From April 14, but I hadn’t seen this article before.

“…
In addition to questioning witnesses who may have insight into the matter, Mr. Durham has obtained documents from the Brookings Institution related to Igor Danchenko, a Russia researcher who worked there a decade ago. Mr. Danchenko later helped gather rumors about Mr. Trump and Russia for that research, known as the Steele dossier, according to people familiar with the request…”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/w...institution.amp.html

Where is John Durham?

Are we still paying him to play pretend investigator?

Here is an article that is most unusual because it is from NYT

The article rips Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele

Too bad NYT didn't report things like this over the last 4 years. Things may have been very very different .

It would only have taken one MSM to report the truth. Could have been NYT, Wash Post, NBC, CBS. ABC, etc.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/0...pies-news-media.html

long article, snips:

Secret Sharers: The Hidden Ties Between Private Spies and Journalists

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Steele had been hired by an investigative firm called Fusion GPS to gather dirt about Donald J. Trump and Russia. The firm’s founders, two former Wall Street Journal reporters, made it clear they would not talk to me for a book I was writing about the business of private intelligence.

Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, the founders of Fusion GPS, wrote a book about the dossier that became a best seller.

Mr. Steele sold his life rights to a Hollywood studio owned by George Clooney.

many of the dossier’s most explosive claims — like a salacious “pee” tape featuring Mr. Trump or a supposed meeting in Prague between Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former attorney, and Russian operatives — have never materialized or have been proved false.

truth is, none of the claims were true

The founders of Alfa Bank, a major Russian financial institution, are suing Fusion GPS, claiming the firm libeled them

Plans for a film based on Mr. Steele’s adventures appear dead

Beneath the dossier’s journey from media obsession to slush pile lies a broader and more troubling story. Today, private spying has boomed into a renegade, billion-dollar industry, one that is increasingly invading our privacy, profiting from deception and manipulating the news

NYT ?

While I was examining the private intelligence business, it became clear that I needed to look at another profession, the one where my career had been spent — journalism. Reporters and private investigators long have had a symbiotic relationship that is hidden from the public. Hired spies feed journalists story tips or documents and use reporters to plant stories benefiting a client without leaving their fingerprints behind.

The information they peddle is often sensational. It can also be impossible to verify or be untrue.

When Mr. Trump, an ex-MI6 agent and two former reporters were thrown into the mix, the ingredients were in place for a media debacle of epic proportions.

the article talks about how Peter Fritsch of Fusion GPS tried to trick John Carreyrou who revealed how Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes were complete frauds

To monitor reporters, Fusion GPS used an outside contractor who submitted open-record requests to government agencies asking for inquiries made by journalists for public documents. In mid-2015, emails show, Mr. Fritsch asked the contractor about ways to frame requests for inquiries by Mr. Carreyrou for Theranos records “so it doesn’t look like we are targeting him specifically?”

“I would like to not mention carreyrou by name,” Mr. Fritsch wrote. “the reason is obvious: if we name him and he sees that, he’ll know who you are working for/with etc.”

When the contractor rejected one proposal about how to disguise their interest, Mr. Fritsch suggested another approach. “to mask it, let’s also include the new york times,” he said.

Mr. Simpson loved holding court with reporters, regaling them with war stories and presenting himself as a journalistic wise man. At a conference of investigative journalists in 2016, he said he and Mr. Fritsch had started Fusion to continue their work as reporters who righted wrongs.

“I like to call it journalism for rent,” he said.

Fusion GPS, like its competitors, belonged to a wider web of enablers — lawyers, public relations executives and “crisis management” consultants — who serve the wealthy, the powerful and the controversial. For their part, private intelligence firms take on jobs that others don’t know how to do or don’t want to get caught doing.

“People who have never been a reporter don’t understand the challenges of printing what you know, right, because you can’t just say what you know — you have to say how you know, and you have to prove it,” Mr. Simpson remarked at the 2016 conference. "When you’re a spy, you really don’t have to get into a lot of that stuff.”

Fusion GPS also mined a field that other private intelligence firms avoided — political opposition research

In the fall of 2016, Fusion GPS invited selected reporters from The Times, The New Yorker and other news organizations to meet Mr. Steele in Washington and receive briefings on what he had uncovered about the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. As is often the case in the world of private intelligence, the meetings came with a catch: If news organizations wrote about the dossier, they had to agree not to disclose that Fusion GPS and the former British agent were the sources of the material.

Mr. Steele was described to journalists as having played a pivotal role in breaking huge cases, including the 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, a former K.G.B. agent, and the F.B.I.’s investigation into bribery at FIFA, soccer’s governing body. And when speaking about Mr. Trump and Russia, he came across as calm, understated and confident, according to reporters who attended the meetings.

Mr. Steele said his information about Mr. Trump and his associates had been gathered by an unnamed, highly skilled operative with Kremlin connections referred to as his “collector.”

And while Mr. Steele said that his information needed to be confirmed, he left little doubt that he was right.

“He described Trump as a kind of Manchurian candidate,” recalled one reporter who met with him.

Mr. Steele had talents. And as with many private spies, his past was his big selling point. But his purported achievements were hard to examine since they were by nature secretive.

The best friend of Mr. Litvinenko, the murdered ex-K.G.B. agent, said neither he nor Mr. Litvinenko’s wife had heard of Mr. Steele.

Ken Bensinger, a BuzzFeed reporter who wrote a book about the FIFA scandal, said that after speaking with Mr. Steele, he concluded that Mr. Steele really didn’t know much about it.

How did Christopher Steele know more about Donald Trump and Russia than the C.I.A. or MI6?

The dossier’s latest blow came last year when the identity of Mr. Steele’s collector was revealed. He turned out to be a Russian-born lawyer, Igor Danchenko, who now lived in the United States

His contacts within Russia appeared to be not Kremlin A-listers but instead childhood friends, college buddies or drinking pals.

“Some people have wanted to maintain that the dossier is checking out when, as far as I can tell, it hasn’t,” said Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News

To learn from the dossier episode, news organizations would have to examine their ties to private intelligence agents, including why they so often granted them anonymity. But as long as the media allows private spies to set the rules, journalists and the public will continue to lose.

In a recent book, Luke Harding, an investigative reporter at The Guardian, described how Mr. Steele had dispatched his “collector” to surreptitiously approach a real estate broker, Sergei Millian, who was a peripheral figure in the Trump/Russia saga. “Millian spoke at length and privately to this person, believing him or her to be trustworthy — a kindred soul,” Mr. Harding wrote.

Millian has said he never talked to Danchenko

xxxxxxxxxxx

so nothing too exciting for those who followed the story, but just think about how the NYT could have changed history by being honest from 2016 and forward

Christopher Steele is a first class fraud and liar

This message has been edited. Last edited by: sdy,

^^^^^^^^
Re: “Too bad NYT didn't report things like this over the last 4 years.”

Maybe the NYT believes that the release of the Durham report is imminent, and is trying to get ahead of the news.

Steele claimed that specific Russians associated with Alfa Bank were connected to Putin.

Perkins Coie law firm told the FBI that Alfa Bank servers were secretly communicating with the Trump campaign (turned out to be totally false)

The named Russians in the dossier are suing Steele for defamation.

A ton of court documents were just released.


Remember Danchenko who was identified as Steele's primary source ? (A guy living in the U.S. in the Alexandria / Arlington area.)


People pieced together who Danchenko's subsources were. Mostly from scouring thru facebook pages of various friends of Danchenko.

Here is the news: As part of the court documents just released, all of the Danchenko subsources say (under oath) they never told Danchenko anything that is in the dossier.


Danchenko was interviewed by the FBI. These subsource sworn court declarations say Danchenko lied.

As murky as the dossier is, this implies Danchenko and Steele made up the whole dossier.


Court docs at:

https://www.courtlistener.com/...y_lte=&order_by=desc


xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

in the second post of this thread (3 years ago), JALLEN wrote:

"My reaction to the dossier, when I finally saw it, was it was mostly 3rd rate gossip, not evidence of anything, certainly not proof of anything.

I wondered if it wasn’t dreamed up by the same short bald headed swarthy men in Santa Monica who come up with network sitcoms and other fiction garbage."

all of the depositions have the same general language.

here is an example:

I want to beat this drum one more time, because this issue w Alfa bank demonstrated some highly coordinated efforts across the Clinton team.

Steele wrote Company Intelligence Report 112 on 14 Sep 2016.

That report always especially bothered me. It stood out from all the other Steele reports that made up the 35 page dossier.

What was special about report 112 ? It did not mention anyone in the Trump campaign. It did not mention Trump. It did not mention anything about the United States.

I studied the dossier very carefully and relatively quickly suspected it was mostly untrue. But the reports did tell a story and you could see how the pieces fit together.
A fabricated story with few hard details that one could use to confirm or deny.
That feature alone made it look like misinformation carefully designed to reinforce each different piece while avoiding verification. Tradecraft

But not report 112. It didn't add anything to the other parts and didn't damage Donald Trump. Why was it there ?

I never figured it out until very late in the game when it was revealed that Michael Sussman of Perkins Coie law firm went directly to James Baker. At the time, Baker was FBI General Counsel. Sussman shared "technical data" that Russian Alfa Bank servers were secretly communicating with Trump Tower. The technical data was eventually declared to be bullshit.


When did Sussman go to Baker ? 19 Sept 2016. Sussman didn't mention Steele.

112 didn't mention secret communications. But it did connect Putin and some Russians to Alfa Bank

I think the Sussman visit to Baker came out when Baker's testimony to one of the congressional committees was finally released publicly.

As soon as I read what Sussman did, and when he did it, it was obvious (ok, maybe highly likely).

This was coordinated. One of the classic misinformation tricks used in the game and widely used by Steele. (and by the FBI)

Plant two independent stories that come from two "different" sources, and where each story adds to the overall "credibility" of the big picture the tricksters were trying to paint.

report 112 dated 14 Sep 2016
Sussman's Alfa story to Baker 19 Sep 2016.

The dossier and it's multiple leaks and releases are full of "coincidences". But as the months rolled by, drip by drip, we learned the players, the lies, and the game plan to bring down Donald Trump. Or at least we learned some of it. The scope and number of players is mind numbing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/0...tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur

Durham Is Said to Seek Indictment of Lawyer at Firm With Democratic Ties

John H. Durham, the special counsel appointed by the Trump administration to scrutinize the Russia investigation, has told the Justice Department that he will ask a grand jury to indict a prominent cybersecurity lawyer on a charge of making a false statement to the F.B.I., people familiar with the matter said.

Any indictment of the lawyer — Michael Sussmann, a former federal prosecutor and now a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm, and who represented the Democratic National Committee on issues related to Russia’s 2016 hacking of its servers — is likely to attract significant political attention.

Donald J. Trump and his supporters have long accused Democrats and Perkins Coie — whose political law group, a division separate from Mr. Sussmann’s, represented the party and the Hillary Clinton campaign — of seeking to stoke unfair suspicions about Mr. Trump’s purported ties to Russia.

The case against Mr. Sussmann centers on the question of who his client was when he conveyed certain suspicions about Mr. Trump and Russia to the F.B.I. in September 2016. Among other things, investigators have examined whether Mr. Sussmann was secretly working for the Clinton campaign — which he denies.

An indictment is not a certainty: On rare occasions, grand juries decline prosecutors’ requests. But Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers, Sean M. Berkowitz and Michael S. Bosworth of Latham & Watkins, acknowledged on Wednesday that they expected him to be indicted, while denying he made any false statement.

“Mr. Sussmann has committed no crime,” they said. “Any prosecution here would be baseless, unprecedented and an unwarranted deviation from the apolitical and principled way in which the Department of Justice is supposed to do its work. We are confident that if Mr. Sussmann is charged, he will prevail at trial and vindicate his good name.”

The accusation against Mr. Sussmann focuses on a meeting he had on Sept. 19, 2016, with James A. Baker, who was the F.B.I.’s top lawyer at the time, according to the people familiar with the matter. They spoke on condition of anonymity.

Because of a five-year statute of limitations for such cases, Mr. Durham has a deadline of this weekend to bring a charge over activity from that date.


At the meeting, Mr. Sussmann relayed data and analysis from cybersecurity researchers who thought that odd internet data might be evidence of a covert communications channel between computer servers associated with the Trump Organization and with Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked Russian financial institution.

The F.B.I. eventually decided those concerns had no merit. The special counsel who later took over the Russia investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, ignored the matter in his final report.

Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers have told the Justice Department that he sought the meeting because he and the cybersecurity researchers believed that The New York Times was on the verge of publishing an article about the Alfa Bank data and he wanted to give the F.B.I. a heads-up. (In fact, The Times was not ready to run that article, but published one mentioning Alfa Bank six weeks later.)

Mr. Durham has been using a grand jury to examine the Alfa Bank episode and appeared to be hunting for any evidence that the data had been cherry-picked or the analysis of it knowingly skewed, The New Yorker and other outlets have reported. To date, there has been no public sign that he has found any such evidence.

But Mr. Durham did apparently find an inconsistency: Mr. Baker, the former F.B.I. lawyer, is said to have told investigators that he recalled Mr. Sussmann saying that he was not meeting him on behalf of any client. But in a deposition before Congress in 2017, Mr. Sussmann testified that he sought the meeting on behalf of an unnamed client who was a cybersecurity expert and had helped analyze the data.

Moreover, internal billing records Mr. Durham is said to have obtained from Perkins Coie are said to show that when Mr. Sussmann logged certain hours as working on the Alfa Bank matter — though not the meeting with Mr. Baker — he billed the time to Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign.


more info here:
https://technofog.substack.com...ham-seeks-indictment

NYT: John Durham seeks indictment of Clinton Campaign Lawyer

Sussmann has been indicted

https://www.scribd.com/documen.../Sussmann-Indictment

Note: Sussmann was the one who hired Crowdstrike to investigate the hack of the DNC servers. It was the Crowdstrike analysis that blamed the Russians for the hack. The FBI never got to inspect the DNC servers

Marc Elias of Perkins Coie recently left the law firm and started his own law firm. Elias has been the DEM chief lawyer involved in vote recounts when DEMs overturn elections with multiple recounts. Keep counting till you win. then stop counting

quote:

Originally posted by sdy:
Sussmann has been indicted

https://www.scribd.com/documen.../Sussmann-Indictment

Good first step, but I want the big fish to pay. He was being paid by the Clinton campaign.

quote:

Originally posted by sdy:
Sussmann has been indicted

https://www.scribd.com/documen.../Sussmann-Indictment

Who is “Tech Executive-1” and “Internet Company-1” ?

Who is “Tech Executive-1” and “Internet Company-1” ?

Not clear yet. Some internet sleuths are speculating.



assuming Campaign Lawyer -1 is Marc Elias ?

Note that Clinton campaign manager, communications director, and foreign policy advisor knew of the planted Russian bank article




Sussmann disseminating Russian Bank -1 allegations on behalf of the Clinton campaign

Russian Bank-1 = Alfa Bank ?

clinton tweet from 31 oct 2016

statement from Jake Sullivan
they knew this was BS

Jake Sullivan is now Biden's National Security Advisor

Thanks sdy.
If it’s not clear yet, that definitely makes it interesting.

Can we have a public hanging now?

quote:

Originally posted by ugeesta:
Can we have a public hanging now?

There seems to be a line forming!

Will bring lawn chairs and some refreshments.

quote:

Note that Clinton campaign manager, communications director, and foreign policy advisor knew of the planted Russian bank article

Clinton campaign manager = Robby Mook

Clinton communications director = Jennifer Palmieri

Clinton foreign policy advisor = Jake Sullivan

Clinton campaign general counsel = Marc Elias of Perkins Coie law firm


Investigative Firm = Fusion GPS

Reporter #2 = Franklin Foer (staff writer at The Atlantic)



Sussmann no longer listed on Perkins Coie web site

Sussmann has resigned from Perkins Coie

Perkins Coie has more than 1,200 lawyers in 20 offices across the United States and Asia

Sussmann just appeared in fed court in DC and pleaded not guilty to the false statement charge Special Counsel Durham filed yesterday. He was released on a $100K bond by agreement of both sides

The case against Sussmann was assigned on Thursday to Judge Christopher Cooper, an appointee of President Barack Obama.

https://www.politico.com/news/...-lying-to-fbi-512316

quote:

Originally posted by sdy:
<snip>
Sussmann no longer listed on Perkins Coie web site
<snip>

He resigned.

“…
Sussman had been working at Perkins Coie, a law firm with long ties to Democrats, but the firm issued a statement following the indictment saying that Sussmann had resigned to focus on his legal defense.
…”

https://www.washingtonpost.com...cb895922f_story.html

quote:

Originally posted by ersatzknarf:
Will bring lawn chairs and some refreshments.

I've got enough popcorn, but will need more Diet Coke.

flashguy