Remember Alfa Bank?

Anyone might be forgiven for imagining that the Russia Hoax is over and done with. But it's not. And Techno Fog has a very interesting article to remind us of that fact. As you may recall, during the final month or two of the 2016 election campaign, outlandish accusations were leveled against Alfa Bank. The basic idea was that a Russian bank, Alfa Bank, was laundering money on behalf of Donald Trump, money that the Putin regime was paying Trump as their supposed agent. These outlandish accusations came from the Hillary campaign and its oppo research branch--in other words, Fusion GPS (remember?), Glenn Simpson, and shady Clinton campaign lawyers.

The whole story quickly collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity, after a brief flurry of excitement ginned up in the Dem media proxy outlets. Even oppo research stories require some minimal factual content, and this story lacked the bare minimum. Apparently the Clinton campaign thought the whole thing would be water over the dam, but Alfa bank had other ideas. They sued, and Techno Fog brings us up to date:

Why is a Fusion GPS attorney risking sanctions?

Fusion GPS appears desperate to settle a potentially catastrophic case.

First, some minimal background:

How Big Could The Alfa Bank Hoax Turn Out To Be?

The last time we referenced the Alfa Bank hoax--Alfa Bank Redux--Starring John Durham!--I pointed out that the importance of the fact that Durham is pursuing the Alfa Bank Hoax angle with grand jury subpoenas lies in where that inquiry leads: Straight to the Clinton and, now, the Biden campaigns and organizations:

The Alfa Bank hoax "dossier" memo was written up by Christopher Steele at the express direction of Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann and Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson. Sussmann then took the story directly to the FBI--to a friend of his, James Baker, who happened to be FBI General Counsel, i.e., Comey's top lawyer. Knowing Sussmann as he did, Baker also knew that this hoax story was coming straight from the Clinton campaign. Add that background to the involvement of Daniel Jones and Jake Sullivan in the Alfa Bank hoax (see above), along with the fact that James Baker has long been believed to be cooperating with Durham and we come to this: Durham's conspiracy net is attempting to catch some of the biggest fish in the Dem hierarchy, central figures in both the Clinton and now the Biden campaigns. 

The theory that draws these non-government actors into Durham's big picture conspiracy case is they provided false information--false statements, so think 1001--to the government, the FBI. The fact that the FBI would have known the information was false in beside the point. It was a form of information laundering--Hey, we received allegations, we investigated them: Wink, wink! 

The Pelosis Are Heavily Invested in Crowdstrike

Crowdstrike being the cyber security firm that, if you believe what you read in the MSM, "investigated" the DNC email "hack." "Heavily invested" means that the Pelosis have invested no less than $1 million dollars in Crowdstrike, beginning just a month ago. That's per a long article by Aaron Maté: Pelosis Take a Big Stake in CrowdStrike, Democrat-Connected Linchpin of Russia Probe. Who knows--if Biden wins maybe there'll be a lot of cyber security and investigating the Dems will want Crowdstrike to get involved in.

Crowdstrike was co-founded by Dmitri Alperovitch, the Russian with the shadowy background who, since coming to the US in 1994, has rocketed to the top of the cyber security sector. Bringing on Shawn Henry, formerly one of the top guys in Bob Mueller's FBI, probably didn't hurt when it came to gaining access to the the federal government and obtaining lucrative contracts. Here's the lineup of Crowdstrike's founders:

CrowdStrike was co-founded by George Kurtz (CEO),^[5] Dmitri Alperovitch (CTO),^[6] and Gregg Marston (CFO, retired) in 2011.^[7][8] In 2012, Shawn Henry, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) official, was hired to lead sister company CrowdStrike Services, Inc., which focused on proactive and incident response services.^[9] In June 2013, the company launched its first product, CrowdStrike Falcon, which provided threat intelligence and attribution to nation state actors^[10] that are conducting economic espionage and IP theft.

And here's what Wikipedia tells us about Crowdstrike's funding:

UPDATED: Alfa Bank Redux--Starring John Durham!

H/T to commenter EZ, who pointed me to a tweet by Fool Nelson that pointed me to a New Yorker article by Dexter Filkins--who wrote the original article touting the short lived Alfa Bank - Trump Tower server conspiracy hoax. The article--The Contested Afterlife of the Trump-Alfa Bank Story--begins with a precis of the original hoax. I say "original" because Filkins is suggesting new conspiracy theories that embrace AG Barr and John Durham acting in concert with "the Russians". 

Here's the first paragraph, to remind you of the original hoax and to get us started:

Two years ago, I wrote about a mysterious series of computer contacts between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, one of the most powerful financial institutions in Russia. For four months, during the summer before the 2016 Presidential election, two servers registered to the bank repeatedly looked up the address of another server, maintained by a mass-marketing firm for the Trump Organization.

 

Remember, now? There's more to it, of course, but that'll do--my interest is in what the new developments (of which, more below) tell us about what John Durham is up to.

Since late summer the conservatives have been treated to regular explosions of anti-Barr and anti-Durham sentiment. You've seen the kind of stuff I'm talking about: They're Deep State operatives working to bury the evidence and get Trump defeated. People peddling this stuff point to Trump's recent tweet storm, right after returning to the White House after his brief stay chez Walter Reed, in which Trump vented about nobody being arrested, not enough documents being declassified, and et cetera. 

I was then and remain now convinced that that was basically political theater for the base. Nevertheless, people whom I previously mistook for serious commentators have taken this cry up in all seriousness. Just last night Fred Fleitz told Lou Dobbs that Durham should have wound up his investigation "a year ago." I guess that tells you all you need to know about what it takes to be a CIA analyst. Or, hey, an FBI analyst, too. I'm agnostic when it comes to analysts--no favorites.

I'm not just trying to beat my own drum, but ... I've been maintaining ever since Barr and Durham set out down this investigative road that they were two serious guys who intended to reach the end--not just offer up a couple of easy indictments. And I've also been maintaining that Barr and Durham are working strenuously to build a "big picture" conspiracy case--a theory of the case that would take in the entire Russia Hoax, not just a few nickel-dime false statement cases divorced from the big picture story. To do that takes time and resources and, unfortunately, is not certain of success. But it's a story that the American people need to have told to them in detail--so that it can't be written off as right wing conspiracy theory.

This is where Filkins article is leading us--confirmation that that's the road that Barr and Durham are on.

Did Brennan Run An Anti-Trump Task Force?

For lack of news, Paul Sperry's recent tweet has caused a minor stir on the conservative interwebs:

Paul Sperry
@paulsperry_ 

DEVELOPING: Investigators have learned that Obama CIA Director John Brennan ran a secret task force out of Langley with its own separate budget to investigate Trump campaign and alleged ties to Russia. Task force set up before FBI officially launched its own probe on 07/31/16. 

10:17 PM · Sep 7, 2020

I'm skeptical of this tweet--the essential content of which is not new--for several reasons.

The first is that, as stated, the whole idea of a CIA task force targeting a US Person residing within the US for ties to a foreign country is too transparently illegal to be probable. A separate budget for such a task force would merely document the illegality.

Counterintelligence operations inside the US--which is what we're talking about here--are the province of the FBI. Brennan--who is not natively stupid, whatever else you may think of him--would understand the risks and would certainly come up with a workaround. That's not to say that Brennan wasn't involved. It's just that the Langley "task force ... with its own separate budget" is too simple. It's too good to be true, because its discovery would make the coup so easy to prove in the big picture conspiracy sense, but like most things that are too good to be true it most likely isn't.

In response to DJL this morning, I wrote:

Yes. They're probably working off a 2017 article in The Guardian. IMO there are two things--possibly three--at work there: the two, the campaign against Flynn, and Brennan spreading the dossier in DC. The other possibility, the Alfa Bank hoax. I believe that that much is true, but with The Guardian you have to be careful.

So, to repeat, what I think drives this narrative is the notorious article by Luke Harding in The Guardian, dating back to April, 2017 (h/t SWC for the reminder). I do wonder whether this article was not intended as a cover for what was really going on--the centrality of the Steele "dossier" to the entire Russia Hoax. That will be difficult to state with certainty because of redactions in the released documents, but I believe it to be probable:

FBI Unredacts Most of Kathleen Kavalec's Notes Re Steele

That was quick!

Two and a half years unclassified, then 11 days as Classified, and now back to being almost totally unclassified. It appears that Bill Barr was not amused by the Chris Wray FBI's adventures in retroactive classification and redaction of Kathleen Kavalec's notes and write up regarding her discussions with Chris Steele, the Brit ex spook and fabulist. Kavalec originally left her notes and an email based on them Unclassified--that was two and a half years ago. The FBI did their retroactive number on the material just over a week ago, but after a furor in the media has ... rethought things.

CTH, in a longer blog tonight, includes the fact that the FBI has apparently reconsidered its redactions of Kathleen Kavalec's typed up notes regarding her meeting on October 11, 2016, with Chris Steele Tatyana Duran. The handwritten notes are clearly for the most part a precis of material in Steele's famous "dossier." However, there are differences, as can be seen from the typed up--and now mostly unredacted--material. Notably, in Kavalec's notes we find Paul Manafort presented as playing the role of courier between Trump and "the Russians," rather than Carter Page being the courier between Manafort and the Russians on Trump's behalf. Another unique feature is that Manafort is also said to communicate secretly with the Kremlin via the Alfa Bank using Tor software and a "hidden server" managed by Alfa Bank. Page is also said to be involved, but in some unspecified way, although he is said to have met twice (rather than just once) with Igor Sechin of Rosneft--and with no apparent reference to his commencement address in Moscow.

These discrepancies in the various versions of Steele's "dossier" material raise the interesting question of how the FBI decided which version of Steele's stories to use in its FISA application. The most readily available version of the Steele dossier features Manafort as the principal behind the Trump outreach to the Russians, but Carter Page serves as the courier between Manafort and the Russians. The appeal of this version--as opposed to Manafort doing the communications on his own, is that it supports the narrative that the FBI used to open an "enterprise counterintelligence investigation"--Crossfire Hurricane.

James Baker And Michael Sussman Revisited

Jeff Carlson has a summary out of James Baker's testimony to the House. Baker, a close friend of James Comey, was General Counsel for the FBI, which is to say that he worked directly with Comey. Baker is currently the subject of a criminal leak investigation. The summary of Baker's testimony--which is mostly very self serving--doesn't contain any bombshells but, as usual, is worth reading. It is mostly concerned with Baker's interaction with Michael Sussman, which I covered extensively in two previous posts. Nevertheless, this aspect of the Russia Hoax is well worth reviewing, if only to remind ourselves of aspects that we may have forgotten:

James Baker Identifies Another Source Behind the FISA Application

It's James Baker's Turn To Throw Rosenstein Under A Bus

Here, below, are the two paragraphs of Sussman's bio from his page at Perkins Coie, the law firm where he's a partner--yes, the same law firm that represented the DNC and laundered DNC money to Glenn Simpson's Fusion GPS (that part's not in his official bio). I urge you to peruse the rest:

Michael Sussmann, formerly with the U.S. Department of Justice, is a nationally-recognized privacy, cybersecurity and national security lawyer. He is engaged on some of the most sophisticated, high-stakes matters today, such as his representation of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in their responses to Russian hacking in the 2016 presidential election. This work was detailed in the best-selling books The Apprentice (2018), The Perfect Weapon (2018), Russian Roulette (2018), and Hacks (2017).

Michael has been ranked as a “Privacy and Data Security Expert” in the Chambers Global and Chambers USA directories. He is often quoted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and other media. His legal work has been cited by investigative reporters in two other important books: Power Wars (2015) and Dragnet Nation (2015). He has provided Congressional testimony and litigated national security cases in federal court.

You'll see why I said in the first post "In a Hillary Clinton administration the sky would have been the limit for Sussman--or close to it," especially when you read the rest of the details of his involvement with the FBI during the 2016 campaign.

About That Contingency Plan

Back in October I wrote a shortish blog (by my usual standards) called The Russia Hoax As Contingency Plan, in which I argued that the Russia Hoax was developed as a contingency plan to steal the presidential election in case Hillary lost. I noted that while the Russia Hoax really took off just before and after the election, it actually had deep roots, all the way back to at least early Spring of 2016.

And now we get confirmation of that from no less authoritative a source than Christopher Steele himself!

When last we heard of Christopher he was embroiled in a law suit in London:

Christopher Steele was dragged into court in a defamation suit filed by three Russian bankers in London who claim they were smeared in a discredited Slate article about a computer server, Trump Tower and Moscow’s Alfa Bank — the three Russian bankers, Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven and German Khan also filed a lawsuit against gutter oppo research firm Fusion GPS.

The Gateway Pundit notes that Slate's fake news story about the Alfa Bank was tweeted out by Hillary Clinton just one week before the election, based on hot new "information" that Christopher had just dreamed up in report 112 of his "dossier".

Steele has just responded to interrogatories in the case, and the Washington Times has provided us with one response:

Mr. Steele wrote: “Fusion’s immediate client was law firm Perkins Coie. It engaged Fusion to obtain information necessary for Perkins Coie LLP to provide legal advice on the potential impact of Russian involvement on the legal validity of the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential election.

“Based on that advice, parties such as the Democratic National Committee and HFACC Inc. (also known as ‘Hillary for America’) could consider steps they would be legally entitled to take to challenge the validity of the outcome of that election.”

And here's an image of the original, per Sean Davis, including the questions Steele was responding to:




And there you have it: Russia Hoax as contingency plan. I'd call it official now. And this is what's been behind "the resistance" for the past two years. A Russia Hoax dreamed up by an agent of a Foreign Power to overturn a US election. Any bets on the amount of column space or air time this will get in the MSM?