For those who keep up on Seth Abramson's investigations -- the latest (on Durham etc)

[Grasswire2]

Seth says this is his longest summarization yet, more than an hour of reading time.

First graphs here. The rest requires a subscription to his substack. $5 a month.

POLITICS
The Durham Indictment of Igor Danchenko Is An Embarrassment to the Department of Justice
A longtime criminal defense attorney, Trump biographer, and chronicler of the Trump-Russia scandal unpacks an irresponsible criminal indictment that has fooled reporters into thinking it significant.

Background
On the tenth page of the first volume of the major Trump-Russia report coordinated by former FBI director Robert Mueller, the venerated lawman opines that he hasn’t been able to access a significant percentage of the stock of evidence he’s been aiming to accrue. The reason? Not dumb luck or any particular investigative failure at the FBI, but systematic hindrance of his efforts by people associated with Donald Trump.

Mueller would later on in his report disclose that much of that hindrance had been coordinated by Trump himself, aided and abetted by Trump’s personal attorneys. If this tune sounds familiar, it should—as it’s exactly what would lead, 21 months after the Mueller Report was released, to an attack on the U.S. Capitol that left five dead.

As Mueller explained to his readers back in 2019, Trump and his political team—even as they claimed there was nothing involving Trump and Russia for anyone in federal law enforcement to investigate—often refused to participate in voluntary interviews; when they did agree to be interviewed, they often insisted on written ones without follow-up questions; if they allowed unfettered access to their knowledge, they often lied; they hid evidence and destroyed evidence; they lied about hiding evidence and destroying evidence; and in general did everything a guilty person would do to avoid being indicted, including committing new crimes. Mueller uncovered evidence of not just obstruction but acts of witness tampering and witness intimidation and seeming bribery, and not just random acts along these lines but acts perpetrated by attorneys on behalf of Trump and his cronies in an obvious bid to escape any responsibility for the obstruction, witness tampering, and other crimes they had so clearly engineered.

Mueller charged none of this conduct. He simply dumped these three paragraphs at the start of his report:

[note -- the material Seth quotes here from Mueller report won't reproduce in this format, for some reason]

So Mueller decided to let Steve Bannon go for destroying evidence from his phone and lying about destroying that evidence, and Bannon rewarded Mueller and all of America by going out and committing a slew of federal felonies (for which he was indicted, but later pardoned by Trump) and helping to plan the armed insurrection on January 6.

And Mueller decided to let Erik Prince go for destroying evidence from his phone, in consultation with Bannon, and Prince rewarded Mueller and all of America for this largesse by going out and committing a slew of federal felonies involving illegal arms.

Mueller decided to let Donald Trump Jr. go for lying to federal investigators, and his reward was again predictable: Trump Jr. became one of the most persistent, shameless purveyors of dangerous disinformation in the United States. In fact, Mueller appeared to know that he’d be lied to by virtually every Trump associate he spoke to—but all of them were let go, launched toward future crimes which would either be pardoned by Trump, ignored by a Joe Biden administration DOJ more concerned about “optics” than rule of law, or left for disposition to a hopelessly deadlocked Congress (or glacial-moving federal court system) to try to sort out. All of the after-the-fact conduct to which Mueller bore direct witness suggested the cover-up of a grave international conspiracy, but Mueller and his team eventually found it all too hot to handle and so they walked away having “merely” established that the Russians attacked America in 2016 and did so to aid Donald Trump’s candidacy for President of the United States.

[Walleye]

1. I hate to say it. But it seems like Putin is still in the catbird seat

[Champp]

4. Republicans and Russians both pissing on truth

and working fist in fist to weaken America and American democracy.

[MsLeopard]

2. Get thee to the greatest! nt

[Grasswire2]

3. much more at link, if you can see it there w/out subscription.

Worth the five bucks.

[MagickMuffin]

5. I don't see a link

Last edited Mon Nov 8, 2021, 06:16 PM - Edit history (1)

[Grasswire2]

6. sorry!

https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/the-durham-indictment-of-igor-danchenko?justPublished=true