That was the main reason some wanted an outsider to take a look at the system, all be it a flawed individual, but the system didn’t want to have oversight, first victim was Flynn, who not surprisingly was promising to bring reform to the intelligence agencies.
The Alfa bank stuff that they made up we knew al this years ago, Glen Simpsons of Fusion GPS who was tasked to come up with the story had already used the same bank as part of an effort to smear John McCain back in 2007 see here
Christopher Steele was just an avatar they would pass on information to and use to make it look like the information had some sort of credibility, we knew this almost right away because he couldn’t even spell Alfa bank correctly, he referred to it as Alpha bank.
I’m guessing some of this will come out at the trial and will be “news” to some.
Crucially, public release of the notes came after the five-year statute of limitations had lapsed in March of this year. The question is why the DOJ — and Durham in particular — gave the FBI a free pass. The uncomfortable answer may be that, as has been suspected for a while, Durham’s authority is effectively limited to private actors such as Sussmann and Danchenko and does not extend to public officials such as McCabe and Strzok.
The order by which William Barr appointed John Durham to serve as special counsel is dated October 19, 2020. The order contains, among other things, the following information:
This Time article seems to provide some comparisons of other investigations in terms of their respective lengths (there was no paywall for me, so I don’t think there’s one).
In short, the Clinton campaign created the Trump-Alfa allegation, fed it to a credulous press that failed to confirm the allegations but ran with them anyway, then promoted the story as if it was legitimate news. The campaign also delivered the claims to the FBI, giving journalists another excuse to portray the accusations as serious and perhaps true.
Most of the press will ignore this news, but the Russia-Trump narrative that Mrs. Clinton sanctioned did enormous harm to the country. It disgraced the FBI, humiliated the press, and sent the country on a three-year investigation to nowhere. Vladimir Putin never came close to doing as much disinformation damage.
Robby Mook, testifying as a witness in defense of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, told jurors that he discussed the matter with the Democratic nominee shortly before Election Day.
Mook described his end of the conversation with Clinton as him telling her, “Hey, we have this and we want to share it with a reporter.”
“She agreed to that,” he said.
The stunning disclosure is the first evidence showing Clinton was aware of allegations of a purported secret back channel between a Trump Organization server and Russia’s Alfa Bank — before the theory emerged publicly eight days before the election.
Mook also acknowledged that the campaign hadn’t verified the accuracy of the data at the time.
“Part of the point of giving it to a reporter was they could run it down further,” he said.
“A reporter could vet the information and then decide to print it.”
Mook testified that he was first told about the Trump-Alfa Bank claims by campaign general counsel Marc Elias. Mook added that he didn’t recall where the data suggesting the connection came from.
Theconservativetreehouse did a flashback, we all knew this at the time and had for years, some just catching up might like to look back knowing what they know now.
We know Fusion GPS was hired to put together the Trump Russian collusion information, the Steele dossier would be used as the grounds for a FISA warrant, they were also talking with Sussmenn (now on trial) regarding the Apha bank phony data they cooked up, they also had been working with the Russian attorney that showed up at Trump tower with a meeting with Don Jr.
Nearly all originating material came from Fusion GPS, yet Mueller after years of investigation, 40 million dollars and hundreds of witnesses had never even heard of them and are nowhere to be mentioned in his report.
For those who have been catching up and are showing some interest now, how is that possible?
Yeah, not just that she was OK with the press having the smear, he seems to miss that part where she planted it, knowing it was bullshit, and kept hammering it home.
In short: The MAGA crowd’s big gotcha is that Hillary was okay with her campaign sharing rumors of questionable veracity about her political opponent with reporters and then tweeting the published information.
Seriously, that’s all they have.
He claims that, although he may technically have been representing the Clinton campaign during that time frame, he was not really representing the campaign in connection with the FBI meeting.
He insists that campaign officials would have been opposed to his bringing the Trump-Russia information to the bureau because they wanted it to be promoted by the media — a strategy Hillary Clinton personally approved. Going to the FBI, on this rationalization, would have been counterproductive because the bureau would lean on the press to delay publishing until agents had time to investigate.
Consequently, we’re to believe that Sussmann went to the FBI against his client’s interests, because of his own patriotic concerns for national security.
Two thumb drives containing Alfa-Bank claims, along with “white papers” pushing the claims, were provided to Baker by Sussmann at the meeting, and the prosecution presented evidence that even the USB drives bought by Sussmann were billed to the Clinton campaign. The thumb drives, one blue and the other red, were displayed to the jury as evidence this week in Washington.
The disbursement report listed the client as Hillary for America, stated “General Political Advice” was the purpose, and described it as “Sussmann Purchase of new single use flash drives for secure sharing of files 9/13/16.”
I await the day when Godzillary distances herself from her own campaign and plays an Arkansas boomer version of Honey Boo-boo what got herself taken advantage of.
Good write up, basically saying if Sussmann is found innocent, which it is likely he will be, it likely will because the jury conclude that the leaders of the FBI pretended not to know his connections with the Clinton campaign and even went out of their way to hide their source from their own investigators because they knew at soon as they told them who the source was they would all know it was a political hit job.
Everybody knew, everybody in the FBI, everybody in the media and everybody in Washington knew it was all a lie. They all pushed the lie because they hoped they could get rid of Trump. Special council Mueller was appointed not to look into Trump Russia collusion, they already all knew that was crap. He was appointed to dig into Trump associates in a hope they could find something they could leverage to get rid of Trump and shield themselves from prying eyes into what they had been up to.
The implication of an innocent verdict will mean the FBI knew exactly who he was and where the information was coming from, which shifts the focus to them. What the Clintons did was bad, what the FBI/DOJ did with a coordinated complicit media, was much worse.
I wouldn’t mind an innocent verdict, if Durham used it to charge those at the top of the FBI and DOJ.
