Russia investigation
February 16, 2022 — Scott Johnson
The Russia hoax must be the biggest political story of the past five years. I certainly have treated it as such. The details added by Special Counsel John Durham in his filing last week in the case of Michael Sussman add slightly to the story and to the questions surrounding it. The unnamed “tech executive” at the heart of the filing is Alex Joffe. On Monday Joffe released a statement
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February 12, 2022 — John Hinderaker
The Russia collusion hoax is the dirtiest trick in the history of American politics, but if the latest filing by John Durham is correct, the Steele dossier wasn’t the half of it: Lawyers for the Clinton campaign paid a technology company to “infiltrate” servers belonging to Trump Tower, and later the White House, in order to establish an “inference” and “narrative” to bring to government agencies linking Donald Trump to
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December 31, 2021 — Scott Johnson
At the end of last year I formulated predictions for 2021 in the spirit of George Eliot’s narrator in Middlemarch: “Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.” I think it likely that the evils of 2022 will exceed those of 2021. For the moment, I’m sticking with my 2021 predictions for the coming year. • Political betting markets will set the over-under on Biden’s tenure in the
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December 16, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Kevin ( “Viva la Resistance!”) Clinesmith is the convicted felon who radically altered a document in the Trump-Russia investigation to justify spying on an American citizen. At the time, Clinesmith was an assistant general counsel at the FBI. In order to receive court approval for surveillance of Carter Page, Clinesmith took a document that said Page WAS a CIA source and altered it say Page WAS NOT a CIA source.
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December 11, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Michaael Isikoff and David Corn were key media conduits for the Russia hoax fabrications wrought and disseminated by Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS, the Perkins Coie law firm, and the Clinton campaign in the run-up to the 2016 election. Isikoff and Corn expanded their reporting into the 2018 bestseller Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump. All in all, given the active
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December 6, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Why won’t the prestige press come clean on its role in the Russia hoax? Crisis management consultant Eric Dezenhall sketches out the deterrents in his Wall Street Journal column “The media stonewalls on the Steele dossier.” Dezenhall frames the basic problem this way, in terms of incentives: The crisis confronting the news media post-dossier is rooted in disinformation. In the crisis business, we often do detective work to uncover the
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December 5, 2021 — Scott Johnson
The Clinton presidential campaign’s fabrication of the Russia hoax is the dirtiest trick in American political history. Beginning with Glenn Simpson/Fusion GPS and the Perkins Coie law firm, it enlisted co-conspirators in the Obama Department of Justice, the FBI, and the mainstream media. The principals are not only still at large, they have achieved high office, wealth, riches, and Pulitzer Prizes. They will never be brought to justice. They won’t
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November 20, 2021 — Scott Johnson
The Clinton presidential campaign’s fabrication of the Russia hoax is the dirtiest trick in American political history. Beginning with Glenn Simpson/Fusion GPS and the Perkins Coie law firm, it enlisted co-conspirators in the Obama Department of Justice, the FBI, and the mainstream media. The principals are not only still at large, they have achieved high office, wealth, riches, and Pulitzer Prizes. They will never be brought to justice. They won’t
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November 17, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
The Washington Post is doing a little house cleaning in the form of correcting two stories, one from 2017 and the other from 2019, that peddled false allegations against then-President Trump regarding the fabricated Steele dossier. The New York Times may follow suit. But Roger Simon poses this excellent question: When will the Post and the Times return their 2018 Pulitzer prizes for their reporting of the false Russia collusion
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November 16, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
The Times breaks its silence with this op-ed by Bill Grueskin. He’s a professor of professional practice and former academic dean at Columbia Journalism School, and has held senior editing positions at The Wall Street Journal, The Miami Herald, and Bloomberg News. Grueskin’s op-ed is called “The Steele Dossier Indicted the Media.” His piece is an indictment of the media, but only up to a point. He writes: Many of
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November 15, 2021 — Scott Johnson
The mainstream media are beginning to crawl backwards like sand crabs from the Steele Dossier. Linking to Paul Farhi’s Washington Post story on its confrontation with its own reporting, Sara Fischer highlights the media’s “epic fail.” (Syntax is apparently part of the “fail.”) Becket Adams expands on the doings at the Post in the Examiner story “Washington Post edits and adds editor’s notes to at least a dozen Steele dossier
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November 10, 2021 — Scott Johnson
The New York Post has an excellent editorial “Anatomy of a media hit job — how press pushed Clinton’s lies against Trump.” The editorial identifies the players, traces the whisper campaign that planted the Russia hoax in the press, and follows the states of the story from hysteria to the current silence and revisionism. The Washington Post was of course a key “player” in the media lineup. Post media critic
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November 8, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Maria Bartiromo has tracked the Clinton/Russia hoax all along the way on her daily FOX Business morning show and weekly on FNC’s Sunday Morning Futures. Yesterday she interviewed former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to comment on developments in the Durham investigation. I have no expectations concerning the investigation and only hope to be pleasantly surprised. Not so Ratcliffe. Having seen the intelligence, he knows where the bodies are
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November 7, 2021 — Scott Johnson
In the scheme of things the indictment handed up by an Eastern District of Virginia grand jury against Igor Danchenko this past Thursday may be small potatoes, but the case is significant. I have embedded a copy of the 39-page indictment at the bottom. Check my summary of the allegations below against the indictment itself. I leave out a lot and the indictment conceals the names of key players in
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November 5, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Eli Lake has covered national security affairs during most of the time that Power Line has been around. I’ve always found his reports to be worth reading. To cite just one example, his reporting helped defeat the nomination of Chas Freeman, the anti-Israel former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, to be the chairman of the National Intelligence Council during the Obama administration. The Washington Post has published Lake’s take on the
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November 4, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
But at least he is working. Federal authorities today arrested Igor Danchenko, an “analyst” who in 2016 gathered leads about possible links between Donald Trump and Russia for Democratic-funded opposition research. Danchenko was what Christopher Steele, who put the phony dossier together, has described as his “primary sub-source.” Gathering leads for opposition research can be a nasty business but, without more, it’s not a crime. However, lying to federal authorities
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September 19, 2021 — John Hinderaker
As Scott noted earlier today, my first reaction to Special Counsel John Durham’s indictment of Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussman on a single count of lying to the FBI was rather dismissive (“small potatoes”). Having read the 27-page indictment itself, I have revised my opinion somewhat. The investigation underlying the indictment, and the manner in which the indictment lays out the facts regarding the Clinton campaign’s fabrication of the “Russian
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