Louise
Well-Known Member
At this point, what difference does it make?
John Durham
- Thread starter PJay
- Start date
At this point, what difference does it make?
WingsOfGold
Well-Known Member
Is Total Bullshiit hyphenated?At this point, what difference does it make?
FBI witness in Sussmann trial says Trump-Alfa Bank allegation was 'far-reaching,' not objective
Hellman also said that he was frustrated that he didn't know the source of the data, and added during cross-examination that he would've included the source in his summary analysis.
Hellman said he disagreed with the white paper regarding the data on the thumb drive that explained the Domain Name System data as being a secret communications channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank. He said that he felt that whoever wrote the white paper jumped to conclusions not supported by the technical data and that the methodology of their analysis was questionable.
The FBI agent also said the overall conclusion of the connection between Trump and Russia from the data didn't make any sense because a presidential candidate would not likely put their own name in a domain name that was easily connected to their organization and Russia if it's supposedly for secret communication.
"Didn't ring true at all," Hellman said. He said the analysis of the data was done "inside of a day," then given for further analysis to the FBI Chicago division, which later agreed with his assessment.
Hellman added that he found it "conveniently coincidental" that someone was looking for suspicious activity between the Trump and Russian servers and found it just three weeks after it began.
Last edited:
Baker said he probably wouldn’t have agreed to meet with Sussmann if he knew Sussmann was acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign.
“That would raise very serious questions, certainly in my mind, about the credibility of the source and the veracity of the info — heightening, in my mind, whether we were going to be played or pulled into the politics,” he said.
“We were aware of and wary of being played – having the fact of our investigation being the thing to enable the press to report on something flawed or incomplete.”
Baker said the fact that Clinton had been investigated by the FBI over her use of a private email server while secretary of state would also have played a factor in his decision.
“I think I would have said: Meet with case agents associated with the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Meet with the ‘Midyear Exam’ folks,” he testified.
Baker said Sussmann’s assertions — which included a text message the night before that said he’d be “coming on my own — not on behalf of a client or company — want to help the Bureau’ — led him to treat Sussmann as a confidential FBI source.
That decision stymied efforts to compile a complete “chain of custody” for two thumb drives of data that Sussmann gave Baker, FBI agent Scott Hellman testified Tuesday.
“I do remember I was frustrated at not being able to ID who had provided these thumb drives to Mr. Baker. He was not willing to tell me,” Hellman said.
nypost.com
“That would raise very serious questions, certainly in my mind, about the credibility of the source and the veracity of the info — heightening, in my mind, whether we were going to be played or pulled into the politics,” he said.
“We were aware of and wary of being played – having the fact of our investigation being the thing to enable the press to report on something flawed or incomplete.”
Baker said the fact that Clinton had been investigated by the FBI over her use of a private email server while secretary of state would also have played a factor in his decision.
“I think I would have said: Meet with case agents associated with the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Meet with the ‘Midyear Exam’ folks,” he testified.
Baker said Sussmann’s assertions — which included a text message the night before that said he’d be “coming on my own — not on behalf of a client or company — want to help the Bureau’ — led him to treat Sussmann as a confidential FBI source.
That decision stymied efforts to compile a complete “chain of custody” for two thumb drives of data that Sussmann gave Baker, FBI agent Scott Hellman testified Tuesday.
“I do remember I was frustrated at not being able to ID who had provided these thumb drives to Mr. Baker. He was not willing to tell me,” Hellman said.
James Baker buries Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann in probe
The testimony directly supports the sole count lodged against defendant Michael Sussmann as a result of special counsel John Durham’s probe.
nypost.com
I think what astonishes me about this is - by this time the whole world knows the entire Trump collusion story was a fabricated smear story originating with the Clinton campaign, and we endured almost three years of pointless investigations. The primary voices throughout the debacle KNEW from the beginning - it was all crap and predicated on completely made up crap. (And yeah, I actually wrote "crap" both times).
But there's a bit of weariness in the press which goes - it's over, it was years ago, can't we just move on?
And I'm saying -
"The whole country is wasting a lot of bandwidth over Depp and Heard - and they broke up in 2016. That's old news, but the daily trial events and details are flooding the airwaves - over news that is essentially, old. I just heard Ellen Barkin pule on the screen, and she was with Johnny 25 years ago. Evidently, OLD news doesn't affect THAT story".
(As an aside - I never saw the deal with Barkin, even when she was young. The mouth, the eyes, the attitude - just don't see it.)
But there's a bit of weariness in the press which goes - it's over, it was years ago, can't we just move on?
And I'm saying -
"The whole country is wasting a lot of bandwidth over Depp and Heard - and they broke up in 2016. That's old news, but the daily trial events and details are flooding the airwaves - over news that is essentially, old. I just heard Ellen Barkin pule on the screen, and she was with Johnny 25 years ago. Evidently, OLD news doesn't affect THAT story".
(As an aside - I never saw the deal with Barkin, even when she was young. The mouth, the eyes, the attitude - just don't see it.)
Whenever they're caught they want to move on.
Everyone in the Clinton Campaign, Hillary and the leadership of the DNC need to be tried, convicted and hanged for it. Framing someone is a crime. They committed a felony.
Unfortunately the Democrat Machine, which controls the inside of government bureaucracy, will put an end to it before those responsible suffer for their crimes.
Hijinx
Well-Known Member
NO ! No! No!
We cannot move on because she was part of what put this senile old mand in power and brought along the inflations and the recession with it.
Not only that, she still hasn't shut her big mouth and is still making up lies that the Democrats swear to.
It would be a different story if she admitted the lies apologized and left the country, or at least became a hermit in some damp old cave somewhere.
But she is livi9ng high off the hog in her 2 or 3 houses, involving herself in politics and has no intention of going away and shutting TFU.
She belongs in prison for Treason , perjury and who the hell knows what else. She is the twin evil witch to Nancy Pelosi and her lies.
We cannot move on because she was part of what put this senile old mand in power and brought along the inflations and the recession with it.
Not only that, she still hasn't shut her big mouth and is still making up lies that the Democrats swear to.
It would be a different story if she admitted the lies apologized and left the country, or at least became a hermit in some damp old cave somewhere.
But she is livi9ng high off the hog in her 2 or 3 houses, involving herself in politics and has no intention of going away and shutting TFU.
She belongs in prison for Treason , perjury and who the hell knows what else. She is the twin evil witch to Nancy Pelosi and her lies.
‘Frustrated’ Clinton lawyer shopped phony Trump-Russia data to CIA in ’17: witnesses
One ex-spy — identified in court only as “Kevin P.” — recalled that he and a colleague met with Sussmann at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., in February 2017, shortly after Trump took office.
Sussmann gave the men two thumb drives that he said came from unidentified “contacts” and showed a secret, cyber back channel between a Trump Organization server and Russia’s Alfa Bank, Kevin P. said
“He said he was not representing a client,” the witness testified, adding that Sussmann also said he’d previously given “similar but unrelated” information to the FBI.
Sussmann, 57, is on trial in Washington, DC, federal court for allegedly denying that he was acting on behalf of a client when he gave two thumb drives and three “white papers” on the purported Trump-Russia ties to then-FBI general counsel James Baker on Sept. 19, 2016.
Sussmann is charged with a single count of lying to the government, with special counsel John Durham alleging that he was actually working for the Clinton campaign and another client, tech executive Rodney Joffe, who told Sussmann about the data.
How FBI bigwig aided and abetted Hillary Clinton plot
But are we really to believe Baker didn’t know that Sussmann — a well-known Democratic lawyer who can drop by the FBI at the drop of a hat — was a biased tipster? Worse, when Baker passes Sussmann’s story to FBI agents, he doesn’t tell them where it’s coming from, allowing the lawyer anonymity even as an investigation finds his tale is garbage.
Durham is pursuing a narrow indictment, but what he’s exposing is far larger: an unethical Clinton campaign, a biased government bureaucracy, and an insouciant class of Beltway insiders who figured they could get away with anything.
Former Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook says Clinton agreed to give Trump-Russia material to reporter
Robby Mook, the former campaign manager for Hillary Clinton, testified on Friday that the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee agreed to provide information about a link between her opponent Donald Trump and Russian Alfa Bank to a reporter, despite the fact that her campaign was not certain about the truth of the allegations.
During cross examination, Mook said the campaign was not fully confident in the Alfa Bank allegations and wanted to give them to a reporter so the reporter could "run it down further" and verify it.
Slate first published a story suggesting Alfa Bank, a Moscow-based financial institution, had a server that was "irregularly pinging" a server registered to the New York-based Trump Organization. The FBI investigated, and a report by the Justice Department inspector general said it concluded that there were no links between Alfa Bank and Trump.
Yesterday, Baker proved Sussmann’s high-powered Latham and Watkins’ attorneys wrong when the former FBI general counsel testified he was “100 percent confident” that Sussmann had denied acting “on behalf of any particular client” during their September 19, 2016 meeting. “My memory on this point, sitting here today, is clear,” Baker told the jury.
Sussmann made the comments “pretty close to the beginning of the meeting,” Baker explained, noting it was “part of his introduction to the meeting.” Sussmann would go on to provide Baker with two thumb drives and several whitepapers, which Baker said Sussmann explained concerned “an apparent surreptitious communications channel between Alfa-Bank, which he described as being connected to the Kremlin in Russia, and some part of the Trump Organization in the U.S.”
Besides attesting to his 100 percent confidence level in what Sussmann had said, Baker explained to the jury his apparent earlier equivocation about Sussmann’s representations. When asked by lead prosecutor Andrew DeFilippis about his congressional testimony in which he appeared not to remember Sussmann’s statements, Baker told the jury he had not prepared for questions about his meeting with Sussmann and had not refreshed his memory at the time.
thefederalist.com
Sussmann made the comments “pretty close to the beginning of the meeting,” Baker explained, noting it was “part of his introduction to the meeting.” Sussmann would go on to provide Baker with two thumb drives and several whitepapers, which Baker said Sussmann explained concerned “an apparent surreptitious communications channel between Alfa-Bank, which he described as being connected to the Kremlin in Russia, and some part of the Trump Organization in the U.S.”
Besides attesting to his 100 percent confidence level in what Sussmann had said, Baker explained to the jury his apparent earlier equivocation about Sussmann’s representations. When asked by lead prosecutor Andrew DeFilippis about his congressional testimony in which he appeared not to remember Sussmann’s statements, Baker told the jury he had not prepared for questions about his meeting with Sussmann and had not refreshed his memory at the time.
Reluctant Witness Devastates Defense Claims In Special Counsel Case
James Baker’s testimony yesterday in United States v. Sussmann proved devasting to the former Clinton campaign attorney.
thefederalist.com
The notes reveal a pattern of repeated lies and omissions by FBI leadership to DOJ officials that concealed the dramatic deterioration of the predicate for the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. As the predication deteriorated, so too was the purported justification for Comey’s public reveal of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
The significance of the FBI’s lies was accentuated this week at Sussmann’s trial when Scott Hellman, an FBI cyber analyst, testified that he knew right away in September 2016 that Sussmann’s data did not suggest any covert communications between Trump and Russia. Hellman added that he wondered if the person who put together the data was suffering from a mental disability.
Hellman’s testimony is the clearest evidence yet that the FBI knew from the start that one of the two major components of the Trump Russia collusion narrative – the Alfa Bank data – was false. As the March 6 notes show, they concealed this fact from their DOJ superiors.
The other major component of the investigation was the Steele dossier. The FBI knew from a January 2017 interview of Igor Danchenko, Christopher Steele’s “Primary Sub-Source” through whom all the allegations in the Steele dossier were originated or channeled, that the dossier too was false.
Danchenko’s most shocking revelation to the FBI was that he had never met Sergei Millian, the attributed source for the Steele dossier’s most inflammatory claims, including the allegation that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and the Kremlin, that Russia passed hacked Democratic National Committee emails to WikiLeaks, as well as the infamous Moscow pee tape story.
thefederalist.com
The significance of the FBI’s lies was accentuated this week at Sussmann’s trial when Scott Hellman, an FBI cyber analyst, testified that he knew right away in September 2016 that Sussmann’s data did not suggest any covert communications between Trump and Russia. Hellman added that he wondered if the person who put together the data was suffering from a mental disability.
Hellman’s testimony is the clearest evidence yet that the FBI knew from the start that one of the two major components of the Trump Russia collusion narrative – the Alfa Bank data – was false. As the March 6 notes show, they concealed this fact from their DOJ superiors.
The other major component of the investigation was the Steele dossier. The FBI knew from a January 2017 interview of Igor Danchenko, Christopher Steele’s “Primary Sub-Source” through whom all the allegations in the Steele dossier were originated or channeled, that the dossier too was false.
Danchenko’s most shocking revelation to the FBI was that he had never met Sergei Millian, the attributed source for the Steele dossier’s most inflammatory claims, including the allegation that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and the Kremlin, that Russia passed hacked Democratic National Committee emails to WikiLeaks, as well as the infamous Moscow pee tape story.
New Notes Show FBI Agents Mislead DOJ On Trump-Russia Investigation
It is perplexing that no one within the FBI has been held accountable for the many lies told at the March 6 meeting.
thefederalist.com
FBI wrongly told its agents Trump-Russia collusion claims had come from DOJ, bombshell document reveals
WASHINGTON — FBI agents probing since-debunked claims of a secret back channel between Donald Trump and a Russian bank believed that the allegations had originated with the Department of Justice — when in fact they came from Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann, who had shopped them to the bureau’s then-general counsel days earlier.
In the latest revelation to emerge from Sussmann’s trial in DC federal court on a count of lying to the FBI, special counsel John Durham’s prosecutors revealed that investigators had received an electronic communication citing a referral from the DOJ “on or about” Sept. 19, 2016, the same day Sussmann met with James Baker, then the FBI’s top lawyer.
The document, a record of the investigation being opened by agents Curtis Heide and Allison Sands and dated Sept. 23, 2016, did not mention Sussmann as the source of the allegations.
“In that referral, the DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE provided the FBI with a white paper that was produced by an anonymous third party,” the communication said, before adding: “According to the white paper, a U.S.-based server that is owned by the TRUMP ORGANIZATION has been communicating with the Russian-based ALFA BANK organization in Moscow, Russia.”
FBI Agent at Sussmann Trial Just Dropped a Bomb About an Ongoing Investigation
Heide testified that he is currently facing an internal investigation for withholding potentially exculpatory evidence from an application for a FISA warrant to surveil someone during their probe of Trump’s 2016 campaign. That wasn’t all. He also said that others who had been involved in the Trump-Russia probe were also being investigated, but he didn’t say who they were or what positions they held at the Bureau.
Heide said the evidence in question was “consensual recordings” of one of the subjects. He did not reveal who was being surveilled. “There are various consensual recordings … and the exculpatory information was not disclosed in the FISA court,” Heide said, adding that the investigation was ongoing and he denied that he’d withheld information.
Heide was the agent who handled a confidential human source who met with and recorded Trump campaign adviser George Papadopolous. Papadopolous denied that the Trump campaign had anything to do with the alleged hack of the DNC, and he also denied that the campaign had anything to do with Russia. It’s not clear that this is what Heide is being investigated over, but it fits the facts that we know so far because his denials were withheld from the warrant application, according to documents released by Attorney General William Barr. According to DOJ Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz, the failure to include those denials were two of 17 “significant inaccuracies and omissions” of the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe.
TOP FBI BRASS WERE “FIRED UP” ABOUT DESTROYING TRUMP
I was skeptical that the Sussman prosecution would tell us much that is new, but some significant nuggets have come out. Like this one: “FBI brass were ‘fired up’ about now-debunked Trump-Russia ties.”So there was zero evidence of any connection between presidential candidate Donald Trump and the Alfa Bank, or any other Russians of note, and all one of Hillary Clinton’s lawyers had to do was waltz into the Bureau with some fabricated “data” and FBI Director James Comey and others were “fired up.” The lust to defeat the interloper Trump and elect Hillary Clinton is palpable.
That is, did they open a case to investigate presidential candidate Trump? Failing to do so is “not an option,” evidence be damned. And one wonders what “tools” were to be put on the case.
That is, go forth and conquer the rebel Donald Trump, who was standing up for the American people against the swamp–of which the FBI’s political leaders are charter members.
FBI Brass Hid Hillary Connection From Agents Probing Trump-Russia Bank Hoax
The Chicago FBI agents figured out quickly that the data was overblown and the possibility of Trump’s organization communicating with the bank server was nearly impossible because of firewalls.
It turns out that the “connection” was a hotel and hospitality marketing firm sending out spam emails. Trump runs hotels, as you may have noticed.
Because the information was so hinky, “didn’t pass analytical merit,” and didn’t show “a covert communications system,” agents prevailed on their boss to ask the 7th Floor at the FBI headquarters if they could be read in on who provided the flash drives, white papers, and other documents purporting the link. The brass who claimed the information came from the DOJ and said as much in the official referral to investigators. The Sept. 24, 2016 referral never mentions Michael Sussmann.
Agent Ryan Gaynor served as the liaison between Chicago agents and the home office in the beltway. He testified that, had he known that the provenance of the information was Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer, it could have “impacted the way I viewed the close hold.”
Assistant Special Counsel Andrew J. DeFilippis introduced emails demonstrating how the agents desperately wanted to know who had tossed this turd into the lap of the FBI and expected them to polish it.
Request denied.
Sussmann billed Clinton campaign for thumb drives he gave to FBI pushing Alfa-Bank allegations
Two thumb drives containing Alfa-Bank claims, along with “white papers” pushing the claims, were provided to Baker by Sussmann at the meeting, and the prosecution presented evidence that even the USB drives bought by Sussmann were billed to the Clinton campaign. The thumb drives, one blue and the other red, were displayed to the jury as evidence this week in Washington.
Kori Arsenault, a paralegal for the Justice Department, discussed an expense report in which the expense owner was listed as “SUSSM” — Sussmann, who submitted it on Sept. 22. The allocation was marked “confidential” and charged to Hillary for America. The expense report included a Staples store receipt dated Sept. 13, and it included a two-pack of 16-gigabyte flash drives that cost $12.99. The store location, which Arsenault showed on Google Maps, was just around the corner from the Perkins offices in Washington.