On July 31 and Aug. 1, The New York Times ran two stories pouring cold water on the release of the previously classified “Annex” to the Report of Special Counsel John Durham dated May 23, 2023. But the authors – Charlie Savage and Adam Goldman – misdirected their readers’ attention from the start to a non-issue, with the help of a literally false headline claiming Durham found certain documents in the Annex to have been “faked” by Russian intelligence.
That’s the basis upon which the Times, Washington Post, Politico, network news, and other legacy media have myopically focused their reporting on the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation of President Trump – which we know was “faked” by the FBI, CIA, and Obama White House.
Part of Durham’s investigation looked into why the FBI did NOTHING – literally – after first receiving the Russian intelligence information in late July 2016, as contrasted with how the FBI reacted to information nearly 60 days old received from an Australian diplomat about a meeting in a London bar.
The Annex includes previously classified information on the receipt of “Special Intelligence” throughout the first part of 2016 from a friendly foreign government, showing Russia’s seemingly real-time knowledge of the inner machinations of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The Annex is a document authored by Durham’s team. Since the source documents upon which the Russian memos were based were not provided – or at least not made public – the accuracy of Russian memos’ paraphrasing/referencing to the source documents is unknown. All those qualifiers go to the work of “analysis” – what is this document, where does it originate, what does it say, what does it rely upon, can it be corroborated separately, what is our level of confidence in accepting the contents as accurate at face value, etc.?
Two items that have attracted the most attention, and which the Times’ stories focus on, are “emails” purportedly written by Leonard Bernardo, dated July 25 and July 27, 2016. Bernardo worked for a George Soros-related entity. His emails were hacked, and he had communications with senior Clinton campaign officials.
The Annex does not have actual “emails” as you might find them on Bernardo’s computer or a recipient’s computer – they have none of the typical email formatting. What they appear to be are “retyped” versions of the text in the body of emails into a Russian language memo, the Russian memo was translated into English, with Durham “cutting & pasting” the English translation into his report.
The July 25 “email” includes the allegation that Hillary Clinton approved a plan conceived by a “foreign policy adviser” to “vilify” then-candidate Donald Trump by falsely linking him to Russia Pres. Putin.
As for the Russian language memo – we don’t know the date — Durham provides an English translation that includes the following:
“According to data from the election campaign headquarters of Hillary Clinton, obtained via the U.S. Soros Foundation, on July 26, 2016, Clinton approved a plan by her policy advisor Juliana Smith … to smear Donald Trump by magnifying the scandal tied to the intrusion Russian special services in the pre-election process to benefit the Republican candidate.”
The Russian memo says next “As envisioned by Smith….” This suggests that maybe among the documents supporting the memo is a description of Smith’s plan either by Smith herself or someone else familiar enough with the details to describe it.
“As envisioned by Smith, raising the theme of ‘Putin’s support for Trump’ to the level of the Olympic scandal would divert constituents’ attention from the investigation of Clinton’s compromised electronic correspondence.”
The Russian memo, which had to have been written after July 27 since it had contents from a July 27 email in it, describes precisely what followed over the next 100 days leading up to the election – establishing “Putin’s support for Trump” was the goal of the supposed “plan.”
The Russian memo goes on:
“…by subsequently steering public opinion towards the notion that it [the public] needs to equate ‘Putin’s efforts’ to influence political processes in the United States via cyberspace to acts against critically important infrastructure (resembling a national power supply network) would force the White House [read “OBAMA”] to use more confrontational scenarios vis-à-vis Moscow….”
The memo says the Clinton campaign will seek to blow up the significance of Russian election interference – which happens in every election – by equating it to an attack on vital national infrastructure, and link Putin and Trump together in the effort, i.e., any election interference by Putin is really a proxy for an attack on democracy by Trump.
Either the Russian intelligence services are clairvoyant and should be playing the lottery every week, or they wandered into a trove of correspondence between people associated with the Clinton campaign describing precisely the game plan executed by the campaign, and White House, CIA, and FBI on its behalf.
The July 27 email attributed to Bernardo is also relatively short in terms of what Durham sets forth as the verbatim text taken from the Russian memo, and it confirms that Clinton approved “Julia’s idea.”
The Times’ authors falsely reported that Durham called the two Bernardo emails “fake” – and said that they were “concocted” by Russian intelligence. Hence, according to the Times, all the controversy surrounding the release of Annex materials was made irrelevant by that finding.
But Durham didn’t conclude the emails were fake. What did he conclude?
His team’s “best assessment” was that they were “composites” – some portion of the text of each was taken from other sources and combined into the text that appeared under Bernardo’s name as an “email.”
It is clear that Bernardo did not write them, i.e., they are not “authentic.”
But it is also clear that some amount of the content in each was accurate – and predicted events that would unfold over the next 100 days.
Durham reached that conclusion only after a long and involved process designed to understand both what the emails were, and how much of the content of the Special Intelligence was accurate.
Everything – and I mean everything — Durham did to answer those questions were things the FBI chose to NOT DO in or after August 2016.
Durham asked intelligence analysts – FBI and CIA presumably – if the emails appeared authentic. Most said that they did. Some noted that Bernardo was, in fact, a victim of hacking by the Russians, so it would not be surprising if his emails were in the Russians’ hands. It was noted by some that the Russians could have fabricated or altered the original information taken from the source documents.
Just the fact that some analysts believed the emails appeared to be authentic should have been enough to push the FBI into action. But it did nothing.
Durham interviewed Bernardo and showed him the emails. The FBI never did that. Bernardo said he did not recognize them, and there was language in them that he would not have used — specifically the sentence “Later the FBI will put more oil into the fire.”
Judging intelligence translated from a foreign language is tricky. Bernardo denied using that phrase, but how far off is that from a very similar phrase more commonly used by a native English speaker – “Pour gas onto the fire”? Bernardo’s original document would have been in English – then translated to Russian – then the Russian version translated back to English. That’s how “gas onto the fire” ends up as “oil into the fire.”
Bernardo also said he did not know who “Julie” was as referenced in the July 25 email.
But he noted that the final sentence in the July 25 email – that “things are ghastly for US-Russian relations” was phrased as something that he would write.
Durham gathered documents with grand jury subpoenas and search warrants. He looked for the documents obtained by Russian hackers. As for the July 25 and July 27 emails, Durham did not find those among the emails of the Soros Foundation.
But he found other emails – either emails or attachments to emails sent by people other than Bernardo – with language identical to Bernardo. Specifically, a passage in the July 25 email was taken directly from an email written by Tim Mauer, who worked for the Carnegie Endowment as a cyber expert. Mauer had never seen the Bernardo emails but agreed that one passage was taken from an email he had sent to colleagues at Carnegie – also hacked by the Russians.
Durham also interviewed Julianne Smith, who was a Clinton campaign foreign policy advisor, and who did involve herself in efforts to amplify the threat of the Putin-Trump relationship to U.S. national security.
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It is noteworthy that Durham begins this portion as follows:
“Smith stated she did not specifically remember proposing a plan to Clinton or other Campaign leadership to try to tie Trump to Putin and Russia.”
That phrasing is never accidental – “did not specifically remember” leaves much room to extricate oneself if a document emerges later that says what it is you claim to not remember. Agents are trained to note such phrases exactly as stated by the person being interviewed.
Smith did say “it was possible” she had proposed ideas to campaign leadership “who may have approved those ideas.” Again – Durham is showing her emails about a “Clinton Plan” she supposedly hatched, and she cannot be confident what other documents he might have that he isn’t showing her.
While she didn’t remember much of anything about anything, the one thing she was certain of is that she would never have made a proposal that had as part of its execution the involvement of the FBI in furtherance of the effort.
Prior to Durham, the FBI did none of this – and has never offered an explanation for why.
THAT was the point made by Durham’s Annex.
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