648

UPDATE:  August 8: Anything to add-augment?

With all the bombshells that break about Trump-Russia-and Comeygate-every single day its easy to become desensitized but even so THIS story stands out-by itself it’s bigger than Watergate, bigger even than Iran-Contra-which is a much bigger scandal than commonly realized as it derived from the Reagan campaign’s possible collusion with Iran’s Ayatollah government in the 1980 election to delay the release of the hostages until after the election.

To appreciate how bad a particular story is you have to always to substitute the word ‘Clinton’ for ‘Trump’ and imagine what the reaction would be then to assess its true dimensions.

Yes Manafort’s billionaire oligarch buddy, Oleg Deripaska, for whom Manafort worked many years for Putin connected candidates in the Ukraine-and whom Manafort wanted to use his position as Trump’s campaign manager to ‘get whole’-as he owed Deripaska millions of dollars, and  Manafort  later offered Deripaska was private briefings on the Trump campaign

Then on August 2,  2016 Manafort met with Konstantin Kilimnik-who was once in the KGB-assuming you can ever leave the KGB.

FN: It later emerged that Deripaska was intimately involved with setting up Kilimnik’s August 2 meeting with Manafort-see Chapter A for much more.

What did they discuss in this meeting? Manafort assures us they spoke about little but the weather-and, you know, the Presidential campaign including the hacked emails of the DNC but ‘just as friends’ not in a ‘serious’ way. Whatever that distinction amounts to.It later emerged they also discussed ending Russian sanctions and we now know Manafort handed Deripaska 75 pages of detailed campaign polling data.

Note that this is indirectly yet another possible Manafort-Assange connection-in yet another coinkydink there’s the NYT’s reporting that Manafort spoke with the Ecuadorean President in 2017 in an attempt for deal to bring Manafort to the US. So both Manafort and Deripaska  were trying to get Assange a deal.

Now we hear that Deripaska’s lawyer was working on a deal for Assange with the Trump WH to give him limited liability in exchange for not leaking all those  stolen CIA documents Assange had in his possession and providing evidence that Russia wasn’t behind the hacks.

Exactly, this is Julian Assange who Trump’s own CIA director at the time-Mike Pompeo-said runs a ‘hostile intelligence service.’ Of course, now we know at this same time, Trump’s WH was secretly working on a deal for the leader of this hostile intelligence service who had worked with Russia to rig the election for Herr Trump.

Again if you don’t think any of this is a ‘big deal’ interpose the name Clinton for Trump. This whole episode gets weirder: the deal with Assange was scuttled by Comey. 

“One of the more devastating intelligence leaks in American history — the unmasking of the CIA’s arsenal of cyber warfare weapons last year — has an untold prelude worthy of a spy novel.”

“Some of the characters are household names, thanks to the Russia scandal: James Comey, fired FBI director. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Department of Justice (DOJ) official Bruce Ohr. Julian Assange, grand master of WikiLeaks. And American attorney Adam Waldman, who has a Forrest Gump-like penchant for showing up in major cases of intrigue.”

“Each played a role in the early days of the Trump administration to try to get Assange to agree to “risk mitigation” — essentially, limiting some classified CIA information he might release in the future.”

“The effort resulted in the drafting of a limited immunity deal that might have temporarily freed the WikiLeaks founder from a London embassy where he has been exiled for years, according to interviews and a trove of internal DOJ documents turned over to Senate investigators. Read the draft immunity deal proffer that the Justice Department was considering for Assange here.”

Again, you have to look at the 30,000 foot view of this. The Trump WH was offering immunity to the leader of a ‘hostile intelligence service’ who had colluded with Russia to help Trump win the 2016 election. Oh, and Trump’s campaign manager, Manafort, had an old Russian oligarch business partner named Deripaska who he had wanted to use his position on the campaign to pay the oligarch back and it is Deripaska who was working on the deal for Assange.

But in the end it was Comey along with Senate Intelligence Committee Mark Warner who deep-sixed Assange’s immunity deal.

“Just a few days after the negotiations opened in mid-February, Waldman reached out to Sen. Warner; the lawyer wanted to see if Senate Intelligence Committee staff wanted any contact with Assange, to ask about Russia or other issues.”

“Warner engaged with Waldman over encrypted text messages, then reached out to Comey. A few days later, Warner contacted Waldman with an unexpected plea.”

“He told me he had just talked with Comey and that, while the government was appreciative of my efforts, my instructions were to stand down, to end the discussions with Assange,” Waldman told me. Waldman offered contemporaneous documents to show he memorialized Warner’s exact words.

“Waldman couldn’t believe a U.S. senator and the FBI chief were sending a different signal, so he went back to Laufman, who assured him the negotiations were still on. “What Laufman said to me after he heard I was told to ‘stand down’ by Warner and Comey was, ‘That’s bullshit. You are not standing down and neither am I,’” Waldman recalled.

“A source familiar with Warner’s interactions says the senator’s contact on the Assange matter was limited and was shared with Senate Intelligence chairman Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.). But the source acknowledges that Warner consulted Comey and passed along the “stand down” instructions to Waldman: “That did happen.”

“Multiple sources tell me the FBI’s counterintelligence team was aware and engaged in the Justice Department’s strategy but could not explain what motivated Comey to send a different message around the negotiations through Warner. A lawyer for Comey did not immediately return calls seeking comment.”

“While the negotiations survived the Warner-Comey intervention, the episode sowed distrust in Assange’s camp.”

“The constructive, principled discussions with DOJ that occurred over nearly two months were complicated by the confusing ‘stand down’ message,” Waldman recalled.

“On April 7, 2017, Assange released documents with the specifics of some of the CIA malware used for cyber attacks. It had immediate impact: A furious U.S. government backed out of the negotiations, and then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo slammed WikiLeaks as a “hostile intelligence service.”

“Soon, the rare opportunity to engage Assange in a dialogue over redactions, a more responsible way to release information, and how the infamous DNC hacks occurred was lost — likely forever.”

There’s just no way to see this as anything less than a quid pro quo.

No way would this have been considered by the Obama WH or Clinton WH and if they had been there’d have been cries of impeachment by nightfall.

 

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October 28, 2016: a Day That Will Live in Infamy Copyright © by . All Rights Reserved.

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