jeez CORRECTION An earlier version of this column incorrectly identified the Trump campaign as the target of an FBI FISA warrant application. The warrant application was for former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. It also implied that the FBI’s statements to special counsel John Durham regarding its doubts about case were made before the investigation started; they were made after it had begun. The earlier version also should have described the respondents to a question about the mainstream media from a New York Times-Siena College poll as "among those who say democracy is under threat." This version has been updated.
another damn opinion piece https://www.wsj.com/articles/specia...p-russia-collusion-bf7023c8?mod=hp_opin_pos_1 Durham Exposes Robert Mueller’s Failure The new report exposes how the original Russia probe covered up the FBI’s offenses. By The Editorial Board May 19, 2023 at 7:03 pm ET Special counsel John Durham’s report on the Russia collusion fiasco deserves more attention than it is getting, and its critics are dismissing it for one big reason: The 306 pages describe the great failure of original special counsel Robert Mueller. Mr. Mueller was named special counsel in May 2017, after Democrats and media claimed Donald Trump fired FBI director Jim Comey to stop the bureau’s investigation into the Russia collusion tale. Mr. Mueller hunted for evidence that Mr. Trump was a Russian mole but couldn’t find it. Now the Durham report makes clear that the Mueller team failed to investigate how the collusion probe began as a dirty trick by the Clinton campaign and how the FBI went along for the ride. The report includes evidence that those engaged in the FBI’s initial Crossfire Hurricane probe and Democratic attorneys used their positions on the Mueller investigating team to cover up the FBI mess. Among Mr. Mueller’s initial hires were FBI agent Peter Strzok, FBI analyst Brian Auten and FBI lawyer Lisa Page—all at the epicenter of the Crossfire fiasco. Of Mr. Mueller’s 18 attorneys, several worked in the Obama Justice Department during the Crossfire probe, including Andrew Weissmann—a highly partisan Democrat who attended Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election night party. They had a strong incentive to hide the truth. One telling example: The Durham report documents the Mueller team’s handling of Charles Dolan, a Democrat who was a source for at least one of the false allegations about Mr. Trump and Russia. The FBI Crossfire team was told in September 2016 by Christopher Steele that Mr. Dolan had information related to the infamous dossier, yet the team never followed up. Agents on Mr. Mueller’s team later realized Mr. Dolan’s importance and pushed to interview him, but they were blocked. One agent told Durham investigators that he was confident Mr. Auten told him to “hold off” interviewing Mr. Dolan. (Mr. Auten said he didn’t recall.) The agent also recalled a meeting at which Mr. Weissmann was present when the agent raised the Dolan information but received “very little feedback.” Another agent and an analyst also pushed the Dolan news in a briefing that included Mr. Auten and Jeannie Rhee (an attorney who once worked for the Clinton Foundation) and tried to open a case. Mr. Auten instructed the analyst to “cease all research and analysis related to Dolan.” The report says the analyst told the Durham team that she believed the decision to block a probe of Mr. Dolan “was politically motivated,” as it “ran counter to the narrative that the Mueller Special Counsel investigators were cultivating given that Dolan was a former Democratic political operative.” The analyst also relayed that at various times “Rhee opined, in sum, that there was no longer a need to investigate the [dossier], because the reports were not within the scope of the Mueller Special Counsel mandate.” Mr. Auten says the Mueller leadership in September 2017 told the team to “cease work on attempting to corroborate the [dossier].” In an understatement for the ages, the Durham report notes that this “directive” was “somewhat surprising given that Director Mueller’s broad mandate was to investigate, among other things, Russian election interference in the 2016 presidential election.” This refers to the Durham finding that the Russians may have compromised Mr. Steele’s sources before he even started writing his dossier. All of this suggests that the Mueller probe was as much a cover-up as an attempt to find evidence of collusion. And it vindicates the view we expressed in October 2017 that Mr. Mueller, as a former FBI director, should have resigned as special counsel because he lacked the proper distance from the bureau. At the time any skepticism about the Mueller probe, or the Russia collusion narrative, was denounced as an apology for Mr. Trump. The Durham report shows how wrong the rest of the press corps was. The Durham probe would never have been necessary if Mr. Mueller and his team had done an honest job. Appeared in the May 20, 2023, print edition as 'Durham Exposes Mueller’s Failure'.
Mueller didn’t find a smoking gun and as stated d specifically didn’t draw a conclusion. In fact Mueller said there wasn’t a crime regarding collusion. That was one of the key differences I highlighted between the reports. Honestly this seems like a reply to other poster than to my specific post you were replying too.
Yes this argument they somehow i the initial investigation into Trump’s campaign was all driven but eh Clintons and the media again ignores that it was done out of the public eye. Of course a political opponent is going to push suspicion of their opponents. One of Trump’s campaign rally cries was “LOCK HER UP!” Yet we see selective outrage about Clinton and the FBI over an investigation that wasn’t even publicaly known.
Correct Comey did more damage to Clinton's campaign than ever he did to Trump's. The Clinton campaign investigation was very much in the media.
The genesis of the FBI investigating Trump associates with a possible connection to Russia has nothing to do with the Clinton campaign or the media. The media's massive attention to the Russian collusion story started well after the FBI had already begun their investigation (in secret, out of public knowledge). Crossfire Hurricane (FBI investigation) - Wikipedia Crossfire Hurricane was the code name for the counterintelligence investigation undertaken by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from July 31, 2016, to May 17, 2017, into myriad links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies and "whether individuals associated with [Trump's] presidential campaign were coordinating, wittingly or unwittingly, with the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election".[1] Trump was not personally under investigation until May 2017, when his firing of FBI director James Comey raised suspicions of obstruction of justice, which triggered the Mueller investigation.[2] The investigation was officially opened on July 31, 2016, initially due to information on Trump campaign member George Papadopoulos's early assertions of Russians having damaging material on Trump's rival candidate Hillary Clinton which the Russians offered to anonymously release as assistance to the Trump campaign. From late July to November 2016, the joint effort between the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Security Agency (NSA) examined evidence of Russian meddling in the presidential election. The FBI's team enjoyed a large degree of autonomy within the broader interagency probe. Origins After working on the Ben Carson 2016 presidential campaign as a foreign policy adviser, in early February 2016 George Papadopoulos, codenamed "Crossfire Typhoon" by the FBI,[18] left the Carson campaign. That same month, he moved to London to begin working for the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP), with which he had been associated for several months. On March 6, he accepted an offer to work with the Trump campaign.[19] As part of his duties with the LCILP, on March 12 he traveled to the Link Campus University in Rome to meet officials with the university. While on this trip, on March 14 he met Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud and informed the professor about his joining the Trump campaign. On March 21, the Trump campaign told the Washington Post that Papadopoulos was one of five foreign policy advisers for the Trump campaign.[20] Mifsud took more interest in Papadopoulos, and met him in London on March 24 with a Russian woman posing as "Putin's niece".[21] Mifsud traveled to Moscow in April 2016, and upon his return he told Papadopoulos that Russian government officials were in possession of "thousands of emails" that could be politically damaging to Hillary Clinton.[21][22] According to reporting by Malta Today about FBI records, Mifsud told the FBI in his February 2017 interviews that he had no advanced knowledge of Russia having emails from the Democratic National Committee, and did not make any offers to Papadopolous.[23] On May 6, Papadopoulos met Alexander Downer, the Australian High Commissioner to Britain in a London bar, and told him about the Clinton emails over drinks.[21] After WikiLeaks released hacked Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails on July 22, the Australian government on July 26 advised American authorities of the encounter between Downer and Papadopoulos. Receipt of this information spurred the FBI's launch of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation on July 31.[24][25][26]
LOL...... I mean it's all you got.... not actually news but someone needing to carry water for your story.
John Hinderaker comments on Strassel's essay: So, Strassel concludes, let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water: Some are responding to the Durham report with calls to dismantle the FBI. But the report shows the rank and file doing exactly what the FBI is supposed to do—question, verify. The fault rests with an arrogant leadership that discarded the usual layers of oversight—a seventh floor that took charge with no regard for rules, little care for the truth, and no accountability from above. A friend of mine who retired recently from the Bureau says much the same thing: the vast majority of agents are solid, he thinks, but there were seven or eight bad apples at the top who steered the FBI into the ditch. more at https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/05/rotten-apples.php
https://www.nationalreview.com/2023...poses-how-thin-the-collusion-case-really-was/ The Durham Report Exposes How Thin the Collusion Case Really Was By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY May 20, 2023 6:30 AM Even FBI officials working the case admitted that it had been opened on the flimsiest of grounds. The vaporousness of the predication for the FBI’s Trump–Russia investigation, “Crossfire Hurricane,” was described Tuesday in our editorial on the Durham Report (and in my post the same day). For years, I have maintained that the probe was opened on false pretenses. But now that we have Special Counsel John Durham’s careful and comprehensive account of the debacle, the bureau and its allied Russiagate agonistes ought to be humiliated. They deranged the country for years over what, at the time they opened the case, FBI leaders knew was a grossly irresponsible basis for commencing any serious investigation, let alone for intruding the bureau into the politics of a presidential election. The damage this sordid affair has done to the FBI as an institution may not be reparable. It is totally predictable and in character that “collusion” cheerleaders, including some of the former FBI officials who were fired, are now mewling that Durham’s report is a “nothing burger.” But it’s still tough to abide. As we’ve noted, amid the media–Democratic-complex hysteria resulting from the publication of hacked DNC emails during the 2016 Democratic Convention, the FBI opened the investigation in late July 2016. This was not a normal case, so the decision was made by top officials at headquarters, based on a strained interpretation of casual comments made two months earlier by George Papadopoulos to a pair of Australian diplomats at a bar in London. Papadopoulos was a green, unpaid Trump campaign aide. At the time they were made, his remarks were sufficiently incomprehensible — and un-comprehended — that the Aussies thought little of them. In summarizing what Papadopoulos said in a contemporaneous memo, the best one of the diplomats could come up with was that he’d made a suggestion of some kind of suggestion: [Papadopoulos] also suggested the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist this process [of exploiting the “baggage” of Hillary and Bill Clinton] with the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to Mrs Clinton (and President Obama). Papadopoulos did not claim to know what, if anything, Russian intelligence had on Hillary Clinton. He did not use the word “emails” or even “dirt.” The diplomats were not intelligence agents, but they knew enough to be dismissive. (As I detailed in Ball of Collusion, one of them, Alexander Downer, had intriguing relationships with both British intelligence officers and such American politicians as the Clintons, to whose foundation he had arranged a $25 million Australian contribution.) Any competent intelligence analyst would have known that, if Trump actually were in some kind of “conspiracy of cooperation” with Vladimir Putin, the last person in the world who’d have known anything about it was George Papadopoulos. It’s unlikely Trump could have picked Papadopoulos out of a line-up. (Sure, they once sat at the same crowded table, and there’s a photograph of it; but there’s also a photograph of Trump chatting with a woman who accused him of rape, and at a deposition he mistook her for his second wife.) Russian intelligence is very capable. Donald Trump, by contrast, has exhibited neither awareness nor habits of intelligence craft through his half-century in public life. If the Aussie diplomats had been intelligence agents, they would have realized that Moscow’s spies would hardly have needed the chaotic Trump campaign’s help to gather or disseminate kompromat on Hillary Clinton. More to the point, though, if the kind of cryptic speculation attributed to Papadopoulos were a sufficient rationale for opening a counterintelligence investigation, the FBI might as well have opened one on its own then-director. Recall that Director Jim Comey held a July 5, 2016, press conference at which he laid out the evidence against Clinton that the FBI had uncovered during the emails investigation — flouting Justice Department guidelines against public statements about misconduct by uncharged persons. As recounted in DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz’s eventual report, Comey’s statement was months in the making: He had started drafting it in late April and early May — i.e., even before Papadopoulos’s mid-May meeting with the Aussie diplomats (but, as I’ve previously pointed out, only shortly after President Obama’s nationally televised assertion that he did not want Clinton charged with a crime). This means that prior to Papadopoulos’s supposed “suggestion of some kind of suggestion,” there were already internal discussions at FBI headquarters about how former secretary Hillary Clinton, all by herself, had given the Russians all the help they needed to undermine her presidential bid. Specifically, Comey had been briefed that, because she recklessly used a homebrew email server to do her State Department work, Clinton was uniquely vulnerable not just to hacking, but to hacking that could capture her sensitive communications with Obama while she was in Russia.more
conclusion: It is not enough to say that Clinton’s private-server system was so non-secure that it could easily have been penetrated by competent foreign intelligence services. The FBI assessed that it probably had been penetrated. By the time of Comey’s press conference, that embarrassing finding had been massaged into this portion of his script: With respect to potential computer intrusion by hostile actors, we did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal email domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked. But, given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved, we assess that we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence. We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial e-mail accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account. We also assess that Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent. She also used her personal e-mail extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.As scathing as that was, Comey’s earlier drafts (described in Horowitz’s report) were even more damning. The director had been planning to say that Clinton also used her personal email extensively while outside the United States, including from the territory of sophisticated adversaries. That use included an email exchange with the President while Secretary Clinton was on the territory of such an adversary.”[Emphasis added.]This express mention of Obama was veiled in a subsequent draft, which referred instead to “another senior government official.” Realizing this would only draw unwanted attention to Clinton’s communications with Obama, which had very possibly been hacked by Russian or other hostile intelligence services, Comey and his advisers completely omitted any allusion to Obama from the remarks he finally delivered on July 5. (Prior to leaving office, Obama quietly directed that his email communications with Clinton be sealed.) Remember, the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane in late July 2016 as a full-throttle investigation — without interviewing Papadopoulos, the Aussie diplomats, or a single relevant witness — because of the supposition that Papadopoulos might have been saying that the Trump campaign believed the Russians had compromising information that they might use against Clinton. Yet, less than four weeks earlier, the FBI’s top official had openly speculated that hostile actors (obviously the Russians, among others) had compromising material that they might use against Clinton. To put it another way, in reading what Comey told the world at his presser, one could easily detect a “suggestion of a kind of suggestion” that the Russians had hacked Clinton’s communications and were in a position to disseminate them at a time that could have been maximally harmful to her presidential campaign, revealing both (a) private conversations that Clinton would understandably have wanted kept confidential, and (b) her gross negligence in conducting sensitive government business this way — which Trump or any other political rival would inevitably argue demonstrated her unfitness to be president. If that’s what the FBI’s own director was saying publicly, what else would you expect from George Papadopoulos? Not much. And thanks to Durham, we now know that’s what the FBI agents working the case thought of the vaunted predication for the case: not much. Less than that, really. As noted above, the bureau opened a full-scale investigation against a presidential campaign based on information from the Aussie diplomats before even interviewing them (just as the bureau failed to interview Christopher Steele’s main source, Igor Danchenko, until after twice swearing under oath to his allegations in FISA-court warrant applications). The bureau got around to this apparently lower priority of actually talking to witnesses on August 2, 2016. Because the interview was to be done in London, the FBI had to consult with its British intelligence counterparts. As Durham details, to pave the way, the bureau’s legal attaché (leg-at) in London (whose name is not given in the report) was dispatched to discuss the opening of the investigation with the Brits. Their reaction was one of “real skepticism.” They told the leg-at that the sketchy statements attributed to Papadopoulos by the Aussie diplomats were “not assess[ed]” to be “particularly valuable intelligence.” In fact, the leg-at added, “the British could not believe the Papadopoulos bar conversation was all there was,” so they assumed the FBI must have more information that it was holding back. It didn’t. By that first week in August, the FBI had assigned a first case agent (also not named in the report) to work under the direction of Agent Peter Strzok and help interview the Aussies. In an August 11 conversation, the leg-at and the case agent had this exchange: Leg-at: Dude, are we telling [British intelligence] everything we know, or is there more to this? Case agent: That’s all we have. Not holding anything back. Leg-at: Damn, that’s thin. Case agent: I know. The one who knew the most at the time about bureau headquarters’ thinking was Strzok. The leg-at recalled that as the agents taxied to the Australian High Commission in London, Strzok muttered, “There’s nothing to this, but we have to run it to ground.” Grounded nothing, I think, is what’s often called a “nothing burger.” Here, the nothing burger is actually the FBI’s Trump–Russia “collusion” investigation, not the Durham Report.
More conservative columnist trying to hype up Durham and downplay Mueller. Sadly at this point the truth runs among partisan lines.
A smaller and weaker local version of the below is to flood this thread with one-sided OP after OP . I have nothing against OPs, just pointing out a potential technique. "Firehouse of Falsehood" Russian propaganda is produced in incredibly large volumes and is broadcast or otherwise distributed via a large number of channels. This propaganda includes text, video, audio, and still imagery propagated via the Internet, social media, satellite television, and traditional radio and television broadcasting. The producers and disseminators include a substantial force of paid Internet “trolls” who also often attack or undermine views or information that runs counter to Russian themes, doing so through online chat rooms, discussion forums, and comments sections on news and other websites.
The desperation is cute… the right wing media apparatus even has to pull their copy cat of The Onion “satirical arm” into the mix.
So many are trying to paint the investigation into Trump’s campaign as though the Clintons and the Nyt were controlling the FBI and that FBI was basically making political ads for the Clintons during the 2016 election. Even Durham says that the FBI had good reason to investigate and that the Steele Dossier want the basis of it.
opinion piece in The Hill Durham Report: The FBI is as bad as you feared, maybe worse https://thehill.com/opinion/crimina...-the-fbi-is-as-bad-as-you-feared-maybe-worse/
The minutia of the merits of the Durham Report no longer interest me, but it does kinda mark the end of official investigations into the whole Russian collusion thing, so I think its interesting to examine how my impressions have changed with information and the passage of time. Back in 2016-17, from my liberal perspective: Clinton looked like a politician willing to get a little dirty, but not actually the criminal that Republicans have been saying she was for the last couple of decades. Trump meanwhile was obviously a terrible person and deserved little benefit of the doubt for any bad thing he was accused of. And it was clear that Russia was meddling in the election to get Trump elected, and it seemed like Trump's engagement with the Russians was somewhere between tacit enjoyment to active collaboration to actual financial and/or policy remuneration for the interference, all with some genuine risk to our foreign policy and national security over his term. And the FBI looked like they might have started a little flat-footed, and Comey probably made things worse by talking to the press too much, but now their noble effort to save democracy was going to get quashed by the president they were investigating. Rosenstein looked like a hero to appoint Mueller. Now: While still not overtly criminal, Clinton now looks much dirtier than before. While she might have started with a kernel of the truth, she pushed baseless conspiracies, like the Alfa Bank data pings, that stepped beyond the usual mudslinging to something downright irresponsible and dangerous. The range of risk that Trump has posed now looks a little narrower -- still worse than the best case, but not the worst case. It looks like he did know Russia was interfering in the election for his benefit and he was happy about it. He also, on a limited basis, shared some confidential information with their operatives to help with that work. And, after his election but before his inauguration, he conducted some shadow foreign policy to undermine Obama's retaliation against Russia. But it looks now like it was opportunistic and he did not make overt promises to repay the favor. He nevertheless had pro-Russian and pro-dictator policy views (which Putin was no doubt aware of), and promoted some shady pro-Russian people (like Flynn), that would benefit Putin anyway. I am still befuddled today why Trump still has such a pro-Russian policy bent. There is still a remote possibility that there was more than a tacit deal between Trump and Putin than all of our investigations have been able to uncover. The DOJ looks okay but not great in all this. Comey was probably a fool to comment publicly (esp regarding Clinton), but given the Russians' interference in the election and contacts they had with the Trump campaign, investigating was the wise thing to do. They may have taken some liberties (such as with the FISA warrants) and made some mistakes, but there was significant fog-of-war going on then. None of our intelligence agencies knew how extensive Russian interference really was. I wouldn't take back any of it. Including the Durham Report -- its rather limited reproach of Crossfire Hurricane demonstrates to me that we still have a functional FBI and sufficient oversight. Mostly I blame Trump for having even the appearance of impropriety. When Russian agents reached out, they should have loudly slammed the door in their faces instead of saying, "If it's what you say I love it." Even if they did manage to observe some ethical boundaries when talking to Russian agents, they created an atmosphere in which our intelligence agencies weren't sure if they were corrupt or not and had to investigate. And Trump was morally wrong and also foolish to quash investigations into his relationships with Russia. He made himself look far more corrupt than anything an unvarnished investigation would have uncovered.
