The Latest Pathetic Attempt to Resurrect The Trump/Russia Hoax From The Dead
Of Course, Rachel Maddow Is Right In The Middle of It
You can’t blame Rodney Joffe and his lawyer for trying. After all, he’s very likely looking at an indictment for his role in creating the Alfa Bank hoax in coordination with the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign and her legal firm Perkins Coie.
The Mueller Special Counsel didn’t find anything real to the Alfa Bank allegations, the FBI investigators also didn’t find anything. The emails Durham has show the conspirators know it’s not real, but now that he’s facing a potential indictment, Joffe swears through a carefully worded statement via his lawyer that the Trump / Alfa Bank connection via the servers was legitimate.
And MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, ever looking to keep hope alive among the faithful believers in Trump/Russia collusion, hypes it to the moon on her program.
As with Christopher Steele’s futile recent attempts to rehabilitate his fake Dossier, this is not going to end well.
The 27 page indictment unsealed last month painted a very unflattering picture of Joffe and the tech researchers who were apparently abusing their access to government databases to do some fishing on the side for their political friends in high places.
Durham’s federal grand jury received internal emails from Perkins Coie and from Joffe’s own company, Neustar via subpoena, and in the emails Joffe and the others involved are discussing among themselves the fact that this purported connection between a Trump Tower computer server in New York City and an Alfa Bank server in Moscow was pretty weak tea.
Several times in these internal communications Joffe and others discuss what they can do to make their virtually nonexistent case for presidential candidate Donald J. Trump having some sort of secret ‘backchannel’ to the Russian government of Vladimir Putin look stronger than it really is, to ensure the feds take it from them. It certainly also does not help that the Alfa Bank server & Trump Tower server theory is based on nonpublic data that Joffe and others had taken from federal databases. That in itself was likely a federal crime.
Private contractors allowed access to highly classified federal databases are given that access to help improve the government’s cybersecurity. They are certainly not supposed to be using the access to search for data on certain politics-related targets and then handing that off to private operatives working for the target’s rival political campaign, which is exactly what happened here.
When the awful symmetry of it was first uncovered back in 2017, this was quickly deemed preposterous by many in the news media. We were told that we simply don’t live in a world where one campaign in a US presidential election would be successful in inventing multiple hoaxes that were fed to federal agencies and that resulted in the other campaign in the race becoming the target of both criminal and counterintelligence investigations.
And yet we now know this is precisely what happened. An impossibility not only became possible, Durham has the solid documentary evidence proving this is what occurred. Federal agencies took not just one Trump/Russia collusion hoax from Clinton’s private operatives, they took TWO of them: the Steele Dossier and the Alfa Bank white papers & thumb drives.
And both hoaxes were used in federal investigations.
Although the Alfa Bank investigation at the FBI appears to have been brief and resulted in no major fallout, those who concocted the hoax achieved their two main goals:
They got the FBI to take the white papers & thumb drives and start an investigation.
This allowed the hoaxers to immediately break the news to their media contacts that the FBI was investigating the Trump campaign for supposedly having a ‘backchannel’ to the Russian government.
Both hoaxes followed the same basic template: get the fake ‘evidence handed off to willing federal officials who played along in believing it could be real, get an investigation of Donald Trump underway for being a Russian stooge, then leak that to a very willing news media that would spread the story all across the fruited plain.
This template worked TWICE, both for Alfa Bank and then for the Steele Dossier. Every single safeguard, protocol, rule and regulation and procedure that should have gotten Clinton’s dirty tricks operators tossed ass-first out of the FBI HQ was circumvented and defeated.
This tells me once he’s done rolling up the ground level operatives working for Clinton, Durham is very likely going to turn his attention to the FBI officials who willing played along with these two hoaxes, even though they’d gotten a heads up from the CIA that they were likely going to be approached by Clinton people looking to feed them fake Trump/Russia scandals.
Like Steele in his interview with George Stephanopoulos, Joffe can put on a brave face and insist the Alfa Bank hoax was ‘real’ and that he did nothing wrong in helping to create the white papers and thumb drives that were given to the FBI.
That won’t save him.
Hillary Clinton did not kill herself. But if she's watching Impeachment: American Crime Story, she & her partner in crime can get an idea of what schemers they are shown to be during the White House years at least. I'm sure it was a drop in the bucket according to the books of the Secret Service agent, the FBI & other reporters.
Brian, I hope you'll be the one to write she has been hooked! And you'll probably know right as the cuffs are snapping on! And tell us!
It’s very sad that the state of journalism has reached such an abysmal low point. This will be a superb book once the indictments start rolling. And I will be one of the first to buy your book when you finish it.