The Washington Post: The Danchenko Indictment Casts Some Slight Doubt On Some Previous Media Reporting on Russiagate

The Washington Post makes a large admission -- but makes it as small and stingy as possible, confining it to a single sentence with no elaboration and no promise of follow-up reportage.

I was trying to do a dramatic zoom-in of the line there. I don't think it worked.

I'd like to ask the Washington Post -- and NBC, and MSNBC, and ABC, and CNN, and the NYT -- which reporters they have assigned to the squad of reporters charged with reviewing past reportage and reporting it accurately this time.

They did this after minor reportorial sins as regards reporting too credulously on WMDs in Iraq. In this case, they were active participants in a hoax/Intelligence Community operation against a political party and the citizens of the United States.

So which reporters, and how many, will be assigned to the project of correcting the record? Of finding out how the press was manipulated -- or, in many cases, willingly enlisted itself in the project of running a psyops campaign against America?

The answer, is of course, that absolutely no one in the corporate media will be assigned to dig into this, because there are too many compromised, too many involved in the conspiracy. It would bring down the whole rotten system.

But every GOP official appearing on their shows should ask this question every time they appear.

Chuck Todd: Who at NBC is charged with re-reporting the Russiagate hoax?

Jake Tapper: You crowed about your role in setting up the Leak of the existence of the Clinton Dossier (not Steele Dossier, Clinton Dossier). '

James Comey said that he was talking with the media and that they wanted to report on the Clinton Dossier, but could not report on such a pack of unverified claims without a "news hook." Then John Brennan tried to get the Clinton Dossier included in the Daily Presidential Briefing but was blocked from doing so, so he paperclipped it to the briefing as an addendum.

Then he called you at CNN. Poof -- he'd provided you with your "news hook."

Did you -- or did a member of your team, Carl Bernstein, Evan Perez, or former Obama State Department Official Jim Sciutto -- collude with John Brennan to contrive this way to give the fake pack of partisan lies we now know as the Clinton Dossier a "news hook"?

If you didn't suggest it, were you aware at the time that this stratagem had been used to give an otherwise non-reportable pack of lies a "news hook" making it reportable? Did you feel ethical qualms about this?

Now knowing that you were a key, central, foundational, indispensable cog in this disinformation campaign, wither witting or unwitting, what responsibility do you feel to do some reportage instead of Democrat Party Stenography and reveal the true story of how the Clinton Dossier was transformed from febrile partisan conspiracy theory into CNN's main story from 2017 to 2019?

And if you don't do that -- are you not admitting that your role in this was not unwitting at all, but rather an intentional, knowing enlistment in a corrupt DNC/Intelligence Community operation to both subvert the 2016 election and then cripple a duly-elected, fairly chosen president?

Because I know you spend so much time telling us how deeply you care about protecting the integrity and honest functioning of our precious American democracy, and safeguarding it against corrupt interference.

Anderson Cooper: Who at CNN is charged with reviewing how CNN became an arm of Hillary Clinton's cynical disinformation campaign? How many hour long investigative specials do you plan to devote to uncovering the truth behind this nefarious foreign influence operation?

NPR: You are literally state media. You took part in a propaganda operation organized by the head of the CIA, the head of National Intelligence, and the Director of the FBI. Will you be assigning a crack team of reporters to review this, and to review your own role in propagating a conspiracy coordinated at the highest levels of the American government? Or do you plan to protect the conspiracy and by doing so, continue it?

NYT, Washington Post: You both received Pulitzer Prizes for your "reporting" of what is now exposed as a cynical campaign lie. Will you be returning these prizes? And who is assigned to attempt to earn you untainted Prizes in their place by reporting on what really happened?

There will be no review, there will be no post-mortem.

But they must be made to confess that -- over and over and over again.

The Washington Post's " " " fact-checker " " " and lineal descendant of Nazis Glenn Kesler says of the Clinton Dossier that a report is "only as good as its sources."

He omits to say that the Dossier's sources were also the Washington Post's sources-- David Ignatius, to name just one example, played stenographer for Christopher Steele's bullshit and the Washington Post published it.

Mongoose-with-a-cobra-in-his-teeth Sean Davis points out another one: By his own testimony, Clinton Operative and Danchenko's main "source" Charles Dolan was also a source for... the Washington Post on Russiagate.

Others point out that Nazi-spawn Glenn Kesler, who serves as the Washington Post's egregiously dishonest " " " fact-checker" " ", had many chances to check the facts of the Russiagate Conspiracy Theory, and always found the facts were just teeeee-rific!

National Review has, believe it or not, a useful recap of the indictment, which actually adds to our knowledge about the players. I'll bold the parts that are new or new-ish to me. In some cases, I knew the general, bullet-point story, but not the details.

Danchenko's background, which is worthy of a second-rate spy novel, came to light in late 2020, when a Justice Department inspector-general investigation was unsealed. A Russian citizen transplanted to Washington as a geopolitics scholar, he landed at the Brookings Institution, a prominent Clinton-friendly think-tank. In 2009, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation of Danchenko. He had allegedly suggested to two Brookings staffers, who appeared to be headed for jobs in the Obama administration, that he could make it worth their while if they passed along classified information. The staffers (one of whom believed Danchenko must be a Russian agent -- imagine that!) instead passed along word of Danchenko's entreaty to the FBI. The Bureau learned that Danchenko appeared to be tied to two Russian agents who were also under investigation.

Agents prepared to seek national-security surveillance of Danchenko under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). But, in what would become an alarming theme, the FBI did not follow through and closed the investigation in March 2011, apparently believing that Danchenko had gone back to Russia.

In fact, he had begun working with Steele. Danchenko was introduced to Steele in 2010 by Fiona Hill, another Brookings Russia scholar.

The Brookings Institution is essentially -- not really, but, you know, essentially -- the foreign policy cover organization for the Clinton Foundation.

So how very strange that the Brookings Institution and its personnel have taken a lead, and I do mean lead role, in pushing the Clinton Dossier and Hillary Clinton's Russiagate Conspiracy Theory.

Hill, you may recall, was a Trump White House National Security Council member who provided key testimony in the House's impeachment of then-President Trump in the Ukraine kerfuffle. (Hill appears not to have been knowingly complicit in the unrelated Trump-Russia hype.)

Ah, National Review. Always simping for the left.

We don't know what we don't know. Why clear someone based on so little knowledge, so early in the process?

Stay Gold, pony-boy.

When Steele was recruited for the Clinton campaign's anti-Trump project in spring 2016, he relied on Danchenko to supply most of the information. Contrary to Steele's later claims, Danchenko did not have a network of useful contacts. But here again, Hill appears inadvertently to have advanced the plot. In 2016, she introduced Danchenko to Charles Dolan, a Russia-focused businessman and Democratic Party activist.

This woman keeps popping up as an indispensable part of Russiagate -- a Johnny Appleseed of conspiracy theory connections -- and National Review wants to claim her role is entirely unwitting?

Not to mention her later role in the second Trump impeachment.

Maybe she was just a pawn in Hillary's game.

But then again, maybe not.

Again, why are we rushing to absolve on so thin a record, so early in the investigation?

If only National Review had been this willing to vindicate Trump of Hillary Clinton's "Trump is a Russian Agent" conspiracy theory!

What is she, a National Review background source?

Dolan is identified in the indictment as "PR Executive-1" because he helped run a public-relations firm. He is a longtime Clinton insider, having worked on Bill Clinton's successful 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns, as well as Hillary's failed 2008 and 2016 bids. In the interim, he was appointed by President Clinton to a State Department advisory committee. From 2006 until 2014, the Kremlin retained Dolan to be its global public-relations agent. For much of that time, conveniently, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was the Obama administration point-person on the "Russia Reset," in which the State Department promoted Russian economic development.

I did not know that. Dolan was himself literally a Kremlin agent!

And he worked for Hillary!

And Hillary's conspiracy theory about Trump was that he, Trump, had unsavory connections to Putin's Kremlin!

Now, put this in the additional context that Hillary Clinton's oppo research firm FusionGPS was simultaneously working directly for Vladimir Putin, attempting to drum up media and government support for overturning the Global Magnitsky Act,, which Putin did not like, because it gave governments the power to seize caches of his wealth (stolen from the Russian treasury) he had secreted in foreign banks.

Who's got Vladimir on speed-dial, you corrupt, pestilent cow of drunkard psycopath?

Read the article to see what you knew or suspected -- Dolan made a trip to Russia and reported that Trump had stayed in a hotel there. He said nothing of prostitutes or peeing. Danchenko just straight-up fabricated that.

Now this part I knew, but it's worth stressing its importance:

Danchenko lied about where his information was coming from. He hid the fact that it was coming from Charles Dolan. Had he admitted that, his "information" would have been more obviously a partisan pack of lies coming straight from the diseased drunkard mouth of Hillary Clinton.

But he needed to claim it came from somewhere.

So he lied and claimed it came from Sergei Millian, a Russian businessman who had light dealings with Trump and who had started the "Russian-American Chamber of Commerce" to boost his US profile.

This lie hid the true source, while contriving a false source which would give Danchenko's claims the thinnest veneer of plausibility.

Trouble was, of course, that Sergei Millian denied, vehemently, ever talking to Danchenko or having any knowlede of any of this.

Sergei Miliam should -- must -- sue Danchenko, Christopher Steele, Perkins-Coie, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton for President, and the DNC for defamation.

And we should crowdfund this lawsuit to "fortify" it with a bankroll of about five or eight million dollars -- conditioned on Millian not being allowed to settle, and being absolutely aggressive in pursuing discovery.

Below, former DNI John Ratcliffe says he expects "many indictments" from Durham.

posted by Ace at 03:34 PM

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