(aka Crossfire Hurricane) An illegal Obama administration FBI, DNC, Clinton campaign, British GCHQ and media coup d’état to disrupt and overturn American democracy and oust President Trump because, as Newt Gingrich explained, “He didn’t belong to the secret society“. The liberal media news organizations tried to keep the crumbling narrative alive even after Mueller exonerated him due to zero evidence. Throughout the Republican-controlled 115th Congress, the DOJ and FBI did not cooperate with congressional investigators, and stonewalled requests for information citing the Mueller investigation. Documents were very slow in coming forth, and redactions were not to protect national security, but rather to obstruct investigators, obscure government wrongdoing, and shield high-level officials and stall past the 2018 Midterm elections. (Conservapedia) Mueller’s investigation was designed from the beginning to create something out of nothing (There was no Russian hack of the DNC server. Seth Rich downloaded files sent to Wikileaks). It paralyzed the country for more than two years. More…
The origins of the first Russia dossier go back to 2002 when Don Berlin created Russia collusion stories involving billionaire brothers which were released to the Mainstream Media years later after the brothers became vocal supporters of Brexit. Dan Bongino shared in March 2019 that the Russia collusion scam was actually created a decade before President Trump’s campaign for the Presidency.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Democrats were looking for a ready-made scenario to attack Donald Trump, and thus the dossier appeared. But the information in this dossier is very close to the article written by the founder of the company that prepared this dossier, Glenn Simpson, who founded Fusion GPS, ”said Bongino.
Simpson founded a company that received funding from Democrats to investigate Trump long before he wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal, that is, the dossier was written at least 10 years before Trump’s presidential campaign. The conspiracy participants in the article and in the dossier, according to Bongino, almost completely coincide.
“According to the plot of an article in The Wall Street Journal, written in 2007 by Glenn Simpson and his wife, former Soviet officials are trying to influence American politics,” – said the former secret service agent.
The April 17 article [of 2007], written by Simpson and Mary Jacoby, was titled “How lobbyists helped former Soviet officials influence Washington.”
“This article bears a lot of similarities with the dossier: plot, heroes. Who is the article talking about? This is Manafort, Deripaska. Deripaska is not mentioned in the dossier, but he plays a big role in the entire plot of Russian influence on the US elections, ”Bongino said.
It is clear that the Russia collusion story used to harass and attempt to remove President Trump from office was created years ago. But Glenn Simpson was not the creator of the original Russian collusion story. The real creator of the Russia collusion scam is an individual who created a fake dossier to use against a billionaire and his brother back in 2003.
In June 2020 TGP broke the story that the Primary Sub-Source (PSS) for the Steele dossier was Igor Danchenko – the individual behind most of the made-up lies in the Steele dossier. Danchenko was American-based not Russian-based. Danchenko is the one individual those looking into the Trump–Russia collusion fraud wanted to identify – the PSS – the individual who was behind the material amount of Steele dossier lies. The Deep State kept Danchenko’s name hidden for nearly four years.
In September 2022 we learned that the FBI made Igor Danchenko a classified human source in March 2017 after the Trump-Russia Hillary Clinton-FBI-created hoax was in full swing. President Trump had been in office less than two months and the FBI had been targeting him for over a year already. They made up the bogus Russia collusion story knowing the media would run with it and Democrat voters would eat it up. It is one of the greatest lies and political scandals in our nation’s history.
Via Techno Fog, “Danchenko was on the FBI payroll as a confidential human source (CHS) from March 2017 through October 2020.” And on Friday October 14, 2022, we learned that the FBI ordered Igor Danchenko to scrub his phones and erase all incriminating evidence of their plot to overthrow the sitting president.3
Lower-level FBI analyst Brittany Herzog and FBI supervisory special agent Amy Anderson — two FBI officials who served on Robert Mueller’s team — testified they wanted to investigate Charles Dolan, a longtime Democrat operative, over his ties to Russia and the Steele Dossier. According to the testimony from the officials, Dolan had ties to Olga Galkina – who was a sub-source for the Steele Dossier and Dolan also did work for a PR agency that did a PR campaign for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Dolan also had a relationship with Igor Danchenko, the primary sub-source of the dossier. They said they were told “not to take further action” by their superiors. Herzog said that to her knowledge Dolan was never interviewed by anyone on the special counsel team. More at TGP…
Billionaire Christopher Chandler is suing the creator of the original Russia collusion sham. Chandler’s suit was reported in an article in 2018 at Buzzfeed.
A billionaire accused by British politicians of being a suspected Russian agent has turned to the American courts in an attempt to “vindicate his reputation”, BuzzFeed News can reveal.
Christopher Chandler, the 58-year-old New Zealand–born founder of a think tank that had a significant influence on the Brexit debate, claims that a private investigator based in Washington, DC, was the original source of “demonstrably false” allegations of money laundering, organised crime, and Russian espionage against him and his brother, Richard, that caused a sensation in London earlier this year.
Chandler, a financier based in Dubai, is suing Donald Berlin and his company, Investigative Consultants, Inc., for $15 million (about £11.6 million) in damages. The libel case was filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia last month and is reported here for the first time.
The article goes on to describe the actions taken by Berlin in 2002.
The proceedings against Berlin will expose Chandler’s background and business activities to a degree of scrutiny that the billionaire has spent his career avoiding.
The lawsuit claims that Berlin, while portraying himself as an experienced investigator with good sources, defrauded customers by providing worthless background reports that he put together by “inventing salacious narratives from his own imagination and weaving those false narratives together with manipulated information from the public domain”.
According to the lawsuit, Berlin was approached by Prince Albert of Monaco’s intelligence adviser to conduct a background check on the Chandlers in 2002, when the brothers lived in Monte Carlo. The suit claims Berlin tried to defraud the prince by producing a fabricated report. It allegedly included details lifted word-for-word from old news articles Berlin found on the internet, while other details, the suit claims, were inspired by “outdated spy novels”.
Berlin is contesting the claim. According to his lawyers, he is a small-business owner with a high-level US government security clearance who simply carried out a background check as requested by a client 15 years ago. They say Chandler has tried to intimidate him into providing a false retraction, but that he refused to go along with it.
Berlin’s story is very similar to the Russia collusion sham, claiming the Chandlers were recruited by the Russian SVR.
The brothers didn’t just handle financial transactions for powerful Russians, the report continued. They also participated personally in spying operations in the south of France. On several occasions, it was claimed, Christopher Chandler left or picked up “dead drops” in French cities for undercover agents, containing personal documents, cash, and shortwave radios.
So important were the Chandlers to their Russian patrons, it alleged, they enjoyed the protection of politicians all the way up to the top of the Kremlin. In 1999, the report said, Richard Chandler was awarded the “third class” Russian order for “service for the fatherland”.
Chandler denies all of this. He and his brother have never engaged in money laundering or organised crime, his lawsuit against Berlin asserts. They’ve never had relationships with the politicians mentioned — including Putin. And they’ve never had anything to do with Russian intelligence.
The Chandler’s claimed the entire Berlin dossier was garbage.
Chandler’s lawyers alleged that Berlin had concocted an entirely false history about the brothers in an attempt to trick Prince Albert, through Eringer, into paying nearly $100,000 for additional bogus investigations.
“From the beginning Berlin knew he did not have Swiss or Russian human intelligence or other sources and expertise required to provide an accurate background report on the Chandlers, so he set out to prepare a fictitious report about them,” Chandler’s legal complaint states. “Berlin intentionally invented salacious accusations about the Chandler brothers in an attempt to entice his marks to pay tens of thousands of dollars for additional fake reports about them.”
The suit claims Berlin “simply copied large portions” of a report he’d written for a previous client, relating to an alleged scam involving Gazprom, and changed the details to make it appear that the Chandlers had participated.
Other allegations were lifted from old news articles. One such claim was that the Chandlers hid money “in the name of Panamanian registered companies such as Dramal, Camparal, and Tutoral at the International Bank of Luxembourg (BIL)”. According to the lawsuit, this was taken from a 2002 article in Le Monde about a totally unrelated case, with the details changed to implicate the Chandlers.
The allegations about espionage are baseless, the suit says. Richard Chandler had allegedly been awarded a “third class” medal for service to the Russian fatherland, but there was no such award, it contends. Christopher Chandler had allegedly organised dead drops of shortwave radios for secret agents to use, but by 2002 such technology was outdated and Russian spies used mobile phones.
Below is Christopher Chandler’s filing in this case against Don Berlin and his company.
The court case above describes multiple accusations made by Berlin in his Russia dossier and Chandler’s denials of these accusations.
According to the case, Berlin is domiciled in Leesburg, Virginia. His company, Investigative Consultants Inc. has an office in Washington, D.C. There are numerous redactions in the document, so Berlin likely has some connections with the Deep State. Much more to follow. (source)
Investigative reporter John Solomon obtained formerly classified FBI documents regarding the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane. The FBI had operations to go after various members of the Trump campaign team who they deemed a threat or could be falsely prosecuted to smear Trump and his campaign.
- George Papadopoulos — Crossfire Typhoon (aka CT)
- Carter Page — Crossfire Dragron (aka CD)
- General Michael Flynn — Crossfire Razor (aka CR)
- Campaign chairman Paul Manafort, — Crossfire Fury (aka CF)
In addition, future Attorney General Jeff Sessions, foreign policy adviser Sam Clovis, and economic adviser Peter Navarro were also targeted according to FBI documents. Inspector General Michael Horowitz lied with his claim that Crossfire Hurricane was “properly predicated.” It was not. There was no justification for this massive counter intelligence investigation, which had only one purpose–help Hillary Clinton.
John Solomon reported:
Former FBI Assistant Director for Intelligence Kevin Brock said the information about Papadopoulos’ foreign lobbying that the bureau used to open the Russia collusion probe failed to meet the bureau’s own legal standards to justify the larger dragnet that encompassed Page and many other Trump officials.
“Normally when the FBI opens an investigation on a U.S. citizen, it has specific facts justifying an investigation of that person,” explained Brock, who led the implementation of many of the bureau’s current rules for informants and intelligence gathering. “But here what the ECs are saying is they don’t know who is involved and they are just conjecturing that someone in the Trump campaign might be in a position to receive help from Russia. You just can’t open a full field investigation on conjecture. . . .
“What they are doing is using preferred definitions,” he said. “When we employ the investigative techniques used against Carter Page to break the laws of another country and steal their secrets, it’s okay to call it spying. When we use those same techniques against a U.S. citizen, it’s called an investigation.”
(TGP) Roger Stone tried to obtain information in his trial that the Mueller team had evidence that Russia gave the emails they hacked from the DNC to WikiLeaks but corrupt Obama Appointed DC judge, Amy Berman Jackson, wouldn’t let him bring this up in his case, even though his charges were based on the entire scam. President Trump indicated that he knew Crowdstrike was at the center of the Russia collusion scam when he made his infamous phone call with the Ukraine’s new President Zelinsky. The President reportedly said the following:
Clearly if you read the call transcript you can see that the President’s request was regarding Crowdstrike and the Bidens only came up after their corrupt actions were mentioned by the Ukrainian leader. This must have hit a nerve because on February 16, 2020, 60 Minutes had a report authored by Scott Pelley, regarding Crowdstrike’s claims that Russia hacked the DNC in 2016. Pelley and 60 Minutes made an effort to clear Crowdstrike’s name in their piece where the far left media outlet suggested The Gateway Pundit (TGP) pushed conspiracy theories and flashed an image of a 2017 TGP report.
60 Minutes went on to push the discredited Trump-Russia conspiracy. Pelley, from 60 Minutes, used former anti-Trump Ambassador Bill Taylor, from the sham impeachment fiasco, as his expert witness on the Ukraine. Taylor claims he knew of no connection between Crowdstrike and the Ukraine. Pelley then shared the following in his report [emphasis added]:
Robert Johnston dealt directly with the FBI as an investigator of the DNC hack for CrowdStrike, a leading cyber security company hired by the Democrats. He told us the FBI didn’t physically examine the DNC servers because CrowdStrike gave the bureau copies of the data from the servers.
“If there is a server or a computer system of any kind that’s involved in the incident you can take an exact bit for bit digital copy of what’s on that system. Now that digital copy is just as good as having the real thing,” Johnston said.
“As far as you know, the FBI got what it needed and what it wanted?” Pelley asked Johnston.
“Exactly and evidence of that is you don’t hear the FBI complaining,” Johnston said.
He’s right. A former senior government official, familiar with the investigation, told us the FBI would have preferred to work alongside CrowdStrike’s investigators, but the Democratic National Committee decided to give the bureau digital copies of its servers instead. The official told us this was “acceptable,” in fact even typical in FBI investigations.
But this was not accurate and it was pathetic for 60 Minutes to spread the ridiculous Crowdstrike statements.
There are many holes with the ‘Russia hacked the DNC emails’ claim, much of what has already been posted here at TGP.
Several individuals previously shared they have sources who claim that the DNC servers were never examined by Crowdstrike:
After speaking w/ my @FBI sources & a @nytimes reporter with direct knowledge of the handling of the @DNC server it’s true – there was no direct examination or physically custody of the DNC server – an “image” (i.e. copy) of the server was examined only: https://t.co/yDJKCYmUQC
— Tony Shaffer (@T_S_P_O_O_K_Y) May 12, 2019
It was also uncovered in the Roger Stone case that CrowdStrike gave the US government three “draft reports” on the so-called hack by Russia which were full of redactions and the FBI just took their word for it. It was also reported that the DOJ never received the unredacted copies of Crowdstrike’s reports:
I missed the previous DOJ filing, but this seems significant.
The DOJ informed the court it doesn’t have the unredacted Crowdstrike reports. https://t.co/xJHC6ntroc
— Techno Fog (@Techno_Fog) June 15, 2019
Former NSA whistleblower Bill Binney previously reported he has evidence the DNC emails were not hacked but copied most likely on to a flashdrive or something similar.
NSA Whistleblower and longtime intelligence analyst Bill Binney on continuation of #RussiaGate fever: “The problem with the Mueller Report & the Rosenstein indictment is it’s based on lies.”
FULL INTERVIEW: https://t.co/qiTOpvNd2q pic.twitter.com/tDSSSg0j0H
— Status Coup (@StatusCoup) June 3, 2019
(Binney is brilliant. See the documentary on Binney entitled: “A Good American” – it will astound you.)
Binney has proof for his assertion but Crowdstrike and the DNC to date have provided no support that it was Russia who hacked the DNC.
Binney also claims that the Mueller gang wouldn’t even look at his data because they knew it would show something different than what they presented in their final bogus report (i.e. Mueller’s dossier as referred to by Devin Nunes).
Apelbaum’s Argument
Cyber expert Yaacov Apelbaum says the 60 Minutes and Crowdstrike claims are completely false:
If Crowdstrike gave the FBI any data it was drive images (we don’t even know which ones). This did not include memory dumps, network pocket captures, firewall activity, etc. This additional data is crucial and should have been examined in real-time by the FBI. If indeed any drive images were given to the FBI, these would have been contaminated because they continued to use these drives for weeks after the alleged hack.
Crowd Strike was completely wrong (most likely intentionally) about the Russian hack of the Ukrainian Artillery allegation. And we know for a fact that they used the same forensic techniques to reach that conclusion as they did on the DNC hack.
Apelbaum posted a report in January 2019, with information basically proving that the DNC was not hacked by the Russians. Apelbaum’s first argument is this –
According to the WaPo (using CrowdStrike, DOJ, and their other usual hush-hush government sources in the know), the attack was perpetrated by a Russian unit lead by Lieutenant Captain Nikolay Kozachek who allegedly crafted a malware called X-Agent and used it to get into the network and install keystroke loggers on several PCs. This allowed them to see what the employees were typing and take screenshots of the employees’ computer.
This is pretty detailed information, but if this was the case, then how did the DOJ learn all of these ‘details’ and use them in the indictments without the FBI ever forensically evaluating the DNC/HRC computers? And since when does the DOJ, an organization that only speaks the language of indictments use hearsay and 3rd parties like the British national Matt Tait (a former GCHQ collector and a connoisseur of all things related to Russian collusion), CrowdStrike, or any other evidence lacking chain of custody certification as a primary source for prosecution?
A second point by Apelbaum is –
… that three of the Russian GRU officers on the DOJ “Wanted by the FBI” list were allegedly working concurrently on multiple non-related projects like interfering with the 2016 United States elections (both HRC and DNC) while at the same time they were also allegedly hacking anti-doping agencies (Images 2-3).
Above are pictures of the individuals the FBI says were working on both the DNC/HRC email hacking and the Olympic doping projects.
The same guys were working on both projects which is all but impossible. (Do we really know if they’re even real people or even real Russians?)
The fact that the three had multiple concurrent high impact and high visibility project assignments is odd because this is not how typical offensive cyber intelligence teams operate. These units tend to be compartmentalized, they are assigned to a specific mission, and the taskforce stays together for the entire duration of the project.
Next Apelbaum questions the Mueller gang’s assertion that the ‘hacker’ named Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian –
Any evidence that Guccifer 2.0 is Russian should be evaluated while keeping these points in mind:
He used a Russian VPN service to cloak his IP address, but did not use TOR. Using a proxy to conduct cyber operations is a SOP [Standard Operating Procedure] in all intelligence and LEA [Law Enforcement Agency] agencies. [i.e. Russia would have masked their VPN service]
He used the AOL email service that captured and forwarded his IP address and the same AOL email to contact various media outlets on the same day of the attack. This is so overt and amateurish that its unlikely to be a mistake and seems like a deliberate attempt to leave traceable breadcrumbs.
He named his Office User account Феликс Эдмундович (Felix Dzerzhinsky), after the founder of the Soviet Secret Police. Devices and accounts used in offensive cyberspace operations use random names to prevent tractability and identification. Why would anyone in the GRU use this pseudonym (beside the obvious reason) is beyond comprehension.
He copied the original Trump opposition research document and pasted it into a new .dotm template (with an editing time of about 2 minutes). This resulted in a change of the “Last Modified by” field from “Warren Flood” to “Феликс Эдмундович” and the creation of additional Russian metadata in the document. Why waste the time and effort doing this?
About 4 hours after creating the ‘Russian’ version of the document, he exported it to a PDF using LibreOffice 4.2 (in the process he lost/removed about 20 of the original pages). This was most likely done to show additional ‘Russian fingerprints’ in the form of broken hyperlink error messages in Russian (Images 4 and 5). Why bother with re-formatting and converting the source documents? Why not just get the raw data out in the original format ASAP?
Apelbaum next discusses Guccifer 2.0 –
In June 21, 2016, Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai from Vice Motherboard interviewed a person who identified himself as “Guccifer 2.0”. During their on-line chat session, the individual claimed that he was Romanian (see transcript of the interview below). His poor Romanian language skills were later used to unmask his Russian identify.
…I’m not a scientific linguist nor do I even know where to find one if my life depended on it, but I’m certain that you can’t reliably determine nationality based on someone impersonating another language or from the use of fake metadata in files. This elaborate theory also has the obvious flaw of assuming that the Russian intelligence services are dumb enough to show up to an interview posing as Romanians without actually being able to read and write flaunt Romanian.
After providing a couple more examples of why the Russian story doesn’t stick, Apelbaum closes with this –
The bottom line is that if we want to go beyond the speculative trivia, the pseudo science, and the bombastic unverified claims, we have to ask the real tough questions, mainly: is Guccifer 2.0 even the real attacker and how did he circumvent all of the logs during several weeks of repeated visits while downloading close to 2 GB of data?
WikiLeaks
Most importantly, we know that WikiLeaks has stated numerous times that Russia did not provide them with the emails they leaked in 2016 and Julian Assange has stated that WikiLeaks had nothing to do with Russia.
But of course the Mueller gang never interviewed WikiLeaks or Julian Assange in an effort to determine how they received the Clinton emails. Of course the Mueller team could not risk WikiLeaks saying the emails were not received from Russia which would destroy their Russia hacked the DNC fairy tale.
Crowdstrike’s New Efforts to Save Face
Yesterday we discovered that Crowdstrike has reportedly obtained a PR firm to help backtrack their bogus claims.
A week ago Personal Liberty ran a wire story originally published in the Los Angeles Times.
In the article ‘Editor’s Notes’ were added in places where the LA Times piece reported fake news. One of the editor’s notes concerned the MSM trope that “Russian intelligence operatives stole and released thousands of internal emails and other documents in an effort to boost Trump’s chances, according to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies.”
The Editor’s note was as follows:
This is fake news. While it’s oft-repeated by the propagandists in the MSM legacy corporate media, there is no evidence that the emails were stolen and released by “Russian intelligence operatives.” The emails were released by WikiLeaks and an entity called Guccifer 2.0. WikiLeaks denies it got them from any Russians, and Julian Assange has hinted that they were stolen by murdered DNC operative Seth Rich. The FBI was denied access to the emails and the conclusion that they were stolen and released by “Russian intelligence operatives” was made by the DNC-hired cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which has ties to Ukrainian oligarchs and the Council on Foreign Relations. –BL
A few days later, this past Tuesday, Personal Liberty reportedly received an email from John Eddy, Executive Vice President of the PR firm Goldin. The email follows:
My firm works with CrowdStrike and we read your article titled “Trump seeks to boost Sanders and foment discord among Democrats” (https://personalliberty.com/trump-seeks-to-boost-sanders-and-foment-discord-among-democrats/ [personalliberty.com]). We need to request important updates to the article.
The article states that the “FBI was denied access to the emails and the conclusion that they were stolen and released by ‘Russian intelligence operatives’ was made by the DNC-hired cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which has ties to Ukrainian oligarchs and the Council on Foreign Relations.” This is incorrect.
CrowdStrike’s founders have no connections to Ukraine. The company also provided all forensic evidence and analysis to the FBI that they requested, and the conclusions have been fully supported by the US Intelligence community (https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democratic-national-committee/). Additionally, CrowdStrike was hired by the DNC to respond to the suspected breach of its servers, and did not do any investigations around the release of the information.
Could you please update the article for accuracy to clarify that CrowdStrike does not have ties to Ukraine, and that the company was hired by the DNC to investigate the hack of the servers?
Note the phrase from Crowdstrike’s PR firm, stating that Crowdstrike “did not do any investigations around the release of the information.”
TGP contacted the Crowdstrike’s PR Firm Goldin Solutions and they confirmed their email to Personal Liberty.
Now after three and a half years of the fraudulent Russia collusion scam being repeated so often that half of America believes that Russia hacked the DNC and gave their emails to WikiLeaks, Crowdstrike announces that it had nothing to do with assessing that Russians gave the emails to WikiLeaks??!!
So why is Crowdstrike announcing this now? Are they liable for fraud by not announcing this years ago? Their lack of a response allowed the coup against the President of the United States to progress! If they didn’t confirm the Russians gave the emails to WikiLeaks, then who did?
The Mueller report clearly states that Russians hacked the DNC and gave the hacked emails to WikiLeaks:
So if Crowdstrike now claims they didn’t confirm that Russians gave emails to WikiLeaks, then who the hell did?
We believe that both Mueller and Crowdstrike are lacking candor!
Per an illustration from Apelbaum, Guccifer 2 is depicted as the red devil icon below:
This illustration shows that Crowdstrike was obviously false in its claims that Russia hacked the DNC.
This is because:
- If Guccifer 2 did it from Romania (the red devil icon on the left of the illustration), he needed a 23 Mbit/s transfer rate. At the time of this hack in 2016, Romania was only supporting 16Mbit/s speeds. But to do that he had to go through all of the red hell in the middle of the illustration, which I don’t believe he did based on the poor technical skill set he demonstrated during his interview with Motherboard vice.
- If the leak came from the inside (the half green half red icon in the right side of illustration), he had the full 23 Mbit/s transfer rate because he just plugged-in a USB drive to the computer. He also didn’t need any hacking skills because he most likely had full system access.
Finally, we know that WikiLeaks stated numerous times that Russia did not provide them with the emails they leaked in 2016 and Julian Assange stated that WikiLeaks had nothing to do with Russia.
But of course the Mueller gang never interviewed WikiLeaks in an effort to determine how they received the Clinton emails. Of course the Mueller team could not risk WikiLeaks saying the emails were not received from Russia which would destroy their Russia hacked the DNC fairy tale.
Source: The Gateway Pundit
Alfa Bank Ruse
A Hillary Clinton campaign operation to plant a false rumor about Donald Trump setting up a “secret hotline” to Moscow through a Russian bank was much broader than known and involved multiple U.S. agencies, according to declassified documents and sources briefed on an ongoing criminal investigation of the scheme.
In addition to the FBI, the 2016 Clinton campaign tried to convince the Obama administration’s State Department, Justice Department and Central Intelligence Agency to look into the hoax, and continued pressing the issue even after Trump was inaugurated in January 2017.
The goal was to trigger federal investigative activity targeting her Republican rival and leak the damaging information to the media.
“The Clinton machine flooded the FBI with pressure from a number of angles until investigations of Trump were opened and reopened,” said one of the briefed sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive law enforcement matter. “The deception was wide-ranging.”
Special Counsel John Durham outlined the FBI part of the scheme in a felony indictment of Michael Sussmann. The former Clinton campaign lawyer was charged last month with making a false statement to the former general counsel of the FBI when he claimed he was not working “for any client” in bringing to the FBI’s attention allegations of a secret channel of communication between computer servers in Trump Tower and the Alfa Bank in Russia.
According to the indictment, Sussmann was in fact acting on behalf of clients including the Clinton campaign, and an unnamed tech executive who RCI has previously reported is Rodney L. Joffe, a regular adviser to the Biden White House on cybersecurity and infrastructure policies.
Internal emails reveal the Clinton operatives knew the links they made between Trump and Russia were “weak,” even describing them as a “red herring,” but fed them to investigators anyway.
After Sussmann’s meeting with the FBI in September 2016, the Clinton campaign approached the State Department the following month with the same lead, this time using paid Clinton campaign subcontractor Christopher Steele to feed the rumors. A former British intelligence officer, Steele was offered as a reliable source to help corroborate the rumors. On Oct. 11, 2016, Steele gave his contact at Foggy Bottom documents alleging that a supposed hidden server at Trump Tower was pinging Moscow.
Two days later, a State official who previously worked under former secretary Clinton funneled the information to the FBI’s then-top Eurasia/Russia counterintelligence official, Stephen Laycock, according to recently declassified notes and testimony. Laycock, in turn, forwarded the information to Peter Strzok, the FBI agent who led the investigation of Trump and his campaign and had just weeks earlier texted a bureau lawyer, “We’ll stop [Trump from being elected].”
“I informed Peter Strzok and another supervisor,” Laycock testified last year in a closed-door Senate hearing.
Steele, who later confessed he was “desperate” to defeat Trump, was the author of the debunked dossier claiming Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election. He even misspelled the name of the Russian bank as “Alpha.” Still, the FBI took his rumors seriously enough to interview tech vendors working for the Trump Organization and obtain warrants to search Trump Tower servers. Within days of receiving the State Department tip, Strzok also used Steele’s dossier to secure a wiretap on Trump adviser Carter Page.
Clinton foreign policy adviser and current National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan would put out a written statement trumpeting the Trump-Alfa Bank story, which was shared by then-candidate Clinton on Oct. 31, 2016, after Slate reported on it. Fusion GPS, the Washington opposition-research group that worked for the Clinton campaign as a paid agent, and helped gather dirt on Alfa Bank and draft the materials Sussmann would later submit to the FBI, reportedly pressed Slate to publish the story by the account of its author, journalist Franklin Foer.
“This was a highly sophisticated operation using enablers in both the media and federal agencies,” George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley told RealClearInvestigations.
The Clinton campaign did not let up even after Trump won the election.
In mid-November 2016, it enlisted top Justice Department official Bruce Ohr – whose wife, Nellie, worked for Fusion GPS – to add credibility to the Alfa rumors. That month, Ohr advised the FBI that Steele had told him that the Alfa Bank server was a link to the Trump campaign. Then in early December, Ohr met with the FBI case supervisor who worked for Strzok at least twice. Declassified notes and other records show that during those meetings, Ohr provided him with thumb drives he had received from paid Clinton opposition researcher and Fusion GPS co-founder, Glenn Simpson, and Ohr’s wife and Simpson’s colleague, Nellie. Quoting his Clinton sources, Ohr insisted the alleged backdoor computer channel between Trump and Alfa was real.
The FBI spent months investigating the claim, eventually dismissing it as baseless. After the FBI closed the case, Sussmann turned to the nation’s top intelligence agency for assistance, as RCI first reported.
In December 2016, Sussmann called then-CIA Director John Brennan’s general counsel – Caroline Krass – to set up a meeting to brief her about the same Alfa Bank rumors. Krass expressed interest in the tip. Then in early February 2017, officials from her office formally sat down with Sussmann for more than an hour to discuss the Trump-Russian bank rumors. Sussmann provided them updated versions of the materials he had handed off to the FBI.
The CIA, in turn, referred the rumors to an FBI liaison for further investigation, according to the sources briefed on his case. Strzok was the lead FBI liaison to the CIA at the time.
Among the documents Durham has obtained is a CIA memo memorializing the meeting with Sussmann, according to the sources. In his grand jury indictment, Durham accused Sussmann of also misleading the CIA, which he referred to only as “Agency-2.” The special counsel alleges that Sussmann, as he did when meeting with an FBI official, had also failed to inform contacts at Langley that he was representing a client – in the latter case specifically Joffe – tied to the Clinton campaign operation and who had been promised a high-level job in a Clinton administration
Billing the Democrat’s campaign for his work on the “confidential project,” Sussmann recruited Joffe and a team of federal computer contractors to mine proprietary databases containing vast quantities of sensitive, nonpublic Internet data for possible dirt on Trump and his advisers. In a new court document filed last week, Durham revealed his team has obtained more than 80,000 pages of documents in response to grand jury subpoenas issued to more than 15 targets and witnesses, including the computer contractors. Among others receiving subpoenas: political organizations, private firms, tech companies and other entities, including a major university — Georgia Tech — which allegedly participated in the Clinton conspiracy as a Pentagon contractor. Some witnesses have been granted immunity and are cooperating with prosecutors, the sources close to the probe said.
“While Sussmann may have hidden his work for the Clinton campaign, this was obviously a useful attack on Trump,” Turley said. “One would expect a CIA official to express reluctance in an investigation that would have a largely domestic focus. But as with the FBI, the Clinton campaign found eager officials to move on any such allegation.”
The CIA is largely barred from collecting information inside the United States or on American citizens.
“The CIA has no business involving itself in a domestic political issue,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told RCI. “The evidence suggests the primary purpose of the meeting was political.”
Fitton said his watchdog group has filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA demanding all records generated from the contacts Sussmann had with the agency in December 2016 and February 2017.
The CIA did not return requests for comment.
For good measure, old Clinton hands tried another pressure point. In early February 2017, Clinton’s foreign policy adviser Sullivan huddled with Fusion GPS’s Simpson and Daniel Jones, an FBI analyst-turned-Democrat-operative, to reboot the same smear campaign against Trump. (As RCI previously reported, Sullivan, who spearheaded the campaign’s effort to promote the narrative of a disturbing Trump-Russia relationship via the Alfa Bank story, is under scrutiny for possibly lying to Congress about his role in the operation.) Jones, in turn, reached out to his former colleagues at the FBI, who reopened the investigation into the old allegations of a cyber-link between Trump and Alfa Bank.
The next month, acting on Jones’ recycled tip, FBI agents visited the offices of the Pennsylvania company that housed the Trump server, which was actually administered by a third-party hotel promotions firm – Cendyn, based in Florida. But their second investigation proved to be another dead end. The sinister communications Jones claimed were flowing between an alleged Trump server and Alfa Bank were found to be innocuous marketing emails. In other words, spam.
Sources say it is odd that FBI headquarters continued to pursue the allegations, because internal FBI communications reveal that the bureau’s own cyber sleuths had pooh-poohed them within days of Sussmann’s briefing, RCI has learned.
Strzok himself had been briefed on that assessment of the materials Sussman dropped off at headquarters on Sept. 19, 2016. In fact, in a Sept. 23, 2016, internal message to Strzok, an FBI official relayed his preliminary findings following an interview with Cendyn, the Florida marketing firm that managed the alleged Trump server.
“Followed up this morning with Central Dynamics [Cendyn] who confirmed that the mail1.trump-email.com domain is an old domain that was set up in approximately 2009 when they were doing business with the Trump Organization that was never used,” according to the message.
Reacting to the Durham indictment, Strzok recently tried to distance himself from the Alfa scandal, insisting in a Lawfare blog: “I had a minor role in the events in question, insofar as I transferred the material Sussman gave to Jim Baker, the FBI’s general counsel at the time, to the personnel who ultimately supervised and looked into the allegations.”
Echoing other critics, Strzok complained that Durham – who originally was tapped to investigate the origins of the Russia “collusion” investigation by Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr – is conducting a partisan witch hunt on behalf of Trump.
Strzok’s claims notwithstanding, Barr’s successor, the President Biden-nominated Attorney General Merrick Garland, testified last week that he has renewed funding and staffing for Durham’s far-reaching investigation for the next fiscal year. “[Y]ou can readily assume his budget has been approved,” Garland assured Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee.
This RealClearInvestigations article was republished by The Gateway Pundit with permission.
See Also:
Chronological History of RussiaGate: The Coup to Oust Trump from the Oval Office
Whistleblower: US and UK Military Contractors Launched Initial Censorship Group that Later Morphed into the Censorship Industrial Complex After 2016 Trump Election
John Durham releases final report, concludes FBI had no verified intel when it opened probe on Trump
US House of Representatives Forms the ‘Weaponization of Government’ Select Committee Headed by Patriot Jim Jordan
Igor Danchenko Found Not Guilty on all Counts by Far-Left DC Jury in Durham Investigation
Federal Informant in Trump Probe Found Dead After He’s Reported Missing
FBI Arrests Igor Danchenko, Analyst Who Contributed to Garbage Steele Dossier
Trump Authorized “Total Declassification of Any & All Documents” Related to RussiaGate and Hillary’s emails w/”No Redactions”
President Trump Grants Full Pardon to George Papadopoulos and London-Based Lawyer Caught Up in Mueller Probe
DOJ Quietly Releases Docs Showing Mueller Investigated and Chose Not to Charge Assange, Wikileaks, and Roger Stone For DNC Hacks
