Although the FBI’s Clinton email investigation was closed in July 2016, the FBI’s Clinton Foundation investigation continues, though it never has had grand jury backing and thus no subpoena power.
Clinton speaks at the 10th Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) annual meeting in September, 2014. (Credit: Mark Lennihan / The Associated Press)
The email investigation uncovered many thousands of emails on non-government computers belonging to Clinton and some of her aides, and many of these same people had obvious roles with the Clinton Foundation. As a result, sometime in September 2016, Clinton Foundation investigators ask to have access to the emails found in the Clinton email investigation.
But that request is rejected by prosecutors at the Eastern District of New York. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Those emails were given to the FBI based on grants of partial immunity and limited-use agreements, meaning agents could only use them for the purpose of investigating possible mishandling of classified information. Some FBI agents were dissatisfied with that answer, and asked for permission to make a similar request to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, according to people familiar with the matter.”
However, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe allegedly tells them no and says they can’t “go prosecutor shopping.”
In early October 2016, a different FBI investigation will find emails belonging to Clinton aide Huma Abedin on a previously unknown computer, leading to a different legal issue about sharing information between various FBI investigations.
It appears the FBI’s Clinton Foundation investigation still has not been given access to the possibly relevant emails found by the Clinton email investigation. (The Wall Street Journal, 10/30/2016)
Russian President Vladimir Putin says in an interview about accusations of Russian government in the hacking of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails: “Listen, does it even matter who hacked this data? The important thing is the content that was given to the public …. There’s no need to distract the public’s attention from the essence of the problem by raising some minor issues connected with the search for who did it. … But I want to tell you again, I don’t know anything about it, and on a state level Russia has never done this.”
However, an internal probe conducted by CrowdStrike Inc. traced the source of the hack to two Russian hacking groups connected with Russian intelligence, “Cozy Bear” and “Fancy Bear.”
James Lewis (Credit: public domain)
James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, claims that Russia has engaged in state hacking in the past and that Putin’s denials are “not credible.”
Putin continues: “You know how many hackers there are today? They act so delicately and precisely that they can leave their mark — or even the mark of others — at the necessary time and place, camouflaging their activities as that of other hackers from other territories or countries. It’s an extremely difficult thing to check, if it’s even possible to check. At any rate, we definitely don’t do this at a state level.” (Bloomberg News, 9/1/2016)
Guccifer, whose real name is Marcel-Lehel Lazar, pled guilty in a US court to two charges earlier in the year, eliminating the need for a trial. He admitted to targeting over 100 Americans over a 14-month period. When he broke into the email account of Clinton confidant Sid Blumenthal in March 2013, he publicly exposed Clinton’s private email address for the first time.
Guccifer has been cooperating with US officials, but federal prosecutors sought a maximum penalty of four and a half years anyway. US District Judge James Cacheris imposes sentence only three months short of that, saying a tough penalty is needed to deter future hacking. Furthermore, while Guccifer confessed, he showed no remorse.
He had already been sentenced to a seven year prison term for hacking in Romania, and was extradited to the US to face charges there. The Romanian government has asked that he be immediately returned to Romania to finish serving his time there. Then, in 2018, he would be sent back to the US to serve his US prison sentence. (The Washington Post, 9/1/2016)
Lisa Monaco (Credit: Geert Vanden Wijngaert/The Associated Press)
“In early September, Johnson, Comey and Monaco arrived on Capitol Hill in a caravan of black SUVs for a meeting with 12 key members of Congress, including the leadership of both parties.
The meeting devolved into a partisan squabble.
“The Dems were, ‘Hey, we have to tell the public,’” recalled one participant. But Republicans resisted, arguing that to warn the public that the election was under attack would further Russia’s aim of sapping confidence in the system.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) went further, officials said, voicing skepticism that the underlying intelligence truly supported the White House’s claims. Through a spokeswoman, McConnell declined to comment, citing the secrecy of that meeting.
Key Democrats were stunned by the GOP response and exasperated that the White House seemed willing to let Republican opposition block any pre-election move.
On Sept. 22, two California Democrats — Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam B. Schiff — did what they couldn’t get the White House to do. They issued a statement making clear that they had learned from intelligence briefings that Russia was directing a campaign to undermine the election, but they stopped short of saying to what end.
A week later, McConnell and other congressional leaders issued a cautious statement that encouraged state election officials to ensure their networks were “secure from attack.” The release made no mention of Russia and emphasized that the lawmakers “would oppose any effort by the federal government” to encroach on the states’ authorities.” (Read more: Washington Post, 6/23/2017)
(…) “In essence, Christopher Steele was interested in getting Oleg Deripaska a new VISA to enter the U.S. Steele was very persistent on this endeavor and was soliciting Bruce Ohr for any assistance. This also sets up a quid-pro-quo probability where the DOJ/FBI agrees to remove travel restrictions on Deripaska in exchange for cooperation on ‘other matters.’
Now we skip ahead a little bit to where Deripaska gained an entry visa, and one of Oleg Deripaska’s lawyers and lobbyists Adam Waldman was representing his interests in the U.S. to politicians and officials. In May of 2018, John Solomon was contacted by Adam Waldman with a story about how the FBI contacted Deripaska for help in their Trump Russia investigation in September of 2016.
(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)
Keep in mind, this is Waldman contacting Solomon with a story.
Waldman told Solomon a story about how his client Oleg Deripaska was approached by the FBI in September of 2016 and asked for help with information about Paul Manafort and by extension Donald Trump. Within the backstory for the FBI and Deripaska was a prior connection between Robert Mueller and Deripaska in 2009.
Again, as you read the recap, remember this is Waldman contacting Solomon. Article Link Here – and my summary below:
♦In 2009 the FBI, then headed by Robert Mueller, requested the assistance of Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska in an operation to retrieve former FBI officer and CIA resource Robert Levinson who was captured in Iran two years earlier. The agent assigned to engage Deripaska was Andrew McCabe; the primary FBI need was financing and operational support. Deripaska spent around $25 million and would have succeeded except the U.S. State Department, then headed by Hillary Clinton, backed out.
♦In September of 2016 Andrew McCabe is now Deputy Director of the FBI, when two FBI agents approached Deripaska in New York – again asking for his help. This time the FBI request was for Deripaska to outline Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort as a tool of the Kremlin. Deripaska once hired Manafort as a political adviser and invested money with him in a business venture that went bad. Deripaska sued Manafort, alleging he stole money. However, according to the article, despite Deripaska’s disposition toward Manafort he viewed the request as absurd. He laughed the FBI away, telling them: “You are trying to create something out of nothing.”
This story, as told from the perspective of Adam Waldman, Deripaska’s lawyer/lobbyist, is important because it highlights a connection between Robert Mueller and Oleg Deripaska; a connection Mueller and the DOJ/FBI never revealed on their own.
I wrote about the ramifications of the Solomon story HERE. Again, hopefully most will review; because there’s a larger story now visible with the new communication between Christopher Steele and Bruce Ohr.
It is likely that Oleg’s 2016 entry into the U.S. was facilitated as part of a quid-pro-quo; either agreed in advance, or, more likely, planned by the DOJ/FBI for later use in their 2016 Trump operation; as evidenced in the September 2016 FBI request. Regardless of the planning aspect, billionaire Deripaska is connected to Chris Steele, a source for Chris Steele, and likely even the employer of Chris Steele.
The FBI used Oleg Deripaska (source), and Oleg Deripaska used the FBI (visa).
Here’s where it gets interesting….
In that Mayarticle John Solomon reports that Deripaska wanted to testify to congress last year (2017), without any immunity request, but was rebuked. Who blocked his testimony?
(…) “Now, think about this…. Yes, with Oleg Deripaska in the picture there was indeed Russian meddling in the 2016 election; only, it wasn’t the type of meddling currently being sold. The FBI/DOJ were using Russian Deripaska to frame their Russian conspiracy narrative. It is almost a certainty that Deripaska was one of Chris Steeles sources for the dossier.
Now, put yourself in Deripaska’s shoes and think about what happens AFTER candidate Donald Trump surprisingly wins the election.
All of a sudden Deripaska the asset becomes a risk to the corrupt Scheme Team (DOJ/FBI et al); especially as the DOJ/FBI then execute the “insurance policy” effort against Donald Trump and eventually enlist Robert Mueller.
It is entirely possible for a Russian to be blackmailing someone, but it ain’t Trump vulnerable to blackmail; it’s the conspiracy crew within the DOJ and FBI. Deripaska now has blackmail material on Comey, McCabe and crew.
After the 2017 (first year) failure of the “insurance policy” it now seems more likely President Trump will outlive the soft coup. In May 2018, Oleg tells Waldman to call John Solomon and tell him the story from a perspective favorable to Deripaska.
As the story is told, in 2017, Oleg [Deripaska] was more than willing to testify to congress…likely laughing the entire time. But the corrupt participants within congress damned sure couldn’t let Deripaska testify. Enter corrupt (SSCI) Vice-Chairman, Mark Warner:
Senator Mark Warner (l) and Senator Richard Burr confer at a Senate Intelligence Committee meeting. (Credit: public domain)
The Russians (Deripaska) really do have leverage and blackmail…but it ain’t over Trump. Oleg has blackmail on Comey, McCabe and conspiracy crew. Oleg Deripaska must be kept away from congress and away from exposing the scheme.
Guess who else must be controlled and/or kept away from congress?
Julian Assange.
Assange has evidence the Russians didn’t hack the DNC.
Between Deripaska’s first-hand knowledge of the DOJ/FBI work on both the Dossier and the DOJ/FBI intention for his use as a witness; and Julian Assange’s first-hand knowledge of who actually took the DNC email communication…well, the entire Russian narrative could explode in their faces.
You can almost hear the corrupt U.S. intelligence officials calling their U.K. GCHQ partners in Britain and yelling at them to do something, anything, and for the love of God, shut down Assange’s access to the internet STAT. Yeah, funny that.
Now, who moves into position to control Julian Assange?
BREAKING: US Senate Intelligence Committee calls editor @JulianAssange to testify. Letter delivered via US embassy in London. WikiLeaks’ legal team say they are “considering the offer but the conditions must conform to a high ethical standard”. Also: https://t.co/pPf0GTjTlppic.twitter.com/gQIUstbGbq
Apparently the SSCI wants to interview WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, in a closed session. Signed by none-other than our corrupt-o-crats Richard Burr and Mark Warner. Yeah, funny that.
Lest anyone need a reminder, the most corrupt part of congress is the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). The SSCI is the center of the deepest part of the Deep State swamp. The SSCI never, ever, E.V.E.R…does anything that does not protect and advance the self-interest of the corrupt Washington DC professional political class.” (Read much more: Conservative Treehouse, 8/10/2018)
The FBI’s 47-page final report on its Clinton email investigation and the FBI’s 11-page summary of its July 2016 interview with Clinton are publicly released. However, both are heavily redacted. The last third of the final report is entirely redacted.
A Secret Service agent stands guard while two other agents close a gate after a Secret Service vehicle arrived at the home of Clinton in Washington, DC, July 2, 2016. (Credit: Cliff Owen / The Associated Press)
The Washington Post notes, “Ordinarily internal documents from FBI investigations are not made public. However, [FBI Director James] Comey has said the unusually high profile case warranted more robust public disclosures than is standard.”
It is believed both reports were finished just prior to when Comey gave a public speech on July 5, 2016, stating that he wouldn’t recommend any indictments in this case. Clinton’s interview occurred only three days prior to this.
The New York Times, the Washington Post, and many other newspapers make the release of the two documents the main headline.
The Post comments, “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her staffers employed an informal and sometimes haphazard system for exchanging and storing sensitive information and were at times either unaware or unconcerned with State Department policy…” (The Washington Post, 9/2/2016)
The Times comments: “The documents provided a number of new details about Mrs. Clinton’s private server, including what appeared to be a frantic effort by a computer specialist to delete an archive of her emails even after a congressional committee had requested that they be preserved.”
This is a reference to the revelation that Platte River Networks (PRN) employee Paul Combetta confessed to deleting and then wiping all of Clinton’s emails off her server in late March 2015, despite him being aware of a Congressional order to preserve them. This had been entirely unknown prior to the publication of the report. (The New York Times, 9/2/2016)
The following are other key findings in the FBI documents, as pointed out by the Times or the Post:
A snippet from the FBI report released on September 2, 2016. (Credit: public domain) The opening paragraph of the FBI’s summary on Clinton’s interview, released on September 2, 2016. (Credit: public domain)
Clinton defended her handling of the private server by repeatedly saying that she deferred to the judgment of her aides.
She regarded emails containing classified discussions about planned drone strikes as “routine.” (In fact, such discussions make up most of her “top secret” emails.)
She said she did not recall receiving any emails “she thought should not be on an unclassified system.” Furthermore, she “could not recall anyone raising concerns with her regarding the sensitivity of the information she received at her email address.” (In fact, she sent or received over 2,000 emails later deemed classified, including at least 22 at the “top secret” level.)
She emailed Colin Powell a day after she was sworn into office to ask him about his use of a personal email account when he was secretary of state. Powell warned her to “be very careful” because if she used her BlackBerry for official business, those emails could become “official record[s] and subject to the law.”
Some of her closest aides were aware she used a private email address but didn’t know she had set up a private server. (However, this is actually contradicted by other evidence.)
The front page of the FBI’s final report, released on July 2, 2016. (Credit: public domain)
She regularly brought her BlackBerry into a secure area near her office where it was prohibited, according to three of her aides. However, one aide said it was only stored there, not used.
She used 13 BlackBerrys to send emails. The FBI was unable to recover any of them. Two aides said “the whereabouts of Clinton’s devices would frequently become unknown once she transitioned to a new device.”
The FBI wrote that “investigative limitations, including the FBI’s inability to obtain all mobile devices and various computer components associated with Clinton’s personal email systems, prevented the FBI from conclusively determining” whether her emails had been successfully hacked.
Shortly after she left office, a laptop was made to contain back-up copies of all her emails. However, it got lost in transit.
According to the Post, Clinton claimed she “did not know much about how the government classified information. For instance, she said she did not pay attention to the difference between levels of classification, like ‘top secret’ and ‘secret,’ indicating she took ‘all classified information seriously.'” And when she was shown an email with the (C) marking, which is commonly used by the department to indicate classified information, she didn’t recognize the marking.
The Post also notes, “she repeatedly told agents she could not recall important details or specific emails she was questioned about.” (The Washington Post, 9/2/2016)
In the FBI’s report on the Clinton email investigation, which is released on this day, it is revealed: “To date, the FBI has recovered from additional data sources and reviewed approximately 17,448 unique work-related and personal emails from Clinton’s tenure [as secretary of state] containing Clinton’s hdr22@clintonemail.com email address that were not provided by [Clinton’s law firm] Williams & Connolly as part of Clinton’s production to the FBI, including emails from January 23, 2009 through March 18, 2009.”
The report also mentions that at least some of the emails going back to the time from before March 2009, when Clinton’s first server was replaced by another one, were recovered from the first back-up of all the data on Clinton’s third server, made on June 29, 2013. That was shortly after this new server was turned on and all the data from the previous server was transferred to it.
Clinton has claimed that she kept 30,068 emails from when she was secretary of state, and deleted the other 31,830 as personal. The FBI claims they had trouble recovering all the deleted ones, because an employee of Platte River Networks, the company that managed Clinton’s servers from June 2013 onwards, used a computer program to wipe the server clean in March 2015. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)
It isn’t clear how many of the 17,448 recovered emails come from the June 29, 2013 back-up and how many come from other sources, such as the inboxes of people who sent and received emails from Clinton, or FBI efforts to recover the wiped emails. The FBI also doesn’t mention how many of the recovered emails are work-related. It was reported on July 21, 2016 that the FBI gave about 14,900 of Clinton’s recovered emails to the State Department, and the department has promised to make all the work-related ones public. But it isn’t clear why the 17,448 and 14,900 numbers differ by about 2,500 emails.
Hours after the FBI’s summary of Clinton’s July 2016 FBI interview is released, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says: “Hillary Clinton’s answers to the FBI about her private email server defy belief. I was absolutely shocked to see that her answers to the FBI stood in direct contradiction to what she told the American people. After reading these documents, I really don’t understand how she was able to get away from prosecution.” (The Washington Post, 9/2/2016)
The FBI Clinton email investigation’s final report, released on this day, states, “FBI investigation and forensic analysis did not find evidence confirming that Clinton’s email server systems were compromised by cyber means.” (Elsewhere in the report, it is mentioned that one email account on the server appears to have been broken into by hackers.)
A generic sample of what an attempted hack would look like in the log data. (Credit: public domain)
But the report goes on to state, “The FBI’s inability to recover all server equipment and the lack of complete server log data for the relevant time period limited the FBI’s forensic analysis of the server systems. As a result, FBI cyber analysis relied, in large part, on witness statements, email correspondence, and related forensic content found on other devices to understand the setup, maintenance, administration, and security of the server systems.”
Elsewhere in the report, it is noted that the FBI was unable to recover any of 13 the BlackBerry mobile devices Clinton used while or shortly after her tenure as secretary of state, a laptop containing a back-up of her emails was lost, the server most recently containing her emails was wiped with BleachBit software, the server used for her first two months in office was also lost, hard drive back-ups made were also lost, and so on. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)
At the conclusion of the FBI’s investigation on July 5, 2016, FBI Director James Comey said there was no “direct evidence” Clinton’s email account had been successfully hacked. But the next day, the New York Times reported, “both private experts and federal investigators immediately understood his meaning: It very likely had been breached, but the intruders were far too skilled to leave evidence of their work.”
After the FBI releases the FBI’s Clinton email investigation final report and the summary of Clinton’s FBI interview, there are different political reactions.
Brian Fallon (left) Reince Priebus (right) (Credits: (CNN and NBC News)
Clinton doesn’t immediately comment after the reports are released. However, the Clinton campaign claims she is pleased the documents have been made public.Her spokesperson Brian Fallon says, “While her use of a single email account was clearly a mistake and she has taken responsibility for it, these materials make clear why the Justice Department believed there was no basis to move forward with this case.” (The Washington Post, 9/2/2016)
By contrast, Reince Priebus, chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), calls the documents “a devastating indictment of her judgment, honesty and basic competency.” He adds that her responses in her FBI interview “either show she is completely incompetent or blatantly lied to the FBI or the public. Either way it’s clear that, through her own actions, she has disqualified herself from the presidency.” (The New York Times, 9/2/2016)
The FBI Clinton email investigation’s final report, released on this day, details how many of Clinton’s emails were deemed classified, and when, and at what level. This data is according to FBI and Intelligence Community (IC) classification reviews, which is different from a State Department review mentioned below:
81 email chains containing approximately 193 individual emails were classified at the “confidential,” “secret,” and “top secret” levels at the time the emails were drafted on unclassified systems and sent to or from Clinton’s personal server.
Of the 81 email chains classified at the time they were sent, 68 remain classified.
Twelve of these email chains, classified at the “confidential” or “secret” levels, were not included in the over 30,000 emails turned over by Clinton in December 2014. Apparently, no “top secret” emails were in this category.
Thirty-six of the 81 email chains were classified at the “confidential” level.
Thirty-seven of the chains were at the “secret” level.
Eight of the chains were at the “top secret” level.
Out of the eight “top secret” chains, seven chains contained information associated with a Special Access Program (SAP), and three email chains contained Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI). One “top secret”/SCI email was later downgraded to a current classification of “secret.”
Thirty-six of the 81 classified email chains were determined to be Not-Releasable to Foreign Governments (NOFORN) and 2 were considered releasable only to Five Allied partners (FVEY) – the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Sixteen of the email chains, classified at the time the emails were sent, were downgraded in current classification by Intelligence Community (IC) agencies.
By contrast, the State Department’s FOIA process identified 2,028 emails currently at the “confidential” level and 65 currently at the “secret” level, for a total of 2093 emails.
The FBI report further notes: “Of these emails, FBI investigation identified approximately 100 emails that overlapped with the 193 emails (80 email chains) determined through the FBI classification review to be classified at the time sent. All except one of the remaining 2,093 emails were determined by the State FOIA process to be ‘confidential’, with one email determined to be ‘secret’ at the time of the FOIA review. State did not provide a determination as to whether the 2,093 emails were classified at the time they were sent.”
It is unclear why the FBI and IC numbers are so different from the State Department numbers when it comes to “confidential” level emails. The FBI and IC identified 36 of the 81 email chains were classified at the “confidential” level, while the State Department identified 2,028 emails at the “confidential” level. And while one cannot compare email chains to emails, all 81 classified emails chains only contained 193 individual emails, so the 36 “confidential” chains must contain fewer emails than that.
Furthermore, the FBI found an additional 17,000 emails to the over 30,000 work-related emails Clinton gave to the State Department, and it appears these largely haven’t been analyzed. It hasn’t even been reported how many of them are work-related. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)
The FBI’s Clinton email investigation final report, released on this day, mentions: “Clinton’s immediate aides, to include [Cheryl] Mills, [Huma] Abedin, [Jake] Sullivan, and [redacted] told the FBI they were unaware of the existence of the private server until after Clinton’s tenure at [the State Department] or when it became public knowledge. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)
Huma Abedin (left) (Credit: Melissa Golden / Redux) Cheryl Mills (right) (Credit: Stephen Crowley / New York Times)
However, emails from when Clinton was secretary of state indicate otherwise, at least for Mills and Abedin:
Abedin had an email account on Clinton’s server that she often used. On February 27, 2010, she sent an email to Justin Cooper, a Bill Clinton aide helping to manage the server, “HRC [Clinton] email coming back—is server okay?” Cooper replied, “UR [You are] funny. We are on the same server.” These emails were sent to Mills as well.
On January 9, 2011, Cooper sent Abedin an email mentioning that he “had to shut down the server” due to a hacking attack.. He sent her another email later in the day, saying he had to shut it down again.
On August 30, 2011, State Department Executive Secretary Stephen Mull emailed Mills, Abedin, and two others, informing them that he was trying to give Clinton a State Department-issued Blackberry “to replace her personal unit which is malfunctioning… possibly because of [sic] her personal email server is down.” Abedin sent an email in reply, and a discussion in person apparently followed.
The FBI’s final report also indicates that Abedin was instrumental in the creation of the server. “At the recommendation of Huma Abedin… in or around fall 2008, [Cooper] contacted Bryan Pagliano… to build the new server system and to assist Cooper with the administration of the new server system.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)
A FBI report released on this day will mention: “The FBI investigation determined Clinton contributed to discussions in four email chains classified as ‘confidential’, three email chains classified as ‘secret’/NOFORN, and four email chains classified as ‘top secret’/ SAP.” (“SAP” stands for “Special Access Programs.”)
However, FBI classification is wildly different from State Department classification when it comes to “confidential” emails, with the FBI deeming 36 email chains of around 100 emails or less classified at that level, compared to the State Department deeming 2,028 individual emails classified at that level.
Furthermore, the FBI puts emails where Clinton asked aides to print out emails as different from replies that added to discussions. The FBI identified 67 times where Clinton forwarded emails for printing at either the “confidential” or “secret” levels. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)
A snippet from a graphic created by the Washington Post, indicating the number of emails written by Clinton that were deemed classified. (Credit: Washington Post)
By contrast, a March 2016Washington Post analysis concluded that 104 of all the emails deemed classified were written by Clinton. Presumably, they used the State Department definition of which ones were classified (since it was the only one publicly available at the time), and they were measuring individual emails instead of email chains. Furthermore, the Post noted that at least some of Clinton’s comments were deemed classified in three-fourths of these 104 emails, so presumably these were not emails where she just asked fo print-outs. (The Washington Post, 3/5/2016)
In the FBI Clinton email investigation’s final report, released on this day, more is revealed about the three Clinton email chains containing at least one paragraph with the “(C)” marking. This indicates the presence of information classified at the “confidential” level.
The report adds that there actually were eight emails in the three email chains. “The emails contained no additional markings, such as a header or footer, indicating that they were classified.”
Kofi Annan (Credit: Jean-Marc Ferré / United Nations
At least one email from two of the email chains have been publicly released. One was sent to Clinton by her aide Monica Hanley on April 8, 2012, regarding a phone call between Clinton and Malawi president Joyce Banda. The second email was sent to Clinton by Hanley on August 2, 2012, regarding a phone call between Clinton and United Nations/Arab League Joint Special Envoy for Syria Kofi Annan. The FBI report indicates both email chains are currently unclassified.
The third email chain is more mysterious. The FBI report doesn’t mention when it was sent, or by whom, of what its contents are. However, the State Department “confirmed through the FOIA review process that [this chain] contains information which is currently classified at the ‘confidential ‘level.” This email has not been found in the over 30,000 work-related emails Clinton gave to the State Department, even though the “confidential” classification clearly indicates it is work-related.
Finally, the State Department hasn’t provided a determination if any of the three emails were classified at the time they were sent. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)
In the FBI’s Clinton email investigation final report released on this day, the FBI discusses the at least 179 “intelligence memos” Clinton confidant Sid Blumenthal emailed to Clinton. Media reports indicate that some memos were accurate and some were totally inaccurate, but none of them were vetted by any US government official, because Blumenthal was and is a private citizen with no security clearance sending the emails directly to Clinton.
An email in which Clinton wanted Sullivan to send a Blumenthal email to Obama, without mentioning who it was from. (Credit: public domain)
According to the FBI report, “Clinton often forwarded the memos to [her aide Jake] Sullivan, asking him to remove information identifying Blumenthal as the originator and to pass the information to other State employees to solicit their input. According to emails between Clinton and Sullivan, Clinton discussed passing the information to the White House, other [US government] agencies, and foreign governments.”
However, the report also mentions that the FBI was unable to determine if any of the memos were actually sent to such recipients, because the State Department didn’t give the FBI any of Sullivan’s emails sent to anyone other than Clinton. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016) (Department of State, 2/29/16)
(…) “The new records also include a September 2, 2016, email that Comey forwards containing a press release issued that day by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), in which Grassley criticized the FBI for not publicly releasing many unclassified records related to the Clinton email-server investigation, as demanded by Congress. In his cover note responding to Grassley’s charge, Comey tells his top aides, “To be great is to be misunderstood.” (Judicial Watch, 2/11/2019)
“Halper first contacted Papadopoulos by email. In a Sept. 2, 2016, message sent to Papadopoulos’s personal email account, he offered the Trump aide $3,000 to write a policy paper on issues related to Turkey, Cyprus, Israel and the Leviathan natural gas field. Halper also offered to pay for Papadopoulos’s flight and a three-night stay in London.
Papadopoulos accepted the proposal, flew to England, and met with Halper and one of his assistants. He delivered the paper electronically Oct. 2 and received payment days later, according to documents TheDCNF reviewed.”
(…) “Papadopoulos questioned Halper’s motivation for contacting him, according to a source familiar with Papadopoulos’ thinking. That’s not just because of the randomness of the initial inquiry but because of questions Halper is said to have asked during their face-to-face meetings in London.
According to a source with knowledge of the meeting, Halper asked Papadopoulos: “George, you know about hacking the emails from Russia, right?”
Papadopoulos told Halper he didn’t know anything about emails or Russian hacking, the source said and spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign. The professor did not follow up on the line of inquiry.
(…) “Halper’s activities are all the more eye-catching because Papadopoulos and Page are central figures in the Russia investigation. Papadopoulos, 30, pleaded guilty in October 2017 to lying to the FBI about contacts he had during the campaign with Russian nationals and a London-based professor with links to the Russian government.
That professor, Joseph Mifsud, told Papadopoulos in April 2016 he learned the Russians had possession of “thousands” of Clinton-related emails. That conversation would later spark the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the presidential campaign. It is not known whether Papadopoulos told anyone on the Trump campaign about Mifsud’s remarks.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 3/25/2018)
“The conversation at a London bar in September 2016 took a strange turn when the woman sitting across from George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign adviser, asked a direct question: Was the Trump campaign working with Russia?
The woman had set up the meeting to discuss foreign policy issues. But she was actually a government investigator posing as a research assistant, according to people familiar with the operation. The F.B.I. sent her to London as part of the counterintelligence inquiry opened that summer to better understand the Trump campaign’s links to Russia.
The American government’s affiliation with the woman, who said her name was Azra Turk, is one previously unreported detail of an operation that has become a political flash point in the face of accusations by President Trump and his allies that American law enforcement and intelligence officials spied on his campaign to undermine his electoral chances. Last year, he called it “Spygate.”
Ms. Turk went to London to help oversee the politically sensitive operation, working alongside a longtime informant, the Cambridge professor Stefan A. Halper. The move was a sign that the bureau wanted in place a trained investigator for a layer of oversight, as well as someone who could gather information for or serve as a credible witness in any potential prosecution that emerged from the case.
A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment, as did a lawyer for Mr. Halper, Robert D. Luskin. Last year, Bill Priestap, then the bureau’s top counterintelligence agent who was deeply involved in the Russia inquiry, told Congress during a closed-door hearing that there was no F.B.I. conspiracy against Mr. Trump or his campaign.
The London operation yielded no fruitful information, but F.B.I. officials have called the bureau’s activities in the months before the election both legal and carefully considered under extraordinary circumstances. They are now under scrutiny as part of an investigation by Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general. He could make the results public in May or June, Attorney General William P. Barr has said. Some of the findings are likely to be classified.” (Read more: The New York Times, 5/02/2019)
George Papadopoulos describes in his House testimony, how undercover CIA asset/FBI informant Stefan Halper introduces him to ‘Azra Turk.’ He also suggests she may be from Turkey.
On the same day the NYT article is published, George Papadopoulos appears on the Tucker Carlson Show to respond:
https://youtu.be/ewA34BJAKmI?t=512
(…) “Email traffic reviewed by TheDCNF shows that Papadopoulos exchanged emails with Turk, Halper and Halper’s wife.
Papadopoulos has described Turk as a “honeypot,” a spy term used to describe a situation where sex is used to lure targets of intelligence operations. Papadopoulos told TheDCNF that Turk, an attractive blonde, flirted heavily with him and attempted to make contact after the London meeting back in the States.
“I’m stunned by the come-hither tone of Azra Turk and her classic honeypot act,” Papadopoulos wrote in his tell-all, “Deep State Target.”
According to Papadopoulos, both Halper and Turk asked him whether he knew about Russian hacks of Democrats. Papadopoulos says he had knowledge of Russian hacking operations, and conveyed that to the two covert agents.
Papadopoulos says that he did not meet again with Turk, in part because he suspected she was working with foreign intelligence agencies. He has recently said he believes that Turk, who spoke little English during the London meetings, has links to the CIA and Turkish intelligence.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 5/3/2019)
“An FBI lawyer texted a bureau agent that then-President Obama “wants to know everything we’re doing” — a message that a Senate committee suggested could refer to the federal investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
The messages shared between attorney Lisa Page and her lover and bureau colleague Peter Strzok were released Wednesday by the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which provides oversight of the bureau, and is chaired by GOP Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.
In one exchange, Page wrote to Strzok in September, 2016 about prepping FBI Director James Comey on talking points for an update he was planning to give Obama that said: “potus wants to know everything we’re doing.”
“We received 38 pages of records from the State Department revealing that Ukraine Prosecutor-General Yuriy Lutsenko was offered “high-level” access to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign by the same lobbying firm that represented Burisma Holdings.
This came to light in an email from George Kent, then-U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission to Ukraine and current Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. The email was to then-Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.
The offer was made by Karen Tramontano, who was an assistant to President Clinton and deputy White House Chief of Staff. She is the CEO of Blue Star Strategies, a Democrat lobbying firm that was hired by Burisma Holdings to combat corruption allegations.
In the same 2016 email, Kent stated that he responded to Lutsenko by recommending that he not take the offer due to corruption concerns with Burisma and the Clinton Foundation.
(…) The records include a September 3, 2016, email from Kent to Yovanovitch and other colleagues which details that Lutsenko informed him that he was pitched high-level access to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign by Blue Star Strategies. The email’s subject line is “Lutsenko now likely not to go to DC with Blue Star, other Ukr issue comments.” The email says:
[Lutsenko] confirmed he had been pitched by Blue Star, not sought them out. He said he honestly didn’t know how Blue Star was to get paid – he didn’t have funds – and that some BPP MP [Petro Poroshenko’s Solidarity Party member of Parliament] that we probably didn’t know “and that’s good” ([redacted]??) had introduced them to him. Blue Star CEO Tramontano’s pitch was that she could gain him access to high levels of the Clinton campaign (GPK note: she was Podesta’s deputy as deputy COS the last year of Bill Clinton’s tenure), and that was appealing – to meet the possible next Presidential Chief of Staff.
Later in the same email, Kent added that he suggested that Lutsenko not take that offer because Blue Star represented Burisma. Kent also mentioned corruption concerns related to the Clinton Foundation and Podesta:
In connection to Blue Star, I noted their representation of Burisma/Zlochevsky, mentioned the various money flows from Ukraine to lobbyists that had been prominently int he news this past month, whether Manafort/Klueyev via Brussels to Podesta Group and Weber/Mercury, Yanu’s Justice Minister Lavrynovych to Skaden/arps-and Greg Craig – and Pinchuk to Clinton Foundation, and the media attention being paid at present to the Kyiv/Washington gravy train….
…and he got the drift. 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.
This email is inconsistent with Yovanovitch’s October 2019testimony under oath before the U.S. House of Representatives in the Trump impeachment inquiry that she knew very little about Burisma Holdings and the long-running corruption investigation against it stating, “it just wasn’t a big issue.”
This smoking gun email ties Hunter Biden’s Burisma’s lobbying operation to an influence-peddling operation involving the Clinton campaign during the 2016 election. This further confirms the Obama-Biden-Deep State targeting of President Trump was to cover-up and distract from their own corruption. (Read more: Judicial Watch, 12/17/2020)(Archive)
US President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet at the G-20 summit in China.
Obama and Putin have a pull-aside meeting at the G20 Summit in China on September 5, 2016. (Credit: Hamari Web)
When Obama is questioned by reporters about accusations that Russia has been behind the hacking of US political entities, he answers: “I will tell you’ve had problems with cyber intrusions from Russia in the past and from other countries in the past.”
He adds, “the goal is not to duplicate in the cyber area the cycle of escalation,” and his intent is “instituting some norms so that everybody’s acting responsibly.” (The Hill, 9/5/2016)
Clinton holds an in-flight press conference on September 5, 2016. (Credit: Andrew Harnik / The Associated Press))
Clinton comments about allegations of Russian hacking of US political entities: “I’m really concerned about the credible reports about Russian government interference in our elections … The fact that our intelligence professionals are now studying this, and taking it seriously… raises some grave questions about potential Russian interference with our electoral process.”
Clinton voices suspicions that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s could be colluding with Russia: “We’ve never had the nominee of one of our major parties urging the Russians to hack more… I think it’s quite intriguing that this activity has happened around the time Trump became the nominee… I often quote a great saying that I learned from living in Arkansas for many years: If you find a turtle on a fence post, it didn’t get there by itself.” (Politico, 9/5/2016)
Paul Ryan, the Republican Speaker of the House, complains how the report was released on the Friday afternoon before a three-day weekend. “It’s like the most buried time you could ever put out a story. I’m surprised. I can’t believe that they would do what is such a patently political move. It makes them look like political operators versus law enforcement officers.” (CNN, 9/6/2016)
One day later, FBI Director James Comey responds with a statement defending the timing of the release.
Documents obtained by this website suggest that the Directors of the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Foundation HIV/Aids Initiative Inc may have falsified a merger agreement and backdated documents by more than 12 months to deceive the IRS, donors and others about the Foundation’s HIV activities.
In 2005 ,the William J. Clinton Foundation (31-1580204) and the Clinton Foundation HIV Aids Initiative Inc (20-0921629) (CHAI) were separate legal entities and thus required to lodge individual IRS returns. Each operated as a 501(c)(3) charitable tax exempt foundation.
The CHAI was incorporated as a non-profit in Arkansas on 24 March 2004. It applied on that same day for a licence to operate in the State of Massachusetts from its head office at 225 Water Street Quincy. It was registered as a corporation licensed to operate in Massachusetts on 4 May 2004.
CHAI was granted 501(c)(3) tax exempt status and its 2004 and 2005 IRS Form 990 annual returns quoted the exempt purpose
THE ORGANIZATION IS A SUPPORTING ORGANIZATION OF THE WILLIAM J. CLINTON PRESIDENTIAL FOUNDATION, AND WILL CARRY OUT ONE OF THE FOUNDATION’S PROGRAMS TO BRING HIGH QUALITY MEDICAL CARE AND TREATMENT TO PEOPLE LIVING WITH HIV/AIDS AND TO IMPROVE HEALTH SYSTEMS IN RESOURCE POOR AREAS AND COUNTRIES .
To bring care and treatment and improve systems.
The distribution of pharmaceuticals was not an approved tax exempt purpose, there is a stated specific prohibition against a grant of tax exemption for pharmaceutical distribution published at the IRS website here:
IRC 501(c)(3) requires an organization to be both “organized” and “operated” exclusively for one or more IRC 501(c)(3) purposes. If the organization fails either the organizational test or the operational test, it is not exempt. Reg. 1.501(c)(3)–1(a)(1).
The organizational test concerns the organization’s articles of organization or comparable governing document. The operational test concerns the organization’s activities. A deficiency in an organization’s governing document cannot be cured by the organization’s actual operations. Likewise, an organization whose activities are not within the statute will not qualify for exemption by virtue of a well written charter. Reg. 1.501(c)(3)–1(b)(1)(iv).
In Federation Pharmacy Services, Inc. v. Commissioner, 625 F.2d 804 (8th Cir. 1980), aff’g 72 T.C. 687 (1979), the appellate court held that a nonprofit pharmaceutical service was not exempt as a charitable organization because it was operated for the substantial commercial purpose of providing pharmacy services to the general public. Although it provided special discount rates for handicapped and senior citizens in its area, it was not committed to providing any drugs below cost or free to indigent persons. Therefore, although its services did improve health in the area, it was primarily a commercial venture operated in competition with other area pharmacies.
The Clinton Foundation, if it admits to the CHAI Inc at all, purports to have merged the 1st CHAI entity into the Clinton Foundation effective at 31 December 2005.
If it had done so, the CHAI Inc would have ceased on that day to exist. As the non-surviving entity in a merger it would have been dissolved and prohibited from further trading.
On 22 February 2006 Bill Clinton signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Australian Government as signatory for the Clinton Foundation HIV Aids Initiative Inc.
On 9 June 2006 Auditors BKD LLP wrote to the directors of the Clinton Foundation:
On the same date it wrote a further letter to include within its audit any and all available supplementary information.
The Clinton Foundation lodged its IRS 990 return electronically shortly after the Audit Report.
Nowhere did it mention any intention to merge, nor were any articles or agreements to effect a merger at 31 December referred to.
It noted that the Clinton HIV/Aids Initiative Inc was related to the Foundation, as it had done in the previous year, it also told the IRS there had been no dissolutions or terminations etc during the 2005 year.
Worryingly for the CHAI, the Foundation provided commentary about CHAI operations that should have immediately triggered a tax audit and recision of tax exemption.
THE CLINTON FOUNDATION HIV/AIDS INITIATIVE (CHAI) EXPANDED ITS PROCUREMENT CONSORTIUM, WHICH OBTAINS LIFE-SAVING AIDS MEDICINES FOR OVER 50 DEVELOPING NATIONS AT A SUBSTANTIALLY REDUCED PRICE.
There are no CHAI Inc’s 2004 or 2005 year returns filed at the Clinton Foundation. There is no merger agreement exhibited. Until today, I am not aware of any public commentary or publication of the agreement or the 990 CHAI return. The files had been successfully disappeared.
I now have a copy of all of that material from the filing at the time.
Around the time the Clinton Foundation audit report and 990 filing were completed, the CHAI Inc asked for an extension of time to lodge its IRS 990 return – to 15 August 2006. That extension is automatically approved as a right.
On 31 July 2006 the CHAI Inc was still operating as a separate legal entity. It held itself out as a legal contracting entity to the Australian Government which entered into these contracts with it on the following dates.
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade – Australian Aid Program
Category:
Health administration services
Contract Period:
14-Aug-2006 to 31-Dec-2010
Contract Value (AUD):
$15,127,586.10
Supplier Name:
CLINTON FOUNDATION HIV/AIDS INITIATIVE
Supplier Details
Name:
CLINTON FOUNDATION HIV/AIDS INITIATIVE
Postal Address:
225 WATER STREET
On 8 July 2006 the CHAI asked for its second extension of time to get its financial house in order for the IRS, this time seeking an extension out to 15 November 2006.
The Clinton Foundation HIV/Aids Initiative Inc was active in Papua New Guinea immediately after the contract with the Australian Government was executed.
The PNG Clinton operations sought the incorporation of a legal entity in Papua New Guinea styled after the CHAI Inc in the US.
Almost 9 months after the Clinton Foundation now tries to have us believe the CHAI Inc was merged out of existence, here it is incorporating a new corporate entity in Papua New Guinea.
If that entity had in fact ceased to operate upon the effective date the Clinton Foundation gives for the merger, 31 December 2005, almost 9 months previous, why wouldn’t the Clinton Foundation name alone be the only logical choice for the corporate person in PNG.
On 23 August 2006 this advertisement appeared in the PNG newspaper.
On 24 August 2006 the Clinton Foundation HIV/Aids Initiative – PNG Inc was incorporated.
Meanwhile, plans were apparently being made for the time machine that would take the directors of the Clinton Foundation and the CHAI back to the last recorded board meetings in 2005 where their due diligence and other conditions precedent to the merger were given the due consideration.
Notwithstanding the absence of any corresponding material in the Clinton Foundation’s 2005 filing which had already been locked in after the 9 June 2006 Audit Report, the CHAI filed its 2005 IRS 990 on 13 November 2006 and it wasn’t quite in sync with the 2005 merger-free head Foundation. That uncomfortable fact for the crooks might help explain the disappearance of these papers until now.
Here’s the date stamp for the avoidance of doubt and establishment of provenance.
Ira and the boys had some sort of problem in 2006 that apparently made it desirable for the CHAI Inc and its 501(c)(3) details to disappear.
But to do that effective 31 December 2005, Ira would have to find the agreements they signed at the time. Or someone would have to forge them. And if they did that, they should also go to jail, go directly to jail, not pass go and not collect several hundred million drug dollars.
I know that our expert readers will pore over these papers. Our readers amaze me with the details they pick up and pass on.
It’s the little things like any subscript writing in the bottom left hand corner leaving a tell tale trace from the word processor that might just establish the exact time the paper met the printer.
Here’s the freshly emerged Merger Agreement purportedly signed pre the merger date during 2005.
The Australians were still dealing with the entity they’d contracted with, the CHAI Inc. With that being the case, it’d make sense for Bill and Ira not to make waves. Not to do the right thing as required under the law and dissolve the non-surviving entity, the CHAI Inc.
Cause that’s what happened. Ira and Bill’s slush funds never die, they just fade away.
The CHAI Inc had this bank account in Massachusetts, along with its head office.
And the CHAI in its headquarter state of Massachusetts didn’t have the good manners to advise its headquarters regulator about the merger.
Because eventually Secretary Galvin and the crew got sick and tired of no returns, no information and no word about the fading jaded CHAI In and its problems.
When I was in the Mergers and Acquisitions caper it was a truism that there are no mergers, there’s only acquisitions – ie there’s a surviving party and the non-surviving party is consumed into it.
When a corporate entity is being merged it’s like being pregnant. A corporation can’t be a little bit merged, that would be an asset sale or an asset contribution from the balance sheet of a surviving entity.
That’s what Clinton and the boys did. Stripped the CHAI Inc bare, disadvantaged its creditors and any contracting party like the Australian Government that looked to it for performance and left it to wallow dead in the water.
In 2008 Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative Inc was dissolved by regulators for failure to comply with financial reporting legislation
The entity’s license to operate was revoked by authorities in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts by an order published on 31 March 2008, taking operative effect from 31 December 2007.
Here is a copy of the extract:
I wrote to the Massachusetts authorities in February, 2016
I am an Australian Journalist reporting on our government’s contributions to certain charitable entities in the United States.
I am interested in the revocation of the certificate of incorporation issued to Clinton Foundation HIV/Aids Initiative Incorporated.
ENDS
Later that day an officer of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Mr Howard Cutter replied, stating:
The entity was dissolved by our office for failure to file annual reports in consecutive years.
While memories of the CHAI lingered it was useful to get some value out of that brand.
Apparently the Clinton Foundation doesn’t care about passing off or misleading or deceptive conduct, because it now tells all and sundry that the CHAI, the Clinton Health Access Initiative was the real deal all along.
Its history goes back to 2002. Even though in its 2009 incorporation it was presented to the authorities as a cleanskin, avoiding all the messy shit that a successor organisation in a Magaziner/Clinton transmission of business see popping up like ticking bombs left to surprise the unwary.
You can see what they were up to in this MOU executed in PNG.
Bill Clinton and Australian officials in CHAI multi-million $$$ fraud and coverup
CHAI is the acronym used by the Clinton Foundation and its supporters in the Australian Government to describe the Clinton Health Access Initiative.
Bill Clinton and the Australian Government don’t like to be reminded about the CHAI’s predecessor, also known as the CHAI. That’s because CHAI #1 flouted the law to such an egregious extent that it was deregistered by US authorities.
Clinton’s criminal conduct in CHAI #1 didn’t stop the Australian Government from sending him money. Individuals within the Australian Government even rewrote publications and changed records to help Clinton during his coverup.
Here’s what the Clinton Foundation says about the CHAI on its website today – note the first line “The Clinton Health Access Initiative, Inc”.
The Clinton Health Access Initiative Inc was not founded in 2002. That claim is false and misleading in a material sense in that it conceals the existence of a predecessor organisation which Clinton called the CHAI.
Here are the CHAI’s biggest donors. Note the “Cumulative Donations by Donor” and “Donor’s Name”. Let there be no mistake, our government is donating our money into a slush fund operated by Bill and Hillary.
Here is a screen shot from the Clinton Foundation’s 2009 website about the CHAI
This wasn’t just a name, the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative Inc was a US incorporated entity with employees and trading operations and some very illegal conduct awaiting explanation.
I’ll come back to the Clinton HIV/Aids Initiative Inc and the cover up later.
In 2006 the Australian Government’s Foreign Minister Alexander Downer signed an MOU with Clinton as detailed in this screen grab from a 2007 DFAT website.
By the latter half of 2010 someone in the Gillard Government saw fit to change the record as detailed in this screen grab from the AUSAID website from 2010/11. Where the original wording recorded a partnership with the William J Clinton Foundation, the revised 2010 version restated it as a partnership with the Clinton Health Access Initiative.
This matters because beyond the direct contracts we were buying drugs from Clinton’s operating company. Those drug dealings involved illegal activities. The new Clinton Health Access Initiative Inc had no involvement in the dealings that brought Clinton, Ranbaxy and their criminal cohort unstuck. Australia is reported to have purchased in excess of $100M in pharmaceuticals under the partnership with the William J. Clinton Foundation. Someone has gone to some length to clean out the records of those transactions but we will find them, it’s just a matter of when.
(note my request to DFAT re the $100M in pharmaceutical purchases under the agreement, I have been told I’ll have a response by COB Thursday)
Here is the signature block for Clinton’s signature on the 2006 MOU
He signed only for the HIV/Aids Initiative and as you’ll see in the next part of this report it was a separate entity and there have been considerable efforts to conceal its existence – some of those cover-up attempts will no doubt expose certain individuals to criminal prosecutions.
Here are the DFAT reported contracts with the Clinton Foundation HIV/Aids Initiative Inc.
2008/2009 contracts
2009/10 contracts
2010-2011
Note that by 2011 the Clinton Health Access Initiative was recorded as the contracting party for the Indonesian contract. (Michael Smith News, 9/06/2016)(Archive) h/t @seacaptim
Clinton is accompanied by traveling press secretary Nick Merrill (l) and director of communications Jennifer Palmieri (r), and listens to a question from a member of the media, Sept. 6, 2016. (Credit: The Associated Press)
“When a reporter aboard Clinton’s campaign plane asked if Putin is using cyberwarfare to help elect Trump, Clinton said “I’m not going to jump to conclusions.” She then proceeded to jump away.
She said recent events aren’t mere coincidence. “I often quote a great saying that I learned from living in Arkansas for many years: ‘If you find a turtle on a fence post, it didn’t get there by itself.’ ” She then added, in case anyone didn’t get her point, that “I think it’s quite intriguing that this activity has happened around the time Trump became the nominee.”
She said that Trump “has generally parroted what is a Putin/Kremlin line.” Etc., etc.
(…) But a casual glance at the timeline shows how fanciful such speculation is. Russians reportedly breached the DNC’s servers back in June 2015. [The DNC lawsuit and Crowdstrike report the servers were breached in July, 2016.] That was long before anyone took Trump’s campaign seriously.
Also, the fact that the DNC had been hacked was publicly announced in June 2016 — more than a month before Trump had said anything about Russia and Hillary’s emails. And the first item released from that hack was the DNC’s opposition research file on Trump.
At the time, nobody claimed Russia was trying to elect Trump, since the first release wasn’t exactly flattering to him. In fact, the Washington Postreported that the DNC hack was part of a broader effort by Russians to target both political parties.
“The intrusion into the DNC was one of several targeting American political organizations. The networks of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were also targeted by Russian spies, as were the computers of some Republican political action committees, U.S. officials said,” the Post article stated.
The request comes in the form of a letter from Representative Jason Chaffetz (R), chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, to Channing Phillips, the US attorney for the District of Columbia. It asks the Justice Department to “investigate and determine whether Secretary Clinton or her employees and contractors violated statutes that prohibit destruction of records, obstruction of congressional inquiries, and concealment or cover up of evidence material to a congressional investigation.”
Although the FBI ended its Clinton email investigation in July 2016 without recommending an indictment of Clinton or anyone else, newly revealed evidence indicates Platte River Networks (PRN) employee Paul Combetta deleted and wiped all of Clinton’s emails in March 2015. He had communications with Clinton’s lawyers just days before and after the deletions, but the FBI was unable to determine what was said in those communications, possibly due to an assertion of attorney-client privilege. (Salon, 9/6/2016)
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is introduced during a campaign stop Friday, Jan. 22, 2016, in Rochester, N.H. ((Credit: /Matt Rourke/The Associated Press))
(…) “Hillary compromised classified materials representing the full range of American espionage: human intelligence or HUMINT from CIA, signals intelligence or SIGINT from NSA, and imagery intelligence or IMINT from NGA.
Of those 81 classified email chains, the FBI assessed that 37 of them included Secret information while eight included Top Secret information. Worse, seven email chains included Special Access Program or SAP information, which is tightly protected by the Intelligence Community and shared on a restricted, need-to-know basis only.
Three more email chains contained Sensitive Compartmented Information or SCI, which was almost certainly SIGINT from NSA. SCI always requires special protection and handling. In fact, you’re only allowed to access it inside a specially-built Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, a SCIF (pronounced “skiff”) in spy-speak. Any exposure of SCI brings severe penalties—at least if you’re not named Clinton.
It’s nice to see the FBI finally confirm just how much highly classified information got exposed here, but I reported this many months ago from Intelligence Community sources, including that Hillary’s “unclassified” emails included Top Secret SAP information from CIA and Top Secret SCI information from NSA.
Which leads to a troubling matter: What the FBI did not mention in its big data dump on EmailGate.
As I told you in this column back in January, Hillary emails included very highly classified intelligence from NSA. In early June 2011, the secretary of state received a long email from her longtime friend and factotum Sid Blumenthal regarding Sudan. This was an astonishingly detailed assessment of high-level political and military machinations in that country, specifically inside information about coup plotting.
This explosive information was timely and deep in the weeds on Sudanese happenings. It’s difficult to see how Blumenthal—a lawyer and Washington fixer, no sort of Africa hand or James Bond—got his hands on such juicy intelligence. As I’ve noted, “Blumenthal’s information came from a top-ranking source with direct access to Sudan’s top military and intelligence officials, and recounted a high-level meeting that had taken place only 24 hours before.” How did Sid obtain this amazing scoop for Hillary?
If Hillary Clinton becomes our next president, we can be certain that her trusty sidekick Sid Blumenthal will have an important role in her White House.
Not to mention that, in terms of verbiage and format, Blumenthal’s email read exactly like classified NSA reporting, as anybody acquainted with our SIGINT would immediately recognize. As one veteran agency official told me back in January, Blumenthal’s email was NSA information with “at least 90 percent confidence.”
Which was no coincidence, since an NSA investigation subsequently determined that Blumenthal’s Sudan assessment was derived from their reporting—in some cases, verbatim. As I reported in March, NSA concluded that Blumenthal’s Sudan report came from four different agency SIGINT reports, all classified Top Secret/SCI. Then it got worse:
At least one of those reports was issued under the GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was). GAMMA is properly viewed as a SIGINT Special Access Program, or SAP, several of which Clinton compromised in another series of her “unclassified” emails.
NSA had no doubt that Blumenthal somehow got his hands on some of their “crown jewels” information. “It’s word-for-word, verbatim copying,” an agency official of them explained. “In one case, an entire paragraph was lifted from an NSA report” that was classified Top Secret/SCI. To add to the mystery, Sid emailed Hillary his “personal” assessment on Sudan only hours after some of those classified NSA reports were issued.
Somehow Sid Blumenthal—who in 2011 was not working for the U.S. government in any capacity and had not held security clearances in a decade—was reading above-top-secret NSA reports just hours after they appeared in tightly restricted GAMMA channels.” (Read more: The Observer, 9/06/16)
Representative Jason Chaffetz (R), chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, writes a letter to Platte River Networks (PRN), the computer company that managed Clinton’s private server since June 2013. Chaffetz warns that one PRN employee, Paul Combetta, could face federal charges for deleting and wiping Clinton’s emails from her server in March 2015. That’s because the House Benghazi Committee had issued a formal order to preserve such records earlier in the month, and Combetta confessed in a later FBI interview that he knew about the order before he made the deletions.
In the letter, Chaffetz says a recent FBI report about the deletions “raises questions to whether [Combetta] violated federal statutes that prohibit destruction of evidence and obstruction of a Congressional investigation.”
Additionally, Combetta took part in conference calls with Clinton’s lawyers just days before and after the deletions, but the FBI was unable to determine what was said in those communications, possibly due to an assertion of attorney-client privilege. In the letter, Chaffetz wants an explanation from PRN how Combetta could refuse to talk to the FBI about the conference calls if the only lawyers involved were Clinton’s. (Salon, 9/6/2016)
The letter is released to CNN on the same day, and publicly published in full. Addressing his decision not to recommend the indictment of Clinton, Comey writes, “At the end of the day, the case itself was not a cliff-hanger; despite all the chest-beating by people no longer in government, there really wasn’t a prosecutable case.”
CNN also reports that over the past several weeks, “Comey has met with groups of former FBI agents as part of his routine visits to field offices around the country. In at least one recent such meeting, according to people familiar with the meeting, former agents were sharply critical of the FBI’s handling of the Clinton probe and particularly the decision to not recommend charges against Clinton. Comey gave the meeting participants a similar answer about the case not being a cliff-hanger.” (CNN, 9/7/2016)
A later CNN article will identify the particularly contentious meeting as taking place in Kansas City. (CNN, 11/2/2016)
In the letter, Comey also defends his decision to release the FBI’s final report on the investigation (with significant redactions). That was a highly unusual move, because that usually only happens after an indictment or conviction. He makes a particular point to defend the timing of the report’s release, as it came out on a Friday afternoon just before the three-day Labor Day weekend.
He concludes the letter: “Those suggesting that we are ‘political’ or part of some ‘fix’ either don’t know us, or they are full of baloney (and maybe some of both).” (CNN, 9/7/2016) (CNN, 9/7/2016)
On September 6, 2016, House Speaker Paul Ryan complains how the report was release on the Friday afternoon before a three-day weekend.
The next day, FBI Director James Comey writes a letter to FBI staff that is immediately published in full by CNN. In it, he asserts that the review process allowing the report’s public release was finished on a Friday morning, September 2, 2016, so he published it later that same day.
He goes on to say, “I almost ordered the material held until [the next] Tuesday because I knew we would take all kinds of grief for releasing it before a holiday weekend, but my judgment was that we had promised transparency and it would be game-playing to withhold it from the public just to avoid folks saying stuff about us. We don’t play games. So we released it Friday. We are continuing to process more material and will release batches of documents as they are ready, no matter the day of the week.” (CNN, 9/7/2016) (CNN, 9/7/2016)
A former newspaper editor and publisher. He has written for USA Today, The Saturday Evening Post, the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, OMNI magazine, and has also produced the syndicated radio program, Health News. He has written 22 books and two documentary videos.
According to Still, during last year’s presidential campaign at the Commander-In-Chief Forum on September 7, 2016, moderator Matt Lauer went “off script” and asked Hillary about her using an illegal, private email-server when she was secretary of state. (See “Hillary Clinton wore an ear phone at Commander-in-Chief Forum”)
According to Bill Still’s source — an unnamed “NBC associate producer of the forum” — Hillary was so enraged that, after the forum, she went into a ballistic melt-down, screaming at her staff, including a racist rant at Donna Brazile, calling Brazile a “buffalo” and “janitor”. Brazile recently turned against Hillary — now we know why.
This is the NBC associate producer’s account of what happened:
“Hillary proceeded to pick up a full glass of water and throw it at the face of the assistant, and the screaming started.
She was in a full meltdown and no one on her staff dared speak with her — she went kind of manic and did not have any control over herself at that point. How these people work with this woman is amazing to me. She really didn’t seem to care who heard any of it.
You really had to see this to believe it. She came apart — literally unglued. She is the most foul-mouthed woman I’ve ever heard. And that voice at screech level — awful!
She screamed she’d get that fucking Lauer fired for this. Referring to Donald Trump, Clinton said, ‘If that fucking bastard wins, we all hang from nooses!Lauer’s finished, and if I lose, it’s all on your heads for screwing this up.’
Her dozen or more aides were visibly disturbed and tried to calm her down when she started shaking uncontrollably as she screamed to get an executive at Comcast, the parent company of NBC Universal, on the phone. Then two rather large aides grabbed her and helped her walk to her car.”
Bill Still said:
“Matt Lauer was massively criticized for the rest of the week on air by the Clinton campaign and the rest of the MSM as having conducted ‘an unfair and partisan attack on Clinton’. Calls were made to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Huffington Post and Twitterexecutives, with orders to crush Matt Lauer. One staffer on the Clinton campaign told the NBC staff that they all fear Clinton’s wrath and uncontrollable outbursts, and one described Hillary as ‘an egotistical psychopath’.
Since Hillary does not allow any staff to have cell phones when she is in their presence, no footage is available.
Interim DNC chairman Donna Brazile, the first black woman to hold the position, was singled out by Hillary during the rant. She screamed at Donna, ‘I’m so sick of your face! You stare at the wall like a brain-dead buffalo, while letting that fucking Lauer get away with this! What are you good for, really? Get the fuck to work janitoring this mess, do I make myself clear?’
A female NBC executive said Donna Brazile looked at Mrs. Clinton and never flinched, which seemed to enrage Hillary all the more. The executive continued: ‘It was the most awful and terrible and racist display. Such a profane meltdown I have ever witnessed from anyone, and I will never forget it. That woman should never see the inside of the Oval Office, I can tell you that. She was unhinged and just continued to verbally abuse everyone. She was out of control.’”
Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, writes a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, with the following declassified information:
DNI releases a copy of the intelligence referral to Comey and Strzok on October 6, 2020:
(…) The declassification comes after Ratcliffe, last week, shared newly-declassified information with the Senate Judiciary Committee which revealed that in September 2016, U.S. intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral on Hillary Clinton purportedly approving “a plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections” in order to distract the public from her email scandal.
That referral was sent to Comey and then-Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok.
“The following information is provided for the exclusive use of your bureau for background investigative action or lead purposes as appropriate,” the CIA memo to Comey and Strzok stated.
“This memorandum contains sensitive information that could be source revealing. It should be handled with particular attention to compartmentation and need-to-know. To avoid the possible compromise of the source, any investigative action taken in response to the information below should be coordinated in advance with Chief Counterintelligence Mission Center, Legal,” the memo, which was sent to Comey and Strzok, read. “It may not be used in any legal proceeding—including FISA applications—without prior approval…”
“Per FBI verbal request, CIA provides the below examples of information the CROSSFIRE HURRICANE fusion cell has gleaned to date,” the memo continued. ““An exchange [REDACTED] discussing US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”
James Comey (Credit: Cliff Owen/The Associated Press)
(…) Ratcliffe also declassified on Tuesday portions of a formal CIA investigative referral sent on Sept. 7, 2016, to fired former FBI Director James Comey and fired former counterintelligence official Peter Strzok asking them to investigate the Clinton campaign’s anti-Trump collusion smear operation in light of Russia’s knowledge of the plan and the likelihood it could be tainted by deliberate Russian disinformation. Rather than act on the CIA investigative referral in the same manner they had launched a full-blown counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign, Strzok and Comey refused to initiate an investigation.
“Per FBI verbal request, CIA provides the below examples of information the CROSSFIRE HURRICANE fusion cell has gleaned to date,” the memo states. “An exchange [REDACTED] discussing US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of private e-mail server.”
The cover note of the memorandum stated that the information within was provided to the FBI “for the exclusive use of your Bureau for background, investigative action, or lead purposes, as appropriate.”
There is no evidence the FBI ever took any action to ensure that Russian knowledge of Clinton’s plans did not lead to infiltration of that campaign’s operation by Russian intelligence agents. The CIA referral, specifically its reference to a “CROSSFIRE HURRICANE fusion cell,” suggests that the Obama administration’s anti-Trump investigation may not have been limited to the FBI, but may have included the use of CIA assets and surveillance capabilities, raising troubling questions about whether the nation’s top spy service was weaponized against a U.S. political campaign.
The CIA referral declassified and released by Ratcliffe shows that it was personally addressed to both Comey and Strzok. Because the CIA does not have legal authority to police domestic matters, it informed the FBI of the agency’s concerns about potential Russian knowledge of Clinton campaign’s plan to smear Trump as a Russian asset, especially given the FBI’s ongoing counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign. Not only did the FBI refuse to investigate whether the Russians were using the Clinton campaign to interfere in the 2016 national election, but Comey also claimed last week that he knew nothing whatsoever about the CIA investigative referral.” (Read more: The Federalist, 10/06/2020)(Archive)
The New York Times reveals that the Platte River Networks (PRN) employee mentioned in a recently released FBI report who deleted and then wiped Clinton’s emails from her private server in March 2015 is named Paul Combetta. Furthermore, at some unknown point during the investigation, the FBI gave him an immunity deal. This is “according to a law enforcement official and others briefed on the investigation.”
It was reported in March 2016 that Clinton computer technician Bryan Pagliano got an immunity deal, but Combetta’s deal stayed secret. Even the FBI’s Clinton email investigation final report, released on September 2, 2016, makes no mention of it. The report also redacted every mention of Combetta’s name, but the Times says “the law enforcement official and others familiar with the case identified the employee as Mr. Combetta.”
Clinton spokesperson Brian Fallon says the deletions by Combetta have already been “thoroughly examined by the FBI prior to its decision to close out this case.”
However, many questions remain, including why Combetta got immunity and when. He was interviewed by the FBI twice, and his answers in his second interview sometimes directly contradict his answers in his first interview, meaning he had to have lied to the FBI at least once, which is a felony. In his second interview also admitted to deleting Clinton’s emails despite being aware of a Congressional order to preserve her emails, which would suggest an admission of additional crimes.
Fallon also comments, “As the FBI’s report notes, neither Hillary Clinton nor her attorneys had knowledge of the Platte River Network employee’s actions. It appears he acted on his own and against guidance given by both Clinton’s and Platte River’s attorneys to retain all data in compliance with a congressional preservation request.”
The House Oversight Committee has asked PRN employees, including Combetta, to appear at a committee hearing on September 13, 2016, about how the email deletions and other matters. (The New York Times, 9/8/2016)
The Denver Post’s editorial board publishes an editorial on September 8, 2016, entitled “A fishy story in Platte River Networks’ purge of Clinton e-mails.” It focuses on Platte River Networks (PRN) employee Paul Combetta’s FBI interview and his deletion and wiping of Clinton’s emails with a program “wonderfully named BleachBit.”
The editorial mentions Combetta’s “sudden remembrance” to delete the emails, and a subsequent conference call between PRN officials and a “longtime Clinton aide and personal lawyer.” When the FBI eventually attempted to investigate the conference call, they were met with Combetta’s claim of attorney-client privilege. The editorial states, “That just looks awful. So [it’s] little wonder the Republican chairman of the House committee investigating Clinton’s e-mail arrangement — Utah’s Jason Chaffetz — has asked federal prosecutors to investigate whether she or others were involved in the decision to destroy those emails following the preservation order.”
The Post argues “the information from the [FBI’s] summary of its investigation doesn’t sit well. It’s reasonable to ask why the FBI didn’t look deeper. It’s reasonable to ask why [Combetta] would act if, as the logic of the cover story must argue, the emails were simply personal notes about yoga appointments and being a grandmother.”
The editorial agrees with Chaffetz’s call for the Justice Department “to investigate and determine whether Secretary Clinton or her employees and contractors violated statutes that prohibit destruction of records, obstruction of congressional inquiries and concealment of cover-up of evidence material to a congressional committee.” It closes by saying, “something about this story feels whitewashed — or maybe bleached out is the better term for it now.” (The Denver Post, 9/8/2016)
FBI acting legislative affairs officer Jason Herring testifies before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
He is asked by Representative Jason Chaffetz (R), chair of the committee, to promise to hand over all of the FBI interview summaries, known as 302s, in unredacted form.
Herring says he can’t do that, and suggests that Chaffetz should file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, just like any private citizen can.
Committee member Representative Trey Gowdy (R) later complains, “Since when did Congress have to go through FOIA to obtain 302s?”
Chaffetz serves the FBI a subpoena during a House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee hearing on September 9, 2016. (Credit: ABC News)
Chaffetz replies to Henning, “You don’t get to decide what I get to see. I get to see it all.” Then he brings out a subpoena. He sends it to the witness table where Henning is sitting, and says, “I’ve signed this subpoena. We want all the 302s… and you are hereby served.”
In fact, Chaffetz’s committee has some of the 302s already, but all “personally identifiable information” has been redacted from them. The committee wants to know more about the role of Paul Combetta in deleting and the wiping all of Clinton’s emails from her personal server, but since Combetta is a Platte River Networks (PRN) employee and not a government employee, much information about what he did has been redacted.
Representative Carolyn Maloney (Credit: Andrew Burton / Getty Images)
Representative Carolyn Maloney (D), a member of the committee, claims the obstacle to Chaffetz seeing the redactions actually is the House Intelligence Committee, not the FBI. Chaffetz has asked House Intelligence chair Representative Devin Nunes (R) for access to the unredacted versions, but no vote on that request has been taken or scheduled yet.
However, Senator Charles Grassley (R), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, also complains about how the FBI is not letting his committee see unredacted documents from the investigation. “The FBI is trying to have it both ways. At the same time it talks about unprecedented transparency, it’s placing unprecedented hurdles in the way of Congressional oversight of unclassified law enforcement matters. It turned over documents, but with strings attached. … The Senate should not allow its controls on classified material to be manipulated to hide embarrassing material from public scrutiny, even when that material is unclassified.” (Politico, 9/12/2016)
Two other Congressional committees formally asked the Justice Department on September 9, 2016 for the full FBI interviews of Combetta and other PRN employees. (US Congress, 9/9/2016)
The editorial states: “Ms. Clinton’s emails have endured much more scrutiny than an ordinary person’s would have, and the criminal case against her was so thin that charging her would have been to treat her very differently. … Anyone who claims that Ms. Clinton should be in prison accuses, without evidence, the FBI of corruption or flagrant incompetence.”
The editorial concludes: “Ms. Clinton is hardly blameless. She treated the public’s interest in sound record-keeping cavalierly. A small amount of classified material also moved across her private server. But it was not obviously marked as such, and there is still no evidence that national security was harmed. … There is no equivalence between Ms. Clinton’s wrongs and Mr. Trump’s manifest unfitness for office.” (The Washington Post, 9/8/2016)
Representative Jason Chaffetz (R), the chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, orders two Platte River Networks (PRN) employees and three others to testify before a Congressional hearing, on September 13, 2016. PRN is the company that managed Clinton’s private server. The following people are ordered to appear:
Those subpoenaed to appear before the House Oversight committee are from left to right: Paul Combetta, Bryan Pagliano, Justin Cooper and Alex McChord and Bill Thornton. (Credits: public domain)
Paul Combetta. He is a PRN employee. On September 8, 2016, the New York Times revealed that Combetta deleted and wiped Clinton’s emails from her private server, and he also got an immunity deal from the Justice Department as part of the FBI’s Clinton email investigation. Congressional committees issued subpoenas for PRN interviews on August 22, 2016, after asking without coersion since September 2015.
Bill Thornton. He also is a PRN employee. The FBI’s final report indicated two PRN employees worked on Clinton’s server, so it seems probable he is the other one.
Bryan Pagliano. He managed Clinton’s server until PRN took over. He was previously subpoenaed by the House Committee on Benghazi, but he pleaded the Fifth. However, he cooperated with the FBI after also getting an immunity deal.
Justin Cooper. He is a member of Bill Clinton’s staff and helped Pagliano manage the server.
On September 09, 2016, Trey Gowdy appears on Fox News with Martha MacCallum to discuss the immunity deal given to Paul Combetta. (Credit: Fox News)
Representative Trey Gowdy (R) comments about a New York Times article from the day before that revealed Platte River Networks employee Paul Combetta was not only the person who deleted and wiped Clinton’s emails, but was the person who got an immunity deal from the FBI.
Gowdy says there are two types of immunity Combetta could have received: use and transactional. “If the FBI and the Department of Justice gave this witness transactional immunity, it is tantamount to giving the triggerman immunity in a robbery case.”
Gowdy, who is a former federal prosecutor, says that Combetta “destroyed official public records” despite a subpoena and preservation order from lawmakers for the documents. He adds that he is “stunned” because “It looks like they gave immunity to the very person you would most want to prosecute.” (Fox News, 9/9/2016)
Cheryl Mills was Clinton’s chief of staff while Clinton was secretary of state, then she was hired to be one of Clinton’s lawyers in 2013, setting up a potential conflict of interest between her different roles. In April 2016, she was interviewed by the FBI, but refused to answer certain questions, claiming attorney-client privilege.
Ronald J. Sievert (Credit: public domain)
Ronald J. Sievert, a former assistant director at the Justice Department and member of the department’s National Security Working Group, said the FBI easily could have gone to court to challenge Mills’ privilege claim. But that didn’t happen.
Mills also was allowed to attend Clinton’s July 2016 FBI interview as one of Clinton’s lawyers, even though she directly participated in many of the matters being discussed by Clinton when Mills was in her chief of staff role.
Sievert comments, “There seems universal agreement among those of us who know the law that no regular US government employee could get away with this.” (The New York Post, 9/9/2016)
This is according to an interview with WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange. “We have tens of thousands, possibly as many as a hundred thousand, pages of documents of different types, related to the operations that Hillary Clinton is associated with.”
This WikiLeaks cartoon has been prominently featured on the WikiLeaks website. (Credit: Latuff / WikiLeaks)
WikiLeaks released almost 20,000 Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails just before the July Democratic presidential convention. He says regarding new releases, “There are some, several … in response to the DNC publications, a lot of people have been inspired by the impact, and so they have stepped forward with additional material.”
He adds, “It’s quite a complex business to sort things, to index them, make sure they’re presentable, to see what the top initial angles are that come out. We’re a small shop. We’re here around the clock. We understand quite much the time pressures that people have, and how significant it is to try and get that out. We worked like hell to get the DNC publication out before the DNC, the day before the DNC.”
“I am very confident we’re going to get this material out before, long before, the day of the [November 2016 presidential] election.” (The Washington Examiner, 9/8/2016)
Clinton presidential running mate Tim Kaine, associates Trump and Russia with the DNC hack during a CBS This Morning interview on September 9, 2016.
Yet, according to the New York Times and details provided in the DNC’s lawsuit against Russia and the Trump campaign, Russia’s alleged cyberattack on the DNC began just weeks after Trump announced his candidacy for president in June 2015.
Senator Charles Grassley (R), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, speaks in the Senate about difficulties he is having with the FBI’s selective release of information regarding the FBI’s Clinton email investigation.
Senator Charles Grassley takes to the Senate floor on September 12, 2016. (Credit: Public domain)
He points out that the FBI has taken the unusual step of releasing the FBI’s final report and Clinton interview summary. “However, its summary is misleading or inaccurate in some key details and leaves out other important facts altogether.”
He says there are dozens of completely unclassified witness reports, but even some Congressional staffers can’t see them “because the FBI improperly bundled [them] with a small amount of classified information, and told the Senate to treat it all as if it were classified.”
He says the normal procedure is for documents to have the classified portions marked. Then the unclassified portions can be released. But in defiance of regulations and a clear executive order on how such material should be handled, “the FBI has ‘instructed’ the Senate office that handles classified information not to separate the unclassified information.”
He points in particular to recently revealed news that Paul Combetta, an employee of the company (Platte River Networks) that managed Clinton’s private server from June 2013 onwards, deleted and wiped all of Clinton’s emails from the server in March 2015. Grassley claims “there is key information related to that issue that is still being kept secret, even though it is unclassified. If I honor the FBI’s ‘instruction’ not to disclose the unclassified information it provided to Congress, I cannot explain why.”
He also says, “Inaccuracies are spreading because of the FBI’s selective release. For example, the FBI’s recently released summary memo may be contradicted by other unclassified interview summaries that are being kept locked away from the public.”
He says he has been fighting the FBI on this, but without success so far, as the FBI isn’t even replying to his letters. (US Senate, 9/13/2016) (YouTube, 9/13/2016)
Lawyers for Bryan Pagliano, the State Department employee who managed Clinton’s server when she was secretary of state, indicate he will plead the Fifth Amendment yet again. He was given a subpoena to speak before a Congressional hearing the next day, on September 13, 2016.
Pagliano refused to speak before a Congressional inquiry in September 2015, refused to take questions for a State Department inspector general’s report published in May 2016, pled the Fifth when he was deposed in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in June 2016, and only took part in the FBI’s Clinton investigation after agreeing to an immunity deal.
Mark MacDougall (Credit: Akin Gump)
Pagliano’s five lawyer team, led by Mark MacDougall, claim: “Any effort to require Mr. Pagliano to publicly appear this week and again assert his Fifth Amendment rights before a committee of the same Congress, inquiring about the same matter as the Benghazi Committee, furthers no legislative purpose and is a transparent effort to publicly harass and humiliate our client for unvarnished political purposes.”
Justin Cooper, a Bill Clinton aide who helped Pagliano manage the server, reportedly has indicated that he will answer questions in the hearing. (The Washington Post, 9/12/2016)
The next day, Pagliano will fail to appear before the Congressional hearing at all.
In comments during a Congressional hearing relating to Clinton’s use of a private server, Representative Jason Chaffetz (R) comments about Clinton’s server manager Bryan Pagliano, “[I]t’s our understanding [that] Mr. Pagliano worked in the I.T. department at the State Department nearly four years yet virtually every single email Mr. Pagliano had has suddenly disappeared. There’s something like less than 20 emails…”
Bryan Pagliano’s empty chair at the hearing. (Credit: CSpan)
Chaffetz also says, “Mr. Pagliano is important because he was receiving a paycheck from the Clintons but failed to disclose that on his financial forms. We’d like to give him an opportunity to answer that question. We also believe he entered into an immunity agreement. You’d think somebody would sing like a songbird if you got immunity from the FBI. What are you afraid of?”
Pagliano cannot answer the question because he fails to attend the hearing, despite a Congressional subpoena to do so. (US Congress, 9/13/2016)
It has been reported that the .pst file containing all of Pagliano’s State Department emails has been lost.
The FBI Clinton email investigation’s final report failed to mention the issue of Pagliano’s lost emails or how many of his emails the FBI had or found. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)
On September 12, 2016, a deadline to respond to a subpoena issued by a Congressional committee passed. Three companies involved in the management of Clinton’s private server had been given the subpoena, and one – Datto, Inc. – responded in time with documents, while the other two – Platte River Networks (PRN) and SECNAP, Inc. – did not.
The next day, Representative Lamar Smith (R) comments in a related Congressional hearing, “just this morning… SECNAP’s [legal] counsel confirmed to my staff that the Clinton’s private LLC [Clinton Executive Service Corp.] is actively engaged in directing their obstructionist responses to Congressional subpoenas.” (US Congress, 9/13/2016)
Clinton’s lawyer will later confirm that he is prohibiting SECNAP from fully complying with a subpoena.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee holds a public hearing related to the management of Clinton’s private server. Four people associated with the management of Clinton’s private server had been served by Congressional subpoenas on September 8, 2016 to force them to testimony:
Paul Combetta (left) Bill Thornton (center) Justin Cooper (right) (Credit: CSpan)
Bryan Pagliano, a former State Department employee who managed Clinton’s server while she was secretary of state. He defies the subpoena by failing to appear at all.
Justin Cooper, a former Bill Clinton aide who helped Pagliano manage the server. He does answer questions for nearly two hours at the hearing.
Paul Combetta, a Platte River Networks (PRN) employee, which managed the server from June 2013 until at least late 2015. He deleted and then wiped all of Clinton’s emails from her server. He fails to answer any questions and pleads the Fifth instead.
Bill Thornton, another PRN employee who managed the server with Combetta. He also to answer any questions and pleads the Fifth instead.
Pagliano’s lawyers have complained the hearing is politically biased and he will continue to refuse to participate. He has also failed to cooperate with another Congressional committee in 2015, a State Department inspector general’s investigation, and a deposition in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.
Representative Jason Chaffetz (R) says of Pagliano’s refusal to appear: “He made the decision not to be here and there are consequences for that. … We’ll look at the full range of options. If anybody is under any illusion I’m going to let go of this and let it sail off into the sunset they are very ill-advised.” However, he doesn’t specify what the penalties might be. (The Associated Press, 9/13/2016) (US Congress, 9/13/2016)
Austin McChord, the CEO of Datto, Inc., was also scheduled to appear, but there is no mention of him. Presumably, he is rescheduled for another hearing.
Justin Cooper appears before the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee on September 13, 2016. (Credit: Alex Wong / Getty Images)
Justin Cooper worked with Bryan Pagliano to manage Clinton’s private server while she was secretary of state. But while Pagliano was a State Department employee, Cooper was an aide to former President Bill Clinton as well as a Clinton Foundation employee. When Cooper testifies before a Congressional committee on this day, he is asked by Representative Jason Chaffetz (R) if he had a security clearance while he was helping to manage the server.
He replies, “No, I did not have a security clearance.”
He mentions that he worked in the White House from 2000 to 2001, but he is not asked if he had a security clearance in those years. However, he mentions that he wasn’t involved in handling classified information at that time.
Chaffetz also asks him, “You had access to the server the entire time you were working for the Clintons?”
He answers, “Yes I had access to the server.”
He also mentions that both he and Pagliano had remote access, which means they could have accessed Clinton’s emails over the Internet at any time. (US Congress, 9/13/2016)
Curiously, the FBI Clinton email investigation’s final report, released earlier inSeptember 2016, doesn’t mention Cooper’s lack of a security clearance. Nor is it mentioned in the summary of Clinton’s July 2016 FBI interview, which is made public in early September 2016 as well, if Clinton knew Cooper had no security clearance when she hired him and continued to pay him for managing the server. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)
Cooper shakes hands with Representative Chaffetz after the hearing. (Credit: CSpan)
Justin Cooper worked with Bryan Pagliano to manage Clinton’s private server while she was secretary of state. When Cooper testifies before a Congressional committee on this day, he is asked by Representative Jason Chaffetz (R), “[H]ow many people had access to the server?”
He replies, “There were two people who had some administrative rights, myself and Mr. Pagliano. I can’t off the top of my head tell you exactly how many users there were over the lifetime of the server, but it was less than 20 people.”
He also mentions, “The only remote access login to the server was for myself and Mr. Pagliano.”
At other points in his testimony, he says that most of the users were members of former President Bill Clinton’s staff and/or Clinton Foundation employees. Cooper doesn’t have a security clearance and its probable that most of the others with access to the server don’t have security clearances either. (US Congress, 9/13/2016)
In July 2016, FBI Director James Comey claimed that Clinton gave between three and nine people without a security clearance access to the server, but he may be defining “access” in a different manner than Cooper.
On September 13, 2016, hacked emails belonging to former Secretary of State Colin Powell appear on a website known as DCLeaks.com. It is unclear who owns the DCLeaks website, which only appeared on the Internet a few months earlier. They are known for previously publishing hacked emails belonging to prominent Democrats and Republicans, including General Philip M. Breedlove, the former commander of NATO forces in Europe, and George Soros, a wealthy backer of liberal causes. It is also reported to have ties to Guccifer 2.0, who in turn has been accused of having links to the Russian government.
Colin Powell (Credit: Paul Morigi / Getty Images)
Powell’s aide Peggy Cifrino states, “We are confirming that General Powell has been hacked and that they are his emails. We have no further comment at this time.” The dates of Powell’s hacked emails range from June 24, 2014 to as recently as August 29, 2016.
Some of the emails are first reported by BuzzFeed and the Intercept, followed by many other prominent mainstream news sources.
The New York Times reports, “A hack of Mr. Powell’s email this week has ripped away the diplomatic jargon and political niceties to reveal his unvarnished disdain of Donald J. Trump as a ‘national disgrace,’ his personal peeves with Hillary Clinton and his lingering, but still very raw, anger with the Republican colleagues with whom he so often clashed a decade ago.” (New York Times, 09/14/16)
“Two months before the 2016 election, George Papadopoulos received a strange request for a meeting in London, one of several the young Trump adviser would be offered — and he would accept — during the presidential campaign.
The meeting request, which has not been reported until now, came from Stefan Halper, a foreign policy expert and Cambridge professor with connections to the CIA and its British counterpart, MI6.
(…) According to a source with knowledge of the meeting, Halper asked Papadopoulos: “George, you know about hacking the emails from Russia, right?”
Papadopoulos told Halper he didn’t know anything about emails or Russian hacking, said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign. The professor did not follow up on the line of inquiry.
Halper first contacted Papadopoulos by email. In a Sept. 2, 2016, message sent to Papadopoulos’s personal email account, he offered the Trump aide $3,000 to write a policy paper on issues related to Turkey, Cyprus, Israel and the Leviathan natural gas field. Halper also offered to pay for Papadopoulos’s flight and a three-night stay in London.
The Connaught Hotell (Credit: public domain)
Papadopoulos accepted the proposal, flew to England, and met with Halper and one of his assistants. He delivered the paper electronically Oct. 2 and received payment days later, according to documents TheDCNF reviewed.
(…) Papadopoulos and Halper met several times during the London trip, including at the Connaught Hotel and the Travellers Club — a classic 19th century club foreign diplomats and politicians frequent. Halper’s research assistant — a Turkish woman named Azra Turk — also met with Papadopoulos. The Connaught Hotel meeting was scheduled for Sept. 13, 2016, and the Travellers Club conclave was two days later.
While discussing the policy paper Papadopoulos was to write, Halper made an out-of-left-field reference to Russians and hacked emails, according to a source with direct knowledge of Papadopoulos’s version of events.
Joel Melstad, spokesperson for the of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), says, “ODNI is not leading an [intelligence community]-wide damage assessment and is not aware of any individual IC element conducting such formal assessments.”
Most of the above “top secret” emails sent or received on Clinton’s server related to the US drone program in Pakistan. According to the Washington Free Beacon, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper “agreed with security officials who argued against the need to carry out the damage assessment. Intelligence officials argued in internal discussions that since many details of the drone missile program targeting terrorists were disclosed in earlier leaks unrelated to Clinton’s use of a personal email server, gauging the damage done by her conduct would be difficult, and possibly unnecessary.”
However, “Other officials said Clapper’s decision appeared based on political considerations and was an effort to avoid embroiling American intelligence agencies in charges they were attempting to influence the outcome of Clinton’s bid for the White House.”
Representative Mike Pompeo (Credit: Politico)
A June 2014 counterintelligence directive, ICD-732, states that “damage assessments shall be conducted when there is an actual or suspected unauthorized disclosure or compromise of classified national intelligence that may cause damage to US national security.”
Representative Mike Pompeo (R) says, “FBI Director [James] Comey has made clear that there was highly classified and sensitive information on Secretary Clinton’s personal server. It is imperative that [a damage assessment] be conducted to determine what harm to American national security may have occurred and, just as importantly, to prevent the massive mishandling of sensitive materials from ever happening again.”
Angelo Codevilla (Credit: public domain)
Angelo Codevilla, a former US intelligence officer, says, “Common sense, the intelligence community’s standard practice, as well as a 2014 directive, require assessing the damage done by any such compromise.” She also asserts that Comey’s “vague and evasive” comments regarding Clinton’s handling of classified information confirm that a significant number of secrets were compromised.
Michelle Van Cleave (Credit: public domain)
Michelle Van Cleave, a former national counterintelligence executive, similarly asserts, “Whenever there is a significant compromise of national security information, as the FBI’s report confirms happened here, it is essential to conduct an assessment of the damage in order to protect plans, programs, or lives that may be at risk.” There have been reports that Clinton’s emails revealed the names of some undercover CIA officers as well.
Kenneth deGraffenreid (Credit: The Institute of World Politics)
Kenneth deGraffenreid, a former deputy national counterintelligence executive, says, “Intelligence agencies hate conducting damage assessments that could show people that somebody did something wrong, or improper, or did it poorly. They never want that known. It’s a bureaucracy that does one thing: protects itself.”
He says Congress should force the intelligence community to conduct the damage assessment, since it will find no political advantage in doing it voluntarily.
However, the Free Beacon reports, “Congressional sources said the House and Senate intelligence oversight committee are reluctant to require the damage assessment since it would codify in writing the false claim that no damage was caused to the drone program by the compromise of secrets by Clinton and her aides.” (The Washington Free Beacon, 9/14/2016)
Hillary Clinton (L) is applauded by Brookings Institution President Strobe Talbott before she delivers remarks about the Obama administration’s national security strategy at the Brookings Institution May 27, 2010 in Washington, DC. (Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous anti-Trump dossier, disclosed information from his Trump-Russia investigation to a longtime Clinton crony because of his position on a State Department advisory board, according to court documents filed on Tuesday.
According to the court filing, Steele told a court in the United Kingdom on Aug. 1 that he provided Strobe Talbott, the Clinton insider, with anti-Trump research because of his position on the Foreign Affairs Policy Board, an independent advisory board set up in 2011 by then-Sec. of State Hillary Clinton.
(…) The Steele document was revealed on Tuesday in a lawsuit filed by three Russian bankers who have sued Steele in the U.K. and U.S. over the dossier. A Sept. 14, 2016 memo in the dossier alleges links between the founders of the bank, Alfa Bank, and the Kremlin. They have sued Steele and Fusion GPS for defamation.
Steele disclosed the link to Talbott in response to a series of questions posed in the U.K. ligation.
(…) Talbott also has a familial link to another dossier that was handled by Steele and Winer. Talbott’s brother-in-law is Cody Shearer, a longtime Clinton fixer who conducted a private investigation of his own into Trump during the campaign.
Shearer’s dossier contains some allegations similar to Steele’s report, including that Russians had blackmail material on Trump. Shearer passed his report to Winer through Sidney Blumenthal, another longtime Clinton insider. Winer then shared the Shearer memos with Steele, who provided them to the FBI.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 12/11/2018)
Below is a list of the first 12 of the Dossier reports that have become available to the public.
1) Report 80, dated June 20, 2016
2) Report 86, dated July 26, 2015 (twenty-fifteen)
3) Report 94, dated July 19, 2016
4) Report 95, undated, but apparently written in late July 2016
5) Report 97, dated July 30, 2016
6) Report 100, dated August 5, 2016
7) Report 101, dated August 10, 2016
8) Report 102, dated August 10, 2016
9) Report 105, dated August 22, 2016
10) Report 111, dated September 14, 2016
11) Report 112, dated September 14, 2016
12) Report 113, dated September 14, 2016
According to the Horowitz report, the first time when FBI Headquarters received any of those Dossier reports was on September 19, 2016. That delivery comprised just six Dossier reports — 80, 94, 95, 100, 101, and 102 (Horowitz page 100). On that date, therefore, the series included a particular four-report gap — Reports 96, 97, 98 and 99. On some later, unknown date, Report 97 too was delivered to FBI Headquarters.
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In this blog, I have speculated that all these 12 reports (except Reports 80 and 86) were delivered unofficially to the FBI Counterintelligence Chief promptly after their publication dates. For example, Report 94 was delivered to that Chief within a few days of its publication date — July 19 — but its delivery was not recorded according to FBI procedures. Report 94 was delivered officially — recorded according to FBI procedures — on September 19. On that official delivery date, however, the Counterintelligence Chief already had possessed the report unofficially since mid-July.
The reason for the abnormal delivery of Dossier reports was to enable the FBI to deny its knowledge of some of the reports.
For example, Steele finished writing Report 94 (and assigned that number to the report) on July 19. Within a few days, that report was delivered to the Counterintelligence Chief, but that delivery was not recorded according to FBI procedures.
By a different delivery method, Report 94 was delivered on July 28 to the Chief Division Counsel FBI New York Field Office (NYFO) — not to FBI Headquarters. This delivery to the NYFO was recorded according to FBI procedures. On July 28, therefore, the FBI could no longer deny that the FBI — in particular, the FBI NYFO — had received Report 94, but it still could deny that FBI Headquarters had received it. (When the NYFO received any Dossier reports, the NYFO simply hid them in a safe until further instructions were received from from FBI Headquarters.)
Later, in mid-September, someone decided that the current situation allowed Report 94 to be delivered officially to FBI Headquarters. This belated delivery was recorded in accordance with FBI procedures on September 19. From this latter date forward, FBI headquarters would have to acknowledge that it had been informed about Report 94.
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The delivery of Report 97 was different. Like Report 94, it was delivered to the Counter-intelligence Chief promptly and unofficially. However, Report 97 was not delivered to the NYFO. Therefore, the FBI created no record at all that Report 97 had been delivered to any FBI office at all. Officially, Report 97 was delivered to the FBI the first time on September 19. Until that latter date, the FBI avoided creating any record indicating any FBI knowledge of the existence of Report 97.
I speculated in a previous blog article that the FBI might be more embarrassed by Report 97 (than, for example, by Report 94), because Report 97 indicated that Christopher Steele was obtaining information from sources with inside knowledge about Trump’s election-campaign staff. In particular, Report 97 claimed to be based partially on reports from “a Russian émigré figure close to the Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign team”. That phrase — which eventually might cause the public to suspect that the FBI was collecting information from inside Trump’s campaign staff — might have caused the decision in July 2016 to not send Report 97 to the NYFO.
By mid-September, however, the situation had changed. Now the FBI Headquarters was trying to overcome objections to its application for a FISA warrant in order to collect information about Trump’s supporters. Therefore, FBI Headquarters now had to receive officially some Dossier reports. In particular, Reports 97 now seemed to FBI Headquarters to be more useful than problematical. After all, the Russian émigré reported the following (emphasis added):
Speaking in confidence to a trusted associate in late July 2016, a Russian émigré figure close to the Republican US presidential candidate Donald TRUMP’s campaign team commented on the fallout from publicity surrounding the Democratic National Committee (DNC) e-mail hacking scandal. The émigré said there was a high level of anxiety within the TRUMP team as a result of various accusations levelled [sic] against them and indications from the Kremlin that President PUTIN and others in the leadership thought things had gone too far now and risked spiralling [sic]out of control.
Continuing on this theme, the émigré associate of TRUMP opined that the Kremlin wanted the situation to calm but for ‘plausible deniability’ to be maintained concerning its (extensive) pro-TRUMP and anti-CLINTON operations. S/he therefore judged that it was unlikely these would be ratcheted up, at least for the time being.
However, in terms of established operational liaison between the TRUMP team and the Kremlin, the émigré confirmed that an intelligence exchange had been running between them for at least 8 years. Within this context PUTIN’s priority requirement had been for intelligence on the activities, business and otherwise, in the US of leading Russian oligarchs and their families. TRUMP and his associates duly had obtained and supplied the Kremlin with this information.
Finally, the émigré said s/he understood the Kremlin had more intelligence on CLINTON and her campaign but he did not know the details or when or if it would be released. As far as ‘kompromat’ (compromising information) on TRUMP were concerned, although there was plenty of this, he understood the Kremlin had given its word that it would not be deployed against the Republican presidential candidate given how helpful and co-operative his team had been over several years, and particularly of late.
In mid-September, FBI Headquarters foresaw a need to use this information in order to obtain a FISA warrant. Therefore, FBI Headquarters belatedly arranged for Report 97 to be received in accordance with FBI procedures. Keep in mind, though, that the Counterintelligence Chief actually had received Report 97 already in July.” (Read more: Mike Sylvester, 10/10/2021)(Archive)(Copy of dossier saved to this website)
A new John Solomon article today, based on an interview with Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, is essentially confirming a May 2018article where it was presumed that Oleg had hired Christopher Steele at the same time Steele was working with Nellie Ohr and Fusion GPS to write the Trump dossier. Here’s the interview:
The report on the FBI contacting Oleg Deripaska in September 2016 for help to structure a narrative of Russian involvement in the Trump Campaign via Paul Manafort has some ramifications.
♦In 2009 the FBI, then headed by Robert Mueller, requested the assistance of Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska in an operation to retrieve former FBI officer and CIA resource Robert Levinson who was captured in Iran two years earlier. The agent assigned to engage Deripaska was Andrew McCabe; the primary FBI need was financing and operational support. Deripaska spent around $25 million and would have succeeded except the U.S. State Department, then headed by Hillary Clinton, backed out.
♦In September of 2016 Andrew McCabe is now Deputy Director of the FBI, when two FBI agents approached Deripaska in New York – again asking for his help. This time the FBI request was for Deripaska to outline Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort as a tool of the Kremlin. Deripaska once hired Manafort as a political adviser and invested money with him in a business venture that went bad. Deripaska sued Manafort, alleging he stole money. However, according to the 2018article, despite Deripaska’s disposition toward Manafort he viewed the request as absurd. He laughed the FBI away, telling them: “You are trying to create something out of nothing.”
Was the DOJ/FBI trying to use Deripaska to frame candidate Donald Trump? Was this part of their 2016 insurance policy?
John Solomon reports that Deripaska wanted to testify to congress in 2017, without any immunity request, but was rebuked. Who blocked his testimony?
(…) Did Robert Mueller omit any mention of Oleg Deripaska from his 2017 Manafort indictment purposefully? Was Deripaska’s denial of any information about Manafort actually Brady material that Mueller and Weissmann intentionally kept from Manafort’s defense team? And/or was Robert Mueller hoping to hide his prior professional work relationship with Deripaska?” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 7/02/2019)
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (Credit: public domain)
While Clinton was secretary of state, she exchanged 18 emails with President Obama from her private email account. All information about these emails has remained classified. But some details are finally released due to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit by Vice News.
All of the emails were exchanged between May 18, 2012 and January 31, 2013. Obama sent eight emails to Clinton, and the other ten were from Clinton to Obama. None of the emails appear to contain highly sensitive or classified information, but instead are thank you notes, holiday greetings, and the like.
All of the emails were withheld under presidential privilege and privacy act and deliberative process exemptions to the FOIA. The new details are formally submitted in what is called a Vaughn Index, a document prepared for FOIA lawsuits in which government departments justify the withholding of information. (Vice News, 09/15/16) (Vicc News, 09/15/16)
In February 2016, it was reported there were 19 emails between Clinton and Obama, not 18. It is unclear if the Vaughn Index is missing one or if the report of 19 emails was off by one.
A Wall Street Journal editorial entitled “The FBI’s Blind Clinton Trust” elicits a September 15, 2016 letter to the editor response from Richard W. Beckler, former Chief of the Criminal Fraud Section of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Richard Beckler (Credit: Bracewell Law)
Beckler writes, “Decisions to prosecute are made by the Justice Department. It is absolutely not the job of the FBI to make prosecutorial decisions. FBI Director James Comey didn’t bother to attend Hillary Clinton’s interview, though he was acting as the ostensible decision maker in the case. One would think he would want to test the witness’s credibility in person. This was clearly no ordinary case and demanded his close attention.”
Furthermore, despite what Comey says, “the FBI doesn’t need to get a referral from Congress to investigate [Clinton’s] false statements to Congress.” He claims, “the FBI’s 302 reports (handwritten notes by FBI agents during investigations) recorded by the FBI should have been turned over to Congress immediately and in their entirety.”
Beckler continues, “Contrary to the [Justice Department]’s normal policy of announcing names of the prosecution team, Mr. Comey hasn’t told anyone who the ‘career’ [Justice Department] attorneys were who supervised the FBI investigation. They have never been named.”
He concludes, “After this long drawn-out FBI inquiry, why did Mr. Comey rush to make his determination and recommendation barely three days after the actual interview took place?” (Wall Street Journal, 09/15/16)
On September 16, 2016, Twitter user Katica@GOPpollanalyst sends a message to Jeffrey Marty via his Twitter page which is a parody account for a fictitious congressional member named Rep. Steven Smith@RepStevenSmith. Katica had recently discovered posts to the Internet forum Reddit by someone using the name “stonetear,” and had deduced through various clues that this person actually is Paul Combetta, the Platte River Networks (PRN) employee who has managed Clinton’s private server since June 2013.
Katica then sends Marty a copy of stonetear’s Reddit post that was written on July 24, 2014, and includes a request for advice about “stripping out” the email address of a “VERY VIP” email account.
A photo of stonetear’s request for help on July 24, 2016, found by Katica and later archived by Redditors. (Credit: Katica / Twitter)
Marty replies, “NO WAY!!!!! That’s HUGE.”
Jeffrey Marty (Credit: Daily Caller)
Marty will later explain in a news article, “After a lot of discussion about the potential fallout of this decision, Katica and I decided the ‘stonetear’ information had to be released. Late Sunday night [September 18, 2016], we tweeted the (then-live) short link to the Reddit ‘VERY VIP’ post and four screenshots to Katica’s 2,000 followers, followed by an immediate re-tweet of her post to my 16,000 followers.”
Many interested people then begin finding and archiving all of Combetta’s Reddit posts, as well as other traces he’d left on the Internet using the “stonetear” alias. In the process, more evidence is found that “stonetear” and Paul Combetta are one and the same.
Within hours after the story breaking in various media outlets, including US News and World Report, “stonetear” is caught deleting all of his Reddit posts. The deletions are captured on video as they happen and are posted to YouTube. By September 20, 2016, a Congressional committee demands Combetta submit to recorded interviews by September 23, 2016 to explain these Reddit posts, as well as the deletions, or he will face another subpoena. (Daily Caller, 09/22/16)
Victoria Nuland and Jonathan Winer (Credit: public domain)
“Judicial Watch and The Daily Caller News Foundation today released 84 pages of documents, including a September 2016 email exchange between then-Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Special Coordinator for Libya Jonathan Winer, a close associate of dossier author Christopher Steele, discussing a “face-to-face” meeting on a “Russian matter.”
(In June 2016 Nuland permitted a meeting between Steele and the FBI’s legal attaché in Rome. Nuland told CBS News that the State Department knew about the Steele dossier by July 2016.)
According to an op-ed Winer wrote for The Washington Post in 2018, also in September 2016, “Steele and I met in Washington and discussed the information now known as the “dossier… I prepared a two-page summary and shared it with Nuland, who indicated that, like me, she felt that the secretary of state needed to be made aware of this material.”
A September 17, 2016, email exchange between Nuland and Winer – that was classified in the interest of national defense or foreign policy – discusses the political situation in Libya, but also brings up a “Russian matter:”
From: Nuland, Victoria J Sent: Saturday, September 17, 2016 1:31 PM To: Winer, Jonathan Subject: Re. Libya Update
In ny face to face?
From: Winer, Jonathan Sent: September 17, 2016 at 1:56:05 PM EDT To: Nuland, Victoria J Subject: Re: Libya Update
Yes that was [sic] be good.
From: Nuland, Victoria J Sent: Saturday, September 17, 2016 1:58 PM To: Winer, Jonathan Subject: Re. Libya Update
Good. I’ll reach out when im there Sunday. [Redacted]
Other emails show senior State Department personnel using unsecure BlackBerrys to transmit classified information even after the Clinton email scandal became public.” (Read more: Judicial Watch 7/18/2019)
Michael Sussmann (l) and James Baker (Credit: Perkins Coie/public domain)
“On September 19, 2016, DNC/Clinton Campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann met with FBI General Counsel James Baker, where Baker was provided with data and “white paper” purporting to show covert communications (since proven to be bogus) between Russian Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization.
Special Counsel John Durham has just provided evidence that the night before – on September 18, 2016 – Sussmann sent Baker this text:
As it turns out, Sussmann was billing the Clinton Campaign for his work on the Alfa Bank hoax. This text from Sussmann to Baker is damning for Sussmann’s case, proving Sussmann’s efforts at deceiving a top official at the FBI about his clients, and demonstrating how Sussmann tried to convince Baker he was there to supposedly do the right thing. (Read more: Techno Fog/Substack, 4/05/2022) (Archive)
A photo captured of Combetta deleting his posts on Reddit, as it was happening. (Credit: updatedblubber)
YouTube member “updatedblubber” posts a video claiming it is a live recording of Platte River Networks (PRN) employee Paul Combetta deleting ‘stonetear’s posts on Reddit. The deletion occurs in the morning of September 19, 2016, within hours after news that the Reddit posts of “stonetear” really belong to Combetta break into the mainstream.
Later on the same day, Representative Lamar Smith (R), chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, writes a letter to PRN attorney Ken Eichner, expressing his concern about the deletion of the Reddit posts. Smith adds, “Given these concerns, the committee requests that you provide dates for the prioritized interview requests, as well as dates for the remaining Platte River Networks employees, by noon on Friday, September 23, 2016. If you fail to provide dates certain for each of the transcribed interviews, the committee will consider issuing subpoenas for depositions.” (YouTube, 09/19/16) (Representative Lamar Smith, 09/19/16)
In the hours following the discovery of the “stonetear” Reddit account, internet sleuths discover the following reasons “stonetear” is an online alias for PRN employee Paul Combetta:
1. On July 24, 2014 ‘stonetear’ posted a request for help on Reddit, asking for help stripping the email address from a VIP’s (VERY VIP) client’s archived emails. The day before, Clinton’s lawyers sent some of Clinton’s emails so they could begin sorting them.
2. On December 10, 2014, ‘stonetear’ asked for advice from Reddit users on how to implement a 60-day email “purge” policy. It is also reportedly near the same time that Clinton told her lawyer Cheryl Mills she didn’t need her “personal” emails, resulting in Mills telling those managing Clinton’s server to delete them.
Another sample captured of Combetta as ‘stonetear’ asking Reddit users for help. (Credit: Reddit)
3. The inactive website combetta.com is registered to the email address stonetear@gmail.com in a search of domain registration information using the service whois.com.
4. This Facebook photo is captioned by a friend of Combetta and refers to him as “Stone Tear.”
Paul Combetta is referred to as “Stonetear” by a friend in this FB photo. (Credit: Facebook)
5. An account for a person named Paul Combetta on the web bazaar Etsy also has the username ‘stonetear.’
6. Platte River Networks (PRN) has stated Combetta is their only employee who lives in Rhode Island. ‘Stonetear’ claims to live in Rhode Island in his posts on Reddit.
7. A website publicizing a help file for the video game Betrayal at Krondor thanks Combetta and shows his email address is stonetear@gmail.com
A photo capture from the website Krondor, thanking Combetta for his help with an internet game and includes stonetear@gmail.com as his email address. (Credit: public domain)
8. Moreover, Stonetear@gmail.com has a Google Account profile picture that looks like Combetta.
A captured shot of Combetta’s ‘stonetear’ Gmail account with photo included. (Credit: public domain)
FBI Director James Comey will later confirm that Paul Combetta is “stonetear” in his testimony to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on September 28, 2016. (CSpan 01:27:39, 09/28/2016)
US District Court Judge Richard Leon criticizes the State Department over what he calls “foot-dragging” regarding Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests relating to Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.
US DC District Court Judge Richard Leon (Credit: public domain)
Leon warns Justice Department lawyers, “You have a client that, to say the least, is not impressing the judges on this court, myself included. … It is in your client’s interest to start being more obviously cooperative. The State Department is at risk of being perceived as obstreperous. [They] need to get with the program.”
The hearing is due to a FOIA lawsuit trying to force the release of documents on whether Clinton and her aides were trained to handle classified information. The State Department propose a deadline of October 17, 2016 to produce about 450 unclassified documents relating to the issue sought by the Daily Caller.
However, Leon orders the department to process and release of the records by October 10, 2016. (Politico, 09/19/16)
Representative Mark Meadows (Credit: public domain)
Representative Mark Meadows (R) of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is reviewing a Reddit post that suggests an IT (Internet technology) specialist who worked on Hillary Clinton’s private server asked for advice on how to alter the contents of “VERY VIP” emails. Meadows is the chairman of the panel’s Government Operations subcommittee.
Reddit users uncovered a two-year-old post from an account they believe belongs to Paul Combetta, a Platte River Networks employee who helped manage Clinton’s private server. Meadows says, “the Reddit post issue and its connection to Paul Combetta is currently being reviewed by [my] staff and evaluations are being made as to the authenticity of the post. If it is determined that the request to change email addresses was made by someone so closely aligned with the Secretary’s IT operation as Mr. Combetta, then it will certainly prompt additional inquiry.”
Representative Jason Chaffetz (R), chair of the same House committee, has issued a criminal referral to the US attorney for the District of Columbia. The referral asks that the Justice Department investigate whether Clinton or her aides were involved in the decision to delete the emails while they were under subpoena and a request for preservation of records. (The Hill, 09/19/16)
“Former FBI General Counsel James Baker met with the Democratic party’s top lawyer, Michael Sussmann, to discuss the ongoing investigation by the bureau into the Trump campaign’s alleged ties with Russia. This meeting happened prior to the FBI’s initial warrant to spy on short-term campaign volunteer Carter Page, sources close to the investigation have told SaraACarter.com. Moreover, information provided by Baker, who gave extensive testimony Wednesday to lawmakers behind closed doors, coincides with the House Intelligence Committee’s final Russia report that suggests Sussmann was also leaking unverified information on the Trump campaign to journalists around the same time he met with Baker, according to the report and sources close the investigation.
These sources say this new information from Baker exposes the bureau’s failure to inform the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that the evidence used to spy on Page was partisan and unverified. It further reveals the extensive role and close connection Sussmann, a cybersecurity and national security lawyer with Perkins Coie, had with the now-embattled research firm, Fusion GPS. The Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton Campaign retained Fusion GPS through Perkins Coie during the 2016 election to investigate alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Fusion GPS then hired former British spy, Christopher Steele, who compiled the unverified dossier during the summer and fall of 2016. In 2017, this reporter first published that Baker was purportedly under a Department of Justice criminal investigation for allegedly leaking classified national security information to the media. At the time, the bureau would not comment on Baker and would not confirm or deny any investigation. Baker, who resigned from the bureau in May, was the FBI’s top counsel and a close advisor to former Director James Comey.
James Baker (Credit: CSpan2)
In 2016, the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid $9.1 million to the law firm, according to reports. Sussmann, however, is also connected to CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike is the private cybersecurity that was retained by Perkins Coie for the DNC to investigate the breach of its server after it was discovered that it had been hacked in April 2016. Although the FBI has conducted its own investigation into the breach of the server the Democratic National Committee never gave the FBI permission to access the server itself.
“These parallels between the law firm and CrowdStrike also need to be investigated,” said a former FBI official familiar with the security firm. “All of these connections aren’t coincidences and it smells to high heaven.”
According to lawmakers, he explained in detail how the Russia probe was handled by bureau officials in an “abnormal way” and detailed his meeting with Sussmann. Fox Newsfirst reported Baker’s testimony quoting Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) who said, “some of the things that were shared were explosive in nature.” Meadows, who attended the deposition of Baker, told SaraACarter.com he would not elaborate on the specifics of the interview, but said, “Mr. Baker’s testimony provided a number of new facts that needed further exploration.” Meadows expects more information in the future and follow-up interviews.
Baker was forthcoming about what he knew and what took place during the investigation, multiple sources said. The information regarding the meeting between Baker and Sussmann would indicate that the FBI was more than likely aware that the law firm was hired by the DNC to investigate alleged connections between the Trump campaign and Russia, but withheld that information from the secret FISC when it sought the warrant to spy on short-term campaign volunteer Page in October.” (Read more: Sara Carter, 10/03/2018)
Jeff Carlson of themarketswork.com pinpoints the possible date of Sussman and Baker’s meeting in the footnotes of a House Intelligence Committee report, to September 2016.
“In the House Intelligence Committee’s final Report on Russian Active Measures, mention is made of a meeting between James Baker and an unknown party in footnote 43, on page 57. This is a particularly heavily redacted portion but the following details are available:
“In September 2016 [redacted] shared similar information in a one-on-one meeting with FBI General Counsel James Baker. HPSCI, Executive Session of [redacted], Dec. 18, 2017. Around the same time as his meeting with FBI, [redacted] shared the information with journalists, [redacted] of Slate, who published an article at the end of October. HPSCI, Executive Session of [redacted] Dec. 18, 2017; [redacted] “Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?,” Slate, Oct. 31, 2016. Candidate Clinton promoted the [redacted] article to her social media followers the same day it was published.” (Intelligence.house (pdf)
“On Sept. 19, FBI General Counsel James Baker met with Perkins Coie partner Michael Sussmann, who had sought out the meeting. Baker told Congressional lawmakers in an Oct. 3, 2018, testimony—a transcript of which was reviewed for this article—that Sussmann presented him with “a stack of material I don’t know maybe a quarter inch half inch thick something like that clipped together, and then I believe there was some type of electronic media, as well, a disk or something.”
The information that Sussmann gave to Baker was related to what Baker described as “a surreptitious channel of communications” between the Trump Organization and “a Russian organization associated with the Russian Government.”
Baker was describing alleged communications between Alfa Bank and a server in the Trump Tower. These allegations, which were investigated by the FBI and proven to be false, were widely covered in the media.
Baker’s testimony also shows that Sussmann was speaking with the media at the same time he had approached Baker, who noted that Sussmann had also provided the info to the media and had told him that “the New York Times was aware of this.”
Baker testified that the FBI approached The New York Times and convinced them to hold off on their reporting while the FBI investigated Sussmann’s information.” (Read more: Epoch Times, 1/24/2019)
“One of the co-founders of the opposition research firm that commissioned the Steele dossier was in contact with a State Department official in the days before a news article was published laying out allegations contained in the salacious anti-Trump report.
Emails obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation show that Glenn Simpson, an executive at Fusion GPS, contacted Jonathan Winer, who then served as State’s special envoy for Libya, on Sept. 19 and Sept. 22, 2016. That was days ahead of the publication of a Yahoo! Newsarticle that was the first story to cite information gathered by Christopher Steele, the former British spy who authored the dossier.
Winer, a longtime aide to former Secretary of State John Kerry, was a source for that article, which laid out Steele’s allegations about Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser who would become the target of FBI surveillance.
The emails, which were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed on TheDCNF’s behalf by Judicial Watch, show for the first time that Simpson had direct contact with a State Department official.
The emails do not mention the dossier or Steele, but they do show that Simpson was desperate to speak with Winer, a Democratic attorney who also served in the State Department during the Clinton administration.
Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, sent an email on Sept. 19, 2016 asking Winer if he was in town.
Former assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland speaks during a news conference in Kiev, Ukraine, April 27, 2016. (Credit: Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters)
(…) Congressional investigators have looked into Winer and the State Department’s role in handling the Steele information and other intelligence used in the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign. Republicans have long been puzzled over information that flowed through Foggy Bottom prior to making its way to FBI investigators.
Victoria Nuland, who served as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, approved a July 5, 2016, meeting between FBI Agent Michael Gaeta and Steele in Rome. Fusion GPS had hired Steele just weeks earlier to investigate President Donald Trump’s possible ties to Russia. The ex-MI6 officer wrote his first of 17 dossier memos on June 20, 2016. That document alleged that the Kremlin had blackmail material on Trump. (Read more: The Daily Caller, 3/04/2019)
Representative Lamar Smith (R), chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, issues a subpoena to FBI Director James Comey for documents and information related to the security of former Clinton’s private email account and server. The committee requested these documents in a September 9, 2016 letter. Comey has yet to turn over any of the requested documents. The subpoena orders him to provide the documents by September 26, 2016.
Smith’s committee has jurisdiction to evaluate the “way in which Executive Branch departments and agencies and private entities can improve their cybersecurity.” (US Congress, 9/20/2016)
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee holds a classified hearing with Peter Kadzik, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, to discuss document requests. Although the hearing is held behind closed doors, Politico will report on what takes place several days later.
Peter Kadzik (Credit: Molly Riley / The Associated Press)
Republicans believe the hearing is necessary because their request for a completely unredacted copy of the FBI’s Clinton investigation report has gone unanswered. They also have questions about the immunity deals the department handed out during the Clinton email investigation, and want to know who else besides Bryan Pagliano and Paul Combetta (both managers of Clinton’s private servers) received legal protection, who agreed to the immunity deals, and whether the deals require recipients to cooperate with other investigative bodies.
Politico writes, “Kadzik wouldn’t say. A Democratic source said he could not answer the questions because Republicans had only asked for the information a few hours earlier in a letter to the Justice Department, and the answers weren’t fully researched.”
Kadzik’s refusal to answer their questions doesn’t go over well with Republicans, and according to one Republican source, “the meeting deteriorate[s] from there.” Another Republican threatens a public hearing where Kadzik would have to testify if he fails to provide the information requested, and in effect dares him to say that “Congress [isn’t] entitled to it.”
The Justice Department will deliver the unredacted copies of the immunity agreements for Pagliano and Combetta on September 22, 2016, and the immunity agreements for former State Department officials Cheryl Mills, Heather Samuelson, and John Bentel will be provided the following day. (Politico, 09/23/2016)
Imran Awan (Credit: Bonnie Jo Mount/Washington Post)
“The Department of Justice found “no evidence” that former Democratic IT aide Imran Awan violated cybersecurity laws, prosecutors said Thursday, but the House of Representatives’ internal watchdog reported that the Pakistani native made “unauthorized access” to congressional servers.
Prosecutors said police interviewed approximately 40 witnesses, reviewed relevant communications and examined a number of related devices, but couldn’t find anything they could charge Imran with regarding cybersecurity. Details of the investigation were included in a plea deal with Imran surrounding unrelated bank fraud.
But a pair of presentations by House Inspector General Theresa Grafenstine detail a number of rules Imran and his family allegedly broke surrounding cybersecurity rules. The watchdog is a past chair of ISACA, an international IT association.
Grafenstine found that Imran made “unauthorized access” to congressional servers in a way that suggested he was trying to “conceal” his activity and that his unusual activity suggested a server could be used for “nefarious purposes.”
A source allowed The Daily Caller News Foundation to review and transcribe the IG’s PowerPoint presentation, but was not given a copy for fear that metadata could reveal the source’s identity.
Bryan Pagliano, who managed Clinton’s server when she was secretary of state, recently was served a subpoena to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. But instead of pleading the Fifth, as two others did, he failed to appear altogether. The committee holds another hearing on this day, and he fails to appear again. As a result, the committee immediately votes on party lines, 19 to 15, to recommend that the House of Representatives hold him in contempt of Congress.
Representative Jason Chaffetz (R), chair of the committee, says, “Subpoenas are not optional. Mr. Pagliano is a crucial fact witness in this committee’s investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server to conduct government business.”
After a required two day wait time, the resolution can be voted on by the entire House to be adopted.
Democrats on the committee argue repeatedly that the move is a politically motivated abuse of power meant to influence the November 2016 presidential election.
A letter by Pagliano’s lawyer Mark McDougall to the committee similarly claims that efforts to force Pagliano to testify show a “naked political agenda” with “no valid legislative aim.” McDougall says Pagliano is ready to appear behind closed doors, but will not appear in public. (The Hill, 9/22/2016) (Politico, 9/22/2016)
Researcher, @MonsieursGhost, raises some very interesting points about when Peter Strzok and Lisa Page could clearly see Alfa Bank, Carter Page, and the dossier unfold into a Steele “influence” operation that was coordinating with the Clinton campaign.
Something has always bothered me about FBI’s treatment of Alfa-Fraud. Here is a short thread (developing) on irregularities and weirdness:
1) Horowitz reports FBI receives Alfa-related memo 112 on 11/6. Where does he get this date? FBI internal memo says it received 10/26… pic.twitter.com/0JJyBDEVKG
On same day Strzok learns Sussman AlfaBank info is
dodgy, @Isikoff story about @carterwpage breaks.
Small Team *knows* source is Steele, causing @petestrzok to admit that Dossier is an “influence” operation (!!) …”as well as” something that might have information value .😬 pic.twitter.com/QTftOJLAwV
“The FBI, Justice Department and a federal surveillance court were all apparently unaware that the Sept. 23, 2016article, written by Michael Isikoff, was based on the infamous and unverified Steele dossier. Numerous reporters, pundits and even a former CIA Moscow station chief have also been fooled into thinking that Isikoff’s article corroborated parts of the dossier.
The confusion is due in part to Isikoff’s report, which was published at Yahoo! News.
A veteran reporter who has worked inside the Beltway for decades, Isikoff used vague sourcing in his Carter Page article. He also failed to disclose that his information was the fruit of an anti-Trump opposition research campaign funded by Democrats.
He also did not acknowledge that his source — former British spy Christopher Steele — had already given the FBI the information he used in the article.”
(…) “Isikoff met Steele in September 2016 at a Washington, D.C. hotel. The pair were introduced by Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS and an “old friend” of Isikoff. The opposition research firm had been hired by the Clinton campaign and DNC to investigate Donald Trump. Fusion hired Steele to look into Trump’s ties to Russia.”
(…) “He did not disclose that Steele, his source, had provided information about Page to the FBI, sparking the very same investigation that Isikoff would confirm in his reporting. Steele began sharing information with the Bureau in July 2016. He provided updates on his findings through the summer and into Fall 2016.
And instead of referring to Steele as a private investigator, which he was, Isikoff described Steele as the more official sounding “well-placed Western intelligence source.”
Isikoff also withheld Steele and Simpson’s political affiliations even though he acknowledged on Friday that he was aware that the pair were working for Democrats. Isikoff did say that he was unaware that Simpson was working for the Clinton campaign and DNC.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 2/05/2018)
Clinton’s personal lawyer David Kendall sends a letter to House Science, Space and Technology Committee chair Representative Lamar Smith (R), complaining about a recent Congressional subpoena to the computer company SECNAP, Inc., which assisted with the security of Clinton’s private server from 2013 onwards.
David Kendall (Credit: Williams & Connolly)
Kendall writes, “The subpoena … is overbroad. We have no objection to the production of documents related to the SECNAP security device used in connection with the server that … hosted Secretary Clinton’s emails from her tenure as secretary …. We do object, however, to the production of SECNAP documents and security information regarding security equipment that was used by CESC [Clinton Executive Security Corp.] after the prior server was provided to the FBI, and thus, never hosted Secretary Clinton’s work-related emails.”
Kendall continues, “Documents regarding this equipment are likely to contain sensitive information related to security of the current network and/or server. Because these documents are unrelated to the Committee’s investigation and contain sensitive security information, I respectfully object to the portion of the subpoena seeking their production.”
Because SECNAP was hired by CESC, a Clinton family company, they want approval from Clinton’s lawyers regarding cooperation with government authorities. (Politico, 09/23/16)
“U.S. intelligence officials are seeking to determine whether an American businessman identified by Donald Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers has opened up private communications with senior Russian officials — including talks about the possible lifting of economic sanctions if the Republican nominee becomes president, according to multiple sources who have been briefed on the issue.
The activities of Trump adviser Carter Page, who has extensive business interests in Russia, have been discussed with senior members of Congress during recent briefings about suspected efforts by Moscow to influence the presidential election, the sources said. After one of those briefings, Senate minority leader Harry Reid wrote FBI Director James Comey, citing reports of meetings between a Trump adviser (a reference to Page) and “high ranking sanctioned individuals” in Moscow over the summer as evidence of “significant and disturbing ties” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin that needed to be investigated by the bureau.
Some of those briefed were “taken aback” when they learned about Page’s contacts in Moscow, viewing them as a possible back channel to the Russians that could undercut U.S. foreign policy, said a congressional source familiar with the briefings but who asked for anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject. The source added that U.S. officials in the briefings indicated that intelligence reports about the adviser’s talks with senior Russian officials close to President Vladimir Putin were being “actively monitored and investigated.”
A senior U.S. law enforcement official did not dispute that characterization when asked for comment by Yahoo News. “It’s on our radar screen,” said the official about Page’s contacts with Russian officials. “It’s being looked at.” (Read more: Yahoo News, 9/23/2016)
US District Judge James Boasberg (Credit: public domain)
US District Judge James Boasberg orders the State Department to finish publicly releasing about 1,000 pages of Clinton’s emails recovered by the FBI by November 4, 2016, just four days before the US presidential election. When Clinton turned over 55,000 pages of emails in December 2014, that totaled 30,000 emails, so if the same ratio holds, that would mean between 500 and 600 emails. Due to an on-going Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit by Judicial Watch, the State Department will release 350 pages of emails by October 7, 350 pages by October 21, and another 350 by November 4. After that, it will produce 500 pages a month.
In late July 2016, the FBI gave the State Department 15,000 emails that had been recovered by the FBI out of Clinton’s 31,000 deleted. For the first time, it is revealed that about 9,400 of these have been deemed purely personal by the department, which means they will not ever be publicly released. That means there are about 5,600 work-related emails to be reviewed and released. But roughly half of those may be largely duplicates of emails that have already been released. For instance, Clinton was often send emails to aides she wanted printed out for later reading, and would merely comment “Please print,” or she would forward an email to an aide without comment.
It is estimated only about 10 percent of the Clinton work-related emails recovered by the FBI will be made public before the election. Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, complains, “The public deserves to know what is in those emails, well before November 8, and the State Department should not continue dragging its feet on producing them.” (The New York Times, 9/23/2016)
Representative Jason Chaffetz (R), chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, claims the Justice Department was “handing out immunity deals like candy” in the Clinton email investigation. Chaffetz claims the Justice Department “exempted key physical evidence from any potential criminal case against the aides.”
According to Chaffetz, three former Clinton aides – Cheryl Mills, Heather Samuelson, and John Bentel – were granted immunity deals in exchange for their cooperation. Mills was Clinton’s chief of staff and then has been one of her lawyers Samuelson was a State Department aide and then also has been a Clinton lawyer. Bentel was director of the department’s Office of Information Resources Management (IRM).
The Justice Department provided copies of the immunity agreements to the House Oversight Committee this week, under seal. The information was then leaked to the Associated Press.
Mills “gave federal investigators access to her laptop on the condition that what they found couldn’t be used against her.” It is believed the same happened to Samuelson. Bentel apparently refused to be interviewed by the FBI until he got an immunity deal.
This brings the total number of people who were granted immunity as part of the FBI’s investigation to at least five. It has previously been reported that Bryan Pagliano and Paul Combetta were given immunity for their cooperation with the FBI. (The Associated Press, 09/23/16)
“Less than a week after Stefan Halper was outed as the FBI informant who infiltrated the Trump campaign, public records reveal that the 73-year-old Oxford University professor and former U.S. government official was paid handsomely by the Obama administration starting in 2012 for various research projects.
A longtime CIA and FBI asset who once reportedly ran a spy-operation on the Jimmy Carter administration, Halper was enlisted by the FBI to spy on several Trump campaign aides during the 2016 U.S. election. Meanwhile, a search of public records reveals that between 2012 and 2018, Halper received a total of $1,058,161 from the Department of Defense.
Halper’s contracts were funded through four annual awards paid directly out of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA). Established as the DoD’s “internal think tank” in 1973 by Richard Nixon (whose administration Halper worked for), the ONA was run by foreign policy strategist Andrew Marshall from its inception until his 2015 retirement at the age of 93, after which he was succeeded by current director James H. Baker.
Halper’s most recent award was noted recently by Trump supporter Jacob Wohl, which piqued the interest of internet researchers who continued the analysis.
According to the Website USASPENDING.gov, the payments to Halper are for “RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES (2012),” “RESEARCH AND STUDIES – THE YEAR 2030, (2014)”, “RUSSIA-CHINA RELATIONSHIP STUDY. (2015),” and “INDIA AND CHINA ECON STUDY (2016).”
The most recent award to Halper for $411,575 was made in two payments, and had a start date of September 26, 2016 – three days after a September 23Yahoo! News article by Michael Isikoff about Trump aide Carter Page, which used information fed to Isikoff by “pissgate” dossier creator Christopher Steele. The FBI would use the Yahoo! article along with the unverified “pissgate” dossier as supporting evidence in a FISA warrant application for Page.” (Read more: Zero Hedge, 5/21/2019)
“A Trump-supporting Pentagon analyst was stripped of his security clearance by Obama-appointed officials after he complained of questionable government contracts to Stefan Halper, the FBI informant who spied on the Trump presidential campaign.
Adam Lovinger, a 12-year strategist in the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, complained to his bosses about Halper contracts in the fall of 2016, his attorney, Sean M. Bigley, told The Washington Times.”
“Daniel Silverberg, then-House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer’s national security adviser, coordinated “work on Russia dossier materials provided by Christopher Steele” with Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Special Envoy for Libya Jonathan Winer, according to newly released documents made public June 12 by Judicial Watch.
A series of emails between Sept. 26, 2016, and Dec. 10, 2016, demonstrate that Winer shared “Russia-related information” he obtained from Steele—whom he described as his “old O friend”—with Nuland, who then shared it with Silverberg.
Winer delayed a previously scheduled meeting with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) in order to share the information with Nuland, according to Judicial Watch.
Multiple references in the emails to additional telephone calls and other contacts with unnamed or redacted parties, as well as discussion of “a possible working group meeting,” suggest an active response by Silverberg to the Steele dossier information he was provided by Nuland and Winer.”
John Carlin (Credit: Diego M. Radzinschi/The National Law Journal)
John Carlin was an Assistant Attorney General – and Head of the Department of Justice’s National Security Division (NSD).
On September 27, 2016, Carlin announced his resignation. He formally left the NSD on October 15, 2016. Carlin had been named Acting Assistant Attorney General in March 2013 and was confirmed in the spring of 2014.
Carlin had previously served as chief of staff to then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller.
Carlin was replaced with Mary McCord – who would later accompany Acting Attorney General Sally Yates to see White House Counsel Don McGahn regarding General Michael Flynn.
Carlin announced his resignation exactly one day after he filed the Government’s proposed 2016 Section 702 certifications. His signature can be found on page 31.
This filing would be subject to intense criticism from the FISA Court following disclosures made by NSA Director Rogers. Significant changes to the handling of raw FISA data would result.
Section 702 is part of the broader FISA Act and permits the government to target for surveillance foreign persons located outside the United States for the purpose of acquiring foreign intelligence information.
Instead of issuing individual court orders, Section 702 requires the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to provide the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) with annual certifications that specify categories of foreign intelligence information the government is authorized to acquire pursuant to Section 702.
The Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence must also certify that Intelligence Community elements will follow targeting procedures and minimization procedures that are approved by the FISC as part of the annual certification.
The National Security Division and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) are jointly required to routinely review all Intelligence Agency U.S. person queries of content to ensure the Section 702 queries satisfy the legal standard.
The NSD – with notice to the ODNI – is required to report any incidents of Agency noncompliance or misconduct to the FISA Court.
Again, John Carlin was Head of the NSD.
At the time Carlin’s sudden resignation went mostly unnoticed.
But there was more to the story.
Here is the official explanation as provided by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence:
After submitting its 2016 Certifications in September 2016, the Department of Justice and ODNI learned, in October 2016, about additional information related to previously reported compliance incidents and reported that additional information to the FISC. The NSA also self-reported the information to oversight bodies, as required by law. These compliance incidents related to the NSA’s inadvertent use of U.S. person identifiers to query NSA’s “upstream” Internet collection acquired pursuant to Section 702.
On October 24, 2016, the government orally apprised the Court of significant non-compliance with the NSA’s minimization procedures involving queries of data acquired under Section 702 using U.S. person identifiers. The full scope of non-compliant querying practices had not been previously disclosed to the Court. Two days later, on the day the Court otherwise would have had to complete its review of the certifications and procedures, the government made a written submission regarding those compliance problems…and the Court held a hearing to address them.
A federal search warrant was obtained on September 26, 2016, for Weiner’s iPhone, iPad, and laptop computer. The FBI obtained these devices the same day. The search warrant authorized the government to search for evidence relating to the following crimes: transmitting obscene material to a minor, sexual exploitation of children, and activities related to child pornography.
On page 303 of this report, the case agent, being the only one that had the authority to release the laptop, stated his concerns over no one contacting him:
“The crickets I was hearing was really making me uncomfortable because something was going to come crashing down….And my understanding, which is uninformed because…I didn’t work the Hillary Clinton matter. My understanding at the time was I am telling you people I have private Hillary Clinton emails, number one, and BlackBerry messages, number two. I’m telling you that we have potentially 10 times the volume that Director Comey said we had on the record. Why isn’t anybody here? Like, if I’m the supervisor of any CI squad in Seattle and I hear about this, I’m getting on with headquarters and saying, hey, some agent working child porn here may have [Hillary Clinton] emails. Get your ass on the phone, call [the case agent], and get a copy of that drive, because that’s how you should be. And that nobody reached out to me within, like, that night, I still to this day, I don’t understand what the hell went wrong.”
Anthony Weiner was released from prison on February 17, 2019 and sent to a halfway house in Brooklyn, New York. Huma Abedin still works side-by-side with Hillary Clinton on her illegally-run ‘Onward Together’ 501(c)(4) political organization. Til this day, what is on that laptop, remains a mystery. (Read more: CoreysDigs, 4/11/2019)(Archive)
(Timeline editor’s note: We have also never seen any of Hillary or Huma’s Blackberry messages.)
The cyber division of the FBI. (Credit: public domain)
(…) “Only a few hours after the New York office of the FBI took possession of the Weinerlaptop, on September 26, 2016, the FBI computer expert discovered it contained more than 140,000 emails involving Hillary Clinton. They were from multiple domain names: State.gov, Clintonemail.com, ClintonFoundation.org, HillaryClinton.com and Blackberry devices. The agent had what he told the inspector general was an “oh shit moment” — recognizing that he had found evidence important to the most important investigation — and he immediately reported it up the chain.
According to the inspector general’s report of June 14, specifically Chapters IX-XI, the treasure “trove” of emails covered Mrs. Clinton’s entiretenure as Secretary of State.
(…) “Indeed, according to the inspector general, 39 high-ranking FBI agents knew of it, along with the New York office and people in the New York U.S. Attorney’s office. The New York FBI informed them all during a secure video-conference on September 28 — chaired by Andrew McCabe.
One agent said the announcement of finding hundreds of thousands of Clinton emails on Weiner’s laptop was “like dropping a bomb in the middle of the meeting.”
The New York agent Sweeney followed up with two calls to McCabe later that evening — after McCabe did not call him as promised.
So . . . what did McCabe, Comey and Strzok do? They sat on it until police officers in New York and FBI agents in New York threatened to expose them. (Read more: The Daily Caller, 6/20/2018)
The DOJ’s NSD maintains oversight of the intelligence agencies’ use of Section 702 authority. The NSD and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) jointly conduct reviews of the intelligence agencies’ Section 702 activities every 60 days. The NSD—with notice to the ODNI—is required to report any incidents of agency noncompliance or misconduct to the FISA court.
Instead of issuing individual court orders, Section 702 requires the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to provide the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) with annual certifications that specify categories of foreign intelligence information the government is authorized to acquire, pursuant to Section 702.
John Carlin (Credit: PBS)
The Attorney General and the DNI must also certify that Intelligence Community agencies will follow targeting procedures and minimization procedures that are approved by the FISC as part of the certification.
On Sept. 26, 2016, NSD head John Carlin filed the government’s proposed 2016 Section 702 certifications. Carlin knew the general status of Rogers’s compliance review. The NSD was part of the review.
In his filing, Carlin failed to disclose a Jan. 7, 2016, inspector general report that was highly critical of agency controls for monitoring query compliance. Carlin also failed to disclose the FBI’s use of private contractors and Rogers’s ongoing compliance review.
On Sept. 27, 2016, the day after he filed the annual certifications, Carlin announced his resignation, which would become effective on Oct. 15, 2016.
On Oct. 4, 2016, a standard follow-up court hearing was held (Page 19), with Carlin present. Again, he made no disclosure of FISA abuse or other related issues. This lack of disclosure would be noted by the court later in the April 2017 ruling:
“The government’s failure to disclose those IG and OCO reviews at the October 4, 2016 hearing [was ascribed] to an institutional “lack of candor.”
When FBI Director James Comey answers questions before a House Judiciary Committee public hearing, two of the committee members ask him key questions about Paul Combetta, the Platte River Networks (PRN) employee who helped manage Clinton’s private server.
Darrell Issa (Credit: Jeff Malet)
Representative Darrell Issa (R) asks: “Director, I have a lot of concerns but one of them refers to Reddit. At the time that the Department of Justice at your behest, or your involvement, gave Paul Combetta immunity, did you do so knowing about all of the posts he had on Reddit…?”
Comey replies: “I am not sure sitting here. My recollection is and I’ll check this and fix it if I am wrong, that we had some awareness of the Reddit posts, I don’t know whether our folks had read them all or not. We had a pretty good understanding of what we thought he had done, but that is my best recollection.”
Issa then asks: “OK, in the last week, [Combetta] has been deleting [his] Reddit posts. Is that consistent with preserving evidence? … You know, I guess my question to you is, is he destroying evidence relevant to Congressional inquiries? And I will answer it for you: yes he is. And what are you going to do about it?”
Comey answers, “That’s not something I can comment on.”
Bob Goodlatte (Credit: Jacquelyn Martin / The Associated Press)
Later in the same hearing, committee chair Representative Bob Goodlatte (R), similarly asks: “Paul Combetta, with PRN, posted to Reddit, asking how to strip out a VIP’s, very VIP email address from a bunch of archived email. … This clearly demonstrates actions taken to destroy evidence by those operating Sec Clinton’s private server and by her staff. … [W]as the FBI aware of this Reddit post prior to offering Mr. Combetta immunity on May 3, 2016?”
Comey responds, “I am not sure. I know that our team looked at it. I don’t know whether they knew about it before then or not.” (House Judiciary Committee, 09/28/2016)
In a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Comey comments on a July 2014 Reddit post by Paul Combetta, a Platte River Networks employee who helped manage Clinton’s private server.
Comey says, “Our team concluded that what he was trying to do was when they produced emails not have the actual address but have some name or placeholder instead of the actual dot-com address in the ‘From:’ line.” As a result, the FBI believes Combetta was not engaged in a secret cover-up when he used his “stonetear” alias on the Reddit website to ask for a tool that could delete Clinton’s email address throughout a large file.
However, Republican lawmakers believe Combetta’s Reddit post reveals an effort to hide Clinton’s emails from investigators. For example, committee chair Bob Goodlatte (R) says he believes it was “obviously part of a cover-up. … This clearly demonstrates an action to destroy evidence by people operating Clinton’s private server and her staff.” (Politico, 09/28/2016)
Appearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Representative Tom Marino (R) asks FBI Director James Comey why he made immunity deals with key figures in the Clinton email investigation instead of using subpoena power. In particular, he wants to know why deals were made to get access to the laptops of Clinton’s lawyers Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson.
Comey replies, “Anytime you’re talking about the prospect of subpoenaing a computer from a lawyer, it involves the lawyer’s practice of law, you know you’re getting into a big Megillah.”
Marino, who was a district attorney and US attorney before being elected to Congress, then asks, “I understand that, clearly. Why did you not decide to go to an investigative grand jury? It would have been cleaner, it would have been much simpler, and you would have had more authority to make these witnesses testify. Not the target, but the witnesses testify. That seems the way to go, Director. We’ve done it thousands of times. This was just too convoluted.”
Comey replies, “Again, I need to steer clear of talking about grand jury use in a particular matter. In general, in my experience, you can often do things faster with informal agreements, especially when you’re interacting with lawyers. In this particular investigation, the investigative team really wanted to get access to the laptops that were used to sort these emails. Those are lawyers’ laptops. That is a very complicated thing. I think they were able to navigate it pretty well to get us access.”
Later in the hearing, Comey adds that the investigation “couldn’t be concluded professionally without doing our best to figure out what was on those laptops. So, getting the laptops was very important to me and to the investigative team.” (Politico, 11/1/2016) (C-SPAN, 9/28/2016)
In contradiction to his answer on this day, in April 2016, he said of the investigation, “The urgency is to do it well and promptly. And ‘well’ comes first.” And in May 2016, he said “I don’t tether to any external deadline” to finish the investigation, such as the Democratic convention in July 2016.
In a surprising moment during FBI Director James Comey’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, he defends the character and integrity of the FBI officials who took part in the FBI’s Clinton investigation.
FBI Director Comey defends his agents before the House Oversight Committee. (Credit: CSpan)
Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee (D) asks, “The foot soldiers, your agents on the ground, you take issue with whether or not they were compromised or they were adhering to somebody elses message. Is that what you’re saying?”
Comey answers, “You can call us wrong, but don’t call us weasels. We are not weasels. We are honest people and … whether or not you agree with the result, this was done the way you want it to be done.”
Politico describes the impassioned moment, “The normally stoic FBI chief grew emotional and emphatic as he rejected claims from Republican lawmakers that the FBI was essentially in the tank for Clinton when it recommended that neither she nor any of her aides be prosecuted in connection with the presence of classified information on Clinton’s private email server. He acknowledged he has ‘no patience’ for such allegations.”(Politico, 09/28/2016)
FBI Director James Comey testifies to House Oversight Committee about the FBI’s handling of the investigation of 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of private email servers while serving as secretary of state.
Representative Lamar Smith (Credit: public domain)
During an appearance before a Congressional committee, FBI Director James Comey is questioned by Representative Lamar Smith (R): “[W]ould you reopen the Clinton [email] investigation if you discovered new information that was both relevant and substantial?”
Comey replies, “It is hard for me to answer in the abstract. We would certainly look at any new and substantial information.”
Smith then asks, “In general – and let’s personalize it – in general, if you discover new information that was substantial and relevant, you would reopen an investigation, would you not?”
Comey replies, “Again, even in general I don’t think we can answer that in the abstract. What we can say is that any investigation if people have new and substantial information we would like to see it so we can make an evaluation.” (US Congress, 9/28/2016)
Exactly one month later, on October 28, 2016, Comey will announce that he is at least partially reopening the investigation, due to newly discovered emails.
(…) “Mr. Comey is questioned about the announcement of re-opening of the Hillary Clinton email investigation on October 28th, 2016. In his response to why there was a delay between the FBI being notified by New York on September 28th, and waiting until October 28th, James Comey revealed a very important nugget.
The New York U.S. Attorney (SDNY) called Main Justice in DC to ask about why they were not receiving authority for a search warrant. We knew that call took place on October 21st, 2016. Now we know “why” and who New York called at DOJ HQ.
Baier: “Did you know that Andrew McCabe, your deputy, had sat on that revelation about the emails”?
Comey: “Yeah, I don’t know that, I don’t know that to be the case. I do know that New York and FBI headquarters became aware that there may be some connection between Weiner’s laptop and the Clinton investigation, weeks before it was brought to me for decision – and as I write in the book I don’t know whether they could have moved faster and why the delay”
Baier: “Was it the threat that New York Agents were going to leak that it existed really what drove you to the ‘not conceal’ part?
Comey: “I don’t think so. I think what actually drove it was the prosecutors in New York who were working the criminal case against Weiner called down to headquarters and said ‘are we getting a search warrant or not for this’? That caused, I’m sorry, Justice Department Headquarters, to then call across the street to the FBI and poke the organization; and they start to move much more quickly. I don’t know why there was, if there was slow activity, why it was slow for those first couple of weeks.”
(…) “In his Bret Baier interview FBI Director James Comey says this call is about a search warrant. There is no indication the call is actually about a search warrant.
However, that phone call kicks off an internal debate about the previously closed Clinton email investigation; and Andrew McCabe sitting on the notification from New York for over three weeks – kicks off an internal FBI discussion about McCabe needing to recuse himself.
Now it’s October 27th, 2016, James Comey chief-of-staff Jim Rybicki wants McCabe to recuse himself. But Rybicki is alone on an island. Lisa Page is furious at such a suggestion, partly because she is McCabe’s legal counsel and if McCabe is recused so too is she.
At the same time as they are debating how to handle the Huma Abedin/Hillary Clinton emails, they are leaking to the media to frame a specific narrative.
Important to note here, that at no time is there any conversation -or hint of a conversation- that anyone is reviewing the content of the emails. The discussions don’t mention a single word about content… every scintilla of conversation is about how to handle the issues of the emails themselves. Actually, there’s not a single person mentioned in thousands of text messages that applies to an actual person who is looking at any content.
Quite simply: there is a glaringly transparent lack of an “investigation”.
(…) “It’s still October 27th, 2016, the day before James Comey announces his FBI decision to re-open the Clinton investigation. Jim Rybicki still saying McCabe should be recused from input; everyone else, including FBI Legal Counsel James Baker, is disagreeing with Rybicki and siding with Lisa Page.
Meanwhile the conversation has shifted slightly to “PC”, probable cause. Read:
(…) “The team is now saying if there was no probable cause when Comey closed the original email investigation in July 2016 (remember the very tight boundaries of review), then there’s no probable cause in October 2016 to reopen the investigation regardless of what the email content might be.
This appears to be how the “small group” or “tight team” justify doing nothing with the content received from New York. They received the emails September 28th and it’s now October 27th, and they haven’t even looked at it. Heck, they are debating if there’s even a need to look at it.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 4/28/2018)
On November 6, 2016, Comey clears Clinton for having her State Department emails on the Abedin/Weiner laptop, two days before the election. (CNN, 11/7/2016)
On page 279 of the DOJ IG Horowitz report, a meeting occurs between Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok and Bill Priestap after Clinton’s emails were discovered on Weiner’s laptop. When Strzok is questioned by the IG team about Clinton’s emails found on Weiner’s laptop, his notes on the event appear to be more helpful than his memory.
Representative Steve King (Credit: Charlie Neibergall / The Associated Press)
FBI Director James Comey says he thinks Paul Combetta, the Platte River Networks employee who helped manage Clinton’s private server, is the Reddit user “stonetear.” In a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee public hearing, Comey is asked by Representative Steve King (R), “Listening in the exchange between yourself and [Representative Darrell] Issa, I would just like to confirm that you were confirming that Mr. Combetta made the Reddit posts?”
Comey replies, “I’m not confirming it. I think he did, it is my understanding. That’s my understanding, I think he did. I haven’t dug into it myself. I’ve been focused on other things as we’ve been talking about, but I think that’s right.” (CSpan 01:27:39, 09/28/2016)
Judicial Watch announced today it received 180 pages of records of communications between former FBI official Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page that include Strzok’s “weiner timeline,” which shows a time gap of almost a month between the discovery of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails on the laptop of disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner and the obtaining of a search warrant.
On November 3, 2016, Strzok sends an emailto Page with a “weiner timeline.” The document shows that on September 28, 2016, the Assistant Director in Charge (ADIC) of the New York Office of the FBI reported “potential MYE-related material,” referring to the Midyear Exam, which was the code name of the FBI’s Clinton email investigation. The timeline shows that not until October 30, almost a month after the discovery was a search warrant for the emails obtained.
(…) A partial Strzok timeline was included in the Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s June 2018report on the Clinton email investigation. Also, the report suggested a possible bias by Strzok: “[W]e did not have confidence that Strzok’s decision to prioritize the Russia investigation over following up on the Midyear-related investigative lead discovered on the Weiner laptop was free from bias.”
(…) The new records uncovered by Judicial Watch also include an email chain that concludes on November 5, 2016 — the day before Comey notified Congress that the FBI had not changed its July conclusion – with the subject line “Drafting” in which Strzok indicates that he is working on the “initial review” of “the data” for an upcoming statement.
In an additional version of the November 2016 “Drafting” email thread, Strzok concludes that he found “no new potentially classified email on the media [laptop] …”
In a November 6, 2016, email with the subject line “Request for conference call bridge” Strzok tells senior FBI officials: “[Redacted], Jon and I completed our review of all of the potential HRC work emails on the laptop. We found no previously unknown, potentially classified emails on the media [laptop].”
Reportedly, only 3,077 of the more than 300,000 emails found on the Weiner laptop “were directly reviewed for classified or incriminating information. Three FBI officials completed that work in a single 12-hour spurt the day before Comey again cleared Clinton of criminal charges.”
The emails also include an October 30, 2016, email titled “MYE data update,” in which Strzok tells other top FBI officials: “The discussion of the classified email remains accurate.”
In an October 31, 2016, email thread discussing a New York Times article about the FBI conducting a review of Huma Abedin’s emails found on Weiner’s laptop that Strzok circulated to then-Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Jonathan Moffa, then-Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Bill Priestap, and redacted persons, Moffa says: “I think [redacted],” to which Strzok replies, “Yes. Yes we did. Makes you wonder who dialed in …” Moffa responds, “Sure does. First reference I’m ever aware of to our review network too.”
On November 1, 2016, a redacted official in the Director’s Office emails Strzok, Page and other redacted persons with a “Media question,” asking, “Politico asks why all of Huma’s electronic devices she may have used were not subpoenaed early on. Could you please provide any guidance on how I should respond? [Redacted]. Thank you.” Strzok replies, “Hi [redacted].”
On October 31, 2016, Strzok forwarded to Page a Mother Jones article titled “A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump,” concerning the allegations by a “former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence” that the Russian government “has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump.”
On October 31, 2016, Strzok forwarded to Priestap, Moffa, Page and unidentified persons an NBC News article titled, “FBI Making Inquiry into Ex-Trump Campaign Manager’s Foreign Ties,” about an FBI investigation of Paul Manafort, with Strzok saying, “Wow, busy news night. Talked with [redacted] earlier, he said [Washington Post reporter] Ellen Nakashima had mentioned below to him.” An unidentified General Counsel office official then responds, “FYI – Slate has an article on the Trump server.”
(The Slatearticle that alleged that Trump’s campaign set up a covert communication system with Russia during the 2016 election using a computer server in the United States and another owned by a Russian bank has been widely debunked.)
On November 14, 2016, New York Times reporter Matt Apuzzo emailed an unidentified FBI official asking, “We got this in the mail today. Any truth to it?” Attached was an “Affidavit for a Criminal Arrest Warrant and Search Warrants,” purporting to have been sworn out by an FBI agent and allegedly “charging DONALD JOHN TRUMP with conspiracy to commit espionage …” The FBI official forwarded it to Strzok and other redacted officials, saying, “For your awareness. The NYT provided the attached document to us today in order to verify its authenticity. It is supposedly an affidavit in support of espionage charges against Donald John Trump. They received it in the mail today. They doubt it is an authentic document noting there are numerous inaccuracies. Wanted to provide it for your awareness.” Strzok forwards it to Page, saying, “Told them it was not authentic. [Redacted].”
(…) “These new records show how Hillary Clinton was protected from the investigation over the Weiner laptop by the FBI for a full month during the presidential campaign,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “And the documents further confirm that Strzok pushed Russia smears of Trump laundered through the media within the FBI. No wonder the FBI is slow-rolling the release of these documents.” (Read more: Judicial Watch, 3/26/2020)(Archive)
A lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch has unearthed an email [full pdf] from Clinton Lawyer David Kendall to FBI chief legal counsel James Baker on the day the FBI was forced to re-open the Clinton email investigation due to the Weiner laptop.
With the passage of time the inherent issues have become somewhat clouded, and most people have forgotten many of the inherent issues that showcased how the FBI and DOJ had decided in advance not to prosecute Hillary Clinton. However, the key takeaway from this latest FOIA finding is that Clinton lawyers directly contacted the FBI team that was investigating the Weiner laptop. (Note: read email chain bottom to top)
The Weiner laptop emails were originally discovered by New York investigators and reported to the FBI office in Washington DC on September 28th, 2016. However, the FBI never took action to review the emails until a month later on October 28th.
It was DOJ officials within SDNY (Southern District of New York) who called Main Justice (DOJ in DC) and asked about a needed search warrant a month later that kicked off the review.
Let’s look at the Page/Strzok messages and remind ourselves of what was going on.
Here are the messages from Lisa Page and Peter Strzok surrounding the original date that New York officials notified Washington DC FBI. It’s important to note the two different entities: DOJ -vs- FBI.
According to the September 28, 2016, messages from FBI Agent Peter Strzok it was the SDNY in New York telling Andrew McCabe in DC about the issue. Pay close attention to the convo:
Notice: “hundreds of thousands of emails turned over by Weiner’s attorney to SDNY”. This is not an outcome of a New York Police Dept. raid on Anthony Weiner. This is Weiner’s attorney going to the U.S. attorney and voluntarily turning over the laptop and by extension the emails. The emails were not turned over to the FBI in New York, the actual emails were turned over to the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District, Preet Bahara.
The SDNY then called the FBI Mid-Year-Exam team in Washington DC, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was notified, and then nothing happened for over three weeks.
On October 21, 2016, a phone call kicks off additional inquiry. This is the call referenced by James Comey in the Bret Baier interview.
Someone from New York called “Main Justice” (the DOJ National Security Division in DC) and notified DOJ-NSD Deputy Asst. Attorney General George Toscas of the Huma Abedin/Hillary Clinton emails via the “Weiner investigation.”
George Toscas “wanted to ensure information got to Andy“, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe…. so he called FBI Agent Peter Strzok…. who told George Toscas “we know”.
Peter Strzok then tells Bill Priestap. Of course, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe already knew about the emails since, more than three weeks earlier.
That phone call kicks off an internal debate about the previously closed Clinton email investigation. And Andrew McCabe sitting on the notification from New York for over three weeks kicks off a second internal FBI discussion about McCabe needing to recuse himself because of the optics of his doing nothing.
It’s October 27th, 2016, James Comey chief-of-staff Jim Rybicki wants McCabe to recuse himself. But Rybicki is alone on an island. Lisa Page is furious at such a suggestion, partly because she is McCabe’s legal counsel and if McCabe is recused so too is she.
At the same time as they are debating how to handle the Huma Abedin/Hillary Clinton emails, the FBI begin leaking to the media to frame a specific narrative. The issue of them sitting on the laptop for three weeks and doing nothing is a potentially damning detail.
Important to note here: at no time is there any conversation -or hint of a conversation- that anyone is reviewing the content of the laptop emails. The discussions don’t mention a single word about content… every scintilla of conversation is about how to handle the issues of the emails themselves. Actually, there’s not a single person mentioned in thousands of text messages that applies to an actual person who is looking at any content.
Quite simply: there is a glaringly transparent lack of an “investigation”.
Within this “tight group” at FBI, as Comey puts it, there is not a single mention of a person who is sitting somewhere looking through the reported “600,000” Clinton emails that was widely reported by media. There’s absolutely ZERO evidence of anyone looking at emails or scouring through laptop data…. and FBI Agent Peter Strzok has no staff under him who he discusses assigned to such a task…. and Strzok damned sure ain’t doing it.
It’s still October 27th, 2016, the day before James Comey announces his FBI decision to re-open the Clinton investigation. Jim Rybicki is still saying McCabe should be recused from input; everyone else, including FBI Legal Counsel James Baker, is disagreeing with Rybicki and siding with Lisa Page. Meanwhile the conversation has shifted slightly to “PC”, probable cause. Read:
While Lisa Page is leaking stories to Devlin Barrett (Wall Street Journal), the internal discussion amid the “small group” is about probable cause.
The team is now saying if there was no probable cause when Comey closed the original email investigation in July 2016 (remember the very tight boundaries of review), then there’s no probable cause in October 2016 to reopen the investigation regardless of what the email content might be. The inspector general report from June 2018 explains why:
The DOJ’s legal interpretation of “intent”, as a prerequisite for criminal charges based on transmission of classified data, virtually assured Clinton would not be prosecuted.
This appears to be how the FBI “small group” or “tight team” justify doing nothing with the content and notification received from New York (SDNY). They received notification of the emails on September 28th and it’s now October 27th, and they haven’t even looked at them. Heck, they are debating if there’s even a need to look at it.
Then on October 28th, 2016, the FBI and Main Justice officials have a conference call about the entire Huma Abedin/Hillary Clinton email issue. Here’s where it gets interesting.
George Toscas and David Laufman from DOJ-NSD articulate a position that something needs to happen because Main Justice is now concerned about the issue of FBI (McCabe) sitting on the emails for over three weeks without any feedback to SDNY (New York).
Comey later admitted in his memoir “A Higher Loyalty,” that political calculations shaped his decisions during this period. But, he wrote, they were calibrated to help Clinton:
“Assuming, as nearly everyone did, that Hillary Clinton would be elected president of the United States in less than two weeks, what would happen to the FBI, the Justice Department or her own presidency if it later was revealed, after the fact, that she still was the subject of an FBI investigation?”
Thanks to the political decision of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Main Justice in DC, specifically DOJ National Security Division, now looks like they are facilitating a cover-up operation being conducted by the FBI “small group”. [which is actually true, but they can’t let that be so glaringly obvious]. FBI Director James Comey is worried that if anyone found out they had sat on this laptop discovery a “President Clinton” would then come under investigation….. how would the FBI explain themselves?
As a result of the Top-Tier officials conference call, FBI Agent Strzok is grumpy because his opinion appears to be insignificant; the discussion is above his pay grade.
The decision is now reached to announce the re-opening of the investigation. This sends Lisa Page bananas…
…In rapid response mode Lisa Page reaches out to journalist Devlin Barrett, again to quickly shape the media coverage. Now that the world is going to be aware of the need for a Clinton email investigation 2.0 the internal conversation returns to McCabe’s recusal.
Please note that at no time in the FBI is anyone directing an actual investigation of the content of the Clinton emails. Every single second of every effort is devoted to shaping the public perception of the need for the investigation. According to Peter Strzok and Lisa Page every media outlet is being watched; every article is being read; and the entire apparatus of the small group (James Baker, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Mike Kortan et al) is shaping coverage therein by contacting their leak outlets.
The laptop emails Anthony Weiner’s lawyer brought to Preet Bharara (SDNY) might have been Anthony Weiner’s leverage to try and escape NY prosecution. Eric Prince outlined the content of that laptop as carrying much more than just Clinton emails:
“Because of Weinergate and the sexting scandal, the NYPD started investigating it. Through a subpoena, through a warrant, they searched his laptop, and sure enough, found those 650,000 emails. They found way more stuff than just more information pertaining to the inappropriate sexting the guy was doing,” Prince claimed.
“They found State Department emails. They found a lot of other really damning criminal information, including money laundering, including the fact that Hillary went to this sex island with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Bill Clinton went there more than 20 times. Hillary Clinton went there at least six times,” he said.
“The amount of garbage that they found in these emails, of criminal activity by Hillary, by her immediate circle, and even by other Democratic members of Congress was so disgusting they gave it to the FBI, and they said, ‘We’re going to go public with this if you don’t reopen the investigation and you don’t do the right thing with timely indictments,’” Prince explained.
“I believe – I know, and this is from a very well-placed source of mine at 1PP, One Police Plaza in New York – the NYPD wanted to do a press conference announcing the warrants and the additional arrests they were making in this investigation, and they’ve gotten huge pushback, to the point of coercion, from the Justice Department, with the Justice Department threatening to charge someone that had been unrelated in the accidental heart attack death of Eric Garner almost two years ago. That’s the level of pushback the Obama Justice Department is doing against actually seeking justice in the email and other related criminal matters,” Prince said. (Link)
There’s never been any investigation that would disprove the laptop content was not what Eric Prince’s sources outlined. However, the SDNY, responding to upper level leadership from Main Justice and FBI in DC, turned over all material and essentially the laptop was buried.
In DC the FBI (Comey and McCabe) created the appearance of a re-opening of the Clinton investigation on October 28th, 2016, to keep control and ensure the investigative outcomes remained in their hands; as Comey said: “they had no choice.”
However, once the FBI opened the investigation October 28th, they did exactly the same thing they had done from September 28th to October 28th… they did nothing. A few days later [November 6, 2018] they declared the second investigation closed, and that was that.
Again, they never expected her to lose.
When she did lose, panic ensued.
Now does Mueller make more sense?
The widely held view of the process is/was that Rod Rosenstein selected Robert Mueller as special counsel, and following that selection Mueller created his team. The perspective from CTH research is slightly different.
CTH believes that following the firing of FBI Director James Comey, the FBI Chief Legal Counsel, Jim Baker and FBI Deputy Director, Andrew McCabe; together with the corrupt small group that was involved in the prior year’s counterintelligence investigation; reacted to Comey’s firing by pressuring Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to appoint their preferred person, Robert Mueller.
Within this internal debate (May 2017); at the time this construct was being argued; is when the famous comment from Rosenstein originates: “what do you want me to do, wear a wire?” The corrupt FBI investigative crew; having initiated and continued “Crossfire Hurricane”; including people from the DOJ-NSD side (Ohr, Weissmann, etc) were pressuring Rosenstein to appoint a special counsel….. but not just any special counsel.. Baker and McCabe had the person pre-selected. That person was Robert Mueller.
They needed Robert Mueller because they needed a person who held a similar level of risk from prior activity exposure as themselves. Mueller, directly or indirectly, was at the center of multiple Obama and Clinton abuses of power.
Obviously we can see the reason for this FBI/DOJ crew to need a special counsel. As career corruptocrats they were operating from a mindset of mitigating risk to themselves and continuing to advance on the objective to attack the executive office through their investigative schemes.
The key point here is subtle but very significant. Robert Mueller didn’t select his team, the corrupt team, the “small group”, selected him.
There is a great deal of inconsistent application of law surrounding the DOJ/FBI investigative authority during 2015 and 2016. There is also a great deal of fatigue surrounding discussion of those inconsistent applications. Contradictions, inconsistency and obtuse justifications are as rampant in our midst as the political narratives shaping them. Perhaps that’s by design. WATCH:
This “Flash” memo was published three days after Secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, offered Illinois state officials assistance in securing election systems. (Credit: Yahoo News)
(…) “On Sept. 29, 2016, a few weeks after the hacking of election-related websites in Illinois and Arizona, ABC News carried a sensational headline: “Russian Hackers Targeted Nearly Half of States’ Voter Registration Systems, Successfully Infiltrated 4.” The story itself reported that “more than 20 state election systems” had been hacked, and four states had been “breached” by hackers suspected of working for the Russian government. The story cited only sources “knowledgeable” about the matter, indicating that those who were pushing the story were eager to hide the institutional origins of the information.
Behind that sensational story was a federal agency seeking to establish its leadership within the national security state apparatus on cybersecurity, despite its limited resources for such responsibility. In late summer and fall 2016, the Department of Homeland Security was maneuvering politically to designate state and local voter registration databases and voting systems as “critical infrastructure.” Such a designation would make voter-related networks and websites under the protection a “priority sub-sector” in the DHS “National Infrastructure Protection Plan, which already included 16 such sub-sectors.
DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson and other senior DHS officials consulted with many state election officials in the hope of getting their approval for such a designation. Meanwhile, the DHS was finishing an intelligence report that would both highlight the Russian threat to U.S. election infrastructure and the role DHS could play in protecting it, thus creating political impetus to the designation. But several secretaries of state—the officials in charge of the election infrastructure in their state—strongly opposed the designation that Johnson wanted.
On Jan. 6, 2017—the same day three intelligence agencies released a joint “assessment” on Russian interference in the election—Johnson announced the designation anyway.
Media stories continued to reflect the official assumption that cyber attacks on state election websites were Russian-sponsored. Stunningly, The Wall Street Journalreported in December 2016 that DHS was itself behind hacking attempts of Georgia’s election database.” (Read more: Consortium News, 8/28/2018)
It's precisely this kind of bullshit that led IG Horowitz to testify that given the breadth and depth of such *errors* it is "fair for people.. to wonder how it could be purely incompetence."pic.twitter.com/Bl8eq5GUl8
National Security Division Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stuart Evans in Washington on Sept. 14, 2016. (Credit: Zach Gibson/AFP/Getty Images)
“Stuart Evans, deputy assistant attorney general for the National Security Division’s Office of Intelligence.
Evans is one of the few government officials discussed in the IG report who raised concerns about the effort to surveil Page and the decision to rely on Steele to obtain FISAs.
Emails cited in the report show that Evans asked FBI agents to provide additional evidence to back up claims in the report.
“According to Evans, he raised on multiple occasions with the FBI, including with Strzok, Lisa Page, and later McCabe, whether seeking FISA authority targeting Carter Page was a good idea, even if the legal standard was met,” the IG report says.
Carter Page speaks to the media after testifying before the House Intelligence Committee on November 2, 2017. (Credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
Evans said that he did not believe there was a compelling benefit to obtaining the warrant because Page was unlikely to put any incriminating information on email or in a telephone call.
Evans was not informed of several other red flags related to the dossier.
According to the IG report, Steele told FBI agents on Oct. 3, 2016 that he believed that a key sub-source for his dossier was a “boaster” and “egotist.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 6/22/2020) (Archive)
“In late September, I spoke with an old friend, Sidney Blumenthal, whom I met 30 years ago when I was investigating the Iran-contra affair for then-Sen. Kerry and Blumenthal was a reporter at The Post. At the time, Russian hacking was at the front and center in the 2016 presidential campaign. The emails of Blumenthal, who had a long association with Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been hacked in 2013 through a Russian server.
While talking about that hacking, Blumenthal and I discussed Steele’s reports. He showed me notes gathered by a journalist I did not know, Cody Shearer, that alleged the Russians had compromising information on Trump of a sexual and financial nature.
What struck me was how some of the material echoed Steele’s but appeared to involve different sources.
On my own, I shared a copy of these notes with Steele, to ask for his professional reaction. He told me it was potentially “collateral” information. I asked him what that meant. He said that it was similar but separate from the information he had gathered from his sources. I agreed to let him keep a copy of the Shearer notes.
Given that I had not worked with Shearer and knew that he was not a professional intelligence officer, I did not mention or share his notes with anyone at the State Department. I did not expect them to be shared with anyone in the U.S. government.” (Read more: Washington Post, 02/08/2018)
Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer are long-time Clinton confidants and colleagues. (Credit: public domain)
“A copy of the little-publicized second dossier in the Trump-Russia affair, acquired by RealClearInvestigations, raises new questions about the origins of the Trump investigation, particularly about the role of Clinton partisans and the extent to which the two dossiers may have been coordinated or complementary operations.
The second dossier — two reports compiled by Cody Shearer, an ex-journalist and longtime Clinton operative — echoes many of the lurid and still unsubstantiated claims made in the Steele dossier, and is receiving new scrutiny. On Sunday, Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a TV interview that his panel is shifting its investigative focus concerning the origins of the Russia investigation from the FBI to the State Department. This probe will include the Shearer dossier.
Jonathan Winer (Credit: U.S. State Department)
In late September 2016, Sidney Blumenthal, a close Clinton confidant and colleague of Shearer’s, passed Shearer’s dossier on to State Department official Jonathan M. Winer, a longtime aide to John Kerry on Capitol Hill and at Foggy Bottom.
According to Winer’s account in a Feb. 8, 2018 Washington Post op-ed, he shared the contents of the Shearer dossier with the author of the first dossier, ex-British spy Christopher Steele, who submitted part of it to the FBI to further substantiate his own investigation into the Trump campaign. Steele was a subcontractor working for the Washington, D.C.-based communications firm Fusion GPS, which was hired by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee to compile opposition research on her Republican opponent.” (Read more: RealClearInvestigations, 4/26/2018)
W. Neil Eggleston (Credit: Diego M. Radzinschi/The National Law Journal)
“Recent revelations reveal that Special Counsel Bob Mueller’s team was out to “get Trump”:
“An FBI agent who played a lead role investigating Michael Flynn told the Justice Department there was never evidence of wrongdoing by the retired general or Russian collusion by President Trump, but the probe was kept open by Special Counsel Robert Mueller because his team had a “get Trump” goal, according to an explosive interview released Friday.”
The ACLJ has been exposing Deep State subversion in the Obama-Biden FBI for years now. We’ve done this largely through our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) practice. In one of our FOIA lawsuits against the FBI, which you can read about here, we have obtained a significant set of documents that we are releasing to the public today. That FOIA demanded all records, including emails, memorandums, briefs, electronic messages, etc., pertaining to FBI agents then-Director Comey reportedly placed in the White House to spy and report back to him, including Anthony Ferrante, Jordan Rae Kelly, and Tashina Gauhar. Specifically, we requested records and emails between or about Comey and the purported spies and others.
(…) We also received additional documents we believe the American people need to see – FBI records directly tying the Obama-Biden White House to the scheme to take down President Trump. These records also tie former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former Deputy (and later) Acting Attorney General Sally Yates to the “get Trump” scheme as well. Here is what we obtained:
On September 30, 2016, Obama White House Counsel Neil Eggleston emailed James Comey and Andrew McCabe, and copied Lisa Page and Natalie H. Quillian (note: Quillian was an advisor to Obama Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, and she is now Deputy Campaign Manager for none other than presidential candidate Joe Biden), a “TOP SECRET” email with no subject line, saying:
“Jim and Andy (cc’ing Tash [Tashina Gauhar] to print for Loretta and Sally, both traveling) – This responds to recent outreach from the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) regarding the FBI’s proposal to conduct a full-content review of [redacted – marked B7D, which regards disclosure of confidential source]. We have had the opportunity to review a memorandum from Deputy Director McCabe to Deputy Attorney General Yates, shared by your staff with mine, which sets out the scope and justification for the proposed review.”
The next paragraph is marked TS for Top Secret, and redacted. And the next paragraph is redacted as well.
The Obama White House’s email then reads:
“Notwithstanding this concern, we stand ready to work with the FBI and DOJ, as we have previously, to discuss possible ways forward. To that end, we are available to meet with DOJ and FBI leadership to discuss next steps.”
That night, on September 30, 2016, at 8:22 PM, McCabe forwards the email to Comey, Baker, and James Rybicki (Comey’s Chief of Staff), marked “TOP SECRET//NOFORN” and says:
“Interesting response from Neil. I was not aware that we had shared our request to the DAG with the WH… We should discuss where/how we should reach back to set up a meeting.”
(Note, the “we” was underlined in McCabe’s original email.)
Then, a few days later, on October 3, McCabe responds to Eggleston in an email marked “TOP SECRET//NOFORN,” copying Comey, Lisa Page, and Quillian, and says:
Neil, I understand your concerns with our request and am happy to come over with a small team to discuss with you the specifics at your earliest convenience. Please let me know a POC my staff can contact to set up a meeting.”
What was the FBI “full-content review” it proposed to the Obama-Biden White House? (We know the FBI used codenames like this for high profile cases; for example, referring to the Clinton investigation as the “Midyear Exam”.)
Why did the Obama-Biden White House express a “concern” but then offer to proceed and cooperate with the FBI anyway?
Why did McCabe tell Comey he wasn’t sure they had shared their “request to the DAG [Sally Yates]” with the White House?
So many questions. But also an answer: Obama’s White House Counsel was colluding with Comey and McCabe’s FBI. What were they up to?” (Read more: ACLJ, 9/26/2020)(Archive)
Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and Ranking Member Rep. Devin Nunes listen to Gordon Sondland, the U.S ambassador to the European Union, testify before the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill November 20, 2019. (Credit: Doug Mills/Getty Images)
“The House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, Adam Schiff (Calif.), said Sunday it was “deeply disturbing” that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) received classified information about Hillary Clinton’s emails from FBI field agents in 2016.
“This is the first that we’ve heard about it, and it is deeply disturbing because if this was shared by New York field agents with Devin Nunes, was it also shared with Rudy Giuliani? Or did Devin Nunes do something, which we have seen subsequently, which is coordinated with the Trump team?” Schiff said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“Was this information shared by the committee with Rudy Giuliani or shared directly with them? We don’t know the answer but we hope the inspector general will find out,” Schiff added.
Nunes said last week that FBI agents gave him information about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails, which were contained on former New York Rep. Anthony Weiner’s (D) laptop, in late September 2016.
“We had whistleblowers that came to us in late September of 2016 who talked to us about this laptop sitting up in New York that had additional emails on it. The House Intelligence Committee, we had that, but we couldn’t do anything with it,” Nunes told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham on Thursday.
In light of IG’s failure to look at leaking/anti-Clinton bias among agents in NYC field office, this seems quite relevant. Nunes says “good FBI agents” told him about Weiner laptop in late September 2016. pic.twitter.com/BU6ysY7Xwn
Nunes said that, because the information was classified, he could not say anything about it until the Justice Department’s (DOJ) internal watchdog released its report… (Read more: The Hill, 6/17/2018)(Archive)
Late September: In London court filings, Christopher Steele is identified as Second Defendant and testifies to following instructions from Fusion GPS, and briefing reporters at several news outlets about the dossier. Steele briefed The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, The New Yorker and Yahoo! News.
Screenshot from Christopher Steele’s testimony to a London court.
“We received 
