Does Durham's Expose of FBI Political Hacks Cover the DNC "Hack"?
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DAILY BIBLE VERSE
2 My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.
John 14:2-3
DURHAM REPORT COVERAGE
Does Durham's Expose of FBI Political Hacks Cover the DNC "Hack"?
Yesterday, a Substack reader asked if the newly released Durham Report says anything about the supposed “Russian hack” of the DNC servers in 2016, the event that appears to have kicked off the whole “Russia Russia Russia” Hoax.
One would think that an investigation into how “Crossfire Hurricane” originated and was conducted within the FBI would certainly look at that.
But one would be wrong. There’s nothing in the report about who might have breached the security of the DNC servers with the so-called “DNC hack.” And that apparently is by design, as Bill Barr, in appointing John Durham in October 2020 and specifying the areas to be investigated, did not include it. In the appointment order, Durham was given authorization to investigate the intelligence and law enforcement “directed at the 2016 presidential campaigns, individuals associated with those campaigns, and individuals associated with the administration of Donald J. Trump, including but not limited to Crossfire Hurricane and the investigation of Special Counsel Robert H. Mueller III.”
By “campaigns,” plural, one would assume Barr meant both the Trump and Clinton campaigns, and any look at Hillary’s campaign would, it would seem, include the DNC “hack.” But Durham’s report doesn’t get into it.
TechnoFog speculates that this is because Durham interpreted Barr’s instructions to mean he was supposed to look at just the campaigns, and the “hack” of the DNC servers could fall outside that scope. This rationale is hard to understand, though, because the “hack” uncovered emails that were viewed as harmful to Hillary’s campaign. Still, that’s where he drew the line.
It seems like a huge failing not to take the opportunity to look into something so closely tied to the Russia Hoax.
As TechnoFog said, “This was a remarkable omission and an unfortunate mistake by Barr, who rightly viewed Crossfire Hurricane and the Trump/Russia investigation with skepticism but didn’t think to extend that skepticism to other matters involving many of the same players.”
His full analysis is a must-read. It goes on to provide an excellent summary of what Durham’s investigation did find. The relentless push to investigate Trump’s campaign was top-down at the FBI, with Director James Comey quite insistent that Carter Page be surveilled.
https://radiopatriot.net/2023/05/16/techno-fog-a-deeper-dive-into-the-durham-report/
As for their investigation of Hillary’s campaign, one FBI agent told Durham’s team that “they were pretty much ‘tippy-toeing’ around HRC because there was a chance she would be the next President.” (It seems they never imagined Trump would be.) Example: FBI headquarters waited four months after hearing that candidate-to-be Hillary was willingly accepting an illegal donation of $2,700 from a foreign source, through an intermediary who was a confidential human source (CHS). The CHS turns out to have been Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne, later to become known for his look into alleged 2020 election fraud. He later tipped the FBI to another foreign government looking to give Hillary’s campaign an illegal donation.
The FBI let all this fall through the cracks and did not obtain any documentation of the illegal payment. And Byrne’s FBI handler told him to “stay away from all events relating to the Clinton campaign.”
“Do not attend any more campaign events, set up meetings, or anything else related to Clinton’s campaign,” the handler told him. “We need to keep you completely away from that situation. I don’t know all the details, but it’s for your own protection.”
The FBI was also supposedly looking into the Clinton Foundation, but Durham found that DOJ and FBI leadership essentially “sabotaged” that investigation and was even “hostile” to presentations from the FBI field offices. At one point, Andrew McCabe ordered that the cases be closed.
Durham’s report indicates that one of the Clinton campaign’s foreign policy advisers admitted “it was possible that she [Hillary] had proposed ideas” on Trump/Russia topics “to the campaign’s leadership, who may have approved those ideas.” They also admitted that it was “possible” someone [Hillary?] proposed linking Trump to Russia to distract from Clinton’s private email server. These discussions were followed by public statements from Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook which said “the Russian government had carried out the DNC hack to “assist Trump’s electoral chances.”
So Durham does at least mention the Clinton campaign’s claim about a DNC “hack” by Russians. That he didn’t or couldn’t follow that up with an independent look at whether or not the claim was true is, well, infuriating.
ASIDE: To quote another particularly infuriating part, “...Durham didn’t have the evidence to charge anyone from the Clinton Campaign with intentionally providing false information to the government. While it was the Clinton Campaign who came up with the general Trump-Russia plan, they were insulated from the planning and execution --- and thus consequences --- by their Perkins Coie lawyers, who used Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele (among others) to feed rumors and innuendo to the FBI.” (Note: they haven’t faced consequences, either!)
ASIDE #2: If you’ve heard criticism that Durham “never interviewed” a number of top FBI officials, TechnoFog explains that they simply declined. “Durham could have compelled their testimony before a grand jury, but that would’ve involved 1) immunity to the witnesses, 2) grand jury secrecy, and 3) answers like ‘I don’t recall.’ Other witnesses who might have lied to the FBI invoked their Fifth Amendment privileges.”
“These are FBI officials and agents,” TechnoFog says, “who know the law and are adept at deceiving...while avoiding prosecution.”
His chilling conclusion is that “the FBI didn’t just abuse its authority and undertake an illegal spying campaign. It influenced elections. It permanently tarnished the reputations of good men like Carter Page. It created the Trump/Russia media frenzy that lasted for years. And it ruined the lives and otherwise bankrupted a significant number of targets and witnesses. All because the FBI objected to the choice of the voters.”
But what about that “DNC hack”? Durham must have assumed it was accomplished by Russian hackers, because his scope of inquiry originally did include “individuals associated with [the] campaigns” and he never bothered to examine their possible involvement in it. How ironic it would’ve been to find that the event that kicked off the whole “Russia” hysteria hadn’t been done by Russians at all.
Even at this late date, no one has seen evidence that Russia hacked the DNC computers. As we’ve reported all along, the servers were given to a company called CrowdStrike, which has never turned over the hard drives to the FBI for forensic analysis. (That’s another incidence of the FBI dropping the ball, or more like spiking it.) And later, the president of CrowdStrike admitted under oath that they’d never seen evidence of a Russian hack.
So the “Russia hacked the DNC servers” story could be just as phony as all the rest of the lies that came out of Hillary’s campaign. But if Russia didn’t hack those emails, someone had to get them. Which brings us to another story, that of a young DNC staffer, a Bernie supporter, who was shot twice from behind early one morning in the summer of 2016 while walking home to his DC apartment, in a robbery attempt during which nothing was taken. The lid was swiftly clamped shut on any inquiry, but someday we’ll find out if this was an isolated incident or part of something bigger, just as we found out about the contamination at the FBI. In the meantime, it’s not conspiracy theory just to wonder about this. Heck, all the other so-called conspiracy theories we’ve ever seriously pondered have turned out to be true.
FURTHER READING
If you have a VIP membership at PJ MEDIA, Matt Margolis has a piece on just how horrific the Durham Report really is and the crying need to win the House, Senate and White House.
We reported yesterday that both Biden and Obama were briefed on Hillary’s role in the Russia Hoax. Here’s more on that.
FBI whistleblowers Steve Friend and Kyle Seraphin appeared on Laura Ingraham’s FOX NEWS show Wednesday night to say the Durham Report “should be the final death knell for the FBI.” A must-read.
Here’s another good summary of the problems cited by Durham. It tells how this group of “Keystone Cops” got away with “one of the dirtiest and most unethical political tricks in our nation’s history.”
Nick Arama at REDSTATE zeroes in on Hillary’s role. Top-level officials knew about it but appear to have kept rank-and-file investigators in the dark.
For all the liberal media outlets who are insisting that there’s nothing to the Durham Report, the Federalist offers a list of “6 Freshly-Documented Instances of Systemic Pro-Democrat FBI Corruption.” To which I would reply, “Only six?”
Finally, can we now say Hillary is “a loathsome mistress of subterfuge and machination, mendacity and rapaciousness, wrapped in an instinct for self-preservation driven by a cold-blooded...hunt for power?” Yes, we can.
A growing chorus to remove Adam Schiff
As Adam Schiff continues to brazen it out and insist that the Durham Report means nothing and the Trump Russian collusion yarn was real (without ever showing us that “ample evidence” he claimed to have), there’s a growing movement demanding that he not merely be removed from the Intelligence Committee for being a liar and leaker (Done!), but that he be expelled from the House altogether. Schiff, of course, thinks he deserves a promotion to the Senate. I guess he thinks Jedi Master-level lying skills are a qualification.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna has submitted a resolution to expel Schiff. She tweeted, “Knowingly using your position on House Intel to push a lie that ripped apart our country, cost taxpayers millions of dollars, and authorized spying on a US President and then proceeding to double down on the lie within days of the Durham report coming out makes you unfit for office. Ethics should investigate.”
Normally, I’d comment here, but I think she’s said it all.
IN OTHER NEWS
Democrats get a taste of their own medicine
In New York City, where half the hotel rooms are reportedly now housing illegal immigrants at taxpayer expense, New York Democrats who voted in droves for Joe “Open Borders” Biden are finally starting to taste their own medicine, and it’s bitter stuff, indeed.
Now, parents in far-left Brooklyn are starting to sound like red staters as they protest plans to use their kids’ school gymnasiums to house hundreds of illegal migrants who haven’t been vetted for either exotic diseases or criminal records. It was okay to expose someone else's kids in Texas or Arizona to those dangers, but these are THEIR precious children!
Liberals can complain all they like about how “cruel and inhumane” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is to bus some of the onslaught of illegal entrants to their far-away blue enclaves, but I see no reason why states that rejected Biden should have to bear the entire brunt of his awful policies while the ones that elected him get off scot-free. The illegal aliens filling their kids' schools are just like the violent crime waves and homelessness making blue cities unlivable: if you don’t like it, all you have to do is stop voting for more of it.
Nashville shooting update
I’ve heard a lot of excuses for not releasing the “manifesto” written by the “trans” mass shooter who murdered six people at the Covenant Christian School in Nashville. But this is the first one that actually makes a valid point.
The school and the church that runs it filed a motion to block the manifesto's release because it’s said to contain information compiled by the killer on the school’s facilities and employees that might impair the school’s ability to protect its interests or its employees’ privacy if it’s made public.
What should be the focus of the investigation is the mindset of the murderer, not exposing the victims to any more harm. So mark me down as being okay with redacting any info that might endanger the school or its workers or students if some other violent lunatic accessed it.