Beyond a Political Scandal, Evidence Shows Russiagate Pushed for Confrontation with Russia
Aug. 4—The Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley released some damning material, the just-declassified “Annex” to the May 12, 2023 report by Special Counsel John Durham. Grassley’s press release stressed the lower-level dirty operations run by the Democrats—and they are undeniable. Yet he featured two notable bombshells.
The infamous “Hillary Clinton plan” of July 2016 (at the time of her nomination at the Democratic convention)—to divert attention away from the fixing of the Democratic primary process in her favor, and from the scandal over her use of a private email account to hide certain official business—was actually afoot at least four months before. An email from Leonard Benardo to DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz shows this. Grassley does state it, but it means the plan was not a reaction to Julian Assange’s public announcement and releases of June and July.
According to the Durham Annex, at the time, the “Clinton staff, with support from special services, is preparing scandalous revelations of business relations between Trump and the ‘Russian Mafia.’” On March 31, 2016, FBI personnel, including then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, shared the intelligence regarding the potential Clinton Campaign plan with high-ranking career officials at the Justice Department.
It should be noted that the Durham annex qualified the authenticity of the Benardo email as follows: “Certain [redacted] analysts and officers whom the Office interviewed, and who were well-versed in the Sensitive Intelligence collection, stated that their best assessment was that the Benardo emails were likely authentic.” However, the annex report suggests that their source might have summarized several Benardo emails into the two presented.
That said, there is much more. Benardo is the senior vice president of George Soros’ Open Society Foundation (OSF), dealing with OFS’s Russia, Ukraine and Georgia matters. In a second email, July 25, 2016, Benardo writes Wasserman Schultz, as covered in Grassley’s release: “During the first stage of the campaign, due to lack of direct evidence, it was decided to disseminate the necessary information through the FBI-affiliated … technical structures … in particular, the CrowdStrike and ThreatConnect companies, from where the information would then be disseminated through leading U.S. publications.” That had been accomplished in June, beginning two days after Julian Assange’s June 12 announcement that WikiLeaks would publish documents on the doings of the DNC and Clinton.
However, what the actual Durham Annex proceeds to report on the Benardo email goes way beyond political dirty tricks. Immediately following is this: “In addition, it is presumed in the FBI that in the future, any clumsy propaganda campaign by the GRU is bound to lead to the emergence of more reliable indications of Moscow’s involvement, which would imminently intensify the U.S. confrontational tendencies toward Russia.”
The CrowdStrike operation had reported on June 14 that the DNC computers had been hacked, with the hacker clumsily leaving behind some Cyrillic (Russian language) characters. (Of note, the CIA’s Marble Framework operation was specifically designed to mimic foreign IPC addresses of five languages, including Russian.) Now, the plan is that the GRU protestations over the CrowdStrike claim will prompt reactions amongst Western intelligence, and the snowball effect will be to “intensity the U.S. confrontational tendencies toward Russia.”
Former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney, and a forensic team assembled by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) proved in 2017 that there never was a hack, Russian, or otherwise of the DNC computers, and that the cyber theft of the released data had to have been an inside job. That information continues to be suppressed, as it was at the time by Trump CIA Director "Fat Mike" Pompeo, who at Trump's direction, was briefed by Binney in October 2017.