“Several FBI whistleblowers say that the agency’s probe into Hunter Biden was internally sabotaged during the 2020 election in order to derail the investigation after agents wrongfully deemed verified evidence as “disinformation” to ignore.

According to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), agents investigating Hunter “opened an assessment which was used by an FBI headquarters team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease,” adding that his office received “a significant number of protected communications from highly credible whistleblowers” regarding the investigation.

Grassley added that “verified and verifiable derogatory information on Hunter Biden was falsely labeled as disinformation,” according to the Washington Examiner.

Brian Auten  (Credit: Twitter)

Timothy Thibault (Credit: public domain)

FBI supervisory intelligence agent Brian Auten opened in August 2020 the assessment that was later used by the agency, according to the disclosures. One of the whistleblowers claimed the FBI assistant special agent in charge of the Washington field office, Timothy Thibault, shut down a line of inquiry into Hunter Biden in October 2020 despite some of the details being known to be true at the time.

A whistleblower also said Thibault “ordered closed” an “avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting,” according to Grassley, even though “all of the reporting was either verified or verifiable via criminal search warrants.” The senator said Thibault “ordered the matter closed without providing a valid reason as required” and that FBI officials “subsequently attempted to improperly mark the matter in FBI systems so that it could not be opened in the future,” according to the disclosures.

The whistleblowers say investigators from FBI headquarters were “in communication with FBI agents responsible for the Hunter Biden information targeted by Mr. Auten’s assessment,” and that their findings on whether the claims were in fact disinformation were placed “in a restricted access sub-file” in September 2020, according to Grassley, who added that the disclosures “appear to indicate that there was a scheme in place among certain FBI officials to undermine derogatory information connected to Hunter Biden by falsely suggesting it was disinformation.”

Grassley summarized the new allegations in a Monday letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Document requests on pages 3 and 4, Grassley Letter, 7/25/2022

The Examiner notes that FBI agent Auten was involved in the Trump-Russia investigation, including interviewing Christopher Steele’s primary source, Igor Danchenko.

According to Grassley, the “volume and consistency” of the allegations regarding the handling of the Hunter Biden probe “substantiate their credibility.”

The assessment by Auten in August 2020 was opened the same month Grassley and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) received a briefing from the FBI “that purportedly related to our Biden investigation and a briefing for which the contents were later leaked in order to paint the investigation in a false light,” Grassley said. The senator said Senate Democrats asked for a briefing in July 2020 “from the very same FBI HQ team that discredited the derogatory Hunter Biden information.”

The FBI inquiry into Hunter Biden reportedly began as a tax investigation, then expanded into a scrutiny of potential money-laundering and foreign lobbying; the DOJ has declined to hand over investigative details. -Washington Examiner

Thibault, the FBI agent who allegedly quashed the Hunter probe, may have violated the Hatch act in 2020 after making posts on social media that were critical of then-president Donald Trump and former AG William Barr.

Also notable – Hunter had the numbers of several FBI agents in his iCloud contacts. (Read more: Zero Hedge, 7/25/2022)  (Archive)

3/4 of his contact were all in cyber division🤨 they could’ve accessed his cloud right? https://t.co/9qotT4L8jR

— Rosie Memos (@almostjingo) July 11, 2022

Margot Cleveland writes:

“This scandal is no longer just about the Biden family; it’s about every member of the law enforcement and intelligence communities who put our country at risk by failing to do their jobs.

FBI whistleblowers claim that agents opened a sham investigation into Hunter Biden to brand reliable and verifiable derogatory evidence as “disinformation,” according to an explosive news release issued yesterday by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

If true, beyond exposing the FBI’s role in running cover for the Biden family, the whistleblowers’ claims prove significant for a second reason: By failing to thoroughly vet the evidence in its possession related to Hunter Biden — which included the hard drive for the MacBook Hunter had abandoned at a repair shop — the intelligence community ignored a momentous national security threat, namely that the Russians potentially possessed a second Hunter Biden laptop.”

(  ) …on July 25, Grassley issued a press release containing letters to Wray and Garland, stating that information Grassley had received “involves concerns about the FBI’s receipt and use of derogatory information relating to Hunter Biden, and the FBI’s false portrayal of acquired evidence as disinformation,” referring to the son of President Joe Biden. Grassley said that “if these allegations are true and accurate, the Justice Department and FBI are—and have been—institutionally corrupted to their very core.” (Read more: The Epoch Times, 8/19/2022)  (Archive)

Snip from Grassley press release, 7/25/2022

Executive Assistant Director of FBI Counterterrorism Division Jill Sanborn testifies before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs/Rules and Administration hearing in March 2021. (Credit: Shawn Thew/Getty Images)

“New whistleblower information reveals that FBI officials are pressuring agents to reclassify cases as “domestic violent extremism” (DVE) despite lacking the criteria to meet such a classification. Whistleblower disclosures have also detailed the agency’s effort to exaggerate DVE data to satisfy the Bureau’s leadership.

One whistleblower explained that because agents are not finding enough DVE cases, they are encouraged and incentivized to change designations even though there is minimal, circumstantial evidence to support the reclassification.

Another whistleblower—with experience in high-profile domestic terrorism investigations—stated that a field office Counterterrorism Assistant Special Agent in Charge and the FBI’s Director of the Counterterrorism Division [Jill Sanborn] have forced agents to recategorize cases as DVE to hit performance metrics manufactured by the Bureau itself.

According to whistleblowers, the FBI uses these metrics to dispense awards and determine promotions. Every whistleblower has called it an environment of “pressure” within the FBI.” (Read more: Breaking911, 7/27/2022)  (Archive)

Jill Sanborn was promoted to Executive Assistant Director of the National Security Branch in May 2021, and didn’t have answers for the Senate on January 11, 2022 about the January 6th protest.

Sen. Ted Cruz: “Did any FBI agents or confidential informants actively participate in the events of January 6th? Yes or no?”

FBI: “Sir, I can’t answer that.” pic.twitter.com/mjL6SeHWei

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) January 11, 2022

Judge Amos Louis Mazzanti III and Seth Rich (Credit: Dallas Morning News/public domain)

(…) Attorney Ty Clevenger is still trying to get at the government’s [unredacted] records regarding Seth Rich and it is still almost impossible.  Clevenger’s efforts have helped uncover records to date but because of the FBI’s dishonesty to date with the FOIA requests on Rich, Clevenger wanted to observe the FBI’s review in this case.

This ruling from the Seth Rich FOIA case is disappointing. Judge Mazzant denied Clevenger’s request for in camera review of the documents withheld by the FBI, but he has not yet ruled on the motions for summary judgment, so he could yet order the FBI to search in other places such as email systems. He also took some swipes at the FBI:

It is alarming that in two cases involving substantially similar FOIA requests, the Government can locate zero relevant documents in one, but over 20,000 potentially relevant pages in the other. Moreover, when Congress created FOIA, “it did not intend for production to take years.” Huddleston, 2021 WL 327510, at *3 (citing Hayden v. DOJ, 413 F. Supp 1285, 1289 (D.D.C. 1976)). Yet, here, the Government has spent over two years processing and reviewing records in an attempt to respond to Huddleston’s requests. And despite that amount of time, the Government maintains that the process is “still ongoing.” Even so, while the Court certainly finds the Government’s handling of Clevenger’s and Huddleston’s FOIA requests concerning,

Huddleston’s arguments are insufficient to suggest bad faith for the purpose of determining whether in camera review of all relevant documents is necessary.

Unfortunately, Clevenger will have to keep fighting to get to the truth behind the FBI’s involvement in the Seth Rich case. (Read more: Gateway Pundit, 7/30/2022)  (Archive)

Lois Lerner (Credit: public domain)

A senior Justice Department official recently flagged by a U.S. senator in an FBI whistleblower probe into alleged politicization of prosecutions played a key role in the Lois Lerner IRS scandal a decade ago in which conservative Tea Party groups were improperly targeted for scrutiny, government emails and congressional evidence shows.

Richard Pilger (Credit: public domain)

Richard Pilger, the current chief of the DOJ Elections Crime Branch of the department’s Public Integrity Section, engaged in discussions in 2010 and 2013 with Lerner and other IRS officials about ways to pursue criminal prosecutions of conservative nonprofits, the records show.

The discussion led the FBI, with Pilger’s direct help, to obtain and review 1.1 million pages of documents from conservative groups and even ponder charging the groups with making false statements on their IRS applications as nonprofits because they had engaged in political speech activities, according to congressional investigators.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired then by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), concluded in 2014 that Pilger’s discussions were part of a larger effort by the Obama administration to criminalize political speech by conservative groups that opposed the administration’s agenda.

“These documents suggest that the Department actively considered prosecuting non-profit groups for their political activities,” the final report concluded. “The Department went so far as to meet with the IRS about the investigation and to gather a 1.1 million-page database of information as potential evidentiary material. Even more astounding, the Department considered prosecuting non-profit groups for actions that are legal for 501(c)(4) groups under federal tax law — that is, for engaging in political speech.”

The committee made public emails showing that in spring 2013 Pilger and Lerner discussed an idea Pilger had heard raised by a Democrat in Congress of bringing false statement cases against the conservative groups for the ways they filled out their IRS applications as 501c3 and 501c4 nonprofits.

“I got a call today from Richard Pilger, Director Election Crimes Branch at DOJ,” Lerner wrote IRS colleagues in a May 8, 2013 email obtained by congressional investigators and Just the News. “I know him from contacts from my days there. He wanted to know who at IRS the DOJ folks could talk to about Sen. [Sheldon] Whitehouse idea at the hearing that DOJ could piece together false statement cases about applicants who ‘lied’ on their 1024s — saying they weren’t planning on doing political activity, and then turning around and making large visible political expenditures.

“DOJ is feeling like it needs to respond, but want to talk to the right folks at IRS to see whether there are impediments from our side and what, if any damage, this may do to IRS programs.”

The emails were first brought to light by a lawsuit a decade ago by Judicial Watch.

A DOJ spokesperson did not immediately respond to a call Thursday seeking comment on behalf of Pilger.

But in an interview with congressional investigators in 2014, Pilger revealed he actually began discussing strategies with Lerner for pursuing the conservative nonprofits for prosecution back in the fall of 2010, a few months after the Supreme Court opened up political spending through its landmark Citizens United ruling, the final report stated.

Pilger sent an email in October 2010 asking for a “good IRS contact re criminal tax enforcement against tax-exempt organizations,” the emails show.

Nancy Marks, an IRS criminal investigator, wrote an email back identifying a contact Pilger’s team could use, but she also cautioned that there was no evidence of criminality known to the agency.” (Read more: JusttheNews, 7/31/2022)  (Archive)

FBI Director Christopher Wray refused to comment during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday when Ted Cruz asked about reports that the special agent accused of orchestrating the entrapment of a group accused of trying to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer during the 2020 election has been promoted since then and now runs the FBI’s Washington D.C. field office, including the January 6 case.

Wray admits to Ted Cruz that the FBI special agent in charge of the Detroit field office during the Whitmer kidnapping debacle is now in charge of the DC field office during the J6 investigation. pic.twitter.com/DUsXbBX0Vt

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 4, 2022

“I can tell you that that case, as I understand it, is now pending a retrial,” Wray said about the group of mentally-ill Michigan men accused of planning to kidnap Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer during the first year of Covid, right before the 2020 election.

Cruz said: “So the guy in charge got a promotion and is now in charge of the January 6 investigation? … That is astonishing.”

“That doesn’t sound right to me,” the FBI director said, before clarifying that it was right.

SEN. TED CRUZ: [The Whitmer kidnapping case] ended up a debacle, where the four people who went to trial — two were acquitted, two received mistrials. None of them were convicted on even a single charge, and the basis of the defense was entrapment. That the paid [informants] for the FBI suggested and had incited the conduct.

How many FBI agents were disciplined or reprimanded after that disastrous case and the misconduct that led to every defendant being acquitted or having a mistrial on every charge?

CHRISTOPHER WRAY, FBI: I can’t comment on any personnel matter. I can tell you that that case, as I understand it, is now pending a retrial.

CRUZ: The special agent in charge of that case has now been sent to the Washington D.C. office, and now leads the investigation regarding January 6. Is that correct?

WRAY: That doesn’t sound right to me.

Steven D’Antuono (Credit: Reuters)

CRUZ: That does not sound right? The name of the individual is Steven D’Antuono. He was run out of the FBI Detriot field office.

And by the way, I will point out that the lead investigator… are you aware he was apparently fired for allegedly beating his wife after coming home from a swingers’ party, and he had made multiple derogatory political posts about President Trump, showing political bias. Are you aware of that?

WRAY: I am aware of, I think, the incident you are describing. An action that was taken about it… To clarify on the first part of your question, Mr. D’Antuono was the special agent in charge of the [Detroit field office] and is now the assistant director in charge of the Washington field office. I thought you were asking about the agent who was responsible–

CRUZ: So the guy in charge got a promotion and is now in charge of the January 6 investigation?

WRAY: The guy in charge of the whole Detroit field office is now in charge of the whole Washington field office.

CRUZ: That is astonishing.

(RealClearPolitics, 8/04/2022)  (Archive)

FBI Washington Field Office ADIC, Steven D’Antuono: “Even if you’ve left D.C., agents from our local field offices will be knocking on your door if we find out that you were part of the criminal activity at the Capitol.” pic.twitter.com/1O7xCrv9UW

— The Hill (@thehill) January 13, 2021

SWEDISH TELECOM GIANT LM ERICSSON & ITS U.S. DIVISION ERICSSON INC. SUED BY 862 AMERICANS FOR ALLEGED PROTECTION MONEY PAYMENTS TO AQ, AQ-IN-IRAQ & ISLAMIC STATE

Plaintiffs are 862 Americans, comprised of 286 GOLD STAR FAMILIES, including numerous former hostages and families… pic.twitter.com/awRKzjZ4Qq

— Michael Rae Khoury (@Vltra_MK) February 20, 2023

Link to latest Civil Complaint vs Ericsson: https://t.co/5oUggtmt4H

— Michael Rae Khoury (@Vltra_MK) February 20, 2023

Link to @PLVSVLTRAINTEL‘s The Ericsson Report: A Matter of National Security: https://t.co/oNtR2MKy2y

(published 2 months before the Civil Case was filed)

— Michael Rae Khoury (@Vltra_MK) February 20, 2023

Sparacino Press Release:

SWEDISH TELECOM GIANT LM ERICSSON & ITS U.S. DIVISION ERICSSON INC. SUED BY 862 AMERICANS FOR ALLEGED PROTECTION MONEY PAYMENTS TO AQ, AQ-IN-IRAQ & ISLAMIC STATE

Plaintiffs are 862 Americans, comprised of 286 GOLD STAR FAMILIES, including numerous former hostages and families of hostages, and dozens of severely injured service members.

Each Plaintiff was injured, or is the loved one of someone who was killed or injured, during attacks committed by Islamic State, al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda-in-Iraq, or a proxy acting at their direction, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, and Syria from 2005 through 2021.

Plaintiffs say Ericsson KNOWINGLY supported a terrorist campaign that attacked, killed, and wounded thousands of Americans in Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, and Syria, including Plaintiffs, by aiding the terrorists through Ericsson’s regular protection money payments to terrorists, Ericsson’s intentional obstruction of United States counterterrorism policy, and Ericsson’s deliberate facilitation of the terrorists’ use of Afghanistan’s cellular networks as a weapon.

“Plaintiffs say while Americans were risking their lives between 2005 and 2021 to help rebuild places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, LM Ericsson, Ericsson AB, Ericsson Inc., Ekholm, and Ibrahim facilitated illicit Iraq-related and Afghanistan related transactions that they knew terrorists such as ISIS and al-Qaeda used to finance attacks against Americans in Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, and Syria,” said Ryan Sparacino, the Founding Partner of Sparacino PLLC. “As alleged, even though the terrorists openly proclaimed their desire for protection money and other assistance to help prosecute their campaign to kill Americans in the Middle East and the U.S. government publicly opposed illicit transactions that flowed protection money to terrorists, Ericsson defied the United States – and its obligations under the Anti-Terrorism Act – in pursuit of profit.”

Mr. Sparacino continued: “Plaintiffs allege that when Islamic State overran Mosul in 2014, responsible businesses suspended operations to avoid funding ISIS, but Ericsson calculated that pulling back was ‘premature.’ Instead, the Complaint details that Ericsson’s cold calculation was that paying terrorists protection money to ensure safe passage through Iraq would be better for its business. As we will show in court, Ericsson continued its long-standing practice as a corporate criminal on a global crime spree where ‘money talks’ regardless of what the law demanded.”

Indeed, Plaintiffs say that Ericsson explicitly chose illegal options over legal alternatives while knowing that their money was flowing to terrorists. For example, when Ericsson was presented with a ‘Speedway’ (unlawful) and a ‘legal way’ (lawful), Plaintiffs allege Ericsson chose the low road.

“Plaintiffs allege it was Ericsson that made that choice, but it was Plaintiffs who suffered the consequences,” Sparacino said.

The filing of today’s Anti-Terrorism Act Complaint against Ericsson followed an extensive investigation (which continues today) that started after Ericsson’s Iraq-related disclosures in February 2022, including extensive time spent investigating the terrorist campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria and how al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda-in-Iraq, and Islamic State funded themselves through illicit corporate deals with companies like Ericsson.

Sparacino PLLC is the same firm that currently represents more than 1,200 American clients who recently secured a comprehensive Anti-Terrorism Act victory in the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in a separate Anti-Terrorism Act matter (that is also about how corruption in Iraq financed terrorism) against Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, GE Healthcare, AstraZeneca, and Roche, captioned Atchley et al. v. AstraZeneca UK Ltd., et al., Case 1:17-cv-02136 (D.D.C.). Sparacino serves as lead investigative counsel in both the Schmitz and Atchley cases, following a similar investigative approach in each.

Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart (Credit: public domain)

“The Florida federal magistrate judge who signed off on a search warrant authorizing the FBI raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort donated to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign — months after he left the local US Attorney’s office to rep employees of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein who had received immunity in the long-running sex-trafficking investigation of the financier.

Sources tell The Post that Judge Bruce Reinhart approved the warrant that enabled federal agents to converge on the palatial South Florida estate on Monday in what Trump called an “unannounced raid on my home.”

Reinhart was elevated to magistrate judge in March 2018 after 10 years in private practice. That November, the Miami Herald reported that he had represented several of Epstein’s employees — including, by Reinhart’s own admission to the outlet, Epstein’s pilots; his scheduler, Sarah Kellen; and Nadia Marcinkova, who Epstein once reportedly described as his “Yugoslavian sex slave.”

Kellen and Marcinkova were among Epstein’s lieutenants who were granted immunity as part of a controversial 2007 deal with federal prosecutors that allowed the pervert to plead guilty to state charges rather than federal crimes. Epstein wound up serving just 13 months in county jail and was granted work release.

According to the Herald, which cited court documents, Reinhart resigned from the South Florida US Attorney’s Office effective on New Year’s Day 2008 and went to work for Epstein’s cohorts the following day.

Epstein, who was found dead in August 2019 of an apparent suicide in the Manhattan Correctional Center while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges, had hired a stable of high-powered lawyers for his defense in the late 2000s, including former independent counsel Kenneth Starr.

Ten months after starting work for Epstein’s co-conspirators, according to Federal Election Commission records, Reinhart gave $1,000 directly to the Obama campaign and another $1,000 to its fundraising arm, the Obama Victory Fund. Though the records show the judge made mostly small-dollar donations to his law firm’s political action committee in subsequent years, Reinhart also donated $500 to Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign in November 2015.

Reinhart was later named in a civil lawsuit by two of Epstein’s victims that accused him of violating Justice Department policies by switching sides in the middle of the Epstein investigation, suggesting he had spilled inside information about the probe to build favor with the notorious defendant, the Herald reported in 2018. (Read more: New York Post, 8/09/22)  (Archive)

President Joe Biden’s administration was involved in the raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence through a “special access request,” according to documents obtained from the National Archives by America First Legal.

On August 8, 2022, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided Mar-a-Lago on the grounds of retrieving alleged classified documents. According to the establishment media, Biden administration officials were “stunned” to hear of the unprecedented action. The Archives also claimed that it had “not been involved in the DOJ investigation.”

But documents show the FBI obtained access to the records through a “special access request” from the Biden White House on behalf of the DOJ, contradicting what the Archives told Congress, America First Legal revealed Monday:

 

Notably, despite the Archives’ claim that it had “not been involved in the DOJ investigation,” the documents show that the Archives’ official responsible for administering all access requests for Presidential records, John Laster, was involved in preparing the 15 boxes for FBI review as late as August 23, 2022:

On October 25, 2022, Acting Archivist Wall wrote to then-Ranking Members James Comer and Jim Jordan, claiming “NARA received the 15 boxes from President Trump on January 18, 2022, and then discovered that they contained classified national security information. Shortly after the discovery, NARA consulted with its Office of Inspector General (OIG), which operates independently of NARA. As DOJ has disclosed publicly in court filings, NARA’s OIG subsequently referred the matter to DOJ on February 9, 2022.”

If the OIG acted independently in making a referral to the FBI, then Mr. Laster would not have involved himself in the FBI’s review of the 15 boxes in his capacity as the Director of the White House Liaison Division “responsible for all access requests for Presidential records.” Similarly, the FBI affidavit before the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida that provided the probable cause for the issuance of a search warrant against Mar-a-Lago on August 8, 2022, stated, “[on February 9, 2022] the Special Agent in Charge of NARA’s Office of the Inspector General sent the NARA Referral via email to DOJ.” However, the evidence is that the Biden White House and the Department of Justice coordinated to obtain the Trump records, and perhaps create a pretext for a law enforcement raid, by way of a “special access request.”

“The special access statute authorizes special access requests to an incumbent president only when the records in question are needed for ‘the conduct of current business’ of the White House,” America First Legal explained. “Providing documents to the DOJ for purposes of a criminal investigation is not the ‘current business’ of the White House.”

Reed D. Rubinstein, senior counselor and director of oversight and investigations, released a statement ripping the White House’s reported role in the FBI raid of Trump’s home.

“The evidence further suggests that Biden officials in the Executive Office of the President and the Department of Justice unlawfully abused their power and then lied about it to the American people,” he said. “This government, it seems, acknowledges no limits on its power to harass, intimidate, and silence its political opponents.” (Read more: Breitbart, 4/10/2023)  (Archive)

“The FBI raided Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and broke into a safe in his palatial home, the former president said Monday.

Trump said in a message on his social media forum Truth Social that his home had been “raided, and occupied” and was “currently under siege.”

FBI agents were reportedly searching for classified documents that Trump allegedly brought with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago after his presidency ended — which, if true, could be a violation of federal law.

The National Archives and Records Administration said it had found classified material in 15 boxes at the residence earlier this year and alerted the FBI. The agents executed a search warrant Monday to look for additional presidential records Trump may have relocated to his Florida estate.

“Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

“After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate.”  (Read more: New York Post, 8/08/2022)  (Archive)

Every “But her emails” hat or shirt sold helps @onwardtogether partners defend democracy, build a progressive bench, and fight for our values.

Just saying!https://t.co/4TiUxjmRNY pic.twitter.com/rflM8fTAbw

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 9, 2022

Hats are available for pre-order again.

Crisis averted.https://t.co/4TiUxjmRNY

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 9, 2022

“The search warrant for the raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home on Monday suggests he is being investigated under the Espionage Act of 1917 — the same law that Hillary Clinton was suspected of violating in 2016.

Attorney General Merrick Garland admitted Thursday that he personally approved the warrant application, which seeks broad discretion to search Trump’s home based on three statutes: 18 U.S.C. section 793, on the mishandling of defense information; 18 U.S.C. section 1519, relating to the destruction of federal documents; and 18 U.S.C. section 2071, which punishes hiding, moving, or destroying federal documents. Section 793 is from the Espionage Act of 1917, passed during the First World War.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was suspected of violating the latter when she used an unsecured private email server in her own home to handle her communications, including emails with classified information, during her time in office.

The relevant part of section 793 punishes “gross negligence” in the handling of defense information, and failure to report the loss or destruction of that information. Clinton was accused of both; her staff even physically destroyed her mobile phones.

Then-FBI Director James Comey, who intervened in the case after then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch was caught meeting with former President Bill Clinton on the tarmac of an airport in Arizona, said that while Hillary Clinton had been “extremely careless” in her handling of classified information, she did not intend to violate the statute. The statute does not, however, include any requirement of intent, leading conservative critics to argue that Comey had been looking to exonerate her. (Read more: Breitbart, 8/12/2022)  (Archive)

Twitter has suspended journalist Paul Sperry after he made several tweets about this week’s FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, where they spent up to 9 hours rifling through the former president’s private office, Melania Trump’s wardrobe, and eventually took 12 boxes of material. According to the Wall Street Journal, the records included a letter from former President Barack Obama, and correspondence between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

The boxes contained some documents subject to a federal law requiring official records to be turned over when a president leaves office as well as some material archives officials described only as “classified national security information,” prompting them to refer the matter to the Justice Department for investigation. -WSJ

Sperry, meanwhile, tweeted several hot-takes on the raid, which appear to have gotten him suspended.

(Zero Hedge, 8/10/2022)  (Archive)

In Part One we outlined the background of the modern Deep State {Go Deep}. In Part Two we outlined the specifics of how President Trump was targeted by political operatives using tools created by the DC system {Go Deep}.  In Part Three we outlined how and why President Trump was blocked from releasing documents {Go Deep}.  Here in Part 4, we begin to assemble the specifics of what documents likely existed in Mar-a-Lago.

It is important to remember, the presidential records act –the presented pretext for the document conflict– is not a criminal statute.  An FBI raid cannot be predicated on a document conflict between the National Archives and a former president.

The DOJ-NSD warrant, and the subsequent raid on Mar-a-Lago can only be related to records the U.S. government deems “classified” and material vital to national security interests.  Hence, DOJ National Security Division involvement.

In prior outlines we have exhaustively covered the details of President Trump’s desire to publicly release information about DOJ and FBI conduct in their targeting of him during the fabricated Trump-Russia claims.  However, to understand the nature of the documents he may hold, we first review the declassification memo provided by President Trump to the DOJ upon his departure from office.

In broad terms there are two sets of documents that intermingle and are directly related. First, documents that highlight the activity of Hillary Clinton’s team in creating the false Trump-Russia conspiracy theory (2015/2016).  Second, documents that highlight the activity of government officials targeting Donald Trump within the same timeframe (Crossfire Hurricane), that continued into 2017, 2018 and 2019 (Robert Mueller).

Think of the two sets of documents as evidence against two teams working in synergy.  Team one (Clinton) was outside government. Team two (DOJ/FBI) was inside government.  The documents pertain to both groups but are also divided.  That helps to explain the wording of the memo above.

The documentary evidence against the outside group (Clinton et al) would also involve government documented evidence as the DOJ/FBI inside group interacted with them.  Notes from interviews, materials provided, FBI 302 summaries of interviews, etc.

We can extract a lot of information on the first sets of evidence from the lawsuit filed by President Trump in March of this year, mostly against the outside actors. [LINK HERE]

The lawsuit was filed against specific persons and most of those persons were interviewed by the FBI as part of the originating investigation.  Within the subjects of the lawsuit we find names and groups including:

Hillary Clinton, Hillary for America Campaign Committee, DNC, DNC Services Corp, Perkins Coie, Michael Sussmann, Marc Elias, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Charles Dolan, Jake Sullivan, John Podesta, Robby Mook, Phillipe Reines as well as Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, Peter Fritsch, Nellie Ohr, Bruce Ohr, Orbis Business Intelligence, Christopher Steele, Igor Danchenko, Neustar Inc., Rodney Joffe, James Comey Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Kevin Clinesmith and Andrew McCabe.

In addition to being named in the lawsuit, many of those names were interviewed by the FBI as part of the origination of the Trump-Russia investigation, and/or part of the ongoing investigation of the Trump-Russia fabrication. Each of those interviews would carry an FD-302 report summarizing the content of the interview, the questions and answers given.

The totality of those 302 documents is a lot of evidence likely consisting of hundreds of pages.

For the government officials on the inside, in addition to 302’s (ex Bruce Ohr) there would be documents of communication between them.

Think about the full unredacted text messages between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok as an example.  The DOJ publicly released over 600 pages of those text messages, and that wasn’t all of them.  The text messages were also redacted, under claims of privacy and national security.  We can assume any version of these text messages declassified by President Trump would not be redacted.  Hence, you go back to the January 20th memo and see the notes about “privacy.”

We also know there are many pages of communication between DOJ lawyer Lisa Page and her boss in the FBI Andrew McCabe.  Almost none of them were ever made public; but they exist.  This internal communication is likely the type of material contained in both the “binder,” left for the DOJ to release, and the boxes at Mar-a-Lago to be used as evidence against the named defendants in the lawsuit.

Bruce Ohr has 302’s and emails relating to his involvement as a conduit between Fusion GPS and the FBI.  Some of those were released in redacted form, and some of them were never released.  Additionally, Nellie Ohr, Bruce’s wife, who worked at Fusion GPS invoked spousal privilege when called to testify before the House committee investigating the issues.  However, it is almost certain the FBI interviewed her so there are likely 302’s on Nellie Ohr.

Chris Steele, Igor Danchenko and Rodney Joffe were also interviewed by the FBI.  Those 302’s were never released.  Presumably John Durham has stakeholder equity in that part of the Trump-Russia hoax, but the documentary evidence prior to January 20, 2021, that exists outside the special counsel could also be records at Mar-a-Lago.

Then we get to the big stuff…. The records and evidence in unredacted and declassified state, that would drive the DOJ-NSD to claim vital national security interests.

The NSA compliance officer notified NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers of unauthorized use of the NSA database by FBI contractors searching U.S. citizens during the 2015/2016 presidential primary.  That 2016 notification is a classified record.

The response from Mike Rogers, and the subsequent documentary evidence of what names were being searched is again a classified record.  The audit logs showing who was doing the searches (which contractors, which agencies and from what offices), as noted by Director Rogers, was preserved.  That is another big-time classified record.

In addition, we would have Admiral Rogers writing a mandatory oversight notification to the FISA court detailing what happened.  That’s a big and comprehensive classified record, likely contained in the documents in Mar-a-Lago… and then the goldmine, the fully unredacted 99-page FISA court opinion detailing the substance of the NSA compromise by FBI officials and contractors, including the names, frequency and dates of the illegal surveillance.  That is a major classified document the Deepest Deep State would want to keep hidden.

These are the types of documents within what former ODNI John Ratcliffe called “thousands of pages that were declassified by President Trump,” and given to both John Durham and Main Justice with an expectation of public release when the Durham special counsel probe concluded.

In short, President Trump declassified documents that show how the institutions within the U.S. government targeted him.  However, the institutions that illegally targeted President Trump are the same institutions who control the specific evidence of their unlawful targeting.

These examples of evidence held by President Donald Trump reveals the background of how the DC surveillance state exists.  THAT was/is the national security threat behind the DOJ-NSD search warrant and affidavit.

The risk to the fabric of the U.S. government is why we see lawyers and pundits so confused as they try to figure out the disproportionate response from the DOJ and FBI, toward “simple records”, held by President Trump in Mar-a-Lago.   Very few people can comprehend what has been done since January 2009, and the current state of corruption as it now exists amid all of the agencies and institutions of government.

Barack Obama spent 8 years building out and refining the political surveillance state.  The operators of the institutions have spent the last six years hiding the construct.

President Donald Trump declassified the material then took evidence to Mar-a-Lago.  The people currently in charge of managing the corrupt system, like Merrick Garland, Lisa Monaco, Chris Wray and the Senate allies, are going bananas.  From their DC perspective, Donald Trump is an existential threat.

Given the nature of their opposition, and the underlying motives for their conduct, there is almost nothing they will not do to protect themselves.  However, if you peel away all the layers of lies, manipulations and corruption, what you find at the heart of their conduct is fear.

What do they fear most?…

…..THIS!

People forget, and that’s ok, but prior to the 2015 MAGA movement driven by President Donald J Trump, political rallies filled with tens-of-thousands of people were extremely rare; almost nonexistent.  However, in the era of Donald J Trump the scale of the people paying attention has grown exponentially.  Every speech, every event, every rally is now filled with thousands and thousands of people.

The frequency of it has made us numb to realizing just how extraordinary this is.  But the people in Washington DC are well aware, and that makes President Trump even more dangerous.  Combine that level of support with what they attempted in order to destroy him, and, well, now you start to put context on their effort.

The existence of Trump is a threat, but the existence of a Trump that could expose their corruption…. well, that makes him a level of threat that leads to a raid on his home in Mar-a-Lago. (Conservative Treehouse, 8/11/2022)  (Archive)

(Conservative Treehouse has generously given us permission to chronicle and republish any relevant information to our timelines.)

“Yesterday, Attorney General Merrik Garland announced the DOJ had filed a motion (available here) to unseal “the search warrant and property receipt” relating to the search of former President Trump’s Mar-A-Lago estate.

Below is the search warrant and accompanying attachments, first put out by Jack Posobiec and Human Events. Huge hat tip to them.

The PDF of the unsealed search warrant and attachments is available here via Courtlistener. I’ve also posted all the pages below.

Some observations: (Read more: Techno Fog/Substack, 8/12/2022)  (Archive)

“According to Paul Sperry, the federal agents involved in the Mar-a-Lago raid are under investigation by Special Counsel John Durham.

“Developing: Sources say the FBI agents and officials who were involved in the raid on former President Trump’s homework in the same Counterintelligence Division of the FBI that investigated Trump in the Russiagate hoax and are actively under criminal investigation by Special Counsel John Durham for potentially abusing their power investigating Trump in the Russian fraud and therefore have a potential conflict of interest and should have been RECUSED from participating in this supposed “espionage” investigation at Mar-a-Lago” Sperry said in a social media post on Saturday.

Paul Sperry/GETTR

(Read more: Gateway Pundit, 8/13/2022)  (Archive)

Paul Sperry continues to post about the Mar-a-Lago raid on GETTR:

(Much more: Paul Sperry/GETTR)

“… I can sum up the Trump documents very succinctly–the documents show that there was a coordinated effort by the CIA, the FBI, and DOD starting in the summer of 2015 to interfere in the 2016 election. Part of this effort involved using NSA-produced intelligence. Oliver Stone’s movie, Snowden, has a scene that accurately describes what NSA was collecting and how it could be used:

When the conspiracy started in the summer of 2015 to interfere in the 2016 election on behalf of Hillary Clinton by the leadership of the CIA, the FBI and DOD, Donald Trump was not the only target. Few believed at the time that Trump had a snowball’s chance in the raging inferno of Hell to win the nomination, much less the Presidency. There were active searches for compromising intel on all of the leading Republican candidates, including Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and on Bernie Sanders.

The CIA, with the knowledge of the Director of National Intelligence, worked with British counterparts starting in the summer of 2015 to collect intelligence on Republican and at least one Democrat candidate. John Brennan was probably hoping that his proactive steps to help the Hillary Clinton campaign would ensure his taking over as DNI in the new Clinton Administration. Regardless of motives, the CIA enlisted the British intelligence community to start gathering intelligence on most major Republican candidates and on Bernie Sanders. This initial phase of intelligence gathering goes beyond opposition research. The information being gathered identified the key personnel in each campaign and identified the people outside the United States receiving their calls, texts, and emails. This information was turned into intelligence reports that then were passed back to the United States intel community as “liaison reporting.” This was not put into normal classified channels. This intelligence was put into a SAP, i.e. a Special Access Program.

This initial phase of intelligence collection produced a great volume of intelligence that allowed analysts to identify key personnel and the people they were communicating with overseas. You don’t have to have access to intelligence information to understand this.

Let me give you one example of how intelligence intercepts were used to target specific individuals. Ask yourself, “how did George Papadopoulos get on the radar?” Papadopoulos was living in London and communicating with Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager at the time. Those communications were intercepted by the UK’s GCHQ and passed, through liaison channels, to the NSA. That information was used in turn by the CIA and the FBI, working with British Intelligence, to ensnare Papadopoulos. He was offered a job, for example, at a firm tied to British Intelligence and subsequently introduced to Joseph Mifsud.

I am confident that some of the documents Trump has show that George Papadopoulos was identified as a possible target by the fall of 2015. Initially, his name was “masked.” But we now know that many people on the Trump campaign had their names “unmasked.” You cannot unmask someone unless their name is in an intelligence report.

Here is another example, we also know that Felix Sater–a longtime business associate of Donald Trump and an FBI informant since December 1998 (he was signed up by Andrew Weismann)–initiated the proposal to do a Trump Tower in Moscow. Don’t take my word for it, that’s what Robert Mueller reported:

In the late summer of 2015, the Trump Organization received a new inquiry about pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow. In approximately September 2015, Felix Sater . . . contacted Cohen (i.e., Michael Cohen) on behalf of I.C. Expert Investment Company (I.C. Expert), a Russian real-estate development corporation controlled by Andrei Vladimirovich Rozov. Sater had known Rozov since approximately 2007 and, in 2014, had served as an agent on behalf of Rozov during Rozov’s purchase of a building in New York City. Sater later contacted Rozov and proposed that I.C. Expert pursue a Trump Tower Moscow project in which I.C. Expert would license the name and brand from the Trump Organization but construct the building on its own. Sater worked on the deal with Rozov and another employee of I.C. Expert. (see page 69 of the Mueller Report).

Sater’s communication with Rozov were intercepted by western intelligence agencies–GCHQ and NSA. I do not know which agency put it into an intel report, but it was put into the system. The Sater FD-1023 will tell us whether or not Sater did this at the direction of the FBI or acted on his own initiative. The key point is that the “bait” to do something with the Russians came from a registered FBI informant.

By December of 2015, the Hillary Campaign decided to use the Russian angle on Donald Trump. Thanks to Wikileaks we have Campaign Manager John Podesta’s email exchange in December 2015 with Democratic operative Brent Budowsky:

“That’s good, sooner it’s clarified the better, and the stronger the better,” Budowski replies, later adding: “Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin, but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria.”

By late December, the intelligence/law enforcement operation targeted Donald Trump as it became clear that he was likely to win the Republican nomination.

I believe Donald Trump is holding trump cards that irrefutably show that the CIA, the FBI and DOD were communicating in Top Secret channels about these activities and that the coordination also included foreign intelligence personnel in at least the UK and Australia.

I hope this helps you understand the desperation of the U.S. national security agencies to keep this stuff hidden. The revelations, if they come, will be devastating. (Larry Johnson/Gateway Pundit, 8/15/2022)  (Archive) 

“Tea Party Patriots Action has filed a federal complaint against the judge who authorized the FBI raid on President Donald J. Trump’s home.

“Judge [Bruce] Reinhart should be disciplined and removed as a federal magistrate because of his failure to meet the standards of ethical conduct and character necessary for the public to have confidence in the nonpartisan role of a judge in a matter of this extreme public interest,” asserted Jennifer Martin, CEO of Tea Party Patriots Action, in the Aug. 16 filing.

One justification Martin provides for Reinhart’s removal is a statement the judge made on his personal Facebook page following the 2016 presidential election.

Noting that Reinhart recently recused himself from a separate case involving Trump due to a “conflict of interest,” Martin also pointed out that the judge has been accused of unethical conduct in the past.

“Judge Reinhart has a history of ethical issues,” she said, “the most noteworthy being his resignation from the US Attorney’s office in Miami on January 1, 2008, and the very next day representing as counsel for employees of the late Jeffrey Epstein, who was under investigation by that same prosecutor’s office at the time of Reinhart’s employment and departure.”

Adding that Reinhart should have recused himself when first approached by the FBI, Martin continued: “The entire episode of the unprecedented search of the former President’s home, authorized by a political appointee of President Trump’s successor, and approved by a federal magistrate who has been outspoken in his opposition to and loathing of President Trump threatens the principle of ‘equal justice under law’ and the confidence of the American people in an unbiased judiciary.” (Read more: RSBNetwork, 8/24/2022)  (Archive)

Judge Amy Berman Jackson (Credit: public domain)

“Judge ruled in 2012 that a president’s discretion to declare records “personal” is far-reaching and mostly unchallengeable.

When it comes to the National Archives, history has a funny way of repeating itself. And legal experts say a decade-old case over audio tapes that Bill Clinton once kept in his sock drawer may have significant impact over the FBI search of Melania Trump’s closet and Donald Trump’s personal office.

The case in question is titled Judicial Watch v. National Archives and Records Administration and it involved an effort by the conservative watchdog to compel the Archives to forcibly seize hours of audio recordings that Clinton made during his presidency with historian Taylor Branch.

For pop culture, the case is most memorable for the revelation that the 42nd president for a time stored the audio tapes in his sock drawer at the White House. The tapes became the focal point of a 2009 book that Branch wrote.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington D.C. ultimately rejected Judicial Watch’s suit by concluding there was no provision in the Presidential Records Act to force the National Archives to seize records from a former president.” (Read more: Just the News, 8/17/2022)  (Archive)

Sen. Chuck Grassley (Credit: Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

“In an Aug. 17  letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Grassley demands an accounting for alleged political bias influencing high-level investigations, particularly out of the FBI’s Washington, D.C., office.

“Starting on May 31, 2022, I’ve written three letters to you regarding political bias that has infected the FBI’s Washington Field Office,” Grassley, R-Iowa, writes. “Two of those letters provided specific and credible allegations based on numerous whistleblowers that have approached my office with information that one can only conclude is indicative of a deeply rooted political infection that has spread to investigative activity into former President Trump and Hunter Biden.”

(…) Although the former head of Crossfire Hurricane, Peter Strzok, was fired after the disclosure of his vitriolic anti-Trump tweets, several members of his team remain working in the counterintelligence unit, the sources say, even though they are under active investigation by both Durham and the bureau’s disciplinary arm, the Office of Professional Responsibility. The FBI declined to respond to questions about any role they may be taking in the Mar-a-Lago case.

Brian Auten: Discredited over Carter Page spy warrants but still handling sensitive cases. (Credit: Twitter)

In addition, a key member of the Crossfire team – Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten – has continued to be involved in politically sensitive investigations, including the ongoing federal probe of potentially incriminating content found on the abandoned laptop of President Biden’s son Hunter Biden, according to recent correspondence between the Senate Judiciary Committee and FBI Director Christopher Wray. FBI whistleblowers have alleged that Auten tried to falsely discredit derogatory evidence against Hunter Biden during the 2020 campaign by labeling it Russian “disinformation,” an assessment that caused investigative activity to cease.

Auten has been allowed to work on sensitive cases even though he has been under internal investigation since 2019 when Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz referred him for disciplinary review for his role in vetting a Hillary Clinton campaign-funded dossier used by the FBI to obtain a series of wiretap warrants to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Horowitz singled out Auten for cutting a number of corners in the verification process and even allowing information he knew to be incorrect slip into warrant affidavits and mislead the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court.

In congressional testimony this month, Wray confirmed that “a number of” former Crossfire Hurricane team members are still employed at the bureau while undergoing disciplinary review. In the meantime, Wray has walled off the former Russiagate investigators only from participating in FISA wiretap applications, according to the sources.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has asked Wray for copies of recent case files and reports generated by Auten and whether he is included among the team the FBI has assembled to determine which of the seized Trump records fall within the scope of its counterespionage investigation and which fall outside of it.

Some former FBI officials worry that Auten, a top bureau expert on Russia and nuclear warfare, will have a hand in analyzing the boxes of documents agents seized from Trump’s home on Aug. 8 to help determine if any of the alleged Top Secret material he kept there might have been compromised, potentially putting national security at risk.

“It is a disgrace that Auten is still even employed by the bureau,” said 27-year FBI veteran Michael Biasello. “I would substitute other analysts and agents.”

An examination of the bureau agents involved in the Mar-a-Lago raid reveals other connections between them and FBI officials who played key roles in advancing the Russiagate hoax.

Jay Bratt: who happens to be a Democratic National Committee donor, has been coordinating the Mar-a-Lago investigation with Alan Kohler, who heads the FBI’s counterintelligence division.

Kohler replaced Bill Priestap in that post after Priestap stepped down from the bureau amid criticism of his role in the Russiagate probe. Kohler had worked at FBI headquarters under Priestap, specializing in countering Russian intelligence threats.

Before that, he worked in London as the FBI’s liaison with British intelligence and law enforcement. The sources say Kohler was close to Stefan Halper, an academic and longtime FBI contractor whom the bureau ran as an informant in a failed effort to suborn Trump campaign officials. He also worked closely with Stephen Somma, a lead case agent in the Crossfire Hurricane probe whom Horowitz said was “primarily responsible” for some of the worst misconduct in the FISA warrant abuse scandal. Somma is a counterintelligence investigator in the FBI’s New York field office, where he has been reassigned to the China desk.

Alan Kohler: Said to be close to Russiagate informant Stefan Halper.
American Security Today

In 2019, Kohler was promoted to special agent in charge of the counterintelligence division at the FBI’s Washington field Office, where he worked alongside then-assistant agent-in-charge Timothy Thibault, who was reassigned by Wray just days prior to the Mar-a-Lago raid, after whistleblowers raised questions about political bias. They asserted that Thibault, who has taken aim at Trump and Republicans on social media, worked with Auten to falsely discredit evidence of alleged money laundering and other activities against Hunter Biden and prevent agents from investigating them.

The Washington field office’s counterintelligence division is now run by Anthony Riedlinger, who previously worked at FBI headquarters as a section chief under Priestap. Some of the agents involved in the raid on Trump’s home came from that Washington field office, according to the sources and FBI case documents.

Bratt, the top counterintelligence official at Justice, traveled to Mar-a-Lago in early June and personally inspected the storage facility while interacting with both Trump and one of his lawyers. Trump allowed the three FBI agents Bratt brought with him to open boxes in the storage room and look through them. They left with some documents. After leaving, Bratt made a request to Trump’s lawyer for increased security at the facility and asked to see surveillance footage from the security cameras. The lawyer complied with the requests. Months went by before the Justice Department took the politically explosive step of sending FBI agents unannounced to Trump’s home, seizing documents, photos, and other items not just from the storage facility but from multiple rooms on the property, including the former president’s office.

Chris Swecker (Credit: (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

Former assistant FBI director Chris Swecker said the search warrant that agents obtained is quite wide-ranging. He pointed out that it authorized the seizure of any information in any form related to “national defense information,” which he said “does not necessarily include classified material.”

“This is a huge, broad search warrant and a huge, broad investigation leveled against the former president,” Swecker said.

What’s more, he said the physical search of the former president’s residence was far more sweeping than first reported and included unsupervised snooping in several dozen bedrooms, as well as numerous storage rooms and closets, including those of the former first lady. FBI agents took numerous boxes and containers of documents and other material, including several binders of photos and even three passports held by the former president.

Although Attorney General Merrick Garland has said that the DOJ seeks to “narrowly scope any search that is undertaken,” details of the warrant reveal agents had the authority to seize entire boxes of records – including those potentially covered by attorney-client privilege and executive privilege – if just a single document inside the container were marked with a classified marking.

Agents were allowed to also seize any containers or boxes “found together with” ones containing classified papers, according to ATTACHMENT B (“Property to be seized”) of the warrant. In addition, the FBI agents were given the authority to confiscate “any government and/or presidential records created between Jan. 20, 2017, and Jan. 20, 2021,” which covers Trump’s full term in office. That meant they were able to take any item related to the Trump administration.

All told, dozens of boxes and containers were removed from Trump’s residence, very few of which actually contained classified information, the sources said.

Rachel Maddow reports Donald Trump has issued a directive to the intelligence community to cooperate with William Barr in investigating the Trump-Russia investigation and reports that David Laufman calls the directive “a grotesque abuse of the intelligence community.” (Credit: MSNBC)

According to Federal Election Commission records, Bratt has given exclusively to Democrats, including at least $800 to the Democratic National Committee. The sources said he is close to David Laufman, whom he replaced as the top counterintelligence official at Justice. An Obama donor, Laufman helped oversee the Russiagate probe, as well as the Clinton email case, which also involved classified information.

A Senate investigator told RCI that Laufman was the “mastermind” behind the strategy to dust off and “weaponize” the rarely enforced statutory relic – the Foreign Agents Registration Act – against Trump campaign officials, a novel legal move that the investigator noted is similar to the department’s current attempts to enforce the Presidential Records Act against Trump – which is a civil, not a criminal, the statute – by invoking the Espionage Act of 1917.

Laufman signed off on the wiretapping of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, which the Department of Justice inspector general determined was conducted under false pretenses involving doctored email, suppression of exculpatory evidence, and other malfeasance.

Suddenly resurfacing as a media surrogate for the Justice Department defending the Mar-a-Lago raid, Laufman has been a key source for stories by the Washington Post, CNN, and other outlets.

On CNN, for instance, he claimed the documents seized from Trump’s storage were “particularly stunning and particularly egregious,” and their discovery “completely validates the government’s investigation” into the former president – though he quickly added, “Whether this investigation transforms into an outright criminal prosecution remains to be seen.”

Swecker said that there is strong reason to fear that the FBI’s counterintelligence division might politicize this case.

“For sure, the FBI has dug themselves into a huge hole because of how they handled the Clinton (email) case and then Crossfire Hurricane and Hunter Biden,” Swecker said. “Myself and many of my colleagues think they are treading on very thin ice here.”

“Unfortunately,” he added, “you can’t recuse an entire FBI division.” (Read more: RealClearInvestigations, 8/18/2022)  (Archive)

Trump/Truth Social, 8/19/2022

“Former President Donald Trump filed a motion requesting an independent review of the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago during an FBI raid on his home earlier this month.

“Law enforcement is a shield that protects Americans. It cannot be used as a weapon for political purposes,” Trump’s motion said. “Therefore, we seek judicial assistance in the aftermath of an unprecedented and unnecessary raid on President Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida.”

Trump’s Motion for Judicial Oversight And Additional Relief requests the court appoint a Special Master, prohibit the FBI from further review of the seized documents until the Special Master is appointed, order the government to release a more detailed property receipt, and return any item seized that was not within the search warrant’s scope.

The property receipt released shortly after the Mar-a-Lago raid only mentions nondescript items, including “Miscellaneous Top Secret Documents,” “Leatherbound box of documents,” and “Various classified/TS/SCI documents.”

Trump’s motion comes just days after he announced he would file a Fourth Amendment motion “concerning the illegal Break-In” of Mar-a-Lago.

“My rights, together with the rights of all Americans, have been violated at a level rarely seen before in our Country,” Trump said on Friday.

In a statement after Trump’s attorneys filed the motion, Trump noted the FBI wanted Mar-a-Lago staff to turn off the estate’s security cameras during the raid. Trump also noted the FBI took his passports and broke into his personal safe with a “safe cracker.”

Trump also laid to rest claims that the FBI seized any classified documents.

“We are now demanding that the Department of ‘Justice’ be instructed to immediately STOP the review of documents illegally seized from my home,” Trump said. “ALL documents have been previously declassified.”

“We are further demanding that the DOJ be forced to turn over a REAL, without ‘plants,’ inventory of my property that was taken and disclose where that property is now located,” Trump continued. “We are demanding that all items wrongfully taken from my home be IMMEDIATELY returned.”

“This Mar-a-Lago Break-In, Search, and Seizure was illegal and unconstitutional, and we are taking all actions necessary to get the documents back, which we would have given to them without the necessity of the despicable raid of my home, so that I can give them to the National Archives until they are required for the future Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Museum.”

“I will never stop fighting for the American people, our Country, and the Rule of Law,” Trump concluded. “Make America Great Again!”

The case was assigned to Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a Trump appointee, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

The case is Trump v. United States Government, No. 22-cv-81294-AMC in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. (Breitbart, 8/22/2022)  (Archive)

(Credit: William J. Hennessy Jr./News 7 Miami)

Judge Bruce Reinhart in a filing on Monday morning announced that formally he rejects “the Government’s argument that the present record justifies keeping the entire Affidavit under seal.”

“The Government argues that even requiring it to redact portions of the Affidavit that could not reveal agent identities or investigative sources and methods imposes an undue burden on its resources and sets a precedent that could be disruptive and burdensome in future cases,” Reinhart wrote. “I do not need to reach the question of whether, in some other case, these concerns could justify denying public access; they very well might.”

“Particularly given the intense public and historical interest in an unprecedented search of a former President’s residence, the Government has not yet shown that these administrative concerns are sufficient to justify sealing,” he added.

This is a stinging rebuke for a Biden administration that was relying on the Florida judge, who is himself an Obama donor, to provide the Department of Justice with political cover for the FBI’s “unprecedented” raid on the former president. If a law enforcement action is “unprecedented,” there is a higher probability that it was unlawful from a judicial point-of-view.

It remains to be seen how much of the search warrant affidavit will be redacted, as the judge previously gave the Department of Justice until Thursday to submit its advised redactions for the document out of argued national security concerns.

“Accordingly, it is hereby ORDERED that by the deadline, the Government shall file under seal a submission addressing possible redactions and providing any additional evidence or legal argument that the Government believes relevant to the pending Motions to Unseal,” the motion stated.” (Read more: BeckerNews, 8/22/2022)  (Archive) (Reinhart Orders On Motion to Unseal)

The New York Post protested decisions by Facebook and Twitter to suppress coverage of the Biden laptop, after the social media platforms concluded the data was unverified and of questionable origin. The New York Post, 10/15/2020

“FBI whistleblowers allege that the Bureau’s leaders ordered agents not to investigate Hunter Biden’s laptop, according to a letter Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson sent to Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz asking that he investigate the matter.

Prior to the 2020 presidential election, some of the content of a laptop belonging to President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, became public and appeared to show damaging information on the then-presidential candidate. Media outlets derided the laptop as misinformation or Russian disinformation at the time.

“After the FBI obtained the Hunter Biden laptop from the Wilmington, Del. computer shop, these whistleblowers stated that local FBI leadership told employees, ‘you will not look at that Hunter Biden laptop’ and that the FBI is ‘not going to change the outcome of the election again,”‘ the letter, which the Daily Mail obtained, reads.

“I hope you understand that the longer your office stands on the sidelines and delays investigating the FBI’s actions, the harder it will be for you to uncover the truth and hold individuals accountable for wrongdoing,” Johnson continued.

Then-FBI Director James Comey announced in 2016 that the Bureau was reopening its investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton prior to the presidential election, a move many critics said affected the race’s outcome.

“While I understand your hesitation to investigate a matter that may be related to an ongoing investigation, it is clear to me based on numerous credible whistleblower disclosures that the FBI cannot be trusted with the handling of Hunter Biden’s laptop,” Johnson further wrote.

The FBI announced earlier this month that it was “aggressively pursuing” its investigation into the laptop.” (Read more: JusttheNews, 8/24/2022)  (Archive)

FBI Special Agents Association logo (Credit: Twitter)

“According to FBI whistleblowers, Chris Wray personally removed concerns by rank-and-file members that the agency had become too politicized in deciding which cases to open.

FBI agents made this complaint to Senate Judiciary Committee members.

On August 25, 2022, investigative reporter Paul Sperry writes:

BREAKING: FBI Director Christopher Wray allegedly removed concerns raised by rank-and-file agents from this year’s final report by the FBI’s Special Agents Advisory Committee (SAAC) about FBI leadership becoming “too politicized” in deciding which cases to open and which investigations to pursue, FBI whistleblowers have told the Senate Judiciary Committee. The SAAC Executive Council, representing more than 10,000 agents from the bureau’s field offices, holds its meetings with the director at FBI headquarters twice a year.

More Paul Sperry:

“The FBI is now acting as both the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party and the paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party.

The FBI interfered in the 2016, 2018, 2020 elections–and now the 2022 election–against Trump/GOP & for Democrats.

For 6 years, the FBI has been falsifying evidence or suppressing exculpatory evidence to frame Trump targets; destroying evidence that would incriminate the bureau; lying to both the IG and Congress; spying based on fraudulent warrants; opening investigations based on false pretenses; criminally leaking classified intercepts to the media; spreading false propaganda; and conducting corrupt searches and seizures. Yet no one is in jail for any of it. Not even dirty FBI lawyer Clinesmith, who confessed to forging a wiretap document.

Biden family whistleblower announced last week that it was top FBI official Tim Thibault who buried the information he gave the bureau on the Biden family’s criminal acts.” (The Gateway Pundit, 9/07/2022)  (Archive)

“During a discussion with Joe Rogan, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked about the removal of content, specifically citing the example of the pre-2020 election Hunter Biden laptop story. In his response Zuckerberg says the background context is important because the FBI came to Facebook and told them Russian disinformation was about to drop, just before the New York Post article was published.

This discussion comes on the heels of an FBI whistleblower approaching the Senate Judiciary Committee with evidence the Washington DC field office was specifically working to cover up any discoveries around the Hunter Biden laptop (per Chuck Grassley). Add the Zuckerberg statement to the whistleblower claim and the resounding implication is the FBI taking advanced proactive measures to stop information they deem adverse to the interests of democrats. The issue surfaces at 05:00 of the video below. WATCH (prompted): (Conservative Treehouse, 8/25/2022) (Archive)

Tucker Carlson and Harmeet Dhillon Discuss Facebook Suppression of Hunter Biden Laptop Story

During a segment on his broadcast this evening, Fox News host Tucker Carlson interviewed Center for American Liberty founder and lawyer, Harmeet Dhillon about how Facebook censored and suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story just before the 2020 election. {Direct Rumble Link} – WATCH: (Conservative Treehouse, 8/25/2022)  (Archive)

Jimmy Dore also does an excellent job covering this story:

“Kash Patel released a statement Friday on Truth Social where he blasted the corrupt Deep State for not keeping his name redacted in the affidavit used to raid President Trump’s home.

Kash also shared some other insightful information.

Patel wrote on Truth Social that he was basically viciously attacked by the Deep State by them not redacting his name from the warrant used to raid the President’s home.  Then Patel shared this:

…This cartel of corruption inside our government is so devoid of concern about national security, they could not be bothered to see the judge in person.  Instead, they literally called in the raid on the home of a former President via the FBI’s best friend, Zuckerberg’s WhatsApp.

This isn’t the first time that we heard that the warrant to raid the President’s home with gun-toting FBI agents was attested to over a WhatsApp call.

Far-left Law and Crime reported that the warrant was attested to over WhatsApp.

The cover sheet was “[a]ttested to” by an FBI special agent “by Phone (WhatsApp),” the form reveals. Indeed, the form is titled as an “application for a warrant by telephone or other reliable electronic means.”

The criminal cover sheet document indicates, in the usual perfunctory fashion, that no other relevant matters are proceeding before other magistrate judges in other sections of the same federal district where the Mar-a-Lago-related proceeding is ongoing. Warrant applications routinely include such attestations to flag the judiciary if prosecutors are seeking search warrants from multiple magistrates.

What we didn’t know is that the FBI uses WhatsApp as their “best friend”.  WhatsApp is owned by Facebook.  What does Patel know about WhatsApp’s use by the FBI?

It appears the FBI uses WhatsApp to hold conversations that they can hide.  Are there any other reasons for using WhatsApp?

Below is Kash Patel’s Truth.

(@Kash/Truth Social)

(Read more: Gateway Pundit, 8/28/2020)  (Archive)

“A Ukrainian woman posing as a member of the Rothschild banking family has been outed as a fraud after she allegedly infiltrated former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, according to reports.

Inna Yashchyshyn, 33, lied to ritzy resort members that she was the heiress to the reputed family’s mass fortune, Anna de Rothschild, according to a probe by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

She appeared at numerous Mar-a-Lago functions mingling with the likes of Trump, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham and others while she held the position as president of United Hearts of Mercy, founded by Florida-based Russian oligarch and former business partner Valery Tarasenko in Canada in 2015, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Yashchyshyn and her group dine after a golf fundraiser. She went under the fake name Anna de Rothschild. (Credit:OCCRP/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

After hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments to the foundation, processor Stripe Inc., suspected fraud and halted the funds for the campaign which was supposed to help families devastated by the COVI-19 pandemic.

Yashchyshyn, 33, is now the subject of several federal investigations after it was revealed she is not in fact a member of the Rothschild family. She’s additionally under investigation by Canadian authorities for alleged financial crimes.

In actuality, Yashchyshyn is the Russian-speaking daughter of an Illinois truck driver. It’s unclear when she came to the US.

She allegedly made several trips to the ex-president’s Florida estate with her fake identity to make connections with some of the nation’s biggest leaders, according to the paper.

Federal records obtained by the Post-Gazette and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project showed Yashchyshyn had two fake passports from the US and Canada with the name “Anna de Rothschild.” A Florida driver’s license in her name listed a $13 million Miami Beach Mansion where she never lived.

Yashchyshyn formerly worked in a suburban Miami business connecting pregnant Russian women to Americans looking to adopt a child, the Post-Gazette reported.

However, her web of lies unfolded amid a legal dispute she had with her former associate, Tarasenko.

According to Tarasenko, a 44-year-old businessman raised in Moscow, she made multiple trips to Mar-a-Lago in an effort to make contacts and create new streams of business.

Photos from 2021 show the brunette hanging out with Trump, Graham and others, according to the reports.

Yashchyshyn (left) is under investigation by US and Canadian officials. (Credit: OCCRP/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

“It wasn’t just dropping the family name. She talked about vineyards and family estates and growing up in Monaco,” John LeFevre, a former investment banker and author, told OCCRP.

She used “her fake identity as Anna de Rothschild to gain access to and build relationships with U.S. politician[s], including but not limited to Donald Trump, Lindsey Graham, and [former Missouri Gov.] Eric Greitens,” Tarasenko said, according to an affidavit obtained by the Post-Gazette.

She said under oath that she has never used another name and has not broken any laws. She told the Post-Gazette that she had never heard of Anna de Rothschild.” (Read more: New York Post, 8/26/2022)  (Archive)

(Timeline editor’s note: Please check our tag on Ukraine for more information about their meddling in the 2016/2020 presidential elections, and their involvement in Impeachment I, Russiagate, Spygate, and possibly the 2024 presidential election.)

 Sperry/Gettr, 8/27/2022

Sperry/Gettr 8/26/2022

Sperry/Gettr 8/26/2022 

Sperry/Gettr 8/26/2022

Sperry/Gettr 8/26/2022 Post 1,  Post 2, Post  3

Sperry/Gettr 8/26/2022 Post 1, Post 2, Post 3

Sperry/Gettr 8/26/2022 Post 1, Post 2, Post 3

Sperry/Gettr 8/27/2022 Post 1, Post 2

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(More: Paul Sperry/Gettr)

“The redacted affidavit released Friday by the Justice Department related to the recent FBI raid on former President Trump’s Florida estate shows the agency in part made their case to return Aug. 8 by saying agents in May had already collected 184 sensitive documents from Mar-a-Lago.

This is a developing story…

“The FBI’s investigation has established that documents bearing classification markings, which appear to contain National Defense Information (NDI), were among the materials contained in the FIFTEEN BOXES and were stored at the PREMISES in an unauthorized location,” the affidavit said.

“There is probable cause to believe that additional documents that contain classified NDI or that are Presidential records subject to record retention requirements currently remain at the PREMISES,” the affidavit continued, following redactions. “There is also probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction will be found at the PREMISES.”

Documents retrieved earlier this year from Mar-A-Lago included “184 unique documents bearing classification markings, including 67 documents marked as CONFIDENTIAL, 92 documents marked as SECRET, and 25 documents marked as TOP SECRET,” according to the affidavit. “Further, the FBI agents observed markings reflecting the following compartments/dissemination controls: HCS, FISA, ORCON, NOFORN, and SI. Based on my training and experience, I know that documents classified at these levels typically contain NDI. Several of the documents also contained what appears to be FPOTUS’s handwritten notes.”

Trump reacted to the release of the affidavit on his Truth Social account Friday afternoon, saying:

Trump Truth Social, 8/26/2022

Judge Bruce E. Reinhart (Credit: public domain)

A judge ordered the redacted document released.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart wrote in the order, “I find that the government has met its burden of showing a compelling reason/good cause to seal portions of the affidavit,” and added that the redacted portions were needed for protecting witnesses, agents, and parties who were not charged, in addition to the strategy and scope of the probe.

The department blacked out the names of witnesses and agents to protect them and the agency’s investigation, but the document, which allowed for the warrant in the unprecedented Aug. 8 raid at Mar-a-Lago, is expected to provide at least some new details.

Trump posted on his Truth Social account on Friday morning, criticizing the raid on his home prior to the affidavit release:

Trump Truth Social, 8/26/2022

(Read more: JusttheNews, 8/26/2022)  (Archive)  (Affidavit)

Techno Fog has more:

The Trump Search Warrant Affidavit has been released

Here it is – with redactions

Techno Fog

The DOJ just released the affidavit submitted in support of the search warrant of former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

Here it is for download.

As expected, the judge allowed the Government to heavily redact the affidavit before it went public. In yesterday’s order, the judge found that parts of the affidavit must remain sealed because:

disclosure would reveal (1) the identities of witnesses, law enforcement agents, and uncharged parties, (2) the investigation’s strategy, direction, scope, sources, and methods, and (3) grand jury information protected by Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e).

This aligns with the DOJ representations that (1) information in the affidavit “could be used to identify many, if not all” of the witnesses; (2) the affidavit would provide a “roadmap for anyone intent on obstructive the investigation.”

Affidavit allegations:

(Read more: Techno Fog/Substack, 8/26/2022)  (Archive)

Timothy Thibault (Credit: public domain)

“Former Washington Field Office Special Agent in Charge Tim Thibault was reportedly escorted out of the Bureau’s headquarters on Friday, amid whistleblower allegations that he showed political bias in his handling of politically sensitive investigations.

The Washington Times reported eyewitness accounts that “Mr. Thibault was seen exiting the bureau’s elevator last Friday escorted by two or three ‘headquarters-looking types.'”

Whistleblowers alleged that Thibault concealed the partisan nature of evidence from FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland to secure their approval to open an investigation into former President Donald Trump. That investigation culminated in the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this month.

The public release of the affidavit that accompanied the search warrant revealed the warrant application relied heavily on information from news articles, including a CBS Miami piece titled “Moving Trucks Spotted At Mar-a-Lago” and a Breitbart News article in which former Trump adviser Kash Patel discussed the classified status of documents the bureau previously removed from the estate on behalf of the National Archives.

Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley confirmed to Just the News prior to the raid that Thibault had been removed from his post and reassigned to an unspecified position.” (JusttheNews, 8/29/2022)  (Archive)

“A top FBI agent at the Washington field office reportedly resigned from his post last week after facing intense scrutiny over allegations he helped shield Hunter Biden from criminal investigations into his laptop and business dealings.

Timothy Thibault, an FBI assistant special agent in charge, was allegedly forced out after he was accused of political bias in his handling of probes involving President Biden’s son, sources told the Washington Times on Monday.

The agent was escorted out of the field office by at least two “headquarters-looking types” last Friday, the sources said.”  (Read more: New York Post, 8/29/2022)  (Archive)

Morrison & Foerster LLC. Not surprising. https://t.co/P8aK6Vtdhp pic.twitter.com/wxFDAwIK5q

— Annie_E (@ds_abp) August 31, 2022

Brandon’s tagged in several entries and has a healthy mini-timeline going.

Avril Haines appears on MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell to complain about President Trump’s abuse of power after removing Brennan’s security clearance. (Credit: MSNBC screenshot)

“The U.S. intelligence community will assess the potential risk to national security of disclosure of materials recovered during the Aug. 8 search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence, according to a letter seen by Reuters.

The letter dated Friday from National Intelligence Director (DNI) Avril Haines to House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff and Oversight Committee chair Carolyn Maloney also said the Justice Department and DNI “are working together to facilitate a classification review” of materials including those recovered during the search.

Schiff and Maloney said in a joint statement they were pleased the government was “assessing the damage caused by the improper storage of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.” Politico reported the letter earlier.

US House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff speaks to the press with US Democratic Representative from New York Carolyn Maloney, August 15, 2022. (Credit: Nicholas Kamm/Getty Images)

The Justice Department on Friday disclosed that it was investigating Trump for removing White House records because it believed he illegally held documents including some involving intelligence-gathering and clandestine human sources – among America’s most closely held secrets.

Haines said DNI “will also lead an Intelligence Community (IC) assessment of the potential risk to national security that would result from the disclosure of the relevant documents” including those seized.

A spokesman for Trump, Taylor Budowich, accused Schiff of being reckless with U.S. intelligence and asserted Democrats had “weaponized the intel community against President Trump with selective and dishonest leaks.” (Read more: Yahoo News, 8/27/2022)  (Archive)

Tucker Carlson covers my @TheGrayzoneNews report exposing the Pentagon’s invitation of multiple Ukrainian Nazis to Disney World, where comedian Jon Stewart honored a former fascist militant for his “personal example.”

Read the Grayzone investigation here: https://t.co/NWiqV4Yue0 pic.twitter.com/CGMIyTZS5G

— Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) September 7, 2022

Defense Department-sponsored “Warrior Games” featured liberal comedian Jon Stewart awarding a member of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion at Disney World. The Pentagon refused to tell The Grayzone whether US taxpayers funded the foreign competitors’ travel.

This August, during the Department of Defense’s annual Warrior Games at Disney World in Orlando, Florida this August 19-28, liberal comedian Jon Stewart awarded a Ukrainian military veteran named Ihor Halushka the “Heart of the Team” award for “inspiring his team” with his “personal example.”

Halushka happens to have been a member of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which has been armed by the US and integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard. The award-winning ultra-nationalist wore a sleeve over his left arm as he accepted the prize, presumably to cover up his tattoo of the Nazi Sonnenrad, or Black Sun.

Ihor Halushka’s Sonnenrad Black Sun tattoo is visible on his left elbow. (Credit: The Grayzone)

(Read more: The Grayzone, 8/31/2022)  (Archive)

“Here we go… It was only a matter of time before the DOJ-NSD architects of the Trump targeting operation came out from the shadows.  This is the moment long-time readers of CTH should have been waiting for.  For the past five years, Mary McCord has been one of a small and select lawfare group organizing the targeting of President Trump.

Mary McCord led the support team who created the Carter Page FISA warrant using the Steele Dossier to replace the required ‘Wood’s file’.  McCord was the DOJ-NSD official who traveled with DOJ Deputy AG Sally Yates to talk to former White House counsel Don McGhan which weaponized the Flynn-Kislyak call to remove Trump’s National Security Advisor.

Mary McCord was the person who organized Alexander Vindman and Eric Ciaramella to construct the first impeachment effort.  Additionally, it was Mary McCord along with her former legal counsel, turned Intelligence Community Inspector General, Michael Atkinson, who changed the ICIG whistleblower rules allowing an anonymous complaint to underpin the false accusations from Ciaramella against Trump.

It was also Mary McCord who was appointed by FISA court Judge James Boasberg as an amici curia to the court, intercepting issues of false information in filings from the DOJ-NSD to the court as constructed by Kevin Clinesmith.

It was Mary McCord who then took up the lead congressional position within the impeachment construct created by Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler, and it was Mary McCord who then joined the January 6 Committee in the committee fight to obtain President Trump’s white house records.

Mary McCord surfaces today with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos to outline what her team has currently constructed, including the specific targeting approaches her DOJ-NSD and Lawfare crew have put together.

As noted by McCord, the ‘obstruction of justice’ angle is a repeat of the threat used by the Deep State to keep the criminal conduct of the DOJ-NSD from being exposed.  WATCH:

When the Carter Page FISA application was originally assembled by the FBI and DOJ, there was initial hesitancy from within the DOJ National Security Division (DOJ-NSD) about submitting the application, because it did not have enough citations in evidence (the infamous ‘Woods File’).  That’s why the Steele Dossier ultimately became important.  It was the Steele Dossier that provided the push, the legal cover needed for the DOJ-NSD to submit the application for a Title-1 surveillance warrant against the campaign of Donald J. Trump.

When the Carter Page title-1 search warrant application was finally assembled for submission to the FISA court, the head of the DOJ-NSD was John Carlin.  Carlin quit working for the DOJ-NSD in late September 2016 just before the final application was submitted (October 21,2016).

John Carlin was replaced by Deputy Asst. Attorney General, Mary McCord.

♦ When the FISA application was finally submitted (approved by Sally Yates and James Comey), it was Mary McCord who did the actual process of filing the application and gaining the Title-1 surveillance warrant.

A few months later, February 2017, with Donald Trump now in office as President, it was Mary McCord who went with Deputy AG Sally Yates to the White House to confront White House legal counsel Don McGahn over the Michael Flynn interview with FBI agents.  The surveillance of Flynn’s calls was presumably done under the auspices and legal authority of the FISA application Mary McCord previously was in charge of submitting.

♦ At the time the Carter Page application was filed (October 21, 2016), Mary McCord’s chief legal counsel inside the office was a DOJ-NSD lawyer named Michael Atkinson.  In his role as the legal counsel for the DOJ-NSD, it was Atkinson’s job to review and audit all FISA applications submitted from inside the DOJ.  Essentially, Atkinson was the DOJ internal compliance officer in charge of making sure all FISA applications were correctly assembled and documented.

♦ When the anonymous CIA whistleblower complaint was filed against President Trump for the issues of the Ukraine call with President Zelensky, the Intelligence Community Inspector General had to change the rules for the complaint to allow an anonymous submission.  Prior to this change, all intelligence whistleblowers had to put their name on the complaint.  It was this 2019 IGIC who changed the rules.  Who was the Intelligence Community Inspector General?  Michael Atkinson.

When ICIG Michael Atkinson turned over the newly authorized anonymous whistleblower complaint to the joint House Intelligence and Judiciary Committee (Schiff and Nadler chairs), who did Michael Atkinson give the complaint to?  Mary McCord.

Yes, after she left main justice, Mary McCord took the job of working for Chairman Jerry Nadler and Chairman Adam Schiff as the chief legal advisor inside the investigation that led to the construction of articles of impeachment.   As a consequence, Mary McCord received the newly permitted anonymous whistleblower complaint from her old office colleague Michael Atkinson.

♦  During his investigation of the Carter Page application, Inspector General Michael Horowitz discovered an intentional lie inside the Carter Page FISA application (directly related to the ‘Woods File’) which his team eventually tracked to FBI counterintelligence division lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith.  Eventually Clinesmith was criminally charged with fabricating evidence (changed wording on an email) in order to intentionally falsify the underlying evidence in the FISA submission.

When John Durham took the Clinesmith indictment to court, the judge in the case was James Boasberg.

♦ In addition to being a DC criminal judge, James Boasberg is also a FISA court judge who signed-off on one of the renewals for the FISA application that was submitted using fraudulent evidence fabricated by Kevin Clinesmith.  In essence, now the presiding judge over the FISA court, Boasberg was the FISC judge who was tricked by Clinesmith and now the criminal court judge in charge of determining Clinesmith’s legal outcome.  Judge Boasberg eventually sentenced Clinesmith to 6 months probation.

As an outcome of continued FISA application fraud and wrongdoing by the FBI in their exploitation of searches of the NSA database, Presiding FISC Judge James Boasberg appointed an amici curiae advisor to the court who would monitor the DOJ-NSD submissions and ongoing FBI activities.

Who did James Boasberg select as a FISA court amicus?  Mary McCord.

♦ SUMMARY:  Mary McCord submitted the original false FISA application to the court using the demonstrably false Dossier.  Mary McCord participated in the framing of Michael Flynn.  Mary McCord worked with ICIG Michael Atkinson to create a fraudulent whistleblower complaint against President Trump; and Mary McCord used that manipulated complaint to assemble articles of impeachment on behalf of the joint House Intel and Judiciary Committee.  Mary McCord then took up a defensive position inside the FISA court to protect the DOJ and FBI from sunlight upon all the aforementioned corrupt activity.

You can clearly see how Mary McCord would be a person of interest if anyone was going to start digging into corruption internally within the FBI, DOJ or DOJ-NSD.  Then, as if on cue to keep the entire corrupt system protected, this happened:

November 4, 2021 – In Washington DC – “Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and the House Jan. 6 Select Committee has tapped Mary McCord, who once ran the Justice Department’s National Security Division, for representation in its fight to obtain former President Donald Trump’s White House records. (read more)

Mary McCord is the epitome of a person using a position to abuse the power within it.

Former Obama White House Counsel Lisa Monaco is now the Deputy Attorney General.  John Carlin is back inside the DOJ-NSD as the Biden administration continued the Obama administration targeting of President Trump.   Mary McCord returns back inside the House J-6 investigative committee put together to purposefully target Donald J Trump…

Now does the timing of Mary McCord surfacing publicly, immediately after the underlying search warrant used in the raid against Donald Trump, make sense?

McCord is the architect, the actual person putting lawfare strategy into lawfare ink and action, for the Trump targeting operations.” (Conservative Treehouse, 8/28/2022)  (Archive)

(Credit: Lee Smith/Twitter, Mar-a-Lago/Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald/Tribune News Service/Getty Images)

“Columnist Lee Smith, author of The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History, said colleagues and peers of his — whose judgment he trusts — speculate that the FBI’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s private residence at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, FL, was a search for documents related to its “Russiagate” surveillance operation of the 45th president.

“I think the best way to understand this is in the context of a six-year-long operation targeting Donald Trump, Donald Trump’s aides, and Donald Trump’s supporters,” Smith said on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday with host Joel Pollak. “I have different colleagues and people whose insight and whose wisdom I trust very much, and they believe that what the FBI was looking for were documents related to … what the FBI called the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, but what most of the rest of us know as the Russiagate operation meant to target candidate Trump, then President-elect Trump, and then President Donald J. Trump.”

Smith said the people whose speculation he was relaying “have much more insight” and “much more knowledge” about the FBI’s operations than he.

(…) “We need to remember these [are] intelligence agencies that Hillary Clinton was using to spy on the Trump campaign and to smear the Trump campaign,” he remarked. “This was in the Obama administration. There is no way that any of this happened without the White House knowing about it.”

Smith said it was “good news” that whistleblowers within the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) provided information to Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R-IA) office about political and partisan internal efforts to suppress information about Hunter Biden.

The existence of whistleblowers within the FBI and DOJ, Smith surmised, could lead to some restraint among the bureaucracies’ worst “anti-Trump” operatives due to fear of exposure.

He remarked, “Thanks to the whistleblowers — and to thanks to Charles Grassley’s letters — now we have anti-Trump operatives at the DOJ and the FBI worried about who they can trust. Under our circumstances at present, that’s very important, and it’s very good news, because we want them looking at each other. We want them fearful of each other. We want them suspicious.” (Read more: Breitbart, 8/28/2022)  (Archive)

Jeremy Bash (Credit: Screenshot MSNBC)

“A national security lawyer tapped by President Joe Biden to lead his Intelligence Advisory Board was one of 50 former intelligence officials to claim in an open letter that the October 2020 publication of Hunter Biden’s emails appeared to be part of a “Russian information operation.”

Jeremy Bash served in several roles during the Obama administration, including CIA Chief of Staff, Defense Department Chief of Staff, and House Intelligence Committee Chief Counsel. He currently serves as Managing Director of Beacon Global Strategies and as an advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Bash also contributed to CNN and MSNBC during the Trump administration.

After the New York Post published emails obtained from Hunter Biden’s laptop, Bash signed onto a letter claiming that the release “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

“If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this,” the officials, including former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director Michael Hayden wrote in the letter.

The letter writers acknowledged that they “d[id] not have evidence of Russian involvement,” and the Daily Caller News Foundation later verified the authenticity of the hard drive. Nevertheless, Twitter suspended the New York Post after it shared the story, citing its rules surrounding hacked material. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told podcast host Joe Rogan on Aug. 25 that the social media giant marked the story as “potential misinformation” after the FBI warned the company that Russia would seek to influence the election.

Bash doubled down on the claims in the letter during an Oct. 19, 2020, appearance on MSNBC.

“This looks like Russian intelligence, this walks like Russian intelligence, this talks like Russian intelligence,” Bash told host Nicolle Wallace. “This effort by Rudy Giuliani and the New York Post and Steve Bannon to cook up supposed dirt on Joe Biden looks like a classic Russian playbook disinformation campaign. And let’s recount exactly what happened in July 2019, when President Trump talked to Zelensky, he said, ‘talk to Rudy Giuliani. He’s my guy on trying to dig up false dirt on Joe Biden.”

And then Rudy Giuliani suddenly comes forward with these mysteriously created emails, probably hacked through a Russian intelligence operation. We have to acknowledge the fact that the president of the U.S. is supporting, is condoning, is welcoming, a Russian intelligence operation in 2020,” Bash continued. “This is collusion in plain sight.”

(Read more: Daily Caller, 8/29/2022)  (Archive)

“The Biden Department of Justice lobbed a pre-election grenade at the presumptive 2024 presidential nominee Donald Trump in a midnight filing on Tuesday by attaching a photo of alleged ‘top secret’ documents the FBI seized at Mar-a-Lago.

The now-infamous photo is undoubtedly circulating throughout Americans’ email inboxes this morning, flooding social media channels, and is being heralded on the morning television shows. It would not be surprising if Attorney General Merrick Garland already has the photo framed and mounted and hung proudly in his office.

The ‘top secret’ documents photo, labeled ‘Attachment F’ (you can guess what the ‘F’ stands for) is indisputably provocative. The TS/SCI documents are splayed dramatically across the ornate blue carpet with white cover sheets neatly laid on top of them.

The obvious first question many people are asking about this photo is: Why are ‘top secret’ documents that are arguably so sensitive to national security that a court-appointed, independent “special master” should not be privy to them, being spread out for a publicity style photo? The attachment is not sealed, although the Department of Justice has asked for numerous redactions for the search warrant affidavit that purportedly justified the unprecedented raid on the former president.

So, why this photo? Why now? This is precisely the question that legal analyst Jonathan Turley is asking about Attachment F.

“Notably, this filing includes this picture which is being widely distributed,” Turley notes on Twitter.

 “It can, however, leave an obviously misleading impression that secret documents were strewn over the floor when this appears to be the work of the FBI agents. The picture is Attachment F and the textual reference on page 13 simply says ‘Certain of the documents had colored cover sheets indicating their classification status’. It is curious that the DOJ would release this particular picture. The point is to state a fact that hardly needs an optical confirmation: the possession of documents with classified cover sheets.”

Thus arises the second question: If this is indeed a staged photo, then why the need for the box on the right-hand side? If you take a closer look, it shows a Time magazine cover that one might interpret as a veiled threat.

Let’s take a look at the actual Time magazine cover, which is from March 4, 2019.

It’s none other than Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential challengers spying on him while he is in the Oval Office. The cover story headline is “Knock, Knock…”

The Time magazine cover that is not-so-subtly displayed in the FBI’s staged photo is yet another sign that the bureau is unable to do its job in a professional and apolitical fashion. This compounds the problem of the apparent political timing of the FBI raid on August 8, which came over eighteen months into the Biden presidency, and despite the documents allegedly being an ‘urgent’ matter of national security.

The Time cover provoked a politicized response from whom we can only assume is the target audience. Business Insider didn’t miss the message.

“A photo released by the Department of Justice showing the documents found during the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid has also unveiled a curious discovery — a framed image of an unflattering TIME magazine cover featuring former President Donald Trump,” BI reports.

“The cover, which appeared to be placed in a gold frame, was from a March 4, 2019 edition of the publication,” the report noted. “It showed 15 of Trump’s Democratic challengers at the time — including President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris — peering into the Oval Office at a nervous-looking Trump who is seated in his chair.”

It may also be the case that the FBI was merely using the photo to leak information to the press.

“The TIME magazine cover, along with Trump’s other personal items commingled with the classified, demonstrates that he was personally handling them,” CNN commentator Asha Rangappa remarked. “Thanks for highlighting key evidence of his guilt!”

New York Times correspondent and CNN analyst Maggie Haberman also noted the Time magazine cover.

Along with some framed Time Magazine covers https://t.co/fyfoqvdXXH

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) August 31, 2022

A Bloomberg reporter went further and provided a passage that he thought was relevant.

“Certain of the documents had colored cover sheets indicating their classification status,” the filing reads, referring to the photo “of certain documents and classified cover sheets recovered from a container in the ’45 office.'”

— Josh Wingrove (@josh_wingrove) August 31, 2022

It is unclear why the DOJ felt it was necessary to attach a staged photograph that is not sealed showing “top secret” documents so sensitive that a “special master” should arguably not be privy to them.(Read more: Becker News, 8/31/2022) (Archive)

Donald Trump Has Perfect Response to FBI’s ‘Gotcha’ Photo of ‘Top Secret’ Docs Scattered All Over Mar-a-Lago Floor

Trump/Truth Social, 8/31/2022

Trump Truth Social, 8/31/2022

Kash Patel also shares his opinion of the photo with Benny Johnson:

(Credit: Clipping from Jesse Watters Primetime, 8/31/2022)

“Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said Wednesday on FNC’s “Jesse Watters Primetime” that he did not think the Department of Justice found what it was looking for during the raid of former President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach, FL home.

“The judge would appoint the special master, and it would be an extension of the court,” Ratcliffe explained. “I do think that it’s the right thing to do. The DOJ’s position is number one. We don’t need a special master. We’ve already — we’ve already sorted everything and looked at everything. Take our word for it that it was done. As you pointed out, they had attorney-client privilege in there, so the taint team that was looking at this didn’t do their job.”

“And, you know, all of this, listen, you presided over a lot of cases,” he continued. “I was a former federal prosecutor, United States attorney. Let me tell you what this is about. Good prosecutors with good cases play it straight. They don’t need to play games. They don’t need to shop for judges, they don’t need to leak intelligence that may or may not exist. And in this case, this tells you that the government didn’t find what they were looking for. There weren’t nuclear secrets in Melania Trump’s underwear drawer, and they’re trying to justify what they’ve done. They’re not playing it straight before the American people. I think that that’s going to play out.” (Breitbart, 9/1/2022)  (Archive)

“A federal judge has dismissed Carter Page’s lawsuit against the FBI and former Director James Comey alleging they improperly surveilled him under a FISA warrant.

The bureau surveilled Page under a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant in a process during which they concealed exculpatory evidence against him, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz found in his 2019 report, per the Washington Examiner.

Judge Dabney Friedrich Stephen (Credit: Stephen J. Boitano/The Associated Press)

Judge Dabney Friedrich, in a Thursday ruling, dismissed the suit.

“Page alleges that the individual defendants violated §§ 1809(a) and 1810 both by unlawfully engaging in electronic surveillance and using or disclosing the fruits of that surveillance. … Each defendant claims that Page fails to sufficiently allege that he or she violated the statute,” Friedrich wrote. “The Court finds that the claims are not time-barred but that Page does not state a claim against any of the individual defendants.”

“Some of the defendants, such as Comey, McCabe, Strzok, and Lisa Page, allegedly approved, encouraged, and facilitated Page’s investigation and the warrant applications,” the judge continued, adding “Absent from the complaint is any claim that these four defendants participated in drafting or substantively reviewing the faulty applications themselves, let alone that they performed the FISA surveillance and acquired Page’s communications.”

“If proven, these allegations clearly demonstrate wrongdoing… but Page does not allege that any of the individual defendants, including the unknown John Doe defendants and those most responsible for the applications’ critical errors, took part in obtaining the surveillance information, either by setting up the devices or gathering or listening to Page’s communications,” the judge wrote.

“Thus, the Court cannot plausibly infer from this complaint that any of the individual defendants, known or unknown, ‘engaged in electronic surveillance,’ in violation of §§ 1809(a) and 1810.,” Friedrich wrote.” (JusttheNews, 9/1/2022)  (Archive)

Judge Aileen Cannon (Credit: Senate Judiciary Committee)

“A federal judge said she would make public a more detailed list of the items the FBI took during its search last month of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, opening the prospect of a much fuller picture of what documents might be among the classified material seized.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision came during a hearing Thursday over whether to appoint an outside party to review the materials now in the Justice Department’s hands to determine whether issues of executive and lawyer-client privilege put some of it out of bounds to investigators.

After hearing arguments from both sides, she said she would issue a written order in due course on Mr. Trump’s request for that third-party review.

Attorneys for Mr. Trump argued that the federal government’s handling of the investigation had damaged public confidence in the probe’s integrity and transparency. They said the appointment of a special master to review documents would help put issues raised by the case in proper context.

“We need respectfully to lower the temperature on both sides,” said Chris Kise, a former Florida solicitor general with ties to the GOP who was added this week to the former president’s legal team.

Jay Bratt, the Justice Department’s lead attorney on the case, said Mr. Trump wasn’t entitled to the appointment of a special master because the classified and presidential records seized didn’t belong to him, but rather to the U.S.

“He is no longer the president,” said Mr. Bratt, chief of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence and export control section. “And because he is no longer the president, he had no right to take those documents.” (Read more: Wall Street Journal, 9/1/2022)  (Archive)

Trump’s ‘stash of nuclear secrets’ is this summer’s Kremlin collusion conspiracy. But the latest chapter of Russiagate may end with a bang.

“The FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago feels like peak Russiagate. There’s the synchronized press hysteria, moving from one absurd end-of-America “bombshell” to the next, accompanied by dark intonations regarding secrets about to be revealed and blustering accusations of high treason. Donald Trump was said to be hoarding “nuclear documents,” which he planned to peddle for billions to the Saudis. Who’s buying the map of Fort Knox? Does Trump have access to Colonel Sanders’ secret fried chicken recipe, too?

It’s no laughing matter to the American press, or for the partisan operatives and national security bureaucrats who feed them their cues. For them, the Mar-a-Lago raid is Russiagate II: The Palm Beach Papers.

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’ proposed damage assessment of the documents is a remake of the January 2017 intelligence community assessment which claimed, without evidence, that Vladimir Putin wanted to put Trump in the Oval Office. The extensive redactions on the affidavit the FBI used to get a warrant to raid Trump’s home are akin to the excessive redactions on the application that the FBI showed a secret court in 2016 to get a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. What was true for the original Russiagate holds here, too: The redactions are designed to hide not state secrets, but government corruption.

The Mar-a-Lago raid feels like Russiagate because, well, it is Russiagate: a conspiracy theory weaponized by the country’s courtier class to serve the interests of a delirious and deracinated oligarchy, spawning daily prophesies of doom fed by an endless supply of national security “leaks” asserting that the former commander-in-chief really was and is a secret Russian agent. And proof of the president’s treachery, chant the priestly keepers of the “collusion” mysteries, will soon be revealed to the public. It is their blanket justification for every past crime and every new banana republic-style abuse of power, accompanied by a drumbeat of ever more outlandish and violent threats.

Avril Haines appears on MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell to complain about President Trump’s abuse of power after removing Brennan’s security clearance. (Credit: MSNBC screenshot)

It is in this context that the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago should be understood: Government records and reports from political and media operatives and bureaucrats who previously starred in Russiagate I give evidence that the FBI raided Trump’s home to seize documents exposing the crimes that the FBI and Justice Department have been committing since 2016. The fact that Russiagate shows no signs of ending anytime soon is bad news for the republic, betrayed from within by a performative elite whose ability to project power outside its gilded bubble requires a steady supply of paranoia, fear, and hysteria.

The story of the Mar-a-Lago raid begins at the end of Trump’s presidency when he declassified documents related to Russiagate. Those records contain evidence of how the FBI spied on Trump’s campaign, presidential transition team, and administration. The documents reportedly include transcripts of FBI intercepts of Trump aides, a declassified copy of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to collect the electronic communications of Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page, and reports regarding Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper, the two main confidential human sources used by the FBI to spy on Trump’s circle.

Kash Patel (Credit: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

Kash Patel, who served in a variety of Pentagon roles and as a principal deputy in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the Trump administration, has said that 60% of the documents related to Russiagate are already in public view. As lead investigator for the House Intelligence Committee’s probe of the FBI’s illegal investigation of the Trump campaign, Patel helped get vital Russiagate records declassified. When Trump named Patel to the ODNI post, he and acting Director Richard Grenell put more Russiagate documents before the U.S. public in 2020. Patel has told the press that what Trump declassified on Jan. 19, 2021, constitutes the remainder of the Russiagate records—which is what the FBI was apparently after.

So, are the Russiagate documents secret? With hours left in Trump’s presidency, the DOJ raised “privacy concerns” about Trump’s declassification, and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows agreed to submit the documents for a final review. “I am returning the bulk of the binder of declassified documents to the Department of Justice,” Meadows wrote in a memo, “with the instruction that the Department must expeditiously conduct a Privacy Act review under the standards that the Department of Justice would normally apply, redact material appropriately, and release the remaining material with redactions applied.”

President Barack Obama meets with, from left: Kathryn Ruemmler, Lisa Monaco, and Susan E. Rice (Credit: Pete White House Flickr photo)

The problem, however, is that Biden’s DOJ, which was tasked with conducting that review, is staffed with key operatives who targeted Trump starting in 2016, like Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. As Barack Obama’s Homeland Security adviser, Monaco met in the White House with Haines, then deputy national security adviser (and former deputy CIA director), and National Security Adviser Susan Rice, who is now director of Biden’s Domestic Policy Council, to push the Trump-Russia narrative. As far as Monaco and her confederates were concerned, once Meadows turned over the declassified documents, the national security establishment was in the clear: The documents would never be seen again.” (Read more: Tablet Mag, 9/2/2022)  (Archive)

“The FBI seized over 50 empty folders marked “CLASSIFIED” during last month’s raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

According to a more detailed property receipt of the seized documents, the FBI discovered 43 empty folders with classified banners in Trump’s office and several others in the former president’s storage room.

It is uncertain whether the photo the DOJ recently released that showed classified folders scattered across the floor included any of the empty folders the FBI seized. (Read more: Breitbart, 9/2/2022)  (Archive)

How many “classified documents” in this infamous photo were just empty envelopes?https://t.co/FG57kZe7wI via @BreitbartNews

— Joel Pollak (@joelpollak) September 2, 2022

(Credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)

“Hunter Biden’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski reportedly fears the recently departed former FBI agent Timothy Thibault buried the information he conveyed to the FBI about his Chinese business dealings with the Biden family.

Bobulinski, who personally met with President Joe Biden in 2017 for an hour to discuss “the Bidens’ family business plans with the Chinese,” is worried Thibault helped “bury information about his dealings with the Biden family that he gave the FBI,” the Washington Free Beacon reported Friday. Thibault was reportedly “running point” on the FBI’s inquiry into Hunter Biden and “allegedly shut down part of the investigation.

(…) Over the course of Joe Biden’s political career, he has repeatedly denied being involved in the family business. “I have never discussed with my son or my brother or anyone else anything having to do with their businesses. Period.” Yet Joe Biden called Hunter in 2018 to speak about the family’s CEFC deal. “I think you’re clear,” Joe Biden said about the deal. “And anyway if you get a chance give me a call, I love you,” the message concluded.” (Read more: Breitbart, 9/2/2022)  (Archive)

“Former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr said Friday on FNC’s “America Reports” that it is “unprecedented” that former President Donald Trump had classified material at his Florida estate and he “jerked around” the Department of Justice for a year while they tried to recover the documents.

Sandra Smith asked, “Do you think this type of this raid was avoidable? Do you think a second subpoena, for example, could have been issued?”

Barr said, “I personally think for them to have taken things to the current point, they probably have pretty good evidence, but that’s speculation. And until we see that, it’s hard to say.”

He added, “Now, let me just say, I think the driver on this from the beginning was, you know, loads of classified information sitting in Mar-a-Lago. People say this was unprecedented, but it’s also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put him in a country club. And how long is the government going to try to get that back? You know, they jawboned for a year. They were deceived on the voluntary actions taken. They then went and got a subpoena. They were deceived on that. They feel and the record, the facts are starting to show that they were being jerked around. And so how long, you know, how long do they wait?” (Breitbart, 9/2/2022)  (Archive)

Peter Strzok: ‘Worst Person in the World’ Bill Barr Is Right – Trump Jerked Around DOJ

(Credit: Vox)

“The claim by former President Donald Trump that he declassified the documents with classified markings found at Mar-a-Lago was challenged Sept. 2 as “highly improbable” by former Attorney General William Barr.

“I can’t think of a legitimate reason why they could be taken out of the government, away from the government, if they’re classified,” who was attorney general during the Trump and George H.W. Bush administrations, said during an appearance on Fox News.

“I frankly am skeptical of this claim that ‘I declassified everything,’ because, frankly, I think it’s highly improbable and second, if in fact, he stood over scores of boxes not really knowing what was in them, and said ‘I hereby declassify everything in here,’ that would be such an abuse, and show such recklessness that it’s almost worse than taking the documents.”

Trump publicly ordered in October 2020 the “total declassification” of “any and all documents” related to the U.S. investigation into alleged Russia-Trump collusion, as well as all documents related to the use of a private email server by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Trump Responds

(…) Barr was known as a staunch Trump defender after becoming attorney general in 2019 but towards the end of the administration, he publicly diverged from Trump on a number of issues, including alleged election fraud.

In a statement on his Truth Social network after Barr’s comments, Trump said that the former attorney general is a Republican in name only, or a RINO, “who was so afraid of being Impeached that he became a captive to the Radical Left Democrats.”

“Barr never fought the way he should have for Election Integrity, and so much else. He started off OK as A.G., but faded fast—Didn’t have courage or stamina. People like that will never Make America Great Again!” Trump added.

Trump also said that Barr acted too slowly on the report from former special counsel Robert Mueller, which found no coordination or cooperation between Trump or his campaign and Russia, and knocked Barr for not releasing the laptop computer once owned by Hunter Biden before the 2020 election.

“The Laptop information should have been released BEFORE the Rigged Election, not after it, for the VOTERS TO SEE,” Trump said.

Barr has defended not making public the existence of a federal investigation into Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son, before the election, saying that it would have affected the outcome.” (Read more: The Epoch Times, 9/3/2022)  (Archive)

(Credit: Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press)

“We’ve been pushing Attorney General Merrick Garland for far greater transparency over the Mar-a-Lago raid, but he and FBI chief Christopher Wray owe the nation clear explanations over the Hunter Biden investigation, too.

Particularly in the wake of Timothy Thibault’s resignation from the bureau amid charges he suppressed evidence in the case and even shut down the FBI’s “laptop” investigation on spurious “Russian misinformation” grounds. He also faced an ongoing Office of Special Counsel probe of his partisan, anti-Trump social-media posts.

Top Senate Judiciary Committee Republican Charles Grassley in late July wrote Wray and Garland (following up on a May letter) citing charges by multiple FBI “highly credible whistleblowers” about the burying of “verified and verifiable” dirt on Hunter by falsely dismissing valid intelligence as “disinformation.”

The whistleblowers claim Thibault (then assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office) shut down an entire avenue of the Hunter investigation in October 2020. (Seemingly, that avenue centered on info from the infamous laptop, which the FBI first acquired in December 2019.)

Now Miranda Devine reports that Thibault that October also apparently buried the extensive testimony of whistleblower Tony Bobulinski, Hunter’s former business partner, about the Biden family’s corrupt influence-peddling.

After Bobulinksi’s initial five-hour FBI interview, he was told Thibault would be his FBI contact, yet the bureau never contacted him again. Nor was he brought before the Delaware grand jury investigating Hunter.

Incidentally, the drive to write off the laptop as “Russian disinformation” apparently began long before The Post’s first October 2020 scoops. FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten had opened an “assessment” that August; per Grassley, its result in October was that: “Verified and verifiable derogatory information on Hunter Biden was falsely labeled as disinformation.”

Grassley tried to press Wray about all this at an Aug. 4 hearing — only to have the FBI chief leave early, claiming he had to catch a flight.” (Read more: The New York Post, 9/05/2022)  (Archive)

Miranda Divine appears on WarRoom, September 6, 2022, to discuss the story with Steve Bannon:

“As requested by the incumbent president” pic.twitter.com/aDhicuYwiz

— Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) September 5, 2022

Jean Pierre insisted that the President was not briefed on the raid.

AP’s @ZekeJMiller: “The FBI…served a search warrant on the [Trump’]s residence…Was [he] or anyone at the WH aware of that…or has [he] been briefed in the aftermath of that…being executed?”

KJP: “No. The President was not briefed…No one at the WH was given a heads up.” pic.twitter.com/jbk4jwRQhX

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) August 9, 2022

District Judge Aileen Mercedes Cannon (Credit: public domain)

Earlier today, Judge Aileen Cannon granted President Trump’s request for a Special Master review of the material confiscated by the Biden DOJ during their raid on his home at Mar-a-Lago.

Judge Cannon also ‘temporarily enjoins’ or forbids the Biden regime from ‘reviewing and using the seized materials’ pending the completion of the review.

The Gateway Pundit posted the judge’s decision earlier today. (Read more: The Gateway Pundit, 9/5/2022) (Archive)

Judge Cannon takes the government to task in her order:

Andrew Weissman, the former Justice official who ran the Mueller special counsel and is now a contributor on the fake news channels, suffered a meltdown following the decision.

Sal Greco, a politically persecuted and fired NYPD officer, responded to Weissman’s temper tantrum.

Via Sal Greco.

After violating the civil rights of mob victims, the Enron defendants ( who’s convictions were overturned because of his misconduct ) and Paul Manafort; Andrew Weissmann ranting about “ the rule of law “ is a joke.

Andrew Weismann is in a lavender rage because an honest and courageous judge has delayed the politicized DOJ effort to destroy @realDonaldTrump while holding him to a different standard then Barrack Obama.

For the second time in his legal career, Andrew Weismann comes across a judge that actually respects the rule of law. The last time was the when his Enron convictions were overturned for his prosecutorial misconduct.

Here are a few of the Twitter rants by Andrew Weissmann:

(Read more: Gateway Pundit, 9/5/2022) (Archive)

Pages from an FBI property list of items seized from former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and made public by the Department of Justice. FBI agents who searched the home found empty folders marked with classified banners. The inventory reveals in general terms the contents of the 33 boxes taken during the Aug. 8 search. (Credit: Jon Elswick/AP)

“A document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities, was found by FBI agents who searched former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and private club last month, according to people familiar with the matter, underscoring concerns among U.S. intelligence officials about classified material stashed in the Florida property.

Some of the seized documents detail top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are kept in the dark about them. Only the president, some members of his Cabinet or a near-Cabinet-level official could authorize other government officials to know details of these special-access programs, according to people familiar with the search, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive details of an ongoing investigation.

Documents about such highly classified operations require special clearances on a need-to-know basis, not just top-secret clearance. Some special-access programs can have as few as a couple dozen government personnel authorized to know of an operation’s existence. Records that deal with such programs are kept under lock and key, almost always in a secure compartmented information facility, with a designated control officer to keep careful tabs on their location.

But such documents were stored at Mar-a-Lago, with uncertain security, more than 18 months after Trump left the White House.

Deep inside busy Mar-a-Lago, a storage room where secrets were kept

After months of trying, according to government court filings, the FBI has recovered more than 300 classified documents from Mar-a-Lago this year: 184 in a set of 15 boxes sent to the National Archives and Records Administration in January, 38 more handed over by a Trump lawyer to investigators in June, and more than 100 additional documents unearthed in a court-approved search on Aug. 8.

It was in this last batch of government secrets, the people familiar with the matter said, that the information about a foreign government’s nuclear-defense readiness was found. These people did not identify the foreign government in question, say where at Mar-a-Lago the document was found or offer additional details about one of the Justice Department’s most sensitive national security investigations.

Christopher Kise, a lawyer for Trump, decried leaks about the case, which he said “continue with no respect for the process nor any regard for the real truth. This does not serve well the interests of justice.”

“Moreover, the damage to public confidence in the integrity of the system simply cannot be underestimated. The responsible course of action here would be for someone — anyone — in the Government to exercise leadership and control. The Court has provided a sensible path forward which does not include the selective leak of unverifiable and misleading information. There is no reason to deviate from that path if the goal is, as it should be, to find a rational solution to document storage issues which have needlessly spiraled out of control.”

Spokespeople for the Justice Department and FBI declined to comment.” (Read more: Washington Post, 9/6/2022)  (Archive)

Brazilian photographer Luisa Dorr on her latest shoot for TIME Magazine, 10/6/2017. (Credit: The Hindu)

“Hillary Clinton told CBS News she began wearing pantsuits after photographers shot “suggestive” photos of her during a trip to Brazil.

“I was sitting on a couch, and the press was let in. There were a bunch of them shooting up,” Clinton told CBS News’s Norah O’Donnell.

“All of a sudden, the White House gets alerted to these billboards that show me sitting down with I thought my legs together, but the way it’s shot, it’s sort of suggestive,” Clinton added.

Some of those photos were used to sell lingerie. Clinton said the incident and the constant photography led her to switch to pantsuits, which have become a staple of the ex-first lady’s fashion.

The former secretary of State and her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, sat down with O’Donnell to promote the pair’s forthcoming Apple TV+ docuseries, “Gutsy.”

“I didn’t know that story,” Chelsea Clinton said. “I didn’t know that story. It’s by far and away the greatest revelation I had.”

Hillary Clinton said the incident in Brazil was the first of many uncomfortable experiences she had with press photographers as she increasingly became a public figure.”  (Read more: The Hill, 9/5/2022)  (Archive)

(Timeline editor’s note: Sorry, we couldn’t bring ourselves to search for the crotch shot photos that appeared on Brazilian billboards.)

“I can’t believe we’re still talking about this, but my emails. . .”: Hillary Clinton’s disbelief this week was shared by many critics left dumbfounded by her claim her private server contained “zero” classified documents. The expression of utter incredulity was classic Clinton — she’s selling hats reading “But her emails” for $30 a pop.

But Hillary’s denial of what was found on her server exposes something far more serious than signature hypocrisy. It reflects establishment figures’ sense of license that they can literally rewrite history with little fear of contradiction by the media.

While calling for limits on free speech over “disinformation,” Hillary has no qualms about falsely denying what published government reports detail.

“As Trump’s problems continue to mount, the right is trying to make this about me again. There’s even a ‘Clinton Standard.’ The fact is that I had zero emails that were classified,” her but-my-emails tweet continued. “Comey admitted he was wrong after he claimed I had classified emails. Trump’s own State Department, under two different Secretaries, found I had no classified emails.”

Virtually everything about that claim is breathtakingly untrue.

Let’s quickly deal with the light lifting before getting back to the “Clinton Standard.”

“Zero emails” were “classified.”

A  Department of Justice inspector general report revealed “81 email chains containing approximately 193 individual emails” were “classified from the CONFIDENTIAL to TOP SECRET levels at the time.” Clinton is echoing her allies’ recent spin that there were only three documents with classification markings among 33,000 emails. It is utter nonsense.

The Clinton email scandal is a scandal because these were emails. There is no classification automatically stamped on text being typed out and sent within minutes. While attachments can have classification markings, the whole point of using secure servers is that emails are created in the moment with inevitable slips in referencing classified material.

Nevertheless, the emails had classified information, including top-secret information tied to “Special Access Programs.” Yet some allies emphasize the inspector general also noted that in some cases there was “conscious effort to avoid sending classified information, by writing around the most sensitive material.” It failed. The emails still contained classified information.

That’s why she was reckless to use her own server: Such mistakes on private servers are more vulnerable to capture by foreign intelligence services. Indeed, according to the FBI, “hostile actors gained access” to some of the information through the emails of Clinton’s associates and aides. (Read more: New York Post, 9/7/2022)  (Archive)

Trump vs Clinton (Credit: Wall Street Journal graphics)

“Recently a Florida judge dismissed the lawsuit brought by President Trump against Hillary Clinton. [65-page ruling HERE]  The media have enjoyed ridiculing Trump by using the words of the judge who dismissed the case.  As noted by the Washington Times, “Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks, a Clinton appointee, said Mr. Trump’s filing was too lengthy, detailing events that “are implausible because they lack any specific allegations which might provide factual support for the conclusions reached.”

(…) In March 2022 President Trump filed a civil lawsuit against: Hillary Clinton, Hillary for America Campaign Committee, DNC, DNC Services Corp, Perkins Coie, Michael Sussmann, Marc Elias, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Charles Dolan, Jake Sullivan, John Podesta, Robby Mook, Phillipe Reines as well as Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, Peter Fritsch, Nellie Ohr, Bruce Ohr, Orbis Business Intelligence, Christopher Steele, Igor Danchenko, Neustar Inc., Rodney Joffe, James Comey Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Kevin Clinesmith and Andrew McCabe. [108-Page Lawsuit Here]

When I was about one-third of the way through reading the lawsuit, I initially stopped and said to myself this is going to take a lot of documentary evidence to back up the claims in the assertions.  Dozens of attachments would be needed and hundreds of citations to the dozens of attachments would be mandatory.  Except, they were not there.

After reading further, while completely understanding the background material that was being described in the filing, I realized this wasn’t a lawsuit per se’.  The 108-pages I was holding in my hands were more akin to a legal transfer mechanism from President Trump to lawyers who needed it.  The filing was contingent upon a series of documents that would be needed to support the claims within it.

Whoever wrote the lawsuit had obviously reviewed the evidence to support the filing.  However, the attachments and citations were missing. That was weird.  That’s when I realized the purpose of the lawsuit.  In hindsight, things became clear when the DOJ-NSD raided the home of Donald Trump, and suddenly the motive to confiscate the documents that would be the missing lawsuit attachments and citations surfaced.

With the manipulative, and I say intentional, “ongoing investigation” angle of the John Durham probe essentially blocking public release of declassified documents showing the efforts of all the lawsuit participants (Trump-Russia Collusion Hoax), President Trump needed a legal way to secure and more importantly share the evidence.

Think of it like the people around Trump wanting to show lawyers the evidence in the documents.  However, because of the construct of the lawfare being deployed against Trump, any lawyer would need a *reason* to review the evidence.   The Trump -v- Clinton et al lawsuit becomes that ‘reason.’

The “documents” (classified or not) are reviewed by lawyers in preparation for the lawsuit.  This is their legal justification for reviewing the documents.  In essence, the lawsuit is a transfer mechanism permitting the Trump legal team to review the evidence on behalf of their client, former President Donald Trump.

Once the formation of the lawsuit is established, the retainer and acceptance of the lawyers to represent their client cemented, the legal counsel, discussion and information within legal duties/obligations of those who represent the plaintiff (Trump) becomes an information silo.  In addition to previous executive privilege established by President Trump himself; outside government there is now another silo to defend against the motives of the Lawfare crew (DOJ), the attorney-client privilege.

The lawsuit itself is the transfer mechanism permitting sharing of the documents and providing legal cover for the reviewers (lawyers).  The details within the 108-page filing constitute the claims of the plaintiff in the lawsuit, which were established by the evidentiary documents later seized by the DOJ and FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago. (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 9/11/2022)  (Archive)

“Last we checked in on the Mar-a-Lago Raid legal proceeding, Judge Aileen M. Cannon issued a Labor Day order announcing she will appoint a Special Master, and prohibiting the feds from using the seized documents until further notice (except that the feds could continue their national security risk assessment), Judge Appoints Special Master, Temporarily Bars FBI/DOJ Review Or Use Of Records Seized in Mar-a-Lago Raid.

(…) Regardless, the feds were not happy with the result, and filed a Motion for a Partial Stay Pending Appeal with Judge Cannon. Procedurally, they have to ask the District Court for a stay before seeking a stay in the appeals court. That certainly will happen if Judge Cannon turns them down.

Here’s excerpts from Motion to District Court for Partial Stay Pending Appeal:

Specifically, the government seeks a stay to the extent the Order (1) enjoins the further review and use for criminal investigative purposes of records bearing classification markings that were recovered pursuant to a court-authorized search warrant and (2) requires the government to disclose those classified records to a special master for review. The government respectfully requests that the Court rule on this motion promptly. If the Court does not grant a stay by Thursday, September 15, the government intends to seek relief from the Eleventh Circuit….

[The motion] is limited to the Order’s directives with respect to the seized classified records1 because those aspects of the Order will cause the most immediate and serious harms to the government and the public. The classified records—a discrete set of just over 100 documents—have already been segregated from the other seized records and are being maintained separately….

Here are the grounds for the stay, the feds argued:

First, the government is likely to succeed in its appeal of the Order as it applies to classified records…. Plaintiff does not and could not assert that he owns or has any possessory interest in classified records; that he has any right to have those government records returned to him; or that he can advance any plausible claims of attorney-client privilege as to such records that would bar the government from reviewing or using them. And although this Court suggested that Plaintiff might be able to assert executive privilege as to some of the seized records, Supreme Court precedent makes clear that any possible assertion of privilege that Plaintiff might attempt to make over the classified records would be overcome by the government’s “demonstrated, specific need” for that evidence. United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683, 713 (1974) (“United States v. Nixon”). Among other things, the classified records are the very subject of the government’s ongoing investigation.

Second, the government and the public would suffer irreparable harm absent a stay…. The Court thus stated that its Order was not intended to “impede the classification review and/or intelligence assessment by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (‘ODNI’).” D.E. 64 at 1-2. But the review and assessment on their own are not sufficient to address and fully mitigate any national security risks presented. The Intelligence Community’s review and assessment cannot be readily segregated from the Department of Justice’s (“DOJ”) and Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (“FBI”) activities in connection with the ongoing criminal investigation, and uncertainty regarding the bounds of the Court’s order and its implications for the activities of the FBI has caused the Intelligence Community, in consultation with DOJ, to pause temporarily this critically important work….

Third, the partial stay sought here would impose no cognizable harm on Plaintiff. It would not disturb the special master’s review of any other records, including any personal materials or records potentially subject to attorney-client privilege….

The feds simultaneously filed a Notice of Appeal, and also a Motion to Unseal Notice of Status of Privilege Review Filter Team,  in which the feds want to reveal the nature of the privilege review, but not the documents themselves.”  (Read more: Legal Insurrection, 9/08/2022)  (Archive)

“Huge revelations pertaining to the content of the documents seized by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago. Trump made some comments to Newsmax and today Devin Nunes is saying he thinks that the docs are about Russiagate.

In a report today from Newsmax, Trump claims he kept them under Executive Privilege, to PROTECT THEM FROM BEING DESTROYED BY THE DEEP STATE.

(Credit: Newsmax/Clandestine)

“I think they thought it was something to do with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax,”

Initially, I found this peculiar, because Trump himself confirmed some of the docs were pertaining to the Iran Deal last week when he retruthed this post from Paul Sperry.

(Credit: @paulsperry/Gettr)

But based on Trump’s most recent comments to Newsmax, the docs are about essentially EVERYTHING! Trump said that the documents in question “expose a Deep State plot” against him. Which is the reason he Declassified them, and took the docs for protection. There are reportedly “11 sets of documents” the FBI were interested in.

So what are the docs about? All of the docs about Deep State’s crimes that Trump was concerned they might destroy. That could cover a wide variety of subjects. Thus far, we know some of the docs to pertain to the Iran Deal and Russiagate/Crossfire Hurricane, but what other crimes is Trump aware of that he might want to prevent the Deep State from destroying? Uranium One? Libya? Haiti? Benghazi? 9/11? JFK Assassination?

Whatever else is in those docs, Trump is insinuating the FBI is looking to retrieve them to prevent him from showing it to the American People.

“They were afraid that things were in there — part of their scam material.”

(…) While the Left think they are closing in, Trump just confirmed the boomerang is in effect. The docs don’t implicate him, they implicate the enemy in all of their most heinous crimes, and Trump wants them public.” (Read more: Clandestine/Substack, 9/8/2022)  (Archive)

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan announced sex trafficking and conspiracy charges against Jeffrey Epstein, July, 2019. (Credit: Jefferson Siegel/NYT)

“Your humble author, as promised, is involved in litigation to extract records from the federal government. It’s easy to talk about current events. The more difficult part is suing federal agencies for documentation of their wrongdoing.

(…) One development we can divulge is our effort to obtain the FBI’s records on Jeffrey Epstein. We made a simple request: hand over all FBI interviews with Epstein. We know those records are out there, as we were the first to report that Epstein had been a source for the FBI. (It was later confirmed that Epstein cooperated on a Bear Stearns investigation.)

Wait. Was pedophile Jeffrey Epstein an informant for Mueller’s FBI?

From the 5/24/18 FBI Vault release: “Epstein has also provided information to the FBI as agreed upon.”

Is that why he escaped serious charges for molesting over twenty girls? pic.twitter.com/K4suAumD85

— Techno Fog (@Techno_Fog) May 24, 2018

But we’re not convinced that was the only time Epstein spoke with the FBI. There were other hints and rumors that he worked with the US government to recover stolen funds. Thus the FOIA request.

How did the FBI respond? Not by denying the existence of any records.

Instead, the FBI is hiding behind FOIA’s law enforcement exemption, stating that the production of the Epstein records would interfere with ongoing law enforcement investigations:

“The records responsive to your request are law enforcement records; there is a pending or prospective law enforcement proceeding relevant to these responsive records, and release of the information could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings.”

(Read more: Techno Fog, 9/9/2022)  (Archive)

For a few months, I have been speculating there were deeper ties to the CIA or NSA for Rodney Joffe. There were a number of indications of that, which I have covered.

Today, the government produced records responsive to my FOIA. We sued the Department of Defense for records, and now we have them.

My FOIA was:

One of the first emails that stood out was sent from Rodney Joffe to Keromytis, noting:

This is confirmation that Joffe worked for the NSA in some capacity.

It’s important not to make leaps of speculation, but there are many possible implications to this. We know the NSA is a corner piece to much of the DNC hack story. Was Joffe involved? We don’t know.

As I have repeatedly reported, there has been a source who alleges Joffe played a key role in the attribution for the DNC hack. Whether that was was for the NSA or FBI (where he also has a lot of contact) or to DARPA/DHS/others, is unclear.

(…) Here is a link to all of the files.

(Read more: UndeadFOIA/Substack, 9/9/2022)  (Archive)

Gary Gensler (Credit: SEC)

“House Intelligence Committee testimony identified Gary Gensler as having final approval for funding discredited dossier.

Gary Gensler, President Joe Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commissioner, had final approval authority for the Hillary Clinton campaign’s payments for the discredited Steele dossier, according to congressional testimony that is adding to concerns about conflicts of interest as the SEC investigates Donald Trump’s social media firm’s merger request.

Questions surfaced last month about the SEC’s probe of Trump’s Truth Social when RealClearInvestigations journalist Paul Sperry reported that Gensler, as SEC chairman, previously served as the Hillary Clinton campaign’s chief financial officer.

Melissa Hodgman-Strzok (Credit: The Daily Mail)

In addition, Sperry reported that SEC Associate Director of Enforcement Melissa Hodgman was married to Peter Strzok, the FBI agent who led the much-criticized Russia collusion probe and was fired in 2018 for anti-Trump texts on his official bureau phone.

The SEC declined to comment when Just the News inquired about Sperry’s report, the role if any, that Gensler and Hodgman are playing in the Truth Social investigation or whether the two SEC executives offered to recuse themselves from the inquiry.

In addition to the connections to Trump, Truth Social is run by former House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, who played a key role in exposing Strzok’s conduct during the Russia probe, the Clinton campaign’s connections to the Steele dossier, the inaccuracies of the dossier and the FBI’s reliance on the former British spy Christopher Steele to obtain FISA warrants targeting the Trump campaign and adviser Carter Page.

In the end, Nunes’ probe exposed that the FBI ultimately determined that most of the allegations Steele placed in the dossier and shared with the agents were disproven, uncorroborated or meaningless Internet rumor and that the FBI misled the court about the reliability of the information.” (Read more JusttheNews, 9/12/2022)  (Archive)

THREAD: Trump’s brief in opposition to the Motion for Stay helps frame what I see as THE key question. (Assuming there was no obstruction, which given DOJ’s leaks I think is far assumption.) 1/

— Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) September 12, 2022

3/ Presidential Records are specifically defined as follows and excludes BOTH “personal records” AND “official records of an agency.” pic.twitter.com/MOmAbxgUIH

— Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) September 12, 2022

5/ So, here’s the interesting part from today’s filing: Trump’s team argues all of the records at issue are EITHER Presidential records or personal records. But why isn’t it possible that instead they are “federal records?” Well, they can’t be logically because they would be pic.twitter.com/twqlWA2uQO

— Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) September 12, 2022

7/ The question I’ve said was key from day one was were these “copies”–they must have been unless they were Presidential or personal records. So, while at first I thought “umm, no, they could be federal records,” is wrong: The question is are they Presidential or personal.

— Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) September 12, 2022

9/9 there was no crime, so they had to create one. (And this discussion assumes some were still classified).

— Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) September 12, 2022

The purposes of making Danchenko a CHS should be quite clear. The Crossfire Hurricane investigation was plagued with problems from the outset. The reasons for opening the investigation were bunk. Those problems continued as the investigation went on, with claims of Trump/Russia collusion proven unverified or outright false. (Thus the targeting of Flynn for a Logan Act violation.)

That developed into the Carter Page FISA applications, first submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) in October 2016, and which relied substantially on the Steele Dossiers (aka Steele Reports). The FISA applications were renewed three times – more on that later. Each application had its own problems, from FBI lawyers lying about Carter Page to the Court being generally misled.

Realizing its own misconduct, the FBI made Danchenko a paid CHS in March 2017 – just before the third FISA warrant was submitted in April 2017. This would allow Comey’s FBI to work directly with Danchenko in support of its counter-intelligence investigation against President Trump.

Danchenko being a CHS also served another purpose: it protected the Bureau and the Mueller Special Counsel from revealing their “sources and methods.” How do you hide misconduct? Bury the witness.

The Motion in Limine

When the Steele Reports were released, the media picked up on the most salacious rumors, one that was utterly unbelievable: that Russian intelligence had a video of Trump involved with prostitutes at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Also known as the “pee tape.”

The allegation came from Danchenko, who attributed it to his sources – one from the Ritz-Carlton, and another being Sergei Millian. Durham will refute it, as it expects to call at trial “Bernd Kuhlen,” the then-general manager of the Ritz-Carlton, who will deny speaking with or ever meeting Danchenko “in June 2016, or at any time.”

What is Durham’s theory on Danchenko’s motive for lying about the Ritz-Carlton allegations? Because it reflects “a deliberate effort to conceal from the FBI Charles Dolan’s role as a source for the Steele Reports and to deceive the FBI regarding Millian’s role (or lack thereof).”

In support of the theory that Danchenko engaged in an “over-arching ‘plan’ to deceive the FBI” about his work for Orbis (the company that collected the information contained in the Steele Reports), Durham also plans to introduce:

Evidence that Danchenko “on multiple occasions communicated and emailed with, among others, Charles Dolan regarding his work for Steele and Orbis.”

“Evidence that proves Dolan was aware of [Danchenko’s] reporting was part of a ‘related project against Trump’ and that this work was being done on behalf of Steele and Orbis.”

(Techno Fog/Substack, 9/133/2022)  (Archive)

Igor Danchenko appears on the Russia-language channel RTVi (U.S.-Israel) in July 2016. (Credit: Twitter/@LikesLurks)

“Today, Special Counsel John Durham moved to unseal this motion in limine in the false statements case against Igor Danchenko.

This motion provides new information on the details of Danchenko’s lies to the FBI, further information on how Special Counsel Mueller ignored Danchenko’s false statements, expected testimony from Clinton-connected executive Charles Dolan, and one crazy development.

But we’ll start with the most damning development: Danchenko was on the FBI payroll as a confidential human source (CHS) from March 2017 through October 2020.

The purposes of making Danchenko a CHS should be quite clear. The Crossfire Hurricane investigation was plagued with problems from the outset. The reasons for opening the investigation were bunk. Those problems continued as the investigation went on, with claims of Trump/Russia collusion proven unverified or outright false. (Thus the targeting of Flynn for a Logan Act violation.)

Those problems continued with the Carter Page FISA applications, first submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) in October 2016, and which relied substantially on the Steele Dossiers (aka Steele Reports). The FISA applications were renewed three times – more on that later. Each application had its own problems, from FBI lawyers lying about Carter Page to the Court being generally misled.

Realizing its own misconduct, the FBI made Danchenko a paid CHS in March 2017 – just before the third FISA warrant was submitted in April 2017. This would allow Comey’s FBI to work directly with Danchenko in support of its counter-intelligence investigation against President Trump. (Read more: Techno Fog/Substack, 9/13/2022)  (Archive)

(…) Then there are Danchenko’s false statements about Charles Dolan, an influential Democrat executive with ties to the Clintons. Interestingly, it was Dolan who was given a tour of the Ritz-Carlton Presidential Suite, which was the supposed location of “Trump’s alleged lurid sexual activities.”

In fact, Dolan is expected to testify at trial. According to Durham:

Charles Dolan (Credit: public domain)

the Government anticipates that Mr. Dolan will testify that (1) it was he and Mr. Kupka who attended a lunch with the Ritz-Carlton general manager and other hotel staff during the June 2016 Moscow trip and that [Danchenko] was not present, and (2) neither Donald Trump nor his purported sexual practices were ever discussed at that lunch. Further, the Government also anticipates that Mr. Dolan will testify that Ritz-Carlton hotel staff did, in fact, provide the aforementioned tour of the presidential suite as part of the June 2016 trip and that, again, Donald Trump and his purported sexual practices were not discussed during that tour.

What is Durham’s theory on Danchenko’s motive for lying about the Ritz-Carlton allegations? Because it reflects “a deliberate effort to conceal from the FBI Charles Dolan’s role as a source for the Steele Reports and to deceive the FBI regarding Millian’s role (or lack thereof).”

In support of the theory that Danchenko engaged in an “over-arching ‘plan’ to deceive the FBI” about his work for Orbis (the company that collected the information contained in the Steele Reports), Durham also plans to introduce:

• Evidence that Danchenko “on multiple occasions communicated and emailed with, among others, Charles Dolan regarding his work for Steele and Orbis.”
• “Evidence that proves Dolan was aware of [Danchenko’s] reporting was part of a ‘related project against Trump’ and that this work was being done on behalf of Steele and Orbis.”

Page 4/Durham Motion/Scribd

(Read more: Techno Fog/Substack, 9/13/2022)  (Archive)

Clippings from pages 30-32/Durham Motion in Limine, 9/13/2022

(L–R) Former FBI agent Peter Strzok; former FBI Director James Comey; and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. (Credit: Getty ;Images/Illustration by Epoch Times)

(…) Perhaps the most stunning disclosure is that Danchenko was given confidential human source (CHS) status by the FBI in March 2017. Notably, this was after Danchenko had disowned the Steele dossier in a January 2017 FBI interview, having admitted that it was based on gossip and rumors. Given the admission, there was no legitimate reason to extend the protections of CHS status to Danchenko, who no longer had any bona fide value to the FBI’s investigation into alleged Trump–Russia collusion.

In fact, the FBI’s investigation ought to have ended as soon as Danchenko disclosed the true provenance of Steele’s reporting.

The FBI’s goal in giving Danchenko the highly coveted CHS status appears to have been to take Danchenko off the grid. As a CHS, Danchenko enjoyed special protections and privileges. Crucially, the FBI was able to use his status to conceal Danchenko and his disclosures from congressional inquiries, such as the investigation by then-Rep. Devin Nunes led by Kash Patel. Other inquiries, such as Freedom of Information Act requests, could similarly be stonewalled by reference to the “sources and methods” justification for concealing the identity, and even the existence, of a CHS.

The FBI had huge incentives to hide Danchenko. Although Danchenko told the FBI several lies in what Durham now describes was an attempt to reconcile what Danchenko had told Steele, the overarching message from Danchenko was that the dossier was untrue. This effectively ended any legitimate inquiry into Trump–Russia collusion. Danchenko’s disavowal also meant that the FBI’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against Trump campaign adviser Carter Page—which were issued based on the Steele dossier—were effectively invalidated.

The FBI had a legal duty to inform the FISA court about Danchenko but failed to do so. In fact, they successfully applied for two further FISA warrants against Page on the basis of the Steele dossier which they knew to be false.

Russian analyst Igor Danchenko is pursued by journalists as he departs the Albert V. Bryan U.S. Courthouse after being arraigned on November 10, 2021 in Alexandria, Virginia. (Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The timing of Danchenko’s elevation to CHS status coincided with two major developments. First, on March 20, 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey told Congress that the Trump campaign was under investigation for alleged ties to Russia. At the time, Comey knew that Danchenko had shredded the investigation’s predicate, yet he chose to forge on regardless. Second, also in March 2017, Nunes found out from a whistleblower in the intelligence community that the Trump transition team had been spied on. Nunes complained that Congress hadn’t been given that information.

As head of the House Intelligence Committee, Nunes immediately ratcheted up his own investigation into the Trump–Russia matter. That investigation would lead to the Nunes memo in February 2018. However, the Nunes memo made no mention of Danchenko or of the fact that he had disavowed the dossier. After the FBI put Danchenko on their CHS payroll, he was completely off the grid and any information about him was withheld from Congress under the “sources and methods” justification.

The FBI’s apparent scheme to bury Danchenko seems to have worked as planned. Neither Nunes nor anyone else knew about Danchenko or his disavowal of the Steele dossier until December 2019, when Justice Department (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz issued his report on the FBI’s FISA abuses. Horowitz didn’t disclose Danchenko’s name and provided very little information other than that Steele had a primary sub-source whose story differed from the one told by Steele himself.

It wasn’t until July 2020 that a group of online sleuths, including myself, were able to extrapolate Danchenko’s name from various data points in Horowitz’s report, as well as from heavily redacted interview notes published by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

With the identification of Danchenko, any remaining credibility of the Steele dossier collapsed. Contrary to the FBI’s claims, Danchenko wasn’t a Russian-based source with access to Kremlin insiders. Instead, he was a Beltway insider who had spent a number of years working at the Democratic-leaning Brookings Institution, where anti-Trump impeachment witness Fiona Hill was his mentor.” (Read more: The Epoch Times, 9/14/2022)  (Archive)

September 23, 2022 – Nunes: Why the FBI Paid Danchenko

A special master has been appointed to act as a firewall between the Justice Department and materials seized during an Aug. 8 raid on former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida.

In a pair of Thursday orders from federal district Judge Aileen Cannon, the DOJ’s motion to access a subset of classified records stored on the Trump property was denied, and a recently retired judge that both the DOJ and Trump’s team agreed on – recently retired Judge Raymond Dearie – will serve as special master.

Pdf source, Highlights via The Last Refuge

Judge Raymond J. Dearie (Credit:

Raymond has until Nov. 30, 2022 to complete his review.

Cannon struck down the DOJ’s request for a partial stay of an earlier motion on accessing the seized materials, after lawyers for the government argued that they should be able to review over 100 classified documents taken during the raid – as they are not covered by any claims of personal property or executive privilege.

That said, Cannon sided with a DOJ request for Trump to pay the full cost associated with a special master.

“If the court were willing to accept the government’s representations that select portions of the seized materials are—without exception—government property not subject to any privileges, and did not think a special master would serve a meaningful purpose, the court would have denied plaintiff’s special master request,” wrote Cannon. “The court does not find it appropriate to accept the government’s conclusions on these important and disputed issues without further review by a neutral third party in an expedited and orderly fashion.” (Zero Hedge, 9/16/2022)   (Archive)

On July 2, 2012, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts appointed Dearie to a seven-year term on the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

(Credit: Wikipedia)

PRIMARY SUBJECTS: Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Twitter, Biden White House, Obama White House, James Baker, Alexander Macgillivray, Vijaya Gadde 

In conjunction with a client who remains confidential, EDIFY developed the nexus schematics featured in this brief that are well-evidenced and identify and connect a slate of important individuals, entities and nations respective to a wide swath of past and ongoing scandals, corruption, crime, treason and bioterrorism.

This brief serves to expand and back-fill the details of the featured graphics while providing meaning with some granularity. At the same time, it informs important ongoing matters and litigation.

The findings develop along six vectors to demonstrate how the entanglements, relationships and overlaps translate to an effective network. The network is positioned to impact important matters like COVID-19 and the Hunter Biden laptop story as just two examples and whereby Twitter’s censorship of both makes Twitter the central node.

The six vectors are: 1-Twitter, its censorship policies and the application and enforcement thereof, 2-Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati [WSGR] an international law firm with over 1,000 attorneys representing many of the world’s largest corporations, as a hub with spokes running to critically-positioned individuals that is suggestive of WSGR as an interface for political control and influence across a wide array of Big Tech and geopolitical domains, 3- Alexander Macgillivray as a WSGR product who serves in the critical position of Principal Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer for the Biden Administration and who served the Obama White House similarly, 4-Vijaya Gadde as a WSGR product who was installed by Macgillivray at Twitter when Macgillivray served as Twitter’s General Counsel and where Gadde went on to suspend President Donald Trump, 5-Former FBI General Counsel James Baker as a common thread through Twitter to President Trump and the FBI/DOJ FISA abuse against Trump and 6-Alison Fauci, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s daughter, as a Twitter engineer and Twitter’s overlap to and potential communication and intelligence conduit for the COVID-19 enterprise fraud construct via Anthony Fauci and his NIH interface.

In the featured nexus schematics, the six vectors above are examined with explanations and SUMMARY FINDINGS to follow:

VECTOR 1: TWITTER: Twitter is the central node and the keystone to understanding. Twitter’s inherent value to the elites, political class and federal apparatus writ large is found in its ability to engage in perception management, which is a technical term more commonly referred to as “psyops” or “psychological warfare”. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Twitter engages in perception management in its capacity to establish and manipulate reality by means of actively determining and shaping the content on its platform. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] Twitter consumers can receive filtered content or are prevented from receiving, seeing or having the ability to publish content altogether. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The de facto censorship occurs primarily along the lines of determining and enforcing community standards, guidelines and rules for user engagement. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] The evidence is clear that the decisions here appear to fall along clearly identifiable political lines resembling two-tier justice. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Content determination, algorithmic manipulation and politically motivated censorship of off-reservation messaging and political opposition are all evidenced examples of how Twitter engages in perception management or appears to do so. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Two evidenced domains of Twitter’s engagement in perception management include censoring content relative to COVID-19 [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] and the Hunter Biden Laptop story. [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21]

Problematic for the critics of Twitter as a politically aligned entity is the patterned evidence of primary subject and other individuals being directly and indirectly tied to other relevant and important individuals and entities in overlapping domains. The complexity is high and so the schematic illustrations are hugely beneficial for understanding.

These nexuses occur such that clear and identifiable alignment to strict political agendas is found on one side of the political spectrum, where censorship is rampant, but not on the other side, where content is essentially unimpeded.

Summarily, evidence and analysis positions Twitter as a gatekeeper of public information.

Evidence of Twitter’s gatekeeper designation is found threaded through Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati as an interface for directly impacting the geopolitical landscape and rising to the level of affecting significant change. [22]

The primary subject from WSGR is Alexander Macgillivray. [22] [23]

VECTOR 2: WILSON SONSINI GOODRICH & ROSATI: WSGR is a an international law firm with over 1,000 attorneys representing many of the world’s largest corporations. WSGR is a primary thread through the network being evidenced that strings directly through to the primary node, Twitter. In that light, WSGR represents Twitter in all corporate disclosures. [24] [25] [26]

In regard to Macgillivray, WSGR also previously employed Vijaya Gadde, who was subsequently installed at Twitter by Macgillivray during his tenure there as General Counsel. [27] Gadde was central to Twitter’s censoring, suspension and banishment of President Donald Trump from the platform. [28]

WSGR’s representation directly overlays COVID-19 in a very critical capacity. WSGR represents Arbutus Biopharma Corp., a Canadian company that is one of two patent holders for U.S. Patent Nos. 8,058,069 and 9,364,435, which are the two patents for the lipid nanoparticle envelope necessary to manufacture the COVID-19 mRNA “vaccines”. [29] [30] [31]

An underlying position holds that the initial phases of the COVID-19 enterprise fraud construct included the unsustainable phase of comorbidity data harvesting where other morbidities [flu/pneumo, heart disease, diabetes and pneumonia] were fraudulently curated and then propagated as COVID-19/SARS-COV-2.

The subsequent “pandemic” phase is one of the vaccinated and boosted. This phase is entirely dependent upon acquiring the patent rights to the mechanism required to deliver the mRNA payload in the injection. The mRNA injections leverage the reverse transcription process causing the recipients’ DNA to become altered to the extent that it causes the body to begin producing the known and problematic S1 spike protein on its own. Evidence indicates that infection and mortality data for COVID-19 currently represents a “pandemic” of the “vaccinated” and boosted. [32] [33] [34] [35]

If vaccine manufactures didn’t acquire rights to WSGR-represented Arbutus’ patents, there could be no “pandemic”, for there would be no delivery mechanism for the required mRNA payload. [36]

With evidence linking COVID-19 directly to China and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, WSGR may further overlay China by its representation of SolarWinds. [37] SolarWinds was directly hacked in a sprawling data breach that caused U.S. lawmakers to designate a national emergency in 2020. China is suspected of the attack and if true, accounts for the overlay. [38] [39] [40] [41]

Relative to the sale of American user Twitter data to Japan’s Tourism Board through NTT Data, a Japanese company; and as it enmeshes Silver Lake Capital, WSGR represents Twitter in its partnership with Silver Lake. [42] [43] [44] [45] [46] [47] [48]

Silver Lake connects to Ari Emanuel and positions Emanuel as a possible intermediary and conduit from the Biden/Obama cartel to the Japan Tourism Board through another possible and connected conduit/intermediary Rahm Emanuel, the current Ambassador to Japan. [49] [50] [51]

Silver Lake is linked to artificial intelligence and facial recognition companies in Sensetime and Shenzhen Sensetime Technology Co. Ltd. including Silver Lake CEO Egon Durban, who is on Twitter’s Board of Directors. Durban is also on the board at WWE, where Ari Emanuel is CEO. Silver Lake has a 20% stake in Sensetime and Shenzhen Sensetime Technology Co. Ltd.

Those companies are CCP functionaries and it is suspected that the Twitter data is being leveraged by them to develop profiles that could be used for China to target American citizens. [52] [53] [54] [55] [56] [57]

VECTOR 3: MACGILLIVRAY: Alexander Macgillivray is the primary subject linking multiple individuals, entities and events including but not limited to WSGR, Twitter, the censorship of President Trump, President Barack Obama, President Joe Biden and the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Google. [23]

WSGR employed attorney Alexander Macgillivray who links Twitter and WSGR to the Obama and Biden Administrations in critical roles, respectively: 1-Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer, Office of Science and Technology Policy [OSTP] and 2-Principal Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer, Office of Science and Technology Policy [OSTP]. [58] [59] [60] [61] [62]

Prior to serving the Obama and Biden White Houses, Macgillivray served as General Counsel to Twitter and Deputy General Counsel to Google. [63] Between the two administrative terms and according to his own blog, Macgillivray installed the CTO at the DNC and worked on election data. [70]

The sequenced thread of Macgillivray from WSGR to Obama to Twitter to Google to Biden is critical to understanding and presents as a launch point for fulsome comprehension of the full network.

Macgillivray currently serves the Biden White House OSTP as the Principal Deputy U.S. CTO. [59]

Established as a primary gatekeeper of public information, Twitter would likely require an interface with the federal government and presidential administration[s] to align Twitter with on-reservation messaging as the evidence suggests. For Twitter, this necessitates content determination, algorithmic manipulation and politically motivated censorship of off-reservation messaging, which have been widely reported. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] Evidence suggests that Macgillivray is a good candidate for that interface through the OSTP in a familiar pattern of Obama retreads serving Biden in the same or similar capacities. It will be further evidenced relative to Nicole Wong below. [64]

As noted, during his tenure as General Counsel for Twitter, Macgillivray installed Vijaya Gadde, who was unprepared and unqualified in her position according to Macillivray’s words. Gadde was central to Twitter’s censorship, suspension and banishment of President Trump from its platform. [65]

When Macgillivray exited Twitter, he only did so on official terms: ““I’ll continue to support the company and its great people by staying on as an advisor for the legal, trust & safety, corporate development and public policy teams,” said Macgillivray. “I continue to care deeply about Twitter, the folks who work at Twitter and our tremendous users, so I’ll remain close to all three.”” [66]

From a ground floor perspective and in her multiple and similar capacities, Chinese-American Nicole Wong appears to have set the course for Macgillivray’s trajectory. [67] Wong’s trajectory cycled her through Twitter, Google and the Obama and Biden administrations. [68] Wong served the Biden transition team as overlaid by the CTSO/CTO vectors. Wong joined Biden’s transition Agency Review Team to support transition efforts related to the National Security Council and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. [69]

Specifically, it is held that Wong likely returned to facilitate Macgillivray’s transition into the Principal Deputy U.S. CTO position for the Biden White House.

The argument that Wong was the “first version” of Macgillivray respective to his roles and functions identified in this report, is further evidenced by Wong’s similar background, to which she returned, respective to the CTSO/CTO vectors as overlaid by the national security domain and the current Biden Administration. It presented as the veteran ushering in the less experienced player, so to speak.

Wong’s professional entanglements also include but aren’t limited to: Perkins Coie LLP [becoming partner], Georgetown University, Berkley School of Law and the Stonebridge Albright Group. [68]

Macgillivray maintains a personal blog with many of his thoughts and opinions that are topical to matters here. [70]

VECTOR 4: GADDE: Vijaya Gadde is a primary subject, who is secondary to Macgillivray and who was installed as Twitter’s General Counsel by Macgillivray when the latter departed the company. [27] Vadde is generally regarded as unqualified and unprepared for her position respective to the scope of its duties and this made Gadde susceptible to manipulation by those surrounding her. [66] This is according to Macgillivray. [65] It occurs along the lines of Gadde appearing to be reliant on information and input from said others to fully execute her duties.

Consider, “Though Gadde doesn’t have the same bonafides as Macgillivray when it comes to first amendment stuff, she is apparently regarded well in the company and at her former firm.

In addition, from what we’ve heard, Twitter will be doing some shuffling of the legal structure as well. Its director of public policy Colin Crowell will no longer report to the General Counsel, but will report directly to CEO Dick Costolo on matters affecting Twitter and Washington.” [65]

In his Twitter departure, Macgillivray stated directly that he would continue to advise Gadde’s department lending to Macgillivray appearing as a prime interface for such manipulation of Gadde to occur. [66]

Gadde was formerly employed by WSGR like Macgillivray. [71]

Gadde was the primary subject who in the capacity of General Counsel for Twitter was central to the censorship, suspension and banishment of President Trump from Twitter’s platform altogether while likely under the influence of others, such as possibly Macgillivray. [72] [73] [74] [75]

VECTOR 5: BAKER: Former FBI General Counsel James Baker is a primary subject that threads top to bottom in varying capacities and overlaps. [76] [77] [78] Of particular interest to the matters here are his affiliation with the orchestrated and widely reported broader attacks on President Trump and Baker’s array of expertise relative to his affiliation with Twitter as Deputy General Counsel and Vice President Legal. [79]

Baker’s Twitter capacity is of particular interest relative to the broader attacks against President Trump, his supporters and specifically as it relates to First Amendment rights and the censorship of conservative content favorable to Trump and unfavorable to Democrats and Democratic candidates like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Such instances are widely reported.

Baker’s acumen in law is compounded by his ties to the FBI, DOJ and Judiciary relative to Twitter and it is problematic here. Baker is uniquely positioned to be plausibly informative about potential DOJ investigations into Twitter for violations. Baker is uniquely positioned in alignment with a long list of individuals and entities that overlap in critical areas. It’s all reinforced by Baker’s spectrum of expertise: FISA, national security, intelligence policy, intelligence matters, counter intelligence matters, law enforcement, prosecution, investigation and more. [80] [81]

The initial DOJ/FBI investigation into President Trump diverged into numerous other contrived, orchestrated, planned, manufactured and executed events like rampant FISA abuse, two fraudulently predicated impeachments, the Mueller Special Counsel, the Capitol “insurrection” entrapment operation, a fraudulent pandemic and stolen 2020 election. These, too, have been widely reported.

Baker was appointed by then FBI Director James Comey, who is known as a long time Clinton confidant and fixer. Comey is intricately linked to the 2016 election and then candidate Hillary Clinton by means of the FBI’s decision not to pursue charges against Clinton for her private and unsecured email server.

The origins of the targeting of and abuses against Trump derived from Clinton’s false allegations that Trump and Russia were conspiring due to Trump’s association with Alfa Bank. [81] The ties further extend to the FISA warrant against Carter Page and so on as is well documented and reported by many. [82] [83]

Baker’s exposure overlaps cause him to be a primary thread. Beyond what is already outlined above, Baker is attached to Special Counsel John Durham by means of his involvement and testimony in the Michael Sussmann trial and the broader matters pertaining to it. [84] Also, Baker is the target of a federal investigation for leaking. [85]

Baker’s FBI and intelligence/counterintelligence experience should have made him an expert in China and yet China appeared to operate undeterred under the bureau’s nose and continues to do so.

Moreover, Baker’s position and qualifications should have positioned him to be privy to the actions of ex officio members of the HPSCI and SSCI respective to China, which would further extend to COVID-19. This would include subjects such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, then Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and then Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell.

Baker’s prominent threading through to the Obama Administration, FBI and DOJ respective to his ties to Twitter, make him a candidate central to both Twitter [ongoing litigation] and the intelligence and FISA abuses against Trump.

It’s important to recall that the DOJ/FBI investigation of Candidate/President Trump initially began as an FBI COUNTERINTELLIGENCE INVESTIGATION with a lower predicating evidentiary standard than a criminal investigation. This allowed the FBI/DOJ to circumvent Trump’s full 4th Amendment protections. The Mueller/Weissmann Special Counsel team therefore appeared to inherit the Trump counterintelligence investigation and then convert into a criminal investigation.

VECTOR 6: FAUCI: The involvement of Dr. Anthony Fauci respective to COVID-19 is assumed moving forward and as resting on substantial existing evidence. Moreover, this document includes limited evidence respective to funding and as outlined.

In part, it is evidenced by the flow of federal dollars from the NIH/NIAID to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The intermediary for the transaction, which pertained to the funding of the bioengineering of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, was Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance. [86] [87]

The entire Fauci onion peels back in layers suitable for a volume of books and is to substantial and complex for this space. It is also already fully documented by this investigator in an underlying catalog of analysis and work. The assumptions made on Fauci here allow us to remain focused. Lastly, they are made along the lines of COVID-19 being entirely a construct of enterprise fraud and where Anthony Fauci is a primary subject and realistic candidate as a primary criminal defendant.

Anthony Fauci’s daughter, Alison Fauci, is of particular interest to these matters respective to her hiring as an engineer at Twitter. [88] This is suggestive of Alison Fauci potentially serving as a conduit between Twitter, its leadership and censorship practices, and the federal medical apparatus framed by HHS, NIH, NIAID, CDC, et al.

According to recent whistleblower testimony from Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, whom Twitter hired in November 2020 to enhance cybersecurity and privacy at the company, testified that Twitter engineers have essentially unfettered and virtually anonymous access permitted by weakness in oversight and security allowing them to access personal and private data from user accounts. [89] It does this to the extent that it could permit the extraction and sale of that data without notice to Twitter as permitted by the oversight and security weaknesses.

Zatko also testified that the FBI had previously warned Twitter that it had one or more foreign intelligence operatives on its payroll. Evidence indicates penetration of Twitter by India and China. [89]

Alison Fauci is a Twitter software engineer who by title, would possess the technical capabilities and access to function as outlined in the testimony.

Beyond Alison Fauci’s functionality as a conduit or intermediary for Dr. Anthony Fauci and his principals at the NIH/NIAID and up, Alison Fauci is by title technically positioned to potentially extract private Twitter user data on designated people including political opposition. Any such extracted data could be fed back upstream to the Obama, Biden cartel et al.

It’s also further evidence of a distinct pattern of nepotism threading through all of these matters where spouses and children play critical roles determined by their placement into the broader construct.

Alison Fauci was positioned to be a possible conduit of information in an intermediary fashion relative to the Anthony Fauci cohort and its preferences for Twitter’s censorship policies for reliable COVID content damaging to the COVID construct of enterprise fraud and that official narrative.

SUMMARY FINDINGS:

The six vectors provide a plausible and evidenced network as diagrammed schematically and expanded upon in this report. The evidence examined and analysis of it inform the SUMMARY FINDINGS ranging from evidenced fact to positions of a high level of confidence:

Twitter is a recognizable and identifiable as a gatekeeper of public information
Twitter operates in alignment with a strict political agenda
Twitter’s agenda alignment appears along the lines of progressive liberal and Democrat thought and policy
Twitter’s collective actions technically rise to the level of engagement in perception management
Twitter engagement in perception management includes content determination, algorithmic manipulation and apparent active censorship against off-reservation messaging [conservative content favorable to Trump] WSGR represents Twitter in all of its corporate disclosures making WSGR integral to all things
WSGR partner Larry Sonsini is regarded as the “Godfather of Silicon Valley” [90] WSGR employed Alexander Macgillivray, another Harvard Law product, who went on to become an apparent architect for censorship practices while serving that capacity in the Obama and Biden White Houses
WSGR has critical ties to factually inconvenient individuals and entities such as Arbutus, Moderna and the mRNA vaccines vis-a-vis Arbutus’ patent holdings on the lipid nanoparticle envelope
WSGR is involved in ongoing litigation respective to the previous point
WSGR is indirectly positioned to intersect two presidential administrations in a capacity to target a third: Obama and Biden; targeting Trump
WSGR presents as an international firm capable of directly impacting the U.S. geopolitical landscape and media content on social media platforms
Macgillivray is the primary subject threading WSGR to the Obama and Biden Administrations and Twitter according to evidence
Macgillivray’s affiliations with/as WSGR, Twitter, Harvard Law, OSTP, U.S. CTO, Google and Vijaya Gadde are problematic
Macgillivray’s highly partisan and biased positions manifesting as anti-Trump are detailed by his own admission in his own blog
Macgillivray installed another WSGR asset in Vijaya Gadde to succeed him as General Counsel
Gadde was born in India and immigrated to the U.S. at three years of age
Vijaya Gadde was unqualified and was subject to influence by others including Macgillivray in his unofficial capacity, so as to rely upon them to fully execute her duties as Twitter’s General Counsel
As such, Vijaya Gadde was central to the censorship, suspension and banishment altogether from Twitter’s platform
Gadde was central to Twitter’s censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story
Through NTT Data, Twitter sold American user data to Japan’s Tourism Board
Long-time Barack Obama confidant Rahm Emanuel is the Ambassador to Japan
Emanuel’s brother Ari Emanuel is another Obama confidant who attaches to Silver Lake Capital
Silver Lake Capital ties to Twitter and links Twitter, Obama and both Emanuel brothers through Ari Emanuel
Silver Lake Capital ties to Chinese company Sensetime, which specializes in artificial intelligence
Egon Durban, on WWE’s board where Ari Emanuel is CEO, presents a likely bridge to full circle respective to China’s acquisition of American Twitter user data
Durban bridge consists of his 20% stake in Sensetime and Shenzhen Sensetime Technology Co. Ltd and his membership on Twitter’s Board of Directors
WSGR represents Twitter in its partnership with Silver Lake
Sensetime is affiliated with the Chinese Military Industrial Complex and the nation of China/CCP
SenseTime owns Shenzhen Sensetime Technology Co., Ltd., which specializes in Facial Recognition Techology
Shenzhen Sensetime Technology Co., Ltd. appears on the U.S. Treasury Department’s “Consolidated Sanctions List” and through ownership ties to the Chinese Military Industrial Complex and the nation of China/CCP
Twitter’s American user data sale to Japan/NTT is believed to have been funneled to China, the CCP and the Chinese Military Industrial Complex through the evidenced conduit network [as diagrammed] Twitter also appears to have actively leveraged parts or all of the same network to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story
The HB laptop suppression derived from the same CTSO that employed Macgillivray under Obama and employs Macgillivray now under Biden
Evidence indicates that political leadership, the intelligence community and the FBI/DOJ engaged in suppressing the HB laptop story
Megan Smith served in CTSO alongside Macgillivray in the same general capacity
CTSO overlaps Deputy U.S. CTO Nicole Wong
Wong was the legal director at Twitter and vice president and Deputy General Counsel at Google
Wong served Biden’s transition Agency Review Team to support transition efforts related to the National Security Council and the Office of Science and Technology Policy
Wong’s trajectory cycled through Twitter, Google and the Obama and Biden administrations to include Wong’s service as on the Biden transition team as overlaid by the CTSO/CTO vectors
Wong presents as the ground floor first version of the trajectory Macgillivray took indicating Wong seems to have pioneered that course for Macgillivray
Wong appears to return to the CTSO/CTO domain via her Biden transition role to facilitate the smooth and effective transition of Macgillivray into his new role as Principal Deputy General of the U.S. CTO
Wong is a fourth-generation Chinese-American born in the U.S.
Wong’s grandfather was Vice President of one of the nations first Chinese community banks threading through to the banking industry and by default the CCP and Chinese Banking
Megan Smith served in CTSO alongside Macgillivray in the same general capacity [91] [92] Smith’s ex-spouse is journalist Kara Swisher who writes for outlets including the New York Times [the mouthpiece for the FBI/DOJ with Washington Post serving the same for the intelligence community] [93] Swisher publicly defended Twitter’s censorship of Trump respective to the Capitol event [94] Swisher’s insistence that Twitter doesn’t censor envelops Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story
Swisher publicly admitted her bias against Trump and a “broader responsibility” to take action on it in a Vox interview
Swisher’s public admission came during an interview that included Wong [95] WSGR and Macgillivray thread through Gadde and Smith right to Wong and Swisher as Smith’s ex-spouse
Macgillivray becomes a primary interface between Obama and Biden respective to CTSO’s scope
Central to Obama is James Baker as a career FBI employee who ascended to General Counsel
Baker’s expertise in FISA, national security, intelligence policy and intelligence matters, counterintelligence respective to the initial DOJ/FBI investigation of President Trump opening as a counterintelligence investigation later laundered into a criminal one by the Mueller/Weissmann special counsel is critical to the broader attacks on Trump, which manifested on Twitter
Baker aggravates Twitter’s culpability in these matters with his service to Twitter as Deputy General Counsel and Vice President of Legal
The aggravation is, in part, evidenced by the genesis of the Trump/Russia collusion fabrication deriving from Hillary Clinton, as approved by Obama according to John Brennan’s own notes in July 2016
The FBI/DOJ leveraged Clinton’s fraudulently stated and Obama-approved allegations to predicate an investigation into President Trump that included FISA abuse, which threads through to the U.S. Supreme Court
Baker was appointed as FBI General Counsel by long-time Clinton confidant and fixer FBI Director James Comey
Comey ties directly to the 2016 election in his decision for the FBI not to prosecute Clinton for her private email server, which China presumably accessed for top secret U.S. intelligence and SAPs
Baker is the subject of a federal criminal leak investigation
Baker was compelled to testify in the John Durham Special Counsel trial of Michael Sussmann
Baker stands to factor into the Durham trial for Russian Igor Daschenko
The network evidenced in this report indicates that an Obama-based network extending into the Biden White House has technically been engaged in perception management by leveraging Twitter as an asset
The network and its asset Twitter appeared to function as a gateway to public information leveraged to target Trump and conservatives in stifling their free speech and censoring their content while advancing the same for the other side of the political spectrum

(Source links included on Edify page)

(Read more: Edify Research and Consulting, 9/15/2022) (Archive)

(Republished with permission)

Judge Raymond Dearie (Credit: public domain)

“The district court has entered an unprecedented order enjoining the Executive Branch’s use of its own highly classified records in a criminal investigation with direct implications for national security,” the Justice Department wrote in its motion Friday.

Judge Aileen Cannon on Thursday appointed former FISA Judge Raymond Dearie to oversee the review of the documents taken by the DOJ-FBI during the Mar-a-Lago raid.

The Trump legal team and AG Merrick Garland and the corrupt DOJ came to an agreement earlier in the week on a potential candidate to serve as the special master in the Mar-a-Lago case.

Judge Raymond Dearie was one of the FISA judges who signed the warrant to spy on Carter Page without cause. (Read more: The Gateway Pundit, 9/16/2022)  (Archive)

#MaraLago Declassified records indicate Judge Dearie, potential Special Master, approved final FISA June 2017 for @carterwpage. NOTE: This FISA is among most problematic because it did not share intel about Page’s work for USG + failed to disclose key concerns Steele reporting. pic.twitter.com/Zm6JD56Xi2

— Catherine Herridge (@CBS_Herridge) September 14, 2022

So rich coming from this creature… https://t.co/lZ45pW4VBV

— Ultra Clinton Timelines (@clintonpay2play) September 17, 2022

“The “Good Information Foundation” – a project led by a top Obama aide – appears to have been caught offering social media influencers money to post false claims about President Donald Trump and January 6th on the Chinese Communist-owned platform TikTok. The attempted election disinformation campaign including outright falsehoods about the Trump campaign “paying millions” for the 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

A video posted to the CCP-linked TikTok by legal influencer Preston Moore reveals the foundation’s efforts to spread disinformation about the events that transpired on January 6th, in addition to the planning and aftermath.

The group behind the nefarious, CCP-linked effort is run by former Time magazine editor, Obama White House staffer, and current MSNBC contributor Rick Stengel, who is on the record praising U.S. propaganda efforts.

#Breaking “Good Info Foundation” appears to be offering money to Viral Tiktok Lawyer to spread anti-Trump propaganda. @stengel FMR Obama SOS for Public Affairs 13-16 appears to be involved with the “Good Info Foundation” unclear if either are involved in the propaganda campaign pic.twitter.com/beeqiB0RuZ

— UM News (@UltraMagaNews) September 17, 2022

A representative from the Good Information Foundation reached out to Moore, who has over 80,000 followers, seeking a paid collaboration on a TikTok video about January 6th. In exchange for $400, Moore would provide a 15 to 60 second video, where he’d be required to use certain terminology when referring to Trump and the events of January 6th.

(…) The Good Information Foundation is a project led by Rick Stengel, the chief executive of the National Constitution Center from 2004 to 2006 and President Obama’s Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs from 2014 to 2016.

“Stengel is an on-air analyst at MSNBC, a strategic advisor at Snap Inc., and a Distinguished Fellow at the Atlantic Council. His 2019 book, Information Wars: How we Lost the Battle Against Disinformation and What to Do About It, recounts his time in the State Department countering Russian disinformation and ISIS propaganda,” explains his bio on the foundation’s website. (Read more: The National Pulse, 9/18/2022) (Archive)

“Former President Bill Clinton said Sunday on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” that Republicans used scare tactics to win elections.

Zakaria asked, “When you look at the midterms, do you think because of abortion and the passage of a few very important bills, could Biden break the historical pattern of the, you know, midterms going badly?”

Clinton said, “Absolutely. We could hold both these houses, but we have to say the right things. And we have to note the Republicans always close well. Why? Because they find some new way to scare the living daylights out of swing voters about something.”

He continued, “That’s what they did in 2021 — where they made Critical Race Theory sound worse than smallpox. And it wasn’t being taught in any public schools in America. But they didn’t care. They just scare people.”

Clinton added, “You still have to get those people. It’s just that there’s so many fewer because as the parties have gone more ideological and clear and somehow psychically intolerant, they pull more and more people toward the extremes. But there’s still some people hanging on there who are really trying to think and trying to understand what’s going on.”

(Breitbart, 9/19/2022)  (Archive)

(Timeline editor’s note: It’s always the opposite with these gangsters.)

“In this lengthy interview with John Ratcliffe and Maria Bartiromo, the former Director of National Intelligence, the man who has likely seen every document that may have eventually ended up in Mar-a-Lago, is challenging the nature of the classified status of those documents. Ratcliffe does not believe the Mar-a-Lago documents are true national security documents, but rather documents that outline fraudulent ‘sources and methods used by the DOJ/FBI in their Trump targeting operation.

Keep in mind that as the DNI during 2020, Ratcliffe saw the documents that eventually became the material President Trump declassified and left with the DOJ to release after the Durham investigation was complete. If Ratcliffe’s suspicions are correct, and there is a more valid reason to support his suspicions than oppose them, then the entire construct of the DOJ-NSD operation to retrieve those documents from Mar-a-Lago is factually one big cover-up operation.

Ratcliffe suspects the documents are essentially the DOJ and FBI work products, including interviews with ‘sources’ like Igor Danchenko, from their fabricated case against President Trump. If accurate, the objective of the DOJ/FBI would be to avoid sunlight on their political targeting operation. This viewpoint makes sense when you consider the DOJ/FBI position that no one should ever be allowed to look at those documents, including the appointed Special Master in the case, Judge Raymond Dearie. WATCH:

(Conservative Treehouse, 9/19/2022)  (Archive)

(…) The whistleblower says the FBI is creating a false narrative by reclassifying Jan. 6 cases as separate instances of “domestic terrorism.”

Via the House Judiciary GOP:

The FBI whistleblower described how a “manipulative” practice by the FBI overstates the “domestic violent extremism” (DVE) threat nationwide by categorizing Jan 6-related cases as originating in field offices around the country rather than “stemming from a single, black swan incident” in Washington, D.C.

#BREAKING: New whistleblower information reveals that the FBI is moving agents off of child sexual abuse investigations to instead pursue political investigations.

The whistleblower recounted being told that “child sexual abuse investigations were no longer an FBI priority.” pic.twitter.com/EBXrnVWhO6

— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) September 20, 2022

(…) On Wednesday Miranda Devine revealed the name of the latest FBI whistleblower – Steve Friend – who exposed the FBI’s disgusting lies on tracking domestic right-wing terrorism.

Steve Friend is a SWAT Team member who has been with the FBI for 12 years. He is married and has two small children. According to Miranda Devine,

“He just could not live with his conscience after he was dragged off these very important child porn, child exploitation, and human trafficking investigations he was working on, and put on the very bogus January 6 cases he has been working on… He could see from the ground how the FBI Washington DC Field Office was manipulating these cases to try and expand and pretend the problem was bigger than it was. And he also didn’t want to participate in SWAT raids on people who were being accused of misdemeanors at worst… Steve Friend stood up and said, ‘I will not do this.’”

Tucker’s report about Steve Friend begins at 20:15:

(Read more: Gateway Pundit, 9/21/2022)  (Archive)

Steve Friend was suspended, stripped of his gun and badge, and escorted out of the FBI field office after complaining about the violations.

(…) In his whistleblower complaint to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, obtained by The Post, Friend lays out multiple violations of FBI policy involving J6 investigations in which he was involved.

He says he was removed from active investigations into child sexual exploitation and human trafficking to work on J6 cases sent from DC. He was told “domestic terrorism was a higher priority” than child pornography. As a result, he believes his child exploitation investigations were harmed.

He also has reported his concerns about a politicized FBI to Republican members of Congress, among 20 whistleblowers from the bureau who have come forward with similar complaints.

Among Friend’s allegations:

• 

  Friend served as a SWAT team member. (Credit: Anna Friend)

  The Washington, DC, field office is “manipulating” FBI case management protocol and farming out J6 cases to field offices across the country to create the false impression that right-wing domestic violence is a widespread national problem that goes far beyond the “black swan” event of Jan. 6, 2021.

• As a result, he was listed as lead agent in cases he had not investigated and which his supervisor had not signed off on, in violation of FBI policy.
•  FBI domestic terrorism cases are being opened on innocent American citizens who were nowhere near the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, based on anonymous tips to an FBI hotline or from Facebook spying on their messages. These tips are turned into investigative tools called “guardians,” after the FBI software that collates them.
•  The FBI has post-facto designated a grassy area outside the Capitol as a restricted zone, when it was not restricted on Jan. 6, 2021, in order to widen the net of prosecutions.
•  The FBI intends to prosecute everyone even peripherally associated with J6 and another wave of J6 subjects are about to be referred to the FBI’s Daytona Beach resident agency “for investigation and arrest.”
•  The Jacksonville area was “inundated” with “guardian” notifications and FBI agents were dispatched to conduct surveillance and knock on people’s doors, including people who had not been in Washington, DC, on Jan. 6, 2021, or who had been to the Trump rally that day but did not go ­inside the Capitol.

Friend says he was punished after complaining to his bosses about being dragged into J6 investigations that were “violating citizens’ Sixth Amendment rights due to overzealous charging by the DOJ and biased jury pools in Washington, DC.”

His top-secret security clearance was suspended last week because he “entered FBI space [his office] and downloaded documents from FBI computer systems [an employee handbook and guidelines for employee disciplinary procedures] to an unauthorized removable flash drive.” (Read more: New York Post, 9/22/2022)  (Archive)

Trump’s lawyers filed a motion asking a judge to reject the DOJ’s request in the case. (Credit: CNN/FOX NEWS/POOL/WPTV/ABC/BILL HENNESSY

“In a stark repudiation of Donald Trump’s legal arguments, a federal appeals court on Wednesday permitted the Justice Department to resume its use of classified records seized from the former president’s Florida estate as part of its ongoing criminal investigation.

Trump appointed Judge Britt Grant votes to lift the hold on Mar-a-Lago documents.

Trump appointed Judge Andrew Brasher votes to lift the hold on Mar-a-Lago documents.

The ruling from a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit amounts to an overwhelming victory for the Justice Department, clearing the way for investigators to continue scrutinizing the documents as they evaluate whether to bring criminal charges over the storage of top-secret records at Mar-a-Lago after Trump left the White House.

The court also pointedly noted that Trump had presented no evidence that he had declassified the sensitive records, as he has repeatedly maintained, and rejected the possibility that Trump could have an “individual interest in or need for” the roughly 100 documents marked as classified.

The government had argued that its investigation had been impeded by an order from U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon that temporarily barred investigators from continuing to use the documents in its probe. Cannon, a Trump appointee, had said the hold would remain in place pending a separate review by an independent arbiter she had appointed at the Trump team’s request.

The appeals panel agreed with the Justice Department’s concerns.

(…) Trump’s lawyers had argued that an independent review of the records was essential given the unprecedented nature of the investigation. The lawyers have also said the department had not yet proven that the seized documents were classified, though they have notably stopped short of asserting — as Trump repeatedly has — that the records were previously declassified.

The Trump team this week resisted providing Dearie with any information to support the idea that the records might have been declassified, signaling the issue could be part of their defense in the event of an indictment.

But the appeals court appeared to scoff at that argument.

“Plaintiff suggests that he may have declassified these documents when he was President. But the record contains no evidence that any of these records were declassified,” they wrote. “In any event, at least for these purposes, the declassification argument is a red herring because declassifying an official document would not change its content or render it personal.” (Read more: WABI5)  (Archive)

(…) Memos obtained by Just the News from the Hudson West III LLC partnership that presidential son Hunter Biden operated with a prominent Chinese business executive named Gongwen Dong show the Biden family pursued at least 21 major deals in 2017 and 2018 for Chinese interests seeking U.S. energy assets, including liquified natural gas export terminals, LNG trade deals, drilling exploration firms, pipelines and other key energy assets.

Many of the deals targeted assets in the oil-rich Gulf Coast, including Louisiana, and aimed to help an energy-hungry China gain access to U.S. oil and gas, according to a summary memo of the 21 deals. Just the News found the memo on a Hunter Biden laptop turned over to the FBI in 2019 and corroborated its authenticity with a Biden business associate directly familiar with the deals and memos.

“Discussed both oil and LNG trading/exporting opportunities,” one memo sent to Hunter Biden read. “Our team was more interested in pursuing the LNG spread trading opportunities, due to the timing of upcoming winter peak usage season and the spiking natural gas price in China.”

That LNG deal and others like it never went forward, but Hunter Biden’s team chose to pivot in 2018 to other oil and gas deals, ranging from pipelines to drilling assets, the memo shows.

“Explore U.S. natural gas industry midstream investment opportunities (including natural gas pipeline projects with international and U.S.-based financial institutions),” the memo recommended as one of the 2018 opportunities.

Another goal, the memo stated: “Explore potential investment opportunities in the petrochemical and energy production space.”

The Hudson West III opportunities memo stated it was seeking to acquire interests in some drilling and exploration companies, like Noble Energy’s parent firm, that had fallen on hard times when oil and gas prices plummeted during the Trump administration. “Explore potential investment opportunity in distressed international energy company affiliates (for example, the Noble Group and affiliates),” the memo read.

The Hunter Biden-connected firm also dabbled with the notion of getting better prices by targeting minority-owned energy firms that got preferential treatment in some markets.  The “model involves the support and nurturing of minority business and commodity brokers” and the benefit would be to “gain further discount and better service terms from its oil major partners,” the strategy memo stated.

According to evidence released by Republican Sens. Charles Grassley and Ron Johnson and Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), Hudson West III’s goal was to find deals to benefit its primary partner in Beijing, CEFC, the Chinese energy giant led by Chinese businessman Ye Jianming, whom Hunter Biden met back in 2015. (Read more: Just the News, 9/22/2022)  (Archive)

(…) But there’s more… Representative Comer says he has two new whistleblowers that [who] worked with Hunter and [they] are ready to expose it all when the Republicans take control of Congress.

Rep. James Comer: I have two whistleblowers. And I am confident they are going to come through in a Republican majority when I conduct the hearings and I have the gavel for oversight. To tell us in detail what their objectives were. And these people were associated with Hunter Biden. And the ultimate goal and the Bidens knew it was for China to start taking ownership in all the different parts in the natural gas industry in the United States… They actually take control of the drillers.

(Gateway Pundit, 9/22/2022)  (Archive)

“An FBI whistleblower recently came forward to warn about the politicization at the FBI, saying that the bureau is spying on law-abiding Americans and that many of its domestic counterterrorism cases are tantamount to “entrapment.”

Kyle Seraphin, who has spent six years in the FBI, was suspended without pay and can’t seek another job without quitting or asking for permission.

“The number of guys who say, ‘I don’t agree with what’s going on here, but I’ve got three years to retire,’ it’s heartbreaking,” he told podcast host Dan Bongino in a Sept. 22 interview.

In one instance, Seraphin said he was forced to blow the whistle last year when Attorney General Merrick Garland told lawmakers that the Department of Justice wasn’t targeting parents. He first provided a member of Congress with an email that was circulated within the FBI that stated Garland ordered the usage of the PATRIOT Act against protesting parents with a tag, “EDUOFFICIALS.”

At the time, in May, Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Mike Johnson (R-La.) asserted that the investigations involved parents who were “upset about mask mandates and state elected officials who publicly voiced opposition to vaccine mandates,” while accusing Garland of making false statements to Congress.

But of that investigation, Seraphin suggested the FBI is targeting individuals for political purposes.

“That’s when you become part of political hatchet jobs, and I didn’t sign up for that, and nobody I know signed up for that either,” he told Bongino. “That’s not what people want to get involved in.” (Read more: The Epoch Times, 9/25/2022)  (Archive)

“The special master handling the Mar-a-Lago raid has given former President Donald Trump a short deadline to provide details that would bolster his claims about documents the FBI seized, a day after the Justice Department scored an appeals court win.

Judge Raymond Dearie, who was appointed special master by Judge Aileen Cannon, gave Trump’s team until Sept. 30 to submit a declaration on a number of key issues, including what appeared to be a reference to suggestions by Trump allies that some of the evidence the FBI said it had seized was somehow planted. Dearie asked Trump’s lawyers on Thursday to provide an affidavit on “a list of any specific items set forth in the Detailed Property Inventory that [Trump] asserts were not seized from the Premises on August 8, 2022.”

Dearie also told Trump’s team to list any specific items that the former president believes were described incorrectly in the FBI’s inventory list or that he believes were located somewhere different in Mar-a-Lago than where the bureau says the item was collected. The special master also asked Trump to provide a detailed list of any items that he believes were seized by the FBI but weren’t listed in the property inventory.

“This submission shall be [Trump’s] final opportunity to raise any factual dispute as to the completeness and accuracy of the Detailed Property Inventory,” the special master said.” (Read more: Washington Examiner, 9/22/2022)  (Archive)

Appearing on CBS Face the Nation today, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan proudly boasted of the $15 billion in weapons the U.S. has shipped into Ukraine while restating the official position of the Biden administration that the U.S. will never permit Russia to hold the eastern part of our proxy state.

Ukraine is to the United States as North Korea is to China. WATCH:

(Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 9/25/2022)  (Archive) (Transcript)

“Republican Rep. James Comer of Kentucky called new revelations about Hunter Biden a “national security nightmare” during a Monday evening Fox News appearance.

“Have you ever wanted to see a spy movie? You don’t even have to go to the theaters. Go to Washington, D.C., where Chinese spies just bait and hook gullible people in power. Sometimes all it takes is a honey trap. We saw it with Eric Swalwell who got caught sleeping with Fang Fang, the spy who stole his heart,” Fox News host Jesse Watters said in introducing Comer, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight Committee. “Swalwell wasn’t the only person to have a Fang Fang in D.C. Turns out Hunter Biden may have dabbled with a Chinese spy, too. Her name is JiaQi Bao.”

Watters described reports from a whistleblower that Hunter Biden sought to sell natural gas to China in 2017, with Bao reportedly telling him where the Chinese wanted to purchase the gas from.

“Nothing sounds good here. And we have confirmed a lot of what it looks like in the email with one whistleblower who is a former Hunter Biden associate,” Comer told Watters. “And Hunter was trying to negotiate a deal to sell the Chinese natural gas, but what we also learned from the whistleblower was that their ultimate goal, this Chinese company, was to buy an interest in the drillers so they could start getting their foot in the door to start taking over the infrastructure of the American energy industry. So, this is a national security concern.”

“Not only do we have proof that Hunter Biden was directly involved from it, the emails and text messages also show that Hunter was asking for office space and he needed extra keys for both Joe and Jill Biden,” Comer continued. “So this links the president to Hunter Biden’s shady business deal with China. This is just a national security nightmare and it kind of puts into perspective maybe why Joe Biden has made some terrible decisions that have been at the best interest of China at the expense of the American consumer.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 9/26/2022)  (Archive)

Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson (Credit: public domain)

“Republican senators are demanding answers on why the Russian national who served as the sub-source for the debunked anti-Trump dossier was hired by the FBI as a confidential human source and paid with U.S. taxpayer dollars throughout the bureau’s original investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election.

Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., in a letter exclusively obtained by Fox News Digital and sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland, are seeking all FBI and Justice Department records related to government payments to Igor Danchenko, along with the counterintelligence concerns he posed and the bureau’s decision to rely on him as a source.

(…) Despite the FBI paying Danchenko to serve as a confidential human source during the Trump administration—and during Special Counsel, Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election—Danchenko was the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation from 2009 to 2011.

That FBI investigation into Danchenko focused on his contacts with suspected Russian intelligence officers and reported attempts to facilitate payments for classified information.

“The FBI, even in light of the extensive derogatory information attached to Danchenko, proceeded to pay him as a confidential human source three months later from March 2017 to October 2020 as part of Crossfire Hurricane,” Grassley and Johnson wrote to Garland. “Therefore, while we were investigating the Justice Department’s and FBI’s misconduct with respect to Crossfire Hurricane, you maintained him on the government’s payroll.”

They added: “This extraordinary fact pattern requires additional information from the Justice Department and FBI relating to why Danchenko was placed on the payroll and paid by the taxpayer to assist in the federal government’s flawed investigation into President Trump.”

Grassley and Johnson demanded all records related to government payments made to Danchenko, the counterintelligence investigation into him, and his later hiring by the FBI by Oct. 22.” (Read more: Fox News, 9/26/2022)  (Archive)

Ripley’s Heroes logo

Kinzinger was ON THE BOARD of the Ukraine org that scammed people out of millions of dollars! https://t.co/xSXHOyK25b

— Jordan Schachtel (@JordanSchachtel) March 25, 2023

Was Adam Kinzinger a party to a massive fraud scheme? Sure seems cozy with these guys, who visited his office in September. https://t.co/I9o2wj8XgY

— Jordan Schachtel (@JordanSchachtel) March 25, 2023

Yikes https://t.co/fzWgTOEQxn

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) March 22, 2023

It turns out Adam Kinzinger and Malcolm Nance have been promoting a guy for months who wasn’t actually a soldier and was just taking photos in front of destroyed tanks in Ukraine all along pic.twitter.com/e4UvZfSOvw

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) March 22, 2023

United States of America, v. Igor Danchenko
Notes:  The government has filed an omnibus Motion in Limine seeking to admit three cases of uncharged conduct by Defendant Igor Y. Danchenko.

The government has filed an omnibus Motion in Limine [Doc. No. 78] (the “Motion”), seeking to admit (1) three instances of uncharged conduct by Defendant Igor Y. Danchenko: (a) evidence relating to Danchenko’s allegedly false statements regarding his sourcing of the Ritz- Carlton allegations; (b) evidence pertaining to Danchenko’s allegedly false statement about disclosing his work for Christopher Steele (“Steele”) and Orbis Business Solutions (“Orbis”); and (c) an email from Danchenko to a former employer, Cenk Sidar, supposedly encouraging Sidar to fabricate sources; (2) three emails from Sergei Millian (“Millian”) to Dmitry Zlodorev (“Zlodorev”) regarding Danchenko; (3) statements from Steele to the FBI about Danchenko’s sourcing from Millian;1 and (4) the existence of, as well as the facts and circumstances pertaining to, the FBI’s counter-intelligence investigation into Danchenko. The government also seeks to prevent Danchenko from introducing any evidence or argument regarding political bias or vindictive prosecution. The Court held a hearing on the Motion on September 29, 2022, following which it took the Motion under advisement.

At the hearing held on September 29, 2022, the government withdrew its motion to admit statements from Christopher Steele to FBI personnel from the Robert Mueller Special Counsel team on September 18 and 19, 2017. Accordingly, the Motion as to the Steele statements is DENIED as moot without prejudice.

Upon consideration of the Motion, the memoranda in support thereof and in opposition thereto, the arguments of counsel at the hearing, and for the reasons stated below, the government’s Motion is GRANTED in part and DENIED in part. (FightWithKash, 10/5/2022)  (Archive)

USA v. Danchenko by FightWithKash

Judge Anthony J. Trenga (Credit: American Law Institute)

“The judge presiding over the case against Igor Danchenko, a source for British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier on former President Donald Trump, ruled he won’t dismiss the indictment but expressed skepticism about some of the false statements charges brought by special counsel John Durham.

The Russian-born lawyer has pleaded not guilty and had an attempt to dismiss Durham’s case against him shot down in court on Thursday by Judge Anthony Trenga of the Eastern District of Virginia.

“The motion is denied,” the judge ruled during the Alexandria court hearing. However, the judge said he would revisit his ruling after Durham’s team had presented its full case during the October trial. Trenga, a George W. Bush appointee who has sat on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, added that “I think it’s an extremely close call, particularly with count one” related to longtime Hillary Clinton ally Chuck Dolan.”

The November 2021 indictment said Danchenko anonymously sourced a fabricated claim about Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort to Dolan, who spent years, including 2016, doing work in Russia. Danchenko also allegedly lied to the FBI about a phone call he claimed he received from Sergei Millian, who Danchenko claimed told him about a conspiracy of cooperation between Trump and the Russians.

The judge said he “has to conclude at this point” that he couldn’t say definitively that Danchenko’s statement related to Dolan was literally true, concluding that “there are sufficient arguments of context” to allow the trial to move forward.

Trenga also said that, regarding the Millian-related charges, he “can’t conclude that there is an undisputed fact that is not actionable” through criminal charges.” (Read more: Washington Examiner, 9/29/2022)  (Archive)

Judge Aileen Cannon on Thursday ruled in favor of Trump and rejected Special Master Raymond Dearie’s request to have Trump’s legal team “verify that the government’s inventory log of seized items is accurate.” ABC News reported.

Special Master Raymond Dearie last Thursday asked President Trump’s lawyers to prove the FBI planted evidence during its raid of Mar-a-Lago in August.

Judge Dearie gave Trump’s legal team a September 30 deadline to submit a declaration.

President Trump’s legal team Wednesday night in a filing said Biden’s corrupt Justice Department actually seized 200,000 pages of documents from Mar-a-Lago.

The DOJ told the Court that they seized 11,000 documents.

Trump’s lawyers allege the 11,000 documents actually tally up to 200,000 *pages* which is why so many vendors have “declined the potential engagement.”

“The problem is compounded by the fact that when Plaintiff’s counsel referred to either 11,000 pages or even 11,000 documents during the status conference (we are still awaiting the transcript), the Government chose not to interject with an accurate number. In conversations between Plaintiff’s counsel and the Government regarding a data vendor, the Government mentioned that the 11,000 documents contain closer to 200,000 pages,” the lawyers said.

Trump’s lawyers argued the timeframe given to scan the documents is too narrow.” (Read more: Gateway Pundit, 9/29/2022)  (Archive)

Former federal prosecutor, @shipwreckedcrew, tweets in response to a leftwing comment about Judge Cannon’s order:

Today, a federal judge ordered the FBI to “produce the information it possesses related to Seth Rich’s laptop.”

(…) This fight dates back to 2017 and includes two FOIA lawsuit. In the first lawsuit, the FBI produced no responsive documents. The parties knew the FBI had something, and so this sparked a second lawsuit – where the FBI somehow found 20,000 pages of potentially responsive documents. The court explains:

Judge Amos L. Mazzant (Credit: public domain)

Of those 20,000 pages, the government found 1,596 pages of responsive documents, of which the government withheld 1,469 pages under various FOIA exemptions (privacy, law enforcement exemption, etc.).

The FBI also withheld the contents of Seth Rich’s personal laptop, which it possesses, in its entirety, alleging the privacy of Rich’s family in “preventing the public release of this information” outweighs the public interest in disclosure.

The court rejected that argument, stating “the FBI has not satisfied its burden of showing more than a de minimis privacy interest that would justify withholding information from Seth Rich’s laptop.”

It concluded:

(Read more: Techno Fog, 9/29/2022) (Archive)

Strzok’s dismissal letter was published today:

“In my 23 years in the FBI, I have not seen a more impactful series of missteps that has called into question the entire organization and more thoroughly damaged the FBI’s reputation.”

h/t @walkafyre pic.twitter.com/rFILnxDL84

— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) September 30, 2022

(Daily Wire, 9/30/2022)  (Archive)

Kash Patel sat with Jan Jekielek from The Epoch Times for an explosive interview this past week at Kash’s Corner.

During their conversation, Kash warned viewers about what is coming out next from the FBI whistleblowers.

Kash Patel: “I think it’s going to be an explosive topic. I don’t think you’ve seen any real damaging information yet. And that’s scary, right? Because this is very damaging. Because when you put it in perspective you’re going to see so much more damaging information. One of the other whistleblowers that came forward was on Dan Bongino’s Show. And he literally said wait til you see the acts of sexual complicity that the 7th floor of the FBI was engaging (in) during this entire time… And I was the guy that exposed the Lisa Page, Peter Strzok thing. I know how that organization at that level of political operatives work. So, there’s a lot more coming.”

“During an interview aired on Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” former Hunter Biden business associate Tony Bobulinski stated that if Facebook, Twitter, or anyone else had reached out to him to verify the authenticity of emails sent to him in The New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, he would have produced the email, with the metadata, within minutes, but no one did.

Bobulinski said, “I went to the second debate in Nashville between President Trump and Joe Biden. That night, I flew to D.C., and the next morning, there was a big debate. Do I voluntarily walk into the FBI or do I go sit down with Sen. Johnson (R-WI) and Sen. Grassley (R-IA)? My lawyers decided it was better that I voluntarily go in to sit and provide these facts. And so, on the morning of October 23, the morning after the debate, I spent five-plus hours sitting in a room with, at one point, I think as [many] as six federal agents, walking through all the facts of my knowledge of the Biden family, how I got involved in this, the trips around the world, CEFC, Chairman Ye, and stuff like that. At the end of that meeting, and remember, I voluntarily went there, so they were happy to take any information I provided to them. I wish I had pictures of the faces of the two main agents that were interviewing me. Because I would say something and you could just see the shock in their face and they would say, let’s take a minute, they’d get up and walk out of the room, and the agents would sort of convene and then come back and restart the interview. Because these facts are just for the sake of our country, for national security, at that point, he was candidate Joe Biden, now he’s the sitting President of the United States, the most powerful person in the free world, and daunting.”

He continued, “So, at the end of that five-plus hour interview, the head of station told my lawyers, listen, an individual named Tim Thibault is going to run point on all of this. We’re definitely going to have Tony come back in for a follow-up interview. It could be as early as next week. Some of the people that were in the room weren’t well-versed on all these facts, we may want to have people come in from Baltimore or Delaware. And I was ready to sit down with anybody that needed me to or travel wherever I wanted to. And so the head of station gave my lawyers Tim Thibault’s cell phone number. Tim was not there that day. … But my lawyers had an hour, hour-and-a-half call with him that Friday night, October 23. And subsequent calls through the weekend and the following week, when I was then coming on your show to provide the facts to the American people. And they were supposed to be working [on] a follow-up interview. And Tim Thibault, in his last discussion with my legal counsel [said], listen, we know Tony’s cooperating. We appreciate all the information he’s provided. We will follow up with you. We’re definitely going to have him come in for a follow-up interview or spend some more time on this. And I haven’t heard from them since.”

Bobulinski also said that his lawyers haven’t heard anything since. (Read more: Breitbart, 10/4/2020) (Archive)

Huma Abedin joins “The View” on October 6, 2022. (Credit: Screenshot/ABC/The View)

“Former campaign vice chair for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, Huma Abedin, told “The View” hosts on Thursday that Clinton faced “impossible standards” as a woman in politics.

Co-host Ana Navarro said “politics have become a personality contest” and asked Abedin about Vice President Kamala Harris being “judged” by the same “phantom ideal woman” as Clinton.

“I know the challenge and you know this well that Hillary had to face just as a woman in politics,” Abedin said. “All these impossible standards, you know, she needs to be taller, shorter, talk this way. This is annoying, you know, she looks angry when she speaks. It was almost like you couldn’t win no matter what you said.”

Abedin said Clinton was never the “personality candidate” and said no one ever questioned whether she was “qualified.” (Read more: Fox News, 10/6/2022)  (Archive)

(Timeline editor’s note: Our timeline suggests the “impossible standards” that Hillary “faced” and had a hard time living up to, are the basic moral standards most people try to live by every day.)

(Credit: Tennessee Star)

(…) Expect Charles Dolan to testify to his conversations with Danchenko and others relating to the dossier allegations at the trial. He’s already testified before a grand jury. For background, Dolan is described in the Danchenko indictment as having “maintained historical and ongoing involvement in Democratic politics.” His history includes serving as chairman of a national Democratic political organization, being a state chairman of Bill Clinton’s 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns, and an advisor to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Based on his ties with the Clintons, one would think that the Clinton Campaign would have known about Dolan’s contacts with Danchenko. However, the Danchenko indictment states “individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign did not direct, and were not aware of, [Dolan’s] meetings with Danchenko and other Russian nationals.”

That statement concerns Dolan’s lack of interactions with the Clinton Campaign. It still leaves unanswered the question of whether Danchenko had any contacts with the Clinton campaign, and whether the Clinton campaign was aware of Danchenko’s activities.

Two theories on that. It’s possible that the Clinton campaign received updates on the opposition research but otherwise isolated itself from these matters, preferring its lawyers at Perkins Coie and its contractors at Fusion GPS (and their sources) get their hands dirty. That would be consistent with what we saw in the Michael Sussmann trial, a real-time demonstration of how the Clinton machine uses the attorney-client and work-product privileges to manipulate the press, spread false accusations, and hide a number of sins.

It is also possible that the Clinton campaign had more knowledge about Danchenko than has been made publicly available. I bring that up because back in December, we discussed a curious filing by Durham, which confirmed that the Clinton campaign and “multiple former employees of that campaign” were subject to “matters before the Special Counsel.” In that filing, Durham discussed the potential conflict of interest of Danchenko’s lawyers, whose firm also represented the Clinton campaign and those former campaign employees.

Specifically, Durham raised these areas of inquiry that may become issues at the Danchenko trial:

• The Clinton Campaign’s knowledge or lack of knowledge concerning the veracity of information in the dossiers sourced by Danchenko;
• The Clinton Campaign’s awareness or lack of awareness of Danchenko’s collection methods and sub-sources;
• Meetings or communications between and among the Clinton Campaign, Fusion GPS, and Christopher Steele regarding or involving Danchenko;
• Danchenko’s knowledge or lack of knowledge regarding the Clinton Campaign’s role in the activities surrounding the Steele Dossier; and
• The extent to which the Clinton Campaign and/or its representatives directed, solicited, or controlled Danchenko’s activities.

All of those points are important, but that last one is particularly compelling and is worth repeating: “The extent to which the Clinton Campaign and/or its representatives directed, solicited, or controlled Danchenko’s activities.”

That implies the Clinton Campaign’s awareness of Danchenko and contacts with Danchenko. (After all, if the answer was “no,” then there would be no conflict.) Thus the potential conflict described by Durham:

“the Clinton Campaign and [Danchenko] each might have an incentive to shift blame and/or responsibility to the other party for any allegedly false information that was contained within the Company Reports and/or provided to the FBI.”

All this reminds us of a question we have previously asked. If the Clinton Campaign was being informed of the work by Fusion GPS, what of the likelihood that the Clinton Campaign was informing the work of Fusion GPS?

And here’s a follow-up question: from whom did Danchenko get the name Sergei Millian?

Furthermore, one has to ask whether those Clinton Campaign/Danchenko contacts, if they existed, stopped after the election – or whether they continued through Danchenko’s 2017 interviews with the FBI.

Will these issues be raised, and will we get answers on the Clinton Campaign’s ties to Danchenko (or Danchenko’s “sources”)? As outside observers, we can’t – and won’t – make guarantees. There’s danger in false promises just like there’s danger in false hope. Durham, however, has suggested the possibility of former representatives of the Clinton Campaign testifying at trial, stating:

“in the event that one or more former representatives of the Clinton Campaign are called to testify” at trial, Danchenko and the witness “would be represented by the same law firm, resulting in a potential conflict.”

(Read more: The Reactionary/Techno Fog, 10/6/2022)  (Archive)

“The FBI team that was in communication with Facebook before the social media company censored the original Hunter Biden laptop story has been identified, according to a new court filing.

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, identified the team as the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), according to an updated complaint entered late on Oct. 6.

Meta named the team after receiving a subpoena in a case alleging the federal government pressured Big Tech firms to censor users.

Laura Dehmlow (Credit: public domain)

Elvis Chan (Credit: public domain)

“Pursuant to the third-party subpoena, Meta has identified the FBI’s FITF, as supervised by Laura Dehmlow, and Elvis Chan as involved in the communications between the FBI and Meta that led to Facebook’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story,” the updated complaint states.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, said in August that Facebook reduced the reach of posts about Hunter Biden’s laptop in response to advice from the FBI.

(…) Laura Dehmlow is a supervisor of FITF. She has been named as a defendant in the case along with Elvis Chan, a special agent who manages the cyber branch at the FBI’s San Francisco Field Office.

According to new documents produced by the government as part of discovery in the case, Dehmlow briefed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Cybersecurity Advisory Committee on March 1, 2022. Minutes of the meeting show Dehmlow telling members that the FITF actually started in 2016 and has since grown to 80 workers.

CISA Director Jen Easterly (Credit: Wikipedia)

Asked about goals for approaching mal-, mis-, and disinformation, Dehmlow said that “we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable; we need to early educate the populace; and that today, critical thinking seems to be a problem currently,” according to the minutes.

Chan, meanwhile, bragged on a recent podcast that the San Francisco office “was very involved in helping to protect the US elections in 2020” by working with private companies and election officials. He also indicated he works closely with CISA Director Jen Easterly, who has been revealed to have taken part in pressuring Big Tech companies to crack down on alleged misinformation.

“We talked with all of these entities I mentioned regularly, at least on a monthly basis. And right before the election, probably on a weekly basis. If they were seeing anything unusual, if we were seeing anything unusual, sharing intelligence with technology companies, with social media companies, so that they could protect their own platforms. That’s where the FBI and the US government can actually help companies,” Chan said.  (Read more: The Epoch Times, 10/07/2022)  (Archive)

Michael Keilty (Credit: LinkedIn)

“We have the transcripts from day 1 of the Igor Danchenko trial. Pretrial matters and jury selection took up all of yesterday morning; openings and the prosecution’s case-in-chief, led by Special Counsel Durham, started in the afternoon.

Let’s dig in and start with the opening statements.

Special Counsel Prosecutor Michael Keilty opened with explanations of Danchenko’s lies to the FBI and discussed some FBI misconduct:

(…) Auten was also present for the FBI’s interview of Steele in October 2016, just weeks before the first FISA application was submitted.’

Q: When you and Mr. Varacalli, and Mr. Gaeta, and Mr. Guessford met with Christopher Steele in early October of 2016, did Christopher Steele provide any corroborative information for the information that was contained in his reports, in the dossier reports?

A: Not for the allegations, no.

( ) …Durham asked about the FBI offer to pay Steele to corroborate his information – what we might call the “million dollar” question. Here is Auten’s testimony on that matter:

As to Steele’s sources, Auten admitted Steele didn’t provide the FBI with the names of any sources back in October 2016.

Q:        So you talked to Mr. Steele about sourcing. Do you recall whether or not Mr. Steele, in early October of 2016 provided you or your colleagues with the names of any of the sources?

A:        Sources, no.

(…) Durham also asked Auten about Sergei Millian, whose name had been discussed in the October 2016 Steele interview. Auten stated that Millian had previously been a confidential human source (CHS) for the FBI’s Atlanta Field Office.

Q:        And what was that relationship?

A:        Mr. Millian, at one time, had been a source.
Q:        When you say “source,” that’s the same thing as confidential human source, correct?

A:        That is correct.

Q:        In common parlance, might be known as an informant?

A:        In common parlance, yes.

Q:        And do you remember for how long Mr. Millian had been a confidential human source for the FBI?

A:        I don’t recall that.

Q:        Do you recall or do you know in German what the nature of the assistance was that Millian provided?

A:        I know where he had provided the assistance. I don’t know exactly what type of assistance it had been.

Q:        Okay. So you know that he has helped as a CHS?

A:        Correct.

Q:        For a period of time?

A:        Correct.

Q:        And you said you knew where he was providing that information?

A:        Correct.

Q:        And where was that?

A:        I believe it was the Atlanta — the Atlanta field office.

Q:        Okay. Do you know, again, personal knowledge, do you know whether or not at some point in time Millian’s status as a CHS ended, he was closed?

A:        Yes.

Q:        And why was it closed, if you know?

A:        I believe it was closed because he moved out of the area of responsibility for the Atlanta field office.

Q:        Now, with respect to Mr. Millian, you heard about Millian from Steele, you knew he had a relationship with the bureau, correct?

A:        Correct.

As an aside, let’s briefly discuss the importance of Millian’s prior relationship with the FBI. Most significantly, it put the FBI on notice that Millian would be willing to corroborate any Steele/Danchenko allegations. The FBI never took advantage of that prior relationship. Again, here we have the FBI failing to follow-up on leads because it knew such steps would blow-up its investigation.

Back to the transcript. Auten said the FBI opened an investigation on Millian after the October 2016 interview of Christopher Steele. He admitted the FBI found no evidence Millian had “assisted in the interference” of the 2016 presidential election.

Q:        Would you tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury whether or not — again, to your personal knowledge – whether or not the bureau opened some file on Mr. Millian?

A:        Yes.

Q:        And was that a matter investigated by the Bureau?

A:        Yes.

Q:        And to your personal knowledge, was it at some point closed?

A:        Yes.

Q:        Were any charges brought against Millian?

A:        No.

Q:        Was there any wrongdoing in terms of him assisting in the interference in some way with the 2016 presidential election?

A:        No.

However, the Millian allegations – which arose from Danchenko’s claims to Steele – were still included in original FISA application and all subsequent renewals:

(Read more: Techno Fog/The Reactionary, 10/12/2022)  (Archive)

Judge Amos L. Mazzant (Credit: public domain)

“Yesterday the government asked for more time to respond to U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant’s September 29, 2022 order directing the FBI to produce all records related to Seth Rich’s laptop. Somewhat relatedly, the FBI is withholding three reports produced by CrowdStrike in August of 2016 regarding the purported hack of the Democratic National Committee.

The order itself is pretty straightforward, at least with respect to Seth’s personal laptop, because it directs the FBI to “produce the information it possesses related to Seth Rich’s laptop and responsive to Plaintiff’s FOIA requests within 14 days of this Order.” On the other hand, the order does not discuss Seth’s work laptop, which is also in the possession of the FBI.

I’m waiting for the FBI to explain what it thinks needs to be clarified, then I may be filing my own motion for clarification. Meanwhile, the FBI has cited only one narrow basis for withholding the records related to Seth’s laptop, namely his privacy. I’m not sure why it takes four weeks and an appellate lawyer to figure out why the judge did or didn’t get that issue right.

In any event, I’m reminded of something that I learned almost thirty years ago when I was a newspaper reporter: people with nothing to hide don’t try to hide nothing. (Read more: Lawflog, 10/13/2022)  (Archive)

(   ) …During the IG’s investigation, Auten had given “a number of positive statements regarding Mr. Danchenko.” He had also made positive statements to Congress about Danchenko – testimony Auten still stands by (if only because he’s dug himself into a hole):

“I believe the primary sub-source was being truthful about who his sub-sources were. I don’t think he was fabricating sub-sources.”

However, after Durham was appointed, Auten became – and apparently remains – a subject of the investigation:

Danchenko’s defense was effective when asking about Auten’s impression of Danchenko at the time of the interview. Auten thought Danchenko was “trying to help.” And Auten admitted that he and Stephen Somma didn’t necessarily want to conduct a thorough interview of Danchenko at the time, thus explaining why they didn’t demand documents or ask about every allegation in the Steele Dossier. They also laid the groundwork for the defense that Dolan wasn’t necessarily a “source” for Danchenko, in that Dolan relied on some open source articles when relaying information on the Trump campaign.

The defense also spent a good deal of time discussing Millian’s various phone numbers and the possibility that he (or the person Danchenko “thought” was Millian) used an App like Skype, WhatsApp, Wickr, or Telegram to contact Danchenko. The flaw? Danchenko’s e-mails to Millian requesting to speak over the phone or meet – after the alleged call.

Redirect by Durham

Durham again focused on Auten and the Crossfire Hurricane Team’s efforts to corroborate Danchenko’s statements. Auten’s testimony was an admission of how little they did, ignoring both travel records and phone records.

There were further details on Auten being a “subject” of an “inquiry.” The investigation into Auten – who is a subject, not a target – has to do with the Danchenko matter and also Crossfire Hurricane and the Carter Page FISAs:

(Read more: The Reactionary/Techno Fog, 10/12/2022)  (Archive)

Charles Dolan (Credit: public domain)

Charles Dolan Jr. is the first witness on the stand. Kielty will be examining for the government.

Dolan goes through his background. Involved in the 1980 presidential campaign for President Jimmy Carter.

Dolan also worked as a political consultant for Congressional campaigns and the Democratic Governors Association. He has joined a government relations firm and served as a liaison between lobbying operations and public affairs communications operations.

He reportedly worked for DC-based PR unit Powell Tate as well as Ketchum Inc. in early 2000s for 4-5 years. Beyond Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign, Dolan says that he has worked as a paid advisor or a volunteer for every DNC campaign since Carter’s besides Obama campaign.

While working for Ketchum, Dolan worked closely with Russia because Ketchum represented the Russian federation. His role at Ketchum was to attract foreign investment. Dolan had regular conference calls with Dmitry Peskov, who is the press secretary for Russian President Putin.

Dolan had meetings with Russian ambassadors and people at embassy as well as various ministers. As far as Dolan’s personal interactions with Peskov, the 2 men met 1-2x per year. When Kielty asks what Dolan talked about w Peskov, Dolan stutters & says: “Things we were working on.”

While working with Ketchum, Dolan traveled to Russia 1-2 times per year, and through this work with the Russian Federation he was also involved in the G20 summit. Dolan also worked with Walt Disney in Russia helping to get their cable TV network and broadcast underway.

Around 2015 Dolan was employed at KGlobal, a PR firm in D.C. Danchenko met Dolan through Fiona Hill of the Brookings Institute who, per the Brookings Institute website: “[is] a senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings.

She recently served as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019.

From 2006 to 2009, she served as national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at The National Intelligence Council.” Fiona Hill had previously been appointed by Trump as deputy assistant to the president and senior director…for European and Russian affairs on his National Security Council staff. Hill left the White House on July 15, 2019.

Back to how Dolan and Danchenko met.

Olga Galkina (Credit: The Daily Mail)

Danchenko was trying to help his former schoolmate Olga Galkina find a PR firm. During March or April of 2016, she met with Dolan in the company of Danchenko. Dolan says he met with Galkina to discuss KGlobal doing business with the company she worked for.

Dolan also mentioned Gregg Hartley, a Republican lobbyist. Dolan said that his communications with Danchenko occurred over email and phone, plus having breakfast and lunch together at times.

Dolan said that he would communicate with Danchenko to check on Olga Galkina. Dolan understood that Danchenko was working as a political risk operative in London, where Orbis is based.

Dolan learned of Christopher Steele and Christopher Borrows of Orbis through Danchenko, who said in an email that Dolan would meet Steele and Borrows at some point if he was in London or if Steele and Borrows came to Washington, D.C.

Government Exhibit 702 is an email from Danchenko to Dolan dated April 29, 2016. Danchenko thanks Dolan for lunch and says he forwarded Dolan’s letter to Steele and Borrows.

He makes the point that he’ll introduce the 3 men if they ever are in London or D.C., respectively.
Danchenko says he didn’t get his new passport this month so he would be available for breakfast on May 20 or 13; he also said he’d be in Russia the first half of June. Mentions the Hotel Peter across the street from the Central Bank…

Dolan says he never met Christopher Steele in person and didn’t work with Orbis Business Intelligence which is Steele’s company.

Keilty* brings up Government Exhibit 703, an email dated April 29, 2016, from Danchenko to Dolan with an attachment and subject line is: Business Intelligence.

The email roughly read: “FYI, sample byproduct of my due diligence practice. Confidential: We don’t post these projects online.” The attachment is an Orbis document prepared by Danchenko; Dolan says he didn’t know what the document was about.

Note mentioned in the middle of this information: In May of 2016, Dolan finalized a trip to Cyprus to meet with Olga Galkina and make a presentation to her boss. Dolan’s PR firm, KGlobal, signed a contract with Galkina’s company.

Dolan says he kept communicating with Danchenko, and was approached by the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) to set up a conference in Moscow. Dolan felt that Danchenko would be useful.

YPO, according to Dolan, is an organization that sets up networking events to connect CEOs of various companies. Dolan mentions his relations with Steven Kupka, a D.C. attorney who was involved in YPO. Kupka wanted to organize a visit to Moscow.

The YPO conference scheduled for October 2016 was to be called “Inside the Kremlin.” Dolan was to be involved due to his extensive experience in Russia. The conference purpose was to introduce business people to Russian government officials.

Dolan approached Danchenko because he’s fluent in Russian and knows English well. At one point, they scouted hotels and venues in Moscow for the attendees to gather.

Dolan recalls meeting with Danchenko in Moscow in June 2016 and having lunch together. He reiterates their communications involved emails, phone calls, lunch, and breakfast, and would both attend the YPO conference. In fact, Danchenko was a speaker there.

In July 2016, when Dolan went to Cyprus for 3-5 days to meet w Danchenko’s friend Galkina for purported business with her company, Dolan confirms to Keilty he did “superficially” discuss upcoming US Presidential election with Galkina. Dolan specifically says they spoke about HRC.

After his visit in Cyprus, Dolan returned to the U.S., continuing to be in contact with Danchenko and planning the YPO conference.

Government Exhibit 712A is an email dated August 19, 2016 at 1:08 PM from Danchenko to Dolan. Danchenko says:

“Hi Chuck,

“Here are the bios of two of four. Who were the others?” This is referring to the people speaking at the YPO conference.

Danchenko then writes: “Could you please ask someone to comment on Paul Manafort’s resignation and anything on the Trump campaign? Off the record of course! Any thought, rumor, allegation. I am working on a related project against Trump.

I asked Gregg three months ago but he didn’t say much although shared a couple insights.

Thanks a lot!

Best,

Igor”

Gregg Hartley (Credit: public domain)

The “Gregg” that Danchenko is referring to is the aforementioned Gregg Hartley, Republican D.C. lobbyist.

Next, Keilty shares Dolan’s response. It roughly says: “Let me dig around on Manafort. Pretty sure the new team wanted him gone asap and used the recent NYT story to drive a stake in his heart.”

There an add’l reply after from Dolan to Danchenko that includes:

“Hi Igor,

I had a drink w a GOP friend of mine who knows [some things]. . . Corey Lewandowski who hates Manafort and still speaks to Trump & regularly played a role. He is said to be doing a happy dance for it.”
There was also a following paragraph that said “a number of people wanted Manafort out.”

At the end of the email, Dolan attached a Politico article about Paul Manafort.

On the stand, Dolan testifies under oath to Keilty that he actually never met this “GOP friend,” but got his story from cable news.

Dolan says he felt like embellishing the story because he knew Danchenko was working in political risk and inferred that Danchenko had helped him before so he was trying to return the favor.

Government Exhibit 713B is Danchenko’s response email to Dolan regarding the Manafort information.

Dated August 20, 2016, Danchenko wrote: “Our goals clearly coincide.” He adds that any additional insights from Dolan would be greatly appreciated.

Dolan’s ultimate response to Danchenko asking for more information was, “Thanks, I’ll let you know if I hear anything else.” Dolan testifies that he did not provide more insights on Manafort.

Dolan says that he probably would’ve been involved in the Clinton campaign but at that time was not.

Despite Danchenko writing to Dolan that he was working on an important project, Dolan did not know if Danchenko was working for anyone in particular.

Dolan makes it a point to note that this email exchange was one of 50 emails he had received from various people and didn’t put too much thought into it.

Dolan met with the Special Counsel on numerous occasions. He claims that he knew about the Steele dossier because his client at the time of its publishing, Galkina’s company, was named in the report.

Government Exhibit 112, a page from the dossier, dated August 22, 2016, Paragraph 3 reads: “Speaking separately, also in late July 2016, an American political figure associated with Trump and his campaign outlined the reason behind Manafort’s recent demise. . .”

The paragraph cites nearly verbatim what Charles Dolan wrote in his email to Danchenko about Paul Manafort. Coincidentally, Dolan’s email with the Manafort information was sent to Danchenko on August 20, 2016. So two days later, the information ended up in the Steele dossier.

There’s more discussion of Dolan describing his relationship with Danchenko. Dolan mentions a time that he saw Danchenko was at a park near his house with his daughter, so he went to go meet with him. Note: Dolan casually mentions picking up over the counter drugs for Danchenko.

Keilty brings up Government Exhibit 1202, the January 10, 2017, Buzzfeed article all about Trump’s “alleged” ties to Russia with the Steele dossier attached to it.

Conversation under seal.

Morning after Buzzfeed article published, on Jan 11, 2017, Dolan testifies he received many calls from # of people. Keilty asked if Dolan spoke with Danchenko that day. Dolan, stuttering on the stand, says he called Danchenko because he, “Was curious where the article came from.”

Keilty asked if Galkina was involved in the Steele dossier, to which Dolan responds that he isn’t sure but, “heard she was.”

In the January 11, 2017 phone call between Dolan and Danchenko, Dolan says that Danchenko told him that he would find out where the Steele dossier came from, but never got back to Dolan.

No further questions.

Fiona Hill (Credit: public domain)

Sears begins cross-examining Dolan. Sears asks, “Besides Fiona Hill, how did you meet Danchenko?” Dolan says maybe through the Brookings Institute.

Regarding Dolan’s relationship with Olga Galkina, Dolan says he spoke to Galkina without Danchenko for most of their relationship, which began in D.C. in March 2016.

Sears probes that the YPO October 2016 conference was not always held in Russia? Dolan confirms that the conference was regularly held in various capitals around the world; just so happened to occur in Moscow at that time.

Dolan says that he and Danchenko were together at the October 2016 conference in Moscow and that Danchenko was a speaker there.

During cross examination, Dolan claims that the first time he ever saw the Steele dossier was in the January 10, 2017 Buzzfeed article, and that he was unaware Danchenko was working on the project.

Regarding Dolan’s October 31, 2021 meeting with the Special Counsel, Dolan says he doesn’t recall if he told the Special Counsel at the time that he didn’t think anything in the Steele dossier was from him.

Defense Exhibit 250 is shown. In August of 2021, Dolan still didn’t see anything in the Steele dossier that was from him.

On September 7, 2021, Dolan brought emails he had to the Special Counsel interview. Sears asks if they pressured Dolan to say that information in the dossier came from him? Dolan agreed that the information in the dossier was “very similar.”

Dolan doesn’t recall that he was being told by the Special Counsel that he was the subject of this investigation. Sears suggests that Dolan was upset upon finding out; Dolan still seems confused and says he’s not familiar with these terms, but hesitantly says, “Yes.”

Dolan says that the government reminded him that he needed to tell the truth. Dolan agreed that he had zero insider knowledge about Paul Manafort; he simply read articles and consumed news.

Dolan says that he had “no phone calls” about specific issues [related to the Steele dossier) or anything about the Trump campaign’s alleged connections to Russia.

Sears asks: “Wasn’t it your understanding Danchenko was writing a book?”

Dolan doesn’t agree and clarified that his understanding was that Danchenko was a political risk analyst and simply responded, and per Sears’ rhetoric, “threw [Danchenko] a bone” with the Manafort story.

Dolan reiterates that the specific email exchange with Danchenko was “1 of 50 that he had” with various individuals that day.

Sears asks Dolan if he’s aware that the government issued subpoenas for most of Dolan’s communications. Dolan testifies under oath that he never communicated with Danchenko about anything that was in the Steele dossier.

Keilty begins his redirect of Dolan and brings up the August 20, 2016 email where Dolan talked about “having a drink with his GOP friend” who Dolan alleged had dirt that could be useful for Danchenko, followed by the Manafort story.

Keilty makes it a point to tell Dolan that he said nothing about cable news in that email, only the GOP friend. This email was a response to Danchenko’s August 19, 2016 email asking Dolan for any “truth, rumor, etc.” about Manafort.

Keilty: “You think Danchenko was after you for open source research?”

The government retracts question just as the defense objects.

A few short reiterations of previously stated queries.

No further questions.

Kevin Helson, Danchenko’s handling agent, is called to the stand.

Helson has worked for the FBI for 20 years. He has a bachelors degree in chemistry and microbiology. He worked at the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation until 2002 before signing on to the FBI.

“Russia” is Helson’s assigned area within the FBI. Helson says his job is to identify individuals who are in U.S. under false pretenses or are acting against U.S.

In 2016, Helson worked in Washington, D.C. field office. He was asked to join Crossfire Hurricane, Helson declined.

Durham asks if Helson was aware in mid-September 2016, there was a Yahoo News article that the FBI was investigating Carter Page, or anything about Christopher Steele. Helson says that he was later aware but not part of the project.

At the end of January 2017, Helson was approached by people from Crossfire Hurricane (Steve Somma* and supervisory intelligence analyst Crossfire Hurricane). For context, Helson confirms to Durham that Auten worked out of headquarters but that Helson worked in the D.C. field office.

Helson’s supervisor gave him a task to meet with Igor Danchenko and eventually bring him on as a confidential human source (CHS). Auten and others related to Crossfire Hurricane were reportedly concerned about follow-up questions from the Steele dossier…

…that merged with Helson’s own projects out of the D.C. office, since Helson’s assigned focus area is matters of intelligence related to Russia.

In late Feb or early March 2017, Kevin Helson, Steve Somma, and Jason Ruehle (Danchenko’s co-handling agent to Helson) had initial meeting with Danchenko to set stage for future meetings & discuss questions regarding the Steele dossier. Helson says this lasted less than an hour.

Durham asks Helson if he had any trouble understanding Danchenko, to which Helson says that Danchenko spoke fluent English and that he had no difficulty communicating with him.
Helson says he didn’t know much about the Steele dossier, and if he wanted to know anything, other people involved in the project had to provide him with the information. Helson makes it a point to note that Crossfire Hurricane later became known as the Mueller investigation.

In conversing with Durham during the examination, Helson discusses his own methods of assessing whether a subject is lying or not based on the idea that, “It’s harder to keep a lie straight during multiple times of telling the same story.”

Sergei Millian (Credit: Twitter)

Durham asks how Helson first became familiar with the names Sergei Milian and Chuck Dolan. Helson somehow found out about them and needed to look it up.

Helson says during his working relationship with Danchenko, his goal was to obtain any new information that could corroborate the Steele dossier. Helson says Danchenko didn’t provide corroborating information.

Durham asks Helson if he’s aware how much of the Steele dossier was attributed to Danchenko. Off the top of his head, Helson says 80%.

Special Counsel John Durham pulls Government Exhibit 1502, which is the LinkedIn message from Igor Danchenko to Anastasia Gnezditskaia where he says he was responsible for 80% of the raw intelligence & 50% of the analysis. Helson says he had no reason to doubt that this is true.

Durham: “Do you recall if Danchenko was to be a paid CHS or not?”

Helson: “[That was dependent upon] what information he gave.” Helson said he probably would become paid over time.

Helson recalls that Danchenko was not paid during their initial meeting in the Alexandria, Virginia, field office, and that when Danchenko was paid for the first time it was less than $3,000.

Helson expected, given that he was eventually paid, that Danchenko would be giving full disclosure, truthful, and as forthright as possible.

Durham shows Government Exhibit 118 paragraph #1. Which reads: “Your client agrees to supply complete and truthful info and testimony to all persons in this matter, as well as other proceedings, etc. …
and that the client must not withhold any info or attempt to protect any person or entity through false info or false implication.”

Helson discusses with Durham his process of collecting information during meetings with Danchenko—by getting record of what was being said and for nuanced things, needed a recording. Helson tells Durham that Danchenko was unaware he was being recorded.

Government Exhibit 151 is a recording; G.E. 151T is the transcript. There was some information in the recording related to the Steele dossier, Helson says, but not all of it.

Government Exhibit 118-11 is a stipulation for the aforementioned recording and translation, wherein both parties agreed that both were a true and accurate copy of a meeting between Danchenko, Helson, and Ruehle. This is one recording among numerous.

Trenga instructs the jury that if there’s any discrepancy while looking at the transcript and the recording to go by the recording.

Durham asks if Danchenko had a copy of the dossier in front of him in each instance that the Steele dossier was discussed. Helson says yes.

Per the FBI recording of the meeting recorded in G.E. 151 and G.E. 151T, Durham asks Helson if it’s relevant that Danchenko said he himself would “record things when speaking with people in case he ever needed them.” Helson concurs this is relevant and [odd].

Durham asks Helson if or when Sergei Milian came up. Helson says that Milian came up at one of his first meetings with Danchenko. Durham asks if Helson is familiar with Report 2016/95; Helson says he looked at this during trial prep.

Helson adds that in March of 2017, Brian Auten raised an issue about Milian, saying there were discrepancies in the information about him.

Government Exhibit 152 and 152T are a recording and transcript.

Durham: “Was there any record that could corroborate that Danchenko received [the] anonymous phone call?”

Helson: “That would have requiring looking at phone records.” Helson says that they had asked Danchenko to provide any phone communication records, which he says would include apps, but Danchenko produced nothing.

Durham: “Was it then your job to get the records?”

Helson said that he wasn’t allowed to legally obtain the phone records of Danchenko since Danchenko was voluntarily providing the FBI information. Helson said to obtain the records legally, they would have needed a predicated investigation and they didn’t have that.

Back to Government Exhibit 152 and 152T; in the recording, Danchenko mentions that he uses WhatsApp.

In this recording, it’s also the first time that Helson says he inquired about Milian’s part of the dossier.
Durham asks if Helson ever recorded Danchenko in conversations outdoors. Helson says it’s difficult to record outdoors because of picking up outside noise but also because the FBI seeks to limit outdoor communications [with brevity].

Durham asks Helson about the electronic Dropbox where Danchenko was supposed to provide documents to the FBI. Helson says that Danchenko provided a “wide depth” of information, and that himself and Ruehle were in “receive mode” during their meetings with Danchenko.

Helson says they allowed the intelligence team to analyze the information.

Durham asks if Danchenko provided corroborating info for the Steele dossier. Helson says no.

Helson says that the information he received depended upon what was received from the Crossfire Hurricane team and later the Mueller investigation. Helson says that eventually the Steele dossier talk “faded off” as a topic they discussed.

Durham asks Helson if Danchenko ever provided supporting documents about the alleged anonymous call from Milian or communications.

Durham pulls Government Exhibit 164 and 164T. In this recording, Helson asks Danchenko about his relationship with Milian. Helson: “There was an email and I think there was a call with a guy up in New York who you thought was Milian?”

Danchenko responds that he doesn’t have Milian’s number; doesn’t remember. Danchenko says, “He never showed up in NY.”

Danchenko provides the email to Helson: “sergio@russianamericanchamber.com”

Durham asks Helson if he ever found out how Danchenko obtained these email addresses. Helson says: “No.”

Back to the recording. Danchenko provides Helson with a phone number that he says is one of Milian’s with a Georgia area code.

It’s very evident in this recording that Danchenko was avoiding having a conversation.

Durham: “It would’ve been helpful to know how Danchenko got Milian’s email addresses and for the dossier, right?”

Helson agrees.

Prior to dealing with Danchenko, Helson says he was unaware of Milian’s prior history with FBI.

Durham shows G.E. 204; it’s an email from Danchenko to MilianGroup July 21, 2016. The subject is “Question about Trump + China”.

Helson says Danchenko never provided him this email.

Durham: “Seeing this email would’ve been important to the investigation, yes?” Since Milian is an alleged sub source of the Steele dossier.

Helson agrees with Durham.

Durham then shows Government Exhibit 205 and 205T; the translation is there because this email was originally written in Russian. It’s from Sergei Milian to Dmitri Zlodorev. Dated July 26, 2016. Milian is asking Zlodorev “Who is Igor?” After receiving an email from him.

Helson does not know if Crossfire Hurricane team ever had a record of whether Milian was in fact even in the U.S. during July 2016. This is relevant because of the allegations that Danchenko said he was supposed to meet with Milian toward the end of July and he “never showed up.”

Government Exhibit 206 and 206T is Zlodorev’s response to Sergei.

Government Exhibit 207 and 207T is an email from Danchenko to MilianGroup dated August 18, 2016.

It opens with:

“Hello Sergey,

I wrote to you several weeks ago. We are contacts on LinkedIn.”

Later in the email Danchenko wrote: “If there’s any opportunity let’s meet.” Zero reference to phone app or anything that Milian never showed up to a meeting.

Helson says that any communications between Danchenko and Sergei would’ve been relevant.

Durham asks if Helson had these communications, would it have changed the investigation? Helson says yes.

On July 21, 2016, Danchenko wrote an email asking Milian about a construction company from Switzerland. To Helson’s knowledge, Danchenko was not in business with this construction company.

Durham asks Helson if he has knowledge of the communications between Danchenko and Milian between July 21, 2016 and August 18, 2016.

Helson says he expected he would’ve been provided those but he was not.

Helson believed documents Danchenko provided that he would say how he was communicating (either thru regular phone calls or thru phone apps).

Durham brings up Government Exhibit 610 & 610T. It’s a Facebook exchange that was originally in Russian between Galkina and Danchenko.

Galkina: “Call me in exactly 15 minutes. It’s regarding Chuck and me.”

Danchenko: “I will try. If I can get thru directly. Possibly Viber or WhatsApp.”

Gov Exhibit 611 is a Facebook message from Igor asking recipient if they have Signal after he referred to something as a “Delicate topic.” According to Helson, Signal is an “encrypted app in which parties can communicate back and forth. The conversations erase when you’re done.”

Government Exhibit 102. On October 24, 2017, there was an in-person meeting with Danchenko in Alexandria, Virginia. Helson raised questions about Danchenko’s communications with the alleged anonymous caller that Danchenko believed was Milian.

His reasoning for believing that the caller was Milian was because he listened to a YouTube video of Sergei Milian speech and in his opinion it sounded just like him. Danchenko said he has no in-person meeting with Milian.

The FBI confronted this because it didn’t line up with what Steele said. Danchenko refuted Steele’s take but never corrected him. Danchenko told FBI he never met with Milian in person. However, Danchenko claimed he spoke on the phone a few times with who he believed was Milian.

Durham: “How confident are you (Helson) that on October 24, 2017, Danchenko said he spoke to Milian on the phone a couple times?

Helson: “Very confident.”

G.E. 103 confirms on November 2, 2017, Helson and Danchenko had an in-person meeting and they discussed Milian again.

Durham: “Why did you have to go back to the Milian piece?”

Helson: “Brian Auten said there were inconsistencies between what Danchenko said regarding his contact with Milian versus what Steele said.”

Durham: “Going off of what Danchenko told Steele, right?”

Helson: “Steele thought Danchenko and Milian met in-person but Danchenko never corrected him.”

Durham: “Based on your interactions with Danchenko, was there ever any indication that there was other information besides what came from Steele? Did Charles Dolan ever come up?”

Helson: “Yes. I didn’t know of Dolan until I found out through Crossfire Hurricane.” Helson said that Danchenko never brought up Charles Dolan to him.

Durham probes: “Isn’t it the goal to corroborate what’s in the Steele dossier?”

Helson: “Yes, to identify the source.”

Durham: “Would it have been helpful to have a U.S. citizen whose info was in the dossier?”

Helson: “Yes. Much easier.”

Government Exhibit 171T. June 15, 2017. The third recorded conversation between Helson, Danchenko, and Ruehle.

Eventually after Helson was Danchenko’s handler, he learned of the emails between Danchenko and Dolan.

Durham shows email G.E. 712A August 19, 2016 from Danchenko to Dolan asking him about info on Paul Manafort and how Danchenko said he was working on a project on Trump. As well as Dolan’s reply to Danchenko G.E. 712B with the “Drink w GOP friend of mine & Paul Manafort” info.

Prior to June 15, 2017, Helson said he had not seen these emails; he said no one on Crossfire Hurricane gave this to him.

Durham: “With respect to his email, wouldn’t it have been good to know this during June of 2017 and prior?”

Helson: “Yes.”

Durham pulls up G.E. 714, the dossier report 216/105. Paragraph 3 is the paragraph that is nearly identical (with superfluous language to polish it up) language that was in Dolan’s email to Danchenko about Paul Manafort.

While looking at this, Durham is asking Helson questions about how he gathered information to corroborate the dossier. Helson, with the request of Mueller’s investigative team, obtained questions to ask Danchenko by Brian Auten and Amy Anderson.

G.E. 171 & 171T is recording & transcript from June 15, 2017 between Helson & Danchenko.

Helson: “For whatever reason, they’re either missing you? Or they’re not finding . . . We’re trying to figure out. . You said something to Steele. . . Do you know Chuck Dolan?”

(Long pause)

Danchenko: “Yes. I’ve known [of] Chuck for 12 years… a couple years [close].” Danchenko says Dolan was always in Russia,

Helson: “You never talked to him about anything shown in the dossier, right?”

Danchenko: “No.”

Helson asks when was last time Danchenko saw Dolan. He replies September of last year in Moscow, but then pulls an exact time.

Helson: “I wasn’t expecting an exact time!” He then asks if Dolan is close to the Kremlin.

Danchenko suggests Dolan is close to Putin professionally.

Durham asks Helson what Danchenko’s demeanor was during this interaction and Helson responds: “A bit of hesitation and a noticeable pause.”

Durham: “Did Danchenko ever mention immediately after the Steele dossier was published in Buzzfeed on January 10, 2017, that Dolan reached out to Danchenko on January 11, 2017?”

Helson: “No.”

Durham: “You would’ve wanted to know that, right?”

Helson: “Yes.”

Durham and Helson briefly talk about the FBI interview with Olga Galkina in D.C.

Helson’s intent was to obtain any knowledge he could find to corroborate the dossier.

Durham asks about how Danchenko referenced his communications in forms (apps, etc.) how he would send screenshots of conversations to Helson.

Helson: “Yes.”

Durham brings up how on New Year’s Day in 2017, Danchenko met with Dolan in a park. “What was your impression of this?”

Helson found it to be interesting. Helson was under the impression that Danchenko introduced Galkina to Dolan.

When Helson asked Danchenko if Dolan would know Steele, he replied: “I think he would.” However, Danchenko did not mention business interactions with either to Helson.

Durham: “Would you learn of Dolan’s connections to Dmitry Peskov?” (Putin’s press secretary)

Helson: “Yes.”

Government Exhibit is a May 17, 2017 2-page report with 3 screenshots of a conversation between Galkina and Danchenko. On bullet point 4, there’s a note that “Galkina claims she can’t travel til September but [Danchenko] made a good pitch.”

G.E. 120 mostly redacted doc. There’s a part discussing Danchenko speaking on social media and another portion. “At this point the development . . . Trump collusion and the gov’t . . . ”

“All of Danchenko’s info was obtained through conversations with colleagues and friends.”
Durham: “Do you recall that Danchenko discussed Dolan’s relationship to Peskov?”

Durham and Helson are talking about “Russian disinformation” in relation to Peskov’s role as Putin’s press secretary.

It’s noted that even as a paid informant, Danchenko did not get Helson any information on Dolan [to corroborate the dossier].

Government Exhibit 605 is a picture of Danchenko and Dolan together in Russia from June 14, 2016. This had been posted to Facebook.

The day the photo was posted to Danchenko’s profile, Galkina tried to arrange a [vicinity?] for Danchenko.

In March 2017, Helson said he first asked Danchenko about Dolan. Danchenko said Dolan was, “A nice guy, a friend.”

Then on September 22, 2017, Danchenko’s story changed and he told Helson that Dolan “has dubious connections in Russia.”

Helson attributed this to the fact that he was simply asking Danchenko about people around him who could be a security risk.

Durham makes a point to conclude that a well-coordinated conspiracy, Report 95 was used on a FISA application, unvetted, against an American citizen.

No further questions.

During cross-examination, Sears probes that, “Wasn’t Danchenko SHOCKED at how Steele presented what he said in the dossier?” Helson agreed. The two men agree that Danchenko never vouched for the information.

Defense Exhibit 100 discusses what the motivations were for Danchenko to become a confidential human source. Helson said: “Patriotism.” Both Helson and Danchenko had concerns for his safety.

Sears states that Helson and Danchenko had a working relationship from March 2017 to October 2020.

Sears asks Helson about the “one time” that Danchenko allegedly acted erratic.

He supposedly walked into an in-person meeting and demanded more money, jumping up and down and very upset.

Sears says that Danchenko later apologized for this and it was revealed that his wife and lawyer had been telling him he should be asking for more money due to his having children and being at risk. Helson confirms this.

Sears reminds Helson he testified to OIG that Danchenko was “gold” as human source following “single erratic behavior incident” because Helson would have known going forward if there was a time that Danchenko was lying. According to Helson, Danchenko never acted like that again.

Helson also said that the Crossfire Hurricane team never raised an issue about information Danchenko had provided Helson. However, Helson says that there were times Danchenko couldn’t recall where something or someone came from source-wise in the dossier.

Sears is pushing that Danchenko, as far as Helson was aware, had never known about or seen the Steele dossier until it was published in Buzzfeed on January 10, 2017.

During this interaction, Helson says he legally wouldn’t have been able to obtain all of Danchenko’s communications unless he had voluntarily provided them himself. Danchenko would later tell Crossfire Hurricane that he deleted nearly all of his communications.

Helson reportedly TOLD Danchenko to scrub his phone. He says following the January 2017 FBI interview, Danchenko was instructed on multiple occasions to scrub his phone because he’d be, “A target to Russians.”

Sears asks Helson about Danchenko’s relationship with Dolan. The two men agree that Danchenko said he approximately knew Dolan for 10 years based on Russia connections.

Danchenko knew that Dolan worked for Ketchum, who did PR for the Kremlin. According to Helson, Danchenko reportedly said Dolan was “naive to Russia.”

In reference to Danchenko saying in October 2017 that Dolan had dubious connections to Russia, Sears and Helson agree that Danchenko then provided the FBI with the names of the “dubious Russia contacts.”

It’s noted that Steele did not contain Danchenko’s identity as the primary source of the dossier, but that Danchenko concealed his own identity.

During Helson’s testimony to the OIG, Sears reminds him that he said Danchenko never struck him as “someone who would lie.”

Danchenko never told Helson that he lied to Steele about his meeting Milian; Danchenko simply never corrected Steele.

About 10 months after Danchenko met with FBI, he told them that he was going to meet with Steele. The FBI was having Danchenko fish information from Steele.

Sears asks Helson if he was trying to drive a wedge between Danchenko and Steele; he replies, “Yes.”

According to Sears & Helson, Danchenko had concerns about giving more info to Steele because he supposedly embellished info Danchenko originally gave to him for the dossier.

Items that Danchenko said were rumors, Steele wrote as fact. Sears is animatedly suggesting that according to Danchenko, Steele was obsessed with “proving the dossier to be true” and that Danchenko eventually “expressed concern about Dolan and Galkina’s relationship.”

Sears: “Danchenko is charged with lying, saying he never spoke to Dolan about anything in the Steele report.”

Helson: “Correct.”

Defense Exhibit 102 is debrief notes from the June 15, 2017 recorded meeting between Helson and Danchenko. Helson’s wrote in a note that Danchenko had known Dolan for “2 years more closer.”

Helson had asked how long it had been since Danchenko had spoken to Dolan. He mentioned the Moscow trip in 2016 and then the January 1, 2017 meeting in the park.

Defense Exhibit 103. Helson does not know if Danchenko ever saw Report 105, which was all about Dolan.
Auten also did not ask Danchenko about it. No one apparently ever focused Helson’s attention on

Paragraph 3 of the dossier report that was all about Paul Manafort; nearly verbatim to what Dolan had written in his reply email to Danchenko.

Government Exhibit 120 is very redacted but begins w/: “At this point in the development source understands the priority is to obtain any and all info that would indicate collusion between Trump’s campaign, administration, & the Russian government or any of its representatives.”

It continues: “Speaking on social media. He keeps asking when I am visiting. On good terms. Asking him about Romeo and Juliet setting.”

In reference to the anonymous phone call with Milian, Danchenko told Auten he emailed Milian after the alleged scheduled meeting that Milian never showed up for, but he did not tell Helson or show him that email.

The issue is again raised that there was contradictory information about Danchenko’s meeting with Milian due to what Steele said, which is why Helson had an October 24, 2017 meeting with Danchenko and then another on November 2, 2017.

Sears: “Did you believe Danchenko knew what Steele told the FBI about his communications with Milian?”

Helson: “I don’t recall.”

Testifying to OIG on Oct 21, 2019, Helson states Danchenko said Steele was completely wrong about his relationship w/ Milian & that Danchenko was not happy w/ Steele about what he put in dossier. Sears insists that Danchenko lying about this could compromise relationship w/ FBI.

Referring to how Danchenko’s August 2016 email to Milian read that the two men never met, Sears argues that if Danchenko had written in the email that they had talked a few weeks back (alluding to the purported anonymous 10-15 call…

…that Danchenko believed to be Milian), Milian may have never called him again if he was trying to remain anonymous.

Sears brings up the Amtrak records of Danchenko going to New York and that Milian was supposedly flying into JFK airport on July 27, 2016.

Helson was unaware of late July FB message from Danchenko to his wife about the giraffes at the Bronx zoo that said “Another meeting later.”

Sears also raises Milian reached out to @GeorgePapa19 around same time that Danchenko believed he received an anonymous call from Milian.

In two of Helson’s Field Office Annual Source Reports, he wrote that any inconsistencies in Danchenko’s report were minor. Steele’s motivations came into question. Helson testified to the OIG that Danchenko’s had “real information” that was helpful to the FBI.

Defense Exhobit 109 stated that Danchenko reported critical reporting that added in a top FBI investigation. It also said that some of Danchenko’s reporting has been added to 25 IRs. An IR is an intelligence report.

Defense Exhibit 110 is a payment amount of $10,000 for the confidential human source, Danchenko, for reporting he provided during January of 2018. He was involved in 5 separate investigations, and his information…

…led to recognizing cyber actors [affecting] the 2016 election, according to the FBI. Danchenko reportedly assisted in uncovering “ongoing-maligned influence.”

Notes that former AG Bill Barr was launching an investigation into how the FBI handled Carter Page. Helson was concerned that the publishing of the redacted January 2017 interview would damage Danchenko.

Helson wrote a memo in July of 2020 that he disagreed with the move to release this. “Internet detectives” figured out who had been interviewed.

On October 21, 2020, Helson drafted an electronic communication to give a lump sum payment of $346,000 to Danchenko, since he would now have safety issues and had provided information for at least 25 FBI investigations.

The lump sum payment request was denied. Danchenko’s total lifetime payments would have been around $565,000 if he had actually received the $346,000.

Sears argued that the FBI didn’t have as much information until Danchenko, which Helson agrees with.

Helson says that they never thought Danchenko was partisan because said some of the things Danchenko brought to FBI were items that would negatively affect Trump. In other words, they’re inferring Danchenko tried to prevent those things from occurring.

No further questions.

In redirect, Durham calls out Helson, because he said there was no derogatory info on Danchenko in reports, but this wasn’t true. Durham raises that there is an open espionage case on Danchenko at that time.

References 65/8, a counterintelligence report. Durham asks if Helson bothered to obtain access to the report and see what it was about. Helson says that he spoke with Laura Pino about it and she said it was hearsay.

Durham: “Did you read the underlying documents? Is it not true that Human Validation recommended that Helson read the file.”

Again, Helson claiming he didn’t have access. Despite his knowledge that there was a witness, Helson said someone countered the witness.

Durham: “Danchenko’s Visa had expired. Did you know whether or not he stayed in the country anyway?” Durham raises the need to determine whether or not there was fraud committed with his immigration status in the states.

Durham: “Did Crossfire Hurricane, Mueller, or ANYONE do what was recommended?”

Conversation under seal.

Helson said he only checked Danchenko’s travel records going forward at that point, not backward.
Durham: “Did you check his financials to find unsolicited reporting that would have [indicated] the FBI might NOT be the primary audience for his reporting?”

Helson: “No.”

Durham: “Did you look into anything regarding his Visa or immigration status?!”

Helson: “No.”

Durham: “Did you polygraph? He could’ve been tasted by a foreign government entity to get intelligence?”

Helson: “No.”

Durham is pissed.

Sears cuts in and tries to say it that Helson disagreed with people trying to invalidate Danchenko as a human source.

“Did you know this woman from Human Validation Unit was an army counterintelligence officer in Europe.”

Helson says this doesn’t make her an expert on Russian intelligence officers in U.S.

Durham probes that Helson maybe opposed this being a 65A case instead of 105.

Durham: “Do you recall any of you or any of your colleagues attempting to corroborate the report? Did you do ANYTHING when the FBI mistakenly thought Danchenko left the country.”

Helson said it was never resolved.

(@realtoriabrooke/Twitter, 10/13/2022)   (Archive)

(…) The purposes of making Danchenko a CHS should be quite clear. The Crossfire Hurricane investigation was plagued with problems from the outset. The reasons for opening the investigation were bunk. Those problems continued as the investigation went on, with claims of Trump/Russia collusion proven unverified or outright false. (Thus the targeting of Flynn for a Logan Act violation.)

Those problems continued with the Carter Page FISA applications, first submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) in October 2016, and which relied substantially on the Steele Dossiers (aka Steele Reports). The FISA applications were renewed three times – more on that later. Each application had its own problems, from FBI lawyers lying about Carter Page to the Court being generally misled.

Realizing its own misconduct, the FBI made Danchenko a paid CHS in March 2017 – just before the third FISA warrant was submitted in April 2017. This would allow Comey’s FBI to work directly with Danchenko in support of its counter-intelligence investigation against President Trump.

Danchenko being a CHS also served another purpose: it protected the Bureau and the Mueller Special Counsel from revealing their “sources and methods.” How do you hide misconduct? Bury the witness. (Techno Fog, 9/13/2022) (Archive)

On Friday, October 14th, we learned the FBI directed Igor Danchenko to scrub his phones and erase all incriminating evidence:

We’ve known since last week that the FBI made Danchenko a confidential human source so as to hide him from Nunes’ and other inquiries into the Russiagate scam. Now we find out that an added benefit was that Danchenko could legally dispose of evidence of the Russiagate scam. Ufb. pic.twitter.com/fHQoLp2Pfv

— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) October 14, 2022

Judge Anthony J. Trenga (Credit: American Law Institute)

“The judge in Special Counsel John Durham’s trial on Igor Danchenko on Friday dismissed one of the five federal counts the Russian intelligence expert was facing for allegedly lying to the FBI, after the defense team made the request, arguing prosecutors has failed to provide sufficient evidence.

The count – one of five – was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga in a federal court in northern Virginia.

The count alleged Danchenko lied to FBI Special Agent Kevin Helson when he said he had not “talked” to longtime Democratic operative and PR executive Charles Dolan about information that went into the so-called Steele dossier to which Danchenko provided 80% of its information.” (Read more:  JusttheNews, 10/14/2022)  (Archive)

Russian analyst Igor Danchenko walks to the Albert V. Bryan U.S. Courthouse on Oct. 11, 2022, in Alexandria, VA (Credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

“On Friday, Special Counsel John Durham finished presenting evidence in the Igor Danchenko trial.

The most damning part of the day, if not the trial? Testimony that FBI supervisors within the Mueller Special Counsel refused requests to interview a source for the Steele Dossier: longtime Democrat activist Charles Dolan.

But first we start with the redirect examination of a witness from Thursday afternoon – FBI Special Agent Kevin Helson – who handled Danchenko when he was a confidential human source. (Our prior article discussed Helson’s investigative failures at length.)

Durham questioned Helson about efforts to determine the Danchenko-Dolan connection in the summer of 2017. By that time, the Mueller Special Counsel had been ongoing since May 2017 and had, on its own, taken part in the last Carter Page FISA renewal. And if you recall from our last articles, Danchenko had been an FBI CHS since March 2017. Once Mueller was appointed, Helson was the go-between, asking Danchenko questions posed by the then-Special Counsel’s team.

By June 2017, the Mueller Special Counsel had developed information that Democrat Charles Dolan may have been a source of the Steele Dossier. They passed questions about Dolan to Agent Helson:

Q         Who did those [Dolan] questions come from?

A         It came from the Mueller investigative team, particularly Ms. [Amy] Anderson.

Durham also cleaned-up Helson’s sloppiness. The previous day, Helson testified that Danchenko didn’t know the Steele Dossier was going to the FBI. Helson admitted he didn’t have any evidence to support his own conclusion.

Q         You were asked a question yesterday that you adopted — you were asked a question about, well, the defendant didn’t know that Steele’s reports were going to the FBI, and you said yes. Do you have any independent knowledge of that?

A         No.

Q         That’s just what the defendant told you, right?

A         Yeah.

Q         So when you told the jury that he, Mr. Danchenko, didn’t know that they were going to the FBI, you don’t know that to be the case?

A         I had no other knowledge that suggested that, no.

Q         Right. There’s no independent evidence of any sort, correct?

A         Yes, correct.

Helson was also asked about Danchenko’s lack of complete honesty with respect to his interactions with Charles Dolan and his travels to Moscow. As you’ll see, Helson’s answers also implicate his own failure to fully investigate his source.

Q         Did Mr. Danchenko tell you about his having been in Moscow in June of 2016?

A         No, he did not tell me that.

Q         Did he tell you anything about his having met with or seen Mr. Dolan in Moscow in June of 2016?

A         No, sir.

Q         Do you recall, sir, whether or not you ever learned the dates on which Mr. Danchenko was in Moscow in June of 2016?

A         I learned of it later.

Q         And do you remember: When you learned at a later point in time he had been in Moscow in June of 2016, did you talk to him about that?

A         No.

Danchenko’s June 2016 Moscow trip, where he met with Dolan, has significant timing because Danchenko flew from Moscow to London to give “a report”. Who was in London? Christopher Steele.

Durham also inquired about Helson’s October 24, 2017 interview of Danchenko. Helson described the purposes of that meeting:

“This meeting was — in part, it was a direction from the Mueller investigative team bringing up the discrepancies in the Sergei Millian matter, and they wanted me to go back specifically to ask the questions and get his response.”

Just so we’re clear – by October 24, 2017, the Mueller Team knew there were issues with Danchenko’s allegations about Sergei Millian. At a minimum, they were aware of the discrepancies in Danchenko’s claims about Millian. And how did Danchenko respond? By changing his story.

The importance is two-fold. First, it confirms to the Mueller Special Counsel that there are even more problems with Danchenko’s story. Second, it catches Danchenko in a lie that would, 4+ years later, be part of his own indictment. (Read more: Techno Fog/The Reactionary, 10/15/2022)  (Archive)

“Hertzog was with the FBI from 2008 through 2019 as an intelligence analyst with a primary focus on Russian counterintelligence. She described her role as an analyst who “looks at information and tries to identify trends, patterns, and investigative next steps.” She was assigned to the Directorate of Intelligence at FBI Headquarters.

Hertzog was assigned to Special Counsel Mueller’s Office in July 2017.  She described her role and chain of command with the Mueller Team:

Q         And what, generally, was your role with the Special Counsel Mueller’s team?

A         I was primarily initially to focus on looking into  reports that the FBI had received on Russian matters.

Q         All right. Did those reports have a particular name?

A         We referred to them typically as the Steele dossier.

Q         Now, as a member of Special Counsel Mueller’s team, was there a chain of command?

A         Yes.

Q         Can you describe the chain of command that you worked with?

A         I reported directly to SIA Brian Auten. Above him was Special Counsel Mueller. There were horizontal chains of reporting as well. So there was an attorney, a supervisory special agent, and then head of FBI personnel.

Q         Okay. So you had occasion to work with special agents as well, correct?

A         Correct.

Q         And who were some of the special agents that you worked with Special Counsel Mueller?

A         I worked with Supervisory Special Agent Amy Anderson and Supervisory Special Agent Joe Nelson.

Hertzog became familiar with the Steele Dossier, and with the parties involved in the Steele Dossier, once she joined the Mueller Team:

Q         And how did you become familiar with Mr. Steele?

A         When I reported [July 2017] to the Special Counsel’s Office, SCO, I had received background information on the investigation up until that point.

It was her job to “look into the Steele Dossier.” She described this as “trying to identify the sourcing for the claims in the dossier and, specifically, the national security threat with regards to the Russian influence piece.” Hertzog explains:

Q         And a lot of names appeared in those dossier reports?

A         Correct.

Q         Did you learn that there were a number of different sources that the defendant relied on?

A         Yes.

Q         Did you have a particular focus on any of those sources?

A         There were a number of sub-sources that were identified for investigative next steps.

Q         Okay. And did you have a particular individual that you focused on?

A         Yes. There was an individual named Olga Galkina who was — when I was assigned to SCO, was my primary focus initially.

Compare Hertzog’s testimony to the words of Robert Mueller:

How do we not conclude that Mueller lied to Congress?

Unless his own team kept him in the dark about their own investigation of the Steele Dossier?

The title of this post references “obstruction” by the Mueller Special Counsel. Just to clarify, we’re not saying that there will be charges of obstruction of justice from anyone on the Mueller Team. (We’re not going to predict what comes next.) By obstruction we mean obstructing the truth, or obstructing the efforts to determine the truth. We plan to dive deeper into this Mueller issue in the near future.

Back to Hertzog. She took investigative steps to look into the Steele Dossier. She investigated Olga Galkina. She also looked into Charles Dolan:

Q         And what’s your understanding of who Mr. Dolan is?

A         Mr. Dolan, to my understanding, having reviewed FBI databases, had connectivity to both Mr. Danchenko and Ms. Galkina.

Q         So your testimony is that you learned about Mr. Dolan through the various FBI databases?

A         I believe information was provided to me as background when I on boarded with SCO, and I became aware of more information as I researched.

In fact, Hertzog connected Dolan to Olga Galkina, and also to those who had worked in the Russian government (such as Putin ally and confidant Dmitry Peskov). She checked Dolan’s travel records, finding he had traveled to Cyprus (where Galkina was located) and also to Russia. She found Dolan’s link to Galkina, a “sub-source for the Steele Dossier” of particular importance.” (Read more: Techno Fog/The Reactionary, 10/15/2022)  (Archive)

“An elite Washington, D.C., think tank has employed individuals who’ve worked for front groups controlled by Chinese spy agencies, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has employed over a dozen individuals who’ve worked in a range of capacities at China-based nonprofits set up or co-opted by Chinese intelligence agencies, including the Ministry of State Security (MSS) and the intel arm of the People’s Liberation Army.

These individuals have served as experts in various policy areas, including international relations, American politics and nuclear policy while working at both the think tank’s D.C. headquarters and at its Tsinghua University center in Beijing. Moreover, not only did Carnegie employ the majority of these experts while current CIA Director William Burns was president of the think tank, but, according to the nonprofit’s current records, Carnegie still employs individuals working for Chinese intelligence front groups.

Carnegie, the CIA and Director Burns did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the DCNF.

The DCNF was able to identify Carnegie staff who’ve worked for Chinese spy fronts by cross-referencing publicly available employment information with a new book on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intel and influence operations written by Alex Joske, a former analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

The book, called “Spies and Lies,” details Chinese intelligence agents’ efforts to infiltrate and influence Western institutions. Joske reveals a front set up by China’s version of the CIA began courting Carnegie in the early 2000s — a relationship the DCNF discovered has persisted to this day. (Read more: Daily Caller, 11/11/2022)  (Archive)

FISA Court rubber stamps FBI warrant applications to spy on Americans. (Credit: River City Reader)

(…) The FBI’s use of the uncorroborated Steele dossier was not the FBI’s worst offense, however. Worse still was the Crossfire Hurricane team’s last-minute amendment to the FISA application that misleadingly framed Steele’s source network as one established during his time as an MI6 agent, when, in fact, neither Danchenko nor any of Steele’s other dossier sources had been sources during his time with British intelligence.

While Steele would later confirm for the inspector general that his source network did not involve sources from his time with MI6, but “was developed entirely in the period after he retired from government service,” from Auten’s detailed trial testimony, we now know that the Crossfire Hurricane team either knew Steele’s source network was not connected to British intelligence or knew that it could not, in good faith, make that representation to the FISA court.

For two days, Durham elicited testimony from Auten of the FBI’s attempts to ascertain Steele’s source network, including during a trip to Europe in early October, but Steele refused to identify his sources. Auten’s testimony in this regard proves significant when considered together with details previously revealed in the Office of Inspector General’s report on FISA abuse.

In discussing the process the FBI undertook to obtain the first FISA warrant on Page, the OIG explained that the day before the FISA court granted the surveillance order, the government submitted a “read copy” of the FISA application to the FISA court’s legal adviser for a preliminary assessment of any issues. The FISA court’s legal adviser asked the attorney working with the FBI on the application “how it was that Steele had a network of subsources?”

The government lawyer “provided additional information to him regarding Steele’s past employment history,” the OIG report explained; that response implied Steele’s source network came from his time with MI6. Significantly, the FISA court’s legal adviser then indicated the additional detail of Steele’s prior work with British intelligence should be included in the official FISA application to the court.

“That the legal advisor not only raised the question about Steele’s access to a network of sources, but then insisted that the FISA application be updated to include information concerning Steele’s prior government position, shows the FISA court placed great significance on Steele’s previous British intelligence work for purposes of assessing the reliability of his source network.” And with that misleading information added, the next day, Oct. 21, 2016, the FISA court issued the first of four orders authorizing the surveillance of Page’s phone and email accounts.

Given the importance the legal adviser placed on understanding Steele’s source network, it seems unlikely the FISA court would have authorized the surveillance of Page had the FBI either acknowledged that Steele’s source network came from his private work with Orbis or conceded that Steele had refused to reveal his sources. It was this final deception, then, and not merely the FBI’s reliance on the uncorroborated Steele dossier, that led to the illegal surveillance of Page. And, here, those involved in adding the last-minute, credibility-boosting footnote reference to Steele’s MI6 work knew full well that misrepresentation would score the bureau a surveillance warrant, making it an even worse transgression.” (Read more: The Federalist, 10/14/2022)  (Archive) 

There are, at the very least, 459 documented violations of state and federal laws and regulations on the infamous device.

For the past thirteen months, Marco Polo—a nonprofit research group comprised of six men from across the U.S. dedicated to exposing corruption and blackmail—has been writing a comprehensive Report on the Biden Laptop and the crimes thereon. Our motives and budget were transparent; thousands of Americans financed its production. We neither sought nor received any institutional/corporate backing. We were delayed for various reasons, but finished the dossier for 35k under budget.

At long last, the Report is complete. It has been sent to members of the U.S. House & U.S. Senate, U.S. attorneys for the jurisdictions in which the Bidens and their associates committed crimes, state and local law enforcement, and—for good measure—every contact on the Biden Laptop, which includes all of Hunter’s classmates at Archmere Academy and a portion of the current White House staff.

It is simple but dense: 630 pages. 2,020 footnotes. Broken up neatly into seven sections with the biggest focus being Business-Related Crimes. We believe that it is the deepest digital colonoscopy ever performed on a sitting U.S. first family.

To read & download the Report click here.

We will have much more to say about this in the coming days & weeks (and months).

Press coverage of the Report (so far) can be found at the following links:

The U.S. Sun (10/19/2022)

Kanekoa News (10/19/2022)

The Daily Wire (10/20/2022)

The Post Millennial (10/20/2022)

Sputnik News (10/20/2022)

Timcast (10/20/2022)

World Tribune (10/20/2022)

Just the News (10/20/2022)

Kanekoa News (10/21/2022)

Daily Mail (10/21/2022)

Valiant News (10/21/2022)

Law Officer (10/21/2022)

Newsmax (10/21/2022)

One America News (10/22/2022)

Blitz (10/24/2022)

Daily Mail (10/24/2022)

National File (10/24/2022)

World Tribune (10/25/2022)

American Wire (10/25/2022)

UncoverDC (10/26/2022)

The Absolute Truth with Emerald Robinson (10/26/2022)

Law Enforcement Today (10/26/2022)

New York Post (10/26/2022)

–Garrett Ziegler, Founder

(MarcoPoloUSA, 10/18/2022)  (Archive)

Let’s talk about Hillary Clinton, Lafarge, ISIS, the law firm Paul | Weiss and Corporations paying “fines” for “Conspiring to Provide Material Support to Foreign Terrorist Organizations” ⚖️💥🎻

From 1985-1992, HRC made $31,000 per year as a board member of Lafarge Corporation 🧵 pic.twitter.com/sAGodpNN5A

— Michael Rae Khoury (@Vltra_MK) March 26, 2023

DAG Lisa Monaco oversaw the charges.

Monaco worked as a summer associate for the law firm Hogan and Hartson, LLP.

(Sullivan & Cromwell)

Monaco has connections to Latham & Watkins’ Kathryn Ruemmler – who defended Michael Sussman and Susan Rice.https://t.co/jzZx6Gk0n5 pic.twitter.com/ZZkuN9CUyV

— Michael Rae Khoury (@Vltra_MK) March 26, 2023

In 2001, Loretta Lynch signed off as Commissioner of the Telcordia Technologies, Inc. > NeuStar, Inc. transfer 22 days before 9/11.https://t.co/zofZuPZRvO

— Michael Rae Khoury (@Vltra_MK) March 26, 2023

“We need to make sure that those who get the benefit of such an arrangement comply with their responsibility.” said John Carlin, a senior member of the deputy attorney general’s office. “If not, you should expect to see serious repercussions.”https://t.co/eKuD1Bv1Na

— Michael Rae Khoury (@Vltra_MK) March 26, 2023

So, John Carlin signed off on the Carter Page FISA warrant on September 26th, 2016.

Now he’s overseeing Ericsson’s FCPA case as a Partner at Paul | Weiss.

The Obama Admin were well aware of Ericsson’s corruption since at least 2009… 👀⚖️💥https://t.co/xXOaqr1Bgz pic.twitter.com/tMlIZLoGpQ

— Michael Rae Khoury (@Vltra_MK) March 26, 2023

Andrew Weissmann… who refused to investigate the Clinton Foundation 👀

In June 2017, he was appointed to a management role on the 2017 special counsel team headed by Robert Mueller.

To assume that position, Weissmann took a leave from his Department of Justice post. pic.twitter.com/dRC95FuRg5

— Michael Rae Khoury (@Vltra_MK) March 26, 2023

Guess who oversaw the deal?

Paul, Weiss was advising Neustar in its $3.1 billion sale to TransUnion… Coincidentally, announced just THREE DAYS before the Sussman Indictment is unsealed.https://t.co/Pwo5IJ1Jpy pic.twitter.com/HU2rVOqyRp

— Michael Rae Khoury (@Vltra_MK) March 26, 2023

Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia <=> Hogan Lovells <=> Neustar <=> Rodney Joffe <=> Perkins Coie <=> John Podesta <=> Michael Sussman <=> Hillary for America <=> Steptoe & Johnson | Hogan Lovells | Kirkland & Ellis ALL DONATED to HFA.

[McGuireWoods] ⚖️🪃🎻 pic.twitter.com/oBdo8Y85EK

— Michael Rae Khoury (@Vltra_MK) March 26, 2023

Cheryl Mills worked as an associate at the Washington law firm of Hogan & Hartson.

Mills has been a Director of the Clinton Foundation while receiving Donations from Hogan & Lovells.

Mills was also mixed up in Vince Foster’s “suicide” & the Whitewater scandal… pic.twitter.com/xYz8GLoV5s

— Michael Rae Khoury (@Vltra_MK) March 26, 2023

Howard Topaz was the tax lawyer who filed income tax returns for the Clintons’ 2004 + 2007-14 joint tax returns – which were prepared by Hogan & Hartson/Hogan Lovells.

Hogan & Hartson employed Gold Star Father Khizr Khan, there he worked on the EB5 travel visa program. pic.twitter.com/cyRhV4kJIZ

— Michael Rae Khoury (@Vltra_MK) March 26, 2023

SEPTEMBER 07, 2011 💥

President Barack Obama nominates Mark Brzezinski to be ambassador to Sweden, specializing in anti-corruption law.

(McGuireWoods Partner – HFA Donation)

Brzezinski was an associate at what was then Hogan & Hartson from 1996-1999.https://t.co/fuijqmJphy pic.twitter.com/evUei39nTX

— Michael Rae Khoury (@Vltra_MK) March 26, 2023

SWEDISH TELECOM GIANT LM ERICSSON & ITS U.S. DIVISION ERICSSON INC. SUED BY 862 AMERICANS FOR ALLEGED PROTECTION MONEY PAYMENTS TO AQ, AQ-IN-IRAQ & ISLAMIC STATE

Plaintiffs are 862 Americans, comprised of 286 GOLD STAR FAMILIEShttps://t.co/Z3LZJbjS3G

— Michael Rae Khoury (@Vltra_MK) March 26, 2023

Tying all people, Law Firms & Twitter together:https://t.co/i1pGKwRNYX

— Michael Rae Khoury (@Vltra_MK) March 26, 2023

https://t.co/PT4PdTsNmthttps://t.co/g8D3wl523A

H/t: @1foreverseeking https://t.co/1qw2XYFZEO

— Michael Rae Khoury (@Vltra_MK) March 26, 2023

(Working archived link for The Canary article above)

That Alex Jones is a nationally detested villain for getting a story incorrect (despite apologizing and retracting countless times, something I’ve yet to see CNN, MSNB anchors do for Rittenhouse) and yet most people couldn’t have cared less about Epstein – a man who trafficked thousands of children, purportedly helped to found the Clinton Foundation, and was suicided in the most painfully obvious manner possible – says a lot about banal and shallow values of our culture and how easily our attention can be diverted to meaningless noise.

It’s like…

On the one hand, you have something that’s kind of bad. Grieving parents get weird voicemails and messages calling them liars (and in one case the n-word despite being white)… OK sure, that’s bad. Did Alex tell them to do that? No. Did Alex apologize and rescind his theory? Yes. OK great, let’s stop talking about this!

Then on the other hand you have a pedophile with his own island and more powerful connections than you can count – many of those connections holding legal positions of authority over your life including PRESIDENTS. The trafficking alone is infinitely worse than a couple of parents being harassed, not to mention the implications of a compromised government that’s complicit in the trafficking (who are willing to murder to cover their tracks). Can we discuss this rather than demonize the guy who’s been screaming about it since 2008?!?!?

Anyways… God bless Whitney Webb for sticking to true journalism. The entire interview is worth a watch:

(Zero Hedge, 11/3/2022)

Seth Rich (Credit: public domain)

“The FBI is asking a U.S. court to reverse its order that it produce information from Seth Rich’s laptop computer.

If the court does not, the bureau wants 66 years to produce the information.

(…) In the new filing, government lawyers said the FBI never extracted the data, which it revealed as originating with a law enforcement agency. They said the information is on a compact disc containing images of the laptop.

“The FBI did not open an investigation into the murder of Seth Rich, nor did it provide investigative or technical assistance to any investigation into the murder of Seth Rich. As a result, the FBI has never extracted the data from the compact disc and never processed the information contained on the disc,” they said.

To produce the information, the FBI would have to convert information on the disc into pages and then review the pages to redact information per FOIA, according to the government.

If Mazzant upholds his order, the FBI wants a lengthy period of time to perform the work—66 years, or 500 pages a month.

“If the court overrules the FBI’s motion, the FBI wants to produce records at a rate of 500 pages per month. At that rate, it will take almost 67 years just to produce the documents, never mind the images and other files,” Ty Clevenger, a lawyer representing Huddleston, told The Epoch Times in an email.

“After dealing with the FBI for five years, I now assume that the FBI is lying to me unless and until it proves otherwise. The FBI is desperately trying to hide records about Seth Rich, and that begs the question of why.” (Read more: The Epoch Times, 10/28/2022)  (Archive)

The National Archives in Washington D.C. (Credit: National Archives.gov)

“Biden’s lawyers discovered the materials in November and self-reported them, and some were classified at the top secret level, officials said.

The issue of handling of classified documents boomeranged Monday on President Joe Biden, just months after the FBI raided Donald Trump’s Florida home, as officials confirmed a small number of classified documents were found in a private office once used by the current president at his think tank.

A senior government official directly familiar with the discovery told Just the News that the National Archives asked the Justice Department to open an investigation in November after a small number of classified documents — some marked top secret — were found in a locked closet in the Penn Biden Center in Washington, where Biden worked after he left the Obama administration.

The official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, said Attorney General Merrick Garland has asked a U.S. attorney in Illinois — a holdover from the Trump administration — to oversee the investigation with NARA and the FBI. The documents appear to be from the Obama administration.

The White House released a statement Monday evening confirming the discovery and the investigation, saying Biden’s lawyers self-disclosed the existence of the documents when the office previously used by the president was being vacated for another party.

“The White House is cooperating with the National Archives and the Department of Justice regarding the discovery of what appear to be Obama-Biden Administration records, including a small number of documents with classified markings,” White House special counsel Richard Sauber said in a statement after the discovery was reported by CBS and CNN. “The documents were discovered when the President’s personal attorneys were packing files housed in a locked closet to prepare to vacate office space at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C.” (Read more: Just the News, 1/9/2023)  (Archive)

Joe Biden speaks at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. (Credit: New York Post)

“Classified documents from Joe Biden’s tenure as Vice President were found in early November at the Penn Biden Center in Washington,  CBS News reports, citing two sources with knowledge of an inquiry launched by Attorney General Merrick Garland.

The investigation into the roughly 10 documents will be conducted by the US Attorney in Chicago (shocking!), according to the sources.

The classified material was identified by personal attorneys for Mr. Biden on Nov. 2, the day before the midterm elections, Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president confirmed. The documents were discovered when Mr. Biden’s personal attorneys “were packing files housed in a locked closet to prepare to vacate office space at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C.,” Sauber said in a statement to CBS News. The documents were contained in a folder that was in a box with other unclassified papers, the sources said. The sources revealed neither what the classified documents contain nor their level of classification. A source familiar told CBS News the documents did not contain nuclear secrets. -CBS News

Remember when the DOJ raided former President Trump and made a huge deal about classified documents having been commingled with not-classified documents? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

According to Sauber, the White House counsel’s office notified the National Archives on the same day the material was discovered, after which the Archives took possession the next morning.

“The discovery of these documents was made by the President’s attorneys,” said Sauber. “The documents were not the subject of any previous request or inquiry by the Archives. Since that discovery, the President’s personal attorneys have cooperated with the Archives and the Department of Justice in a process to ensure that any Obama-Biden Administration records are appropriately in the possession of the Archives.”

In charge of the investigation is John Lausch, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, who will seek to determine how the classified material ended up at the Penn Biden Center (which received $54.6 million in Chinese donations after the Biden Center was announced in 2016). (Zero Hedge, 1/10/2023)  (Archive)

Dana Remus (Credit: Andrew Harnik/AP)

(…) At least 5 White House aides, including former White House Counsel Dana Remus, were involved in Biden’s classified documents scandal.

(…) Joe Biden STOLE highly classified documents from a SCIF while he was a US Senator and Vice President. He had no right to store any classified material at his home or the Penn Biden Center.

Not only did Biden steal SCIF-designated documents and improperly scatter them everywhere, evidence shows he likely used them to provide classified briefings on Ukraine to his son/bagman Hunter Biden.

It also appears Biden is hiding documents from NARA.

According to investigative reporter Paul Sperry, records reveal Joe Biden had his personal lawyer send a FedEx driver to the Penn Biden Center to pick up his boxes of classified White House documents on November 2, 2022 – just ONE DAY BEFORE the National Archives (NARA) arrived to the center to seize the documents.

Did Joe Biden withhold classified documents from the National Archives?

BREAKING: Records reveal Biden had his personal lawyer send a FedEx driver to the Penn Biden Center to pick up boxes of WH docs on Nov 2, 2022–the day before (Nov 3) the National Archives arrived @ the Center to retrieve classified WH docs “discovered” there. Docs w/h from NARA?

— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) November 22, 2023

(Read more: The Gateway Pundit, 11/22/2023)  (Archive)

Representative Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), is expected to become chairman of the Judiciary Committee if Republicans take the House. (Credit: yahoo!news)

“House Judiciary Republicans on Friday released a 1,000-plus page report on FBI whistleblower disclosures on “the politicization of the FBI And Justice Department.”

The members called the report “the first comprehensive accounting of the FBI’s problems to date, which undermine the FBI’s fundamental law-enforcement mission.”

They also say in an announcement about the report that the 1,050 document “primarily concerns FBI abuses, due to the experiences and roles of whistleblowers, but also examines the actions of the Justice Department where appropriate for context and explanation.”

(…) “The thousand-page report builds on various whistleblower disclosures describing the FBI’s Washington hierarchy as ‘rotted at its core’ with a “systemic culture of unaccountability,” the report also reads.

The House Judiciary Republicans list as some of the “key takeaways” in the report as:

• FBI leadership abusing its law-enforcement authority for political reasons.
• The FBI artificially inflating and manipulating domestic violent extremism statistics for political purposes.
• The FBI downplaying and reducing the spread of the serious allegations of wrongdoing leveled against Hunter Biden.
• The Justice Department and FBI using counterterrorism resources to target parents resisting a far-left educational curriculum.

(Read more: JusttheNews, 11/4/2022)  (Archive)

“The FBI took possession of the Biden Laptop—via grand jury subpoena—on December 9, 2019. The two agents from the Wilmington Resident Agency of the Baltimore Field Office who delivered that subpoena to the laptop repair shop owner (Mac Isaac) were Josh Wilson and Mike Dzielak.

Wilson and Dzielak have since attempted to scrub their online footprint, but Wilson is still featured in several articles. Locating a picture of Dzielak, however, proved somewhat difficult—and now we know why. In his soon-to-be-released book, Mac Isaac recounts how Dzielak told Mac Isaac the following—in a serious tone—after delivering the grand jury subpoena: “It is our experience that nothing ever happens to people that don’t talk about these things.” Well, Mac Isaac did “talk about these things” after Dzielak and Wilson (& the FBI HQ) slow-walked the investigation into the Bidens.”

(Credit: Marco Polo)

(Read more: Marco Polo/Substack, 11/05/2022)  (Archive)

Alexander Vindman testifies before a House Intelligence Committee hearing as part of the impeachment inquiry into President Trump on November 19, 2019. (Credit: Jonathan Ernst, Reuters)

“A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by star impeachment witness Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman (Ret.) against Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani, and two Trump White House staffers for supposed “witness intimidation” during Trump’s impeachment hearings.

Vindman filed his suit in February, just over a year after he had enjoyed fifteen minutes of infamy before Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and the House Intelligence Committee, as Democrats sought to impeach and remove Trump for allegedly pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate allegations of corruption against Joe Biden, his leading rival in the 2020 election.

(…) Vindman alerted a contact in the intelligence committee — whom he refused to name under oath — about a July 2019 phone call between Trump and Zelensky, triggering the investigation into Trump. Schiff would not allow Vindman to be questioned about the so-called “whistleblower” who first approached the House Intelligence Committee with his second-hand concerns about the call. Vindman did admit, however, that the Ukrainians felt no “pressure” to investigate Biden.

(…) U.S. District Court James Boasberg of the District of Columbia, a Barack Obama appointee, issued a 29-page ruling, The Hill reported, concluding that even if “Defendants leveled harsh, meanspirited, and at times misleading attacks” against Vindman, “political hackery alone does not violate [the law at issue].” White House staffers Dan Scavino and Julia Hahn, a former reporter for Breitbart News, were also named as defendants in the lawsuit.” (Read more: Breitbart, 11/8/2022)  (Archive)

Patrick Moore (l, bottom) and his law office in Boston, Massachusetts. Moore was appointed as the First Assistant Attorney General by the newly elected Massachusetts Attorney General, Andrea Campbell, in December 2022. (Credit: MSN)

 Nine boxes of documents were taken from President Biden’s attorney Patrick Moore’s Boston office, but have yet to be reviewed, the National Archives disclosed in a response letter to Sens. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, this week first obtained by Fox News Digital.

The Archives had not previously publicly disclosed the number of boxes taken from Boston. It had been reported that Moore had shipped boxes of documents from the Penn Biden Center to his Boston office before discovering the initial trove of classified documents at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

In response to questions by Johnson and Grassley in a Feb. 24 letter asking how and when the archives learned that records were transported to Boston, Acting Archivist of the United States Debra Steidel Wall responded the agency learned about it on Nov. 3, 2022.

“When NARA [National Archives and Records Administration] contacted President Biden’s personal counsel on November 3, 2022, to arrange to pick up boxes from the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., they informed NARA that Mr. Moore had moved other boxes from the Penn Biden Center to Mr. Moore’s law firm in Boston,” the letter states.

In addition, the archives notified the Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General on Nov. 4 that the documents had been moved. The documents were then picked up on Nov. 9 and were secured in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston.

“NARA staff retrieved nine boxes from Mr. Moore’s Boston office,” Wall continued, which had not been previously known.

Despite having possession of the documents since November, the Archives has not yet reviewed the boxes’ content to determine whether additional classified materials are inside.

“NARA has not reviewed the contents of the boxes found at Mr. Moore’s Boston office,” Wall states in the letter dated Tuesday. (Read more: Fox News, 3/08/2023)  (Archive)

FoiaFan@15poundstogo highlights a few of the released documents:

Wow. From the latest Crooked Hillary FBI foia drop. "Bad guy within" "Put ___ up to it" "determined not to prosecute" "all handled quietly" pic.twitter.com/qgf9i31Uwn

— FoiaFan (@15poundstogo) November 11, 2022

Funny how the FBI quickly announced before Election Day '16 that the Weiner Laptop offered nothing new on the Hillary investigation. But they DIDN'T INTERVIEW the laptop's OWNER until 2 MONTHS AFTER the election. Isn't that special?!?
AND, they made the agents sign NDAs!!! pic.twitter.com/Dc8gLdTJTu

— FoiaFan (@15poundstogo) November 11, 2022

Clinton testifies to House Select Committee on Benghazi in October 2015. (Credit: public domain)

Jonathan Turley

“In the shift of the left against free speech principles, there is no figure more actively or openly pushing for censorship than Hillary Clinton. Now, reports indicate that Clinton has unleashed her allies in the corporate world to coerce Musk to restore censorship policies or face bankruptcy. The effort of the Clinton-linked “Accountable Tech” reveals the level of panic in Democratic circles that free speech could be restored on one social media platform. The group was open about how losing control over Twitter could result in a loss of control over social media generally. For Clinton, it is an “all-hands on deck” call for censorship. She previously called upon foreign governments to crackdown on the free speech of Americans on Twitter.

We have been discussing how Clinton and others have called on foreign countries to pass censorship laws to prevent Elon Musk from restoring free speech protections on Twitter. It seems that, after years of using censorship-by-surrogates in social media companies, Democratic leaders seem to have rediscovered good old-fashioned state censorship.

Accountable Tech led an effort to send a letter to top Twitter advertisers to force Musk to accept “non-negotiable” requirements for censorship.

General Motors was one of the first to pull its advertising funds to stop free speech restoration on the site.

Of course, the company had no problem with supporting Twitter when it was running one of the largest censorship systems in history — or supporting TikTok (which is Chinese-owned and has been denounced for state control and access to data). Twitter has been denounced for years for its bias against conservative and dissenting voices, including presumably many GM customers on the right. None of that was a concern for GM but the pledge to restore free speech to Twitter warrants a suspension.

The letter is open about the potential cascading effect if free speech is restored on one platform: “While the company is hardly a poster child for healthy social media, it has taken welcome steps in recent years to mitigate systemic risks, ratcheting up pressure on the likes of Facebook and YouTube to follow suit.”

The letter insists that free speech will only invite “disinformation, hate, and harassment” and that “[u]nder the guise of ‘free speech,’ [Musk’s] vision will silence and endanger marginalized communities, and tear at the fraying fabric of democracy.”

Among other things, the letter demands “algorithmic accountability,”  a notable inclusion in light of Democratic politicians demanding enlightened algorithms to protect citizens from their own bad choices or thoughts.

This is a copy of the letter posted in Turley’s article. The original letter was posted on Scribd and has since been removed.)

General Motors was one of the first to pull its advertising funds to stop free speech restoration on the site.

Of course, the company had no problem with supporting Twitter when it was running one of the largest censorship systems in history — or supporting TikTok (which is Chinese owned and has been denounced for state control and access to data). Twitter has been denounced for years for its bias against conservative and dissenting voices, including presumably many GM customers on the right. None of that was a concern for GM but the pledge to restore free speech to Twitter warrants a suspension.

The letter is open about the potential cascading effect if free speech is restored on one platform: “While the company is hardly a poster-child for healthy social media, it has taken welcome steps in recent years to mitigate systemic risks, ratcheting up pressure on the likes of Facebook and YouTube to follow suit.”

The letter insists that free speech will only invite “disinformation, hate, and harassment” and that “[u]nder the guise of ‘free speech,’ [Musk’s] vision will silence and endanger marginalized communities, and tear at the fraying fabric of democracy.”

Among other things, the letter demands “algorithmic accountability,”  a notable inclusion in light of Democratic politicians demanding enlightened algorithms to protect citizens from their own bad choices or thoughts.

In addition to Accountable Tech, twenty-five other groups signed the letter to demand the restoration of censorship policies, including Media Matters and the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. Accountable Tech has partnered in the past with Hillary Clinton’s Onward Together nonprofit group.

I have no objection to boycotts, which are an important form of free speech. However, this boycott action is directed at restoring censorship and preventing others from being able to post or to read opposing viewpoints.

If consistent with their past records, these companies will likely cave to these demands. While the public has clearly shown that they want more (not less) free speech, these executives are likely to yield to the pressure of Clinton and other powerful figures to coerce Musk into limiting the speech of others on his platform.

These campaigns only add support to Musk’s push for alternative revenue sources, including verification fees.  As I previously wrote, we can show that there is a market for free speech by supporting Twitter in trying to reduce the dependence on corporate sponsors. If Musk remains faithful to free speech, many customers are likely to join his platform and support his effort to reduce censorship on social media. (Read more: Jonathan Turley, 11/17/2022)  (Archive)