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.

The IT role in Russiagate: Part I – Taking (brief) stock with graphics

[Links to Parts II and III at the bottom. – J.E.]

This article started out to be a somewhat different one, developing a couple of points about the monitoring of EOP (Executive Office of the President) communications referenced in the John Durham court filings.

But with a firehose of new information coming in, it seems necessary to take stock and put in perspective the things we know up to this point.  I don’t think most will find it a waste of time.  The stock-taking is relatively short, and the principal feature is something we haven’t had yet:  schematic diagrams of how the major IT pieces fit together to make the surveillance of “Trump” possible, and facilitate the concoction of an anti-Trump narrative about supposed links to Russia.

The graphics are very simplified, which I suspect many readers will consider a blessing.  My hope is to spare some unnecessary efforts to sort out confusion when it need not be at work.

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.

War comes home: Russia v. Turkey; Jet shootdown; Rebels attack Russian helos with U.S. TOW missiles

Shootdown porn. (Image via rebel video on YouTube)

The war in Syria is metastasizing, as long predicted by this author and others.  It’s perilously close to a direct confrontation of Turkey and Russia in combat — a situation that didn’t start with the warplane shootdown today, but rather seems to have culminated in it.  The ground picture in the area of the shootdown is the key.

What we know for sure today is that Turkey shot down a Russian Su-24 Fencer attack aircraft, which the Turks say was violating their air space.  The Turks report that an F-16 fighter pair took out the Russian aircraft.

It also appears that Russian helicopters sent on a rescue mission for the Su-24 air crew were destroyed.  If a video posted by Syrian rebels (below) is valid – assuming it shows something the rebels pulled off today (24 November) – it looks like the rebels used TOW missiles to attack the Russian helos while they were on the ground at the Su-24 crash site.

These rapid-fire events raise questions that will not be answered at a leisurely pace.  The basic question is what Russia and Turkey will do now.  But there is also the question of “why now?”  Turkey has been closely tracking Russian air activity for weeks.  The two air forces have interacted at dangerous levels before; the Aviationist has a good summary here.  But today, instead of warnings and sword-rattling, the Turks shot the Russian aircraft down.

Obama blocks U.S. pilots from bombing ISIS; Iranian fighters escort Russian bombers

USAF F-15E Strike Eagle from the 48th Fighter Wing (RAF Lakenheath) arrives at Incirlik in Nov 2015. (Image: USAF, Tech Sgt. Taylor Worley)

It’s essential to have the big picture on this.  The war in Syria is turning into something bigger, with substantially bigger implications than what happens to ISIS.

But ISIS remains the handy pretext for Russia’s and Iran’s growing intervention in both Syria and Iraq.  That intervention is changing their posture, and the correlation of both military and political forces across the region, almost by the day.  They are not there for ISIS, and they’re not there for Assad.  They’re there – putting down stakes from the Caspian and the Caucasus to the Horn of Africa – because they intend to be in charge of carving up the rapidly fragmenting ruins of the post-World War I Middle East.

ISIS will get something of a vote in this conflict.  But America won’t.  The reason for these two realities is that Obama has limited the use of U.S. force – limited it to such an extent that ISIS is still a very viable entity.  Obama’s “restraint” is also the reason Russia and Iran keep having ISIS as a handy, open-ended pretext for arranging to occupy Iraq and Syria.  Which is what they’re actually doing.

Obama has in fact restrained the use of U.S. force to an unnatural degree.  We’ve known for a while now that 75% of the strike sorties flown against ISIS by our aircraft return to base without bombing anything.  U.S. Central Command reported that in operational statistics months ago, and it was picked up by stateside media as early as May 2015.