Carter Page was the convenient target of a FISA application the Obama-era DOJ and FBI needed to cover for their illegal surveillance. In essence, late summer 2016 the DOJ/FBI needed to get a search warrant to cover for the illegal political surveillance they had been undertaking for the past 10+ months on the Trump campaign.

The DOJ/FBI had an intelligence source named Carter Page, essentially an informant who worked for the CIA and whom the FBI previously used to indict Russians in the Buryakov case. Page was tangentially affiliated with the Trump campaign, so he became the conduit -a target- to get a search warrant that would provide the cover for all prior surveillance.

Carter Page became the useful target, and the Steele dossier, again provided by -essentially- another confidential informant (Chris Steele), provided the evidence to support the warrant. Thus, the dossier was important to support the search warrant application (the FISA app). The FISA application is the Title-1 search warrant application, and the dossier was essentially the underlying ‘woods file’, to justify the warrant.

Everything associated with the search warrant was nonsense, including the informants (Chris Steele, Igor Danchenko, Charles Dolan) who provided the DOJ with evidence (fabricated information) to take to the judge. That’s why it is all falling apart in closer examination. Everyone in the DOJ and FBI knew the evidence justifying the search warrant was nonsense, but they needed the warrant to cover for their prior unlawful conduct.

However, the target of that warrant, the former useful CIA, FBI and DOJ informant who was valuable to the DOJ in prior legal cases, is angry. Carter Page is righteously angry at the FBI and DOJ for lying to a judge (FISA Court) to get a search warrant against him and everyone he talked to and communicated with. So Carter Page has been filing civil lawsuits against the participants hoping to hold them accountable.

Today the civil lawsuit Carter Page -vs- James Comey, former FBI Director at the time when Page was targeted, was assigned to a new judge….. and who do you think the judge “randomly selected” was?

Yup…. James Boasberg, current presiding judge over the FISA Court.

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We begin any outline of the Durham investigation with the following disclaimer:  How is John Durham going to reveal everything that is possible about the deep state Trump targeting operation, and simultaneously handle the involvement of Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissmann and the Special Counsel team who were specifically appointed to cover it up.

Kash Patel, former Pentagon Chief of Staff, and former Senior Staff Advisor to the House Intelligence Committee, discusses the recent public developments within the John Durham investigation, and gives his opinion on possible targets who were operating inside government. 

Patel holds the opinion that Joe Biden’s current National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan is a likely target.  Patel also says he could see three former FBI officials as targets of the Durham probe: (1) former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe; (2) former FBI Special Agent in the Counterintelligence Division, Peter Strzok; and (3) former DOJ legal counsel to Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page.

Patel frames his opinion that Andrew McCabe would be targeted from the perspective that McCabe likely told FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith to change the wording of an email in order to support the Carter Page FISA application renewal.  Clinesmith plead guilty and was sentenced to six months probation; however, in the court filings and affidavits, Clinesmith said under oath he acted alone – so I’m not sure why Patel is confident about Andrew McCabe being at risk from Clinesmith.  WATCH:

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Everyone is rightly frustrated by the lack of legal accountability upon the primary government officials and politicians who participated in the political use of their agencies to target Donald Trump.    However, it is important to keep in mind the biggest network who participated in Spygate from inside government was the Robert Mueller Special Counsel team.

It is going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to have an optimistic outlook toward accountability until someone -anyone- can reconcile how John Durham can target former government officials and yet avoid the scale of the Special Counsel efforts that were deployed to cover it up.  The 2016 DOJ/FBI Crossfire Hurricane operation to the 2017 DOJ/FBI Special Counsel is one long continuum of the same exact corrupt investigation; done for the exact same corrupt intents; and carried out by the same people.

There is no way John Durham is going to touch the Special Counsel investigation of Robert Mueller; and until someone can provide a reasonable discussion of how Durham can deal with the Robert Mueller investigation and yet target former government officials -who were protected by Mueller- everything regarding future indictments of bigger fish is essentially hope porn.

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More people are awakening to the uncomfortable reality that the FBI is a domestic enforcement mechanism for the Fourth Branch of Government.  The most recent awakening is being driven by the brazen FBI raid on Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe with the intent to leak the information to their allies at the New York Times.

Make no mistake, this is one long continuum of FBI activity that is only growing increasingly more obvious as they consider themselves unaccountable to anyone except their own ideological interests.   Who is the check in the U.S. justice system to provide oversight over the FBI?  The uncomfortable answer is no one.

Remember, the oft reported relationships surrounding the divisions within the Fourth Branch:  ♦The CIA uses The Washington Post. ♦The State Dept uses CNN, and ♦the FBI uses The New York Times.

James O’Keefe is currently in a lawsuit against The New York Times.  The FBI raids the home of O’Keefe and then passes along the confidential communication between Project Veritas and their legal team to the New York Times.  With a large audience, Tim Poole is realizing what CTH readers have been discussing for a decade:

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Absolute power ends with absolute corruption.  The day after Christopher Steele appeared on ABC news to construct the defensive position against the information later released in an indictment by John Durham of ‘Trump-Russia’ conspiracy promoter Igor Danchenko.   The very next day, the FBI raids the home of Oleg Deripaska.

Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska was the former employer of Christopher Steele {Go Deep}.  The timing of the raid was transparently political.  George Stephanopoulos interviewed Steele, because the Clinton operation in 2016 was at risk.  Stephanopoulos’s interview was risk mitigation.  Deripaska’s raid the next day was cover.

The FBI raid on O’Keefe was done for the same ideological purpose as the raid on Deripaska.  This is all one long continuum.  All of this is coordinated by political operatives using the DOJ and FBI as their enforcement mechanism.

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John Durham is providing evidence {Go Deep} showing how the “Trump-Russia” collusion story was created by Hillary Clinton and Democrat operatives like Dan Jones, Charles Dolan, Glenn Simpson and contracted operatives within Fusion-GPS; who then laundered their fake stories to Christopher Steele and his source Igor Danchenko for distribution to the FBI; and who then leaked the information to awaiting allies in the media.  Those same media recipients are now scrubbing their participation:

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It’s an issue within the Trump operation that we have highlighted for years {Go Deep}.  The media reports on media reports of media reports. Now, the collective system of the Washington Post writing about a New York Times article that is based on CNN reporting (using anonymous planted leaks from the DOJ/FBI) starts to collapse in reverse.  CNN does a stealth deletion, causing the New York Times to stealth edit, creating a need for the Washington Post to rewrite their participation.

We asked years ago: “Think about a New York Times, CNN or Washington Post journalist now having to accept that every column inch they have written in the past [four years] was built upon a foundation of lies. Do we really think such a catastrophic level of flawed ideology could ever reconstitute into  genuine reporting of fact-based information?” Of course not.

These guys are so corrupt, and they participated so completely in the willful distribution of false information, they are beyond redemption.  They don’t even attempt to apologize, admit their errors or accept responsibility.  Instead, they just start deleting the trail of their involvement.  Nothing to see here folks, move along, move along.

Over a year ago, CBS News journalist Catherine Herridge obtained a 94-page spread sheet (pdf here) showing dates of media reports, dates of Steele reports on the same material, and the FBI effort to verify or validate the circular process in their investigation.

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TechnoFog has a good outline on the background of Igor Danchenko and the DOJ/FBI team effort to avoid undermining the Steele Dossier. {SEE HERE}  The accurate analysis ends with the following question, also posed by Sergei Millian: “Why was the DOJ/FBI covering for Danchenko“?

To my friends in the truth media, the answer is inside the information previously released {See Here} which we have covered for a long time; and which the righteous media (Mollie Hemmingway, Lee Smith, Kimberley Strassel, etc) are hopefully only a few weeks away from outlining.

The DOJ/FBI coverup, which included being purposefully blind to the 2017 Danchenko revelations, was not done to protect Danchenko. It was done to protect Andrew Weissmann and Robert Mueller.

Yes, the FBI and DOJ knew the primary subsource for Christopher Steele, Igor Danchenko, disavowed the material in the dossier and undermined it in January of 2017 and again in June 15, 2017, as everyone is noting.  Yes, despite that knowledge Mueller/Weissmann applied for a FISA renewal on June 29th.  However, there’s a date a year later, all the way into July of 2018, when the DOJ and FBI claimed that Danchenko was speaking truth in their affirmation to the FISA court.

THAT is in 2018.

Why would the same DOJ/FBI officials who knew the dossier was junk in early 2017 lie to the FISA court in 2018?

ANSWER: Because they were not protecting Danchenko, they were protecting Robert Mueller.

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An interview by Maria Bartiromo this morning highlights one of the dynamics almost invisible to most voices who speak on a granular level about the background of Spygate, and where they believe John Durham is going.   In this interview, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe outlines the moment in August of 2016 when Team Obama (he uses John Brennan) tells the president what Team Clinton is doing.

To set the correct context to understand the importance of what Ratcliffe is outlining here, it is important to remember that inside the executive branch of government, heading into the 2016 election, the two distinct camps were operating based on their perspective of their individual best interests.  Two distinct camps – Team Clinton and Team Obama.

Watch the interview while paying close attention to the dates and personalities that Ratcliffe is outlining.  I will expand on the background to explain how these issues surface in the investigation of John Durham; where he will go and where he will not go.  WATCH:

To understand the context Ratcliffe is explaining, it is important to go back to the relationship that existed between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.  It is from this relationship when things start to fall into place, as the Clinton camp was operating in the year of the 2016 election.  Grab a beverage, this is going to get weedy…

Deep political followers will remember well the 2008 Democrat primary between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  It was a brutal battle within the Democrat Party between radical ideologues (Team Obama) and the entrenched establishment old guard (Team Clinton).

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House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes, and House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jim Jordan discuss several topics of concern in/around Washington DC including the recent indictment of Christopher Steele source Igor Danchenko.  {Direct Rumble Link}

Within the conversation, CTH readers get a good look at one of the problems we have discussed exclusively on these pages, the issue of the information silos.  Both Nunes and Jordan discuss information from the perspective of their legislative silo, without standing back to consider the issues as they exist in the larger dynamic.

Ex. ¹Notice how both congressional advocates discuss Danchenko from the perspective of giving the FBI the source material (inside the dossier) to trigger the FISA surveillance authorities.  Yet, both miss the motive of why the FBI needed the FISA surveillance authority to cover for pre-existing unlawful surveillance that was already taking place prior to October of 2016.  WATCH:

¹Having spoken to staffers on these committees, this is one of the more frustrating issues to accept.  The silo effect, the outlook that only extends their investigation insofar as their legislative authority reaches, permits the Fourth Branch of Government to continue playing the Legislative Branch as fools.

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There is an issue being overlooked, well, not so much ‘overlooked’ per se’, but rather intentionally being ignored by everyone in the discussion.

Maybe not an 800lb gorilla in the room, but at least to a troop of screaming spider monkeys swinging from the drapes and chandeliers.

As everyone is well aware, back in 2016 the entire U.S. media apparatus was given copies of the Clinton-funded Christoper Steele dossier, as Fusion GPS worked every source in their contact list to push the fabricated claims into the headlines.  Eventually the stenographers in/around DC, led by CNN and Buzzfeed, acquiesced.

As a result of the Durham indictment, we now know a fellow named Igor Danchenko was working closely with Democrat Party public relations executive Charles Dolan to funnel the fabricated source material to Chris Steele.

Chris Steele, under contract with Fusion-GPS to assemble opposition research that would be used by allies in the media and FBI, then took the Danchenko/Dolan fabricated claims and put it into his dossier.

DOJ official Bruce Ohr, the husband of another Fusion-GPS employee Nellie Ohr, was used as the laundry conduit to put the dossier into the hands of the FBI.  Simultaneously Glenn Simpson took the dossier and shopped it to his media pals.  That’s how the entire story was created; and yes, we already knew most of this and Durham is simply filling in the details.   However, there is something missing from all reporting.

We know the dossier was used as the resource material for the October 21, 2016, FISA application -a Title 1 search warrant-  to conduct political surveillance against the Trump campaign by accusing Carter Page of being an agent of the Russian government.  The Steele dossier was essentially a substitute for the ‘woods file’ that justifies an intrusive search warrant against a U.S. citizen.  The dossier was the evidence used by the FBI and DOJ to justify the warrant application.

What’s missing from this context is not just the fabricated dossier in the hands of the media; but rather, in March 2017 the actual FISA application was in the hands of the media.   Not only did most mainstream U.S. media like Buzzfeed, Politico, The New York Times and the Washington Post have the dossier in their hands, effective March 17, 2017, they also had the full and unredacted FISA application as it was leaked by the Senate Intelligence Committee Security Director James Wolfe.

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When the Carter Page FISA application was originally assembled by the FBI and DOJ, there was initial hesitancy from within the DOJ National Security Division (DOJ-NSD) about submitting the application, because it did not have enough citations in evidence (the infamous ‘Woods File’).  That’s why the Steele Dossier ultimately became important.  It was the Steele Dossier that provided the push, the legal cover needed for the DOJ-NSD to submit the application for a Title-1 surveillance warrant against the campaign of Donald J. Trump.

When the application was finally assembled for submission to the FISA court, the head of the DOJ-NSD was John Carlin.  Carlin quit working for the DOJ-NSD in late September 2016 just before the final application was submitted (October 21,2016).  John Carlin was replaced by Deputy Asst. Attorney General, Mary McCord.

♦ When the FISA application was finally submitted (approved by Sally Yates and James Comey), it was Mary McCord who did the actual process of filing the application and gaining the Title-1 surveillance warrant.

A few months later, February 2017, with Donald Trump now in office as President, it was Mary McCord who went with Deputy AG Sally Yates to the White House to confront White House legal counsel Don McGahn over the Michael Flynn interview with FBI agents.  The surveillance of Flynn’s calls was presumably done under the auspices and legal authority of the FISA application Mary McCord previously was in charge of submitting.

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CTH begins every review of John Durham news with the following disclaimer:  If Special Counsel John Durham was going to reveal what is possible; how is Durham going to handle the reality that Robert Mueller’s and Andrew Weissmann’s entire existence was in place to hide it?

♦ The primary subsource for the Christopher Steele dossier was a guy named Igor Danchenko.   According to several investigations of the dossier, Chris Steele attributes most of the information within the dossier to Danchenko.  John Durham has just arrested Igor Danchenko [indictment pdf here]

The backstory is…. In essence, Chris Steele put a bunch of Danchenko garbage inside his dossier, and his dossier was used to get the Carter Page FISA warrant to conduct surveillance against the Trump campaign (October 21, 2016). Danchenko then disavowed the veracity of all the information he provided during FBI interviews in January, February and March 2017; but the FBI ignored the Danchenko statements and used the dossier for two more FISA renewals in April and June 2017.

For a background on Igor Danchenko and his sketchy claims both to Chris Steele and to FBI investigators, review this prior video put together by John Spiropoulos prior to the information we discover today:

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Today, Igor Danchenko was indicted on five counts of lying to the FBI as an outcome of the special counsel investigation headed by John Durham. {New York Times}

However, it is important to note what Durham is doing here.  Durham is charging Danchenko (working outside government) with lying to the FBI while simultaneously avoiding drawing attention to the FBI/DOJ officials (inside government) who knew Danchenko was lying and were willfully blind to the lying in order to continue attacking and investigating President Donald Trump.

So far, John Durham is willing to go after the co-conspirators outside government, but he is unwilling to target or call out the co-conspirators currently inside the U.S. government.

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