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How John Durham Buried Evidence He Had Been Doing the Work of Russian Spies … and then Tulsi Gabbard Buried More

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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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Russia’s Useful Idiom, John Ratcliffe: Lost in Two Translations

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John Ratcliffe keeps going on propaganda channels to parrot Russian idioms (and make false claims) shamelessly. Whichever Russian spy wrote that disinformation package years ago must have gotten a new dacha to reward him for how he has turned America’s CIA Director into an unabashed useful idiom for Russia.

Ratcliffe might want to rein in his boisterousness, however. Because Chuck Grassley and Tulsi Gabbard — or whoever actually did the declassification of the Durham appendix — left just enough breadcrumbs to suggest there’s a material difference between the FBI and some other government agency’s translation of the Deep State email reflecting an SVR plan to frame Hillary Clinton. Ratcliffe may not realize just how clear it is that John Durham framed Hillary Clinton, with Ratcliffe’s help.

I started down this rabbit hole when I puzzled through this footnote, revealing that there are multiple translations of “some” of the items in question.

So I made a table of all the documents identified as exhibits to the appendix, showing which footnote referred to which document and the language of the document.

The first thing this exercise disclosed were two missing documents — or rather, documents the discussions of which are entirely redacted.

The first appears in a discussion of a 2017 CIA review that concluded these SVR reports — it’s not clear whether the report reviewed just the Loretta Lynch ones, or all of them; I have a hunch this report also discusses Oleg Deripaska — were not fabrications. Note missing footnote 76 here.

The second is more interesting–but it’s part of a far more important discovery. At least according to the footnotes, the redactions in these two passages (which bracket the draft report that Durham falsely claims was the basis of his investigation) serve to obscure which fake Leonard Benardo email was incorporated into which SVR document.

The reference to “The above-referenced [SVR] memorandum included the English text of a document” pertains to the Benardo email that appears second in the appendix — the one with the (stupid, obviously Russian) references to the Olympics.

There are at least two versions of the Benardo email (identified as Appendix Documents 5 and 6 in footnote 36) that lack the Olympics reference.

And one of those, Appendix Document 6, is what was attached to the July 27 email described in the unredacted passage here.

The fake Benardo email dated July 27 — which these redactions tried hard to suggest was attached to the email mentioning “vilif[ying] Moscow” — was actually attached to another communication completely obscured by this redaction, the second missing document. Footnote 40 and footnote 41 both cite Classified Appendix Document 8.

This clarifies the process by which the draft report that Durham falsely claimed was the basis of his investigation was made.

The first email in the chain is the July 26 Deep State one — the one saying it’d be cool to frame Hillary.

The second is that July 27 email — basically a discussion about how they were going to frame Hillary, attaching one of the fake Benardo emails without mention of the Olympics. Again, that’s what got mentioned in John Brennan’s notes, not the report. At that point, one of the spies must have thought it would be cute to make a reference to what appears to be the Olympics doping scandal, which was ongoing at the time, something that mattered to the Russians but probably not Benardo or Julianne Smith, and so they altered the fake Benardo email for inclusion in the eventual report, to add the Olympics.

And then a third email between Russian spies — the one that is completely redacted — attached the fake Benardo email, dated July 27, claiming Hillary had approved this plan. The email reflecting approval came after the spies decided to frame Hillary (not like it matters since the emails were all fake anyway).

Now, as I keep saying, the report that Durham falsely claimed was the basis of his investigation had to come after that missing email, because that’s what they fabricated to claim that Hillary had actually approved the plan. The report was the last document, not the first, as Durham misleadingly suggested by putting it at the beginning of his discussion. The unredacted report would make clear that both the approval and the Olympics reference were deliberately added to take Benardo emails, and then incorporated in the draft report itself.

Which brings me back to where I started. Aside from two documents of little interest here (a document on Benardo that could be a SVR profile of him or could just be his bio, Classified Appendix Document 1) and the entirely redacted reference associated with the 2017 CIA review (Classified Appendix Document 10), there are six documents in Russian:

  • The January 2016 report mentioning Loretta Lynch and Jim Comey
  • The March 2016 report mentioning Loretta Lynch
  • The July 26 Deep State email discussing framing Hillary
  • The July 27 email, to which one of the fake July 25 Benardo emails that did not mention the Olympics was attached
  • The missing document, to which the fake July 27 Benardo email was attached
  • The draft report, to which the fake July 25 Benardo email that mentioned the Olympics was incorporated

The January and March reports are actually the same document, Classified Appendix Document 2. Durham describes both were “in Russian,” with the discussion of translation redacted; this discussion tracks the DOJ IG Report closely, and so may have used those same versions.

As you can see above, the discussion about who translated the July 27 email and the missing one is entirely redacted. The same is true of the draft report itself.

Not the July 26 Deep State email, though.

The intro to that states clearly that Durham used an FBI translation: “The FBI’s translation of this email is as follows.”

In other words, the July 26 Deep State email showing that Russian spies decided to frame Hillary before they fabricated emails supporting their effort exists in at least two versions.

And John Ratcliffe, rattling off Russian idioms on every Fox show, may not know that.

Update: I’m reviewing the Michael Sussmann case, and Andrew DeFilippis played a similar temporal gimmick twice during that trial.

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By “Vilifying” SVR Victim Julianne Smith, Kash Patel Establishes Precedent to Share the Epstein Files

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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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