HPSCI ranking member Devin Nunes discusses the new Lee Smith book “The Plot Against The President” and how Fusion-GPS used distribution of protodossiers to the media prior to the assembly by Fusion contractor Christopher Steele.
One of the more remarkable aspects to the political weaponization of the intelligence apparatus was the complicity of specific journalists and specific outlets to advance the Russian collusion-conspiracy narrative.

HPSCI Ranking Member Devin Nunes sits down for a lengthy interview with Jan Jekielek to discuss Spygate and the House investigation of the 2016 election known as “Objective Medusa”, the committee investigation that yielded the Nunes memo.

This would appear to be one of the few positive indicators that AG Bill Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham are indeed doing more than bondo.  The New York Times is reporting the Durham “review” has now officially moved into a full “criminal investigation”.  [All emphasis mine]

WASHINGTON — For more than two years, President Trump has repeatedly attacked the Russia investigation, portraying it as a hoax and illegal even months after the special counsel closed it. Now, Mr. Trump’s own Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into how it all began.

Justice Department officials have shifted an administrative review of the Russia investigation closely overseen by Attorney General William P. Barr to a criminal inquiry, according to two people familiar with the matter. The move gives the prosecutor running it, John H. Durham, the power to subpoena for witness testimony and documents, to impanel a grand jury and to file criminal charges.

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A letter from DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz provides both good news and bad news.   The goods news is Horowitz letter says likely no need for a “classified version” which means AG Bill Barr likely declassifying a lot of it.
However, the bad news is on page #2 where Horowitz says the final draft assembly is still ongoing, and the “review phase” has not yet begun.  Which means the report is not likely to be made public before Thanksgiving.
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U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley sent a forboding tweet a few days ago outlining the possibility of the FISA investigation would result in a “deep six” cover-up.

Grassley has a unique perspective on a very specific element to the construct of the FISA application, and the political use therein, that most have forgotten.  Back in 2018 when Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Grassley was hot on the trail of a very specific individual that has had almost no attention since. The election clock ran out on Grassley; the mid-terms took place; and Grassley was never able to get to his target.
The background to this tweet needs a little context {GO DEEP} and surrounds two individuals who have NOT been identified as being questioned by either IG Michael Horowitz or U.S. Attorney John Durham.
Those two individuals are: Daniel Jones, former lead staffer for former SSCI Vice-Chair Dianne Feinstein; and a lawyer for Christopher Steele named Adam Waldman.
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Representative John Ratcliffe appears with Martha MacCallum to discuss the ongoing closed-door testimony from officials upset about President Trump’s unorthodox approach to foreign policy.
Mr. Ratcliffe notes the purposeful leaks from Chairman Adam Schiff and his Lawfare staff to their aligned media scribes are intentionally false by design.

After the DOJ/FBI advanced their defensive efforts last weekend via the New York Times and NBC, now the CIA/ODNI faction step forth with the same intents and purposes.
CIA defending journalist Natasha Bertrand has been participating in the multi-year PR effort which helped frame the CIA/ODNI talking points against President Trump, and she is deployed again in the latest effort within Politico.   The timing here is predictable.

(Via Politico) President Donald Trump’s obsession with former CIA director John Brennan could be on a collision course with an ongoing Justice Department probe as Attorney General Bill Barr takes a more hands-on approach to examining the intelligence community’s actions in 2016.
[…] Durham’s report is likely to land well after the results of an inquiry by the Justice Department’s Inspector General, who is examining the FBI’s applications to a secret court in 2016 and 2017 to obtain surveillance warrants on a Trump campaign aide.

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With media reporting that U.S. Attorney John Durham has expanded the timeline and scope of his investigation into U.S. government and intelligence community activity during the 2016 election, there’s an interesting quote from NBC:

…”Justice Department officials have said that Durham has found something significant, and that critics should be careful.”…

The expanded investigative timeline is now into May 2017 when Mueller was appointed special counsel, and would mean all of the preceding (and surrounding) activity leading up to Mueller would be reviewed.   With that carefully in mind….
During the 2016 effort to weaponize the institutions of government against the outside candidacy of Donald Trump, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) was headed by Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein.  After the 2016 election Senator Feinstein abdicated her vice-chair position to Senator Mark Warner in January 2017.
While the SSCI was engaged in their part of the 2016 effort Vice-Chair Feinstein’s lead staffer was a man named Daniel Jones. Dan Jones was the contact point between the SSCI and Fusion-GPS.
After the election, and after Feinstein abdicated, Dan Jones left the committee to continue paying Fusion-GPS (Glenn Simpson) for ongoing efforts toward the impeachment insurance policy angle.
Feinstein appears to have left because she didn’t want to deal with the consequences of a President Trump, IF he discovered the SSCI involvement. Dan Jones left because with a Trump presidency the SSCI, now co-chaired by Senator Mark Warner, needed arms-length plausible deniability amid their 2017 operations to continue the removal effort (soft coup).
The trail for this plausible deniability process and ongoing soft-coup effort first surfaces with Dan Jones appearing in the early 2017 text messages between Senator Warner and the liaison for Christopher Steele, lawyer and lobbyist Adam Waldman:
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Within today’s reporting from the New York Times and NBC, a key aspect is how CIA analysts are worried about explaining and/or justifying the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA).  As such it is well worth remembering information about John Durham’s originating focus from June, 2019:
Against the backdrop of the DOJ admitting FBI investigators never had access to the DNC servers to verify a Russian hack; and with new information about the FBI receiving partial and redacted analysis from Crowdstrike; the review by U.S. Attorney John Durham toward the downstream assessment/claims of the CIA takes on new meaning.
CTH has previously outlined how the December 29th, 2016, Joint Analysis Report (JAR) on Russia Cyber Activity was a quickly compiled bunch of nonsense about Russian hacking.
The JAR was followed a week later by the January 7th, 2017, Intelligence Community Assessment. The ICA took the ridiculous construct of the JAR and then overlaid a political narrative that Russia was trying to help Donald Trump.
The ICA was the brain-trust of John Brennan, James Clapper and James Comey. While the majority of content was from the CIA, some of the content within the ICA was written by FBI Agent Peter Strzok who held a unique “insurance policy” interest in how the report could be utilized in 2017.  NSA Director Mike Rogers would not sign up to the “high confidence” claims, likely because he saw through the political motives of the report.
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The activity of the “small group” of coup plotters consists of three generalized subsidiary agencies: (1) DOJ/FBI, (2) CIA/ODNI, and (3) The State Department.
Within each “small group faction” a years-long review of their narrative constructs shows the groups have specific and unique media outlets for their offensive (’16, ’17) and defensive (’18, ’19) propaganda efforts.
•The DOJ/FBI faction of the “small group” leaks to narrative engineers at the New York Times and NBC. •The CIA/ODNI faction utilize the Washington Post and ABC; and •the State Dept. faction use CNN and CBS. Each faction uses the same reporters & pundits for their distribution. This pattern, albeit generalized, has been consistent for several years.

The originating media entity -utilizing the leaks, opinions and agenda of the faction most concerned- starts the process. The secondary media groups come in for support – reporting on the reporting; and then reporting on the reporting of the reporting… and so on. This process provides a concentric distribution effort to bolster the originating premise.
Similar to the Journ-o-list effort of Ezra Klein, all of the ideologically aligned reporters share information for the larger process of defending the prior activity and advancing a unified narrative. [Reference Buzzfeed’s Ali Watkins sharing leaks from SSCI Security Director James Wolfe to her peers at WaPo and New York Times while she had sex with the source to keep the information pipeline open.]
It is important to remember this concerted process whenever we are reviewing media articles concerning the matters of interest to each of the “small group” factions.
In essence, the propagandists within the media are the same; and the sources for the positions reflected in the articles are the same. Wash, rinse and repeat depending on the identified risk.
So today we see NBC and the New York Times going “out front” on behalf of their interests. Referencing the faction each outlet represents we see the *reporting* is to defend the interests of the DOJ and FBI.
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