Senator Charles Grassley (Credit: Brendan Smialowski / Agence France Presse / Getty Images)

Senator Charles Grassley (R), head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, writes a letter to the State Department. He asks if some of Clinton’s former top aides, including Huma Abedin, Jake Sullivan, and Philippe Reines have kept their security clearances “in light of the fact that classified information has been discovered” on Clinton’s private server.

However, the State Department declines to tell him, saying it won’t discuss the status of any individuals’ security clearance. (The New York Times, 7/6/2016)

It has previously been reported that Clinton and her former chief of staff Cheryl Mills have kept their security clearances.

James Comey (Credit: Michael Reynolds/European Press Agency)

“Transcripts reviewed by the Senate Judiciary Committee reveal that former FBI Director James Comey began drafting an exoneration statement in the Clinton email investigation before the FBI had interviewed key witnesses.  Chairman Chuck Grassley and Senator Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, requested all records relating to the drafting of the statement as the committee continues to review the circumstances surrounding Comey’s removal from the Bureau.

“Conclusion first, fact-gathering second—that’s no way to run an investigation.  The FBI should be held to a higher standard than that, especially in a matter of such great public interest and controversy,” the senators wrote in a letter today to the FBI.

Last fall, following allegations from Democrats in Congress, the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) began investigating whether Comey’s actions in the Clinton email investigation violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits government employees from using their official position to influence an election.  In the course of that investigation, OSC interviewed two FBI officials close to Comey: James Rybicki, Comey’s Chief of Staff, and Trisha Anderson, the Principal Deputy General Counsel of National Security and Cyberlaw.  OSC provided transcripts of those interviews at Grassley’s request after it closed the investigation due to Comey’s termination.

Both transcripts are heavily redacted without explanation. However, they indicate that Comey began drafting a statement to announce the conclusion of the Clinton email investigation in April or May of 2016, before the FBI interviewed up to 17 key witnesses including former Secretary Clinton and several of her closest aides.  The draft statement also came before the Department entered into immunity agreements with Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson where the Department agreed to a very limited review of Secretary Clinton’s emails and to destroy their laptops after review.  In an extraordinary July announcement, Comey exonerated Clinton despite noting “there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information.”

In their letter, the two chairmen requested all drafts of Comey’s statement closing the Clinton investigation, all related emails and any records previously provided to OSC in the course of its investigation.

OSC is the permanent, independent investigative agency for personnel matters in the federal government and is not related to Robert Mueller’s temporary prosecutorial office within the Justice Department.

Full text of the letter from Grassley and Graham follows. (Read more: grassley.senate.gov, 8/31/2017)

Hillary wins the Democratic party’s nomination for president. (Source: Times of Israel)

“In the days before Hillary Clinton launched an unprecedented big-money fundraising vehicle with state parties last summer, she vowed “to rebuild our party from the ground up,” proclaiming “when our state parties are strong, we win. That’s what will happen.”

But less than 1 percent of the $61 million raised by that effort has stayed in the state parties’ coffers, according to a Politico analysis of the latest Federal Election Commission filings.

The venture, the Hillary Victory Fund, is a so-called joint fundraising committee comprised of Clinton’s presidential campaign, the Democratic National Committee and 32 state party committees. The setup allows Clinton to solicit checks of $350,000 or more from her super-rich supporters at extravagant fundraisers including a dinner at George Clooney’s house and a concert at Radio City Music Hall featuring Katy Perry and Elton John.

The victory fund has transferred $3.8 million to the state parties, but almost all of that cash ($3.3 million, or 88 percent) was quickly transferred to the DNC, usually within a day or two, by the Clinton staffer who controls the committee, Politico’s analysis of the FEC records found.” (Read more: Politico, 05/02/2016)

Alexandra Chalupa (Credit: Linked In)

Alexandra Chalupa, a consultant for the Democratic National Committee (DNC), has been working for several weeks on an opposition research file about Paul Manafort, the campaign manager of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Manafort has a long history of advising politicians around the world, including controversial dictators. Logging into her Yahoo email account, she gets a warning entitled “Important action required” from a Yahoo cybersecurity team. The warning adds, “We strongly suspect that your account has been the target of state-sponsored actors.”

Paul Manafort (Credit: Linked In)

Paul Manafort was a key adviser to Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych from 2004 until 2010. Yanukovych is a controversial figure frequently accused of widespread corruption and was overthrown after a massive series of protests in February 2014, and has since been living in Russia, protected by the Russian government. Chalupa had been drafting memos and writing emails about Manafort’s link to pro-Russian Ukrainian leaders such as Yanukovych when she got the warning. She had been in contact with investigative journalists in Ukraine who had been giving her information about Manafort’s ties there.

Chalupa immediately alerts top DNC officials. But more warnings from Yahoo’s security team follows. On May 3, 2016, she writes in an email to DNC communications director Luis Miranda, “Since I started digging into Manafort, these messages have been a daily occurrence on my Yahoo account despite changing my password often.”

A photo capture of the Yahoo security warning appearing on DNC consultant Alexandra Chalupa’s computer screen. (Credit: Yahoo News)

In July 2016, she will tell Yahoo News, “I was freaked out,” and “This is really scary.” Her email message to Miranda will later be one of 20,000 emails released by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, showing that there was good reason to be concerned about hacking attempts.

Chalupa’s email to Miranda, results in concern amongst top level DNC officials. One unnamed insider will later say. “That’s when we knew it was the Russians,” since Russia would be very interested in Chalupa’s research and other countries like China would not. This source also says that as a precaution, “we told her to stop her research.”

Yahoo will later confirm that it did send numerous warnings to Chalupa, and one Yahoo security official will say, “Rest assured we only send these notifications of suspected attacks by state-sponsored actors when we have a high degree of confidence.” (Yahoo News, 7/25/2016)

Vadym Pozharskyi (Credit: public domain)

Hunter Biden had executives at Burisma set up a bank account for him at a bank that later closed because of a money laundering investigation.

Emails taken off of Hunter Biden’s laptop reveal that he provided Burisma executive, Vadym Pozharskyi, with his passport and multiple bank statements to open up an account with Satabank in 2016. The bank went under due to money laundering investigations in 2018.

In order to set up the account, Hunter needed to provide a “certified declaration of source wealth,” have it notarized, and then sent it to an auction house in Malta, Ukraine.

The auctioneer, Pierre Pillow, was also charged with money laundering accusations back in 2020. Burisma’s’ owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, rented Pillow’s apartment in Malta back in 2014. (Read more: The Post Millennial, 6/19/2023)  (Archive)

From a Wikileaks email sent by Alexandra Chalupa to Luis Miranda, Communications Director of the DNC:

(Credit: Wikileaks)

Two points.

Open World is a supposedly non-partisan Congressional agency.

Michael Isikoff is the same journalist Christopher Steele leaked to in September 2016:

The Carter Page FISA application extensively cited a September 23, 2016, Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff, which focused on Page’s July 2016 trip to Moscow. This information was used to corroborate the Steele Dossier.

Steele leaked to Isikoff who wrote the article for Yahoo News. The Isikoff article was then used to help obtain a Title I FISA grant to gather information on Page. This search was then leaked by Steele to David Corn at Mother Jones.

Isikoff accompanied Chalupa to a reception at the Ukrainian Embassy immediately after the Library of Congress event.

Remember when we learned last week that Michael Isikoff’s Fusion GPS-supplied “reporting” was used as evidence to confirm supposed veracity of TrumpRussia dossier?

He was simultaneously recruited by DNC/Clinton to dig up anti-Trump dirt.

h/t Wikileaks https://t.co/k4A46mnH0H pic.twitter.com/5lxZDQICLW

— Jordan Schachtel (@JordanSchachtel) February 6, 2018

(Read more: themarketswork.com, 3/09/2018)

Donald Trump (Credit: Win McNamee/Reuters)

“Donald J. Trump became the presumptive Republican presidential nominee on Tuesday with a landslide win in Indiana that drove his principal opponent, Senator Ted Cruz, from the race and cleared the way for the polarizing, populist outsider to take control of the party.”

Michael Horowitz & Sally Yates (Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/AP, Pete Marovich/Getty)

“The Justice Department took steps Tuesday to restore the access of some government watchdogs to sensitive internal records, but officials called on Congress to enact a permanent, wider fix.

The inspector general offices for 72 agencies across the federal government charged that legal policy changes made by the Obama administration over the last several years had curtailed their access to records, harmed a wide range of investigations and compromised their independence.

At least 20 investigations into topics such as sexual abuse at the Peace Corps and fatal shootings by the Drug Enforcement Administration were slowed, hindered, or sometimes closed as a result of the changes, the inspectors general said.

Justice Department officials said Tuesday that a new directive and an accompanying legal opinion would address some of those concerns.

In a memo dated Monday, Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates said that responding to investigations by the Justice Department’s inspector general “is of the highest priority” for the department, and she directed officials to provide timely access to all the material requested.

That includes grand jury documents, wiretapping records and other confidential materials that a controversial Justice Department legal opinion last year concluded could be withheld in some circumstances. Ms. Yates’s memo was first reported by The Associated Press.

In December, a congressional spending bill signed by President Obama threatened to cut off funding if records were improperly withheld from the inspectors general for the Justice Department and five others covered by the bill: the Commerce Department, NASA, the National Science Foundation, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Legal Service Corporation.

A legal opinion last week by the Justice Department’s office of legal counsel — replacing the one that came out last year — said that because of that funding measure, all material must now be turned over to those watchdogs through the end of the fiscal year in September.

In a telephone interview, Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general and leader of the governmentwide association of inspectors general, said it was unfortunate that it had taken the threat of a cutoff in funding by Congress for his office to see its full access to investigative records restored for now.

“The I.G.s have a right to access these documents — period,” he said.” (Read more: New York Times, 5/03/2016)

(Credit: Nick Diggory/Getty Images)

“Barack Obama’s spy chiefs never believed that Donald Trump was a Russian spy. The Trump-Russia collusion narrative originated as a diversionary tactic in the event emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server went public. FBI Headquarters attached itself to the project, devoting manpower and resources to investigating Trump, when the Bureau learned that foreign intelligence services had her correspondence.

U.S. Attorney John Durham’s nearly two-year-long investigation into the origins of the FBI’s probe of the 2016 Trump campaign is, according to news reports, making “excellent progress” and expanding. The shape of the case has been clear for some time, as I reported in my 2019 book, “The Plot Against the President”: the Clinton campaign was worried about the candidate’s emails going public. The decision to protect her could not possibly be made by mid-level FBI field agents and lawyers but only by senior U.S. officials.

(…) The FBI seemed to have become aware several months earlier that her emails had been compromised and was already planning the second leg of its cover-up before it had concluded the first. On May 4, FBI agent Peter Strzok texted FBI lawyer Lisa Page “Now the pressure really starts to finish [Midyear Exam].” Page texted back: “It sure does.”

I asked the former Obama official why the FBI’s interests dovetailed with those of the Clinton campaign. Was the Bureau concerned that its counterintelligence mission would be tarnished with Clinton’s emails in possession of a foreign spy service? “They were on Team Hillary,” says the former Obama official. “They didn’t care about their mission. According to John Brennan’s handwritten notes, Russia knew what the Clinton campaign was doing with its Russia collusion plan. The FBI must have also known Russia knew and went ahead with it anyway. And then Brennan used it as the basis of the January 2017 intelligence community assessment, even though the Russians knew it was based on a fabrication.”

Government documents further substantiate the assessment that the purpose of Crossfire Hurricane was to defend against the potential release of Clinton’s emails and protect her candidacy.” (Read more: The Epoch Times, 12/17/2020)  (Archive)

At the same time Donald Trump becomes the presumed Republican presidential nominee, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page feel an added pressure to end the Clinton email investigation.

On May 6, 2016, an obscure source reports the following:

“An intriguing Security Council (SC) report circulating in the Kremlin today suggests that a “war of words” has broken out between the Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) Alexander Bortnikov and Chairwoman of the Council of Federation Valentina Matviyenko over the issue of releasing to the Western media tens-of-thousands of top secret and classified emails obtained by the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) from the private, but unsecured, computer (email server) belonging to former US Secretary of State, and present American presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton.

According to this report, beginning in 2011, SVR intelligence analysts began “serious/concerning” monitoring of a Romanian computer hacker named Marcel Lazăr Lehel (aka Guccifer) after he attempted, unsuccessfully, to break into the computer system of the Federation funded RT television network.

Following SVR procedures for the monitoring of international computer hackers, this report continues, Guccifer’s activities were followed and recorded (both physically and electronically) allowing these intelligence analysts, in 2013, to not only detect his breaking into the private computer of Secretary Clinton but allowing the SVR to copy all of its contents too.

Shortly after the SVR obtained these tens-of-thousands of top-secret and classified emails from Secretary Clinton’s private computer, this report notes, Chairwoman Matviyenko personally authorized a “partial/limited” release of them to RT—who then, on 20 March 2013, published an article about them titled Hillary Clinton’s ‘hacked’ Benghazi emails: FULL RELEASE—but which barely any Western mainstream media sources reported on at the time.” (Read more: WhatDoesItMean, 5/06/2016)(Archive)

On May 9, 2016, Judge Napolitano appears on Fox News and mentions the same report, creating a buzz of discussion about the missing emails and speculations on what the Kremlin could have.

4. Here’s an early morning tweet (May 10, 2016) of Judge Nap on FOX the previous night (May 9, 2016) with the story:

4. Here’s an early morning tweet (May 10th) of Judge Nap on FOX the previous night (May 9th) with the story:https://t.co/ygHCxTqZzU … pic.twitter.com/EFurQCJXiV

— JW_redacted_ (@jw_redacted_) June 1, 2018

By: Jeff Carlson (themarketswork.com)

“The New York Times provided us an introduction to FBI reasoning in launching the Trump-Russia Inquiry – drunken comments from George Papadopoulos:

During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Alexander Downer (Credit: The Australian)

About three weeks earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign.

The information that Mr. Papadopoulos gave to the Australians answers one of the lingering mysteries of the past year: What so alarmed American officials to provoke the F.B.I. to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign months before the presidential election?

The Papadopoulos/Downer meeting has been portrayed as a chance encounter in a bar. That does not appear to be the case. Papadopoulos was introduced to Downer through a chain of two intermediaries. Papadopoulos knew an Israeli embassy official in London named Christian Cantor who introduced Papadopoulos to Erika Thompson. Thompson was a counselor to Downer and served in Australia’s London embassy.

On May 4, 2016, Papadopoulos gave an interview to the London Times in which he stated then-UK Prime Minister David Cameron should apologize to Trump for negative comments. The interview was not well-received. According to the Daily Caller, Thompson reached out to Papadopoulos two days after the story appeared and said Downer wanted to meet with Papadopoulos. The meeting between Papadopoulos and Downer took place on May 10, 2016. Downer reportedly told Papadopoulos to “leave David Cameron alone.”

We know Papadopoulos mentioned “thousands of emails” in his FBI Interview regarding his April 26, 2016 meeting with Mifsud. That comment is noted in the July 28, 2017 Affidavit and the October 5, 2017 Statement of the Offense. However, there is nothing regarding comments made to Alexander Downer in either document.

What does Alexander Downer have to say about the May 10, 2016 meeting. From a news.com.au article:

“We had a drink and he (Papadopoulos) talked about what Trump’s foreign policy would be like if Trump won the election.”

He (Trump) hadn’t got the nomination at that stage. During that conversation he (Papadopoulos) mentioned the Russians might use material that they have on Hillary Clinton in the lead-up to the election, which may be damaging.

On April 28, 2018, Downer gave an interview to The Australian. The story, which I’ve read, is behind a paywall – but the Daily Caller provides some details:

“We didn’t know anything about Trump and Russia and we had no particular focus on that,’’ Downer says of the Papadopoulos meeting. “For us we were more interested in what Trump would do in Asia” Downer told The Australian. “He [Papadopoulos] didn’t say dirt; he said material that could be damaging to her. No, he said it would be damaging. He didn’t say what it was.”

“By the way, nothing [Papadopoulos] said in that conversation indicated Trump himself had been conspiring with the Russians to collect information on Hillary Clinton. It was just that this guy, [Papadopoulos], clearly knew that the Russians did have material on Hillary Clinton — but whether Trump knew or not? He didn’t say Trump knew or that Trump was in any way involved in this. He said it was about Russians and Hillary Clinton; it wasn’t about Trump.”

Interestingly, the Schiff Memo appears to back this account up. From page two:

“Papadopoulos’ disclosure occurred against the backdrop of Russia’s aggressive covert campaign to influence our elections, which the FBI was already monitoring. We would later learn in Papadopoulos’ plea that the information the Russians could assist by anonymously releasing were thousands of Hillary Clinton emails.”

Despite initial reporting to the contrary, it appears neither “political dirt” nor Clinton emails were ever mentioned at the Papadopoulos/Downer meeting. Notably, Papadopoulos didn’t mention anything to indicate Trump knew of the Clinton information, or had any role in its collection or potential distribution.

There’s been some confusion over how Papadopoulos’ comments made their way to the FBI. Downer stated in his interview that he reported the conversation back to Australia almost immediately…” (Read much more: themarketswork.com, 8/15/2018)

Yuriy Lutsenko (Credit: Wikipedia)

After then-Vice President Joe Biden succeeded in pressuring Ukraine to remove its prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, the next person to hold the job had ties to Hunter Biden.

Yuri Lutsenko, the prosecutor general who took over for Shokin after his ouster in 2016 [May 12, 2016], had relied on the same lobbyists representing Ukrainian energy company Burisma and its chief executive for years, State Department emails suggest. Hunter Biden personally brought those lobbyists into the Burisma deal in 2015 for the purpose of shutting down investigations of Burisma’s chief executive, according to his own emails.

(…) An IRS whistleblower told lawmakers in May that, in 2020, Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf shut down an effort to get a search warrant for Blue Star Strategies’s emails.

Whether Shokin was indeed investigating Burisma and Zlochevsky at the time then-Vice President Joe Biden called for Shokin’s removal has become a flashpoint in the partisan debate over the Biden family’s business.

Archer, Hunter Biden’s former business partner, offered little clarity to the debate.

Archer conceded that Shokin was a “threat” to Burisma and that his removal benefited the company.

“Then he was fired, and then somehow Burisma was let off the hook,” Archer told Tucker Carlson in an interview last week.

But he also said Burisma board members were provided a different version of events.

Archer said during a transcribed interview with the House Oversight Committee that the “D.C. team” had suggested to the board that the firing of Shokin would pose problems for Zlochevsky because Shokin was “under control,” which Archer took to mean that the then-prosecutor general had been bribed.

A bribe was paid to a prosecutor general during Archer’s tenure on the Burisma board, and the removal of that prosecutor was indeed bad for Burisma, but it did not appear to be Shokin.

According to the State Department emails, the Obama administration believed Zlochevsky, Burisma’s chief executive, had “almost certainly” paid a bribe to Shokin’s predecessor, Vitaly Yarema, in December 2014 to shut down an investigation.

Archer and Hunter Biden were already on the Burisma board at that point, having joined the board earlier in 2014.

Yarema, the Ukrainian prosecutor general before Shokin, was accused of helping Zlochevsky by taking steps that resulted in the release of assets that a British court had seized from him. Yarema was the Ukrainian prosecutor who, the State Department believed, had received a bribe from Zlochevsky.

Shokin took over for Yarema in February 2015 and began investigating Burisma, evidence suggests, more aggressively.

In February 2016, which was after Joe Biden began calling for Shokin’s removal, Shokin’s office seized assets belonging to Zlochevsky, undermining the claim that Shokin was not investigating Burisma.

Under Lutsenko, the Ukrainian prosecutor who replaced Shokin and who seemingly had ties to Hunter Biden’s business orbit, the investigation into Zlochevsky ended.

Blue Star Strategies did not respond to a request for comment. (Read more: Washington Examiner, 8/29/2023)  (Archive)

The audio recording of a conversation between @JoeBiden and @poroshenko on May 13, 2016. Discussion of the issue of financing the “Samopomich” fraction in the Ukrainian Parliament.

An audio recording of a conversation between Vice President of the United States Joe Biden and President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko on May 13, 2016. Discussion of the new tariff.

An audio recording of  Joe Biden and Petro Poroshenko on May 13, 2016. They discuss the newly appointed Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Yuriy Lutsenko, who replaces recently fired Viktor Shokin.

“On May 15, 2016, James Rybicki, former chief of staff to Comey, sends FBI General Counsel James Baker; Bill Priestap, former assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division; McCabe; Page; and others an email with the subject line “Request from the Director.”

James Rybicki (Credit: Jacquelyn Martin/The Associated Press)

Rybicki writes: By NLT [no later than] next Monday, the Director would like to see a list of all cases charged in the last 20 years where the gravamen of the charge was mishandling classified information.

It should be in chart form with: (1) case name, (2) a short summary for content (3) charges brought, and (4) charge of conviction.

If need be, we can get it from NSD [National Security Division] and let them know that the Director asked for this personally.

Please let me know who can take the lead on this.

Thanks!

Jim

Page forwards to Strzok: FYSA [For your situational awareness]

Strzok replies to Page: I’ll take the lead, of course – sounds like an espionage section question… Or do you think OGC [Office of the General Counsel] should?

And the more reason for us to get feedback to Rybicki, as we all identified this as an issue/question over a week ago.

Page replies: I was going to reply to Jim [Rybicki] and tell him I can talked [sic] to you about this already. Do you want me to? (Read more: Judicial Watch, 2/15/2019)

Hillary Clinton and Peter Strzok (Credit: Getty Images)

“Foreign actors” obtained access to some of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails — including at least one email classified as “secret” — according to a new memo from two GOP-led House committees and an internal FBI email.”

(…) “The House committees, which conducted a joint probe into decisions made by the DOJ in 2016 and 2017, addressed a range of issues in their memo including Clinton’s email security.

“Documents provided to the Committees show foreign actors obtained access to some of Mrs. Clinton’s emails — including at least one email classified ‘Secret,'” the memo says, adding that foreign actors also accessed the private accounts of some Clinton staffers.

The memo does not say who the foreign actors are, or what material was obtained, but it notes that secret information is defined as information that, if disclosed, could “reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the national security.”

The committees say that no one appears to have been held accountable either criminally or administratively.

Relatedly, Fox News has obtained a May 2016 email from FBI investigator Peter Strzok — who also is criticized in the House memo for his anti-Trump texts with colleague Lisa Page. The email says that “we know foreign actors obtained access” to some Clinton emails, including at least one “secret” message “via compromises of the private email accounts” of Clinton staffers.” (Strzok Email, 5/17/2016)  (Read more: Fox News, 6/14/2018)

The Special Counsel that was formed to investigate “RussiaGate” appears to have been oblivious to the fact that emails were exported from Luis Miranda’s mailbox on May 23, 2016. Did the Special Counsel choose to omit information or did the evidence from Crowdstrike not inform them of all activity that occurred at the DNC?

For those who don’t already know, analysis of the leaked DNC emails that were published by WikiLeaks was carried out earlier this year and it revealed that the emails were acquired in multiple batches on different days. (This is something that can easily be verified independently by simply looking at the last modified dates in the metadata of WikiLeaks’ collection of DNC emails.)

The first batch of emails acquired in May were mostly from Luis Miranda’s mailbox (which was also the source of most of the emails dubbed as “damaging” by the media), however, emails from Jeremy Brinster, Ryan Banfill and Andy Crystal also appear to have been acquired on this date.

These emails were exported to EML files on May 23, 2016.

Strangely, though, there is no mention of this date in the Netyksho indictment or the Mueller report.

The Mueller report states:

And the Netyksho indictment states:

The phrase “during that time” implies that research attributed to Yermakov occurred between the dates cited.

However, we already know that DNC emails published by WikiLeaks started to be acquired before that time.

To clarify, this means emails (from mailboxes of Miranda, Brinster, Banfill and Crystal) were exported on May 23, 2016 and then, approximately 2 days later, Yermakov allegedly researched PowerShell commands to export emails and the DNC’s mail server was allegedly accessed by GRU officers who then took a batch of emails spanning multiple mailboxes.

(I say “allegedly accessed” because both the Netyksho indictment and the Mueller report lack sufficient evidence to demonstrate that infrastructure attributed to the GRU was genuinely controlled by the GRU.)

And it seems the activity relating to May 23, 2016 may be unknown to the Special Counsel for some reason.

CrowdStrike had started monitoring the network two weeks prior to the email acquisition on May 23, 2016. So, they should have captured and recorded evidence of this activity but, oddly, it seems the Special Counsel was unaware of it.” (Read more: Adam Carter, 10/20/2019)  (Archive)

Samuelson is one of three Clinton lawyers who sorted Clinton’s emails to decide which ones were work-related and which ones were personal. She did most of the sorting, but she was supervised by Clinton lawyers Cheryl Mills and David Kendall. The FBI mostly asks her about this sorting process. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

(Credit: The Associated Press)

“The State Department’s inspector general report on Wednesday offered little absolution for Hillary Clinton or several of her top aides who refused to cooperate with the investigation into the former secretary of state’s exclusive use of a private email server.

The 83-page document, which was given to lawmakers and leaked to the press, noted systemic problems with records at the State Department but zeroed in on Clinton, concluding that she had violated federal rules with her private email server.

1. Clinton’s email setup was never approved by State security agencies

Even though department policy mandated throughout Clinton’s tenure at Foggy Bottom that day-to-day operations should be conducted via authorized means, the IG report found no evidence that the secretary of state “requested or obtained guidance or approval to conduct official business via a personal email account on her private server.”

According to interviews with officials in the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and the Bureau of Information Resource Management, Clinton would have had to “discuss using her personal email account to conduct official business with their offices, who in turn would have attempted to provide her with approved and secured means that met her business needs.”

But those officials said they approved no such setup because of department rules and the inherent security risks.

The report said those departments “did not — and would not — approve her exclusive reliance on a personal email account to conduct Department business.”

2. Clinton never sought assistance to set up her email system to transmit certain sensitive information

The department’s policy also mandated that employees use approved and secure devices to transmit information known as SBU — “sensitive but unclassified” — outside State’s OpenNet network, and that if they did so on a regular basis to non-department addresses, they should reach out to the Bureau of Information Resource Management.

“However, OIG found no evidence that Secretary Clinton ever contacted IRM to request such a solution, despite the fact that emails exchanged on her personal account regularly contained information marked as SBU,” the report states.

3. The arrangement made staffers nervous — and management told them to keep quiet

The IG report noted that two Information Resources Management staffers had communicated their concerns with their departmental boss in late 2010.

“In one meeting, one staff member raised concerns that information sent and received on Secretary Clinton’s account could contain Federal records that needed to be preserved in order to satisfy Federal recordkeeping requirements,” the report noted.

The staff member recalled that the director said Clinton’s personal system had already been reviewed and approved by legal staff “and that the matter was not to be discussed any further,” according to the report’s language.

“As previously noted, OIG found no evidence that staff in the Office of the Legal Adviser reviewed or approved Secretary Clinton’s personal system,” the next line of the report reads.

The other staff member who raised concerns said the director stated that the department’s mission is to “support the Secretary and instructed the staff never to speak of the Secretary’s personal email system again.”

4. Clinton’s chief of staff suggested setting up a separate computer

Speaking with senior officials in the Office of the Secretary and its Executive Secretariat, as well as with Patrick F. Kennedy, the department’s undersecretary for management, Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills in January 2009 suggested that a separate stand-alone computer might be set up for the secretary of state “to enable her to check her emails from her desk.”

That discussion came as Clinton expressed her desire to take her BlackBerry into secure areas. Kennedy called it a “great idea” and “the best solution,” although the IG report found that no such arrangement was ever made.

5. Clinton worried about ‘the personal being accessible’

The report’s next bullet point recalls a November 2010 conversation between Clinton and top aide Huma Abedin, her deputy chief of staff for operations. According to the report, the email discussion centered around emails from Clinton’s account not being able to be received by State employees. Abedin suggested, “we should talk about putting you on state email or releasing your email address to the department so you are not going to spam.”

Clinton responded: “Let’s get separate address or device but I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible.”

The former secretary of state declined the OIG’s request for an interview, while Abedin did not respond, according to the report.

6. Abedin rejected the idea for Clinton to use two devices

State Department officials in August 2011 discussed providing Clinton with an agency-issued BlackBerry to replace her “malfunctioning” personal BlackBerry because “her personal email server is down.” Then-Executive Secretary Stephen D. Mull suggested that he would provide Clinton two devices — “one with an operating State Department email account (which would mask her identity, but which would also be subject to FOIA requests), and another which would just have phone and internet capability.”

Abedin shot down the proposal because it “doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.” The IG did not find any evidence that Clinton received a new device or address after the discussion.

7. Clinton’s email system needed troubleshooting

According to emails the OIG said it reviewed from between “2010 through at least October 2012,” messages between State Department staff and two individuals who provided technical support for Clinton’s email server showed operational issues. “For example, in December 2010, the Senior Advisor worked with S/ES-IRM and IRM staff to resolve issues affecting the ability of emails transmitted through the clintonemail.com domain used by Secretary Clinton to reach Department email addresses using the state.gov domain,” the report states.

Staffers with the office handling information technology for the Office of the Secretary met with a Clinton top technology staffer to resolve the situation. “The issue was ultimately resolved and, on December 21, 2010, S/ES-IRM staff sent senior S/ES staffers an email describing the issue and summarizing the activities undertaken to resolve it,” the report stated.

The unnamed Clinton technology staffer also met with staffers in Cyber Threat Analysis Division on another occasion, the report said. The third interaction occurred in late October 2012 when Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on the New York City area. An email exchange between Abedin and another member of Clinton’s staff “revealed that the server located in Secretary Clinton’s New York residence was down.”

The Clinton technology staffer then met with Office of Information Resources Management staffers to see whether State could provide support. According to the report, S/ES-IRM staff said they told the Clinton aide they could not because the server was private.

8. The server was briefly shut down over hacking concerns

The report noted that on Jan. 9, 2011, a non-State technical adviser retained by former President Bill Clinton informed Abedin that he had shut down the server because he thought “someone was trying to hack us and while they did not get in i didnt [sic] want to let them have the chance to.”

The same person wrote Abedin later the same day, stating, “We were attacked again so I shut [the server] down for a few min.”

“On January 10, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations emailed the Chief of Staff and the Deputy Chief of Staff for Planning and instructed them not to email the Secretary ‘anything sensitive’ and stated that she could ‘explain more in person,'” the report stated, with Abedin being the person who sent the email.

9. Clinton and her staffers worried about being hacked but didn’t report to security personnel

On May 13, 2011, the IG report states that “two of Secretary Clinton’s immediate staff discussed via email the Secretary’s concern that someone was ‘hacking into her email’ after she received an email with a suspicious link.”

Hours after that discussion, an email from William Burns, then-undersecretary of state for political affairs, appeared in Clinton’s inbox carrying a link to a suspect URL and nothing else in the message.

“Is this really from you? I was worried about opening it!” Clinton responded hours later.

The IG report referenced pre-existing department policy requiring employees to report suspicious incidents to Information Resources Management officials when it comes to their attention, including that it is also “required when a user suspects compromise of, among other things, a personally owned device containing personally identifiable information.”

“However, OIG found no evidence that the Secretary or her staff reported these incidents to computer security personnel or anyone else within the Department,” the report states. (Politico, 5/26/2016)  (Archive)   (DoS OIG Report: Evaluation of Email Records Management and Cybersecurity Requirements, May 2016)

(Credit: Amazon)

“The Democratic National Committee last month denied a claim made by its former chairwoman, Donna Brazile, about the timeline of the hacking of the committee’s systems, the latest of many contradictions related to the crucial days when thousands of emails were allegedly stolen from the party’s mail server.

In her 2018 book, Brazile wrote that after learning that alleged Russian hackers were inside its systems, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) asked Crowdstrike, the cybersecurity firm it hired to defend against the hack, to wait one month before kicking out the intruders.

Midway through the month-long wait, the hackers are said to have stolen the 40,000 emails that would eventually be published by Wikileaks.

Brazile’s claim gained renewed significance last month with the release of the final Russia report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). The report (pdf) stated that the DNC was aware that the hackers had already stolen files from its systems before the postponement request described by Brazile.

“No one asked anyone to wait,” a senior DNC official told The Epoch Times. “There was a period of time between when we discovered the breach and fully remediated, but that is incredibly fast and everyone was working around the clock to get ready to totally flip our system as fast as possible.”

(…) Brazile did not respond to a request for comment. The former DNC chairwoman wrote in her book that the committee requested the one-month delay in May 2016 because staff needed their computers during the state primaries.

“In May, when CrowdStrike recommended that we take down our system and rebuild it, the DNC told them to wait a month, because the state primaries for the presidential election were still underway, and the party and the staff needed to be at their computers to manage these efforts. For a whole month, CrowdStrike watched Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear operating,” Brazile wrote, referring to the codenames Crowdstrike assigned to the two intruders discovered on the DNC network.

(…) The contradiction between the committee and its chairwoman is among a number of clashing accounts about the emails that were taken from the DNC, the crime at the origin of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign. Special counsel Robert Mueller, who took over the FBI probe of the Trump campaign in May 2017, and Crowdstrike are at odds about whether the DNC’s mail server was hacked and if emails were taken. (Read more: The Epoch Times, 9/03/2020)  (Archive)

John Bentel (Credit: Facebook)

According to a 2016 State Department inspector general’s report, department officials alleged that John Bentel, the director of the Office of the Executive Secretariat for Information Resource Management, discouraged them from raising concerns about Clinton’s use of personal email. The report also alleges that Bentel falsely claimed that Clinton had legal approval for the use of her computer system.

At some point between the release of this report on May 25, 2016 and the conclusion of the FBI’s Clinton investigation by July 5, 2016, Bentel is interviewed by the FBI. According to an FBI summary, “Bentel denied that State [Department] employees raised concerns about Clinton’s email to him, that he discouraged employees from discussing it, or that he was aware during Clinton’s tenure that she was using a personal email account or server to conduct official State business.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Cynthia McFadden interviews Guccifer in Romania in April 2016. (Credit: NBC News)

Guccifer, whose real name Marcel-Lehel Lazar, is interviewed by the FBI as part of the FBI’s Clinton email investigation. He appears to have spoken to the FBI previously, but these may have been about other matters, since he hacked dozens of US citizens.

Around the end of April 2016, Guccifer had high-profile interviews with Fox News and NBC News. It was already known that he broke into the email account of Clinton confidant Sid Blumenthal in March 2013 and learned Clinton’s private email address. In both media interviews, Guccifer claimed that he then gained access to Clinton’s private server. But the FBI will later say that Guccifer admitted in his FBI interview that he lied about this.

Additionally, “FBI forensic analysis of the Clinton server during the timeframe [Guccifer] claimed to have compromised the server did not identify evidence that [he] hacked the server.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Hunter Biden (Credit: The Associated Press)

A White House scheduling email sent to then-Vice President Joe Biden ahead of a call with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was also sent to his son, Hunter, who was serving on the board of a Ukrainian energy firm looking to escape a corruption probe.

In the call, the elder Mr. Biden urged Mr. Poroshenko to continue reforming Ukraine’s prosecutor general office. It’s unclear whether Hunter Biden was involved in the call outside of getting an email alert about it.

The timing of the call, however, coincides with Hunter Biden‘s $1 million-a-year job on the board for Burisma, which allegedly hired him to help dodge charges from the Ukraine prosecutor general.

The White House scheduling email was sent on May 26, 2016, from Mr. Biden‘s assistant, John S. Flynn. It was disclosed by the National Archives in response to a Freedom of Information Request and mined by an online FOIA sleuth who gave it to The Washington Times.

The scheduling email from Mr. Flynn provided both Mr. Biden and Hunter Biden with the details for the vice president’s upcoming trips to Delaware and Rhode Island as well as the call to Mr. Poroshenko.

“Boss — 8:45 a.m. prep for 9 a.m. phone call with Pres Poroshenko. Then we’re off to Rhode Island for infrastructure event and then Wilmington for UDel commencement. Nate will have your draft remarks delivered later tonight or with your press clips in the morning,” Mr. Flynn wrote to Vice President Biden and Hunter Biden.

It’s not clear why Mr. Biden‘s son was included as a recipient of the email.

Mr. Flynn did not respond to an inquiry from The Times.

Mr. Biden’s call to Mr. Poroshenko occurred as executives of the Burisma energy company were seeking Mr. Biden‘s help through Hunter Biden to end the corruption probe, according to recently released information from a paid FBI informant. (Read more: The Washington Times, 7/03/2023)  (Archive)

UPDATE:

Unearthed Email Reveals Hunter Biden Was Notified of Official Government Call Between Poroshenko and Joe Biden in Message Sent to “Robert L. Peters” – Proves Bidens Were Secretly Working Family Business Deals Together While Joe was VP

“Manafort joined Trump’s campaign on March 29, 2016, and then was promoted to campaign chairman on May 19, 2016.  

NABU leaked the existence of the ledgers on May 29, 2016. Later that summer, it told U.S. media the ledgers showed payments to Manafort, a revelation that forced him to resign from the campaign in August 2016.” (Read more: The Hill, 4/25/2019)  (Archive)

Nikolai Holmov (Credit: Twitter)

“On May 30, 2016, Nellie Ohr sent an email to Bruce Ohr, Holtyn, Ivana Nizich, and Joe Wheatley—then both trial attorneys in the DOJ’s Organized Crime and Gang Section. Nizich had previously worked for Bruce Ohr. The email held a subject line that read “Reported Trove of Documents on Ukrainian Party of Regions’ ‘Black Cashbox.’” Within the email was the text from an article penned the day before by Nikolai Holmov, a blogger at Odessatalk, with the title bolded and enlarged. It also contained a link to the underlying article.

“Documentation regarding that Party of Regions’ ‘chyornaya kasse’ has now seemingly found its way to NABU, the Ukrainian National Anti-Corruption Bureau,” the article stated.

The article contained a tweet that led to another article, in Russian, from May 28, 2016, providing further details on the “chyornaya kasse” or black box ledger:

“On Saturday, published in the Weekly Mirror, Ukraine, an interview was made public with the former First Deputy Head of the Security Service of Ukraine Viktor Trepak, who claims that he handed over documents confirming illegal payments of cash by the Party of Regions to a number of former and current senior officials. According to him, we are talking about the so-called “black bookkeeping” of the Party of Regions with total payments of about $2 billion.”

Trepak reportedly claimed his information regarding the more than $2 billion fund implicated “officials of the highest level, ministers and heads of departments, people’s deputies, famous politicians, public figures, representatives of international organizations, judges, including the highest judicial instances.”

(UPDATE) Interestingly, when one goes to Holmov’s Twitter feed, the last retweet sent (as of publication of this article) was on Jan. 11, 2019. It is a retweet of an announcement from Mark Galeotti that he was “joining the pre-eminent security think tank @RUSI_org as a Senior Associate Fellow.” Galeotti, as previously mentioned, had been referenced with some frequency in Ohr’s emails. In addition to being the author of numerous articles, Galeotti penned an article for Tablet Magazine, titled, “The ‘Trump Dossier,’ or How Russia Helped America Break Itself.”

(Credit: Twitter)

Some questions raised in Holmov’s article would later prove prescient. “Have copies of these documents made their way to other, perhaps foreign security services? To what end?” he asked. “If there are foreign personalities involved, are those relevant documents to be shared with those nations—and when?”

Holmov addressed the motivations of the person responsible for disclosing the ledger, noting, “Not all informants are informants for cash reward—there are other (and perhaps more dangerous) motivators.”

He also wondered about the timing, observing that the documents had “not just appeared from nowhere. Somebody has kept it, knowing it to be what it is, for quite some time. Thus why now has it come to light and been given to the authorities?”

Interestingly, Holmov noted that no names or specifics have been made public “for now” as any such disclosure “could very well impede subsequent investigations by NABU.”  A Ukrainian court later determined that a NABU official played a role in the leaking of documents to The New York Times.

Nellie’s May 30, 2016, email would prove prophetic. It alerted officials within the Justice Department of a discovery that would have far-reaching implications for Manafort—and the Trump campaign—months before the news reached a national level. (Read more: themarketswork, 4/11/2019)  (Archive)