The Russia Hoax Was Debunked Once-and-For-All with Durham’s Indictment
- Thread starter Wolverine
- Start date
Tranquillus in Exile
New member
National Review apparently thinks that the FBI investigation was triggered by the Steele dossier. It was not. This was the timeline:
October 2015: conservative political website The Washington Free Beacon hires Fusion GPS to conduct research on Trump.
April 2016: an attorney for the DNC hires Fusion GPS to investigate Trump after the Free Beacon stops its backing.
June 2016: Fusion GPS subcontracts Steele's firm to begin compiling the dossier.
July 2016: the FBI opens an investigation into the Kremlin’s attempt to influence the election, including whether Donald Trump’s campaign was involved in those efforts.
(The immediate cause was George Papadopoulos telling an Australian diplomat that “the Trump campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the campaign through the anonymous release of information that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton.”)
https://www.factcheck.org/2017/06/t...ign associates were involved in those efforts
Last edited:
You jest.
When have the dims EVER let go of any pony they were riding into the ground ???
ExpressLane
Verified User
Like CNN or MSNBS
ExpressLane
Verified User
He has three indictments. Little fish given evidence on bigger fish.
John Durham Is Getting Close to the Jugular
COMMENTARY
.By Charles Lipson - RCP ContributorNovember 08, 2021
John Durham Is Getting Close to the Jugular(AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
Last week, John Durham’s grand jury issued its third criminal indictment in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. The person who was arrested may be obscure; the news may have been buried after Virginia’s bombshell election results; but Durham’s move is a big deal. It shows that the special counsel’s probe is methodically unraveling a huge conspiracy, seemingly engineered by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and implicating James Comey’s FBI, either as a willing participant or as utterly incompetent boobs.
The latest indictment also damages the mainstream media, which is why so many news outlets have ignored or underplayed it. After all, they broadcast a false story for years and are none too eager to revisit it. Other losers are the prosecutors assembled by Robert Mueller, most of them Democrats, who had reams of this damaging information and ignored it.
What Durham and a few intrepid reporters are uncovering may well be the most ambitious dirty trick pulled in an American election and its aftermath. The question now is whether Durham can expose the full extent of this malfeasance and charge those who planned and executed it.
Durham’s latest indictment charges Igor Danchenko (pictured) with lying multiple times to the FBI. Danchenko, who worked at the Brookings Institution as a Russian expert, may not be a household name, but he was a crucial player in concocting the false story that Donald Trump was collaborating with the Kremlin to win the White House. The real conspiracy, it turns out, was aimed at Trump and was conducted by the Clinton campaign and her longtime associates. It was financed jointly by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Some leaked emails suggested it was approved by the candidate herself. The FBI continued running with it long after it had ample evidence to know it was a concoction. House Democrats ran with it even longer, basking in fulsome, uncritical media coverage. All of it was false.
The Danchenko indictment matters because his bogus information was the heart of the “Steele dossier,” which, in turn, was the heart of the anti-Trump investigation. The dossier was compiled by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, who had been hired by people working for Clinton. Steele claimed his information about Trump, including salacious sexual allegations, came from Russian sources. It didn’t. It came from Danchenko, who was working at a Washington think tank. As Danchenko admitted to the FBI, much of what he told Steele was old rumors or exaggerations. Some of it appears to have been simply fabricated. Steele incorporated it, and the Democrats deployed it.
The FBI interviewed Danchenko multiple times in January 2017, around the time Trump was taking office. Comey’s FBI had already received the dossier and his agents were trying to verify its allegations. They couldn’t do so, and Danchenko’s admissions told them why. His interrogation should have immediately stopped the FBI from using the dossier to investigate Trump. So should a warning from Bruce Ohr, the highest-ranking career official in the Department of Justice, that Steele was strongly biased. The FBI blew right through these red lights.
The bureau continued to use the bogus information in applying for secret warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to spy on Carter Page and, through him, on others connected with Trump. Officials told the court, falsely, that the warrant information was reliable and verified when they knew it was neither.
What the warrants say, in essence, is, “We need to spy on Carter Page because we think he’s an enemy agent.” But the FBI already knew he wasn’t. That means they were trolling for other information. How did the FBI know Page was on our side? Because they asked the CIA and were told, quite explicitly, that Page was helping them, not the Kremlin. The CIA gave that exculpatory information to FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, who altered the message to say Page was not working for the CIA. His alternation was criminal, and he plead guilty after Durham charged him.
The story gets worse. Although Clinesmith altered the CIA message for FBI use, he also gave his superiors the CIA’s true communication. So, his bosses knew the real story. They weren’t interested in the truth, which they kept secret from the FISA court to continuing spying on Page. If there is any justice left in Washington, those responsible for this travesty will be held criminally liable. Page may well have a civil case against them, too.
As the FBI blundered forward on its political mission, it made other revealing missteps. The most important was Director Comey’s meeting with the incoming president in early January 2017. Comey told Trump the FBI had acquired some damning materials about him but emphasized they were still unverified. As Comey’s own aides warned him, that communication could be seen as a kind of blackmail threat, the kind that marked J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure.
Comey’s meeting with the president had another major consequence. Until then, even anti-Trump news outlets had been wary about mentioning the dossier (which the Clinton team had been shopping to them) because they couldn’t actually verify any of the vital details. That reticence changed with Comey’s briefing, which was news in its own right. The story now became, “FBI chief briefs president-elect Trump about salacious dossier, revealing damning info Kremlin could use to blackmail Trump.” One online outlet, BuzzFeed, went further. It published the full Steele dossier, and the media frenzy began.
Remember, this whole story was concocted and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and fed to the FBI and the media by her attorneys and associates. The FBI, which should have been able to quickly prove the story was false, plodded on with its investigation and fed the frenzy.
Although the dossier was commissioned to sink Trump in November, it was still useful after he won the election. Trump’s adversaries could exploit it to hamstring his embryonic administration, and that’s exactly what they did. With the whole-hearted backing of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff spent three years beating the drum of the “Russia collusion” hoax. Schiff’s constant media appearances claiming he had conclusive evidence of Trump-Russia collaboration continued long after he had received classified briefings that demolished his story. The briefer was former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, and he has confirmed those meetings with Schiff and his Senate counterpart, Mark Warner. No matter to Schiff, who kept repeating his claims and pursuing his full-scale investigation. First the verdict; then the inquiry. It was all part of a four-year-long battle, first to prevent Trump’s election, then to undermine his presidency, and finally to damage his chances for reelection.
The Clinton team launched this operation with professional expertise. The goal was to produce a powerful anti-Trump story, using whatever materials they could, then share it with the media (to smear Trump) and the FBI (to launch a major investigation and ensnare Trump). Ideally, the campaign’s involvement would be hidden, removed from the damning report by several layers of lawyers, opposition researchers, camp followers, and flacks.
To provide that insulation, the campaign used attorney Marc Elias, then at Perkins Coie law firm in Washington (where the recently indicted Michael Sussmann was a colleague), to hire an opposition-research firm, Fusion GPS. That firm, headed by former reporters Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, in turn hired Steele, a Brit who had formerly worked for his country’s intelligence services, to produce the damning dossier. To translate some Russian materials, Fusion GPS hired Nellie Ohr, whose husband, Bruce, learned how biased Steele was and told the FBI to treat Steele and his information warily.
Bureau agents ignored that early warning and all the others. They quickly learned Steele’s material was a mirage, thanks to their interviews with Danchenko. They also confirmed that Steele’s dossier depended on Danchenko, so its claims of “Russian sourcing” were false. By interviewing Danchenko’s own sources, they learned that their third-hand statements, which were used in the dossier, were mainly rumors and “bar talk.”
The prosecutorial team assembled by Robert Mueller should have known all this, too. They had complete access to this exculpatory FBI material on day one and ignored it. A year and a half later, when Mueller himself finally testified before Congress, he didn’t even know what Fusion GPS was. By that point, Mueller seemed to have genuine difficulty remembering the details of his own investigation. His team of attorneys had no such excuse. Hired by Mueller’s top deputy, Andrew Weissmann, they were among the country’s sharpest and toughest prosecutors — and the most partisan. The more Durham uncovers, the worse the Mueller team will look.
Reviewing this evidence, Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal has concluded the Steele dossier is misnamed. It should be called the “Clinton dossier,” she says, since Hillary commissioned it, paid for it, and had her aides feed it to the media, the State Department, and the FBI. It was a full-scale disinformation campaign — coherent, well-organized, and well-funded. It was rotten to the core.
The question now is whether John Durham can find enough evidence to charge the ones who planned and executed it. The charging documents he filed for Danchenko and Sussmann are far more extensive than the necessary minimum. They suggest that Durham has compiled extensive evidence about a broader conspiracy. Will he settle for the capillaries now that he has the jugular in view?
Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security. He can be reached at charles.lipson@gmail.com.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/a...m_is_getting_close_to_the_jugular_146702.html
COMMENTARY
.By Charles Lipson - RCP ContributorNovember 08, 2021
John Durham Is Getting Close to the Jugular(AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
Last week, John Durham’s grand jury issued its third criminal indictment in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. The person who was arrested may be obscure; the news may have been buried after Virginia’s bombshell election results; but Durham’s move is a big deal. It shows that the special counsel’s probe is methodically unraveling a huge conspiracy, seemingly engineered by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and implicating James Comey’s FBI, either as a willing participant or as utterly incompetent boobs.
The latest indictment also damages the mainstream media, which is why so many news outlets have ignored or underplayed it. After all, they broadcast a false story for years and are none too eager to revisit it. Other losers are the prosecutors assembled by Robert Mueller, most of them Democrats, who had reams of this damaging information and ignored it.
What Durham and a few intrepid reporters are uncovering may well be the most ambitious dirty trick pulled in an American election and its aftermath. The question now is whether Durham can expose the full extent of this malfeasance and charge those who planned and executed it.
Durham’s latest indictment charges Igor Danchenko (pictured) with lying multiple times to the FBI. Danchenko, who worked at the Brookings Institution as a Russian expert, may not be a household name, but he was a crucial player in concocting the false story that Donald Trump was collaborating with the Kremlin to win the White House. The real conspiracy, it turns out, was aimed at Trump and was conducted by the Clinton campaign and her longtime associates. It was financed jointly by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Some leaked emails suggested it was approved by the candidate herself. The FBI continued running with it long after it had ample evidence to know it was a concoction. House Democrats ran with it even longer, basking in fulsome, uncritical media coverage. All of it was false.
The Danchenko indictment matters because his bogus information was the heart of the “Steele dossier,” which, in turn, was the heart of the anti-Trump investigation. The dossier was compiled by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, who had been hired by people working for Clinton. Steele claimed his information about Trump, including salacious sexual allegations, came from Russian sources. It didn’t. It came from Danchenko, who was working at a Washington think tank. As Danchenko admitted to the FBI, much of what he told Steele was old rumors or exaggerations. Some of it appears to have been simply fabricated. Steele incorporated it, and the Democrats deployed it.
The FBI interviewed Danchenko multiple times in January 2017, around the time Trump was taking office. Comey’s FBI had already received the dossier and his agents were trying to verify its allegations. They couldn’t do so, and Danchenko’s admissions told them why. His interrogation should have immediately stopped the FBI from using the dossier to investigate Trump. So should a warning from Bruce Ohr, the highest-ranking career official in the Department of Justice, that Steele was strongly biased. The FBI blew right through these red lights.
The bureau continued to use the bogus information in applying for secret warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to spy on Carter Page and, through him, on others connected with Trump. Officials told the court, falsely, that the warrant information was reliable and verified when they knew it was neither.
What the warrants say, in essence, is, “We need to spy on Carter Page because we think he’s an enemy agent.” But the FBI already knew he wasn’t. That means they were trolling for other information. How did the FBI know Page was on our side? Because they asked the CIA and were told, quite explicitly, that Page was helping them, not the Kremlin. The CIA gave that exculpatory information to FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, who altered the message to say Page was not working for the CIA. His alternation was criminal, and he plead guilty after Durham charged him.
The story gets worse. Although Clinesmith altered the CIA message for FBI use, he also gave his superiors the CIA’s true communication. So, his bosses knew the real story. They weren’t interested in the truth, which they kept secret from the FISA court to continuing spying on Page. If there is any justice left in Washington, those responsible for this travesty will be held criminally liable. Page may well have a civil case against them, too.
As the FBI blundered forward on its political mission, it made other revealing missteps. The most important was Director Comey’s meeting with the incoming president in early January 2017. Comey told Trump the FBI had acquired some damning materials about him but emphasized they were still unverified. As Comey’s own aides warned him, that communication could be seen as a kind of blackmail threat, the kind that marked J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure.
Comey’s meeting with the president had another major consequence. Until then, even anti-Trump news outlets had been wary about mentioning the dossier (which the Clinton team had been shopping to them) because they couldn’t actually verify any of the vital details. That reticence changed with Comey’s briefing, which was news in its own right. The story now became, “FBI chief briefs president-elect Trump about salacious dossier, revealing damning info Kremlin could use to blackmail Trump.” One online outlet, BuzzFeed, went further. It published the full Steele dossier, and the media frenzy began.
Remember, this whole story was concocted and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and fed to the FBI and the media by her attorneys and associates. The FBI, which should have been able to quickly prove the story was false, plodded on with its investigation and fed the frenzy.
Although the dossier was commissioned to sink Trump in November, it was still useful after he won the election. Trump’s adversaries could exploit it to hamstring his embryonic administration, and that’s exactly what they did. With the whole-hearted backing of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff spent three years beating the drum of the “Russia collusion” hoax. Schiff’s constant media appearances claiming he had conclusive evidence of Trump-Russia collaboration continued long after he had received classified briefings that demolished his story. The briefer was former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, and he has confirmed those meetings with Schiff and his Senate counterpart, Mark Warner. No matter to Schiff, who kept repeating his claims and pursuing his full-scale investigation. First the verdict; then the inquiry. It was all part of a four-year-long battle, first to prevent Trump’s election, then to undermine his presidency, and finally to damage his chances for reelection.
The Clinton team launched this operation with professional expertise. The goal was to produce a powerful anti-Trump story, using whatever materials they could, then share it with the media (to smear Trump) and the FBI (to launch a major investigation and ensnare Trump). Ideally, the campaign’s involvement would be hidden, removed from the damning report by several layers of lawyers, opposition researchers, camp followers, and flacks.
To provide that insulation, the campaign used attorney Marc Elias, then at Perkins Coie law firm in Washington (where the recently indicted Michael Sussmann was a colleague), to hire an opposition-research firm, Fusion GPS. That firm, headed by former reporters Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, in turn hired Steele, a Brit who had formerly worked for his country’s intelligence services, to produce the damning dossier. To translate some Russian materials, Fusion GPS hired Nellie Ohr, whose husband, Bruce, learned how biased Steele was and told the FBI to treat Steele and his information warily.
Bureau agents ignored that early warning and all the others. They quickly learned Steele’s material was a mirage, thanks to their interviews with Danchenko. They also confirmed that Steele’s dossier depended on Danchenko, so its claims of “Russian sourcing” were false. By interviewing Danchenko’s own sources, they learned that their third-hand statements, which were used in the dossier, were mainly rumors and “bar talk.”
The prosecutorial team assembled by Robert Mueller should have known all this, too. They had complete access to this exculpatory FBI material on day one and ignored it. A year and a half later, when Mueller himself finally testified before Congress, he didn’t even know what Fusion GPS was. By that point, Mueller seemed to have genuine difficulty remembering the details of his own investigation. His team of attorneys had no such excuse. Hired by Mueller’s top deputy, Andrew Weissmann, they were among the country’s sharpest and toughest prosecutors — and the most partisan. The more Durham uncovers, the worse the Mueller team will look.
Reviewing this evidence, Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal has concluded the Steele dossier is misnamed. It should be called the “Clinton dossier,” she says, since Hillary commissioned it, paid for it, and had her aides feed it to the media, the State Department, and the FBI. It was a full-scale disinformation campaign — coherent, well-organized, and well-funded. It was rotten to the core.
The question now is whether John Durham can find enough evidence to charge the ones who planned and executed it. The charging documents he filed for Danchenko and Sussmann are far more extensive than the necessary minimum. They suggest that Durham has compiled extensive evidence about a broader conspiracy. Will he settle for the capillaries now that he has the jugular in view?
Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security. He can be reached at charles.lipson@gmail.com.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/a...m_is_getting_close_to_the_jugular_146702.html
Yes, it does.
National Security Adviser Sullivan is 'foreign policy advisor' in former Clinton lawyer indictment
There is no indication that Sullivan is a target of Durham’s investigation, only that he received information from a campaign lawyer
By Jake Gibson , David Spunt | Fox News
Andy McCarthy on the implications of John Durham's latest indictments
Jake Sullivan, President Biden's White House national security adviser, is the "foreign policy advisor" referred to in the indictment of former Hillary Clinton presidential campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, according to two well-placed sources.
This is the closest Special Counsel John Durham's investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation has come to anyone directly associated with the Biden White House.
Sussmann was indicted for allegedly lying to the FBI on Sept. 16, and has pleaded not guilty to one count of making a false statement to a federal agent. This case came out of Durham’s probe into the origins of the Russia investigation.
Durham’s indictment alleges Sussmann told then-FBI General Counsel James Baker he was not doing work "for any client" when he requested and held a September 2016 meeting in which he provided evidence of a purported secret communications channel between then-candidate Donald Trump and Russia.
In fact, he later billed the Clinton campaign for the meeting, according to Durham's indictment. The FBI also looked into the story about the alleged link between the Trump presidential campaign and the Russian bank, it turned out to be bogus.
The Durham indictment lays out a scenario where an unnamed Clinton campaign lawyer, "exchanged emails with the Clinton Campaign’s campaign manager, communications director, and foreign policy advisor [Jake Sullivan] concerning the Russian Bank-1 allegations that Sussmann had recently shared," with an unnamed reporter.
Fox News has reached out to Sullivan’s office for comment. White House Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre referred Fox News to the Department of Justice and said the White House had no comment as of Tuesday. "I don't know anything about what you're you're just mentioning," Jean-Pierre said. "So I have to to talk to our team."
The Durham indictment also alleges that Sussmann was working on behalf of a tech industry executive, an American internet company and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.
Prosecutors say Sussmann's "lie" is important because it "misled the FBI General Counsel and other FBI personnel concerning the political nature of his work."
Another grand jury indictment was returned on Nov. 4 for Igor Danchenko, a Russian analyst who is accused of being the primary sub-source in the Steele dossier. He is charged with five counts of making false statements to the FBI and his next court appearance is scheduled for Wednesday.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/na...icy-advisor-former-clinton-lawyers-indictment
There is no indication that Sullivan is a target of Durham’s investigation, only that he received information from a campaign lawyer
By Jake Gibson , David Spunt | Fox News
Andy McCarthy on the implications of John Durham's latest indictments
Jake Sullivan, President Biden's White House national security adviser, is the "foreign policy advisor" referred to in the indictment of former Hillary Clinton presidential campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, according to two well-placed sources.
This is the closest Special Counsel John Durham's investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation has come to anyone directly associated with the Biden White House.
Sussmann was indicted for allegedly lying to the FBI on Sept. 16, and has pleaded not guilty to one count of making a false statement to a federal agent. This case came out of Durham’s probe into the origins of the Russia investigation.
Durham’s indictment alleges Sussmann told then-FBI General Counsel James Baker he was not doing work "for any client" when he requested and held a September 2016 meeting in which he provided evidence of a purported secret communications channel between then-candidate Donald Trump and Russia.
In fact, he later billed the Clinton campaign for the meeting, according to Durham's indictment. The FBI also looked into the story about the alleged link between the Trump presidential campaign and the Russian bank, it turned out to be bogus.
The Durham indictment lays out a scenario where an unnamed Clinton campaign lawyer, "exchanged emails with the Clinton Campaign’s campaign manager, communications director, and foreign policy advisor [Jake Sullivan] concerning the Russian Bank-1 allegations that Sussmann had recently shared," with an unnamed reporter.
Fox News has reached out to Sullivan’s office for comment. White House Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre referred Fox News to the Department of Justice and said the White House had no comment as of Tuesday. "I don't know anything about what you're you're just mentioning," Jean-Pierre said. "So I have to to talk to our team."
The Durham indictment also alleges that Sussmann was working on behalf of a tech industry executive, an American internet company and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.
Prosecutors say Sussmann's "lie" is important because it "misled the FBI General Counsel and other FBI personnel concerning the political nature of his work."
Another grand jury indictment was returned on Nov. 4 for Igor Danchenko, a Russian analyst who is accused of being the primary sub-source in the Steele dossier. He is charged with five counts of making false statements to the FBI and his next court appearance is scheduled for Wednesday.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/na...icy-advisor-former-clinton-lawyers-indictment
False.
I understand your response because you are one of those individuals that would rather have no mean tweets instead of what is currently going on in our country. Ever look at what is actually in the "infrastructure bill"?
You are foolish and your blind rage will cost you a lot of money and freedom.
How did you do with your declaration about the Virginia election results?
False
BidenPresident
Verified User
Perhaps. But gives us a chance to present the facts.
BidenPresident
Verified User
Agree with all. Well stated.
I hope he lives a long life behind bars. A grand jury is being convened in Georgia. Since that crime is on tape, it seems like Trump is going to have a hard time getting out of that one. And that's just for starters.