Bump Trump: Guide for the perplexed to last week’s Russiagate/Spygate contribution

[Note:  in the interest of getting this work in progress posted, I am dispensing with most links in the text.  Every assertion is documented, and the documentation will be found in the series of my articles appended at the end.  It’s a first-ever compilation of such a list of articles, and I hope will be of use for bookmarking.  One thing it settles is the date hacks for when I – and others – recognized the official narrative about Crossfire Hurricane was invalid:  not a reflection of reality.  I want to emphasize that references to the indispensable work of others – the Brigade of Musketeers who have labored long over Russiagate and Spygate – are credited in those articles. I am responsible for the judgments I include in this article; they are not to blame. – J.E.]

All this, and we still didn’t find out why Nellie Ohr got a ham radio license in May 2016.

My bottom-line assessment of this past week’s reporting by Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi up-front:

First, this has served as a good taking-stock moment.

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

Here’s motive on the Mar-a-Lago raid; or, Dog-paddling outside the OODA loop

Divining the principal purpose of the DOJ/FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago on 8 August 2022 hasn’t really been that hard.  The timing and its juxtaposition with the Justice Department’s motion to substitute itself for FBI employees, as defendant in Trump’s RICO lawsuit over Russiagate, have produced a “speaking timeline.”

But it’s good to know that one of the two most important events in that timeline yields a treasure trove of motive for DOJ to seize materials from Mar-a-Lago.  That event is former president Trump’s filing of an amended complaint in the RICO lawsuit, which he did on 21 June 2022.

I’ve been threatening to inspect the amendments to the lawsuit, and have now completed that extensive task (So You Don’t Have To).  The short version up front:  the amendments include a raft of details that weren’t in the original complaint, although many of them have been known for years (having come from sources like the DOJ IG report on the FISA process, and summaries of findings about Russiagate/Spygate from Senate and House committees).

Two pings on the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago: Classification kerfuffle and Trump’s RICO suit

There is a whole lot else to say, so my apologies up front for not saying it.  I just want to keep this short (well, shorter than it would otherwise be).  Consider this an open invitation to say whatever seems to live loud within you and demand saying.

Ideally, the comments on classification of documents, presidential authority, and Trump’s holding of documents out of office would be even shorter than they’re going to be.

The bottom line on everything is that Trump was the president until 20 January 2021, and in most cases the president isn’t subject to the same agency regulations and procedures everyone else is.

That doesn’t make a clean single-color area for the president to operate in, however.  Rather, it generates a gray area largely governed by negation.

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.