Only minions go to jail in the US political system. I well recall the triumphant online howls of Lefties after Obama’s election in 2008, with visions of Cheney, and perhaps even the evil BushHitler himself, being “perp-walked” in orange jumpsuits. Similarly with Trump supporters on Clinton with “Lock her Up“. Then there’s the endless fantasies of the Left about convicting Trump himself, yet another of which collapsed just the other day.
Michael Haden, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Susan Rice, Peter Strzok, Fiona Hill, Sally Yates, James Clapper
So it will go for all the assholes shown in this photo, plus many others identified in this Federalist article, who may never even be investigated, which they group as people in: Comey’s FBI, Obama’s DOJ, Obama’s State Department, Democratic National Committee, Clinton Campaign, and Clinton’s opposition research group, Fusion GPS.
Yes, it is that tangled and convoluted, which is yet another reason there will be few consequences. Not enough ordinary people care about what is a bigger scandal and crime than Watergate, because it’s just another complex Washington D.C. scandal they don’t understand – while those who do know, including many outside the USA, don’t care because it helped damage Trump and the implementation of his policies.
The primary criminal investigation is now being led by John Durham, one of the few men in D.C. with a genuine reputation as a straight-shooter, based on his work for both the Bush and Obama administrations investigating the likes of the CIA. He started in 2019 and the going has been so slow that I’d pretty much given up on him catching and convicting anybody. But it turns out that the man does move and in 2022 he’s prosecuting a few people in trials.
Carter Page & Kevin Clinesmith
My cynicism is based on what has already happened to a key, if minor figure in the FBI, who is mentioned in that Federalist article. The story concerns one Carter Page, a Trump campaign aide, who got wire-tapped by the FBI in 2016. By 2018 jokes were being made that Page must be the cleanest man in D.C., for despite all their work there was no sign that the FBI was even going to indict Page, let alone prosecute him, on the basis of dirty work with the Russians, or anything else for that matter. After another year had passed it became clear as to why that was.
Carter Page had actually been working with the CIA. Not unusual; the history of modern spy agencies is that they’ve often used businessmen simply to learn ordinary things that help the spies build a better picture of their frenemies. Thus it’s also standard practice for the FBI Counter-Intelligence group, when they’re about to investigate an American citizen, to contact the CIA and other intelligence agencies to see if they’re using these citizens as a source. The FBI did that in this case and got the confirming email from the CIA.
And then FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith changed it to read the exact opposite, which was then presented to the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Court, together with the infamous fake known as the Steele Dossier, as evidence that Page deserved to be spied on. Incredibly Clinesmith was already serving on the Mueller investigation when he did this – until he got dumped after the revelation of his private texts by the FBI Inspector General’s Report showed an incredible degree of anti-Trump bias. Of course the more famous of these people and their texts was this one between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok:
The IG report said [Lisa] Page texted Strzok in August 2016, after Trump won the GOP presidential nomination, fretting, “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!”
Strzok replied, “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it,”
Aside from getting canned by the FBI, Strzok and Page suffered no other penalties. After Durham got Clinesmith the government requested a three-to-six month prison sentence but instead the judge sentenced him to community service and imposed no fine. In June 2021 his law license was suspended for just one year, but it was applied retroactively from his guilty plea so he got it back in August 2021.
For lying to not just any court but the FISA court to enable spying on US citizens. Must be nice to be a partisan Democrat working for the FBI, DOJ or the State Department.
But why pick on Clinesmith, Strzok and Page when other parts of the Establishment were just as dirty, right to the top:
The very day in January 2017 that then-FBI Director James Comey signed a FISA surveillance warrant application declaring content from Christopher Steele’s dossier had been “verified,” he wrote President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, that “We are not able to sufficiently corroborate the reporting”
…
“The FBI filed three renewal applications with the FISC, on January 12, April 7, and June 29, 2017. In addition to repeating the seven significant errors contained in the first FISA application and outlined above, we identified 10 additional significant errors in the three renewal applications,” Horowitz’s Inspector General report said.
The following links are an excellent three part summary of the 400 page, 2019 Horowitz report: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. There are extensive quotes from the report about the problems with both Steele and his “Primary Sub-source” but I’ll stick with summaries from two different articles, starting with Steele…
The FBI had terminated Steele two months earlier for violating the terms of his confidential informant agreement by leaking to the news media. The FBI had also had been warned by the CIA since 2015 that Steele was susceptible to Russian disinformation because he was too involved with oligarchs…the FBI had interviewed in November 2016 one of Steele’s former MI6 bosses, who warned agents that Steele had overstated his seniority during the time he served in British intelligence.
… followed by the details of the “Primary Sub-source”, who should have been investigated before the FISA applications were made:
The source tells the FBI that Steele was lying to them because he – the source – never told Steele many of the allegations that appear in the Page FISA warrant. The source says that, at best, some of what Steele conveyed were gross exaggerations. The source is horrified to see Steele positioning their conversations as “covert intelligence” from a highly placed informant inside the Russian government.
– information came from “word of mouth and hearsay;”
– other sub-sources exaggerated their access to information and the relevance
– takes what [sub-sources] tell [him/her] “with a grain of salt”.
– sub-sources did not have direct access to the persons they were reporting on
– contradicted the Steele election reporting on key issues described in the wire-tapping renewal applications.
The FBI also hid all that from the FISA court and even during later testimony before Congress. Comey has no excuses. His FBI knew all this by January 2017. They also fought like hell to prevent then House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes from releasing this in early 2018.
But one big letdown of the Horowitz report was that it treated all this as mere “errors”, and it did not ask why the FBI had failed to investigate a big problem with Steele:
One area the FBI assiduously avoided was Steele’s knowledge that he was working for the Clinton Campaign and his understanding that his research would be publicized and used to affect the 2016 election. This information, had it been presented, would have been critical to the FISA Court’s ability to evaluate Steele’s bias.
…
This lack of information or deference means that, first, the IG did not fully establish exactly the relevant chains of command (Comey and McCabe at the FBI; Yates, Boente and Rosenstein at the DOJ); and second, he did not pin down what the players knew and when they knew it.Some of this information vacuum occurred because several players in the FBI’s crime drama (such as Comey), refused to cooperate with the IG. What they knew or should have known and when they knew it will be key questions that need to be answered. Bottom line, the IG’s Report is itself damning, but it is not the final word.
And this is where Durham’s investigation has differed from Horowitz’s: it’s a criminal inquiry. Durham clearly does think that criminal skullduggery occurred across these agencies, and showed his teeth right from the start in 2019 by dissenting from the IG’s view that the Steele dossier “played no role in the Crossfire Hurricane opening”. That link has a concise list of the reasons why Durham does not agree, together with a detailed timeline of how the FBI learned of the dossier and started the investigation, including these two doozies:
- The FBI’s faith in Steele extended to sharing classified information with him. According to Horowitz, at an October 2016 meeting in Rome, FBI agents gave Steele a “general overview” of Crossfire Hurricane, including its then-secret probes of Manafort, Page, Flynn, and Papadopoulos. The FBI was so eager to enlist Steele that it offered to pay him $15,000 “just for attending” the Rome meeting and a “significantly” greater amount if he could collect more information.
- Then-senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, whose wife Nellie worked alongside Steele at Fusion GPS, first made contact with Steele right before the former British spy’s meeting with [FBI agent] Gaeta on July 5,
Wheels within fucking wheels in this crowd of husbands, wives and lovers. Pillow talk among honourable people! Trust in people you already knew should not be trusted.
Incidentally, it turns out that Trump’s National Security Advisor Michael Flynn (whose clearance from charges I covered here), accused by the Clinton campaign, sundry Intelligence Community leakers and the MSM (of course) of getting too close to Russia, starting in 2015 with a dinner with Putin, was operating then as an intelligence source for the USA. In his case for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), who testified to Mueller that Flynn had approached them before the meeting and been de-briefed afterwards. Mueller sat on those affidavits because they weren’t material to his prosecution of Flynn’s 2016 actions as NSA – and also because they would have blown up the Mueller-Clinton narrative. They were only just released the other day after some minor news outfit called JustTheNews extracted them from the government – doing the work the MSM did not want to do. Flynn is now suing the US government for $50 million, and in act of petty revenge they’re suing him for the $40,000 they spent on the 2015 trip.
Igor Danchenko
In November 2021 Durham made public that the “Primary Sub-source” was one Igor Danchenko and indicted him for lying to the FBI. That led to other revelations such as him being investigated in 2009 by the FBI as a possible Russian spy since he was connected to two men they were already investigating as spies.
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.
The Brookings Institution is essentially the foreign policy cover organisation for the Clinton Foundation. And Fiona Hill? Where have you heard that name before? Oh right, she was a key witness during Trump’s first impeachment. No bias there. It gets better.
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.
So far from being “inside Russia” it would be more accurate to say that Danchenko was inside the Clinton orbit. Information from Russian sources was actually from the Clinton campaign, with key player Dolan as – literally – a Kremlin agent. If you read that article (from none other than the Trump-loathing team at National Review) you’ll see that the information flow ran from Dolan to Danchenko to Steele to the FBI.
By the way, Clinton’s opposition research firm FusionGPS was also simultaneously working directly for Vladimir Putin, attempting to drum up media and government support for overturning the US Global Magnitsky Act, which Putin did not like.
And these people had the chutzpah to say Trump was tied to the Russians. There is no better deflection than to accuse your opponent of what you’re doing.
I’ve no doubt that Danchenko will be convicted of lying to the FBI and since he is not a precious worker for any of the three-letter Federal agencies he might see some jail time, but not much.
Michael Sussman
Which brings us to the latest in Durhams work: the prosecution of former Hillary Clinton and Democrat National Commitee (DNC) lawyer, Michael Sussman, for the same crime of lying to the FBI.
In Sussman’s case he approached the FBI directly, claiming that he had damaging information about Trump – specifically that he was colluding with the Russian Alfa Bank via a secret server hotline – and claimed that he was doing so out of his concern as an American citizen – when in fact he was acting as the Clinton campaign lawyer and billing them for the time he spent with the FBI.
That last fact caused some fun when Durham subpoenaed key people from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign – the DNC, Fusion GPS, and liberal law firm Perkins Coie – and demanded to see all of Sussman’s communications with them. His lawyers claimed attorney-client privilege that meant they would not disclose them, but Durham already had the text messages:
“Jim – it’s Michael Sussmann. I have something time-sensitive (and sensitive) I need to discuss. Do you have availability for a short meeting tomorrow? I’m coming on my own – not on behalf of a client or company – want to help the Bureau. Thanks.”
Durham had painted him into a corner. He got the comms. He’s also got some star witnesses who are singing in the dock, likely to save their own hides.
Former FBI General Counsel James Baker, who Sussman met, testified that he was “100% confident” about the following, which confirmed Sussman’s own text.
Sussmann claimed no client was behind the Alfa-Bank disinfo, a claim represented in a subsequent meeting with “Bill Priestap, who was the assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, and Trisha Anderson, the FBI’s deputy general counsel, right after his Sussmann meeting.” Both wrote down that there was no connection to a client in their meeting notes.
In other words, not just a dumb process lie (like “lying” about the date of a meeting) but a material lie; one that directly affected the FBI investigation of Trump and his team.
Then it was the turn of longtime Clinton lawyer, Mark Elias:
Sussmann’s partner at the time, also testified that they were representing the Clinton team and had hired the Fusion GPS to help dig up dirt on the Trump team. Durham also got in other records during Elias’ testimony showing that they were meeting on the Alfa Bank, and Elias said that he considered his work with Sussmann and Joffe to be part of his Clinton campaign work.
Durham then played a crucial card by getting the testimony of two former CIA agents who testified that Sussman had told the same lies to them, which shows a pattern of deliberate lying.
Then, last Friday, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook directly implicated Hillary Clinton herself by testifying that she approved the plan to spread the lie. Some people, like Liberal Democrat law professor Jonathan Turley, seem to think this is a big deal, and perhaps if the MSM put it on the front-pages (Yes, yes, I know) it might become a big deal for the general public. But as the boys at Powerline point out, if you didn’t follow the MSM then you already knew about this ages ago:
More broadly, we have long known that Hillary personally directed the Russia collusion hoax. Indeed, the Obama administration knew this virtually from the hoax’s inception. We wrote about this a year and a half ago, based on handwritten notes by John Brennan, then CIA Director, dated July 28,2016.
…
According to these documents, Hillary approved the plan to smear Donald Trump with the Russia collusion hoax on July 26, 2016. (The Fusion GPS/Christopher Steele “dossier” fabrication was under way by this time.) Her action was immediately picked up by Russian intelligence. At almost the same time, U.S. intelligence, spying on the Russians, got the story. On July 28, just two days after Hillary allegedly green-lighted the smear, Barack Obama, James Comey, Susan Rice and Denis McDonough assembled to be briefed by John Brennan on the situation.
Hillary Clinton – and friends
Closer and closer Durham comes to the heart of the scandal. I think Sussman is a dead duck, but even in his case there is a glimmer of hope in that it’s a jury trial set in Washington D.C where 92% of voters went for Biden in 2020:
Many of the members of the broader jury pool, as well as some selected for the jury itself, expressed strong disdain for former President Donald Trump and/or support for Clinton. Most said they hadn’t heard of the Sussmann case until the judge told them about it last week.
“I remembered that the 2016 election was kind of a mess and that there were a lot of shenanigans,” one of the selected jurors told the court.
Heh. A perfect example of the general public and this entire scandal. Maybe that sort of ignorance will help the prosecution: maybe it will help the defence. Sussman has probably bet on the latter, otherwise he’d have pled guilty by now in the face of all this evidence.
But as I said at the start of this post, I can’t believe that any of these senior people will ever suffer any legal penalties for all this, especially Hillary Clinton. A lot of minor figures in the Clintons world have gone to jail over the years, all the way back to the Whitewater scandal, but never the main players. As just one current example, Hillary’s original Tweet about the Alfa Bank mentions one Jake Sullivan releasing the statement as the Hillary for America Senior Policy Advisor: Sullivan is now Biden’s National Security Adviser FFS. As professor Turley says:
Hillary Clinton has always had a sort of Voldemort-like status of she who must not be named in a scandal. The Clintons have really been able to avoid direct responsibility in a series of scandals. And here was her campaign manager effectively dropping the dime on his former boss and saying, “Look, she approved it. She knew about it.”
…
But the thing to keep in mind is that President Obama was briefed when he was president, that Hillary Clinton was planning to make a Russian collusion claim against Donald Trump to try to sort of get out of her own email issues during the campaign.And we now have someone saying, “Yeah, she green-lighted the Alfa Bank claims,” which were completely without foundation. The Clintons are really quite adept at avoiding direct responsibility on some of these scandals, and I expect that will be the case here.
With the exception of false statements made to federal investigators, there’s not a lot that can be brought for charges against a wide array of individuals.
UPDATE:
Courtesy of RealClearPolitics:
The Sussmann trial indicates how the media and federal agencies play into the Democrats’ scandal-industrial process. Take Mook’s testimony last Friday. It was a huge story because, for the first time, a Clinton insider directly tied Hillary to the smear campaign. That campaign was the biggest political dirty trick in modern American politics, one the media had actively promoted. Yet, when the bombshell exploded, the mainstream media went silent, both about the news and about their own culpability. On Friday, when the news broke, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC did not mention the Mook bombshell or even the Sussmann trial. Not a peep. Saturday’s New York Times was equally silent. The Washington Post did cover the story but buried the lede – Hillary Clinton’s direct involvement – well down in their report. A Post national correspondent actually ran an “analysis” piece entitled “Again: There’s No Evidence Hillary Clinton Triggered the Russian Probe.”
No Minister 
Very excellent summary Tom.
Maybe Andrei is right that the west is doomed. With scum like that at the top you cannot bet against it. And that’s without looking at the Biden crime family.
And they said Trump was a threat to democracy!!!
Here’s the thing, when I point out the levels of dysfunction in American “democracy” in the context of geopolitics you live up to your monika Old C and give me grief
And yet in this post where the level of corruption involving US security agencies and the ruling elite, you see it for what it is
I for one would love to know the truth about the shooting of Seth Rich, a mysterious thing that just gets brushed off if anybody raises it even though Seth Rich seems to be intimately connected with the leak of the content of the DNC servers
This is one of the mysteries along with who really poisoned the Skripal cat that the powers that be willsee buried forever
Trump represented a threat to the grift of all these cunts. From the politicians, the Democrat lawyers, the deep state, the defense contractors, Wall St – the whole damn lot. Trump gave the everyday American a seat at the table in DC, and for that reason he had to go.
BTW – some of the worst actors were the Republican establishment, who by virtue of their deliberate inaction allowed this whole thing to metastasize. Ryan & McConnell ran the congress in ’17 & ’18. They could’ve used the Committee process to expose the whole deal, but didn’t.
Oh but but the mean tweets.
It’s a different story and yet the same story when it comes to the fifty one former Intelligence Community (IC) people who wrote the 2020 letter claiming that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation”. As this article in this NY Post article points out:
The doubling down by some is impressive. In fact one of the guys who originally said “no comment” in that March article has since come out and said that if he did influence the 2020 election to defeat Trump then he’s proud of that.
This is how the IC see themselves, above the politicians (even when they agree with them and follow their directions), and far, far above the dirty, ignorant voters.
And from what I see the rest of the Establishment in D.C., thinks much the same in other areas of government. It’s Sir Humphrey Appleby on steroids and without the wit, charm and basic human decency.
And just look at them. Some of the same faces, especially the leading ones, are there, pulling this shit in late 2020, when the revelations from two years earlier (or in Clapper’s case several years ago when he lied to Congress) should have buried them.
Tom don’t think for a second our “elite” and establishment are any better. And they wonder why we are so suspicious of what they say.
Yes, well that’s obvious from the fact that every single one of them here in NZ were on the same side as these people, which is why they eagerly swallowed all the Russian-Collusion bullshit.
Some do even to this day, even in the face of all this. I’ve seen a few of them over on Kiwiblog, one of whom boasts of being a moderator there and has implied a former Beehive job that he’s looking forward to getting back to, presumably if National gets elected into government in 2023.
I see Trump as the traitor in chief and he needs to be held accountable, but as Tom says in his post in the US it’s the minions who do the time whilst the big cheese’s escape censure. Trump is a Putin fanboi and I suspect rather strongly that he owes Putin big time and / or that Putin has something really good on him, meaning Trump is severely compromised and whilst POTUS was a severe security risk to the US. To have compromised and co-opted a POTUS would be the intelligence coup of all time.
Politicians are the perennial poisoned painful wart on the arse of humanity, but traitors should be strangled at birth. I have absolutely no time for traitors because they sell out their country, putting their own countrymens lives at risk. Maybe it’s because of my military background, but it’s the one area that the Russians and I agree on, and that’s how they are dealt with. Shoot them on the spot and worry about the fair trial later.
All of those traitors in the US who hatched and supported the treasonous plot to overthrow the 2020 Election result, should be prosecuted and tried for treason. Gibbets should be erected outside the Courthouses to remind them and the public of the consequences of their treasonous actions.
I could not agree more, starting with Grannie Mao Pants, but I would note the heavy breathing and pearl clutching that has occurred on the US Left – and among many on the Left around the world – about the nooses and yardarms that a few of the protestors had at Trump’s rally on Jan 6.
Violence, like law breaking, is just awful.
When it’s not the Left doing it.
After years of investigations conducted by Trump’s political and bureaucratic enemies it should be a matter of embarrassment that “suspect” is all you have left.
Sorry Tom you’re wasting your time Trump Derangement Syndrome is so deeply ingrained in these people I doubt many years of psychiatric treatment would help.
After all the revelations I’m pretty sure that the majority in this country will still believe the Trump/Russia collusion narrative.
Not surprising given the sickening biased media coverage in this country.
I say a plague on both your houses … Trump and Biden. Trump remains the same old Trump unable to understand the democratic process and let it work itself out … Take the Republican primary in Pennsylvania with Dr Oz,, the Trump supported candidate, just 1079 votes ahead of David McCormick and thousands of mail in ballots yet to be counted, and Trump calls on Oz to declare himself the winner. Said it before and I’ll say it again, the US of A deserves much better than either Trump or Biden. I guess I have self diagnosed myself as suffering from both TDS and BDS … at least my eyes are open.
I think maybe Trump has every right to question. It’s very clear the “elites” and establishment of both parties were out to destroy his presidency. The reason obviously was he had the temerity to crash their comfortable little party.
The Trump/Russia hoax is a great stain on the “elites” and left wing media. and of course no one will be held to account.
The scum will always protect their own. Look at the makeup of the Sussman jury. No way will they find him guilty.
You all cheered when Biden was elected. Now see what a total absolute disaster he is proving for the free world. But at least the “elites” sensibilities aren’t offended by a barbarian.
Gen. Michael Flynn was taken out early on by FBI malfeasance because, among other things, as newly appointed National Security Adviser, he was quite keen to get to the bottom of how GW Bush was goaded by the IC into invading Iraq, when all Saddam ever had was a few drums of yellow-cake.
It appears that you have confused Carter Page and Lisa Page.
The latter was having an extra-marital affair with Peter Strzok and it was she (not Carter) that emailed Strzok, alarmed that Trump might win.
Carter Page had nothing to do with that famous email.
Ah no, but I see where the confusion could come from. Will update the original quote with her full name.
From the WSJ:
That last point is the real kicker here.
Beyond the WSJ paywall (posted for those who only accept stories from the MSM)….
Haha…. These MSM assholes. Absolute fucking partisans for the Democrats: