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

September 2021: One ping on the IP addresses of war

In an earlier article, after John Durham’s indictment of Michael Sussmann was filed, I noted that the millions of Pentagon-held IP addresses that were turned over in January 2021 to an obscure company in Florida had reverted to Pentagon stewardship the week before news of the indictment came out.

The Sussmann indictment’s filing date with the federal court for the District of Columbia was 16 September 2021.  The true-bill signature date for the grand jury foreman was also 16 September 2021.  DOJ prosecutors would have presented their information to the grand jury on or before that date.  (The 16th was a Thursday.)

On 10 September 2021, the Washington Post reported that the IP addresses had been turned back over to the Department of Defense on 7 September.  That was the Tuesday of the week before the Sussmann indictment.

The Post cited a brief notice from DOD on the matter, which was of interest given that there was no contemporaneous Pentagon announcement back on 20 January 2021, when the IP addresses were transferred to Global Resource Systems, the company (seemingly a sole proprietorship) headquartered in Plantation, Florida.  As a reminder,

The Sussmann indictment and the Alfa Bank saga: A focused timeline

At Just the News, John Solomon reported a few days ago that according to the Justice Department’s IG, the FBI is still ignoring its own procedures in handling FISA surveillance applications.

Some of Solomon’s opening points:

“The FBI’s Woods Procedures are designed to ensure FISA applications are ‘scrupulously accurate’ and require agents to document support for all factual assertions contained in them,” Horowitz reported. “However, our audit found numerous instances where this did not occur.” 

Horowitz first flagged 29 applications in March 2020 that had problems including 209 errors. 

Twenty-nine applications in one month is not a small or inconsequential number of applications.  Keep in mind, this was still in Donald Trump’s presidency.  What readers think they may have done to clean out the Augean stable of D.C. bureaucracy, even Trump was not able to achieve, more than three years into his term.  It’s always useful to remember how much of the D.C. “establishment” was pulling against him the entire time he was in office.  FBI officials who ignored or gun-decked the Woods Procedures, as a slew of them did in 2016 under Obama, were likely to be prominent among them.

This timely observation from Solomon is by way of introducing a focused timeline that I hope will illuminate how very widespread and entrenched the scope of what John Durham has been investigating will turn out to be.

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.

‘Boots on the ground’: Saigon on the Euphrates, on steroids

Brain trust. (Image: AP, Pablo Martinez Monsivais via nola.com)

Regular correspondents of this space may have wondered why I haven’t been writing more recently about the events in Iraq and Syria.  (Or Afghanistan, for that matter.)

The short answer is: because it’s too depressing to watch the Obama administration repeating every mistake of Kennedy and Johnson in Vietnam, but from a posture of greater weakness, greater foolishness, and – bonus! – apparent hatred for the United States.

Who wants to write about that?

We’ve reached the point at which there is nothing positive or hopeful to say.  I think most readers realize that, even if they can’t fully articulate what the problems seem to be.  Obama is quite literally doing nothing right, in his political-military approach to these hot spots of the Middle East.  There’s nothing in his policy to work with.