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.”*

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Durham Chronicles: Fusion GPS and the Moby Dick method of litigation support

If you want a fresh perspective on John Durham’s grand jury subpoena for materials related to the Alfa Bank hoax and Michael Sussmann’s activities, you could do worse than have a visit with Glenn Simpson’s testimony to the House Intelligence Committee (the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, or HPSCI) from 14 November 2017.

Those who have been following Durham’s false statement case against Sussmann, which alleges that Sussmann lied to the FBI in 2016 when he told FBI general Counsel James Baker that he wasn’t representing a client in a meeting in September of that year, are familiar with where the case stands at the moment.  Sussmann’s trial is scheduled to begin on 16 May 2022, and both sides, prosecution and defense, are busy filing motions and related items.

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 importance of background, and Danchenko’s primary Russian sub-source

In the TOC Ready Room preview for this article, I alluded to the principal point of highlighting the information in it.  That point is that Spygate was not a pick-up-game reaction to events in 2016.  In terms of involvement by the Obama federal agencies and Hillary Clinton’s network, evidence of connections to prior motives and preparation abounds.

Examples include Alexandra Chalupa and a cast of Obama officials already seeking Ukrainian cooperation on a Manafort-focused narrative in January 2016, before Manafort joined the Trump campaign and before the first primary election had been held.  If this was about impugning Manafort, why?  By 2019 we could see that getting ahead of any bad news about Biden was an obvious motive – but was it a priority at that point, considering Biden wasn’t running in 2016?  Did Republicans in general know enough about the Biden shenanigans to create a pervasive problem for Hillary and other Democrats that year?

Something other than narrowly-focused, proximate reactions seems to have been going on.

Durham’s ‘Clues’: Pentagon contractors, CrowdStrike, Georgia, and the IP addresses

Paul Sperry had an article at Real Clear Investigations on 7 October in which he reported that John Durham’s investigation of the federal government’s handling of “Russiagate” is focusing on Pentagon contractors.  Like the “speaking indictment” of Michael Sussmann, this framing of where Durham’s headed functions to shift perceptions somewhat, shedding new light on old information.

Like so much of the “new light,” the investigative pathways prompted by what has recently come out cause us to look further back and see the fresh likelihood of connections between the familiar events of Spygate/Russiagate and earlier events.

This treatment will not be at all comprehensive.  It’s a collection of such potential links, assembled in the last few weeks and presented in complete sentences as a marker, rather than as a finished analysis or theory.  Basically, these are research notes.  I want to get them out there as a service.

Rather than attempting to weave them as a story, I’m trusting readers to know the basic outline and recognize why dates and events are significant.  There has been prior work on all of the points here:  nothing is entirely new, as I think dedicated followers of the problem set are aware.  Hyperlinks will take you to more extended discussions and analyses.

Here is the grab-bag of interesting points, in no particular order.