proper remedy for such abuse of the grand jury is suppression of the documents.
Fourth, the Special Counsel seeks documents that are irrelevant on their face. Such documents do not bear on the narrow charge in this case, and vitiating privilege for the purpose of admitting these irrelevant documents would materially impair Mr. Sussmann’s ability to prepare for his trial.
He also revealed that some of those privilege claims went back to August — that is, the weeks after Durham should have closed up shop.
Email from Andrew DeFilippis, Dep’t of Just., to Patrick Stokes, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, et al. (Aug. 9, 2021) (requesting a call to discuss privilege issues with a hope “to avoid filing motions with the Court”); Email from Andrew DeFilippis, Dep’t of Just., to Patrick Stokes, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, et al. (Aug. 14, 2021) (stating that the Special Counsel “wanted to give all parties involved the opportunity to weigh in before we . . . pursue particular legal process, or seek relief from the Court”). And since January— before the deadline to produce unclassified discovery had passed—the Special Counsel suggested that such a filing was imminent, telling the DNC, for example, that he was “contemplating a public court filing in the near term.” Email from Andrew DeFilippis, Dep’t of Just., to Shawn Crowley, Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP (Jan. 17, 2022). [my emphasis]
In a hearing on May 4, right before trial, Joffe’s lawyer revealed they had demanded Durham press a legal claim much earlier, in May 2021.
MR. TYRRELL: So if they wanted to challenge our assertion of privilege as to this limited universe of documents — again, which is separate from the other larger piece with regard to HFA — they should have done so months ago. I don’t know why they waited until now, Your Honor, but I want to be clear. I want to say without hesitation that it’s not because there was ever any discussion with us about resolving this issue without court intervention.
THE COURT: That was my question. Were you adamant a year ago?
MR. TYRRELL: Pardon me?
THE COURT: Were you adamant a year ago that —
MR. TYRRELL: Yes. We’ve been throughout. We were not willing to entertain resolution of this without court intervention.
THE COURT: Very well.
Ultimately, Cooper did bow to Durham’s demand, but prohibited them from using those documents at trial.
That didn’t prevent DeFilippis from attempting to use the privileged documents to perjury trap his one Fusion witness, the kind of perjury trap that might have provided a way to continue the madness indefinitely.
I’ll end where I begin: How Durham managed to coach witnesses testimony by threatening them with charges.
In addition to Auten, Durham did this, over and over again, with his star Sussmann witness Jim Baker.
Perhaps most interestingly, he did it in the weeks before trial with witnesses who, documentary evidence showed, had been informed or would have assumed that Michael Sussmann was representing the DNC, the key thing Durham claimed Sussmann could have credibly lied to hide.
The first time FBI Agent Ryan Gaynor testified to John Durham in October 2020, for example, he told prosecutors that the DNC was the source of the allegation.
Q. Okay. So in your first meeting with the government, you — this is October of 2020, correct?
A. Yes.
Q. You told them multiple times that you believed that the Democratic National Committee was the source of the allegations of connections between Alfa-Bank and Russia, correct?
A. Correct, which was wrong.
Q. Okay. But you said that you thought the Democratic party itself was who provided the information, correct?
At the end of that October 2020 interview, prosecutors threatened Gaynor with prosecution.
In trial prep testimony, however, starting on May 13, 2022, he came to claim to believe that Sussmann was representing himself, because otherwise his client would have been material — precisely the materiality claim Durham needed to make the charges stick.
More striking was how Durham’s star cyber witness (one of the guys who botched the investigation in September 2016 without examining the data closely) explained why the text he received from his boss, Nate Batty, referring to the white paper as a “DNC report” on September 21, 2016, didn’t amount to notice that Sussmann brought the report on behalf of the DNC.
At trial, Michael Sussmann lawyer Sean Berkowitz asked Hellman how it could be that he would see a reference to a DNC report and not take from that it was a DNC report. Hellman described “the only explanation that … was discussed” — which is that it was a typo.
Q. What’s your explanation for it?
A. I have no recollection of seeing that link message. And there is — have absolutely no belief that either me or Agent Batty knew where that data was coming from, let alone that it was coming from DNC. The only explanation that popped or was discussed was that it could have been a typo and somebody was trying to refer to DNS instead of DNC.
Q. So you think it was a typo?
A. I don’t know.
Q. When you said the only one suggesting it — isn’t it true that it was Mr. DeFilippis that suggested to you that it might have been a typo recently?
A. That’s correct.
Q. Okay. You didn’t think that at the time. Right?
A. I did not. I had never seen it or had any memory of seeing it ever before it was put in front of me.
With some prodding, Hellman admitted that when he referred to “discussing explanations,” he meant doing so with Andrew DeFilippis. This exchange was, quite literally, Berkowitz eliciting Hellman to describe that DeFilippis told him what to think about evidence that should have sunk his case years earlier.
As I said, DeFilippis cheated. With lesser attorneys or more exhausted witnesses, it might have worked.
And they’re about to try again.
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https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Screenshot-2025-08-07-at-1.27.05-PM.png11741190emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-08-10 11:27:132025-08-12 07:42:45John Durham’s Show Trials: A Preview of Coming Attractions
As I’ve been showing, the Durham classified annex goes to significant lengths to hide that a Russian email discussing creating a conspiracy theory about the American Deep State, which he dates to July 26, precedes the draft SVR memo he claims has animated his years-long hunt, which dates to July 27 or later.
You can date the draft SVR memo (Durham doesn’t provide its date at all in the unclassified report, and if he does here, the date has been redacted) by tracking the inputs (red arrows) into the fake emails on which the draft memo is purportedly based (blue arrows), as I lay out here.
You can review a live copy of this (without the arrows) at this link.
The fake email integrated into the memo itself — bearing the date of July 25 but mentioning the Olympics — derives from the Thomas Rid story and the real Tim Maurer email — but it appears to have been altered to add the reference to the Olympics on July 27 (because a copy without the Olympics mention is attached to an email dated July 27).
And the fake email, bearing the date of July 27, claiming that Hillary approved a plan on July 26 appears to derive from the real July 27 Julianne Smith email soliciting a totally innocuous letter condemning Trump’s attack on NATO. We might learn more about its creation, except the email to which it is attached is entirely redacted in the annex.
That is, so long as his claim that the Deep State memo is dated “the day after” two emails purporting to be dated June 25 is accurate, then the emails and draft report that guided his entire investigation were the conspiracy theory proposed on July 26. Durham did the work of Russian spies for four years.
If this is, indeed, the timeline, then Durham — as well as John Ratcliffe and Kash Patel — should have recognized they were pursuing an investigation of Hillary Clinton based off a deliberate Russian spy hoax.
There’s one more thing that supports this argument — and reveals how problematic it is for Durham (who continued his investigation for two more years after he would have concluded the emails were “composites”) and the others: the extent to which he, as well as the person who redacted this for release, tried to obscure all this in the classified annex.
This kind of deceit was not remotely unusual for Durham (as I’ll return to when I review what Durham did do after concluding he was using a clear Russian hoax as his excuse to investigate Hillary Clinton). Andrew DeFilippis, especially, did this kind of stuff all the time. Here, where he used email timestamps in two different time zones to falsely suggest that Fusion was the source for a public link about the Alfa Bank anomalies, is just one such example.
The list below is overwhelming. The most important detail, however, is how Durham treats the real email from Julianne Smith asking people to sign onto some totally innocuous letter criticizing Trump’s attacks on NATO. Durham obtained one copy of the email from the SVR trove and another from a subpoena, presumably to Smith or CNAS, where she worked.
The annex separates the disclosure that Julianne Smith had also been hacked (noted in footnote 27) from the discussion of the email she sent on July 27, obscuring that Durham obtained two copies of that email, one from the SVR collection (cited in the annex as Document Classified Appendix Document 9, which also includes the Maurer email), and one via subpoena (cited in the unclassified report as XXXX-0014561). He does that even though discussion of the “certain emails, attachments, and documents that contain language and references with the exact same or similar verbiage to the materials referenced above” precedes that discussion. In the unclassified report, he treats this email differently, effectively treating it as corroboration for the claims in the fake report, rather than a source used to fabricate it (though he later uses it as corroboration after concluding that the underlying emails are composites based on … that email).
In either case, however, if he is treating Smith’s July 27 email as a source (and that’s one place it appears in his report), then the draft memo must post-date the July 26 Deep State email.
On July 26, Russian spies decided it’d be cool to start a conspiracy theory about the Deep State. And on July 27, having stolen that Smith email, they decided to claim that Hillary — as opposed to some other Deep State entity — decided to smear Donald Trump.
And everyone involved in this is working really hard to hide that they knew that.
Update: On the topic of Smith’s email, I’ve been puzzling over the redaction in this passage; I wondered if Durham expressed some obnoxious opinion about her.
It was suggested to me, however, that that redaction might hide Durham speculating about what Russian spooks thought — maybe something like, “it is a logical deduction that [Russian spies believed that]”… The mention of the spies would therefore justify classification on classification bases. But holy hell if it were something like that, it would mean Durham was trying to rationalize why Russian spooks fabricated emails to make up this claim.
Durham’s deceits
By July 2021, John Durham had evidence to conclude the emails behind a draft SVR memo on which his entire investigation rested were “composites,” that is, fabrications. But he continued on for two more years, attempting and failing to create evidence to substantiate that Russian disinformation by prosecuting Michael Sussmann and Igor Danchenko. To hide that he had done that, he engaged in a great deal of deceit in both his unclassified and classified reports.
Durham frames his focus around three bullets John Ratcliffe included in his 2020 memo sending these materials to Lindsey Graham. The first bullet claims to focus on “Russian intelligence analysis,” suggesting that his focus was on a draft SVR report that leads the narrative in the classified appendix, but is actually the last document temporally. But the second bullet refers to John Brennan notes that quote not the purported end analysis, but an email advancing the plot to frame Hillary.
The two exhibits — Brennan’s notes and a referral from the CIA that he couldn’t prove ever got sent to FBI — include redactions that obscure the actual content of both. Importantly, witnesses were not shown the full exhibits, though Brennan correctly stated that Durham misrepresented what his notes were about.
Durham misrepresented how many witnesses (and who) testified that they had not seen the referral memo.
Thereafter in the unclassified report, Durham referred to “Clinton Plan intelligence” as if it focused on that discreet claim or even the draft memo, when it referred to the larger body of intelligence obtained via the Dutch, and so in context the plan to frame Hillary. In the classified report, Durham referred to Clinton campaign plan, rather than the intelligence asserting it.
Durham mentioned two Leonard Benardo emails early in the annex (there were actually four documents claiming to be emails in the report), then discussed the earlier, apparently finished, intelligence from earlier 2016 implicating Loretta Lynch, suggesting they were the emails. He returns to this strategy later in the appendix.
Then, the beginning of the section focused on the SVR documents starts with the draft memo, not the specific emails. He keeps moving the ball.
The date of the draft memo appears nowhere in the unclassified report and may not appear in the classified report either (if it is there, it is redacted).
The annex separates the disclosure that Julianne Smith had also been hacked (noted in footnote 27) from the discussion of the email she sent on July 27, obscuring that Durham obtained two copies of that email, one from the SVR collection (cited in the annex as Document Classified Appendix Document 9, which also includes the Maurer email), and one via subpoena (cited in the unclassified report as XXXX-0014561). He does that even though discussion of the email appears after the introduction, “certain emails, attachments, and documents that contain language and references with the exact same or similar verbiage to the materials referenced above.” In the unclassified report, he treats this email differently, effectively treating it as corroboration for the claims in the fake email, rather than a source used to fabricate it (though he also uses it as corroboration after concluding that the underlying emails are composites based on … that email). In either case, however, if he is treating Smith’s July 27 email as a source, then the draft memo must post-date the July 26 Deep State email talking about ginning up a conspiracy theory.
After introducing the Benardo emails, the annex discloses there were several versions of the July 25 one, which helps to obscure that one copy of the earliest version was attached to a July 27 email, which in turn suggests the reference to the Olympics was added on July 27. As noted, the redactions exacerbate this sleight of hand.
The annex hides that the Deep State email predates the draft memo by discussing the two versions of the July 25 Benardo email in-between.
The annex doesn’t appear to explain that one of two copies of the first fake July 25 email (without the Olympics) is considered part of the same document as the July 27 “vilify” email.
The description that the real Tim Maurer email is the same date as the fake July 25 emails gives the impression that they were made the same day, when at least the revisions of the fake email probably happened on July 27.
Durham provides a description of this (then-dated) article about a voting hacker for hire, but does not provide a description of the Thomas Rid article discussed in the email, which is not only a clear source for the draft memo, but should make analysts look twice at the Russian idiom in English in the fake Benardo email, because Rid discusses the language games behind the Guccifer 2.0 persona at some length.
When Durham concedes the emails to which the draft memo is sourced are composites, he does not name CNAS, where Smith worked, even though earlier in the section he says she was hacked too.
Lying with redactions
The introduction to the draft memo redacts details about what is in it, most notably the emails the entire annex purports to focus on.
That continues in the redactions after the draft memo. This obscures which email was incorporated into the draft memo: the one referring to the Olympics. The redaction introducing the first fake July 25 email further obscures this, making it harder to figure out that Classified Appendix Document 6 is a July 27 email with one of the first versions of the July 25 email (that is, before the Olympics were added) attached.
The redaction of the email after the July 27 “vilify” one obscures that the July 27 Benardo email discussing Hillary’s approval is attached to that redacted email and not the “vilify” one, further obscuring that the emails dated July 25 were likely revised on July 27, to add the Olympics reference.
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https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/SVRs-Deep-State-Hoax.png15482518emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-08-09 12:00:242025-08-10 18:05:33How John Durham Buried Evidence He Had Been Doing the Work of Russian Spies … and then Tulsi Gabbard Buried More
A friend — an expert — recommended this David Graham column purporting to respond to Trump’s latest claim of a Russian hoax. It is solid enough.
It goes through all the assessments about the Russian attack on 2016 (notice how we never focus on Russia’s even more overt assistance for Trump in 2020 and 2024?), and describes that, “perhaps because” there’s so much evidence, Trump dismisses it as a hoax.
In spite of all of this evidence, or perhaps because of it, Trump has loudly insisted that it’s all a hoax.
Where it goes hopelessly off the rails is in this paragraph, in which Graham uses the passive voice to describe how three things — the focus on Carter Page, the Alfa Bank anomalies, and the Steele dossier — “assisted” Trump in instilling doubt.
His attempts to instill doubt have been assisted by the fact that some of the wilder rumors and reports concerning his campaign didn’t turn out to be true. Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser, was a bit of an eccentric character but not a traitor, as some suggested, much less the key to unraveling any grand conspiracy. Trump was probably not communicating with a Russian bank via a mysterious server. He was almost certainly not a longtime Russian-intelligence asset. The so-called Steele dossier was full of falsehoods. I argued at the time that BuzzFeed’s decision to publish it was a grievous error, and it warped conversation about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
With that passive voice, Graham dodges the agency involved in these things, at least one of which goes back to a deliberate and apparently successful attempt to fill the dossier with disinformation, and another of which has been stoked by years of lawfare (and, as I suggested here, also had help from someone I believe was involved in the Russian operation).
Graham then describes an SVR plan* — concocted in advance of, but within a week of, the founding moment in the Steele narrative — to frame Hillary Clinton, a plan that right wingers have adopted as their own for years, this way:
A special counsel appointed by Barr during Trump’s first term, with the goal of ferreting out political skulduggery in the Russia investigation, found that messages about Clinton being treated as a smoking gun were, in fact, likely concocted by the Russians.
Again, the passive voice. Not, “the Russians concocted a hoax that a Bill Barr-appointed Special Counsel chased as if it were true for four years, two of those after he had concluded it was a fabrication,” but that that “Special Counsel ‘found’ that the document was concocted by Russians.”
And as a result, this column participates in the polarization about this debate that was baked in from the start. Graham presents claims, all true, and in the process pits actual facts against Trump’s necessary faith in the Hillary hoax. It’s a good column. But I’m not sure where it gets us.
I’d like to attempt to reconceive the 2016 election operation, not in terms of the judgments that spooks and prosecutors have come to (on which Graham focuses), but instead on what it achieved. I laid out some of this last year with LOLGOP, but this scheme adds the SVR hoax built into the process.
Network within the attention economy: First, in the election during which the attention economy became the medium in which elections (and politics generally) are contested, Russia tapped into that economy in a way that networked with right wingers. I’m in no way saying that Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s troll operation had an effect on the outcome (I’m less sure about the hack-and-leak operation). I believe now, as then, that the effect of the trolling operation was like throwing a few matches onto a flaming bonfire. But the trolls proved they could get Trump’s closest buddies to treat fakes like TEN_GOP as one of their own; Trump’s closest propagandists still prove to be easy, if pricier, marks. They also got Trump’s now Chief of Staff to treat them as real. It’s also likely that the chat rooms in which Trump’s allies orchestrated their own attention campaigns, starting with the one that a Nazi living in Eastern Europe helped to professionalize, were influenced by Russian-linked figures; chat rooms are a wonderful way to cultivate people with plausible deniability. Perhaps most importantly, the hack-and-leak campaign proved not just that Trump was happy to rely on Russian props for his own exploitation of the attention economy, but would even do really stupid things in pursuit of such props. Russia discovered they could get Trump and all his allies to chase what they were offering.
Impede Hillary: Ginger Rogers had to do everything backwards and in heels. So did Hillary. But she also had fend off a persistent wave of hacks (the effect of this on a campaign was overlooked). And her own attempts to function within that attention economy were not just drowned out by the algorithmically boosted efforts of Trump, but were corrupted by Russian disinformation.
Dangle various quid pro quos: Russia also offered a number of inducements they might collect on in case of a Trump win: An impossibly lucrative Trump Tower deal, relying on GRU ties and sanctioned banks, to Trump’s personal attorney. Advance notice of the campaign and maybe energy deals to the Coffee Boy. Dirt for sanctions relief to the failson. Advance notice of the hack-and-leak campaign in exchange for a pardon for Julian Assange to the rat-fucker. Campaign assistance and millions in payment or debt relief in exchange for a plan to carve up Ukraine from the campaign manager. *** Importantly, Trump said yes — or at least, maybe — to every single one of these dangles. What disrupted them was the investigation — first the discovery of Mike Flynn’s intervention to undermine sanctions, then the exposure of the June 9 meeting, and ultimately the August 2 meeting exchanging campaign assistance in the context of a plan to eviscerate Ukraine. The Mueller investigation showed that every one of these men (save Don Jr, who wisely dodged the grand jury) lied to cover up these dangles. And Trump pardoned most of them, thereby affirming the import of those lies.
Entail complicity in destroying the Deep State: I’m largely alone in this, but I believe that at least one of those quid pro quos raised the stakes of the inducements. If it is true — as I laid out here — that the Shadow Brokers operation dumping NSA exploits used the same infrastructure as the Guccifer 2.0 operation, it would mean the acceptance of the latter involved tacit participation in the former. More concretely, by the time Roger Stone started pursuing a Julian Assange pardon in October 2016, WikiLeaks was already sitting on the CIA hacking tools stolen by Joshua Schulte, tools that Schulte himself recognized would make it easy for Russia to identify CIA’s operations and assets; by the time Stone started intervening at the “highest levels of Government” for Assange, Trump’s own CIA Director had dubbed WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence service. In other words, well before he was elected, Trump unwittingly entered a deal that would make him a participant in the willful destruction of the US security establishment to deliver on his side of the bargain.
Stoke conspiracies about the Deep State: As I said here, that SVR plan, apparently birthed on July 26, 2016, to do …
something about a task from someone, I don’t know, some dark forces, like the FBI for instance, or better yet, Clinton sympathizers in the IC, Pentagon, Deep State (or somewhere else?) about American websites deploying a campaign to demonize the actions of Russia’s GRU
… was probably no more than spaghetti at the wall. Not everything Russia tried that year worked. But that one did, because it weaponized Trump’s venality — his enthusiasm for all those inducements and therefore his anger that something (the investigation) prevented him from collecting them — and his narcissism. Consider: We know that Trump was all too happy to use the stolen files published at WikiLeaks to drive his information economy. We know that Trump was all too happy to use Hunter Biden — some parts of which came from Russia no matter where the actual laptop did — to drive his information economy. But the claims of a Hillary hoax, all built in from the start, remain his go-to distraction. To get out of his own Russian trouble, Trump used the dossier disinformation to take out one after another Russian expert at the FBI. At the moment Trump needed to reclaim his ability to distract and redirect attention from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, he turned back to his Russia Russia Russia grievance, a grievance that built on the disinformation injected in the dossier and — we now know — an SVR fabrication that gave him an excuse to corrupt the Justice Department and spin his adversaries as the enemy, which increasingly entailed relying, secretly, on Russia as his enabler.
At every step, Trump’s reliance on the Hillary hoax entailed more and more destruction of the US security establishment.
This is why I’m making such a big deal out of this redaction, one that attempts to hide that this was an SVR plot from the start and how obvious that should have been and likely was to Durham before he chose to continue his witch hunt pursuing Trump’s adversaries for two more years.
The redaction hides Durham’s efforts to obscure all that in an annex he likely assumed would be buried forever; the temporal games the annex play resemble ones Andrew DeFilippis repeatedly used during the Michael Sussmann trial. But it also attempts to hide that Trump’s top spies — the ones resuscitating a claim two of them first championed in an earlier attempt to distract and redirect — know that Durham attempted to obscure it. As I said, the people to whom this is obvious are Putin’s spies.
Over the years, Trump’s serial adherence to that Hillary hoax — out of necessity to avoid narcissistic injury, as his favorite tool to leverage the attention economy, and increasingly as a measure of loyalty of right wingers to him — has always depended on the continued cooperation of Putin’s spies. That’s how Trump came out of a meeting in Helsinki with Putin and declared the Russian spies were right. And that’s how we got to this place, where all three of Trump’s top spies are reading right from a script written by Russian spies nine years ago. They can’t reveal the plot. Trump can’t reveal the plot.***
The answer to the question, “What exactly is the “Russia hoax’?” is not all the proof that Russia interfered in our election to 2016, hoping to help Trump win. The answer is that the “Russia hoax” is a ploy Russian spies seeded all those years ago to leverage Trump’s narcissism to polarize the US on competing sides of a grievance that would have the effect of destroying the US Deep State.
* SVR is Russia’s foreign intelligence service. Under the moniker APT 29, they were hacking Hillary-related targets long before Russia’s military intelligence did so, under the moniker APT 28, during the election. This post provides more background.
Update: I have removed mention of sanctions relief — and business deals generally — in conjunction with Kirill Dmitriev at the asterisks, at the demand of RDIF. I apologize for the original misrepresentation.
In this post, I reviewed the two premises of John Durham’s investigation into Hillary Clinton:
Documents stolen from Russian spies claimed Hillary Clinton had a plan to smear Donald Trump because of his ties to Russia (to which Durham added a plan that she would fabricate evidence against Trump)
The FBI should have taken that into consideration before they relied on the Steele dossier or investigated the Alfa Bank anomalies
I also showed that Durham was lying about what document he built that premise off of, which he claimed was a draft SVR report, the date of which he never disclosed (but which appears to date to July 27). In fact, the notice that CIA gave to FBI of that alleged plan was almost certainly a different one, one which made it clear that Hillary didn’t have a plan to frame Trump, but instead that SVR had a plan to frame Hillary.
As part of that argument, I showed how the referral memo — a memo CIA drafted to send to the FBI in early September 2016, but which appears never got sent — doesn’t actually match the draft SVR report (reporting that Hillary would smear Trump), but instead matches emails that show SVR would frame Hillary.
I noted that the memo refers to “an exchange,” not a draft memo.
But I also noted that there was a redaction pertaining to Guccifer 2.0 that, in 2020 — two years after Robert Mueller indicted GRU for Guccifer 2.0 — John Ratcliffe didn’t want to share publicly.
That’s where I may have misstated. I claimed that the report had nothing that could match that kind of Guccifer 2.0 reference. But it actually may. There’s a redaction in the excerpted report in the Durham annex right after a discussion of Guccifer 2.0 (the only reference to Guccifer in the declassified material), which then picks back up with questions of attribution that had been the subject of discussion of one of the only real emails found to be quoted in the report.
In other words, I could be wrong that Guccifer does not feature prominently in this report. It may be that Durham hid it, just like John Ratcliffe hid it in the referral memo.
Still, what’s clear is that the Deep State email that almost certainly launched this effort did tie Guccifer to Hillary.
Effectively, this exchange says, “fuck, they’re onto Guccifer, let’s start a conspiracy theory about Hillary! dark forces!! Deep State!!!” And then the follow-up email describes the conspiracy theory in terms of “vilifying” Putin and Trump.
And that matters because shortly after this email, Russia launched a sustained, two-fold campaign, both to undermine the attribution of Guccifer 2.0 and to frame Hillary Clinton. Indeed, just days after SVR set out to frame Hillary Clinton, the effort to debunk the Guccifer attribution expanded, not least with Roger Stone, who reversed course on the Russian attribution over a matter of days in early August 2016, as if he were reading right from the SVR script.
A few days after that, Julian Assange picked up the Seth Rich conspiracy started, a conspiracy theory that provided an alternative source for the documents stolen by GRU, one that played on dark forces involved with the Clintons.
And where did that come from?
SVR reports purporting to date back to July 13 — the very same stash of documents that fabricated a plan by Hillary Clinton to smear Donald Trump.
ISIKOFF: Exactly. She was puzzled about all the conspiracy theories swirling around the case that she was investigating. So she finally turns to the U.S. intelligence community. She had a security clearance as a assistant U.S. attorney. She asked them to help her figure out, where’s all this stuff coming from? And they come back with a bombshell. They provide Sines with copies, English translations of copies of intelligence bulletins that were circulated by the Russian SVR – that’s Russia’s version of the CIA – just three days after Seth Rich’s death, July 13, 2016. In the intel – that first intelligence bulletin, the SVR suggests – it doesn’t suggest – asserts that Seth Rich was on his way to talk to the FBI that early Sunday morning when he was gunned down by a squad of assassins working for Hillary Clinton.
And this was, as far as we can tell, the first time that a conspiracy theory about Seth Rich’s death was put out there. That very same day, July 13, it pops up on an obscure website, called whatdoesitmean.com, which, when you look at it and examine it, it’s filled with all sorts of stories attributed to Russian intelligence officials, Russian foreign ministry officials, Russian press reports. It’s effectively a vehicle for Kremlin propaganda. And they apparently took this SVR bulletin that had been intercepted by U.S. intelligence officials and used it to put out this wild conspiracy theory that played right into that far-right conspiratorial meme I mentioned before about the Clintons’ – a Clinton body count and assassins working for the Clintons who go around rubbing out inconvenient people in their political path.
The efforts to undermine the Guccifer 2.0 attribution didn’t much survive the other public attributions, including confirmation in the Intelligence Community Assessment, to say nothing of the Mueller indictment of GRU.
Except, of course, for this guy.
I actually suspect that Durham’s team aspired to include the whole muddle. After all, when interviewing Manos Antonakakis in the days after Durham should have given up his conspiracy theory, Andrew DeFilippis attacked the DNS researcher for deigning to try to attribute Guccifer 2.0.
Finally, I will leave you with an anecdote and a thought. During one of my interviews with the Special Counsel prosecutor, I was asked point blank by Mr. DeFilippis, “Do you believe that DARPA should be instructing you to investigate the origins of a hacker (Guccifer_2.0) that hacked a political entity (DNC)?” Let that sync for a moment, folks. Someone hacked a political party (DNC, in this case), in the middle of an election year (2016), and the lead investigator of DoJ’s special council would question whether US researchers working for DARPA should conduct investigations in this matter is “acceptable”! While I was tempted to say back to him “What if this hacker hacked GOP? Would you want me to investigate him then?”, I kept my cool and I told him that this is a question for DARPA’s director, and not for me to answer.
So the effort to frame Hillary Clinton had to be spun free of the effort to muddle attribution of Guccifer 2.0.
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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