In The Danchenko Motions, I wrote:
I've reviewed the government motions in limine and the response of defendant Igor Danchenko, a US based Russian national. Read together they reinforce my notion that the government will have a difficult time convincing a jury, particularly one in the DC area, to find Danchenko guilty (and they may very well be correct in that conclusion). At the same time, the motions reinforce my confidence in the underlying accuracy of the real story behind the Russia collusion hoax:
I was correct regarding Danchenko's acquittal while the trial testimony reinforced confidence in the underlying accuracy of my views expressed on this subject since 2018. In fact, it turns out the degree of collusion to invent and maintain the collusion hoax was more than I originally thought possible.
Key points from the trial:
1. Danchenko estimated that he was the source for 80% of the factual statements and 50% of the analysis in the Steele Dossier.
2. Danchenko's defense was based not on the accuracy of the information he passed on to Steele, but on the contention he accurately portrayed to Steele, and later the FBI, that he was merely passing on gossip and unsubstantiated rumor.
3. In October 2016, the FBI offered to pay Steele up to $1 million if he could provide verification for the claims made in the dossier. He never did so.
4. In January 2017, the FBI interviewed Danchenko, who informed them of the unreliability of the claims in the dossier.
5. The FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst, serving as the direct contact with Danchenko, confirmed the agency was never able to corroborate Danchenko's claims.
6. Despite this, in October 2016, and January, April, and July of 2017, FBI and DOJ officials certified to the FISA Court regarding the reliability of the claims made in the dossier, which were incorporated into the FISA warrant application and its renewals. Remember that, according to the Inspector General's report, the warrant would not have been issued without the claims regarding the dossier. It turns out we had a word game being played in which the FBI and DOJ claim their certification was simply that they had verified Danchenko passed the claims on to Steele who reported them accurately, not that the claims themselves were reliable.(1)
7. Even with the dossier information, the FBI/DOJ was initially advised by the FISA Court reviewer, who reviews and comments on draft applications, that the warrant would probably not be approved unless the FBI/DOJ included information on the overall reliability of Steele's sources. In response, the final warrant application cited Steele's Russian informant network developed when he worked for British intelligence, implying the same network was the source for the dossier. This was false as Danchenko and Steele's other sources were unconnected with that earlier network.
8. In his Congressional testimony, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, repeatedly asserted that the Steele Dossier was "beyond his purview", and indeed his report made no mention of it in the section reporting on possible collusion by Trump and his associates, only making a footnote reference in the second part on possible obstruction of justice. This was an inaccurate statement. Testimony at trial revealed that the Special Counsel had an entire team investigating the claims made in the dossier. It seems the dossier was not mentioned in the final report because Mueller's team could not verify the claims.(2)
9. In the course of investigating the dossier, the Mueller team rejected the recommendation by an FBI agent, assigned to the Mueller investigation, to interview Charles Dolan, once she discovered he was a source for Danchenko. Dolan is a DC lobbyist, who has worked on Clinton campaigns throughout the years, and was supporting Hillary in 2016. The recommendation to interview him came after the FBI agent realized that Dolan also handled PR in the United States for the Kremlin and was personally meeting with Vladimir Putin's spokesperson. The Clinton partisans serving as Mueller's legal team clearly did not want to touch anything that connected Hillary Clinton with Putin, so avoided interviewing Dolan.
The trial testimony further confirms (1) there was not enough reliable evidence to justify applying for the FISA warrant on Carter Page; (2) by late January 2017, the FBI had interviewed the primary source for the Dossier, who could not verify the accuracy of its contents, nor had Christopher Steele provided any further information regarding its accuracy; (3) by the time of Robert Mueller's appointment in May 2017, no further support for the reliability of the dossier had been uncovered. Yet, for two more years, the Steele Dossier continued to exist as a boogeyman for the media, used to scare unsuspecting readers and viewers, all in furtherance of its narrative regarding Donald Trump.
At this point all one can say is that Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Adam Schiff, the New York Times, and Donald Trump (the latter for his post-2020 election insanity) could not have done more to damage the United States and its institutions than if they'd been paid agents of Vladimir Putin.
As for Durham and his investigation, who knows what's next? Will they issue a report? Will there be any further prosecutions?
At the risk of sounding more and more like Cato the Elder, who ended each speech in the Roman Senate with "Carthago delenda est", I continue to ask, "will no one tell me who Josef Mifsud was working for?"
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(1) This word game reminds me of what happened with the Hunter Biden laptop in the closing weeks of the 2020 campaign. As soon as the New York Post reported on the laptop, 51 former intelligence officials issued a statement saying the story had "all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation". That was enough for most of the rest of the press as well as Facebook and Twitter to ignore the story and suppress it from circulation. Now that Biden has been elected, it apparently has become permissible to acknowledge the authenticity of the laptop. Its contents raised questions not only about Hunter Biden, but what his father knew of, or possibly derived financial benefit from, his son's Russian, Ukrainian, and Chinese connections. Once the authenticity of the laptop became evident, 50 of the 51 officials have declined to comment. The one who did told the press that their statement merely said the story had "hallmarks of Russian disinformation", not that the story actually was Russian disinformation, and it wasn't his fault if people can't read. That's okay since it served its purpose, signaling to a press predisposed to favor Biden that it was okay to suppress the story.
(2) I don't know if Mueller deliberate misled Congress. By the time of his testimony he seemed to be mentally worn down and his appearance was embarrassing. It's possible his Clinton supporting legal team manipulated and misled Mueller during the preparation of his testimony, and perhaps throughout the entire investigation.
I have two brief comments. One, you seem to keep to the paradigm that the entire Steele dossier is accurate or the whole thing is false. My understanding is that substantial portions have been verified, small parts discredited, and much of its veracity is unknown. Without being more specific about which parts of the dossier the FBI vouched for, it's hard to say if they were wrong to do so or not.
ReplyDeleteTwo, I still haven't seen anything from the supposed laptop (there still has not been anything produced that could not have come from intelligence services) that says anything more than Hunter Biden was trying to trade on his father's name (which is common and legal among politicians families, however sleazy and reprehensible), and nothing that indicates actual involvement from Joe Biden. The very-leftist Some More News (not a fan of the Bidens at all) recently did a segment on Hunter's laptop. I'd be interested if you thought they made any errors.
It's not my paradigm. It's the paradigm of the Inspector General for the Department of Justice, and of Danchenko and the FBI in the just concluded trial. What has been verified from the Steele Dossier? Carter Page did not receive a stake in a Russian oil & gas company and was not involved with the Ukraine statement in the 2016 GOP platform. Paul Manafort was not serving as the connection between the Kremlin and Page. There was no Moscow Ritz-Carlton peeing incident. The Alfa server story was false. Michael Cohen did not visit Prague, etc. None of the stories circulating in the media were ever verified by the FBI or Mueller. From what I've seen, when people say something in the dossier is verified it is something like the statements that Carter Page visited Russia or Trump stayed at the Ritz Carlton is correct. There is nothing of substance that has been verified. If it had, why did the Mueller gang so carefully avoid mentioning the issues with the dossier? The Inspector General's report found 17 inaccuracies in the FISA warrant application, most linked to the dossier. Danchenko's own testimony, and he was the source of most of the dossier, was that he was merely passing on gossip and did not stand by its factual accuracy and told the FBI that. As stated in my summary, the FBI's own testimony at the trial was that it was not able to verify, so you don't have to take my word for it.
DeleteAs to the Biden laptop, I don't know what its contents may reveal. It is possible Joe may have had nothing to do with his son. The problem is the suppression of a legitimate news story under false pretenses, that simply would not have occurred if it had been Fredo Trump's laptop, when it would have been blasted across every media outlet in October 2020. The same can be said regarding Hillary Clinton - Hillary and her campaign had at least as much indicia indicating connections with the Kremlin as Donald Trump, yet an investigation was only opened regarding Trump.
By the way, I still don't get notification of your comments due to that strange glitch with blogspot. I usually see them if they are on recent posts but if you make any on older ones I may not realize they are there.
DeleteI can't do much about the glitch. I do find it odd that you think the FBI was reluctant to investigate Clinton when it publicly announced other investigations of Clinton.
ReplyDeleteSome of the items confirmed in the dossier were Putin's strong preference for Trump, and various secret meetings between members of Trump's team and Russian officials and spies, long before these meetings were documented by the Mueller report.
As to who Putin favored, in 2017 I wrote that, on balance, I thought Putin favored Trump, though some factors favored Clinton - one of which was that the Steele Dossier contained information purported to come from Russian intelligence sources; why would Putin be allowing damaging info regarding Trump to be leaked to Clinton if he favored The Donald? (it turns out that Steele made that part up!); read my post "Finding Real News". But so what? Putin openly favored Obama over McCain and Romney, both of whom he hated. Obama and Clinton both blamed poor relations with Russia exclusively on George Bush, absolving Putin of all blame, and Obama was caught on mic with Medvedev in 2012 asking him to tell Putin he'd have more flexibility after the election (a reference to denying Poland and Czech missile defense systems). And, all the while, before and during her time as SoS, the Clinton Foundation was pulling in millions from Kremlin-connected oligarchs. Read, "Why Wasn't the Clinton Campaign Investigated in 2016?"
DeleteAs to the differing treatment of the Clinton investigations. The email investigation was triggered by documents coming out of the Benghazi investigation, and then reinforced by the report of the State Department's Inspector General. DOJ had to do an investigation, but Clinton was handled with kid gloves. Obama went on 60 Minutes to announce Hillary was innocent, yet no one at DOJ called for Special Counsel in light of that interference. Hillary was allowed to get away with the destruction of evidence (I've been through two criminal investigations, one involving Mueller, and I can tell you that if you waltzed into a DOJ office and announced "here are the documents I think relevant and I destroyed the rest", an indictment would issue quickly). A material witness, Cheryl Mills, was allowed to sit in on Hillary's FBI interview, a big no-no. The FBI drafted an announcement of its decision not to recommend charges before even interviewing Hillary (and did not draft an alternative charging announcement); Read "53 Transcripts: Whose Testimony Was Accurate?" was more on this. Finally, Comey cleared Hillary by inventing an intent requirement for a strict liability statute, not requiring intent for a violation (in contrast to obstruction of justice which does require intent). They needed to clear the decks for Hillary's run against Trump, who they viewed as the bigger threat.
Comey's own account of the reopening of the investigation in late October is quite interesting. It turns out Andrew McCabe had been sitting on the information about Weiner's laptop for a month before telling Comey. Comey's reaction was based on (1) learning it was highly likely the laptop contained nothing damaging; (2) his assumption that Hillary would win the election, and (3) his concern that not announcing it until after the election would both taint the newly-elected President and cause reputational damage to the FBI, which is why the announcement was made. It may have been a miscalculation, but he thought he was helping Hillary; for more on the Clinton investigation read, "Reverse Watergate: Hillary Walks!", "A Unified Field Theory of the 2016 Election". (I had a long comment on the Mueller report which I managed to accidentally delete. I'll get back to that part in a few days.
Regarding the Biden laptop, which is now acknowledged, now that the election is over, even by the NY Times, as Hunter's, I have no opinion as to what it contains and won't unless and until I actually see documents from it. It is impossible to trust reporting purporting to say what the laptop contains, whether from Left or Right. Both Breitbart and the Times are simply pushing narratives. What is the real scandal as of now, is what my footnote refers to - the coordinated suppression of the story, when we both now if it involved a laptop owned by one of the Trump kids would have been front page news everywhere until the election. The quote from the one intelligence official who would talk about it later gives the game away. It was about manipulation.
DeleteWhile it's been a while since I read the Mueller report and the Dossier, my recollection is that, with the exception of the NY Trump Tower meeting, the Mueller report focused on the allegations contained within the dossier, though it avoided making any reference to the dossier because its questionable provenance would have raised embarrassing questions for the Democrats and the Clinton campaign. I'll end by asking the questions I've asked before:
DeleteIn late January 2017 Trump had dinner with Comey at which he told Comey he was considering ordering the FBI to investigate the dossier. Comey advised against that because if news of such an investigation leaked it would look like the agency was investigating the President. Why, if elements of the dossier were true, would Trump want to order such an investigation? And why would Comey want to dissuade the President from issuing such order?
With the release of the Durham Report in May 2023 we have further confirmation of the fraudulent nature of the Steele Dossier. From the Durham Report, "Our investigation determined that the Crossfire Hurricane investigators did not and could not corroborate any of the substantive allegations contained in the Steele reporting." Steele could not provide any such information even after being offered "$1 million or more by the FBI for such corroboration". Danchenko, when interviewed in January 2017 could not offer corroboration of anything and he characterized his info as "rumor and speculation". The Steele Dossier was skillfully assembled by Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS and Steele under the eye of the Clinton campaign, and released to divert attention from Hillary's email scandal. The Durham report goes through in exhaustive detail the allegations used in the Steele Dossier to obtain the FISA warrant against Carter Page and the lack of any verification of such allegations. Further, the Mueller gang had a team to examine the Steele Dossier but dissolved it when it could not verify its contents. And Mueller inaccurately stated the Dossier was not within his "purview" when he testified to Congress. The Durham Report contains the statements of the FBI analysts assigned to the Mueller team to investigate the dossier. These analysts also testified that their recommendation to interview an American individual who was a source for the dossier and had ties to both Clinton and Putin, was denied.
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