89 The Leeden Manifesto: The GOP’s 2016 Hunt for Her Emails and Bannon’s Unknown Role

UPDATE 3.0: This chapter is solid on substance AND largely editings-only mild editings still needed

UPDATE 4.0 Got rid of redundant back story on Schmitz, etc covered in Chapter Comey’s Russian Disinformation

New Beginning 2.0:

In Chapter Comey’s Fake Russian Doc we looked at Comey’s fake Russian document that he used to defend his indefensible, very careless Press Conference on July 5, 2016-at least this was his rationalization in classified settings. We then went on to look at the story that emerged in 2018 that Trump’s campaign advisor Joseph Schmitz who (not so incidentally) had been the COO of Blackwater while Erik Prince was CEO had shopped what turned out to be fake Hillary Clinton emails to the FBI and looked at Seth Abramson’s-very plausible theory that Schmitz’s unidentified agent was none other than the Late Peter Smith.

I then theorized whether Schmitz-quite plausibly working with Smith-was also the source for Comey’s Russian disinformation doc he claimed justified his indefensible, very careless Press Conference.

As to the central question of who Schmitz’s client was, I’ve come to think he was following Barbara Leeden’s playbook.

First of all it has to be understood how broad the obsession of the entire Republican party was with finding Clinton’s legally deleted emails in the 2016 election.

FN: Despite the fact that Clinton’s lawyer deleted her personal emails as the rules and precedent call for, Comey and Friends searched and ran down over 13,000 of them-so while the Trump campaign-and GOP co-conspirators kept repeating 33,000, in fact there were only 19,000 and change still outstanding.

What’s that-you don’t think you can trust Hillary’s lawyer because Hillary’s lawyer has Hillary’s interests foremost in mind? Well are you equally concerned about the way say Steve Bannon’s lawyer conducted  himself in terms of how many emails he withheld from the HSPC? In reality the law provided for Hillary’s lawyers to take out the personal emails-this is how subjects conduct themselves in investigations everyday-per this is how the law works.

Meanwhile all the emails of these Republican chicken hawks on email security foaming at the mouth over deleted emails, had their own email communications disappear-but only in the most relevant periods when they were colluding and conspiring with Russia-and the GOP dominated FBI.

End FN

In Bannon’s very misleading HSPCI testimony in early 2018, he did say this regarding the Emailgate obsession within the Republican party.

“Fired chief strategist Steve Bannon told the House Intelligence Committee in February that members of the Trump campaign “kept getting approached” by outsiders suggesting ways to get Clinton’s emails, according to a source familiar with his testimony.”

This again puts the gloss on it that some marginal folks outside the campaign had some “harebrained ideas”-Bannon used this exact phrase before HSPCI but that the campaign itself didn’t bite-Bannon claims to have dismissed the very notion of finding the infamous 33,000 as “hopeless fantasy.”

FN: Actually that framing-he was interested but thought it wasn’t ‘viable’-to use the phrasing of Peter Smith’s former business partner-may be not in HSPCI but in Mueller transcripts

Indeed, while Bannon would end up testifying against Stone for Stone’s lies before HSPCI, Bannon lied just as much before HSPCI-Stone also pretended not to know who Smith was-despite what Stone’s buddy Corsi said: if not for Peter Smith the Comey Letter never happens. But Mueller didn’t indict Bannon for his own lies to HSPCI but rather offered him a deal to help indict and convict Stone for his HSPCI lies.

FN: Later we can place quotes on Stone’s and Bannon’s dissembling

UPDATE: Emptywheel documents just  how big a canard Bannon’s claim to have been uninterested in Podesta’s emails is

Flynn interviews also underscore this

End FN

The entire party was obsessed with the emails-not just the Trump campaign.

FN: This is a crucial point we develop more below.

And this brings us back to Barbara Leeden-whose husband, Michael Leeden, got away with Iran-Contra-just as Ms. Leeden has gotten away with Russian Collusion and Conspiracy.

FN: Indeed, she hasn’t even lost her job on Chuck Grassley’s Senate Judiciary Committee.

UPDATE: Place this sentence below? Way back in June, 2015-before Trump begun his precipitous rise to the top of the GOP primary polls never to relinquish-Ms. Leeden sent an email to one Steve Bannon.

FN: Find the quote from Mueller FOIA.

Starting on Location 4200 in Abramson’s Proof of Conspiracy regarding Smith-Leeden etc.

“The Trump campaign’s clandestine summer 2016 efforts to secure the Clinton emails allegedly stolen by the Russians continue after Manafort’s departure—despite the fact that if the campaign were to receive the emails, it would be not only receiving stolen property but potentially aiding and abetting the computer crimes that led to the theft of the emails in the first instance. Alongside separate efforts to secure Clinton’s emails executed by Trump national security adviser Joseph Schmitz—a man once caught running a Saudi-financed scheme to sell Russian weapons in Syria—and longtime Trump friend and adviser Roger Stone, another effort, led by a GOP operative named Peter W. Smith, had begun in June 2016 and involved searching the “dark web” for Clinton’s emails

“In late July, his public comments on the matter notwithstanding, Trump had privately broached the sort of effort Smith had been involved in for weeks, “ask[ing] individuals affiliated with his Campaign to find the deleted Clinton emails,” according to the Mueller Report.

“The report indicates that in July and August 2016 Trump issued this order to his staff “repeatedly,” and that the order led directly to his chief national security advisor, Flynn, contacting at least three individuals outside the campaign who had already started looking for the emails—including Smith. Smith had by then been periodically in contact with a former Senate staffer, Barbara Ledeen—wife of Michael Ledeen, another shadow Trump national security adviser—who had written to Smith of eagerly seeking “classified” emails “purloined by our enemies,” even if doing so meant dealing, through intermediaries, with “various foreign services.”

So with all the happy post Bill Barr fake summary talk ‘Isn’t it wonderful that our President didn’t collude with Russia’-Barbara Leeden way back in 2015, couldn’t have been more frank: she had the clear intent to commit computer crimes with a hostile foreign power-preferably Russia.’

“Ledeen believed the effort to acquire stolen Clinton emails would be worth the risk of unsavory contacts with America’s enemies if the intelligence services of (among others) the Russians had “reassemble[d] the [Clinton] server’s email content” after stealing it and would be willing to provide even one stolen email to either her or Smith—a development that, notwithstanding it constituting the receipt of stolen classified material from a foreign intelligence service, would be “catastrophic to the Clinton campaign,” in Ledeen’s view.”

FN: Leeden had always conceived the emails as being recovered by foreign intel-ie, her intent right from the beginning was to engage in a conspiracy to commit computer crimes.

End FN

Smith had ultimately declined to work with Ledeen, but only because, in his estimation, her “initiative was not viable at th[e] time.”

On this last point color me skeptical-that Smith didn’t find it viable. I mean the Mueller Report seems to accept this claim but what’s it based on? As it turns out just a single former ‘business associate’ of the late Peter Smith. This fits the typical pattern of all the GOP co-conspirators-they only admit what they have no choice but admit and even then they attempt to minimize, rationalize, distort, then finally, divert.

Then when you dig deeper they have to backtrack further but even then they continue to dissemble and distort-even though they were pushed back another 25 yards. For instance in his HSPCI testimony Bannon denied ever speaking to Roger Stone. In his Mueller testimony he confessed to having spoke with him many times-on the phone as well as electronically but claimed he was just humoring him.

FN: A claim clearly debunked here

Bannon before HSPCI-as well as Stone when he was before HSPCI-pretended not to even know who Smith was outside of press reports-which is some brazen lying indeed it’s so utterly, patently false.

FN: Find quotes

At HSPCI, Bannon denied knowing anything much about the desire to find Clinton’s 33,000. Before Mueller he admitted he was-actually very-interested but then insisted that he ‘figured out very quickly’ it was pretty much impossible to recover her deleted emails.

So this is quite possibly another case  of deny everything and if forced to admit, then minimize, dissemble, confuse, obfuscate. As Peter Smith was by then the Late Peter Smith his former business associate did the dissembling for him. So allegedly he-initially as it’s admitted he later partnered with her in September, 2016-saw Leeden’s proposal but didn’t think it was ‘viable.’

Michael Flynn also attempted to minimize the importance he placed on Leeden’s But Her Emails Manifesto she sent out in 2015. In Flynn’s case, to be sure, this minimization was hardly plausible as his response email to Leeden was quite effusive.

To be sure, initially Flynn perjured himself-just like in Bannon’s HSPCI testimony-he pretended to know nothing about any Hunt For Her Emails. Indeed, in light of his initial lack of candor his plea deal was basically itself an act of grace. To be sure he was MORE honest later-though as always the basic principle with all GOP co-conspirators is they never admit anything unless they have absolutely no other choice.

Then there’s Erik Prince’s response to Leeden’s letter…

It’s in Mueller FOIA #16 

Pg 314

See also Jane Mayer

Location 4231

While everyone denies that they were all that impressed by Leeden’s Emailglate Manifesto what’s striking is that the future Search For Her Emails  of the GOP co-conspirators followed the exact contours laid out in Leeden’s But Her Emails Manifesto.

Consider Erik Prince who the Mueller Report would document actually provided some of the funding to get Clinton’s emails in September 2016.

According to the report, Prince “provided funding to hire a tech advisor to ascertain the authenticity” of e-mails that conservative activists had obtained. Prince, who was interviewed by the special counsel’s team, said that the cache of e-mails in question turned out to be fakes.

The report, however, details a strange effort by Trump-campaign associates to hack into Clinton and the Democrats’ e-mail accounts that paralleled the Russian plot. According to Mueller, the effort began as early as December, 2015, and ramped up after Trump publicly declared, on July 27, 2016, that he hoped Russia would “find the thirty thousand e-mails that are missing” from Clinton’s private e-mail server. Mueller and his team never interviewed Trump, but the retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn, the campaign aide whom Trump later appointed his national-security adviser, told them that Trump repeatedly asked to get Clinton’s e-mails. According to the report, Flynn tried to do this by contacting multiple people who might be able to supply them, including two well-placed conservative operatives, Peter Smith and Barbara Ledeen.”

December, 2015 was when Leeden emailed Flynn and Smith her But Her Emails Manifesto.

But it’s even better than this. Way back in June, 2015-before Trump begun his precipitous rise to the top of the GOP primary polls never to relinquish-Ms. Leeden sent an email to one Steve Bannon.

In light of the recent FOIA release of the Mueller report-as EW notes-the only actual new information in it was that Bannon had advance knowledge of the leak of the DNC emails just before the start of the 2016 Democratic convention it’s amazing how far we’ve come since the time in which the conventional wisdom was that Bannon had no role in Russian Collusion.

Everyone had presumed it-even alas people who most of us in the Dem base have a high regard for: even Josh Marshall, even Rachel Maddow. 

I remember she said something on an episode to the effect that Bannnon is the one Trump flack apparently with no involvement. Et tu Rachel!

FN: Find quotes-at least for Marshall-in earlier-maybe original-transcript.

UPDATE: Link to older post in earlier manuscript is above.

The reason everyone presumed Bannon wasn’t involved was there was no evidence he was involved. More specifically there had been no reporting in reputable MSM news outlets about Bannon having any ties to Russian Collusion-often it was framed in a very unfortunate way: ‘While many of the top Trump campaign senior aides had suspicious Russia ties, none have been found for Steve Bannon.’

Yet, to speak personally, I always assumed Bannon was in up to his neck in Russian Collusion no less than Roger Stone or Paul Manfort or Michael Flynn, etc.

FN: I have the old blog posts to prove it? See earlier manuscripts

The trouble is that MSM journos don’t understand Malcolm Nance’s point that there’s a difference between thinking like a journalist and thinking like an intel agent. MSM journalists refuse to consider any theories that there isn’t already multi source evidence for but when you’re an investigator you have to be willing to follow-an educated-hunch. Instinct, intuition-what savvy MSMers dismiss as ‘speculation’-for a MSM journo to accuse someone of speculation is like what the average person would think of someone accused of being a child predator.

So Jay Rosen’s savvy punditry wax skeptical about “conspiracy theories”-and the Mueller Report said it “didn’t establish” to steal the 2016 election from Hillary but for those who doubt it this is what a conspiracy looks like in black and white starting on pg 199 of the first batch of unredacted Mueller 302s

Again this was from Leeden to Steve Bannon way back in June, 2015. This underscores my argument above that the Ahablike obsession in Finding That Woman’s Emails was not at all special to the Trump campaign. This Emailgate obsession would directly lead to the Comey Letter. The rogue FBI agents weren’t always pro Trump but they were all anti Hillary.

Indeed, if anything Trump led to divisions in GOPland-both inside and outside the FBI-but negative partisanship got them through.

FN: Indeed it even led to a few GOPers leaving the party as Comey says he did-he claims that 2016 was the first election he didn’t vote in. Though it would have been much better if he’d simply voted for Trump rather than abstaining from voting for the GOP candidate for the first time in his adult life while rigging it for him.

It’s arguable that many-if not all-of the elements of the-successful-plot to steal the 2016 election from Hillary-as she herself said the morning after November 9-I know they’d never let me be President-would have been present whoever the Republican 2016 nominee was

Remember Leeden was the Senate Judiciary aide of Chuck Grassley-about as mainstream an “Establishment Republican”-as you will get. When she first sent out her proposal to get Russian hackers to hack Hillary’s-legally-deleted emails in June, 2015, she probably had little inkling that Trump would be the nominee-few in either the GOP or Dem Establishments-nor the savvy MSM Punditocracy to say nothing of Nate Silver-saw it coming.

FN: Again to speak personally, your friendly author of this book did and has the blog posts to prove that too; by mid July 2015 I strongly suspected Trump Was the One-to paraphrase Stone’s hero, Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign slogan.

End FN

While we don’t know who Ms. Leeden was supporting at the time it’s quite plausible it was Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio-possibly Chris Christie. But in any case the point is none of this was specific to Trump in a time few thought he’d be the nominee.

It’s true that unlike the rest of the 2016 GOP candidates, Trump had this Putin love and a long history of Russian connections-going back to the 1980s when he was one of very few NYC landlords who allowed anonymous sales-which was perfect for Russian money launderers sending dirty money out from the then still Soviet Union.

But then there are those DMs Emma Best released of Julian Assange and Wikileaks back in 2014-2015 which made it clear Assange was simply anti Clinton and would have done the same thing for Low Energy Jeb or Little Marco.

Indeed, regarding Russian Collusion and Conspiracy, remember Leeden herself-Ms. GOP Establishment-proposed working with Russian intelligence before she or anyone else in GOP Establishment Land ever dreamed Trump would really be the nominee.

Pg 203:

So not to put too fine a point but she’s proposing that: the U.S. conservative media partner up with foreign intelligence. Again this is not the brainchild of Trump, it’s the brainchild of the garden variety Establishment GOP. It was bequeathed to Trump when he unexpectedly romped through the primary.

But it’s even better than this as Chuck Grassley’s Senate Judiciary aide goes on to argue that getting the emails from foreign intelligence was preferable…

So did the Trump campaign and indeed the entire Republican party commit the deadly serious crime of Conspiracy to Commit Crimes? The intent to commit this deadly serious act of  treason in the service of election rigging could not be more clear.

Which to paraphrase President Joe is a BFD as a crucial part of proof is intent and we’ve got that in spades.

So do tell  Little Ms. Chuck Grassley’s Judiciary Committee aide-what are the advantages of foreign intelligence?

Pg 204:

Again the intent to commit the crime of conspiracy with foreign intelligence couldn’t be more clear. For the savvy pundits who insist it must be impossibly super explicit-how much more could it get than this ‘Executive Summary to Hack Her Emails?’

After all, she wants foreign intelligence to hack the emails and give it to the conservative media-which requires a quid pro quo with foreign intel…

She was also proposing directing the foreign intelligence of our enemies to blackmail the Clintons AND according to her that this was what Russia did in Uranium One which if true she made more news here.

UPDATE: See link above for footnote.

Leeden’s plan was to be implemented and utilized for whoever the future GOP nominee was-even if Carly Fiorina won…

FN: Though that was never going to happen as she by her own admission was a token.

So despite the lies Bannon told HSPCI-he knew of no concerted effort by the Trump campaign to obtain HRC’s emails-Flynn initially told the same lies-then when Bannon admitted to Mueller he did, he pretended to reject it as ‘not viable’ much as the Late Peter Smith’s ‘business associate’ claimed Smith did back in December, 2015-he actually received Leeden’s proposal already in June, 2015.

UPDATE: Below maybe further quote Seth on the skills of CA and how it was perfect for foreign interference in an election…

UPDATE: As I argue Leeden always conceived the most likely way to get the emails was via foreign intelligence

Many wax skeptical about “conspiracy theories”-and the Mueller Report said it “didn’t establish” a conspiracy to steal the 2016 election from Hillary but for those who doubt it this is what a conspiracy looks like in black and white on pg 200.

She even wrote a comprehensive Executive Summary. How much more ‘organized’ do the savvy MSMers-the Ken Dilanians, the Devlin Barretts, the Dean Baquets-need it to get?

So Leeden-who since 2003 was and continues to be Chuck Grassley’s Senate Judiciary aide-laid out the kind of explicit conspiracy manifesto that all the savvy pundits claimed to want to see to be forced to admit that yes “collusion” happened in 2016-and even worse conspiracy happened-as conspiracy is an actual crime.

And despite the gymnastics and prevarications Bannon, Flynn, Smith-‘from the grave’-Erik Prince, Kellyann Conway, Sean Spicer, etc-have contorted into to denying even remembering Ms. Leeden’s email, the reality is that the Ahablike obsession with Hacking Her Emails only grew throughout the campaign and the search would fit like a glove with the contours of Leedens’ Executive Summary-including her clear preference way back in June, 2015 with having foreign intelligence-preferably Russian intelligence-obtaining the emails. 

As we saw above-on page 200-she expressed a near certainty that Clinton’s deleted emails somehow weren’t really deleted ie that somehow they could be recovered.

Then on pg 201 she contends that in all likelihood the emails were already in the hands of foreign intelligence agencies.

FN: Regarding all the Storm and Drang over Clinton’s deleted emails Prince was one of many in the But Her Emails party who deleted a bunch of emails in the relevant period and then gave us to understand that they have no idea where these emails got-Jerome Corsi and Bannon himself sing the same sad sadly implausible song.

Mueller FOIA 16 Pg 15

So already all the elements are here of the future GOP co-conspirators-from the Late Peter Smith-who according to Corsi-was responsible for how Huma’s emails ended up on Weiner’s laptop that was in the possession of the NYPD at the time-to Joseph Schmitz and Michael Flynn.

A search for Clinton’s emails on the dark web with the help of Russian hackers. All the elements were already spelled out here in June, 2015 before Trump even took his fateful stroll down the Trump Hotel escalator.

It’s also very interesting that it was Bannon-who denied any knowledge of a The Hunt For Her Emails before HSPCI-then claimed to basically be humoring proposals  from Roger Stone-he also was CCed on Peter Smith’s emails-to find them in at least his earliest Mueller interviews- and who MSM commentators-even very astute commentators like Josh Marshall and Rachel Maddow-presumed Bannon had no Russian Collusion Cum Rogue FBI Agent Collusion-who received Barbara Leeden’s manifesto this early-six months before she sent it to Peter Smith and Michael Flynn.

FN: Just like-after denying any conversations  about  Her Emails with Roger Stone-he had to change his tune in front of Mueller-as Mueller had the documents to call out his lies. But even then he claimed to only be humoring Stone. 

Indeed, the conventional wisdom that Bannon had little or no role was so wide as even to be universal. Indeed, maybe we still wouldn’t know if he hadn’t opened his big mouth to Michael Wolff. That was what led the Mueller team to finally take an interest in him…

FN:

Mr. Mueller issued the subpoena after Mr. Bannon was quoted in a new book criticizing Mr. Trump, saying that Donald Trump Jr.’s 2016 meeting with Russians was “treasonous” and predicting that the special counsel investigation would ultimately center on money laundering.

After excerpts from the book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” were published this month, Mr. Trump derided Mr. Bannon publicly and threatened to sue him for defamation. Mr. Bannon was soon ousted as the executive chairman of the hard-right website Breitbart News.”

End FN

Indeed Flynn-when he finally stopped misremembering everything had some very interesting revelations about Bannon’s role.

Now look while I don’t want to toot my own horn-someone has to! LOL- I always presumed his own role had to be considerable. How could a self respecting GOP co-conspirator cum “ratfucker”-Marcy Wheeler’s phrase-look himself in the mirror if he was out of the loop on all this fun?

It never made any sense so I presumed-before admittedly there was a shred of evidence that of course he was in on all of it.

FN: This is a good point Bannon’s buddy, mentioned above, Michael Wolff, who got no little criticism from the savvy Beltway pundits: there’s a sense in which being a MSM journalist means you have to pretend to know less than you do to kind of bargain with yourself how much of the truth you will report.

See MSM chapters in previous manuscript link…

End FN

But even I was somewhat jarred in reading Flynn’s later revelations to Mueller about Bannon.

Pg 58

Then in classic GOP dissembling style, Flynn attempts to minimize his bracing admission

Pg 59

Right he and Bannon-and many other senior campaign aides, and of course Trump himself-had many conversations about the deleted emails-and who had them and Trump wanted them to find them-but in his mind this was not a “concerted” effort to get them-just maybe an unconcerted effort?

A very large but unconcerted effort to get Hillary’s emails…

Flynn continued to perjure himself in much the same vein as Bannon and Stone did before HSPCI-and Bannon did at least in his first interviews with Mueller.

Ibid.

There you go-they never had any interest in getting the emails they had so many conversations about! Even better he claims he never had any conversations on how to get the emails when a few sentences earlier he spoke of Trump’s strong desire to find them. 

Above I argued that the subsequent Hunt For Her Emails took on all the contours of Leeden’s initial Manifesto cum Executive Summary.

This is a good example of this phenomenon:

Pg 59-60

The idea that “People on the campaign did not think there was any way for CLINTON’S deleted email messages to be gone” was the argument on the front page of Leeden’s “executive summary.”

Interesting also that Flynn claimed to believe that ‘if the email messages existed’ the FBI would discover them. That in a sense was exactly what did happen and it was the winning shot for Trump’s illegitimate “victory.”

FN: Comey’s alleged predicate for taking the action that flipped the election to Trump was that ‘they might contain the Hillary’s GOLDEN EMAILS.’

The next paragraph is again vintage Leeden’s Executive Summary.

Pg 60

Again Leeden’s manifesto clearly saw foreign intel as the most likely source for them to acquire HRC”s emails with Russia clearly her first preference.

In Flynn’s subsequent interview-on January 5, 2018-he un-mis-remembered some things.

While on pg 59 he didn’t remember any concerted effort to find Hillary’s emails, his tune changes in this later interview-starting on pg 72.

Pg 72

So they hoped Wikileaks would publish Hillary’s emails. Does this qualify as concerted or unconcerted?

So now Flynn reveals not only that he had many conversations with Bannon about Hillary’s emails but that he “always seemed to have insight” into specific stories-presumably about her emails. Then he suggests that Bannon “may have”had insight into what was in Weiner’s laptop while it was in NYPD custody.

Here it must be acknowledged that while the title of this book is the Stone-Corsi-Peter Smith Nexus these three are hardly an exhaustive list. Others in the nexus-in terms of the efforts-concerted or otherwise-to get the 33,000-and in successfully planting Huma’s emails on Weiner’s laptop-certainly include Flynn himself-Steve Bannon, Schmitz, and it goes without saying Erik Prince-who contributed to Trump through various channels three quarters of a million dollars in the last few months of the campaign.

Above I explained that I always presumed that Bannon was neck deep in But Her Emails-before there was even a scrap of evidence as it made no sense that he wasn’t-if he weren’t it would have been GOP co-conspirator cum dirty trickster cum ratfucker malpractice.

But yet another reason it was always logical to presume-evidence or no-that Bannon was neckdeep in But Her Emails-in light of Erik Prince’s role-Bannon was Prince’s closet contact in the campaign. The idea that he didn’t tell Bannon that he was funding Smith-Leeden’s attempt to authenticate emails off the dark web is in reality 0.

Flynn’s revelation here strongly suggests that Bannon and Prince were also neck deep specifically in the Immaculate Discovery of Huma’s emails on Weiner’s laptop. It makes sense. Remember per Corsi, Smith is who made the ID happen-presumably through his NYPD contacts. Prince was funding Smith’s efforts-actually Smith-Leeden, so it’s also a fair assumption Grassley’s aide Leeden was totally plugged in. After all this was her manifesto come to life-the dog catching the car.

FN: This once again highlights my point that Russian Collusion-and Rogue FBI Agent Collusion-was about more than the Trump campaign but GOPland Circa 2016 as a whole. As we will see below there is reason to believe that the RNC had prior knowledge of the DNC hack and dump-prior knowledge at least before the dump. From there it’s a fair conjecture bigwigs at the RNC also knew in advance the Podesta emails were coming and the machinations at NYPD and NYFBI that led to the Comey Letter.

When you remember Leeden’s role on Grassley’s Senate Judiciary, the GOP Senate also had awareness. The GOP’s stubborn refusal to take Russian Interference and Collusion wasn’t simply about protecting Trump-and avoiding the GOP base who worships him.

Surely that was a significant motivation but it also shouldn’t be underestimated how much these GOP Establishment types were defending not just Trump but also themselves.

End FN

UPDATE: See pg 122 of Mueller FOIA#14

Then there’s Rudy. Above we saw Flynn allude to him being this great cyber guy. Obviously if anyone, it was Rudy who had the contacts and it was he who telegraphed it before the fact.

FN: As did-indeed-Lara Trump, which underscores the fact that knowledge of the coming Comey Letter was widely held in TrumpWorld.

As for Bannon suggesting there was classified information on Weiner’s laptop, he may have been signing from the same hymnal here as Prince. Remember Prince’s lies about what was on the laptop-pedophillia, etc-were published in Breitbart. 

Prince painted a pretty granular picture of what was currently happening at the FBI in late October, 2016 that certainly could suggest inside knowledge.

“Blackwater founder and former Navy SEAL Erik Prince told Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM that according to one of his “well-placed sources” in the New York Police Department, “The NYPD wanted to do a press conference announcing the warrants and the additional arrests they were making” in the Anthony Weiner investigation, but received “huge pushback” from the Justice Department.”

To be clear my assumption would not be that  Prince was making it up-I would strongly suspect he had these sources.

The mistake is the savvy MSM’s tendency to always try to assume the most banal explanation for anything-unless the subject is Hillary Clinton. This same tendency was a great help to Hitler years ago-for many years Hitler’s lies and gaslighting were taken completely at face value-he’s for peace but peace with strength, peace with honor for Germany…

Based on everything we know by now there’s no reason in the world to blandly assume a la Devlin Barrett that ‘Gee Prince was making up some whoppers but none of this really happened, so, anyway, let’s get coffee…’

I mean obviously this needs to be investigated but at this point it’s not logical to presume the most innocuous or banal explanation. Again and again over the last six and a half years that has proven to be the wrong tact to take.

But many folks are very slow learners..

FN: As demonstrated by the furor over Afghanistan where everyone seems to forget that Biden has implemented Trump’s agenda. Now if you don’t like it ok but if you weren’t criticizing it while Trump was there you have no credibility.

“I mean, it’s not like the foreign intelligence agencies leave a thank-you note after they’ve hacked and stolen your data,” Prince said to SiriusXM host Alex Marlow.

Prince claimed he had insider knowledge of the investigation that could help explain why FBI Director James Comey had to announce he was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s email server last week.”

Again I take him at his word here-that he-like Stone revealed to The Intercept the following year-had this insider knowledge.

FN: As we will see below, Stone and Prince had many, many communications over the course of the campaign-they had 67 calls just over a few months in the Spring of 2016. So there’s every reason to think they are singing from the same hymn book here-and that they discussed and compared notes many times during real time in October, 2016.

End FN

The idea that he did have it has far more explanatory power and is far more in line with our current understanding  of the fact pattern than the idea that Prince-or even Stone-were simply exaggerating. Perhaps you could say they are taking a page from their Master’s book and engaging in Truthful Hyperbole…

“Because of Weinergate and the sexting scandal, the NYPD started investigating it. Through a subpoena, through a warrant, they searched his laptop, and sure enough, found those 650,000 emails. They found way more stuff than just more information pertaining to the inappropriate sexting the guy was doing,” Prince claimed.

“They found State Department emails. They found a lot of other really damning criminal information, including money laundering, including the fact that Hillary went to this sex island with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Bill Clinton went there more than 20 times. Hillary Clinton went there at least six times,” he said.

“The amount of garbage that they found in these emails, of criminal activity by Hillary, by her immediate circle, and even by other Democratic members of Congress was so disgusting they gave it to the FBI, and they said, ‘We’re going to go public with this if you don’t reopen the investigation and you don’t do the right thing with timely indictments,’” Prince explained

“I believe – I know, and this is from a very well-placed source of mine at 1PP, One Police Plaza in New York – the NYPD wanted to do a press conference announcing the warrants and the additional arrests they were making in this investigation, and they’ve gotten huge pushback, to the point of coercion, from the Justice Department, with the Justice Department threatening to charge someone that had been unrelated in the accidental heart attack death of Eric Garner almost two years ago. That’s the level of pushback the Obama Justice Department is doing against actually seeking justice in the email and other related criminal matters,” Prince said.

Great. Now we need an investigation to discover the source

FN: Speaking of Eric Garner the NYPD’s-and NYFBI’s-outrage at the Obama Administration for taking the case against NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo to a federal court was a large part of it’s visceral opposition to Clinton’s 2016 campaign-as her DOJ would have been at least as tough on this case as the Obama DOJ had been.

Eric Dyson had provocatively suggested maybe even tougher. 

End FN

“There’s five different parts of the FBI conducting investigations into these things, with constant downdrafts from the Obama Justice Department. So in the, I hope, unlikely and very unfortunate event that Hillary Clinton is elected president, we will have a constitutional crisis that we have not seen since, I believe, 1860,” Prince declared.

Five different parts.. This source told Prince this?

FN: Again what the GOP leaning agents at NYPD and NYFBI considered a “constitutional crisis” would be holding cops who had grossly abused their power-like Pantaleo or Derek Chauvin accountable

End FN

Marlow asked Prince to clarify these revelations.

“NYPD was the first one to look at that laptop,” Prince elaborated. “Weiner and Huma Abedin, his wife – the closest adviser of Hillary Clinton for 20 years – have both flipped. They are cooperating with the government. They both have – they see potential jail time of many years for their crimes, for Huma Abedin sending and receiving and even storing hundreds of thousands of messages from the State Department server and from Hillary Clinton’s own homebrew server, which contained classified information. Weiner faces all kinds of exposure for the inappropriate sexting that was going on and for other information that they found.”

“So NYPD first gets that computer. They see how disgusting it is. They keep a copy of everything, and they pass a copy on to the FBI, which finally pushes the FBI off their chairs, making Comey reopen that investigation, which was indicated in the letter last week. The point being, NYPD has all the information, and they will pursue justice within their rights if the FBI doesn’t,” Prince contended.

Again this fits very well with what both Stone and Corsi independently verified in their own respective books-see Chapter Unknown Background.

“There is all kinds of criminal culpability through all the emails they’ve seen of that 650,000, including money laundering, underage sex, pay-for-play, and, of course, plenty of proof of inappropriate handling, sending/receiving of classified information, up to SAP level Special Access Programs,” he stated.

“The point being, fortunately, it’s not just the FBI; [there are] five different offices that are in the hunt for justice, but the NYPD has it as well,” Prince said, citing the Wall Street Journal reporting that has “exposed downdraft, back pressure from the Justice Department” against both the FBI and NYPD, in an effort to “keep the sunlight and the disinfecting effects of the truth and transparency from shining on this great evil that has gone on, and is slowly being exposed.”

“The Justice Department is trying to run out the clock, to elect Hillary Clinton, to prevent any real justice from being done,” he warned.

Prince reported that the other legislators involved in the case “have not been named yet,” and urged the NYPD to hold a press conference and name them.

“I wish they’d do it today,” he said. “These are the unusual sliding-door moments of history, that people can stand up and be counted, and make a real difference, and to save a Republic, save a Constitution that we actually need and love, that our forefathers fought and died for. For any cop that is aware of this level of wrongdoing, and they have veterans in their family, or deceased veterans in their family, they owe it to them to stand up, to stand and be counted today, and shine the light of truth on this great evil.”

“From what I understand, up to the commissioner or at least the chief level in NYPD, they wanted to have a press conference, and DOJ, Washington people, political appointees have been exerting all kinds of undue pressure on them to back down,” he added.

FN: There were the quotes in TruePundit that anti Clinton agents were threatening to leak the emails to Wikileaks if Comey didn’t do-what he ended up doing… See Chapter TruePundit

End FN

Then we get to Flynn’s April 25, 2018 interview where he opens up further regarding Emailgate starting with Bannon’s role-which, again, until Michael Wolff’s book almost everyone presumed was none, and which he insisted to HSPCI was none.

Pg 86

We then broach the topic of wether it was Russia who hacked the DNC, etc. During their flights Trump would ask all his aides if they thought it was Russia.

Pgs 86-87

But it appears that Flynn had acted skeptical it was Russia as it was what Trump  wanted to hear-elsewhere he made it clear that he did believe it was Russia.

FN: This is an evolution we also saw from Roger Stone regarding who hacked the DNC.

Again this hardly sounds like an ‘unconcerted’ effort to find Hillary’s emails. Elsewhere he attempts to minimize the importance he put in Leeden’s emails to him but this shows a quite different picture

Pg 87

As we read this passage once again reflect on the difference between a concerted and unconcerted effort to get Clinton’s 33,000 emails.

Flynn throws in not hearing anyone talk about calling Stone as if that were dispositive of anything…

More contortions to avoid saying the bald truth too baldly. It’s possible that when Trump asked him to go on a concerted effort to find Hillary’s emails, Flynn responded by going on a concerted effort to find Hillary’s emails, in fact it’s more than possible it’s likely he responded by going on a concerted effort to find Hillary’s emails.

Pg 88

Again a lot of bobbing and weaving to obscure Flynn’s admission that like Giuliani he spoke to contacts at the FBI about finding Her Emails-that’s how concerted the search was. Like Rudy, Flynn would emphasize he spoke to retired agents. But again, according to what Comey in his post Comey Letter conversation with Loretta Lynch, many senior FBI people stayed on past retirement. So paradoxically “retired” doesn’t necessarily mean inactive.

So even if this gloss by Flynn-Giuliani is true-they only spoke to retired agents-this isn’t exculpatory as many senior retired agents just kept coming to work and plotting to take down THAT WOMAN-you suspect these are the folks who hated the Clintons ever since Bill had the temerity to defeat their preferred candidate in 1992-George Bush Sr.

OTOH Roger Stone’s claim in his Intercept interview that the agents who pressured Comey were middle level-rather than top-is false-again Comey said the problem was that they were very senior people who stayed on past retirement and so there was little that could be done to them.

Speaking of Rudy:

Again this certainty that ‘someone’ had the missing emails among both Flynn and other top Trump campaign senior aides is the same certainty in Leeden’s original executive summary.

FN: My strong assumption is this was no accident-likely most top GOP co-conspirators in the party became familiar with Leeden’s proposal-after all she was Grassley’s aide. It’s very likely that she carpet bombed her entire Rolodex of GOP co-conspirators with her 25 page proposal to Get Her Emails.

Flynn admits to talking to his own DIA contacts about Clinton’s emails.

Pg 89

FN: Could the redacted name after Leeden be Schmitz? Regarding Sessions, it’s been totally memory holed after the Daily Beast’s 2018 orphan scoop that per Jason Wilson, Papadopolous told Sessions about what Mifsud said. More on this below.

So while Devlin Barrett now insists-apropos of his waving hands-that surely Rudy just made up the idea he had sources inside the FBI-Flynn believed that when he said something you could take it to the bank. Just so-it’s logical to assume Rudy was telling the truth here.

FN: Regarding the predictable rejoinder-‘You believe Giuliani?!’-note long time defense attorney Seth Abramson’s point that with people as dishonest as Trump and his GOP co-conspirators you should believe them only in the rare cases when what they say is actually to their disadvantage.

The fact that Rudy doesn’t name drop just proves he’s smart-in this regard he’s smart anyway-as it provides the plausible deniability that the Devlin Barretts and Ken Dilanians of the world can latch onto-surely a duck is not a duck, surely it was all just Trump fooling about Russia hacking Clinton’s emails and Rudy making stuff up.

UPDATE:

When Fox News Generals Boasted of Brokering Russian Meetings with Mike Flynn

“It’s not certain that Vallely was the guy who sent the Vallely article to Flynn, but it’s a very good bet.

In addition to being a birther and having called for an uprising against Obama years before 2016, Vallely has predictably embraced QAnon. Vallely also signed a very recent letter similarly invoking apocalypse under a Democratic President.

By length of name (the redaction appears longer than 7 characters), I don’t think Vallely is the retired General and Fox contributor referenced in that same interview, one who introduced Flynn to another person who thought he had access to secret emails. Unlike the respect that Flynn had for the General addressing Russia, Flynn seemed more skeptical of this General and his associate, calling the General’s writings “conspiratorial” and the associate’s theories “a lot of B.S.”

Still, the pro-Russian General was representing to others that he and Flynn had reached out to Russians, and on precisely the Russia-Turkey-Syria nexus that Flynn would continue pursuing as he prepared to take over as National Security Advisor.

End UPDATE

Now back to Bannon.

Pg 89

Then Flynn makes a pretty stunning claim.

Pg 90

This is literally the first time I’ve ever come across the suggestion of a Bannon connection to Wikileaks. Yet it’s unclear if the Mueller team ever followed up on this apparent stunner.

Compare this testimony by Flynn with what Bannon himself would later tell a federal court: he saw Roger Stone as the campaign’s access point to Wikileaks. 

One point that clearly jumps out is that Bannon paints a picture that directly contradicts what Flynn told Mueller in the quote above.

“Bannon, 65, denied that the campaign had direct contact with WikiLeaks or its founder, Julian Assange, who released emails obtained by Russian hackers that were damaging to Trump’s rival Hillary Clinton. Instead, he said, he came to understand that Stone, a self-described dirty trickster, was the key intermediary.

“I was led to believe he had a relationship with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange,” said Bannon, sitting in the witness box in black jacket, two black shirts and grey trousers. “He had a relationship, or told me he had a relationship with WikiLeaks. It was something I think he would frequently mention or talk about, when we talked about other things.”

The begging question is what is the predicate that led Flynn to believe Bannon himself had a W connection-a claim that has not been made anywhere else so far as I know?

But in reading Flynn’s testimony here-complements of Buzzfeed’s dogged pursuit via FOIA requests-it’s sort of stunning the extent to which Flynn over again refers to The Insightful Steve Bannon Being Insightful about Her Emails.

We noted-via the Emptywheel link above-that in the last batch released in response to Buzzfeed-that the only new revelation was Bannon had prior knowledge of the coming Wikileaks dump of DNC emails.

This -for context was three and a half weeks before he joined the campaign. What the unredacted portion doesn’t tell us is how he obtained this prior knowledge. The typical facile savvy assumption would just be that he overheard Trump and Stone talking about it, end of story.

But Flynn’s revelations suggest he was in deeper than just overhearing it by chance. For one thing-contrary to what Bannon told HSPCI-he was in regular conversation with Stone-by phone, email, text, etc-for months before joining the campaign about the emails.

But add to this Flynn’s tantalizing revelations about Bannon’s role.

Pg 91

Again the recurring idea that Bannon seemed to have insight. Again Flynn was the guy who worked with Smith and Leeden to find the emails-one thing that was always crystal clear was Flynn’s own central role in the Hunt for Her Emails. After hemming and hawing on pg 60-in an earlier interview-as we later saw he admitted in a subsequent interview that he did indeed make-‘probably would have” a ‘concerted effort’ to find Her Emails.

And he went to Bannon for insight?

As is known, Trump pardoned Bannon in January 2021-soon after he fomented the Insurrection. This after he had previously excommunicated Bannon from TrumpWorld post Fast and Furious.

At the time Marcy Wheeler argued this showed that at the end of the day Bannon was the Irreplaceable One. 

“If it just excuses his fraud charges in SDNY, it’ll end that federal prosecution, leave him open for state prosecution on the same crimes plus civil suits, and/or make him the star witness against his co-defendants.”

“If it is broader, it will cover some of Bannon’s activities leading up to the insurrection, something that is likely to make a Trump conviction in the Senate more likely (as the Bannon pardon may all by itself).”

“One way or another, it probably doesn’t end Bannon’s legal woes (there’s also an investigation into his foreign influence peddling). Plus, there’s still the matter of his grand jury testimony in the Mueller investigation, just some of which was unsealed for the Roger Stone trial.”

“But Bannon, alone among Trump’s closest associates, got a pardon after the coup attempt made such pardons more risky.”

“Which makes the reasons for the pardon all the more interesting.”

UPDATE: Bannon’s new indictment 

Indeed-in light of Flynn’s recurring theme of the Insightful Steve Bannon on all matters But Her Emails-it might even be more interesting than Ms. Wheeler herself had imagined when she wrote this.

Indeed, Flynn on pg 91 suggested that Bannon also had foreknowledge of the coming Comey Letter which would make sense.

FN: Indeed, what has become crystal clear is that a large swath of GOPland knew about Huma’s emails over a month prior to the Comey Letter-indeed prior to Comey’s learning of the emails-which is not to forget that Comey himself was long a member of good standing in GOPland-going back to his time on D’Amato’s Senate Whitewater boondoggle.

Again as we saw in Chapter The Previous Unknown Background, Corsi argues that if not for Smith they never would have gotten Huma’s emails on Weiner’s laptop.

We also know as a matter of fact that Prince was partially funding Smith’s efforts. We also know that Bannon was  Prince’s-who donated three quarters of a million dollars the last few months to the Trump campaign alone-closest contact on the campaign.

But if we assume Bannon had such deep insight and knowledge-and we should assume it-the question is how, and in attempting to answer let’s not forget Cambridge Analytica-remember the emails he received from the Mercers about working with Wikileaks?

“Julian Assange confirms Cambridge Analytica sought WikiLeaks’ help.”

It’s also important to remember that in 2014, Bannon was effectively Alexander Nix’s boss.

In other words:  Julian Assange confirms Cambridge Analytica Steve Bannon sought WikiLeaks’ help.

In this context “Cambridge Analytica” and “Steve Bannon” are one in the same-like  two thirds of the Holy Trinity…

Regarding the notion of a Clinton Email Recovery Plan-it’s important to remember just how deep and varied was CA’s actual skill set.

So as to why Bannon was, based on public knowledge, the earliest recipient of Leeden’s But Her Emails Executive Summary there are two tracks to explain this-his role as head of Breitbart and as head of CA and Nix’s boss-and close confidant of the Mercers-who we know were all in on the Clinton Email Recovery Plan.

Seth Abramson documents the amount of Israeli intelligence working on CA-and how somehow, these Israeli intelligence agents had gotten hold of all these emails off Nigerian servers.

“In estimating the cost of the services Zamel might have provided the Trump campaign, the Guardian offers a report establishing that $2 million—the exact amount Nader pays Zamel immediately after the 2016 election—was Cambridge Analytica’s total fee for the complex, large-scale, last-minute general-election campaign it had been hired to conduct in Nigeria in 2015. During its campaign in Nigeria, Cambridge Analytica represented to its client that its intelligence-gathering partners for the project actually worked for Israeli intelligence; some of the firm’s own staff, speaking months later to the Guardian, said they were surprised to learn that Israelis working on the project, whether governmental or nongovernmental, were in possession of a large trove of hacked materials from a Nigerian server.”

Location 2719-2743

Regarding Zamel it’s important to appreciate how deep his Israeli intelligence ties go-as Seth documents in granular detail.

Perhaps then the many conversations Stone and Bannon had about the emails-including prior to Bannon joining the campaign- were a lot more than Bannon simply humoring him?

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21031656-16th-mueller-foia-release#document/p268/a2049057

pg 268

As for Prince-again Bannon was his closet contact on the campaign he’d donated so much to-per SSCI, Prince and Stone engaged in 67 phone calls in April-May of 2016 alone. 

He also had 67 phone calls with Manafort’s minion Rick Gates which was 3 more calls than Stone shared with Manafort himself during this time.

Yet Bannon does everything to marginalize Stone’s role in the campaign. Sorry-senior presidential campaign aides much less campaign managers don’t have 200 phone calls with someone over two months just to humor them and not hurt their feelings.

Regarding CA it’s interesting also to note that Leeden frames her proposal as coming from the logistical company Global Scan.

Did either Team Mueller-or the counterintel investigation into Russian interference-look into Global Scan? If not why not…

Back to Michael Flynn in Mueller FOIA transcripts #14

As we saw above, Flynn previously dissembled on wether Russia was behind the DNC hack. This passage is very interesting in terms of what he said in conversations with Trump and other senior campaign aides on plane rides subsequent to the DNC dump and Russia if you’re listening. 

Pg 95

The first paragraph begins with the canonical agnosticism the GOP co-conspirators often use when they can’t deny something incriminating outright-‘We didn’t care where it came from we just wanted them released.’

Even this admits they were willing and eager to use emails stolen by Russian intelligence. Though this show of agnosticism differs from Leeden’s Executive Summary where she made it clear that her preference was to get it from Russian intelligence as Peter Smith himself would later also make clear.

In the final paragraph he admitted to speaking to dark web contacts-among others. .  But of course he did-this was his and Smith’s joint venture.

To verify if the Russians had the emails in Flynn’s own words.

FN: Again she emailed this to Bannon back in June, 2015 before Trump’s meteoric rise to the top of the polls.

FN 2.0: Again we see the various elements of Leeden’s Manifesto became articles of faith in GOPLand like that Russia had Hillary’s emails. 

Note this link was tweeted by Dan Scavino, Trump’s social media director, in early May 2016

Kremlin has Hillary’s emails. Russia has 20,000 emails stolen from her secret home server. @IngrahamAngle #Trump2016 https://t.co/HvFlFBo2RT

— Dan Scavino Jr.🇺🇸🦅 (@DanScavino) May 12, 2016

There might be a more optimum place for this link..

End FN 2.0

Again Flynn had-back on page 60 as we documented above-insisted that even if the campaign was interested in the emails they didn’t search for them themselves but just hoped they’d come to them like manna from Clinton Derangement Syndrome Heaven; or at least if they did search for them the search wasn’t ‘concerted’-leaving open the possibility of an ‘unconcerted’ search.

But now it sounds pretty concerted-how much more concerted could it get? While when he previously discussed the source of the emails, Flynn waxed agnostic as to their origin-probably because Trump would be royally pissed if he said it was Russia-now Flynn admitted that he was given an assignment to find the source of the eemails and essentially verify wether it was Russia.

He also admitted that he spoke to people on the dark web about Russia. 

FN: Again this was he and Smith’s joint project-that Schmitz also shared.

Next-we get to Barbara Leeden.

Pg 118.

Sure would be interesting to know whose name was redacted here-was it Smith? Schmitz? Yet another Russian Conspiracy co-conspirator?

Pg 119

Remember Flynn’s claim there was no concerted effort to find HRC’s emails? Ok so we can corroborate the redacted individual above was NOT Smith.

Pg 119

FN: As Smith is mentioned by name here-the only time in Flynn’s interview-clearly he wasn’t the redacted individual  Flynn mentioned above along with Leeden. So maybe it was Schmitz?

Why it was only one time is curious… Hopefully there were many other times Smith’s name was mentioned in the redacted parts-or in the 302s.

So maybe this was ‘concerted’ but no need to worry about it as it contained a lot of information but it wasn’t a report. 

As for the claim that he didn’t tell the campaign-or didn’t remember if he did-it doesn’t even approach passing the laugh test. He himself has described how obsessed Trump and his senior aides were with Clinton’s emails. As we saw above, in May 2016 Trump’s social media director tweeted out an article claiming Russia already had Clinton’s emails-a very widely held view in the campaign-and all of GOPland-at the time, and, indeed, Leeden had already asserted that Russia ‘probably’ had Clinton’s emails a year earlier in her June, 2015 email to Bannon.

Look-if you’re on the phone with Roger Stone 200 times over two months-as Manafort-Gates-Prince were-it’d be hard not to touch on this at some point.

All the GOP co-conspirators play this game-either they don’t remember or they forgot as it was so unimportant or they did but they didn’t tell anyone. George Papadopoulos maintained that absurd fiction too-and nobody in the MSM, or the elected Democrats, or even the Mueller team, seems to have ever heard of the names Mashburn or  Jason Wilson

FN: The Coffee Boy TOLD WILSON he told Jeff Sessions about what Mifsud said.

Mashburn PDF

Above I suggested that Leeden might be the key to answering the question of who Schmitz’s agent was. What’s interesting and notable about Leeden’s proposal is that she frames it as a proposal from the company Global Scan Services for a CLIENT.

So is this the client that Schmitz was working for? But while we can quibble on who the ‘client’ was what’s clear is that the entire Crusade for Her Emails-again a crusade that was the obsession of not just the Trump campaign but the entire 2016 Republican party-closely followed the contours of Leeden’s initial proposal-that she sent to many-likely most of the top GOP party operatives back in 2015. Again the earliest recipient we’re aware of was actually Steve Bannon.

As we saw above from the Flynn interviews the entire party took it as an article of faith that the emails ‘were out there’ and likely in the hands of Russian intelligence just as she laid out in her Executive Summary

FN: Regarding my emphasis that But Her Emails is a story of an Ahablike obsession not just of the Trump campaign but the entire GOP note Flynn’s revelation above that the RNC also had prior knowledge of the coming Wikileaks’ dump of the DNC emails. The source was likely the same as the Trump campaign-Roger Stone and-though his role has been obscured and forgotten-Papadpolous.

How much was Stone’s view back in April that the Russians had Clinton’s emails informed by the very much glorified Coffee Boy? To be sure it was also revealed-per Rick Gates’ interviews-that Stone knew about Guccifer 2.0 considerably prior to when G2 first was reported on in mid June, 2016.

FN: Recall EW’s piece on Stone’s remarkable interest  Donald Trump’s foreign policy

End FN

Regarding Peter Smith’s project an interesting question is why the Mueller FOIA  Flynn transcripts released have so little regarding Flynn’s relationship with the Late Peter Smith-who again, per Jerome Corsi effectively won the election for Trump by getting  Huma’s emails to the NYPD where they they ended up on her unlucky husband’s laptop.

FN: Chapter The Unreported Background

The answer hopefully is that it’s in the redacted parts and 302s-and/or in the counterintel.

Do these observations belong below?

Pg 119 is the only point in this transcript that refers to Smith by name.

Above, I expressed great skepticism that Smith didn’t take up Leeden’s manifesto until late August, 2016 as has been claimed-a claim that the publicly released Mueller transcripts make no effort to deny or corroborate. While the unredacted Mueller FOIA transcripts don’t expand much on the Smith-Flynn relationship they were already talking-plotting-in late 2015. 

“A veteran Republican activist whose quest to obtain Hillary Clinton’s emails from hackers dominated the final months of his life struck up a professional relationship with Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser to President Trump, as early as 2015, and told associates during the presidential campaign that he was using the retired general’s connections to help him on the email project.”

“U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley, a Chicago Democrat and the only Illinois member of Congress on an intelligence committee, said Friday he read the stories about Smith with great interest. “It is obviously an area that I think this (House Intelligence) committee should investigate,” he said.

He read them with great interest and thought HSPCI should investigate and then what happened? Like Nadler’s interest in the leaks of the anti Clinton rogue FBI agents and his vow to get to the bottom of it back in 2017-2018, we’ve never heard anything about it again.

There are many questions you’d like to ask this ‘business associate’ of Smith’s but first and foremost is: what did Flynn tell them about the Moscow trip?

“People who knew Mr. Smith, including former Wall Street financier Charles Ortel and freelance writer Tom Lipscomb, describe his quest as all-consuming, and say he believed Mrs. Clinton’s emails would reveal a vast amount of incriminating information. Mrs. Clinton described the 33,000 emails that her lawyers deleted from her personal server as relating to routine matters such as yoga.”

Yet despite all this information in this WSJ piece they then say with typical MSM framing that:

“How much of Mr. Smith’s quest was undertaken with the knowledge of anyone in Mr. Trump’s orbit is a question investigators have been probing for more than a year.”

This after by their own account Smith and Flynn started a working relationship in 2015 and even spoke the day Flynn went to Russia to eat dinner with Putin and Jill Stein and after in another article the Journal reported that Smith sent a proposal to hack Hillary’s emails  to Flynn-Bannon-Kellyann Conway-Sean Spicer, et al. Yet we still aren’t sure if the Trump campaign knew anything about Smith’s work?!

Recalling again the MSM’s savvy tendency that Michael Wolff remarked on-discussed above-where Beltway journalists negotiate against themselves regarding what they know.

Again in Smith’s operation you see all the elements in Leeden’s original proposal-of course, Leeden and Smith in fact were working together. The official version taken at face value is that this only started in late August after Trump’s ‘Russia, if you’re listening’ moment-but it’s clear that Smith was already part of The Hunt For Her Emails in late 2015.

Another aspect was Smith was paying hackers-including hackers with Russian intel connections.

“Mr. Smith formed a company called KLS Research as a vehicle for his project, the Journal previously reported. He reached out to businessmen as financial backers, including Maine real-estate developer Michael Liberty, Florida-based investor John “Jack” Purcell and Chicago financier Patrick Haynes. They were named in an email reviewed by the Journal as among a group of people who pledged to contribute $100,000 to the effort, along with $50,000 of Mr. Smith’s own money.”

“Messrs. Haynes and Purcell didn’t respond to requests for comment. An attorney for Mr. Liberty said his client never donated but may have been asked. The Journal couldn’t determine the identity of a fourth name in the email.”

“Mr. Lipscomb also told the Journal he believed Mr. Smith was soliciting money from friends, including himself, under false pretenses. In an interview, he said he now thinks Mr. Smith was a “deluded old man” who had “bet the farm” on misguided efforts to find the emails.”

Except he actually wasn’t deluded-ultimately he did catch the car as his intel connections led to the Comey Letter which won it for Trump.

This is one more reason to suspect foul play ‘whatsoever’ -if Corsi is right Smith was potentially a very dangerous man as the man who won it for Trump. Perhaps the powers that be freaked when he gave that interview. Place this point below. Think about it: it’s much easier to dismiss someone as a ‘deluded old man’ after they’re dead

FN: As we saw in the Unreported Background chapter, Corsi states Lipscomb initially introduced him to Peter Smith.

UPDATE: EW’s piece on ‘Happy Russian students’ and the SSCI communications from Smith-pg 795…

AKA Peter Smith’s Penchant for Secrecy

The day after Smith sent his email on the ‘Clinton Email Reconaissance Initiative” to Flynn-Bannon, etc he made some major cash withdrawals from his own bank account. 

“Now, BuzzFeed News has reviewed documents showing that FBI agents and congressional investigators have zeroed in on transactions Smith made right as his effort to procure Clinton’s emails heated up. Just a day after he finished a report suggesting he was working with Trump campaign officials, for example, he transferred $9,500 from an account he had set up to fund the email project to his personal account, later taking out more than $4,900 in cash. According to a person with direct knowledge of Smith’s project, the Republican operative stated that he was prepared to pay hackers “many thousands of dollars” for Clinton’s emails — and ultimately did so.”

So whatever came of these investigators who reportedly zeroed in on these transactions?

As Labor Day approached, Smith assembled a group of people including experts in technology, lawyers, and even a Russian-speaking investigator to figure out how to obtain Clinton’s emails, according to the Journal. On the Friday before the Labor Day weekend, Smith incorporated a company called KLS Research. In a proposal Smith put together describing the effort to obtain the emails, he named the company as the “preferred vehicle” for the research into Clinton’s email, and Smith would tell Tait that KLS Research would also help “avoid campaign reporting.”

Smith and his longtime business partner, John Szobocsan, were the two signers for a bank account linked to KLS Research. The men were partners in other private equity ventures, and had known one another for decades. Tait wrote that Szobocsan joined at least one of the calls with Smith. Neither Szobocsan nor his lawyer returned detailed messages seeking comment.

Soon after Labor Day, Smith appears to have finished an operational plan, which included the names of top Trump campaign officials, some of whom have denied speaking with Smith anytime during the campaign. Smith’s report is dated Sept. 7.

Note that Szobocasan is the same business partner together with Smith who spoke to Flynn just before leaving for the Putin  Summit in December, 2015.

FN: JS was also the business partner who claimed Smith was initially uninterested in Leeden’s proposal.

UPDATE: In late 2018, a WSJ piece reported that Smith’s activities were an ‘area of expanding interest’ for Mueller and that Szobocasan himself was a focus.

But as usual, this is yet another potentially very pregnant lead that we’ve never heard a word about again. Szobocsan isn’t mentioned in any of the Mueller transcripts released in response to Jason Leopold’s FOIA requests.

End UPDATE

“The next day, Smith withdrew $9,500 from the KLS Research account and deposited it into his personal bank account, both held at Northern Trust. From there, Smith took out a little more than $4,900 in cash and sent checks to an accountant and an LLC controlled by a private real estate company. Later in September, Smith made withdrawals of $500 and $700 from KLS Research.”

“These transactions came to light after Northern Trust received a subpoena from the FBI for Smith’s records last December. The subpoena specifically sought information about the $9,500 withdrawal from KLS Research’s account.”

“After scouring nine accounts that Smith controlled, Northern Trust turned over documents showing 88 suspicious cash withdrawals totaling about $140,000 between January 2016 and April 2017, including a $3,000 withdrawal six days after the election. Northern Trust found these transactions suspicious because officials could not determine the purpose of the withdrawals and because some of them took place over the time Smith was engaged in his project to obtain Clinton’s emails. Many of the cash transactions, the bank noted, were less than $10,000, small enough not to trigger an automatic alert to the government. After receiving the subpoena, the bank sent a report to Treasury’s financial crimes unit, which shared its findings with the FBI, special counsel Robert Mueller, and Senate Intelligence Committee investigators.”

More fascinating questions that we heard were being investigated which we never saw the answers to:

“Now, according to the three US law enforcement officials, Smith remains an important figure in the government’s investigation. FBI and Senate Intelligence Committee investigators are trying to follow the money to learn whether Smith paid anyone connected with the Russian government. The FBI suspects Smith used some of the cash to fund his operation and paid hackers who provided him emails, according to two bureau sources who told BuzzFeed News that view is based on a close review of his banking activity and interviews with other people.”

Separately, investigators working for special counsel Mueller have also interviewed people who Smith tried to recruit and others who worked on his operation to obtain Clinton’s emails, according to the three law enforcement sources and a fourth person with direct knowledge of the interviews. Mueller’s team has also tried to determine if Flynn assisted Smith in his operation, according to two FBI agents. They added that Smith’s suspicious financial transactions are key to that effort.

In a first-person account published on the website Lawfare last year, Tait, the former GCHQ information security officer, said he warned Smith about the Clinton email operation.

“If this dark web contact is a front for the Russian government, you really don’t want to play this game. But [Smith and Szobocsan] were not discouraged. They appeared to be convinced of the need to obtain Clinton’s private emails and make them public, and they had a reckless lack of interest in whether the emails came from a Russian cut-out,” he wrote. “I never found out who Smith’s contact on the ‘Dark Web’ was. It was never clear to me whether this person was merely someone trying to dupe Smith out of his money, or a Russian front, and it was never clear to me how they represented their own credentials to Smith.”

“Smith, in his only press interview before he died, told the Journal that he and his team found five groups of hackers who claimed to have Clinton’s emails, including two groups he said were Russians.”

“Smith also told the newspaper that he never intended to pay for emails obtained by hackers — a contention the person with direct knowledge of Smith’s plan disputed, saying Smith did pay for what he was told were Clinton’s emails. This source also said that Smith purposely omitted any mention of paying hackers from his written plan for the operation.”

“Smith’s quest to find Clinton’s emails appears to have fizzled. He never released any of the email samples he reportedly received, because he could not verify them. About 10 days after being interviewed by the Journal, Smith went to a Minnesota hotel room and killed himself.”

Again I have to sharply disagree with this gloss-Smith’s quest did not fail-again he was able to engineer the Comey Letter that won it for Trump. As for the interest ‘fizzling’ it appears that even after the election-that Trump won thanks to Smith’s own chicanery-his interest continued even then until ultimately claiming success in finding them just 10 days before he showed up dead in a Chicago hotel room-more below.

Then there was an email about a scholarship fund… for Russian students

“Longtime Republican activist Peter W. Smith raised at least $100,000 from unidentified donors for a “scholarship fund…for Russian students” as part of an effort to obtain emails stolen by hackers from Hillary Clinton ahead of the 2016 presidential election, The Wall Street Journal reports.”

“New details revealed by the Journal on Sunday suggest Smith’s activities were far more extensive than previously known and may very well have involved Russian figures. Smith is said to have collected at least $100,000 from four wealthy donors and gone to great lengths to keep their identities secret, using encrypted email accounts and having his associates communicate with him by using the “Draft” folder in a Gmail account they all shared under the pseudonym “Robert Tyler.” Another $50,000 that went toward the so-called “Clinton Email Reconnaissance Initiative” was provided by Smith himself, according to the report, though it was not immediately clear if he acquired the money from other individuals.”

As we saw from the Mueller FOIA transcripts above, Erik Prince partially funded Smith’s “Clinton Email Reconnaissance Initiative.”

But again note how closely this follows the contours and outline of the initial Leeden Executive Summary.

One email reportedly referenced plans to give part of the money raised to a scholarship fund for Russian students. “This $100k total with the $50k received from you will allow us to fund the Washington Scholarship Fund for the Russian students for the promised $150K,” the Journal quoted the email as saying. The writer was identified only as “Rob,” and there does not appear to be any scholarship fund with that name offering assistance to Russian students. The email went on to include the cryptic message: “The students are very pleased with the email releases they have seen, and are thrilled with their educational advancement opportunities.” The email reportedly came shortly after WikiLeaks began releasing hacked Democratic emails.”

EW has also written about these ‘Russian students’ and their ‘scholarship fund.’

The article also relies on documents, which it describes to include emails and court records, including:

• Court records involving Smith associate John Szobocsan’s efforts to get Smith’s estate to repay him for legal fees associated with three interviews with the Mueller team and an August grand jury appearance (which is pretty good evidence of Mueller’s focus, though not why).
• Correspondence showing Smith asking associates to “folder,” writing drafts in a Gmail account under the fake name of Robert Tyler, that both the associates and Smith had access to.
• “[A]n email in the ‘Robert Tyler’ [foldering] account [showing] Mr. Smith obtained $100,000 from at least four financiers as well as a $50,000 contribution from Mr. Smith himself.” The email was dated October 11, 2016 and has the subject line, “Wire Instructions—Clinton Email Reconnaissance Initiative.” It came from someone calling himself “ROB,” describing the funding as supporting “the Washington Scholarship Fund for the Russian students.” The email also notes, “The students are very pleased with the email releases they have seen, and are thrilled with their educational advancement opportunities.” The WSJ states that Ortel is not among the funders named in the email, which means they know who the other four funders are (if one or more were a source for the story, it might explain why WSJ is not revealing that really critical piece of news).

The WSJ really bolloxes describing the significance of the timing of this email as coming,

just days after WikiLeaks and the website DCLeaks began releasing emails damaging to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and four days after the U.S. government publicly warned that Russia was attempting to interfere in the U.S. election

“What it means is that it came just four days after the Podesta emails first started coming out, suggesting that the reference to Russian students is actually code for happiness about the emails already being released by the Russians.”

Marcy Wheeler than remarks on the fact that while Smith clearly had a penchant for secrecy he wasn’t so good at execution-after all he was 80 years old.

All of this leads me to be more interested in where the methods adopted imperfectly by this 80 year old came from than that he did. An obvious candidate is Chuck Johnson, whose cooperation with the Smith rat-fuck is detailed in the Politico article, and whose businesses have all been shutting down in recent months, and whose defense attorney did not respond to a question from me last week about whether he still represents Johnson. Though Johnson, and his Nazi friend living in Ukraine, Weev, are better at operational security than what the WSJ describes here.”

Speaking of Chuck Johnson this is how he represented his relationship in 2016 to Smith to Politico:

“In another leaked email, Smith forwarded a link to a story from GotNews, a website founded by Johnson, accusing McCarthy of carrying on an affair with North Carolina Rep. Renee Ellmers. The leak also includes an email in which Johnson provided Smith with Boyle’s contact information. Boyle and others at Breitbart aggressively covered the alleged affair, and McCarthy withdrew from the speaker’s race. (Boyle referred questions to Breitbart spokesman Chad Wilkinson, who declined to comment. Porter—who worked with Smith and George Conway to promote Clinton sex scandals back in the ’90s—did not respond to requests for comment.)

Johnson said he and Smith stayed in touch, discussing “tactics and research” regularly throughout the presidential campaign, and that Smith sought his help tracking down Clinton’s emails. “He wanted me to introduce him to Bannon, to a few others, and I sort of demurred on some of that,” Johnson said. “I didn’t think his operation was as sophisticated as it needed to be, and I thought it was good to keep the campaign as insulated as possible.”

Instead, Johnson said, he put the word out to a “hidden oppo network” of right-leaning opposition researchers to notify them of the effort. Johnson declined to provide the names of any of the members of this “network,” but he praised Smith’s ambition.

“The magnitude of what he was trying to do was kind of impressive,” Johnson said. “He had people running around Europe, had people talking to Guccifer.” (U.S. intelligence agencies have linked the materials provided by “Guccifer 2.0”—an alias that has taken credit for hacking the Democratic National Committee and communicated with Republican operatives, including Trump confidant Roger Stone—to Russian government hackers.)

The claim that Johnson “kind of demurred on some of that” is contradicted by the  SSCI report-finally released in 2020. The SSCI Russia investigation turned up an email Johnson sent Smith where he got quite nasty, apparently on behalf of: the uniquely insightful Steve Bannon. 

Pg 800:

Pg 801:

So Johnson lied-a GOP co-conspirator lying? I know didn’t see that coming-he had totally read Bannon in and on October 24-just 4 days before the Comey Letter-Bannon-Johnson were trying to shakedown the now Late Peter Smith. Interesting that Johnson declared “we do not give a rats ass what happens to you” and what happened to Smith was he turned up dead in a Chicago hotel room just 10 days after he told the WSJ he had finally found the deleted Clinton emails. But much more on this below.

As we saw in Chapter Unreported Background there was a real rivalry between Stone and Johnson-over who got credit for orchestrating Trump’s showing up at the second debate with the Clinton accusers on his arm. Perhaps it extended to Smith-who was Stone-Corsi’ co-conspirator. What all this points to is that within the GOP Crusade for Her Emails in 2016 there were also real nasty rivalries.

Here’s what SSCI says regarding Smith’s ‘Russian students.’

Pg 794:

As for Tait, he actually sat for an interview with the HSPCI in late 2017.

Overall, this interview is rather disappointing-unless there was more testimony in closed session not yet released. Most of the 81 pages is run by the GOP that then led the committee. You have to go almost 60 pages in for any Democratic questioners and then they fail to focus on the main event instead following the GOP’s lead and asking Tait about Christopher Steele-a diversionary GOP obsession not relevant to what really matters in Tait’s story.

Tait had no firsthand knowledge of the Steele Dossier-but he had made a somewhat critical comment at the time it was released-that it was raw intelligence without context.

FN: Which as a purely descriptive matter was certainly true-it was raw intelligence, though this is something that Steele-and Glenn Simpson, etc-had pointed out. It was those who wanted to declare the Dossier-and therefore the entire Russia Collusion investigation-a hoax who failed to note that it was raw intelligence not a finished product.

End FN

This was the GOP preoccupation as it diverted from the actions of the Trump campaign and the GOP co-conspirators in their willingness to collude-and indeed conspire-with Russia.

There was therefore only a few interesting exchanges. One was that Smith not only clearly had deep connections to the Trump campaign but also the RNC.

Pg 22:

Pg 23:

This corroborates Flynn’s Mueller testimony that the RNC also had prior knowledge of the DNC hack and leak-the RNC knew the leak was coming beforehand.

However, a major shortcoming of this interview is that the questions focus more on ‘who and how many people were involved’-which Tait states he was told little about and few about the details of the operation itself-which he testified he actually did hear a lot of details about.

So they asked him a number of questions about a subject he doesn’t have many answers to-who exactly was involved- while asking far fewer questions about what he did have answers to-the details of the operation itself.

He does touch on a major subject matter of this chapter-a contractor Smith might have been working for.

Pg 21

Then there was the very detailed email that Tait received that he suspected may not have been meant for his eyes.

Pg 21:

Well someone did as Erik Prince claims he was unable to authenticate them-and Schmitz  shopped them to the FBI. Tait never learned anything further as he declined to sign the disclosure agreement, alas.

FN: Again, I conjecture a la Seth Abramson that Smith and Schmitz worked together on the search.

But this is a crucial point on pg 24:

Pg 25:

Essentially the official oppositional research for the Trump campaign.

FN: It has to be said that in the sense that Smith’s operation was essentially the official opposition research team of the Trump campaign it’s perhaps the most successful opposition research team in campaign history-as it produced the Comey Letter-the game winning field goal for the Trump campaign.

And as we saw above, Smith had deep ties to the RNC-which also had prior knowledge of the dump of the DNC emails just before the convention.

Pg 39:

This underscores my point above that Russian Collusion and Conspiracy wasn’t just a story about Trump but the Republican party. Indeed, it’s a pretty logical conjecture that the RNC also had prior knowledge of the Wikileaks dump of the Podesta emails.

FN: Or for that matter of the Comey Letter.

UPDATE: For just one example of this logical conjecture being proven correct see Chapter Devin Nunes.

UPDATE: In Chapter Devin Nunes we see that Nunes already had knowledge of Huma’s emails on September 29; so the big picture is the senior GOP poobahs had prior knowledge of both the DNC hack and the Comey Letter.

What’s striking about the email-that Tait maybe received by mistake-is its granularity.

Pg 51:

It recalls the granularity of the Leeden Manifesto. Yet another good question the HSPCI didn’t ask Tait about was Barbara Leeden-at the minimum did her name come up.

But again this interview is notable more for what they didn’t ask than what they did. The Dems showed their typical tendency-of being more interested in responding to GOP diversionary tactics than advancing the ball for themselves-aka the Dems as usual went prevent defense.

FN Nixed

Finally regarding the question of Peter Smith’s alleged suicide there is more than a little historical irony as Smith himself was a major proponent of conspiracy theories of how Vince Foster really died. 

The only difference is that questions about Smith’s suicide are more plausible than Vince Foster’s ever was.

I honestly don’t know how common it is for a suicide to leave a letter with the headline ‘NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER.’

As has been noted, no one who knew Smith found him depressed much less suicidal in the days and weeks before his apparent suicide.

When I spoke to Peter Smith I had no indication that he was ill or planning to take his own life.

— Shane Harris (@shaneharris) July 13, 2017

And Harris spoke to him just 10 days prior to the alleged suicide.

Charles Ortel  and  Jerome Corsi’s buddy Tom Lipscomb-who introduced Corsi to Smith-also saw no such signs-and he knew Smith pretty well.

“People who knew Mr. Smith, including former Wall Street financier Charles Ortel and freelance writer Tom Lipscomb, describe his quest as all-consuming, and say he believed Mrs. Clinton’s emails would reveal a vast amount of incriminating information. Mrs. Clinton described the 33,000 emails that her lawyers deleted from her personal server as relating to routine matters such as yoga.

So why would Smith kill himself?

The detailed notes he left behind spoke to failing health since January. Also in January, his son David entered a state prison following a conviction on aggravated criminal sexual abuse charges, state records show. The notes also cite an expiring $5 million life insurance policy, and property records show he sold his Gold Coast condo last year amid a foreclosure threat.”

But whatever stress these factors were in his life, at the time of the alleged suicide, Smith  seemed to have plenty to live for.

After all, finding Clinton’s-legally-deleted emails was a crusade, an all consuming quest for him. Why would he kill himself after he had just allegedly finally found them?

After all his 25 year nemesis-the Clintons-had been defeated-and PACE Jerome Corsi this was largely thanks to Smith himself-he was who got  Huma’s emails into the right hands at the NYPD so that they ended up in the laptop. Beyond this Smith  claimed to in this final interview to have finally obtained Clinton’s emails.

A few other points. As a matter of simple mechanics, it’s far easier to dismiss someone as a ‘deluded old man’ as Lipscomb himself did in the quote above after they’re dead. It’s quite plausible that many in the know in GOPland freaked out after Smith’s WSJ interview in early May, 2018. After all, this is the man who according to Corsi, was most responsible for getting Huma’s emails onto Weiner’s laptop; ie the man who was most responsible for the GOP’s successful rigging of the 2016 election.

Imagine how dangerous he was then-if he’d ever started talking. And in May, 2018 he did start talking.

Remember too, that we saw above at least one explicit threat against Smith from Chuck Johnson back on October, 24, 2016-apparently Johnson and Bannon wanted to steal Smith’s thunder for themselves. So when you talk about the powers that be in the Republican party freaking out after Smith’s WSJ interview there is no greater power within than Steve Bannon himself.

FN: True it wasn’t a physical threat but…

One more point regarding the idea Smith might have been too dangerous to live.

Being caught between those on the right they think might want to silence them and a Democrat-led committee that’s hit them with subpoenas and potentially large legal bills has left them with what Stockton labels “a sense of paranoia.” The couple have packed their things up and switched locations in the middle of the night at least once when they became suspicious of a group of “paramilitary-looking” young men. When they first made contact with the committee, the meeting, they say, was a disaster that left them with real questions about who they could trust. They’ve spent most of the past few months on the run.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/jan6-rally-trump-2020-election-capitol-congress-gosar-1253392/

Ok so conclusions-or at least SOME conclusions we can draw from this chapter-there are so many questions raised it’s pretty well impossible to draw a comprehensive list. The objective of this book is not to offer up a comprehensive list of correct conclusions as the the material is so vast-and these are  conjectures, investigative leads rather than finished conclusions-for that we need far more investigation.

A. The centrality and importance of the Leeden Manifesto in Russian Collusion cum Rogue FBI agent Collusion cum But Her Emails. I’m not claiming that the Hunt for Her emails crusade hatched whole cloth from Ms. Leeden’s head much like Athena was supposed to have hatched from Apollo’s.

Certainly the obsession over Her Emails was widely shared. But what’s important about her proposal is:

1. How formal it was-with an ‘executive summary’ and framed as a proposal for a ‘client’-who perhaps later emerged as Peter Smith.

2. How much it’s contours match the way the actual search would be conducted. The certainty that ‘the emails were out there’ that they were likely hacked by foreign intelligence-probably Russia-AND that the best way to track them down was the assistance of foreign intelligence-again particularly Russian.

While the MSM has minimized  the idea of a conspiracy-apparently requiring something extremely explicit and formal to seriously consider it-Leeden’s Executive Summary is extremely formal and explicit. If it’s not explicit enough for the Savvy, not sure how formal and explicit they could imagine anything would be. If Devlin Barrett, Erik Wemple and Ken Dilanian still can’t seriously consider that the Trump campaign INDEED THE ENTIRE REPUBLICAN PARTY-on this point about the entire party see below-conspired to work with foreign intelligence to take down Hillary Clinton and steal the election then they need to draw up their own conspiracy so we can know what one is supposed to look like in their savvy imaginings.

What is also notable about Leeden’s Manifesto is how early it was put together-Bannon received his copy in June, 2015.

And this brings us to the final thing about the Leeden Manifesto that makes it so important.

3. What makes the Leeden Manifesto  so important is not so much Leeden the woman as her institution-a GOP aide on the Senate Judiciary since 2003.

It underscores that this is a story about the willingness  on the part of an entire major political party to collude and conspire with foreign intelligence including our foreign adversary-namely Russia-to steal a US Presidential election. This willingness was not just in the Trump campaign but the entire 2016 Republican party.

But Her Emails was about a Republican party so nihilistic and treacherous that all that matters is winning-even if they have to steal it. Indeed, as we note elsewhere in this book this is a story that has been going on since Nixon scuttled LBJ’s Vietnam peace talks just to win a Presidential election

FN: In discussing this feverish Hunt for Her Emails, as noted above, James Comey even if he didn’t vote for the Republican candidate for the first time in his adult life-shared the fever. He had rhapsodied to Congress soon after he’d stolen the election from Hillary that ‘this could be the Golden Emails’

Chapter Why the Comey Letter for more.

The Leeden Executive summary underscores this as it was conceived of by Ms. Leeden-a Senate Judiciary aide for Chuck Grassley as about an ‘establishment Republican’ as you’re going to find. Again, as we noted above, she sent this email to Steve Bannon back in June, 2015 before Trump begun his precipitous rise up the GOP primary polls.

A large part of why  the Leeden Manifesto is so important is because it’s my conjecture that this 25 page proposal to collude with foreign intelligence to hack Hillary’s emails  was widely circulated in (Establishment) GOPland.

Again, I’m not claiming this idea hatched from her head like Apollo or that she was the only one doing proposals-there were likely many-later we saw both Bannon’s friends at Cambridge Analytica-Alexander Nix and the Mercers-and Peter Smith craft proposals-though how much it was informed by Leeden is an interesting question to ask.

But her proposal was very formal,  put out very early, and because of who she was-a longtime aide to the GOP Senate Judiciary-my guess is it was forwarded very widely among GOP bigwigs. We know for a fact that it was sent to Bannon in June, 2015, and both Peter Smith and Michael Flynn later in the year-Prince who was also familiar with it-and who was Bannon’s main man at the Trump campaign and who funded part of Smith-Leeden’s proposal in September, 2016.

There’s every reason to assume that many other GOP bigshots saw it-or at least members of their own staff saw it. It’s plausible that the various GOP campaigns were familiar with it-the Jeb Bush campaign, Little Marco’s, Scott Walker, Chris Christie. Also various Congressional GOPers and conservative pundits-a la Sean Hannity, etc.

The best way to think about it is not ask who in GOPland saw it but who didn’t? Probably no one who is anyone.

Above I argued that one  major reason the GOP was unwilling to take Russian Collusion more seriously was their own exposure.

This conjecture of mine is also corroborated by Flynn’s Mueller interviews and Matt Tait’s HSPCI interview we looked at above. Tait revealed not only Smith’s close ties to the Trump campaign-especially with Flynn and his son, but also at the RNC. In Flynn’s testimony he revealed the the RNC also had prior knowledge of Wikileak’s coming leak of the DNC emails.

From here it’s logical to conjecture that they also had advanced knowledge of both the Podesta emails and the Comey Letter

FN: In Chapter Unreported Background, Roger Stone noted that the Comey Letter was addressed ONLY to the GOP committee Chairmen.

But again, Comey was a life long member of GOPLand and even if he didn’t vote for Trump he was as obsessed over Her Emails as anyone.

After all, they had prior knowledge of the DNC hacks before the conventions. After the conventions the RNC’s top two officials-Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer-would join the Trump campaign. The idea that they would get less inside information after their two top officials joined the campaign than prior doesn’t pass the laugh test.

UPDATE: And as the next Chapter Devin Nunes shows leading GOPers in Congress and outside of it-the conservative media, Trump campaign etc-knew as much as a month in advance of the “October Surprise”-ie it wasn’t a surprise to  senior people and leaders in the Republican party

So this is one major conclusion-the centrality of the Leeden Manifesto which points to the fact that this is a story not just about Trump but the entire Republican party.

A few other conclusions…

2. The centrality and importance of Steve Bannon. As we saw above, there was a time when Bannon’s involvement in Russian Collusion-also Rogue FBI Agent Collusion though this latter got little post 2016 coverage-was thought to be minimal.

UPDATE regarding Bannon’s role in Emailgate:

Konstantin Kilimnik Shared Stolen Data Laundered Through Bannon’s Propaganda with State Department

End UPDATE

ndeed, it wasn’t until Bannon opened his big mo

uth to Michael Wolff that he was understood to have any sort of significant role. It’s not clear why he spilled his guts to Wolff other than the vanity of seeing his name in print but it had the twofold effect of getting him excommunicated by TrumpWorld-for all intents and purposes the entire Republican party, including Breitbart and the Mercers, and him becoming a person of interest in the Mueller investigation.

Despite Bannon’s excommunication he slowly begun to re-insinuate himself into the Russia House-through connections, etc-and sucking up to Trump publicly first and foremost. Then soon after the Insurrection, Trump pardoned him. As we saw above, Marcy Wheeler argued this shows that Bannon was truly the indispensable one in TrumpWorld.

UPDATE: Now Bannon is again the toast of Trumpworld

Agreed though it’s deeper than perhaps even Emptywheel thought. Indeed-as we also saw above-Marcy had another post about the latest Mueller transcripts in response to Buzzfeed’s  FOIA request. She pointed out that in this latest the only new information was that Bannon had prior information on the DNC leak. Yet other releases suggest that Bannon’s role here was even deeper.

FN: Flynn suggested Bannon himself might have communicated with Wikileaks a la Roger Stone

As discussed above Bannon was the first recipient of the Leeden Manifesto that we know of. This in itself underscores his important role as both the then CEO of Breitbart and Alexander Nix’s boss at Cambridge Analytica.

Then there was Flynn’s later Mueller testimony where he spoke of Bannon as having particularly important knowledge and insight of coming surprises. As we saw above Flynn repeated this theme time and again that Bannon-thanks to his media role and contacts-had unique insight. He remembers Bannon telegraphing the Comey Letter and what would be in Huma’s emails.

Finally in a total bombshell-relative to previous public knowledge-Flynn revealed that Bannon may have had his own connection to Wikileaks.

In this vein we also are able to find traces of Bannon’s awareness of  Peter Smith. He had been on e of the Trump campaign senior aides CCed into Smith’s email to senior Trump campaign aides in early September, 2016

C. Finally don’t sleep on The Coffee Boy George Papadopolous

His role has largely been forgotten and obscured. Elsewhere in this book we document how Ari Melber interviewed The Coffee Boy the day after Bill Barr’s fake summary of the Mueller Report. Melber acted as if Papadopoulous himself had somehow been exonerated.

The conventional wisdom regarding Papadopolous seems to have settled into the sterile narrative be that he was just a boastful yet guileless kid trying to make a name for himself via Trumpian ‘truthful hyperbole’ and that his role in Russian Collusion is not so important after all. Yes he was indicted but for ‘a mere process crime.’

“In person, he came across as warm, oddly guileless and eager to please. He made boastful claims. (“I was on a first-name basis with Netanyahu for four years.”) He made ingratiating claims. (“As an individual I’m more comfortable with Washington Post people like you than with, I dunno, the Daily Caller.”) And then there was his central claim: that the entire federal investigation of Trump had its origins in dirty tricks masterminded by a group of foreign and U.S. intelligence entities.”

“If you’re among the Americans who aren’t obsessed with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III or dependent on MSNBC or Fox News — that is to say, the majority — you might need to be reminded that George Papadopoulos is the onetime foreign policy adviser to Trump who pleaded guilty in October 2017 to having lied to the FBI about the timing and extent of his contact with a professor who promised to connect him to high Russian officials. This made him an object of cable-news fascination, a man posited by many to be the long-sought link between the Trump campaign and Moscow, the key to unlocking a Kremlin-Trump conspiracy.

Although most people stopped believing anything so grandiose about him long before Mueller released the report of his collusion investigation, Papadopoulos, now 31, has managed to (sort of) stay prominent. He has released a book, “Deep State Target,” that lays out an alternate version of events, in which he was set up in a series of traps laid by the FBI, the CIA and foreign intelligence operatives. It has received enthusiastic endorsements on Fox News, where Papadopoulos has become a regular guest, and other right-leaning outlets.”

If ‘most people’ have in fact ‘stop believing anything so grandiose about him’ long before the Mueller Report, why is this?  What fact pattern is it based on?

The tone of these paragraphs suggests the very idea of ‘a Kremlin-Trump conspiracy’ is rather absurd on its face-it’s ‘grandiose’ which means basically sad and delusional.

This despite the fact that the Mueller Report did document a clear intent by the Trump campaign to conspire with Russia and this chapter shows that this intent didn’t start with Trump but was present in the entire GOP going back to early, 2015. Leeden-and Smith/Schmitz, et al-afterwords couldn’t have been more explicit in their desire to conspire with Russia.

Part of this alleged phenomenon of ‘no longer believing in anything so grandiose’ regarding Papadopolous’ role in the campaign in terms of conspiring and colluding with Russia, may be nothing more than many pundits simply taking the Coffee Boy at his word that he told no one in the campaign about what Mifsud told him about Russia having emails that can hurt Hillary’s campaign.

Apparently the Savvy never heard of the names John Mashburn or Jason Wilson as both assert Papadopolous DID tell the campaign about the emails. The idea that he didn’t was never very plausible-he told both Greek defense minister and the Australian minister, Alexander Downer-yet we’re supposed to believe that this young guy supposedly desperate to get his name out there said nothing about this to the Trump campaign despite Trump’s rabid focus on the emails.

Mashburn testified before both the Senate Judiciary Committee and Team Mueller that the Coffee Boy had emailed him about what Mifsud said about incriminating emails on Hillary Clinton.

But this email was allegedly never found and the matter was dropped.

UPDATE: See EW for more on the Coffee Boy extraordinaire

Trump’s Never-Declined Invitation from Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko

FN: It’s all quite mysterious in that according to the tech experts the intel folks can ruthlessly locate almost any of our communications and yet were unable to find all these emails that somehow disappeared-emails of all these GOP chicken hawks-they were so hawkish on Clinton’s deleted emails yet somehow all their emails were deleted and our  allegedly big and bad spy agencies weren’t able to find them.

Then there’s the very mysterious story of Jason Wilson. According to Wilson he met the Coffee Boy’ and the Coffee Boy’s very suspicious wife over drinks at a Chicago bar in March, 2018. And contrary to what Papa Doc told Ari Melber and Bob Mueller, he told Wilson that he did in fact tell Jeff Sessions about what Mifsud said. 

What’s particularly mysterious about this story is that there was absolutely no followup-no one else in Savvy MSMWorld even attempted to corroborate Wilson’s story-and apparently all the various Russian Collusion investigators-from Bob Mueller to Adam Schiff never heard of the name Jason Wilson.

But then there were many such orphans during the Mueller years-the Savvy would decide it didn’t like a story-like that Paul Manafort spoke to the Ecuadoran embassy about Assange and we’d never hear about it again. There were many such instances but what was unusual with Jason Wilson is no one even tried to take issue with it-as happened on the Manafort-Assange piece and many others like it. They simply didn’t even acknowledge the Daily Beast scoop.

FN:

https://mobile.twitter.com/realSimonaMP/status/980827065162354691

FN: See chapters on savvy MSM for more.

UPDATE: See new chapter where Jeff Gordon testified that Trump was present when the Coffee Boy proposed meeting Putin and was quite taken with the idea

So those are three pretty notable conclusions of this chapter-the centrality of the Leeden Manifesto, the hithero unappreciated centrality of Steve Bannon’s role, and the wrongly forgotten Coffee Boy.

Again as noted above while the title of this book centers the Stone-Corsi-Peter Smith Nexus this list is far from exhaustive and this chapter makes clear that Bannon was-is-also part of this nexus as is Bannon’s very good friend, Erik Prince. And as we saw above, Bannon had many phone calls with Stone prior to Bannon joining the campaign as did Prince.

As for Roger Stone, Emptywheel did a piece on Roger Stone’s remarkable interest in Donald Trump’s foreign policy. 

It turns out that Stone was very involved in the crafting of Trump’s (in)famous Mayflower speech of April, 2016. 

To the extent that Stone was remarkably interested in Trump’s foreign policy it’s been in the direction of making it more pro Russian. A logical explanation for this was that Stone knew Russia was interfering in the election on Trump’s behalf and the policy concessions were the quo in the quid pro quo.

Assuming that Stone knew by the time of the Mayflower speech Russia was assisting Trump the question that begs is how he knew. My guess is there wasn’t just one  fact but a number of facts that confirmed they were. There’s the suggestion based on testimony from other co-conspirators in the Mueller investigation that Stone was already speaking to Guccifer 2.0 months before G2 first rose to public awareness.

Then, once again, we have to return to the Leeden Manifesto which took it as an article of faith that Russian intelligence probably already had Clinton’s emails. And this was an animating article of faith in GOPLand going back at least to June, 2015 when Leeden emailed her manifesto to Steve Bannon.

As we saw above, Trump’s social media director, Dan Scavino, tweeted out a story from a fake news site in May, 2016 that claimed Russia had her emails. But another source may well have been Papadopolous.

To be clear, despite how impressed Ari Melber and his MSM Friends were with the Coffee Boy’s facile denials, I take it as an article of faith that of course he told the Trump campaign. Clinton’s deleted emails were THE animating focus of GOPWorld and he was desperate to make a name for himself yet we’re supposed to believe PapaDoc said nothing about it?

So I presume that he did email John Mashburn about what Mifsud told him and told Jeff Sessions about it. What I don’t presume is that he only told Mashburn and Sessions-though with Sessions’ importance many would have heard about it though him even is Papadoplolous told no one else.

FN: While the SSCI investigators also apparently didn’t see the Daily Beast article on Jason Wilson, the SSCI did say that-unlike Ari Melber and the Washington Post journal-linked above-they didn’t find his denials very credible.

UPDATE: Again, check out new chapter on Jeff Gordon telling Mueller that Trump was quite fascinated by the Coffee Boy’s proposal of a meeting with Putin.

UPDATE: How much of the following belongs here and how much in Chapter No Moving On?

UPDATE: I’m still asking this same question

Ok so if you’ve followed me through all this you may well wonder what it’s going to take to ever have real investigations that chase down all these leads and begging questions. What’s more clear than ever after four years of Dem control of the House (between 2019-2022, including two years of unified Dem control in 2021-2022) is simply trusting our Dem Electeds to do the right thing has been shown yet again to be a Fool’s Errand.

FN: True they didn’t have close to a filibuster proof majority which is why: they should have eliminated the filibuster; even if they didn’t have the votes at that point thanks to Manchin-Sinema, Schumer at least should have looked at ways to tweak it that would effectively defanged it-but this kind of “procedural hardball”-a la Greg Sargent and Brian Beutler-is not in an old guard Democrat like Schumer’s wheelhouse. On some level Dems from Schumer’s-Baby Boomer- generation think that if the Democrats play hardball for one second the Dems will lose the next election 49-1 a la 1972 and 1984, completely missing the fact that this is a completely different country and electoral map in 2024 than 1984.

FN:

OTOH many elected Dems-as well as many Dem voters on Twitter rave about Biden’s performance the last few years.

OTOH it’s been two years since the initial faux outrage over Afghanistan that drove down Biden’s poll numbers and there’s been the usual Savvy paralysis through analysis since in trying to explain why his numbers have never recovered but none of it has touched on the central cause: that many Dem voters remain far less impressed over Biden’s performance.

FN: This is simple math-Biden would not remain stuck at 40% approval if a significant minority of Democrats weren’t themselves unhappy with his performance.

And, yes, the Unity Police-I’ve had many run ins with them on Twitter-live in this dream world where any criticism  of or even circumspection about Biden is seen as giving aide and comfort to the GOP co-conspirators.

Personally  I actually at this point give him a pretty good grade-maybe B to B+-but this is largely because he gets an A++ for his excellent work in fighting back against Putin’s dirty, genocidal war in Ukraine. Indeed as we speak tonight, not only has Putin’s invasion been largely a flop but he may be on the cusp of facing a civil war in his own country.

It really does appear civil war is breaking out in Moscow after the Russian army killed hundreds of Wagner’s men. Prigozhin is aggressively heading to Moscow and Putin is nowhere to be seen. pic.twitter.com/olbPHj98pT

— Marlene Robertson (@marlene4719) June 23, 2023

No doubt the credit goes first and foremost to President Zelensky and the brave Ukrainian people. But there’s no question that Biden has done a masterful job at every point-who could imagined how much European unity could be achieved-thanks to Biden’s diplomatic efforts much less that Sweden and Finland would apply to join NATO?

Then there’s Biden’s very impressive intelligence gambit which I think it’s fair to call unprecedented, where Biden and his intel agencies used truth and openess against lies and repression putting out the truth about Putin’s pending invasion before he was able to fully develop the phony narrative that he attacked Ukraine because of alleged Ukrainian Nazis.

So even if I give President Joe a solid B+ that’s largely on the strength of a double A+ on Ukraine-imagine how things might have gone in Ukraine if “President Trump” were still there-seeing as Putin is the man who elected him?!

Republicans say they stand for America, but Putin and the rest of us know better. If Biden weren't in office right now, Russia would have completed their invasion of Ukraine by now. pic.twitter.com/dkJveuB78e

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) June 26, 2023

By definition that means without Ukraine his grade is probably more like maybe a C+ at best. Where does he fall short? I’ve discussed this elsewhere particularly in Chapter President Joe’s First Mistake-he didn’t fire Christopher Wray. He also didn’t fire Louis DeJoy, Tony Ornato…

Even now despite how it has sidelined much of his agenda, Biden’s support for ending the filibuster remains lukewarm at best-as is true of Schumer.  Both of these Boomer Dem Leaders-technically I guess  Biden is too old to even be a Boomer-are also lukewarm on expanding the Supreme Court or any kind of radical reform of the Republican dominated Court.

The overlapping thread of this is Biden-and much of the Old Guard Dems a la Schumer-Pelosi etc-is discomfiture with anything that wasn’t-in their own mind-“normal” back in the 1970s and 1980s when Biden first got into politics.

And this is the larger metaphysical issue at the heart of the recent rebubbling up of the Merrick Garland debates. 

FN:

For a sympathetic, charitable view of Garland’s performance see-who else?-EW.

The WaPo Shows There Should Be More Scrutiny of Steve D’Antuono

https://www.gaslitnationpod.com/episodes-transcripts-20/2023/06/21/merrick-garland-we-told-you-so

For the institutionalist Garland defenders it seems that Garland was admirably reinstalling regular order, a normal process at the DOJ. This was Harry Litman’s argument on Chris Hayes the night after the WaPo story broke. In his sparring with Ankush there were two central questions.

One is wether “regular order” really required the exceedingly cautious “Trump who” approach of the DOJ in early 2021-Khardori was very skeptical, but the second is was “normalcy” the right rubric-after all what exactly had been normal about Trump? His insurrection was the opposite of normal-so treating it as such effectively normalized it-similarly for his espionage…

And it does seem that you can analogize the Merrick Garland debate to Biden’s entire Administration. Biden’s entire premise from the launch of his campaign in 2019 was that Americans should elect him to get things back to “normal”-a premise that always seemed naive and in retrospect I think it’s fair to argue was the Original Sin of Biden’s Administration. And that this Original Sin is the First Cause of Biden’s weak approval numbers.

FN: Obviously this is a positive not a normative point; obviously I like other Democrats, indeed, like most Americans hopes Biden will win regardless. Hopefully he will and he seems to be on track though I don’t know if I find the latest election numbers THAT optimistic.

Some key findings in new @NBCNews poll:

– Trump's lead over DeSantis doubles, from 46-31 to 51-22
– Biden leads Trump 49-45
– Biden leads w/women (55-38), 18-34 year olds (65-30), Latinos (66-26), Indies (47-33)

Good, strong numbers for Biden. 1/https://t.co/OxQJhQ5hTo

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) June 25, 2023

To be sure, Simon has a good track record-his take on 2022 proved correct but a 4 point national lead is hardly humongous when you remember the GOP’s electoral college advantage.

UPDATE:

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/22/biden-abortion-2024-campaign-reelection-00103158

Meanwhile if Biden’s DOJ was somewhat reticent on the issue of Trump accountability, the record of the Congressional Dems was itself quite mediocre.

One of the few green shoots would turn out to be the January 6 Select Committee. Pelosi only set this up with regret. Her and the rest of the Dem leaders had wanted a bipartisan Presidential Commission on the model of the 9/11 Commission.

FN: Failing to understand that the 9/11 Commission itself was a compromised failure.

End FN

The Dems had conceded so much in their desperate attempt for the GOP to join them on the Commission that it was a major relief-and a big error on the part of #MoscowMitch and Friends-that Republicans as usual refused any negotiation-just a blanket rejection. If the GOP had accepted the Commission they’d effectively have had total veto power over anything it wanted to do. So we were saved-not by the Dems who were prepared to give away the store, but  the usual blanket Republican recalcitrance.

Again, this was for the better-unlike the toothless Commission the Dems were proposing the SC had a real shot at actually learning something. Indeed, Bennie Thompson was as good a choice as any in Congress to run it-everything he’s said publicly suggested he got it and understood very well that we must have accountability.

FN: Overall the J6 SC is rightly seen as a pretty impressive success though it had the clear flaw of leaving out any serious look at the failure of the intelligence agencies-both in the run up to J6 as well as the rather surreal fact that multiple agencies failed to save all texts from the day-the idea that all these agencies just happened to choose the most important day in US history in terms of records to mass delete all texts is an impressive “coincidence” indeed a la Malcolm Nance-see Chapter Secret Service.

Regarding Dems, Rachel Bade’s book is highly relevant-Nadler to the extent he fell short on his promises clearly had his arms tied for much of it-Pelosi…

End UPDATE

No my friends, if we want answers to all the questions raised in this chapter and throughout this book it’s on us. There are two tracks on which we must proceed. For more on these tracks see Chapter No Moving On