Durham was a distraction away from Trump's connection to Alfa Bank in Russia.

[Botany]

Thanx to DUer gab13by13 for posting about this yesterday.

Durham going after Sussmann was a distraction away from the Trump's connection to Alfa Bank in Russia.

Sussmann, who worked for Clinton, acquitted of lying to FBI in 2016
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142924105



Now why was a server in a little town in PA that was owned by Trump having daily contacts with the Alfa
Bank's computers? People need to be in prison for this shit. And it is time we see the full unredacted
Mueller report. Every time Trump said "fake news" about Trump/Russia connections he was lying.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/15/was-there-a-connection-between-a-russian-bank-and-the-trump-campaign

As Max and his colleagues searched D.N.S. logs for domains associated with Republican candidates, they were perplexed by what they encountered. “We went looking for fingerprints similar to what was on the D.N.C. computers, but we didn’t find what we were looking for,” Max told me. “We found something totally different—something unique.” In the small town of Lititz, Pennsylvania, a domain linked to the Trump Organization (mail1.trump-email.com) seemed to be behaving in a peculiar way. The server that housed the domain belonged to a company called Listrak, which mostly helped deliver mass-marketing e-mails: blasts of messages advertising spa treatments, Las Vegas weekends, and other enticements. Some Trump Organization domains sent mass e-mail blasts, but the one that Max and his colleagues spotted appeared not to be sending anything. At the same time, though, a very small group of companies seemed to be trying to communicate with it.

Examining records for the Trump domain, Max’s group discovered D.N.S. lookups from a pair of servers owned by Alfa Bank, one of the largest banks in Russia. Alfa Bank’s computers were looking up the address of the Trump server nearly every day. There were dozens of lookups on some days and far fewer on others, but the total number was notable: between May and September, Alfa Bank looked up the Trump Organization’s domain more than two thousand times. “We were watching this happen in real time—it was like watching an airplane fly by,” Max said. “And we thought, Why the hell is a Russian bank communicating with a server that belongs to the Trump Organization, and at such a rate?”

Only one other entity seemed to be reaching out to the Trump Organization’s domain with any frequency: Spectrum Health, of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Spectrum Health is closely linked to the DeVos family; Richard DeVos, Jr., is the chairman of the board, and one of its hospitals is named after his mother. His wife, Betsy DeVos, was appointed Secretary of Education by Donald Trump. Her brother, Erik Prince, is a Trump associate who has attracted the scrutiny of Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Trump’s ties to Russia. Mueller has been looking into Prince’s meeting, following the election, with a Russian official in the Seychelles, at which he reportedly discussed setting up a back channel between Trump and the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. (Prince maintains that the meeting was “incidental.”) In the summer of 2016, Max and the others weren’t aware of any of this. “We didn’t know who DeVos was,” Max said

[gab13by13]

1. Thanks for the information,

I wasn't aware of all of that. Appointing Durham was a big fat example of extreme projection, a big smoke screen to cover up the Trump server connected to Alfa Bank. Imagine if it was a Democratic president's server connected to one of our adversaries server.

When will we fight these anti-democratic people with equal force?

Things could go south in the next 2 elections. Our AG needs to appoint a special prosecutor with the same guard rails who can't be fired to investigate the attempted coup, maybe that won't be enough, but it should be done.

[Botany]

3. Garland has let the 10 solid Obstruction of Justice charges against Trump from the Mueller ....

.... investigation expire because the time expired because of statute of limitations stuff. Every
one of those obstruction charges had to do with Trump/Russia connections. We will have to
overwhelm the vote in '22 & '24 so the races can't be even close.

America needs to see just how deep into America, Fox News, and the Republican Russia has been
and probably still is now but the Ukraine war might have drained its resources.

[Baitball Blogger]

2. It would be great to take down that entire family.

[jaxexpat]

16. It would provide a feel-good moment. That's for sure.

Unfortunately, that crew of miscreants is only the comic relief part of the coup. Their masters consider them, in the long view, infinitely expendable. For that reason, they are in real peril. I wonder if they're even aware of their vulnerability. They seem to be trusting of their support from the "heartland" and may even actually believe some of the redneck lunacy they spout.

[lastlib]

18. Would be the best thing to happen to America since Nixon resigned...

if the tRump family and entire circle was frog-marched to Leavenworth. I'm not holding my breath, but have a sliver of hope that something will happen to them somehow, sometime.

[elias7]

4. Funny how Durham prosecutes the person who pointed out the elephant in the room

But ignores the elephant

[tanyev]

5. Marking to read later.

[BlueIdaho]

7. When will the DOJ defund Durham?

He’s a feckless distraction chewing through millions of tax dollars. Enough already.

[Botany]

12. Speaking of feckless distractions chewing through millions of tax dollars.

7 years and 77 million $s (I think it is more) to investigate a failed real estate deal called
Whitewater which morphed into "the great blow job hunt" which stopped Bill Clinton from
getting bin Laden and the Taliban (see 9/11).

[BlueIdaho]

14. 👆🏻 x1000

[kentuck]

8. Why didn't Durham investigate this?

Garland should ask for his resignation immediately, and if not received, fire him.

Then he should appoint another Special Prosecutor to find out the truth about "Russian connections".

The evidence is still there. It just needs to be uncovered. There was simply too many facts that were in our faces when Trump started talking about the "Russian hoax". The hoax was perpetrated by him, blaming Hillary Clinton, because it was too close for comfort.

Donald Trump does not want anyone to know, ever, how he was connected to Vladimir Putin and Russian oligarchs. Because there were criminal activities involved.

[OAITW r.2.0]

9. What would be the purpose of these constant look-ups?

I've been aware of the Alfa Bank-Trump connection since before the 2016 election, but have never read anything as to what these hook-ups would have accomplished.

[kentuck]

10. I don't recall the time frame but...

Jared Kushner was busted attempting to make a secret connection with Putin and Russia. Was it before or after the Alfa Bank discovery?

And whatever happened to the "secret connection" that Trump wanted very badly. Eric Prince was still working on it when he went to Seychelles.

Did they ever get their "secret channel"?

[Kid Berwyn]

11. Peter Dale Scott observed Alfa Bank has big clout in DC.

Peter Dale Scott is considered the father of “Deep Politics” — the study of hidden permanent institutions and interests whose influence on the political realm transcends the elected, appointed, and career officials who come and go.

A professor of English at Berkeley and a former Canadian diplomat, he is the author of several critically acclaimed books on the pivotal events of our country’s recent past, including American War Machine (2010) and The American Deep State (2018), which are relevant to the story below.

The Mueller Report, Alfa Bank, and the Deep State
PETER DALE SCOTT 04/29/19

Excerpt…

The various speculations about the Trump link to Alfa and Fridman, whether innocuous or shady, justify a closer look at the charges about Alfa’s influence two decades ago. (Scott, American War Machine, 187.)

As the Guardian reported in 2002, Alfa’s 1990s clout in Washington was demonstrated when its oil company, Tyumen,

was loaned $489m in credits by the US Export-Import Bank after lobbying by Halliburton…. The [Clinton] White House and State Department tried to veto the Russian deal. But after intense lobbying by Halliburton the objections were overruled on Capitol Hill [which then was Republican controlled] … The State Department’s concerns were based on the fact that Tyumen was controlled by a holding conglomerate, the Alfa Group, that had been investigated in Russia for mafia connections.

Veteran newsman Knut Royce (a major contributor to three Pulitzer Prize–winning stories) reported the details:

Under the guidance of Richard Cheney, a get-the-government-out-of-my-face conservative, Halliburton Company over the past five years has emerged as a corporate welfare hog, benefiting from at least $3.8 billion in federal contracts and taxpayer-insured loans.

One of these loans was approved in April by the U.S. Export-Import Bank. It guaranteed $489 million in credits to a Russian oil company [Tyumen, owned by Alfa] whose roots are imbedded in a legacy of KGB and Communist Party corruption, as well as drug trafficking and organized crime funds, according to Russian and U.S. sources and documents.

[Two reports, one by “a former U.S. intelligence officer,” and one by the Russian FSB] claim that Alfa Bank, one of Russia’s largest and most profitable, as well as Alfa Eko, a trading company, had been deeply involved in the early 1990s in laundering of Russian and Colombian drug money and in trafficking drugs from the Far East to Europe …

The FSB report, too, claimed that the Alfa Group’s top executives, oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven, “allegedly participated in the transit of drugs from Southeast Asia through Russia and into Europe.” (Please go here for full text.)

In 2013 Tyumen Oil was acquired by the Russian oil company Rosneft, which had just signed a multibillion-dollar oil exploration deal with Exxon, allegedly “the biggest oil deal ever.” The deal — put on hold by President Barack Obama’s imposition of sanctions on Russia — was so huge that, according to the Wall Street Journal, its temporary cancellation “put Exxon at risk.” (Daniel Gilbert, “Sanctions Over Ukraine Put Exxon at Risk: Deal With Russia’s Rosneft to Drill in Arctic Is Crucial to Oil Company,” Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2014. The deal was originally made by Rosneft with BP, but the BP deal was blocked by a successful legal challenge from a company controlled by Fridman.)

In April 2017, after Exxon’s Chairman, Rex Tillerson, became Trump’s first secretary of state, “Exxon tried to get permission from the Trump administration to resume drilling in Russia. The Treasury Department denied the waiver.” (A year later, Trump fired Tillerson.)

What Mueller did research, he did thoroughly. I suspect that his findings will create problems for Trump and maybe other politicians. But the report’s silence on the Trump-Alfa connection — if not broken by eventual release of counterintelligence information now redacted — is an indication that the bank’s clout in Washington is still as powerful as it was in the 1990s.

Since the election, Trump has also acted in ways that will protect Alfa Bank from criminal investigations. In July 2018, Brian Benczkowski was narrowly confirmed as head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, despite Democratic concerns over the fact that he had previously, while a lawyer at Kirkland & Ellis, represented the Alfa Bank in the investigation of whether its computer servers had contacted the Trump Organization. (1)

And William Barr, now attorney general, also worked at Kirkland & Ellis during the Bank Alfa investigation, leading Newsweek to ask a week ago whether he should not now recuse himself from matters affecting the Mueller report. (2)

Continues…

https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/government-integrity/the-mueller-report-alfa-bank-and-the-deep-state/

[housecat]

15. Thank you for posting

[Novara]

13. How could it be a "distraction" when his pointing out the connection is why he was prosecuted?

That doesn't make sense to me.

I mean, Sussman was prosecuted regarding his information about the Alfa Bank connection, so how is the prosecution a distraction from the information when it was what the case was about? Seems to me, that anyone looking into finding out more about the prosecution would be interested in why Sussman was prosecuted, and they'd find out that he told the FBI about the Alfa Bank connection. So the prosecution highlights the Alfa Bank information.

Maybe I'm being too logical.

[Ohio Joe]

17. It's a nice theory but the timing does not add up...

By the time this article was written in 2018, the investigation into the servers had long been closed (2017). Durham was not appointed until 2019, 2 years after the investigation was dead, killed by Sessions and hand waved away by the senate investigation. Until the Sussmann trial was underway, there had been little to no mention of the server communications for several years... It was dead. There was no need to distract from a dead issue. If anything, Durham revived it and brought it back to people's attention.

[Botany]

19. Durham was 100% about distracting from a Trump Russia conection

n/t

[Ohio Joe]

20. 'Revenge' is much more in line with TFG's MO...

If Durham had been appointed during the Mueller investigation, that might make sense, but it was not done until after it ended.

[Botany]

22. Durham's job was to deflect looking @ the connections between Trump and Russia.

Look, the real problem here was that people were investigating the multiple links between
Trump and Russia not the real links between Trump and Russia just like they are trying to
sell the real problem in the SCOTUS' overturning Roe v Wade is the leaks not the taking away
the rights of every women in America to have control over her body.

Besides I have posted this on the internet so it has to be true.


https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/03/trump-russian-asset-election-intelligence-community-report.html

[Grins]

21. I don't get this. Where is the "distraction" in the linked article?

It's not there as the linked article is from 08 October 2018.

The Mueller report was in Bill Barr's bloody hands in March of 2019.
Barr secretly appointed Durham Special Counsel 19-months later (19 Oct 2020), a scant 15-days before the general election.
Forty-one days after the election, Barr announced he was leaving DoJ on 31 December.

Why wait so long?
What was happening in Oct. of 2020 that needed a "distraction?"

I don't think it was Alpha Bank. I think it was just another shitty Reich-wing tactic to put into place a political arsonist, John Durham, someone Biden could not fire, to feed the Reich-wing's Noise and Rage Machine that thrives and lives on conflict, for another year or two.

Anyone...?

Note: A nice article. Thanks for bringing it up again.