Durham Still 'Pushing'

That's what the WSJ tells us this morning--but not much else. Let's see.

Alexander Downer, the Aussie "diplomat," says he was recontacted by Durham. Downer says he told Durham that he had nothing to add to what was already on the public record. He declined further comment to reporters.

OK. But how about this:

"Increasingly, investigators are focused on former CIA Director John Brennan, examining whether he pushed for a blunter assessment about Russia's motivations than others in the intelligence community felt was warranted, people familiar with the matter said."

I think we've already heard that Durham was focused on Brennan and the ICA--several times. You've got to like that business about a "blunter assessment." I think Durham wants to know how much of it was pure fiction.

That's pretty much how the article goes--very defensive, pushing the idea that there was no slant to anything the Intel Community did. For example:

"There was no political interference," by Mr. Brennan or anyone else, said a former senior intelligence official involved in preparing the report. A 2004 intelligence overhaul that added new procedures to "tease out and highlight" analysts differences ... "worked perfectly," the official said.

 Uh, a "former senior intelligence official"? "Involved in preparing the report"? That could be John Brennan. Or Peter Strzok!

And so it goes. But the good news, if this seems like news to anyone, is that Durham is still on the job, still pushing.

An Impeachment Theater Conspiracy Theory

I spent part of the day reading and rereading material about Eric Ciaramella, the "whistleblower," and trying to make sense of the ongoing Impeachment Theater in the House. Somehow it doesn't all seem to add up. It could, of course--reality can be stranger than fiction. Nevertheless, perhaps it's time to try to come up with a more conspiratorial theory than has been previously floated that might tie it all up. After all, the entire Russia Hoax was more conspiratorial in reality than anything we've ever seen before in our history.

On the one hand, it seems possible that Impeachment Theater could be explained by sheer craziness: Trump Derangement Syndrome, rage at how 2016 derailed the permanent Dem ascendancy, the collapse of the Russia hoax--things like that. Certainly we've seen enough craziness in the House Dems to fit in with that explanation.

On the other hand, this whole whistleblower thing is pretty half assed, even as Dem theater goes. There's a nice blog at Zerohedge that goes into how anomalous it is: When Is A Whistleblower, Not A Whistleblower?

The author's central point is that Ciaramella doesn't act like a whistleblower--especially because he and his handlers have taken extraordinary steps to conceal his identity from public view:

Sara Carter: Nunes On Need For Probe Of CIA/FBI Overseas Ops

Sara Carter has an update on the shape the Russia Hoax investigation is taking, where it's headed. I'm linking to the version at Zerohedge: Nunes: FBI/CIA's Actions Against Trump Campaign Overseas Must Be Investigated. The content is fairly self evident, so I'll just copy the main points, mostly direct quotes.  Carter's reporting also address John Durham's work with the CIA. That's an issue that has come up in the comments recently.

First, re Devin Nunes' remarks regarding the need for a thorough probe of the overseas activities of both the CIA and the FBI:

The top Republican with the House Intelligence Committee Rep. Devin Nunes told SaraACarter.com there is insurmountable evidence of the FBI’s malfeasance regarding the bureau’s probe into President Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia, but what must be investigated is the FBI’s actions overseas into the campaign. 

Those questions will also naturally involve the CIA and any relationship the clandestine agency had with the bureau during the Russia probe, Nunes said. 

What has been revealed during the course of nearly three years of investigations by the Intelligence Committee and others, is that the FBI had informants spying on the campaign. The most damning information was that the FBI had specifically targeted volunteers with the Trump campaign: Carter Page, George Papadopolous, as well as others who traveled outside the United States. Once they were overseas, the FBI had continuing operations and received information from informants to build an investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia. 

The "as well as others" is clearly a reference to Stephen Miller., and I don't understand why Carter fails to point this out. The attempted targeting of Miller is, to me, a highly significant detail. Miller was--and still is--very much a Trump insider. And he had not conceivable connection to Russia, yet he was being targeted at a very early stage. The appearance is that anyone associated with Trump who traveled abroad was fair game for FBI/CIA/MI6 targeting.

WSJ Publishes Russian Meddling Conspiracy Theory

How did the Russian Government influence the 2016 US presidential election and change its course, handing it to Donald Trump? Inquiring minds want to know! 

Fortunately, there's a simple explanation, which Holman Jenkins alludes to on the "conservative" Op-Ed page of the WSJ this morning: Trump: A Brawler for Democracy--A weak and unlikely and untutored president beats back a concerted campaign of delegitimization. I'm going through this exercise because, obviously, the WSJ has a big readership and is still influential in "conservative" circles. I take it, therefore, that what Jenkins presents is actually influential among conventional, establishment GOP types. And it's still being advanced, even after the Mueller Meltdown.

There's another important reason for spending my time on this. If you persevere to the end you'll see the importance of Bill Barr's focus on the Intelligence Community Assessment--written by John Brennan's "handpicked" analysts. The ICA remains the absolute linchpin of the Russian "meddling" narrative. Barr knows he needs to get to the bottom of that.

So, as usual, Jenkins presents his oft repeated view, utterly daft and unsupported, presenting it as simple fact:

Mr. Trump did launch his campaign as an infomercial to promote his personal brand. He didn’t expect to be president. ... Mr. Trump, expecting he would soon return to private life, kept trying to parlay his newly stratospheric celebrity into a Trump Tower deal in Moscow well into the 2016 campaign.

However, Jenkins does give backhanded kudos to Trump:

And one thing you can say about President Trump: This most unlikely and in some ways weakest of presidents has brawled his way to victory over the most concerted delegitimization campaign any president has ever faced.

But then at the end he lets us in on--or, rather, hints at--the truth of what happened: how the Russians meddled, manipulated the hapless Jim Comey, and changed the course of history--although he requires you to follow a link to the New Yorker to get the real lowdown:

Will Mueller's Testimony Cause The Sky To Fall?

Short answer: No. Longer answer ...

When we first heard--just a week ago--that Robert Mueller would be testifying before a “joint panel” of the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, on July 17th, my initial reaction was twofold:

1. This was probably prompted by the realization that Barr and Durham are focusing very strongly on the Intelligence Community Assessment that John Brennan manufactured in order to support the Russia Hoax narrative, and the need to offer some sort of support for that narrative, weak as it was shown to be by the Mueller Dossier itself; and

2. The decision to drag Mueller out before the public eye once again--after his widely panned no-questions press conference--was an expression of Dem desperation in the face of the Barr DoJ's new found effectiveness.

In my view, Adam Schiff gave the game away with his tweet announcing the development:

Robert Mueller has agreed to testify before Congress pursuant to subpoena. 

Russia attacked our democracy to help Trump win. Trump welcomed and used that help. As Mueller said, that should concern every American. 

And now, every American will get to hear directly from Mueller.

The bolded portion is a capsulized version of the whole Russia Hoax of "collusion," precisely what the Mueller Dossier said it couldn't find. As I said at the time:

Sheer desperation. Mueller's appearance will be staged to defend the ICA narrative of the Russia Hoax, to stave off the looming disaster just a bit longer. But this isn't going to stop Barr and Durham. Mueller better mind how he goes.

I remain of that opinion but, surprisingly, a few commentators expressed alarm. For example the husband/wife duo of Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing--experienced inside DC players--expressed the view that, while Mueller would probably avoid saying anything much beyond "read the report" in his public testimony, Andrew Weissmann in the closed door session would do real "damage" to the President and would probably "lie" in order to do that damage.

UPDATED: Mueller To Testify Now That ICA Is In Play

Robert Mueller has agreed to testify before a “joint panel” of the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, on July 17th. As CTH points out, this will be carefully rehearsed theater. What's it about? Adam Schiff gives it away in a tweet. We've all been hearing for the past two weeks that Barr and Durham are focusing on the ICA, the intelligence "assessment" that has controlled the Russia Hoax overall narrative. It's as phony as the Steele "dossier", but its evidence free "finding" that Putin "attacked our democracy to help Trump win" has been the Good News and the Creed of the Russia Hoaxers. Schiff tweets:

Adam Schiff

✔@RepAdamSchiff

Robert Mueller has agreed to testify before Congress pursuant to subpoena.
Russia attacked our democracy to help Trump win. Trump welcomed and used that help. As Mueller said, that should concern every American.
And now, every American will get to hear directly from Mueller.

8:02 PM - Jun 25, 2019

Sheer desperation. Mueller's appearance will be staged to defend the ICA narrative of the Russia Hoax, to stave off the looming disaster just a bit longer. But this isn't going to stop Barr and Durham. Mueller better mind how he goes.


UPDATE 1: You never know what might come up in Mueller's testimony, so this may be a good spot to recommend Jeff Carlson's new blog, Tracing the Origins of Congressional Democrats’ ‘Obstruction’ Strategy. Back in December, 2018, in A Message Of Hope, I made a big deal about Bill Barr's 19 page legal memo to Rod Rosenstein, which Barr wrote in June of 2018. The title of that memo was "Mueller's Theory Of Obstruction."

Carlson goes into detail regarding the development of the Democrat obstruction strategy, drawing on Mueller's (actually Weissmann's) theory, but his closing section is titled "William Barr’s Foresight". His point is simply that, at a time when nobody else--including Trump's lawyers--saw where Mueller was headed--Bill Barr did. This was a major reason that Barr took the AG gig when he could have been retired in comfort. Count on it--Barr is all over this. But look for the Dems to play that theory up. They don't need a straight opinion from Mueller to try to use the theory.

UPDATE 2: We all have a list of questions we'd like to see put to Mueller, but President Trump reopened what would be a fascinating line of inquiry in an interview with Maria Bartiromo (via Zerohedge). To put what follows in perspective, recall that Strzok and Page were dismissed from Team Mueller--and ultimately from the FBI--for cause for matters having to do with their emails and texts:

President Trump on Wednesday claimed that special counsel Robert Mueller 'illegally terminated' texts between ... Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.  

...


[Trump] was likely referring to a December report by the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) which found that after [Strzok] was fired from the Mueller probe, the special counsel's office allowed Strzok's phone to be wiped clean by the FBI before it was reassigned to another agent.  

It strains credulity to imagine that the special counsel's office would 'accidentally' allow Strzok's iPhone to be reformatted after he was fired for exchanging biased text messages on it. 

Jordan Schachtel
✔
@JordanSchachtel 

 So Mueller's team wiped ALL of the data off of Peter Strzok's iPhone after determining "it contained no substantive text messages." Given what we know about Strzok, this smells like quite the coverup. Time for Congress to step in?https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2018/i-2018-003523.pdf …

11:16 AM - Dec 13, 2018 

Page's phone was similarly scrubbed.  

Jordan Schachtel
✔
@JordanSchachtel
Replying to @JordanSchachtel 

I'm sure you're all super shocked to find out that Lisa Page's phone was also scrubbed 

12:56 PM - Dec 13, 2018 

[Description of the content of their communications] 

No wonder Strzok's iPhone was allowed to be scrubbed!

UPDATED: Barr And Durham Are Focused On The CIA

At this point in the Russia Hoax investigation it has become increasingly apparent that former CIA Director John Brennan was at the very heart of the whole Russia Hoax. For that reason I've tried to focus on the significance of the Task Force that Brennan--in cooperation with Obama and his top staff--assembled in summer of 2016. The Task Force was ostensibly to focus on Russian "meddling" in the election, but there is little to no doubt that the Task Force was driven by what is known as the "Steele dossier". We won't quibble over the authorship--the main point is simply the made-up character of the dossier, that it was a false narrative put together for political purposes and then weaponized through the US Intelligence Community (IC) against candidate Trump and, later, against President Trump by Team Mueller. In that sense Team Mueller can be viewed as an extension of the Task Force, both in an offensive sense (targeting the POTUS) and in an defensive sense (attempting to ward of investigation of Obama administration and IC criminality).

I've been a champion of AG Bill Barr and his avowed purpose of getting to the bottom of the Russia Hoax. However, in recent weeks commenters have expressed frustration that there has not been massive declassification and publication of relevant documents and that there have been no indictments. I believe the reason for this is relatively straightforward.

Hitherto, attention has largely focused on the FBI criminality, and in particular on the fraudulent FISA that was opened and renewed three times against Carter Page. Of course, that FISA followed upon the dossier-driven opening of the Crossfire Hurricane Full Investigation, and the FISA itself was therefore undoubtedly dossier-driven as well. Given that background, the Team Mueller operation could only have been also dossier-driven--as I've argued at great length over the months. That view has, I think, been totally vindicated. In a sense, therefore, the focus on the FBI has been the easy part of the Russia Hoax investigation, simply because the opening of investigations, the applications for FISA coverage, all involve the creation of extensive paper trails. There can be no doubt whatsoever that, if Barr wished to, he could indict a fair number of former FBI officials today.

However, that would not insure getting to the "origins" of the Russia Hoax, as Barr is determined to do. FBI involvement in the Russia Hoax was necessary because the FBI, as our lead counterintelligence (CI) agency, must be the agency to open investigations and apply for electronic surveillance of US persons via FISA. But, as we have seen, the FBI wasn't the true originating and driving force behind the Russia Hoax. That honor goes to John Brennan of the CIA and the inner circle of the Obama Administration and its State Department. To get to that level Barr will need to work up from the level of the FBI.

Assessing The Assessment

A few days ago commenter Mike Sylwester noted in a comment to Brennan's Task Force--The Heart Of The Russia Hoax that the Brennan task force that was assembled to stop Trump appears to have excluded analysts from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and Department of State (DoS) from its work. This, despite the fact that DoD and DoS representatives with Democrat political connections played key roles in propagating the Russia Hoax. The task force's work, of course, included coming up with the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that has been perhaps the fundamental driver of the whole Russia Hoax narrative. As a result, the ICA has been getting renewed scrutiny.

This morning I was taking a look at an article by Ray McGovern, DoJ Bloodhounds on the Scent of John Brennan, which also focuses on reporting that Brennan's task force is being targeted by Barr and Durham. It happens that McGovern's article closes with a pointed reference to the Intelligence Community Assessment and its exclusion of any views that might have been, well, independent. Earlier, in About that IC Assessment: Paul Sperry Has Good News, we quoted Sperry's reporting that GOP Congressional investigators have been honing in on the production of that Assessment and, in particular, the growing likelihood that--like virtually all else Russia Hoax--it was essentially a byproduct of the Steele "dossier":

Staff investigators for GOP Rep. Devin Nunes’ intelligence committee, for one, are now going over “every word” of the ICA — including classified footnotes — to see if any of the analysis was pre-cooked based on the [Steele] dossier. On Tuesday, Nunes sent letters to Obama intel officials responsible for the report. He demanded former top spook John Brennan and intel czar James Clapper provide answers about how they used the dossier in intel reports and when they learned the Clinton camp paid for it. 

Under oath, Brennan has denied knowing the Clinton campaign commissioned the dossier. He also told the House intelligence panel the CIA didn’t rely on the dossier “in any way” for its reports on Russian interference. Committee staff are taking a second look at his May 2017 testimony. 

Clapper, for his part, conceded in a recent CNN interview that the ICA was based on “some of the substantive content of the dossier.” Without elaborating, he maintained that “we were able to corroborate” certain allegations.

In that light, here are the closing paragraphs of McGovern's article, in which McGovern highlights the exclusion of DIA and DoS from the task force and, therefore, from any voice in developing the ICA:

Durham Is Focusing On The Task Force And The ICA Assessment

Excellent. AG Bill Barr is on the same page we described earlier today: Brennan's Task Force--The Heart Of The Russia Hoax. Barr recognizes the Task Force and the ICA Assessment as twin lynchpins in the Russia Hoax.

The NYT has an article out that reports that AG Bill Barr's prosecutor of choice for the Russia Hoax "review", John Durham, "wants to better understand the intelligence that flowed from the C.I.A. to the F.B.I. in the summer of 2016." That means, the Task Force. And the NYT understands that:

In the summer of 2016, the intelligence community formed a task force housed at the C.I.A. to investigate Russian interference. The group shared intelligence with F.B.I. investigators who opened the bureau’s Russia inquiry ...

Further, Durham is focusing on the analytical process behind the production of the ICA Assessment.

Specifically, the article (Justice Dept. Seeks to Question C.I.A. Officers in Russia Inquiry Review) reports that Durham will soon seek to interview two CIA employees who were key to that CIA/FBI cooperation in 2016--and it should come as no surprise that the same personnel who were involved in the Task Force were also involved in the production of the ICA assessment (Peter Strzok, on the FBI side, was also involved in both):

One of the C.I.A. officers he wants to question works at the agency’s counterintelligence mission center that would have been one conduit for the C.I.A. to pass intelligence to the F.B.I. about Russian attempts to reach out to the Trump campaign, or information that the agency uncovered about Moscow’s interference campaign. C.I.A. officers at the center work closely with the F.B.I. on complex cases like hunting down traitors and helping validate the agency’s informants. 

The senior analyst whom the Justice Department wants to talk to was involved in the C.I.A. assessment of Russian activities in 2016, ...

The article makes two additional points: