The second part of the article concludes with an unusual hypothesis: the Theranos story was not so much about the concept of home test kits as it was about centralized population control:
In a short, 2-minute video titled, “This is how we prevent the next pandemic,” published on YouTube on 27 January 2021, you can hear the world’s chief health officer, comrade Gates explain his rescue plan for when we have the “next pandemic.” “By the next pandemic,” says Mr. Gates, “I believe we can have what I call mega-testing diagnostic platforms. They can be deployed quickly, cost very little, and test 20% of the entire population every week. … To stop future pandemics quickly, we need to be able to spot disease outbreaks as soon as they happen anywhere in the world. And that requires a global alert system. … Stopping the next pandemic will be a big investment.”
So, according to comrade Gates, fighting these next pandemics will require quick, cheap and ultra-versatile platforms that can test 20% of the entire population every week. Doesn’t that sound a lot like what Theranos was trying to build? Indeed, on the occasion of promoting their joint venture with Walgreens in 2013, Elizabeth Holmes explained that, “We have an operational plan that will allow us to become within five miles from every person’s home through Wallgreens that we’ve opened and continue to open nationally.”
The explicit purpose of this infrastructure was to centralize the health care process so that diagnostics, medication and treatment could all come from the same source. Now that kind of a thing could explain our powerbrokers’ excitement about Theranos: it would be a very powerful tool of population control in the hands of those who lusted to wield it.
This agenda could explain why during its first 11 years, Theranos board of directors consisted almost exclusively of deep state actors: high ranking military officers and top foreign policy officials, but no medical doctors or health care experts. It also explains why the power players behind Theranos weren’t bothered about whether the technology actually worked or not: it was not intended as an accurate diagnostics tool (we already had those); it was intended as an information weapon.
Unlike the PCR test which has been known and well understood by health care professionals worldwide, Theranos technology would have remained a mystery, hidden behind the veils of patents and protected intellectual property. The public would not be given the opportunity to have the devices examined independently; such checks would certainly be entrusted to reliable, Theranos-friendly inspectors.
In other words, Theranos' technology was designed to be a black box, with proprietary secrets preventing certain aspects from being disclosed to the public, much like the "secret ingredients" in the mRNA injections. The article points out that venture capitalists and deep state actors are still pursuing the basic Theranos idea; think only of the similar claims made some years ago by Toshiba. And here the article concludes with an intriguing observation and a bit of speculation:
So, the information arms race is still very much on and the power players who brought us Theranos haven’t given up on their agenda. This is a war on – and for – our minds. If we heed the warning from Bill Gates, we must expect to see more pandemics; mega-testing diagnostic platforms might spring up in our neighborhoods, and we might be pressured to take those tests regularly and believe the results. The authorities will protect us from the frightful pandemics and tell us exactly what’s expected of us to protect ourselves and others.
This reminded me of something I had written about in the following blog:
UPDATE: OPTICAL PHASE CONJUGATION, BIOLOGICAL TISSUE, AND THERANOS
What I said there was this:
Well, there may be more to this story, because one of this site's regular readers, T.M., spotted this very intriguing paper:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2688902/
Notably, this paper appeared in 2009, approximately five years after Holmes founded Theranos. What the abstract says is quite intriguing for our purposes:
Elastic optical scattering, the dominant light interaction process in biological tissues, prevents tissues from being transparent. While scattering may appear stochastic, it is in fact deterministic in nature. We show that, despite experimental imperfections, optical phase conjugation (λ = 532 nm) can force a transmitted light field to retrace its trajectory through a biological target and recover the original light field. For a 0.69 mm thick chicken breast tissue section, we can enhance point source light return by ∼5×103 times and achieve a light transmission enhancement factor of 3.8 within a collection angle of 29°. Additionally, we find that the reconstruction's quality, measured by the width of the reconstructed point source, is independent of tissue thickness (up to 0.69 mm thick). This phenomenon may be used to enhance light transmission through tissue, enable measurement of small tissue movements, and form the basis of new tissue imaging techniques
In other words, as cells move the movement itself distorts the light they emit, but this original signature may be recovered through the phenomenon of phase conjugation. The latter bears a little explanation. Phase conjugation emerged as a major phenomenon of interest from the super-secret work being done in the 1980s during the Reagan administration's Strategic Defense Initiative or "Star Wars" program, and as we shall see in a moment, emerged in quite a different context in the secret Soviet biophysics research of the 1960s and 1970s. Simply put, as a light wave moves through a medium such as the atmosphere, it undergoes scattering that distorts the original "shape" it had when emitted from its source.
Thus, pointing a laser at, say, a missile or an aircraft moving through the atmosphere meant that the cohered beam of laser light would be subject to scattering, and lose much of the energy coming from the source of the emission. A way had to be found to mitigate this effect, and the means was phase conjugation, which (to be very crude about it) took a "picture" of the distortion or scattering effects themselves, and then used that distortion itself as a template to reconfigure the laser beam at the source in the opposite pattern or phase, thus allowing the beam to maintain its coherence and energy over much greater distances.
In some cases in the literature, this phase conjugation effect was even called "time reserved waves" because the effect of phase conjugation was to reverse the normal inverse square law of light scattering. Theoretically, the phenomenon meant that energy could be concentrated at the target, since the inverse square law was "reversed."
Thus, in this paper, the claim is to have used the same phenomenon to view the the light emitted from cells. This in itself is very intriguing, because if you've been following the work of U.S. Army Lt. Col. Tom Bearden (retired) over the years, you'll recall that the Soviet Union did a great deal of very classified research in biophysics, trying to discover the electromagnetic "templates" of specific diseases in cells, and of healthy "templates" in cells, and then allegedly used those templates to irradiate biological tissue to create, or cure, various diseases including cancer.
And there as well, the phenomenon of phase conjugation entered the picture, though as in the above paper, in a biological rather than missile defense context.
Could this phenomenon be coupled to that of the recent discovery of a new kind of light wave emerging in the boundary transition between crystals and liquids that I blogged about in the above-linked blog? My high octane speculative guess is yes, and that those light waves will differ depending on the relative health of the liquid they transition into.
My wild speculation of the day here is this: can this same phenomenon be used to help breach the blood brain barrier? and can it thus be used for a direct physiological manipulation of the brain itself? Is it, in other words, another tool in the arsenal of mind manipulation techniques? I suspect so...
... and I also suspect, as I've stated before, that we've not seen the last of the Theranos story, nor of the illuminating dots-to-connect that this most recent article outlines.
Readers of this website who go back a few years know of my fascination with the story of Elizabeth Holmes and her high-tech medical start-up Theranos. For those who do not know the story, a brief review is in order. Holmes was a mere 19 years old, and a drop-out from Stanford University, when she started her medical-diagnostics company Theranos.
She quickly amassed an amazing amount of money, and more importantly, an unusual list of people to be investors and members of the board of Theranos, people like former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, Riley Bechtel (of the Bechtel firm), Rupert Murdoch, former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn, and General "Mad Dog" Mattis. On and on we could go. What attracted all this attention?
Holmes' and Theranos' claim was to be able to run a variety of standard medical tests on a machine about as big as a desktop computer, and to do so on "a drop of blood," i.e., on a minimum of blood, rather than several syringes drawn out over time. In effect, the device was to be a "home diagnostics" unit.
Holmes herself was a not an unattractive women, and quickly became the darling diva of the television talk shows, but the shine soon warn off when the results from her machines and even the concept behind them were challenged, and eventually the firm collapsed, taking Holmes' reputation with it.
But as I've pointed out in several blogs on this website, questions remained. For example, Toshiba a few months after the collapse of Theranos announced its own machine based on similar concepts. I've even noted that some of Theranos' concepts appear to have been mimicked. (For some of those blogs, see)
With this background in mind, on to today's article. This time, the right questions about the narrative are being asked:
Theranos scandal: the REAL story (1/3)
Theranos scandal: the REAL story (2/3)
Firstly, it is important to note the first part of the article's review of "the standard narrative" regarding Holmes and Theranos:
But there was a big problem at the core of this venture. Namely, Holmes’ inventions were mostly imaginary, her technology didn’t work, and her mission was based on wishful thinking. So how was she able to build her house of cards with such an impressive façade and make herself into America’s favorite entrepreneur and youngest female “self-made” billionaire? The narrative was that it was down to her supposed brilliance, her story, conviction, charisma, and her disarming personal charm. We’ve been led to believe that those were the weapons she used to persuade some of the most powerful people in the US military and political establishment to become directors of her startup and to convince a group of seasoned investors and experienced business people to back her venture with hundreds of millions of dollars.
That story is hugely implausible, but it is nevertheless being told and retold in the media without much critical analysis or skepticism, only allowing for the possibility that Holmes’s one co-conspirator was her partner and boyfriend Ramesh (Sunny) Balwani.
However, as I have tried to point out in my own blogs linked above, her basic concepts were not implausible, so this part of the critique of the narrative is also a bit suspect, though the questions it raises are central to the saga: why would people such as General Mattis or George Schultz become involved?
The author of the article points out that mere charm or management skills are usually not enough to even make it past the gatekeepers to the sources of investment capital, let alone to people like Sam Nunn, George Schultz, or Riley Bechtel:
The cosmetics alone – the stories, visions, displays of confidence or personal charm – they won’t even get you past the gatekeepers if the stuff behind the façade doesn’t convince. In Elizabeth Holmes’s case, even minimal due diligence should have eliminated her: she set out to revolutionize health care but had no qualifications or experience in medicine and only rudimentary training in biochemistry. In almost all cases, her patents specified design of future solutions but not the functionality. She published no white papers or technical specifications, and could not demonstrate that her supposed inventions even worked. Any specialist in the field of medicine or biochemistry would have easily disqualified her claims and determined that there was no substance to her story.
As the article observes, the standard narrative all too passing strange: how indeed did Holmes get past the gatekeepers, gain entry to personal contact with these big names, and more importantly, why did the big names go along with it?
At this juncture the article relates the story of how Theranos employees Erika Cheung and Schultz's own grandson Tyler Schultz met private over dinner with the former secretary of state to inform him of the massive fraud at Theranos, and that its technology, in spite of public hype and claims to the contrary, did not yet exist. Schultz himself dismissed the assertions, and his response is worth noting:
George Shultz dismissed his grandson and Erika Cheung, saying: “I know Tyler’s very smart, you seem very smart, but the fact of the matter is I’ve brought in a wealth of intelligent people, and they tell me that this device is going to revolutionize health care. And so maybe you should consider doing something else.” Cheung resigned from Theranos the next day after only seven months on the job.
While Theranos continued in operation unhindered, she and Tyler Shultz became targets of very aggressive surveillance and intimidation. Keeping them silent was entrusted to David Boies’ law firm Boies Schiller. Recall, David Boies was also on Theranos board of directors and the fact that he had a hand in pressuring Tyler Shultz and Erika Cheung to keep quiet indicates that he too was in the know about Theranos dark secrets.
But rather than investigating those secrets, action was directed against Theranos employees and potential whistleblowers. At a later point in time, George Shultz invited Tyler to his house to convince him to keep quiet. On that occasion Tyler indicated that he would consider signing a confidentiality agreement at which his grandfather said, “Good, there are two Theranos lawyers upstairs; can I go get them?” But ultimately his grandson declined to sign the papers.
The question boils down to this:
But the idea that she could continually deceive scores of industry experts and specialists in firms like Walgreens, Safeway, Pfizer, GSK and numerous health care institutions, as well as many high level business executives and investors, that is very difficult to explain. How should we believe that all these people had been hoodwinked by Holmes and that she could keep them all hoodwinked for over 12 years (2003-2016)? (boldface emphasis added)
In answer to this question, we arrive at the second installment of the article, and what, for me, has always been the real implication of the Theranos story, and finally someone has stated and argued the case: Holmes was the designated "public face" (and patsy, should something go wrong), and the public narrative is exactly that, a narrative.
It is far more likely that Holmes was recruited to be the front-woman of Theranos while the project’s real power brokers remained behind the stage. Her real qualifications were her youth, unbridled ambition, lack of any scruples about deceiving her own employees, investors and the public, and her willingness to advance her goals over people’s lives.
She also had that sense of her family’s greatness which might have enabled her to set aside all legal and ethical considerations in pursuing her grand mission. Another plus would have been her supposed fluency in Mandarin, since future health challenges were expected to come from China.
We also know that an unnamed but influential person twice introduced Holmes to professor Phyllis Gardner. The same person may have also leaned on professor Channing Robertson to admit the unqualified Holmes into his chemistry lab? Furthermore, Holmes was able to skate past the due diligence gatekeepers at Lucas Ventures Group and land straight into Don Lucas Sr’s office thanks to an introduction from some unnamed friend of her father’s.
The article points out that George Schultz's reaction to his own grandson's attempt to point out the fraud is that of a person more concerned to protect the project itself than his own reputation. And this becomes but the most egregious example of a whole host of inconsistencies and questions. Consider the following detail, and let the ramifications sink in:
Another revealing moment was an interview between Holmes and Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittran. He jokingly mentioned that the only person missing from her board of directors was the Pope, and then asked: “How did that happen? Was it, I’m just going to write to Henry Kissinger, these kind of caliber of people who are in the public eye, but probably not so easy to ring up?” Holmes replied that, “In our case, those were people whom I had the privilege of getting to know and in many cases working with for in some cases a couple of years before we asked them to join the board.”
I don’t know how or when Holmes met Shultz, Kissinger, Mattis, Bechtel, Roughead, Perry, Boies, or Nunn. But she told us that she had been working with many of them for years before they joined Theranos as directors. OK then, what exactly were they “working” on? Most of these people were deeply rooted in the military and foreign policy establishments and none of them had anything to do with medicine, biochemistry or health care.
Yet for some reason, they all decided to pool their considerable influence and raise a huge amount of capital in order to “democratize diagnostics” and revolutionize health care? They also thought the best way to do that was to entrust it to a 19-year old with no qualifications in any of the relevant domains? This all brings us to a really important question: why?
There is a related issue as the article also points out: why would these big name investors back a start-up, rather than going to established names in medical testing like Abbot or Siemens? Why recruit someone with no experience or qualifications like Holmes? Here the article, in my opinion, begins to run into trouble, for the author opines that this is probably what the investors did do, and they ran into a problem:
For some reason however, that route did not work for them and we can venture a guess why: probably because the response from the real blood testing experts would have been (or was) that what they were asking for was impossible. That is what professors Dr. Phyllis Gardner and Dr. Darren Saunders had suggested. Indeed, Dr. Gardner did not hesitate to say that Theranos investors were crazy to back such a venture.
In other words, the central feature of the story was and is that the concept behind Theranos was then unworkable. Yet, as I've pointed out in my own blogs on the subject, Toshiba later made similar claims, and the optics behind the Theranos idea seems to be at least in part confirmed by subsequent discoveries. We'll return to this point about the optics in a moment.
you forget the /s?
Please post more info if you can! Anyone from Romania want to chime in?
The COVID house of cards is on life support. They simply can't keep this behemoth afloat.
"Code Yellow" means they're pissing their pants.
more info: Sars-CoV2 Isolation Court Case - RSA
they do this A LOT with words btw. Almost all are deliberate...tyranny/tranny is new to me tho, lol.
yes, there's a PM function here! I'll send you a msg.
We're at a point where to prop up the COVID hoax they have to LITERALLY lie and cite studies that DON'T support their psychosis.
Humans are currently (and historically) under attack by a non-human hive mind entity that is turning people into NPCs.
There's a video circulating of a deaf woman breaking down precisely because of this. Crazy.
As RCI first reported, Jones emailed a daily news bulletin known as "TDIP Research" to prominent Beltway journalists to keep the Trump-Russia “collusion” rumor-mill going, including the debunked rumor about the "secret server." Durham has subpoenaed Jones to testify before his grand jury hearing the case, along with computer experts and researchers recruited by Sussmann for the Clinton campaign project, persons close to the investigation said. Attempts to reach Jones for comment were unsuccessful.
In a statement, Durham said his investigation "is ongoing."
Indictments for a single-count process crime such as making a false statement normally run a page or two. But Durham’s filing charging Sussmann spans 27 pages and is packed with detail. FBI veterans say the 40-year prosecutor used the indictment to outline a broader conspiracy case he’s building that invokes several other federal statutes.
"That is what we call a 'speaking indictment,' meaning it is far more detailed than is required for a simple indictment under [federal statute] 1001,” which outlaws making false statements and representations to federal investigators, former assistant FBI Director Chris Swecker said in an interview with RealClearInvestigations.
"It is damning,” he added. “And I see it as a placeholder for additional indictments, such as government grant and contract fraud, computer intrusion, the Privacy Act and other laws against dissemination of personally identifiable information, and mail fraud and wire fraud – not to mention conspiracy to commit those offenses."
"I definitely see more [indictments] to come,” emphasized Swecker, who knows Durham personally and worked with him on prior investigations. The sources close to the case said former FBI general counsel James Baker, who accepted the sketchy materials from Sussmann and passed them on to agents for investigation, is cooperating with Durham’s investigation, along with former FBI counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap, who has provided prosecutors contemporaneous notes about what led the bureau to open an investigation into the allegations Trump used Alfa Bank as a conduit between his campaign and Russian President Vladimir Putin to steal the election.
According to the sources, Durham also has found evidence Sussmann misled the CIA, another front in the scandal being reported here for the first time. In December 2016, the sources say Sussmann phoned the general counsel at the agency and told her the same story about the supposed secret server – at the same time the CIA was compiling a national intelligence report that accused Putin of meddling in the election to help Trump win.
Sussmann told Caroline Krass, then the agency’s top attorney, that he had information that may help her with a review President Obama had ordered of all intelligence related to the election and Russia, known as the Intelligence Community Assessment. The review ended up including an annex with several unfounded and since-debunked allegations against Trump developed by the Clinton campaign.
It’s not clear if the two-page annex, which claimed the allegations were “consistent with the judgments in this assessment,” included the Alfa Bank canard. Before it was made public, several sections had been redacted. But after Sussmann conveyed the information to Krass, an Obama appointee, she told him she would consider it for the intelligence review of Russian interference, which tracks with Sussmann’s 2017 closed-door testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. (Krass’ name is blacked out in the declassified transcript, but sources familiar with Sussmann's testimony confirmed that he identified her as his CIA contact.)
“We’re interested,” said Krass, who left the agency several months later. "We’re doing this review and I’ll speak to someone here.”
It’s not known if Sussmann failed to inform the top CIA lawyer that he was working on behalf of the Clinton campaign, as he’s alleged to have done at the FBI. Attempts to reach Krass, who now serves as Biden’s top lawyer at the Pentagon, were unsuccessful.
But in his return trip to the CIA after the election, Sussmann “stated falsely – as he previously had stated to the FBI general counsel – that he was ‘not representing a particular client,’ " according to the Durham indictment, which cites a contemporaneous memo drafted by two agency officials with whom Sussmann met that memorializes their meeting. (The document refers to the CIA by the pseudonym “Agency-2.” Sources confirm Agency-2 is the CIA.)
Remarkably, the CIA did not ask for the source of Sussmann’s walk-in tip, including where he got several data files he gave the agency. The FBI exhibited a similar lack of curiosity when Sussmann told it about the false Trump/Alfa Bank connection.
Attempts to reach Sussmann to get his side to the additional CIA allegations leveled by Durham were unsuccessful. The 57-year-old attorney pleaded not guilty to a single felony count and was released on a $100,000 bond Friday. If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison.
The prominent Washington lawyer quietly resigned from Perkins Coie, which has scrubbed all references to him from its website. And late last month, as rumors of the indictment swirled, the powerhouse law firm divested its entire Political Law Group formerly headed by Marc Elias – who commissioned the Steele dossier. Elias, who worked closely with Sussmann on the Trump-Alfa Bank project, also is no longer employed by the firm. Jake Sullivan’s Golf Cart Rounds
In late July 2016, during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, the CIA picked up Russian chatter about a Clinton foreign policy adviser who was trying to develop allegations to “vilify" Trump. The intercepts said Clinton herself had approved a “plan" to “stir up a scandal” against Trump by tying him to Putin. According to hand-written notes, then-CIA chief John Brennan warned President Obama that Moscow had intercepted information about the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016, of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump.” That summer, Brennan had personally briefed Democrats, including then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, on the Alfa Bank-Trump server rumors, according to congressional reports. Reid fired off a letter to Comey demanding that the FBI do more to investigate Trump's ties to Russia.
During that convention, Sullivan drove a golf cart from one TV-network news tent in the parking lot to another, pitching producers and anchors a story that Trump was conspiring with Putin to steal the election. CNN, ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News, as well as Chris Wallace of Fox News, all gave him airtime to spin the Clinton campaign’s unfounded theories. Sullivan also gave off-camera background briefings to reporters.
"We were on a mission," Clinton campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri later admitted in a Washington Post column. “We wanted to raise the alarm."
Then, on the eve of the election, Sullivan claimed in a written campaign statement that Trump and the Russians had set up a “secret hotline” through Alfa Bank, and he suggested “federal authorities” were investigating “this direct connection between Trump and Russia.” He portrayed the shocking discovery as the work of independent experts — “computer scientists” — without disclosing their attachment to the campaign.
“This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow,” Sullivan claimed.
Clinton teed up his statement in an Oct. 31, 2016, tweet, which quickly went viral. Also that day, Clinton tweeted, “It’s time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia,” while attaching a meme that read: “Donald Trump has a secret server. It was set up to communicate privately with a Putin-tied Russian bank called Alfa Bank.”
It’s not immediately apparent if then-Vice President Joe Biden was briefed about the Alfa Bank tale or other Trump-Russia rumors and investigations.
Biden has never been questioned about his own role in the investigation of Trump. However, it was the former vice president who introduced the idea of prosecuting Trump’s national security adviser appointee, Gen. Flynn, under the Logan Act of 1799, a dead-letter statute that prohibits private citizens from interfering in U.S. foreign policy and which hasn’t been used to prosecute anyone in modern times. According to notes taken by then-FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok, who attended a Jan. 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting with Obama and Biden, in which Trump, Flynn and Russia were discussed, Biden raised the idea: “VP: Logan Act,” the notes read.
Sullivan has argued in congressional testimony and elsewhere that Flynn violated the Logan Act, raising suspicions he may have put the idea in Biden’s head. Sullivan had advised the vice president before joining the Clinton campaign.
White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan figures prominently in a grand jury investigation run by Special Counsel John Durham into an alleged 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign scheme to use both the FBI and CIA to tar Donald Trump as a colluder with Russia, according to people familiar with the criminal probe, which they say has broadened into a conspiracy case.
Sullivan is facing scrutiny, sources say, over potentially false statements he made about his involvement in the effort, which continued after the election and into 2017. As a senior foreign policy adviser to Clinton, Sullivan spearheaded what was known inside her campaign as a “confidential project” to link Trump to the Kremlin through dubious email-server records provided to the agencies, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Last week, Michael A. Sussmann, a partner in Perkins Coie, a law firm representing the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of making false statements to the FBI about his clients and their motives behind planting the rumor, at the highest levels of the FBI, of a secret Trump-Russia server. After a months-long investigation, the FBI found no merit to the rumor.
The grand jury indicated in its lengthy indictment that several people were involved in the alleged conspiracy to mislead the FBI and trigger an investigation of the Republican presidential candidate -- including Sullivan, who was described by his campaign position but not identified by name.
The Clinton campaign project, these sources say, also involved compiling a "digital dossier” on several Trump campaign officials – including Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and Carter Page. This effort exploited highly sensitive, nonpublic Internet data related to their personal email communications and web-browsing, known as Internet Protocol, or IP, addresses.
To mine the data, the Clinton campaign enlisted a team of Beltway computer contractors as well as university researchers with security clearance who often collaborate with the FBI and the intelligence community. They worked from a five-page campaign document called the "Trump Associates List."
The tech group also pulled logs purportedly from servers for a Russian bank and Trump Tower, and the campaign provided the data to the FBI on two thumb drives, along with three “white papers” that claimed the data indicated the Trump campaign was secretly communicating with Moscow through a server in Trump Tower and the Alfa Bank in Russia. Based on the material, the FBI opened at least one investigation, adding to several others it had already initiated targeting the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016.
The indictment states that Sussmann, as well as the cyber experts recruited for the operation, "coordinated with representatives and agents of the Clinton campaign with regard to the data and written materials that Sussmann gave to the FBI and the media."
One of those campaign agents was Sullivan, according to emails Durham obtained. On Sept. 15, 2016 – just four days before Sussmann handed off the materials to the FBI – Marc Elias, his law partner and fellow Democratic Party operative, "exchanged emails with the Clinton campaign’s foreign policy adviser concerning the Russian bank allegations," as well as with other top campaign officials, the indictment states.
The sources close to the case confirmed the "foreign policy adviser" referenced by title is Sullivan. They say he was briefed on the development of the opposition-research materials tying Trump to Alfa Bank, and was aware of the participants in the project. These included the Washington opposition-research group Fusion GPS, which worked for the Clinton campaign as a paid agent and helped gather dirt on Alfa Bank and draft the materials Elias discussed with Sullivan, the materials Sussmann would later submit to the FBI. Fusion researchers were in regular contact with both Sussmann and Elias about the project in the summer and fall of 2016. Sullivan also personally met with Elias, who briefed him on Fusion's opposition research, according to the sources.
Sullivan maintained in congressional testimony in December 2017 that he didn’t know of Fusion’s involvement in the Alfa Bank opposition research. In the same closed-door testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, he also denied knowing anything about Fusion in 2016 or who was conducting the opposition research for the campaign.
"Marc [Elias] ... would occasionally give us updates on the opposition research they were conducting, but I didn't know what the nature of that effort was – inside effort, outside effort, who was funding it, who was doing it, anything like that," Sullivan stated under oath.
Sullivan also testified he didn’t know that Perkins Coie, the law firm where Elias and Sussmann were partners, was working for the Clinton campaign until October 2017, when it was reported in the media as part of stories revealing the campaign's contract with Fusion, which also produced the so-called Steele dossier. Sullivan maintained he didn’t even know that the politically prominent Elias worked for Perkins Coie, a well-known Democratic law firm. Major media stories from 2016 routinely identified Elias as "general counsel for the Clinton campaign" and a "partner at Perkins Coie."
"To be honest with you, Marc wears a tremendous number of hats, so I wasn’t sure who he was representing," Sullivan testified. "I sort of thought he was, you know, just talking to us as, you know, a fellow traveler in this — in this campaign effort."
Although he acknowledged knowing Elias and his partner were marshaling opposition researchers for a campaign project targeting Trump, Sullivan insisted, "They didn’t do something with it." In truth, they used the research to instigate a full-blown investigation at the FBI and seed a number of stories in the Washington media, which Elias discussed in emails.
Lying to Congress is a felony. Though the offense is rarely prosecuted, former Special Counsel Robert Mueller won convictions of two of Trump’s associates on charges of that very offense.
An attorney for Sullivan did not respond to questions, while a spokeswoman for the National Security Council declined comment. After the 2016 election, Sullivan continued to participate in the anti-Trump effort, which enlisted no fewer than three Internet companies and two university computer researchers, who persisted in exploiting nonpublic Internet data to conjure up “derogatory information on Trump" and his associates, according to the indictment.
Prosecutors say the operation ran through at least February 2017, when Sullivan met with another central figure in the plot to plant the anti-Trump smear at the FBI. But now the goal was to compel agents to continue investigating the false rumors in the wake of the election, thereby keeping Trump's presidency under an ethical cloud.
On Feb. 10, 2017, Sullivan huddled with two Fusion operatives and their partner Daniel Jones, a former FBI analyst and Democratic staffer on the Hill, to hatch the post-election plan to resurrect rumors Trump was a tool of the Kremlin. As RealClearInvestigations first reported, the meeting, which lasted about an hour and took place in a Washington office building, also included former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
The group discussed raising money to finance a multimillion-dollar opposition research project headed by Jones to target the new president. In effect, Jones’ operation would replace the Clinton campaign’s operation, continuing the effort to undermine Trump.
It’s not clear if Sussmann attended the Feb. 10 meeting, but he was apparently still involved in the operation, along with his crew of data miners. The day before the meeting attended by Sullivan, Sussmann paid a visit to the CIA’s Langley headquarters to peddle the disinformation about the secret server – this time to top officials there, according to the sources familiar with Durham's investigation.
During a roughly 90-minute meeting, Sussmann provided two officials at the intelligence headquarters “updated” documents and data he'd provided the FBI before the election, RealClearInvestigations has learned exclusively.
Then, on March 28, 2017, Jones met with the FBI to pass on supposedly fresh leads he and the cyber researchers had learned about the Alfa Bank server and Trump, and the FBI looked into the new leads after having closed its investigation a month earlier. That same month, FBI Director James Comey publicly announced the bureau was investigating possible “coordination" between Moscow and the newly sworn-in president's campaign.
Despite the renewed push by Jones, the FBI debunked the tip of a nefarious Russian back channel. Agents learned the email server in question wasn’t even controlled by the Trump Organization. "It wasn’t true," Mueller confirmed in 2019 testimony.
It turns out that the supposed “secret server" was housed in the small Pennsylvania town of Lititz, and not Trump Tower in New York City, and it was operated by a marketing firm based in Florida called Cendyn that routinely blasts out emails promoting multiple hotel chains. Simply put, the third-party server sent spam to Alfa Bank employees who used Trump hotels. The bank had maintained a New York office since 2001.
“The FBI’s investigation revealed that the email server at issue was not owned or operated by the Trump Organization but, rather, had been administrated by a mass-marketing email company that sent advertisements for Trump hotels and hundreds of other clients,” Durham wrote in his indictment.
Nonetheless, Jones and Sullivan kept promoting the canard as true.
With help from Sullivan and Podesta in 2017, Jones launched a nonprofit group called The Democracy Integrity Project, which raised some $7 million mainly from Silicon Valley tech executives. TDIP hired computer researchers, as well as Fusion opposition researchers and Christopher Steele, the British author of the now-discredited Steele dossier, to “prove” the rumors in the dossier. As they sought new dirt on Trump, they fed their information to media outlets, leading Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee (namely Sens. Mark Warner and Ron Wyden), and the FBI. Jones previously worked on the Senate intelligence panel, which had launched a major investigation of Trump and Russia, and he provided a pipeline of information for the committee, according to the sources.
haha wut? This is new to me!
This certainly highlights the extreme fracturing of society like nothing else.
ZOMG, DAE TRUMP?
At UNC Chapel Hill, professors received a template to include in their course syllabi this semester, threatening overwhelmingly vaccinated students with automatic disenrollment if they exhibit improper mask-wearing techniques
Very unhappy to learn that @YouTube has also removed our Liberty Report episode with special guest @RobertKennedyJr- it was one of our most popular episodes. Fortunately you can still find it on free speech sites.
Why not use the actual Oval Office?
lol.