Durham’s Nugget: An intelligence tale

In a quick-look treatment on 16 May, Lee Smith unerringly identified a central data point from John Durham’s special counsel report on the FBI’s conduct of Crossfire Hurricane.

That point is John Brennan’s handwritten record of having briefed President Obama and a group of administration seniors, on 3 August 2016, about “Russian intelligence” on Hillary Clinton’s operation to generate a fake narrative in which Russia colluded with Donald Trump.

Smith points out that James Comey was reportedly in attendance at that meeting.  That would mean Comey knew throughout the execution of Crossfire Hurricane that it was entirely possible much if not all of the supposed “evidence” of Russia-Trump collusion was coming from a campaign “oppo” effort mounted by Clinton.

Yet with this implication in throbbing neon in the special counsel investigation, Durham ultimately let Comey off the hook

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The bait and switch of election “security”: Timeline nuggets from a colluding cabal

A great deal has come out from the “Twitter files” about the collusion of federal government agencies, Big Tech and social media, legacy/left-wing media, and “civil society” organizations (think-tanks, self-appointed “watchdog” groups) to silence legitimate speech, and to do so on a thoroughly biased basis.

Although the pattern demonstrated in Twitter correspondence has related to several topics, one of the most important is suppression of reporting on Hunter Biden, his laptop, and the Biden family ties to foreign governments and companies.  The files, and testimony prompted by their revelations, have clarified that systematic collusion was behind suppression of information about the Hunter Biden laptop in the weeks just before the November 2020 election.

In fact, there’s good reason to posit a connection between suppression of the laptop story on social media,

Two pings: On POTUSes with classified docs, and the riddle-wrapped mystery of George Santos

These are going to be short(-ish) pings.  OSINT research is all over the place right now – God bless us, every one – and my intention is to focus.  So I’m not going to do a comprehensive treatment.

Conservatives are justifiably disgusted with the media for double-standard coverage on the reportedly recent discovery of classified documents loosed upon the world by former Vice President Biden when he left office in January 2017.  The documents have been somewhere for the last six years; in November, we’re told, some of them turned up in a search by Biden’s “personal” lawyers of his one-time office at the digs of the Chinese-funded (U.) Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C.  In December, more were found at a “separate location” where Biden had office space.  And In January, another discovery was made in Biden’s Wilmington garage, where his vintage Corvette lodges.

Update:  More material was reportedly (14 January) just found

TOC Ready Room 28 December 2022: Grab bag – AZ election lawsuit; George Santos; illegal migrants

As readers have probably guessed, I’ve been taking a bit of a Christmas holiday and not posting much recently.  (As an update from several weeks ago, I continue to work on an extensive article about Chinese land holdings in the U.S., and some implications for national security.  That won’t be out until the New Year at this point.)

This Ready Room will be a little grab-bag of reflections on a few topics, the first of which is the Arizona judge’s ruling against gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s lawsuit over the conduct of the 2022 general election in Maricopa County.  The evidence of irregularities is extensive, and a strong case was made that failures of preparation and operation on election day, including machines and back-up planning, ended up disenfranchising numerous voters.  In the opinion of legal experts who were tracking the lawsuit and the court filings by Kari Lake, the evidence also showed an unmistakable bias in the political demographics affected by the irregularities, which were overwhelmingly Republican precincts.

I want to focus on just one aspect of the issue, however.

Mar-a-Lago affidavit: Russiagate rides again

The affidavit behind the warrant for the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago is out, sort of, and it appears to fulfill expectations.  The statute citations are absurd, the prior cooperation of former President Trump with federal agencies is clear, a huge question remains unanswered, and the issue of declassification is dealt with in a series of rimshots that never land in a pocket (which alone should have been a red flag to magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart).

And that’s just the part we can see.  The real question – not really a question, I think – is what’s invisible behind the massive redactions.

I say it’s not really a question, because one thing it has to be is excuses for the statute citations, which include language implying Trump is suspected of conspiring to hand sensitive national defense material to unauthorized persons, and has unknown confederates in such an enterprise.