Let's hope so. I still wonder how high Durham will go.
John Durham Is Getting Close to the Jugular
Last week, John Durham’s grand jury issued its third criminal indictment in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. The person who was arrested may be obscure; the news may have been buried after Virginia’s bombshell election results; but Durham’s move is a big deal. It shows that the special counsel’s probe is methodically unraveling a huge conspiracy, seemingly engineered by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and implicating James Comey’s FBI, either as a willing participant or as utterly incompetent boobs.
The latest indictment also damages the mainstream media, which is why so many news outlets have ignored or underplayed it. After all, they broadcast a false story for years and are none too eager to revisit it. Other losers are the prosecutors assembled by Robert Mueller, most of them Democrats, who had reams of this damaging information and ignored it.
What Durham and a few intrepid reporters are uncovering may well be the most ambitious dirty trick pulled in an American election and its aftermath. The question now is whether Durham can expose the full extent of this malfeasance and charge those who planned and executed it.
Durham’s latest indictment charges Igor Danchenko (pictured) with lying multiple times to the FBI. Danchenko, who worked at the Brookings Institution as a Russian expert, may not be a household name, but he was a crucial player in concocting the false story that Donald Trump was collaborating with the Kremlin to win the White House. The real conspiracy, it turns out, was aimed at Trump and was conducted by the Clinton campaign and her longtime associates. It was financed jointly by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Some leaked emails suggested it was approved by the candidate herself. The FBI continued running with it long after it had ample evidence to know it was a concoction. House Democrats ran with it even longer, basking in fulsome, uncritical media coverage. All of it was false.
The Danchenko indictment matters because his bogus information was the heart of the “Steele dossier,” which, in turn, was the heart of the anti-Trump investigation. The dossier was compiled by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, who had been hired by people working for Clinton. Steele claimed his information about Trump, including salacious sexual allegations, came from Russian sources. It didn’t. It came from Danchenko, who was working at a Washington think tank. As Danchenko admitted to the FBI, much of what he told Steele was old rumors or exaggerations. Some of it appears to have been simply fabricated. Steele incorporated it, and the Democrats deployed it.The bureau continued to use the bogus information in applying for secret warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to spy on Carter Page and, through him, on others connected with Trump. Officials told the court, falsely, that the warrant information was reliable and verified when they knew it was neither.What the warrants say, in essence, is, “We need to spy on Carter Page because we think he’s an enemy agent.” But the FBI already knew he wasn’t. That means they were trolling for other information. How did the FBI know Page was on our side? Because they asked the CIA and were told, quite explicitly, that Page was helping them, not the Kremlin. The CIA gave that exculpatory information to FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, who altered the message to say Page was not working for the CIA. His alternation was criminal, and he plead guilty after Durham charged him.
The story gets worse. Although Clinesmith altered the CIA message for FBI use, he also gave his superiors the CIA’s true communication. So, his bosses knew the real story. They weren’t interested in the truth, which they kept secret from the FISA court to continuing spying on Page. If there is any justice left in Washington, those responsible for this travesty will be held criminally liable. Page may well have a civil case against them, too.Read the rest of the article at the link.Reviewing this evidence, Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal has concluded the Steele dossier is misnamed. It should be called the “Clinton dossier,” she says, since Hillary commissioned it, paid for it, and had her aides feed it to the media, the State Department, and the FBI. It was a full-scale disinformation campaign — coherent, well-organized, and well-funded. It was rotten to the core.
The question now is whether John Durham can find enough evidence to charge the ones who planned and executed it. The charging documents he filed for Danchenko and Sussmann are far more extensive than the necessary minimum. They suggest that Durham has compiled extensive evidence about a broader conspiracy. Will he settle for the capillaries now that he has the jugular in view?