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Kash Patel Yapped His Mouth with a REAL Feeb

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There’ll be a lot of good articles on this lawsuit that three recently fired senior FBI agents — Brian Driscoll, Steven Jensen, and Spencer Evans — have filed against Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, and the agencies that fired them. For example, NYT focuses on disclosures about Stephen Miller’s role in running DOJ. NPR focuses on Dan Bongino’s obsession with social media.

The complaint retells stories already reported in the press, such as how the Trump Administration intended to hire Robert Kissane as interim FBI Director but fucked up the announcement, so Driscoll served instead. There are descriptions designed to be embarrassing — if not debilitating to Kash’s ability to lead the agency — such as the revelation that Kash has a collection of whiskey and cigars in his office and  that Kash’s challenge coin that is unusually large. The audience for such disclosures goes beyond Judge Jia Cobb, who’ll preside over the case, to members of Congress who’ll hold hearings with Kash just days from now.

These details discrediting Kash’s leadership are matched by details describing how these men, especially Driscoll, were fired because of their efforts to treat FBI agents with respect and dignity, intervening to prevent firings or mitigate the impact of them. A long passage describes Driscoll’s efforts to undercut Emil Bove’s jihad against agents who–like Bove and Driscoll themselves–had participated in the January 6 investigation. This includes an anecdote about how Bove bolloxed an attempt to send an email to the entire FBI workforce to complain about Driscoll.

This is a speaking complaint written by people who’ve helped write their share of speaking indictments in their careers.

Which is why my favorite line is the one describing Kash acknowledging that these firings could lead to his deposition: “[Kash] again commented that he knew the nature of the summary firings were likely illegal and that he could be sued and later deposed.” [my emphasis]

The deposition comment, as it pertains to Kash, appears twice in the lawsuit: once at the beginning, to substantiate that Kash knew these firings were unlawful, which the complaint immediately contrasts with the sworn promises Kash made to the Senate not to politicize firings.

4. Patel openly acknowledged the unlawfulness of his actions. On or about August 5, 2025, in a conversation with Driscoll, Patel plainly stated the reasoning behind his firing of FBI employees that Mr. Driscoll sought to defend. In sum and substance, Patel admitted that his superiors, who he referred to as “they” and who Driscoll understood to include Defendant Department of Justice (“DOJ”) and the White House (which encompasses Defendant Executive Office of the President (“EOP”)), had directed him to fire anyone who they identified as having worked on a criminal investigation against President Donald J. Trump. Patel explained that he had to fire the people his superiors told him to fire, because his ability to keep his own job depended on the removal of the agents who worked on cases involving the President. Patel explained that there was nothing he or Driscoll could do to stop these or any other firings, because “the FBI tried to put the President in jail and he hasn’t forgotten it.” Driscoll indicated his belief that Patel’s reference to his superiors meant DOJ and the White House, and Patel did not deny it.

5. When Driscoll explained that firing employees based on case assignments would be in direct violation of internal FBI processes meant to adjudicate adverse actions and prevent retaliation based on case assignments, Patel said that he understood that and he knew the nature of the summary firings were likely illegal and that he could be sued and later deposed.

6. Patel’s actions stood in stark contrast to his sworn testimony during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. There, he assured the Committee and the country that “all FBI employees will be protected against political retribution.” An exchange with Senator Richard Blumenthal on the topic of firing agents who worked on criminal investigations involving President Trump proceeded as follows:

Sen. Blumenthal: You’ve committed that the FBI will not be politicized. So here’s your first test. Will you commit that you will not tolerate the firing of the FBI agents who worked with the Special Counsel’s Office on these investigations? . . .

Patel: Senator. Every FBI employee will be held to the absolute same standard, and no one will be terminated for case assignments.

7. Likewise in his written responses to a Senate Questionnaire, Patel repeatedly emphasized his commitment that “personnel decisions should be based on performance and adherence to the law” and that “every FBI employee will be held to the absolute same standard, and no one will be terminated for case assignments.” He also asserted that he would “ensure that the appropriate processes are always followed” with respect to adverse actions against FBI personnel.

The lawsuit repeats the deposition comment twice in a longer passage where Driscoll describes how he was fired because he attempted to prevent the firing of another agent, Christopher Meyer, who had been assigned to pilot Kash’s frequent flights back to Las Vegas.

169. On or around August 1, 2025, FBI Supervisory Special Agent Chris Meyer became the subject of intense social media activity. Specifically, various social media posts claimed incorrectly that Meyer had been the signatory to the Mar-a-Lago search warrant affidavit and was now Patel’s personal pilot.

170. In fact, Meyer was not the signatory to the Mar-a-Lago search warrant affidavit. He was not the case agent for the investigation concerning President Trump’s handling of classified documents, nor did he participate in the search of Mar-a-Lago.

[snip]

173. On Saturday, August 2, 2025, the FBI’s Associate Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer Will Rivers called Driscoll to ask him for details about Meyer. Meyer is a military veteran and a qualified pilot. As part of his duties with the FBI, he flew the FBI’s private jet, a Gulfstream G550, which means he served as the FBI Director’s pilot while on duty. Along with those duties, Meyer—and all of the G550 pilots—also flew HRT personnel to overseas missions and other mission-critical assignments. HRT is also responsible for flying “Foreign Transfer of Custody” missions, which detains and transports terrorists and criminals from overseas to the United States to face criminal prosecution. In short, each pilot in CIRG plays an essential role in critical FBI missions.

174. Rivers wanted to know Meyer’s current location and whether he was flying the Director on his current trip. He also asked Driscoll about Meyer’s tenure with the FBI, which was approximately 13 years. Rivers told Driscoll that Meyer was no longer permitted to fly the Director’s plane.

[snip]

179. At this point, Driscoll demanded an opportunity to speak with Patel in person, to which Rivers agreed. Driscoll scheduled a meeting with Patel for Tuesday, August 5, 2025.

180. Driscoll later spoke with Meyer over the phone and informed him that he would no longer be allowed to pilot Patel’s aircraft. Driscoll also told Meyer that he would be raising the issue with the Director and would challenge the decision.

181. On Monday, August 4, 2024, Driscoll received a call from Bongino. Bongino asked Driscoll if anybody would be able to “find anything” in his emails from the time he (Driscoll) was serving as Acting Director. Driscoll replied that there would be nothing incriminating to find in his emails during this time and took Bongino’s question to mean that somebody besides Bongino and Patel would be searching through his old emails in an attempt to find a basis for firing him. Bongino said that he would attempt to keep Driscoll in place.

182. On Tuesday, August 5, 2025, at 9:00 a.m., Driscoll again met with Rivers. This meeting included a status update on Meyer.

183. At 10:00 a.m. on August 5, 2025, Driscoll met directly with Patel to discuss Meyer. Specifically, Driscoll stated that summarily firing Meyer would be illegal based on his military veteran status and would also violate all established FBI policies for adverse actions against personnel.

184. Patel responded that Meyer would be fired by Friday, August 8, 2025, and that there was nothing either Patel or Driscoll could say or do that would stop it. Driscoll pointed out that Meyer had not committed any misconduct and that being assigned to cases could not be grounds for termination. Patel said he understood this, but that as Driscoll should know from “sitting in this seat,” meaning serving as the Director, that “you can’t save everyone.”

185. When Driscoll explained it, Patel acknowledged that the FBI would be sued and would lose in court. He also acknowledged that he would likely be deposed concerning his knowledge of the reasons for Meyer’s termination. He also acknowledged that the FBI workforce would likely respond negatively to Meyer’s termination.

186. Patel stated that all FBI employees who they identified who had worked on the cases against President Trump would be removed from their jobs, regardless of their retirement eligibility status. He then stated that Driscoll needed to understand that “the FBI tried to put the President in jail and he hasn’t forgotten it.” Patel then stated that his own job depended on the removal of the agents who worked on the cases against the President, regardless of whether the agents chose to work on those cases or not. Patel acknowledged that this would be in direct violation of internal FBI processes meant to adjudicate adverse actions and prevent retaliation based on case assignments. He again commented that he knew the nature of the summary firings were likely illegal and that he could be sued and later deposed. [my emphasis]

There’s even the equivalent passage where Steven Jensen staved off Walter Giardina’s firing for some months by warning Dan Bongino that he might face a deposition.

130. At some point in May 2025, Jensen received a phone call from Bongino, who was audibly upset. He asked Jensen whether he knew who SA Walter Giardina was and told Jensen that he has “got to go.” Giardina was an agent assigned to WFO. Jensen asked him to elaborate, but Bongino explained that he could not do so over the phone. Jensen met him at FBI Headquarters to continue the discussion. Jensen knew Giardina to be a dedicated and hardworking FBI agent who was assigned to high-profile investigations into members of both political parties because of these qualities.

131. Upon arriving at FBI Headquarters, Jensen found Bongino in his Chief of Staff’s office. Bongino looked as if he had not slept for several days. He seemed extremely anxious and agitated. Jensen asked him what was wrong. Bongino explained that he had found a room filled with classified documents and “burn bags” related to the now-closed Crossfire Hurricane investigation. He expressed shock at the existence of these burn bags.

132. By his comments, it seemed to Jensen that Bongino might not have been fully aware that the use of “burn bags” is a standard method across multiple federal agencies for preparing classified material for destruction when an investigation is deemed closed, or when physical copies of the materials are no longer necessary. He also appeared unaware that the FBI also stored digital copies of materials on the FBI’s classified computer system, and that this was likely the case with these materials. At the meeting, Bongino also made an unfounded additional allegation about Giardina’s handling of data, claiming that the allegation was “just out there.”

133. Bongino insisted that Jensen summarily fire Giardina. Jensen explained that Giardina was a military veteran and was entitled to certain rights which did not allow such a firing. He explained that if Bongino forced him to summarily fire Giardina, he would document in a report that the firing was at the direction of Bongino and had occurred after Jensen explained why the firing violated FBI procedures and Giardina’s rights. He explained that Bongino would likely be deposed in a lawsuit should Giardina choose to challenge his unlawful firing. Bongino did not pursue further his demand that Giardina be summarily fired in that meeting. In fact, Giardina was never assigned to work on Crossfire Hurricane. [my emphasis]

Note the similarity between these two conversations: in both, FBI’s top officials ordered their subordinates to fire someone based — at least partly — on false premises, shit floating around on social media (involvement in the Mar-a-Lago search in Meyer’s case, involvement in Crossfire Hurricane and mishandling data in Giardina’s case, both marked in blue). Both involve military veterans whose status prohibits certain kinds of firing (marked in red). In both, the subordinate gave warnings that such firings would be illegal (marked in green); Kash repeatedly acknowledged he knew those firings would be illegal.

Both of these exchanges, as described, were set up like witness interviews, where FBI agents know how to repeatedly get the core admission from the subject.

There’s some question whether Jensen and Driscoll documented these exchanges and if so how. Jensen said he would document the conversation if Bongino went ahead and fired Giardina in May, which he did not do. A footnote explains,

3 The facts alleged in this section are based primarily on the firsthand knowledge, best recollections, and/or communications of and involving Plaintiffs. Unless otherwise indicated with quotation marks, descriptions of conversations and other oral statements are reflected in sum and substance and to the best recollections of Plaintiffs.

That doesn’t explain what kind of documentation each man made of the conversations or when. Both men know well the lesson of Jim Comey, whose attempt to take official notes with him after he was fired was criminalized over the course of years. But both men were also trained, over decades, to write 302 reports after the fact that would be deemed reliable in court.

In any case, Driscoll makes sure to name the witnesses to various parts of this progression: The conversations with Will Rivers on August 2 and — just before the conversation with Kash — on August 5. The phone conversation with Bongino on August 4. Details of timing that would show up in phone records and official calendars.

These are men who know how to substantiate a case, and in the case of these crucial conversations, did so.

Which is why the warnings about the depositions are so delicious.

It actually is hard to demand that FBI Directors and their Deputies sit for a deposition. There’s a whole body of precedent that requires plaintiffs to work their way up to more senior officials. For example, Peter Strzok (the circumstances of whose firing and subsequent lawsuit, which made some of the very same First Amendment and Due Process claims, Driscoll and Jensen presumably also know well) had to fight hard to get Chris Wray to sit for a deposition, and even harder to get Trump to sit for one.

But here, the plaintiffs have the defendants on the record noting that they would have to sit for depositions.

The depositions themselves would be worse than embarrassing. They would record:

  • Both men’s rank ignorance of FBI processes
  • The erroneous social media conspiracies that dictated firings of highly qualified FBI agents
  • Acknowledgment — laid out elsewhere in the complaint — by both Bongino and Kash that these men were doing their jobs competently
  • As noted, the knowledge of all the reasons why the firings of Giardina and Meyer, as well as those of the plaintiffs, were illegal (note, at least per the biographies in the complaint, none of the plaintiffs are veterans entitled to special treatment on firings)

In that first instance, the warning about the deposition does something else.

The White House is a defendant in this lawsuit. The basis for that rests in part on Emil Bove’s repeated explanations that Stephen Miller was ordering up the FBI firings and specific references to White House involvement that both Bongino and Kash relayed to Jensen. But it also rests in that question — again, from a trained FBI agent — about who Kash meant by “they.” “Driscoll indicated his belief that Patel’s reference to his superiors meant DOJ and the White House, and Patel did not deny it.”

Again, this may help plaintiffs clear a hurdle that also proved onerous for Strzok and Andrew McCabe when they tried to pierce the orders the White House gave to politicize the FBI. Effectively, Driscoll already got the concession that he would have had to get in a deposition to start asking for details on — say — Stephen Miller’s role in all this, to say nothing of Kash’s understanding (and this is one of the few things put in quotation marks) that, “the FBI tried to put the President in jail and he hasn’t forgotten it.”

Kash, because he ran his mouth, may have made it easier to demand a deposition of President Trump in this case.

And finally, there’s the contrast between the concession that he might have to sit for a deposition with the sworn promises that Kash made to get confirmed. Kash already has a history of false claims that got him in legal trouble, with the grand jury testimony that he succeeded in burying during his confirmation. But here, the plaintiffs have dangled the threat of posing one set of sworn statements — that no agents would be fired for the cases they worked — with the admissions Kash already admitted he might have to make in a deposition.

To be sure, this case still faces the same hurdles and delays that both McCabe and Strzok faced (Strzok is still waiting to hear whether his case will go to trial). But because neither Bongino nor Kash could acquit themselves competently when interacting with men who had spent years doing certain FBI agent things, they’ve already backed themselves, and the people — “they” — who ordered these firings, into certain corners.

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Kash Patel and John Ratcliffe Predicate ANOTHER Investigation on Emails Stolen from Foreign Spies

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NYT has a weird article — right wing propagandist Devlin Barrett is the first byline, with Maggie and Mike contributing as well — purporting to explain the John Bolton investigation. The first and fourth paragraphs claim that the investigation into Bolton is a “a long-running investigation” that “began to pick up momentum during the Biden administration,” claims that conflict with both the NYP’s seeded propaganda story on the search, which described that Kash Patel, “reopened the matter after he took over the FBI in February,” and a well-sourced CNN story, which described that, “the Justice Department reopen[ed] the years-old investigation.”

NYT bases its claim suggesting a continuous investigation on the collection from an adversarial spook service, during the Biden Administration, of emails purportedly sent by Bolton to family members.

The emails in question, according to the people, were sent by Mr. Bolton and included information that appeared to derive from classified documents he had seen while he was national security adviser. Mr. Bolton apparently sent the messages to people close to him who were helping him gather material that he would ultimately use in his 2020 memoir, “The Room Where It Happened.”

But way down in ¶12, NYT describes that John Ratcliffe briefed these emails to Kash Patel and between them they decided that these emails included classified information.

During Mr. Trump’s second term, John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, briefed Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, on the information that had been collected about Mr. Bolton’s emails. The officials believed that the material Mr. Bolton had transcribed into the unclassified and unsecured email contained classified information. Each intelligence agency makes its own determinations about what information is classified, so it is often up to the “originating” agency to decide whether particular pieces of information are classified, and how sensitive they are.

That is, Ratcliffe found something he could use to target Bolton and brought it to Kash. That’s what gave Kash the excuse to reopen the investigation.

This is about where credible DOJ reporters would start ringing alarm bells, because it makes this investigation not like other investigations into classified documents — NYT likens this investigation to the Hillary email investigation, Trump’s own theft of classified documents, and the investigation into Joe Biden — but the John Durham investigation, which Ratcliffe and Kash launched based off emails stolen from Russia which — we now know — were fabricated.

There are even indices in this story that suggest caution. The object of the search, NYT says, was to see whether Bolton possessed anything to corroborate the emails, precisely the approach Durham tried to take with Leonard Benardo.

One major reason for conducting the searches was to see if Mr. Bolton possessed material that matched or corroborated the intelligence agency material, which, if found, would indicate that the emails found in the possession of the foreign spy service were genuine, the people said.

Even according to NYT, the FBI still has no fucking clue whether these emails are genuine (and apparently didn’t take less intrusive means to check, such as a covert warrant to Bolton’s email provider).

Nevertheless, NYT invents explanations for why the material in question didn’t end up in Bolton’s book.

The material in the intercepted emails included information that Mr. Bolton did not ultimately use in his book. That may suggest that he had been told it remained classified during early reviews of his manuscript or that he ultimately decided to omit it, because of either its sensitivity or its importance.

In a story that admits the FBI doesn’t know whether these emails are genuine or not, they don’t consider another explanation: That Bolton may not have written the emails at all, just as Leonard Benardo didn’t write emails reporting on a devious Hillary Clinton plot to make something of Trump’s ties to Russia.

Look, we just learned that Ratcliffe and Patel participated in a 4-year effort to frame Hillary Clinton based off emails fabricated by Russian spies. Can you please not be so horny to normalize all this that you ignore that the fact pattern here is precisely the same?

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Devlin Barrett and Mike Schmidt Mistake the Fox in the Henhouse for a Guard Puppy

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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
  • John Durham’s lead FBI Agent, Jack Eckenrode, who endorsed Kash to be FBI Director, is conducting interviews in the investigation
  • “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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Kash Patel Continues to Cover Up His Role in the HPSCI Investigations

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Tulsi Gabbard should be helping the President prepare to capitulate to Vladimir Putin.

She’s doing so, tellingly, by continuing to push propaganda — this time, the email via which NSA Director Mike Rogers registered his moderate rather than high confidence in intelligence showing that Putin wanted Trump to win — that she hopes will distract from the fact that the Russian investigation ratcheted up in 2017 because Trump’s National Security Adviser secretly undermined sanctions with Russia.

Indeed, the same day Rogers wrote that email was the day Flynn made his first call to Sergey Kislyak about undermining President Obama’s position on Israel, a call the transcript for which has not been released, but the follow-up to which records Kislyak describing Putin’s awareness of the calls: “your previous, uh, uh, telephone call, I reported to Moscow and it was considered at the highest level in Russia.”

More interesting is a cache of documents released to the Federalist, regarding the various investigations into leaks about Trump’s ties to Russia in 2016 and 2017, with the Adam Schiff documents plopped in there starting at 143, after the Genetic Christmas file.

The cache, in general, shows why FBI had difficulty finding the leakers on all the cases except James Wolfe (which I’ll return to), the SSCI staffer who had been dating Ali Watkins: the intelligence behind these stories was often shared with at least 60 and sometimes close to 300 people.

It also shows how aggressively Trump’s DOJ investigated these stories. Of particular note, after Durham investigated Jim Baker and others for a leak, his results were used to reconsider the other Trump-related investigations — the process that was first disclosed in 2021. Details of the subpoenas served on HPSCI (covered extensively in this DOJ IG Report), including both Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, are redacted. And the inclusion of the “whistleblowers” documents in this cache show how DOJ discredited his claims: after interviewing Michael Bahar, they realized the timeline they had been given misrepresented Bahar’s normal activities (which included contact with the press long preceding the conspiracy theories about Adam Schiff). In other words, the cache as a whole debunks the claims people are making about Schiff, rather than confirm them.

You won’t hear that from the frothers.

Several of the case files confirm the veracity of stories for which NYT or WaPo got Pulitzers. Trump is suing the Pulitzer Foundation for awarding those prizes, and these documents will help the newspapers defend the lawsuits.

Both the investigation into the Flynn story and the Carter Page one sputtered out after those records were declassified — in both cases, declassifications in which Kash Patel was centrally involved. To repeat: These investigations were largely halted because Kash declassified the information involved.

That makes the entire manufactured mob around this more interesting. Regarding the HPSCI “whistleblower” (whom Schiff has said was terminated for cause): at the time of the alleged leaks nothing went on in HPSCI without Kash’s involvement or awareness. Yet after making an enormous stink about being targeted in a lawsuit in 2023, Kash has released nothing about all that — not even the explicit concerns that Rod Rosenstein raised about Kash in January 2018, separate from these investigations.

Then again, there are a bunch other documents that Kash could release, such as the Crossfire Hurricane binder that he claimed was declassified on January 19, 2021, or the grand jury testimony that he obtained immunity to give. Kash could vindicate his past claims. Thus far, he has not.

Arctic Haze

Opened August 1, 2017

Closed September 9, 2021

Investigated source for details of the SVR documents as raised by Jim Comey in testimony about Clinton Foundation. The investigation focused closely on Daniel Richman, the Comey friend who got copies of his memos memorializing Trump conversations. In 2021, Comey shared his phone to show there was no evidence implicating him. Only at that late date did the FBI chase down possible other sources — but only the ones who might have a motive to protect Comey.

Echos Fate

First reported on January 24, 2017

Opened May 12, 2017

Closed December 9, 2020

Investigated source for David Ignatius story exposing Mike Flynn’s calls with Russia. It came to incorporate one redacted entity, as well as EDMO (where Jeffrey Jensen was doing propaganda for Bill Barr). The investigation determined that over 167 people had access to this information.

Foggy Falls

Opened May 10, 2017

Closed May 6, 2020

Investigated leak of Carter Page FISA application. The opening memo describes who in Congress got read only briefs of the application. Starting in 2018, after HPSCI released dueling memos on the application, FBI started asking whether they could prosecute at all.

Riding Hood

Opened October 18, 2017

Closed July 17, 2019

This is the Ali Watkins-based tip (from June) that led into the James Wolfe investigation. It is presented out of order in the cache.

Genetic Christmas

Story dated December 14, 2016

Crime report July 25, 2017

Opened October 23, 2017

Closed April 16, 2020

Investigated sources for NBC reporting that Putin was personally involved in election operation. Over 60 people had access either to the documentation or briefing.

Sirens Lure

Opened August 14, 2017

Closed May 11, 2021

Investigated sources for reports on Jared Kushner’s targeting in Russian investigation. There were 192 people in the subject pool.

Tropic Vortex

Referred by Dana Boente March 22, 2017

Opened January 31, 2019

Closed February 25, 2020

This was initially based on an October 2016 NYT story (which may actually be this story on an entirely different topic, a scan DOJ asked Yahoo to do, using a FISA warrant, for a terrorism-related selector). But it came to incorporate this story on Jim Comey’s effort to push back on Trump’s false “tapp” claim (only the NYT, which includes Mike Schmidt, is named, though ABC had the story too). The initial investigation was referred to John Durham because one subject of the investigation was a former senior FBI official. Durham submitted his report in January 2019, and DOJ decided to reconsider all the other investigations based on what Durham had discovered.

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Kash Patel and John Solomon Declare Their Own Sources and Methods Illegal

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The FBI released documents to John Solomon to run a hit piece on Adam Schiff that amounts to a confession that Kash Patel and John Solomon’s sources and methods were illegal.

At issue are some 302s from HPSCI whistleblower claiming that Adam Schiff tried to research and leak information about the Russian investigation.

Water.

Wet.

I mean, I don’t doubt that Schiff (and Eric Swalwell) did leak information from HPSCI, in the same way that I have no doubt that people close to Devin Nunes likewise leaked information.

There’s a very long history of members of Congress doing that, about all topics. It’s a safety valve for Executive abuse of classification authority.

I also know, for a fact, that the primary whistleblower, who describes that he was not part of Nunes’ team investigating Russia, gets key details about Schiff’s treatment of classified information and contact with the press in this precise period wrong. I also know that his imagined description of sources behind stories was badly flawed in at least one respect, in such a way that might have distracted the FBI from a far more ominous channel of classified information.

Keep in mind, too, that these 302s reflect a cherry pick of 302s from the investigation into leaks about Trump — an investigation that Kash himself has squealed mightily about (and was investigated in). Kash personally was considered a far bigger leaking concern into 2018 than Schiff’s staffers, even after this testimony, by Rod Rosenstein. And the flood of leaks to John Solomon (via whatever source) was institutionalized up to the end of Trump’s first term.

Indeed, after Kash claimed that Trump had declassified everything he took home with him in 2021, he had to invoke the Fifth Amendment when testifying about the claim before a grand jury.

Finally, they complain that ultimately — sometime after 2019 — DOJ decided that Speech and Debate prevented any charges here is pretty funny. That’s because the very same Speech and Debate protection prevented DOJ from accessing, much less prosecuting, most of the information implicating Scott Perry in Trump’s insurrection.

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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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The SVR Fabrication Necessitates Reconceiving the 2016 Russian Influence Operation

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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.

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How Chuck Grassley’s Politicized Redactions Gave Putin Leverage over Trump

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After making Canada, Japan, Vietnam, and Switzerland go to the US and making the EU go to Trump’s golf course in Scotland to negotiate tariffs, Trump sent his real estate developer buddy, Steve Witkoff, to Moscow to negotiate tariffs with Vladimir Putin.

I would have low expectations that Witkoff, who has gotten his ass handed to him at every turn, would negotiate a reasonable deal with Russia in any case.

All the more so given the politicized release of old documents on Russia that Tulsi Gabbard has orchestrated in recent weeks.

Consider just this redaction in the classified Durham appendix that Chuck Grassley released last week.

As I laid out here, the redaction is designed to fool readers in several ways.

First, it helps to sustain a fiction that the draft SVR memo purporting to report Hillary Clinton approving a plan to smear Donald Trump is the first document in a series, and not the last. That, in turn, serves to suggest that what I call the Deep State memo, laying out a plan by SVR to frame Hillary came after the draft memo, rather than laid out a plan to fabricate the memo, complete with fabricated emails including Russian idioms attributed to Leonard Benardo.

But that’s not right. The Deep State email was, Durham described, sent on July 26. The draft SVR email incorporates an email fabricated on July 27.

Indeed, after this Deep State email, Russian spies talked about “mak[ing] [something]” — that is, fabricating emails — to “illuminate” how Clinton wanted to “vilif[y]” Trump and Putin, proposing an initial fabricated July 25 email promising to, “put more oil into the fire,” but not yet adding reference to the doping scandal that was contemporaneously a very sore subject for Russia. The email with the reference to the Olympics, dated July 25 but almost certainly fabricated on July 27, is the one that was incorporated into the draft SVR memo.

In response, those Russian spies said … we don’t know what, but we do know that they attached the fabricated July 27 email purporting to reflect Hillary approving that plan on July 26.

I’d love to know what that email says; it may make it more clear that this was all a great plan to frame Hillary Clinton, or it may reveal other parts of the plan, possibly pertaining to Guccifer 2.0. But I don’t need to know what it says to know that the email gives Putin great leverage over Donald Trump at the moment that Trump finally tries to assert a strong hand with the Russian dictator.

By hiding that email in an attempt to hide that what Trump has claimed for eight years was an effort by Hillary to frame Trump was — is, still — a wildly successful attempt by SVR to frame Hillary, Trump’s top spies — Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director and Useful Idiom John Ratcliffe, and FBI Director Kash Patel — have all sustained a secret with Russia’s spies, a secret Kash has been chasing all that time, a secret that could legally implicate at least Ratcliffe and Kash (not least because they sustained this campaign during the time they were private citizens) in a crime.

Trump’s top spies are keeping a secret: the secret that for the last eight years Trump has carried out precisely the plan to frame Hillary Clinton that those SVR spies first ginned up on July 26, 2016.

And here’s the thing. Putin’s spies know much of what is behind that redaction. They can reverse engineer it because the footnote to it shows that the email in question is the one to which those Russian spies attached that fake July 27 email, nine years ago. They still have that email. Hell, it’s probably hanging in a gilt-edged frame somewhere, Putin’s trophy from a wildly successful attempt to compromise the Main Enemy.

So that redaction is not, as a classification redaction should, keeping any secrets from our adversaries. The Russian spies know what is too embarrassing for Grassley and Tulsi and Kash and Ratcliffe to release.

But we don’t.

And that’s why this entire frenzy to release more secrets just in advance of this meeting with Putin has made Trump far, far weaker.

Donald Trump cares more about his claims of grievance, a fake grievance that has always gotten him out of jams, than he does about America, to say nothing of Ukraine.

And Chuck Grassley’s willful protection of this secret between Putin’s spies and Trump’s has only served to give Putin leverage over Trump and over the United States.

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

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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.

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

  • Falsely claimed the Russian intelligence report alleging Hillary had a plan to smear Trump about his ties to Russia did — or would even have to — rely on false information
  • Misrepresented the nature of the report about Hillary, thereby misrepresenting the dissemination of SVR intelligence within the Intelligence Community
  • Only found any confirmation for his Clinton conspiracy conspiracy theory from witnesses whose memories had been radically altered by the threat of criminal prosecution; everyone else disclaimed every shred of Durham’s Clinton conspiracy conspiracy theory

There are just a few things structurally that seeing the classified annex adds. Here’s how the two sections map.

Both tell the story of the SVR Report (just the classified annex describes the underlying documents or concedes they were fabricated). Both describe how none of Hillary’s people knew anything about Durham’s Clinton conspiracy conspiracy theory. Both point to true things — reliance on an accurate Franklin Foer story that Durham miscites, interest in whether the FBI was investigating, and an effort to condemn Trump for his attacks on NATO — to bolster Durham’s case that his Clinton conspiracy conspiracy theory is true, though in the classified annex, Durham puts these details in his “The authenticity of the Benardo emails” section.

Both include a section that points to some other part of his (or the right wing’s) obsessions to bolster the Clinton conspiracy conspiracy theory. The unclassified report has a section that misrepresents both Fusion’s dissemination of the Steele dossier and Clinton’s media push of the Alfa Bank allegations (in the process, conflicting with other parts of his report and the results of his investigations) to buck up his theory. The classified annex has a section (after the conclusion that the emails were “composites” and a section describing other times the US Intelligence Community treated these SVR documents as authentic) pointing to Loretta Lynch’s “odd” reaction to a briefing on the two SVR reports claiming she was intervening in the Clinton email investigation. It’s the inclusion of that briefing (Durham conveniently ignores both that the FBI found these documents to be “objectively false” and the reference to Jim Comey throwing the election for Republicans) that allows Durham to decide that, while the emails on which the report was based were probably “composites,” the Clinton plan might be true (this is the conclusion Sean Davis and with him FBI Director Kash Patel cling to) and so his investigation into the FBI’s purported receipt of a report about it legitimate.

The other remarkable difference between the unclassified and classified report is in the way Durham describes his certainty that what he calls a referral ever got to the FBI — or more specifically, Peter Strzok — in the first place. His unclassified report includes an entire paragraph describing that no one on the Crossfire Hurricane team remembered seeing it.

The Office showed portions of the Clinton Plan intelligence to a number of individuals who were actively involved in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Most advised they had never seen the intelligence before, and some expressed surprise and dismay upon learning of it. For example, the original Supervisory Special Agent on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, Supervisory Special Agent-1, reviewed the intelligence during one of his interviews with the Office. 428 After reading it, Supervisory Special Agent-1 became visibly upset and emotional, left the interview room with his counsel, and subsequently returned to state emphatically that he had never been apprised ofthe Clinton Plan intelligence and had never seen the aforementioned Referral Memo. 429 Supervisory Special Agent-1 expressed a sense of betrayal that no one had informed him ofthe intelligence. When the Office cautioned Supervisory Special Agent-1 that we had not verified or corroborated the accuracy of the intelligence and its assertions regarding the Clinton campaign, Supervisory Special Agent-1 responded firmly that regardless of whether its contents were true, he should have been informed of it. 430

During Durham’s testimony to Congress, Strzok revealed that 1) contrary to Durham’s insinuations, he had spoken with with Durham’s investigators and 2) the copy of the referral that Durham’s team showed him was not an FBI copy, suggesting that Durham also had no proof the document ever made it to the FBI.

So in the unclassified report, Durham confesses his entire premise — that the FBI received this report and didn’t respond as he thinks they should have — may be utter bullshit, because they never received it.

Yet in his classified report, he states as fact, three different times, that it was sent to the FBI. He says this twice in the section purporting to validate the import of this report because the Intelligence Community responded to it, section 4 above.

In addition, as described in the unclassified report, on September 7, 2016, the CIA sent the FBI an “investigative referral” memorandum that referred to, among other information, the purported Clinton campaign plan.

[snip]

The DNI also declassified a portion of former CIA Director Brennan’s handwritten notes that describe the August 3, 2016 meeting with President Obama and the CIA Referral Memorandum sent to Director Comey and Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok. [my emphasis]

And then in the conclusion — the one Davis is impressed with — finding that even though the email on which this conspiracy theory was based is a composite, nevertheless it was important because the CIA sent a referral memo that he falsely suggests actually arrived at its destination.

Moreover, in early September 2016, the CIA prepared a referral memorandum on the information regarding the purported “plan” that went to the FBI [my emphasis]

So looking at these two together, the classified annex concludes that the emails behind the report that launched this whole project are “composites,” but because the CIA sent the FBI a referral memo, argues it was a legitimate exercise to review how the FBI responded to that referral memo. Then the unclassified report concedes it has no proof the CIA referral ever made it to the Crossfire Hurricane team, but the investigation was legitimate because Clinton may have shared knowingly false allegations about Trump with the FBI.

John Ratcliffe committed the crime John Durham was hunting

Now consider how those Ratcliffe declassifications cabined the investigation.

He describes that in interviews with Clinton and FBI people (to the extent that he’s not covering up FBI interviews that don’t help him), he used the declassified files with people who lacked clearance (including, with Jennifer Palmieri, the referral document rather than the report itself) and used a redacted version of the emails with people who had clearance, as well as Leonard Benardo. So his question about “Clinton plan” all focused on how fevered right wingers defined it.

I’ve already talked about the blind spots built into John Brennan’s notes. These notes span the fifth and sixth pages of Brennan’s notes, meaning a whole lot of the briefing was more important. They’re described as offering insight into “Russian activities,” not Hillary’s (the CIA couldn’t investigate Hillary’s in any case). The first redacted paragraph likely describes the SVR targets in question.

But there’s a bullet before the description of the purported Hillary plan, and who knows how much after it.

Now check out where the word, “vilify” appears in the known SVR documents. The actual draft report — the purported subject of this investigation — used the word, “smear.” The two emails dated July 25 using a Russian idiom, along with the email between spooks discussing starting a conspiracy theory, use the word, “demonize.” The purported July 27 email from Benardo doesn’t use any such word.

The word “vilify” appears in this email between spooks — the one that follows the one in which they discuss a plan to start a conspiracy theory about the Deep State.

Even in the classified appendix, Durham provides very little of the email, and half of what is there is redacted.

Now look at the referral memo.

It refers to “an exchange,” not a draft memo, which is what the memo in question is. It’s hard to imagine, at this point, what could be behind that redaction about Guccifer. And while there’s a mention in the report itself to Guccifer, that doesn’t pertain to Hillary. It’s a claim about what the FBI has discovered:

Clinton’s supporters in the FBI lack conclusive irrefutable evidence of the Russian Federation’s involvement in the scandal, tied to the theft of the DNC’s correspondence. In the meantime, during the launched investigation, there has been a multitude of circumstantial evidence that the alias of Guccifer 2.0 (the name of the hacker who accepted responsibility for the incident) was, in fact, used to cover up a special unit of the GRU of the Russian Federation Defense Ministry’s General Staff.

The email between the two spooks — which could fairly be called “an exchange” — ties the attribution to Guccifer directly to the plan to start a conspiracy theory about Hillary.

Effectively, this exchange says, “fuck, they’re onto Guccifer, let’s start a conspiracy theory about Hillary! dark forces!! Deep State!!!” And then the follow-up email describes the conspiracy theory in terms of “vilifying” Putin and Trump.

Both these reports — the Brennan notes and the CIA referral to FBI — appear to refer not to the draft report about Hillary’s claimed plan, but instead to communications between the Russian spooks reflecting a plan to invent a conspiracy theory about Hillary to muddle the Guccifer attribution (which is precisely what Roger Stone immediately did).

If that’s right, it means it was never a Clinton plan, it was an SVR plan. That makes sense; after all, John Brennan wouldn’t be permitted to investigate Hillary Clinton’s plans to do oppo research, but he would be permitted to investigate SVR’s plans to frame Hillary. And that’s what he told Durham:  he was focused not on Hillary’s plan but Russia’s.

When interviewed, Brennan generally recalled reviewing the materials but stated he did not recall focusing specifically on its assertions regarding the Clinton campaign’s purported plan. 400 Brennan recalled instead focusing on Russia’s role in hacking the DNC. 401

And having apparently mischaracterized what actually elicited CIA attention, Durham then spent paragraphs and paragraphs talking about how if the FBI had simply factored in a conspiracy theory invented by SVR to muddle the GRU attribution, then they might not have relied on the Steele dossier (itself being injected with Russian disinformation) or accepted the Alfa Bank allegations.

Indeed, Durham actually considered whether Peter Strzok committed a crime by ignoring his misrepresentation of the referral that he had no evidence Strzok ever received.

Whether these failures by U.S. officials amounted to criminal acts, however, is a different question. In order for the above-described facts to give rise to criminal liability under federal civil rights statutes, the Office would need to, for example, identify one or more persons who (i) knew the Clinton campaign intended to falsely accuse its opponent with specific information or allegations, (ii) intentionally disregarded a particular civil right of a particular person (such as the right to be free of unreasonable searches or seizures), and (iii) then intentionally aided that effort by taking investigative steps based on those allegations while knowing that they were false.

[snip]

Although the evidence we collected revealed a troubling disregard for the Clinton Plan intelligence and potential confirmation bias in favor of continued investigative scrutiny of Trump and his associates, it did not yield evidence sufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that any FBI or CIA officials494 intentionally furthered a Clinton campaign plan to frame or falsely accuse Trump of improper ties to Russia.

But Durham never factors into his own investigation those other two emails between spooks, both of which likely precede the report he claimed he was investigating. He never mentions them at all. Had he factored those in, all of this would have been shut down in 2021.

And after claiming that Clinton had a plan to falsely accuse her opponent rather than that SVR had a plan to falsely accuse Hillary, Durham used all this to get warrants targeting Michael Sussmann and Igor Danchenko. He, “intentionally disregarded a particular civil right of [Sussmann and Danchenko] (such as the right to be free of unreasonable searches or seizures), and (iii) then intentionally aided that effort by taking investigative steps based on those allegations while knowing that they were false.”

Once you see those two other emails between the Russian spooks — the one linking Guccifer directly to the plan to talk about the Deep State and the one using the word “vilify,” both of which Durham disregarded — then you have evidence that Kash, Ratcliffe, and Durham himself knew the SVR intended to falsely accuse Hillary, then took investigative steps based on those allegations that were clearly fabricated.

They took four whole years of investigative steps.

No wonder Durham allegedly tried to bury all this in burn bags.

Update: Remember that Kash, at a time he was a private citizen, was making claims making insinuations about Hillary making a plan in July 2016.

Update: And Ratcliffe was similarly making false claims on this topic while a private citizen.

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