Why the FBI Dismissed Claims of Secret Trump–Russia Link

FBI agents, just weeks before the 2016 election, opened an investigation into allegations of a secret communication channel between Donald Trump and Russia. The bureau closed the probe after several months but did not make public that it had dismissed the claims, which came from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and a group of researchers.

Details of the FBI’s analyses, and CIA treatment of the claims, emerged during the trial of ex-Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann.

‘Jumped to Conclusions’

The white paper and data handed over to the FBI by Sussmann on Sept. 19, 2016, asserted there was a “secret email server” used by the Trump Organization that was communicating with Alfa Bank in Moscow through “another unusually-configured server” at Spectrum Health in Michigan.

“These servers are configured for direct communications between the Trump organization and Alfa Bank to the exclusion of all other systems,” researchers wrote. “The only plausible reason,” they claimed, “is to hide the considerably recent email traffic occurring between the Trump organization and Alfa Bank.”

Scott Hellman, an agent who specializes in investigating cyber crimes, took the first crack at the allegations with Nathan Batty, a colleague. The pair spent inside of a day examining the data, and quickly concluded that whoever penned the white paper “had jumped to some conclusions that were not supported by the technical data,” Hellman testified.

The allegations were based on purported “look-ups,” or Domain Name System requests, between mail1.trump-email.com, the server allegedly controlled by Trump’s business, and servers belonging to the Russian bank. DNS lookups are a way for a computer to find another computer’s Internet Protocol address (IP address), a unique number needed for communication between computers.

The researchers said they tried to connect with the Trump server and that the server would not accept mail from their IP address, or returned what was essentially an error message, Hellman said. The researchers used that, among other data, to suggest the Trump server would only communicate with certain devices, such as those linked to Alfa Bank.

“That didn’t make sense to me. It was sort of like if I knocked on your door, and you told me to go away—I don’t want to talk to you—I’m then going to assume that you’re only willing to talk to other people. I can’t make that assumption. I don’t know if you’re willing to talk to anybody. But that’s what they had done,” he said. “When they received an error message, they assumed that that computer wasn’t willing to talk to them, but it was willing to talk to others, and there was no evidence to suggest that. So assumptions like that is what I was referring to.”

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The FBI knew RussiaGate was a lie — but hid that truth

The FBI knew the Trump-Russia collusion narrative was utter bunk even as it suggested otherwise to Congress, the courts and the public early in 2017. Evidence revealed by special counsel John Durham proves it beyond dispute.

At RealClearInvestigations, Paul Sperry lays out the case.

Declassified for Durham’s probe, a March 2017 memo prepared by Lisa Page for FBI head James Comey’s meeting with Congress’ “Gang of Eight” — the bipartisan House and Senate leaders who oversee the most classified stuff — was a total cook-up job. 

It advised Comey to present accusations that Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort and foreign policy adviser Carter Page were working with the Russian government as coming from a confidential Russia-based source with real intel-community chops. In fact, the FBI had already established that the root source was US-based former Brookings flunky Igor Danchenko’s utterly speculative gossip with an ex-girlfriend and a Democratic Party hack.

That, plus publicly reported info, was all Christopher Steele (a retired British spy who doesn’t even speak Russian) ever had to back up his “dossier.” And the FBI knew it since at least January 2017, when it interviewed Danchenko.

Comey hid all this during his meetings, and after. Yet the public only learned it years later, once the Durham probe began.  

The Comey meeting where he served up these nonsense stories prompted both House and Senate Intelligence committees to open probes. But that was hardly the only poisoned fruit. 

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Joe Biden’s Submissive — and Highly Revealing — Embrace of Saudi Despots

In 2018, President Trump issued a statement reaffirming the U.S.’s long-standing relationship with the Saudi royal family on the ground that this partnership serves America’s “national interests.” Trump specifically cited the fact that “Saudi Arabia is the largest oil producing nation in the world” and has purchased hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons from U.S. arms manufacturers. Trump’s statement was issued in the wake of widespread demands in Washington that Trump reduce or even sever ties with the Saudi regime due to the likely role played by its Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, in the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

What made these Trump-era demands somewhat odd was that the Khashoggi murder was not exactly the first time the Saudi regime violated human rights and committed atrocities of virtually every type. For decades, the arbitrary imprisonment and murder of Saudi dissidents, journalists, and activists have been commonplace, to say nothing of the U.S./UK-supported devastation of Yemen which began during the Obama years. All of that took place as American presidents in the post-World War II order made the deep and close partnership between Washington and the tyrants of Riyadh a staple of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Yet, as was typical for the Trump years, political and media commentators treated Trump’s decision to maintain relations with the Saudis as if it were some unprecedented aberration of evil which he alone pioneered — some radical departure of long-standing, bipartisan American values — rather than what it was: namely, the continuation of standard bipartisan U.S. policy for decades. In an indignant editorial following Trump’s statement, The New York Times exclaimed that Trump was making the world “more [dangerous] by emboldening despots in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere,” specifically blaming “Mr. Trump’s view that all relationships are transactional, and that moral or human rights considerations must be sacrificed to a primitive understanding of American national interests.”

The life-long Eurocrat, former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, lamented what he described as Trump’s worldview: “if you buy US weapons and if you are against Iran – then you can kill and repress as much as you want.” CNN published an analysis by the network’s White House reporter Stephen Collinson— under the headline: “Trump’s Saudi support highlights brutality of ‘America First’ doctrine” — which thundered: “Refusing to break with Saudi strongman Mohammed bin Salman over the killing in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Trump effectively told global despots that if they side with him, Washington will turn a blind eye to actions that infringe traditional US values.” Trump’s willingness to do business with the Saudis, argued Collinson, “represented another blow to the international rule of law and global accountability, concepts Trump has shown little desire to enforce in nearly two years in office.”

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Why Won’t The Pulitzer Board Answer Trump On Whether Its ‘Review Process’ Is Legit Enough To Revoke Prizes For Russia Hoax Propaganda?

Despite previously claiming it “has a standing process for reviewing questions about past awards, under the guidelines of which complaints are considered by an appointed committee,” the Pulitzer Prize Board won’t say if it is still reviewing the awards it granted to corporate media outlets guilty of promoting the Russia collusion hoax.

In his most recent letter, former President Donald Trump threatened to sue the board unless it discloses whether it plans to rescind the awards given to “blatantly fake, derogatory, and defamatory news.”

“You have an obligation to share with me the status of that supposedly ‘appointed committee’s’ review following its alleged ‘standing process,’” Trump wrote on May 27.

Trump also said the board worked with “the publications that have obsessively promulgated disgustingly false attacks against me” and “done all you can to destroy my reputation.”

“[H]ow can I get my reputation back?” Trump asked.

Both The New York Times and The Washington Post received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for amplifying claims that Trump colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election. Despite years of evidence proving that Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid for and peddled the narrative in an attempt to sic the government on her political enemy Trump, the Pulitzer Prize Board has yet to rescind any of its prizes for reporting that was based on the debunked Steele dossier.

As a matter of fact, the Pulitzer webpage still legitimizes the false reporting implicating Trump in a conspiracy to undermine the integrity of U.S. elections.

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Disclosed: How Obama Administration Officials Conducted Shadow Diplomacy With Iran To Undermine Trump

Senior Obama administration officials engaged in a secret meeting with Iran in 2018 as part of an effort to undermine the Trump administration’s diplomatic push to isolate the hardline regime, according to an internal State Department document.

As the Trump administration worked to increase economic pressure on Iran in 2018, a delegation of “U.S. former ambassadors held a secret, “off-the-record” meeting with former Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif at his residence in New York City, according to a State Department memo unearthed this week as part of a lawsuit brought to compel the release of this information. The meeting took place around the same time John Kerry was reported to be working behind-the-scenes with Iranian officials to salvage the 2015 nuclear accord.

The internal memo, which is marked unclassified, details how these former U.S. ambassadors conducted shadow diplomacy with Iran’s top envoy surrounding “nuclear weapons, potential prisoner swaps, [the] Afghanistan withdrawal, and negotiations with the Taliban,” according to the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a legal advocacy group that sued the State Department to obtain the internal memo.

The document is the firmest proof to date that Obama-era officials were engaged in back-channel efforts to keep negotiations with Iran alive, even as former president Donald Trump and his administration worked to isolate the regime, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo told the Free Beacon in exclusive remarks. Pompeo, who was not aware of these meetings while leading the State Department, said the memo corroborates reports from the time about Kerry’s efforts to salvage the 2015 nuclear deal through back-channel powwows with Iranian officials.

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How Did Mueller’s $40 Million Trump-Russia Investigation ‘Miss’ Hillary’s Hoax?

One of the public revelations created by the trial of Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann is that Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Hillary Clinton’s lawyers, and Hillary Clinton’s contracted opposition research firm, Fusion GPS, manufactured the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.  How did Robert Muller not find this?

The Clinton hoax is the key takeaway within the testimony of Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, during the Sussman trial.  Of course, every intellectually honest person who watched events unfold already knew that.  However, the DC politicians, institutions of the DOJ and FBI, and the entire corporate media world have been pretending not to know the truth for almost six years.  Now they are in a pretending pickle.

Mr. Mook was legally forced to put the truth into the official record, ironically because the Clinton lawyers needed him to in order to save themselves.  A stunned Jonathan Turley writes about the revelation HERE.  Meanwhile the journalists who received Pulitzer Prizes, for pushing the manufactured Clinton lies that Mook now admits, must avoid any mention of the testimony in order to maintain their ‘pretending not to know things‘ position.

Special Prosecutor John Durham found the truth behind the creation of the Trump-Russia hoax, and through the trial of Sussmann is now diligently passing out the bitter pill ‘I toldyaso’s’ to the small group of rebellious researchers who found this exact trail of evidence years ago.

The Clinton campaign lying is politics.  The Clinton campaign selling lies to the media is slimy, but nonetheless politics.  The media pushing those lies only showcases how corrupt they are in supporting their political allies.  However, the Clinton campaign selling those lies to the FBI is a bit more problematic; thus, the trial of Sussmann.

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It Took FBI Less Than A Day To Discover Trump Conspiracy Theory Was Bogus

An FBI agent said Tuesday that it took him and another agent “less than a day” to determine the allegation about former President Donald Trump having ties to a Russian financial institution was false and pushed by Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman.

FBI Supervisory Special Agent Scott Hellman said “it took him and another agent less than a day to ascertain the data and ‘white papers’ on two thumb drives Sussmann gave Baker did not support the Trump-Alfa Bank ‘secret connection’ allegation,” according to The Epoch Times’ national affairs reporter John Haughey. Hellman was on the stand during the first day of Sussman’s trial for allegedly lying to the FBI.

Sussman is on trial for telling FBI General Counsel James Baker months before the 2016 election. Sussman claimed that he wasn’t working for “any client” when he presented him with “white papers” and purported data that were supposed to show Trump had a “covert communications channel” with Russian-tied financial institution Alfa Bank. The indictment against him states he was working for the Clinton campaign and Tech Executive-1, not independently.

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Karine Jean-Pierre has frequent history of accusing things of being racist

Newly installed White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has a long history of accusing policies and political enemies of “racism,” a review of her social media and TV news appearances show.

The Post looked at Jean-Pierre’s tweets between 2015 and 2020 and found a staggering 57 instances where she accused people, policies, ideas, or words of being “racist.”

And Jean-Pierre accused people and ideas she was opposed to as “racist” at least 43 times in TV appearances too, according to video clipping service Grabien, whose available analysis spanned just the first two years of President Trump’s term in office.

Her target on both social media and TV was overwhelmingly Trump.

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It took the Biden administration 6 MONTHS of research to come up with ‘ultra MAGA’

Joe Biden’s usage of the phrase “ultra MAGA,” deployed earlier this month in several speeches by the President to try and alienate the Trump faction of Republicans, isn’t as organic as it was first advertised to be.

After the outcry of “let’s go Brandon,” progressive think tanks and Washington DC’s brightest minds got to work on a counterattack of their own, and “ultra MAGA” was what they came up with.

The Washington Post has revealed that Biden’s usage of “ultra MAGA” to describe members of the Republican party was intentional and not spontaneous or organic. It took six months of research by Biden’s adviser Anita Dunn and the Center for American Progress Action Fund to come up with that. Focus group testing and polls undertaken by the Hart Research and the Global Strategy Group indicated that respondents see the phrase “MAGA” more negatively than other labels like “Trump Republicans.”

This scoop debunks claims made earlier this week by White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who  said “ultra MAGA” was “the President’s phrase and he made those comments himself.”

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Nazis Are Actually Fine Now, According to the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League

If you happened to be alive during the years of 2016 to 2020, you can probably recall the routine issuance of frantic bulletins that “Nazis” were suddenly on the march in the US. Not just that some ludicrous, ragtag group of self-identified Nazis could be occasionally spotted in the wild — which had always been a somewhat regular, albeit freakish occurrence. Rather, the idea was that full-bore ideological “Nazism” had surged as a genuinely formidable political force, and everyone needed to be extremely terrified of this.

Principally responsible for the alleged outbreak of pro-Nazi fervor, or so the prevailing theory went, was Donald Trump. He had either tacitly or deliberately fueled the Nazis’ rise, because associating himself with Nazis would definitely be a huge boon to his electoral fortunes. MSNBC anchor Joy Reid encapsulated this view when she warned in 2017 that “resurgent Neo-Nazism” had gripped the US under Trump’s rule. Reams of academic articles were published on the subject, wondering whether Trump was the new “American Führer”; it was a commonly-held belief that “Literal Nazis” had taken power. (As opposed to figurative Nazis). Evidence for the theory ranged from the individual emotional turmoil experienced by journalists, to Twitter trolls with cartoon frogs as their profile pictures, to allusive suggestions — including by former apparatchiks of the National Security State — that the existence of immigrant detention centers was proof a Nazi regime had seized the reins of state.

This fearful narrative was propelled by episodes which may now appear somewhat farcical in hindsight, but at the time were taken deadly seriously. One example was an alleged spate of anti-semitic hate crimes that occurred in 2017 — a series of “bomb threat” phone calls were placed to Jewish Community Centers. Even before any details had surfaced about the identity of the suspects, an outfit called the “Anne Frank Center” hysterically attributed personal responsibility for the incidents to Trump. Fans of dark humor were no doubt thrilled when it later emerged that the bomb threats had in fact been called in by a teenager in Israel, as well as a deranged former Intercept journalist — and not some MAGA-hat guy sitting in a corrugated shack in the backwoods of Arkansas. (The “Anne Frank Center” was being run at the time by a hardcore partisan Democratic operative in New Jersey, whom I personally met years ago when he was running a pro-LGBT group. Let’s just say the individual is a tad… excitable. Still, this individual’s bombastic anti-Trump screeds were credulously portrayed by media outlets as carrying the solemn moral weight of the fabled Holocaust victim.)

And so the ever-present specter of Actual Nazis running rampant, taking their direction from Führer Trump, loomed large over the American political scene. This understandably generated lots of fear and stress, most of which tended to be conveniently funneled into boosting the political prospects of Democrats. Even figures as milquetoast as former Maryland governor and 2016 presidential candidate Martin O’Malley, hardly anyone’s idea of an envelope-pushing thinker, proclaimed that the conditions in the US circa 2017 were reminiscent of the conditions in Germany circa 1933. Thus, all responsible citizens were obligated to heed the call for unshakeable “Resistance.” O’Malley typified the trend whereby standard-fare Democrats became incredibly radicalized in their style of rhetoric, even if their policy prescriptions remained relatively static. Always top of the agenda for ambitious liberals was to compete amongst themselves for who could express their Trump-related anxieties in the most apocalyptic terms. Which, of course, included the belief that Trump was governing on behalf of Nazis and/or was himself a Nazi.

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