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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Three more pings on Mar-a-Lago raid: A situational awareness adjustment

This thought-treatment I really do hope to keep tight.  Nothing has changed substantially in terms of common facts since the last article, and my hope is to help focus the speculation on the situation, which right now is all over the place.

The pings have to do with (1) what the DOJ/FBI could have been and/or probably were looking for in the 8 August 2022 raid at Mar-a-Lago; (2) what the purpose(s) of the raid may have been; and (3) what DOJ and FBI already know about Trump knows, what he’s been doing at any relevant time in the past, and what his intentions are.

Regarding (2), I suspect there was more than one purpose.

A rogue SCIF at a law firm? Examining the latest report about the FBI and Perkins Coie; UPDATE: FBI weighs in

[See update at the bottom – J.E.]

On Tuesday, Tucker Carlson had a brief segment with Rep. Matt Gaetz to discuss information Gaetz and Rep. Jim Jordan received recently from a “whistleblower.”  The gist of the information is that since 2012, the FBI has maintained a “secure work environment” at the Perkins Coie law firm. (H/t: Conservative Treehouse; video below.)

From Gaetz’s comments, it sounds as if Michael Sussmann, formerly a partner at Perkins Coie (before his indictment in the Durham investigation, for which charge Sussmann was acquitted by a jury on Tuesday), administered the secure work environment until he left the firm in 2021.

Sundance speculates at CTH that the secure work environment at Perkins Coie is where (or perhaps one of the “wheres”) people were gaining unauthorized access to unminimized (i.e., not “masked”) U.S. person identifying information (USPI), as described in the FISA court summary by Judge Rosemary Collyer released in 2017.

TOC Ready Room 9 April 2022: Russia-Ukraine, Adieu mon status quo; Echoes of info ops dance in our heads

The first order of business in the Ready Room is the state of the status quo six-odd weeks into the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Per our RR convention, this won’t be an in-depth look.  But it’s important to point out that the status quo has already changed, in ways that are likely to be irreversible, and that have been flying under the radar up to now.

I think a lot of people realize this is happening, even if they can’t readily think what the specific details are.  Only one border has been breached so far, after all.  NATO hasn’t been drawn into “World War III.”  How bad can it be?

We’ve looked at one detail already:  the immediate failure of NATO’s missile defense linchpin.

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.