dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Why The Special Counsel Needs To Fight

Part 3 of 3

Massaging the Media

That July 28, 2016 message from Danchenko proves significant in context of the flurry of emails from Fusion GPS’s co-founders, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, to reporters that were made public during the Sussmann prosecution. During this same timeframe, Simpson and Fritsch were peddling to the media claims that Millian and Carter Page were part of the supposed Trump-Russia collusion. As with Millian, Danchenko had fabricated supposed intel about Page, providing it to Steele. Steele included it in the dossier, which he then handed off to the FBI.

For instance, on July 24, 2016, Simpson emailed the Washington Post’s Tom Hamburger with the subject line “millian,” providing Hamburger two email addresses for Millian. The next day, Mark Hosenball from Reuters emailed Simpson, asking him to “please remember to send me stuff on Sergei the Millian-aire.” Hosenball also asked Simpson for any “stuff on the Carter Page guy, including his most recent Russian excursions.”

On July 26, 2016, an email thread between Fritsch and Jay Solomon from the Wall Street Journal shows Fritsch saying, off the record, that an “easy scoop waiting for confirmation: that dude carter page met with igor sechin when he went to moscow earlier this month.” Fritsch also told Solomon that Page “met with a senior kremlin official called divyekin, who told page they have good kompromat on hillary and offered to help. He also warned page they have good kompromat on the donald.”

Fusion GPS also pushed Millian as a Russian stooge to ABC News’ Matthew Mosk in an email thread from July 28, 2016. Yet another email thread, between Simpson and the Washington Post’s Hamburger dated July 29, 2016, also confirms that Fusion GPS pushed the fiction that Page met with Sechin and Ivanov in Russia to the Post reporter. Hamburger told Simpson that he had checked with one of their Moscow sources, who called the claim of a meeting “bullshit” and “impossible.”

Feeding Fabrications to the FBI

The Danchenko indictment includes a second allegation that proves key when read with Fusion GPS’s emails to the media. According to the indictment, on September 18, 2016, Danchenko sent another message to the same acquaintance, stating that he had “work to do for Steele who’s probably coming to DC on Wednesday.” The indictment further noted that Steele then traveled to Washington D.C. on September 21, 2016.

While in D.C. on September 21, 2016, “at the direction of Fusion GPS, Christopher Steele brief[ed] the N.Y. Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, Yahoo! News, and CNN.” According to a Yahoo! News reporter present at that briefing, “Steele told him at the meeting that he had provided his election reporting to the FBI and that there were ‘people in the [FBI] taking this very seriously.”

The day after Danchenko mentioned the work he had to do for Steele, Fusion GPS’s Jake Berkowitz sent his boss Simpson and Mosk an email further painting Millian as a Russian asset. A thread between The New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau and Fritsch dating from September 24 and September 27, 2016 likewise focused on Millian, with Fusion GPS providing the Times reporter Millian’s IP address and screengrabs indicating it was registered in Moscow.

The timing and content of these emails suggest Danchenko’s lies went from Steele to Fusion GPS and then straight to the media. What the emails don’t disclose, however, are the conversations between Steele and Fusion GPS, internally at Fusion GPS, and between Fusion GPS and Marc Elias of Perkins Coie.

Some of the approximate 1,500 emails Fusion GPS withheld from the special counsel likely include discussions of the “intel” Steele obtained from Danchenko. It is well past time for Durham to fight for those documents.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/03/why-the-special-counsel-needs-to-fight-for-more-spygate-documents-stat/