Samizdat | May 20, 2022
Former Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told a federal court in Washington, DC on Friday that, in 2016, Hillary Clinton approved leaking to the media a story claiming that the Trump Organization had been in contact with Russia’s Alfa Bank. The story originated with one of Clinton’s lawyers, and is false.
Mook, who ran Clinton’s unsuccessful campaign in 2016, told the court that campaign lawyer Marc Elias approached him claiming to have proof that servers connected with Russia’s Alfa Bank exchanged data with servers belonging to the Trump Organization. He said that he had been assured that the evidence had come from “people that had expertise in this sort of matter.”
Mook said that nobody on the campaign was “totally confident” in the information, and that he asked Clinton whether he should release it to the media. “She agreed,” he said, and the information was released.
Once the claims were published by Slate, an online news source, the Clinton campaign put out a statement describing the supposed Alfa Bank server exchange as “the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow.” Then-Clinton adviser and current National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan wrote the statement, saying that the Alfa Bank allegations raise “even more troubling questions in light of Russia’s masterminding of hacking efforts … to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”
However, the allegations were false. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report into “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia made no mention of the server allegations, and found no evidence of “collusion” or Russian “hacking efforts” to influence the 2016 election.
Furthermore, an FBI investigation into the allegations found that there was “nothing there,” the agency’s former general counsel, James Baker, testified in the same courtroom on Thursday. Both Mook and Baker were testifying in the trial of Michael Sussmann, who first brought the Alfa Bank allegations to the FBI.
Sussman is charged with making false statements to the agency when he told Baker in 2016 that he was not working “for any client” when he approached the FBI with his allegations. However, prosecutors allege that he was working for the Clinton campaign at the time, and that he billed the campaign for his work immediately after meeting Baker.
Sussman, who has pleaded not guilty, is being prosecuted by US Department of Justice Special Counsel John Durham, who was appointed by then Attorney General William Barr in 2019 to investigate the FBI’s handling of the ‘Russiagate’ investigation before Mueller took over.
Trump has insisted since 2016 that the allegations of “collusion” against him were a politically-motivated “witch hunt.”
May 21, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Russophobia | Hillary Clinton, United States |
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Samizdat – 19.05.2022
WASHINGTON – The FBI found no evidence of a covert communications channel between former US President Donald Trump and Russia’s Alfa Bank, former FBI General Counsel James Baker said in a testimony at the trial of Hillary Clinton’s lawyer Michael Sussmann, according to a Fox News report.
Sussmann told the FBI in 2016 that there was a backdoor communications channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, which is reportedly linked to the Russian government. Sussmann is being charged with making a false statement in connection with the meeting for allegedly lying about not working on behalf of any clients.
A probe conducted by Special Counsel John Durham alleges that Sussmann was actually working for the campaign of Hillary Clinton, as well as for tech executive Rodney Joffe.
Baker emphasized that the FBI concluded there was no substance to Sussmann’s allegations against Trump and could not confirm there was a surreptitious communications channel, the report said.
The testimony echoes that of FBI Special Agent Scott Hellman, who said on Tuesday during the trial said that the allegations against Trump were found to be untrue, the report added.
The FBI investigated allegations of Trump collusion with the Russian government in a probe run by Special Counsel Robert Mueller starting in 2017. Mueller’s investigation found no evidence of a criminal conspiracy or collusion between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russian officials.
Durham in 2019 was chosen to investigate the origins of the FBI’s probe into the Trump campaign. The investigation has resulted in indictments against Sussmann, as well as Igor Danchenko and Kevin Clinesmith.
May 19, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Russophobia | Hillary Clinton, United States |
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Special Counsel John Durham continues to drop bombshells in filings in the prosecution of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann. Just last week, Durham defeated an effort by Sussmann to dismiss the charges. He is now moving to give immunity to a key witness while revealing that the claims made by the Clinton campaign were viewed by the CIA as “not technically plausible” and “user created.” He also revealed that at least five of the former Clinton campaign contractors/researchers have invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to cooperate in fear that they might incriminate themselves in criminal conduct. Finally, Durham offers further details on the involvement of Clinton campaign general counsel Marc Elias and former British spy Christopher Steele in the alleged false claims.
Recently, Durham revealed extremely damaging evidence against Sussmann. However, this is the first full description of the Clinton associates refusing to cooperate under the Fifth Amendment. Durham noted that he gave immunity to an individual identified only as “Research 2.” He then noted that this was made necessary by the refusal to cooperate by key Clinton associates:
“The only witness currently immunized by the government, Researcher-2, was conferred with that status on July 28, 2021 – over a month prior to the defendant’s Indictment in this matter. And the Government immunized Researcher-2 because, among other reasons, at least five other witnesses who conducted work relating to the Russian Bank-1 allegations invoked (or indicated their intent to invoke) their right against self-incrimination. The Government therefore pursued Researcher-2’s immunity in order to uncover otherwise-unavailable facts underlying the opposition research project that Tech Executive-1 and others carried out in advance of the defendant’s meeting with the FBI.” [Emphasis added]
For his part, Sussmann and the Clinton associates have sought to use attorney-client privilege to keep evidence from Durham.
Durham also detailed how the false Russian collusion claims related to Alfa Bank involved Clinton General Counsel Marc Elias and Christopher Steele. Indeed, the new requested immunized testimony would come from a Tech executive who allegedly can share information on meetings with Elias and Steele.
The Alfa Bank hoax and Sussmann’s efforts paralleled the work of his partner Elias at the law firm Perkins Coie in pushing the Steele Dossier in a separate debunked collusion claim. The Federal Election Commission recently fined the Clinton Campaign and the DNC for hiding the funding of the dossier as a legal cost by Elias at Perkins Coie.
“Durham notes that both the CIA and FBI were sent on an effective wild goose chase by the Clinton campaign. He notes that the government found the allegations to be manufactured and not even technically possible. He refers to the CIA in the following passage:
Agency-2 concluded in early 2017 that the Russian Bank-1 data and Russian Phone Provider-1 data was not “technically plausible,” did not “withstand technical scrutiny,” “contained gaps,” “conflicted with [itself],” and was “user created and not machine/tool generated.”
This dovetails with the statements of the Clinton associates themselves who were worried about the lack of support for the Russian collusion claims. “Researcher 1” features prominently in those exchanges.
According to Durham, the Alfa Bank allegation fell apart even before Sussmann delivered it to the FBI. The indictment details how an unnamed “tech executive” allegedly used his authority at multiple internet companies to help develop the ridiculous claim. (The executive reportedly later claimed that he was promised a top cyber security job in the Clinton administration). Notably, there were many who expressed misgivings not only within the companies working on the secret project but also among unnamed “university researchers” who repeatedly said the argument was bogus.
The researchers were told they should not be looking for proof but just enough to “give the base of a very useful narrative.” The researchers argued, according to the indictment, that anyone familiar with analyzing internet traffic “would poke several holes” in that narrative, noting that what they saw likely “was not a secret communications channel with Russian Bank-1, but ‘a red herring,’” according to the indictment.
“Researcher-1” repeated these doubts, the indictment says, and asked, “How do we plan to defend against the criticism that this is not spoofed traffic we are observing? There is no answer to that. Let’s assume again that they are not smart enough to refute our ‘best case scenario.’ You do realize that we will have to expose every trick we have in our bag to even make a very weak association.”
“Researcher-1” allegedly further warned, “We cannot technically make any claims that would fly public scrutiny. The only thing that drives us at this point is that we just do not like [Trump]. This will not fly in eyes of public scrutiny. Folks, I am afraid we have tunnel vision. Time to regroup?”
It appears that the “time to regroup” has passed with the issuance of immunity deals to compel testimony.
Here is the filing:
US-v-Sussmann-04162022-US-Filing
April 20, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception | CIA, FBI, Hillary Clinton, United States |
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The Federal Election Commission, tasked with maintaining the integrity of US campaign finance rules, fined former Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee for violations related to election expenditures concerning the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.
On Tuesday, the FEC declared Clinton and the DNC “violated strict rules on describing expenditures of payments funneled to the opposition research firm Fusion GPS through their law firm,” according to a memo obtained by the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard.
“A combined $1,024,407.97 was paid by the treasurers of the DNC and Clinton campaign to law firm Perkins Coie for Fusion GPS’s information, and the party and campaign hid the reason, claiming it was for legal services, not opposition research.
“Instead, the DNC’s $849,407.97 and the Clinton campaign’s $175,000 covered Fusion GPS’s opposition research on the dossier, a basis for the so-called ‘Russia hoax’ that dogged Trump’s first term.
“The memo said that the Clinton campaign and DNC argued that they were correct in describing their payment as for ‘legal advice and services’ because it was Perkins Coie that hired Fusion GPS. But the agency said the law is clear and was violated.”
The fine revolves around a complaint filed by the Coolidge Reagan Foundation back in Sept. 2018.
The memo says (pg. 9) that Clinton and the DNC have agreed to pay the fine: “Solely for the purpose of settling this matter expeditiously and to avoid further legal costs, Respondent does not concede, but will not further contest the Commission’s finding of probable cause to believe.”
As a result, the Hillary for America campaign will pay a fine of $8,000, while the DNC is fined a civil penalty of $105,000.
Dan Backer, a representative for the Coolidge Reagan Foundation, told Bedard the settlement represents a monumental instance of accountability rarely seen these days.
“This may well be the first time that Hillary Clinton — one of the most evidently corrupt politicians in American history — has actually been held legally accountable, and I’m proud to have forced the FEC to do their job for once. The Coolidge Reagan Foundation proved that with pluck and grit, Americans who stand with integrity can stand up to the Clinton machine and other corrupt political elites,” Backer said.
The fines come as President Donald Trump last week sued Clinton, several staffers and various members of the DNC and fake news media for causing him and the American people grievous harm by perpetuating false claims of Russia collusion during the 2016 presidential election.
March 31, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Russophobia | Hillary Clinton, United States |
2 Comments
An interview for Fox News’ “Ingraham Angle,” featuring former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, was censored for being potentially “offensive” and “inappropriate” to some audiences.
In the interview, Ingraham asked Gabbard, “Congresswoman, why are we talking about no-fly zones instead of the fact that for the first time we have President Zelensky stepping back from his earlier NATO wishes and even demands?”
Gabbard expressed her frustration with the fact that allegedly no one was discussing a statement Ukraine’s President Zelensky made, about being “… open to the fact of saying, ‘Hey, yeah, maybe we’ll set this NATO membership thing aside,’ and he’s willing to talk with Putin directly to negotiate.”
Gabbard suggested that the West was interfering with attempts to settle the conflict because, “it’s good for the military industrial complex” and it allowed Western leaders to “have this proxy war with Russia, something that Hillary Clinton laid out just recently.”
Gabbard strongly condemned the war, saying: “This war machine, this power elite in Washington, want to turn Ukraine into another Afghanistan, turn into killing fields where this long-term insurgency is supported. And they bleed out and cripple, kill as many Russians as possible for who knows how long, and they’re really showing their real aim in the fact that they’re not taking action right now to end this conflict.”
YouTube flagged the video, putting up a filter that said, “the following content has been identified by the YouTube community as inappropriate or offensive to some audiences.”
March 15, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Hillary Clinton, NATO, Ukraine, YouTube |
5 Comments
Calling the US a “hacking empire” of the world, the Chinese Foreign Ministry urged Washington to stop “malicious” cyber activities following reports that American hackers subverted a network in China to launch attacks on Russia and Belarus.
“China is gravely concerned about cyberattacks against other countries that originate from the US and use China as a springboard,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian told reporters at a press briefing on Monday.
Zhao was commenting on recent Chinese media reports that hackers, mainly from the US but also from NATO allies Germany and the Netherlands, recently hijacked a Chinese computer network for cyberattacks, 87% of which targeted Russia.
“Against the background of the Ukraine situation, such a move may produce the negative effect of misleading the international community and spreading disinformation,” Zhao said, pointing out that “a former US senior official called publicly for launching cyberattacks on Russia not long ago.”
This appeared to be a reference to Hillary Clinton, former US secretary of state and presidential candidate, who made the calls in an MSNBC interview at the end of February.
While Beijing doesn’t know the exact role of the US government in the attack, or if it is linked to the “long practice of smearing China in cyberspace” by the US, Zhao called for Washington to “adopt a more responsible attitude.”
Meanwhile, the White House said on Monday that the US has threatened China with “significant consequences” if it helps Russia in any way, during lengthy talks in Rome between National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Chinese envoy Yang Jiechi.
Multiple Western outlets claimed over the weekend that Moscow had asked Beijing for military aid for the conflict in Ukraine. Zhao called the claims “disinformation” coming from the US.
March 15, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception | China, Hillary Clinton, NATO, Russia, United States |
2 Comments
A legal motion makes bombshell allegations about IT firm’s clandestine spying activities on Trump White House
Lawyers working for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign paid an IT firm to “infiltrate” servers at Trump Tower and the White House in order to establish a “narrative” that would link Donald Trump to Russia, an explosive new legal filing alleges.
The legal motion, filed in a District of Columbia court on Friday by a Justice Department (DOJ) prosecutor investigating the origins of the FBI’s ‘Russiagate’ probe, relates to potential conflicts of interest by former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann. Sussmann has previously pleaded not guilty to a one-count charge of lying to federal agents.
Two months before the 2016 election, Sussmann, a partner at Perkins Coie, the law firm that represented the Democrats and Clinton’s campaign, allegedly told the FBI he was not working on behalf of Clinton when he presented the agency with supposedly incriminating documents.
In the filing, Special Counsel John Durham alleges that Sussmann was working on behalf of the Clinton campaign and an unnamed “technology executive” at a US tech firm when he submitted “purported data” and “white papers” to then-FBI General Counsel James Baker in September 2016. They apparently pointed to a “covert communications channel” between the Trump Organization and Russia-based Alfa Bank (identified as “Russian Bank-1”).
Highlighting Sussmann’s “billing records,” Durham alleges that he had “repeatedly billed the Clinton Campaign for his work on the Russian Bank-1 allegations.” This involved an unnamed lawyer working with the campaign, the tech executive (identified as “Tech Executive-1”), an investigative firm, several cyber-researchers, and employees at “multiple internet companies,” the motion states.
It alleges that the executive “exploited his access to non-public and/or proprietary Internet data” and tasked researchers at an unnamed US university to “mine Internet data” so as to create “an inference” and “narrative” linking Trump to Russia. The executive claimed to be working “to please certain VIPs.”
While many US media outlets pointed to the Alfa Bank claims as proof of Trump’s “collusion” with the Kremlin, the FBI found that the email server in question was run by an advertising agency that sent out promotional emails for Trump’s hotels, among other things.
Among the internet data exploited was “domain name system (DNS) Internet traffic” from Trump Tower, Trump’s apartment building in New York City, and the White House, the filing states. It alleged that Tech Executive-1’s employer (identified as “Internet Company-1”) provided DNS resolution services to the White House – and accused the executive and his associates of exploiting this arrangement to mine data for “derogatory information” about Trump.
Then, in 2017, Sussmann apparently used this information to compile “an updated set of allegations” about Trump’s supposed Russian ties – noting “suspicious DNS lookups” and “Russian-made wireless phones” – to another US government agency, the motion states. Durham said he found “no support for these allegations” and added that some of the lookups occurred as early as 2014 during the Obama administration.
Demanding “reparations” be paid, Trump said in a statement on Saturday that the filing provided “indisputable evidence” that his campaign and presidency were “spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign” to “develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia.”
“This is a scandal far greater in scope and magnitude than Watergate and those who were involved in and knew about this spying operation should be subject to criminal prosecution,” he added, noting that there was a time when the alleged crime “would have been punishable by death.”
There has been no official response from Clinton as yet.
Last year, Sussmann’s attorneys said their client had “committed no crime,” calling charges against him “baseless [and] unprecedented.” Meanwhile, a lawyer for the person who fed Sussmann the Alfa Bank claims said that his client did not know his law firm had a relationship with the Clinton campaign “and was simply doing the right thing.”
Sussmann represented the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during proceedings related to the alleged 2016 hack of its computers. Both Clinton and the DNC had blamed Russia, but could not back up their accusations.
The original Russia probe ballooned into a two-year investigation led by then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who failed to produce evidence of collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia.
February 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular | Hillary Clinton, United States |
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A LOT has been said about the psychological effects of Covid on the public. Worryingly, the management of an unpredictably mutating virus which is always one step ahead is fraying the composure of our leaders too.
In the last couple of weeks, Presidents Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron have lashed out at fellow citizens who defy government orders to be vaccinated because they doubt ‘the science’ is truly settled in favour of a jab which has not been subjected to the full range of tests for side-effects later in life.
Exasperated by resistance to their Covid dictates, the American and French leaders appear to be losing their minds and their manners in the battle between the risks of vaccination and the risk of becoming serious ill with the virus.
Biden, alarmed by the refusal of one third of Americans to be vaccinated while Omicron is on the loose – though it causes mainly flu-like symptoms – warned them at Christmas that they faced a ‘winter of death’. Not one person in the US is yet known to have died from the latest Covid variant.
‘We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated, for themselves and their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm,’ quoth the ancient prophet of doom at a White House briefing whose message was that the unjabbed are not just selfish, they endanger the lives of everyone else.
Biden fingered them officially as ‘bad persons’, an unwelcome term in America where being a good person is vital to many. Not unnaturally, his presentation was badly received, reinforcing as it did the political polarisation between Democrats and Republicans, whom the former accuse of being the main vaccination hold-outs.
People, including essential workers, are being fired across America for defying Biden’s vaccination mandates.
Macron went further this week in a newspaper interview, threatening to ‘emmerder les non-vaccinés jusqu’au bout’. A polite translation of this is that he intends to go after them hard until they give in.
Emmerder – literally, to smear with sh*t – is a commonly used expression and is offensive or not according to context. Macron deliberately used it at its rudest and got the reaction he hoped for.
A session of parliament to discuss the government’s introduction of an updated vaccination passport restricting the freedom of movement of the unvaccinated was suspended in uproar when members heard the explosion of Macron’s little bomb.
He changed the focus of the argument from the virus to his brutal language. It’s likely to be a talking point for his opponents during his campaign for re-election this spring.
The fashion for politicians insulting the people they rely on to elect them was set by President Obama referring to ‘bitter clingers’ and Hillary Clinton describing some Midwestern voters as ‘deplorables’. (Those bad persons again.)
Biden and Macron forgot that these remarks were never forgiven by their targets and in Clinton’s case helped her to lose the race for the presidency.
Boris Johnson has at least grasped that, after two years of unprecedented exposure to the arbitrary powers of government, it is politically counter-productive to strain people’s patience with constant loosening and re-tightening of a Covid regime unknown in free countries outside wartime.
What is shocking about Biden, Macron, Obama and Clinton is the openness of their contempt for the people they govern as if being in public office conferred on them a wisdom that separated them from the common voters rather than the duty to lead with their consent.
There is nothing in our democratic system, adversarial as it is, that entitles politicians to treat us angrily. How many people, hearing the Biden and Macron anathemas, rushed out with arms bared to the needle?
I was vaccinated promptly myself because the odds pushed me that way. But I understand the motives of those who see obligatory vaccination – along with a sustained media campaign to vilify them – as a step too far by an overbearing state.
The certitudes of government’s own scientific advisers are offset by the determination of so many health professionals – including my own GP – to refuse the vaccines. What right do political leaders, themselves scientifically uneducated, have to threaten doctors and nurses who have daily experience of how medical treatments work and which can be trusted?
‘My body my choice’, the battle cry that worked so well for supporters of abortion, is suddenly off the table when the principle doesn’t suit politicians.
Biden and Macron weren’t showing leadership. What they expressed was frustration that, with all their power, they cannot force obedience on free-thinking citizens and anger that they will be blamed for the consequences. Macron especially forgot that the way we speak to each other in public matters. If you abuse people, they remember.
January 6, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine, Emmanuel Macron, Hillary Clinton, Human rights, Joe Biden, Obama |
2 Comments
Just follow the money
I have been following the story regarding the arrest of the sub-source who reportedly provided much of the apparently fabricated “intelligence” that went into the Christopher Steele dossier that was commissioned by Hillary Clinton and the DNC to get the dirt on GOP candidate Donald Trump. The real story is, of course, that the Democrats used their incumbency in the presidency to illegally involve various national security agencies in the process of defaming Trump, but for the time being we have to be content with the detention of Russian born Virginia resident Igor Danchenko for the crime of lying to the FBI.
My problem is that apart from the lying, which might be categorized in a file labeled “Everyone Lies to the Police,” I can’t quite figure out what the poor sod did that was criminal. I have reconstructed the sequence of events as follows: A business intelligence research firm Fusion GPS originally began researching Trump’s possible ties with Russia during the primary elections on behalf of a conservative who wanted to damage Trump’s campaign. After Trump became the Republican nominee, the original funder discontinued the search, but Fusion GPS was hired to keep going by the Perkins Coie law firm, which was working for the Hillary Clinton campaign. Christopher Steele, former MI-6 officer with a good reputation and reported access to information coming from Russia among other places, was sub-contracted by Fusion to assist in the effort by compiling a dossier containing defamatory material on Trump. As he had limited access to the kind of sleaze that was being sought, Steele contacted a known intelligence researcher who appeared to have such access. That was Danchenko, an analyst who specialized in Russia, whom Steele subsequently described as his “primary sub-source.” Danchenko had worked for the Washington DC based and Democratic Party linked Brookings Institution from 2005 until 2010 and was considered reliable.
Steele tasked Danchenko with finding out details about Trump and the Russians, to include possible contacts with the Kremlin’s intelligence services during a trip to Moscow in 2013 where the Trump Organization was hosting the Miss Universe contest. Danchenko did just that to Steele’s satisfaction, which also pleased Steele’s clients. The information collected subsequently was incorporated into what became the notorious Steele Dossier and was used by the FBI among others to make a case against Donald Trump and his associates. Among other initiatives, the Bureau used the file, which it knew to be largely innuendo, as justification to obtain a secret surveillance court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court (FISA) which authorized a wiretap targeting former Trump adviser Carter Page.
The only problem was that some of the information was fabricated, apparently by Danchenko, though that is by no means clear. The fake material included the notorious anecdote about Trump urinating on a prostitute in the bed that Barak Obama had slept in when he had visited the Russian capital. The assumption was that Trump would have been photographed in flagrante and the Kremlin would have been able to use the material to blackmail him. Other parts of the final dossier were also discovered to be false.
Making something up in a criminal investigation might be wrong, even criminal, but both Steele and Danchenko were private citizens with no legal status at the time. It was up to Steele to validate the information he was receiving. As for Danchenko, he was one of numerous former officials of various governments that have set themselves up profitably as intelligence peddlers. Some of them make a very nice living from it and many of them are quite willing to bend the facts to make a client happy. In my own experience in CIA I have run into many intelligence peddlers in Europe and the Middle East and they all use the same MO, namely mixing confirmable factual information with fabricated information so the former validates the latter. Since leaving government, I have also worked for three private security firms in the US and I would suggest that at least two of them would have been quite willing to slant what they were discovering to fit what the client was seeking to find. Such behavior is not at all unusual in the business since ex-intelligence officers and policemen tend to have a history of operating with little oversight and minimum accountability.
In this case, the charges cited in the indictment derived from statements made by Danchenko describing the sources he claimed to have used in providing sensitive information to Steele’s United Kingdom investigative firm with which he had contracted to prepare what are identified in the indictment as “Company Reports.” The implication would of course be that he had no actual sources and instead used his creative writing skills to come up with some suitable narratives relating to Trump’s behavior. Danchenko, for his part, reportedly claimed to investigators that it was Steele who overstated the information that had been provided from confidential Russian sources which was in the nature of “raw intelligence,” not a finished product. Be that as it may, the final dossier was a concoction of verifiable facts mixed with gossip, rumors and sheer speculation. Danchenko also denied knowing who was paying for the investigation even though it appears that he had had contact with several Clinton associates, most notably one Charles H. Dolan, who may have actually suggested to the investigators what type of “information” was being sought.
The arrest came as part of the special counsel John Durham investigation into Russiagate and related matters, most specifically the claim that Russian intelligence agencies had interfered in the 2016 election. This latest activity comes after Durham’s recent charging of Hillary Clinton’s former campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann in an indictment that alleges that he lied to federal investigators in September 2016, when he gave them information that he falsely claimed showed a connection between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank in Russia.
So the takeaway from all of this is that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians to subvert the 2016 election. On the contrary, it was Hillary Clinton’s campaign that sought the dirt on Trump and used a largely fraudulent dossier to make its case. And, oh yes, President Barack Obama knew exactly what was going on, which led to the completely illegal involvement of the intelligence and law enforcement federal agencies. And you can bet that if Obama knew, so did his Vice President Joe Biden. And the former head of CIA John Brennan and FBI head James Comey, who corruptly engaged their agencies in the conspiracy, are still walking free instead of in jail where they should be. And as for Hillary… I will leave that up to the reader.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
November 23, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | CIA, FBI, Hillary Clinton, United States |
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The indictment by Special Counsel John Durham of Igor Danchenko for lying to the FBI demonstrates conclusively the Steele dossier was wholly untrue. Clinton paid for the dossier to be created and Clinton people supplied the fodder. Steele, working with journalists, pushed the dossier into the hands of the FBI to try to derail the Trump campaign. When that failed, the dossier was used to attack the elected president of the United States. The whole thing was the actual and moral equivalent of a Cold War op where someone was targeted by the FBI with fake photos of them in bed with a prostitute.
Start with a quick review of what Durham uncovered about the most destructive political assassination since Kennedy.
Christopher Steele, paid by the Clinton campaign (after Clinton’s denial, it took a year for congressional investigators to uncover the dossier was commissioned by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, working for the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, paid through the Perkins-Coie law firm) did no investigative work. Instead, his reputation as a former British intelligence officer was purchased to validate a dossier of lies and then to traffic those lies to the FBI and journalists.
Durham’s investigation confirms one of Steele’s key “sources” is the now-arrested Danchenko, a Russian émigré living in the U.S. Steele was introduced to the Russian by Fiona Hill, then of the Brookings Institute (Hill would go on to play a key role in the Ukraine impeachment scam.) Danchenko completely made up most of what he told Steele about Trump-Russian collusion. What he did not make up himself he was spoon fed by Charles Dolan, a long-time Clinton hack and campaign regular. Ironically, Dolan had close ties not only to the Clintons but to the Russians as well; he and the public relations firm where he worked represented the Russian government and were registered as foreign agents for Russia. Dolan is credited with, among other things, making up the pee tape episode. Dolan also fed bogus info to Olga Galkina, another Russian who passed the information to Danchenko for inclusion in the dossier. Galkina noted in e-mails she was expecting Dolan to get her a job in the Hillary administration. Steele, a life-long Russia and intelligence expert, never questioned or verified anything he was told.
In short: Clinton pays for the dossier, Steele fills it with lies fed to him by a Clinton PR stooge through Russian cutouts, and the FBI swallowed the whole story. There never was a Russiagate. The only campaign which colluded with Russia was Clinton’s. And Democrats, knowing this, actually had the guts to claim it was Trump who obstructed justice.
That the dossier was a sham was evident to anyone who ever read a decent spy novel. It was a textbook information op and The American Conservative, without any access to the documents Durham now has, saw through it years ago, as did many other non-MSM outlets. See here (2/5/2018). Here (2/15/2018). Here (6/15/2018.) Here (3/25/2019.) Here (12/11/2019) and more. What was obvious from the publicly available information was, well, obvious to everyone but the FBI.
The dossier was the flimsy excuse the FBI used to justify a full-on investigation unprecedented in a democracy into the Trump campaign. That included electronic surveillance (obtained by the FBI lying directly to the FISA court and presenting Steele’s lies as corroborating evidence,) the use of undercover operatives, false flag ops with foreign diplomats and case officers, and prosecution threats over minor procedural acts designed to legally torture low level Trump staffers (Carter Page, who the FBI knew was a CIA source, and George Papadopoulos) into “flipping” on the candidate.
Page in particular was a nobody with nothing, but the FBI needed him. Agents “believed at the time they approached the decision point on a second FISA renewal that, based upon the evidence already collected, Carter Page was a distraction in the investigation, not a key player in the Trump campaign, and was not critical to the overarching investigation.” They renewed the warrants anyway, three times, due to their value under the “two hop” rule. The FBI can extend surveillance two hops from its target, so if Carter Page called Michael Flynn who called Trump, all of those calls are legally open to monitoring. Page was a handy little bug used for a fishing expedition.
What’s left is only to answer was the FBI really that inept that they could not see a textbook op run against them or that the FBI knew early on they had been handed a pile of rubbish but needed some sort of legal cover for their own operation, spying on Trump, and thus decided to look the other way at the obvious shortcomings of Steele’s work.
“The fact pattern that John Durham is methodically establishing shows what James Comey and Andrew McCabe likely knew from day one the Steele dossier was politically-driven nonsense created at the behest of the Clinton campaign,” said Kevin Brock, the FBI’s former intelligence chief. “And yet they knowingly ran with its false information to obtain legal process against an American citizen. They defrauded not just a federal court, they defrauded the FBI and the American people.”
The 2019 Horowitz Report, a look into the FBI’s conduct by the Justice Department Inspector General, made clear the FBI knew the dossier was bunk and purposefully lied to the FISA court in claiming instead the dossier was backed up by investigative news reports, which themselves were secretly based on the dossier. The FBI knew Steele, who was on their payroll as a paid informant, had created a classic intel officer’s information loop, secretly becoming his own corroborating source, and gleefully looked the other way because it supported their goals.
How bad was it? At no point in handling info accusing the sitting president of being a Russian agent, what would have been the most significant political event in American history, did the FBI seriously ask themselves “So exactly where did this information come from, specific sources and methods please, and how could those sources have known it?” Were all the polygraphs broken? The FBI learned Danchenko was Steele’s primary source in 2017, via the Carter Page tap, and moved ahead anyway.
From the FBI’s perspective, turning a blind eye was not even that risky a gambit. They were so certain they would succeed (FBI agents and illicit lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page exchanged texts saying “Page: “Trump’s not ever going to become president, right? Strzok: No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”) and Hillary would ascend to the Oval Office that they felt they would have top cover for their evil. After Trump won and the FBI’s coup planners shifted to impeachment, they held on to their top cover as James Comey presented himself as the man on the cross, aided by a MSM which cared only about a) ending Donald Trump and b) cranking up their ratings with dollops of the dossier’s innuendo. A mass media that bought lies about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and then promised “never again” did it again.
If a genie granted me a wish, I would want a conversation with Robert Mueller under some sort of truth spell. Did Mueller “miss” all the lies in his lengthy investigation, hoping to protect his beloved FBI? Or did he see himself as a reluctant white knight, having realized during his investigation the real crime committed was coup planning by the FBI and thinking that by ignoring their actions but clearing Trump he would bring the whole affair to its least worst conclusion?
I suspect Mueller realized he had been handed a coup-in-progress to either abet (by indicting Trump on demonstrably false information) or bury. He could not bring himself to destroy his beloved FBI. But the former Marine could also not bring himself to become the Colin Powell of his generation, squandering his hard won reputation to validate something he knew was not true. Mueller split the difference, and kept silent on the FBI and left Trump to his own fates.
This is the third indictment by Durham. Danchenko’s indictment, Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann’s, and FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith’s depict criminal efforts to get Trump. The arrest of Danchenko makes clear Durham knows the whole story. What will he do with it? Will he walk his indictments up the ladder ever-closer to Hillary? Will he proceed sideways, leaving Hillary but moving deeper into the FBI? Maybe see if Fiona Hill connects the failed Russiagate coup she played a pivotal role in with the failed Ukrainegate impeachment she played a pivotal role in? Or will he use the stage of Congressional hearings as a way to bypass Joe Biden’s Justice Department and throw the real decision making back to the voters?
History will record this chapter of America’s story as one of its more sordid affairs. Only time however will tell if the greater tale is one of how close we came to ending our democracy via an intelligence agency coup, or whether Russiagate was just a nascent practice run by the FBI, on a longer road which leads to our demise a president or two later. For those who belittled the idea of the Deep State, this is what it looks like exposed, all pink and naked.
November 22, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | FBI, Hillary Clinton |
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If anyone still doubts whether former US president Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election, new revelations this week should put the question to bed for good, with an FBI document showing it to be a fabrication.
The revelations in question take the form of an indictment laid against a Russian citizen living in the United States by the name of Igor Danchenko. The accusation against him is that he lied to the FBI when being questioned about his role in the “Russiagate” affair. But the real scandal is not in the untruths he supposedly told officers, but in what the charges reveal about how Russiagate came into being.
The origin of the scandal was the infamous “Steele dossier,” assembled by former British spy Christopher Steele, who had been commissioned by the American company Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Trump on behalf of the US Democratic Party. Steele then paid Danchenko to do the work for him.
What the indictment reveals for the first time is that Danchenko in turn made use of the services of somebody referred to as “PR Executive-1,” who has been identified by the press as one Chuck Dolan. And it’s here that things begin to get truly interesting.
As the charge sheet states, during his career Dolan has served as “chairman of a national Democratic political organization,” “state chairman of President Clinton’s 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns,” and “an adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.” And so it turns out that the allegations that Trump was a Russian agent hinged on a report commissioned by the Democratic Party, which relied heavily on information provided by somebody who was once an official in that party. The corrupt circularity of it is quite extraordinary.
Even stranger, the source of the claims that Trump was too close to the Russians was somebody who was very close to them himself. For as the indictment says, Dolan was employed “to handle public relations for the Russian government and a state-owned energy company. PR Executive-1 served as a lead consultant during that project and frequently interacted with senior Russian Federation leadership.” It turns out that it wasn’t the Republicans but the Democrats who were chummy with the Russians. The irony!
Danchenko’s relationship with Dolan exposes a lot about where the claims in the Steele dossier came from. Danchenko was quite clear about his purpose, telling Dolan that he wanted to hear “Any thought, rumour, allegation. I am working on a related project against Trump.” Clearly, this wasn’t a piece of neutral research, but a hatchet job for which any old rumour would do.
But if rumour wasn’t available, fabrication would do fine too. This becomes clear in the parts of the indictment dealing with the famous “pee-pee tape” – an alleged video-recording of Trump cavorting with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel while they urinated on the bed in the presidential suite.
The FBI document describes how Dolan and someone known as “Organizer-1” arranged a conference in Moscow at the hotel in question, in preparation for which they met the hotel manager and a member of staff and received a tour of the building, including the presidential suite. The manager and staff member are thus identified as the persons mentioned in the Steele dossier as “Source E” and “Source F,” who supposedly revealed the existence of the infamous videotape.
But that’s not all – the indictment says that although a hotel staff member did tell Dolan and Organizer-1 that Trump had stayed in the presidential suite, “according to both Organizer-1 and PR Executive-1, the staff member did not mention any sexual or salacious activity.” In short, the story of the “pee-pee tape” is a fabrication, pure and simple.
It’s not the only blow the document deals to the Russiagate story. It reveals that Dolan didn’t possess any great insider information. For instance, Danchenko wrote in the dossier that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had been fired due to infighting in the Republican camp, citing Dolan as having told him that he learned this from a meeting with a “GOP insider.” But Dolan then told the FBI that in reality he “fabricated the fact of the meeting in his communications with Danchenko.”
Fabrication once again. A pattern is beginning to emerge. And it continues. The dossier made hay with claims of a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. Danchenko told the FBI that his source was an anonymous telephone call from someone whom he believed was “Chamber President-1,” identified as Sergei Millian, the head of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce.
But as the FBI discovered, Danchenko never spoke to Millian at all. Again, the claim to have received information from a high-placed source was false. But even if it had been true, it wouldn’t have been much better. Anonymous phone calls are hardly reliable sources. Yet somehow, this provided the basis for allegations of a deep conspiracy at the heart of the American political system. How anybody ever believed any of it is hard to imagine.
But believe it they did, including the FBI. Again and again in its indictment of Danchenko, the FBI accuses him of having serious impeded the course of justice with his false statements. Danchenko’s fabrications, the FBI complains, helped send it off on wild goose chases while preventing it from properly investigating the Russiagate allegations.
In making these claims, however, the FBI is being disingenuous. The organisation’s real errors came long before it got its hands on Danchenko, when it used the dossier to investigate Trump and, among other things, request the wiretapping of one-time Trump adviser Carter Page on the entirely false grounds that he was a Russian agent. The real problem was not that Danchenko lied to the FBI (if he did), but that the FBI believed the nonsense that he published in the dossier.
The truth is this: the Steele dossier was obvious garbage from the get-go. Sensible commentators pointed this out the moment it was published. Yet the FBI believed it and invested considerable resources in following up its claims, in the process blackening the name of innocents, such as Carter Page. That is entirely the FBI’s fault, no one else’s.
Unfortunately, in all this sorry affair, it’s the small fish who end up being caught – people like Danchenko, whose role in this sordid business was not insignificant but ultimately fairly minor compared with that of the security officials, journalists, and politicians who took the rubbish he produced and ran with it. Sadly, one doubts that any of them will ever be held to account.
Paul Robinson is a professor at the University of Ottawa. He writes about Russian and Soviet history, military history and military ethics, and is the author of the Irrussianality blog.
November 6, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | FBI, Hillary Clinton, United States |
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Former MI6 man Christipher Steele is the subject of an obscenely vapid ABC documentary, with a contemptible interview by George Stephanopoulos that’s so deferential it’s like watching a first date that should be an interrogation.
Just as MI6 super spy James Bond is back in theatres with No Time to Die, former MI6 agent Christopher Steele is back in the spotlight with the story that refuses to die, in an ABC ‘documentary’ titled Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier, now streaming on Hulu.
Steele came to fame as the shadowy force behind the Steele Dossier, the document which was the spark that lit the Trump-Russia collusion fire that was doused in gasoline by obsessive partisan media coverage and numerous, spurious government investigations for the last five years. The dossier claimed that then-candidate Trump was “colluding with Moscow” and that those devious Russians had “kompromat” on Trump in the golden form of a “pee tape.”
Steele’s “coming out of the shadows” consists of him sitting down with George Stephanopoulos and having a cuddle session on fancy sofas in a posh apartment.
Stephanopoulos is the perfect choice for the softball interview since he and Steele have a lot in common – they’ve both worked for the Clintons. Stephanopoulos as adviser to President Bill Clinton and Steele as de facto dirt-finder for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
ABC tried to stretch the excruciatingly thin gruel of this supposed ‘interview’ into an hour-long documentary by adding talking heads from their own newsroom. They failed, as the end result is a one-hour show that is hilariously shallow and vapid, even by ABC News standards.
Out of the Shadows spends considerably more time rehashing the “history” of Russia, Vladimir Putin and Trump than it does actually talking to Steele. Russia is deemed “a rogue state virus spreading westward with its villainy,” Putin a “KGB killer,” and Trump a “threat to American democracy.” In other words, it’s standard establishment media talking points.
Steele’s background is somewhat explored, but being the ever-diligent super spy that he is, Steele never explicitly states that he worked for MI6. I guess he doesn’t want to blow his cover.
What Steele actually says in this interview is of strikingly minimal impact. Thanks to Stephanopoulos’ anti-journalistic, anti-adversarial, deferential approach, no new ground is broken.
It’s well-known that Steele didn’t just compile the dossier, he actively pushed it to media outlets, in effect working to try and scupper Trump’s election campaign. The fact that he was ostensibly working for Democrats at the time certainly makes it appear as if he was a part of a wider disinformation/interference operation, but of course that’s a topic Stephanopoulos whistles past in this patty-cake chat.
Steele admits to no wrongdoing or error, despite the U.S. intelligence agencies “eviscerating” his findings after thorough investigation, and the FBI labelling him “untrustworthy.”
The issue of the “sources” Steele uses doesn’t get the attention it deserves either, as it’s reported that he only used one “key collector,” but Steele is quick to make clear it was “one collector” but not “one source.” That seems like a distinction without a difference.
As the documentary reports, that one collector was not a person in Moscow, but actually someone in Washington DC whose name is not revealed. The Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz reported this person claimed that the information being given to Steele was “word of mouth and hearsay.” In other words, Steele was acting less as an intelligence expert seeking truth with his dossier than he was being a gossip columnist spreading rumor and innuendo.
Steele’s declaration, “I stand by the work we did, the sources we had, and the professionalism we applied to it,” is as devoid of substance as the rest of the interview.
The most damning aspect comes toward the end, and even that is soft pedaled, when Stephanopoulos asks Steele about both the dossier’s allegation that Trump counsel Michael Cohen went to Prague to meet with Russian intelligence and about the pee tape.
Cohen denies a Prague meeting ever took place, and since he has now flipped against Trump, one would assume he’s telling the truth. But Steele’s resolve remains, as he conjures up a wild scenario where Cohen is still lying because he wants to avoid being charged with treason.
Stephanopoulos, of course, lets this utter lunacy pass almost without notice. He could’ve asked Steele how exactly Cohen got to Prague, since his passport shows no travel to the Czech Republic. Or pressed Steele to provide details or at least a passable explanation for how that meeting could possibly have taken place? But he didn’t, he just smiled and continued playing footsie with Steele.
The ‘pee tape’ is the most salacious accusation in the dossier, and despite it never surfacing and no evidence it exists, Steele still stands by the claim…sort of. He says that the tape “probably does” exist but that he wouldn’t “put 100% certainty on it.”
When Stephanopoulos asks why the tape hasn’t come out, Steele replies that “it hasn’t needed to be released…because I think the Russians felt they’d got pretty good value out of Donald Trump when he was president.”
Look, I loathe Trump, always have and always will, but this sounds like the ravings of someone deeply infected with a ferocious case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, which is maybe why he is still taken seriously by the equally afflicted establishment media.
The more you know about Steele, the more readily apparent it becomes that he’s an absolute charlatan and bullshit artist masquerading as a serious intelligence expert. He’s no James Bond, he’s not even George Smiley. He’s more like a cross between Mr. Bean and Inspector Clouseau, who should, like this vacant and vacuous interview/documentary, be relentlessly ridiculed and righteously disrespected.
October 20, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Film Review | Hillary Clinton, MI6, UK, United States |
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