Annex A
There's been a fair amount of comment regarding the soon to be famous "Annex A" to the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA). The ICA, of course, was the brainchild of the Intel Triumvirate of Brennan, Clapper, and Comey. Released in the first week of January, 2017, it sought to delegitimize the incoming Trump administration before Trump was even inaugurated by claiming that the Intel Community had "high confidence" that Russia had tried to help Trump get elected.
The whole thing was nonsense, of course, and now we're told that there is documentary evidence that IC analysts pushed back against the official conclusions of the ICA. The official conclusion was that the Russians wanted Trump elected, but the analysts apparently put in writing that the evidence that claimed to support that conclusion was actually very weak. Instead, the analysts pointed out, the evidence that the Russians wanted Hillary to win was quite strong. That pushback was suppressed by the IC, but has been dug out by the Barr/Durham investigation. We have never missed an opportunity to stress that the ICA is at the very heart of the Big Picture conspiracy case that Durham is building.
Yesterday, as one of his first official acts as DNI, John Ratcliffe forwarded to Senators Grassley and Johnson a newly declassified version of Annex A . It's quite brief--not even a page and a half. All it is is a summary of the fabrications that Chris Steele ginned up for the Clinton campaign as contractor for the Clinton oppo research shop at Fusion GPS. Steele then also purveyed these falsehoods to the FBI, the Fake News Media, and various politicians and their operatives. As the Horowitz Report was at pains to point out, the FBI was fully aware--from the get go, in July, 2016--of the political provenance of the Steele "dossier," as it came to be known. The fact that this material was, in all essentials, fiction was also known by the FBI when Peter Strzok helped put together the summary of the "dossier" that was appended to the ICA--Annex A.
None of this should be news to regular readers. Bill Barr and John Durham are smart guys, and they've been focused on the ICA all along. The reason is simple. If the ICA was a knowingly fraudulent production that put forth conclusions favored by the IC Triumvirate, but disputed by the analysts themselves, then we have a conspiracy. It's a conspiracy to defraud the US Government of the honest services of the Intel Community, because if the ICA had been the product of honest services it would have incorporated the views of the analysts who were fraudulently claimed to have reached the official conclusions. By colluding to falsify the true views of the analysts, the IC Triumvirate of Brennan, Clapper, and Comey conspired to defraud the US Government of their honest services. The aim of their conspiracy, of course, was to undermine the legitimacy of Trump's election.
Also, as I've been at pains to emphasize, without the ICA there could never have been a Mueller Witchhunt. Think about it. Without an official IC document saying that the Russians tried to help Trump Rosenstein would have had to put all his eggs in one basket ... Crossfire Hurricane! And we all know, just as Strzok told Lisa Page, what Crossfire Hurricane had actually established by the startup of Team Mueller was that there was no "there" there. As it was, Rod Rosenstein was able to blithely authorize Mueller to continue looking into "any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump. While that's a reference to Crossfire Hurricane, it was only because of the artificial "Russian meddling" hysteria conjured by the ICA that Rosenstein could get away with that. Without that ICA generated hysteria in the media, Rosenstein would have actually had to go into the whole question of whether there was any predication for Crossfire Hurricane in the first place. And we know the answer to that, too, thanks to the declassification of the Opening EC. There was none. It was all a hoax.
This is the Big Picture conspiracy that we'll be hearing about as we approach Election 2020. And it's what all this ginned up BS about BLM and every other tempest in a teapot is all about: desperately trying to distract attention from the Big Picture story that Barr and Durham will be putting into final form.
ADDENDUM: The beauty of bringing this as a conspiracy to defraud is that for each separate act that helped further the goal of the conspiracy--whether the act was criminal in itself or not--as long as that act helped to further the goals of the conspiracy it becomes a criminal act. And the prosecutors will be able to present the entire conspiracy against Trump to a jury to explain why the given act is important. The possibilities in this should give Durham enormous leverage against potential defendants.
I had to laugh earlier when I read about this at CTH. Sundance has the nerve to now tell his readers that Barr and Durham--well, Durham; sundance can't get himself to actually mention Barr--are doing something rather smart. Thanks, sundance! No doubt Barr and Durham are reassured by sundance's pat on the back.