Thread by @bhweingarten

🧵Thread: Notes & nuggets from a first read of the Durham Report

First - Worth noting at end of beginning that Durham praises Garland for letting inquiry "proceed independently and without interference" -- which AG will likely play up -- protecting the institution. Q: How many folks involved in Russiagate currently work in Durham DOJ/Wray FBI?

Ask yourself if this is the standard applied to those the regime has targeted

"[N]either U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation." No one has paid for targeting Trump as a traitor. It guarantees worse to come

"The speed and manner in which the FBI opened and investigated Crossfire Hurricane during the presidential election season based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence also reflected a noticeable departure from how it approached prior matters involving...Clinton… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

"FBI elected to end an investigation after one of its longtime and valuable CHSs went beyond what was authorized and made an improper and possibly illegal financial contribution to the Clinton campaign on behalf of a foreign entity." Anyone pay for this?

Once again the only justice Hillary Clinton has ever faced is losing to Donald Trump. The cost was a Russiagate that destabilized much of his presidency

"the Steele Reports were first provided to the FBI in early July 2016 but, for unexplained reasons, only made their way to the Crossfire Hurricane investigators in mid-September." Why? Why don't we know this? Did Durham probe it?

"Our investigation determined that the Crossfire Hurricane investigators did not and could not corroborate any of the substantive allegations contained in the Steele reporting." This corroborates @paulsperry_ reporting @RCInvestigates. Note that Rep. Adam Schiff, a key Russian… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

So where do @carterwpage and @GeorgePapa19 go to get their time, money, reputations back?

FBI eviscerated @carterwpage's rights based on a game of telephone

...At the same time it targeted Carter Page as some kind of Russian traitor, when he had worked with the CIA as an asset previously, FBI relied on a man who had been subject to a cointel investigation based on his ties to Russian nationals in Danchenko. It paid him as a source!

Your tax dollars at work: "The FBI interviewed hundreds of individuals through the course of the Crossfire Hurricane and later investigations, and yet it did not interview Dolan as a possible source of information about Trump."

"The evidence uncovered by the Office showed that Danchenko never spoke with @SergeiMillian and simply fabricated the allegations that he attributed to Millian." This is the source of the "Trump is a traitor let's sic the entire NatSec apparatus on him" play

"Based on the review of Crossfire Hurricane and related intelligence activities, we conclude that the Department and the FBI failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law in connection with certain events and activities described in this report." Among… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Durham says FBI:
-Failed to uphold "mission of strict fidelity" to law
-Was "cavalier" in Page FISA fraud
-"Disregarded important requirements" in FISA renewals
-Senior officials "displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor" in ignoring anti-Trump sources of info

But maybe the most important and telling takeaway from Durham is that in spite of the obvious hyper-politicization, weaponization, and corruption his report identifies, he and his team -- products of these institutions -- don't call for heads to roll, radical change. If you were… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Read the "Applicable Laws and Department and FBI Policies" from the Durham Report, and ask yourself if that's how they've been applied against perceived political opponents of the political establishment justice.gov/storage/durham…

Imagine if the victims of Russiagate were treated with the same deference as Durham special counsel did their victimizers

Russiagate is one of the greatest scandals in U.S. history, and here's the justice Americans get: Three false statements cases and a handful of referrals

Imagine investigating the investigators behind a conspiracy, effectively, to bring down a presidency, and you don't interview the head of the chief investigative agency behind the whole operation

Did the FBI similarly scrutinize anyone/everyone in the Clinton campaign's orbit with ties to foreign adversaries?

Neither Jim Comey nor Peter Strzok compelled to sit for interview with John Durham special counsel

Behold America: These are your betters

Add Bill Priestap to the list, along with Jim Comey and Peter Strzok, of critical officials Durham Special Counsel did not compel to interview

What Australian diplomats said George Papadopoulos said "was the sole basis cited by the FBI for opening a full investigation into individuals associated with the ongoing Trump campaign." Let that sink in

FBI employees are "explicitly caution[ed]...to avoid reputational risk to those being investigated by, among other things, specifying different standards for opening an assessment, a preliminary investigation, and a full investigation, with a corresponding continuum of… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Durham Special Counsel "found no indications from witness testimony, electronic communications, emails, calendar entries, or other documentation that, at the time, the FBI gave any consideration to the actual trustworthiness of the information the [Australian] diplomats" provided… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

The FBI has never been held accountable for this: "The information from Papadopoulos was clearly raw and unevaluated. It was not the product of normal IC collection and analysis, and it lacked the standard caveats accompanying uncorroborated information from an individual whose… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Read the Durham Report and you might find yourself asking questions like: Why does the FBI deserve billions of dollars for a new headquarters?

Here's the entire basis of Russiagate. They destabilized a presidency and a country on "show me the man and I'll show you the crime" "justice"

"at the time of the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI did not possess any intelligence showing that anyone associated with the Trump campaign was in contact with Russian intelligence officers at any point during the campaign." This is by the book, right?

"'the British could not believe the Papadopoulos bar conversation was all there was' and they were convinced the FBI must have had more information that it was holding back"

Russiagate was, and is, an international disgrace

What a joke

"The use of defensive briefings in 2015 [for Hillary Clinton] contrasts with the FBI's failure to provide a defensive briefing to the Trump campaign approximately one year later when Australia shared the information from Papadopoulos...Deputy Director McCabe informed the OIG that… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

"The speed with which surveillance of a U.S. person associated with Trump's campaign was authorized - in the face of the unverified Steele Reports and in the absence of a defensive briefing being provided to then-candidate Trump - are difficult to explain compared to the FBI's… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Imagine how a hypothetical Trump Foundation would've been treated versus the Clinton Foundation

Color me shocked: "When interviewed, Brennan generally recalled reviewing the materials [about how Clinton was planning to tie Trump to Russia as a dirty trick] but stated he did not recall focusing specifically on its assertions regarding the Clinton campaign's purported plan.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Durham Special Counsel "located no evidence that in conducting the Crossfire Hurricane investigation the FBI considered whether and how the Clinton Plan intelligence [that she planned to tie Trump to Russia to distract from her malfeasance] might impact the investigation."

"The… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

So are we going to see the full transcript of the May 2022 interview between Durham Special Counsel and Hillary Clinton?

So Clinton's team had no plan to tie Trump to Russia to distract from her own malfeasance, they just parroted the work of a DNC-funded firm tying Trump to Russia

Some stuff occurring around the time Clinton campaign allegedly planned to tie Trump to Russia to distract from her illegal but unprosecuted use of an email server--which Team Clinton denies

"The fact that the Clinton campaign immediately issued a tweet concerning the articles - after funding the Alfa Bank allegations and receiving foreknowledge ofthe articles from Sussmann and Elias - tends to support the notion that the Alfa Bank allegations were part of a Clinton… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Let it be written on America's tombstone: "the government's handling of the Clinton Plan intelligence may have amounted to a significant intelligence failure and a troubling instance in which confirmation bias and a tunnel-vision pursuit of investigative ends may have caused… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Comey and McCabe threw all caution to the wind and ran roughshod over the rights of @carterwpage

No big deal here, just totally lawless spying on Americans

"FISA surveillance must be used for the purposes and in the ways specified in the statute rather than to prove that someone is not an agent of a foreign power." Durham details how the FISA power was abused. The only person who paid with barely a slap on the wrist was Clinesmith

Whatever you do, don't document anything about Steele's sub-sources

Steele "reports were not disseminated in a manner that would have allowed experienced FBI counterintelligence experts an early opportunity to examine the reports and subject them to appropriate analysis and scrutiny...Despite the lack of any corroboration of the Reports'… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

75 day delay in disseminating Steele Reports, and lack of recollection of agents about matter suggests "FBI [may have] had misgivings from the start about the[ir] provenance and reliability...Nevertheless, within two days of their eventual receipt by the Crossfire Hurricane team,… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

"not a single substantive allegation pulled from the Steele Reports and used in the initial Page FISA application had been corroborated at the time of the FISA submission - or indeed, to our knowledge, has ever been corroborated by the FBI."

Show me the man and I'll try to justify spying on him on the back end: "Shockingly, Case Agent-I told the Office that the initial FISA application targeting Page was being done in the hope that the returns would 'self-corroborate.'"

Should Igor Danchenko have even been in the U.S.? Was this arrangement kosher, or is this something close to immigration fraud?

This is the man who the FBI made a paid informant

Was Igor Danchenko paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in de facto hush money by the FBI, under guise of being a paid informant?

Check this line out: "Interviews conducted by the Office revealed...that the Assistant Directors for Counterintelligence in WFO and FBI… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Clinton-tied Charles Dolan was a key Danchenko source, so naturally "a case was never opened on Dolan and Dolan was never interviewed by the FBI"

*apparent key source I should say

"The FBI interviewed hundreds of individuals through the course of the Crossfire Hurricane and Mueller Special Counsel investigations, and yet, they did not interview Dolan or the other two U.S. persons identified by Steele as early as October 2016."

"the spectacular [Steele dossier] claim...of a 'well-developed conspiracy of co-operation' between the Trump campaign and Russian leadership is based entirely on a purported anonymous telephone call Danchenko said he received from someone he had never spoken to before"

If you’re subject to a counterespionage investigation and repeatedly lie, deceive, and dissemble, you too can make hundreds of thousands of dollars as an FBI informant. We paid for Danchenko

Danchenko lied about scandalous Ritz Carlton pee story; also lied about the source of it

Fusion GPS and the Clinton Campaign/DNC were as forthcoming as you'd expect in connection with Durham Special Counsel investigation

Obama FBI didn't care about illegal leaks to reporters about investigation into opposing party presidential campaign

"Nevertheless, they persisted" -- in railroading Carter Page for a political purpose without ever allowing him to tell his side of the story

Look at the utter contempt for Americans' rights reflected in foisting this fraud on the FISA court

"In a number of instances, the Page FISA applications relied on 'assessments' to address what otherwise appeared to be plainly exculpatory statements by Page." In other words, when the truth doesn't fit print the lie

"In his conversation with CHS-I, Papadopoulos clearly said that such assistance from the Russians would be illegal. This was arguably the most significant information the FBI had gathered after approximately six weeks of investigative effort to evaluate the information it had… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

"with respect to Papadopoulos's denial of any knowledge of a relationship between the Russians and the Trump campaign, it does not appear that the FBI gave any serious thought to simply interviewing him to resolve the discrepancy between his unambiguous statements to CHS-1 and… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Utterly shameful, and shameless: "CHS-2 challenged Papadopoulos with approximately 200 prompts or baited statements which elicited approximately 174 clearly exculpatory statements from Papadopoulos...over the course of their recorded meetings, Papadopoulos repeatedly denied that… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Durham Special Counsel never interviewed Steele or Danchenko. Just classic.

Pathetic: "Despite repeated interviews and good faith attempts to refresh recollections, the path of the Steele Reports is littered with failed memories and inconsistent versions of events. The evidence gathered was not sufficient to prove at trial that any FBI personnel… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Just take Christopher Steele's word for it: "While undoubtedly the past performance of a source is an important factor in determining the reliability of information, surely establishing probable cause to accuse a U.S. person, to say nothing of a U.S. presidential campaign… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Long-time cointel expert at agency other than FBI quoted here: "Indeed, after the Steele Dossier was leaked and became public, that expert's reaction was to ask the FBI, 'You didn't use that, right?'"

Is this satisfactory to Americans? "Given the claimed inability of the principal actors to recall the details of critical conversations, and the lack of evidence as to who was responsible for information that was included or withheld in the FfSA applications, the standard of… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Looks like Congress has some more work to do on immigration

The FBI basically corroborated nothing wrt core aspects of the information operation dba "Trump-Russia collusion"

Democracy dies in bureaucratese: "the FBI's handling of important aspects of the Crossfire Hurricane matter were seriously deficient"

Complete and total failure: "One of the chief errors from the start of Crossfire Hurricane was the poor analysis the FBI brought to bear on the critical pieces of information that it had gathered, as well as an over-reliance on flawed or incomplete human intelligence that only… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

A total novice put in charge of investigating virtually any crime -- let alone an alleged treasonous conspiracy between a leading presidential candidate and a foreign adversary -- would never proceed this way or have thought this all was above board

The Attorney General must sign off now on investigating political foes -- that'll surely be a check on weaponization of the national security apparatus (sarc)

"Throughout the duration of Crossfire Hurricane, facts and circumstances that were inconsistent with the premise that Trump and/or persons associated with the Trump campaign were involved in a collusive or conspiratorial relationship with the Russian government were ignored or… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

List of the myriad pieces of evidence the FBI "discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia" in its zeal to get Trump

Who exactly within the national security apparatus would have adequately "redteamed" for Trump in connection with Crossfire Hurricane?

Did Durham Special Counsel interview Susan Rice? Did the office even attempt to do so?