Barr, Durham, Jones & Sullivan

Sounds like a law firm, and it's true--three out the four are lawyers. In reality, of course, it refers to the latest revelation in the continuing Barr investigation of the Russia Hoax lawfare coup attempt against President Trump. Please note: I said revelation, not development. As I pointed out recently (Why The Daniel Jones Story Is Significant) this part of the investigation has--beyond any doubt--been intensively ongoing for some time. Most likely for months:

Consider this. I simply can't conceive that Durham is calling Jones before the grand jury on a whim, without having conducted a searching background investigation of everything connected to Jones. If Durham sent Jones a grand jury subpoena to testify before the grand jury, IMO it's for sure that he has also issued grand jury subpoenas for everything in Jones life that could conceivably be obtained via grand jury subpoenas. That would, as SWC says, focus on communications and finances. Moreover, before quizzing Jones on all that, Durham would have reviewed that mountain of material and followed out all leads that arose from it. And my belief is that Durham would not be calling Jones before the grand jury if he hadn't already developed bona fide investigative leads that he has followed out. That's too serious a step to take just to show how thorough an investigator he is.

In other words, Barr and Durham have been busy--very busy. And anyone who thinks Donald Trump is clueless about this is, well, clueless themselves. Of course Trump has a right to be frustrated. The crew of his appointees who should have turned this coup plot inside out during the first two years of his administration betrayed him. Barr has not. Anyway, Trump does the politics, Barr does the legal stuff.

This is why I find it irritating to read the kind of stuff that Paul Sperry has been running on his twitter feed for the past week or so. I get it that this stuff generates, views, clicks, retweets, etc. Still ...

Here is what AG Barr and Durham are preventing you, the voter, from knowing definitively before you vote

Apr 10, 2019 — “I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal,” AG Barr testified.

But apparently not big enough of a deal to kick ass and take names in the intervening period. Pathetic

“This is the nightmare scenario. Essentially, the year and a half of arguably the number one issue for the Republican base is virtually meaningless if this doesn't happen before the election," a GOP congressional aide told Axios.

BREAKING: A Democrat inside Durham's office, whose family works as part of the Democratic Machine in Connecticut, and a Never-Trumper inside Barr's office sabotaged and slow-walked the #Spygate investigation

Apparently Barr & Durham r nothing more than institutionalists who care more about protecting their beloved institution (DOJ/FBI) than they do about protecting the civil liberties of American citizens illegally spied on & investigated by those institutions

Barr and Durham as villains. It works for some. But it's not the real world.

On the other hand, just a bit more recently on the same twitter feed--but without so much as a reference to the above tweets--we now read:

BREAKING: Ex-FBI Clinton hand Dan Jones under grand jury subpoena in Durham probe of whether false data on Trump provided FBI. Jones sent FBI agents on goose chase March 2017 over bogus claims of Russian bank-Trump Tower backchannel. Jones has hired lawyer

Trump-Russia 2.0: Dossier-Tied Firm Pitching Journalists Daily on 'Collusion' | RealClearInvestig...

Above, Daniel J. Jones, whose outfit has hired Glenn Simpson and Christopher Steele, key figures behind the Trump-Russia dossier. Key Democratic operatives and private investigators who tried to...

8:43 PM · Oct 10, 2020·

And:

Paul Sperry

@paulsperry_

DEVELOPING: In ominous turn,#Spygate probe now operating from new case theory Clinton operatives (Sussman, Jones, Steele, Simpson +cyber experts) may have fed FBI falsified evidence (a crime) to frame Trump  &FBI knew it was false but used it anyway to justify investigating Trump

8:58 PM · Oct 10, 2020·

That's the real world, and if you believe that this is a "new case theory", well ...

Any time you see multiple names listed, all of whom were involved in the same fraud, you can bet that the investigators will be looking at conspiracy charges. They'll also be looking at who else facilitated and financed that conspiracy. With political operatives like these--with ties to the Clinton and Biden camps (Jake Sullivan is currently a top adviser to Biden)--the amount of investigation would be staggering. 

Think about this. If Daniel Jones got $50 million from 7-10 "donors" on the West Coast and in New York--and he did, at the beginning of 2017--for the purpose of taking out a president, what kind of investigation would you want to conduct? For starters, you'd want to know who all the people involved were--because it wasn't just Daniel Jones. Who gave the money, who received the money--including journalists--who was communicating with whom? You don't do that overnight. It's just not possible, not even with the assistance of modern database software.

Now, to do Sperry credit, he has been onto aspects of this story for quite some time: Transcripts: Clinton Aides Allied With Fusion GPS Pair After Election -- to Re-Push Anti-Trump Dossier. Which means that, if Sperry was onto it, you can bet that Barr and Durham were. And, since we're probably not going to learn anything soon about this investigation, you may want to revisit the two linked articles for some useful background.

As Sperry notes in the first of the two long investigative pieces:

Longtime observers of the Washington political scene are curious how Jones has for years been able to escape serious scrutiny while running a political influence operation that works closely with national media, federal law enforcement and congressional investigators. With access to a multimillion-dollar war chest, they say he could continue to push the anti-Trump Russia collusion narrative long past the Mueller report or even the 2020 presidential election.

 

Think about all the obstruction of the Trump administration, all the leaks, the fake impeachment and put it in that context: "a political influence operation that works closely with national media, federal law enforcement and congressional investigators." Both Jones and Jake Sullivan had the contacts in the USIC and in Congress to make that work.

However, it takes a LOT of money to run an operation like that. Sperry goes into the funding behind Jones--just in case you were wondering who those people are who can just pony up millions of dollars in cash. There are a lot of the usual suspects--George Soros and the like. He also links to another excellent investigative article, by Chuck Ross: Charity Backed By Silicon Valley Tech Titans Gave $500K To Fusion GPS-Linked Group. Here are the bullet points at the top of Ross' article:

• A former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer [Daniel Jones] who has worked with Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele quietly formed a pro-democracy nonprofit group in 2018 called Advance Democracy Inc. 
• A Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found that a multi-billion dollar charity backed by Silicon Valley tech titans donated $500,000 to the group last year.
• The staffer [Daniel Jones] operates a similar charity called The Democracy Integrity Project, which receives funding from George Soros. He allegedly told one associate that the group operates as a “shadow media organization” that works with the U.S. government. 

About that Silicon Valley "charity"--The Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF)--that funds "a political influence operation that works closely with national media, federal law enforcement and congressional investigators" as well as another related outfit that operates as a “shadow media organization” that works with the U.S. government--who might be behind that?

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has donated nearly $2 billion in his company’s stock to SVCF since 2010, according to Forbes, including $214 million in November 2018. Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey contributed $21 million in Square stock in 2015, and Netflix founder Reed Hastings gave $100 million in 2016. Google co-founder Sergey Brin gave $10 million in 2015.

Starbucks founder and potential 2020 presidential candidate Howard Schultz gave $1 million in 2014. J.B. Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, gave $605,000 in 2016 through his family foundation, according to Forbes, which pulled donor information from Security Exchange Commission filings.

SVCF uses donor-advised funds to accept donations and make grants. Donors receive an immediate tax benefit for contributions, many of which are made in the form of stocks and other assets, but can distribute funds on a longer timeline than would be required at a traditional private foundation. They can also recommend who receives the grants using their donations.

The funds, known as DAFs, also provide an extra layer of anonymity for donors compared to a foundation funded by an individual or family. Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat, has said that the donor-advised fund industry fosters “identity laundering.”

SVCF has more than 1,000 donor-advised funds, a spokeswoman for the group told The DCNF.

Who do you know can assure us with certainty that--to take just one example--James Comey has not been in touch with any of the people associated with Jones? Me neither. Does this give you any idea of the possibilities behind Barr's statement to--and reported by--President Trump, to the effect that Barr and Durham have "bigger fish to fry." As a reminder, Barr's statement was in the context of saying that they had evidence against Obama and Biden. Are these guys bigger fish that Obama and Biden? Let me put it this way: I think I could make a very reasonable argument that they are. For example, it was the Pritzker family that funded Obama's entire political career. Politicians are never independent of their sources of funding.

The significance of Sperry's second article, which dates to May 2020, is that it ropes Jake Sullivan (foreign policy adviser to Biden both in the WH and currently) into the years long media campaign against Trump that paralleled all the official attacks: the Mueller witchhunt, the fake impeachment, etc. Check it out. What you'll find is that, while Congress did talk to Sullivan, it was all done quite gingerly--Sullivan wasn't asked, for example, about Hillary's ties to his and Jones' little enterprise:

Top officials with the Hillary Clinton campaign re-engaged with the opposition researchers behind the Steele dossier just three weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration, newly declassified congressional witness transcripts reveal, indicating her campaign’s participation in an ongoing and well-funded effort to undermine the president by casting him as a tool of the Kremlin.

Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta testified that he met on Feb. 10, 2017, with Daniel Jones, a former aide to California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and Glenn Simpson and his partner Peter Fritsch of Fusion GPS. In separate testimony, Clinton’s senior foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan revealed he also participated in the meeting. The Clinton campaign had funneled money through a law firm, Perkins Coie, to pay Fusion to compile the now-discredited dossier which was a prime driver of the Trump-Russia conspiracy theories – and FBI investigations -- that have shadowed his administration.

 

And it was Perkins Coie, through Michael Sussmann, who fed the Alfa Bank hoax directly to the very top of the FBI--General Counsel James Baker (said to be cooperating with Durham).

Podesta said he agreed to help the trio open doors to big Democratic fund-raisers and sit down for press interviews and documentaries regarding any “new developments” uncovered by dossier author and former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Sullivan accompanied Podesta to the meeting, which he said lasted about an hour and was held in an office building in Washington.

“Was the conversation about the then-dossier?” a House panel staffer asked Sullivan, who had previously worked in the Obama administration as Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser.

"I mean not specifically about the dossier,” Sullivan replied. "lt was sort of about the effort that they had put in to finding out ties between Trump and Russia and what their belief was based on the accumulation on that."

If Jones and Sullivan have to show up in front of a grand jury, I doubt they'll be allowed to slide away like that.

This is what Barr is on the trail of. It's big. It's sprawling.