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The Russia Russia Russia Grievance Was Built Into Russian Attack from the Start

On July 29, 2016, two days after SVR crafted the draft memo falsely claiming Hillary Clinton had a Deep State plan to smear Donald Trump that would stoke investigations for much of the last decade, Christopher Steele reached out to Bruce Ohr, then in charge of transnational crime at DOJ. Steele was going to be in DC on short notice. Would he like to meet for breakfast?

The meeting between the two is one of the most curious details of the right wing conspiracy theory that has animated the right wing since.

According to Ohr’s notes and his subsequent testimony, he and Steele spoke about a number of things: a claim sourced to SVR that Russia had Trump over a barrel, both details about Carter Page from the dossier and notice of it, Russian doping, and Oleg Deripaska’s plan to start pressuring Manafort for the money Deripaska claimed he was owed.

Mr. Ohr. So Chris Steele provided me with basically three items of information. One of them I’ve described to you already, the comment that information supposedly stated and made by the head, former head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.

He also mentioned that Carter Page had met with certain high-level Russian officials when he was in Moscow. My recollection is at that time, the name Carter Page had already been in the press, and there had been some kind of statement about who he had met with when he went to Moscow. And so the first item that I recall Chris Steele telling me was he had information that Carter Page met with higher-level Russian officials, not just whoever was mentioned in the press article. So that was one item.

And then the third item he mentioned was that Paul Hauser, who was an attorney working for Oleg Deripaska, had information about Paul Manafort, that Paul Manafort had entered into some kind of business deal with Oleg Deripaska, had stolen a large amount of money from Oleg Deripaska, and that Paul Hauser was trying to gather information that would show that, you know, or give more detail about what Paul Manafort had done with respect to Deripaska.

[snip]

Q Were there any other topics that were discussed during your July 30, 2016, meeting?

A Yes, there were. Based on my sketchy notes from the time, I think there was some information relating to the Russian doping scandal, but I don’t recall the substance of that.

The right wing has pointed to this meeting as the founding moment of what they call Hillary Clinton’s hoax — Steele’s efforts to find side channels via which to share the dossier, which they claim was part of a Hillary plot to frame Trump, though it was one Hillary didn’t know about or sanction.

But they always ignore the Deripaska part. Indeed, even though most Republican members of Congress who have pursued the dossier concluded it was filled with Russian disinformation, even though the DOJ IG Report says (using the moniker Oligarch-1 for Deripaska) that Deripaska had the knowledge and means to do that by the time of this meeting, Deripaska’s potential role has disappeared from all right wing obsession on the dossier (indeed, at the time it did disappear in 2018, well past the time members of Congress were focused on the SVR documents that included the Hillary memo, multiple right wing propagandists were claiming references to Deripaska was really Trump).

Of course, the right wing really wants to say nothing of the way this founding moment of their imagined dossier operation interacts with Konstantin Kilimnik’s role, including a meeting with Trump’s campaign manager he was setting up on those very days, to discuss how to win, how to get Manafort paid, and how to carve up Ukraine. Or the way that Manafort came back from a meeting with a Deripaska aide the following January and started pushing the attack on the dossier.

Oleg Deripaska was playing a brutal double game, but rather than admit that, Republicans would rather join in the Hillary side of it.

But at that moment in July 2016, Russian spooks had already decided it’d be fun to exploit the tensions caused by the election operation by framing Hillary Clinton, and by doing so, discrediting the investigation and giving a malignant narcissist cause for grievance.

I’m not saying that Deripaska was acting on the memo itself (though I find the addition of the Olympics in the memo, matching Steele’s mention of it to Ohr, to be notable). And his 2018 Daily Caller column stoking dossier grievance reads from the same script.

What has been inelegantly termed the “Deep State” is really this: shadow power exercised by a small number of individuals from media, business, government and the intelligence community, foisting provocative and cynically false manipulations on the public. Out of these manipulations, an agenda of these architects’ own design is born.

There was a larger plan to frame Hillary, as evidenced by the Seth Rich attack that started two weeks earlier and got picked up by Julian Assange and Roger Stone two weeks later.

I’m saying the Hillary hoax was built into the operation from the start.

Nor am I saying that Russia expected it would destroy the United States.

It was just one strand of spaghetti they threw at the wall in 2016.

But boy did it stick.

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FBI Thwarted an Investigation into How Russians Injected Disinformation in the Steele Dossier

Judging from the chronology of his interview transcripts, John Durham first started chasing his conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton by September 17, 2019 (a detail I’ll return to). This list shows all the interviews cited in both Durham’s unclassified report and the annex; the italicized ones appear only in his classified annex (meaning they likely focus on the SVR intelligence at the core of that material).

In early September, Bill Barr’s office was micromanaging what Durham should investigate, including feeding him a binder of material. On September 16, he met with a partisan Cyber Agent named Nate Batty; he’s the guy who bolloxed the investigation of the Alfa Bank allegations, knowing that they came from Democrats. Then, on September 17, he met with “HQ Analyst-3” and she explained the nature of the SVR collection.

That September 17 interview is the only one exclusively listed in the annex. But it’s not the only interview Durham did with her. Between the unclassified report and the annex, Durham cited five interviews with this analyst, starting a month earlier, on August 14, 2019. In that interview, she described checking the SVR materials for information on the people prosecuted by Robert Mueller, a question he returned to twice more, in December 2019 and February 2020.

Where this analyst played the most significant role in his report, though, was in finding — in “significant intelligence information that first became available for the FBI to review in 2018” (perhaps not coincidentally after the DOJ IG investigation into the SVR material raised concerns about whether it had been sufficiently consulted during the Hillary email investigation) — “that as a result of [Russia’s access to sensitive U.S. government information”], Steele’s subsources could have been compromised by the Russians at a point in time prior to the date of the first Steele dossier report.”

It’s possible this analyst is Brittany Herzog, who testified about Steele’s subsources at the Igor Danchenko trial, though she left the FBI in 2019 to start grad school.

The bulk of what Durham included from this analyst pertained to how, in fall 2018, after she found evidence that Steele’s subsources had been identified before the first report in 2016, senior officials at FBI told her to stop documenting her work. She escalated the problem, ultimately to David Bowdich. Durham doesn’t discuss what happened then, even though his investigation continued past the time Bowdich departed.

We’ve never heard the results of that — except, perhaps, in questions by DOJ IG why the FBI didn’t unpack the possibility that Oleg Deripaska had injected disinformation in the dossier.

Which is why Durham’s own disinformation problem (well, one of them) is so interesting.

Having interviewed Analyst-3 about what was in the SVR files, he cited the DOJ IG report (by way of the SSCI Report) to affirm that Oleg Deripaska knew of the Steele project by July 2016. But then in a totally separate section, he casually asserted (citing NYT) that Steele worked for Deripaska (something he could, and should, have cited to Bruce Ohr’s 302s).

The FBI would have multiple reasons not to want to chase the disinformation in the Steele dossier, first in 2018, and then — after Mueller had established that Manafort was trying to get debt forgiven by him when he shared how the campaign planned to win and then discussed how to carve up Ukraine, another reason when Bowdich got that briefing. Over and over again, however, people serving Trump’s disinformation purposes never seem to want to pull the threads of Deripaska’s relationship with Steele and the possibility that Russia was sending disinformation coming and going.

Incidentally, Analyst-3 was not among the people who backed Durham’s theory that the Leonard Benardo emails were authentic.

Cited testimony

August 14, 2019: SVR didn’t have anything regarding regarding any Trump election campaign conspiracy with the Russians, nor did she see anything in FBI holdings regarding Carter Page, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, or Paul Manafort, though there was material on Manafort that was not connected to the election or the presidential campaign.

September 17, 2019: Timing of SVR hacks. Victims targeted. 

December 10, 2019: Timing of SVR hacks. Victims targeted. The three things obtained: emails about hacking, analysis of hacked documents, and the stolen emails hacked. Hypothesis that the reference to “special services” in the SVR report was a reference to Christopher Steele. Details of the SVR report. Probable description of the compromise of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. SVR didn’t have anything regarding regarding any Trump election campaign conspiracy with the Russians, nor did she see anything in FBI holdings regarding Carter Page, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, or Paul Manafort.

February 19, 2020: The review team initially briefed Counterintelligence and Cyber executive management about their findings on the compromise of Steele’s sources during a conference call. Following the call, while driving home, Headquarters Analyst-3 was called by Acting Section Chief-2. Acting Section Chief-2 told Headquarters Analyst-3 that they appreciated the team’s work, but no more memorandums were to be written. A meeting was then held with Assistant Director Priestap and others. During that meeting, the review team was told to be careful about what they were writing down because issues relating to Steele were under intense scrutiny. SVR didn’t have anything regarding regarding any Trump election campaign conspiracy with the Russians, nor did she see anything in FBI holdings regarding Carter Page, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, or Paul Manafort.

December 2, 2021: Moreover, significant intelligence information that first became available for the FBI to review in 2018 showed that the Russians had access to sensitive U.S. government information years earlier that would have allowed them to identify Steele’s subsources. Indeed, an experienced FBI analyst assessed that as a result of their access to the information, Steele’s subsources could have been compromised by the Russians at a point in time prior to the date of the first Steele dossier report. Two weeks later, the Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence, Dina Corsi, met with the review team and directed them not to document any recommendations, context, or analysis in the memorandum they were preparing. The instructions, which Headquarters Analyst-3 described as “highly unusual,” concerned the team because analysis is what analysts do. Headquarters Analyst-3 was so concerned about the failure to fully exploit the materials involving Steele subsource information (and the possible need to bring information already exploited to the attention of the FISC) that she raised her concerns about the FBI’s lack of action in an email to her supervisor in the hope of having the issues explored further. See FBI-0009265 (Email from Headquarters Analyst-3 to FBI employees dated 10/17/2018). Although the team did not fully adhere to that instruction because of the need to provide context to the team’s findings, they did tone down their conclusions in the final memorandum. Headquarters Analyst-3 recalled that a separate briefing on the review was eventually provided by the team in the Deputy Director’s conference room, although Headquarters Analyst-3 could not recall if Deputy Director David Bowdich attended the briefing. Headquarters Analyst-3 did know that Bowdich was aware of the review itself. [T]here is reason to believe that even earlier in time [Russia] had access to other highly sensitive information from which the identities of Steele’s sources could have been compromised.

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

HPSCI’s dishonesty mirror

My very favorite paragraphs in the entire House Intelligence Report (HPSCI Report) attacking the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russian election interference are these two:

They complain that the 2-page appendix of the ICA addressing the Steele dossier didn’t include details about Christopher Steele that would discredit the dossier, chief among them HPSCI’s claim that Steele was terminated “for being dishonest.”

Here’s how the DOJ Inspector General on the Carter Page FISAs described when and why Steele got shut down as a source:

On November 1, 2016, Steele’s FBI handling agent questioned Steele, who admitted speaking to the reporter who wrote the October 31 article. The handling agent advised Steele at that time that his relationship with the FBI would likely be terminated for disclosing his relationship with the FBI to the press, and the FBI officially closed Steele for cause on November 17, 2016. Steele was never paid by the FBI for any of the reports or information that he provided concerning Carter Page or connections between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.

He was terminated “for disclosing his relationship with the FBI to the press.” Now, perhaps it’s churlish to expect a report on accuracy and sourcing dated September 18, 2020 to account for a report released 284 days earlier, on December 9, 2019.

So, let’s try their own claimed source. Here’s how Steele’s handler, Mike Gaeta, described it in a December 2017 HPSCI interview that the HPSCI report cites extensively, including in that first paragraph.

I called him to confront him and ask him if he was the source in that article. So I said, “Was that you in the article?” And he goes, “Yes, it was.” At which point I said, “Why on Earth would you do that?” And I said, “Everything is going to change here on out.”

I told him a couple of things. I told him, you know, you are no longer considering — don’t consider yourself being tasked by us. You are not working on our behalf. You are not to collect any information on behalf of the FBl. I said, you know, the relationship will end. You know, this was because of his violation of the agreement that we had made back on October 3rd, which I don’t believe we got into, but because he clearly didn’t follow directions, because he clearly went against what he was instructed to do, and because he went public, the relationship was then ended that day.

But then, officially, on paper, a few weeks later, we actually shut the file down. And that was — and I also told him he was not being paid. There was a payment that he was expecting at that point, and I said that that’s not going to happen

[snip]

Up until that moment, he had been a complete professional. And so, when I see that in the article, I was just — that’s when I was taken aback. And then when I confronted him, he said, “Yes, I did it.” And then he makes this comment about being upset about the actions of the Director on the Friday before. [my emphasis]

Steele “went public,” which “went against what he was instructed to do,” but he was honest that he had done so. “Up until that moment, he had been a complete professional.”

Even the Nunes memo — the predecessor to this section, largely authored by now-FBI Director Kash Patel — describes that Steele was terminated because he made an “unauthorized disclosure to the media” (though that memo makes plenty of other errors, which I addressed here).

Steele wasn’t closed because he was dishonest (indeed, the IG Report quotes Peter Strzok saying, “We did not close him because we thought he was [a] fabricator”). And he definitely wasn’t closed in October, as the first but not second paragraph claims, before the Mother Jones article that was the precipitating reason for his termination as an FBI source.

The first paragraph above kicked off an entire section of the HPSCI Report attacking Steele’s credibility. The second appears several pages later, in a section scolding the ICA authors for not providing proper source reporting. These pivotal paragraphs in HPSCI’s case against Christopher Steele claim that he was fired for being dishonest.

The claim, itself, was dishonest. The claim, itself, misrepresents source reporting.

That’s a pretty good read of the kind of rampant error and sloppiness found throughout this entire section — and, indeed, the report more generally.

Dossier insertion

And consider the import of that first paragraph’s citation to “interviews with the FBI agent who handled Mr. Steele.”

As I explained in this post, the claimed project of the HPSCI Report was to measure whether the ICA had enough evidence to back the assessments they made in the report, published on January 5, 2017. Elsewhere (with the notable exception of the 2018 indictment of Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s trolls), HPSCI pretends they’ve learned absolutely nothing in the interim period. They don’t know that George Papadopoulos got advance notice Russia was going to drop emails. They don’t know that Don Jr. responded enthusiastically to an email offering, “very high level and sensitive information [that] is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” They don’t know that Trump’s campaign manager met with a suspected Russian spy and shared campaign strategy at the same meeting where they discussed getting paid by pro-Russian oligarchs and carving up Ukraine.

The premise of the report is to play dumb to all that.

The dossier discussion, by contrast, engages in no such conceit. Over and over, HPSCI uses stuff discovered after the ICA to claim ICA authors shouldn’t have included the Steele dossier in the ICA (though once again, this is very selective). It’s a different project entirely.

Even in structure, it feels like HPSCI took an existing, mostly unrelated report on the dossier and plopped it into the middle of this assessment of the ICA. The entire dossier section — almost a quarter of the full report — is actually a subsection of a finding addressing a different document; the dossier is included in that section because the ICA summary of the dossier reportedly included the words, “Russian plans and intentions.”

Given the apparently haphazard ploy to dump the dossier work in here, look closely at what the HPSCI report says about the inclusion of the dossier in the ICA in the first place.

Schrodinger’s dossier

All three reports released recently (CIA’s Tradecraft review, Tulsi’s propaganda presentation, and this 2020 HPSCI report) have some version of complaint that, after a debate among Jim Comey, John Brennan, and Mike Rogers as to how to fulfill President Obama’s mandate to include everything they knew in the ICA, they decided to put it into an annex along with a bullet — newly disclosed — that cited to it as “additional reporting.”

Tulsi even has someone she calls a whistleblower who claimed he remained ignorant that that had happened as late as September 2019, though like so many of her claims that’s based on a misrepresentation of the record.

The HPSCI Report cites those four words, “Russian plans and intentions,” it used them to justify including the dossier in this section. But it doesn’t describe what the CIA report does: the two-page appendix includes a disclaimer.

Ultimately, agency heads decided to include a two-page summary of the Dossier as an annex to the ICA, with a disclaimer that the material was not used “to reach the analytic conclusions.” [my emphasis]

The HPSCI omission is important. That’s true, first of all, because the HPSCI Report goes to great lengths to claim that by including the bullet, the ICA authors effectively incorporated the dossier content in the report itself. But their analysis makes it very clear the dossier material was not in the ICA.  Just as one example, the HPSCI Report claims “The ICA indicated no evidence of similar damaging material being held by Moscow on candidate Trump, making him less vulnerable to such post-election influence operations” [than Hillary]. Elsewhere they claim that Hillary, traveling as either the First Lady or the Secretary of State, was more vulnerable to compromise on overseas trips than Trump, traveling as a beauty pageant promoter. If the dossier is in the ICA, both those claims are ridiculous (once you consider Trump’s secret efforts to build a Trump Tower funded by sanctioned banks, both are ridiculous in any case, but…).

HPSCI adopts another inconsistent claim about how the dossier appendix was included in the ICA. Tulsi’s documents show that the plan for the ICA was to create three versions:

But as both the HPSCI Report and the CIA report complain, “the highest classified version of the ICA” — the one intended for around 30 people — “had been shared with more than 200 US officials.” (The HPSCI report later complains that the dossier couldn’t have been included in the ICA in the service of a defensive briefing because that most classified version went to 250 people.)

Well, who did that? Most of that dissemination would have happened after January 20, 2017. Most of that dissemination would have happened under Donald Trump. And that’s weird, because HPSCI also claims that the dossier was stuck in (an appendix of) only the most classified section to “better able to shield the assessment from scrutiny,” even though they’ve just complained about how broadly it disseminated … under Trump.

Holding the ICA accountable for things discovered a year later

Mostly, though, the vast bulk of the HPSCI report about the dossier is an extended rant that ICA authors did not include stuff the committee itself discovered via a sustained investigation.

A list of just some of the things the HPSCI Report complains the ICA authors did not include includes:

  • Details from the January 2017 debrief of Igor Danchenko, which started on January 24 but wasn’t memorialized until early February
  • A full accounting of how many media outlets Steele shared the dossier with (which may be sourced to Glenn Simpson’s 2019 book or HPSCI’s own investigation)
  • The Buzzfeed publication on January 10, 2017
  • The means by which Steele delivered his reports, which HPSCI’s own investigation unpacked (relying in part on that December 2017 Gaeta interview)
  • Gaeta’s own background (a complaint which ignored how FBI works sources)
  • Steele’s own refusal to be interviewed by the investigation (???), as if the ICA could ever have accounted for that
  • The absence of claims about Steele’s source network — which the FBI first started discovering with their January 2017 Danchenko interview
  • Gaeta’s 2017 testimony about what Bruce Ohr did
  • Details about what Steele did at DOJ (such as what he said to Bruce Ohr) but didn’t do with the Crossfire Hurricane team
  • Other details of the termination discussion HPSCI obtained from Gaeta
  • Details about Fusion’s work for Natalia Veselnitskaya, which came out in the wake of Don Jr’s release of the June 9 emails (largely forced by HPSCI’s investigation)
  • Details about plans to pay Steele, which were killed (HPSCI affirmatively misrepresented the circumstances of the tasking assignment; most of the reports came before the tasking meeting)
  • More details about Steele’s ties to the press
  • A quote from Andrew McCabe’s December 2017 testimony about what the FBI had been able to verify

And some of the things that were known by January 5, 2017 were almost certainly not available to ICA for the same reason that details of George Papadopoulos’ advance notice of the email leak were not: because it was part of an ongoing FBI investigation.

The standard applied to the dossier is wildly different than the standard applied to the rest of the report.

HPSCI bros need to review their hacking claims

Worse still, the HPSCI Report sucks at the thing that should be a slam dunk. The second-to-last part of this section challenges the ICA claim that some parts of the dossier were consistent with other known facts.

Now, I would expect a half committee of Congressional staffers, many with past training on the IC, to be able to do as well as little old me before they had two of the key interviews on which they rely on.

January 11, 2017: The Democrats Newfound Love for Russian Intelligence Product

September 6, 2017: John Sipher’s Garbage Post Arguing the Steele Dossier Isn’t Garbage

Most of HPSCI’s assessment of “corroboration” reviews generalized items about Putin’s intent. It claims,

The CIA further claimed “limited” intelligence corroboration of Steele’s information, but failed to mention that his dossier was produced after Russian election hacking operations had already been exposed in the media — beginning 4 June 2016, [sic] while Mr. Steele delivered his first report to FBI on 5 July 2016 — and thus any dossier mention of Russian hacking was neither predictive, nor was it unique information that was “corroborated” by intelligence.

“Regurgitated” would have been a more descriptive term to describe the dossier, in that it parroted media or internet stories and pundit comments on Russian hacks of the DNC.

As pertaining to hacking, though — their primary focus — it’s actually not that the dossier parroted things that were public.

It’s that they affirmatively rebutted the most obvious conclusions from the ongoing hack-and-leak. For example, the first and several reports completed after that all suggested that the Kompromat that Russia had on Hillary was decades old material from when she traveled to Russia, not the hack-and-leak campaign rolling out in front of our eyes. A July 26, 2016 report, released after the DNC release and almost a year after the first public attributions of the APT 29 hack of State and DOD to Russia, claimed that Russia wasn’t having much success at hacking Western targets, a claim that anyone briefed on those APT 29 hacks (including the Republicans so taken with the SVR reports stolen in those hacks) would know was laughable. The most incendiary December 13 post attributed the troll campaign to Webzilla, not Yevgeniy Prigozhin. That is, the dossier wasn’t just delayed; it affirmatively contradicted most of the publicly known details about the election interference campaign and even more of the details that the ICA addressed closely. That should have raised concerns from everyone looking closely. It’s not just that the dossier had a lot of shit. It’s that the shit it did have would have led the Democrats to be complacent about the campaign targeting them (another point I made before HPSCI’s big interviews in December 2017).

And that should have raised questions from everyone involved.

HPSCI’s only consistency is playing dumb about Manafort and Deripaska

Which leads me to where this section gets really weird.

Again, the point of this report is to assess whether the ICA claims made in a January 5, 2017 report were backed by sufficient intelligence.

Yet at three different points in this section, HPSCI complains about what happened after the report was complete. They complain about the way Jim Comey briefed the dossier to Trump on January 6, 2017. They claim that including the dossier raised alarmist concerns among senior policy makers — about which Trump complained after the fact. And in a report purporting to review the ICA itself, they complain about what Comey said in a White House visit on February 8, 2017 (which was after the first Igor Danchenko debriefing but a day before it was memorialized).

This is all weird on its face. None of it pertains to the contents of the ICA at all (and to the extent it feeds right wing frothy conspiracy theories, it relies on their demand that ICA authors know what it took HPSCI a year to discover).

But one thing that at least some of these people knew before this time does not appear in the HPSCI. While HPSCI makes much of the fact that (the ICA didn’t mention that) Fusion GPS worked with Natalia Veselnitskaya, they show no concern about the fact that, via a different firm, Steele worked with Oleg Deripaska — and even attempted to collect dirt on Paul Manafort for him starting in March 2016, something addressed in the Danchenko interview. By May 2017, the intelligence community had assessed that Deripaska “was associated” with a Russian intelligence agency. The right wing, including multiple people on HPSCI, staged a panic about Steele’s ties to Deripaska in August 2018 … and then they just dropped it. The December 2019 IG Report included extensive discussion of the degree to which Deripaska influenced Steele’s earlier reporting and might have succeeded in injecting the dossier with disinformation.

Even crazier, with their obsession about how Steele delivered the dossier to the FBI, they ignore how Steele pushed Deripaska’s own complaints to DOJ, all in parallel with his efforts to hand off the dossier. I laid out the double game Deripaska appears to have been playing in early 2020, nine months before this HPSCI Report.

These details become all the more important given the HPSCI Report’s focus on things that happened in late January and February 2017, because Paul Manafort — about whom they play dumb throughout this report — met with a Deripaska deputy just as the dossier was breaking, only to return and advise right wingers to launch precisely the campaign that this HPSCI Report tries to carry out.

In one of HPSCI’s few complaints about the ICA fairly situated on what (or how little) they might know about the dossier by January 5, 2017, HPSCI notes that while the ICA described the complexity of Steele’s claimed network, they didn’t know enough to know whether it was infected by his own fabrication or Russian disinformation.

The ICA also describes dossier information as collected from “a layered network of identified and unidentified subsources” although the ICA did not clarify that FBI and CIA had so few details on the alleged network, that they didn’t know if this material was all or in part fabricated by Mr. Steele, his subsources, or if it was Russian disinformation fed to the subsources.

But by September 2020, HPSCI should have.

Update: Fixed year of DOJ IG Report.

Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Manufactured Horseshit: Paul Manafort Returns to the Scene of the Crime

Vaughn Hillyard caught Paul Manafort in a victory lap on the floor of the RNC the other day.

Hillyard: Mr. Manafort, how is it to be back?

Manafort It’s great to be back.

And so it is that eight years after getting advance warning of the DNC release from his long time buddy Roger Stone, almost eight years after Stone emailed Manafort telling him he had a way to win the race, and just short of eight years after Manafort met with Konstantin Kilimnik in a cigar bar and discussed the outlines of a quid pro quo: campaign information for debt relief in exchange for a commitment to carve up Ukraine (Manafort insists he rejected the plan to carve up Ukraine, though the plan nevertheless remained active until at least 2018).

Aside from Hillyard and Robert Costa’s tweets marking Manafort’s arrival, his presence made barely a blip in the news coverage.

Why should it?

Among all the other criminals and insurrectionists, Manafort no longer sticks out.

And with JD Vance’s selection as VP, Manafort’s support for a pro-Russian Ukraine also looks banal, rather than alarming.

But there is likely a backstory few want to pursue.

Back in May, when Paul Manafort’s return was first reported and then denied, 24sight described how (as he had done in 2016), Paulie had been and kept working the back channel.

Manafort has quietly been passing strategic advice back to Trump through co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita and longtime Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio, the Republican sources said. Manafort has been analyzing polling results and advised on the organization of state Republican parties and selecting delegates to the Republican nominating convention — one of his specialties — according to two Republicans familiar with the dealings.

But LaCivita and other Trump campaign officials vehemently denied Manafort’s involvement.

LaCivita called questions about huddling with Manafort for Trump’s benefit “manufactured horseshit,” in a text message to 24sight News. Trump campaign spokesman Brian Hughes endorsed LaCivita’s reply, adding some context to the pushback.

“There was clearly a moment of consideration about using Manafort specifically for the convention,” Hughes said Wednesday. “But Manafort very publicly withdrew himself.”

Asked if Manafort had discussions with Fabrizio about helping steer the campaign, Hughes said he was unaware of everything that people talk about outside the campaign.

Three Republicans familiar with the dealings said that LaCivita met with Manafort in suburban Washington last fall. LaCivita denied details of the meeting to 24sight News, but declined to answer additional questions.

LaCivita was denying Manafort’s centrality as vigorously as he is now attempting to deny the (Orbán-aligned) Project 2025, as vigorously as Steve Bannon denied Manafort’s ongoing role in 2016, in spite of receiving plans on how to secure the victory, plans which led Bannon to worry about the appearance of Russian involvement in the victory.

But all these pieces go together.

That is, Trump is running not just as someone who explicitly wants to be a Dictator from Day One, someone who supports all the same policies as a Project that targets divorce and birth control along with the very idea of civil service.

He is running with Russian help on a plan to give Russia what it wants, starting, but not ending, with Ukraine on a silver platter.

Trump, and the guy Trump pardoned for lying about what happened with Russia in 2016, are simply picking up where things left off.

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How the Steele Dossier Broke MAGAts’ Brains

The Steele Dossier broke America.

Not literally. Nearly three decades of Fox News, increasing wealth inequality, and unlimited money in politics likely did that.

But there are MAGAts who blame much of it on the dossier. There are MAGAts who situate their own shift in allegiance from the country to Trump based on a false belief that the dossier was part of a devious plot between Hillary Clinton and the Deep State to frame Donald Trump. That’s a key part of this thread from a right wing podcaster excusing January 6, which went viral just days after the attack.

Such views — mixing accurate criticism of the dossier with wild conspiracy theories — really did play a key role in polarizing the US. Phil Bump explained how the adoption of such conspiracy theories (which he fact checked) worked in real time. And I noted that if, as virtually all Republican members of Congress who spent years investigating the dossier concluded, it was riddled with Russian disinformation, it means MAGAts attacked their own country in response to Russian disinformation.

This didn’t happen by accident. Instead, it likely involved a brilliant multi-step disinformation campaign victimizing everyone: Hillary, Paul Manafort and Trump, and even the Deep State.

The first step was a brutal double game Oleg Deripaska deployed: using his tie to Christopher Steele to add to Paul Manafort’s legal insecurity — or perhaps to hide his own role in election interference by offering himself as a potential cooperator — even while using that insecurity to win cooperation from Trump’s campaign manager on the election attack.

The next step was, apparently, injecting garbage into the Steele dossier, some near misses that obscured the real attack and made Trump’s people less secure.

The third was an effort, partly deliberate and then later partly organic (albeit often on the part of credulous people who published obviously false claims from Konstantin Kilimnik), to conflate the dossier with the entire Russian investigation. Along the way MAGAt politicians, both right wing and quasi-lefty influencers, and even established journalistic institutions would join this effort. Because the dossier was unreliable, because it was used in the investigation of Carter Page (a guy already under scrutiny when he joined the Trump campaign) — this sustained propaganda campaign insisted — all the reporting on the Russian attack, the FBI investigation into it, and the results must be nought.

By substituting the dossier for the rest of the Russian investigation, this propaganda effort flipped Trump’s enthusiasm for foreign interference in democracy on its head, and allowed him — the guy who invited Russia to hack his opponent — to play the victim.

Deripaska’s double game

The first part of this process has gotten the least attention (indeed, Republican conspiracy theories covered it up).

There were two parts of the intelligence collection on Trump and his associates: with a few notable exceptions, accurate open source research done by Fusion GPS itself, and raw HUMINT collection from former MI6 officer Christopher Steele that may have been injected with disinformation. It has long been public that right wing billionaire Paul Singer indirectly paid for the open source research during the GOP primary, only to have the Democrats pick up the project during the general election.

What’s not widely known is that starting in March — the same month Manafort was publicly hired by the campaign (though, according to Sam Patten, Konstantin Kilimnik expected that to happen before it was public) — Deripaska paid Steele, through an attorney, to collect on Manafort.

[Steele’s] initial entree into U.S. election-related material dealt with Paul Manafort’s connections to Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs. In particular, Steele told the FBI that Manafort owed significant money to these oligarchs and several other Russians. At this time, Steele was working for a different client, Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

And Steele paid Fusion to help with this effort. So before May, Deripaska paid Steele, who paid Fusion. After May, Democrats paid Fusion, which paid Steele.

But, as Igor Danchenko described, that earlier effort to collect on Manafort met with little success.

[H]e may have asked friends and contacts in Russia [for information on Manafort], but he couldn’t remember off-hand. He added that, for this topic, his friends and contacts in Russian couldn’t say very much because they were “too far removed” from the matter.

It was after that, on a trip Danchenko took to Russia, when Steele asked Danchenko to “look for information dealing with the US presidential election, including compromising materials on Donald Trump.”

Probably as a result of this close relationship, by July, intelligence reporting later assessed, one of Deripaska’s associates was probably aware of the DNC dossier project. Similarly, reporting found that, “two persons affiliated with [Russian Intelligence Services] were aware of Steele’s election investigation in early 2016.” As I have, John Durham linked these two reports, suggesting a likelihood that the Russian spooks had ties to Deripaska (though in making that link, Durham obscured Deripaska’s identity). Given Deripaska’s own alleged ties to Russian intelligence, if his lawyer knew and he knew, spooks close to him — including, allegedly, Kilimnik — would likely have known. Durham also described that Russian intelligence had identified Steele’s subsource network.

Paul Manafort’s former boss, Oleg Deripaska, probably knew about the dossier project in close to real time.

Christopher Steele denies that’s the case.

If Deripaska did know of the project, though, it dramatically changes the significance of a meeting Christopher Steele had with Bruce Ohr, then a top lawyer coordinating DOJ’s effort to combat multinational organized crime, in late July 2016. Steele had been trying to pitch Ohr to recruit oligarchs purportedly willing to cooperate against Russia. He had, earlier in 2016, assured Ohr that Deripaska had distanced himself from Putin. Earlier in July, he contacted Ohr about Deripaska.

Steele thought Deripaska could be trusted.

And on July 30, between the time Konstantin Kilimnik flew to Moscow to prepare for his Paul Manafort meeting and when he arrived in New York for that meeting, Steele met with Ohr in DC.

For years, Republicans claimed that this was an instance of Steele working every contact he had at FBI and DOJ to make sure his dossier reports got shared. Except Steele did more than share dossier leads at that meeting (one, about what Russian spooks had reportedly said about Trump, the other about whom Carter Page might have met with in Moscow). In addition, he shared information about Russian doping, a topic on which Steele reportedly had a good track record.

And most importantly, Steele pitched information from Deripaska about Paul Manafort (this is from Ohr’s testimony to Congress).

Mr. Ohr. So Chris Steele provided me with basically three items of information. One of them I’ve described to you already, the comment that information supposedly stated and made by the head, former head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.

He also mentioned that Carter Page had met with certain high-level Russian officials when he was in Moscow. My recollection is at that time, the name Carter Page had already been in the press, and there had been some kind of statement about who he had met with when he went to Moscow. And so the first item that I recall Chris Steele telling me was he had information that Carter Page met with higher-level Russian officials, not just whoever was mentioned in the press article. So that was one item.

And then the third item he mentioned was that Paul Hauser, who was an attorney working for Oleg Deripaska, had information about Paul Manafort, that Paul Manafort had entered into some kind of business deal with Oleg Deripaska, had stolen a large amount of money from Oleg Deripaska, and that Paul Hauser was trying to gather information that would show that, you know, or give more detail about what Paul Manafort had done with respect to Deripaska.

[snip]

Q Were there any other topics that were discussed during your July 30, 2016, meeting?

A Yes, there were. Based on my sketchy notes from the time, I think there was some information relating to the Russian doping scandal, but I don’t recall the substance of that.

When I first understood how this worked together, I thought that Deripaska was primarily doing this to increase Paul Manafort’s legal exposure, making Manafort more vulnerable when Deripaska, via Kilimnik, started making asks in a cigar bar days later. It certainly may have increased the chance that the FBI would develop the criminal investigation into Manafort.

But it likely did another thing: it likely made the FBI more interested in treating Deripaska as a source, rather than a subject. And sure enough, in September 2016, the FBI interviewed Deripaska, at which interview (John Solomon parroted in advance of Robert Mueller’s testimony, during the period Solomon was a key player in Rudy Giuliani’s information operation) he scoffed that Manafort would have any tie to Russia.

“I told them straightforward, ‘Look, I am not a friend with him [Manafort]. Apparently not, because I started a court case [against him] six or nine months before … . But since I’m Russian I would be very surprised that anyone from Russia would try to approach him for any reason, and wouldn’t come and ask me my opinion,’ ” he said, recounting exactly what he says he told the FBI agents that day.

“I told them straightforward, I just don’t believe that he would represent any Russian interest. And knowing what he’s doing on Ukraine for the last, what, seven or eight years.”

As I’ve written, much of the outreach to Trump’s associates in 2016 involved people who had served as FBI sources. Deripaska knew Steele spoke with the FBI. People like Sergei Millian and Felix Sater had been FBI sources. More recently, of course, Alexander Smirnov allegedly attempted to frame Joe Biden.

A key tactic of this effort was to exploit FBI’s HUMINT efforts, to use FBI’s informants against it. So much so that Deripaska even feigned cooperation with the FBI himself!

The dossier would become an important part of — largely constructed — stories about the Russian investigation. But that all lay on top a foundation of efforts Deripaska made to use Christopher Steele to set up (and maybe even obscure) his asks of Paul Manafort.

A series of near misses

The knowledge that Deripaska and Russian spooks had of Steele’s network and the ongoing Fusion GPS project would have provided the means to plant disinformation.

As noted above, for a period, every one of the Republicans who examined the dossier at length concluded that Russia had succeeded in filling the dossier with disinformation. Lindsey Graham — who conducted an investigation into the circumstances of the Carter Page FISA — said it did. Chuck Grassley — who led the investigation into the dossier — said it did. Ron Johnson — who also made a show of investigating these things — said it did. Chuck Ross — the chief scribe of the dossier on the right — said it did. The high gaslighter Catherine Herridge said it did. Fox News and all their favorite sources said it did. WSJ’s editorial page said it did.

Then, they stopped saying it.

Maybe they thought through the implication of it being Russian disinformation. Maybe they started looking to John Durham’s efforts to blame Hillary Clinton by fabricating conspiracy theories instead.

Because, think about it: Unlike Rudy Giuliani, there’s no hint that Hillary set out to collect dirt that would be easily identifiable to the campaign as disinformation. She had no reason to seek inaccurate information; the reality was already damning enough.

“For us to go out and say a bunch of things that aren’t true, you know, can cause a lot of damage to the campaign,” Hillary Campaign Manager Robby Mook testified in the Michael Sussmann trial.

Hillary gained nothing by paying a lot of money for a project riddled with disinformation. Russian spooks simply took advantage of something every politician does — collect oppo research — to harm her, harm Carter Page, and harm the US.

Consider the effect it may have had (I examine the reports one by one here).

One effect possible disinformation may have had was to make Hillary complacent as she struggled to deal with a hack during the height of the campaign. For example, several of Steele’s reports said any kompromat Russia had on Hillary consisted of very dated intercepts, not recently-stolen emails. One report falsely claimed Russia hadn’t had success at hacking Western targets. Later reports provided purported updates on the hack-and-leak campaign, suggesting Russia was dropping any further efforts, that directly conflict with ongoing developments. Subsequent investigation showed those reports were all false.

And every one of those reports might have led Democrats (and the FBI) to be complacent about ongoing risks posed by the hack they had IDed in April (and indeed, they didn’t expect the files stolen from the DNC to be released).

Another report which could be disinformation (but which, if you can believe Danchenko, may also be Steele exaggeration of very tepid things he said about someone he believed to be Sergei Millian), would be to shield Konstantin Kilimnik’s role in the election interference. One of the most important reports for what came afterwards alleged that the,

“well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump’s team and Russian leadership “was managed on the TRUMP side by the Republican candidate’s campaign manager, Paul MANAFORT, who was using foreign policy advisor, Carter PAGE and others as intermediaries.

If Page was Manafort’s go-between, no one would look at what Kilimnik was doing.

To be sure, this could be Steele’s doing. It appears in a report that misrepresented what Danchenko claims to have told Steele about his contacts with Sergei Millian.

And as the Senate Intelligence Committee Report noted — I hope, sardonically — nothing about Manafort’s ties to Deripaska (or Kilimnik) ever made it into the dossier.

Steele and his subsources appear to have neglected to include or missed in its entirety Paul Manafort’s business relationship with Deripaska, which provided Deripaska leverage over Manafort and a possible route of influence into the Trump Campaign.

Steele mentions Paul Manafort by name roughly 20 times in the dossier, always in the context of his work in Ukraine; and, in particular, Manafort’s work on behalf of then-Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych. Deripaska, who had a long-standing business relationship with Manafort, is not mentioned once. Neither is Kilimnik, Manafort’s right-hand man in Kyiv, who himself has extensive ties to Deripaska. 5885 Despite Steele’s expertise on Ukraine and Russia, particularly on oligarchs, the dossier memos are silent on the issue.

Whatever the explanation — Danchenko’s failures to get dirt, Steele’s efforts to protect another contract, or disinformation — the dossier’s failure to note Kilimnik’s role (along with its silence about Natalia Veselnitskaya’s pitch of dirt to Don Jr. and George Papadopoulos’ shenanigans in London) effectively distracted from the most glaring signs of Trump ties with Russia. It served as camouflage. The things that don’t show up in the dossier that Fusion and Steele should have learned were almost as useful to the Russian project as the near-misses that did.

Perhaps the best established case of disinformation, however, is a tribute to its usefulness. Starting in October 2016 (in the period Michael Cohen was frantically cleaning up Trump’s Stormy Daniels problem), Steele produced first three (one, two, three), and then, in December 2016, a fourth report alleging that Michael Cohen was instead cleaning up the alleged coordination between Manafort and the Russians. Each report got progressively more inflammatory, with the last one alleging that Cohen and three associates went to Prague in August or September for secret discussions with the Kremlin and its hackers; the discussion allegedly involved cash payments to operatives and plans to cover up the operation.

If true, this would have been a smoking gun.

Within weeks of the last report, on January 12, 2017 — two days after Buzzfeed published the dossier — the Intelligence Community got intelligence assessing that it was disinformation.

January 12, 2017, report relayed information from [redacted] outlining an inaccuracy in a limited subset of Steele’s reporting about the activities of Michael Cohen. The [redacted] stated that it did not have high confidence in this subset of Steele’s reporting and assessed that the referenced subset was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations.

Of course, that was not made public for over three years. As a result, even as the story of Mike Flynn’s attempts to undermine Obama’s foreign policy rolled out, even as Cohen was accepting big payments from Viktor Vekselberg, the Cohen-in-Prague story became the measure of so-called collusion.

From the start of the public accounting of Trump’s ties to Russia, then, something the IC already understood to be likely disinformation was the yardstick of the Russian investigation.

Two aspects of the story make it especially ripe to be intentional disinformation, in form and content.

First, according to Danchenko, the Cohen story came from his childhood friend, Olga Galkina, who knew he worked in some kind of intelligence collection and who even tried to task him to collect information after the dossier came out.

In March of 2016, Danchenko had introduced PR executive Chuck Dolan to her. Dolan and Danchenko traveled the same DC-based circles of Russian experts, and she was looking for the kind of public affairs consulting that Dolan offered, on behalf of her company. Over the course of two trips to Cyprus as part of that business, Dolan and Galkina developed an independent relationship. Dolan’s company was at the same time working on a business development project for the Russian government, in which he directly interacted with Dmitry Peskov’s office. Through that networking, on July 13, 2016, Galkina claimed that Dolan had recommended her for a job with Peskov’s office (he told Durham’s prosecutors he didn’t remember this when they asked). And on October 15, 2016 — in the same week that she first shared the Cohen story with Danchenko — Galkina gossiped about knowing something via Peskov’s office.

On October 15, 2016, Galkina communicated with a Russia-based journalist and stated that because of her [Galkina] “acquaintance with Chuck Dolan and several citizens from the Russian presidential administration,” Galkina knew “something and can tell a little about it by voice. ” 882

As Danchenko told the FBI, when he asked Galkina if she knew anything about several people on whom Steele had tasked him to collect, Michael Cohen’s name was the single one she recognized.

[Danchenko] began his explanation of the Prague and Michael Cohen-related reports by stating that Christopher Steele had given him 4-5 names to research for the election-related tasking. He could only remember three of the names: Carter Page, Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen. When he talked to [Galkina] in the fall of 2016 — he believes it was a phone call — he rattled off these names and, out of them, he was surprised to her that [Galkina] [later [Danchenko] softened this to “almost immediately] recognized Cohen’s name. [bold brackets original]

After that initial conversation, Danchenko asked Galkina to go back to her sources for more detail, which resulted in several more reports.

In other words, the source for the allegation that Michael Cohen, in an attempt to cover up a Trump scandal, had direct ties to the Presidential Administration — the Kremlin — is someone who had developed direct and lucrative ties to Dmitry Peskov’s office, and had been bragging about having dirt involving Peskov’s office that very week.

And Dmitry Peskov is one person who undoubtedly knew that Michael Cohen had called the Kremlin nine months earlier, because Trump’s fixer had called Peskov’s own office.

In the wake of Trump’s public denial on July 27 that he had any ongoing business with Russia, and in the period when Cohen was busy covering up other Trump scandals, a story arose that alleged Cohen’s cover-up involved ties to the Kremlin.

As Robert Mueller would substantiate two years later, Cohen’s cover-up did involve a ties to the Kremlin, a call in which he solicited Putin’s help for a business deal involving a sanctioned bank and the GRU. But those were entirely different ties, in time and substance, from the ties claimed in the dossier.

This is the kind of near miss story — a story that approximated Cohen’s real contact with the Kremlin, which he and Trump were lying to hide, a story that approximated Cohen’s real efforts to cover up Trump’s scandals — that could serve both to distract and raise the risks of the public lies Cohen and Trump were telling to hide that Trump Tower deal, the lies that Dmitry Peskov knew Trump was telling.

It also proved useful when Cohen doubled down on his lies, in 2017. As I pointed out in real time, as the Trump Tower deal started to get leaked to the press (though without the most damning detail, that Cohen did succeed in reaching the Kremlin; Trump Organization withheld the email that proved that from Congress) Cohen used denials of the dossier allegations as a way to deny the burgeoning Trump Tower scandal as well. Because there was nothing to substantiate the Cohen-in-Prague story, Cohen’s then lawyer claimed, it meant there was no story at all.

The entire letter is pitched around the claim that HPSCI “included Mr. Cohen in its inquiry based solely upon certain sensational allegations contained” in the Steele dossier. “Absent those allegations,” the letter continues, “Mr. Cohen would not be involved in your investigation.” The idea — presented two weeks before disclosure of emails showing Cohen brokering a deal with Russians in early 2016 — is if Cohen can discredit the dossier, then he will have shown that there is no reason to investigate him or his role brokering deals with the Russians. Even the denial of any documents of interest is limited to the dossier: “We have not uncovered a single document that would in any way corroborate the Dossier’s allegations regarding Mr. Cohen, nor do we believe that any such document exists.”

With that, Cohen’s lawyers address the allegations in the dossier, one by one. As a result, the rebuttal reads kind of like this:

I Did Not Go to Prague I Did Not Go to Prague I Did Not Go to Prague I Did Not Go to Prague

Cohen literally denies that he ever traveled to Prague six times, as well as denying carefully worded, often quoted, versions of meeting with Russians in a European capital in 2016. Of course that formulation — He did not participate in meetings of any kind with Kremlin officials in Prague in August 2016 — stops well short of other potential ties to Russians. And two of his denials look very different given the emails disclosed two weeks later showing an attempt to broker a deal that Felix Sater thought might get Trump elected, including an email from him to one of the most trusted agents of the Kremlin.

Mr. Cohen is not aware of any “secret TRUMP campaign/Kremlin relationship.”

Mr. Cohen is not aware of any indirect communications between the “TRUMP team” and “trusted agents” of the Kremlin.

As I said above, I think it highly likely the dossier includes at least some disinformation seeded by the Russians. So the most charitable scenario of what went down is that the Russians, knowing Cohen had made half-hearted attempts to broker the Trump Tower deal Trump had wanted for years, planted his name hoping some kind of awkwardness like this would result.

That is, Cohen used his true denial of having been to Prague to rebut the equally true claim that he had contact with the Kremlin.

Manafort’s plan

There’s good reason to believe that Cohen’s focus was not an accident.

That’s because, after meeting with a Deripaska associate, Paul Manafort advised Trump to use precisely this approach.

In early January, Manafort met in Madrid with a Deripaska associate, Gregory Oganov. Manafort’s explanations to Mueller’s team about the purpose of the meeting vacillated (it was one of the topics about which Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled he had lied). But according to a text from Kilimnik, the meeting was about recreating the old relationship he had had with Deripaska.

A May 2017 story from Ken Vogel (yeah, I know), described how after that trip, Manafort called Reince Priebus and told him that the dossier was full of inaccuracies, and that those inaccuracies — and the FBI’s reliance on Steele, the guy paid by a lawyer for Deripaska who brought claims about Manafort to DOJ — discredited the Russian investigation generally.

It was about a week before Trump’s inauguration, and Manafort wanted to brief Trump’s team on alleged inaccuracies in a recently released dossier of memos written by a former British spy for Trump’s opponents that alleged compromising ties among Russia, Trump and Trump’s associates, including Manafort.

“On the day that the dossier came out in the press, Paul called Reince, as a responsible ally of the president would do, and said this story about me is garbage, and a bunch of the other stuff in there seems implausible,” said a person close to Manafort.

[snip]

According to a GOP operative familiar with Manafort’s conversation with Priebus, Manafort suggested the errors in the dossier discredited it, as well as the FBI investigation, since the bureau had reached a tentative (but later aborted) agreement to pay the former British spy to continue his research and had briefed both Trump and then-President Barack Obama on the dossier.

Manafort told Priebus that the dossier was tainted by inaccuracies and by the motivations of the people who initiated it, whomhe alleged were Democratic activists and donors working in cahoots with Ukrainian government officials, according to the operative. [my emphasis]

Priebus shared Manafort’s comments with Trump.

Priebus did, however, alert Trump to the conversation with Manafort, according to the operative familiar with the conversation and a person close to Trump.

Notably, along with disputing that anyone with ties to Steele would know what Yanukovych would say to Putin, Manafort also debunked the claim that he was managing relations with Russia because he didn’t know Page.

In his conversation with Priebus, Manafort also disputed the assertion in the Steele dossier that Manafort managed relations between Trump’s team and the Russian leadership, using Page and others as intermediaries.

Manafort told Priebus that he’d never met Page, according to the operative.

As with Cohen’s later debunking of the Prague story to distract from the Trump Tower story, Manafort used a near miss in the dossier  to discredit the larger true claim, that he had been working with someone in Russia.

Manafort met with Kilimnik personally in February, and according to Rick Gates, at Manafort’s behest, Kilimnik kept hunting down the other sources for the dossier. Of course, according to later intelligence reporting, Russian spooks already knew that.

How about that?

Within a day after the release of the dossier, at a time when he was meeting with an Oleg Deripaska deputy, Manafort came up with a strategy to discredit the entire Russian investigation by discrediting the dossier. How was Manafort so prescient about the faults of the dossier?

But Deripaska had almost certainly known about the dossier project for six months by that point, and had funded an earlier collection effort targeting Manafort himself.

And Republicans followed that strategy — to discredit the Russian investigation by discrediting the dossier and FBI’s decision to rely on Steele, a strategy Manafort shared after a meeting with a top Deripaska aide — for three years.


This post is part of a series describing how Trump trained Republicans to hate rule of law. Earlier posts include:

LOLGOP and I are doing a podcast series that closely follows this series.

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Apple Podcast

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The series builds on this background.

 

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Another Maggie Haberman NYT Story Covers Up Oleg Deripaska’s Role

The reason it matters that Trump brought in Paul Manafort to work on his campaign again for “free” this year is that in 2016, Manafort shared the campaign’s strategy with his long-time business associate Konstantin Kilimnik, who (according to the Treasury Department) is a “known Russian Intelligence Services agent” who “provided the Russian Intelligence Services with [that] sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy.”

The reason it matters that Manafort — as he did in 2016 — claims he has stepped aside from that “free” job to find other ways to help Donald Trump is that he continued to coach the campaign even after he lost, projecting Trump and Russia’s own voter fraud claims onto Hillary Clinton. It also matters because after Trump won, Manafort met with a key Oleg Deripaska deputy to “recreat[e] old friendship.” After that meeting, he advised Reince Priebus to discredit the Russian investigation by focusing on the Steele dossier (recall that Deripaska had paid Steele to collect intelligence about Manafort before Fusion asked Steele to collect more broadly). That strategy worked spectacularly well, with every Russigate conspiracy theorist both making false claims about dossier reporting and, at the same time, claiming that because the dossier turned out to be false, everything else must be too.

The reason it matters that — even as he threatens to abandon NATO much less Ukraine — Trump welcomed Manafort onto his campaign again is that both at the meeting where Trump’s former campaign manager shared campaign strategy and for several years after, Manafort and Kilimnik kept talking about plans to carve up Ukraine. Kilimnik even told Manafort, in December 2016, that they could have peace in Ukraine within a few months with just a wink from Trump. Trump makes similar boasts all the time now.

You’ll find none of that in the NYT story reporting on Manafort’s announcement that he will help Trump in an unofficial role (or WaPo or CNN’s story either).

Seven paragraphs in, Maggie (writing with Jonathan Swan) describes that Manafort went to prison, but doesn’t bother to explain that he laundered money and violated FARA to hide that his influence peddling was backed by Russian-aligned oligarchs.

Mr. Manafort helped stave off efforts to thwart Mr. Trump’s nomination at the 2016 convention, went to prison for various financial crimes and was pardoned by Mr. Trump.

Hell, even just the thought of letting a massive tax cheat play a role in his campaign should be a key focus; instead, NYT brushes that off as, “various financial crimes.”

Three paragraphs later Maggie suggests some tie between those pro-Russian oligarchs and Manafort being “ensnared” by Mueller, but doesn’t describe what Mueller found.

In August 2016, he was ousted in part over headlines about his work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine. Later, Mr. Manafort was ensnared in the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, into ties between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russian officials.

Two paragraphs latter, Maggie and Swan suggest that five advisors, most quite senior (George Papadoloulos, Gates, Manafort, Michael Cohen, and Roger Stone) who were sentenced to prison equate to a “few,”

Mr. Manafort was one of only a few Trump advisers who were sentenced to prison, for crimes unrelated to the campaign.

That doesn’t count the two other advisors from 2016 (Mike Flynn and Elliot Broidy) who were pardoned before they were sentenced, and the three (Allen Weisselberg, Steve Bannon, and Peter Navarro) who have more recently been sentenced to prison.

I mean, sure, compared to the dozens of senior GOP officials currently facing prosecution for allegedly trying to steal the 2020 election and the hundreds of Trump devotees already sentenced for 2020, five or seven or whatever is teeny, but “few”? Since when did having even a few — much less seven — advisors from one campaign get convicted merit the word, “only”?

Maggie (and Swan) never mention that Amy Berman Jackson found that Paul Manafort lied to cover up the details of his relations with Kilimnik in 2016, a lie about something directly related to the election, but that Mueller simply chose not to prosecute those lies.

The sole mention of Mueller’s focus pertained to something that Mueller found Manafort didn’t orchestrate: the change in the platform on Ukraine.

[I]n a controversy that received little attention at the time, language was inserted into the platform watering down language supporting Ukraine with military aid against Russian incursions. That language change was among the issues Mr. Mueller sought information about during his investigation.

In other words, Maggie and Swan buried the real reason why Manafort threatened — and still threatens, given past history — to discredit Trump’s campaign or undermine US democracy: Wittingly or not — we don’t know because of the lies and the pardon — he was at the center of a key part of the Russian attack on American democracy.

Journalists should not simply bury that.

Worse, too, this is not the first time that a story bearing Maggie’s byline has covered up Manafort’s tie to Deripaska in all this. This story not only tried to shift the timing of the August 2 meeting Manafort had with Kilimnik, but it took out language describing Kilimnik sending Deripaska polling data as well as to Manafort’s Ukranian benefactors. (Since that story, a bunch of files liberated by Jason Leopold have shown Manafort’s efforts to suck up to Deripaska.)

A correction was made on Jan. 9, 2019:

A previous version of this article misidentified the people to whom Paul Manafort wanted a Russian associate to send polling data. Mr. Manafort wanted the data sent to two Ukrainian oligarchs, Serhiy Lyovochkin and Rinat Akhmetov, not to Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch close to the Kremlin.

The story remains a source of disinformation and confusion five years later.

As I showed in this post, that change was made in the same period that Rick Gates, immediately after Bill Barr’s confirmation, started to revert his story to what it had been when he was still getting caught in false stories in interview after interview.

I get that outlets telling this story (WaPo and CNN were no better) want to avoid relitigating the Russian investigation. I get that Trump always complains when journalists report on the actual facts disclosed by the Russian investigation and the open questions his pardons guaranteed would never be answered.

That’s not a reason to bury it all. Burying these facts is nothing more than capitulating to a bully.

Holding Trump accountable for his past documented abuses should be the easy part of journalism.

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The May 2017 Report Tying Oleg Deripaska to Russian Intelligence

I’m working on a longer post about the sentencing submissions (McGonigal; SDNY) for Charles McGonigal’s SDNY case — the former head of counterintelligence for FBI’s New York Field Office. He will be sentenced in that case on Friday; he will be sentenced in his DC case in February.

The submission for McGonigal submitted by former Bill Barr flunkie Seth DuCharme argued that McGonigal’s crime, researching a rival oligarch for Oleg Deripaska after he retired in 2018, is no big deal because DOJ has sanctioned Deripaska’s rival, Vladimir Potanin, since that time.

[W]hen compared to other conduct for which the government has brought criminal charges, it bears repeating that here the crime was clearly malum prohibitum rather than malum in se—in other words, the defendant’s intent in agreeing to provide an SDN with information to be used for business competition purposes is far less serious than the criminal conduct in other IEEPA-related cases. [links added]

DuCharme asks for a probation sentence.

As you can imagine, SDNY has a lot to say about that in response. DuCharme, whom PACER does not show as having taken many, if any defendant, through sentencing since he left DOJ in 2021, really invited SDNY to throw a lot of damaging information at McGonigal.

One thing SDNY did was explain why McGonigal knew working for Deripaska was more damaging than that. One thing they note is that in January 2018, before he left the FBI, McGonigal reviewed a list of oligarchs, including Deripaska, under consideration for sanctions.

McGonigal knew full well that Deripaska was sanctioned. As SAC, McGonigal supervised and participated in investigations of Russian oligarchs, including Deripaska. (PSR ¶ 19).

[snip]

And in January 2018, McGonigal received and reviewed a then-classified list of Russian oligarchs with close ties to the Kremlin who would be considered for sanctions to be imposed as a result of Russia’s 2014 attack on Ukraine. (PSR ¶ 19).

That detail was in the indictment.

As SAC, McGonigal supervised and participated in investigations of Russian oligarchs, incl uding Deripaska . Among other things, in 2018, McGONIGAL , while acting as SAC, received and reviewed a then-classified list of Russian oligarchs with close ties to the Kremlin who would be considered for sanctions to be imposed as a result of Russia ‘ s 2014 conflict with Ukraine .

But there’s a detail DOJ has since gotten declassified, one of those “other things” only alluded to in the indictment: before McGonigal started pursuing ties with Albania while still at FBI, he received a report “stating that Deripaska was associated with a Russian intelligence agency.”

Among other things, in May 2017, McGonigal received a then-classified email stating that Deripaska was associated with a Russian intelligence agency, and possibly involved in that agency’s coup attempt in another country. (PSR ¶ 19).

By context, the agency must be GRU and the attempted coup must be Montenegro, a country implicated in McGonigal’s other prosecution — one where Paul Manafort had an extensive history with Deripaska and one mentioned in Andrew Weissmann’s Team M report. See also this post Rayne wrote on related topics.

In other words, this strongly suggests that in the same month when Rod Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller to investigate how GRU tampered in the 2016 election, McGonigal received a report tying Deripaska to the GRU.

Then he went on to agree to work for Deripaska anyway, hoping to make millions from a guy with a key role in the 2016 attack on American democracy.

And Bill Barr’s flunkie, Seth DuCharme — the guy who helped set up a way for Rudy Giuliani to share information from Russian-backed Ukrainians to be funneled to the Hunter Biden investigation — thinks that McGonigal should be sentenced to probation as a result.

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Charles McGonigal’s Lonely Plea Deal

Former FBI Assistant Director Charles McGonigal pled guilty to one count of conspiring to violate sanctions today.

Tellingly, the Information doesn’t say with whom he conspired.

Remember, he was charged in January with former translator Sergey Shestakov. The acts to which he pled guilty — collecting business intelligence on Oleg Deripaska rival Vladimir Potanin, according to reports from the plea — he was alleged to have done with Shestakov and for Agent-1, understood to be Yevgeniy Fokin.

19 . In or about August 2021 , McGONIGAL, SHESTAKOV, and Agent-1 drafted and executed a contract (the “Contract”) . According to the Contract, a Cyprus corporation (the “Cyprus Corporation”) would pay a Corporation based in New Jersey (the “New Jersey Corporation”) $51 , 280 upon execution of the Contract and $41 , 790 per month for “business intelligence services, analysis, and research relevant to [the Russian Corporation], its business operations, and shareholders. ” Although the payments under the Contract in fact would be made to MCGONIGAL and SHESTAKOV at the behest of Deripaska , as negotiated by Agent-1 , none of those people was named in or was a si gnatory to the Contract . Pursuant to the Contract , on August 13, 2021 1 $51 , 280 was wired from a Russian bank (the “Russian Bank”) to the New Jersey Corporation, to be followed by monthly payments of $41, 790 between August 18 and November 18 , 2021.

20 . The New Jersey Corporation was owned by a friend of McGONIGAL (the ”Friend” ) . The Friend had arranged for McGONIGAL to participate in the business of the New Jersey Corporation while McGONIGAL was still serving as SAC with the FBI . The Friend provided McGONIGAL with a corporate email account and a cellphone under a false name, which McGONIGAL at times used, in order to conceal McGONIGAL’ s work for the New Jersey Corporation while still employed by the FBI. Wit h respect to the Contract, however, McGONIGAL told SHESTAKOV that he had not informed the Friend that he was using the New Jersey Corporation to receive payment on the Contract . SHESTAKOV subsequently forged the Friend’ s signature on the Contract without the Friend’ s knowledge or permission . When the Friend questioned McGONIGAL about why the Russian Bank was making payments to the New Jersey Corporation, McGONIGAL told the Friend, in substance and in part, that it was payment for “legitimate” work McGONIGAL was performing for “a rich Russian guy . ” The Friend acquiesced in the use of the New Jersey Corporation, and subsequently transferred funds obtained pursuant to the Contract at McGONIGAL’ s direction, including to McGONIGAL and SHESTAKOV.

21. From at least in or about August 2021 until in or about November 2021 and in return for the payments specified in the Contract, McGONIGAL sought to gather information about Oligarch-2 and the Russian Corporation . Among other things, McGONIGAL retained subcontractors to assist in this endeavor. With respect to one such subcontractor (“Subcontractor-ln) , McGONIGAL requested a “soup to nuts” investigation of Oligarch-2 and the Russian Corporation . McGONIGAL declined to t ell Subcontractor-1 the identity of his client, despite having an established relationship with Subcontractor- 1 in which McGONIGAL had identified his prior, lawful client.

Instead, his Information tersely describes that he and others worked for Deripaska.

From in or about August 2021 through in or about November 2021, McGONIGAL and others, acting at the behest of Oleg Deripaska, whom the United States Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control designated as a Specially Designated National on or about April 6, 2018, sought to gather derogatory information about a rival of Deripaska, in violation of IEEPA.

From in or about August 2021 through in or about November 2021, McGONIGAL and others received and routed payments from Deripaska through two corporations, neither of which was registered in the name of McGONIGAL or Deripaska, in an effort to conceal that the payments originated from Deripaska.

Even the press release makes no mention of Shestakov. It only describes McGonigal’s conspiracy with Fokin.

In 2021, MCGONIGAL conspired to provide services to Deripaska, in violation of U.S. sanctions imposed on Deripaska in 2018.  Specifically, following his negotiations with an agent of Deripaska, MCGONIGAL agreed to and did investigate a rival Russian oligarch in return for concealed payments from Deripaska.  As part of their negotiations with Deripaska’s agent, MCGONIGAL and the agent attempted to conceal Deripaska’s involvement by, among other means, not directly naming Deripaska in electronic communications, using shell companies as counterparties in the contract that outlined the services to be performed, using a forged signature on that contract, and using the same shell companies to send and receive payment from Deripaska.

Nor is there any hint of cooperation, which you’d think a former FBI Agent might do if there were a co-conspirator still around to cooperate against. According to Innercity Press’ live tweet of the hearing, even though Seth DuCharme had recently suggested that both this and his DC case would be resolved in one agreement, this agreement doesn’t rule out consecutive sentences, meaning he could face more than the five years he’s facing in SDNY. Nor are tax charges off the table.

It’s not exactly the kind of sweet plea deal he must have imagined Bill Barr’s former fixer, Seth DuCharme might negotiate.

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Seth DuCharme Really, Really Wants to Graymail Charles McGonigal’s Path to Freedom

I’m really not surprised that former Bill Barr flunky Seth DuCharme is trying to graymail the government in the SDNY case of his client, Charles McGonigal. That’s a legal strategy whereby you demand so many highly classified documents for trial that the government is faced with the prospect of dismissing a criminal case rather than going to trial.

As a reminder, former Special Assistant in Charge of Counterintelligence in FBI’s NY’s Field Office McGonigal was charged in two indictments: A DC indictment charging him for hiding some meetings with and payments from an Albanian associate while still at the FBI, and a SDNY indictment charging him and Sergey Shestakov with money laundering and conspiring to violate the sanctions imposed on Oleg Deripaska after McGonigal left theFBI.

Almost six months and maybe one or two sealed docket items in, there’s no public sign of a Classified Information Protection Act notice in the DC case (see this post for a background on CIPA).

Not so the SDNY case. That case has been headed for CIPA from the start.

But something funky is going on with the CIPA process, as if there’s a CIPA filter team backstopping the prosecution team.

SDNY must have planned this from the start, and it is driving McGonigal’s team nuts.

It started on February 8, when SDNY filed a CIPA letter, requesting a CIPA 2 conference.

Often, these letters review the entire CIPA process. The one Jay Bratt submitted in the Trump stolen documents case last week, for example, went through Section 1, Section 2, Section 3, Section 4, Section 5, Section 6 (broken down by sub-section), Section 7, Section 8, Section 9, and Section 10.

Not the SDNY one in the McGonigal case. It went through Section 2 — asking for a conference — and then stopped.

The Government expects to provide the Court with further information about whether there will be any need for CIPA practice in this case, and to answer any questions the Court may have, at the CIPA Section 2 conference.

In response, on March 1, McGonigal’s lawyers submitted their own CIPA letter, laying out Sections 1 through 8. Along the way, it described how important Section 4 is and informed Judge

Section 4, which is in many ways the heart of CIPA, governs the methods of disclosure of classified information by the government to the defendant, pursuant to its constitutional and statutory obligations. See 18 U.S.C. § App. III § 4. Section 4 is implicated when the head of the department with control over the matter, and after personal consideration of the matter, invokes the states-secrets privilege to withhold classified information from the defendant in the interests of national security. Doe v. C.I.A., No. 05 CIV. 7939 LTSFM, 2007 WL 30099, at *1 (S.D.N.Y. Jan. 4, 2007); see also United States v. Aref, 533 F.3d 72, 80 (2d Cir. 2008). The states-secrets privilege however is not absolute: it “must—under some circumstances—give way . . . to a criminal defendant’s right to present a meaningful defense.” United States v. Abu-Jihaad, 630 F.3d 102, 141 (2d Cir. 2010). (internal quotations omitted).

Under Section 4, upon a “sufficient showing” by the government, the Court may authorize the government to “delete specified items of classified information from documents to be made available to the defendant . . . , to substitute a summary of the information for such classified documents, or to substitute a statement admitting relevant facts that the classified information would tend to prove.” 18 U.S.C. § App. III § 4. The government makes a sufficient showing that such alternatives are warranted through an ex parte submission to the Court. See id; see also United States v. Muhanad Mahmoud Al-Farekh, 956 F.3d 99, 109 (2d Cir. 2020). Of critical importance to the fairness of the process, the Court may review, ex parte and in camera, the classified information at issue to determine whether and in what form the information must be disclosed to the defendant, and whether the government has truly satisfied its discovery obligations. See, e.g., United States v. Aref, No. 04 CR 402, 2006 WL 1877142, at *1 (N.D.N.Y. July 6, 2006). To assist the Court in this analysis, the defense will provide the Court with its initial view of the scope of material that will be relevant and helpful in the preparation of the defense at the upcoming conference and will supplement that information as appropriate. [my emphasis]

This effectively flipped CIPA on its head, alerting Judge Jennifer Rearden they planned to tell the government what classified discovery should look like, not vice versa.

On March 3, Judge Rearden confirmed she would hold two separate CIPA conferences. The SDNY was held on March 6. On March 7, the day after SDNY’s CIPA conference and the day before McGonigal’s, SDNY wrote to note how McGonigal had flipped on its head.

Although much of McGonigal’s general discourse on CIPA is unobjectionable, the Government believes several points require correction or supplementation.

The whole thing is worth reading: for the description that the US Attorney’s Manual does not convey rights, for the observation that McGonigal had conflated the prosecution team and the Intelligence Community, for the challenge to McGonigal’s claim that the IC must have information about “a recently retired FBI intelligence official being corrupted by a Russian oligarch” (there’s even a long footnote distinguishing the Scooter Libby case, in both Circuit and victim, from this), and for McGonigal’s claim to do in an ex parte Section 2 hearing what normally comes later, in Section 5.

But notably SDNY’s response letter describes that while DOJ must comply with Brady, it doesn’t have to tell a defendant how it is doing so.

Second, although legal rules such as Brady and Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 16 do obligate the Government to disclose particular information, they do not oblige the Government to explain to defendants how they have satisfied that obligation.

The next day, McGonigal had his CIPA hearing.

On May 8, SDNY filed a short letter informing Judge Rearden that they had declassified the material they had told her they would in their own CIPA 2 hearing and provided it to the defense.

At the March 6, 2023 ex parte conference held pursuant to Section 2 of the Classified Information Procedures Act (“CIPA”) in the above-referenced case, the Government described to the Court certain materials that the Government was seeking to declassify. The Government writes to confirm that those materials have been declassified and produced to the defendants. At this time, the Government does not anticipate making a filing pursuant to Section 4 of CIPA and believes it has met its discovery obligations with respect to classified information.

In saying they didn’t anticipate making a filing pursuant to Section 4, they were undercutting the premise McGonigal’s team had made back on March 1.

Given the letter McGonigal submitted last Friday, June 23, such an approach seems to be driving McGonigal nuts. It describes that it is puzzling and concerning and hard to imagine that there isn’t more.

With respect to the way forward as it pertains to classified discovery, as we noted at our last court appearance, the government has indicated that it “does not anticipate making a filing pursuant to Section 4 of CIPA and believes it has met its discovery obligations with respect to classified information.” See ECF No. 44 at 1. In a subsequent series of conversations, the government informed us, in a general way, that it has satisfied its discovery obligations relating to classified information. The government’s position is perplexing. While it is not surprising that the government does not wish to account for its each and every step in satisfying its constitutional obligations, it is puzzling and concerning that the government would, at this stage, determine that no CIPA Section 4 presentation to the Court is appropriate, when we are a year away from trial and the government’s discovery obligations with respect to Rule 16, the Jencks Act, Brady and Giglio are ongoing. The indictment and the U.S. Attorney’s press release include accusations that foreseeably implicate classified information within each of the four categories of discoverable information. With respect to the category of impeachment material alone, it is hard to imagine a world in which there are no classified materials that touch on the credibility of the government’s trial witnesses (or alleged unindicted coconspirator hearsay declarants), and which would require treatment under Section 4 of CIPA.

It explains that both McGonigal and Seth DuCharme can be trusted with the government’s classified information — after all, McGonigal was only indicted for cozying up to the Russian oligarch he had hunted for years!

Not mishandling classified information.

And Seth DuCharme was, until recently, trusted with Bill Barr’s most sensitive secrets.

Further, it is hard to understand why the government is so reluctant to be more transparent in explaining its discovery practices to the defense in this case. While many national security cases involve defendants with no prior clearances or experience with the U.S. Intelligence Community, and may involve only recently-cleared defense counsel who may be new to navigating the burdens and responsibilities of handling classified information, here, those concerns do not apply. Mr. McGonigal was one of the most senior and experienced national security investigators in the FBI with significant direct professional experience in the areas germane to his requests for assurances about the thoroughness of the government’s discovery analysis. In addition, before moving to private practice, the undersigned counsel served as the Chief of the National Security Section, the Chief of the Criminal Division and the Acting United States Attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of New York as well as the Senior Counselor to the Attorney General of the United States for National Security and Criminal matters, and has responsibly held TS/SCI clearances with respect to some of the United States government’s most sensitive programs. As the Department of Justice has concluded in re-instating defense counsel’s clearances for the purpose of this case, we are trustworthy. So, here, we have a defendant and defense counsel who are highly respectful and experienced with regard to the protocols for handling and compartmentalizing sensitive classified information, and simply request comfort that the government has indeed done everything it would normally do in a case such as this, with sufficient detail to assess the credibility of the government’s position.

Notably, Mr. McGonigal has not been accused of mishandling classified information in the cases brought against him, and he maintains respect for the national security interests of the United States, as of course do we. In addition, we are not asking the government to disclose to the defense any sensitive sources and methods by which discoverable information was collected—only to provide greater transparency to us, and to the Court, as to how it views its procedural obligations, so that we may consider the fairness and reasonableness of the government’s approach. Mr. McGonigal is personally familiar with this process from his time at the FBI, and it is reasonable for him to expect to be treated no worse than the other defendants who have come before him. To adequately represent Mr. McGonigal, it seems only fair that we be allowed to hold the United States government to the same standards that the defendant upheld as a national security and law enforcement professional, and to make a record of the government’s position.

DuCharme then invoked the Nejad case where, under his former boss’ tenure, a sanctions case blew up because DOJ failed to meet its discovery obligations.

Given DuCharme’s helpful offer to meet in a secure hearing or to submit a more highly classified brief, he’s clearly got something specific in mind.

In sum, if the government could explain, in an appropriate setting, how it determined that it had obviated the need for a CIPA Section 4 proceeding, we likely can avoid speculative motion practice, and the parties and this Court may be assured that we can continue to litigate this case fairly and with the level of confidence to which we are entitled.

[snip]

To the extent the Court would like more detailed briefing on these issues prior to the conference, the CISO has provided to cleared defense counsel access to facilities that would allow us to draft a supplemental submission at a higher classification level.

To be sure: I’m not sure which side is right here, and CIPA always sucks for defendants.

But both sides are dancing around something awfully interesting, as if the circumstances that led to McGonigal’s compromise are different — potentially even significantly worse — than anyone is letting on.

McGonigal’s team repeatedly invoked State Secrets. And DuCharme was the Barr flunky who ran interference so that Rudy Giuliani (whose close associate implicated McGonigal) could seek out dirt from known Russian agents without getting arrested. So the background here could indeed be quite interesting.

Thus far, at least, SDNY is refusing to play that game.

Timeline

January 12: Indictment

February 8: DOJ requests a CIPA 2 hearing

March 1: Seth DuCharme sends his own CIPA letter

March 3: Judge Rearden orders a CIPA 2 hearing

March 7: SDNY writes to refute some of DuCharme’s claims

May 8: SDNY writes to confirm it has declassified the materials described at March 6 CIPA hearing and does not believe it will need a CIPA 4 hearing

June 23: DuChare writes again saying it’s not possible for SDNY to have fulfilled its obligations

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John Durham’s Disinformation Problem

The only person about whose ties to Christopher Steele John Durham showed no curiosity was Oleg Deripaska.

The only person whose ties to the creator of the dossier that led the FBI to adopt false claims against Trump aides that Durham didn’t pursue was the guy, on whose behalf, Trump’s campaign regularly sent out internal polling data starting in May 2016, the guy, on whose behalf, Trump’s campaign manager briefed Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnik on the campaign’s plan to win swing states. The 2021 Treasury filing that stated, as fact, that Kilimnik is a, “known Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf,” also stated, as fact, that in 2016, “Kilimnik provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy,” the very same polling data and campaign strategy he obtained from Trump’s campaign manager on Oleg Deripaska’s behalf. As I’ve laid out, John Durham never mentioned Kilimnik in his report, not once, to say nothing of how Kilimnik obtained internal polling data and a campaign strategy briefing and delivered it to Russian spies.

Everyone else who had the least little tie to Christopher Steele, Durham pursued relentlessly. He charged Igor Danchenko, even though the FBI used Danchenko to, “fish information from Mr. Steele about what Mr. Steele was up to,” as the former British spook pursued a second dossier against Trump in 2017. He charged Danchenko even though Danchenko neither wrote the dossier nor shared it (or even knew it was being shared) with the FBI. Durham not only charged Steele’s primary source, but he caused Danchenko to be burned as an FBI informant, even though Danchenko’s subsource network had reportedly proven incredibly valuable to the FBI. Durham even helped to ensure that the FBI would not pay a significant lump sum payment to Danchenko for his assistance after Republicans in Congress led to his exposure.

Durham’s report aired, at length, details of the earlier counterintelligence investigation into Danchenko; he didn’t include the reasons Danchenko’s handler found the allegations unreliable (indeed, an undated referral in his report suggests Durham retaliated against Danchenko’s handler Kevin Helson for providing those details at trial). Once again, Durham failed his own standards of including exculpatory information. Durham also falsely claimed that Danchenko never told the FBI that his source network knew of his tie to Steele. In reality, as I’ll return to below, in his first interview with the FBI, Dancehnko described that two of them did.

Durham also conducted the investigation into Charles Dolan he believed Robert Mueller’s team should have done in 2017. Durham obtained Dolan’s email, his work email, his phone records, and his Facebook records. Durham still found no proof that Dolan was the source for any of the Russia-related reports in the dossier. After not getting the answers he wanted in Dolan’s first interview, Durham made him a subject and had him review an email Dolan sent, passing on information he had read in public sources, with a report in the dossier, which Dolan conceded might have come from his email. But Dolan still testified that Danchenko never asked Dolan for information about Trump’s connection to Russia.

It wasn’t just Danchenko and Dolan, though. A key part of Durham’s conspiracy theory against Michael Sussmann depended on the fact that — shortly after Sussmann got the Alfa Bank anomaly independent of the Hillary campaign — Sussmann asked Steele about the bank during a meeting where Marc Elias asked Sussmann to help vet Steele. Durham tried to introduce Steele’s subsequent report on Alfa Bank based on that meeting, even though all the evidence shows that if the Brit did provide the report to the FBI, he did so on his own, and it’s not even clear that he himself did provide that particular report directly to his FBI handler.

Durham compelled Fusion’s tech expert Laura Seago to testify because a meeting and four emails she exchanged with Rodney Joffe were the one link between Joffe and the dossier. Seago testified that the Alfa Bank allegations were not a big part of the work she did on Trump-related issues.

Durham had Deborah Fine testify because, as one of the Hillary Campaign’s Deputy General Counsels, she was the only person associated with the campaign — aside from Marc Elias — who regularly met with Fusion GPS. Durham made her testify even though she knew nothing about research relating to Alfa Bank and didn’t remember any conversations about Trump and Russia. Instead, Fine testified, her interaction with Fusion pertained to lawsuits filed against Trump, his company, and his family that Fusion helped to research.

Durham used every method at his disposal — including getting Judge Christopher Cooper to override the Hillary campaign’s claim of privilege over some Fusion emails — to unpack any possible relationship that subjects of his investigation had with Christopher Steele.

Except Oleg Deripaska.

In fact, Durham did the opposite: he obscured the import of Deripaska’s ties to Steele.

In his report, Durham asserted, as fact, something that had only been implied before: Oleg Deripaska paid Steele in spring 2016 to collect information on Paul Manafort.

When interviewed by the FBI in September 2017, Steele stated that his initial entree into U.S. election-related material dealt with Paul Manafort’s connections to Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs. In particular, Steele told the FBI that Manafort owed significant money to these oligarchs and several other Russians. 890 At this time, Steele was working for a different client, Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, often referred to as “Putin’s Oligarch” in media reporting, on a separate litigation-related issue. 891

In the same way that Paul Singer initiated the open source research into Trump done by Fusion GPS before the Democrats took it over, Oleg Deripaska — the person on whose behalf Russian intelligence obtained inside dirt, via Konstantin Kilimnik, from Trump’s campaign — initiated the HUMINT collection on Trump’s team, lasting at least until April 18, 2016, even after the Russian attack on Hillary Clinton had already started.

Oleg Deripaska started the dossier project and only later did the Democrats pick it up, unwitting to the fact that it was started by a guy who was busy playing a key role in Russia’s influence operation targeting Hillary’s campaign.

It’s bad enough that Durham didn’t pursue the tie between the dossier and Russia’s later efforts to obtain inside dirt from Trump’s campaign.

But when he described the evidence that Russia likely learned of Steele’s work for the DNC by July 2016, before Steele did virtually all but one of the substantive reports on Trump, Durham did so in a section almost 100 pages earlier than his description of Deripaska’s ties to Steele, and by adopting the moniker the DOJ IG Report used for Deripaska, “Oligarch 1,” he hid that the source of that knowledge was Deripaska himself.

As the record now reflects, at the time of the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI did not possess any intelligence showing that anyone associated with the Trump campaign was in contact with Russian intelligence officers at any point during the campaign. 251 Moreover, the now more complete record of facts relevant to the opening of Crossfire Hurricane is illuminating. Indeed, at the time Crossfire Hurricane was opened, the FBI (albeit not the Crossfire Hurricane investigators) was in possession of some of the Steele Reports. However, even if the Crossfire Hurricane investigators were in possession of the Steele Reports earlier, they would not have been aware of the fact that the Russians were cognizant of Steele’s election-related reporting. The SSCI Russia Report notes that”[s]ensitive reporting from June 2017 indicated that a [person affiliated] to Russian Oligarch 1 was [possibly aware] of Steele’s election investigation as of early July 20 l 6.” 252 Indeed, “an early June 2017 USIC report indicated that two persons affiliated with [Russian Intelligence Services] were aware of Steele’s election investigation in early July 2016.”253 Put more pointedly, Russian intelligence knew of Steele’s election investigation for the Clinton campaign by no later than early July 2016. Thus, as discussed in Section IV.D. l .a.3, Steele’s sources may have been compromised by the Russians at a time prior to the creation of the Steele Reports and throughout the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation.

Steele’s source network may have been compromised before the project started, Durham charged. But Durham hid the evidence that if it was compromised, it was compromised by the guy on whose behalf Trump’s campaign manager shared campaign information with Russian intelligence.

In fact, the DOJ IG Report, finished in December 2019 and from which Durham adopted that moniker, Oligarch 1, strongly suggests that Deripaska himself and his “known Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf” sidekick, Konstantin Kilimnik, were the source of any disinformation in the dossier.

Durham did not pursue that evidence, at all, in his report. As I said, he never once mentioned Kilimnik.

He ignored Deripaska’s likely role in disinformation in 2016, even though he focused repeatedly on disinformation in his report. He complained, for example, that the FBI didn’t unpack any potential disinformation in the dossier before using it in the Carter Page FISA applications.

The failure to identify the primary sub-source early in the investigation’s pursuit of FISA authority prevented the FBI from properly examining the possibility that some or much of the non-open source information contained in Steele’s reporting was Russian disinformation (that wittingly or unwittingly was passed along to Steele), or that the reporting was otherwise not credible.

He suggested Danchenko’s unresolved counterintelligence investigation — and not Oleg Deripaska — was the source of potential disinformation.

Our review found no indication that the Crossfire Hurricane investigators ever attempted to resolve the prior Danchenko espionage matter before opening him as a paid CHS. Moreover, our investigation found no indication that the Crossfire Hurricane investigators disclosed the existence of Danchenko’s unresolved counterintelligence investigation to the Department attorneys who were responsible for drafting the FISA renewal applications targeting Carter Page. As a result, the FISC was never advised of information that very well may have affected the FISC’s view of Steele’s primary sub-source’s (and Steele’s) reliability and trustworthiness. Equally important is the fact that in not resolving Danchenko’s status vis-a-vis the Russian intelligence services, it appears the FBI never gave appropriate consideration to the possibility that the intelligence Danchenko was providing to Steele -which, again, according to Danchenko himself, made up a significant majority of the information in the Steele Dossier reports – was, in whole or in part, Russian disinformation.

He falsely used one answer Danchenko gave in his first meeting with the FBI to suggest that might be a source of disinformation.

Danchenko’s uncharged false statements to the FBI reflecting the fact that he never informed friends, associates, and/or sources that he worked for Orbis or Steele and that “you [the FBI] are the first people he’s told.” In fact, the evidence revealed that Danchenko on multiple occasions communicated and emailed with, among others, Dolan regarding his work for Steele and Orbis, thus potentially opening the door to the receipt and dissemination of Russian disinformation;

The claim was grossly dishonest, because at the same meeting, Danchenko described that Olga Galkina knew he worked in business intelligence, and also revealed how he asked Orbis for help setting up another of his sources with language instruction in the UK. Danchenko told the FBI enough, from his first interview, that gave them reason to think his sources might know for whom he reported. But Durham accused Danchenko of lying about it anyway, because he needed to blame Danchenko, and not Deripaska, for any disinformation in the dossier.

Durham even complained that Peter Strzok had not considered whether the original Australian report about George Papadopoulos could be disinformation. Maybe it’s the Australians’ fault, Durham suggests, not Deripaska’s!

Durham looked for disinformation in every source but the one place where — even by early in his investigation — the FBI already suspected it, in the guy who kicked off the dossier project in 2016, before the Democrats even got to it.

Durham’s treatment of Deripaska’s suspected role in disinformation in 2016 is all the more astounding given how quickly Durham dismissed the possibility that the foundation of his own investigation was disinformation.

Durham built his entire project on a source that the intelligence community warned him might be a fabrication, the Russian intelligence report claiming that Hillary had a plan to hold Trump accountable for his ties to Russia. Durham dismissed that warning in two short paragraphs.

As was declassified and made public previously, the purported Clinton Plan intelligence was derived from insight that “U.S. intelligence agencies obtained into Russian intelligence analysis.” 394 Given the origins of the Clinton Plan intelligence as the product of a foreign adversary, the Office was cognizant of the statement that DNI Ratcliffe made to Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham in a September 29, 2020 letter: “The [intelligence community] does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.” 395

Recognizing this uncertainty, the Office nevertheless endeavored to investigate the bases for, and credibility of, this intelligence in order to assess its accuracy and its potential implications for the broader matters within our purview.

Remember: Durham made this report the cornerstone of his investigation starting around February 2020, three months after the DOJ IG Report, in December 2019, publicly gave reason to believe that Deripaska had been feeding the dossier with disinformation starting at least by July 2016, the month of this purported Russian intelligence report. Durham made this report the cornerstone of his investigation in spite of his confirmation that Deripaska initiated the dossier project in March 2016 and continued it until weeks before the Democrats took it over.

And Durham made this report the cornerstone of his investigation by fabricating a claim that even the Russians didn’t make about Hillary: that she wanted to promote a false narrative about Trump, rather than demonstrate all the true and damning Russian ties Trump had that Fusion had already fed to Franklin Foer by early July 2016.

Hillary Clinton had no incentive to pay a lot of money for false information — and nor did anyone need to fabricate Trump’s ties to Russia. Paying for false information predictably could — and did, and hasn’t stopped doing in the interim seven years — backfire stupendously. Plus, as I have shown, paying for false information demonstrably led to complacency about the possibility that the material stolen in the earlier hack would be used later in the campaign.

Hillary Clinton had no incentive to pay for disinformation! And Durham utterly fabricated the claim that she did!

But Oleg Deripaska would have an incentive to pay for disinformation.

Not only did that false information in the dossier send the FBI looking at Carter Page as Paul Manafort’s liaison with Russia instead of Konstantin Kilimnik — who then waltzed into a cigar bar in New York to hear how Trump planned to win Pennsylvania. Not only did the false information in the dossier lead the FBI to spend valuable time vetting the dossier rather than pursuing the hundreds of real ties Trump had to Russia.

But the false information in the dossier — and the way that Trump, in the wake of a January 2017 Manafort meeting with another Deripaska associate, attacked the dossier as a way to discredit the larger Russian investigation —  undermined the investigation and ultimately did untold damage to the FBI.

The false information in the dossier has been one of the most singular sources of partisan antagonism in the United States ever since. It has ripped the country apart. One right wing influencer even blamed the dossier for the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

Hillary Clinton had no incentive to pay for that. But Oleg Deripaska did.

And rather than laying out Deripaska’s likely role in the disinformation in the dossier, the known disinformation behind claims about Trump, Durham simply invented a claim that after such time as Deripaska had kicked off the dossier project and the Democrats picked it up, after such time as Deripaska knew that Democrats were funding the dossier, Hillary decided to make up false claims about Trump.

Rather than honestly laying out the public evidence that Deripaska was playing a ruthless double game — using Steele to make Manafort legally and financially less secure while using Manafort’s insecurity to win his cooperation with the influence operation — Durham did the one thing that could continue the wild success of Deripaska’s disinformation project: Blame Hillary for the disinformation, rather than Deripaska himself.

I don’t know whether Durham wittingly decided he was going to play Oleg Deripaska’s flunkie from inside the federal government (to say nothing of Alfa Bank, with whose investigation Durham shared a script). But everything he did with his investigation, every misrepresentation he makes in his report, all the human carnage Durham has done since, simply continues the disinformation project Deripaska kicked off seven years ago.

And that’s why his singular lack of curiosity about Deripaska’s ties to Steele is so telling.

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