"The Deep State" aka the American Intelligence Community

[a fan]

In 2016, Dr Fiona Hill (then at Brookings, working for Strobe Talbott *) introduced her researcher Danshenko to Clinton campaign operative Dolan.

...then Dr Hill joined the Trump admin NSC to "help out"

* Strobe Talbott
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strobe_Talbott
He became friends with future President Bill Clinton when both were Rhodes Scholars at the University of Oxford; during his studies there he translated Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs into English.

In 1972, Talbott, along with his friends Robert Reich (a fellow Rhodes Scholar) and David E. Kendall, rallied to his friends Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton to help them in their Texas campaign to elect George McGovern president of the United States. In the 1980s, he was Time's principal correspondent on Soviet-American relations, and his work for the magazine was cited in the three Overseas Press Club Awards won by Time in the 1980s. Talbott also wrote several books on disarmament. He translated and edited Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (2 vol 1974) by Nikita S. Khrushchev.

Following Bill Clinton's election as president, Talbott was invited into government where he served 1993-1994 managing the consequences of the Soviet breakup as Ambassador-at-Large and Special Adviser to the Secretary of State Warren Christopher on the New Independent States. He held the #2 job in the State Department as Deputy Secretary of State 1994-2001

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ste ... s-in-2016/
Former British spy Christopher Steele recently testified that he was contacted by Clinton-ally Strobe Talbott in Summer 2016 regarding his investigation into presidential candidate Donald Trump, after Talbott learned of the investigation from Obama administration officials.

“I remember taking a phone call from [Talbott], your Lordship, earlier in the summer, in which he said that he was aware that I had — he spoke in fairly cryptic terms, but he was aware that we had material of relevance to the U.S. election,” Steele testified as part of a defamation lawsuit against him in the U.K., according to transcript of the deposition obtained by the Daily Caller.

Talbott, the current president of the Brookings Institution, indicated that he was told of Steele’s work by either former national security adviser Susan Rice or former State Department official Victoria Nuland.

“Although he didn’t state it explicitly, one or either or both of them had briefed him on the work we had been doing,” Steele said. Rice spokeswoman Erin Pelton told the Daily Caller that it is “utterly and completely false” that Rice spoke with Talbott regarding Steele’s investigation. Nuland declined the Daily Caller‘s request for comment.

Steele went on to provide Talbott with a copy of the dossier in November 2016. And Talbott, who was tapped in 2011 by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to chair the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Advisory Board, disseminated the dossier to his Brookings colleague, Fiona Hill in January 2017 while she was serving in the Trump administration.

Talbott’s brother-in-law, Cody Shearer, also disseminated his own dossier in 2016 claiming that the Kremlin had video of Trump engaged in sexual behavior in Moscow — a charge that later ended up in Steele’s dossier.

Steele also admitted in March that his claim of secret communications between a Russian bank and the Trump presidential campaign was based on a tip from lawyer Michael Sussman, whose firm Perkins Coie represented the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign.

Steele further said that his records on all conversations with the “primary sub-source” of the Steele Dossier, which was used by the FBI as the basis for an investigation of alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, were deleted in 2017. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) has since asked the Justice Department to release all documents that “question the accuracy and reliability” of Steele’s sources.

From Andy McCarthy --
https://nypost.com/2021/11/04/arrest-il ... y-clinton/
It appears that Durham theorizes that the Trump-Russia collusion narrative was a political attack manufactured by the Clinton campaign. Relying on Danchenko, Steele compiled the reports for Glenn Simpson, co-founder of intelligence firm Fusion-GPS, which specializes in digging up political dirt. Fusion-GPS was retained for the Trump project by Perkins-Coie, the Clinton campaign’s law firm.

In September, Durham indicted former Perkins-Coie attorney Michael Sussmann for making a false statement to the FBI while peddling Trump-Russia allegations that the bureau eventually found unsubstantiated. Durham alleges that Sussmann concealed that he was working for the Clinton campaign and a tech executive who was hoping for an important government job if Clinton was elected.

Durham’s charging instruments suggest that the Clinton campaign used its agents to peddle the Trump-Russia rumors to the government and the media, then used the fact that Trump was being investigated as part of its campaign messaging.

This is getting funner...

Yes, it is.

ProTip: next time a Russian Spy calls your campaign offering dirt on your opponent? Don't send your senior staff to take that meeting.

Oh, and don't have your campaign team lie to the press and to the FBI anytime someone mentions Russia.

Because, well......that shockingly leads to bad outcomes.

[Typical Lax Dad]

In 2016, Dr Fiona Hill (then at Brookings, working for Strobe Talbott *) introduced her researcher Danshenko to Clinton campaign operative Dolan.

...then Dr Hill joined the Trump admin NSC to "help out"

* Strobe Talbott
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strobe_Talbott
He became friends with future President Bill Clinton when both were Rhodes Scholars at the University of Oxford; during his studies there he translated Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs into English.

In 1972, Talbott, along with his friends Robert Reich (a fellow Rhodes Scholar) and David E. Kendall, rallied to his friends Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton to help them in their Texas campaign to elect George McGovern president of the United States. In the 1980s, he was Time's principal correspondent on Soviet-American relations, and his work for the magazine was cited in the three Overseas Press Club Awards won by Time in the 1980s. Talbott also wrote several books on disarmament. He translated and edited Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (2 vol 1974) by Nikita S. Khrushchev.

Following Bill Clinton's election as president, Talbott was invited into government where he served 1993-1994 managing the consequences of the Soviet breakup as Ambassador-at-Large and Special Adviser to the Secretary of State Warren Christopher on the New Independent States. He held the #2 job in the State Department as Deputy Secretary of State 1994-2001

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ste ... s-in-2016/
Former British spy Christopher Steele recently testified that he was contacted by Clinton-ally Strobe Talbott in Summer 2016 regarding his investigation into presidential candidate Donald Trump, after Talbott learned of the investigation from Obama administration officials.

“I remember taking a phone call from [Talbott], your Lordship, earlier in the summer, in which he said that he was aware that I had — he spoke in fairly cryptic terms, but he was aware that we had material of relevance to the U.S. election,” Steele testified as part of a defamation lawsuit against him in the U.K., according to transcript of the deposition obtained by the Daily Caller.

Talbott, the current president of the Brookings Institution, indicated that he was told of Steele’s work by either former national security adviser Susan Rice or former State Department official Victoria Nuland.

“Although he didn’t state it explicitly, one or either or both of them had briefed him on the work we had been doing,” Steele said. Rice spokeswoman Erin Pelton told the Daily Caller that it is “utterly and completely false” that Rice spoke with Talbott regarding Steele’s investigation. Nuland declined the Daily Caller‘s request for comment.

Steele went on to provide Talbott with a copy of the dossier in November 2016. And Talbott, who was tapped in 2011 by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to chair the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Advisory Board, disseminated the dossier to his Brookings colleague, Fiona Hill in January 2017 while she was serving in the Trump administration.

Talbott’s brother-in-law, Cody Shearer, also disseminated his own dossier in 2016 claiming that the Kremlin had video of Trump engaged in sexual behavior in Moscow — a charge that later ended up in Steele’s dossier.

Steele also admitted in March that his claim of secret communications between a Russian bank and the Trump presidential campaign was based on a tip from lawyer Michael Sussman, whose firm Perkins Coie represented the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign.

Steele further said that his records on all conversations with the “primary sub-source” of the Steele Dossier, which was used by the FBI as the basis for an investigation of alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, were deleted in 2017. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) has since asked the Justice Department to release all documents that “question the accuracy and reliability” of Steele’s sources.

From Andy McCarthy --
https://nypost.com/2021/11/04/arrest-il ... y-clinton/
It appears that Durham theorizes that the Trump-Russia collusion narrative was a political attack manufactured by the Clinton campaign. Relying on Danchenko, Steele compiled the reports for Glenn Simpson, co-founder of intelligence firm Fusion-GPS, which specializes in digging up political dirt. Fusion-GPS was retained for the Trump project by Perkins-Coie, the Clinton campaign’s law firm.

In September, Durham indicted former Perkins-Coie attorney Michael Sussmann for making a false statement to the FBI while peddling Trump-Russia allegations that the bureau eventually found unsubstantiated. Durham alleges that Sussmann concealed that he was working for the Clinton campaign and a tech executive who was hoping for an important government job if Clinton was elected.

Durham’s charging instruments suggest that the Clinton campaign used its agents to peddle the Trump-Russia rumors to the government and the media, then used the fact that Trump was being investigated as part of its campaign messaging.

This is getting funner...

[youthathletics]

In 2016, Dr Fiona Hill (then at Brookings, working for Strobe Talbott *) introduced her researcher Danshenko to Clinton campaign operative Dolan.

...then Dr Hill joined the Trump admin NSC to "help out"

* Strobe Talbott
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strobe_Talbott
He became friends with future President Bill Clinton when both were Rhodes Scholars at the University of Oxford; during his studies there he translated Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs into English.

In 1972, Talbott, along with his friends Robert Reich (a fellow Rhodes Scholar) and David E. Kendall, rallied to his friends Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton to help them in their Texas campaign to elect George McGovern president of the United States. In the 1980s, he was Time's principal correspondent on Soviet-American relations, and his work for the magazine was cited in the three Overseas Press Club Awards won by Time in the 1980s. Talbott also wrote several books on disarmament. He translated and edited Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (2 vol 1974) by Nikita S. Khrushchev.

Following Bill Clinton's election as president, Talbott was invited into government where he served 1993-1994 managing the consequences of the Soviet breakup as Ambassador-at-Large and Special Adviser to the Secretary of State Warren Christopher on the New Independent States. He held the #2 job in the State Department as Deputy Secretary of State 1994-2001

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ste ... s-in-2016/
Former British spy Christopher Steele recently testified that he was contacted by Clinton-ally Strobe Talbott in Summer 2016 regarding his investigation into presidential candidate Donald Trump, after Talbott learned of the investigation from Obama administration officials.

“I remember taking a phone call from [Talbott], your Lordship, earlier in the summer, in which he said that he was aware that I had — he spoke in fairly cryptic terms, but he was aware that we had material of relevance to the U.S. election,” Steele testified as part of a defamation lawsuit against him in the U.K., according to transcript of the deposition obtained by the Daily Caller.

Talbott, the current president of the Brookings Institution, indicated that he was told of Steele’s work by either former national security adviser Susan Rice or former State Department official Victoria Nuland.

“Although he didn’t state it explicitly, one or either or both of them had briefed him on the work we had been doing,” Steele said. Rice spokeswoman Erin Pelton told the Daily Caller that it is “utterly and completely false” that Rice spoke with Talbott regarding Steele’s investigation. Nuland declined the Daily Caller‘s request for comment.

Steele went on to provide Talbott with a copy of the dossier in November 2016. And Talbott, who was tapped in 2011 by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to chair the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Advisory Board, disseminated the dossier to his Brookings colleague, Fiona Hill in January 2017 while she was serving in the Trump administration.

Talbott’s brother-in-law, Cody Shearer, also disseminated his own dossier in 2016 claiming that the Kremlin had video of Trump engaged in sexual behavior in Moscow — a charge that later ended up in Steele’s dossier.

Steele also admitted in March that his claim of secret communications between a Russian bank and the Trump presidential campaign was based on a tip from lawyer Michael Sussman, whose firm Perkins Coie represented the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign.

Steele further said that his records on all conversations with the “primary sub-source” of the Steele Dossier, which was used by the FBI as the basis for an investigation of alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, were deleted in 2017. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) has since asked the Justice Department to release all documents that “question the accuracy and reliability” of Steele’s sources.

From Andy McCarthy --
https://nypost.com/2021/11/04/arrest-il ... y-clinton/
It appears that Durham theorizes that the Trump-Russia collusion narrative was a political attack manufactured by the Clinton campaign. Relying on Danchenko, Steele compiled the reports for Glenn Simpson, co-founder of intelligence firm Fusion-GPS, which specializes in digging up political dirt. Fusion-GPS was retained for the Trump project by Perkins-Coie, the Clinton campaign’s law firm.

In September, Durham indicted former Perkins-Coie attorney Michael Sussmann for making a false statement to the FBI while peddling Trump-Russia allegations that the bureau eventually found unsubstantiated. Durham alleges that Sussmann concealed that he was working for the Clinton campaign and a tech executive who was hoping for an important government job if Clinton was elected.

Durham’s charging instruments suggest that the Clinton campaign used its agents to peddle the Trump-Russia rumors to the government and the media, then used the fact that Trump was being investigated as part of its campaign messaging.

This is getting funner...

Yes, it is.

ProTip: next time a Russian Spy calls your campaign offering dirt on your opponent? Don't send your senior staff to take that meeting.

Oh, and don't have your campaign team lie to the press and to the FBI anytime someone mentions Russia.

Because, well......that shockingly leads to bad outcomes.

Also, don't let Comey or Brennan or the Clintons anywhere around you.....crazy things happen.

[tech37]

In 2016, Dr Fiona Hill (then at Brookings, working for Strobe Talbott *) introduced her researcher Danshenko to Clinton campaign operative Dolan.

...then Dr Hill joined the Trump admin NSC to "help out"

* Strobe Talbott
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strobe_Talbott
He became friends with future President Bill Clinton when both were Rhodes Scholars at the University of Oxford; during his studies there he translated Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs into English.

In 1972, Talbott, along with his friends Robert Reich (a fellow Rhodes Scholar) and David E. Kendall, rallied to his friends Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton to help them in their Texas campaign to elect George McGovern president of the United States. In the 1980s, he was Time's principal correspondent on Soviet-American relations, and his work for the magazine was cited in the three Overseas Press Club Awards won by Time in the 1980s. Talbott also wrote several books on disarmament. He translated and edited Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (2 vol 1974) by Nikita S. Khrushchev.

Following Bill Clinton's election as president, Talbott was invited into government where he served 1993-1994 managing the consequences of the Soviet breakup as Ambassador-at-Large and Special Adviser to the Secretary of State Warren Christopher on the New Independent States. He held the #2 job in the State Department as Deputy Secretary of State 1994-2001

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ste ... s-in-2016/
Former British spy Christopher Steele recently testified that he was contacted by Clinton-ally Strobe Talbott in Summer 2016 regarding his investigation into presidential candidate Donald Trump, after Talbott learned of the investigation from Obama administration officials.

“I remember taking a phone call from [Talbott], your Lordship, earlier in the summer, in which he said that he was aware that I had — he spoke in fairly cryptic terms, but he was aware that we had material of relevance to the U.S. election,” Steele testified as part of a defamation lawsuit against him in the U.K., according to transcript of the deposition obtained by the Daily Caller.

Talbott, the current president of the Brookings Institution, indicated that he was told of Steele’s work by either former national security adviser Susan Rice or former State Department official Victoria Nuland.

“Although he didn’t state it explicitly, one or either or both of them had briefed him on the work we had been doing,” Steele said. Rice spokeswoman Erin Pelton told the Daily Caller that it is “utterly and completely false” that Rice spoke with Talbott regarding Steele’s investigation. Nuland declined the Daily Caller‘s request for comment.

Steele went on to provide Talbott with a copy of the dossier in November 2016. And Talbott, who was tapped in 2011 by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to chair the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Advisory Board, disseminated the dossier to his Brookings colleague, Fiona Hill in January 2017 while she was serving in the Trump administration.

Talbott’s brother-in-law, Cody Shearer, also disseminated his own dossier in 2016 claiming that the Kremlin had video of Trump engaged in sexual behavior in Moscow — a charge that later ended up in Steele’s dossier.

Steele also admitted in March that his claim of secret communications between a Russian bank and the Trump presidential campaign was based on a tip from lawyer Michael Sussman, whose firm Perkins Coie represented the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign.

Steele further said that his records on all conversations with the “primary sub-source” of the Steele Dossier, which was used by the FBI as the basis for an investigation of alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, were deleted in 2017. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) has since asked the Justice Department to release all documents that “question the accuracy and reliability” of Steele’s sources.

From Andy McCarthy --
https://nypost.com/2021/11/04/arrest-il ... y-clinton/
It appears that Durham theorizes that the Trump-Russia collusion narrative was a political attack manufactured by the Clinton campaign. Relying on Danchenko, Steele compiled the reports for Glenn Simpson, co-founder of intelligence firm Fusion-GPS, which specializes in digging up political dirt. Fusion-GPS was retained for the Trump project by Perkins-Coie, the Clinton campaign’s law firm.

In September, Durham indicted former Perkins-Coie attorney Michael Sussmann for making a false statement to the FBI while peddling Trump-Russia allegations that the bureau eventually found unsubstantiated. Durham alleges that Sussmann concealed that he was working for the Clinton campaign and a tech executive who was hoping for an important government job if Clinton was elected.

Durham’s charging instruments suggest that the Clinton campaign used its agents to peddle the Trump-Russia rumors to the government and the media, then used the fact that Trump was being investigated as part of its campaign messaging.

This is getting funner...

Yes, it is.

ProTip: next time a Russian Spy calls your campaign offering dirt on your opponent? Don't send your senior staff to take that meeting.

Oh, and don't have your campaign team lie to the press and to the FBI anytime someone mentions Russia.

Because, well......that shockingly leads to bad outcomes.

Hanlon's razor, nothing more... said so when it happened. You're free to rehash all this any way you like a fan. But as I've said since he became involved, I'll wait for Durham's report.

[tech37]

In 2016, Dr Fiona Hill (then at Brookings, working for Strobe Talbott *) introduced her researcher Danshenko to Clinton campaign operative Dolan.

...then Dr Hill joined the Trump admin NSC to "help out"

* Strobe Talbott
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strobe_Talbott
He became friends with future President Bill Clinton when both were Rhodes Scholars at the University of Oxford; during his studies there he translated Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs into English.

In 1972, Talbott, along with his friends Robert Reich (a fellow Rhodes Scholar) and David E. Kendall, rallied to his friends Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton to help them in their Texas campaign to elect George McGovern president of the United States. In the 1980s, he was Time's principal correspondent on Soviet-American relations, and his work for the magazine was cited in the three Overseas Press Club Awards won by Time in the 1980s. Talbott also wrote several books on disarmament. He translated and edited Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (2 vol 1974) by Nikita S. Khrushchev.

Following Bill Clinton's election as president, Talbott was invited into government where he served 1993-1994 managing the consequences of the Soviet breakup as Ambassador-at-Large and Special Adviser to the Secretary of State Warren Christopher on the New Independent States. He held the #2 job in the State Department as Deputy Secretary of State 1994-2001

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ste ... s-in-2016/
Former British spy Christopher Steele recently testified that he was contacted by Clinton-ally Strobe Talbott in Summer 2016 regarding his investigation into presidential candidate Donald Trump, after Talbott learned of the investigation from Obama administration officials.

“I remember taking a phone call from [Talbott], your Lordship, earlier in the summer, in which he said that he was aware that I had — he spoke in fairly cryptic terms, but he was aware that we had material of relevance to the U.S. election,” Steele testified as part of a defamation lawsuit against him in the U.K., according to transcript of the deposition obtained by the Daily Caller.

Talbott, the current president of the Brookings Institution, indicated that he was told of Steele’s work by either former national security adviser Susan Rice or former State Department official Victoria Nuland.

“Although he didn’t state it explicitly, one or either or both of them had briefed him on the work we had been doing,” Steele said. Rice spokeswoman Erin Pelton told the Daily Caller that it is “utterly and completely false” that Rice spoke with Talbott regarding Steele’s investigation. Nuland declined the Daily Caller‘s request for comment.

Steele went on to provide Talbott with a copy of the dossier in November 2016. And Talbott, who was tapped in 2011 by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to chair the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Advisory Board, disseminated the dossier to his Brookings colleague, Fiona Hill in January 2017 while she was serving in the Trump administration.

Talbott’s brother-in-law, Cody Shearer, also disseminated his own dossier in 2016 claiming that the Kremlin had video of Trump engaged in sexual behavior in Moscow — a charge that later ended up in Steele’s dossier.

Steele also admitted in March that his claim of secret communications between a Russian bank and the Trump presidential campaign was based on a tip from lawyer Michael Sussman, whose firm Perkins Coie represented the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign.

Steele further said that his records on all conversations with the “primary sub-source” of the Steele Dossier, which was used by the FBI as the basis for an investigation of alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, were deleted in 2017. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) has since asked the Justice Department to release all documents that “question the accuracy and reliability” of Steele’s sources.

From Andy McCarthy --
https://nypost.com/2021/11/04/arrest-il ... y-clinton/
It appears that Durham theorizes that the Trump-Russia collusion narrative was a political attack manufactured by the Clinton campaign. Relying on Danchenko, Steele compiled the reports for Glenn Simpson, co-founder of intelligence firm Fusion-GPS, which specializes in digging up political dirt. Fusion-GPS was retained for the Trump project by Perkins-Coie, the Clinton campaign’s law firm.

In September, Durham indicted former Perkins-Coie attorney Michael Sussmann for making a false statement to the FBI while peddling Trump-Russia allegations that the bureau eventually found unsubstantiated. Durham alleges that Sussmann concealed that he was working for the Clinton campaign and a tech executive who was hoping for an important government job if Clinton was elected.

Durham’s charging instruments suggest that the Clinton campaign used its agents to peddle the Trump-Russia rumors to the government and the media, then used the fact that Trump was being investigated as part of its campaign messaging.

This is getting funner...

Yes, it is.

ProTip: next time a Russian Spy calls your campaign offering dirt on your opponent? Don't send your senior staff to take that meeting.

Oh, and don't have your campaign team lie to the press and to the FBI anytime someone mentions Russia.

Because, well......that shockingly leads to bad outcomes.

Also, don't let Comey or Brennan or the Clintons anywhere around you.....crazy things happen.

And the entire country suffers for it.

[MDlaxfan76]

In 2016, Dr Fiona Hill (then at Brookings, working for Strobe Talbott *) introduced her researcher Danshenko to Clinton campaign operative Dolan.

...then Dr Hill joined the Trump admin NSC to "help out"

* Strobe Talbott
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strobe_Talbott
He became friends with future President Bill Clinton when both were Rhodes Scholars at the University of Oxford; during his studies there he translated Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs into English.

In 1972, Talbott, along with his friends Robert Reich (a fellow Rhodes Scholar) and David E. Kendall, rallied to his friends Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton to help them in their Texas campaign to elect George McGovern president of the United States. In the 1980s, he was Time's principal correspondent on Soviet-American relations, and his work for the magazine was cited in the three Overseas Press Club Awards won by Time in the 1980s. Talbott also wrote several books on disarmament. He translated and edited Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (2 vol 1974) by Nikita S. Khrushchev.

Following Bill Clinton's election as president, Talbott was invited into government where he served 1993-1994 managing the consequences of the Soviet breakup as Ambassador-at-Large and Special Adviser to the Secretary of State Warren Christopher on the New Independent States. He held the #2 job in the State Department as Deputy Secretary of State 1994-2001

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ste ... s-in-2016/
Former British spy Christopher Steele recently testified that he was contacted by Clinton-ally Strobe Talbott in Summer 2016 regarding his investigation into presidential candidate Donald Trump, after Talbott learned of the investigation from Obama administration officials.

“I remember taking a phone call from [Talbott], your Lordship, earlier in the summer, in which he said that he was aware that I had — he spoke in fairly cryptic terms, but he was aware that we had material of relevance to the U.S. election,” Steele testified as part of a defamation lawsuit against him in the U.K., according to transcript of the deposition obtained by the Daily Caller.

Talbott, the current president of the Brookings Institution, indicated that he was told of Steele’s work by either former national security adviser Susan Rice or former State Department official Victoria Nuland.

“Although he didn’t state it explicitly, one or either or both of them had briefed him on the work we had been doing,” Steele said. Rice spokeswoman Erin Pelton told the Daily Caller that it is “utterly and completely false” that Rice spoke with Talbott regarding Steele’s investigation. Nuland declined the Daily Caller‘s request for comment.

Steele went on to provide Talbott with a copy of the dossier in November 2016. And Talbott, who was tapped in 2011 by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to chair the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Advisory Board, disseminated the dossier to his Brookings colleague, Fiona Hill in January 2017 while she was serving in the Trump administration.

Talbott’s brother-in-law, Cody Shearer, also disseminated his own dossier in 2016 claiming that the Kremlin had video of Trump engaged in sexual behavior in Moscow — a charge that later ended up in Steele’s dossier.

Steele also admitted in March that his claim of secret communications between a Russian bank and the Trump presidential campaign was based on a tip from lawyer Michael Sussman, whose firm Perkins Coie represented the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign.

Steele further said that his records on all conversations with the “primary sub-source” of the Steele Dossier, which was used by the FBI as the basis for an investigation of alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, were deleted in 2017. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) has since asked the Justice Department to release all documents that “question the accuracy and reliability” of Steele’s sources.

From Andy McCarthy --
https://nypost.com/2021/11/04/arrest-il ... y-clinton/
It appears that Durham theorizes that the Trump-Russia collusion narrative was a political attack manufactured by the Clinton campaign. Relying on Danchenko, Steele compiled the reports for Glenn Simpson, co-founder of intelligence firm Fusion-GPS, which specializes in digging up political dirt. Fusion-GPS was retained for the Trump project by Perkins-Coie, the Clinton campaign’s law firm.

In September, Durham indicted former Perkins-Coie attorney Michael Sussmann for making a false statement to the FBI while peddling Trump-Russia allegations that the bureau eventually found unsubstantiated. Durham alleges that Sussmann concealed that he was working for the Clinton campaign and a tech executive who was hoping for an important government job if Clinton was elected.

Durham’s charging instruments suggest that the Clinton campaign used its agents to peddle the Trump-Russia rumors to the government and the media, then used the fact that Trump was being investigated as part of its campaign messaging.

This is getting funner...

Yes, it is.

ProTip: next time a Russian Spy calls your campaign offering dirt on your opponent? Don't send your senior staff to take that meeting.

Oh, and don't have your campaign team lie to the press and to the FBI anytime someone mentions Russia.

Because, well......that shockingly leads to bad outcomes.

Also, don't let Comey or Brennan or the Clintons anywhere around you.....crazy things happen.

And the entire country suffers for it.

yeah, clearly all those Trump folks getting indicted and going to jail and all those Russians, they were all put up to it by either Comey, Brennan, or the Clintons...

[a fan]

Hanlon's razor, nothing more... said so when it happened.

So did I, said so when it happened. OS can back me up. I saw no evidence that Trump colluded with Russia...said so before Mueller.

TeamTrump TRIED to collude with Russia, and failed. The TrumpT meeting with a Russian spy. That doesn't bother you, and I don't understand why.

Saying he's stupid doesn't let him off that ethical hook.

[MDlaxfan76]

Hanlon's razor, nothing more... said so when it happened.

So did I, said so when it happened. OS can back me up. I saw no evidence that Trump colluded with Russia...said so before Mueller.

TeamTrump TRIED to collude with Russia, and failed. The TrumpT meeting with a Russian spy. That doesn't bother you, and I don't understand why.

Saying he's stupid doesn't let him off that ethical hook.

ahhh, they don't care how much of sleaze ball Trump was/is, much less all the sleazes he attracted around him, all of that was a feature not a bug to his appeal.

That's the key insight, it was and is a feature not a bug.

[Farfromgeneva]

In philosophy and psychology, ressentiment (French pronunciation: ​[rəsɑ̃timɑ̃]) is one of the forms of resentment or hostility. The concept was of particular interest to some 19th century thinkers, most notably Friedrich Nietzsche. According to their use, ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed toward an object that one identifies as the cause of one's frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for one's frustration.[1] The sense of weakness or inferiority complex and perhaps even jealousy in the face of the "cause" generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one's frustration. This value system is then used as a means of justifying one's own weaknesses by identifying the source of envy as objectively inferior, serving as a defense mechanism that prevents the resentful individual from addressing and overcoming their insecurities and flaws. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability.[citation needed]

[old salt]

Hanlon's razor, nothing more... said so when it happened.

So did I, said so when it happened. OS can back me up. I saw no evidence that Trump colluded with Russia...said so before Mueller.

TeamTrump TRIED to collude with Russia, and failed. The TrumpT meeting with a Russian spy. That doesn't bother you, and I don't understand why.

Saying he's stupid doesn't let him off that ethical hook.

HRC's Russian PsyOp is still working -- you continue to ignore the fact that the Russian lawyer lady who asked for the meeting (& did the dangle) was - like Christopher Steele - a Fusion GPS client. Small world. They heard her out, then blew her off, while HRC's campaign did business with them. Stay tuned, the loose ends are all coming together.

[a fan]

Hanlon's razor, nothing more... said so when it happened.

So did I, said so when it happened. OS can back me up. I saw no evidence that Trump colluded with Russia...said so before Mueller.

TeamTrump TRIED to collude with Russia, and failed. The TrumpT meeting with a Russian spy. That doesn't bother you, and I don't understand why.

Saying he's stupid doesn't let him off that ethical hook.

HRC's Russian PsyOp is still working -- you continue to ignore the fact that the Russian lawyer lady who asked for the meeting (& did the dangle) was - like Christopher Steele - a Fusion GPS client. Small world.

It. Doesn't. Matter. Anyone who isn't a complete tree stump could tell that she was CLEARLY a Russian spy when she contacted TeamTrump.

And you don't take meetings with some random Russian lady you've never met before, who is claiming to have dirt on Hillary...just weeks before an election, and your daddy is running for POTUS. You just don't. You call the F'ing FBI IMMEDIATELY if you care even a tiny bit about America.

The fact that I have to explain this to you is........frustrating.

[old salt]

Hanlon's razor, nothing more... said so when it happened.

So did I, said so when it happened. OS can back me up. I saw no evidence that Trump colluded with Russia...said so before Mueller.

TeamTrump TRIED to collude with Russia, and failed. The TrumpT meeting with a Russian spy. That doesn't bother you, and I don't understand why.

Saying he's stupid doesn't let him off that ethical hook.

HRC's Russian PsyOp is still working -- you continue to ignore the fact that the Russian lawyer lady who asked for the meeting (& did the dangle) was - like Christopher Steele - a Fusion GPS client. Small world.

It. Doesn't. Matter. Anyone who isn't a complete tree stump could tell that she was CLEARLY a Russian spy when she contacted TeamTrump.

And you don't take meetings with some random Russian lady you've never met before, who is claiming to have dirt on Hillary...just weeks before an election, and your daddy is running for POTUS. You just don't. You call the F'ing FBI IMMEDIATELY if you care even a tiny bit about America.

The fact that I have to explain this to you is........frustrating.

A friend asked them to take the meeting. It was not a cold call.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Hanlon's razor, nothing more... said so when it happened.

So did I, said so when it happened. OS can back me up. I saw no evidence that Trump colluded with Russia...said so before Mueller.

TeamTrump TRIED to collude with Russia, and failed. The TrumpT meeting with a Russian spy. That doesn't bother you, and I don't understand why.

Saying he's stupid doesn't let him off that ethical hook.

HRC's Russian PsyOp is still working -- you continue to ignore the fact that the Russian lawyer lady who asked for the meeting (& did the dangle) was - like Christopher Steele - a Fusion GPS client. Small world.

It. Doesn't. Matter. Anyone who isn't a complete tree stump could tell that she was CLEARLY a Russian spy when she contacted TeamTrump.

And you don't take meetings with some random Russian lady you've never met before, who is claiming to have dirt on Hillary...just weeks before an election, and your daddy is running for POTUS. You just don't. You call the F'ing FBI IMMEDIATELY if you care even a tiny bit about America.

The fact that I have to explain this to you is........frustrating.

A friend asked them to take the meeting. It was not a cold call.

you think the spy told the friend it was a spy!! You protected us??!! Lord help us.

[a fan]

A friend asked them to take the meeting. It was not a cold call.

That doesn't contradict with a word I said, OS.

You know what they did was wrong, and you know that that meeting is the reason that reasonable Americans might believe that TeamTrump was trying to work with Putin.

But you'll never budge, and will continue to pretend like your view isn't entirely based on the fact that you're a Republican, and so is Trump. I though four years might have relaxed your stance on this. I was wrong.

So we've each had our say, again.. Let's move on.

[tech37]

Report: Hillary Clinton Tried To Prove Trump Was Colluding With Russians By Colluding With Russians

https://babylonbee.com/news/hillary-cli ... h-russians

[youthathletics]

Report: Hillary Clinton Tried To Prove Trump Was Colluding With Russians By Colluding With Russians

https://babylonbee.com/news/hillary-cli ... h-russians

Nailed it.

[old salt]

From behind the WSJ paywall :

https://www.wsj.com/articles/durham-and ... 1636064837

Durham and the Clinton Dossier

A new indictment continues the slow unraveling of a 2016 political scandal.

By Kimberley A. Strassel
Nov. 4, 2021

The nation argued for five years over the infamous “Steele dossier,” the document on which the Federal Bureau of Investigation relied to investigate Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. It should have been called the Clinton dossier.

Special counsel John Durham this week obtained an indictment of Igor Danchenko, a Russian who provided information for the dossier. Mr. Danchenko is charged with lying to the FBI, but the bigger story of the indictment is Democrats’ central role in every aspect of the dossier and the FBI investigation.

Never forget the original claim. According to the FBI, Democrats and the media, Mr. Trump harbored secret and nefarious ties with Russia. We knew that because—as Mother Jones explained in a 2016 article that became the reigning story line— Christopher Steele was a “credible source with a proven record of providing reliable, sensitive, and important information to the U.S. government.” He had come across “troubling” evidence of Trump collusion and brought it to U.S. law enforcement.

It took a year for congressional investigators to reveal the dossier had in fact been commissioned by the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS, working for the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It took two more years for Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz to expose that Mr. Steele had relied on a Russian source who said he’d never expected Mr. Steele to present his info as facts, since most of it was “hearsay.” Two more years on, Mr. Durham’s indictment says this source—Mr. Danchenko—obtained material from a longtime Democratic operative who was active in the 2016 Clinton campaign. Clintonites here, Clintonites there, Trump “scandals” everywhere.

The revelation shouldn’t surprise us, given that Mr. Danchenko was never some high-level Russian in Moscow. From 2005 through 2010 he worked at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, a center-left think tank. Around the end of that employment, the indictment asserts, he was introduced to “PR Executive-1,” a Clinton crony who the New York Times confirmed is Charles Dolan.

Mr. Dolan has long been in Clinton circles, having served seven years as head of the Democratic Governors Association and state chairman of Bill Clinton’s 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns. President Clinton appointed him to a State Department advisory commission, and the indictment notes he was an active “volunteer” on Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign. He also had far more ties to Russians than anyone in Mr. Trump’s circle, having for eight years helped handle “global public relations for the Russian government” and throughout 2016 interacted frequently with senior Russian officials and Russian Embassy staff.

The indictment reveals that in August 2016, Mr. Danchenko asked Mr. Dolan for any “thought, rumor or allegation” regarding the summer’s resignation of Paul Manafort as Mr. Trump’s campaign manager. Mr. Danchenko explained he was working on a “project against Trump.” Mr. Dolan replied that he’d had a drink with a “GOP friend of mine who knows some of the players” and provided gossip. Sentences of this email appear nearly verbatim in the Steele dossier, though they are (hilariously) sourced to a “close associate of TRUMP.” To add farce to fantasy, the indictment says the Mr. Dolan later told the FBI he’d fabricated meeting a GOP friend and had simply passed on info he’d read in the press.

The indictment notes Mr. Dolan was connected to yet other people and events that appear in the dossier. He traveled to Moscow in June 2016 to plan a conference. He stayed at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton, where he met the general manager and staff and toured the presidential suite. The dossier’s ugliest accusation against Mr. Trump, which involves disgusting sexual acts, happens to be set in the Ritz-Carlton’s presidential suite and to mention the hotel manager and staff. Mr. Danchenko met with Mr. Dolan at the Moscow hotel on that trip. He flew soon after to London to provide information to Mr. Steele for his dossier.

The indictment flags meetings, emails and calls that suggests Mr. Dolan passed plenty of other information to Mr. Danchenko for the dossier. This includes information he might have obtained during visits to the Russian Embassy in Washington. (Did the Russians know where this was going?) Mr. Dolan was also in regular communication with Olga Galkina, another Russian who fed information to Mr. Danchenko for the dossier. Ms. Galkina noted in two separate emails that she was expecting Mr. Dolan to get her a State Department job in a Hillary Clinton administration.

The indictment alleges Mr. Danchenko lied about Mr. Dolan’s interaction with the dossier when the bureau belatedly tried to check the dossier’s accuracy. The indictment says all this deprived the FBI of the ability to learn about the “reliability, motivations, and potential bias” of the Democratic source. True, though this latest indictment again paints the FBI as either inept or biased.

According to the charges, Mr. Dolan told the FBI the Clinton campaign didn’t direct him and wasn’t aware of his dealings with Mr. Danchenko and that he didn’t know his info would land at the FBI. Maybe, though the indictment notes that one Dolan email in early 2017 expressed knowledge that Mr. Danchenko had supplied information to the dossier now in the news.

The Clinton dossier should go down as one of the biggest scandals in U.S. political history. Not just for the breadth of the con, but for the time it has taken to expose it.

[old salt]

From behind the National Review paywall :

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/ ... n-scandal/

It’s one of the biggest scandals in American political history, and it barely warrants any media coverage.

Donald Trump might have desired a closer relationship with Vladimir Putin, but it was Democrats who had aggressively and successfully disseminated Russian disinformation during and after the 2016 election, manipulating a pliant media and law enforcement, plunging the nation into four years of paranoia meant to undermine trust in the American electoral system.

Special counsel John Durham has now handed down another indictment, arresting Igor Danchenko, a grifter, suspected Russian spy, and primary sub-source for the “Steele Dossier,” the discredited file that was assembled by opposition-research shop Fusion GPS and funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign through its law firm, Perkins Coie.

Not only did the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party operators pay for these uncorroborated allegations, they then spread the lies to government agencies and major media organizations. The candidate herself often perpetuated a conspiracy theory that she almost surely knew was bogus. And because it was Trump, everyone ran with it, including law enforcement.

We know a lawyer at the FBI doctored an email and used it as the basis for a sworn statement to spy on Trump-campaign adviser Carter Page — omitting the fact that the underlying evidence was a partisan document — and that Obama officials unmasked members of the opposition party during an election. Department of Justice inspector general Michael Horowitz found that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications used to spy on Page were riddled with 17 “significant errors.” More important, Horowitz testified that “the FISA applications relied entirely on information from the . . . primary sub source’s reporting to support the allegation that Page was coordinating with the Russian government on 2016 U.S. presidential election activities.”

There were early signs that controversy was a farce. In March 2017, I wrote a tepid piece headlined, “Democrats Shouldn’t Dismiss Nunes’ Spying Claims So Quickly.” At the time, House Intelligence chairman Devin Nunes, somewhat ham-fistedly, assembled a memo detailing how the Trump campaign had been spied on and unmasked and that conversations “with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value were widely disseminated in an intelligence community report” and that the evidence was predicated on a dossier paid for by Democrats. I will save you the hundreds of hyperlinks to liberal commentators calling Nunes a traitor and liar, but let’s just say it was quite the scene.

At the time, Nunes was also battered for failing to abide by proper congressional decorum and for sharing his information with the White House before filling in Democrats. Nunes, granted, should have acted in a less partisan manner. Then again, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, a relentless presence on cable television during this time, not only knew that Nunes was right but lied when claiming Russians had “hacked the election,” and lied again when claiming to be in possession of real-world evidence of criminal conspiracy. There would never be a “credible” investigation. In fact, Schiff didn’t even try to impeach the president for criminal conspiracy related to Russia.

These days, Schiff is the author of a best-selling book, but Nunes is vindicated.

None of this sparked much skepticism from the establishment media. They would continue to obsess over Russian collusion, making a point of stressing that the partisan oppo-research hadn’t sparked the FBI investigation. “Republicans’ Steele dossier conspiracy theory was dealt a big blow this weekend,” read a piece by Washington Post’s Aaron Blake, one of the many writers at that paper who latched on to the “collusion” story. With Danchenko’s arrest, the Post now contends that “allegations cast new uncertainty on some past reporting on the dossier by news organizations, including The Washington Post.” Will the newspaper return its Pulitzer now?

It’s important to remember, as Jonathan Chait of New York magazine helpfully noted in his unhinged opus: “The truth is that much of the reporting of the Russia scandal over the past 18 months has followed the contours of what Steele’s sources told him.” Indeed, Russia collusion was the most successful ratf***ing enterprise in American history.

We now know that the premise of the narrative that undergirded hundreds of stories was created in a public-relations lab. What we don’t know is how much the media knew. Even if we generously concede that most journalists were merely dupes rather than participants, the lack of skepticism and professionalism is still jarring.

Whether it was reporters telling us that Russian hackers had taken over the U.S. electricity grid to deny beleaguered Vermonters heat or that Trump had created a secret Internet server to surreptitiously communicate with a Russian bank, every “mistake” skewed in the same direction. And we learned during these years that journalists could “correct” stories whose entire premises were concocted.

CNN was likely the worst offender. Whether it was erroneously reporting that Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen had testified that the then-presidential candidate had advance knowledge of the 2016 Trump Tower meeting between campaign officials and a Russian operative (untrue, even according to the single highly partisan source they used for the story) or pushing a four-byline story alleging that James Comey was about to publicly dispute the president’s claim that the former FBI director told him three times that he was not under investigation (he would do the opposite), they would never explain how they got it all so wrong.

It was CNN that broke a story about Donald Trump Jr. being offered advance access to the hacked emails of the DNC and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. The hysteria that followed was amazing. CNN was later forced to “correct” the piece when another paper got its hands on the emails. Two sources had allegedly gotten the date wrong. Yet, somehow, NBC’s Ken Dilanian and other reporters had also independently confirmed the same mistake from their own independent sources. This was one of the most miraculous happenstances in journalistic history!

Not that it matters. There will be no repercussions. No explanation. No self-reflection. No professional oversight. No apology.

[old salt]

From the National Review Editors :

Dossier Deceit

We learn from special counsel John Durham’s indictment of Igor Danchenko that “the FBI ultimately devoted substantial resources attempting to investigate and corroborate the allegations” in the now-infamous Steele dossier. “Ultimately” is right — but not before it relied on the shoddy document to surveil an American citizen in an investigation that produced the Mueller probe and a two-year-long obsession with Trump and Russian built on a preposterous foundation.

The web of deceit is a tangled one, but while the indictment details a shocking story of transnational dirty tricks weaponized at the highest level of American politics, the most significant moral failure was on the part of the FBI itself.

Durham, who is investigating the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, indicted Danchenko on five counts of lying to the Bureau’s investigators regarding the compilation of the information in the dossier. The document was a collection of political opposition research posing as intelligence reports, generated at the behest of the Hillary Clinton campaign, which portrayed Donald Trump and his 2016 campaign as clandestine agents of the Kremlin.

It is worth relating the background in detail.

These reports were crafted by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, in partnership with Glenn Simpson, co-founder of the political research firm Fusion GPS. Perkins Coie, the sharp-elbowed Democratic law firm that represented the Clinton campaign, retained Simpson for the project. Simpson, in turn, recruited Steele, who brought in Danchenko, his business associate.

Danchenko’s background, which is worthy of a second-rate spy novel, came to light in late 2020, when a Justice Department inspector-general investigation was unsealed. A Russian citizen transplanted to Washington as a geopolitics scholar, he landed at the Brookings Institution, a prominent Clinton-friendly think-tank. In 2009, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation of Danchenko. He had allegedly suggested to two Brookings staffers, who appeared to be headed for jobs in the Obama administration, that he could make it worth their while if they passed along classified information. The staffers (one of whom believed Danchenko must be a Russian agent – imagine that!) instead passed along word of Danchenko’s entreaty to the FBI. The Bureau learned that Danchenko appeared to be tied to two Russian agents who were also under investigation.

Agents prepared to seek national-security surveillance of Danchenko under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). But, in what would become an alarming theme, the FBI did not follow through and closed the investigation in March 2011, apparently believing that Danchenko had gone back to Russia.

In fact, he had begun working with Steele. Danchenko was introduced to Steele in 2010 by Fiona Hill, another Brookings Russia scholar. Hill, you may recall, was a Trump White House National Security Council member who provided key testimony in the House’s impeachment of then-President Trump in the Ukraine kerfuffle. (Hill appears not to have been knowingly complicit in the unrelated Trump-Russia hype.)

When Steele was recruited for the Clinton campaign’s anti-Trump project in spring 2016, he relied on Danchenko to supply most of the information. Contrary to Steele’s later claims, Danchenko did not have a network of useful contacts. But here again, Hill appears inadvertently to have advanced the plot. In 2016, she introduced Danchenko to Charles Dolan, a Russia-focused businessman and Democratic Party activist.

Dolan is identified in the indictment as “PR Executive-1” because he helped run a public-relations firm. He is a longtime Clinton insider, having worked on Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns, as well as Hillary’s failed 2008 and 2016 bids. In the interim, he was appointed by President Clinton to a State Department advisory committee. From 2006 until 2014, the Kremlin retained Dolan to be its global public-relations agent. For much of that time, conveniently, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was the Obama administration point-person on the “Russia Reset,” in which the State Department promoted Russian economic development.

As the indictment details, Dolan hired Danchenko to consult on a conference he planned for October 2016 in Moscow. In the preceding months, Dolan had constant communication with Danchenko and made a preparatory trip to Moscow, meeting with Danchenko. Dolan would pass information to Danchenko, which Danchenko would embellish, sometimes beyond recognition, in passing it on to Steele, who dutifully included it in the dossier without disclosing its origins.

In the most notorious example, Dolan had meetings in a Moscow hotel and was given a tour of the presidential suite, in which he was told Donald Trump had once stayed. Danchenko was not present for these meetings, and the indictment says there was no discussion of any sexual hijinks. Dolan then communicated some of the details to Danchenko who, within days, flew to London to meet with Steele. By the time Steele finished writing up what Danchenko told him, the episode had been spun into the now infamous “pee tape” claim – i.e., that Trump had cavorted with prostitutes in the presidential suite, which they defiled because Trump hated the Obamas (who had supposedly stayed there earlier), and Putin thus had a recording of the whole sordid affair. In reality, Danchenko is Steele’s source, has no first-hand knowledge, and appears to have made the whole thing up.

According to the indictment, Danchenko lied to the FBI about getting information from Dolan. He also lied about having learned directly from a close Trump associate that Trump’s campaign was in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” with the Kremlin. Danchenko claimed that this information came from the president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce — identified in the indictment as “Chamber President-1,” and in public reporting as Sergei Millian.

A minor real-estate developer, Millian did some business with the Trump organization and started this obscure “chamber” in order to raise his profile. In reality, Danchenko never spoke or met with Millian. He continued to cling to his incredible story in several interviews by the FBI throughout 2017. As a result, four of the five false statement counts relate to this alleged fabrication. The other concerns Danchenko’s alleged concealment of Dolan’s role.

The spotlight on Danchenko, and on the seminal role of the Hillary Clinton campaign in creating and disseminating the Trump-Russia “collusion” tale, is understandable. It should not, however, divert attention from the FBI’s stunningly inept performance. On its face, the dossier is a screed full of blatant nonsense. The Danchenko indictment shows that if a modicum of fair-minded investigation had been done, a borderline competent FBI agent would quickly have spotted its glaring weaknesses. Yet, the Bureau took no meaningful action to corroborate the Steele/Danchenko claims before seeking FISA warrants under oath. Agents did not even interview Danchenko, the main source, until four months later.

Too good to check is an impulse that never serves journalists well, and it’s even worse when it is the policy of a law-enforcement agency wielding awesome powers. At best, the FBI allowed itself to get duped into playing along with a political hit against, first, a presidential candidate and, then, the duly elected president of the United States. May John Durham continue to expose the details of this sorry scheme, and hold accountable anyone who broke the law in the course of advancing it.

[youthathletics]

A fraudulent intent, however carefully concealed at the outset, will generally, in the end, betray itself.
~Livy