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.

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The chain gang (an Alfa-gate tale): From Senator MBNA, to Aon, to Twitter and Musk

Checking in recently with some history of the Alfa-gate series of untoward Russia-hoax events, we unearthed some “degrees of separation” type dots through which the events linked, however innocently, to MBNA, the Delaware banking giant Joe Biden was at one time referred to as “the Senator from [i.e., “from MBNA”],” and other aspects of the Biden family enterprises.

The most pertinent TOC articles are here and here.  That’s where you’ll find background links for most of the assertions of fact below.

The reason for this opening exercise is to set the stage for broader links that reveal a big-picture pattern, one that goes beyond the links highlighted earlier.

This big-picture pattern goes beyond the known outlines of Alfa-gate and its parent -gates, Russiagate and Spygate.  In fact, it reaches all the way to Elon Musk’s bid to buy out Twitter, and for me illuminates the full meaning of “investor activism,” and how it appears to connect in at least some cases to the politics of interventionist government.

Starting with the MBNA thread, a brief summary:

Hunter Biden got a lucrative $100,000-a-year job at MBNA in 1996,

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.

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.

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.