Eric Garland's Attack on Hillary Clinton - Part One
Just like John Durham's 'Indictments', it's nonsense. Here's why.
Eric Garland has attacked Hillary Clinton on Twitter, with a long thread, that started two days ago and is continuing as I write. This is one of many threads that Garland has put out praising the conspiracy theorist special counsel John Durham, appointed by Bill Barr in support of Donald Trump. John Durham is nobody to give credence to, and mainstream commentators have frequently pointed out how his indictments and filings fall apart immediately after posting. I hope all my readers are following the wonderful File 411 on Substack, too. She’s a brilliant source of info on every legal matter concerning Trump Russia.
Durham deserves his own article, but first let me just fisk Eric’s attack on Hillary Clinton. It’s pretty long, so I won’t address every tweet, just the biggest howlers. (Update: going to be two pieces, sorry). Eric sums it all up for us with this TL/DR of insanity, which almost speaks for itself in its ludicrousness, and is, literally, a conspiracy theory:
Right. First things first: not a single person in the entire world, including John Durham, has alleged this or anything close to it. (Here’s Durham’s latest filing, and here is Sussman’s response.) Durham has not, at any time, charged anybody with conspiracy to screw up FISA warrants. Michael Sussman is charged with a single count of making a false statement to the FBI - and not a false statement about the Alfa-Trump pings. The only thing - one count - Sussman is charged with is not declaring he was working on behalf of a client when he went to the FBI. (And he, in fact, was not working on behalf of a client, hence his plea of not guilty).
Er… no. The Steele Dossier was not “produced by multiple entities” nor was it (LOL) “intended as a tool to embarrass the FBI after the 2016 election”. In fact, the Steele Dossier was produced by Orbis Business Intelligence for a single client, Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS were paid by various entities along the way, starting with Republican rivals to Trump, and ending with Perkins Coie (whom they declared when talking to the FBI to be a branch of the Democrat Party), but Orbis BI (Steele) only ever had one client throughout, namely Fusion. The Dossier was opposition research on Donald Trump, starting with GOP rivals and moving to Hillary. In fact, Chris Steele, who is a monumental patriot in the UK and a lifelong friend to the United States, was so alarmed at what he discovered that he produced the last reports of the dossier with no client whatsoever as Fusion had ended the contract at that stage.
Now, as Garland does spout a tremendous amount of image-based garbage tweets, it will make this article too long to embed them all. Here’s a link to his thread as of yesterday, and I shall now move to quoting in order to refute.
The effect of the Dossier's presentation to the FBI in 2016 was that multiple FISA warrant applications were tainted. Also, an Ass't General Counsel for the FBI straight up lied to the FISC about the status of Carter PAGE, a confidential informant for CIA *against* the Russians…. Please recognize how noxious this kind of lying to the FBI/FISA court was. There was a critical national security investigation going on to investigate hostile foreign spies, and Clinesmith lies about the identity of one of the targets - potentially compromising the whole thing. The DOJ didn't even file its sentencing memo for Clinesmith until after the election.
And if you want to savor the good stuff on PACER, it's in the sentencing memos. The gov't often drops juicy details - especially if they're recommending a high sentence.
Like they did here…. Another group of details in the sentencing memo (which, I tell you, is usually loaded with more good stuff) is that Clinesmith didn't lie just once, but repeatedly lied and omitted critical information.
Which *should* get him more than a single charge... #HINT…The Durham special counsel has the text messages of this thing...so anybody screwing around should assume they are all the way busted.
Clinesmith sure did.
No, it isn’t. First, factually, the FISA warrants were not tainted. The judge in the FISC who authorized the FISA warrants said that he would have granted them even though Kevin Clinesmith did alter a description of Carter Page as a former CIA source. It’s absolutely true that Clinesmith pled guilty to this incredibly minor detail. He had altered the notation to be clearer as he thought it not relevant. Should he have done that, no, did he violate Page’s rights, yes. But far from Eric Garland’s wild assertions of Carter Page being one of the good guys, a CIA asset, etc, the FISC Judge said he would have granted the application anyway. The facts are the OPPOSITE to what Garland is falsely claiming. The FISC judge, even if Clinesmith had noted Page’s former cooperation with the CIA, said he would still have agreed with the FBI that there was probable cause to consider Carter Page an agent of Russia. The FISA warrant on Page was not tainted. It is still valid. All intelligence gained on Carter Page using that FISA warrant is fully valid and fully admissible in any court.
Here’s a real news report.
Federal District Court Judge James Boasberg said that while Clinesmith's actions were serious, the warrant application probably would have been approved anyway without his misstatement. Boasberg also serves as the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
And did “the government” aka John Durham “drop juicy deets” and “ask for a big punishment” on Clinesmith? He did. Durham asked for six months jail, the max. Eric Garland leaves out the actual punishment Judge Boasberg gave Kevin Clinesmith, Eric Garland’s “John Durham is my hero” sole conviction. But Dear Mr Putin is here to fill you in.
He gave Clinesmith probation.
Probation.
And as Boasberg is the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court himself, the head honcho, we can reasonably infer that - unlike Eric Garland - he saw no tainted warrants and no severe crime, much less a “giant conspiracy” by “paid agents of Hillary Clinton.” He gave Clinesmith the minimum. Pour one out for old Eric, folks, and all anti Hillary Clinton - John Durham fans everywhere.
This will have to be a two-parter, it’s no good, there’s just too much wrong here for a single article. But we will wade back in with a few more Eric Garland-y goodies first.
So far, the media narrative has denigrated the Durham investigation and assiduously avoided reporting too many facts.
Here, below, are the facts alleged by DOJ. They are compelling.
The question is why the Clinton campaign would engage in this alleged activity. 🤔
Yes. The “media narrative” has denigrated the Durham investigation because it’s a pile of garbage. No. They are not “compelling” and that’s why the media has, with one voice, called Durham’s stuff a pile of Garland, sorry, garbage. “The question is why the Clinton campaign would engage in this alleged activity”. Yes. that is the question and the answer is “they didn’t”. For a start, Kevin Clinesmith, the FBI lawyer who got probation, was working for the FBI. He was not working for Hillary. He was a career FBI lawyer. So there goes the first third of your Hillary attack thread. Before we open it to comments so far and move on to the rest of the nonsense, here’s what Eric calls the “media narrative” on Durham:
Lawfare: On the Special Counsel’s Weird Prosecution of Michael Sussmann
Politico: Durham prosecution faces hurdles in D.C. court
Washington Post: After two years, this is the best Trump’s chosen investigator can do?
New York Magazine: Durham’s Attempt to Discredit Trump’s Enemies Is Falling Apart: Trump’s prosecutor omitted key evidence from his indictment.
New York Times: Defendant in Case Brought by Durham Says New Evidence Undercuts Charge
The headline on the last story, which is news reporting and not an opinion piece, belies the savage disposal of Durham’s nonexistent case on Sussman, so I’ll quote from the text. Tomorrow there will be a part two debunking Eric Garland’s nonsensical attacks on Hillary Clinton over the Alfa Bank - Trump pings, which, by the way, are most certainly not nonsense and have not, in any way whatever, “been debunked”. (Durham is denying a communications channel, when what I reported was financial transfers. He’s setting up a straw man, and he’s been shown already to be routinely dishonest.) The Times wrote in December:
The materials could make it harder for the special counsel, John H. Durham, to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the cybersecurity lawyer, Michael Sussmann, is guilty of the charge against him: making a false statement to the F.B.I. during a September 2016 meeting about possible links between Donald J. Trump and Russia.
The newly disclosed evidence consists of records of two Justice Department interviews of the former F.B.I. official to whom Mr. Sussmann is accused of lying, each of which offers a different version of the key interaction than the version in the indictment. That official [James Baker] is the prosecution’s main witness….No one else was present at the meeting, and if the trial boils down to pitting Mr. Baker’s memory against Mr. Sussmann’s, the newly disclosed evidence will provide fodder for the defense team to show that Mr. Baker’s accounts of that aspect of the meeting have been inconsistent, and to raise doubts about the reliability of the version cited by Mr. Durham.
Have your say in the comments, and there will be more tomorrow!
It’s been quite rewarding watching you and other respected voices taking apart the latest Garland quest for attention. There is nothing more unsettling than his attacks on the FBI & Hillary & his misrepresentation of the Steel Dossier. And…if I remember correctly, even the FBI agents (in the reporting) had mused how completely stupid Carter Page was in spite of his ties to Russia. Garland is trying to cling to relevancy in a landscape that is changing quickly. He’s running out of material. Not once has he backed up his insanity with actual documentation from the case.
He sounds just like Nethery. Pretty pathetic