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Stephen McIntyre Profile picture
@ClimateAudit
Jun 8, 2024 • 12 tweets • 8 min read • Read on X
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in 2019 and 2020, there was a huge amount of interest in the Strzok-Page texts, but almost no attention was paid to the fact that the texts had been heavily "curated" before reaching the public and that some key topics were missing.

One of the key topics that was missing from the Strzok-Page texts (as curated) was any mention of the interview of Steele's Primary Sub-Source in late January 2017. Given that the FBI had insisted on inclusion of Steele dossier allegations in the Intelligence Community Assessment dated January 6, 2017, this was a central FBI issue at the time and the lack of any reference in the Strzok-Page texts as originally presented is noteworthy.

Readers may recall that the very first tranche of Strzok-Page texts, released in Feb 2018, contained a long gap from mid-December 2017 to mid-May 2018 - from the ICA to appointment of Mueller. This is the very period in which the Crossfire investigation metastasized into the lawfare that undermined the incoming administration. The fact that this period was separately missing from both Strzok and Lisa Page has never been adequately explained. As an aside, it seems odd that the FBI can retrieve emails and texts from targets, but not from their own employees.

Subsequently, a tranche of texts from the missing period was released, but these were also heavily curated and contained no texts that relate to the Primary Subsource.

However, from an an exhibit in the Flynn case , we //KNOW// that, in the late evening of January 13, 2017, Strzok and Page texted about the Primary Subsource, less than two weeks prior to the interview (which began on January 24, 2017). The message wasn't interpretable in real time, but we (Hans Mahncke) were subsequently able to connect it to the Danchenko interview via the reference to the "Womble" law firm, with which Danchenko's lawyer, Mark Schamel, was then associated. We also learned that Schamel was friends with and namedropped Lisa Monaco.

But other than this single excerpt from the Flynn exhibits, I haven't located anything in any of the other Strzok texts than can be plausibly connected to the critical interviews of the Primary Subsource.

I think that there are some Strzok emails from Jan 19 and Jan 22, 2017 that may refer to the pending Primary Subsource interview, that I'll discuss next.

One useful thing that the Weaponization Committee could do would be to publish a complete and unexpurgated set of Strzok-Page texts. Given the interest created by the highly expurgated version, one wonders what an expurgated and unbowdlerized version might yield.courtlistener.com/docket/6234142…Image
In the volume of Strzok emails released on October 31, 2019, there was an almost entirely redacted thread dated January 19 and January 22, 2017, a couple of days before the Primary Subsource interview on January 24, 2017, which look to me like they have a good chance of relating to the PSS interview.

The thread began with an email from FBI Office of General Council (OGC) - Sally Anne Moyer or Kevin Clinesmith - to Strzok and a CD subordinate, with a very short subject line.

We know that the PSS interview was lawyered up and carried out under a sweetheart queen-for-a-day deal that was usually only available to highly placed Democrats (Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills etc.) So involvement of OGC in negotiation of the PSS interview is expected.Image
at 6:47 pm on Thursday, Jan 19, 2017, Strzok's CD subordinate wrote back that "here's what we have to decide ASAP". The issue is totally redacted, naturally. (This is one day before inauguration.) Image
At 7:04 PM, Strzok told his correspondents (OGC, WF and CD/Counterintelligence) that he had already briefed Bill [Priestap], who was trying to reach DD [McCabe]. WF probably Pientka, who had just left Crossfire, but had contacted Danchenko on behalf of Strzok on Jan 13th. At 7:27 PM, Strzok confirmed that Priestap had been contacted and was ready.Image
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At 8:00 PM Jan 19, 2017, Strzok relayed further instructions to his CD/Counterintelligence subordinate to relay to WFO and asked to be updated with "plan for meet and results of same". At 10:17PM, his subordinate responded, also thanking Strzok for "coordination assistance".
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On Sunday evening (Jan 22, 2017) at 7:24 PM, Strzok checked with his posse on whether they had any update for the Monday "am meeting //upstairs//". Strzok checked a second time at 8:00 PM.
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at 8:11 PM Sunday Jan 22, 2017, Strzok's subordinate emailed WFO "two things" - redacted. Presumably Strzok was on bcc as he replied.

at 8:40 PM, Strzok emailed his posse complaining that he "didn't like this. There is ALWAYS a middle of the night emergency of an ill-defined nature".Image
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then also at 8:40 PM. Strzok forwarded his communications to Lisa Page, adding that he had forwarded the exchange to Priestap. Lisa sympathized back at 9:40 PM.
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Does this exchange pertain to the pending January 24, 2017 interview with the Primary Sub-source. Given the timing and context, I think that there is a very high probability that it does.

This is relevant because it indicates that the most senior FBI staff (McCabe, Comey) would have been briefed on the pending interview with the Primary Sub-Source. It doesn't make any sense that they wouldn't have been, but they were never questioned in 2017-2018 about their knowledge of the meeting for the simple reason that the FBI rigorously concealed the existence of the meeting with the Primary Sub-source and were thus not questioned about it by the House or Senate Intel Committees.

Plus, the FBI hid Danchenko by making him a Confidential Human Source and by scrubbing any and all references to the Primary Sub-source in the Strzok-Page texts.
Strzok and Page sued the government for releasing their texts. A reader commented that they "won" their case.

The case is indeed in the news,
but it would be more accurate to say that the Biden DOJ, which is more protective of the bureaucracy than the public, has agreed to settle with Strzok and Page. In a similar manner presumably as the bureaucracy rewarded Andrew McCabe, powderpuffed Kevin Clinesmith, let time limits expire on Hunter Biden while punishing Navarro and Bannon.nbcnews.com/politics/justi…Image
Strzok and Page claimed that disclosure of their messages violated their "privacy rights". Privacy rights that appear to exist only for Democrats and uniparty bureaucrats, but not for opposition. Image
typo= missing tranche was Dec 2016 to May 2017 -as is clear from context

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Stephen McIntyre Profile picture
Aug 12
Here's a listing of Minority HPSCI Staff in early 2017. Most of the redactions in yesterday's release can be identified here. Image
In two of the 302s, WHISTLEB described the HPSCI Democrat system for exfiltrating secret information from a secure room in a three letter agency: presumably FBI, from which copies and notes were prohibited.

As a work-around, three HPSCI Democrat staffers would attend the Secure Room and, after each visit, "would immediately compose summaries" on a standalone computer set up in a back room by "committee's network administrator" for exclusive use by "Russian team" members. After the three Russian team members had completed their visit summaries, they briefed certain other staffers.

All of the names underneath the redactions can be plausibly identified from contemporary HPSCI Democrat staff rosters as shown below.Image
Here is a transcription of each of the two descriptions of the Russian team and secondary briefees, showing character counts.

The Russian Team had two 16s (at least one with LN8) and an 11. (number denotes character count of full name.)

The secondary briefees were a 6+5 (12), two 13s (one a 5+7), an 11, and the communications director (a 14). One of the 13s was a new hire.Image
Read 9 tweets
Stephen McIntyre Profile picture
Jul 31
Durham Classified Appendix is almost entirely about "Clinton Plan". Unsurprisingly, nothing about the post-election events during which Russiagate collusion hoax actually metastasized under FBI and CIA into a national flesh-eating disease.
Emails from Lenny Benardo of Soros' Open Society Foundation feature prominently. Note that Benardo was mentioned in a Washington Post article by Demirjan and Devlin Barrett on May 24, 2017 (a few days after Mueller appointment) - archive archive.is/w43O2 reporting that the email had been dismissed by FBI as "unreliable". DWS, Benardo and Renteria said at the time that they had never been interviewed by FBI.Image
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Fool_Nelson proposed Julie Smith as Foreign Policy Advisor-2 in Durham report at the time:
Here's a July 27, 2016 email (attributed to Benardo) which contains a detail relevant to the argument against @DNIGabbard's first drop, claiming that Russian interference concern was NEVER about election infrastructure, but always about DNC hack and Buff Bernie memes. Here Benardo talks about how to make Russia "a domestic issue" by raising the spectre of a "critical infrastructure threat for the election". Brennan subsequently did just that: raised concern about "infrastructure threat". ODNI played down that threat in their briefings and ultimately in the proposed post-election PDB of December 8, 2016 which was cancelled by Obama intervention.Image
Read 4 tweets
Stephen McIntyre Profile picture
Jul 22
the ICA version in the recent DNI documents is a different version (dated January 5, 2017) than the released version (dated January 6, 2017). There were many changes overnight - some substantive.

Before editorializing, I'll laboriously go through comparisons - final version on left, previous day version on right. (I apologize for not marking this on each of the following slides.)Image
The Jan 6, 2017 version contained a preface entitled "Background... The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution", not present in the Jan 5 version (as shown). It has two sections.

The first section entitled "The Analytic Process" stated that these assessments "adhere to tradecraft standards".

"On these issues of great importance to US national security, the goal of intelligence analysis is to provide assessments to decisionmakers that are intellectually rigorous, objective, timely, and useful, and that adhere to tradecraft standards."

Now recall the dispute over inclusion of Steele dossier information in the ICA as an appendix and, as we recently learned, as a bullet supporting the assessment that Putin "aspired" to help Trump. Some IC professionals objected to the inclusion of Steele dossier information on the grounds that it did not meet tradecraft standards for inclusion in an ICA. Comey, McCabe and FBI insisted on its inclusion on the grounds that Obama had said to include "everything" - which they interpreted as mandating inclusion of Steele dossier information even though it didn't meet tradecraft standards.

Reasonable people can perhaps disagree on whether this was justified or not. What was not justified was the claim that the inclusion decision complied with "tradecraft standards". It was bad enough to include non-compliant material, but the claim that the included material "adhered to tradecraft standards" was miserably false. The recent Tradecraft Review should have addressed this fault.Image
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The preface also included the following assertion:
"The tradecraft standards for analytic products have been refined over the past ten years. These standards include describing sources (including their reliability and access to the information they provide), clearly expressing uncertainty, distinguishing between underlying information and analysts’ judgments and assumptions, exploring alternatives, demonstrating relevance to the customer, using strong and transparent logic, and explaining change or consistency in judgments over time."

The "past ten years" here refers to the period of time since the savage tradecraft review by the WMD Commission, an excellent repot on a previous intelligence failure of similar scale to the Russia collusion hoax as an //intelligence failure// - which it was (even if non-criminal).

They state that "standards include describing sources (including their reliability and access to the information they provide)". Now apply that to the description of the Steele network in the classified appendix (declassified and released in 2020) shown below and transcribed as follows:
"the source is an executive of a private business intelligence firm and a former employee of a friendly foreign intelligence service who has been compensated for previous reporting over the past three years. The source maintains and collects information from a layered network of identified and unidentified subsources, some of which has been corroborated in the past. The source collected this information on behalf of private clients and was not compensated for it by the FBI".

This description does not remotely comply with the warranty in the Preface. We know that Steele (the "source") had told the FBI that his information was funneled through a "Russian-based sub-source" who Steele refused to identify. Steele did however tell the FBI that Sergei Millian was one of the sub-subsources to the "Russian-based sub-source". By mid-December 2016, the FBI had figured out that Steele's "Russian-based sub-source" was Igor Danchenko, an alumnus of U of Louisville, Georgetown and Brookings Institute, who lived in northern Virginia and had an American-born daughter. A fulsome description of sources IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE WARRANTY IN THE PREFACE would have included these details and more.

It would have also stated that the FBI planned to interview the Primary Sub-Source as soon as possible. Given the importance of the document, the obvious question from any sane reviewer of the draft ICA would be: "uh, why don't you interview Steele's Primary Sub-Source right now? Today? " "And, by the way, why are you saying that he is 'Russian-based' when he lives in northern Virginia?"

If the reviewers had known that Steele's Primary Sub-Source had lived in northern Virginia and was available for interview, maybe they would have said: "uh, maybe we should hold off this ICA until we talk to Danchenko. This is a big document, maybe we should do some due diligence". But they weren't given that option, because Danchenko's location in northern Virginia was concealed from them. The warranty in the prefatory Background was false.

Subsequently, a few weeks later, when the FBI interviewed Danchenko and he revealed that there wasn't any "layered network" and that the key allegations were based (at best) on an anonymous phone call and that many of the sourcing claims in the dossier were untrue, the intelligence community had an obligation to fess up. To retract their claims about the Steele dossier, which, by the end of January, had emerged in public consciousness as the driving predicate of the Russia collusion investigation. Once the FBI knew that the sourcing claims were fraudulent, they had an obligation to disclose that to the rest of the IC and to publicly disown the Steele dossier, which had become important to the public precisely because of its endorsement in the ICA.Image
Read 9 tweets
Stephen McIntyre Profile picture
Jul 14
Trump's latest tariff venture is a 50% tariff on copper, ostensibly for national security reasons. Copper markets are something that I analysed in the 1970s; so I know the structure of the markets and statistics. I was even been involved as a junior analyst in a trade case about US copper tariffs.

Under the US Defense Production Act, Canada is considered "domestic production" for the purposes of national security, but neither Trump nor the Canadian government seem to have had any interest in this legislation.

I remember the difficulties of trying to make long-term forecasts of copper supply and demand. Copper is also a market with voluminous statistics maintained consistently for a very long period. US Geological Survey for US consumption and primary production of refined copper for 1950-2024 are shown below. As someone who, in the 1970s, actually thought about what this chart would look like, it was interesting to re-visit.

In the 1920s and 1930s, US copper company were industrial behemoths: Anaconda, Kennecott, Phelps Dodge and Asarco, all now forgotten, were among the top 20 or top 50 US stocks back in the day. In the 1970s, they were still major companies. US accounted for about 25% of world production and consumption.

But, as you can see, since 2000, both US primary production and US refined consumption have declined precipitously. US refined consumption is now at lower levels than in the 1970s and US primary production is less than the early 1950s.

What will be the impact of a 50% tariff on copper imports? In the next post, I'll show how the changes in US market compare to world production.Image
although US copper production has declined since the 1970s, world copper production has almost quadrupled. US share of world copper refined production (here primary plus secondary scrap) has decreased from about 25% to 3%.

US copper production and consumption no longer dominate world markets - despite what the Beltway may imagine. An approximate 3% share doesn't get to dictate prices.

That means that the 50% copper tariff will be borne entirely by US copper consumers (i.e. manufacturers using copper). US producers will almost certainly increase their price to match the price of imports. So the tariff will be a bonanza for US domestic producers (e.g. Freeport McMoran) and a burden for US manufacturers.Image
the copper data also shows a vignette into the remarkable change in world economic geography since 9/11. In 2001, US still produced more copper than China. In 2024, China produced more than 13(!) times as much copper as USA. This isn't just production, but also consumption. Chinese manufacturers consume most of their copper production; their copper consumption is accordingly an order of magnitude greater than US copper consumption.

So when Trump puffs about the importance of USA as a market, this is simply not true of a basic commodity like copper. And I'm skeptical that it is true for other basic commodities.Image
Read 4 tweets
Stephen McIntyre Profile picture
Jul 9
on first page: Brennan's lawyer, Robert Litt, was General Counsel at ODNI in 2016 and involved in some key events. Litt published an article in October 2017 lawfaremedia.org/article/irrele… which claimed that "The dossier itself played absolutely no role in the coordinated intelligence assessment that Russia interfered in our election." The recent Tradecraft Review, abysmal as it was, admitted that the dossier was cited in the classified ICA as a bullet support for the claim that Putin "aspired" to help Trump get elected.Image
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@15poundstogo very Clintonian here Image
Brennan refers here to two press releases issued by William Evanina in July and August 2020. The Evanina statements were prompted in large part by the release of Biden-Poroshenko tapes by Ukrainian parliamentarian Andrii Derkach (who had previously in October 2016 published receipts showing that Hunter Biden was getting paid $1 million per year by Burisma). Shortly after Evanina's statements, "Trump" administration sanctioned Derkach. As a result of these sanctions, Derkach was de-platformed and the Biden-Poroshenko tapes were deleted from nearly all locations. One of the tapes showed that Poroshenko and Biden gloated in August 2016 about the removal of Manafort as Trump campaign chair as a result of Ukrainian interference (Black Ledger announcement.)Image
Read 11 tweets
Stephen McIntyre Profile picture
Apr 13
New thread on new information from redactions.

I just noticed that the information in Binder on Trump briefing in Aug 2016 was previously published by Grassley in July 2020, a few days after identification of Steele Primary Sub-source (and thus we, in this corner, were otherwise preoccupied).
grassley.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/…

The new version sheds light on a previous redaction. Katrina, Norm, Ted, John and Amir were mentioned. Just noting this for future reference.Image
something else that I'm noticing in the less redacted documents: Kevin Clinesmith was much more prominent in Crossfire Hurricane operation than we previously realized.

In real time, Hans, myself and others had vehemently and savagely criticized Durham's useless plea agreement with Clinesmith that had failed to use their leverage over Clinesmith to obtain a road map of the Russiagate hoax operation. Compare for example Mueller's use of leverage over Rick Gates to interview him about 20 times, If anything, there was more leverage over Clinesmith.

Durham's failure to lever Clinesmith looks worse and worse as we now see Clinesmith's name in multiple Crossfire documents that had previously been redacted.

For example, here is Clinesmith on August 30, 2016 - early days of Russiagate hoax - approving the reporting of FBI surveillance of Trump and Flynn while they were supposedly providing a counterintelligence briefing.

In this briefing, they failed to give Trump and Flynn the same warning about Turkey that they had previously given Clinton's lawyers.Image
here's an example where the "declassified" Binder contains a redaction not made in the version published by Grassley almost five years ago. the name of Edward (Ted) Gistaro of ODNI Image
Read 19 tweets

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