The fetid swamp of “integrity”: The initiative that scurried from the spotlight

The recent articles showing that erstwhile U.S. Administrator of Truth Nina Jankowicz was connected with the shadowy, government-funded British group Institute for Statecraft (and its offshoot Integrity Initiative project) have reopened a can of worms far too numerous to herd into a single post.

Indeed, they’re so numerous it’s hard to keep track of them from one online search to the next.

So this won’t be an in-depth treatment of “IfS/II” and its squirming, hydra-headed mass.  Rather, it’s a few notes on what Ms. Jankowicz was doing in the period when an IfS/II document reflects a connection to her.  Plus some bonus observations about IfS/II.

As far as I’ve discerned at this point, one document out of quite a few – all of which were hacked and exposed by Anonymous in 2018 and early 2019 – identifies Jankowicz as explicitly linked to the Integrity Initiative’s “UK Cluster.”*

A work-in-progress timeline surrounding Feb 2017 Daniel Jones meeting, including the ‘Trump’s insurance broker’ angle

With a great deal happening, it’s important to move some things out there before they are fully developed and analyzed, largely because some of the event dates are remarkably coincident with known events from the Spygate timeline. 

The anchor point for this rough-condition timeline is early February 2017, when on successive days Michael Sussmann met with officials at the CIA to urge on them his trove of purported Alfa Bank-Trump data (9 February 2017), and John Podesta met with Peter Fritsch and Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, along with former Dianne Feinstein staffer Daniel Jones (on 10 February 2017), who in the same timeframe started a non-profit that hired Fusion to continue its anti-Trump work from 2016.

These dates are of particular interest, and not only because John Durham has discussed the Sussmann-CIA meeting in his court filings in the Sussmann false-statement case.

Ongoing: Five top-level pings on the Russiagate/Spygate maneuver war

We recently passed the five-year mark of the public breaking of the Russiagaet/Spygate saga (which I reckon to the day the Steele dossier burst forth upon us, 10 January 2017), and a brief stock-taking is in order.

To keep these points crisply punctuated, they will be brief.  This is an overview, not an in-depth treatment. 

I include here the points I consider essential to useful analysis of the “-gates.”  There is a very great deal more that can be said, but these are the points that keep us on track.

Ping One

The unclubbable Mr. Trump: China, Ukraine, and a surprise banking oversight action

On 20 March, we checked in with a story from the period 2014-2016, when the French bank BNP Paribas was, initially, greenlighted by the Obama administration to do business with Iran, as sanctions were relaxed, and then months later was hit by U.S. government authorities with the biggest settlement forfeiture in banking history for a prior record of sanctions violations (including sanctions on Iran).

In the interim between the first development (January 2014) and the second (June 2014), BNP Paribas flagged – to UK officials – a suspicious transaction by the owner of Burisma, Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky.  The date of the notification, March 2014, fell in the period when Vice President Joe Biden was holding frequent phone conversations with top Ukrainian officials as the “Maidan Revolution” crisis expanded.  About a month after BNP Paribas alerted the UK to Zlochevsky – who had fled Ukraine in February 2014 – Hunter Biden and Devon Archer joined Burisma’s board, and payments from the company began flowing to them.

The foreign intel angle on Spygate: What probably didn’t happen, and what probably did

This should more properly be titled “A slice of the foreign intel angle on Spygate,” because it’s not a comprehensive survey.  Such a survey would at a minimum have to include British, Australian, and Italian involvement in human intelligence (HUMINT) threads, among others.  The survey here isn’t that expansive.

Rather, it separates out a chunk of the purported information to date on one part of the larger story line.  The part in question is a combination of signals intelligence (SIGINT) and Russian intelligence, and in particular, U.S. and friendly intelligence on Russian intelligence.  The latter – or at least claims about the latter; i.e., claims about our intel on Russian intel – played a key role in perpetuating the Russiagate narrative when it was looking particularly seedy and ill-starred.

In retrospect, it appears skepticism about some claims of foreign-intel sourcing was always in order.