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Trump’s Attempt to Repackage His Capitulation in Ukraine

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The other day, Axios posted a ridiculous column (with Mike Allen as the first byline) beginning to lay the groundwork for Trump to repackage imminent failure on Ukraine. It starts by allowing senior White House officials anonymously and vaguely blame Europeans for Trump’s failure to craft a deal.

Frustrated Trump aides contend the blame should fall on European allies, not on Trump or even Russian President Vladimir Putin.

All three bases for that blame in the column are ridiculous:

  • “White House officials are losing patience with European leaders, whom they claim are pushing Ukraine to hold out for unrealistic territorial concessions by Russia.”
  • “U.S. officials believe [Countries besides the UK and France] want the U.S. to bear the full cost of the war, while putting no skin in the game themselves.”
  • Europeans aren’t prepared to add sanctions against Russia, even though, “European countries are already working on a new set of sanctions against Russia.”

What appears to have happened is that Mike Allen let a bunch of White House officials make ridiculous claims with no pushback.

The latter half of the column (Barak Ravid is the second byline) ends with a description of another pointless Steve Witkoff meeting:

The latest: On Friday, Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak met in New York.

They discussed the potential Zelensky-Putin meeting and Yermak invited Witkoff for a first visit to Kyiv, but no significant progress was made, a source with knowledge of the meeting said.

The story comes after three more stories documenting how fucking incompetent Witkoff is. On Thursday, the Atlantic described how Putin confused Witkoff.

utin told Witkoff that, in return, Russia would be willing to give up its legal claim to two territories in southern Ukraine, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, that Russia has partially occupied since its February 2022 invasion. Witkoff, according to the U.S. and European officials, entertained this proposal. But the question of what would become of the thousands of Russian soldiers stationed in those regions was never addressed, the officials told us. Their continued presence would be a nonstarter for Ukraine, but Putin conveniently left the matter out, and Witkoff never asked.

This became apparent to European officials in their discussions with Trump-administration officials following the meeting in Moscow. European officials were “confused about the phrasing,” as one European official put it, of what Putin and Witkoff had tentatively agreed to. They made calls to their American counterparts and warned that if Russia wasn’t required to withdraw from Ukrainian territory, it would almost certainly launch more attacks when the opportunity arises.

Asked about any confusion surrounding Witkoff’s discussions, a White House official said that Trump and his national-security team continue to engage with Russian and Ukrainian officials, but that “it is not in the national interest to further negotiate these issues publicly.”

[snip]

Putin, a former Russian intelligence officer skilled in the art of mixed messages, views conquest of Ukraine as essential to his goal of restoring Russia to its Soviet-era glory. And European officials said they fear that Witkoff’s limited knowledge of the conflict’s deep history is a major vulnerability. Witkoff, a real-estate executive and longtime friend of Trump’s, is seen as a shrewd businessman and one of the few people in Trump’s inner circle who truly speaks for the president. He assumed the role of envoy, however, with no prior government or diplomatic experience.

That same day, Reuters provided a similarly comical description of how Witkoff got played, adding the detail that Witkoff had no notetaker with him in Russia.

On an August 7 call with several European leaders, Witkoff indicated that Putin was willing to withdraw from the Ukrainian regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in return for Kyiv ceding Donetsk and Luhansk, according to a source familiar with the exchange.

The proposal startled many of those on the call, since it departed sharply from their own assessments of Putin’s position, said four people with knowledge of the discussions, including U.S and European officials who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

Witkoff appeared to change his account the next day. In a call convened by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio with European national security advisers, the envoy said Putin was not in fact offering to withdraw from the two territories in question, according to one of the sources.

Instead, U.S. officials indicated on the call Putin had signaled lesser concessions to Washington, including that he would not demand the West formally recognize Zaporizhzhia and Kherson as Russian, said a separate U.S. official.

Reuters couldn’t independently determine what was said in the Moscow meeting.

Witkoff, a real estate magnate with no background in diplomacy, broke with standard protocol by going to the meeting without a State Department notetaker and thus left without a record of Putin’s precise proposals, said one source with knowledge of internal administration dynamics.

A Politico story the next day generated a full-fledged social media attack on Felicia Schwarz, because she highlighted the many bozo anecdotes about Witkoff …

Trump’s unconventional fixer has met Putin five times over six months, but he has yet to translate his access to the Russian leader into any breakthroughs on Ukraine.

There were many barriers to the summit in Anchorage yielding results — Putin’s unwillingness to make significant concessions to end his war against Ukraine the major one, but many of those familiar with Witkoff’s role in the negotiations with Russia say he has made talks more difficult.

[snip]

“He’s kind of a rogue actor,” said a U.S. official familiar with Witkoff’s diplomatic style. “He talks to all these people, but no one knows what he says in any of these meetings. He will say things publicly but then he changes his mind. It’s hard to operationalize that.”

Witkoff’s Washington office is sparsely staffed, and short on people with Russia expertise or experienced in complex diplomatic negotiations. And he has refused to do typical consultations with Russia and Ukraine experts in and outside of government, according to the five people familiar with internal discussions.

[snip]

His staff, to the extent he has any, often doesn’t know where he is or what he is doing, according to four people familiar with the dynamics of the office. They said he spends most of his time at his office in the White House, while the rest of his team is at the State Department.

“The thing is, Witkoff isn’t consistently engaged. He will pop in for a visit to Vladimir Putin, say a bunch of stuff, not tell anyone what really happened and then just fuck off to his life again. Meanwhile, the Russians are talking to you about how ‘Witkoff says…’ and you don’t know whether they’re right or not, but you can’t get a readout from the Russians,” the U.S. official said.

JD Vance wrote a 350-word Xitter post accusing Schwarz — whose described sources include European, Russian, and US sources — of participating in a foreign influence operation, an accusation that might serve to rationalize an attempt to spy on her.

This story from Politico is journalistic malpractice. But it’s more than that: it’s a foreign influence operation meant to hurt the administration and one of our most effective members.

Notice how all of the people attacking Steve are on background? That means it’s two or three deep staters who are angry that Witkoff has succeeded where they’ve failed.

You know what this “reporter” left out to make room for anonymous quotes?

The full quote from the sitting vice president, on the record.

A quote from the secretary of the state, on the record.

A quote from Jared Kushner, on the record.

The full quote from the UK’s Jonathan Powell, one of the most respected national security people in the Western World, who defended Steve vigorously from these malicious smears.

The person who wrote this garbage is @felschwartz. Aside from the failure to include on the record information directly contradicting her reporting, I wonder if she ever asked herself why these anonymous sources came to her at this moment with this particular story. They have an agenda to blow up the president’s efforts to make peace, and they saw her as a useful vessel to launder garbage into the conversation, truth be damned.

There are two possible explanations: Felicia is just not very smart, and allowed herself to be used by deep state con men. Or she’s in on it, and used her position to willingly participate in a literal foreign influence operation. Either way, it’s disgraceful.

To set the record straight: Steve Witkoff is an invaluable member of our team. He did not mislead anyone on what the Russians told him and what the Russians conceded. (Trust me, I’ve seen the intel.) The fruits of his negotiations are that we have narrowed the list of open issues in the Russia-Ukraine war to a set of clearly defined issues–specifically, security guarantees and territorial concessions.

Maybe we make peace, and maybe we don’t. If we do, it will be because Steve Witkoff and the President of the United States worked their tails off, in the face of outright lies from the mainstream press.

Remember: as JD claims he knows better than Russian experts, Tulsi Gabbard is withholding their own intelligence on Russia even from Five Eyes partners. And Tulsi purged the top Russian expert who largely prepared the Alaska meeting over John Ratcliffe’s support by stripping her security clearance.

In the days leading up to President Donald Trump’s Aug. 15 Alaska summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, one of the CIA’s senior-most Russia experts worked grueling hours, helping Trump and his team prepare for high-stakes diplomacy over Ukraine and making sure they were adequately briefed, according to a former agency colleague.

Four days later, the CIA officer — whom The Washington Post is not naming for her protection — was at work at the spy agency’s Langley headquarters when she was abruptly ordered to report to the security office. She was informed that her clearance to look at classified material was being stripped. In a span of minutes, her 29-year career in public service was essentially over.

The officer had been expecting an imminent move to Europe to take up a prestigious assignment approved by CIA Director John Ratcliffe.

Instead, she became the latest casualty of a widening cull by Trump and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, fueled at times by far-right activist Laura Loomer, targeting national security professionals whom they deem to have engaged in “politicization or weaponization of intelligence to advance personal, partisan, or non-objective agendas,” according to Gabbard’s Aug. 19 memo announcing the revocation at Trump’s direction of security clearances.

Jared Kushner’s endorsement of Witkoff may suggest the fondness for Witkoff have more to do with plans to forcibly remove the population of Gaza so Kushner can turn it into a golf resort.

A postwar plan for Gaza circulating within the Trump administration, modeled on President Donald Trump’s vow to “take over” the enclave, would turn it into a trusteeship administered by the United States for at least 10 years while it is transformed into a gleaming tourism resort and high-tech manufacturing and technology hub.

The 38-page prospectus seen by The Washington Post envisions at least a temporary relocation of all of Gaza’s more than 2 million population, either through what it calls “voluntary” departures to another country or into restricted, secured zones inside the enclave during reconstruction.

Those who own land would be offered a digital token by the trust in exchange for rights to redevelop their property, to be used to finance a new life elsewhere or eventually redeemed for an apartment in one of six to eight new “AI-powered, smart cities” to be built in Gaza. Each Palestinian who chooses to leave would be given a $5,000 cash payment and subsidies to cover four years of rent elsewhere, as well as a year of food.

[snip]

On Wednesday, Trump held a White House meeting to discuss ideas for how to end the war, now approaching the two-year mark, and what comes next. Participants included Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special presidential envoy Steve Witkoff; former British prime minister Tony Blair, whose views on Gaza’s future have been solicited by the administration; and Trump’ son-in-law Jared Kushner, who handled much of the president’s first-term initiatives on the Middle East and has extensive private interests in the region.

No readout of the meeting or policy decisions were announced, although Witkoff said the night before the gathering that the administration had “a very comprehensive plan.”

Remember, the Emirates were the vehicle via which Kirill Dmitriev was pitching bribes for sanctions relief in the first place, back in 2017 (in part, to one of Kushner’s best buddies).

JD is probably right: The Europeans and Americans who actually care about Ukraine seem intent on exposing Witkoff for the clown he is.

But it’s happening even as Trump is preparing to blame Europe for his own urgent need to capitulate to Putin.

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Quantum Leaps: The So-Called Whistleblower That Got NSA’s Top Mathematician Fired

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Tulsi Gabbard has a so-called whistleblower (SCWB) on whose claims she has built wild conspiracy theories that conflict even with what Kash Patel and John Ratcliffe have said after reviewing the same documents. The SCWB’s claims about … well, a bunch of things, are so flimsy I thought I could just ignore them.

Sadly, I can’t.

Tulsi just used the claims to fire a top NSA mathematician, Vinh Nguyen, over the objections of the Acting Director of NSA.

The acting director of the National Security Agency tried to protect one of his top scientists from losing his security clearance as Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, prepared to announce the move this week, according to officials briefed on the matter.

The effort failed. Ms. Gabbard, on orders from President Trump, fired the scientist, who was a leading government expert on artificial intelligence, cryptology and advanced mathematics.

SCWB also seems to harbor a grievance against Shelby Pierson based on his own conspiratorial misunderstanding. Pierson warned against Russian interference in 2020, and had since moved back to lead the analytical team at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. She was ousted along with Nguyen.

So this whistleblower complaint appears to have led to the ouster of two senior intelligence officials.

And his claims are riddled with problems.

As laid out in documents Tulsi has released, there are several parts to his complaint (but they’re so disorganized they make me worry about the analytical ability of what must be one of the Intelligence Community’s top analysts). What appears to have happened is the SCWB felt that Nguyen pressured him to adopt one of the Key Judgments of the 2017 ICA weeks after the fact, and it led him to get paranoid about everything that happened before and after that. Based off a misreading, a rumor, and an apparent chip on his shoulder, in 2019 he came to believe that both Nguyen and Pierson had been hiding that the Steele dossier had a role in the ICA that it provably did not have, and based on that, he tried to submit a whistleblower complaint, with little success, until Tulsi came along.

Here’s the timeline:

February 2016: Squire Patton Boggs shares concerns about voting

Years after the fact, SCWB retroactively came to suspect that a law firm reaching out to raise concerns about election integrity must have been a malicious attempt to influence the election.

Late 2016: Stand down on election infrastructure intrusions

Leading up to the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, SCWB was tasked, with one other person, with doing an overview of Russian intrusions into voting infrastructure. The more they looked, the more they found, but with one exception, there was no exfiltration involved. Before that was finalized for the ICA, someone — this may be Nyugen again — told him to stop working on one particular intrusion because it was something else.

SCWB claims that his work didn’t make it into the ICA, but there are nine paragraphs on the subject, including this one, which appears to list the “something else” as criminal hackers.

Unidentified actors operating from leased commercial infrastructure commonly used in GRU operations also targeted US state and local voter registration systems. We have low confidence in attributing these reports to the GRU because such services are commonly used by cybercriminals, who probably conducted at least some of the intrusion attempts to collect personally identifiable information on US victims.

Years later, SCWB would come to believe this something else was not criminal hackers, but a continuation of the DNS fabrications John Durham invented as part of his pursuit of a Russian conspiracy theory. SCWB based this in part on a deliberately inflammatory and factually erroneous court filing which had to be walked back, but not before Kash Patel and Trump weighed in to invite death threats.

Tellingly, Tulsi didn’t provide the backup to this SCWB claim, which suggests it could withstand even less scrutiny than the rest of his claims.

January 4, 2017: Treatment of foreign media

SCWB also complained about how the ICA dealt with foreign media, reasoning that there were other foreign media outlets seeking to intervene in the election, so it would be unsound analytically to present only the Russian attempts to denigrate Hillary. According to an endnote, he raised this issue on January 4, 2017, the day before the ICA was finalized.

Early to mid-January 2017: The Key Judgment dispute (SCWB complaint version)

The first complaint presented in his complaint (which appears in two places, and is actually the third or fourth complaint chronologically) is that he was pressured to adopt the ICA judgment that the Russians wanted to influence the election, period, but especially to support Trump.

In the second description of this, SCWB places this temporally before the ICA was finalized and contextualizes the dispute against the backdrop of changing views between September and January (precisely the view Tulsi adopted in her propaganda work). That second description includes a number of assertions that don’t match the documents Tulsi released.

Through my role in leading production of the prior 2016 ICA, I also knew that as recently as September of 2016, other elements of the ICvi had pushed back during analytic coordination on warnings of Russian intent to influence the 2016 presidential election, stating that such a judgement would be misleading. Yet, by January, at least one of the IC Elements that had pushed back (the Federal Bureau of Investigation) had seemingly altered its position and embraced a judgement of Russian intent to influence the election, seemingly without any new data other than the election’s unexpected result and public speculation that Russia had ”hacked” the vote – a scenario that, we in the IC judged, simply did not occur.

His endnote, vi above, cites to this email, which is entirely limited to voting infrastructure intrusions.

On page 5, under the “(U// ) Adversaries with Intent” section, we would prefer for the first sentence regarding Russia’s intent to be softened. The way it currently reads, it would indicate that we have definitive information that Russia does intend to disrupt our elections and we are uncomfortable making that assessment at this point. We would suggest editing the sentence to read as the following (changes highlighted): “( ) We judge Russia to be the only nation state with the current means and possible motivation to use cyber attack to disrupt the 2016 election or deny political legitimacy to US presidential candidates.” We would also suggest editing the title of that section to instead read something along the lines of “(U// ) Evaluation of Likely Adversaries” so that it doesn’t mislead the reader to believe that the IC currently has information indicating Russia has a known intent to influence the elections.

So SCWB is the source of Tulsi’s own conflation of warnings about Russian intent to change the vote with Russian intent to influence who won, and as such his claims about changed views are simply not backed by the record. They’re more defensible in his case, both because he came to this problem from the focus of voting infrastructure and was compartmented out of discussions about Russian intent. But it’s still provably a conflation of two different things.

Furthermore, CIA fully backed the view that Russian intended to help Trump, but even if SCWB were right that only FBI had changed their view, that could reflect several prongs of the criminal investigation about which no one else knew — that George Papadopoulos had gotten seeming advance warning of Russia’s effort to harm Hillary and Carter Page claimed he had an “open checkbook” to found a pro-Russian think tank.

At that level, then, his primary complaint replicates (or, more likely, is the source) of all the problems with Tulsi’s larger conspiracy theories, that he claims not to know the difference between a voting machine and a DNC server.

In the first telling of this conflict, however, SCWB made specific claims about what he remembered his NIO — understood to be Nguyen — saying, six years later:

There is reporting you are not allowed to see, if you saw it, you would agree.

Isn’t it possible Putin has something on Trump, to blackmail and coerce him?

You need to TRUST ME on this.

I need you to say you agree with these judgments, so that DIA will go along with them! [emphasis original]

This is the claimed source of pressure and now the likely explanation for the firing of one of NSA’s top mathematicians.

Importantly, this exchange necessarily came after the finalization of the ICA, because (in SCWB’s telling) it was influenced by James Clapper’s purported reaction to the briefing of the Steele dossier to Trump.

According to [], the DNI had been surprised by DIR Comey’s unilateral, last moment inclusion of the “Steel Dossier” in briefing materials — supposedly inserted by DIR Comey as the group rode together in a government vehicle. [] had characterized the “Steel Dossier” as being viewed by the DNI, and [] as well, as non-credible sensationalism, and to my knowledge the material had never been taken seriously by the IC.

But the rumor about Clapper turned out to be wrong.

While SCWB may have had not access to this for some time, Clapper testified to HPSCI in July 2017 that the plan ahead of time was to have Comey brief Trump on it.

MR. CLAPPER: No, the only purpose was to make sune that the President-elect was aware it was out there. And when we went up to brief him and his team on the 6th of January, we had deliberately planned ahead of time that we’d bring this up, but neck down just to him and to Director Comey.

In other words, SCWB’s entire understanding was based on a false rumor of what went on — not to mention a seeming sustained and unpersuasive ignorance of what was publicly reported on the dossier.

Again, I have no complaint that SCWB didn’t budge his judgment based on the fact that he was not read into the Fusion Cell compartment, which is what really was going on. But really, the dispute is overblown, because by this point (again, several weeks after the publication of the ICA) the ICA was already stale. I know I didn’t care whether DIA bought off on it weeks after the fact.

Importantly, however, Tulsi’s entire conspiracy theory is based on SCWB’s uncorrected adoption of a rumor here.

September 2019: The dossier tantrum (SCWB complaint version)

SCWB’s mistaken belief that the dossier was somehow the secret thing that was central to the ICA that he didn’t know about likely explains the way he threw a tantrum about it in September 2019, based off a wild misreading of an email to him.

At a time when the precise role of the dossier had been public for over a year, he was forwarded a FOIA request referencing “Shelby” — which he seems to have taken as a reference to Shelby Pierson — to search for references to the dossier because “an assessment” of the dossier “was added as an annex.”

Shelby believes this should be responded to by the NIC as the dossier was a factor in the 2017 ICA on the election interference in which an assessment of the document was added as an annex.

Please review the attach document and conduct a search for the time period May 2016through February 2017 of all records of communication (including emails on both .gov and non-.gov accounts, text messages, and instant chats) between the office of the Director ofNational Intelligence, including but not limited to former ODNI Director James Clapper, and the office of the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, including but not limited to former FBI Director James Comey, regarding the collection of memos known as the “Steele Dossier.”

The SCWB replied in a tizzy, asserting that the non-compartmented version of the ICA had no dossier reference (which is true) and stating that his analytical scrub of the classified non-compartmented version did not include anything represented to be dossier materials (also true).

He then went on to repeat the rumor about what Clapper said about the dossier that also had been publicly debunked for years.

I was asked by NIO Cyber [ ] to participate in the analytic scrub of the non-compartmented version of what I think is the 2017 ICA referenced below. It included no dossier reference that I recall.

  • I was not / am not in all of the Russia compartments, and so I did not participate in the crafting of the compartmented version
  • At no point did [] suggest that there was any analytically significant reporting that I was NOT seeing, with the exception of compartmented material (I asked repeatedly, because of analytic concerns I held regarding a KJ that remain unresolved to this day.)
  • At no point did I see or consider what I gather is, or was represented to be, ‘dossier’ materials.

I did hear second hand from [], ostensibly recounting words of then DNI Clapper, on the day of a briefing to current [then, I think, just elect] POTUS, about inclusion of dossier materials in a presentation to POTUS elect. This was characterized as an unexpected and unwanted sudden and unilateral act by then DIR FBI Comey, and as a source of concern to the DNI.

To this day, I have never seen or reviewed dossier materials in a work setting. I did recently hear them referenced by two colleagues in terms consistent with the email below, which struck me as concerning and at odds with my personal experience working election issues during 2015-2017.

  • With that single, recent exception, other than the email below, at no time in my IC career has ‘dossier’ material ever been represented to me in a work setting as something the NIC viewed as credible, or that was influential in crafting NIC products.

Once the dossier was in the ICA — and Clapper addressed that in public testimony in May 2017 — then its briefing to Trump was inevitable.

After another exchange, the SCWB ratcheted up his tantrum.

3. IF the Dossier material WAS used by the NIC, unless it is also compartmented, my NIO intentionally deceived and excluded me from things I was cleared for and had need to know, throughout his entire tenure here. I prefer to think that isn’t true, but if it was, we have a problem.

4. IF instead, Shelby or [] are mis-speaking about what the NIC was considering in its’ analyses, it’s a pretty reckless idea to fling out in an FOUO email.

The recklessness was and remains SCWB’s. No one said the dossier had been included in the analysis; he projected that onto the email sent him. And while Tulsi has studiously avoided releasing the annex that spoils her propaganda, Chuck Grassley did, revealing this caveeat:

We have only limited corroboration of source’s reporting in this case and did not use it to reach the analytic conclusions of the CIA/FBI/NSA assessment.

Further, the annex does compare the dossier with compartmented intelligence, meaning its classification was sound.

He simply made it up to have a tantrum.

In his later whistleblower complaint, he obscured the false rumor on which this was all based, claiming only he “had been led to believe that the prior- DNI Clapper viewed the ‘Steel Dossier’ material as untrustworthy.” That doesn’t excuse adhering to that for years, long after it was debunked.

And he seemed to concede that in the original email he had blown an “annex” out of proportion. To sustain his tantrum, he said that this would be a potential inappropriate use of classification,” except he bases that on a claim that the dossier was “widely available” in the press when it didn’t become available until five days after the ICA release.

I thought this meant either the premise of the FOIA email was incorrect – or – that “Steele Dossier”-related material was held in CAP channels, which seemed like a potential inappropriate use of classification for something so widely available in the open source press. If the material had actually been a “factor,” or, even just attached to a compartmented ICA, and whether the 2017 ICA’s judgements were valid, or not, it seemed that (and other NIO) had been actively misleading me, and potentially other NIC deputies, for several years.

By 2023 when he submitted this, all the evidence that he was wrong about the dossier and wrong about the briefing was public. But he nevertheless still stewed on his resentment that was based on those mistaken beliefs.

2019 to 2023: Whistleblower’s complaint

Starting after SCWB’s dossier tantrum in 2019, he started making complaints, first to management, and then to Inspectors General. But for much of that period, he wasn’t so much trying to make a complaint; he was trying to share information with John Durham. After the ICIG told him, in 2022, that they had no way to facilitate that referral, he tried to reach out to Durham’s office directly.

2022: Durham outreach

Tellingly, Tulsi doesn’t include the backup to SCWB’s DNS theories, so there’s no way to assess whether his theories are anything more than conspiracy theory (though, as noted, he himself sourced them to a deeply problematic court filing). He describes speaking to someone from the office (though he clearly didn’t believe the person did have ties to the office), but was put off because of ongoing trials.

[] replied to the effect that the Special Counsel was busy with upcoming trials, but that they would get back to me. Following conclusion of that trial, no contact from or anyone in DOJ was forthcoming. I was never asked to interview, or to attest to any of the events, or for a more detailed description of my concerns.

You really get the sense that SCWB was beginning to lose it by this period.

For example, nowhere does he seem to consider the many ways in which Durham’s own conspiracy theories about DNS were destroyed in the first trial — again, that was public. There was no real DNS theory left afterwards, so it is unsurprising that no one from Durham’s office reached out, in the wake of two humiliating acquittals, to further pursue theories that their own prosecutions had debunked.

January to June 2023: A belated DNS panic

A year after the Michael Sussmann trial disclosed that the FBI’s investigation of the Alfa Bank DNS anomalies was a shitshow, and weeks after Durham released his report trying to fudge that fact, SCWB renewed an attempt started years earlier to share a hypothesis with Durham: that the intrusions into some voting-related servers in 2016 were in fact fabricated by the people (he still falsely believed) had fabricated the Alfa Bank anomalies themselves.

The palpable frustration that no one responded to his concerns are fairly common for whistleblower attempts of any sort. All the more so for theories that have been debunked in a trial and Special Counsel report.

SCWB’s paranoid conspiracies

As I said above, I’m sympathetic with some of SCWB’s complaints. He’s entitled to refuse to budge on the ICA’s key judgments. He’s entitled to question the analytical rigor of assessing only one country’s media campaign (though by his own description, he did that after the fact).

But as someone who reconstructed the conflict between himself and Nguyen, six years later (that is, long after his mistaken beliefs had been debunked), as SCWB himself refusing to “abandon my tradecraft standards” and adhering to the “‘religion’ of analysts,” clinging to such paranoid conspiracies is inexcusable.

Though it does prove lucrative when your paranoid conspiracies happen to tell the incoming DNI and President precisely what they want to hear. If my understanding of SCWB’s identity is correct, he has served in a White House position advising on cybersecurity and now likely participates in the grift of Golden Dome. In the age of Trump, adherence to paranoid conspiracies is very lucrative.

But, unfortunately, they also lead to the United States purging key intelligence resources.

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Mike Rogers Doesn’t Exculpate Trump on “Collusion” Like Trump Once Thought

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On Monday, House Judiciary Committee made available two sets of documents I’ve already covered:

On Tuesday, Tulsi Gabbard announced she was stripping the clearance of 37 current and former spooks, in a thinly veiled political purge. NYT provides background on some of the people Tulsi purged, including Vinh Nguyen, who was purged because he allegedly pressured Tulsi’s so-called whistleblower to affirm conclusions in the 2017 ICA, but who had remained in active service as a crucial contributor to NSA’s quantum computing efforts until this purge. This purge clearly places loyalty to Trump over America’s most crucial intelligence efforts.

Add these 37 people to the long list of those who been purged in service of Trump’s invented grievance about the 2016 election:

I’ll return to the way that Tulsi continues to use the hoax about Russia as an excuse to purge those who might contest Russia. The degree to which Russia has milked Trump’s grievances to destroy US capabilities against it is one of the reasons I view the 2016 operation as the most successful intelligence operation of recent history.

But for now, I want to show how these two efforts work in tandem, but also show that Tulsi’s purge actually helps to confirm that Trump “colluded” with Russia in 2016.

Back in 2023, I did a post on the releases to Judicial Watch (release 1, release 2) of the Crossfire Hurricane binder, which led me to conclude it was one dumbass binder. In that post, I developed a rough list of what was included in the binder, what was withheld from JW under FOIA, and what was listed as pending when Trump created the binder in 2020. We can compare my earlier list with what has been currently released, which I put into a table here.

These are close to but not quite matching documents. There were 270 pages omitted entirely from the JW FOIA (I noted only the larger chunks of withheld documents in my list). The current release omits the June 29, 2017 Carter Page FISA application, which is 121 pages.

That leaves roughly 16 pages that were in the original Crossfire Hurricane binder (as reflected in the JW FOIA) not reflected in the current release, though most if not all of those pages reflect the tracking of requests Trump made to DOJ, some of which appear in the current release as Tab numbers, some of which had not been fulfilled by the time Trump’s team put together the binder in January 2021. Two are identified: Request 14, for materials on Michael Sussmann or other Perkins Coie lawyers, and Request 17, for a meeting between Bruce Ohr and Andrew Weissmann about money laundering. Three, Requests 1, 5, and 6, are not identified.

I’ve put more analysis below, which addresses how badly cherry picked this binder was. In addition to intentionally burning Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper, as well as FBI’s informant confidentiality promises, this binder told a Russian spy story, not the story of the investigation.

But for now, I want to focus on the Mike Rogers 302 which had previously been released in heavily redacted form as part of Jason Leopold’s FOIA in 2020. The comparison of the two releases all but confirms that only Rogers’ 302 was included in the binder, even though Robert Mueller interviewed all of Trump’s top spooks back in 2017. The inclusion of Rogers, but not Rick Ledgett, likely helps to explain why Ledgett was purged along with 36 other people yesterday.

The 302 doesn’t help Trump’s current case all that much.

For example, it records that Rogers was the one who, “suggested the information [from the Steele dossier] be included in an annex or appendix rather than in the nearly one page summary he had seen.” That is one of the alleged crimes at the core of the HPSCI report, here attributed to the guy Trump treated as his most favorable government witness in 2020.

Some of the rest of the interview undercuts claims that Crossfire Hurricane investigators were trying to harm Trump. Notably, Rogers remained ignorant of the Mike Flynn prong; but he also explained that the collection on Flynn would have targeted the people he spoke with.

Much of the rest of the interview — and the reason, I suspect, why Trump included this in his dumbass binder — focuses on a March 26, 2017 conversation that Trump had with Rogers, which was the subject of public reporting in 2017, including a Nakashima/Entous story that was likely of interest to the leak investigation. It includes this language:

According to ADM Rogers’ recollection of the call and the memo, President Trump expressed frustration with the ongoing investigation into Russian interference, saying that it made relations with the Russians difficult. ADM Rogers noted that when President Trump speaks, he tends to talk in long strings and it is not immediately clear what he expects to be answered and what is rhetorical. The President often doesn’t pause for an answer before continuing to talk. During the call, President Trump disagreed with definitive assertions that the Russians were responsible for the hacks and said it was impossible to tell who was actually responsible for the hacking. He also said it was making it hard for him to deal with the Russians, and asked ADM Rogers what he thought. ADM Rogers acknowledged it was does make relations difficult, but then explained in detail, but at a high level, the intelligence supporting ADM Rogers’ confidence, and the rest of the community’s, that the Russians were behind the hacks. President Trump stated they would have to “agree to disagree” on the matter. [two lines redacted under Other Government Agency redaction] President Trump then asked ADM Rogers if he would say “that” publicly. ADM Rogers interpreted “that” to mean [one line redacted under Other Government Agency redaction]. ADM Rogers told President Trump he could not do that, as he did not and could not discuss USPERs in unclassified settings. President Trump did not ask him to “pushback” on the investigation itself, but he clearly did not agreement with the assessment of the Russian involvement.

This passage is not all that helpful to Trump either. The FBI released this even as Tulsi is attempting to undercut claims that Russia did the hack-and-leak, but it reaffirms IC certainty that Russia was behind the hack. It proves Tulsi is lying now!

It also makes it clear that Trump went to great efforts to clear the way to fulfill his commitments to Russia in 2017, with no success.

That Rogers interview took place one day before Rick Ledgett’s interview, the 302 for which remains mostly redacted.

The Mueller Report explains (in a section likely pertinent to Edward Gistaro’s inclusion on Tulsi’s purge list as well) why having just Rogers’ side of this exchange would be of interest.

On March 26, 2017, the day after the President called Coats, the President called NSA Director Admiral Michael Rogers.347 The President expressed frustration with the Russia investigation, saying that it made relations with the Russians difficult.348 The President told Rogers “the thing with the Russians [wa]s messing up” his ability to get things done with Russia.349 The President also said that the news stories linking him with Russia were not true and asked Rogers if he could do anything to refute the stories.350 Deputy Director of the NSA Richard Ledgett, who was present for the call, said it was the most unusual thing he had experienced in 40 years of government service.351 After the call concluded, Ledgett prepared a memorandum that he and Rogers both signed documenting the content of the conversation and the President’s request, and they placed the memorandum in a safe.352 But Rogers did not perceive the President’s request to be an order, and the President did not ask Rogers to push back on the Russia investigation itself.353 Rogers later testified in a congressional hearing that as NSA Director he had “never been directed to do anything [he] believe[d] to be illegal, immoral, unethical or inappropriate” and did “not recall ever feeling pressured to do so.”354

347 Rogers 6/12/17 302, at 3-4.

348 Rogers 6/12/17 302, at 4.

349 Ledgett 6/13/17 302, at 1-2; see Rogers 6/12/17 302, at 4.

350 Rogers 6/12/17 302, at 4-5; Ledgett 6/13/17 302, at 2.

351 Ledgett 6/13/17 302, at 2.

352 Ledgett 6/13/17 302, at 2-3; Rogers 6/12/17 302, at 4.

353 Rogers 6/12/17 302, at 5; Ledgett 6/13/17 302, at 2.

Rogers claimed Trump made no ask of the NSA Director, but he only gets there by claiming that you can never tell when Trump is making an ask. Ledgett claimed that this was the most “unusual” thing he had experienced in 40 years serving the country, which is probably why he chose to document it.

Now consider those two redactions. Per the WaPo story that led to this interview, the ask was a request to deny evidence of “collusion,” which Rogers deferred by saying “he did not and could not discuss USPERs in unclassified settings.”

Trump made separate appeals to the director of national intelligence, Daniel Coats, and to Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, urging them to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion during the 2016 election.

Coats and Rogers refused to comply with the requests, which they both deemed to be inappropriate, according to two current and two former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private communications with the president.

[snip]

“The problem wasn’t so much asking them to issue statements, it was asking them to issue false statements about an ongoing investigation,” a former senior intelligence official said of the request to Coats.

But Rogers’ answer — and the redaction — only makes sense if they were speaking of specific evidence of “collusion,” not the absence thereof. The quote to WaPo makes it clear that the source believed there was affirmative evidence of “collusion.”

That is, the redaction strongly suggests that Trump asked Rogers not to deny “collusion,” but to deny that the intercepts NSA had implicating Trump’s closest aides (and likely his son and son-in-law, though NSA may not have discovered all of those yet) confirmed “collusion.”

So on Monday, Jim Jordan celebrated the release of a Mike Rogers 302 the redactions to which suggest Trump asked Rogers to lie. And on Tuesday, Tulsi purged the guy who testified he found that disturbing.

Additional analysis

Carter Page FISA: As noted above, one of the main withholdings from the current document set that was in the binder on January 19, 2020 is the final Carter Page FISA, which had already been sequestered by FISC at that point. We have every reason to believe at least one version of the full binder went to Mar-a-Lago. That strongly suggests that a sequestered copy of the Page document was found at Mar-a-Lago in the August 2022 search. That, in turn, may help to explain why Kash Patel had to plead the Fifth when testifying to the Jack Smith grand jury: because if that FISA application did go to Mar-a-Lago, then it reflected material over which the FISA Court had special handling instructions, a separate crime.

George Papadopoulos doth protest materials: The binder’s treatment of George Papadopoulos is rather stunning. First, there’s the inclusion of the Joseph Mifsud 302, which like the Papadopoulos 302s from the same period — which are not included — admits to some of their contact, but obscure other parts. There’s nothing credible about this 302, but it is presented as if it helps Trump’s cause.

Meanwhile, the treatment of the Stefan Halper files is wildly uneven. It includes backup materials and the 302s describing how Halper got asked to reach out to Carter Page and others (it also reveals that Halper and Peter Navarro were buddies). The materials include much, if not all, of Halper’s conversations with Carter Page. But the single solitary scrap of his reporting from conversations with Papadopoulos is a cherry picked fragment declassified for House Republicans. But it leaves out Halper reporting in which, for example, Papadopoulos discussed monetizing his access to Trump, an effort that underlay his relationship with Sergei Millian. In short, there are vast swaths of the investigation into Papadopoulos left out here, with just Mifsud’s 302 included as stand-in, as if that exonerated Papadopoulos.

Christopher Steele materials: At least a hundred pages of Christopher Steele materials were withheld from the JW FOIA:

The latter is the most interesting to me, because it is incomplete. As one example, there’s a section about whether there was corroboration for the claim that Trump had agreed to intervene in Ukraine. It mentioned the platform changes and part of Trump’s July 21 comments about NATO, but does not mention that he publicly stated he would consider recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea. And while the date of this report is not marked, it also includes no comment about the discussions between Paul Manafort and Konstantin Kilimnik about carving up Ukraine, nor does it mention the floated offer to Michael Cohen.

Similarly, the table is rightly critical about references in the Steele dossier that purport to rely on Millian. But they don’t mention that Millian was saying some of the things about Trump publicly that got recorded in the dossier.

And another timing issue: The table claims there’s no corroboration that the Kremlin was involved in the dissemination of the John Podesta material. There was never a time in 2017 when that was true.

Perhaps the most interesting bit about the Steele material, however, pertains to the John Durham investigation. In many ways, this binder reflects what Durham was asked to investigate. But no Igor Danchenko materials were included in here. That’s fairly stunning, given the extent to which right wingers later incorporated Danchenko’s reporting into their conspiracy theory. All the more so given that the binder makes a big deal that Steele and Stefan Halper were closed for cause, but does not mention Danchenko, who was closed in the same period that Halper was, and for the same reason (that right wingers exposed his tie to the FBI).

David Kendall defensive briefing: One testament of the degree to which this binder was the roadmap for Durham is the defensive briefing given to Hillary Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, about a Turkish influence operation in October 2015. Defensive briefings make up a big chunk of the Durham report, which attempted but failed to show that Hillary was more favorably treated. The inclusion of it is all the odder given that when Trump and Mike Flynn got a defensive briefing, the FBI did not yet know that Flynn was a willing participant in a parallel Turkish influence campaign.

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Kash Patel Continues to Cover Up His Role in the HPSCI Investigations

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Tulsi Gabbard should be helping the President prepare to capitulate to Vladimir Putin.

She’s doing so, tellingly, by continuing to push propaganda — this time, the email via which NSA Director Mike Rogers registered his moderate rather than high confidence in intelligence showing that Putin wanted Trump to win — that she hopes will distract from the fact that the Russian investigation ratcheted up in 2017 because Trump’s National Security Adviser secretly undermined sanctions with Russia.

Indeed, the same day Rogers wrote that email was the day Flynn made his first call to Sergey Kislyak about undermining President Obama’s position on Israel, a call the transcript for which has not been released, but the follow-up to which records Kislyak describing Putin’s awareness of the calls: “your previous, uh, uh, telephone call, I reported to Moscow and it was considered at the highest level in Russia.”

More interesting is a cache of documents released to the Federalist, regarding the various investigations into leaks about Trump’s ties to Russia in 2016 and 2017, with the Adam Schiff documents plopped in there starting at 143, after the Genetic Christmas file.

The cache, in general, shows why FBI had difficulty finding the leakers on all the cases except James Wolfe (which I’ll return to), the SSCI staffer who had been dating Ali Watkins: the intelligence behind these stories was often shared with at least 60 and sometimes close to 300 people.

It also shows how aggressively Trump’s DOJ investigated these stories. Of particular note, after Durham investigated Jim Baker and others for a leak, his results were used to reconsider the other Trump-related investigations — the process that was first disclosed in 2021. Details of the subpoenas served on HPSCI (covered extensively in this DOJ IG Report), including both Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, are redacted. And the inclusion of the “whistleblowers” documents in this cache show how DOJ discredited his claims: after interviewing Michael Bahar, they realized the timeline they had been given misrepresented Bahar’s normal activities (which included contact with the press long preceding the conspiracy theories about Adam Schiff). In other words, the cache as a whole debunks the claims people are making about Schiff, rather than confirm them.

You won’t hear that from the frothers.

Several of the case files confirm the veracity of stories for which NYT or WaPo got Pulitzers. Trump is suing the Pulitzer Foundation for awarding those prizes, and these documents will help the newspapers defend the lawsuits.

Both the investigation into the Flynn story and the Carter Page one sputtered out after those records were declassified — in both cases, declassifications in which Kash Patel was centrally involved. To repeat: These investigations were largely halted because Kash declassified the information involved.

That makes the entire manufactured mob around this more interesting. Regarding the HPSCI “whistleblower” (whom Schiff has said was terminated for cause): at the time of the alleged leaks nothing went on in HPSCI without Kash’s involvement or awareness. Yet after making an enormous stink about being targeted in a lawsuit in 2023, Kash has released nothing about all that — not even the explicit concerns that Rod Rosenstein raised about Kash in January 2018, separate from these investigations.

Then again, there are a bunch other documents that Kash could release, such as the Crossfire Hurricane binder that he claimed was declassified on January 19, 2021, or the grand jury testimony that he obtained immunity to give. Kash could vindicate his past claims. Thus far, he has not.

Arctic Haze

Opened August 1, 2017

Closed September 9, 2021

Investigated source for details of the SVR documents as raised by Jim Comey in testimony about Clinton Foundation. The investigation focused closely on Daniel Richman, the Comey friend who got copies of his memos memorializing Trump conversations. In 2021, Comey shared his phone to show there was no evidence implicating him. Only at that late date did the FBI chase down possible other sources — but only the ones who might have a motive to protect Comey.

Echos Fate

First reported on January 24, 2017

Opened May 12, 2017

Closed December 9, 2020

Investigated source for David Ignatius story exposing Mike Flynn’s calls with Russia. It came to incorporate one redacted entity, as well as EDMO (where Jeffrey Jensen was doing propaganda for Bill Barr). The investigation determined that over 167 people had access to this information.

Foggy Falls

Opened May 10, 2017

Closed May 6, 2020

Investigated leak of Carter Page FISA application. The opening memo describes who in Congress got read only briefs of the application. Starting in 2018, after HPSCI released dueling memos on the application, FBI started asking whether they could prosecute at all.

Riding Hood

Opened October 18, 2017

Closed July 17, 2019

This is the Ali Watkins-based tip (from June) that led into the James Wolfe investigation. It is presented out of order in the cache.

Genetic Christmas

Story dated December 14, 2016

Crime report July 25, 2017

Opened October 23, 2017

Closed April 16, 2020

Investigated sources for NBC reporting that Putin was personally involved in election operation. Over 60 people had access either to the documentation or briefing.

Sirens Lure

Opened August 14, 2017

Closed May 11, 2021

Investigated sources for reports on Jared Kushner’s targeting in Russian investigation. There were 192 people in the subject pool.

Tropic Vortex

Referred by Dana Boente March 22, 2017

Opened January 31, 2019

Closed February 25, 2020

This was initially based on an October 2016 NYT story (which may actually be this story on an entirely different topic, a scan DOJ asked Yahoo to do, using a FISA warrant, for a terrorism-related selector). But it came to incorporate this story on Jim Comey’s effort to push back on Trump’s false “tapp” claim (only the NYT, which includes Mike Schmidt, is named, though ABC had the story too). The initial investigation was referred to John Durham because one subject of the investigation was a former senior FBI official. Durham submitted his report in January 2019, and DOJ decided to reconsider all the other investigations based on what Durham had discovered.

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How John Durham Buried Evidence He Had Been Doing the Work of Russian Spies … and then Tulsi Gabbard Buried More

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As I’ve been showing, the Durham classified annex goes to significant lengths to hide that a Russian email discussing creating a conspiracy theory about the American Deep State, which he dates to July 26, precedes the draft SVR memo he claims has animated his years-long hunt, which dates to July 27 or later.

You can date the draft SVR memo (Durham doesn’t provide its date at all in the unclassified report, and if he does here, the date has been redacted) by tracking the inputs (red arrows) into the fake emails on which the draft memo is purportedly based (blue arrows), as I lay out here.

You can review a live copy of this (without the arrows) at this link.

The fake email integrated into the memo itself — bearing the date of July 25 but mentioning the Olympics — derives from the Thomas Rid story and the real Tim Maurer email — but it appears to have been altered to add the reference to the Olympics on July 27 (because a copy without the Olympics mention is attached to an email dated July 27).

And the fake email, bearing the date of July 27, claiming that Hillary approved a plan on July 26 appears to derive from the real July 27 Julianne Smith email soliciting a totally innocuous letter condemning Trump’s attack on NATO. We might learn more about its creation, except the email to which it is attached is entirely redacted in the annex.

That is, so long as his claim that the Deep State memo is dated “the day after” two emails purporting to be dated June 25 is accurate, then the emails and draft report that guided his entire investigation were the conspiracy theory proposed on July 26. Durham did the work of Russian spies for four years.

If this is, indeed, the timeline, then Durham — as well as John Ratcliffe and Kash Patel — should have recognized they were pursuing an investigation of Hillary Clinton based off a deliberate Russian spy hoax.

There’s one more thing that supports this argument — and reveals how problematic it is for Durham (who continued his investigation for two more years after he would have concluded the emails were “composites”) and the others: the extent to which he, as well as the person who redacted this for release, tried to obscure all this in the classified annex.

This kind of deceit was not remotely unusual for Durham (as I’ll return to when I review what Durham did do after concluding he was using a clear Russian hoax as his excuse to investigate Hillary Clinton). Andrew DeFilippis, especially, did this kind of stuff all the time. Here, where he used email timestamps in two different time zones to falsely suggest that Fusion was the source for a public link about the Alfa Bank anomalies, is just one such example.

The list below is overwhelming. The most important detail, however, is how Durham treats the real email from Julianne Smith asking people to sign onto some totally innocuous letter criticizing Trump’s attacks on NATO. Durham obtained one copy of the email from the SVR trove and another from a subpoena, presumably to Smith or CNAS, where she worked.

The annex separates the disclosure that Julianne Smith had also been hacked (noted in footnote 27) from the discussion of the email she sent on July 27, obscuring that Durham obtained two copies of that email, one from the SVR collection (cited in the annex as Document Classified Appendix Document 9, which also includes the Maurer email), and one via subpoena (cited in the unclassified report as XXXX-0014561). He does that even though discussion of the “certain emails, attachments, and documents that contain language and references with the exact same or similar verbiage to the materials referenced above” precedes that discussion. In the unclassified report, he treats this email differently, effectively treating it as corroboration for the claims in the fake report, rather than a source used to fabricate it (though he later uses it as corroboration after concluding that the underlying emails are composites based on … that email).

In either case, however, if he is treating Smith’s July 27 email as a source (and that’s one place it appears in his report), then the draft memo must post-date the July 26 Deep State email.

On July 26, Russian spies decided it’d be cool to start a conspiracy theory about the Deep State. And on July 27, having stolen that Smith email, they decided to claim that Hillary — as opposed to some other Deep State entity — decided to smear Donald Trump.

And everyone involved in this is working really hard to hide that they knew that.

Update: On the topic of Smith’s email, I’ve been puzzling over the redaction in this passage; I wondered if Durham expressed some obnoxious opinion about her.

It was suggested to me, however, that that redaction might hide Durham speculating about what Russian spooks thought — maybe something like, “it is a logical deduction that [Russian spies believed that]”… The mention of the spies would therefore justify classification on classification bases. But holy hell if it were something like that, it would mean Durham was trying to rationalize why Russian spooks fabricated emails to make up this claim.

Durham’s deceits

By July 2021, John Durham had evidence to conclude the emails behind a draft SVR memo on which his entire investigation rested were “composites,” that is, fabrications. But he continued on for two more years, attempting and failing to create evidence to substantiate that Russian disinformation by prosecuting Michael Sussmann and Igor Danchenko. To hide that he had done that, he engaged in a great deal of deceit in both his unclassified and classified reports.

  • Durham frames his focus around three bullets John Ratcliffe included in his 2020 memo sending these materials to Lindsey Graham. The first bullet claims to focus on “Russian intelligence analysis,” suggesting that his focus was on a draft SVR report that leads the narrative in the classified appendix, but is actually the last document temporally. But the second bullet refers to John Brennan notes that quote not the purported end analysis, but an email advancing the plot to frame Hillary.
  • The two exhibits — Brennan’s notes and a referral from the CIA that he couldn’t prove ever got sent to FBI — include redactions that obscure the actual content of both. Importantly, witnesses were not shown the full exhibits, though Brennan correctly stated that Durham misrepresented what his notes were about.
  • Durham misrepresented how many witnesses (and who) testified that they had not seen the referral memo.
  • Thereafter in the unclassified report, Durham referred to “Clinton Plan intelligence” as if it focused on that discreet claim or even the draft memo, when it referred to the larger body of intelligence obtained via the Dutch, and so in context the plan to frame Hillary. In the classified report, Durham referred to Clinton campaign plan, rather than the intelligence asserting it.
  • Durham mentioned two Leonard Benardo emails early in the annex (there were actually four documents claiming to be emails in the report), then discussed the earlier, apparently finished, intelligence from earlier 2016 implicating Loretta Lynch, suggesting they were the emails. He returns to this strategy later in the appendix.
  • Then, the beginning of the section focused on the SVR documents starts with the draft memo, not the specific emails. He keeps moving the ball.
  • The date of the draft memo appears nowhere in the unclassified report and may not appear in the classified report either (if it is there, it is redacted).
  • The annex separates the disclosure that Julianne Smith had also been hacked (noted in footnote 27) from the discussion of the email she sent on July 27, obscuring that Durham obtained two copies of that email, one from the SVR collection (cited in the annex as Document Classified Appendix Document 9, which also includes the Maurer email), and one via subpoena (cited in the unclassified report as XXXX-0014561). He does that even though discussion of the email appears after the introduction, “certain emails, attachments, and documents that contain language and references with the exact same or similar verbiage to the materials referenced above.” In the unclassified report, he treats this email differently, effectively treating it as corroboration for the claims in the fake email, rather than a source used to fabricate it (though he also uses it as corroboration after concluding that the underlying emails are composites based on … that email). In either case, however, if he is treating Smith’s July 27 email as a source, then the draft memo must post-date the July 26 Deep State email talking about ginning up a conspiracy theory.
  • After introducing the Benardo emails, the annex discloses there were several versions of the July 25 one, which helps to obscure that one copy of the earliest version was attached to a July 27 email, which in turn suggests the reference to the Olympics was added on July 27. As noted, the redactions exacerbate this sleight of hand.
  • The annex hides that the Deep State email predates the draft memo by discussing the two versions of the July 25 Benardo email in-between.
  • The annex doesn’t appear to explain that one of two copies of the first fake July 25 email (without the Olympics) is considered part of the same document as the July 27 “vilify” email.
  • The description that the real Tim Maurer email is the same date as the fake July 25 emails gives the impression that they were made the same day, when at least the revisions of the fake email probably happened on July 27.
  • Durham provides a description of this (then-dated) article about a voting hacker for hire, but does not provide a description of the Thomas Rid article discussed in the email, which is not only a clear source for the draft memo, but should make analysts look twice at the Russian idiom in English in the fake Benardo email, because Rid discusses the language games behind the Guccifer 2.0 persona at some length.
  • When Durham concedes the emails to which the draft memo is sourced are composites, he does not name CNAS, where Smith worked, even though earlier in the section he says she was hacked too.

Lying with redactions

  • The introduction to the draft memo redacts details about what is in it, most notably the emails the entire annex purports to focus on.
  • That continues in the redactions after the draft memo. This obscures which email was incorporated into the draft memo: the one referring to the Olympics. The redaction introducing the first fake July 25 email further obscures this, making it harder to figure out that Classified Appendix Document 6 is a July 27 email with one of the first versions of the July 25 email (that is, before the Olympics were added) attached.
  • The redaction of the email after the July 27 “vilify” one obscures that the July 27 Benardo email discussing Hillary’s approval is attached to that redacted email and not the “vilify” one, further obscuring that the emails dated July 25 were likely revised on July 27, to add the Olympics reference.
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How Chuck Grassley’s Politicized Redactions Gave Putin Leverage over Trump

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After making Canada, Japan, Vietnam, and Switzerland go to the US and making the EU go to Trump’s golf course in Scotland to negotiate tariffs, Trump sent his real estate developer buddy, Steve Witkoff, to Moscow to negotiate tariffs with Vladimir Putin.

I would have low expectations that Witkoff, who has gotten his ass handed to him at every turn, would negotiate a reasonable deal with Russia in any case.

All the more so given the politicized release of old documents on Russia that Tulsi Gabbard has orchestrated in recent weeks.

Consider just this redaction in the classified Durham appendix that Chuck Grassley released last week.

As I laid out here, the redaction is designed to fool readers in several ways.

First, it helps to sustain a fiction that the draft SVR memo purporting to report Hillary Clinton approving a plan to smear Donald Trump is the first document in a series, and not the last. That, in turn, serves to suggest that what I call the Deep State memo, laying out a plan by SVR to frame Hillary came after the draft memo, rather than laid out a plan to fabricate the memo, complete with fabricated emails including Russian idioms attributed to Leonard Benardo.

But that’s not right. The Deep State email was, Durham described, sent on July 26. The draft SVR email incorporates an email fabricated on July 27.

Indeed, after this Deep State email, Russian spies talked about “mak[ing] [something]” — that is, fabricating emails — to “illuminate” how Clinton wanted to “vilif[y]” Trump and Putin, proposing an initial fabricated July 25 email promising to, “put more oil into the fire,” but not yet adding reference to the doping scandal that was contemporaneously a very sore subject for Russia. The email with the reference to the Olympics, dated July 25 but almost certainly fabricated on July 27, is the one that was incorporated into the draft SVR memo.

In response, those Russian spies said … we don’t know what, but we do know that they attached the fabricated July 27 email purporting to reflect Hillary approving that plan on July 26.

I’d love to know what that email says; it may make it more clear that this was all a great plan to frame Hillary Clinton, or it may reveal other parts of the plan, possibly pertaining to Guccifer 2.0. But I don’t need to know what it says to know that the email gives Putin great leverage over Donald Trump at the moment that Trump finally tries to assert a strong hand with the Russian dictator.

By hiding that email in an attempt to hide that what Trump has claimed for eight years was an effort by Hillary to frame Trump was — is, still — a wildly successful attempt by SVR to frame Hillary, Trump’s top spies — Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director and Useful Idiom John Ratcliffe, and FBI Director Kash Patel — have all sustained a secret with Russia’s spies, a secret Kash has been chasing all that time, a secret that could legally implicate at least Ratcliffe and Kash (not least because they sustained this campaign during the time they were private citizens) in a crime.

Trump’s top spies are keeping a secret: the secret that for the last eight years Trump has carried out precisely the plan to frame Hillary Clinton that those SVR spies first ginned up on July 26, 2016.

And here’s the thing. Putin’s spies know much of what is behind that redaction. They can reverse engineer it because the footnote to it shows that the email in question is the one to which those Russian spies attached that fake July 27 email, nine years ago. They still have that email. Hell, it’s probably hanging in a gilt-edged frame somewhere, Putin’s trophy from a wildly successful attempt to compromise the Main Enemy.

So that redaction is not, as a classification redaction should, keeping any secrets from our adversaries. The Russian spies know what is too embarrassing for Grassley and Tulsi and Kash and Ratcliffe to release.

But we don’t.

And that’s why this entire frenzy to release more secrets just in advance of this meeting with Putin has made Trump far, far weaker.

Donald Trump cares more about his claims of grievance, a fake grievance that has always gotten him out of jams, than he does about America, to say nothing of Ukraine.

And Chuck Grassley’s willful protection of this secret between Putin’s spies and Trump’s has only served to give Putin leverage over Trump and over the United States.

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Days After the FBI Announced an Investigation, Russian Spies Deliberately “Put More Oil into the Fire”

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I really don’t think enough people are getting the pee-your-pants humor — at least if you’re Russian and want to destroy the United States — at the core of the classified annex from the Durham Report.

Durham describes that, in a May 21, 2021 interview with Leonard Benardo, Durham showed the Open Society Foundation Executive an email purportedly stolen from him in 2016 and asked him if he wrote it. Benardo told Durham, “he would not have used certain terms, such as ‘oil into the fire.'”

Durham, you see, was pretty aroused by the term, “put more oil into the fire,” because he was chasing a conspiracy theory that Hillary framed Donald Trump by paying for a dossier that — unbeknownst to her — was likely riddled with Russian disinformation, thanks to Oleg Deripaska, and also — unbeknownst to her — got shared with the FBI, and because – unbeknownst to her — Michael Sussmann brought allegations about a DNS anomaly to the FBI (one that the guy I went to the FBI about had a role in inflaming just weeks later). So that phrase, “put more oil into the fire,” looked like paydirt. It seemed to confirm the exact same conspiracy theory Durham was chasing: that Hillary intended to frame Trump at the FBI (even though the FBI had already announced their investigation).

Durham doesn’t quote what Benardo said directly. It may well have been more colorful than that he wouldn’t have used that term. Benardo has lived in Moscow and other parts of the former Soviet Union, and so he surely recognizes the phrase not only is not one most Americans would use — they would say, “pour fuel on the fire” or “add fuel to the fire.” They definitely wouldn’t use “oil.”

But he would recognize it as a Russian idiom.

And to be clear, while Chuck Grassley and Tulsi Gabbard are redacting most details about the provenance of these documents, the introduction says, “the above-referenced [SVR] memorandum included the English text of a document … the document contained a purported email from Benardo” on which, a redacted passage from Durham suggests, the SVR report “was partially based.”

That appears to confirm that this text appeared in the intelligence report that Durham chased like a toddler for four years in English. That is, it’s not a problem of translation — English to Russian back into English. A document that Durham spent years trying to verify as authentic uses a Russian idiom to describe the chaos that might ensue as a result of the FBI investigation that was publicly confirmed the very date of the email, July 25, 2016.

And this is one reason why the timing of these documents matters, which Grassley and Gabbard aggressively obscure. This is as close as we can establish:

  • July 25: Thomas Rid story
  • July 25, 11 to 11:35AM: Smith texts other people trying to figure out if there was any investigation of the hack, and then discovering the FBI has just announced such an investigation (as I noted here, Durham doesn’t disclose anywhere in his report that during the Michael Sussmann prosecution, Sussmann forced him to obtain these emails that show FBI releasing a statement without consulting with the Dems, the victims of the hack, which goes a long way to debunking his conspiracy theory).
  • July 25, undisclosed time: Maurer responds to the Rid story
  • July 25, undisclosed time, but the date could be made up: Two drafts of purported Benardo emails
  • July 26: Email between two Russian spooks suggesting “doing something about a task from someone”
  • July 27: Email between two Russian spooks about illuminating Hillary’s attempts to vilify Trump and Putin that links to a purported July 27 Benardo email which among other things reports that Hillary has “approved Julia’s idea”
  • July 26 to July 28: A draft Russian spy memorandum claiming that on July 26, Hillary Clinton approved a plan to smear Donald Trump, citing July 25 emails purportedly from Benardo
  • July 27: Email from Smith soliciting signers for a letter condemning Trump’s attack on NATO

Importantly, Durham describes that this email between two Russian spooks was “dated the following day” from the email with the Russian idiom in the English text, so July 26.

This email between two Russian spooks says, let’s do something “about a task from someone, I don’t know, some dark forces, like the FBI, or better yet, Clinton sympathizers in IC, Pentagon, Deep State (or somewhere else?), about American websites deploying a campaign to demonize the actions of Russia’s GRU.” This email between two Russian spooks effectively says, “Let’s do something about a campaign to demonize Trump.”

That’s why the date of the report — the one Durham never disclosed in his entire unclassified report and which he either didn’t disclose here or Grassley and Gabbard are covering up — matters.

Because even if you believed the emails from Benardo were real, the one with the Russian idiom dated July 25 and one dated July 27 — the very same day Trump would ask Russia to hack Hillary some more and Russian hackers would almost immediately comply, the same day Trump lied about chasing business interests in Russia, a lie Putin’s top people had proof was a lie, the same day Trump said he might recognize Crimea (in the days immediately following, Roger Stone attempted to script pro-Russian tweets from Trump) — even if you believed those emails were true, you’d have to notice that a key part of the SVR report, the detail that Hillary had, past tense, approved “a campaign to demonize the actions of Russia’s GRU” only appears in the July 27 email, not the July 25 one.

And that email, also in “English,” was attached to a follow-up email discussing the plan to “‘illuminate’ how Clinton was attempting to ‘villif[y] Moscow.'”

That all seems to suggest that the intelligence report itself — the one claiming to confirm that Hillary had approved a campaign to demonize Russia? — appeared the day after two Russian spooks said, “wouldn’t it be cool, now that we know the FBI is looking, to claim that Hillary was seeking to frame Trump?” Let’s pour fuel on the fire, as it were.

Durham ultimately concluded that these emails were “composites” of other emails — though he only identifies one, an email about an article from one of America’s foremost intelligence disinformation scholars, Thomas Rid, who is nowhere near as high up on Putin’s list of adversaries as Benardo surely is, but certainly someone it’d be hilarious to mock.

Durham doesn’t bother to discuss what Rid said, but much of what Rid did say conflicts with what the purported intelligence report does. Perhaps more importantly, Rid discussed how one of the early Guccifer documents included the signature of Felix Dzerzhinsky: “one dumped document was modified using Russian language settings, by a user named ‘Феликс Эдмундович,’ a code name referring to the founder of the Soviet Secret Police.” Likewise, it might have been worth mentioning that in the article whence this “composite” email came, Rid commented on the shitty English of Guccifer 2.0. “Guccifer 2.0’s English initially was also weak, but in subsequent posts the quality improved sharply.”

Had Durham actually looked these things: the apparent timing — including the coincidence with Donald Trump’s overtly pro-Russian statements, to say nothing of his lies about Russian business ties — had Durham actually considered all of this, that “English” phrase, “put more oil into the fire,” in shitty English, he might have gotten the joke.

Because honestly, it is fucking hilarious. Well-played, Russian spy dudes. Well-fucking-played.

But instead of seeing how he had been made a laughingstock — and really, the entire US intelligence community, especially the FBI that these conspiracy theories have serially destroyed — Durham instead doubled down, indicting two more men he hoped would fulfill his conspiracy theories, first destroying US DNS capabilities targeting Russia and then chasing Sergei Millian’s uncorroborated tweets, for years.

Nine years into this influence operation, that phrase, “put more oil into the fire,” a phrase that someone at the FBI should have recognized as a Russian idiom at least five years ago, is still ripping the country to pieces.

And somewhere, some Russian spies are peeing their pants in laughter.

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How John Durham and Chuck Grassley Covered Up Getting Ass-Handed by Russia

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The most important passage of the classified annex of the Durham Report is this one — though you won’t hear it from the frothy mob, in significant part because Chuck Grassley and Tulsi Gabbard are hiding what these documents are. Durham describes that it is “dated the following day” just after discussing an email dated July 25, so July 26.

Go ahead and read it once. But before I explain why it is so important, first let me illustrate how Chuck Grassley and Tulsi Gabbard are obscuring the provenance of these documents.

As I explained here, these documents were stolen from Russian foreign intelligence (SVR) by another country’s intelligence service (understood to be the Dutch). The documents themselves generally consist of two different kinds of documents:

  • Emails and other raw intelligence that SVR stole from victims, including US think tanks, State Department, and the Executive Office of the President
  • Discussions among SVR — mostly intelligence analysis — about the files they stole

Sometimes the victim files the Russians stole would be attached to the reports, sometimes they would be incorporated into the reports. Sometimes the Russians would translate the English-language documents they stole, other times they would not. So the game of telephone that most of these documents entail looks like this:

  • SVR steals documents
  • SVR translates documents
  • SVR analyzes documents
  • Dutch intelligence steals documents from SVR
  • Dutch intelligence shares documents with CIA and/or FBI
  • CIA and/or FBI translate the Russian bits
  • CIA and/or FBI analyze what they found
  • CIA sends what they think they found to FBI

But that’s not all. For the key documents in this collection, they report the speech of one or another Hillary Clinton associate, which means the game of telephone looks like this:

  • Debbie Wasserman Schultz or Julianne Smith talk with Think Tank guys (primarily Open Society’s Leonard Benardo, but also OSF’s Jeffrey Goldstein, as well as unidentified people at Atlantic Council and Carnegie Endowment)
  • Think tank guys write what they learned from DWS or Julianne Smith
  • SVR steals documents from Think Tank guys
  • SVR translates documents from English to Russian
  • SVR analyzes documents
  • Dutch intelligence steals documents from SVR
  • Dutch intelligence shares documents with CIA and/or FBI
  • CIA and/or FBI translate the Russian bits to English
  • CIA and/or FBI analyze what they found
  • CIA sends what they think they found to FBI

Best as I can tell, that path is the one involved in the documents Durham claims are the most important in his appendix, the ones that claim to report what Smith said about a Hillary Clinton plan to smear Donald Trump.

Here’s what FBI lawyer Tricia Anderson wrote about the problems with this game of telephone in a memo:

  • The reports likely reflected multiple levels of hearsay given that they were based on purported communications between Wasserman Schultz and potential donors, not any underlying communications between Lynch and Clinton campaign staff;
  • Wasserman Schultz’ communications may have contained exaggerations designed to reassure potential donors who were concerned by news about the FBI investigation;
  • The [Russians] who drafted the reports may have injected opinion, editorialization, or exaggeration into the reports; and
  • Translation errors may have contributed to the potential for unreliability

Durham provided just a summary of this assessment, but a fair one (in part because he’s more focused on later documents that don’t involve DWS but do involve all those levels of reported speech).

Here’s how the purported smoking gun was introduced (note, if Durham provided the date, it is redacted, but it reports something that happened on July 26, so it can be no later than then but could be July 27).

 

There was additional analysis about the provenance following the text.

There are a number of things conveyed in these redactions:

  • The classification marks
  • That CIA received these documents
  • The dates the Dutch passed them on
  • Presumably (though given Durham’s practice elsewhere in his report, not definitely) the date of the underlying memo
  • A description of the people at SVR they were obtained from
  • The import of all the other think tanks
  • The nature of the incorporated messages purported to be from Benardo

I don’t contest some of those redactions. But the amount of redaction, and lack of context elsewhere, obscure what the purported smoking gun is: a draft SVR report that in some way incorporates language attributed to Leonard Benardo. We have no clue whether it is dated July 26, 27, or 28 (by which date CIA had a copy). The section that most frothers are quoting (just like the section of other SVR reports released in recent weeks) is not an email itself, it is a Russian discussion about purported emails.

Durham follows the actual SVR report with the text attributed to Benardo; the description of how this text is incorporated in the document is redacted.

He follows it with another similar (raw) email attributed to Benardo (which should make evident whom Benardo sent the email to, or at what time, but Durham didn’t share that).

John Durham does not mention, at all, that the language of those first two purported Benardo emails — the ones with a date of July 25 — in no way supports the claim made in the SVR Report, that on,

26 July 2016, Clinton approved of a plan of her policy advisor, Julianna Smith … to smear Donald Trump. by magnifying the scandal tied to the intrusion by the Russian special services in the pre-election process to benefit the Republican nominee.

As envisioned by Smith, raising the theme of “Putin’s support for Trump” to the level of the Olympics scandal would divert the constituents’ attention from the investigation of Clinton’s compromised electronic correspondence.

He does note in a footnote that the SVR report got Julianne’s first name wrong, Juliana. He simply asserts that the “Julie” referred to in the purported Benardo emails is Julianne; he doesn’t note that in the purported follow-up Benardo email the name used is “Julia,” not the kind of thing a colleague would normally do. Durham interviewed Benardo, who specifically said he didn’t know who “Julie” (or “Julia”) was.

The only corroboration at all that the language in the Benardo email was real, was evidence it was not: an email sent by someone else, a Carnegie Endowment cyber guy named Tim Maurer, discussing this article on attribution from Thomas Rid. Durham says less about the Rid article than another cited in this correspondence, which is telling, because Rid discussed the Democrats’ decision, back in June, to go public with the hack.

This was big. Democratic political operatives suspected that not one but two teams of Putin’s spies were trying to help Trump and harm Clinton. The Trump campaign, after all, was getting friendly with Russia. The Democrats decided to go public.

Rid also discussed the Guccifer persona at length, which is important for reasons I’ll explain in a follow-up.

As noted, ultimately Durham concludes that the emails themselves — documents that are supposed to be raw collection — are instead “composites,” including from a totally different guy, Maurer.

The Office’s best assessment is that the July 25th and July 27th emails that purport to be from Benardo were ultimately a composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian intelligence hacking of the U.S.-based Think Tanks, including the Open Society Foundations, the Carnegie Endowment, and others. Indeed, as discussed above, language from Tim Maurer’s email of July 25th is identical to language contained in Benardo’s purported email of the same date.

Durham is hedging wildly here. I think the NYT overstates when it says, “Mr. Durham concluded that the email from July 27, 2016, and a related one dated two days earlier were probably manufactured.” That would be the conclusion sane normal people would draw, that if emails purporting to be from Benardo were actually cut-and-pasted language from Maurer, but Durham doesn’t make that conclusion (perhaps because he continued to chase this conspiracy theory for another two years after he interviewed all these people, indicting two more men only to discover his theories about them, too, were made up). Indeed, in an almost entirely redacted (and therefore useless) passage, Durham claims that in what must be July 2017, the CIA still maintained that the report and at least some of the purported emails were not fabrications. He also cites interviews he did with people who thought the Benardo emails were authentic.

But yeah, if the emails themselves are “composites,” it means they’re made up, not even attributing the author correctly. In fact, if they’re composites, we have no reason to believe the emails dated July 25 weren’t in fact “composited” on July 26 or 27.

Now’s a good time to mention that Durham is obscuring the sequence of the documents here (not least by withholding the metadata of the real email he obtains, but also thanks to the redactions from Grassley and Tulsi). The sequence looks something like this, but we can’t be sure:

  • July 25: Thomas Rid story
  • July 25, 11 to 11:35AM: Smith texts other people trying to figure out if there was any investigation of the hack (as I noted here, Durham doesn’t disclose anywhere in his report that during the Michael Sussmann prosecution, Sussmann forced him to obtain these emails that show FBI releasing a statement without consulting with the Dems, the victims of the hack.
  • July 25, undisclosed time: Maurer responds to the Rid story
  • July 25, undisclosed time, but the date could be made up: Two drafts of purported Benardo emails
  • July 26: Email between two Russian spooks suggesting “doing something about a task from someone”
  • Unknown date: A draft Russian spy memorandum claiming that on July 26, Hillary Clinton approved a plan to smear Donald Trump, citing July 25 emails purportedly from Benardo
  • July 27: Email between two Russian spooks about illuminating Hillary’s attempts to vilify Trump and Putin that links to a purported Benardo email, in what Durham describes as English but is … probably not written by a native English speaker
  • July 27: Email from Smith soliciting signers for a letter condemning Trump’s attack on NATO

Narratively, Durham puts the draft report, incorporating a July 25 email attributed to Benardo, then citing another July 25 email attributed to Benardo, and describing Hillary approving a plan on July 26, before the email between two Russian spooks, which by description is dated July 26. But I’ve been staring at it for an hour (and reviewing Durham’s unclassified report and now realizing he never provides the date there, either) and for the life of me, I’m not sure if we know whether the two spooks email precedes the draft intelligence report or not (note, too, that it starts, “Great!” by responding to something, suggesting there’s an even earlier one Durham suppressed). If my read that it is dated July 26 is correct, it would have been written on the same day as the purported approval by Hillary, of a plan to smear Donald Trump. But the only email attributed to Benardo reflecting Hillary’s approval is written July 27, meaning it’s more likely it was written on July 27.

So we don’t know. I am still searching but I believe Durham never revealed the date of that memo. But based on what we can see, SVR didn’t “have” an email reflecting Hillary approving this plan until July 27, the day after (at least by Durham’s description) two Russian spooks discussed telling stories about the Deep State.

If that’s right, Russian spooks were discussing “making” such a report before they “found” an email in stilted English that Durham couldn’t match describing Hillary approving this plan.

Based on interviews (italicized here) that appear only in this annex, John Durham first started chasing this conspiracy theory no later than September 2019 (the day after meeting with Nate Batty, the politicized FBI Agent who killed the Alfa Bank investigation). After interviews done by July 2021, Durham should have come to the conclusion he states here: that the purported emails were “compiled” from emails of entirely different people. And yet all the while, the IC was in possession of documents showing one Russian spook suggesting that another one, “do something about a task from someone, I don’t know, some dark forces, like the FBI for instance, or better yet, Clinton sympathizers in IC, Pentagon, Deep State.”

Durham tried to bury all that, that he created precisely the chaos the Russian spooks were trying to manufacture, in this classified annex and — if you believe Kash Patel — burn the proof.

The Russians told you what they were up to.

And yet you fell for it anyway.

Update: Fixed spelling of Benardo’s last name.

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A Dossier Steal: HPSCI Expertly Discloses Their Own Shoddy Cover-Up

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HPSCI’s dishonesty mirror

My very favorite paragraphs in the entire House Intelligence Report (HPSCI Report) attacking the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russian election interference are these two:

They complain that the 2-page appendix of the ICA addressing the Steele dossier didn’t include details about Christopher Steele that would discredit the dossier, chief among them HPSCI’s claim that Steele was terminated “for being dishonest.”

Here’s how the DOJ Inspector General on the Carter Page FISAs described when and why Steele got shut down as a source:

On November 1, 2016, Steele’s FBI handling agent questioned Steele, who admitted speaking to the reporter who wrote the October 31 article. The handling agent advised Steele at that time that his relationship with the FBI would likely be terminated for disclosing his relationship with the FBI to the press, and the FBI officially closed Steele for cause on November 17, 2016. Steele was never paid by the FBI for any of the reports or information that he provided concerning Carter Page or connections between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.

He was terminated “for disclosing his relationship with the FBI to the press.” Now, perhaps it’s churlish to expect a report on accuracy and sourcing dated September 18, 2020 to account for a report released 284 days earlier, on December 9, 2019.

So, let’s try their own claimed source. Here’s how Steele’s handler, Mike Gaeta, described it in a December 2017 HPSCI interview that the HPSCI report cites extensively, including in that first paragraph.

I called him to confront him and ask him if he was the source in that article. So I said, “Was that you in the article?” And he goes, “Yes, it was.” At which point I said, “Why on Earth would you do that?” And I said, “Everything is going to change here on out.”

I told him a couple of things. I told him, you know, you are no longer considering — don’t consider yourself being tasked by us. You are not working on our behalf. You are not to collect any information on behalf of the FBl. I said, you know, the relationship will end. You know, this was because of his violation of the agreement that we had made back on October 3rd, which I don’t believe we got into, but because he clearly didn’t follow directions, because he clearly went against what he was instructed to do, and because he went public, the relationship was then ended that day.

But then, officially, on paper, a few weeks later, we actually shut the file down. And that was — and I also told him he was not being paid. There was a payment that he was expecting at that point, and I said that that’s not going to happen

[snip]

Up until that moment, he had been a complete professional. And so, when I see that in the article, I was just — that’s when I was taken aback. And then when I confronted him, he said, “Yes, I did it.” And then he makes this comment about being upset about the actions of the Director on the Friday before. [my emphasis]

Steele “went public,” which “went against what he was instructed to do,” but he was honest that he had done so. “Up until that moment, he had been a complete professional.”

Even the Nunes memo — the predecessor to this section, largely authored by now-FBI Director Kash Patel — describes that Steele was terminated because he made an “unauthorized disclosure to the media” (though that memo makes plenty of other errors, which I addressed here).

Steele wasn’t closed because he was dishonest (indeed, the IG Report quotes Peter Strzok saying, “We did not close him because we thought he was [a] fabricator”). And he definitely wasn’t closed in October, as the first but not second paragraph claims, before the Mother Jones article that was the precipitating reason for his termination as an FBI source.

The first paragraph above kicked off an entire section of the HPSCI Report attacking Steele’s credibility. The second appears several pages later, in a section scolding the ICA authors for not providing proper source reporting. These pivotal paragraphs in HPSCI’s case against Christopher Steele claim that he was fired for being dishonest.

The claim, itself, was dishonest. The claim, itself, misrepresents source reporting.

That’s a pretty good read of the kind of rampant error and sloppiness found throughout this entire section — and, indeed, the report more generally.

Dossier insertion

And consider the import of that first paragraph’s citation to “interviews with the FBI agent who handled Mr. Steele.”

As I explained in this post, the claimed project of the HPSCI Report was to measure whether the ICA had enough evidence to back the assessments they made in the report, published on January 5, 2017. Elsewhere (with the notable exception of the 2018 indictment of Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s trolls), HPSCI pretends they’ve learned absolutely nothing in the interim period. They don’t know that George Papadopoulos got advance notice Russia was going to drop emails. They don’t know that Don Jr. responded enthusiastically to an email offering, “very high level and sensitive information [that] is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” They don’t know that Trump’s campaign manager met with a suspected Russian spy and shared campaign strategy at the same meeting where they discussed getting paid by pro-Russian oligarchs and carving up Ukraine.

The premise of the report is to play dumb to all that.

The dossier discussion, by contrast, engages in no such conceit. Over and over, HPSCI uses stuff discovered after the ICA to claim ICA authors shouldn’t have included the Steele dossier in the ICA (though once again, this is very selective). It’s a different project entirely.

Even in structure, it feels like HPSCI took an existing, mostly unrelated report on the dossier and plopped it into the middle of this assessment of the ICA. The entire dossier section — almost a quarter of the full report — is actually a subsection of a finding addressing a different document; the dossier is included in that section because the ICA summary of the dossier reportedly included the words, “Russian plans and intentions.”

Given the apparently haphazard ploy to dump the dossier work in here, look closely at what the HPSCI report says about the inclusion of the dossier in the ICA in the first place.

Schrodinger’s dossier

All three reports released recently (CIA’s Tradecraft review, Tulsi’s propaganda presentation, and this 2020 HPSCI report) have some version of complaint that, after a debate among Jim Comey, John Brennan, and Mike Rogers as to how to fulfill President Obama’s mandate to include everything they knew in the ICA, they decided to put it into an annex along with a bullet — newly disclosed — that cited to it as “additional reporting.”

Tulsi even has someone she calls a whistleblower who claimed he remained ignorant that that had happened as late as September 2019, though like so many of her claims that’s based on a misrepresentation of the record.

The HPSCI Report cites those four words, “Russian plans and intentions,” it used them to justify including the dossier in this section. But it doesn’t describe what the CIA report does: the two-page appendix includes a disclaimer.

Ultimately, agency heads decided to include a two-page summary of the Dossier as an annex to the ICA, with a disclaimer that the material was not used “to reach the analytic conclusions.” [my emphasis]

The HPSCI omission is important. That’s true, first of all, because the HPSCI Report goes to great lengths to claim that by including the bullet, the ICA authors effectively incorporated the dossier content in the report itself. But their analysis makes it very clear the dossier material was not in the ICA.  Just as one example, the HPSCI Report claims “The ICA indicated no evidence of similar damaging material being held by Moscow on candidate Trump, making him less vulnerable to such post-election influence operations” [than Hillary]. Elsewhere they claim that Hillary, traveling as either the First Lady or the Secretary of State, was more vulnerable to compromise on overseas trips than Trump, traveling as a beauty pageant promoter. If the dossier is in the ICA, both those claims are ridiculous (once you consider Trump’s secret efforts to build a Trump Tower funded by sanctioned banks, both are ridiculous in any case, but…).

HPSCI adopts another inconsistent claim about how the dossier appendix was included in the ICA. Tulsi’s documents show that the plan for the ICA was to create three versions:

But as both the HPSCI Report and the CIA report complain, “the highest classified version of the ICA” — the one intended for around 30 people — “had been shared with more than 200 US officials.” (The HPSCI report later complains that the dossier couldn’t have been included in the ICA in the service of a defensive briefing because that most classified version went to 250 people.)

Well, who did that? Most of that dissemination would have happened after January 20, 2017. Most of that dissemination would have happened under Donald Trump. And that’s weird, because HPSCI also claims that the dossier was stuck in (an appendix of) only the most classified section to “better able to shield the assessment from scrutiny,” even though they’ve just complained about how broadly it disseminated … under Trump.

Holding the ICA accountable for things discovered a year later

Mostly, though, the vast bulk of the HPSCI report about the dossier is an extended rant that ICA authors did not include stuff the committee itself discovered via a sustained investigation.

A list of just some of the things the HPSCI Report complains the ICA authors did not include includes:

  • Details from the January 2017 debrief of Igor Danchenko, which started on January 24 but wasn’t memorialized until early February
  • A full accounting of how many media outlets Steele shared the dossier with (which may be sourced to Glenn Simpson’s 2019 book or HPSCI’s own investigation)
  • The Buzzfeed publication on January 10, 2017
  • The means by which Steele delivered his reports, which HPSCI’s own investigation unpacked (relying in part on that December 2017 Gaeta interview)
  • Gaeta’s own background (a complaint which ignored how FBI works sources)
  • Steele’s own refusal to be interviewed by the investigation (???), as if the ICA could ever have accounted for that
  • The absence of claims about Steele’s source network — which the FBI first started discovering with their January 2017 Danchenko interview
  • Gaeta’s 2017 testimony about what Bruce Ohr did
  • Details about what Steele did at DOJ (such as what he said to Bruce Ohr) but didn’t do with the Crossfire Hurricane team
  • Other details of the termination discussion HPSCI obtained from Gaeta
  • Details about Fusion’s work for Natalia Veselnitskaya, which came out in the wake of Don Jr’s release of the June 9 emails (largely forced by HPSCI’s investigation)
  • Details about plans to pay Steele, which were killed (HPSCI affirmatively misrepresented the circumstances of the tasking assignment; most of the reports came before the tasking meeting)
  • More details about Steele’s ties to the press
  • A quote from Andrew McCabe’s December 2017 testimony about what the FBI had been able to verify

And some of the things that were known by January 5, 2017 were almost certainly not available to ICA for the same reason that details of George Papadopoulos’ advance notice of the email leak were not: because it was part of an ongoing FBI investigation.

The standard applied to the dossier is wildly different than the standard applied to the rest of the report.

HPSCI bros need to review their hacking claims

Worse still, the HPSCI Report sucks at the thing that should be a slam dunk. The second-to-last part of this section challenges the ICA claim that some parts of the dossier were consistent with other known facts.

Now, I would expect a half committee of Congressional staffers, many with past training on the IC, to be able to do as well as little old me before they had two of the key interviews on which they rely on.

January 11, 2017: The Democrats Newfound Love for Russian Intelligence Product

September 6, 2017: John Sipher’s Garbage Post Arguing the Steele Dossier Isn’t Garbage

Most of HPSCI’s assessment of “corroboration” reviews generalized items about Putin’s intent. It claims,

The CIA further claimed “limited” intelligence corroboration of Steele’s information, but failed to mention that his dossier was produced after Russian election hacking operations had already been exposed in the media — beginning 4 June 2016, [sic] while Mr. Steele delivered his first report to FBI on 5 July 2016 — and thus any dossier mention of Russian hacking was neither predictive, nor was it unique information that was “corroborated” by intelligence.

“Regurgitated” would have been a more descriptive term to describe the dossier, in that it parroted media or internet stories and pundit comments on Russian hacks of the DNC.

As pertaining to hacking, though — their primary focus — it’s actually not that the dossier parroted things that were public.

It’s that they affirmatively rebutted the most obvious conclusions from the ongoing hack-and-leak. For example, the first and several reports completed after that all suggested that the Kompromat that Russia had on Hillary was decades old material from when she traveled to Russia, not the hack-and-leak campaign rolling out in front of our eyes. A July 26, 2016 report, released after the DNC release and almost a year after the first public attributions of the APT 29 hack of State and DOD to Russia, claimed that Russia wasn’t having much success at hacking Western targets, a claim that anyone briefed on those APT 29 hacks (including the Republicans so taken with the SVR reports stolen in those hacks) would know was laughable. The most incendiary December 13 post attributed the troll campaign to Webzilla, not Yevgeniy Prigozhin. That is, the dossier wasn’t just delayed; it affirmatively contradicted most of the publicly known details about the election interference campaign and even more of the details that the ICA addressed closely. That should have raised concerns from everyone looking closely. It’s not just that the dossier had a lot of shit. It’s that the shit it did have would have led the Democrats to be complacent about the campaign targeting them (another point I made before HPSCI’s big interviews in December 2017).

And that should have raised questions from everyone involved.

HPSCI’s only consistency is playing dumb about Manafort and Deripaska

Which leads me to where this section gets really weird.

Again, the point of this report is to assess whether the ICA claims made in a January 5, 2017 report were backed by sufficient intelligence.

Yet at three different points in this section, HPSCI complains about what happened after the report was complete. They complain about the way Jim Comey briefed the dossier to Trump on January 6, 2017. They claim that including the dossier raised alarmist concerns among senior policy makers — about which Trump complained after the fact. And in a report purporting to review the ICA itself, they complain about what Comey said in a White House visit on February 8, 2017 (which was after the first Igor Danchenko debriefing but a day before it was memorialized).

This is all weird on its face. None of it pertains to the contents of the ICA at all (and to the extent it feeds right wing frothy conspiracy theories, it relies on their demand that ICA authors know what it took HPSCI a year to discover).

But one thing that at least some of these people knew before this time does not appear in the HPSCI. While HPSCI makes much of the fact that (the ICA didn’t mention that) Fusion GPS worked with Natalia Veselnitskaya, they show no concern about the fact that, via a different firm, Steele worked with Oleg Deripaska — and even attempted to collect dirt on Paul Manafort for him starting in March 2016, something addressed in the Danchenko interview. By May 2017, the intelligence community had assessed that Deripaska “was associated” with a Russian intelligence agency. The right wing, including multiple people on HPSCI, staged a panic about Steele’s ties to Deripaska in August 2018 … and then they just dropped it. The December 2019 IG Report included extensive discussion of the degree to which Deripaska influenced Steele’s earlier reporting and might have succeeded in injecting the dossier with disinformation.

Even crazier, with their obsession about how Steele delivered the dossier to the FBI, they ignore how Steele pushed Deripaska’s own complaints to DOJ, all in parallel with his efforts to hand off the dossier. I laid out the double game Deripaska appears to have been playing in early 2020, nine months before this HPSCI Report.

These details become all the more important given the HPSCI Report’s focus on things that happened in late January and February 2017, because Paul Manafort — about whom they play dumb throughout this report — met with a Deripaska deputy just as the dossier was breaking, only to return and advise right wingers to launch precisely the campaign that this HPSCI Report tries to carry out.

In one of HPSCI’s few complaints about the ICA fairly situated on what (or how little) they might know about the dossier by January 5, 2017, HPSCI notes that while the ICA described the complexity of Steele’s claimed network, they didn’t know enough to know whether it was infected by his own fabrication or Russian disinformation.

The ICA also describes dossier information as collected from “a layered network of identified and unidentified subsources” although the ICA did not clarify that FBI and CIA had so few details on the alleged network, that they didn’t know if this material was all or in part fabricated by Mr. Steele, his subsources, or if it was Russian disinformation fed to the subsources.

But by September 2020, HPSCI should have.

Update: Fixed year of DOJ IG Report.

Links

A Dossier Steal: HPSCI Expertly Discloses Their Own Shoddy Cover-Up

Think of the HPSCI Report as a Time Machine to Launder Donald Trump’s Russia Russia Russia Claims

Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe Reveal Putin “Was Counting on” a Trump Win

Tulsi Gabbard Teams Up with Russian Spies to Wiretap and Unmask Hillary Clinton

The Secrets about Russia’s Influence Operation that Tulsi Gabbard Is Still Keeping from Us

Tulsi Gabbard Accuses Kash Patel of Covering Up for the Obama Deep State

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Trump Keeps Demanding that You Stop Talking about His Jeffrey Epstein Problem

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From the second I saw Trump say, Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?, I knew this scandal would roll out differently. At that point, I understood it only as a matter of attention — and I was right.

“POTUS is clearly furious,” said a person close to the White House, who, like others in this story, was granted anonymity to discuss the mood inside the West Wing. “It’s the first time I’ve seen them sort of paralyzed.”

A senior White House official told POLITICO the president is frustrated with his staff’s inability to tamp down conspiracy theories they once spread and by the wall of media coverage that started when Attorney General Pam Bondi released information from the Epstein case that was already in the public domain.

“He feels there are way bigger stories that deserve attention,” the senior White House official said.

Donald Trump survives (and thrives) via two super powers: his ability to command and redirect attention, and his exploitation of polarization to defy actual truth once he has that attention. And, in asking that question, Ae you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein, he expressed that he believed those super powers were failing.

At the time I only understood that his ability to command and redirect attention was failing, but given what has transpired since we can hypothesize about what brought him to this point.

Epstein is different than past scandals because it is so close to a motivating conspiracy of his base, QAnon. A third of his mob is motivated by an equally strong cult belief, and he relies on that mob to control political opinion and wield credible threats against defectors. Meanwhile, his base is suffering from what I’ll call “Justice deprivation,” (which I’ll return to — I’m sure there’s a better term), meaning they believe in him because he continues to stoke their belief he’ll deliver “Justice.” But they’re getting impatient. The John Durham investigation didn’t quench their thirst for vengeance against the Deep State, and now Pam Bondi has been caught stalling on delivering justice to the pedophiles.

And, Ghislaine Maxwell has a credible threat. This doesn’t mean she has proof Trump raped 15-year olds, though we can’t rule it out. Given how things are proceeding, I doubt we’ll ever learn what it is. What matters is the threat was and is serious enough he recognizes he must neutralize it.

But that credible threat meant that two parallel developments — Maxwell’s attempt to cut her 20-year prison sentence and the bumbling efforts from Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino to resolve the Epstein thirst they had stoked — collided in the week before John Sauer had to move forward on defending the prosecution against Maxwell’s appeal. Probably, Bondi’s frantic review of the case files in March was an assessment, as Maxwell was preparing her appeal, of how badly those two risks collided, and (as we’ll see) a creation of a list of names to target.

For a brief moment, the left — which has squandered any effort to be able to command attention, in part because most prefer to yell at Chuck Schumer — managed to piggyback on the right wing mob to be able to command attention and even, in Congress, political risks.

In those weeks, we’ve seen Sauer take an action (the response to her cert petition at SCOTUS) that Maxwell viewed as a threat to her ability to get out of prison. Then, her attorney David Markus publicly conveyed that he believed Donald Trump was reneging on a deal (publicly, that was a reference to the appeal, but this is a world of easy double entendres). Then the initial WSJ story — I can’t prove that it came from Maxwell but everything that happened since is consistent with that and this discussion assumes that’s true — demonstrated to Trump how Maxwell’s threat might play out against the backdrop of his mob’s dissatisfaction with Bondi’s dodge on the Epstein files, which convinced Trump to take steps to address the Maxwell threat, all the while against the backdrop of the second (Iran was the first) defections from his base, as they accused Trump of covering up.

It’s fairly clear the plan was to fire Maurene Comey, freeing up Trump to sell out the victims, create a delay and diversion with the grand jury head fakes, so as to shift Maxwell’s focus on Trump onto everyone else. Markus revealed that she was asked about 100 people in her two-day “proffer,” and the plan is to feed the base with scandals about those 100 people, some of whom will be the most prominent Democrats. That will provide Trump the space and excuse to get Maxwell out of prison.

Meanwhile, the Tulsi Gabbard conspiracy theories met with tremendous success at redirecting the focus, at least of the top trolls, from Epstein to transparently bullshit claims about The Black President. Kate Starbird shows that the Epstein focus tailed off by the end of day on Friday July 18, after Tulsi aired her conspiracy theories.

But those conspiracy theories are already creating their own problems. The John Durham investigation already proved there’s no legal there there. And Tulsi recklessly (but effectively) upped the ante, promising even better results than Trump ever promised Durham would provide. Treason, she said.

Trump is still struggling. Perhaps, most lethally for him, he’s not hiding that he’s trying to command and redirect attention — he has said as much three times now. Spectacle fails when you reveal its strings, and Trump, himself, is disclosing them.

He literally reeled off a list of things he wants journalists to cover other than his own Epstein problems.

What are you hoping Todd Blanche gets out of his meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell?

Well I don’t know about the meeting — I know it’s taking place. And he’s a fantastic man. He’s a great attorney, and people should really focus on how well the country’s doing, or they should focus on the fact that Barack Hussein Obama led a coup, or they should focus on the fact that Larry Summers, from Harvard, that Bill Clinton, who you know very well, and lots of other friends — really close friends of Jeffrey Summers [sic] — should be spoken about, because, you know — Jeffrey Epstein — should be spoken about. And they should speak about them because they don’t talk about them, they talk about me, I have nothing to do with the guy.

[pre-planned exchange about the homeless in which Trump asserts authority to take over DC]

Have you heard about Todd Blanche’s interview with Ghislaine Maxwell? Have you considered clemency for Ghislaine Maxwell?

Well, I don’t want to talk about that. What I do want to say is that Todd is a great attorney. But you ought to be speaking about Larry Summers, you ought to be speaking about some of his friends that are hedge fund guys, they’re all over the place. You ought to be speaking about Bill Clinton who went to the island 28 times. I never went to the island.

Do you maintain you did not write a letter?

I don’t even know what they’re talking about. Now somebody could have written a letter, used my name, but that’s happened a lot. All you have to do is take a look at the dossier, the fake dossier. Everything’s fake with that administration. Everything’s fake with the Democrats. Take a look at what they just found about the dossier. Everything is fake. They’re a bunch of sick people.

[turns back to talk about homeless people]

[Another conversation endorsing genocide of Palestinians]

Would you consider a pardon or a commutation for Ghislaine Maxwell?

It’s something I haven’t thought about.

If [inaudible] recommended it?

I’m allowed to do it, but it’s something I have not thought about.

But you wouldn’t rule it out.

But Markus, Maxwell’s attorney, is doing a good job of shifting the attention. After the first proffer, the WSJ magically came to focus on all those other people, some of the very same people Trump would name the next day (again, Markus revealed that Blanche brought in a list of about a hundred names, surely culled from what they saw in the case files; Maxwell is not being asked what happened, she’s being asked what kind of dirt she has on a pre-selected group of people).  And NewsMax and some key influencers are beginning to sell his narrative that Maxwell is the victim. Markus is a formidable lawyer in any context, but he happens to be South Florida’s formidable lawyer, and he knows these players and how they work.

And while Todd Blanche and Pam Bondi are nowhere near as formidable as Markus (indeed, Markus handed Blanche his ass on a cheap plastic plate), they do have the power and the shamelessness to do what needs to get done — the betrayal of victims, the clemency for a monster. Blanche already guaranteed that everything Trump will do going forward, including pardoning a sex trafficker to neutralize the threat she poses to him, will be rubber stamped by a SCOTUS already happy to sanction Trump’s crimes. We can’t probe his motives, even if they’re transparently deprave, SCOTUS already dictated.

That means only political pressure can thwart or impose a cost for Trump’s plan on rewarding a sex trafficker to redirect her weapons.

  • One question is what Maurene Comey does. She has been silent (and, as far as I know, has not been a source for any story). But there are a number of steps she might take that would either clarify how important her own firing was in making this happen or fuel the response.
  • I think Trump has also assumed the victims won’t find a way to speak up. That may well be true — after all everyone else is terrified and they have far less power than all the people cowering from Trump — but it may not be. There are a lot of journalists who have fought to tell their stories, and those stories are powerful.
  • Epstein’s executors are clear they’ll accept subpoenas. And at least for the moment, Democrats have succeeded in forcing Republicans to vote for subpoenas.
  • I’d love to do a campaign asking every Republican to go on the record about whether they would impeach Trump for a Ghislaine Maxwell pardon — but the moment for that may have passed.
  • One reason Deputy Attorneys General don’t meet with sex traffickers is because it makes them a witness. And while I think Blanche may one day claim he is protected by dual privileges — those of a top law enforcement officer and those of the President’s consigliere — that’ll be a legally dodgy claim. He has done plenty, already, to warrant a subpoena for testimony about why he has broken every law enforcement protocol to meet with a sex trafficker.
  • The three judges involved in the grand jury unseal requests seem to smell something is up; Richard Berman, in particular, is acutely aware of how badly the victims have and are being treated. (Note the docket in that case has shifted to non-public filing, which likely means victims have started filing their response to the unsealing request.)
  • Bondi created 1,000 witnesses to what is in the Epstein files, and put everything on a SharePoint server, meaning it may be vulnerable to hacking under the zero day just released, and was vulnerable to Elon’s DOGE boys.
  • NewsMax, which employs Alex Acosta and is front-running the pardon Ghislaine campaign, could be pressured for coddling pedophiles. And for the moment at least, the twin powerhouses of the Trump bubble, are taking different approaches (silence versus complicity) to helping Trump kill this story.
  • And until the far right totally gets on board, it is still possible to keep this swamping the news.

All of which is to say there are other sources of attention and power. Trump has a plan forward and a shit-ton of tools (and an exceedingly competent partner in Markus), but cannot be sure he’ll be able to reclaim that attention.

Still, a number of other things are going on, as Trump’s accelerating sprint to consolidate power.

Again, he is disclosing his strings. You don’t shift attention by telling people to avert their gaze, you entice them elsewhere. First Trump started yelling at his influencers for covering Epstein (most of them complied with his orders, but not all), and then he started giving people a list of things to cover instead: Trump’s claimed successes, his Potemkin trade deals, or the Obama conspiracy theory, or Larry Summers and Bill Clinton. You gotta pick, grandpa. You pick your focus and lead the way, you don’t give a multiple choice test!

The diversion — Tulsi’s conspiracy theory — may create its own problems. NYT reports that Tulsi did that without giving Pam Bondi a heads up (in the same way Bondi staged the first Epstein influencer event).

Ms. Bondi was given little warning the director of national intelligence was about to demand she investigate one of Mr. Trump’s most longstanding grievances: claims without evidence that the Obama administration overstated Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election in order to undermine him.

Ms. Bondi, fresh off a nasty fight with a top F.B.I. official over who was responsible for the political mess around the Epstein case, felt blindsided and annoyed, according to several people familiar with her thinking. They said that in reality, however, Ms. Gabbard was acting as little more than a proxy for a president demanding action on his vengeance agenda.

Ms. Bondi’s staff scrambled for a solution that would satisfy Mr. Trump while not committing the department to a tit-for-tat Obama investigation with unpredictable legal and political consequences.

Ms. Gabbard, standing at the White House briefing room lectern on Wednesday, made a series of provocative claims and pointedly said the onus was now on the Justice Department.

Several hours later, Ms. Bondi’s deputies posted an ambiguous, four-paragraph statement on the department’s website that announced the formation of what they described as a “strike force” to look into the Gabbard accusations.

In several posts, Ben Wittes has unpacked the series of non-announcements that Bondi has made.

So if the two conspired as government officials—as the Fox News article suggests—to do something nefarious to cook intelligence to get Trump, the statute of limitations for that offense, assuming such conduct even maps onto any known criminal offense, would have lapsed long ago. Ditto the statutes governing false statements and perjury. In other words, it’s completely unclear what the Justice Department—so eager to announce the investigation—might actually be investigating.

I can think of only two possible answers to this question.

Third, the first possibility is that some of the investigations of these matters dragged on for years, and some interviews might have taken place late enough that statutes of limitations have not yet run. For example, Comey gave one congressional testimony as late as September 2020, which would leave a few months yet before the statute of limitations on that. Brennan was interviewed by the John Durham investigation in August of the same year. So it’s theoretically possible that the investigation is limited to supposedly false statements made in the context of interviews made within the past five years.

Fourth, the second possibility—maybe more likely—is that the investigation is premised on a fanciful theory that the supposed “conspiracy” continued past the two men’s service in government. If you posit some conspiracy, after all, the statute of limitations runs five years past the end of the conspiracy, not five years after any of the specific acts that make up the conspiracy.

With respect to any supposed conspiracy involving Brennan and Comey to cook the intelligence on Russia to get Trump, we are operating in the land of fantasy. And when exactly does a conspiracy to commit a fantastical act end? In other words, if one predicates an investigation based on nonsense, it is possible to nonsense one’s way back quite a few years using a theory of conspiracy to nonsense.

Fifth, I actually doubt that either of these things is what is really happening here. What I think is happening is what one might call a ghost investigation.

I’d add another several points about evidence:

  • First, DOJ and FBI already conducted assessments about some of this evidence, both as they assessed it in counterintelligence reviews and as part of the John Durham investigation. As I’ve shown, Tulsi’s claims include an SVR document that HPSCI not only selectively cited, but which they had to know had been deemed “objectively false;” revisiting that decision would require, among other things, conceding that Jim Comey intentionally threw the election to Donald Trump in 2016. The Durham investigation showed that to try to make an investigation of these files, you have to fabricate things that aren’t even in the underlying Russian spy reports.
  • Now, think of the witnesses. DOJ can’t pursue this for the same reason it would have been nearly impossible to reopen the Russian investigation; because a credible witness (in that case, Bill Barr) had weighed in definitively. Tulsi’s recent claims conflict with things Kash Patel, Marco Rubio, and John Ratcliffe have had to say, after reviewing the same evidence. As I’ll show, the HPSCI Report right wingers are frothing over actually added an egregious error years after Kash sort of got the same assertion correct.
  • And that would also mean that the FBI and CIA Director would be natural, irreplaceable witnesses. Want to create a shitshow? Invite John Brennan to call Kash Patel as a hostile defense witness to both what happened in 2017 and what has happened more recently.

Will Sommer has been tracking what he calls “hype-debt” among Trump’s rubes.

But as I dove into the MAGA internet to get a sense of whether this distraction was working as intended, I was surprised to discover that not everyone was buying it. Yes, it’s only been a few days. But my sense is that Trump is racking up a sort of hype-debt within the party, as he tries to refocus his base away from one disappointment by setting them up for an even bigger one when Obama fails to face a military tribunal.

Take Liz Wheeler, a conservative pundit who received one of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s fateful Epstein binders back in February, and has since become one of the most vocal critics of Trump’s attempt to shut down questions about Epstein. On Monday, demonstrating why she was trusted to participate in the binder photo-op in the first place, she gushed that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had published “new evidence” of a scheme by senior members of the Obama administration to undermine Trump’s first term. (That was, coincidentally, a day after the infamous Wall Street Journal story on Trump writing a note to Epstein). Gabbard’s moves against Obama, she wrote, marked “the first glimmer of what I would call real justice.”

But even Wheeler couldn’t miss the contradiction here. If Obama and his aides committed treason, why don’t they actually get, y’know, arrested? Can a Trump Justice Department that can’t manage to release the Epstein documents without stepping on a series of rakes really pull off the criminal prosecution of an entire past presidential administration?

Wheeler said the only way to fulfill Trump’s new commitment to his supporters would be actual prosecutions.

Though he was also one of the first to catch NewsMax prepping the way for Maxwell’s clemency.

Meanwhile, Republicans are the only ones who buy this. In Gallup’s latest, Trump has started closing in on his all-time lows — his support immediately after leading an assault on the Capitol — among support from Independents. And that’s as the effects of his tariffs builds.

It seems likely that Trump’s defense attorney will pull of some kind of non-Trump Epstein distraction. What’s not yet clear is how much backlash that will elicit. Or whether Trump will reclaim his ability to grab attention.

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