I would be shocked if it were otherwise, given the legal problems of the case as well as the venue. I’ve written about this many times before, but the main point is that it’s really really hard to convict someone of lying to people who are extremely eager to believe your lies and are collaborating in those lies, and have no interest in finding out the truth.

I concluded long ago that there would almost certainly be no way for any of the Russiagate perps to be found guilty, particularly in the left-leaning courts and communities where the trials would be held. Many of them are also lawyers or people who work with lawyers frequently, and before they started Russiagate I believe they were very careful to do things in such a way that convictions would be highly unlikely and very difficult to obtain – if anyone ever discovered what they’d done in the first place (which they didn’t think would happen, either, although it ultimately did).

Yesterday, prior to the Danchenko verdict, Andrew C. McCarthy wrote this:

The culmination of this collusive arrangement, one of the great political dirty tricks in American history, was the FBI peddling to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, under oath, the uncorroborated rumor, innuendo, and sheer fabrications of the Steele dossier. Not once, not twice, not thrice, but four separate times, over close to a year and for months into his presidency, agents depicted Trump as a clandestine agent of Moscow.

This is where Danchenko comes in. A cagey operator whom the FBI credibly suspected as a Russian asset a dozen years ago, he was the main source of “intelligence” — which is apparently Russian for “gossip among drinking buddies” — that Steele turned into the faux reports that comprised the dossier.

In his probe into the origins of the bureau’s Trump-Russia investigation (codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane”), Durham discovered that, although Danchenko acknowledged that the Steele dossier was farcical, he also appeared to have misled the FBI regarding his sources. In particular, he made up a conversation with Sergie Millian — a loose Trump associate whom Danchenko doesn’t know and never actually communicated with. The result was the dossier claim that Trump and the Kremlin were in a “conspiracy of cooperation.”

That’s the background, which you probably already knew. But here’s the legal problem:

Durham charged Danchenko with four counts of lying about Millian… It is a tough case for Durham because it’s hard to expect a jury to convict someone for lying to the FBI about comparatively less serious matters when the FBI itself was blatantly and serially dishonest with a federal court — with apparent impunity…

Understandably, the more appalled the jury becomes over the FBI’s behavior, the less inclined it may be to convict Danchenko.

That is the heart of the matter, and it’s what occurred in the Sussman case as well, to the best of my recollection.

The Democrats and the MSM (a redundancy) will spin this as a big win for the Russiagate group. My sense is that most voters have moved on and are paying little attention at this point. Most people’s viewpoints on Russiagate and the FBI solidified a long time ago.

ADDENDUM:

I already wrote that I don’t think that the abomination known as Russiagate has any likely successful avenue for legal redress. I say that with a combination of regret and anger, but not every bad act has a legal solution. Our legal system is constructed – for good reasons – to make it difficult to prove guilt, in order to protect the innocent from being railroaded. That, unfortunately, is even true for those with great power who can do great damage and get off scot free.

One of the reasons this was almost inevitable in all the Durham cases has to do with venue. The Danchenko case was tried in Alexandria, Virginia, which is not only a deep blue area but one filled with members of the Deep State. I can’t even imagine how air-tight a case would have to be for someone like Danchenko to have been convicted in a venue such as that; I don’t even think such a thing would be humanly possible.

That’s why I don’t blame Durham overmuch.

Here’s part of what Durham said to the jury:

Durham was emphatic that in prosecuting Igor Danchenko for alleged lies about his sources for information that ended up in the bogus “Steele dossier,” the special counsel’s office was not defending the bureau. As reported by the Washington Examiner’s Jerry Dunleavy, who is covering the trial, Durham concluded that “the FBI failed here,” observing that it “mishandled the investigation” and that its agents “didn’t do what they should have done.” Durham added that the explanation for the bureau’s appalling performance could be that it is “simply incompetent” or possibly that it was “working in coordination.” He does not appear to have stated with whom the FBI might have worked in coordination; the implication points to the Clinton campaign, which sponsored the dossier — opposition research based on which Hillary Clinton argued that Trump was a Putin puppet.

Something like that last contention – which I believe to be the case – simply does not have the sort of evidence that would have convinced this jury or any such jury in this venue, and I don’t think that Durham was wrong not to bring such a case.

Here’s the sort of thing Dachenko’s defense argued, just to give you some of the flavor of the thing:

…[T]here are four false-statements counts, all related to Danchenko’s alleged fabrication of a conversation with Sergei Millian, a loose associate of Trump’s with whom there is no evidence that Danchenko ever spoke. Danchenko’s lawyers are stressing that Millian did not testify and Durham could not disprove that a conversation may have taken place over an Internet app rather than a conventional phone — although they also insist that Danchenko never claimed to be sure that the person with whom he spoke was Millian.

That sort of “plausible” deniability was more than enough for this jury.

More here:

The special counsel [Durham] is using tried-and-true “lying to the feds” charges to unravel for the public the hoax—which on its face requires painting the FBI as dupes. Yet every filing and witness question is instead building Mr. Durham’s case of rank FBI malfeasance.

Mr. Danchenko pleaded not guilty, His trial—and prior to it Mr. Durham’s unsuccessful prosecution of Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann—has by now yielded a scandalous portrait of an FBI willing to take nearly any step—and cut any corner—to harm Donald Trump…

While Mr. Durham presents evidence Mr. Danchenko lied to FBI handlers, there is as much evidence the FBI closed its eyes to glaring problems in his story…

Partisanship and incompetence aren’t crimes, so the FBI isn’t in the dock. But Mr. Durham is making the case for the public—and it’s as ugly as they come.

That was written on October 13, towards the beginning of the Dachenko trial. It foreshadowed the ending, which in my opinion was a foregone conclusion.

The post Danchenko found not guilty on all counts appeared first on The New Neo.

I write a lot about the large and continuing influence of the MSM on American public opinion, an effect accomplished through what the MSM chooses to cover, the manner in which it covers it, and what it purposely doesn’t cover (for example, see this post from yesterday).

I can think of no better illustration of the principal than the results of a recent poll reported on by Mollie Hemingway:

Evidence of that [MSM] power and how irresponsibly it is used is found in a recent Harvard-Harris poll for April 2020. A majority of Americans, 53 percent, believe the Christopher Steele dossier “was real in its findings of Trump colluding with the Russians.” Only 47 percent of Americans chose the factually correct option that it was Clinton-funded campaign oppo fueled by disinformation.

Please read the whole article.

You can quibble about the sample selection in the poll and about whether it’s valid, but in this case those details are hardly the point. The percentage of people saying the Steele dossier’s findings were “real” and that Trump “colluded with the Russians” should have been something in the nature of 10%. Clearly, it is not. Whether it’s an actual majority or just close to a majority is irrelevant. The point is that the MSM knows that it can create a false narrative that a lot of Americans – perhaps a majority – will believe.

This matters a great deal. And it is why they persist, even when they are proven to have been lying time and again. The lie gets halfway round the world before the truth has time to get its boots on, and those boots are made for walkin‘ – and running – a marathon.

A good example of how opinion can be formed through omission or minimization and/or framing can be found here:

Yesterday, a massive story broke about FBI malfeasance at the dawn of @realDonaldTrump’s administration.

How many times did the mainstream media mention it during their morning shows?

CNN: 0
CBS: 0
ABC: 0
NBC: 0
MSNBC: 0

Unreal.

— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) April 30, 2020

Ronna McDaniel may be the GOP Chair, but her voice is small compared to that of the networks she is critiquing. And they know it.

The post A very depressing example of how propaganda works on the American public appeared first on The New Neo.

Christopher Steele told a British court last month that he no longer has documents and other information from his meetings with the main source for his Trump dossier, suggesting that the former British spy has no way of backing up his side in a dispute with the Justice Department’s inspector general (IG), according to a deposition transcript obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Steele also told the court that his communications regarding the dossier, including with Fusion GPS, were “wiped” in December 2016 and January 2017, the transcript shows…

It is unclear if Steele made audio or video recordings of the debriefings with the source, or if the retired spy was referring to written or electronic documents. It is also unclear whether Steele got rid of the information himself, or if it was lost through other means…

The status of the information was revealed during an exchange Steele had on March 18 with Hugh Tomlinson, a lawyer for Petr Aven, German Khan, and Mikhail Fridman, the owners of Alfa Bank.

The three Russian bankers are suing Steele for defamation over a memo in the dossier that accused them of making illicit payments to Vladimir Putin…

The lawyer asked Steele about the existence of the documents and recordings that his attorneys mentioned in their rebuttal to the IG report.

“But none of these documents exist, so they have all been destroyed?” a lawyer asked Steele.

“They no longer exist,” Steele said.

Steele indicated that many other records related to the dossier were deleted, including from a personal email account he used for the Fusion GPS project.

“As I understand your position, you have no contemporaneous notes or emails, save for your notes of interactions with the FBI; is that right?” Tomlinson asked.

“I believe that is true, yes,” Steele replied…

“You have no record of anything, have you?” Tomlinson asked.

“I haven’t got any records relating to the creation of 112,” said Steele.

“Or indeed any of the other memoranda?”

“No, they were wiped in early January 2017.”

More at the link.

One of the many things that’s interesting about this (to me, anyway) is Steele’s use of the passive voice without any prepositional phrase telling who the actor might have been. The records were wiped, as though some magic eraser came down from the sky. The documents no longer exist, having evaporated in a puff of smoke.

The post Christopher Steele: somehow it all disappeared appeared first on The New Neo.

Additional information released on Wednesday shows exactly when in 2017 the FBI received evidence that Russian intelligence operatives fed Steele with disinformation.

The FBI obtained information on Jan. 12, 2017, two days after BuzzFeed News published the dossier, Steele’s allegation that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen visited Prague in August 2016 was likely the product of Russian disinformation.

The FBI received evidence on Feb. 27, 2017 that Russians may have fed disinformation to Steele regarding his most explosive claim: that Donald Trump used hookers during a 2013 trip to Moscow. (RELATED: The FBI Knew The Steele Dossier Contained Russian Disinformation Three Years Ago — And Somehow That Never Leaked)

The footnotes declassified on Wednesday say that the FBI’s Transnational Organized Crime Intelligence Unit sought a validation review of Steele as an FBI source in 2015 because of his links to five Russian oligarchs.

The footnote says that the FBI unit found that five Russian oligarchs who sought meetings with the FBI that year had intermediaries who contacted Steele.

I doubt many people are paying attention to this, with COVID-19 dominating everything. And even if there was no pandemic, I very much doubt the news would make a particle of difference to most (perhaps all) of the Trump opposition.

The post What did the FBI know and when did they know it? Plenty, and early. appeared first on The New Neo.

…[T]he ‘Lawfare’ blog…[is] a site that’s placed itself at the center of the operation to legitimize and push Trump-Russia conspiracy theories throughout the Trump presidency.

Their specialty has been to claim the Steele dossier is “mostly verified” and asserting it as a credible source of allegations…

To put it lightly, the recent IG report has not been kind to the Lawfare blog. People like Benjamin Wittes, who spent years trashing Devin Nunes’ correct memo, are left flailing about, desperately looking for a way to save face.

You can read one of Wittes’ statements here. It’s a good example of the genre of the very incomplete mea culpa – you might say it’s a mea minima culpa (forgive my unschooled Latin). It contains an admission of error along with fresh attacks on Nunes and tactical twistings of what Horowitz actually said, as the writer at Red State explains.

But this post isn’t really about Wittes himself. It’s about the entire phenomenon of being not just wrong but extremely and publicly wrong, and how a person deals with it. Admitting wrongdoing, even to the small extent that Wittes has done, is actually more than a great many people do. Maybe even more than most people do. But for many (most?) people, this small admission doesn’t usually lead to a lot of introspection and change, because all they do is go on to the next way of being wrong.

Or, as Winston Churchill succinctly put it: “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”

Indeed. The profundity, depth, and breadth of their wrongness doesn’t seem to put a dent in their confidence in their judgment and in their politics. And the two generally go together because people often succumb to confirmation bias, if they’re not outright lying (which also can certainly happen).

In summary, a mind is a difficult thing to change.

Errors of this magnitude should spark a great deal of reflection, but they rarely change a person in any fundamental way – particularly pundits, who have gone on public record with their erroneous statements and are frantically trying to salvage their reputations and keep readers’ trust. Change is hard for many reasons, but here are some:

(1) Psychological – this applies to the political but also the personal. A lot of people want to protect their pride and save face, and excuses or rationalizations seem to them to be a better mechanism than admission of error or fault or stupidity or failure.

(2) Political – such errors (whether true errors or outright lies) are usually intertwined with the political goals of the person and what they want to be true. They are embedded in a belief system built of many separate elements going to make a whole and to determine the person’s political goals. The person still believes in all of this and doesn’t want to undermine those goals or to question them. It is too threatening to the sense of self and of life purpose.

(3) Financial – sometimes a person’s job would be threatened by a switch in viewpoint of any significant magnitude.

(4) Social – a real change of heart, a true mea culpa, could easily cause rifts with family, friends, and colleagues. Do not underestimate this factor.

For me, points one and two didn’t really matter; I’m not sure why. I was interested in the truth as best I could ascertain it. The third point was irrelevant; I was not employed in the pundit business at the time of my political change and had no intention of ever being in that line of work (which just goes to show you how wrong a person can be). As for number four, it was big – or would have been if I’d been aware of it, but I was so naive that I had no idea it would happen to me until the change cat was already out of the bag and I was faced with much conflict with friends and loved ones. If I’d seen it coming I don’t think it would have stopped me, but in fact I never saw it coming so I never had to consider it.

The post Lawfare: admitting you were wrong appeared first on The New Neo.

The ubiquity of Horowitz’s debunking passages suggests that he wanted the public to come away with the impression that the dossier was a flabby, hasty, precipitous, conclusory charade of a document. Viewers of certain MSNBC fare were surely blindsided by the news, if they ever even heard it.

Name a host on cable news who has dug more deeply into Trump-Russia than MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow…

…On the day Horowitz released his punishing report — with all its assertions about the dossier’s dubiety — Maddow chose not to focus on the integrity of the document that she’d once claimed was accumulating credibility on a nearly daily basis…

When small bits of news arose in favor of the dossier, the franchise MSNBC host pumped air into them. At least some of her many fans surely came away from her broadcasts thinking the dossier was a serious piece of investigative research, not the flimflam, quick-twitch game of telephone outlined in the Horowitz report. She seemed to be rooting for the document.

And when large bits of news arose against the dossier, Maddow found other topics more compelling.

She was there for the bunkings, absent for the debunkings — a pattern of misleading and dishonest asymmetry.

I know people who watch Maddow religiously and think she’s a remarkable purveyor of truth. I don’t talk to them about politics, but I know they are fans of hers, and I also know that watching her has made them more and more rabidly against Trump and more convinced than ever that he’s close to being the devil himself. It’s led in some cases to increasing depression and fear, and why wouldn’t it?

While I’m at it, I might mention that one of the puzzlements of the entire Russiagate “narrative” has been the fanning of the flames against Russia – by the left. After all, Russia was the country about which the following exchange occurred not so very long ago – 2012, in fact. But because Obama was their hero, there wasn’t a bit of concern at the time (or later, as far as I’ve seen) by the WaPo or the rest of the MSM, just laughter at stupidhead Romney and oh-so-smart Obama:

But consistency isn’t required of leftists. Say whatever works in the moment, and count on the MSM to not point out discrepancies then or later. That’s why I’m surprised this critique of Maddow was published in the WaPo at all, even if it’s just a one-person opinion piece. Actually, it’s way too kind to Maddow, but for the WaPo it’s hard-hitting.

My theory on why they allowed it is that it’s an attempt to distance themselves from Maddow and her like and to draw attention away from their own misleading coverage of the same stories. It seems the Horowitz Report was so damaging to the FBI and the Steele dossier that even the WaPo can’t ignore that reality entirely.

The post I’m surprised this critique of Rachel Maddow appeared in the <i>WaPo</i> appeared first on The New Neo.

SUPERCUT — Media to Americans: Of course the Trump dossier is true! pic.twitter.com/R2uOijnMeJ

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) December 13, 2019

How many of these people will ever apologize and/or correct? I rarely watch their shows so I don’t know for sure, but my money would be on “none of them.”

The post A little stroll down memory lane on the MSM and the dossier appeared first on The New Neo.

Christopher Steele, author of the dossier that played a key role in the Trump-Russia inquiry, will not assist Attorney General William Barr’s investigation of the investigators, according to a new report.

…[T]he British ex-spy “would not cooperate” with nor answer questions from U.S. Attorney John Durham, whom Barr has tasked with reviewing the origins of the counterintelligence investigation into President Trump’s presidential campaign and the way that the Justice Department and FBI conducted the inquiry.

…The report said Steele “might cooperate” with DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s independent investigation, signaling a shift in Steele’s thinking.

Is it just me, or does anyone else think that Steele is a real person but that “Christopher Steele” is not his real name, and that we know little about him? When the entire episode first came out, it struck me that the name sounded like a character in a romance novel.

The post Christopher Steele won’t cooperate with the investigation by US Attorney Durham appeared first on The New Neo.

In rushing out their assessment of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, Obama-administration officials chose not to include the risible Steele-dossier allegations that they had put in their “VERIFIED APPLICATION” for warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) because . . . wait for it . . . the allegations weren’t verified.

And now, the officials are squabbling over who pushed the dossier. Why? Because the dossier — a Clinton-campaign opposition-research screed, based on anonymous Russian sources peddling farcical hearsay, compiled by a well-paid foreign operative (former British spy Christopher Steele) — is crumbling by the day.

As I write, we mark the two-year anniversary of Robert Mueller’s appointment to take over the Russiagate probe — which is fast transforming into the Spygate probe.

The dossier not only hasn’t stood the test of time, it was never verified. And yet the investigators claimed it had been verified, as required. And they kept repeating the “verified” claim:

The rules of the FISC require the Justice Department to notify the court promptly if misstatements or inaccuracies have been discovered. Far from alerting the FISC that information in what it boldly labeled the “VERIFIED APPLICATION” was actually unverified, the Justice Department and the FBI kept reaffirming the dossier allegations to the court — in January, April, and June of 2017.

McCarthy also writes that in the disagreement between Comey and Brennan over who was least responsible for pushing the fake dossier, Comey might have the edge and Brennan might be more implicated. But even if that’s true, it certainly doesn’t absolve Comey:

Even if former director Comey is right that it was Brennan, not he, who was trying to slide the dossier into the ICA, Comey’s FBI still used it in the FISC. Plus, Comey himself did agree to brief Trump on it, though in a very incomplete way — alerting the president-elect to the lurid story about prostitutes in a Moscow hotel, but studiously omitting the tiny detail about how the FBI had used the “salacious and unverified” dossier in the FISC to contend that Trump’s campaign was in a conspiracy with Russia to undermine the election.

Much much more at the link.

The post Andrew C. McCarthy on the Steele dossier and the “verified application” appeared first on The New Neo.

Comey and Brennan are like two perps being questioned about a possible felony murder, each naming the other as the triggerman:

A potential rift is emerging between James Comey and John Brennan over who pushed to include information from the unverified Steele dossier in an intelligence community assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Comey, a former FBI director, sent an email to subordinates in late 2016 indicating Brennan, a former CIA director, wanted to include materials from the dossier in the intelligence community assessment, known as the ICA, Fox News reported.

Proactive CYA by Comey?

A former CIA official speaking on Brennan’s behalf is disputing the assertion. The former official told Fox that Brennan and James Clapper, a former director of national intelligence, opposed Comey’s push to include Steele dossier information in the ICA.

The dispute pits two former intelligence community officials against each other…

The post “He did it!” “No, HE did it!” appeared first on The New Neo.