FISA Abuse troll is a scam.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Russian analyst who contributed to a dossier of Democratic-funded research into ties between Russia and Donald Trump was arrested Thursday on charges of lying to the FBI about his sources of information, among them an associate of Hillary Clinton.

The case against Igor Danchenko is part of special counsel John Durham’s ongoing investigation into the origins of the FBI’s probe into whether Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia had conspired to tip the outcome of that year’s presidential campaign.

The indictment, the third criminal case brought by Durham and the second in a two-month span, is likely to boost complaints from Trump allies that well-connected Democrats worked behind the scenes to advance suspicions about Trump and Russia that contributed to the FBI’s election-year investigation.

The case does not undercut investigators’ findings that the Kremlin aided the Trump campaign — findings that were not based on the dossier. But it does endorse a longstanding concern about the Russia probe: that opposition research the FBI relied on was marred by unsupported, uncorroborated claims.

MORE ON THE DURHAM INVESTIGATION
Analyst who aided Trump-Russia dossier charged with lying
Lawyer charged in Durham probe demands more info about case
Lawyer pleads not guilty in Trump-Russia investigation probe
Lawyer charged in probe of Trump-Russia investigation

The five-count indictment accuses Danchenko of making multiple false statements to the FBI when interviewed in 2017 about his role in collecting information for Christopher Steele, a former British spy who was paid by Democrats to investigate connections between Trump and Russia.

Danchenko, a U.S.-based Russian who’d specialized in Russian and Eurasian matters as an analyst at the Brookings Institution think tank, was a significant source for Steele as Steele compiled his dossier of research. That dossier, the target of intense derision from Trump, was ultimately provided to the FBI and used by federal authorities as they applied for and received surveillance warrants targeting a former Trump campaign aide.

According to the indictment, Danchenko repeatedly lied to the FBI about his sources of information and that deception mattered because the FBI “devoted substantial resources attempting to investigate and corroborate the allegations” in the dossier and had “relied in large part” on that research in obtaining the surveillance warrants.

A lawyer for Danchenko had no immediate comment.

The indictment says Danchenko misled the FBI by denying that he had discussed any allegations in the dossier with a contact of his who was a public relations executive and longtime Democratic operative who campaigned for Clinton, Trump’s 2016 opponent.

In fact, the indictment says, Danchenko had sourced one or more allegations in the dossier anonymously to that Clinton associate. As the FBI worked to corroborate the dossier’s allegations, it would have been important to know the Democrat’s role in feeding information for it because it bore upon his “reliability, motivations, and potential bias as a source,” according to the indictment.

The individual is not named in court papers, but his lawyer confirmed his identity as Chuck Dolan, a former executive director of the Democratic Governors Association who advised Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and volunteered in her 2016 campaign. The lawyer, Ralph Drury Martin, declined to comment further on the ongoing investigation.

Charging documents also refer to salacious and unsupported sexual allegations involving Trump’s behavior at a Moscow hotel that were included in the dossier but that Trump has vigorously disputed, including to former FBI Director James Comey.

The indictment says Danchenko told the FBI he had collected information about Trump’s activities at the hotel from multiple sources but didn’t himself know if the sexual allegations were true.

The unnamed Clinton ally had stayed at the same hotel in June 2016 and had attended meetings with Danchenko, according to the indictment. It says that had the FBI known that the Democrat was a source for Danchenko, the bureau could have interviewed him about the Moscow trip and whether they had discussed Trump’s own stay there.

The indictment also accuses Danchenko of lying to the FBI about a July 2016 phone call he says he had with someone he believed to be the president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce. That person, according to the dossier and Danchenko’s account to the FBI, told him about a “well-developed conspiracy of co-operation” between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The indictment says Danchenko fabricated his account and never actually received such a phone call.

Both the dossier and the Durham probe are politically charged.

Trump’s Justice Department appointed Durham as Trump claimed the investigation of campaign ties to Russia was a witch hunt. Trump pointed to the dossier, much of which the indictment says the FBI was unable to corroborate, as evidence of a tainted probe driven by Democrats.

But the dossier had no part in launching the Trump-Russia investigation. Special counsel Robert Mueller ultimately found questionable ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, but not sufficient evidence to pursue criminal charges. Democrats have lambasted the Durham probe as politically motivated, but the Biden administration has not stopped it.

The Justice Department’s inspector general has faulted the FBI and the Justice Department for their handling of the dossier. Danchenko — who was not identified by name in the watchdog report — had told FBI investigators during a 2017 interview about the dossier’s origins and veracity that there were “potentially serious problems with Steele’s descriptions of information in his reports.”

But those qualms from Danchenko were omitted from the final three surveillance applications, making the dossier appear more credible than even one of its own sources thought it was, according to the report from Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

The indictment is the third criminal action from Durham.

Cybersecurity lawyer Michael Sussmann was charged in September with lying to the FBI during a 2016 conversation in which he relayed concerns about potentially suspicious cyber contacts between a Trump Organization server and the server of a Russian bank. Durham’s team says he concealed from the FBI that he was presenting the concerns as a lawyer for the Clinton campaign. He has pleaded not guilty.

Last year, Kevin Clinesmith, a former FBI lawyer, admitted altering an email related to the surveillance of Trump aide Carter Page.

Click to expand...

rkymtnman said:

it this is the "groundbreaking" indictments from this probe that bugeye/rollupreader was supposed to produce, durham layed an egg (a 2nd egg actually). lying to the fbi is the best he can come up in like what 18, 24 months???? laughable

Click to expand...

rkymtnman said:

the other thing i saw the other day is a refresh into the unusual connection b/t Alfa Bank and the Trump Org.

that kinda got buried but i'm thinking relates to trump and money laundering. like selling real estate for grossly overpriced values to russians.

Click to expand...

hanimmal said:

Click to expand...

A new court filing by Donald Trump appointed lawyer John Durham presented another claim without providing any evidence. As a result, the former president is alleges in a new statement that there was a massive crime. He's also claiming that Republicans won't do anything to hold anyone accountable for it.

According to Trump's statement, former Secretary of State "Hillary Clinton and the Radical Left Democrats (sic)" spied on the Executive Office of the President.

Durham explained in his filing that this "spying" on the presidency began in 2014. So, it's unclear how Clinton, who was no longer in office, and the so-called "radical left Democrats" spied on former President Barack Obama, who was in office until Jan. 20, 2016.

"In addition, the more complete data assembled by Tech Executive-1 and his associates reflected that DNS lookups involving the EOP and Russian Phone Provider-1 began at least as early 2014 (i.e., during the Obama administration and years before Trump took office) – another fact which the allegations omitted," Durham said in his filing.

Durham made a filing Saturday saying that lawyer Michael Sussman, who was no longer working for the Democrats, shared a version of allegations about the Russian Alfa Bank with the CIA after Trump was inaugurated.

As legal expert Marcy Wheeler explained, "the frothy right is very excited that, among the data that someone heavily involved in cybersecurity like Rodney Joffe would have ready access to, was data that included the White House. They seem less interested that, to disprove the allegations Sussmann presented, Durham effectively (in their frothy minds) conducted the same 'spying' on EOP networks of President Obama that Durham insinuates Joffe did of Trump."

Durham made these announcements, but it's unclear if he's presented them to a grand jury and if that grand jury has seen the evidence. In the filing, however, Durham presents no evidence, only allegations. Meeting with the CIA isn't illegal and Durham hasn't charged Joffee with anything, nor has he indicated that Joffe knew what information he had before turning it over to the authorities.

It's unclear whether Durham will be able to charge anyone with a crime for anything he claims he "found" in this new filing.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

hanimmal said:

Looks like Peej is the new Bugeye.

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-durham-spying-claims/
View attachment 5085474

https://www.emptywheel.net/2022/02/12/john-durham-ask-not-for-whom-the-statute-of-limitation-tolls/

Click to expand...

hanimmal said:

Looks like Peej is the new Bugeye.

Click to expand...

On Friday, special counsel John Durham, tasked by former attorney general William P. Barr with evaluating the legitimacy of the investigation into Russia interference in the 2016 election, filed a document as part of an indictment targeting attorney Michael Sussmann. In it, Durham hinted at evidence related to a story that percolated briefly before Election Day that year: that a server affiliated with Donald Trump’s private company had been in regular contact with a server associated with a Russian bank.

That story was quickly debunked, but now Durham hinted that it was a function of something broader, an effort by Sussmann, whose firm had been retained by the campaign of Hillary Clinton, to use analysis of data from various computer networks to find connections between Trump and Russia. Among the data sets included in that analysis were ones from Trump Tower and, provocatively, “the Executive Office of the President of the United States.”

In short order, a narrative crystallized on the right pushed forward by a statement from former Trump staffer Kash Patel that was amplified by Fox News: Clinton’s campaign did something fishy with computers to spy on Trump’s campaign and his White House. Over the weekend, the cable channel and other right-wing outlets and voices echoed and amplified this idea.

Then reality finished getting its boots on. The Washington Post’s fact-checkers submerged the story in cold water, as did the New York Times. A filing from Sussmann’s legal team and statements from others involved in the situation like the researchers who analyzed the data state, for example, that the period in which the White House (to shorthand the “executive office” descriptor) was included in the analysis ended before Trump took office. Durham’s filing doesn’t suggest otherwise. Also, the data being evaluated were not a function of anything having been hacked or stolen; instead, it was an analysis of a particular, limited kind of data file that had been shared by both the White House and outside Internet service providers as part of standard practice for detecting illicit online activity. (In fact, this appears to be why the White House was sharing the data; it was a response to a Russian infiltration in 2015.)

What’s more, the question of whether Sussmann was working for Clinton’s campaign is at the heart of the indictment against him. Here, again, Durham draws an inferred, not a direct, line that Sussmann contests. Regardless, the indication from Durham’s filing is not that Clinton’s team pushed downward for a probe into possible electronic links between Trump and Russia but, instead, that a technology executive who had retained Sussmann independently raised the possibility to his attention and from there it moved up. Remember the timing here: This was just as material stolen from the Democratic Party by Russian hackers was being leaked and questions about Trump’s ties to Russia were being elevated (even before Clinton’s team did so publicly).

So this was the state of play as of Tuesday morning. The original story line that Clinton’s team had overseen some sort of electronic spying on Trump including while he was president was badly undercut, leading conscientious observers to understandably want to pepper their assessments with qualifiers and caveats.

And then Fox News’s prime time programming began.


Host Sean Hannity dived into the story with both feet, running forward rapidly not with the new developments but the initial, undercut ones.

“As we first reported last night,” he said, “a bombshell filing from the Durham probe details how the Clinton campaign and their associates actively — according to, of course, John Durham — exploited Internet data mined from Trump Tower and even the Trump White House to smear Donald Trump.” This, Hannity argued, was being suppressed by a “media mob” terrified of the implications — the go-to explanation from Fox hosts to transform cautious assessments of the allegations by other outlets into proof that they were trying to bury the truth.

Hannity quoted several lines from Durham’s filing, offering none of the qualifications that had emerged since Friday. Hannity also quoted from Sussmann’s response — though only the part in which it describes the Durham filing as being “irrelevant to the charged offense and are plainly intended to politicize this case, inflame media coverage and taint the jury pool.”

To discuss the case, Hannity interviewed two guests: former California congressman Devin Nunes (for whom Patel had once worked); and Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett. Jarrett, I will note, is not a dispassionate observer of the overlap of politics and the law; he has written books titled, “The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump” and “Witch Hunt: The Plot to Destroy Trump and Undo His Election.”

It was also Jarrett who offered the more reality-detached assessment of Durham’s filing. He alleged that a number of laws had been broken, from defrauding the United States (perhaps Durham’s ultimate target) to racketeering to computer crimes.

Here is how Jarrett described what happened: “In this particular case, a tech company being paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign is using cyber sleuths to penetrate in an unauthorized way the servers to collect data without permission, without knowledge of Donald Trump, the Trump Organization, the Trump transition and allegedly the Trump White House. I mean, it’s absolutely breathtaking and stunning.”


So the research was being conducted in part by a researcher at a university, not by a tech company, and the company at issue, Neustar, was not known to have been paid by Clinton’s campaign. It’s not clear that it was being paid at all for the research, in fact. The “cyber sleuths” — a phrase so cringe-inducing that it’s worth pointing out as cringe-inducing — are not understood to have “penetrated” any servers to collect data; instead, they analyzed log files that had been shared with them. Shared with them meaning “not collected without permission.” It did occur without Trump’s knowledge, certainly, but, again, lawyers for the research team that had possession of the White House data write that “to our knowledge all of the data they used was nonprivate … data from before Trump took office.”
Again, Durham’s filing does not conflict with this.

In other words, Jarrett’s claims were not only not supported by the Durham filing, but he also actively had to ignore a multitude of information undercutting the Fox News narrative about the filing to gin up his purported list of crimes.

Hannity’s response? “Unbelievable,” which is true, but not in the way he meant it.

Nunes’s contributions were similarly misinformed. “Clearly anyone able to get into the White House, no matter who the president is, is something that is unprecedented. Those should be the most guarded communications in this country,” he said, suggesting that the data had been obtained illicitly, which no one, including Durham, has alleged. Nunes later wondered how contractors could have communications of Americans all over the country, including the sitting president. Beyond the apparent inaccuracy of the “in the White House” part, this is not any collection of “communications.” It is, instead, log files of domain name lookups that contractors and researchers use to track bad behavior online. (I wrote more about this on Monday.)

Click to expand...

Special counsel John Durham lashed out at his own witness during the trial of a Russian-born businessman who was a key source in Christopher Steele's dossier.

Senior FBI intelligence analyst Brian Auten, who oversaw part of the bureau's early investigation into Donald Trump's ties to Russia, helped prosecutors by testifying that Igor Danchenko withheld information from investigators about his dossier sourcing that would have helped authorities, but things changed after defense lawyers cross-examined him, reported CNN.

Danchenko focused on the analyst's previous testimony years ago to the Justice Department inspector general and the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which he told that he considered Danchenko "truthful" and helpful to the FBI's Russia probe, and he said securing him as a source was beneficial to the agency.

That contradicted the heart of Durham's indictment, which alleges that Danchenko repeatedly lied to the FBI and impeded investigators trying to corroborate the Steele dossier.

IN OTHER NEWS: Trump threatened to ‘out’ confidential sources from Russia investigation

Auten testified that he stood by that previous testimony, and he also told the court that Durham misleadingly cherry-picked material that he wrote.

Durham returned for a final round of questioning of his own witness, but he sounded angry at times and elicited sometimes hostile testimony from Auten, who conceded that he had been recommended for suspension by the FBI's internal auditors -- which could undercut the credibility of the special counsel's witness.

He then admonished Auten for claiming that George Papadopoulos was a “high-level adviser” to Trump’s 2016 campaign, when in fact he was a low-level foreign policy aide.

Durham also tried but failed to get Auten to agree the FBI was more concerned about Papadopoulos' links to the Middle East than Russia, but the FBI analyst said they were worried about both.

Click to expand...

hanimmal said:

If I saw @Bugeye 3 times in a mirror do you think the new right wing propaganda troll will post?

Click to expand...