USA 2020 Elections: Thread

[grarpamp]

>> Donald J Trump won the 2020 US Presidential Election.
>
> In part, via Democrat Owned Fake News Media Propaganda...


And in part through Illegal Spying by the Democrats,
and in part through False Prosecutions and Impeachments,
all generating FUD for Reps, Propaganda for Dems,, etc, etc...


Leaks Suggest Durham Probe Is Making Progress

https://www.theepochtimes.com/leaks-show-durham-probe-is-making-progress_3955973.html

Recent media reports point obliquely to significant developments in
John Durham’s special counsel investigation. He’s using a grand jury
to subpoena documents and witness testimony regarding the FBI’s
illegal spying operation against Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential
campaign. And now stories in the Wall Street Journal and Washington
Post say Durham may be looking to make criminal charges against
“lower-level FBI agents” as well as outside sources who passed false
information to federal law enforcement.

If that’s accurate, the latter category could include political
operatives, foreign spies, big-name Beltway lawyers, journalists, and
computer experts. But current and former government officials say the
reports seem intended to shape the narrative on behalf of those Durham
may really have in his crosshairs—senior FBI officials, including
former Acting Director Andrew McCabe.

Since the November election, I’ve expressed skepticism regarding
Durham’s investigation. Without Durham’s former boss Attorney General
William Barr holding anyone accountable before the 2020 vote, there
was nothing stopping the FBI and other federal agencies from
continuing to interfere in elections on behalf of their preferred
candidates. There was also nothing ensuring that Durham would be
allowed to continue his probe with a Trump loss.

With Durham now working under the auspices of Joe Biden’s Justice
Department, his ability to make his findings public, never mind bring
charges, might be limited. According to the reports, Durham’s
witnesses want Attorney General Merrick Garland to shut him down. And
the president likely concurs.

Biden was the number two official in an administration that spied on a
presidential campaign and then Trump’s transition team. He offered
advice on how to frame Trump’s national security adviser Gen. Michael
Flynn. Even a man in cognitive decline as Biden appears to be would
see that allowing his co-conspirators to be exposed to legal risk
might tempt them to detail his role in full.

And if he crosses the FBI, the president isn’t the only Biden family
member who might regret it. Recent reports show that the Bureau
protected his son Hunter by burying evidence not only of his financial
relationships with corrupt foreign officials, but also of a possible
blackmail scheme targeting him with the purpose of compromising US
national security. Should Biden fail to protect the FBI from Durham,
the FBI might stop shielding his son from the law.

And yet Durham is clearly making headway or else sources wouldn’t be
leaking their concerns to the press.

    “Without a doubt the sources for these stories are present or past
FBI officials who are trying to pre-emptively downplay what Durham
has,” said one senior congressional aide. “Leaking ahead of bad
Russiagate news to bend the narrative their way is their MO. The same
FBI leakers did the same thing before the DOJ inspector general’s
report on FISA abuse came out,” said the aide, referring to the
December 2019 account of how the FBI deceived a secret court to obtain
a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to spy on the Trump
campaign.

According to the current round of leaks, Durham prosecutors “have
focused on people outside the FBI who provided information that helped
fuel the 2016 investigation.” That includes both those who passed
information directly to the FBI and, writes the Journal, those who
“passed it on to others who later shared it with the FBI.”

That’s a broad category with a long list attached, implicating famous
and infamous Washington, DC political personalities as well as
Christopher Steele, the British ex-spy who put his name to a dossier
of falsified reports alleging Trump’s ties to Russian officials.

The list would also include Steele’s clients, Glenn Simpson and Peter
Fritsch, co-founders of Fusion GPS, the Washington, DC firm hired by
the Hillary Clinton campaign to smear the 2016 Republican candidate.
Another Fusion contractor, Nellie Ohr, would also be on that list—she
passed information to her husband Justice Department lawyer Bruce Ohr,
who relayed it to the FBI. Having served as an intermediary for the
FBI and Steele and Simpson as well, he, too, would be under the
spotlight.

Lots of Clinton allies would be on the hot seat. Campaign lawyer
Michael Sussman passed information to FBI general counsel James Baker
regarding a clandestine link between computer servers for the Trump
Organization and Alfa Bank, a Russian financial institution. The FBI
investigated the tip and found nothing. Durham called the
cyber-experts who first made the claims about the so-called secret
server hook-up to testify.

Others in the Clinton circle who would be on the list include Mrs.
Clinton’s counselor Sidney Blumenthal, who played relay man for a
second dossier falsely alleging Trump was compromised by Russia. Those
reports were written by another Clinton hand, Cody Shearer, and passed
by Blumenthal to State Department official Jonathan Winer, who relayed
the false information to the FBI through Steele.

And there’s Stefan Halper, the longtime Beltway political operative
who the FBI employed as a confidential human source. He falsely
alleged that Flynn had been compromised in a Russian honeypot
operation. CIA director John Brennan would be a big catch. In 2017
congressional testimony, he boasted that the information and
intelligence he shared with the Bureau served as “the basis” of the
FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. Durham interviewed him for eight
hours last summer, though Brennan’s spokesman said the former
spymaster wasn’t a suspect or a target.

A name that keeps popping up in news reports is Steele’s so-called
primary sub-source, Igor Danchenko. The former Brookings Institution
researcher told the FBI that his information regarding Trump’s Russia
connections came from several sources inside Russia. But five Russian
nationals whom Danchenko claimed as sources recently signed affidavits
swearing that they did not provide him with any information found in
the Clinton-funded dossier. So it seems certain Danchenko lied to the
FBI.

And that was always the FBI’s second parachute. Danchenko was set up
from the outset to be the fall guy. On the front end, he helped
credential the dossier to make it look genuine if the FISA court
started asking questions: Steele’s primary sub-source for the Trump
information was a real Russian who had real Russian sources. And if
the FBI’s plot was discovered, they’d claim they were not criminal,
just incompetent—they got fooled by “Russian disinformation,” i.e.,
Danchenko’s information.

It seems the leakers have positioned him to play the sap here, too.
The message they’re sending is that the probe will stop at Danchenko
and maybe some other low-hanging fruit but everyone else is in the
clear — Clinton lieutenants, spies, and especially the senior FBI
officials who drove the operation. Otherwise, it will amount to a
grossly politicized effort to target the opponents of the former
president.

It’s not hard to see the FBI’s angle. “I doubt the investigation is
only about people who lied to the FBI,” said Kash Patel, the former
national security prosecutor who led Congressman Devin Nunes’
investigation into the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe. “It’s not like the
FBI suddenly realized they had a bunch of losers who were lying to
them. The FBI knew they were lying. Our investigation proved that the
FBI knew that the credibility of their sources was zero.”

The Durham investigation is almost certainly about the senior FBI
officials who staged the lies.

    “They basically forged a FISA warrant and took it to a federal
judge to spy on the Trump campaign,” says Patel.

    “I’d be looking at Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, and Andrew McCabe,” he
said, referring to the FBI cell that managed the anti-Trump plot.

Patel noted that McCabe lied about leaking to the media regarding the
investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

    “And he got caught by the inspector general,” said Patel.

    “Why wouldn’t they do the same thing here? The stories coming out
now are in publications the FBI used in the past to deflect away from
their own corruption.”

If Durham does come down on the FBI, we’ll see the media take over the
narrative and drive it against him. Prestige press organizations will
do anything to protect their sources, especially if they’re dirty cops
who pushed an illegal espionage operation against a president they
didn’t like.