Amid much fanfare and Twitter blocking, Jerome Corsi has released his “complaint” against Robert Mueller and his team (including even Peter Carr for his serial no comments, which Corsi alleges amounts to leaking grand jury material). The complaint ticks all the boxes you’d expect:
- Cut and pasted complaints about the bias of Mueller’s team — complete with original and now inaccurate date — that already failed in a Larry Klayman appeal to the DC Circuit
- Reliance on Judicial Watch’s FOIA of Peter Carr’s serial no-comment answers to claim that Mueller has been leaking grand jury information (citing a number of stories clearly sourced to Trump’s lawyers, with whom Corsi is in a Joint Defense Agreement)
- A litany of crimes Corsi claims Mueller’s team have committed, up to and including treason; several of the crimes include those that Mueller’s team has said Corsi may be charged with, including subornation of perjury
- A request to liberate information — his own 302s and grand jury testimony — that would disclose to his co-conspirators the kinds of questions Mueller is asking
- Gratuitous mention of Uranium One and complaints that Mueller’s team didn’t want to hear about it
In a particularly nice bit of timing, the complaint was released just before Trump committed some of the crimes Corsi claims Mueller’s team committed, including witness tampering.
Grifters gotta grift
Some of the supporting documentation that Corsi includes reveals two of the undisclosed reasons Corsi didn’t accept a plea agreement. First, he worried it would prevent him from being a (as Stephen Miller would call it) “chain migration” sponsor for his wife’s cousin.
More tellingly, perhaps, Corsi claimed he would go bankrupt if he were not able to grift off of accusing Robert Mueller of abuse.
Though as I read his plea, it doesn’t include such restrictions, and if it it did, it would only apply to the subject of his testimony.
The September 13, 2016 release Corsi cites to explain his August 15, 2016 foreknowledge
All that said, I’m quite interested in how Corsi formulates what happened, not least because of the way it fits into the rest of Corsi and Stone’s joint cover story.
First, Corsi situates his actions from 2016 in context of Hillary’s 2015 announcement about her server, not the election.
In a March 10, 2015 press conference, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted that as Secretary of State she had conducted U.S. Government business through a nongovernment, private email server. Secretary Clinton stated that she had turned over 30,490 emails but deleted nearly 32,000 others.
Immediately after March 10, 2015, people experienced in foreign affairs and national security instantly recognized to a virtual certainty that Clinton’s emails had already been acquired by the espionage services of every major nation and perhaps passed on to terrorist organizations, because (a) the server was not secure and (b) communications of the U.S. Secretary of State would be a high priority for spy agencies.
There are numerous reasons why Corsi might want to frame this complaint this way, not least that he couldn’t claim that Jeannie Rhee has a conflict without making everything about the Clinton Foundation. But we also know that Corsi (though allegedly not Stone) was part of the Peter Smith effort to find the emails Hillary deleted, so it’s rich he complains that the server made her vulnerable to the very spies the Smith effort was soliciting the emails from.
From there he transitions seamlessly (this is the following paragraph) into the DNC leaks.
Ultimately, this story led to further, but different, revelations that Wikileaks was releasing emails from the computer servers of the Democratic National Committee (“DNC”) on Friday, July 22, 2016.1 “On the evening of July 5, 2016, 1,976 megabytes of data were downloaded from the DNC’s server. The operation took 87 seconds . . . No Internet service provider . . . was capable of downloading data at this speed.” 2
1 Tim Hamburger and Karen Tumulty, “WikiLeaks releases thousands of documents about Clinton and internal deliberations,” The Washington Post, July 22, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/07/22/on-eve-of-democraticconvention-wikileaks-releases-thousands-of-documents-about-clinton-the-campaign-and-internaldeliberations/.
2 Patrick Lawrence, “A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack,” The Nation, August 9, 2017; https://www.thenation.com/article/a-new-report-raises-big-questionsabout-last-years-dnc-hack/.
Notably, Corsi focuses on the NGP/Van story in its most breathless form as told in The Nation, one that was subsequently corrected. That’s remarkable for a lot of reasons, not least because the NGP/Van story has been treated by its proponents as a release from Guccifer 2.0, not Wikileaks (Guccifer 2.0 linked to it but did not actually release the file on the WordPress site). If that’s what Corsi wants to claim was the source of his knowledge, then he’s saying he based his deductions on Guccifer 2.0, not anything Wikileaks did. But even that doesn’t help, because that file was not released publicly until September 13, well after the August comments that pose such a legal problem for Corsi and Roger Stone.
To substantiate his divine inspiration story that he deducted that Podesta’s emails would come out, he points to just one story.
Wikileaks actually announced before July 22, 2016, that it would release DNC documents and do so in several batches, which was widely reported ahead of time, including in The New York Times. See Exhibit B, attached.
Corsi’s claim he deducted anything is — as Charlie Savage complains about his own article himself — problematic, as his article only addressed the DNC documents. There actually could be ways to claim you could deduce Podeta’s emails were coming by August 2, 2016, but Savage’s story is not one of them.
This passage makes explicit what was already clear elsewhere: the time period Mueller is interested in is August 2016. And, Corsi says, Mueller accuses him and Stone of “acquiring” foreknowledge, which I find striking given the evidence they acquired not just foreknowledge that the emails would be leaked, but of the specific content of at least some of those emails.
Readers of The New York Times and other news received the same foreknowledge from mid to late July of which the Special Counsel’s office now accuses Dr. Corsi and Roger Stone of supposedly acquiring in August 2016.
Dr. Corsi – as he has stated publicly – noticed that emails to and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta were conspicuously missing from the July 22, 2016 public-release of DNC emails. Employing his professional skills and considerable experience as an analyst and investigative journalist, Dr. Corsi logically concluded that Wikileaks would release Podesta’s emails soon in a second round “data dump” from the same group of DNC emails stolen on July 5, 2016.
Note, too, the claim that Corsi predicted a “second” data dump of Podesta’s emails is inconsistent with his own email (cited in his criminal information) that said there would be, “2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct.” That is, even in his own complaint, he obfuscates between the DCCC or Clinton Foundation emails WikiLeaks was peddling literally days after he returned to the US and the Podesta emails that eventually came out in October.
Special Counsel Mueller and his prosecutorial staff, however, have misrepresented the investigative research of hundreds of journalists into a false narrative that Dr. Corsi and/or Roger Stone “colluded” with Russian intelligence services.
Finally, Corsi describes that Mueller claims this amounts to him and Stone “colluding” with “Russian intelligence services.” Either he’s full of shit, he’s extrapolating from a Mueller allegation shared in proffers that WikiLeaks is tied to RIS, or he’s revealing a more direct accusation than publicly made thus far. All three of those are possibly, with Corsi the most likely guess is always “full of shit,” but the other two are worth noting.