Thread by @ClimateAudit

Lee Smith has interesting article on Vorontsov Affidavit. Reasonable people can disagree on interpretation of these murky events and I disagree totally on most of Lee's interpretation, while also being glad that he commented on document.

https://twitter.com/EpochOpinion/status/1408067403573989385

Lee asks the same question that I began asking a couple of days ago: it is astounding that FBI was asking a Danchenko sub-source about Danchenko seven months before Danchenko named Vorontsov as a sub-source.

Lee notes (as both of us have long said) that Steele's instantaneous, too instantaneous, "intelligence" was only possible because it was fabricated. Bespoke intel porn, so to speak.

I strongly disagree with the premise of Lee's rhetorical question "did it [FBI] help create them?". It creates an implausible straw man that will distract from more realistic and perhaps even more important line of inquiry.

My own surmise is that Danchenko was NOT on FBI's radar in June 2020 because of Steele dossier assignment. At the time, the first dossier memorandum hadn't even been written. I think that Danchenko was on FBI radar because his multiple trips to Russia and shady employment in

shady employment in the US attracted attention of FBI counterintel (which didn't know that Danchenko was involved in private espionage for Christopher Steele and Orbis.) For all we know right now, Vorontsov (who appears to have been in the know on Danchenko's connection to Orbis)

Vorontsov may well have told the FBI about Danchenko's connection to Steele (as FN speculated yesterday).

It's possible, even probable, that it took FBI a while to connect the counterintel concerns about Danchenko from June 2016 to the PSS of the Steele dossier. But one assumes that all of this would have been immediately retrievable from FBI database in Steele or Danchenko search

that FBI concealed their June 2016 investigation of Danchenko and their June 2016 interview of Vorontsov for four years, despite intense scrutiny, speaks volumes of FBI duplicity in this sordid affair.

that FBI gave Barr and Ratcliffe a tired 2009 report on Danchenko, while withholding a June 2016 report on Danchenko and Vorontsov that was current as the dossier was being written, shows the extremity of their duplicity.

my other beef with Lee's interpretation is his attempt to connect these various misconducts to getting "a FISA warrant to spy on the Trump team". I've complained endlessly about over-emphasis on the Page FISA as a supposed cause celebre and overemphasis on "spying",

the main line of the resistance narrative was through the ICA, which had nothing to do with FISA or "spying", but everything to do with fomenting resistance against and destabilizing the incoming administration. If 10% of the interest in the esoteric FISA issues were allocated

to the resistance between the inauguration and the Mueller appointment, understanding would be much improved.