Uggh, comment system ate a long post.
Anyway, Trump was chasing a Trump Tower Moscow deal for years, signed letter of intent Oct 2015 at time of 3rd GOP debate but lied about it to the public (Cohen lied to Congress about this & went to jail)
Flynn was dining with Putin in Dec 2015, 2 months before he joined Trump's campaign as its National Security advisor.
Trump campaign's George Papadopoulos was bragging to an Aussie diplomat in London in May 2016 about all the hacked Hillary emails that were waiting to be dropped, which the diplomat reported after the GRU did drop hacked DNC emails - the day after Trump in Jul 2016 made his famous outrageous "Russia if you're listening" request for our enemy to hack his opponent, which they did the next day. (Cohen's travel to Russia in June 2016 got cancelled when Russian connections got too hot). 
Javanka, Don Jr & Manafort met with a Russian lawyer Veselnitskaya in Trump Tower in June 2016, with Trump himself probably listening in on speaker phone, Ivana sticking around after to receive an envelope. (same lawyer was later indicted in absentia for lies around 2015 money laundering). See more relevant quotes below.
Manafort met with Kremlin-friendly oligarch Deripaska in August & Manafort fed him swing state polling info (PA,MI,WI,MN) every week for the remainder of the campaign - why did the GRU/Russia need this?
Roger Stone was also making noises about dropped Hillary emails in Aug 2016, and met with Wikileaks' Julian Assange in his embassy hideout to make sure it happened.
Sussmann's contact with the FBI *Sept 18, 2016* (too early for an October surprise) was done without Clinton Campaign approval (since the FBI's Comey had released scandalous accusations against Hillary after dropping her case in July), and Sussmann's meeting effectively killed a NY Times story that was ready to drop, while the FBI then bolloxed the investigation, even asking Alfa Bank to verify its own records, at which point they deleted all historical data.
So Hillary's team being happy to have Slate reveal the weird DNS interchange between Trump & Alfa Bank servers is understandable as Comey prepared his 2nd near-criminal public slam against hear (plus there's Spectrum Health's in Michigan, near those swing states and tied to Betsy de Voos & thus her scumbag intel intrigue brother Erik Prince - which doesn't make the Spectrum data de facto implicated in anything wrong, but after various Russian hacking and their proxy Macedonian spam farms, did arouse the community, even if the FBI couldn't be assed to do a serious job on this, unlike the time spent on Weiner's laptop)
(to be continued)

CALLING THE AGENT OF A FOREIGN AGENT TO ASK FOR COMMENT (emptywheel)

There’s one other thing going on. On the stand, Gaynor spent a great deal of time explaining about how important it was to hide an investigation — particularly from anyone who might have a partisan interest — during an election.

Except for all the talk of a close hold, the FBI wasn’t holding this very close. They were stomping around to a bunch of sources asking for data logs, even before they had checked what was on (one of) the thumb drives that Sussmann had dropped off. They fairly demonstrably were stomping around before they understood what they should be looking for.

They also were calling Mandiant, which was working for Alfa Bank, which by October 19 when they were formally interviewed discovered Alfa Bank had no logs, but which knew of the investigation by October 5.

Q. Uh-huh. You testified about the reasons why you’d want to keep it covert you wouldn’t want to do anything that could affect the election so close to the election. Right?

A. Yes.

Q. The FBI, as part of the Alfa-Bank investigation, talked to a number of different individuals outside of the FBI to acquire information, to get you information so that you could investigate the allegations. Right?

A. Yes.

Q. Okay. You spoke to people at Central Dynamics?

A. Yes, and I believe the investigative team documented in the email that I saw that they had done it in a manner to attempt to avoid it outing the allegation.

[snip]

A. I’m sorry?

Q. And how is that that they could conduct an interview with a third party in a way that the third party wouldn’t tell other people about it?

A. They described it in a manner that they had obfuscated what their direct interest was.

Q. So from the Central Dynamics’ perspective, they didn’t know what you were looking at?

A. That is what I had in the email chain, yes. n

Q. But you testified that the FBI interviewed Mandiant as part of the investigation. Correct?

A. Yes. My understanding there is that was a private liaison relationship that occurred.

Q. Mandiant — just to be clear — Alfa-Bank itself hired Mandiant to analyze whether there was a secret communications channel. Correct?

A. Yes.

Q. So Alfa-Bank paid Mandiant to look into whether there was a secret communications channel. Right?

A. Yes.

Q. And Alfa-Bank obviously had a relationship with Mandiant that was put at issue by hiring Mandiant. Right?

A. Yes.

Q. Okay. So the FBI went to Alfa-Bank’s paid consultant and asked them for their view on the allegation. Correct?

A. I believe the FBI had a prior relationship with one of the employees, and they utilized that in the field. Plus, I don’t think the Bureau would violate policy on a sensitive investigative matter when the Chief Division Counsel of the office is involved. So I would assume that they did that in a manner that they did not feel would be alerting or go to the media.

Q. Mr. Gaynor, the FBI in this investigation went to Alfa-Bank’s

paid consultant and asked them for their views of the allegations. correct?

A. Yes.

Q. And Alfa-Bank’s paid consultant could have told Alfa-Bank. Correct?

A. Yes.

Q. And could have told the press for all you know. Correct?

A. Yes. And I don’t know how Chicago mitigated that.

Q. And is it your testimony that going to Alfa-Bank, the Russian bank that is the focus of this investigation, and asking their paid consultant for their views on the matter wasn’t going to overt?

A. Again, I don’t know how Chicago mitigated that issue.

[snip]

Q. Did you ever have a conversation with anybody at headquarters about whether to provide the names of the source to the Chicago agents?

A. Yes. There was a conversation about the close hold, as I mentioned, although it wasn’t correctly, I guess, documented between Pete Strzok, myself and Mr. Moffa at some point during that time period.

[snip]

Q. And the reason that you say no one talked to him is because, as of that point, October 6th, you had already concluded that there was nothing to these allegations. Right?

A. As of October 5th, evening of October 5th, we had come to a pretty solid conclusion that these allegations did not have merit and there wasn’t a national security threat.

Q. Are you aware that the agents first interviewed Alfa-Bank’s paid consultant, Mandiant, merely two weeks later on October 19th?

A. So I’m aware that we had information from Mandiant as of October 5th that they had looked at this allegation and found that it didn’t have merit. And then I’m also aware that there was an interview that was conducted later, October 19th or so, when I was made aware of it, yes.

A text between Allison Sands and Scott Hellman reflects the FBI had contact with Alfa Bank by October 4.

It appears that contact occurred in London — a place where Mark Hosenball has strong source ties since the time in 1976 when he got expelled for reporting on Northern Ireland.

In other words, Gaynor’s currently operative stance is that case agents couldn’t contact David Dagon — much less Rodney Joffe, who had business ties with the FBI — to find out what was going on, because that would present a conflict.

But it was okay for the FBI to contact the agent of the subject of the investigation overtly.

Sussmann innocent, as predicted

harpiesays:

May 31, 2022 at 1:59 pm

NPR has a quote from the Jury Foreperson [also a photo of Durham leaving the courtroom]: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/31/1102150260/special-counsel-durham-fails-first-courtroom-test-in-his-three-year-probe

The jury forewoman, who did not give her name, told reporters outside the courthouse that “I think we could have spent our time more wisely.”

“It didn’t pan out in the government’s favor and that’s on them,” she also said.

Reply

• harpiesays:

  May 31, 2022 at 2:10 pm

  More from jurors at WaPo:
  https://twitter.com/DevlinBarrett/status/1531692900903530499

  Jury Forewoman: “Politics were not a factor” [] “Personally, I don’t think it should have been prosecuted” [] [the government] “could have spent our time more wisely.”

  A second juror: [in the jury room] “everyone pretty much saw it the same way.”

  Like, here's the list of government officials Fox News hoped would be investigated/arrested/jailed under the "investigate the investigators" rubric. They got... a failed charge against a lawyer no one had ever heard of. https://t.co/lqeZMBEGmW pic.twitter.com/QiL4hywrgp

  — Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) May 31, 2022

Analysis by Marshall Cohen Published 4:13 PM EDT, Tue May 31, 2022