Hunter Biden’s Uber Connection and the K Street Collision

On December 3, 2018, at least per emails in the MarcoPolo set at BidenLaptopEmails dot com, Hunter Biden accessed his Uber account by logging in using his phone, but logging in through what appears to be a Comcast connection in Newburyport, MA, where he was getting treatment from Dr. Keith Ablow.

I found this request as part of my effort to figure out which iCloud accounts were run by which devices during the period — roughly January 14 to February 15, 2019 — when his digital life was being taken over and packaged up as part of a huge political hit job to be used against his father the following year.

It was surprisingly common for Hunter Biden to access Uber by logging in using a browser from a Mac computer, not the phone app. I’m not an Uber user, but isn’t the point that the service relies on tracking you via your phone and its location data?

But when Hunter Biden logged into Uber using his phone, the normal way, he appears to have used his cell service. Again, the normal way.

But on December 3, 2018, Hunter Biden logged into Uber using some Comcast network — not his cell service — in Newburyport MA, in the town but not the exact location where Dr. Ablow’s practice was; this also appears to be a different location from where Hunter would stay in January, as well.

As I laid out in this post, there were several instances during the period where Hunter Biden appears to have been getting his digital life hacked where his communications didn’t connect, starting with an exchange in January 2019 that Keith Ablow facilitated, in Hunter’s first known email to the shrink. It was an exchange asking two doctors for assistance. Hunter asked at one point, “Guys are you getting my emails?,” and contrary to Ablow’s assurances, it appears they were not. If Hunter wasn’t accessing his cell service in this period, that might help to explain why he was sending messages that their recipients weren’t getting.

But this Comcast log-in to Uber is notable for several other reasons.

Around February 13, 2018, Hunter had added his rhbdc iCloud account — the account believed to be taken over a year later — to his Uber account; prior to that his account was exclusively registered to his rhb iCloud account — the account that would be exposed via an encrypted phone backup available through iTunes. For most of 2018, Hunter Biden’s Uber account was common to both of those iCloud accounts. Both emails would get a notice whenever he used the service.

On December 1, 2018, the password was changed, with notice to just the rhb account. There were a bunch of rides on December 3, paid by Venmo (Hunter’s Venmo had definitely been compromised earlier in 2018, but that’s for another post), the Uber receipts for which don’t appear to be in the MarcoPolo stash of emails. On December 3, the rhbdc account password was changed. There was one ride on the rhbdc Uber on December 3 in Newburyport, the same location where the password had been changed.

But from December 3, 2018 through at least February 8, at least per the emails that ended up in the MarcoPolo set, just his rhbdc iCloud account was getting notices from Uber. The first trip showing that Uber had been set back to the way it had been was on February 19, 2019. Then, in the very last days of this email set, following new devices being added to Hunter’s Uber account, three or even four receipts show up.

Some of the rides during this period are pretty interesting, too — such as a 50-minute, 15-mile drive (with no wait time) to go .1 mile around the corner on a key day of the account takeover.

And while it doesn’t show up in the emails, per Gus Dimitrelos — the forensics guy who did a long report for Washington Examiner — the iPhone XS that would be stored to iTunes (registered to the rhb iCloud) had an Uber account showing a modified date on November 22, 2018, a created date of January 22, 2019 — right in the thick of events, and an accessed date of February 3, 2019. I don’t believe those Uber events show up in the MarcoPolo set, even though the set includes emails from both the rhb and rhbdc iCloud accounts and so should reflect changes made on the rhb Uber account.

Among other things, by splitting these two Uber accounts, you might show “Hunter Biden” in two different places at one time. Imagine, for example, if the “other intelligence” the IRS used to justify obtaining the laptop from Mac Isaac was just one of two Uber accounts showing him to be in Delaware?

The possibility that a digital or even physical Hunter Biden was in two places at once in this period brings me to a story about Lyft.

In addition to Hunter’s failed attempt to email two doctors in early January 2019, this post describes a few other communication disconnects in this key period.

  • He failed to respond to Ablow’s practice manager when she tried to respond to his droidhunter88 account on January 15
  • On January 18, Ablow entirely rewrote a statement for Vanity Fair in such a way that Hunter’s attorney George Mesires — who appears to have passed it onto the magazine — would not have realized it

Metaphorically, at least, Hunter Biden was not publicly speaking for himself in this period.

But there’s one more potential communication disconnect from this period.

On January 24, 2019, an Ablow associate, Greg, had a meeting with Hunter Biden at which (per an email the associate wrote memorializing the meeting), it was decided that Greg would be Hunter’s “Chief of Staff.”

The email memorialization had a list of things Greg was going to do, including communication with two of Hunter’s kids and his lawyer.

And his father’s assistant.

Among the things on the list — right next to sky diving and flying lessons ASAP — was a note to talk to Katie Dodge: “ski’s and gear – need phone number and address to ship to.”

Katie Dodge was Hunter Biden’s long-time personal assistant, who already was doing the administrative things on this list, though not the flying lessons and sky diving. Dodge was doing those administrative things for income less than half of what Greg proposed he should be paid, to do what Dodge was already doing (again, less the flying lessons and sky diving).

On January 29, 2019, five days after this meeting at which Greg made himself Chief of Staff in charge of contacting Dodge about skis and boots — per SMS texts published by Dimitrelos — Dodge wrote Hunter and asked him about paying for his storage facility. At least per the published SMS texts, this was the first she had spoken to Hunter via SMS text since October 2018.

After an exchange about the storage facility, Hunter asked whether she could get his skis and boots and send them to him, “here,” by context, in MA.

Can you get my ski bag- and ski boots – from storage. Fed-ex can pick them up and deliver here or there’s another company that does that and I can get them if someone puts skis and boots where they can pick up.

She seemed surprised by the request, and asked if they had previously been at K Street. She agreed to go get the skis — but noted that would require paying the overdue storage bill — and asked where she should be overnighting them.

Also what resort do they need to go to? What are the dates?

Hunter had no idea where he’s going to be using these skis that he asked her to overnight to MA.

I have neither.

She appears to have sent them, because on February 8, 2019, she asked,

Did you receive your skis?

This SMS conversation — focused largely on paying bills — went on for almost two more weeks. Then, on February 20 (the day after Hunter’s Uber account was restored to the way it had been before December 3), in response to a question about a particular financial change he said he wanted to make, which they had already discussed on February 15, Dodge asked if he had made the call to make that happen.

He seems to have missed that instruction entirely — because of “limited access to communications on all forms.”

No didn’t ! I’ve got limited access to communications on all forms

Then — in what seems like a muddled voice-to-text transmission — he asked her about the skis that she appears to have retrieved from storage by February 8, as if he doesn’t know that.

Ivan you get the skis done I’ll send you a dress tomorrow

She already sent the skis somewhere, but he was offering to send her the address in MA “tomorrow,” so on February 21.

I’m interested in the skis and Dodge’s efforts to retrieve them from storage in the DC area and her follow-up about them on February 8 because one of the things in unallocated space that someone tried to delete — again, per Dimitrelos’s reports — were the February 7, 2019 texts and collision report from a Lyft driver who apologized to “Mr. Biden” for the collision they had had the previous evening, February 6, at roughly this ridiculous part of K Street in Washington DC.

Hunter Biden’s long-time assistant wrote him on February 8, asking if he got the skis she made significant efforts to send him from the DC area to MA a week earlier, with absolutely no awareness that Hunter — or someone presenting as Hunter Biden — was on K Street, side-swiping or getting side-swiped by a Lyft driver.

Now, certainly, it was possible that Hunter Biden drove from MA to DC to be present for a car accident on February 6, 2019. Maybe the trip — by whomever — served to pick up those skis.

But neither he nor his personal assistant seems to have had any clue that that had happened.

Update: After several tries, I’ve taken out errors regarding when the Uber for the XS was set up. Thanks to zscoreUSA for the persistence.

Related posts

The Laptop Everyone Knows as Hunter Biden’s Appears to Have Been Deleted Starting February 15, 2019: This post describes a number of the events that occurred in the key time period, and has a timeline that will have to suffice until I tidy up an updated one.

Gary Shapley and Hunter Biden’s Colleague Named “Z”: One thing that happened in the key period in 2019 is that Hunter Biden’s contacts were restored — which creates the possibility that the publicly released contacts reflect alterations.

Hunter Biden’s Matryoshka Cell Phone: How the IRS and Frothers Got Hunter’s Encrypted iPhone Content: The “laptop” as we know it appears to be the entire iCloud of one Hunter Biden account and a phone containing another iCloud account saved — during the period of compromise — to his iTunes account.

Keith Ablow’s Unallocated Space in Hunter Biden’s Memory: When Hunter Biden went to Newburyport, MA to get Ketamine treatment from Fox News personality Keith Ablow in early 2019, he had a series of communications failures that prevented him from speaking to others directly.

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Keith Ablow’s Unallocated Space in Hunter Biden’s Memory

In the third part of Gus Dimitrelos’ report* on the laptop attributed to Hunter Biden, he examines what he could find in the unallocated space of the laptop — the place where deleted files go on computers until they eventually get written over. He does it, in laymen’s terms, to prove that there was someone at the keyboard of the laptop, deleting individual files by hand, which he claims (falsely) is proof that, “Robert Hunter Biden is in control of the MacBook Laptop.”

He shows remarkably little interest in what got deleted.

At least two of the files deleted from the laptop pertain to the therapist from whom the President’s son was getting Ketamine treatment during the period his digital life appears to have been taken over, Keith Ablow, and in whose office the DEA discovered different laptop owned by Hunter Biden in 2020.

According to two people familiar with the matter, a different Hunter Biden laptop landed in the custody of the DEA in February when they executed a search warrant on the Massachusetts office of a psychiatrist accused of professional misconduct. The psychiatrist has not been charged with a crime.

Hunter Biden was not a target of the search or the investigation, and his lawyer ultimately got his laptop back. It’s not clear why his computer was left in the doctor’s office.

Who is Keith Ablow?

One enduring mystery about the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” affair is why the son of a top Democrat ended up doing Ketamine therapy with a Fox personality just weeks short of allegations that the shrink had sexually harassed patients, an accusation that would lead to his suspension.

Ablow’s career on Fox extended back years by the time in 2018 when Hunter Biden got involved with him. He made obnoxious comments both about the Obamas and marriage equality and a ludicrous pitch in favor of Newt Gingrich. There’s no reason a Democrat should ever have trusted him.

And then, shortly after the time when Hunter Biden’s digital world appears to have been taken over by his droidhunter Gmail, several lawsuits accusing Ablow of sexual harassment went public.

The women allege that Dr. Keith Ablow, an author who was a contributor to Fox News network until 2017, abused his position while treating them for acute depression, leaving them unable to trust authority figures and plagued with feelings of shame and self-recrimination.

“He began to hit me when we engaged in sexual activities,” wrote one plaintiff, a New York woman, in a sworn affidavit filed with her lawsuit. “He would have me on my knees and begin to beat me with his hands on my breasts,” she wrote, “occasionally saying, ‘I own you,’ or ‘You are my slave.’”

The malpractice lawsuits, two of them filed on Thursday in Essex Superior Court and a third filed last year, paint a picture of a therapist who encouraged women to trust and rely on him, then coaxed them into humiliating sexual activities, often during treatment sessions for which they were charged. When the New York woman had trouble paying her therapy bills, she said, Ablow advised her to work as an escort or stripper because the work was lucrative.

The three lawsuits were settled. But as a result Ablow’s medical license was suspended. As noted above, for some reason the DEA searched his office a year later, where they found yet another Hunter Biden laptop left behind.

Update: Here’s a picture of Ablow speaking at a Trump rally in MA on March 4, 2017.

 

Deleting Ablow

In fact, the accusations against Ablow were one of two things that Dimitrelos found in the unallocated space of what would have been the laptop.

On February 25, 2019, Hunter Biden texted someone else a link to the BoGlo report on the accusations, which had been published four days earlier. “My psychiatrist,” Hunter Biden explained in a follow-up text. “I can’t catch a break,” he said in the third. If authentic, these texts appear to capture Hunter’s immediate response to the abuse allegations, and the four-day delay in his discovery of them.

That someone would delete those is interesting enough.

But I’m far more interested in the other file Dimitrelos found. It was a December 10, 2018 invoice, sent by iChat. It reflected the following psychotherapy sessions with Hunter, which were identified as “New Incident”:

  • November 10, 2018: 90 minutes
  • November 11, 2018: 90 minutes
  • November 12, 2018: 30 minutes
  • November 14, 2018: 60 minutes
  • November 14, 2018: 60 minutes
  • November 15, 2018: 60 minutes
  • November 16, 2018: 60 minutes

It was a three page invoice, but Dimitrelos only shows the first page, so there could be more sessions in the weeks between November 16 and December 10, 2018. All sessions were paid by credit card within days.

But even just that single page shows that Hunter was spending time with Ablow in the period when he obtained new devices — including the laptop believed to be the one that ended up in John Paul Mac Isaac’s shop.

It’s easy to see, then, how and when Ablow might have come into possession of a Hunter Biden laptop and Hunter Biden might have started using the new one that would end up becoming a big political hit job.

[Update: I corrected my timeline here. Hunter Biden started using the laptop believed to be the one brought to Mac Isaac’s shop in October, not November.]

Baystate or Bluewater

Dimitrelos says the invoice, “correlates [with] email communications with Keith Ablow and the Practice Manager.”

But the invoice doesn’t. It differs with the emails we see with Ablow and his practice manager, a woman named Tiffany Bartholemew, as they appear in the BidenLaptopEmails dot com collection, in at least one key respect. The bill is from “Bluestate Psychiatry.” But Bartholomew writes from “Bluewater Wellness.”

The discrepancy may arise from a difference in treatment: and therefore also payment schemes. Of the emails related to Ablow sent by Hunter, about a dozen had to do with accommodations, including:

  • Emails Bartholomew sent on December 4, 2018 (and so before the invoice) about payment for “this week” at Plum Island Rental
  • The confirmation for that reservation, sent the same date as the invoice, to the rhbdcicloud and cc’ed to Bartholomew, followed by one sent on January 3, not cc’ed to Bartholomew, providing instructions for getting in
  • An email sent on January 26 from the “manager of Dr. Ablow’s cottage”
  • Seven emails from a guy who seems to have made himself Hunter’s Chief of Staff at a meeting on January 24, all of which pertain in part or in whole to finding a new place in Newburyport, MA

Those were all sent to the rhbdcicloud. Another email from Bartholomew, sent to the same email, alerted Hunter to a rescheduled Yoga session while in Massachusetts.

There were several other more curious emails involving Bartholomew:

  • An email sent on January 5, 2019 to rhbdc at me.com, seemingly asking Hunter for advice about how to deal with an insane temp leaving adverse reviews on Google
  • An MP4, dated January 8, 2019, titled Neverending story, sent first via Google Drive from a Gmail account, then forwarded the next day from her Ablew email account, both times to the rhbdcicloud

In this same period, Hunter paid someone with the last name Bartholomew but a different first name, via Venmo, for purchases at CVS, using his rhbrspdc account.

Guys are you getting my emails?

But several of the emails demonstrate Hunter’s communication woes during this period.

The very first email from Hunter Biden to Ablow in the Marco Polo set, sent on January 3, 2019, was misaddressed, and bounced. It was sent again, with the subject line “yyyy.”

While no body of that text appears in the Marco Polo set, Ablow responded to it, adding a third person, Rock, and asking for help getting a doctor to review Hunter’s daughter’s x-rays from a bad skiing accident.

Hunter responds, saying he is attaching the x-rays (and reply emails show jpg attachments):

I am attaching the X-rays and would so much appreciate your helopmputting [sic] them in the right hands.

Hunter and Ablow exchange two emails among themselves.

Then Ablow responds to his own email, which this time is marked [External], noting that “His [apparently meaning Hunter’s] email is screwed up,” and then saying he had texted Rock.

From: Keith Ablow <kablow[redacted]>
Sent: Thursday, January 3, 2019 11:40 AM
To: Positano [redacted]; rhbdcicloud
Subject: [EXTERNAL]Re: From Keith

CAUTION: External Email.

Rock
His email is screwed up

I texted you

The doctor responds — happy to help — and provides his contact. Ablow thanks him. Hunter responds to that, plaintively,

Guys are you getting my emails?

And though neither of the external interlocutors ever said a thing directly to Hunter, Ablow says, yes, suggesting they had gotten his emails, then instructs Hunter to contact the doctor and “send him the x-rays,” even though in the original email Hunter already sent 2 jpgs.

Hunter then tried to email the doctor directly, using the same email included in Ablow’s email (possibly even using the link from the doctor’s own email), and it bounces, “RecipientNotFound; Recipient not found by SMTP address lookup.”

At least based on the Marco Polo set, Hunter Biden didn’t send much between then and January 15 (though I may return to what he did send; he had important exchanges with his lawyer George Mesires).

Then he had another communication failure with Ablow’s team, though apparently of a different type.

On January 15, 2019 at 11:13AM, Hunter sent Ablow’s practice manager, Bartholomew. an email from his droidhunter account, asking “Schedule?” The email itself appears in the MarcoPolo collection, but any other body of the email is not preserved.

Bartholomew responded, on January 15 at 11:19PM, to the droidhunter account, describing his schedule for both “today” (seemingly meaning January 15) and “tomorrow,” his Ketamine treatment on January 16.

Then, just under 3.5 hours later, she sent that same email again, to both the droidhunter and rhbdcicloud with the message:

Below is the response I sent within minutes of receiving your email.

I called you this morning
Both Keith and I texted – I, multiple times, both on the group text and solo
I tried calling
I had Jodi text and call and you did not answer until 2pm

I texted you after sending the below email and mentioned adding yoga on for tomorrow – I did not receive a response and I will not waste people’s time booking them if you do not stay in touch

Bartholomew appears to have attributed this to Hunter’s mental struggles, and it may well have been (though it is notable since it is the sole exchange with her involving the droidhunter email).

The reason people love my Dad Chris iOS because he’s the son they hope to raise

The questions about whether Hunter was communicating externally — to say nothing of the effect of the Ketamine treatment, which by context would have been January 16 — makes me really uncomfortable with what happened with a statement Hunter Biden shared for this Vanity Fair story on whether Hunter’s problems were leading Joe to hesitate about running.

The exchange starts with Hunter forwarding an email he sent to Doug Brinkley on his rosemontseneca email to Ablow, using his rhbdcicloud email, with his long and very rough draft of a statement.

Ablow asks if he wants edits.

I could also make a few other edits, with humility. Would you like me to?

Hunter responds by saying it needs both edits and to be more concise. So Ablow promises to do it overnight.

I can make it all happen by 8 am.

Not to worry.

This is my thing.

Stay tuned.

As that exchange was happening, Hunter sent the statement to his lawyer, George Mesires, via his rhbdcme address. Mesires responded saying, “I can’t stop crying,” but providing no edits.

Hunter sends two snide comments to the journalist to his attorney George Mesires, from the rosemontseneca email, ccing Ablow.

Then ultimately he sends the statement as rewritten by Ablow to Mesires.

“FIXED A FEW OF MY TYPOS . . .” Hunter said of the statement substantially written by Ablow. Mesires would have no way of knowing that Ablow had made all the changes.

Vanity Fair removed one paragraph about Hunter’s own background as well as this significantly edited snide comment to him:

I hope that answers your question, Chris. I would ask this one of you: Are your talents best used as a tabloid journalist? If you were willing to endure more pain to make a more powerful contribution to our shared world, what would you do? What has stood in your way? My father would tell you this: Don’t let it. Reach deep down and deliver the gifts you were meant to give to others. And that’s the message Americans will see come to life in 2020.

At a time when Hunter Biden was in a communications vacuum, just days off a Ketamine treatment, and probably getting his life hacked irreparably, to become the non-stop political hit job of those trying to take down his father, Keith Ablow replaced Hunter’s statement with his own.

In the process Ablow replaced this fairly amazing paragraph about Joe Biden … [I’ve left all typos, including the charming, “iOS” instead of “is.”]

The reason people love my Dad Chris iOS because he’s the son they hope to raise he’s the parent they hope to be he’s the brother and friend we all look up to. They love him Chris because he is as real an American as they are and they all want to be. He’s not perfect’ he’s got a horrible temper, he spoils his grandkids, he loves my Mom almost too much and he still thinks he can still make me angrier than anyone on earth sometimes. There’s nobody I want to make more proud of me than my Dad and there’s no-one that I know can ever be more proud of me and my whole family. May Dad never has asked anyone of us to be less human he’s just taught us all what it means to be a good man in hard world. He taught me what his mom and dad taught him “Always remember no man is better than you and you are no better than you.”if er to break I m certain they would all say —no one will ever know you better than your brothers and your sisters you always take their side no matter how badly they screwed up. Every Biden kid knows there’s nothing that they could do to make anyone in this family to stop loving you. And finally always be kind to the people in pain (unless they hurt your grandmother your mom your aunt or your sister- then you’re free to beat the shit out of them if your sister hasn’t beat you to it.)

With this one:

I believe that my father has become an ongoing symbol of what it means to keep on fighting for what is good in oneself, in others and in our country. I can tell you that I wouldn’t be alive today, if my dad hadn’t kept fighting for me, too, through my darkest days. So the idea that tragedy or tough times or any number of trials would dissuade a Biden from serving his fellow man—whether a friend or a fellow citizen—could not be more misguided. My dad has proven, ag ain and again, that he is (as Teddy Roosevelt once said of himself) “as strong as a bull moose” and that America “can use [him] to the limit.”

There’s no sign Brinkley ever responded to Hunter’s email. Instead, Hunter sent him three emails — one, responding to an email Brinkley sent him in July 2018, saying,

Obviously I didn’t send that stream of conscience rant with personal attacks and 7000 grammatical spelling and plain unintelligible errors made tons of edits and cutout 80%.

A minute later he sent two more responding to the email he had actually sent Brinkley, quoting just the bolded part of this last line of his own second paragraph.

And its made us understand that the one thing that binds us all not just my family everyone you will ever meet is what it is to feel pain and how the even the smallest gesture of genuine kindness and love can make you hope for a better day.

That line about small gestures of kindness, like much else from Hunter’s own statement, had been removed.

It’s not yet clear what happened between Ablow and Hunter — or whether Ablow’s awareness of Hunter’s technical communication problems went further than that single email.

What is clear is that, in the process, Ablow managed to replace Hunter’s own, heartfelt words about his father and his own struggles.


* At least the first of Dimitrelos’ reports is on Scribe. He sent me copies, but would only permit me to repost them (which would take far more redactions) with some kind of indemnity for ongoing privacy violations. I instead reached out to Hunter Biden’s attorneys for permission to share it privately with some experts but have heard nothing.

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Hunter Biden’s Matryoshka Cell Phone: How the IRS and Frothers Got Hunter’s Encrypted iPhone Content

Believe it or not, what sent me down the rabbit hole of Hunter Biden’s “laptop” was not the laptop itself.

It was a cell phone.

Or, more specifically, it was two details in purported IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley’s testimony. First, after introducing summaries from some Hunter Biden WhatsApp chats — summaries that, Abbe Lowell claimed, got the most basic details wrong — Shapley explained that the chats didn’t come from the laptop itself, they came from a warrant served on Apple for the iCloud backup to which they were saved.

Q Could you tell us about this document, what is it, and how was it obtained —

A Sure. So there was an electronic search warrant for iCloud backup, and these messages were in that backup and provided —

Q Okay.

A — from a third party, from iCloud.

This appears to be the search warrant return obtained — again, per Shapley’s testimony — in August 2020.

For example, in August 2020, we got the results back from an iCloud search warrant. Unlike the laptop, these came to the investigative team from a third-party record keeper and included a set of messages. The messages included material we clearly needed to follow up on.

Shapley’s disclosure that there were WhatsApp texts saved to iCloud stunned me. That’s because, for all the material produced from the laptop itself — which even frothers have treated as all the content in Hunter Biden’s iCloud account — I had never seen WhatsApp texts.

Plus, there’s a technical issue. WhatsApp texts, like Signal texts, don’t automatically back up to iCloud. If one really wants to use their end-to-end encryption to best advantage, one doesn’t store them in the cloud, because then the only easy way to get the texts would be directly from someone’s phone. These texts purported to involve a Chinese national (though, as noted, Lowell says that’s false) whose phone would presumably be inaccessible overseas. And at the time the IRS obtained these texts, Hunter Biden didn’t know about the investigation into himself. They hadn’t seized his phone.

For Shapley’s description to be true, then, Hunter Biden would have had to back up the texts to his iCloud. But if he had, they should have shown up on the laptop itself, right along with every other scrap of the President’s son’s private life.

There were crumbs of an explanation for this in Shapley’s notes from the October 22, 2020 meeting on the government’s treatment of the laptop attributed to Hunter Biden.

In the meeting, Whistleblower X — who by his own description saw things online that he hadn’t obtained via the laptop directly, even though DOJ warned the agents not to do that — kept prodding about whether the investigative team had been provided all the messages on the laptop.

29. SA [Whistblower X] asked if all information on the hard drive had been reviewed…the answer is that they did not look at all of that SA [Whistleblower X] questions if Dillon reviewed all iMessage’s that wore relevant and not privileged. They would find the answer.

As Shapley recorded, on February 27, 2020, the forensics people provided all messages from the hard drive of material John Paul Mac Isaac restored from the laptop.

30. 2/27/2020 DE3 with all messages from the hard drive were provided by computer forensics— via USB Drive

That production included iPad and MacBook messages, but no iPhone messages.

32. 227 Productions

DE3 USB containing exported messages (ipad and macbook messages) No iphone messages

They didn’t get messages off any iPhone until they found a password, conveniently written on a business card, and with that password, were able to get into encrypted iPhone content on the laptop.

Laptop — iphone messages were on the hard drive but encrypted they didn’t get those messages until they looked at laptop and found a business card with the password on it so they were able to get into the iphone messages [my emphasis]

This still didn’t answer my question — how was the IRS able to get WhatsApp texts from iCloud when they weren’t on the iCloud content that appears on the Hunter Biden laptop.

But a detail on the fourth of Guy Dimitrelos’ reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop may explain it.

In his first report, Dimitrelos explained that the 5 million artifacts found on the hard drive were connected to Hunter Biden’s iCloud account, which he says was tied to the email [email protected].

  1. The hard drive contained approximately 5,791,819 files and system artifacts and was connected to and authenticated on an Apple iCloud account of [email protected] which is owned by Robert Hunter Biden (RHB).

[snip]

  1. Since this Apple MacBook Pro model was not released until 2017, all data prior to 2017 was stored (backed-up) to the [email protected] account and then downloaded to the MacBook Pro hard drive Downloads folder as illustrated in paragraph 30.

In his fourth report — basically 133 pages into his sequential reporting — Dimitrelos noted that Hunter Biden had another iCloud account, one tied to one of the emails he identified on page 4 of his report: [email protected].

In fact, at least according to the unreliable emails released at BidenLaptopEmails dot com (AKA MarcoPolo), that’s the account to which the laptop believed to be the one that ended up at Mac Isaac’s shop was registered to, not the [email protected] account.

At the Marco Polo site, there are 453 pages of emails from the [email protected] account (so around 22650). They include some of the most interesting in the collection, the ones directly with the Biden family and others indicating sensitive travel. There are 269 from the [email protected] account (so around 13,450) — but it’s the latter that seems to have been taken over in early 2019. I’ve described that the droidhunter88 gmail account effectively took over control of the iCloud account in that period (though I need to go back to the timeline and distinguish which events happened on one iCloud account and which on the other), and I think that’s right. But importantly, at times, the RosemontSeneca email is linked into it. That is, a RosemontSeneca email was used on both iCloud accounts.

As to the phone, Dimitrelos describes that he found a phone registered to the [email protected] account in an encrypted container in an iTunes backup.

I identified an encrypted container located within Apple’s MobileSync iTunes default backup folder.

[snip]

I identified the iOS backup to be an iPhone with the phone number below and Apple id of

[email protected] which is one of Robert Hunter Biden’s iCloud accounts.

Part two of Dimitrelos’ report described finding passwords for the iTunes account in two places. First, a picture of a partly rumpled lined piece of paper stored in a Hidden Album. This picture included Amazon, WiFi, iTunes, GMail, and Apple ID passwords, all registered to a different Gmail account. And then, associated with an iPad registered to still a third iCloud account, registered to a Gmail account.

The latter shows that Hunter Biden’s iTunes password was changed on January 30, 2019, solidly in the middle of the period I’ve argued that his account was taken over by the DroidHunter gmail account.

And screencaps in parts two and four of Dimitrelos’ report show that both the iPad and the iPhone were backed up during this same period, on February 6, 2019. Someone changed the iTunes password, and backed up these two devices, where they were found on the laptop. All in this same period where Hunter Biden seems to have lost control over his laptop.

In part four of Dimitrelos’ report, he describes that there were, indeed, WhatsApp messages on the iPhone, registered to that entirely different iCloud account, seemingly backed up to iTunes on the [email protected] account.

I can’t be sure about this, because I’m not a forensics expert, both Shapley and Dimitrelos are deliberately unreliable narrators, and even they don’t have all the data to understand what went on here. But it appears that the reason why there were no WhatsApp texts on the laptop itself, which had all the content in the [email protected] iCloud account, is that they weren’t used by a device registered to the [email protected] iCloud account. They were used by a device registered to the [email protected] account, which was (as Shapley’s notes reflect) stored in encrypted fashion on the laptop.

There’s one more very important point about this.

The government had a warrant. If they really did find a business card (one not described anywhere I’ve seen in Dimitrelos’ report) with a password, they were able to get the encrypted content (though oftentimes prosecutors will recommend you go back and get a second warrant for that). From there, it seems, the IRS got another warrant for the other iCloud account, the [email protected] one. That’s how they got a legally sound copy of the WhatsApp texts in August 2020.

But for people like Rudy Giuliani or Garrett Ziegler or John Paul Mac Isaac, taking a laptop they purport to have been abandoned, and then using a password found on that laptop to access an encrypted container — especially one of a different iCloud account — is legally another level of conduct.

Update: I screwed up the number of emails; I’ve corrected that now.

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The Laptop Everyone Knows as Hunter Biden’s Appears to Have Been Deleted Starting February 15, 2019

I’ve been wading through Hunter Biden data all weekend. There’s some evidence that the descriptions of the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” based on the drive Rudy Giuliani has peddled do not match the description of what should be on such devices given what the FBI and IRS saw.

Before I explain that, though, I want to talk about how the life of Hunter Biden’s iCloud account differs from what is portrayed in this analysis paid for by Washington Examiner.

As that report describes, Hunter Biden activated a MacBook Pro on October 21, 2018, then set it up with Hunter’s iCloud on October 22. Hunter then used the MacBook as his primary device until March 17, 2019, a month before it waltzed into John Paul Mac Isaac’s computer repair shop to start a second act as the biggest political hit job ever.

There are problems with that story. A longer table of the devices that logged into Hunter Biden’s iCloud includes devices that appear to have been accessing core Hunter Biden content.

That same table doesn’t show any access after November 15, 2018, with the last access being the device Roberts MacBook Pro that would end up in a Delaware repair shop, but showing up six days earlier than it should. There’s a phone that should but does not show up in those devices, too.

The report doesn’t discuss the import of the shifts between these emails.

RHB used several emails for business and personal use including:
[email protected] [sic]
[email protected] ([email protected])
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]

One email missing from this list is a Gmail account under which a bunch of passwords were stored. That’ll become important later.

The most important email is the Gmail account (misspelled above), [email protected], which Hunter Biden used to contact sex workers, probably including the Russian escort service that the IRS used to predicate the IRS investigation. That email account got added to his iCloud account at the same time as his iCloud contents were requested, and then again before the MacBook stopped being used. Those changes often happened in conjunction with changes to the phone number.

For now, though, I just want to map out the major events with Hunter’s iCloud accounts from September 1, 2018 (perhaps the months before the IRS would open an investigation into him because he was frequenting a Russian escort service) until the final email as found on the laptop itself. There’s a bunch more — one after another credit card gets rejected, and he keeps moving his Wells Fargo card over to pay for his Apple account; the iCloud account shows Hunter reauthorizing use of biometrics to get into his Wells Fargo account in this period.

In January 2019, the Gmail account Hunter Biden used to contact sex workers (probably including the Russian escort service he had been using) effectively took over his iCloud account and asked for a complete copy of his iCloud account. Then, the next month, all the data on the Hunter Biden laptop was deleted.

Update: I’ve taken the reference to the HB RediPhone out altogether–it’s clear that’s a branded iPhone–and replaced it with a better explanation of the other devices.

Update: I see that he does have D[r]oidhunter88, but doesn’t discuss the import of it.

Update: I’ve added a few things that happened while Hunter’s account was pwned. Importantly, as part of this process an app called “Hunter” was given full access to his droidhunter88 gmail account. There are also a few emails that seem to be a test process.

Update: Added the missing Gmail account.

Hunter Biden’s iCloud

9/1/18: An account recovery request for your Apple ID ([email protected]) was made from the web near Los Angeles, CA on August 31, 2018 at 9:36:07 PM PDT. The contact phone number provided was [Hunter Biden’s].

9/1/18: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on September 1, 2018 at 10:29:36 AM PDT: Password

9/1/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud on a MacBook Pro 13″.
Date and Time: September 1, 2018, 10:34 AM PDT

9/1/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser.
Date and Time: September 1, 2018, 10:42 AM PDT

9/2/18: Your Apple ID, [email protected], was just used to download Hide2Vault from the Mac App Store on a computer or device that has not previously been used.

9/2/18: Welcome to your new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar.

9/11/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser.

9/11/18: The password for your Apple ID ([email protected]) has been successfully reset.

9/11/18: Robert’s iPad is being erased. The erase of Robert’s iPad started at 2:56 PM PDT on August 5, 2018.

This is one of several times in several weeks that Hunter loses his iPhone, but while it’s lost, someone also pings his MacBook.

9/16/18: A sound was played on iPhone. A sound was played on iPhone at 8:25 PM PDT on September 15, 2018. (Repeats 25 times in 5 minutes)

9/16/18: A sound was played on Robert’s MacBook Pro at 8:30 PM PDT on September 15, 2018. (Repeats 2 times)

9/16/18: A sound was played on iPhone at 8:31 PM PDT on September 15, 2018. (Repeats 7 times)

9/16/18: iPhone was found near Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area 23287 Palm Canyon Ln Malibu, CA 90265 United States at 11:32 PM PDT.

9/16/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser.

9/19/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser.

9/20/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud on an iPhone 8 Plus.

This is the second time he loses his phone. What follows is basically a chase of Hunter Biden’s iPhone across LA. It’s not clear it is ever recovered — but it is over two weeks before a new iPhone logs into his account.

9/27/18: Lost Mode enabled on Robert Hunter’s iPhone. This device was put into Lost Mode at 7:20 PM PDT on September 27, 2018.

9/27/18: Robert Hunter’s iPhone was found near [address redacted] Lynwood, CA 90262 United States at 7:20 PM PDT.

9/27/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud on an iPhone 8 Plus.

9/27/18: A sound was played on Robert Hunter’s iPhone at 7:20 PM PDT on September 27, 2018.

9/27/18: A sound was played on Robert Hunter’s iPhone at 7:20 PM PDT on September 27, 2018.

9/27/18: Robert Hunter’s iPhone was found near [address redacted] Lynwood, CA 90262 United States at 7:20 PM PDT.

9/28/18: Robert Hunter’s iPhone was found near [different address redacted] Lynwood, CA 90262 United States at 4:24 PM PDT.

9/28/18: Robert Hunter’s iPhone was found near [third address redacted] Lynwood, CA 90262 United States at 5:27 PM PDT.

9/28/18: Robert Hunter’s iPhone was found near [fourth address redacted] Los Angeles, CA 90036 United States at 6:22 PM PDT.

9/28/18: Robert Hunter’s iPhone was found near [fifth address redacted] Los Angeles, CA 90069 United States at 6:38 PM PDT.

10/13/18: Bobby Hernandez to [email protected]: You left your phone. How do I get it to you?

10/14/18: The password for your Apple ID ([email protected]) has been successfully reset.

By date, this login is the HB rediPhone, but Apple recognized it as an iPhone X.

10/14/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud on an iPhone X. Date and Time: October 14, 2018, 11:24 AM PDT

10/17/18: The password for your Apple ID ([email protected]) has been successfully reset.

10/17/18: The following information for your Apple ID (r•••••@rspdc.com) was updated on October 17, 2018. Trusted Phone Number Added – Phone number ending in 73

10/17/18: New sign-in to your linked account [email protected] Your Google Account was just signed in to from a new Apple iPhone device.

Per the Gus Dimitrelos report, the following activity reflects the creation of a new MacBook account called Robert’s MacBook Pro — the laptop that would end up in Mac Isaac’s shop. But there doesn’t appear to be an alert for a new device like there is the for the iPhone 8 Plus the following day.

10/21/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud on a MacBook Pro 13″. Date and Time: October 21, 2018, 5:50 AM PDT

10/21/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser. Date and Time: October 21, 2018, 9:06 AM PDT

10/22/18: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on October 22, 2018 at 7:47:30 PM EDT: Phone number(s)

10/23/18: Your Apple ID, [email protected], was just used to download Quora from the App Store on a computer or device that has not previously been used.

10/23/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud on an iPhone 8 Plus. Date and Time: October 23, 2018, 4:10 PM PDT

10/23/18: New sign-in to your linked account [email protected] Your Google Account was just signed in to from a new Apple iPhone device.

Several spyware apps get purchased in this period.

10/29/18: Your mSpy credentials to your control panel: Username/Login: [email protected]

11/2/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud on an iPhone XS.

11/16/18: You recently added [email protected] as a new alternate email address for your Apple ID.

11/21/18: You’ve purchased the following subscription with a 1‑month free trial: Subscription Tile Premium

11/22/18: Your Apple ID, [email protected], was just used to download KAYAK Flights, Hotels & Cars from the iTunes Store on a computer or device that has not previously been used.

12/28/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser. Date and Time: December 28, 2018, 7:06 AM PST

1/3/19: Keith Ablow (then Hunter’s therapist) says Hunter’s email is screwed up

1/6/19: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser. Date and Time: January 6, 2019, 1:51 AM PST

1/12/19: Your Recent Mac Cleanup Pro Order [ADV181229-7742-90963]

1/14/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 13, 2019 at 10:28:31 PM EST: Phone number(s)

1/14/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 13, 2019 at 10:31:15 PM EST: Password

1/14/19 The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 13, 2019 at 10:52:13 PM EST: Billing and/or Shipping Information

1/14/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 13, 2019 at 10:53:40 PM EST: Phone number(s)

1/14/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 13, 2019 at 11:12:45 PM EST: Billing Information

1/16/19: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser. Date and Time: January 16, 2019, 1:59 PM PST

While Hunter is in Ketamine treatment at Keith Ablow’s, a service called “Hunter” gets access to the droidhunter88 gmail account

1/16/19: Here’s my first tip for you!

1/16/19: Hi Robinson, Hunter now has access to your Google Account [email protected].

Hunter can:
View your email messages and settings
Manage drafts and send emails
Send email on your behalf

A bunch of things happen in this four day period: first, someone accessed droidhunter88 from a new iPhone. Someone changed the phone number for the Hunter Biden iCloud. Then, droidhunter88 was given access to the iCloud account. Then the iCloud account ordered all of Hunter’s iCloud contents. Then the password for the account was reset.

1/17/19: New device signed in to [email protected] Your Google Account was just signed in to from a new Apple iPhone device.

1/17/19: I am here to help you find the emails you need!

Giovanni here from Hunter.

I wanted to quickly check if I can help you getting started with Hunter.

There are plenty of functionalities included with your free plan that will allow you to find, verify and enrich a set of data in bulk: these are all explained in our video guides.

However, if you already have a precise task to perform, reply to this email so I can better assist you!

1/17/19: n (from [email protected])

1/18/19: Long email to tabloid journalist sent under rosemontseneca email (this is sent first to Keith Ablow and then George Mesires, the latter of whom responds); this would have shown how the email account worked

1/19/19: The following information for your Apple ID (r•••••@rspdc.com) was updated on January 19, 2019. Trusted Phone Number Removed – Phone number ending in 13

1/20/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 20, 2019 at 5:24:54 PM EST: Phone number(s)

1/20/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 20, 2019 at 5:31:21 PM EST: Apple ID
Email address(es)

1/20/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 20, 2019 at 5:31:21 PM EST: Apple ID Email address(es)

1/20/19: A request for a copy of the data associated with the Apple ID [email protected] was made on January 20, 2019 at 5:40:26 PM EST

1/21/19: The password for your Apple ID ([email protected]) has been successfully reset.

1/21/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 21, 2019 at 8:28:05 AM EST: Name — changed from Robert Hunter to Robert Biden

1/21/19: You recently added [email protected] as the notification email address for your Apple ID

1/21/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 21, 2019 at 8:31:02 AM EST:
Rescue email address

1/22/19: The following information for your Apple ID (r•••••@icloud.com) was updated on January 22, 2019. Trusted Phone Number Removed – Phone number ending in 96

1/22/19: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser. Date and Time: January 22, 2019, 4:21 AM PST

1/22/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 22, 2019 at 10:05:20 AM EST:
Email address(es)

1/22/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 22, 2019 at 10:05:29 AM EST:
Email address(es)

1/22/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 22, 2019 at 10:05:34 AM EST:
Email address(es)

1/24/19: You recently added [email protected] as a new alternate email address for your Apple ID.

I think that after ordering all Hunter’s data, the account is reset to what it had been from the start. But Droidhunter88, not [email protected], gets the iCloud backup.

1/24/19: Your contacts have been restored successfully on January 24, 2019, 1:17 PM PST.

1/25/19: The data you requested on January 20, 2019 at 5:40:26 PM EST is ready to download. [Sent to both Droidhunter88 and [email protected]]

1/27/19: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser. Date and Time: January 27, 2019, 7:41 AM PST

Several photo editing apps are purchased in this period (and one CAD app).

1/27/19: You’ve purchased the following subscription with a 1‑month free trial: Subscription Polarr Photo Editor Yearly

2/6/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on February 5, 2019 at 11:39:09 PM EST: Phone number(s)

2/9/19: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser. Date and Time: February 9, 2019, 9:52 AM PST

2/9/19: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser. Date and Time: February 9, 2019, 5:08 PM PST

Hunter connected to your Google Account
Hi Robinson,

2/9/19: Hunter now has access to your Google Account [email protected].

2/9/19: test To:[email protected]

2/9/19: jkFrom:”Robinson Hunter” [email protected]:[email protected]

2/9/19: The following information for your Apple ID (r•••••@icloud.com) was updated on February 10, 2019. Trusted Phone Number Added – Phone number ending in 96

2/9/19: You recently added [email protected] as the notification email address for your Apple ID.

2/9/19: You recently added [email protected] as the notification email address for your Apple ID

2/9/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on February 9, 2019 at 8:33:57 PM EST: Rescue email address

2/9/19: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud on an iPhone 6s. Date and Time: February 9, 2019, 6:11 PM PST

2/10/19: Your Apple ID, [email protected], was just used to download Call recorder for iphone from the iTunes Store on a computer or device that has not previously been used.

2/15/19: Hi Robinson, Did you know? Hunter doesn’t have only one Chrome extension! We recently built a simple email tracker for Gmail.

This is where the data on the MacBook that would end up in Mac Isaac’s shop started getting deleted.

2/15/19: Robert’s MacBook is being erased. The erase of Robert’s MacBook started at 4:18 PM PST on February 15, 2019.

2/15/19: Robert’s MacBook Pro has been locked. This Mac was locked at 8:36 PM PST on February 15, 2019.

2/19/19: Noiseless MacPhun LLC

2/20/19: where the fuck are youi? from DroidHunter88 to dpagano:

this is hunter
i dont have your #

call me please

The droidhunter88 account bought a new iPhone — but, after telling Apple they would recycle the old one, instead kept it. That would effectively be another device associated with Hunter Biden. Given some of the other apps involved, this may have served as a way to get Hunter Biden’s calls (eg, from Mac Isaac). Unlike the new devices that show up in 2018, this one was paid for. 

2/21/19: New device signed in to [email protected] Your Google Account was just signed in to from a new Apple iPhone device.

2/21/19: Hi Robinson, Welcome to Google on your new Apple iPhone (tied to droidhunter88)

2/28/19: Your items are ready for pickup.Order Number: W776795632Ordered on: February 28, 2019

2/28/19: Your trade-in has been initiated. Thanks for using Apple GiveBack.

3/1/19: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud on an iPhone XR. Date and Time: March 1, 2019, 8:52 AM PST

3/5/19: Recently you reported an issue with Polarr Photo Editor, Polarr Photo Editor Yearly using iTunes Report a Problem

3/7/19: Your Apple ID, [email protected], was just used to download Lovense [sic] Remote from the App Store on a computer or device that has not previously been used.

3/9/19: New sign-in to your linked account [email protected] Your Google Account was just signed in to from a new Apple iPhone device.

3/9/19: Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose (Unabridged)

3/13/19: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser. Date and Time: March 13, 2019, 5:43 PM PDT

3/16/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on March 16, 2019 at 11:59:16 PM EDT:Email address(es)

Droidhunter88 is added back to Hunter’s iCloud contact again.

3/17/19: You recently added [email protected] as a new alternate email address for your Apple ID.

3/17/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on March 17, 2019 at 12:02:06 AM EDT: Email address(es)

3/17/19: We haven’t received your device.

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Walt Nauta and the Single Box

The section of the less redacted search warrant affidavit showing when Walt Nauta moved boxes in and out of the storage room differs from the timeline shown in the indictment in one key way.

The search warrant affidavit used to demonstrate probable cause doesn’t describe how, on May 22 of last year, the former valet spent over half an hour in the storage room, and then left carrying a single box.

53. On May 22, 2022, NAUTA entered the Storage Room at 3:47 p.m. and left approximately 34 minutes later, carrying one of TRUMP’s boxes.

There are several possible explanations why that description may not be in the search warrant affidavit.

Perhaps investigators didn’t think it important — though that would be hard to believe, given that the affidavit observes something that the indictment does not as explicitly: that all this box moving happened in the same period when Nauta disavowed any knowledge of box movement.

On May 30, 2022, four days after WITNESS 5’s interview with the FBI during which the location of boxes was a significant subject of questioning, WITNESS 5 is observed exiting the ANTEROOM doorway with approximately fifty Bankers boxes, consistent with the description of the FPOTUS BOXES. [my emphasis]

Perhaps investigators simply didn’t see Nauta and the single box on May 22. But note that the surveillance video was motion activated, so any movement on May 22 should show up just like all the other movement did, and in close proximity to his movements captured two days later.

[T]he FBI determined that the drive contained video footage from four cameras in the basement hallway of the PREMISES in which the door to the STORAGE ROOM is located. The footage on the drive begins on April 23, 2022, and ends on June 24, 2022. The recording feature of the cameras appears to be motion activated, so that footage is only captured when motion is detected within each camera’s field of view.

Or perhaps this movement, Nauta spending half an hour in the storage room then leaving with a single box, is one of the surveillance footage gaps that investigators spent much of a year trying to fill and explain.

The different treatment of this one box is more interesting given other details of the timeline.

For example, Nauta retrieved that single box just two days before the original deadline for the subpoena, May 24.

The return date of the subpoena was May 24, 2022.

Nauta retrieved that box the day before Trump met with Corcoran and another attorney who hasn’t been IDed yet, but who may be Boris Epshteyn. At the meeting, a day after presumably getting a box that didn’t show up in the search warrant affidavit, Trump whined that, “I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes!”

54. On May 23, 2022, TRUMP met with Trump Attorney 1 and Trump Attorney 2 at The Mar-a-Lago Club to discuss the response to the May 11 Subpoena. Trump Attorney 1 and Trump Attorney 2 told TRUMP that they needed to search for documents that would be responsive to the subpoena and provide a certification that there had been compliance with the subpoena. TRUMP, in sum and substance, made the following statements, among others, as memorialized by Trump Attorney 1:

a. I don’t want anybody looking, I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don’t, I don’t want you looking through my boxes.

b. Well what if we, what happens if we just don’t respond at all or don’t play ball with them?

c. Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?

d. Well look isn’t it better if there are no documents?

Amidst all that whining, Trump agreed to let Corcoran search for documents, but only after a ten day delay. And then Trump delayed his departure to Bedminster so he would be at Mar-a-Lago to sort boxes and to see the scheme through.

56. On May 23, TRUMP also confirmed his understanding with Trump Attorney 1 that Trump Attorney 1 would return to The Mar-a-Lago Club on June 2 to search for any documents with classification markings to produce in response to the May 11 Subpoena. Trump Attorney 1 made it clear to TRUMP that Trump Attorney 1 would conduct the search for responsive documents by looking through TRUMP’s boxes that had been transported from the White House and remained in storage at The Mar-a-Lago Club. TRUMP indicated that he wanted to be at The Mar-a-Lago Club when Trump Attorney 1 returned to review his boxes on June 2, and that TRUMP would change his summer travel plans to do so. TRUMP told Trump Attorney 2 that Trump Attorney 2 did not need to be present for the review of boxes.

57. After meeting with Trump Attorney 1 and Trump Attorney 2 on May 23, TRUMP delayed his departure from The Mar-a-Lago Club to The Bedminster Club for the summer so that he would be present at The Mar-a-Lago Club on June 2, when Trump Attorney 1 returned to review the boxes.

Something that doesn’t show up in the indictment but does in the affidavit is that Corcoran then pushed for an extension on the subpoena deadline.

On May 25, 2022, while negotiating for an extension of the subpoena, FPOTUS COUNSEL 1 sent two letters to DOJ COUNSEL. In the second such letter, which is attached as Exhibit 1, FPOTUS COUNSEL 1 asked DOJ to consider a few “principles,” which include FPOTUS COUNSEL 1’s claim that a President has absolute authority to declassify documents. In this letter, FPOTUS COUNSEL 1 requested, among other things, that “DOJ provide this letter to any judicial officer who is asked to rule on any motion pertaining to this investigation, or on any application made in connection with any investigative request concerning this investigation.”

Just one of the two letters Corcoran sent that day has been released — the one falsely claiming Trump had returned documents in good faith earlier that year, though Corcoran may not have known that was false. Nauta would repeat a version of that claim the next day, on May 26, in his FBI interview, though unlike Corcoran, he is credibly accused of knowing well that was a lie.

All the other movement of boxes, then, occurs during that subpoena extension (and this might be another reason why the May 22 movement is not included on the affidavit — perhaps investigators focused on what happened during the subpoena extension). Nauta empties the storage closet of 64 more boxes, moving all these boxes in the same week when, in an FBI interview, he allegedly denied knowing anything about an earlier scheme to sort through boxes.

On May 24, 2022, WITNESS 5 is observed exiting the ANTEROOM doorway with three boxes.

On May 30, 2022, four days after WITNESS 5’s interview with the FBI during which the location of boxes was a significant subject of questioning, WITNESS 5 is observed exiting the ANTEROOM doorway with approximately fifty Bankers boxes, consistent with the description of the FPOTUS BOXES. FBI did not observe this quantity of boxes being returned to the STORAGE ROOM through the ANTEROOM entrance in its review of the footage.

The next day, on June 1, 2022, WITNESS 5 is observed carrying eleven brown cardboard boxes out the ANTEROOM entrance. One box did not have a lid on it and appeared to contain papers.

And then, after Nauta told a female Trump that Trump wanted to pick from all those boxes, Nauta loaded up several of the boxes withheld from Corcoran’s search onto Trump’s plane to take to Bedminster, never to be seen again.

72. Earlier [on June 3], NAUTA and others loaded several of TRUMP’s boxes along with other items on aircraft that flew TRUMP and his family north for the summer.

So it may or may not be a significant detail, but the day before Trump orchestrates this scheme to keep 35 boxes shielded from Corcoran’s search, Nauta spent half an hour in the storage room retrieving a single box.

Some weeks after this scheme, on June 21, the day before DOJ asked Trump Organization for surveillance footage, per the discovery letter, Nauta appeared before a grand jury, his second (and only other) interview with investigators.

A bunch of reports last year, such as this one from Devlin Barrett that likely confuses Nauta with Molly Michael, described that Nauta changed his testimony in what would be this grand jury appearance, admitting that Trump ordered him to move boxes.

When FBI agents first interviewed Nauta, he denied any role in moving boxes or sensitive documents, the people familiar with the situation said in interviews before Nauta’s name became public. But as investigators gathered more evidence, they questioned him a second time and he told a starkly different story — that Trump instructed him to move the boxes, these people said.

But those reports came at a time when DOJ was still trying to get more testimony from Nauta.

Prosecutors have indicated they are skeptical of an initial account Mr. Nauta gave investigators about moving documents stored at Mar-a-Lago and are using the specter of charges against him for misleading investigators to persuade him to sit again for questioning, according to two people briefed on the matter.

So, particularly given that a grand jury appearance would have been in — and so would be charged — in DC, it’s not really clear whether Nauta did correct his story before the grand jury. If he didn’t, Jack Smith could prosecute Nauta individually on a perjury charge that might go to trial within months, not the year the Espionage Act trial is expected to take.

Whether or not he cleaned up his testimony, on June 21, Nauta appeared before the grand jury.

Having locked that testimony in, on June 22 prosecutors asked Trump Organization — probably Alan Garten, from whom discovery has been deficient in past investigations — for surveillance footage.

DOJ COUNSEL has advised me that on or about June 22, 2022, counsel for the Trump Organization, a group of business entities associated with FPOTUS, confirmed that the Trump Organization maintains security cameras in the vicinity of the STORAGE ROOM and that on June 24, 2022, counsel for the Trump Organization agreed to accept service of a grand jury subpoena for footage from those cameras.

Shortly after that, per reporting on some of the last grand jury testimony banked in DC before DOJ took steps to charge the Espionage charges in Florida, Nauta called Chief of Operations for Trump Organization, Matthew Calamari Sr.

To resolve the issue about the gaps in the surveillance footage, the special counsel last week subpoenaed Matthew Calamari Sr, the Trump Organization’s security chief who became its chief operating officer, and his son Matthew Calamari Jr, the director of corporate security.

Both Calamaris testified to the federal grand jury in Washington on Thursday, and were questioned in part on a text message that Trump’s valet, Walt Nauta, had sent them around the time that the justice department last year asked for the surveillance footage, one of the people said.

The text message is understood to involve Nauta asking Matthew Calamari Sr to call him back about the justice department’s request, one of the people said – initially a point of confusion for the justice department, which appears to have thought the text was to Calamari Jr.

Then, less than two weeks later, on July 6, Trump Organization provided DOJ with surveillance footage showing Nauta moving a great many boxes out of the storage room, and moving fewer than half of them back in before Evan Corcoran searched them. That’s pretty damning stuff! It provided some of the most compelling evidence in the affidavit justifying a search on the former President’s beach resort.

DOJ only got two months of footage, not the five they had asked for (which would have covered the tail end of the earlier sort of boxes). That’s unsurprising: even normal businesses only retain such footage for a limited period of time.

But in addition to obtaining fewer months than they had requested, the footage Trump Org turned over reportedly had other gaps, gaps that have not yet been charged or even mentioned, at least in unsealed form, in any official DOJ filing.

What’s unclear is whether that May 22 footage, showing that Nauta spent half an hour in the storage closet only to come out with a single box, was originally one of those surveillance gaps or not.

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Serving as Julian Assange’s Unwitting Data Mule to Israel Shamir Is Not Journalism

It’s a testament to how effective WikiLeaks’ propaganda is that almost none of the people implicated by things Julian Assange did years ago and almost none of the people who brainlessly repeat Julian Assange’s propaganda now know about this May 16, 2022 filing, submitted last year in the Josh Schulte case, which I wrote about here.

The redacted bits of the filing almost certainly describe things obtained in an ongoing investigation of WikiLeaks that pertain to how the data stolen by Schulte was used. The unredacted parts, however, describe that what must be the WikiLeaks investigation is both ongoing and has a scope that, “is neither known to the public nor to all of the targets of the investigation.”

“All of the targets.” That phrase is telling. At least one target — Assange — knows he is a target. The other targets (and DOJ uses the jargon to describe people who almost certainly will be charged, not just people who might be) don’t know.

The WikiLeaks investigation — which is ongoing and not just, as many boosters claim, an attempt to shore up the case against Assange — is not an investigation into Assange, exclusively. There are other targets.

Key WikiLeaks people almost certainly know about this filing, because they treated Schulte’s second trial — where he defended himself and repeatedly tried to publicly share classified information, almost certainly including details of the discovery about the ongoing WikiLeaks investigation he had received — differently than the first.

They’re just not telling you that there are other targets of the WikiLeaks investigation.

They’re not telling you, in part, because it ensures that when the Met or FBI or other investigators approach people to obtain information about those other targets, they’ll refuse, because they don’t want to be part of a prosecution of Julian Assange for what they’re telling themselves is journalism.

James Ball is the latest person describing how that happened.

In a Rolling Stone post describing the two year effort to obtain his cooperation, he claims journalists are being asked to cooperate against Assange.

And he claims he’s being approached — for information that clearly pertains to Israel Shamir — as a journalist.

He asserts that he’s being approached as a journalist by claiming that DOJ wants to talk to him about this 2013 article, rather than about his own conduct described in the article.

As the article described, in 2010, he unwittingly served as Assange’s data mule, handing off 90,000 State Cables to Israel Shamir, who then exploited them — by sharing them with Belarusian dictator Alexandr Lukashenko and/or selling them — before the entire Cable set was released.

Shamir is an anti-Semitic writer, a supporter of the dictator of Belarus, and a man with ties and friends in Russian security services. He and Julian—unknown to us—had been in friendly contact for years. It was a friendship that would have serious consequences.

Introduced to WikiLeaks staff and supporters under a false name, Shamir was given direct access to more than 90,000 of the U.S. Embassy cables, covering Russia, all of Eastern Europe, parts of the Middle East, and Israel. This was, for quite some time, denied by WikiLeaks. But that’s never a denial I’ve found convincing: the reason I know he has them is that I gave them to him, at Assange’s orders, not knowing who he was.

Why did this prove to be a grave mistake? Not just for Shamir’s views, which are easy to Google, but for what he did next. The first hints of trouble came through contacts from various Putin-influenced Russian media outlets. A pro-Putin outlet got in touch to say Shamir had been asking for $10,000 for access to the cables. He was selling the material we were working to give away free, to responsible outlets.

Worse was to come. The NGO Index on Censorship sent a string of questions and some photographic evidence, suggesting Shamir had given the cables to Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Europe’s last dictator. Shamir had written a pro-Belarus article, shortly before photos emerged of him leaving the interior ministry. The day after, Belarus’s dictator gave a speech saying he was establishing a WikiLeaks for Belarus, citing some stories and information appearing in the genuine (and then unpublished) cables. [my emphasis]

As he admits, at least by 2013, Ball was aware that Shamir had ties to Russian spooks.

What Ball describes in the piece is that he entered into an agreement with Assange to provide data to someone, Shamir, that Shamir did not publish, but instead shared with a repressive dictator and, probably, with Russian intelligence services.

That’s not journalism. That’s spying.

To be sure: as Ball describes, he realized his error and promptly left WikiLeaks (and, as he described in the 2013 article, refused to sign some of the NDAs Assange was pushing). That’s why he was approached as a witness and not a subject, because he made affirmative efforts to leave the conspiracy that has already been charged against Assange and almost certainly will be charged against Shamir, if it hasn’t already been, under seal.

After having served as an unwitting data mule for Assange in a handoff that would result in Lukashenko (and possibly Russian spies) getting advance access to the content of the Cables, Ball subsequently became a journalist. But that does not retroactively change what happened in 2010. Nor does that mean FBI approached him as a journalist. They approached him as a guy who once unwittingly served as a data mule for the part of the Cable releases that undermines all the claims that Assange is nothing but a publisher.

Here’s what people miss about the publication charges against Julian Assange, including the Cable count. They charge him for, “distributing them and then by publishing them.” Proving that Assange distributed the State Cables via unwitting data mule James Ball to Shamir is all DOJ would have to do to prove that charge against Assange, to prove that Assange shared them with someone not authorized to receive them. At a hypothetical trial of Assange (and whoever else gets charged), they’ll undoubtedly explain that after first giving privileged access to the Cables to Shamir, who handed them onto people who would use them to suppress dissent, Assange published all of them. That’s part of the cover. That’s part of what leads people like Ball to imagine he was involved in journalism when he shared the Cable files with Shamir.

For a number of WikiLeaks releases, there’s some story like this, about how before publication, files were either removed from the publication set or provided exclusively to someone in advance. The publication is, in part, cover for that earlier sharing. Schulte even described how if Russia got the source code he shared with WikiLeaks but which WikiLeaks, with limited exceptions, did not publish, they would never publish it, because it would be more useful to reverse engineer what the CIA had been doing.

These tools are MUCH more valuable undiscovered by the media or the nation that lost them. Now, you can secretly trace and discover every operation that nation is conducting.

Schulte is one of the people that anyone charged in a larger WikiLeaks conspiracy would be charged with conspiring with.

That’s the tough thing about US conspiracy law: Once you enter into a conspiracy, you’re on the hook for the actions of anyone who later enters into that conspiracy — like Shamir or Schulte — whether or not you know about it personally. You’re on the hook unless and until you take affirmative actions to leave the conspiracy. Lots of people with ties to WikiLeaks want no tie to Assange’s relationship with Shamir, but if DOJ adds him as a co-conspirator, then they’re not going to have much choice in the matter.

In any case, because so few of WikiLeaks’ boosters know that there are other targets in this investigation, they seem to be getting unfortunate legal advice, such as regarding the import of the detail that FBI obtained a statement from Shamir — whose statements, if and when he is charged as a co-conspirator, can be entered at trial — stating that Ball provided Cables, which he claimed to be about “the Jews,” to him.

The U.S. government cannot make much use of what I revealed in the article in a court of law unless I testify to it — and it is not hard to see how I could be useful if they were trying to strengthen the political case against Assange. In the article, I admit that I was the one who gave Shamir the material, albeit on Assange’s orders, without knowing who he was. If I testified to all this, it could, at least in theory, open me to criminal charges of my own.

[snip]

When, after months of delaying tactics had run out of road, we said a final “no”, there was a small sting in the tale from a DOJ prosecutor to my lawyers. Sending a statement in which Shamir had falsely claimed I had provided him with cables on “the Jews,” the prosecutor noted:

“Upon seeing those words from Shamir, I cannot help but ask whether Mr. Ball would reconsider his decision about speaking to the investigators, even if only just to respond to Shamir’s allegations.”

Yeah, it was a sleazy tactic, but also one designed to alert his lawyer that Ball does not currently have exposure but at a trial in which Shamir is a co-conspirator, Ball’s own conduct will be introduced at trial as part of proving that Cable charge and can be introduced without the article Ball wrote in 2013. Ball was advised they can’t use his article without his testimony — and because he had already left any agreement with Assange that’s probably right — but FBI can certainly introduce Shamir’s claims that he got the Cables from Ball, along with whatever other evidence they have about what Shamir did with them afterwards.

One more reason the fact that this is an ongoing investigation into targets not publicly identified matters: DOJ may or may not  or may already have gotten the UK to approve superseding the existing indictment against Assange, the one that has led people to believe he is the only target of it. But they certainly have the ability to charge a conspiracy in which Assange is an uncharged co-conspirator, showing a seven year conspiracy involving Russian spooks — starting no later than that handoff of cables to Shamir — charging everyone else that entered into a conspiracy via Assange with Russian spooks. Back in 2020, prosecutors implied to Jeremy Hammond that the long extradition process of Assange would provide the opportunity to charge Assange’s involvement in the 2016 Russian hack-and-leak. And because at least one of the people who would be charged in such a conspiracy, Josh Schulte, appears to have continued his efforts to leak through last year, any statute of limitations might go through 2027. That’s why they’re in no rush to charge Shamir publicly: because the way conspiracy law works in the US, they can charge everyone who didn’t affirmatively leave the WikiLeaks conspiracy so long as the conspiracy remains ongoing.

Ball may well be right that the other people the FBI has approached are being approached for coverage of WikiLeaks they did, as journalists (though there are some edge cases). But of the descriptions I’ve seen, there’s always another as yet uncharged target about whom the FBI is asking. That may not change their calculus about whether they want to cooperate, but it means, whether they know it or not, that their refusals are not limited to a bid to protect Assange’s conduct.

I think the people approached for their coverage of WikiLeaks should definitely tell the FBI to fuck off.

But there’s more going on here, particularly with the request to Ball.

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Double Booked: Whistleblower X Described Inappropriate Presidential Interference … Back in 2019

There’s a line in Whistleblower X’s testimony that hasn’t gotten enough attention amid the uncritical treatment of Gary Shapley’s media tour claiming improper political interference in the investigation of Hunter Biden.

Whistleblower X described that when investigators asked late last year why prosecutors hadn’t yet charged Hunter Biden, they learned that the attorneys had “found some emails” that made them question whether “they could actually charge the case.”

So we found out through talking with our SAC that the attorneys had found — we were always asking for updates on charging. When are we going to charge? When are we going to charge? We were told that the prosecutors had found some emails that concerned them if they could actually charge the case. That’s what they said to us.

This explanation — that prosecutors had discovered emails that made them question whether they could charge the case, at all — would present an entirely different explanation for the delayed (and seemingly softball) charging decision with regards to Hunter Biden, one for which there is abundant evidence in the two transcripts, yet one that has been ignored by lazy journalists.

It suggests there may be evidence of past misconduct that, if shared with Hunter Biden’s lawyers in discovery, would lead to dismissal of the entire case, or at least an acquittal.

Non-Virgin Birth

Start with how the investigation was set up. Shapley described that the investigation into Hunter Biden was spun off of an investigation into what he called a “foreign-based amateur online pornography platform.”

The investigation into Hunter Biden, code name Sportsman, was first opened in November 2018 as an offshoot of an investigation the IRS was conducting into a foreign-based amateur online pornography platform.

Whistleblower X, who opened the case immediately after joining the International Tax and Financial Crimes group, described that “amateur online pornography platform” differently; he described it as a “social media company” that may have hosted a prostitution ring.

I started this investigation in November of 2018 after reviewing bank reports related to another case I was working on a social media company. Those bank reports identified Hunter Biden as paying prostitutes related to a potential prostitution ring.

Also included in those bank reports was evidence that Hunter Biden was living lavishly through his corporate bank account. This is a typical thing that we look for in tax cases — criminal tax cases, I should say.

Remember that Whistleblower X has a habit of seeing sex workers everywhere he looks.

Whistleblower X then went from there to look for evidence of crime in public reporting on Hunter Biden’s divorce proceedings.

In addition, there was media reporting related to Hunter Biden’s wife, ex-wife, divorce proceedings basically talking about his tax issues. And I wanted to quote some of the things that were said in her divorce filing which was public record.

“Throughout the parties’ separation, Mr. Biden” — referring to Hunter Biden — “has created financial concerns for the family by spending extravagantly on his own interests, including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, gifts for women with whom he had sexual relationships with, while leaving the family with no funds to pay legitimate bills.

“The parties’ outstanding debts are shocking and overwhelming. The parties have maxed-out credit card debt, double mortgages on both real properties they own, and a tax debt of at least $300,000.” [my emphasis]

Then, in response to questioning from Minority Counsel, Whistleblower X described how, on his third attempt to open the investigation, he ran bank reports for Burisma, which is what convinced his supervisor to permit him to open the investigation.

Mr. X. My initiation packet, so sending the case forward to get — we call it subject case. It’s an SCI. It’s elevating the case to actually working the investigation. My first one showed the unfiled returns and the taxes owed for 2015 and that was it on my first package. So that was the wrongdoing that we were alleging.

And my supervisor goes: You don’t have enough. You need to find more.

So I kept digging for more and more. And even after that point, he goes: You haven’t found enough. So I ended up searching bank reports that [I] ran on the periphery of what we were looking at.

So I ran bank reports for Burisma, and in those bank reports I had found additional payments that Hunter had received. And then at that point I had found that Hunter did not report the income for 2014 related to Burisma.

So now I had a false return year. So that alone — it was basically so much evidence that I put in there — allowed us to elevate the case.

A potentially “amateur” sex worker site, to divorce proceedings, to Burisma. It all sounds like an effort to find a crime, and finding that crime has been a significant focus of a 12-person international tax group supposedly tasked to find much more significant tax crime ever since.

I don’t think anyone asked how long this process of making three bids to open an investigation into Hunter Biden took. So it’s actually unclear how the timing works with the investigation in Delaware opened in January 2019.

So in [or] around March or April of 2019, the case went up to DOJ Tax. And at that time we were told that William Barr made the decision to join two investigations together. So at that point in time I had found out that Delaware had opened up an investigation related to the bank reports and that that occurred in January of 2019, so 2 months after I started mine.

Likewise, there has never been an explanation for what predicated the separate investigation in Delaware opened in 2019, though NYT describes that an existing civil review of Hunter Biden’s tax problems became a criminal investigation that also included the foreign influence peddling, largely, Burisma, that appears to have since been dropped.

Then, we learn, that shortly after Barr was confirmed, and in a period when he was trying to reverse the prosecution of Michael Cohen, sustaining investigations into Greg Craig and Andrew McCabe, perpetuating efforts to seed an investigation into John Kerry, and launching a four year witch hunt based off fabricated claims about Hillary Clinton, the Attorney General consolidated everything in Delaware — the perfect venue if Joe Biden is your target but (as Whistleblower X noted), the wrong place for Joe Biden’s son, who lived in LA or DC during the alleged crimes in question.

Documented Sixth Amendment Concerns

How all this got started matters, because this early period may be when adverse emails that could make it impossible to prosecute Hunter Biden at trial got put into the record.

That’s because Whistleblower X’s supervisor for the first period of the investigation — for a period that may have spanned over 14 months — believed there were Sixth Amendment and political influence problems with the investigation.

When describing how this perturbed him, Whistleblower X freely admitted that he was reading everything in the press about Hunter Biden (that detail will become important later) and that he went to his supervisor’s boss to get his boss to stop raising concerns about Trump’s tweets.

Whistleblower X described his supervisor Matt Kutz’ concern about Trump’s tweets — a direct example of precisely what Republicans are searching for, inappropriate Presidential interference!! — as exhibiting a liberal viewpoint.

From what I was told by various people in my agency, my IRS supervisor, Matt Kutz, created memos which he put in the investigative files regarding the investigation potentially violating the subject’s Sixth Amendment rights. He also referred to Donald Trump’s tweets at the time.

I recall that at one point I had to go around my supervisor and ask his boss, ASAC George Murphy, to tell him to stop sending me and the Hunter Biden prosecution team these emails and that I was searching media articles on a weekly basis and was aware of everything being written in the media regarding the case.

[snip]

A So it was actually Matthew Kutz. He was my supervisor at the time and from the articles that he was sending me, I would say he had more of a liberal view than I had and it was pretty obvious from the things he would send me and discuss. And that’s just me making an observation.

So I later found out about these memos that were put in the file regarding the issues that he saw with the investigation, the fact that we even had it opened. So I only learned about those after.

And then it came to a point to where he’s sending us so many media articles about different issues that I had to tell him stop, please. And I had to go around him. And that’s when I went to my ASAC at the time, George Murphy, who was above him. [my emphasis]

After learning of an example of Presidential interference, but from Trump, GOP staffers in the interview interrupted the Minority’s questioning by going off the record about something, as if they were the witness.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 2. Off the record.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 1. Off the record.

[Discussion off the record.]

MAJORITY COUNSEL 1. On the record.

That off the record discussion appears to have discussed why Whistleblower X believed that his supervisor’s concerns about the Sixth Amendment were proof of liberal bias, because that’s what Whistleblower X explained immediately after going back on the record. And then, Whistleblower X explained to Minority Counsel, that Matt Kutz raised concerns four years ago about whether this could ever be prosecuted.

Mr. X. So these articles were a lot about — were a lot of articles regarding Trump and getting a fair investigation and things related to that, Trump’s tweets and stuff like that. So, that’s what drew me to my conclusion.

BY MINORITY COUNSEL 1: Q What was the purpose behind him sending you the Trump tweets? What was he trying to get at, or was he trying to give you more information for your case? Why would he send those, or do you know?

A Yeah, I think he was bringing up concerns with potentially us prosecuting the case down the road, potential issues we’re going to incur. I don’t remember the exact email that he sent that caused me to be — that he had to stop sending me some of the news articles, because it wasn’t even the fact that he was sending me these news articles.

It was the opinion he was providing in those emails that I did not agree or that I did not — not agree with but did not think was appropriate. [my emphasis]

Whistleblower X told us in one part of the interview that prosecutors had found something in the email record that led them to worry they could not prosecute this case at all, and then in another part of the interview he told us that the supervisor for the first year or so of this investigation believed they would have problems prosecuting it down the road because of Trump’s constant badgering for precisely this investigation.

Maybe, just maybe, the reason no US Attorney’s Office wanted to take this to trial is because this investigation was plagued by inappropriate tampering from the other President from the start?

Gary Shapley’s Involvement

In January 2020, in the same period when Bill Barr was setting up an alternative channel via which DOJ could ingest dirt about Hunter Biden that Russian spies shared with Rudy Giuliani, Gary Shapley became Whistleblower X’s supervisor, overseeing the 12-person International Tax group that would hunt Hunter Biden for five years.

Now is probably a good time to note that Shapley — who splits his time between Baltimore and DC — seems to have a good relationship with Rod Rosenstein, a Maryland AUSA who went on to become US Attorney and then Deputy Attorney General during a period when DOJ was launching politicized investigations into Trump’s enemies.

Mr. Shapley. No. I think I’ve said it, that this is not the norm. This is — I’ve worked with some great guys, some great prosecutors that went on to be U.S. attorneys and went on to be the deputy attorney general and, I think I have experience enough to where it means something.

As noted, Shapley became Whistleblower X’s supervisor just as Barr was setting up a protected means to ingest dirt pertaining to Burisma. But by his own description, Shapley didn’t start liaising more closely with David Weiss until later….

… Until Rudy Giuliani released the laptop.

From around October 2020 through October 2022, I was the IRS CI manager who interacted directly with the United States Attorney, David Weiss, and individuals at DOJ Tax Division the most.

This coincidence — that Shapley became more involved just after Rudy disclosed that a blind computer repairman had shared a laptop with the FBI before he himself, the President’s personal lawyer, got a copy — may be significant.

The Really Really Really Dated Claim about the Laptop

By Shapley’s description, he contacted the AUSA on the case, Lesley Wolf, and not only complained that the FBI was misrepresenting the laptop (when in fact they were mostly no-commenting), but also raised the possibility that John Durham may have searched the laptop.

On October 19th, 2020, I emailed Assistant United States Attorney Wolf: “We need to talk about the computer. It appears the FBI is making certain representations about the device, and the only reason we know what is on the device is because of the IRS CI affiant search warrant that allowed access to the documents. If Durham also executed a search warrant on a device, we need to know so that my leadership is informed. My management has to be looped into whatever the FBI is doing with the laptop. It is IRS CI’s responsibility to know what is happening. Let me know when I can be briefed on this issue.”

In his congressional testimony Durham specified that Hunter was the one Trump enemy he hadn’t been ordered to investigate — but remember that there were reports Ukrainians brought dirt to him.

In his testimony, Shapley admitted that the investigative team called this meeting because, “we were just making sure that everything was being handled appropriately.” But he emphasized Whistleblower X’s complaints that parts of the laptop had been withheld from investigators.

As I noted in this post, per Shapley’s own notes, that’s not what the bulk of the meeting was about.

Of 43 numbered entries, just eight deal in part or in whole with access Whistleblower X had, and some of that is conflicting [note that Shapley misspells Cellebrite “cellabright” throughout]. Here’s what those eight numbered entries describe:

  • 14a. Describing that the John Paul Mac Isaac 302 about what he saw on the laptop was being withheld from the prosecution team (as a whole), even though the taint team had found no privileged items discussed in it
  • 25. Describing that Whistleblower X had never seen a PDF version of the Cellebrite report from the drive, but instead had to look at the device itself
  • 29. Describing Whistleblower X asking whether all the iMessages that were relevant and non-privileged had been reviewed, the answer to which the team didn’t know immediately [this seems to confirm the IRS was not doing the scope review of the laptop]
  • 30. Describing that all messages from the hard drive had been shared in the third disclosure to investigators in February 2020, which seems to partially address item 29
  • 33. Discussing a March 2020 email describing limits on the quality and completeness of the recovery of the hard drive; in response to Whistleblower X’s complaint that he hadn’t seen it, an AUSA (probably Wolf) said they would eventually see a redacted version of the report
  • 40c. Quoting Whistleblower X complaining [it’s unclear whether this is in an April 2020 email or live] that he never saw the Cellebrite file
  • 41. Describing that the Cellebrite file was uploaded sometime in May [which may refute 40c]
  • 42. Describing Whistleblower X stating that if they’re going to testify, they need to see everything, in response to which Lesley Wolf said they would return to that issue

Most of the report seems to be an effort to ascertain legal chain of custody, given the discovery that the original source of the laptop had just spent the last few months turning it into a campaign season political hit job. But amid that discussion, Whistleblower X appears to have aired a series of complaints about decisions DOJ made about access in the interim year.

In his testimony, Shapley also made much of the final bullet point in his notes — the only part of the memo, aside from Whistleblower X’s complaints, that memorializes contemporaneous discussion. In his testimony, Shapley quoted AUSA Lesley Wolf stating, just over a week after NYPost released their first story on the laptop, that there was no reason to think anything had been added to the laptop.

We have no reason to believe there is anything fabricated nefariously on the computer or hard drive. There are emails and other items that corroborate the items on the laptop and hard drive.

Shapley repeated that judgment from October 2020 in May 2023 uncritically, as if it is remotely definitive.

AUSA Wolf acknowledged that there was no reason to believe that any data was manipulated on devices by any third party. She further supported this belief by mentioning that they corroborated the data with other sources of information received.

Right wingers are predictably going nuts over this, claiming it proves something it does not.

Even ignoring the timing of Wolf’s comment, just days after the initial disclosure of the laptop, this comment falls far short of validating authenticity of the laptop. Wolf was only validating the laptop — all of it!! — by matching data points. Importantly, “the computer guy” at the meeting (who could probably spell Cellebrite correctly) proposed doing a report showing document creation date.

If the FBI did that after that meeting, Shapley chose not to disclose the outcome. Given what we know about Mac Isaac’s treatment of the laptop, such a step might have showed whether the blind computer repairman’s failure to airgap the machine resulted in email updates — including from the recently hacked Burisma — being loaded to the laptop.

More importantly, the discussion shows that a year after the government obtained the laptop, no one had yet done this kind of validation of the laptop (and given the recovery problems with it, it’s not entirely clear they could).  A year after obtaining the laptop, the government was still just working off trust in Mac Isaac’s sketchy and changing story.

Plus, it’s one thing to say the laptop as Mac Isaac delivered it to the FBI had nothing added, if that’s true, but we know that the laptop as released by Rudy did have alterations. And the fact that Rudy altered the laptop in the midst of launching an election-year attack discredits any claim that anyone makes about the laptop as released by him.

Whistleblower X’s Hot and Cold Affection for Forensic Reports

One of Whistleblower X’s serial complaints about the laptop — that he couldn’t get the Cellebrite report of the laptop itself, items 25, 40c, and 41, above — is of particular interest: That’s because the WhatsApp messages that Shapley shared with the Committee, showing Hunter Biden invoking his father in an attempt to get business in China, also did not come from the forensic format in which they’d be received from Apple.

In fact, they’re not even direct copies of the report from Apple — they are summaries, as Shapley admitted to the Committee. Shapley doesn’t even know who did the summary.

Q Could you tell us about this document, what is it, and how was it obtained —

A Sure. So there was an electronic search warrant for iCloud backup, and these messages were in that backup and provided —

Q Okay.

A — from a third party, from iCloud.

Q Okay. Who was it provided to?

A The — the investigative team from —

Q Okay. A It would go through all the same processes of — since it’s electronic, it would go to one of the computer analysis folks, and then they would put it in a readable format, and then it would go through filter review.

Q Okay. And these aren’t WhatsApp messages, these are summaries of WhatsApp messages, correct?

A Yeah, that’s correct. Because it was something about the readability of the actual piece, right? It was easier to summarize in a spreadsheet.

Q Okay. And who did the summary? Who prepared this document?

A It was either the computer analysis guy or [redacted, probably Whistleblower X], one or the other

This is the content that the Committee tried to recreate to look like real messages, only to mix message type and appearance.

Here’s what an FBI production from WhatsApp messages obtained from an iCloud warrant would look like in official admissible form, from an exhibit in Vladislav Klyushin’s trial.

It is also a reconstruction (and includes translations), but one that has enough information to afford reliability. It’s also entirely readable.

There’s simply no reason to further summarize from there, much less to do so without all the metadata included, as the IRS reportedly did. It’s not the Committee that first did sketchy reconstructions. Shapley, or Whistleblower X, did, off material they claimed to obtain directly from a warrant return.

These WhatsApp messages from Hunter Biden’s iCloud are important for several reasons: notably, that investigators reportedly had them in hand, directly from Apple, by August 2020, possibly relying on the laptop they had not yet fully validated to get them, then using them to validate the laptop content, the kind of investigative bellybutton that can get a case thrown out.

Further, when discussing them, Whistleblower X makes much of the fact that he wasn’t able to get location data to see whether Hunter was with his father when he sent these emails.

They had just served a search warrant on Apple, which should have gotten a good deal about Hunter Biden’s data — at the very least, the IP from which he was logging in. But given that they had an Apple return in hand, Whistleblower X’s complaint that they weren’t able to get it … almost certainly means he’s complaining that they weren’t able to get Joe Biden’s location data.

In 2020.

During the election.

Taint

With that in mind, go back to Whistleblower X’s complaints, over and over, that he didn’t have all the content from the laptop.

As Shapley explained in response to questioning, the investigative team was instructed not to look at anything from the Internet that was otherwise available, including — especially — the laptop.

Q Now, was your team, were they permitted to use open-source methods for looking at the materials for this case? Like, if materials were published on the internet related to Hunter Biden or related to Hunter Biden’s business concerns, were you allowed to consult that?

A No. We were directed that if there’s anything from the laptop from other sources to not look at it because then it’s potential for it to be tainted.

Q Okay. So if it’s posted on the internet, if it’s written about in the newspaper, you were not allowed to consult that open source method?

A Yeah. We were directed not to.

Q Is that customary?

A I would say yes. Yes.

Whistleblower X, however — after describing that the case predication itself came from press coverage of Hunter Biden’s messy divorce and that he was referencing press coverage of Hunter Biden’s messy life on a weekly basis — described seeing videos on Twitter that he had not received from the laptop.

And one thing that I want to be clear on, that there was information — and I don’t know the detail of that information that was withheld from us — but there was information withheld from the investigators.

And some of that was withheld for privilege. But there was other things — we went out and talked to one of the potential prostitutes. And there were videos that I’ve seen out there on Twitter, on the internet, and information related to that person that I had never seen before.

And I brought this up as an issue. I’m like: I’m seeing things here. Why am I not seeing that from you guys? And when I say “you guys,” the prosecutors. And there was a notion that some information was being held back from us, and I don’t know what that information was.

Whistleblower X, who chased down every one of Hunter Biden’s known sex partners for interviews, complained there were videos online — videos that would have come from a laptop that had been altered — that he had never seen.

Attorney-Client Taint

Whistleblower X risked tainting the investigation by reviewing material released on a laptop that had been altered.

That wasn’t the only taint concern though.

Twice in the interview, Congressional investigators introduced exhibits that Shapley hadn’t seen before: first an email from Eric Schwerin to Hunter Biden, which Shapley explained that he “ha[d]n’t seen it in this form, but I’ve seen excerpts of this document.” Then they showed Shapley an email involving — in addition to Schwerin and Hunter Biden — George Mesires, an email clearly marked as “Re: Tax Analysis — Attorney Communication.”

When Majority Counsel asked Shapley if he has seen that email, he and his attorney went off the record.

Have you seen this document before?

Mr. Lytle. Can we talk to our client just briefly.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 2. Of course. We can go off the record.

[Discussion off the record.]

MAJORITY COUNSEL 2. We’re back on the record.

Having had to consult his attorney about what the simple yes or no response was, Shapley came back to note that this was privileged.

BY MAJORITY COUNSEL 2: Q The question is whether you’ve seen this document before.

A No. Anything from George Mesires was considered privileged —

Q Okay.

A — attorney-client privilege and was not provided to us.

Q Okay. And so that was kept from you by the FBI?

A No. It would be a filter team.

Q Okay.

A When we get any information, and even from the laptop and hard drive, it went through filter reviews, and we only saw what came back as nonprivileged.

A long discussion ensued in which Republican lawyers complained that DOJ conducted privilege reviews for lawyers and accountants working for lawyers. It was immediately after that discussion that Majority Counsel asked whether the investigative team could review material made public from the laptop, as described above.

No, they couldn’t, Shapley explained, because they might see something that would taint the prosecution.

In response to a later question from the Minority, Shapley admitted that if he remained on the prosecution team, reviewing the Mesires letter would amount to taint.

In his response, he referred to Mesires as a “quote-unquote” attorney.

Q Okay. And this was back in 2017. Okay. And then on exhibit 5, it’s the same question, George Mesires, and I think you might have mentioned him earlier, do you know his relationship?

A Yeah. I know him to be a personal, quote, unquote attorney to Hunter Biden. And if I wasn’t taken off the case, I would have been tainted by this document

For example, in August 2020, we got the results back from an iCloud search warrant. Unlike the laptop, these came to the investigative team from a third-party record keeper and included a set of messages. The messages included material we clearly needed to follow up on. [my emphasis]

That’s how Shapley “quote-unquote” dealt with Mesires.

Whistleblower X, who admitted seeing videos online he hadn’t seen in material shared from the filter team, was different though.

As he was reading from an email that, he said, showed Lesley Wolf refusing to get approval for interviews, Whistleblower X stopped himself from reading one particular name.

Lesley Wolf says to me on September 9th, 2021: “I do not think that you are going to be able to do these interviews as planned. The document requests require approval from Tax Division. At present, Jack and Mark are racing to get the EWC motion on Stuart’s desk” — so Stuart was the [Acting] Deputy [Assistant] Attorney General, Stuart Goldberg at Tax Division — “Stuart’s desk for approval before he leaves town for a week. “Along with the approval for the” — and I’m going to leave the name out of that — “both of these items are higher priority and we can’t pull time and attention away to move these subpoenas through. [my emphasis]

In follow-up, Minority counsel asked Whistleblower X what name he had asked to leave out.

It was George Mesires.

Q Okay. You mentioned — this is a little ways later — I believe on September the 9th of 2021 that you had an email. You were reading through it, and you had mentioned that Stuart Goldberg was leaving town. You said there was a name that you wanted to leave out when you were reading the email. What was that name?

A So it was the name of Hunter’s personal counsel, George Mesires.

A year after complaining loudly that he hadn’t been provided stuff he saw on Twitter, he tried to subpoena Hunter Biden’s “quote unquote attorney.”

Whistleblower X’s Unclean Dirt

There’s one more detail that suggests whatever prosecutors found in email could have made the case unsustainable — and also makes Whistleblower X’s urgent concerns, in a meeting just over a week after NYPost reported on Rudy’s version of the laptop — far more suspect.

In what appears to be the last of his complaints about not getting information on the laptop (item 42), he said, as recorded by Shapley,

42 SA [redacted, probably X] — For items not seen by agents shouldn’t they see everything because if they have to testify to it they need to see it

a. Lesley response is that this is a historical review and we can discuss that later.

To get access to the entirety of the laptop, Whistleblower X made an argument about what he would need to do to prepare to be the key witness against Hunter Biden at trial.

That argument is 180 degrees the reverse from what he explained over and over in his testimony, about how he was avoiding anything that might taint him as a witness.

For example, he said he had been avoiding testimony to Congress to preserve his ability to testify.

I’d like to note that I wasn’t present at the leadership meeting on October 7th, 2022, that Mr. Shapley and leaders from the IRS were a part of with U.S. Attorney David Weiss, the meeting where he made the statements about not being in charge.

I also wanted to continue to protect the record and my ability to testify as the case agent in the future, which is also a part of the reason I didn’t come forward to you.

[snip]

I was interviewed by an investigator — I think they were with TIGTA. I told them, I didn’t leak anything. I thought that the leak might have come from either defense counsel, or from DOJ like the other ones came. But what I can tell you, and I’ve told this to the prosecution team, I’ve done everything that I can to keep my record clean and to keep my ability to testify as the case agent as clean as I possibly can.

He explained that he purposely wouldn’t write stuff down to preserve his ability to be summary witness.

Mr. X. On the record.

I just want to say that I made every effort to — when we work these cases, you have to be careful of what you might say that could be used against you if you were to go to trial or if you were to go in front of a grand jury. Usually, the IRS special agent is the final witness, the summary witness. So things that you put out there in emails, they can attack you at a later date.

So I did everything that I could to possibly make the record as clean as it possibly could, investigated the case, but in doing that, here’s all the things that happened because of that.

Shapley, on the other hand, did put all that in writing. When Minority Counsel pressed him on the fact that he really hadn’t disclosed any of this to supervisors, he described that he kept taking notes of bitch sessions so that the others could testify.

Q No one at IRS above — other than CI, no deputy commissioners, no commissioner? A That is correct. And, there was a common theme that and the co-case agent Christine Puglisi would — after all these pros team calls we would have a follow-up call. And sometimes FBI agents would be on there as well. And it was basically talking about the strategy and it often became like, Wow, they are not letting us do this. Can you believe they said that? Like that type of thing.

And we — in order to protect the record of the investigation basically it was me that could only document that, right? Because we wanted to make sure that the agents weren’t documenting things that would eventually be turned over in discovery and could somehow affect the viability of the case.

So that is something that I documented moving forward. And each time we were, like, Wow, they didn’t let us do the search warrant. Like she said — to overcome probable cause with a search warrant is, like, that is it, right? That is really, like, okay, well, you are going to go do it, because we want evidence that is unfiltered, right? But the whole point is we were like, well, there is no way they are not going to charge us. The evidence is there. They say the evidence is there. And we just really couldn’t believe that they would be doing something wrong. It was a very heavy burden to overcome from my experience and training to be, like, wow, there is something going on here.

[snip]

Now I want to talk about exhibit 6, which is your memo about the laptop and the hard drive. Was this memo provided to anyone?

A This memo was discussed in length with the case agent and co-case agent, but to protect the record, these I couldn’t send to them.

Q Okay.

A So after each time we had calls like this, I would have conversations with them. There was even a document that I produced where they were like, well, there was this problem, this problem, this problem. So I was like, I’ll record it, because we don’t want this to potentially be discoverable and have any issues in the future. So this is an example of that, where if there are at least two people that will say that we talked about this right after, and most of the conversation is to discuss what happened during that, to make sure that it was accurate.

Q But you don’t provide a copy to your supervisor or Mr. Fort or anyone else in your chain of command?

A No.

Q It just stays with you?

A That’s correct. [my emphasis]

Effectively, what Shapley and Whistleblower X described to Congress is that the IRS investigators were keeping a double set of books regarding the investigation.

To be fair, I think many — perhaps most! — government investigative teams do this. Short of that, they get an agent who investigated just a small corner of the whole, shielded from any ongoing investigation. Or a paralegal.

But if an investigator really really wants to take the stand against they guy they’ve been investigating for five years, they have to be sure to keep their books clean.

Reviewing the full Hunter Biden laptop would have tainted Whistleblower X as a witness, though. Even ignoring probable chain of custody problems with the laptop, reviewing the laptop as reviewed with a search warrant would have made Whistleblower X a tainted witness. Reviewing the laptop as Rudy released it after altering it, all the more so.

Plus, some of the details in the IRS’ double set of books about the Hunter Biden investigation raise questions not about DOJ approval processes, but about integrity of evidence, including the laptop and everything that came after that.

For example, because in September 2020, AUSA Lesley Wolf raised the possibility (and then debunked) that the investigation would shut down after the election, as this double set of books recorded, it raises real concerns about whether this investigation was nothing more than an election stunt, whether Bill Barr’s DOJ was simply investigating Hunter Biden for a campaign ploy. When Wolf described that DOJ was under fire for self-inflicted reasons, it’s unclear whether she was talking about past disclosures, like the Carter Page IG Report that focused on FBI’s conduct, or whether she was talking about Barr’s tampering in ongoing investigations, something that was quite pressing in September 2020.

Gary Shapley created a double set of books in the Hunter Biden investigation and described it as such. That double set of books raises ample questions about whether this investigation was about Hunter Biden … or his father.

Cleanup on Aisle Nine

The press release from Delaware US Attorney David Weiss’ office announcing two Informations as part of a plea deal stated the investigation into Hunter Biden was “ongoing.”

The team assigned to the plea deal includes two Special AUSAs, Leo Wise (who has been brought into troubled cases in the past) and Derek Hines, and includes Benjamin Wallace from DE USAO rather than the AUSA at the center of allegations of abuse, Lesley Wolf.

Whistleblower X — a big fan of hearsay — told the House Ways and Means Committee that FBI Agents were being treated the same way IRS Agents are: requiring that they report through their Special Agent in Charge to Weiss.

A I did hear from FBI that they were being treated the exact same way — that they had to communicate through their SAC to the U.S. Attorney in Delaware.

So in spite of Gary Shapley’s wails that his team got cut off as retaliation, there’s some reason to believe everyone did.

Whistleblower X also referenced two topics into which there might be an ongoing investigation. The first was a CEFC deal with Hunter Biden in 2017 and 2018.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 1. Can I go off the record? Mr. X. Yeah. Off the record.

[Discussion off the record.]

MAJORITY COUNSEL 1. Back on the record?

Mr. X. I don’t feel comfortable disclosing anything further on that issue.

The other involves the circumstances of how Kevin Morris paid off Hunter Biden’s tax debt in 2000.

A So on his 2020 tax return, personal tax return, Hunter stated: “See statement in 2020. The taxpayer received financial support from a personal friend totaling approximately $1.4 million. The parties agreed in 2020 to treat the support as a loan and later documented their agreement in a promissory note in the amount of $1.4 million, 5 percent interest. “The promissory note requires periodic payments between 2025 and 2027. The promissory note was executed by both parties on October 13th, 2021. “The taxpayer is treating this amount as a loan for tax purposes. The balance of the financial support is treated as a gift. No amount of the support is treated as a reported taxable event on this tax return.” So that’s what was filed with the return.

Q And has that transaction been investigated or —

A I’m no longer a part of an investigation related to that.

[snip]

Q It’s a voluntary interview. If you’re not comfortable saying, you don’t have to answer the question, any of our questions.

A It goes back to one of my — if there is potentially a current investigation that’s out there to —

Mr. Zerbe. Let’s go off the record.

[Discussion off the record.]

MAJORITY COUNSEL 2. Go back on the record?

Statutes of limitation on the latter event would not expire until at least 2025 (though, as noted, the terms of the loan only require that the President’s son start repaying the loan in 2025). It could well be that Hunter Biden, or his benefactor, will eventually be charged with a serious felony — potentially include campaign finance violations — for the way Joe Biden’s son eliminated some of his past tax exposure (though this post-dated the election).

So I think it very possible that Weiss effectively reset the Hunter Biden investigation as a way to move past a great deal of dodgy shit that went down in the last five years.

But amid the media attention Shapley has generated, there are signs that something else — not lefty political bias — undermined the case against Hunter Biden, potentially up to and including outright misconduct. There is a whole range of communications that may have made a prosecution of Hunter Biden unsustainable: documentation of political pressure from Trump, concerns about the sources of leads, evidence of potential taint, and a clear obsession with investigating Joe, not just Hunter.

Those thing should make a Hunter Biden prosecution unsustainable. And the people who kept a double set of books recording some of it are now wailing as if someone else blew the case.

When they may have.

The leaks that seem to have been the proximate cause of the turmoil may make — may already have made — such misconduct more apparent.

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SCOTUS Takes Over

Good boy, Congress! Now it’s your turn President

SCOTUS has set itself up as the sole arbiter of the constitutional limits on the power of the federal government. We say we have a federal government of limited powers. As I’ve noted in this series, one of the goals of the Founders was to keep the federal government from interfering in the internal affairs of the states. In the debates on the Reconstruction Amendments, there is a constant return to the idea that the feds shouldn’t infringe state power. And there’s the 10th Amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Our federalism, or dual sovereignty, may have served political purposes in the late 18th Century, but now it’s created monstrous problems. By narrowly construing the limits of federal power and asserting control over congress and the president, SCOTUS has created or ignored horrifying problems and made it almost impossible for us to solve them. In this post I’ll look at several of them.

1. Democracy In Citizens United, the right-wing members of SCOTUS held that laws limiting PAC spending on elections were somehow unconstitutional. Now billions of dollars are spent on dark money contributions that benefit campaigns, and while we can assume these people are filthy rich, we don’t know who they are, and we have no to find out what they expect in return. (Hint: it’s not good government.)

In Shelby County v. Holder SCOTUS struck down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, the pre-clearance provision,

… because the coverage formula was based on data over 40 years old, making it no longer responsive to current needs and therefore an impermissible burden on the constitutional principles of federalism and equal sovereignty of the states. Fn omitted.

In Rucho v. Common Cause SCOTUS allowed partisan gerrymandering.

The Court ruled that while partisan gerrymandering may be “incompatible with democratic principles”, the federal courts cannot review such allegations, as they present nonjusticiable political questions outside the remit of these courts. Fn omitted.

In Brnovich v. DNC, SCOTUS upheld two Arizona laws making voting harder. The two laws had a disparate negative impact on poor people, mostly minorities. The explanation for this decision even in Wikipedia doesn’t make sense to me, but then, I’m in favor of voting. It was generally seen as the last step before complete dismantling of the Voting Rights Act.

That destruction was narrowly avoided in the recent Allen v. Milligan decision, where John Roberts didn’t reverse an earlier case, Gingles, discussed here. Gingles is a very narrow reading of §2 of the VRA, meeting Robert’s lifelong goal of making it really hard to win a VRA case.

A majority of SCOTUS has now decided not to further attack democracy by adopting the ridiculous independent state legislature silliness. Of course they reserved their own supremacy.

These cases make voter suppression easy, and Red states have imposed a startling array of limitations. For example, Texas passed a law limiting drop boxes for mail-in ballots to one per county. In this interview Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama, a sponsor of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, describes some more.

The intent is clear. Continuing centuries of practice, SCOTUS revanchists rule that states are free to restrict voting any way they see fit, no matter the impact on democracy. As a result, SCOTUS is enabling minority rule.

The main impact is on cities, which are routinely cracked and packed to restrict their political power. For example, Texas tightly controls the ability of large cities to govern themselves. Recently cities were forbidden from requiring water breaks for workers as they swelter under a heat dome for the third week.

How long are Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio residents willing to see their taxes spent in small country towns while rural religious fanatics control their personal lives?

2. Women’s Health As I’ve noted Alito’s decision in Dobbs doesn’t comport with constitutional law as I learned it in the long ago. But its consequences have been sickening. Jessica Valenti tries to keep track of attacks on women in her substack. Pregnant women are rufusing to travel to Red states or plan to leave them over health concerns.

Not content with controlling the lives of women who seek treatment inside their jurisdictions, the anti-women states pass laws with extra-territorial effects, like Texas’ SB 8, the Bounty law. These states claim the right to attack citizens of other states who provide care. Blue states are responding by enacting shield laws, refusing to recognize the demands of the aggressors. Here’s an explainer from Vox. Shield laws typically operate to protect all kinds of health care criminalized by legislators in Red States, including gender-affirming care.

This sets up a serious conflict between the states, perhaps reminiscent of the fury over the Fugitive Slave laws. How long will normal people put up with these assaults?

3. Taking away Congressional power SCOTUS is working to hamstring Congress. One obvious example is Shelby County v. Holder, where SCOTUS said Congress didn’t work hard enough to justify renewal of the VRA.

In the middle of the Covid crisis, Congress indicated OSHA should adopt a rule under its emergency authority requiring larger employers to protect their workers. OSHA complied. SCOTUS struck that down on the shadow docket. SCOTUS ruled that Congress couldn’t delegate the management of the crisis to an agency but had to do something specific to prove to SCOTUS Congress did its homework.

In EPA v. West Virginia, SCOTUS said Congress had to pass a new bill if it wanted to do anything serious about climate change. It created a brand-new constitutional rule to explain its decision, which the creators gave the laughable title major questions doctrine. It says that if 5 members of SCOTUS think something is a big deal, Congress can’t delegate authority to an agency under general language, but must specifically authorize the agency to act in a way those 5 oracles think conclusive.

We’re told the solution is through the ballot box. How long will we put up with this sham voting regime when SCOTUS feels free to slap down laws that don’t meet its ever-changing standards?

4. Controlling executive powers In the middle of the Covid crisis, district court judges enjoined enforcement of vaccine mandates for health care workers and rebellious members of the military. The injunctions were upheld by appellate courts. Then SCOTUS overturned them after an emergency hearing. The lower courts set themselves up as arbiters of the nation’s military and health care policies. SCOTUS implicitly agreed that lower courts were entitled to do so, even as it overruled these outrageous decisions.

Shortly after taking office, Biden established immigration enforcement priorities. Ken Paxton, the indicted, impeached, and wildly partisan Attorney General of Texas, filed suit to block those priorities and establish priorities he liked. The lower courts granted a stay and SCOTUS allowed that stay to remain in effect for a year. Then in US v. Texas, a recent decision I haven’t read, SCOTUS overruled the 5th Circuit. This is typical for any decision of the executive. Courts at all levels feel free to impose stays and screw around for months while the problem festers.

How long can we let the judiciary prevent us from dealing with massive problems before we protect ourselves from their ignorance and their dangerous ideology?

Note: Please remember that you should not say, or even think, that SCOTUS is an illegitimate power-grabbing rabble intent on imposing their minority views. It hurts their feelings and detracts from the sanctity of their holy calling.

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A Guide to the False Claims John Durham Will Tell Congress

I finally finished my last post on the Durham Report last week before heading off for a visit with family for a week. This post gathers them all together in one place.

John Durham’s investigation was a four year effort to flip the script: to make Hillary Clinton — the victim of a nation-state attack in 2016 — its villain.

Durham and his sponsor, Bill Barr, did so as part of a larger effort — one that also included Barr’s sabotage of both the release of the Mueller Report and the ongoing investigations into Trump’s people — to discredit the investigation started because Trump’s Coffee Boy bragged about learning of the Russian attack in advance, and he wasn’t the only one. The Rat-Fucker, too, got advance notice, the Rat-Fucker, too, bragged about Russia’s assistance to the campaign, though because the FBI didn’t investigate Guccifer 2.0 aggressively enough in real time, it took several years to unpack Roger Stone’s advance knowledge.

And so, in an attempt to negate the results of a very real and very productive investigation, Durham sought out targets via whom he could avenge that investigation into Trump. The investigation itself failed to Lock Her Up, to say nothing of jailing any of the men and women of “the Deep State” who believed that enthusiastic foreknowledge of a Russian attack on a presidential candidate was an important thing to investigate, right along with Emirati efforts to cultivate politicians of both parties, the improper handling of classified information, and suspected (but ultimately uncorroborated) corruption.

Durham tried, but failed, to criminalize efforts to keep the country safe from Russian influence operations. Likewise, he tried, but failed, to criminalize political speech, a political candidate’s effort to raise concerns about her opponent’s very real ties to the country that had targeted her. The two prosecutions Durham brought in an attempt to obtain evidence to support the conspiracy theory that animated his entire investigation — or, short of that, to lead the public to believe in his conspiracy theory, regardless of the evidence — ended in embarrassing acquittals, but not before devastating the livelihoods of his targets and others, many of whom had previously played valuable roles in keeping the US safe.

In a sane world, with a diligent press, that should have ended it. In a sane world, with a diligent press, this four year effort would be recognized as the weaponization of DOJ that Trump-whisperers imagine might only happen in the future, or that Republican supporters of fascism set up a committee to falsely claim happened, only to Republicans, in the past.

But that didn’t happen.

So here we are, six months after Durham’s second humiliating trial loss, that of Igor Danchenko, the one where Durham personally led the prosecution, and he finally released the required report on his investigation. By regulation the report is supposed to be just a record of his prosecutions and declinations. Rather than admit that there had been no there there to his conspiracy theory, Durham engaged in omissions and false claims to bolster his conspiracy theory.

Tomorrow, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee will invite Durham to repeat his false claims.

Here’s a guide to some of the false claims he may make before Congress.

 

John Durham Lied about Who Told the False Stories

Eight Things Not Mentioned in the Durham Report

John Durham Committed the “Crime” of “Inferring” of Which He Accused Rodney Joffe

“Ridiculous:” Durham’s Failed Clinton Conspiracy Theory

John Durham Fabricated His Basis to Criminalize Oppo Research

John Durham’s Disinformation Problem

 

John Durham covered up what really happened with the Alfa Bank investigation

The Dishonest and Incompetent FBI Work John Durham Learned to Love

FBI Cyber Division’s Enduring Blue Pill Mystery

John Durham’s Blind Man’s Bluff on DNS Visibility

 

John Durham committed the prosecutorial errors he attacked when the FBI made them, but worse

Doo-Doo Process: John Durham Claims to Know Better than Anthony Trenga and Two Juries

John Durham, High Priest of the Cult of the Coffee Boy

 

The press hasn’t called out Durham even while they’ve identified his false claims

How Jonathan Swan Covered [Up] John Durham’s Corruption

How CNN Inculpated John Durham While Purportedly Exonerating Trump

Republicans Demanded Independence for John Durham and Got Robert Hur and Jack Smith in the Bargain

 

Bonus track!

Trophy Documents: The Entire Point Was to Make FBI Obedient

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John Durham’s Disinformation Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except Oleg Deripaska.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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