What A Remarkably Strange Cover Up For Durham To End His Investigation With
Assuming Most Media Commentators Are Correct, And That's What's Going On
After a long wait and much anticipation, the false statements trial of Steele Dossier main source and Hillary Clinton campaign dirty trickster and fabulist Igor Danchenko got underway on Tuesday, October 11 in the courtroom of Judge Anthony J. Trenga.
The trial is being held in the Eastern District of Virginia, in the Albert V. Bryan US Courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia.
One new wrinkle to the trial coverage is that no cell phones, laptops or any electronic devices are allowed inside the courthouse. So reporters in the courtroom are being reduced to scribbling notes with pen and paper and then rushing outside to make posts on social media.
The Charges The Defendant Faces
It’s curious that while the FBI itself knew Danchenko and his boss Christopher Steele were both dirty trickster political operatives working for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, and that Danchenko was telling them numerous lies in a series of interviews recorded by the Crossfire Hurricane team between January and September of 2017, neither the FBI nor the DOJ had any interest in pursuing Danchenko for the false statements he made.
Enter John Durham, appointed by US Attorney General William Barr in June of 2019 to get to the bottom of exactly how a federal counterintelligence investigation involving spy warrants was launched targeting the Donald J. Trump presidential campaign of 2016 based on obviously fake shit that turned out to have come straight from the Clinton campaign’s dirty tricks squad. Durham’s scope also includes investigating the Mueller Special Counsel’s work in prosecuting over 30 individuals, many of them on what turned out be invented crimes and made up charges.
While the FBI had no interest in prosecuting Danchenko for his false statements about his dossier sources, John Durham - for his own reasons - certainly does.
Danchenko faces five specific charges in this trial. The five counts are divided between the lies Danchenko told to try to steer the FBI away from a real dossier source - Chuck Dolan, who’s been a top power broker and activist in Democratic circles since the Jimmy Carter days - while handing the agents a fake dossier source in Sergei Millian.
Opening Statements
Durham Special Counsel team member Michael Keilty made the opening statement for the government.
Keilty related to the jury how Danchenko - after getting himself an immunity agreement, violated it. The agreement required Danchenko to answer all questions truthfully. Instead, Danchenko told a series of lies designed to hide real sources of the Steele Dossier while proffering a fake source instead.
Keilty's opening statement to the jury yesterday directly states the reason the FBI began paying Danchenko to come aboard as a CHS from March 2017 all the way thru October of 2020 was...
so Danchenko could provide evidence that would corroborate the Trump/Russia collusion allegations in the Steele Dossier.
But of course, Danchenko could not do this. The key allegations everyone was interested in, the ones that formed the basis for the Trump/Russia collusion claims…are all made up.
Danchenko’s team countered by insisting that their client was only asked vague questions by the interviewing agents and that the answers he gave were ‘literally true’.
Lawyer Danny Oronato also maintained that Danchenko was never asked by the FBI to specifically name the sources he was using for his dossier reports. Durham’s team fired back that this untrue and witness testimony along with transcripts of the recorded interviews the agents had with Danchenko will establish not only was he asked who his sources were, he repeatedly tried to steer the agents away from Chuck Dolan and towards Sergei Millian.
If this is the defense Danchenko's team is going to attempt, I have to wonder if this whole trial is a show just to get things on the record.
The public transcripts from the interviews the FBI agents had with Danchenko already revealed they were asking him direct questions trying to nail down who his dossier sources were.
And when directly asked if Chuck Dolan was a source for any of his dossier reports, Danchenko strongly denied it, saying Dolan was not involved at all.
The Government’s First Witness: FBI Special Agent Brian Auten
Like the far better known Peter Strzok, Auten is one of those agents who seems to end up involved in every politically sensitive investigation the bureau handles.
Many people have been assuming that a key part of Durham’s job is to provide cover for an unbelievably corrupt FBI. If so, they likely expected Durham to toss softball questions at any FBI personnel put on the stand, limiting his questioning to provide the agency a lot of safe space. It was expected that Durham would give the FBI Crossfire Hurricane team personnel plenty of chances to point their fingers at Danchenko and claim he successfully bamboozled them.
However once Durham got Auten under oath and began his questioning, the things that began being revealed hardly made the FBI look innocent or deceived.
The Trial’s First Big Bombshell: FBI Offered Steele Up To $1 Million To Verify His Own Fake Dossier
Of course in some corners of the media world, there are still a few lone holdouts still plaintively wailing that the Steele Dossier is ‘mostly fact’ and ‘true open source information’, so much evidence has surfaced to debunk the allegations used as a predicate for the Page FISA warrant that the point is pretty much moot.
Of course there are plenty of items in the dossier that were open source and very true - such as Carter Page’s trip to Russia, where he spoke at a public event. What was fake was the stories that Danchenko and his shady dossier sources spun around that trip. Such as the claim that while he was in Russia, Page met with several key Russian government officials and was offered a massive bribe to get sanctions on Russia lifted in the event Trump somehow won the 2016 election. That never happened.
Stefan Halper’s Wasted Summer
Let me remind everybody why the FBI resorted to the Steele Dossier so late in the game, as a last resort.
Why they waited until OCTOBER OF 2016 to suddenly frantically begin throwing together a case for using the dossier for the FISA warrant they wanted on the Trump presidential campaign.
BECAUSE STEFAN HALPER LET THEM DOWN.
You all remember Stefan Halper, right?
He's the undercover FBI informant who spent all of the summer of 2016 futilely trying to get both George Papadapoulos and/or Carter Page to say something incriminating on tape while he was secretly recording them.
For several MONTHS the Crossfire Hurricane team waited for Halper's surreptitious recording of Page and Papadopoulos to hit pay dirt.
But Halper, despite all the leading questions he asked the two unsuspecting former Trump advisors, could not get them to say something that the FBI could use as a basis for opening the investigation they wanted to open on Trump. In fact, all Halper and his handlers had for their efforts at the end of the summer was a series of **exculpatory statements** that the Trump advisors had made on tape.
The Steele Dossier Was Plan B After Halper’s Failure
After initially focusing on Papadopoulos as the target for the warrant they hoped to obtain, when Halper failed in his mission, the FBI team switched to Carter Page because while Papadopoulos makes no appearances at all in the Steele Dossier, Page appears several times.
But it was now into October of 2016 by the time the team made the decision to make Steele’s dossier allegations the centerpiece of the spy warrant they wanted on the Trump campaign. Time was running out, and this forced the team to scramble to get the warrant application ready.
But to get a FISA warrant approved…you have to demonstrate to the court that you have a legitimate probable cause or predicate to ask for this surveillance of the target.
The problem was that at that time, the FBI still didn’t have any.
For 5 years now this elaborate and deceptive dance has been allowed to go on - with mainstream media help - as the FBI and Steele pass the buck back and forth between themselves over who was supposed to verify the allegations in his dossier.
Steele scoffs when asked that his dossier was just 'raw intelligence' he collected and hey, it's not his job to verify raw intelligence, don't cha' know?
So of course from the very beginning when the FBI asked him for any evidence to back up his dossier reports, Steele didn't have anything to offer them.
But Durham is about to reveal in court what an absolute farce this stupid dance always was on both sides.
So, Steele at that point in October of 2016 wouldn’t even tell the FBI who his primary sub-source was for the dossier. So the Crossfire Hurricane team tried a fast, novel approach in an attempt to come up with any corroborating evidence for Steele’s allegations:
They offered to pay Steele up to $1 million dollars to verify his own dossier.
Yes.
This really happened.
And of course if this is true, Steele didn't even make a pass at the $1 million because nobody knew better than he did that his dossier was bullshit.
Kash Patel during a live interview was quick to share his initial thoughts on the breaking news of the FBI’s million dollar offer to Steele:
“Your breaking news shows us the depths that they would go to falsely corroborate the Steele Dossier… more importantly they were willing to spend $1 million taxpayer dollars on shoveling political hot garbage though the federal court system just to surveil a political target that was totally baseless…”
So it looks like the FBI offered payment of up to $1 million to Steele in October of 2016 if he could just cough up some corroboration for his dossier.
Steele couldn't do it, but the FBI went ahead and put the Steele Dossier allegations in the Carter Page warrant anyway.
Then in March of 2017, over a month after Donald J. Trump had been sworn in as the nation's 45th President, the FBI hires Steele employee Danchenko as a CHS and begins paying him to see if he could corroborate any of the allegations they had been using to spy on Trump and his associates since October of 2016 and were **continuing to use** in renewals to keep up their spying.
And for some strange reason, the FBI keeps Danchenko on as a CHS and continues paying him for another 2 1/2 years even though the FISA surveillance warrant's last renewal expired in September of 2017.
Very interesting.
Was Danchenko informing on anybody to the agency for the 2 1/2 years they no longer him for any Steele Dossier corroboration? Like say, I don’t know, I’m just spitballing here…Chuck Dolan, Christopher Steele, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, etc.
Durham establishes on the record that the FBI failed to corroborate any of the Steele Dossier allegations before they used them in the FISA warrant targeting Carter Page for surveillance - and by extension, the entire Donald Trump presidential campaign.
Yet when the Supervisory Agent acting as the affiant signs off on the warrant application, they are making a legal sworn statement to the court that the evidence in the warrant is true and they have verified it to the best of their ability.
Durham got Auten to admit that it wasn't Danchenko who lied to the FISA Court.
IT WAS THE FBI.
But surely the FBI received corroborating evidence for the Steele Dossier/Danchenko allegations from somewhere before they filed that warrant with the FISA Court, right?
I mean, they wouldn't just submit a warrant full of allegations they hadn't be able to verify, right? Right?
WRONG.
Even when the FBI trawled the intelligence agencies looking for anything to back up Steele & Danchenko's allegations, they found nothing.
And notice how Auten tries again to mumble a non-answer before Durham forces him to explicitly say it to the jury.
That's twice that Auten has tried to provide a non-answer to a direct question from Durham.
First, when Durham asked Auten if the FBI had corroborated any of the Steele dossier allegations before submitting the FISA warrant to the Court, Auten mumbled that he and the other Crossfire Hurricane team members "looked through FBI systems to determine whether or not we could verify, corroborate, confirm, or disconfirm the information in those reports.”
THAT'S NOT AN ANSWER. So Durham pinned him down and forced Auten to say it in front of the jury:
Durham: "And between September 19th of 2016 and October 21st, when the FBI submitted the FISA application, were you able to confirm or corroborate in any of the FBI system the very serious allegations that were contained in the dossier reports?"
Auten: "No."
Then when Durham directly asked Auten if any of the intel agencies has provided any corroboration for Steele & Dancheko's dossier allegations that the Crossfire Hurricane team had placed in the Page FISA warrant application, Auten again tries to mumble a non-answer:
Durham: "And what can you tell the jurors about whether or not any of the intelligence agencies that the FBI contacted for corroborative information produced any corroborative information?"
Auten: "We did receive information back from a number of different agencies."
Durham: "Then, as to the information that you received back from the agencies, did they corroborate the specificity of specific allegations that were contained in the dossier reports?"
Auten: "Not corroborating the specific allegations, no."
You're not going to slip an non-answer to the jury with Durham doing the questioning.
As FBI Special Agent Brian Auten found out the hard way.
There Was Never Any Real Predicate To Open The Crossfire Hurricane Counterintelligence Investigation Into The Donald Trump Campaign
Not in July of 2016 or at any other time.
Another key admission Durham got from Brian Auten.
He got Auten to admit that the preliminary investigation into Downer's tip to the FBI turned up no evidence whatsoever to support it.
But hey...when you open up a full investigation, why, you get new investigative tools at your disposal that aren't allowed in preliminary investigations!
So when the preliminary investigation came dry, the FBI decided to launch a full investigation to unleash all their amazing investigative tools into trying to find any evidence to support Downer's tip!
And 6 years later, what do we know?
They never found SHIT to corroborate any of this stuff, and even got so desperate they were waving money under the noses of Steele and Danchenko to corroborate it for them because they were so hot to investigate Trump.
Every SpyGate researcher worth their salt knows exactly why this admission from Auten is a huge BOOM.
They opened an investigation into the Trump campaign based on a 'suggestion of some kind of suggestion'.
As Strzok later admitted to his side dish Lisa Page: there was never any 'there there'. There was no evidence.
All they ever had was a rumor of a statement George Papadopoulos made to Alexander Downer in a U.K. wine room. Yet the FBI opened up a full investigation of Donald J. Trump and all his campaign associates...based on a rumor.
Devin Nunes was saying back in 2017 this Crossfire Hurricane investigation was opened up with any kind of proper predicate and he's going to be completely vindicated on that by the time this trial is over.
FBI Got The Corroboration Blues
Comey and the FBI supervisory agent who I suspect is a name we all know at this point both made sworn statements when they signed the FISA warrant application on Carter Page that the information [ Steele Dossier allegations] were 'true and correct'.
And they never even lifted one finger to verify any of the allegations before making use of them.
Hell, how were they supposed to go and check any of it? FBI agent Brian Auten testified on the stand that Steele wouldn’t tell them who his primary sub source was. Auten went on to say he first realized Steele’s source was Danchenko in ‘late December’ of 2016, about two months **after** the Crossfire Hurricane team had already used the Steele Dossier’s still-unverified allegations in the Page warrant.
Durham hammered the point home during the trial’s first two days, with both documentary evidence and witness testimony: these agents took these allegations from Steele and Danchenko and used them without even what appears to be a token effort to corroborate any of it. Nobody needed to lie to these people at the FBI. They knew they were being lied to and they were OK with it. They were going to use that dossier come hell or high water.
Nobody Leaks On John Durham; Nobody Steals His Thunder
The FBI offering a $1 million payment to Christopher Steele to verify his own dossier after the FBI had already decided to use it to get a surveillance warrant of the Trump campaign is one hell of a bombshell.
For FIVE YEARS this offer by the FBI of a payment to Steele to verify his own fricken' dossier never leaked.
We also found out only last week that the FBI made Danchenko a paid Confidential Human Source from March of 2017 all the way through October of 2020.
Once again...nobody...NOBODY...leaks on Durham.
He drops the bombs when he's ready to drop them.
Durham’s Last Rodeo?
It’s widely assumed by many news media commentators on both sides of the political spectrum that this trial is the swan song of the Durham Special Counsel.
I agree with what my friend Kyle, who goes by “Just Human” on Telegram, had to say about Durham’s overall RICO strategy in prosecuting the vast criminal ‘joint venture’ he’s been exposing to grand juries, a conspiracy that spanned the Clinton campaign, Perkins Coie, Fusion GPS, the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ, the State Department, a bunch of federal cybersecurity contractors, and even some foreign intelligence services.
You don’t hold a trial or two about a conspiracy this massive.
Sussmann case forever DESTROYED the Alfa Bank Hoax, got Marc Elias, Robby Mook, and a number of other people (including FBI Agents) before a grand jury and on the witness stand. Mook admitted Hillary approved the sharing of the hoax with corrupt media. We learned of Joffe (who is still under investigation) and his companies, the researchers, the spying on the EOP, and we got FBI agents on the stand where we learned they too were under investigation. Most importantly, the Sussmann case/trial busted down the attorney-client privilege wall that these corrupt people have used for decades to hide their criminality.
The Danchenko case is no different. I don’t expect a conviction, though i do expect Durham will successfully prove his case and do WANT a conviction; I expect, and have seen in the filings to date, the further dismantling of the Steele Dossier, the exposure of longtime Clinton apparatchik Chuck Dolan (who was referred for investigation), the absolute BOMBSHELL that Danchenko was made a CHS and then informed on Dolan (and others), and now Dolan is going to testify AGAINST Danchenko! The Danchenko case has given us the REAL Russian collusion, which was between Hillary, the Dems, their PR firms, Steele, and the Ukrainian-Born, suspected Russian asset Danchenko and his source, Russian Swamp loving Chuck Dolan.
This is mob trial stuff. Durham is working his way up. Getting the right people before grand juries, on witness stands, getting the docs, and getting the filings he NEEDS in the court record for future prosecutions of corrupt players higher up.
Dismantling a criminal syndicate cannot be done within just one trial. It takes many investigations, many cases, many trials. Danchenko is an important one, but it is just one of many.
You think it's bad for the FBI so far, wait until we reach the part where Durham gets FBI people to affirm on the stand under oath to the jury that they’d discovered who Danchenko and Steele were working for before they used their fake stuff to get a FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign.
THIS BITCH RIGHT HERE.
You think Durham won't go there?
ABSOLUTELY HE'S GOING THERE.
It’s just a question of when that Durham decides he wants to explore for the jury who Steele and Danchenko’s employer was, where the money paying for the Steele Dossier was actually coming from.
We’ll Know Soon What Durham’s Next Moves Will Be
I’m keenly aware that my take on what Durham is up to and where he’s going is markedly different from much of the rest of the media. They are calling this trial Durham’s swan song, and expect to see him pack it in, release a bullshit report that covers everything up and be fishing with his grandkids this time next year.
That’s not what is going to happen. Durham didn’t expose a massive RICO criminal conspiracy involving theft of classified information by private spies, abuse of federal law enforcement & intelligence surveillance powers, as well as treason against the United States, just to walk off and not charge anybody for it.
When I’m proven to be right, many of these commentators are going to pretend I was just some lucky jerk who against all evidence placed a long bet and beat the house.
BULLSHIT.
Luck has nothing to do with it. I’ve stayed consistent for 5 years because I know what the evidence is and I know what Durham has got. It’s clear to me why he’s pursuing the strategy he is of building the cases backwards publicly before he unseals indictments against Hillary Clinton and others for the espionage and treason against the United States that they engaged in.
Shifting narratives going on around me simply don’t matter. They may influence other people but they don’t influence me. Emotions and temper tantrums over your own expectations have no place in journalism.
And you can quote me on that.
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