“President Barack Obama’s White House kept three key officials in the dark about bombshell Russia intelligence received in early August of 2016 from CIA Director John Brennan until after the presidential election in November.

The three officials held the top roles focusing on Russia, cybersecurity, and intelligence programs at the National Security Council. Their exclusion is likely to raise new questions about the Obama administration’s involvement in the origins of the investigation of the Trump campaign that evolved into the probe by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Michael Daniel (l), Celeste Wallander (c), and Brett Holmgren

The Obama administration coordinated a series of so-called “small group” meetings in response to Brennan’s intelligence, but excluded three officials who would usually be involved in high-profile work on the topics: White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Michael Daniel, Senior Director for Russia and Eurasia Celeste Wallander, and Senior Director for Intelligence Programs Brett Holmgren.

The exclusion of the officials was first documented in the third volume (pdf) of the Russia report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which noted that “several NSC officials who would normally be included in discussions of importance … were neither included in the discussions nor exposed to the sensitive intelligence until after the election.” (Read more: The Epoch Times, 5/17/2020)  (Archive)

(…) Researchers, including British political analyst Chris Blackburn, have used open sources to show that Mifsud was a well-known figure in Western academic, diplomatic, and intelligence circles. Blackburn, whose research has previously focused on Islamic terrorist groups, has worked with senior leaders within global intelligence agencies. He told RealClearInvestigations that Mifsud’s known contacts suggest he’s not a Russian spy – or he is one of the most successful in history.

“Shortly after the FBI opened its counterintelligence probe based on the Papadopoulos information on July 31, the lead agent on the case, FBI Deputy Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok, went to London to investigate.

Claire Smith (Credit: public domain)

“A counter-intelligence officer would first look at someone’s most frequent contacts,” says Blackburn. “So when Strzok gets to London in early August to look into the Papadopoulos meeting with Mifsud, he would’ve found that one of his most notable contacts is Claire Smith.”

Smith is a prominent British diplomat whose biography describes her as an envoy with 25 years of experience and “expert in managing the complexities of global business practices.” Her postings included Beijing and Islamabad.

She worked with Mifsud at three different institutions—the London Academy of Diplomacy, University of Stirling, and Link Campus University in Rome. Blackburn believes that Smith’s working relationship with Mifsud is an important piece of evidence. “She was on the United Kingdom’s Joint Intelligence Committee,” says Blackburn. “It’s a very significant institution in the UK’s intelligence community, answering directly to the prime minister.”

For eight years, until April 2017, Smith was also a member of Britain’s security vetting appeals panel, which, according to its website, is “an independent avenue of appeal for Civil Service staff and contractors whose security clearance has been refused or withdrawn.”

“Smith was vetting UK government employees,” says Blackburn. “So how could she have missed that her colleague Joseph Mifsud was actually a Russian spy? She continued to work alongside him. She got her picture taken with him.”

If it’s true the professor was working with Russian intelligence, says Blackburn, “he was in place to recruit anyone he was training, in Rome or London. Effectively, Mifsud would have been a talent spotter for Russian intelligence.”

Gianni Pittella (Credit: Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP)

Moreover, explains Blackburn, if Mifsud proved to be a spy, he would’ve compromised a number of high-level European intelligence and diplomatic officials the professor worked with in London and Rome. They include Gianni Pittella, an Italian senator who was previously a member of the European Parliament, where he headed the Socialists and Democrats alliance, one of the Parliament’s most important left-wing blocs.

“Joseph is my dear friend,” Pittella told the Italian press in November after news of Mifsud’s alleged involvement in the Russiagate scandal spread. Pittella was a visiting lecturer when Mifsud was director of the London Academy of Diplomacy and is on the Link Campus Foundation’s board.

Link offers degrees in strategic studies and “diplomatic science.” Blackburn says that among the students who attend Link are police officers from around Europe, especially Italy, Malta, and eastern European countries, as well as a large contingent from Brazil. Link’s president is the former Italian interior minister, Vincenzo Scotti, who is alleged to have told Mifsud to hide. (Read more: RealClearInvestigations, 5/26/2018)  (Archive)

John Brennan and Barack Obama (Credit: Pete Souza/White House)

“Early last August, an envelope with extraordinary handling restrictions arrived at the White House. Sent by courier from the CIA, it carried “eyes only” instructions that its contents be shown to just four people: President Barack Obama and three senior aides. [The aides names were revealed in a video within linked article. They are: Avril Haines, Denis McDonough and Susan Rice.]A

Inside was an intelligence bombshell, a report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government that detailed Russian President Vladi­mir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race.

But it went further. The intelligence captured Putin’s specific instructions on the operation’s audacious objectives — defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump.”

(…) “The material was so sensitive that CIA Director John O. Brennan kept it out of the President’s Daily Brief, concerned that even that restricted report’s distribution was too broad. The CIA package came with instructions that it be returned immediately after it was read. To guard against leaks, subsequent meetings in the Situation Room followed the same protocols as planning sessions for the Osama bin Laden raid.

It took time for other parts of the intelligence community to endorse the CIA’s view. Only in the administration’s final weeks in office did it tell the public, in a declassified report, what officials had learned from Brennan in August — that Putin was working to elect Trump. (Read more: Washington Post, 6/23/2017)

“Text messages between former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page debating how much information to share with the Justice Department about a London meeting — days after the bureau opened its initial Russia investigation — are drawing fresh scrutiny as alleged surveillance abuse and the probe’s origins are investigated by three separate probes, Fox News has learned.

On Aug. 3, 2016, Strzok wrote, “I think we need to consider the lines of what we disclose to DOJ. For example, the last stipulation notes we will not disclose [the] identifies outside the FBI. I think you might argue the unauthorized disclosure might (reasonably) be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to US national security…”

A clipping of a Strzok /Page text with words written in. “DCM” stands for Deputy Chief of Mission.

In an earlier discussion on Aug. 2, 2016, Strzok reported he had a “good meeting.” Page warned, “Make sure you can lawfully protect what you sign. Just thinking about congress, foia [Freedom of Information Act], etc. I’m sure it’s fine. I just don’t know how protection of intel-type stuff works in that context.”

Fox News has learned some of the words and names that were redacted in the string of Strzok-Page messages; they are included below.

The New York Times was first to report lengthy details about the 2016 meeting in question, when the FBI “dispatched a pair of agents to London on a mission so secretive that all but a handful of officials were kept in the dark.” The report said this assignment included questioning Australian Ambassador Alexander Downer. Downer’s information about then-Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos helped lay the foundation for the FBI’s counterintelligence probe – which later grew into former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

House Republicans, continuing to probe the texts, have considered August 2016 a pivotal month. They have been looking closely at these exchanges, and how long before the August meeting Downer reported the Papadopoulos information.” (Read more: Fox News, 7/03/2019)

Greg Rubini@GregRubini – May 8, 2020

— Greg Rubini (@GregRubini) May 9, 2020

— Greg Rubini (@GregRubini) May 9, 2020

— Greg Rubini (@GregRubini) May 9, 2020

Greg Rubini@GregRubini

6. want to hear directly from Judge Napolitano?
there you go:
March 14, 2017 – 10 days after the Trump tweet:
. pic.twitter.com/7DjMNARzsu

— Greg Rubini (@GregRubini) May 9, 2020

Avril Haines appears on MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell in August, 2018, to discuss President Trump’s abuse of power after removing former CIA director Brennan’s security clearance. (Credit: MSNBC screenshot)

(…) “In the first week of August — directly after the creation of Crossfire Hurricane — Director Brennan contacted Avril Haines via telephone, as he had received intelligence in relation to President Vladimir Putin.

An envelope which contained “eyes only” instructions was sent by courier from the Central Intelligence Agency to the White House. The contents of the envelope were shown to four people: President Barack Obama, and three of his senior aides, most likely Denis McDonough, Susan Rice and Avril Haines.

Within the envelope was a valuable source that Director Brennan had used to ascertain certain information, a source which he intentionally kept away from the Presidential Daily Brief. This was because, by 2013, the Presidential Daily Brief was being received by over 30 recipients.

“Inside was an intelligence bombshell, a report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government that detailed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race.

But it went further. The intelligence captured Putin’s specific instructions on the operation’s audacious objects — defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump.” — The Washington Post

As a result of this, Director Brennan created a secret task force at the Central Intelligence Agency’s Headquarters, which was composed of several dozen analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The Working Group reported to two different groups.

• President Barack Obama and less than 14 senior United States Government officials.
• A team of operations specialists at the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Also in early August 2016 — presumably the same week — agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch, where they questioned her about a letter they had received in early March 2016 from a foreign source, supposedly written by Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz to Leonard Benardo of the Open Society Foundations regarding the Midyear Exam investigation.

During this meeting, the agents offered to give Attorney General Lynch a “defensive briefing”. Shortly after this, the Federal Bureau of Investigation concluded that the Benardo letter was an unreliable document.

President Obama ordered his aides to determine ways to retaliate or deter against the Russian Government through three steps:

• Gain a high-confidence assessment from the United States intelligence agencies on Russia’s role and intent.
• Check vulnerabilities in state-run election systems.
• Seek bipartisan support from Congressional leaders for a statement condemning Moscow and urging states to accept federal assistance.

Obama meets with Kathryn Ruemmler (l), Lisa Monaco (c), and Susan Rice. (Credit: White House Flickr photo by Pete Souza)

The same week, Rice, Haines and Lisa Monaco convened meetings in the White House Situation Room, which would later be referred to as “Deputies Meetings”. These meetings were initially attended by:

• Director John Brennan, Central Intelligence Agency
• Director James Clapper, Office of the Director of National Intelligence
• Director James Comey, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
• Attorney General Loretta Lynch, United States Department of Justice

As time passed, another Cabinet member joined the Deputies Meetings: Vice President Joe Biden.

The Deputies Meetings needed to defend against any potential leaks, and therefore followed the same protocols taken during the planning stages of the raid of Osama bin Laden.

At a later time, agendas were directly sent to Cabinet secretaries, including Secretary John Kerry and Secretary Ashton Carter. When an agenda was received, their subordinates were ordered never to open the envelopes. Further to this, some agendas were withheld until the participants had arrived in the Situation Room and sat down.

Ordinarily, a video feed from the White House Situation Room is fed into various National Security Council offices to allow senior aides to view the events with zero sound. However, during the Deputies Meetings, the video feeds were switched off.

One of these Deputies Meetings was hosted by Haines, where the attendees of the meetings argued that any deliberative attempt to strike back against Russia would become a tool of propaganda for President Vladimir Putin, while another was concerned about the potential effect any action may have on Election Day 2016.

Haines would later note she was “very concerned” during this time about the potential of Russians gaining influence within the Trump campaign, although she apparently remained unaware of the existence of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 4/29/2019)

John Brennan (Credit: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/The Associated Press)

“Brennan first alerts the White House to the Putin intelligence and later briefs Obama in the Oval Office convened a secret task force at CIA headquarters composed of several dozen analysts and officers from the CIA, the NSA and the FBI.

The unit functioned as a sealed compartment, its work hidden from the rest of the intelligence community. Those brought in signed new non-disclosure agreements to be granted access to intelligence from all three participating agencies.

They worked exclusively for two groups of “customers,” officials said. The first was Obama and fewer than 14 senior officials in government. The second was a team of operations specialists at the CIA, NSA and FBI who took direction from the task force on where to aim their subsequent efforts to collect more intelligence on Russia.” (Read more: Washington Post, 6/23/2017)

In another cryptic exchange dated August 6, 2016, Strzok and Page discuss an unnamed “menace.”

“Maybe you’re meant to stay where you are because you’re meant to protect the country from that menace,” Page writes.

“I can protect our country at many levels, not sure if that helps,” Strzok replies.

(Strzok/Page text messages)

Stone gives a speech to the Southwest Broward Republican Organization on August 8, 2016. (Credit: Nydia B. Stone)

In a public appearance, Republican strategist Roger Stone is asked to predict what “October surprise” Wikileaks leader Julian Assange may reveal about Clinton that could influence the November 2016 presidential election. WikiLeaks released a batch of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in July 2016 and hinted at more releases to come.

Stone replies, “Well, it could be any number of things. I actually have communicated with Assange. I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation, but there’s no telling what the October surprise may be.”

Stone was an official consultant to the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump until August 2015, and has remains a prominent surrogate and confidant for Trump. (Talkingpointsmemo.com, 8/7/2016)

However, Stone’s prediction will be proven wrong when WikiLeaks begins posting thousands of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s private emails on October 7, 2016. But Stone will post a Tweet on August 21, 2016 that may have predicted that.

Julian Assange seems to suggest on Dutch television program Nieuwsuur that Seth Rich was the source for the Wikileaks-exposed DNC emails and was murdered.

Susan Rice (Credit: U.S. Institute of Peace)

“National security adviser Susan Rice, deputy national security adviser and former deputy director of the CIA under Brennan, Avril Haines, and White House homeland-security adviser Lisa Monaco convened meetings in the Situation Room to weigh the mounting evidence of Russian interference and generate options for how to respond. At first, only four senior security officials were allowed to attend: Brennan, Clapper, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch and FBI Director James B. Comey. Aides ordinarily allowed entry as “plus-ones” were barred.

Gradually, the circle widened to include Vice President Biden and others. Agendas sent to Cabinet secretaries — including John F. Kerry at the State Department and Ashton B. Carter at the Pentagon — arrived in envelopes that subordinates were not supposed to open. Sometimes the agendas were withheld until participants had taken their seats in the Situation Room.”

(…) “They were concerned that any pre-election response could provoke an escalation from Putin. Moscow’s meddling to that point was seen as deeply concerning but unlikely to materially affect the outcome of the election. Far more worrisome to the Obama team was the prospect of a cyber-assault on voting systems before and on Election Day.

They also worried that any action they took would be perceived as political interference in an already volatile campaign. By August, Trump was predicting that the election would be rigged. Obama officials feared providing fuel to such claims, playing into Russia’s efforts to discredit the outcome and potentially contaminating the expected Clinton triumph.

Before departing for an August vacation to Martha’s Vineyard, Obama instructed aides to pursue ways to deter Moscow and proceed along three main paths: Get a high-confidence assessment from U.S. intelligence agencies on Russia’s role and intent; shore up any vulnerabilities in state-run election systems; and seek bipartisan support from congressional leaders for a statement condemning Moscow and urging states to accept federal help.” (Read more: Washington Post, 6/23/2017)

“It was the most damaging of all the damaging texts exchanged between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. On Aug. [9], 2016, in the second week of the Trump-Russia investigation on which both were working, Page texted Strzok to say, “He’s not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Strzok responded, “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”

(…) “The Justice Department gave Congress Page’s “not ever going to become president” text months ago, when it produced thousands of texts to Hill investigators. But lawmakers — and the public — did not learn of the explosive second part of the exchange — Strzok’s “We’ll stop it” answer — until last Thursday, when Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the Clinton email investigation was  that given to Congress.

Why wasn’t that given to Congress?” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., asked on Fox News the day the Horowitz report was released. “Why did I find out about that today at noon?”

(…) “There had been a flaw in the FBI’s collection system, Horowitz said. Searching for the missing texts, Horowitz took possession of Strzok’s and Page’s phones and “undertook a series of steps to seek to exploit, to extract the missing text messages from the phones.” (Read more: Washington Examiner, 6/20/2018)

Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s former chief of staff at the State Department, was deposed in May 2016 as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit by Judicial Watch. At that time, she refused to answer some questions, citing attorney-client privilege. Judge Emmet Sullivan worked out a compromise to have Mills answer some questions in writing to prevent further litigation, and Mills’ written answers are made public by Judicial Watch on this day.

This written testimony shows that shortly after the hacker known as Guccifer broke into the email account of Clinton confidant Sid Blumenthal and publicy revealed Clinton’s private email address in March 2013, Mills was worried about the potential impact this coud have on Clinton’s private email server. Mills discussed this with Clinton’s computer techician Bryan Pagliano. Clinton’s email address was changed, but it is still unknown if any other security measures were taken. (Politico, 8/10/2016)

Seth Rich (l) and Julian Assange (Credit: public domain)

“A persistent American lawyer has uncovered the undeniable fact that the FBI has been continuously lying, including giving false testimony in court, in response to Freedom of Information requests for its records on Seth Rich. The FBI has previously given affidavits that it has no records regarding Seth Rich.

A Freedom of Information request to the FBI which did not mention Seth Rich, but asked for all email correspondence between FBI Head of Counterterrorism Peter Strzok, who headed the investigation into the DNC leaks and Wikileaks, and FBI attorney Lisa Page, has revealed two pages of emails which do not merely mention Seth Rich but have “Seth Rich” as their heading. The emails were provided in, to say the least, heavily redacted form.

Before I analyse these particular emails, I should make plain that they are not the major point. The major point is that the FBI claimed it had no records mentioning Seth Rich, and these have come to light in response to a different FOIA request that was not about him. What other falsely denied documents does the FBI hold about Rich, that were not fortuitously picked up by a search for correspondence between two named individuals?

To look at the documents themselves, they have to be read from the bottom up, and they consist of a series of emails between members of the Washington Field Office of the FBI (WF in the telegrams) into which Strzok was copied in, and which he ultimately forwarded on to the lawyer Lisa Page.” (Read much more: Craig Murray, 1/28/2020)  (Archive)

(Credit: Lawflog.com)

Persistent American lawyer Ty Clevenger writes:

(…) “As most people outside of solitary confinement know, the whole “Russian collusion” investigation began with the premise that Russia hacked the DNC, but considerable evidence suggests that the DNC emails were downloaded by someone inside the DNC — like Mr. Rich — and then provided to Wikileaks.

Rather than re-invent the wheel, I’ve copied and pasted my letter to U.S. Attorney John Durham, U.S. Attorney Richard Donoghue, and Inspector General Michael Horowitz:

Mr. Durham, Mr. Donoghue and Mr. Horowitz:

I wish to file a criminal complaint regarding false statements made by FBI Section Chief David M. Hardy in two affidavits [click here and here] filed in the FOIA case identified above [i.e., Ty Clevenger v. U.S. Department of Justice, et al., Civil Action No. 18-CV-01568]. I requested FBI records pertaining to Seth Rich, who allegedly was the source of Democratic National Committee emails published by Wikileaks in 2016 (rather than Russian hackers). In the affidavits (attached to the email version of this letter), Mr. Hardy testified that his office conducted a reasonable search, and it found no responsive records.

New evidence proves otherwise, and it appears that Mr. Hardy has perpetrated a fraud on the court. Judicial Watch recently published documents that it obtained in response to a FOIA request for communications between former FBI agent Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page and I would direct your attention to pages 123-125. In those pages, you will find a heavily-redacted email discussion regarding Mr. Rich.  Note that the header on those emails is “Seth Rich.” (Read more: Ty Clevenger/Lawflog, 1/27/2020)  (Archive)

Carter Page (Credit: Getty Images)

“Somma is reported to be an FBI counterintelligence agent referred to as “Case Agent 1” in the IG report.

The report said that “Case Agent 1” was “primarily responsible for some of the most significant errors and omissions” in the FBI’s applications for surveillance orders on Page.

Somma played a role in several key developments in the investigation. He opened the case file on Page, he first proposed surveillance on the Trump aide, and was the FBI handler for Stefan Halper, a longtime confidential human source who was tasked with meeting Page and George Papadopoulos.

(DOJ OIG FISA Report pg. 161)

Somma also took part in a January 2017 interview with the primary source for Christopher Steele, the former British spy whose dossier was a key aspect of the FISA applications.

The IG reported identified six areas where Somma withheld information from the investigation.

He failed to disclose exculpatory statements that Page and Papadopoulos made to Halper during secretly recorded conversations before the 2016 election. He also received information from the CIA in August 2016 that Page had a longstanding relationship with the spy agency. The IG report says that Somma did not divulge that information to others at the FBI.

Somma also withheld information that Steele’s source divulged in the January 2017 interview that undercut key allegations in the dossier. The FBI relied heavily on the document to obtain spy warrants against Page.

The Steele source said that Steele embellished or misinterpreted information that was in the dossier. He said that he provided Steele with information that was based on “rumor and speculation,” but that Steele passed it along as fact in the dossier.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 6/22/2020)  (Archive)

Rudy Giuliani (Credit: public domain)

In a CNN interview, Rudy Giuliani criticizes FBI Director James Comey’s July 5, 2016 announcement to not recommend indicting Clinton. “I believe the decision was so wrong, I can’t understand how he came to that conclusion. I don’t believe he did it for bad reasons, because I think he is a good man. But the decision perplexes me. It perplexes [former Assistant FBI Director James] Kallstrom, who worked for him. It perplexes numerous FBI agents who talk to me all the time. And it embarrasses some FBI agents.” (CNN, 8/11/2016)

Giuliani is a former US attorney, former mayor of New York City, and a frequent media surrogate for the Trump campaign. The Daily Beast will note that Giuliani “spent decades of his life as a federal prosecutor and then mayor working closely with the FBI, and especially its New York office. One of Giuliani’s security firms employed a former head of the New York FBI office, and other alumni of it.” Furthermore, his former law firm has long been general counsel to the FBI Agents Association (FBIAA), which represents 13,000 former and current agents. (The Daily Beast, 11/2/2016)

The Daily Beast reports that cybersecurity experts believe the hacker or hackers who stole emails from the DNC (Democratic National Committee) are behind a website known as DCLeaks. The site went public in June 2016 to little media attention. But the site contains emails from hundreds of Republican and Democratic US politicans, including staffers to Republican Senators John McCain and Linsey Graham, plus staffers to former Republican Repesentative Michelle Bachmann.  An unnamed “an individual close to the investigation of the Democratic Party hacks” says the evidence is growing that both parties have been targeted. “Everyone is sweating this right now. This isn’t just limited to Democrats.”

Senators John McCain (left) and Linsey Graham (right) (Credit: Kevin Lamarque / Reuters)

The cybersecurity company ThreatConnect has been investigating the recent hacks of US political targets, and they call DCLeaks a “Russian-backed influence outlet.” In particular, they have linked it to Fancy Bear (a.k.a. APT 28), a hacking group also accused of hacking the DNC, an believed by many to be working for the Russian government. “DCLeaks’ registration and hosting information aligns with other Fancy Bear activities and known tactics, techniques, and procedures.” They also claim that the hacker or hacking group known as Guccifer 2.0, who claims to be behind the hacking of the DNC emails that WikiLeaks publicly posted in July 2016, is linked to DCLeaks.
The Daily Beast reports that “researchers, at ThreatConnect and elsewhere, also now believe that Guccifer 2.0 was WikiLeaks’ source and that the group is acting as a front for the Russian government.” (The Daily Beast, 8/12/2016)

In late 2014, Clinton sorted her emails into what she and her lawyers deemed work-related and personal, and then deleted over 31,000 of the “personal” emails. In the FBI investigation into her emails that concluded in July 2016, it was reported that “several thousand” of the personal emails were recovered or found through other people having copies, and many of these actually were work-related.

In a court filing, the State Department reveals that it is planning to release all of the emails it decides are work-related. The emails will be given to Judicial Watch, who have a number of on-going Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits related to Clinton’s emails. However, it is unknown just how many emails were recovered and how many of those are work-related. It also is unknown how soon they will be released. Republican National Committee (RNC) chair Reince Priebus urges the department to release the emails before the November 2016 presidential election. (The Hill, 8/16/2016)

Debbie Wassermann Schultz accidentally tells the truth for the first time about their push to anoint Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.

“Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau. Investigators assert that the disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials.

(…) The papers, known in Ukraine as the “black ledger,” are a chicken-scratch of Cyrillic covering about 400 pages taken from books once kept in a third-floor room in the former Party of Regions headquarters on Lipskaya Street in Kiev. The room held two safes stuffed with $100 bills, said Taras V. Chornovil, a former party leader who was also a recipient of the money at times. He said in an interview that he had once received $10,000 in a “wad of cash” for a trip to Europe.

A page from the “black ledger,” released by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau. This page does not include Mr. Manafort’s name.

“This was our cash,” he said, adding that he had left the party in part over concerns about off-the-books activity. “They had it on the table, stacks of money, and they had lists of who to pay.”The National Anti-Corruption Bureau, which obtained the ledger, said in a statement that Mr. Manafort’s name appeared 22 times in the documents over five years, with payments totaling $12.7 million. The purpose of the payments is not clear. Nor is the outcome, since the handwritten entries cannot be cross-referenced against banking records, and the signatures for receipt have not yet been verified.

“Paul Manafort is among those names on the list of so-called ‘black accounts of the Party of Regions,’ which the detectives of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine are investigating,” the statement said. “We emphasize that the presence of P. Manafort’s name in the list does not mean that he actually got the money, because the signatures that appear in the column of recipients could belong to other people.”

The accounting records surfaced this year, when Serhiy A. Leshchenko, a member of Parliament who said he had received a partial copy from a source he did not identify, published line items covering six months of outlays in 2012 totaling $66 million. In an interview, Mr. Leshchenko said another source had provided the entire multiyear ledger to Viktor M. Trepak, a former deputy director of the domestic intelligence agency of Ukraine, the S.B.U., who passed it to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau.” (Read more: New York Times, 8/14/2016)  (Archive)

John Brennan (l) and Robert Hannigan. (Credit: Agence France Presse/Getty Images)

(…) “Steele believed that the Russians were engaged in the biggest electoral crime in U.S. history, and wondered why the F.B.I. and the State Department didn’t seem to be taking the threat seriously. Likening it to the attack on Pearl Harbor, he felt that President Obama needed to make a speech to alert the country. He also thought that Obama should privately warn Putin that unless he stopped meddling the U.S. would retaliate with a cyberattack so devastating it would shut Russia down.

Steele wasn’t aware that by August, 2016, a similar debate was taking place inside the Obama White House and the U.S. intelligence agencies. According to an article by the Washington Post, that month the C.I.A. sent what the paper described as “an intelligence bombshell” to President Obama, warning him that Putin was directly involved in a Russian cyber campaign aimed at disrupting the Presidential election—and helping Trump win. Robert Hannigan, then the head of the U.K.’s intelligence service the G.C.H.Q., had recently flown to Washington and briefed the C.I.A.’s director, John Brennan, on a stream of illicit communications between Trump’s team and Moscow that had been intercepted. (The content of these intercepts has not become public.) But, as the Post noted, the C.I.A.’s assessment that the Russians were interfering specifically to boost Trump was not yet accepted by other intelligence agencies, and it wasn’t until days before the Inauguration that major U.S. intelligence agencies had unanimously endorsed this view.”

(…) “In early September, 2016, Obama tried to get congressional leaders to issue a bipartisan statement condemning Russia’s meddling in the election. He reasoned that if both parties signed on the statement couldn’t be attacked as political. The intelligence community had recently informed the Gang of Eight—the leaders of both parties and the ranking representatives on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees—that Russia was acting on behalf of Trump. But one Gang of Eight member, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, expressed skepticism about the Russians’ role, and refused to sign a bipartisan statement condemning Russia. After that, Obama, instead of issuing a statement himself, said nothing.

Steele anxiously asked his American counterparts what else could be done to alert the country. One option was to go to the press. Simpson wasn’t all that worried, though. As he recalled in his subsequent congressional testimony, “We were operating under the assumption at that time that Hillary Clinton was going to win the election, and so there was no urgency to it.” (Read more: The New Yorker, 3/12/2018)

In early July 2016, Republicans formally asked the Justice Department to open an investigation into whether Clinton committed perjury with some of her comments while speaking before Congress in October 2015.

Representative Bob Goodlatte (Credit: Twitter)

On August 15, 2016, Representatives Bob Goodlatte (R), chair of the Judiciary Committee, and Jason Chaffetz (R), chair of the Oversight Committee, write a letter to Channing Phillips, the US attorney for the District of Columbia. The letter points out four comments Clinton made in her Congressional testimony that they believe contradicts what the FBI learned during their Clinton email investigation.

They write: “The four pieces of sworn testimony by Secretary Clinton described herein are incompatible with the FBI’s findings. We hope this information is helpful to your office’s consideration of our referral.”

• In her testimony, Clinton claimed that none of the material she sent or received via her personal email account was marked as classified. But the FBI later determined that at least three emails contained classified markings, although they were apparently done in error.
• Clinton claimed her lawyers went through each of her emails individually before deciding to delete them or not. However, the FBI has since claimed this is not so.
• She said all of her work-related emails were given back to the State Department in December 2014, but thousands of other work-related emails have since been found.
• She claimed she only used one server while secretary of state, but the FBI says the server was replaced more than once.

Earlier in the month, the Justice Department told Goodlatte and Chaffetz that it is reviewing information “and will take appropriate action as necessary.”

The Hill comments that the “letter is a sign that Republicans are committed to pressuring the Justice Department to act against Clinton, even after it notably declined to prosecute her for mishandling classified information,” and that Republicans “also appear to be making a public case for an indictment, perhaps building off widespread unease with the decision not to prosecute…” (The Hill, 8/16/2016)

“Two FBI officials who worked on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation exchanged text messages last year in which they appear to have discussed ways to prevent Donald Trump from being elected president.

“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way [Trump] gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk,” FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok wrote in a cryptic text message to Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer and his mistress.

“It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40,” Strzok wrote in the text, dated Aug. 15, 2016.

Andy is likely Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe. (Read more: The Daily Caller, 12/13/2017) (Strzok/Page/text messages)

Jeh Johnson (Credit: Gage Skidmore)

“Jeh Johnson, the homeland-security secretary, was responsible for finding out whether the government could quickly shore up the security of the nation’s archaic patchwork of voting systems. He floated the idea of designating state mechanisms “critical infrastructure,” a label that would have entitled states to receive priority in federal cybersecurity assistance, putting them on a par with U.S. defense contractors and financial networks.

On Aug. 15, Johnson arranged a conference call with dozens of state officials, hoping to enlist their support. He ran into a wall of resistance.

The reaction “ranged from neutral to negative,” Johnson said in congressional testimony Wednesday.

Brian Kemp, the Republican secretary of state of Georgia, used the call to denounce Johnson’s proposal as an assault on state rights. “I think it was a politically calculated move by the previous administration,” Kemp said in a recent interview, adding that he remains unconvinced that Russia waged a campaign to disrupt the 2016 race. “I don’t necessarily believe that,” he said.

Stung by the reaction, the White House turned to Congress for help, hoping that a bipartisan appeal to states would be more effective.” (Read more: Washington Post, 6/23/2017)

David Kendall, (r), sits behind Hillary Clinton during a House hearing of the Select Committee on Benghazi, on October 22, 2015. (Credit: Diego M. Radzinschi/The National Law Journal)

“Judicial Watch announced today it received 218 pages of disgraced former FBI officials Peter Strzok-Lisa Page emails which show then-FBI General Counsel James Baker instructing FBI officials to expedite the release of FBI investigative material to Hillary Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall in August 2016. Kendall and the FBI’s top lawyer discussed specifically quickly obtaining the “302” report of the FBI/DOJ interview of Mrs. Clinton.

(…) On August 16, 2016, at 10:02 p.m. Baker emails then-Associate Deputy Director David Bowdich; Michael Steinbach, former executive assistant director for national security; former Acting Assistant Director Jason V. Herring; former FBI lawyer Lisa Page; former Principal Deputy General Counsel Trisha Anderson; Michael Kortan, FBI assistant director for public affairs, now retired; James Rybicki, former chief of staff to Comey; and others to inform them that he “just spoke” with Clinton’s lawyer Kendall, who requested documents from the FBI. Baker says he told Kendall he would “need to submit a request.” Baker tells them, “I said we would process it expeditiously.”

“I just spoke with David Kendall … I conveyed our view that in order to obtain the documents [FBI investigative material] they are seeking they need to submit a request pursuant to the Privacy Act and FOIA. I said they could submit a letter to me covering both statutes. They will send it in the morning. I said that we would process it expeditiously. David asked us to focus first on the Secretary’s 302 [FBI interview report]. I said OK. [Redacted] We will have to focus on this issue tomorrow and get the 302 out the door as soon as possible and then focus on the rest of the stuff.”

The following day, August 17, 2016, Kendall sent a FOIA/Privacy Act request on “behalf of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton” to the FBI’s top lawyer with a request for “expeditious processing.” Baker passes this request to Bowdich, Steinbach, Herring, Page, Anderson:

In my view, we need to move as quickly as possible on this, but pursuant to David’s oral request last night, we should focus first on Secretary Clinton’s 302…. Is the end of this week out of the question for her 302?

In a follow-up email exchange, the same day, Anderson arranged for Herring, Page, former FBI Assistant Director and head of the Office of Congressional Affairs Gregory Brower, Strzok and others to “coordinate a plan for processing and releasing” Clinton’s 302, though one official reminds others that they should process the request “consistent” with other requests.

Then, in an August 21, 2016, email exchange Baker tells his people that he would “alert” Kendall shortly before Clinton’s 302 was to be posted on the FBI’s FOIA Vault webpage. On September 2, 2016, the FBI announced the release of Clinton’s interview documents.

Finally, on August 24, 2016, the acting FBI FOIA unit chief said he sees “no problem” with giving Hillary’s attorney a heads up before her records were posted to the Vault.” (Read more: Judicial Watch, 6/03/2019)

Included in the DOJ’s motion to dismiss the criminal charges against General Flynn, Exhibit 2 is the official filing and opening of the Crossfire Razor investigation. Of note, the investigation is categorized as a sensitive investigation matter (SIM) because it was during the middle of the 2016 general election campaign.

The documents include the FBI’s summary of the interview of Clinton on July 1, 2016, known as a 302.

The State Department wanted to review the 302 interview summaries first, but the FBI ignored that request. On July 7, 2016, FBI Director James Comey said when it came to documents relating to the FBI’s Clinton investigation, he was committed to delivering to Congress “everything I can possibly give you under the law and to doing it as quickly as possible.”

Representative Adam Schiff (Credit: Michael Buckner / Getty Images)

Representative Adam Schiff (D) criticizes the move. “With the exception of the classified emails that had been found on the private server, I can see little legitimate purpose to which Congress will put these materials. Instead, as the now-discredited Benghazi Committee demonstrated, their contents will simply be leaked for political purposes. This will neither serve the interests of justice nor aid Congress in its responsibilities and will merely set a precedent for the FBI to turn over closed case files whenever one party in Congress does not like a prosecutorial decision. This has been done in the name of transparency, but as this precedent chills the cooperation of other witnesses in the future, I suspect the Department of Justice will later come to refer to it by a different name — mistake.”

The documents can be seen by members of Congress, but they are not allowed to publicly reveal any of it. An FBI spokesperson says, “The material contains classified and other sensitive information and is being provided with the expectation it will not be disseminated or disclosed without FBI concurrence.”

However, Senator Charles Grassley (R), chair of the judiciary committee, says, “On initial review, it seems that much of the material given to the Senate today, other than copies of the large number of emails on Secretary Clinton’s server containing classified information, is marked ‘unclassified/for official use.’ The FBI should make as much of the material available as possible.”

Clinton campaign spokesperson Brian Fallon also wants to see the material publicly release, saying, “This is an extraordinarily rare step that was sought solely by Republicans for the purposes of further second-guessing the career professionals at the FBI. We believe that if these materials are going to be shared outside the Justice Department, they should be released widely so that the public can see them for themselves, rather than allow Republicans to mischaracterize them through selective, partisan leaks.” (Politico, 8/16/2016)

(…) Among the most significant of the newly declassified documents is a memorandum written by FBI agent Joe Pientka III, the case agent on Trump-Russia. It was Pientka who, at the FBI’s New York City headquarters on August 17, 2016, purported to brief Trump and two top campaign surrogates — the aforementioned General Flynn and then–New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who was slated to run the transition if Trump won.

In reality, Pientka and the FBI regarded the occasion not as a briefing for the Republican presidential nominee but as an opportunity to interact with Donald Trump for investigative purposes. Clearly, the Bureau did that because Trump was the main subject of the investigation. The hope was that he’d blurt things out that would help the FBI prove he was an agent of Russia.

The Obama administration and the FBI knew that it was they who were meddling in a presidential campaign — using executive intelligence powers to monitor the president’s political opposition. This, they also knew, would rightly be regarded as a scandalous abuse of power if it ever became public. There was no rational or good-faith evidentiary basis to believe that Trump was in a criminal conspiracy with the Kremlin or that he’d had any role in Russian intelligence’s suspected hacking of Democratic Party email accounts.

You didn’t have to believe Trump was a savory man to know that. His top advisers were Flynn, a decorated combat veteran; Christie, a former U.S. attorney who vigorously investigated national-security cases; Rudy Giuliani, a legendary former U.S. attorney and New York City mayor who’d rallied the country against anti-American terrorism; and Jeff Sessions, a longtime U.S. senator with a strong national-defense track record. To believe Trump was unfit for the presidency on temperamental or policy grounds was a perfectly reasonable position for Obama officials to take — though an irrelevant one, since it’s up to the voters to decide who is suitable. But to claim to suspect that Trump was in a cyberespionage conspiracy with the Kremlin was inane . . . except as a subterfuge to conduct political spying, which Obama officials well knew was an abuse of power.

So they concealed it. They structured the investigation on the fiction that there was a principled distinction between Trump himself and the Trump campaign. In truth, the animating assumption of the probe was that Trump himself was acting on Russia’s behalf, either willfully or under the duress of blackmail. By purporting to focus on the campaign, investigators had the fig leaf of deniability they needed to monitor the candidate.

Just two weeks before Pientka’s August 17 “briefing” of Trump, the FBI formally opened “Crossfire Hurricane,” the codename for the Trump-Russia investigation. The Bureau also opened four Trump-Russia subfiles, related to Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos and Flynn.

There was no case file called “Donald Trump” because Trump was “Crossfire Hurricane.” The theory of Crossfire Hurricane was that Russia had blackmail information on Trump, which it could use to extort Trump into doing Putin’s bidding if Trump were elected. It was further alleged that Russia had been cultivating Trump for years and was helping Trump’s election bid in exchange for future considerations. Investigators surmised that Trump had recruited Paul Manafort (who had connections to Russian oligarchs and pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarchs) as his campaign manager, enabling Manafort to use such emissaries as Page to carry out furtive communications between Trump and the Kremlin. If elected, the theory went, Trump would steer American policy in Russia’s favor, just as the Bureau speculated that Trump was already corruptly steering the Republican party into a more pro-Moscow posture.” (Read more: National Review, 8/01/2020)  (Archive)

“Newly declassified internal Federal Bureau of Investigation documents prove the top U.S. law enforcement agency used a so-called defensive briefing of the Trump campaign in 2016 to spy on and collect information about Donald Trump himself. The new documents, which are just the latest in a string of declassifications regarding the FBI operation to spy on the Trump campaign and later the Trump administration, detail the FBI’s attempts to use a briefing ostensibly meant to warn the Trump campaign about foreign intelligence threats to spy on the Trump campaign itself.

FBI Summary Of August 17, 2… by The Federalist on Scribd

(…) In one of the documents declassified and released on Wednesday, FBI supervisory Special Agent Joe Pientka wrote that he deliberately used the briefing to “actively listen for topics or questions” from Trump “regarding the Russian Federation.” Rather than provide the Trump campaign a specific warning that certain campaign principals were being targeted by Russian intelligence, the FBI instead gave a general, non-specific warning that foreign intelligence services might eventually target the campaign.

Pientka’s written summary of the briefing noted that Trump, Michael Flynn, and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie were the only three Trump campaign members in attendance. Christie’s attendance had not previously been disclosed. The August 17, 2016 meeting came the day after the FBI opened a formal counterintelligence investigation against Flynn and just two days after FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok texted his former lover, FBI attorney Lisa Page, about an “insurance policy” he had designed to keep Trump from becoming president.

(…) Pientka was excoriated in a report from the Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of Inspector General (OIG) for his behavior during the FBI’s spy operation against the Trump campaign. Pientka told the OIG that he designed the August 17 meeting to “gain assessment and possibly have some level of familiarity with [Flynn].”

According to the OIG report, Pientka “was selected to provide the FBI briefings, in part, because Flynn, who was a subject in the ongoing Crossfire Hurricane investigation, would be attending the Trump campaign briefing.”

Pientka told the OIG that he was selected to attend on behalf of the FBI so he could “record” or “overhear” from Trump, Flynn, or Christie “any kind of admission” that they were colluding with the Russian government to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. Pientka also added that he wanted to get a baseline impression of Flynn’s “overall mannerisms” in case he needed to later use that information against him.” (Read more: The Federalist, 7/23/2020)  (Archive)

Reuters reports that the foundation has recently hired the cybersecurity company FireEye to investigte and combat hacking after seeing indications of possible hacking. This is according to two unnamed “sources familiar with the matter.”

No stolen emails or documents from the foundation have been made public so far. However, one of the sources plus two unnamed US security officials say that hackers appear to have used “spear phishing” techniques to gain access to the foundation’s network, in the same way they’ve hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and other political targets. (Reuters, 8/18/2016)

Logo of FireEye (Credit: public domain)

Earlier in the day, Reuters reported from several sources that it is likely the Clinton Foundation’s computer network has been recently hacked. But the foundation says, “We have no evidence Clinton Foundation systems were breached and have not been notified by law enforcement of an issue.”

Reuters also reported the foundation recently hired the cybersecurity company FireEye to combat hacking. The foundation has not responded to this. (Politico, 8/18/2016)

An August 18, 2016, email from FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Bill Priestap to Strzok, Moffa and a FBI official (identity redacted), asking if they “happen to know when Clinton will receive the brief? And where will it occur, and which two people has she designated to receive it with her?”

Strzok replies, “She has not designated her people and no date is set. I believe brief will be HVRA [the FBI’s Hudson Valley Resident Agent] or WPRA [FBI’s White Plains Resident Agent].”

Further on in the email exchange, the unidentified FBI official from the Washington field office writes, “There is no additional or new info as of this morning when I checked with the DNI scheduler. There is a policy that briefs will not be provided a week prior to a debate. If the other candidate does not ID people soon, there was talk that they may not be able to do them. That’s all I know at this time.”

Strzok forwards the exchange to Lisa Page and says, “And now we’ve got sources in dni <smiley emoji>.”

Page replies, “Yup, I knew the same. Just hadn’t shared yet.”

Strzok responds, “What?! You holding out? <wink emoji>”

Page replies, “Time, dude. Time.”

Strzok responds, “I know, dudette. Hence, the <wink emoji>. Same realization of shit, haven’t even told you about Trump brief…”

The DOJ’s Inspector General report on “Crossfire Hurricane” describes the FBI’s use of a national security briefing to the Trump campaign in August 2016 to try to further its investigation by planting an agent in the room:

[W]e learned during the course of our review that in August 2016, the supervisor of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, SSA 1, participated on behalf of the FBI in a strategic intelligence briefing given by Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to candidate Trump and his national security advisors, including Michael Flynn, and in a separate strategic intelligence briefing given to candidate Clinton and her national security advisors. The stated purpose of the FBI portion of the briefing was to provide the recipients “a baseline on the presence and threat posed by foreign intelligence services to the National Security of the U.S.” However, we found that SSA 1 was selected to provide the FBI briefings, in part, because Flynn, who was a subject in the ongoing Crossfire Hurricane investigation, would be attending the Trump campaign briefing.

(Read more: Judicial Watch, 2/21/2020)  (Archive)

Paul Manafort (Credit: Rick Wilking/Reuters)

“The Trump campaign announced Manafort was resigning from the campaign, nearly 5 months after he joined.

“I am very appreciative for his great work in helping to get us where we are today, and in particular his work guiding us through the delegate and convention process,” Trump said in a statement. “Paul is a true professional and I wish him the greatest success.”

The Trump campaign provided no reason for Manafort’s resignation. But in the days immediately leading up to the announcement, the New York Times reported investigators were looking into $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments to Manafort from former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, and the Associated Press reported he helped a pro-Russian party in Ukraine funnel money to lobbying firms in Washington, D.C.

“I think my father didn’t want to be distracted by whatever things Paul was dealing with,” Trump’s son Eric told Fox News after the resignation. “Paul was amazing, and, yes, he helped us get through the primary process, he helped us get through the convention. He did a great job with the delegates. But, again, my father didn’t want to have the distraction looming over the campaign.”

Shortly before Manafort’s resignation, Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, now senior advisers to the White House, were brought on as the campaign’s chief executive and campaign manager, and ultimately led Trump to an unexpected victory in November. (Fortune, 3/22/2017)

If the “Ukraine meddled in 2016 is Russian propaganda” claim is right, time to cancel your subscription to the Financial Times and get the FBI on their case. The article is dated August 28, 2016.

(…) “In 2016, Serhiy Leshchenko, a Ukrainian member of parliament and an anti-corruption activist (who got embroiled in his own corruption scandal), coordinated the release of a handwritten ledger. The document purported to show off-the-book payments made to Manafort from the Party of the Regions — the political arm of the Viktor Yanukovich, the Ukrainian President who had been overthrown in a coup-type revolt by a much more western-friendly political faction. The ledger itself was released by NABU, a Ukrainian government anti-corruption organization set up as result of prodding by the Obama Administration and which was run with the backing and financial support of the FBI.

(As an aside: NABU — which also got embroiled into its own political corruption scandal — also happens to be at the heart of an internal Ukrainian political fight that sucked in ex-Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. But that’s a different and complicated story. And then there’s the weird angle of the FBI being so closely involved with NABU at a time when this Ukrainian anti-corruption agency decided to involve itself in an American election.)

Anyway, Leshchenko — a foreign politician — made clear that his objective at the time was to kill off Trump’s candidacy. That’s a direct admission of meddling. As Oleksiy Kuzmenko has documented so well, Leshchenko repeated this statement in various ways in both English and Ukrainian over and over again.

Lev Golinkin explained in The Nation a few months ago that the release of that ledger by Leshchenko and NABU was an important event — and a direct intervention in the election. “The story rocked the 2016 election, given Manafort’s position as head of Trump’s campaign. The Hillary Clinton campaign immediately seized on it as proof that Manafort—and therefore Trump—was tied to Yanukovych and the Kremlin,” he wrote. “Manafort was ousted based on handwritten pieces of paper—the story would’ve never gone anywhere without NABU and Leshchenko’s vouching for the ledger’s authenticity. That’s as direct as it gets.”

But three years later, this episode has been wiped from the collective memory of our media and political establishment. What used to be fact is now smeared as either a pro-Trump rightwing conspiracy theory or Russian propaganda — and probably both. But saying that it didn’t happen doesn’t change the historical record.” (Read more: The Grayzone, 11/23/2019)  (Archive)

“…Biden and Poroshenko laugh together over the release of information against former Trump campaign advisor Paul Manafort. The famous ‘black ledger’ allegedly showed off-the-books payments to Manafort from former Ukrainian President Yanukovych. The ‘black ledger’ was later found to be fabricated; however, the information was used to begin investigations into Manfort; he was forced to resign from Trump’s team prior to the election.

In the tape below, Biden and Poroshenko can be heard laughing about the incident.

Local Ukrainian media reports:

“During a telephone conversation, Poroshenko said one phrase that could cost Biden the entire presidential race, as well as serve as the beginning of an investigation into Ukraine’s interference in the electoral process with the support of the Democratic Party.

According to Poroshenko, taking adviser Yanukovych Manfort to Trump’s team was a bad idea: “And one more thing, just as a joke. We published documents of the former Party of Regions. As I understand it, one of Mr. Trump’s key advisers, Paul Manafort, resigned today … As for me, it was a bad idea to take Advisor Yanukovych to Trump’s team. ”

Poroshenko clearly said: “we published.” This is important, as it can be evidence that it was Poroshenko who led the intervention operation.

We will be back in May 2016. Then the former People’s Deputy Sergei Leshchenko published material on the “black bookkeeping” of the Party of Regions, on the basis of which the total cost of political needs of the Yanukovych clan settled to more than $ 66 million. The materials also turned out to be the name of Paul Manafort.”  

(Read more: CreativeDestructionMedia, 7/9/2020) (Archive)

Judge Emmet Sullivan, District Court for the District of Columbia, (Credit: Diego M. Radzinschi / The National Law Journal)

Judicial Watch has been seeking to have Clinton deposed as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit involving her emails. However, US District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan rules: “Judicial Watch’s argument that a deposition is preferable in this case because of the ability to ask follow-up questions is not persuasive. Given the extensive public record related to the clintonemail.com system, a record which Judicial Watch has acknowledged

Judicial Watch will be able to anticipate many follow-up questions. For those follow-up questions that Judicial Watch is unable to anticipate, it can move this Court for permission to serve additional interrogatories.”

Sullivan notes that due to legal precedents applicable to current and former Cabinet officials, he should only require Clinton to appear at a deposition if “exceptional circumstances” justify it.

Sullivan says he is still intent on finding out why Clinton’s private server was set up and whether there were other reasons beyond Clinton’s public claim of “convenience.” He also says it is important that she at least answer questions in writing about this because depositions of Clinton’s staff had shown that “her closest aides at the State Department do not have personal knowledge of her purpose in using the [server].”

Politico notes, “Technically, it is still possible one of several other judges considering similar cases could issue such an order [for Clinton to be deposed in person], but the clock may run out soon on efforts to force such an appearance in advance of the November [presidential] election.”

Judicial Watch also asked for the depositions of former State Department officials Clarence Finney and John Bentel.

Sullivan rejects the deposition of Finney, despite the fact that Finney’s job was to organize responses to FOIA requests. However, he does order the future deposition of Bentel. It has been reported that Bentel blocked other department employees from raising questions about Clinton’s use of her server. (Politico, 8/19/2016)

Roger Stone (Credit: CBS Miami)

Roger Stone writes on Twitter, “Trust me, it will soon be [John] Podesta’s time in the barrel.” (Twitter, 8/21/2016) Stone is a Republican strategist and confidant of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, while Podesta is Clinton’s campaign chair.

On October 7, 2016, Stone’s Tweet will take on new meaning when WikiLeaks begins posting thousands of Podesta’s private emails.

Several days later, Podesta will cite this Tweet and then claim “it’s a reasonable assumption, or at least a reasonable conclusion, that Mr. Stone had advance warning and the Trump campaign had advance warning” about the WikiLeaks release. (The Washington Post, 10/11/2016)

However, Stone will claim that the Tweet was in reference to a separate story he was working on that would accuse Podesta of possible criminal wrongdoing. But he will also say that he has had “back-channel communications” with WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange through a mutual friend. (CBS Miami, 10/12/2016)

“Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager said Sunday there are serious questions about whether Donald Trump is a “puppet” for Russia.

“We now need Donald Trump to explain to us the extent to which the hand of the Kremlin is at the core of his own campaign,” Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said on ABC’s This Week. “There’s a web of financial interests that have not been disclosed. And there are real questions being raised about whether Donald Trump himself is just a puppet for the Kremlin in this race.”

Mook said that the departure of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort from the campaign last week “doesn’t mean that the Russians have been pushed out of this campaign.”

Manafort resigned Friday amid reports about his business dealings with Ukrainian leaders aligned with Russia. Those reports involved allegations of millions of dollars in cash payments and secret lobbying efforts in the U.S. Manafort has denied the allegations.

“The hand of the Kremlin has been at work in this (Trump’s) campaign for some time,” Mook said. “It’s clear that they are supporting Donald Trump.” (Read more: USA Today, 8/21/2016)

Representative Lamar Smith (Credit: public domain)

Representative Lamar Smith (R), chair of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology, issues subpoenas for Platte River Networks, which managed Clinton’s server from May 2013 until August 2015; Datto, Inc., which made back-up copies of the server; and SECNAP, which carried out threat monitoring of the network connected to Clinton’s server. Smith wants documents from the companies by September 9, 2016, after they declined to voluntarily produce them. Congressional committees requested information since August and November 2015, to no avail. The companies had been threatened with subpoenas on July 12, 2016.

Smith comments, “Companies providing services to Secretary Hillary Clinton’s private email account and server are not above the law.” He claims the information he is seeking is “critical to… informing policy changes in how to prevent similar email arrangements in the future.”

Smith is working with Senator Ron Johnson (R), chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. They are looking for information about breaches or potential breaches, and documents that detail the scope of the work of each company. (The Washington Post, 8/22/2016)

Representative Jason Chaffetz (Credit: The Associated Press)

Representative Jason Chaffetz (R), chair of the House Oversight Committee, has started looking over the documents the FBI gave to Congress several days earlier. He complains about the “high level of redactions.”

He says: “Hillary Clinton is out there saying there’s not very much sensitive information in there, that she didn’t trade in sensitive classified information. It’s so sensitive and so classified that even I as the chairman of the Oversight Committee don’t have the high level of clearance to see what’s in those materials. I think the documents are overly classified. We’re going to call on the FBI this week to give us a version where there’s non-classified, the unclassified material, and the classified material redacted so that that could be out there in the public. I think that’s the right thing to do.”

He adds that he is not accusing the FBI of protecting Clinton, but “A lot of this that they claim is classified is just flat-out embarrassing. There’s nothing classified about it, it’s just embarrassing. It’s a lot of immature name-calling, stuff like that.”

Chaffetz also says that when he asked the FBI to provide a second copy of the documents in a classified setting, he was given documents that are “different.” “So we have a second set of documents that’s now different. When you turn them page by page, they’re different. I don’t know why that happened.” He is trying to resolve the issue. (Politico, 8/22/2016)

During the FBI’s Clinton email investigation, the FBI found some of Clinton’s over 31,000 deleted emails from when she was secretary of state. At the conclusion of the investigation in July 2016, FBI Director James Comey said the FBI “discovered several thousand work-related emails,” but is it uncertain exactly how many of these emails were found, either work-related or personal. The FBI has given the State Department a CD containing the found emails, and the department has said it will publicly release all the work-related ones.

US District Judge James Boasberg (Credit: Diego M. Radzinschi / National Law Review)

In a court hearing presided by US District Judge James Boasberg on this day, it is revealed that the CD contains around 14,900 emails. Boasberg orders the State Department to review the emails for public release in response to various Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits by Judicial Watch. However, it is still unclear if any of these are duplicates of the 30,000 Clinton emails already publicly released. Furthermore, it is unknown how many of the found deleted emails are personal and how many are work-related (aside from Comey’s vague “several thousand” emails comment).

In addtion, the FBI has given the State Department seven other CDs: one contains classified documents related to Clinton, another contains emails returned by Clinton, and the other five contain materials from other people that was retrieved by the FBI.

State Department spokesperson Mark Toner says, “We can confirm that the FBI material includes tens of thousands of non-record (meaning personal) and record materials that will have to be carefully appraised at State. State has not yet had the opportunity to complete a review of the documents to determine whether they are agency records or if they are duplicative of documents State has already produced through the Freedom of Information Act.”

Regarding the CD of Clinton emails, Toner says, “We still don’t have a full sense of how many of the 14,900 are new. Granted, that’s a healthy number there, so there’s likely to be quite a few.”

Republican National Committee (RNC) chair Reince Priebus comments, “The process for reviewing these emails needs to be expedited, public disclosure should begin before early voting starts, and the emails in question should be released in full before Election Day.” (Politico, 8/22/2016) (The Washington Post, 8/22/2016)

On September 23, 2016, it will be revealed that 5,600 of the 14,900 recovered emails are deemed work-related.

Cyber attacks on such media organizations have been “detected in recent months,” and are being investigated by the FBI and other US agencies. CNN reports, “Investigators so far believe that Russian intelligence is likely behind the attacks and that Russian hackers are targeting news organizations as part of a broader series of hacks that also have focused on Democratic Party organizations,” according to unnamed US officials.

Little has been publicly revealed about the media attacks except for the attacks on the New York Times. The Times says their email services are outsourced to Google and they have no evidence that their computer networks have been compromised. CNN claims that individual reporters have been targeted, not entire networks, but it is unclear how many were targeted or how many had their email accounts breached.

CNN further reports, “US intelligence officials believe the picture emerging from the series of recent intrusions is that Russian spy agencies are using a wave of cyber attacks, including against think-tanks in Washington, to gather intelligence from a broad array of non-governmental organizations with windows into the US political system. News organizations are considered top targets because they can yield valuable intelligence on reporter contacts in the government, as well as communications and unpublished works with sensitive information…” (CNN, 8/23/2016)

The Associated Press is less definitive about who might be responsible, saying that an unnamed US official claims the FBI is looking into whether Russian intelligence agencies are responsible for the hacking attempts. (The Associated Press, 8/23/2016)

When WikiLeaks head Julian Assange is asked if this information could be a “game-changer” in the election, he replies, “I think it’s significant. You know, it depends on how it catches fire in the public and in the media.”

He also says, “I don’t want to give the game away, but it’s a variety of documents, from different types of institutions that are associated with the election campaign, some quite unexpected angles, some quite interesting, some even entertaining.” (Reuters, 8/24/2016)

Since late 2014, when Clinton and her lawyers deleted over 31,000 of Clinton’s emails from when she was secretary of state, it has been unclear if the emails were simply deleted or “wiped,” meaning deliberate steps were taken to make sure they couldn’t be recovered later.

Trey Gowdy appears with Martha MacCallum on Fox News on August 25, 2016. (Credit: Fox News)

In an interview, Representative Trey Gowdy (R) says that, “[Clinton] and her lawyers [Cheryl Mills, David Kendall, and Heather Samuelson] had those emails deleted. And they didn’t just push the delete button; they had them deleted where even God can’t read them. They were using something called BleachBit. You don’t use BleachBit for yoga emails or bridemaids emails. When you’re using BleachBit, it is something you really do not want the world to see.”

BleachBit Logo (Credit: public domain)

BleachBit is computer software whose website advertises that it can “prevent recovery” of files. Politico notes that if Gowdy is correct, this would be “further proof that Clinton had something to hide in deleting personal emails from the private email system she used during her tenure as secretary of state.” It is not explained how Gowdy might know this, but his comments come only a few days after the FBI gave raw materials about their Clinton email investigation to Congress. (Politico, 8/25/2016)

Gowdy’s claim contradicts what FBI Director James Comey said on July 5, 2016 when he announced that he would not recommend charging Clinton with any crime. At that time, Comey stated, “we found no evidence that any of the additional work-related emails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them. Our assessment is that, like many email users, Secretary Clinton periodically deleted emails or emails were purged from the system when devices were changed.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 7/5/2016)

Within hours of Gowdy’s comments, BleachBit updates their website to say: “Last year when Clinton was asked about wiping her email server, she joked, ‘Like with a cloth or something?’ It turns out now that BleachBit was that cloth, according to remarks by Gowdy.” The website also notes, “As of the time of writing BleachBit has not been served a warrant or subpoena in relation to the investigation. … The cleaning process [of our program] is not reversible.” (BleachBit, 8/25/2016)

On September 2, 2016, the FBI’s final report on their Clinton email investigation will be released, and it will be revealed that BleachBit was used on Clinton’s server in late March 2015. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

John Brennan (Credit: Al Drago/New York Times)

“The C.I.A. told senior lawmakers in classified briefings last summer that it had information indicating that Russia was working to help elect Donald J. Trump president, a finding that did not emerge publicly until after Mr. Trump’s victory months later, former government officials say.”

(…) “The former officials said that in late August — 10 weeks before the election — John O. Brennan, then the C.I.A. director, was so concerned about increasing evidence of Russia’s election meddling that he began a series of urgent, individual briefings for eight top members of Congress, some of them on secure phone lines while they were on their summer break.

It is unclear what new intelligence might have prompted the classified briefings. But with concerns growing both internally and publicly at the time about a significant Russian breach of the Democratic National Committee, the C.I.A. began seeing signs of possible connections to the Trump campaign, the officials said. By the campaign’s final weeks, Congress and the intelligence agencies were racing to understand the scope of the Russia threat.

In an Aug. 25 briefing for Harry Reid, then the top Democrat in the Senate, Mr. Brennan indicated that Russia’s hackings appeared aimed at helping Mr. Trump win the November election, according to two former officials with knowledge of the briefing.

The officials said Mr. Brennan also indicated that unnamed advisers to Mr. Trump might be working with the Russians to interfere in the election. The F.B.I. and two congressional committees are now investigating that claim, focusing on possible communications and financial dealings between Russian affiliates and a handful of former advisers to Mr. Trump. So far, no proof of collusion has emerged publicly.” (Read more: New York Times, 4/06/2017)

Yuriy Lutsenko (Credit: Reuters)

“A few months after Joe Biden forced the firing of Ukraine’s chief prosecutor, his son’s company Burisma Holdings courted the replacement with a promise to bring him to Washington to meet with Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the final weeks of the 2016 election, newly released State Department memos reveal.

Burisma’s effort to woo — through its Democrat-tied U.S. lobbying firm — newly installed Ukraine Prosecutor-General Yuriy Lutsenko raised concerns at the highest levels of the U.S. embassy in Kiev, where officials tried to talk the prosecutor out of the trip given the fact he was overseeing a probe of the gas company.

 A snippet of George Kent email about Lutsenko/Blue Star trip

“Lutsenko now likely not to go to DC with Blue Star,” senior State official George Kent wrote then-Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch in September 2016 after talking with Lutsenko about the bad optics of the trip.

“He got the drift,” Kent added. “Not ideal timing, little receptive audience and wrong facilitator. He said he’d figure out a better time when there would be more traction/better audience.” (Read more: Just the News, 11/01/2020)  (Archive)

Clinton does a call-in interview with Mika Brzezinski on August 26, 2016. (Credit: MSNBC)

Clinton is asked by MSNBC journalist Mika Brzezinski, “Are you certain that there are no emails or foundation ties to foreign entities that will be revealed that could perhaps permanently impact your presidential prospects?”

Clinton replies, “Mika, I am sure, and I am sure because I have a very strong foundation of understanding about the foundation—not to have a play on words—that the kind of work the foundation has done which attracted donors from around the world is work that went right into providing services to people.” (Politico, 8/26/2016)

“Judicial Watch announced today it received 191 pages of emails between former FBI official Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page which include an August 26, 2016, email in which Strzok says that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in her interview with the FBI about her email controversy apologized for “the work and effort” it caused the bureau and said she chose to use it “out of convenience” and that “it proved to be anything but.”

Strzok said Clinton’s apology and the “convenience” discussion were “not in” the FBI 302 report which summarized the interview.

(…) The new records include an August 26, 2016, email from CNN’s Even Perez to Michael Kortan, the FBI’s assistant director for public affairs, saying: “Do you know if Gowdy is right that the FBI didn’t ask Clinton about her intent? And is that weird?”

Kortan forwards the email to Strzok, saying, “The question of the day …”

Strzok replies to Kortan, “I know, I was getting increasingly irritated at Gowdy last night. I don’t know the basis for him saying that. We certainly asked her. She said she did it for convenience because she wanted one system for email. We also asked those close to her – Abedin and Mills specifically – who said the same thing.

“[Redacted] but we can find the references in the 302 which discuss it.

“Though not in the 302, at the end of the interview she apologized for the work and effort it created for the FBI. She said words to the effect of, I’m sorry this has caused so much work and expenditure of resources by the FBI. I chose to use my own server out of convenience; it proved to be anything but.”

Strzok forwarded the exchange to Page, saying, “Need to nip this in the bud.”

(Read more: Judicial Watch, 2/21/2020)  (Archive)  (Emails PDF)

In the early morning of August 26, 2016, Strzok sends Page a text expressing anger at Trey Gowdy and says, “he’s really starting to p*ss me off.”

(Trey Gowdy appeared on Fox News the previous evening, discussing the Clinton team’s use of BleachBit to destroy her emails.) (Fox News, 8/26/2016)

Later that day, Strzok writes: “Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support…”

On August 27, 2016, Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, responds to Brennan’s recent briefing by writing a letter to FBI director, James Comey, expressing concerns that Trump is an “unwitting agent” of the Kremlin and that Russia is attempting to influence the presidential election. He then requests that the F.B.I. open an investigation.

(Reid Letter to Comey, 8/27/2016)

Just one month earlier, former Secretary of State Colin Powell suggested that Clinton had shot herself in the foot by not apologizing immediately and by dragging out her email controversy.

A sample of Colin Powell’s leaked emails published by DCLinks.com. (Credit: public domain)

The Intercept later highlights an email Powell writes on August 28, 2016 which states, “HRC could have killed this two years ago by merely telling everyone honestly what she had done and not tie me to it.”

Powell says he tried to put an end to the matter by meeting with Cheryl Mills earlier that month. Instead, he writes, “I told her staff three times not to try that gambit. I had to throw a mini tantrum at a Hampton’s [sic] party to get their attention. She keeps tripping into these ‘character’ minefields.”

The emails reveal Powell isn’t shy about sharing his frustrations over the Clinton campaign’s attempt to “blur the lines between Clinton’s private email server and Powell’s AOL account,” according to the Intercept. He suggests to dozens of reporters and producers who emailed him to read his book, “It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership,” in which he devoted an entire chapter to his efforts to revamp the State Department’s IT system.”

Powell also argues, when he arrived at the State Department, the information technology system was extremely outdated.  The Intercept will conclude, “[U]nlike Clinton, Powell never set up a private server. Instead, he used his personal AOL [AmericaOnline] account, on a server maintained by AOL, and used a government computer for classified communications.” (The Intercept, 09/13/16)

The hacker website DCLeaks.com will publish Colin Powell’s hacked emails on September 13, 2016.

Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin at home with their son in 2013. (Credit: Elinor Carucci / NY Magazine)

Huma Abedin, a top aide to Clinton, announces that she is separating from her husband Anthony Weiner, and is pursuing a divorce from him. This will later have an important impact on the FBI’s Clinton email investigation. Weiner was a Democratic Congressperson until 2011 when he resigned due to a sexting scandal – sending sexual texts to other women that were made public. Another sexting scandal involving him ended his 2013 campaign to be mayor of New York City. Abedin’s announcement comes one day after yet more new sexting by Weiner is made public, this time allegedly to a 15-year-old girl.  (The New York Times, 8/29/2016)

On October 28, 2016, FBI Director James Comey will announce that the FBI’s Clinton email investigation will be at least partially reopened due to thousands of Abedin’s emails found on a computer used by both Weiner and Abedin that was seized by the FBI as part of their unrelated investigation into Weiner’s sexting with the underaged girl.

Harry Reid (Credit: public domain)

“In a letter to the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey Jr., Mr. Reid wrote that the threat of Russian interference “is more extensive than is widely known and may include the intent to falsify official election results.” Recent classified briefings from senior intelligence officials, Mr. Reid said in an interview, have left him fearful that President Vladimir V. Putin’s “goal is tampering with this election.”

(…) “Mr. Reid’s accusation that Russia is seeking not only to influence the election with propaganda but also to tamper with the vote counting goes significantly beyond anything the Obama administration has said in public.

While intelligence agencies have told the White House that they have “high confidence” that Russian intelligence services were behind the hacking of the Democratic committee, the administration has not leveled any accusations against Mr. Putin’s government. Asked about that in the interview, Mr. Reid said he was free to say things the president was not.

But Mr. Reid argued that the connections between some of Donald J. Trump’s former and current advisers and the Russian leadership should, by itself, prompt an investigation. He referred indirectly in his letter to a speech given in Russia by one Trump adviser, Carter Page, a consultant and investor in the energy giant Gazprom, who criticized American sanctions policy toward Russia.

“Trump and his people keep saying the election is rigged,” Mr. Reid said. “Why is he saying that? Because people are telling him the election can be messed with.” Mr. Trump’s advisers say they are concerned that unnamed elites could rig the election for his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Reid argued that if Russia concentrated on “less than six” swing states, it could alter results and undermine confidence in the electoral system. That would pose challenges, given that most states have paper backups, but he noted that hackers could keep people from voting by tampering with the rolls of eligible voters.” (Read more: New York Times, 8/29/2016)

Harold T. Martin III (Credit: public domain)

“In early October 2016, news broke that a contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) had been arrested over the possible theft of state secrets. Since then, little media attention has been given to what the U.S. government has called the largest theft of classified information in U.S. history, or the man allegedly behind it.

Initially arrested in August 2016 — after terabytes upon terabytes of classified information were discovered at his home, information that was taken over a period of two decades — Harold T. Martin III has been held in pre-trial detention ever since. Martin, who worked for the same government contractor as NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, has yet to enter into a plea agreement for the 20 felony counts he faces, as government prosecutors have struggled to build a strong case against him. Yet, unlike in the cases of Snowden and other alleged leakers awaiting trial like Reality Winner, the press coverage of Martin’s case has been scarce.

Complaint

The lack of coverage stems in part from the fact that the government has struggled to build its case against Martin, who was initially nicknamed the “second Snowden,” as it remains unclear what Martin did with the estimated 50 terabytes of data – a cache nearly 20 times greater than the Panama Papers.

(…) According to court documents, Martin’s case is just as complex as the man himself, making it difficult to ascribe his intent. For one thing, Martin’s habit of taking government documents home remained undetected for over 20 years – even after tightening of security following the Snowden leaks – and he extensively used “sophisticated encryption, anonymization, and virtual machine technologies” to hide his actions online.

He also possessed “remote data storage accounts” as well as “encrypted communication and cloud storage apps installed on his mobile device.” Federal prosecutors have also asserted that Martin “was in possession of a sophisticated software tool which runs without being installed on a computer and provided anonymous internet access, leaving no digital footprint.” And they have asserted that Martin “communicated online with others in languages other than English, including Russian” via an encrypted connection.

In addition, Martin’s cache of documents, stored at his home and in his car, were accompanied by “handwritten notes [that] also include descriptions of the most basic concepts associated with classified operations, as if the notes were intended for an audience outside of the Intelligence Community unfamiliar with the details of its operations.”

Martin was also heavily armed, a fact that was apparently unknown to his wife, who was shocked when the FBI removed 10 firearms from his residence, including an AR-style tactical rifle and a shotgun with a flash suppressor. Only two of the weapons were registered.

He also initially lied to authorities about the thefts of the documents, only admitting his unauthorized removal of the documents when confronted with examples of the classified information found in his possession.

There is also evidence suggesting that Martin may not be as “apolitical” as his defense has sought to portray him. Court documents reveal that he often complained about the NSA’s incompetence, claiming in one letter that his co-workers were “missing most of the basics in security practice.” In addition, Martin — who served in Operation Desert Storm — was deeply affected by his experiences in the military and, according to a former mentor, showed an “intense personal and professional interest in the post-traumatic stress disorder.”

However, the most compelling evidence that there is more to this case is how Martin’s theft of classified documents was discovered. According to The New York Times, federal investigators stumbled upon Martin’s trove of documents, investigating him only after uncovering a comment Martin had posted online – the contents of which are still unknown – made him a prime suspect in the “Shadow Brokers” leak.” (Read more: Whitney Webb, 3/20/2018)

US District Judge Amit Mehta (Credit: public domain)

US District Court Judge Amit Mehta is presiding over a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit initiated by Judicial Watch regarding the public release of information relating to the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya. The FBI recently gave the State Department almost 15,000 previously unknown Clinton emails, so Mehta wants to know if any of them relate to Benghazi.

State Department spokesperson John Kirby says, “Using broad search terms, we have identified approximately 30 documents potentially responsive to a Benghazi-related request. At this time, we have not confirmed that the documents are, in fact, responsive, or whether they are duplicates of materials already provided to the department by former Secretary Clinton in December 2014.” The department says it will need until the end of September 2016 to review the 30 or so emails and redact any classified information in them.

However, Mehta doesn’t understand why it would take the department so long to process so few emails. He orders the department to return in a week to try to justify the processing time.

Starting in mid-2014, Clinton was specifically asked for all her emails related to Benghazi, months before she was asked for all her work-related emails in general. The Benghazi-related emails were the first of her emails to be released, in early 2015.

Jason Miller, senior communications adviser for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, says, “Clinton swore before a federal court and told the American people she handed over all of her work-related emails. If Clinton did not consider emails about something as important as Benghazi to be work-related, one has to wonder what is contained in the other emails she attempted to wipe from her server.” (The Hill, 8/30/2016)

On August 30, 2016, former FBI Director James Comey emails then-Assistant Director Andrew McCabe, copying Page, James Baker, Priestap and James Trainor with the subject line “WH” and said “Both meetings went well and I was well prepared.… I will need an update briefing on [redacted] next week. As you might imagine, there was great interest in what each of us is doing on that front and in understanding what more we can do and the obstacles we see.” Page forwards the email to Strzok, who replied, “Thanks. Bill asked me as I was leaving if I thought it should be in CD [Counterintelligence Division]. Guessing this prompted it. I said yes then described and endorsed Allies reorganization idea.” (Judicial Watch, 2/21/2020)  (Archive)

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“On 31 August 2016, the hacker (or hackers) operating under the name Guccifer 2.0 (previously associated with a number of breaches of Democratic National Committee material) released a controversial document that purportedly outlined recommended practices for Democratic candidates’ engaging with the Black Lives Matter movement in 2015.

Clipping of DCCC email/Guccifer 2.0

Troy Perry (Credit: public domain)

A number of documents supposedly accessed from the computer of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi were posted to Guccifer 2.0’s blog, among them a 19 November 2015 memo to Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) workers from staffer Troy Perry:

Presidential candidates have struggled to respond to tactics of the Black Lives Matter movement. While there has been little engagement with House candidates, candidates and campaign staff should be prepared. This document should not be emailed or handed to anyone outside of the building. Please only give campaign staff these best practices in meetings or over the phone.

In a sub-section of that document, DCCC staffers were advised to offer limited invitations for meetings with Black Lives Matter activists and not to “offer support for concrete policy positions” about the movement:

Tactics
Meet with Local Activists

° If approached by BLM activists, campaign staff should offer to meet with local activists. Invited BLM attendees should be limited. Please aim for personal or small group meetings.

° Listen to their concerns
° Don’t offer support for concrete policy positions
° Frontline district staff should meet with activists

Provide a Point Person

Always provide a campaign contact person for BLM activists. It is important to let activists know the campaign wants to engage in an open dialogue.

In response to the leaked documents, DCCC national press secretary Meredith Kelly said in a statement that:

The DCCC highly respects and values the leadership of the Black Lives Matter movement. In less than two years, BLM has evolved from three words into a political force that is changing and waking our nation. At the DCCC, we highly encourage our candidates to not only embrace the importance of this movement, but to meet with and listen to community activists to partner social change.

We will not allow this hacking to distract from our common goals nor disparage the BLM movement. We continue to welcome further engagement with activists and BLM leaders nationwide.

The Black Lives Matter movement expressed disappointment with the contents of the revealed material in a statement posted to Facebook and Twitter:

We are disappointed at the DCCC’s placating response to our demand to value all Black life. Black communities deserve to be heard, not handled. People are dying.

Whether Republican, Democrat or otherwise, our elected officials have an ethical and democratic responsibility to make legislation that reflects the needs of their constituents. That includes Black people facing life-threatening challenges because of racist, failed policies.

We demand, and are fighting every day for, a radical transformation of American democracy where all Black lives are valued.

Prominent Black Lives Matter activist Deray Mckesson published a tweet questioning whether the DNCC’s stance had changed since November 2015:

The DNCC memo re: the movement highlights a serious lack of attention to issues related to black people. Has their view changed since 2015?

— deray mckesson (@deray) August 31, 2016

Fellow activist Shaun King also tweeted a criticism:

In the leaked memo, the Democratic Party instructs politicians how to be polite with #BlackLivesMatter activists without actually helping. — Shaun King (@ShaunKing) August 31, 2016

The DCCC acknowledged Guccifer 2.0’s Black Lives Matter document leak, but the DCCC has not yet issued any official comment on the content of the leak (or any dispute of its authenticity), and Nancy Pelosi has so far declined to comment.

The authenticity of previous DNC leaks was not questioned by any involved parties, and several high-ranking DNC officials (including former chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz) resigned in the aftermath.” (Snopes, 8/31/2016)  (Archive)

On August 31, 2016, a redacted FBI General Counsel official asks Strzok and Page if they should respond to a Washington Times article that asserts that the FBI found “hundreds, and likely thousands, of violations of the Federal Records Act” by Clinton in her non-government email server use. Strzok’s immediate reply is redacted. Strzok ends up asking for the article to be sent to him. (Judicial Watch, 2/21/2020)   (Archive)

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Sam Clovis (Credit: public domain)

“In late summer, the professor met with Trump campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis for coffee in Northern Virginia, offering to provide foreign-policy expertise to the Trump effort. In September, he reached out to George Papadopoulos, an unpaid foreign-policy adviser for the campaign, inviting him to London to work on a research paper.”

(…) “In late August 2016, the professor reached out to Clovis, asking if they could meet somewhere in the Washington area, according to Clovis’s attorney, Victoria Toensing.

“He said he wanted to be helpful to the campaign” and lend the Trump team his foreign-policy experience, Toensing said.

Clovis, an Iowa political figure and former Air Force officer, met the source and chatted briefly with him over coffee, on either Aug. 31 or Sept. 1, at a hotel cafe in Crystal City, she said. Most of the discussion involved him asking Clovis his views on China.

“It was two academics discussing China,” Toensing said. “Russia never came up.”

The professor asked Clovis if they could meet again, but Clovis was too busy with the campaign. After the election, the professor sent him a note of congratulations, Toensing said.

Clovis did not view the interactions as suspicious at the time, Toensing said, but now is unsettled that the professor never mentioned his contacts with other Trump aides.” (Read more: Washington Post, 5/18/2018)