Paul C. Roberts says Durham prosecution of "Russia-gate" doomed fm beginning. Regardless, we must still fight these satanic globalist scum, suckers

Apollonian

Guest Columnist
Special Counsel John Durham’s Failed Russiagate Investigation

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS • JUNE 1, 2022

Link: https://www.unz.com/proberts/special-counsel-john-durhams-failed-russiagate-investigation/

Years ago I wrote that nothing would come of Special Counsel John Durham’s Russiagate investigation. Yesterday I was proven correct. A politicized Washington, D.C., jury threw out the only case Durham has brought against a seditious operation that began six years ago. Michael Sussman, a Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer was cleared of lying to a FBI agent, the only crime Durham could find of a massive operation orchestrated by the CIA and FBI to prevent President Trump from normalizing relations with Russia.

American foreign policy was set on a totally different course from Trump’s intent by the neoconservatives with the Wolfowitz doctrine of US hegemony. Russia has to be pushed back and overcome with problems that would drain and redirect the Kremlin’s energy away from opposing US unilateralism. After pouring $5 billion into preparing the overthrow of the Ukrainian government, the neoconservatives struck with the US-orchestrated “Maidan Revolution” in 2014 and installed an anti-Russian puppet government. Neither the military-security complex nor the neoconservatives were going to let President Trump proceed with his goal of normalizing relations with Russia. The relations were on schedule to be much worsened with the humiliation and isolation of Russia as the goal.
Trump, being a real estate developer with no sound or knowledgable advisers, had no idea of the challenge his normalization posed to the ruling establishment, Republicans as well as Democrats. Trump was a sitting duck.

It was obvious that Durham’s job was to make sure the Russiagate investigation failed. We have known for years of the FBI’s role in orchestrating Russiagate.
The facts are available. High level FBI officials were involved in the plot against Trump. The FBI lied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, prompting one judge to resign in protest. But Durham focused on low level Clinton campaign officials. Despite evidence, he didn’t even go after Hillary.

He couldn’t. Hillary on the stand would have said that the CIA and FBI brought her the issue and whereas it served her interest she did not originate Russiagate. Conservatives no less than liberals would not want to shake the public’s confidence in government by implicating the CIA and FBI in a plot to control US foreign policy and perhaps remove a president from office. There was no way there could be a real investigation of Russiagate. Indeed, Attorney General Bill Barr could have stopped the orchestration while he was in office, but he did not. Trump was out of step with the ruling establishment and had to be reduced to impotence and got rid off.


The Kremlin thinks that foreign policy is used to further a country’s national interest, but not in the United States. In the US foreign policy serves the power and profit of the military/security complex and the hegemonic ideology of the neoconservatives. A $1,000 billion annual military/security budget requires an enemy, not normalized relations. Clearly, the Kremlin has been in the dark about this and has been waiting patiently for the West to act rationally rather than in a suicidal manner.

The neoconservatives’ well thought-out plan to overthrow the Ukrainian government, install a puppet, and train and equip a neo-Nazi militia to shell the Russian population in the Donbass area of Ukraine was designed to provoke a Russian intervention that could be used to justify sanctions that would isolate Russia from Europe and justify more US missile bases on Russia’s borders. This plan was threatened by President Trump’s declared goal of normalizing relations with Russia. Trump had to go, because he positioned himself as an obstacle to a hegemonic foreign policy two decades in the making.

In the US the justice system is politicized. That Durham had to bring his case in the District of Columbia guaranteed that Sussman would not be convicted. I suspect that Sussman’s acquittal is the end of the Russiagate investigation. Just as the media demonization of police officer Derek Chauvin meant no jury would fail to convict him, the demonization of Russia means that no jury would rule against the belief that there was Russian collusion in our internal affairs.
 
Commentary on gross horrendous corruption by the satanic globalists, suckers--they have (nearly) INFINITE funds fm the central-bank (US Federal Reserve Bank) to pay lawyers, bribe judges and politicians, etc.

 
Corruption is not only in the criminals involved, but in the scum who call themselves, "the people"--just now too many over-populated "liberal" scum throughout the population. Doesn't mean there's lots of good people remaining, but the corruption still is now tooooo much, w. too many puke among the people--the culture is DOOMED.

 

The Questions John Durham Didn't Ask​

Link: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-questions-john-durham-didnt-ask/

As he wraps up his Russiagate investigation with the now-failed prosecution of Igor Danchenko, we are left only with questions about what John Durham failed to do.
Clinton Attorney Michael Sussman Acquitted Of Charge Of Lying To The F.B.I.


Peter Van Buren
Nov 28, 202212:05 AM

As he wraps up his Russiagate investigation with the now-failed prosecution of Igor Danchenko, we are left only with questions about what John Durham did not do.
The mainstream media barely covered this event, which began with an attempt to overthrow and dispose of the president of the United States. Best to start with what we learned. Durham established what FBI Director James Comey likely knew from near day one: the Steele dossier was politically driven nonsense created by the Clinton campaign. The FBI knowingly ran with its false information to begin a legal process against American citizens, to include Donald Trump as a candidate and as president. The FBI’s goal was to destroy candidate Trump—and, when that failed, destroy President Trump—by tagging him as a Russian agent.
The FBI as an organization knew for sure in early 2017, likely earlier, that Trump was not a Russian spy. But the bureau allowed the process to drift on through the Mueller report and all the rest. Mueller established a “dossier validation” unit that found none of Christopher Steele’s reporting could be corroborated. Mueller also shut down attempts by FBI agents to investigate a Clinton crony with high-level connections to Putin, and failed to complete an espionage investigation into Steele’s Russian primary sub-source.
Imagine how different Trump's term would have been had we all known with certainty what the FBI did. No Maddow, no walls closing in, no insinuations America's president was dealing cards to the Russians right out of the Oval Office. What was lost for the nation’s business we'll never know.
The 2019 Horowitz report, a look into the FBI’s conduct by the Justice Department Inspector General, now backed up by Durham's work, made clear the FBI knew the dossier was bunk and purposefully lied to the FISA court to keep its lies alive. 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 goal of spying on the Trump campaign, hoping to bring Trump down. Make no mistake, this was a failed coup attempt by the FBI.
How bad was it? At no point in handling information 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, “Exactly where did this information come from, specific sources and methods please, and how could those sources have known it?” The FBI learned Danchenko was Steele’s near-single, primary source in 2017, via the Carter Page tap, and moved ahead anyway. Were all the polygraphs broken? Was there no “?” key on their word processors?
And that is what we must focus on, what Durham failed to ask.
FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty to Durham's charge that Clinesmith lied on the FISA application for Carter Page to obtain a court's permission to electronically surveil Page and, via the two-hop rule, the bulk of Trump's inner circle. That rule allows those with a direct tap on one person (say, Carter Page) the legal ability to listen in two hops downstream. So if Page called Michael Cohen (one hop) and Cohen later called Trump (two hops) that would have constituted legal surveillance.
Page was a patsy, and the FBI knew it but needed a patsy bad enough to lie to create one. What was hidden from the courts was that the FBI knew Page was already a source, an agent, for the CIA and was not working for the Russians. It was with the tap on Carter Page that the whole investigation of Russiagate, Crossfire Hurricane, began. Did Clinesmith act alone in formulating his lies? Was he ordered to lie? Was his lie part of any broader pattern of lies on later FISA applications? Who worked with Clinesmith to create the FISA application and when was the lie incorporated? How many people above Clinesmith (McCabe, Comey, et al.) knew about the lie and played along? How far up the FBI chain did they know it was all constructed, that Page was a stooge alright, but one clearly documented as working for the American side? Durham never seemed to ask, and we the public may never know.
Though Clinton lawyer Michael Sussman, Durham prosecution number two, was found not guilty of perjury, his trial revealed all sorts of questions Durham allowed to fade out. Testimony showed Hillary Clinton herself signed off on the plan to push out the information about the link between Trump and Alfa Bank despite concerns that the connection was dubious at best. This was the first confirmation that Clinton was directly involved, in the instant the decision was made to feed the false Trump-Alfa story to the FBI and mainstream media. It followed WikiLeaks releasing information taken from the DNC servers that showed, inter alia, the Clinton campaign’s efforts to disparage Bernie Sanders. The leaks broke during the Democratic Convention and threatened to split the party. It was crisis time for the Democrats.
Concurrent with the WikiLeaks disclosure and the sense of panic inside the campaign at the 2016 Democratic National Convention came Clinton’s sign-off to begin the Russiagate dirty tricks campaign. That is the specific “why” behind the timing of the Russiagate narrative. Durham left Clinton out of his questioning, albeit with the help of the court blocking such "non-relevant" lines of inquiry in Sussman's trial.
The Sussman trial also revealed the extent of spying on Trump. Newsworthy in Durham’s indictment of Sussman were allegations tech company Neustar and its executive Rodney Joffe accessed “dedicated servers for the Executive Office of the President of the United States (EOP.)” Joffe then “exploited this arrangement by mining the EOP’s DNS traffic and other data for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.”
Joffe also “enlisted the assistance of researchers at a U.S.-based university” (likely Georgia Tech) who had access to “large amounts of Internet data.” This would have been how Joffe got access to data from Trump’s private computers; working off a Pentagon-paid for contract, Georgia Tech had already taken the data. “[Joffe] tasked these researchers to mine Internet data to establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’ tying then-candidate Trump to Russia,” he added. “In doing so, [Joffe] indicated that he was seeking to please certain ‘VIPs,’ referring to individuals at Law Firm-1 and the Clinton campaign.”
Durham never pursued the Joffe line. Who paid him? When did he start monitoring the Oval Office? What did he learn? When did he stop? Was any of the monitoring, likely unconstitutionally, shared with the FBI? Was the FBI aware of the action and what, if anything, did they do to support it, profit from it, or try and limit it? Were Georgia Tech researchers culpable?
Durham's third and final prosecution was of Igor Danchenko, who was also found not guilty on all counts heard by the jury. Danchenko, of the Brookings Institution, was the primary Russian source for Steele's Dossier. He also served as a cover for Charles Dolan, a Clinton operative who simply made things up (such as the pee tape) and washed his lies through Danchenko to give them additional validity and hide his connection to Clinton.
The FBI lapped up what Steele served them, pigs at the trough, and like Steele himself, never seriously questioned where the information they were acting on originated. Even in 2017 when the FBI learned the primary source was U.S.-based Danchenko, Crossfire Hurricane as the investigation into Trump was called, was allowed to proceed.
Left answered: exactly when did the FBI learn Steele's near-only source was bogus? When did they learn Dolan was the originator of the pee tape? Why did they not conclude the investigation at that point? How high up the FBI chain of command did knowledge of the lackadaisical sourcing by Steele go? Director Comey? If not, why not? Is this why Comey was fired by Trump? The FBI was actively investigating the President of the United States as a Russian spy and Comey was not aware of the details?
And speaking of sources, why was Steele himself never charged with anything? Steele, throughout most of Crossfire Hurricane, was on both Clinton's payroll to create and disseminate false information, and the FBI’s to peddle the same falsehoods to them, all guaranteed by nothing more than his secret squirrel reputation as a British intelligence officer.

Why didn't Durham walk his indictments up the ladder? Or instead, why did he not proceed sideways, leaving Hillary but moving deeper into the FBI? Why not see if Fiona Hill at Brookings connects the failed Russiagate coup with the failed Ukrainegate impeachment, both of which she played a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in? Why didn't Durham use the stage of congressional hearings to bypass Joe Biden’s Justice Department and throw the real decision making back to the voters?
It is all over now. Biden is president, and it is easy enough to say “so what?” Most people who did not support Hillary Clinton long ago concluded that she is a liar and untrustworthy. Her supporters know she’ll never run for public office again, hence the sense of anti-climax.
But what matters is less the details of Hillary’s lie than that someone as close to being elected would lie about such a thing, treason, claiming her opponent was working for Russia. No doubt that for many Clinton’s manipulations are weighed against Trump’s transgressions, whataboutism. But Trump's 2016 win did not absolve Hillary of her sins. And those who worry about elections being stolen via vote miscounts are thinking way too small. If you want to really worry, think like a Clinton.
 

Twitter Files Unveil More FBI Collusion​

by RT
December 10th 2022, 10:07 am

Link: https://www.infowars.com/posts/twitter-files-unveil-more-fbi-collusion/

A top executive coordinated US election “enforcement” with federal agents.

US federal agencies worked closely with Twitter moderators to clamp down on what they saw as “disinformation” during the 2020 election. Executives went to great lengths to scrub certain content they deemed false and dangerous, following increasingly frequent sit-downs with law enforcement and intelligence orgs, according to the third installment of the “Twitter Files.”

Published on Friday by journalist Matt Taibbi, the trove of files includes messages from Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, revealing he was running out of “generic” names to disguise his increasingly regular meetings with federal officials ahead of the 2020 election in the company calendar.


“DEFINITELY NOT meeting with the FBI I SWEAR,” he quipped in response to a colleague who suggested calling it a “Very Boring Business Meeting That Is Definitely Not About Trump.”

Another missive speaks of Roth’s “weekly sync” with officials from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), suggesting he consulted with three-letter agencies to discuss “election security.” The message also mentions a “monthly meeting” with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), a unit created to “identify and counteract malign foreign influence operations targeting the United States” in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential win.

23. Some of Roth’s later Slacks indicate his weekly confabs with federal law enforcement involved separate meetings. Here, he ghosts the FBI and DHS, respectively, to go first to an “Aspen Institute thing,” then take a call with Apple. pic.twitter.com/i771hD8aCD
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022

The FBI even went as far as to flag individual tweets thought to be problematic, in one case urging Twitter to censor a former Republican official – apparently on the basis of a Politifact article alone. The DHS, ODNI and “some NGOs that aren’t academic” were also involved in the process.

A special channel was created on October 8, 2020 for senior executives like Roth, Trust and Policy chief Vijaya Gadde, and top lawyer Jim Baker – who previously worked as general counsel for the FBI – to coordinate election-related decisions, given the name “us2020_xfn_enforcement.”

This “smaller, more powerful cadre” of senior executives made decisions “on the fly, often in minutes and based on guesses, gut calls, even Google searches,” while also “clearly liaising with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of election-related content,” Taibbi wrote, dubbing the group a “high-speed Supreme Court of moderation.”


Taibbi started publishing the “Twitter Files” on a rolling basis in collaboration with other reporters last week, having received direct authorization from the platform’s new owner Elon Musk. The first batch of records focused on Twitter’s decision to ban a controversial New York Post story on the foreign business dealings of then-candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, published in October 2020. “Shadowbanning” featured prominently in the second installation, showing that Twitter engaged in the practice despite repeated denials, while Friday’s trove largely centered on the permanent suspension of Trump, who was at the time president of the United States.
 

7 Takeaways From Release of Durham Report on Origin of Trump-Russia Probe​

05.16.23
Fred Lucas
Daily Signal

Link: https://firebrand.news/7-takeaways-...-on-origin-of-trump-russia-probe/?seyid=65833

DurhamReportOverview-1260x650-Mg3GeV.jpeg


Special counsel John Durham, in a widely anticipated report Monday, condemned the Justice Department and FBI for their conduct in the “Russian collusion” investigation of Donald Trump.
Durham’s investigation looked at the origins of Crossfire Hurricane, the name of the FBI probe of whether Trump or his 2016 presidential campaign colluded with Russians to win the election.
The investigation was taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller, a former FBI director, after Trump was elected president. Mueller’s team concluded there was no evidence of conspiracy or collusion between Trump or his campaign and Russia.
Trump’s second attorney general, William Barr, appointed Durham, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut, to look into the origins of the investigation. In late 2020, Barr named the veteran prosecutor, who has scored convictions in high-profile cases of public corruption and organized crime, as special counsel.
Here are seven key takeaways from Durham’s 306-page public report.

1. What’s Next?

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, announced that he would like Durham to testify to Congress. Jordan is also chairman of the Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government.
We’ve reached out to the Justice Department to have Special Counsel John Durham testify next week.
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) May 15, 2023
“We’ve reached out to the Justice Department to have Special Counsel John Durham testify next week,” Jordan tweeted Monday.
Trump, meanwhile, celebrated with a post on his social media platform, Truth Social.
“WOW! After extensive research, Special Counsel John Durham concludes the FBI never should have launched the Trump-Russia Probe!” Trump wrote. “In other words, the American Public was scammed, just as it is being scammed right now by those who don’t want to see GREATNESS for AMERICA.”
Neither the Justice Department nor the FBI pushed back against Durham’s findings.
In a written statement, the FBI didn’t contest the findings:
The conduct in 2016 and 2017 that Special Counsel Durham examined was the reason that current FBI leadership already implemented dozens of corrective actions, which have now been in place for some time. Had those reforms been in place in 2016, the missteps identified in the report could have been prevented. This report reinforces the importance of ensuring the FBI continues to do its work with the rigor, objectivity, and professionalism the American people deserve and rightly expect.
Attorney General Merrick Garland received the Durham report Friday and, as required, notified members of Congress.
“On Friday, May 12, 2023, consistent with Attorney General Barr’s Order, Special Counsel Durham submitted to me a 306-page unclassified report ‘in a form that will permit public dissemination,’ and a 29-page classified appendix,” Garland’s letter to the House and Senate says.

2. No ‘Actual Evidence of Collusion’

The FBI’s investigation of Trump began without any evidence as a predicate, the Durham report found.
“Neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” the special counsel writes.
“Based on the review of Crossfire Hurricane and related intelligence activities, we conclude that the [Justice] Department and the FBI failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law in connection with certain events and activities described in this report,” the Durham report says.
The report later adds:
As the more complete record now shows, there are specific areas of Crossfire Hurricane activity in which the FBI badly underperformed and failed, not only in its duties to the public, but also in preventing the severe reputational harm that has befallen the FBI as a consequence of Crossfire Hurricane.
Importantly, had the Crossfire Hurricane actors faithfully followed their own principles regarding objectivity and integrity, there were clear opportunities to have avoided the mistakes and to have prevented the damage resulting from their embrace of seriously flawed information that they failed to analyze and assess properly.

3. ‘Speed’ on Trump, ‘Caution’ on Clinton

Durham’s report also notes significant differences between how the FBI investigated Trump and how it investigated his Democrat opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“The speed and manner in which the FBI opened and investigated Crossfire Hurricane during the presidential election season based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence also reflected a noticeable departure from how it approached prior matters involving possible attempted foreign election interference plans aimed at the Clinton campaign,” the report says.
The Durham report states that Clinton General Counsel Marc Elias “declined to be voluntarily interviewed by the Office.” Elias was recently severed by the Democratic National Committee from representation. The campaign was fined by the FEC for his hiding the funding of the…
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) May 15, 2023
The FBI “moved with considerable caution” on matters involving Clinton, it says.
“In one such matter discussed …, Headquarters and [Justice] Department officials required defensive briefings to be provided to Clinton and other officials or candidates who appeared to be the targets of foreign interference,” the report says.
It also notes that, in a matter related to the Clinton Foundation, “both senior FBI and Department officials placed restrictions on how those matters were to be handled such that essentially no investigative activities occurred for months leading up to the election.”
“These examples are also markedly different from the FBI’s actions with respect to other highly significant intelligence it received from a trusted foreign source pointing to a Clinton campaign plan to vilify Trump by tying him to [Russian President] Vladimir Putin so as to divert attention from her own concerns relating to her use of a private email server [while she was secretary of state],” the report says.
It adds:
Unlike the FBI’s opening of a full investigation of unknown members of the Trump campaign based on raw, uncorroborated information, in this separate matter involving a purported Clinton campaign plan, the FBI never opened any type of inquiry, issued any taskings, employed any analytical personnel, or produced any analytical products in connection with the information.
This lack of action was despite the fact that the significance of the Clinton plan intelligence was such as to have prompted the Director of the CIA to brief the President, Vice President, Attorney General, Director of the FBI, and other senior government officials about its content within days of its receipt. It was also of enough importance for the CIA to send a formal written referral memorandum to Director [James] Comey and the Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, Peter Strzok, for their consideration and action.

4. ‘Hostile Feelings Toward Trump’

Durham’s report provides some detail about FBI officials who were “hostile” to Trump or had partisan leanings that got in the way. It says:
In particular, at the direction of Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Peter Strzok opened Crossfire Hurricane immediately. Strzok, at a minimum, had pronounced hostile feelings toward Trump. The matter was opened as a full investigation without [anyone] ever having spoken to the persons who provided the information.
Further, the FBI did so without (i) any significant review of its own intelligence databases, (ii) collection and examination of any relevant intelligence from other U.S. intelligence entities, (iii) interviews of witnesses essential to understand the raw information it had received or (iv) using any of the standard analytical tools typically employed by the FBI in evaluating raw intelligence.
Both the FBI’s McCabe and Strzok were fired after Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report of his investigation into the matter.

5. ‘Trump’s Political Opponents’

The special counsel’s report states that the investigation was “in part triggered and sustained” by political opposition to Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.
“In particular, there was significant reliance on investigative leads provided or funded (directly or indirectly) by Trump’s political opponents,” the report says. “The [Justice] Department did not adequately examine or question these materials and the motivations of those providing them, even when at about the same time the Director of the FBI and others learned of significant and potentially contrary intelligence.”
The Durham report found a “continuing need for the FBI and the [Justice] Department to recognize that lack of analytical rigor, apparent confirmation bias, and an over-willingness to rely on information from individuals connected to political opponents caused investigators to fail to adequately consider alternative hypotheses and to act without appropriate objectivity or restraint in pursuing allegations of collusion or conspiracy between a U.S. political campaign and a foreign power.”

6. No ‘Wholesale Changes’

Nevertheless, Durham’s report says it “does not recommend any wholesale changes in the guidelines and policies that the Department and the FBI now have in place to ensure proper conduct and accountability in how counterintelligence activities are carried out.”
The report acknowledges hindsight, but says the problems should have been clear at the time.
“Although recognizing that in hindsight much is clearer, much of this also seems to have been clear at the time,” Durham’s report says. “We therefore believe it is important to examine past conduct to identify shortcomings and improve how the government carries out its most sensitive functions.”

7. ‘Criminal Offense,’ ‘Cavalier Attitude’

Durham’s federal grand jury indicted three people in connection with the investigation of Trump, but managed only one conviction.
FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty to falsifying an email about a warrant application submitted to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Clinesmith was sentenced to community service.
The court’s approval of the application under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was used as pretext to spy on Trump campaign associate Carter Page.
Former Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann and Russian national Igor Danchenko, a U.S. resident, were indicted on charges of lying to the FBI. Both men were acquitted.
Clinesmith “committed a criminal offense by fabricating language in an email that was material to the FBI obtaining a FISA surveillance order,” the Durham report says.
“In other instances, FBI personnel working on that same FISA application displayed, at best, a cavalier attitude towards accuracy and completeness,” the report adds:
FBI personnel also repeatedly disregarded important requirements when they continued to seek renewals of that FISA surveillance while acknowledging—both then and in hindsight—that they did not genuinely believe there was probable cause to believe that the target was knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of a foreign power, or knowingly helping another person in such activities. And certain personnel disregarded significant exculpatory information that should have prompted investigative restraint and reexamination.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

The post 7 Takeaways From Release of Durham Report on Origin of Trump-Russia Probe appeared first on The Daily Signal.
 

Defund the FBI right now. They use our tax dollars to protect criminals and set up false flags and crush whistleblowers. Defund CIA too​

May 23, 2023 9:54 am by IWB

Link: https://www.investmentwatchblog.com...lags-and-crush-whistleblowers-defund-cia-too/

[clk link above to see the twitter notation]

by icky_vicinity23

The CIA and FBI are criminal gangs, run by the Rothschilds/Rockefellers. Stop giving them our money

See also 'They glorify the criminals, arrest the Good Samaritans, and censor the truth tellers.'... 'they are coming after your kids'

twitter.com/amuse/status/1660722064209092616?t=Rj4Hb1qqof8ONPm2FfmipQ&s=19

In other words, John Durham covered for the CIA/FBI per usual and our democracy is still f*cked
 
Durham Blasts the FBI, But Ignores the Role of Russiagate Ringleader, John Brennan

MIKE WHITNEY • MAY 30, 2023

Link: https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/durham...e-role-of-russiagate-ringleader-john-brennan/



The Durham Report fails to identify the ringleader of the Russiagate fiasco, John Brennan. It was Brennan who first reported “contacts… between Russian officials and persons in the Trump campaign”. It was also Brennan who initially referred the case to the FBI. It was also Brennan who “hand-picked” the analysts who cobbled together the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) which said that Putin was trying to swing the election in Trump’s favor. And, it was also Brennan who hijacked the “Trump-Russia-meme” from the Hillary campaign in order to prosecute his war on Trump. At every turn, Brennan was there, massaging the intelligence, pulling the strings, and micromanaging the entire operation from behind the scenes. So, while it might seem like the FBI was ‘leading the Russiagate charge’, it was actually Brennan who was calling the shots. This is from an article by Aaron Mate:
“…it is clear that Brennan’s role in propagating the collusion narrative went far beyond his work on the ICA. (Intelligence Community Assessment) A close review of facts that have slowly come to light reveals that he was a central architect and promoter of the conspiracy theory from its inception... Brennan stands apart for the outsized role he played in generating and spreading the (collusion) false narrative.” The Brennan Dossier: All About a Prime Mover of Russiagate, Aaron Mate, Real Clear Investigations
Mate is right, Brennan was “central architect and promoter” of the Russiagate fraud. The alleged Trump-Russia connection may have started with the Hillary campaign, but it was Brennan who transformed it into an expansive domestic counterintelligence operation aimed at regime change. That was Brennan’s doing; he was the backroom puppetmaster overseeing the action and guiding the project towards its final conclusion. What the Durham Report confirms, is that the plan was put into motion sometime after Brennan’s Oval Office meeting with Barack Obama in July, 2016. Check out this clip from an article by Lee Smith:
The only genuine piece of Russian intelligence that US spy services ever received about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia was intelligence that Russia knew Hillary Clinton backed a 2016 campaign plan to smear Trump as a Russian agent.
According to John Durham’s 300-page report, the information reached the CIA in late July 2016. Brennan told Durham that on August 3 he briefed President Barack Obama at the White House on what the special counsel refers to as the Clinton Plan intelligence. Others in attendance at the meeting were Vice President Joe Biden, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and FBI Director James Comey.” The Durham Coverup, Lee Smith
So, now we know that Brennan told Obama, Biden, Lynch and Comey that the Russia-Trump nonsense was part of a smear campaign cooked up by the Hillary campaign to divert attention from her email problems. We also know that Brennan conducted the briefing on August 3, 2016.
So, if Brennan knew that the Russia-Trump claims were false back in July, then how do we explain the fact that Brennan went ahead and published a damning Intelligence agency report 5 months later strongly suggesting a link between Trump and the Kremlin?
Here’s a brief excerpt from Brennan’s Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) which was released on January 6, 2017 and which clearly states the opposite of what Brennan told Obama five months earlier:
We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump..
Further, a body of reporting, to include different intelligence disciplines, open source reporting on Russian leadership policy preferences, and Russian media content, showed that Moscow sought to denigrate Secretary Clinton.
The ICA relies on public Russian leadership commentary, Russian state media reports, public examples of where Russian interests would have aligned with candidates’ policy statements, and a body of intelligence reporting to support the assessment that Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for Trump. The 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA)
Let’s summarize the findings in the report:
  1. Vladimir Putin was directly involved in the US 2016 presidential election
  2. Putin’s goal was to “denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability
  3. Putin and the Russian government supported Donald Trump
Brennan knew that none of this was true because , as we said earlier, he had already told Obama that the Russia-Trump smear was part of a “dirty tricks” operation generated by the Hillary campaign.
So, why would Brennan use Hillary’s spurious allegations against Trump when the election was already over? What did he hope to gain?
Three things:
  1. To call-into-question the results of the election thereby undermining Trump’s legitimacy as president
  2. To derail Trump’s political and foreign policy agenda
  3. (Most important) To build a case against Trump that could be used in impeachment proceedings.
This was an attempt to depose the president of the United States. There can be no doubt about that. Why else would a man in Brennan’s position try to frame Trump as a Russian agent?
To remove him from office, that’s why. And there’s more, too. Here’s what Brennan told the House Intelligence Committee during his testimony in 2017:
“I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals. It raised questions in my mind about whether Russia was able to gain the cooperation of those individuals.”
We know now that Brennan had no “information or intelligence” that revealed contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia because there weren’t any. He lied. More importantly, Brennan delivered this testimony more than a year after he had told Obama that he knew the Trump-Russia theory was ‘Opposition Research’ concocted for the Hillary campaign. So, he knew what he was saying was false, but he said it anyway. In short, he lied to Congress which is a felony.
Check out this ‘smoking gun’ excerpt from page 86 of the Durham Report. According to the report, the CIA sent a Referral Memo to the FBI on September 7, 2016, in which they stated the following:
An exchange … discussing US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server..
The Office did not identify any further actions that the CIA or FBI took in response to this intelligence product as it related to the Clinton Plan intelligence. The Durham Report, Page 86
They knew. They all knew.
Durham merely confirmed what independent analysts have been saying from the start, that both the CIA and the FBI knew that the Trump-Russia allegation was a fraud from the get-go. But they decided to use it anyway in order to scupper Trump’s political agenda and pave the way for his impeachment. Isn’t that what we typically call a “regime change” operation?
It is. Here’s more background from an article by Stephen Cohen at The Nation:
In testimony to the House Intelligence Committee in May 2017, John Brennan, formerly Obama’s head of the CIA, strongly suggested that he and his agency were the first, as The Washington Post put it at the time, “in triggering an FBI probe.” Certainly both the Post and The New York Times interpreted his remarks in this way. Equally certain, Brennan played a central role in promoting the Russiagate narrative thereafter, briefing members of Congress privately and giving President Obama himself a top-secret envelope in early August 2016 that almost certainly contained Steele’s dossier…..
In short, if these reports and Brennan’s own testimony are to be believed, he, not the FBI, was the instigator and godfather of Russiagate.“Russiagate or Intelgate?”, Stephen Cohen, The Nation
There it is in black and white; it all began with Brennan. Brennan is the “godfather of Russiagate” just as Cohen says.
Here’s more from Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton at artvoice.com:
“Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid reportedly believed then-Obama CIA Director Brennan was feeding him information about alleged links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in order to make public accusations:
According to ‘Russian Roulette,’ by Yahoo! News chief investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff and David Corn… Brennan contacted Reid on Aug. 25, 2016, to brief him on the state of Russia’s interference in the presidential campaign. Brennan briefed other members of the so-called Gang of Eight, but Reid is the only who took direct action.
Two days after the briefing, Reid wrote a letter to then-FBI Director James Comey asserting that ‘evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign continues to mount.’ Reid called on Comey to investigate the links ‘thoroughly and in a timely fashion.’
Reid saw Brennan’s outreach as ‘a sign of urgency,’ Isikoff and Corn wrote in the book. ‘Reid also had the impression that Brennan had an ulterior motive. He concluded the CIA chief believed the public needed to know about the Russian operation, including the information about the possible links to the Trump campaign.’
According to the book, Brennan told Reid that the intelligence community had determined that the Russian government was behind the hack and leak of Democratic emails and that Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind it. Brennan also told Reid that there was evidence that Russian operatives were attempting to tamper with election results. Indeed, on August 27, 2016, Reid wrote a letter to Comey accusing President Trump’s campaign of colluding with the Russian government.” “T he John Brennan-Harry Reid Collusion to ‘Get Trump’”, artvoice.com

Comey didn’t want to go along with the charade, but what choice did he have, after all, didn’t he open an investigation into Hillary’s emails 11 days before the November balloting which cost Clinton the election?
He did, which means they probably had him over a barrel. Either he did what they said, or he’d be driven from office in disgrace. Of course, I’m speculating here, but I find it hard to believe that an old-school bureaucrat like Comey suddenly decided to throw caution to the wind and agree to go along with a hairbrained scheme to frame the president of the United States as a Russian agent. That just too wacky to believe. I think it’s much more likely that he simply caved-in to the pressure he was getting from Brennan.
In any event, it’s clear that Brennan whipped Reid into a frenzy which prompted the credulous senator to urge Comey to open an investigation into Trump’s (fabricated) links to the Kremlin. The Durham Report confirms that the FBI opened the probe without sufficient hard evidence, but the report does not clarify the role that Brennan played in putting the wheels in motion. This is from an article at The Hill:
(Attorney General Bill) Barr will want to zero in on a particular area of concern: the use by the FBI of confidential human sources, whether its own or those offered up by the then-CIA director. …
…the cast of characters leveraged by the FBI against the Trump campaign all appear to have their genesis as CIA sources (“assets,” in agency vernacular) shared at times with the FBI. From Stefan Halper and possibly Joseph Mifsud, to Christopher Steele, to Carter Page himself, and now a mysterious “government investigator” posing as Halper’s assistant and cited in The New York Times article, legitimate questions arise as to whether Comey was manipulated into furthering a CIA political operation more than an FBI counterintelligence case.” “James Comey is in trouble and he knows it”, The Hill
Repeat: “legitimate questions arise as to whether Comey was manipulated into furthering a CIA political operation more than an FBI counterintelligence case.”
So, The Hill has arrived at the same conclusion that we have, that Comey was merely a pawn in Brennan’s sprawling regime change operation. In fact, according to former CIA analyst Philip Giraldi, Brennan’s tentacles may have extended all the way to the FISA courts that improperly issued the warrants to spy on members of the Trump campaign. Take a look:
“Brennan was the key to the operation because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court refused to approve several requests by the FBI to initiate taps on Trump associates and Trump Tower as there was no probable cause to do so but the British and other European intelligence services were legally able to intercept communications linked to American sources. Brennan was able to use his connections with those foreign intelligence agencies, primarily the British GCHQ, to make it look like the concerns about Trump were coming from friendly and allied countries and therefore had to be responded to as part of routine intelligence sharing. As a result, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Gen. Michael Flynn were all wiretapped. And likely there were others. This all happened during the primaries and after Trump became the GOP nominee.” “The Conspiracy Against Trump”, Philip Giraldi, Unz Review
Giraldi’s piece makes Brennan look like the ultimate “fixer”. If you needed warrants, he’d get you warrants. If you needed spies, he’d get you spies. If you needed something planted in the media, or someone to start a rumor, or maybe even an “official-sounding” document that’s been dolled-up to look like ‘the consensus view of the entire US Intelligence Community’; he could do that too. He could do it all because he’s a virtuoso spymaster who knew the system from the ground-up. He understood how all the levers worked and which buttons to push to get things done. He also knew how easy it is to bamboozle the American people who trust whatever spurious accusations they read in the media or hear on the cable news channels. He had a keen grasp of that.
Brennan is the consummate uber-spook, a deft and capable professional who conducts his business mainly in the shadows and whose influence on events is never entirely known. That’s why I think Brennan played the key role in the Russiagate scam, because he’s a man of many talents who would not be opposed to using his power to advance his own leftist agenda by crushing a political rival that he viscerally despised.

THE DURHAM WHITEWASH
And, that’s my problem with the Durham Report, because even though it is a powerful indictment of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, it fails in its most important task, which is to identify the architect and ringleader of the Russiagate hoax. The report doesn’t do that, instead, it diverts attention away from the prime suspect to the footsoldiers who merely implemented his battleplan. That’s not just a bad outcome. That’s a whitewash.
 
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