When an Appeals Court decided in April that a redistricting map prepared by Democrats was in violation of the state constitution, the job of revising the map went to a special master appointed by the court. He produced a new map which was much less favorable to Democrats in general and which had one very unexpected outcome. Because districts for east and west Manhattan were combined, it meant that two Democratic incumbents who’ve been in office for 30 as allies years would be facing off against one another. Monday the NY Times wrote about the contest between Rep. Carolyn Maloney and Rep. Jerry Nadler.
As he sat in the shade of Riverside Park on a sparkling recent weekday morning in Manhattan, Representative Jerrold Nadler tried to make sense of how two powerful allies suddenly found themselves at war…
He recalled telling Ms. Maloney in a private conversation on the House floor in Washington a few days earlier that he would win, suggesting she run for a neighboring seat.
“She said basically the opposite, and so it was an impasse,” Mr. Nadler said, “and we left it at that.”
…neither Mr. Nadler nor Ms. Maloney has wasted any time working the phones to pressure union leaders, old political allies and wealthy donors — many of whom the two have shared for years — to pick sides.
Allies of Ms. Maloney whispered doubts about Mr. Nadler’s health. (His aides say his health is good.) Mr. Nadler’s associates circulated old news articles about Ms. Maloney’s obsession with pandas, and suggested that Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is officially neutral in the race, really preferred him.
Maloney has indeed been trying to bring pandas to New York’s zoo, a plan that would cost the city millions of dollars. On the other hand, Nadler’s health has been an issue in recent years. In 2019 he was on the verge of passing out during a public event with Mayor de Blasio.
Last November the NY Post ran a story quoting people who suggested it was time for Nadler to retire.
“People are wondering when he would decide to retire,” said one associate, who noted that Democrats could lose control of the House of Representatives next year, with Nadler facing a prolonged future in the minority.
“He has a fighting spirit but maybe now is the time to exit,” the insider added…
Though the 74-year-old has long been a vigorous and vocal legislator, some say age and ill health have finally caught up with him. Two people who saw him recently said he could barely walk.
A poll published last Thursday found Rep. Maloney with an early lead.
The primary is still nearly three months away, but the poll from WPIX, Emerson College and The Hill shows Maloney with an early, 10-point advantage. Thirty-one percent of Democratic primary voters say they plan to cast their ballots for Maloney, while 21 percent are backing Nadler.
Another 36 percent of voters, however, remain undecided, meaning the race could shift toward either candidate in the coming months.
There’s still time and a lot of undecided voters left in this race. Yesterday, Nadler picked up the endorsement of the Working Families Party.
The ultra liberal Working Families Party has endorsed Rep. Jerrold Nadler over Rep. Carolyn Maloney on Wednesday in the campaign that pits two decades-entrenched Democratic incumbents and one-time allies against one another following redistricting.
“Jerry Nadler has been a powerful voice for reforming the Supreme Court, reimagining our justice system, and putting diplomacy and engagement over war and aggression,” said Sochie Nnaemeka, director of the New York Working Families Party in backing the House Judiciary Committee Chairman.
Of course the good news is that one of these candidates is going to lose, something that no GOP challenger would have been able to pull off. The bad news is that only one of them can lose. (Well, technically, there is a another Democrat in the primary so they could both lose but it’s not likely to happen.) We’ll just have to wait a few more weeks to see who holds onto this seat.
In the wake of the risible Sussman verdict, it has emerged that for the last ten years, the FBI has maintained a “secure work environment” within the offices of Perkins Coie, the Democratic Party’s law firm. Marc Elias, the DNC’s top lawyer, was until recently a partner in Perkins Coie. It was Perkins Coie that laundered the money the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign paid Fusion GPS for what became the fraudulent Steele “dossier.”
And now we learn that not just in 2016, but four years earlier, dating to the middle of the Obama administration, the FBI had some kind of cozy relationship with the Perkins firm. I have never heard of the FBI maintaining a “secure work environment” inside a private law firm, let alone a private law firm that is best known for representing the Democratic Party. We need to know a great deal more about what was going on here. How was the Bureau collaborating with the Perkins firm? Was the Perkins firm a cut-out that concealed what actually was going on, i.e., collaboration between the FBI and the Democratic National Committee or other Democratic entities? The Bureau needs to come clean.
Andy McCarthy says that John Durham’s mistake was prosecuting Michael Sussman as though the FBI was the innocent victim of Sussman’s lies, a dupe, when in fact the FBI was a willing collaborator in the plot against Donald Trump. That case certainly becomes stronger with the revelation that the FBI has had a close, secret, decade-long relationship with the Democratic Party’s law firm. Michael Sussman’s law firm.
Every time you think you have plumbed the depth of Deep State corruption, it turns out there are more layers of corruption still to be revealed.
Why are so many Jews Democrats? It has been hard to fathom why the Jews, thought by many to be so intelligent and overrepresented in science, medicine, literature, music, and sociology, would embrace Democrat ideology so as to plant the seeds of their own economic and cultural destruction. Jews are voting Democrat in numbers that far outpace Gentiles and people have been wondering why for a very long time. It makes no sense if Jews are as intelligent as they are reputed to be. Democrat ideology mitigates against the best interest of Jews in America.
Seventy-three percent of American Jews say they are liberals who support Democrat candidates. What is puzzling is that you would think their affluence would lead them to choose Republicans, who are far better poised to serve Jews’ economic interests. But no.
One New Jersey rabbi proposed that Jews vote Democrat because it’s in their DNA. Jews were slaves in Egypt, which all good Jewish families still talk about. They were victims of the Holocaust where they were slaughtered wholesale. As a result of this history, so it is thought, Jews have historically been motivated by a drive to “do good” in the world. There is no doubt Jews were and are still victims of anti-Semitism, but being a victim should not mean one is beholden to victimhood. Victimhood is how we got where we are today, with ethnic groups warring against white people and each other. Jews don’t have to embrace toxic victimhood in order to remember their history.
Until recently Democrats have always been “for the little guy.” In my own Jewish family that was the case, but that was back in the 50s when socialism and Marxism were mostly hidden from public scrutiny and no one could calculate the socialist damage being done. This is a different time. An acquaintance of mine proposed the notion that it is not in their DNA but in the colleges where this indoctrination toward liberalism and Democrat voting begins. Since Jews have a high rate of college attendance compared with other demographic groups and are exposed to socialist/Marxist ideas there, the college explanation makes some sense.
In 2016, the Pew Center released a study which listed Jewish people as the most educated religious group in the world. In the U.S., another 2001 survey of Jews and college students revealed that of all U.S. Jews, 53% of them identify as liberal or Democrat. Of Jewish college students, 54% are Democrats. By contrast, only 22% of all U.S. Jews identify as conservative, the same percentage of college students who identify as conservative. What is college doing to Jews? Or maybe it is more a case of Jews flocking to liberal colleges; a chicken-egg question, perhaps. (Jordan Peterson thinks that personality-type defines if you are a liberal or a conservative. This makes great sense to me, but is another discussion entirely.)
I am not certain that college attendance is the only cause of Jewish liberalism, but it is probably the most likely culprit. Many colleges are festering pustules of regressive socialist/Marxist thinking. Our Jewish youngsters are being groomed intellectually to be perversely liberal.
Malcolm Muggeridge opined that modern man is abolishing himself through education. His famous quote so eloquently and accurately albeit unknowingly predicted why America’s prospects in 2022 look so tenuous:
So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense.
Muggeridge goes on to describe American education and culture, that colleges would become havens not of education but of nihilism and self-absorption:
Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over–a weary, battered old brontosaurus — and became extinct.
Muggeridge, way back then, presciently managed to address many of our present-day problems in one fell swoop: abortion, pornography, unearned affluence, population demographics, drug use, and our pathetic education system. The prospect that Muggeridge is right that the bastions of education are causing this decline in American civilization is turning out to be not just the most reliable answer as to why Jews vote Democrat but also why non-Jews do as well.
It is in the education system where young minds are most often shaped, not in the home. If a child raised in a conservative home is sent to public schools at say, four years old, he may well begin to list to port, shaped by forces diametrically opposed to most parental desires. If that child goes to college, the odds of cranking out a shiny new sexually perverse little socialist rise dramatically. Any parent wanting to maintain a child’s conservative and/or Christian upbringing sabotages himself or herself by sending the child to a public indoctrination system or to many colleges.
What predisposes Jews to vote for Democrats? When Jews were asked what values and political beliefs drive them, by far the most important thing was “equality.” Not Israel, not persecution, but “equality.” Today, that would mean “equity,” a different animal, but Jews still are voting for Democrats in outsized numbers where they sabotage their own prospects of success. Democrats are not for equality. Just the reverse. Democrats are for some groups doing better than other groups despite qualifications, and Jews are not among the Democrats’ favorite people, if judged by some of the more vocally hostile politicians and platforms in our Congress.
Jews would do well to realize that the Democrat Party is not their friend and in fact, often stands for ideologies Jews should be seriously against.
Allahpundit already covered the initial release of news of yet another moment in the Uvalde school shooting timeline that turned out to be completely wrong, so if you haven’t heard about this yet, go read that first. The school district police (who are no longer cooperating with state investigators or answering requests from reporters) had stated repeatedly that the shooter entered through a door that had been left propped open with a rock by a teacher. She allegedly did this because she was carrying in some food from her car.
The first reversal we heard was that the teacher didn’t prop the door open. By the end of the night, that story had changed again. She had propped it open, but when the shooter was approaching she “kicked the rock away” and either “pulled” or “slammed” the door shut. There is allegedly a video showing this happening but it’s not being released. So now we have even more questions.
An exterior door at Robb Elementary School did not lock when it was closed by a teacher shortly before a gunman used it to get inside and kill 19 students and two teachers, leaving investigators searching to determine why, state police said Tuesday.
State police initially said a teacher had propped the door open shortly before Salvador Ramos, 18, entered the school in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24.
They have now determined that the teacher, who has not been identified, propped the door open with a rock, but then removed the rock and closed the door when she realized there was a shooter on campus, said Travis Considine, chief communications officer for the Texas Department of Public Safety. But, Considine said, the door that was designed to lock when shut did not lock.
Most people are correctly saying that if we want to prevent future school shootings, we need to understand how they happen and what went wrong in new systems and training that should supposedly prevent these events. But that requires a thorough and competent investigation, a task currently seeming almost impossible when people are apparently either lying to cover their own backsides or are extraordinarily incompetent. (Perhaps a combination of both.)
If there is a video of the teacher propping the door open or at least kicking the rock away and closing it, why not release it? I understand the need to protect her privacy (though plenty of locals are already suggesting they know which teacher it is), but couldn’t her face and features be blurred? That may seem intrusive, but if you expect the public to have any faith in this investigation they need to start providing some incontrovertible evidence because we’ve been given no reason to believe anything they say at this point.
The next item on the agenda should have been as easy as pie and yet I don’t see any record of it being done. If the door is designed to automatically lock when it shuts and that didn’t happen on the day of the shooting we will have identified a weak point in the system. Then all schools using similarly designed doors can begin inspections and, if required, repairs or replacements. Why hasn’t someone brought the press with a few cameras over to that entrance, opened the door multiple times, and closed it with varying amounts of force? Preferably, they should let it close multiple times in the same fashion it’s supposedly shown closing in the video. If you can reproduce what’s been reported and the door doesn’t lock – even if it’s only one in ten times – then the mystery is solved and we can move forward. But if you can’t reproduce that effect and the door is functioning properly, somebody else is either lying or criminally confused.
Personally, I will be stunned if it turns out that the teacher is lying. She could definitely have an incentive to lie if she actually did leave it propped open because she wouldn’t want to be seen as the person who let the shooting happen through negligence. But at that moment, with a gunman approaching the entrance, would she knowingly leave the door ajar? It doesn’t seem so. And the fact that the school district police are no longer answering questions or cooperating with the investigation probably tells us all we need to know. Someone saw a chance to possibly pin the blame on one of the teachers to deflect from the disastrous decisions the police chief made while the children were being murdered.
Does there need to be accountability? Obviously. But that should only be a sideshow in this ongoing mess. We need to keep our focus on finding out what parts of the system failed and then get the word out to every school in the country. If the Department of Education really wants to make itself useful, it could ensure the accurate promulgation of this data and any other useful information and ensure that federal funding is available to support schools in making required changes. It would be a pleasure to see some congressional action that everyone would support regardless of party or ideology.
With each passing day, the news connected to the COVID shots grows worse. That the injections don’t prevent COVID — or even its spread — has been known for months, and post-injection problems encompass almost everything that can go wrong with a body.
“Not a single organ, not a single bodily function, is unharmed” after one of these shots, said Arne Burkhardt, a professor of forensics at Reutlingen’s Pathological Institute.
So little has been written about why “side effects” such as myocarditis have popped up that one can’t help but wonder: Does anybody understand how these shots work?
In the space below, let’s pick three of the harshest complications and explore how COVID shots could be driving the mechanics of each.
1 – Myocarditis
The pale-yellow fluid of the Pfizer or Moderna vial contains billions of microscopic fat globs called lipid nanoparticles. Each is an incredibly tiny envelope, used to conceal the novel drug: messenger RNA. Once injected, the combination of nanoparticles and mRNA becomes a well-camouflaged predator.
According to Pfizer’s own data, less than half the nanoparticles stay in the arm where they were injected. Most slip through tiny cracks in muscle tissue and enter the bloodstream. Venous blood speeds them to the heart, which pumps and disperses them to the entire body.
Depending on the level of exercise, from 5 to 25% of these particles wind up in coronary circulation. Why is this important? Consider the rather large number of nanoparticles that must slip into human heart tissue: 50 to 250 million out of each billion that enter the veins of the arm.
Coronary circulation branches into microscopic capillaries that rush nutrients to heart muscle cells. And since the nanoparticles designed by Pfizer and Moderna masquerade as triglycerides, heart muscle cells are apt to snatch them out of circulation as food.
Now imagine the shock for any hard-charging heart cell that engulfs one of these particles. Expecting a meal, the cell unwraps the envelope, and voilà! Freshly unveiled messenger RNA seizes the cell’s protein-generating apparatus, forcing out a known toxin — the COVID spike protein.
Very soon, with urgent biochemical signals, the afflicted cell telegraphs news of its hijacking to the immune system, which will marshal what it takes to destroy the cell.
An immune-mediated attack on heart muscle cells is, of course, the very essence of myocarditis. Foreign RNA takes control of a cell’s protein production, transforming these cells into enemies of the body, and the immune system converts them into useless scar tissue. The process is irreversible, as heart muscle cells do not regenerate.
According to CDC, myocarditis from COVID jabs is “rare” and “mild,” but where is the evidence for this proclamation? Pfizer’s data shows every shot — at least in part — entering the bloodstream, so CDC has interesting notions about the word “rare.” Clinical myocarditis is never “mild.” A phenomenon that kills thousands of heart muscle cells is better classified as “serious” or “severe.” And even if the subject doesn’t die right away, how is that person not permanently injured? And how is the process not cumulative with each subsequent jab?
Given that about 40% of CDC income comes from vaccine patents and products, how can we be assured these experts are not self-serving?
2 – Vascular Damage and Heart Attack Risk
Now let’s turn attention from lipid nanoparticles to their end-product, the COVID spike protein. Having been forced into production by messenger RNA, spike protein peels off cell membranes and drops into general circulation. From there, it stabs and deactivates ACE-2 protein, which is displayed on the innermost lining of blood vessels.
Deactivating ACE-2 has enormous consequences for the body: Its loss leads to oxidativestress on blood vessels, putting the patient at risk for organ damage and blood clots over time.
Can oxidative stress persist for months, or even longer? A study of spike-injected hamsters showed that damaged ACE-2 was not replaced by mammalian cells. Either the cells never sensed that ACE-2 was “spiked” or didn’t generate a signal to replace spiked ACE-2 with a fresher version. To put it a more scientific way: Injected spike protein down-regulated ACE-2, probably for as long as the cells stayed alive.
Does any of this apply to humans? Using the PULS lab score to study a large group of at-risk patients, investigators found that future risk for heart attack remained almost triple two and a half months after two mRNA shots.
3 – Neurodegenerative Disease
Is the COVID jab really associated with premature Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease? Evidence continues to mount, and spike protein is once again the culprit. Circulating spike targets the brain in a variety of ways:
by exposing brain cells to unnecessary toxins through crowbar-like effects on the blood-brain barrier.
by attacking ACE-2 protein-rich environments in the brain.
by forcing mitochondria (the energy-producing organelles of cells) into less efficient processes, so that injured brain cells take on the eerie characteristics of cancer and Alzheimer’s cells.
Long-term outlook
Messenger RNA technology has been around for over 20 years, and multiple vaccines have been attempted. Each failed because the experimental animals failed to thrive.
Last February, spike protein was found to inhibit type 1 interferon, the powerful regulator of the immune system. Hindering type 1 interferon reduces the body’s ability to defend against:
(1) malignancies
(2) autoimmune diseases
(3) viral infections
Over the next year, we will continue to observe how impaired interferon affects the great COVID shot experiment. But while we study the pathology, let us further develop the mechanisms associated with mRNA injections, so that new approaches to the injuries they inflict may be devised.
Joseph Shepherd is a physician in Birmingham, Alabama.
Queen Elizabeth is celebrating her Platinum Jubilee–70 years on the throne. After a lifetime of integrity and faithful service, the queen is naturally popular. Current surveys have Elizabeth at 81% favorable and 12% unfavorable. One wonders who the 12% are–IRA terrorists, maybe?
Of the royal family, Prince William and Duchess Catherine score next at 74/10. Prince Andrew is the least popular royal, with a 5% approval rating. I don’t think I have ever before seen a public person with an approval rating that low.
Up one notch from Prince Andrew are the Sussexes, Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan Markle. Poor Harry now scores an anemic 32/58 approval, while Meghan lags behind at a brutal 23/63.
In my opinion, Meghan’s unpopularity is deserved. It also strikes me that one can compare her standing with the public to that of Amber Heard, a principal in a trial that has been followed by orders of magnitude more people than, say, the Sussman prosecution.
For those who haven’t paid attention, Amber Heard is a modestly successful actress who at one time was married to Johnny Depp, a more prominent actor. Heard was part of the “me too” movement. Someone at Amnesty International (she promised a big donation to Amnesty, but didn’t deliver) ghost wrote an op-ed for Heard in the Washington Post in which she described herself as “a public figure representing domestic abuse.” That was all it took.
Depp sued her for defamation, claiming that he did not, in fact beat Heard during their brief marriage. Several years ago he brought a similar lawsuit against the U.K.’s Sun newspaper, which called him a wife beater based on Heard’s allegations. That case was tried to a London judge who held that Heard’s claims were true. Depp got a second bite at the apple in a Virginia courtroom, I assume because British judgments do not get collateral estoppel effect in American courts.
Depp v. Heard has been followed breathlessly by many millions in the U.S. and around the world. To say that the testimony has been lurid is an understatement. The trial has lifted the lid on an almost unbelievably depraved Hollywood lifestyle.
Amber Heard is much like Meghan Markle. Like Markle, she came from a hardscrabble background, but was ambitious beyond what most consider reasonable. Like Markle, through grit and determination she parlayed her natural beauty into a pretty successful acting career. Like Markle, her ambition found its ultimate outlet in marrying up.
For whatever reason, it seems that this combination is not popular with the general public.
I have only watched portions of the Depp v. Heard trial, but from what I have seen I think that both litigants have considerable faults. That said, Depp is, in my view, much worse–a hopeless drunk and drug addict, and a crude, cruel man. In all, a terrible human being. From what I have seen, I think Heard’s characterization of herself as a victim of domestic abuse is probably correct, if sometimes overblown.
And yet the public can’t stand Heard. Every day at the courthouse, Depp is cheered by adoring fans, while Heard is booed. The courtroom is packed with Depp fans; he flirts with court personnel and is treated deferentially by the judge. On social media, Heard is relentlessly mocked, with 30-second videos purporting to destroy her case a staple on TikTok. I guess the “me too” moment must be over.
One remarkable feature of the trial is that Depp’s lawyers, who have had the better of Heard’s lawyers at every turn, called an expert witness (a woman who, for what it is worth, is even more beautiful than Amber) to testify to Heard’s personality defects–she supposedly suffers from “borderline personality disorder”–and call her a liar. How did this happen? There were hundreds of times in my career as a litigator when I would have liked to have a psychologist examine an adverse party and testify to his untrustworthiness, but this is not ordinarily possible.
I assume the explanation must be that Heard’s lawyers called a psychologist to testify that Heard exhibits the characteristics of a battered woman, or else to testify to the emotional damage that Depp’s defamation of Heard has caused–she has asserted a counterclaim–thus opening the door for Depp to call his own psychologist by way of rebuttal. I am always reluctant to criticize other lawyers, who know a million times more about their cases than I do, but this seems like an appalling blunder.
The Depp v. Heard jury retired to deliberate at about the same time as the Sussman jury. The Depp case is being followed with vastly more interest, and the jury is taking more time to deliberate. Notwithstanding relentless spin on Depp’s behalf, my guess (having watched nowhere near half of the trial) is that the jury will not award much, if any, money to either party. The key element is perhaps the gender composition of the jury, which I believe has five men and two women. That at least should give Heard a fighting chance.
Measuring Special Counsel John Durham’s performance by the outcome in United States v. Sussmann would be a mistake.
by MARGOT CLEVELAND at the Federalist:
The jury in the Michael Sussmann criminal case resumes deliberations today after the long Memorial Day weekend. While prosecutors presented overwhelming evidence over the last two weeks that Sussmann lied to then-FBI General Counsel James Baker in 2016, an acquittal by the D.C. jury still seems likely.
Judging the success of Special Counsel John Durham’s probe into the investigation of President Trump and those associated with the Trump campaign and administration should not rest on the outcome of the Sussmann prosecution, however. In fact, even if the special counsel’s office scores a conviction in its false statement case against Sussmann, that would do little to right the scales of justice unbalanced by more than five years of the politically motivated abuse of power that began as Crossfire Hurricane and continued even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued his final report.
So, measuring Durham’s performance by the outcome in United States v. Sussmann would be a mistake. Also, especially in the case of an acquittal, it would ignore the valuable information exposed related to the broader Spygate scandal. Using that gauge as a measure, the special counsel’s office succeeded wildly.
Durham Proved the Collusion Hoax Was a Hillary Clinton Enterprise
On September 19, 2016, Sussmann provided Baker data and whitepapers purporting to show a secret communications network between the Russia-based Alfa Bank and Donald Trump. In indicting Sussmann for allegedly lying to Baker during this meeting, the special counsel’s office revealed in its 27-page speaking indictment “a scandal much deeper than merely Sussmann’s role in a second Russian hoax — a scandal that entangles the Clinton campaign, multiple internet companies, two federally-funded university researchers, and a complicit media.”
Since then, proof that the Clinton campaign held near-total responsibility for launching the Russia-collusion hoax mounted with nearly every legal filing. It eventually culminated during the Sussmann trial when former Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook testified that Hillary Clinton personally “agreed with the decision” to feed the unverified—and quickly debunked—theory that Trump was communicating secretly with Russia through a back-door Alfa Bank channel.
Other trial evidence confirmed the Clinton campaign paid the law firm Perkins and Coie a flat fee of as much as $130,000 per month during the campaign, and authorized lead counsel Marc Elias to hire Fusion GPS for opposition research. Billing records then showed Sussmann charged his time for working the Alfa Bank hoax—including the time he spent meeting with the FBI’s General Counsel Baker—to the Clinton campaign. In fact, late last week, the jury in the Sussmann case learned that Sussmann even charged the Clinton campaign for two thumb drives purchased at Staples used for the Alfa Bank project.
While the Sussmann case focused on the Alfa Bank hoax, the detailed evidence presented over the course of that prosecution also confirmed the Clinton campaign paid for Fusion GPS to compile the Christopher Steele dossier. Given Mook’s testimony that he sought Clinton’s approval to push the Alfa Bank claims to the media, it is only reasonable to infer she likewise personally green-lighted the peddling of the claims contained in the Steele dossier.
But even if Clinton did not personally approve of peddling the lies contained in the Steele dossier, the Sussmann case established that her campaign paid for the lies—including those emanating from the Russian-national Igor Danchenko. And Special Counsel Durham’s indictment against Danchenko reveals that individuals hired by the Clinton campaign fed that Russian disinformation to U.S. media, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies.
A Court Ruling Requiring More Disclosures
Beyond exposing the Clinton campaign’s responsibility for the Russia-collusion hoax, Durham’s prosecution of Sussmann sets the stage for potentially even more damaging revelations about Clinton’s personal involvement in the scandal.
To date, the Clinton campaign has hidden behind claims of attorney-client privilege to prevent Durham from obtaining documents, communications, and testimony through the grand jury. The Clinton campaign claimed material prepared by, or communications between, Perkins and Coie attorneys, Fusion GPS employees, investigators, and other third parties are protected by attorney-client privilege. Prosecutors in the Sussmann case, however, succeeded in obtaining a court ruling that several documents withheld by Fusion GPS, based on the Clinton campaign’s claims of privilege, are not protected and must be given to prosecutors.
While Fusion GPS continues to withhold thousands of documents, this precedent provides the special counsel’s office solid grounds to challenge the privilege in both the Danchenko case and in other grand jury probes that may be pending. Piercing the privilege will prove key to further exposing Clinton’s personal involvement in Spygate.
Killing the Alfa Bank Hoax For Good
No matter the verdict the jury returns in the Sussmann case, the special counsel’s prosecution also revealed that the Alfa Bank stories were hoaxes—and the scandalous way they were crafted and seeded to America.
Voters first learned of the supposed connection between Trump and the Russian-based Alfa Bank about one week before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, when Slate reported that trusted cyber experts had discovered an “irregular pattern of server lookups” that suggested “a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.”
While the Slate article hedged somewhat by admitting “what the scientists amassed wasn’t a smoking gun,” and that the data “doesn’t absolutely preclude alternative explanations,” the headline, “Group of Computer Scientists Believes a Trump Server Was Communicating With a Russian Bank,” captured the essence of the article—and what its author Franklin Foer, Fusion GPS, and the Clinton campaign wanted Americans to believe.
The Alfa Bank hoax did not end there, however, or even after Trump’s election. Sussmann continued to push the theory to the CIA in February 2017, following Trump’s inauguration. Soon thereafter, Daniel Jones, a former staffer for the U.S. Senate Committee on Intelligence, Ranking Member Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, and the president and CEO of The Democracy Integrity Project (TDIP) continued the Alfa Bank witch-hunt.
According to a complaint filed with the Senate’s Ethics Committee, staff and members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, including T. Kirk McConnell, “requested and accepted” professional services from Jones and TDIP. Specifically, the complaint alleged that the Armed Services Committee, “via senior leadership staff acting in their official capacity, asked Mr. Jones to research and offer his insights into the alleged connections between Alfa Bank and Trump Organization servers,” and to “evaluate information it had received about DNS look-ups between Alfa Bank servers and Trump Organization servers.”
Jones, the TDIP, and the Senate Armed Services Committee continued the Alfa Bank investigation long after the FBI had concluded in early February 2017 that there “were no such links” between the Trump organization and Alfa Bank. The media also persisted in pushing the supposed Russia collusion scandal.
Media Keeps the Lies Circulating
The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins re-upped the Alfa Bank tale in 2018, in a tome titled, “Was There a Connection Between a Russian Bank and the Trump Campaign?” Filkins then resurrected the story for The New Yorker in October 2020, repeating many of the same allegations in “The Contested Afterlife of the Trump-Alfa Bank Story.”
In both pieces, Filkins referenced “Max,” who claimed that he, along with a team of other supposed guardians of the internet, had uncovered the mysterious Alfa Bank-Trump connections. But thanks to the prosecution of Sussmann, we now know “Max” is tech executive Rodney Joffe, and that his fellow cyber experts pushing the Alfa Bank hoax were April Lorenzen and David Dagon.
Court filings in the Sussmann case also revealed that the cyber researchers saw the Alfa Bank theory as flawed. They also showed another expert, Manos Antonakakis, who reviewed the Alfa Bank-Trump whitepapers, had congratulated Joffe on crafting the paper to avoid the most glaring hole in the thesis.
The more devastating take-down of the Alfa Bank theory, however, came during Sussmann’s trial, when government cyber security experts testified of their review of the data, telling the jury they had quickly concluded the hypothesis made no sense. One agent noted it sounded “5150ish” at the time. He explained to the jury he meant that the individual positing the Alfa Bank-Trump connection sounded as if he “was suffering from some mental disability.”
Exposing Deep Intelligence Corruption
Beyond burying the Alfa Bank hoax as a crazy conspiracy theory, Durham’s investigation also exposed the scandalous way the theory permeated both the media and U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Joffe tasked two Georgia Tech cyber researchers, as well as employees at tech companies over which he had influence, with mining proprietary and sensitive government data for any connection between Trump and Russia to push the Russia collusion narrative. Joffe also held responsibility for providing the Alfa Bank data to Sussmann, who shared it with the Clinton campaign’s head lawyer, Elias, and Fusion GPS, with the group then plotting to push the tale to the media.
The evidence further showed that Sussmann then fed the Alfa Bank story to the FBI, lying to Baker at the time, prompting the FBI to launch an investigation into the supposed secret communication network. Meantime, Joffe provided a different FBI contact the same Alfa Bank “intel” while asking that agent to maintain his anonymity, thereby creating a problem of circular reporting. Special Counsel Durham also revealed that Joffe still risks prosecution.
As with Sussmann, whether Joffe ever faces charges or a conviction says nothing of the success of the Durham investigation. To date, the special counsel has succeeded in exposing Hillary Clinton’s role in the hoax—and that the Alfa Bank hoax was real and spectacularly scandalous.
Muggeridge goes on to describe American education and culture, that colleges would become havens not of education but of nihilism and self-absorption:
MN Prager Discussion Group 