Sen. Chuck Grassley publicly released the newly declassified Appendix (Durham annex) to John Durham’s 2023 Special Counsel report. The lightly redacted annex provides additional detail into much of what was previously known including: the Steele dossier as the basis of its application to the FISA Court for warrants to spy on Carter Page, the FBI’s failure to review evidence they believed would be incriminatory to Hillary Clinton, and then-President Barack Obama’s attempt to “scuttle” the investigation into Clinton’s use of a personal server during her tenure as secretary of state.
What is new, however, is the involvement of billionaire activist George Soros in the elaborate plot against then-candidate Donald Trump.
Here are a few initial takeaways from the newly released document from investigative journalist John Solomon, the founder and editor of Just the News, who has been following this story closely:
Newly-declassified so-called Clinton Plan intelligence included intercepted communications from a George Soros ally which suggested that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign against Donald Trump was plotting a “long-term affair to demonize” Trump by linking him to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and that the Clinton campaign expected that “the FBI will put more oil into the fire.”The revelations, including intercepted purported communications from Leonard Benardo, a top official at George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and communications by Clinton foreign policy adviser Julianne Smith, provide new insight into information that the U.S. intelligence community received in July 2016 – just before the FBI launched its politicized Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
According to the annex, long before the FBI launched Crossfire Hurricane, credible foreign sources were telling the U.S. intelligence community that the bureau would “play a role in spreading the salacious Trump–Russia collusion narrative”:
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. The media analysis on the DNC hacking appears solid…. Julie [Campaign Advisor] says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump. Now it is good for a post-convention bounce. Later the FBI will put more oil into the fire.
One of the emails from Benardo said:
HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton] approved [Campaign adviser Julie’s] idea about Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections. That should distract people from her own missing emails. The point is making the Russian play a U.S. domestic issue… In absence of direct evidence, Crowdstrike and ThreatConnect will supply the media, and GRU [Russia’s Main Intelligence Directive] will hopefully carry on to give more facts.
Solomon highlights Durham’s comment that “there is evidence to believe the Clinton Plan intelligence was authentic and that the Clinton campaign did carry out such a dirty trick.”
The annex states:
The office’s review of certain communications involving Smith provided possible additional support … to the notion that the Clinton campaign was engaged in an effort or plan in late July 2016 to encourage scrutiny of Trump’s purported ties to Russia, and that the [Clinton] campaign might have wanted or expected the FBI or other agencies to aid that effort (‘put more oil into the fire’) by commencing a formal investigation of the DNC hack.
The Durham annex also contained two memos from January and March 2016. The first “detailed the alleged intention by then-President Obama to scuttle the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s illicit private email server.”
The second “alleged that “[the Democratic Party] opposition is focused on discrediting Trump…. [a]mong other things, the Clinton staff, with support from special services, is preparing scandalous revelations of business relations between Trump and the ‘Russian Mafia’.”
There is a lot of material in this document. We will provide a more detailed update after we’ve had a chance to digest it more fully.
Update: August 1, 9:30 a.m.
The New York Times had a distinctly different take on the Durham annex. Reminiscent of the October 2020 assessment of 51 former Intelligence Community officials that the Hunter Biden laptop story bore all the classic hallmarks of a Russian information campaign, the Times reports that the purported email from July 27, 2016 included in the annex “was most likely stitched together by Russian spies.”
For those who don’t subscribe to The NY Times, because why would you, the article can be viewed here.
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