Posted originally on the CTH on November 29, 2023 | Sundance
If you know the background context, the latest developments in the Seth Rich laptop legal battle could be extremely interesting. However, despite a very favorable court ruling, I caution against too much optimism – the stakes in this ancillary story to the targeting of President Donald Trump are extremely high.
The bottom line of the latest development is that a judge has given the DOJ 14 days to turn over the contents of the laptop belonging to former DNC staffer Seth Rich. There are multiple points of information that point toward Seth Rich having downloaded the DNC email files and shared them with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
Seth Rich was killed shortly thereafter in what DC claims was a “botched robbery.”
The reason this story is important will be highlighted below in granular detail. However, within the Time Magazine article about the judge’s ruling the closing statement summarizes the position of the DEEPEST elements of the DC Deep State. NOTE:
…”After his death, Rich was proven to not be the source of any email leaks, with the Mueller Report—also known as the Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election—finding Russian hackers responsible.” (link)
This point, emphasized at the end of the Newsweek article outlining the recent ruling, is the epicenter of the DC narrative. You see, just like the James Wolfe leak of the FISA application to journalist Ali Watkins (hidden by the DOJ/FBI/IC and aligned interests), if the truth of the Trump targeting by the DOJ/FBI and Obama Intelligence community were to surface in the ancillary stories around the Seth Rich issue, it would be the most explosive revelation as to the scale of DC corruption and cover-up.
The Weissmann/Mueller report contains claims that Russia hacked the DNC servers as the central element to the Russia interference narrative in the U.S. election. This DNC hack claim is the fulcrum issue structurally underpinning the Russian election interference narrative pushed by the Weissmann and Muller Special Counsel. However, this essential “hacking” claim was/is directly disputed by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, as outlined during a previous Dana Rohrabacher interview and by Julian Assange’s own on-the-record statements.
When you overlay the timeline of activity that touches the story of Seth Rich, a DNC staff member who was outraged at the DNC effort to block Bernie Sanders, the potential motive for Seth Rich’s death takes on an entirely different dimension. That said, even people very high up in the Trump administration would be part of the cover up to protect DC from sunlight. No one in Washington DC wants this story to be investigated or told.
Julian Assange was arrested at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London immediately after the Weissmann/Muller report was released to Bill Barr in 2019.
Additionally, despite investigating the background of the Trump-Russia nonsense, John Durham never touched the DNC hacking claim – the core of the Mueller report. Why? The Occam’s razor reason is that Durham knew the U.S. Government threw a bag over Assange to protect the fraudulent Trump-Russia and Russian interference claims.
Again, this reality speaks to the corruption within the John Durham investigation. By claiming he was not authorized to review anything from the Mueller probe, John Durham was protecting Weissmann, Mueller and the core of their justification for a 2-year investigation.
I believe John Durham knew why Assange was eventually arrested. Durham stayed away from it, intentionally.
The Russians HAD TO have made efforts to interfere in the election, or else the factual basis for the surveillance operation against candidate Donald Trump is naked to the world.
That’s why so much DOJ, FBI and Mueller special counsel energy was exhausted framing the predicate.
“Seventeen intelligence agencies,” the December 29th Joint Analysis Report, the expulsion of the Russian diplomats which was an outcropping of the JAR, the rushed January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, shoving microphones in everyone’s faces and demanding they answer if they believed Russia interfered – all of it, and I do mean every bit of it, is predicated on an absolute DC need to establish that Russia Attempted to Interfere in the 2016 election.
The “Russian Malicious Cyber Activity – Joint Analysis Report” (full pdf) is pure nonsense. It outlines nothing more than vague and disingenuous typical hacking activity that is no more substantive than any other hacking report on any other foreign actor. However, it was needed to help frame the Russian interference narrative.
There were no Russian diplomats involved; there was no Russian election interference; there was no Russian hacking of the DNC; it was all a fraud created by the intelligence community (IC), FBI and Main Justice to support Hillary Clinton’s lies and then cover their own targeting tracks.
Seth Rich was the likely source of the DNC emails. It is possible that Rich was coincidentally killed as a result of a “botched robbery.” However, that possibility diminishes very quickly when you look at the timeline of the Julian Assange arrest. There are just too many coincidences in the timeline to be, well, coincidences.
On September 26, 2021, Yahoo News published an extensive article about the CIA targeting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2017 and the extreme conversations that were taking place at the highest levels of the U.S. government about how to control him.
There is a much bigger story transparently obvious when overlapped with CTH research files on the Mueller investigation and the U.S. intelligence community. Specifically, the motive intentionally not outlined by Yahoo News in their 2021 obfuscation.
What I am going to share is a deep dive using the resources and timeline from within that Yahoo article, and the specific details we have assembled, that paints a clear picture about what interests existed for the Deep State, the Intelligence apparatus and the Mueller-Weissmann special counsel.
This fully cited review is not for the faint of heart. This is a journey that could shock many; it could alarm more and will likely force more than a few to reevaluate just what the purpose was for Mike Pompeo within the Donald Trump administration.
As the Yahoo News article begins, they outline how those within the Trump administration viewed Assange as a risk in 2017.
Here it is critical to accept that many people inside the Trump administration were there to control events, not to facilitate a policy agenda from a political outsider. In the example of Assange, the information he carried was a risk to those who attempted and failed to stop Trump from winning the 2016 election.
Julian Assange was not a threat to Donald Trump, but he was a threat to those who attempted to stop Donald Trump.
In 2017, the DC system was reacting to a presidency they did not control. As an outcome, the Office of the President was being managed and influenced by some with ulterior motives.
Yahoo, via Michael Isikoff, puts it this way: “Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request “sketches” or “options” for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official. “There seemed to be no boundaries.”
To understand the risk that Julian Assange represented to FBI/CIA interests, and effectively the Mueller special counsel, it is important to understand just how extensive the operations of the FBI/CIA were in 2016. It is within this network of foreign and domestic operations where FBI Agent Peter Strzok was clearly working as a bridge between the CIA and FBI operations.
By now, people are familiar with the construct of CIA operations involving Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor generally identified as a western intelligence operative who was tasked by the FBI/CIA to run an operation against Trump campaign official George Papadopoulos in both Italy (Rome) and London. {Go Deep} John Durham ignored him, and said in testimony after his report that he could not find Mifsud.
In a similar fashion, the FBI tasked U.S. intelligence asset Stefan Halper to target another Trump campaign official, Carter Page. Under the auspices of being a Cambridge Professor, Stefan Halper also targeted General Michael Flynn. Additionally, using assistance from a female FBI agent, under the false name Azra Turk, Halper also targeted Papadopoulos. Again, John Durham ignored it.
The initial operations to target Flynn, Papadopoulos and Page were all based overseas. This seemingly makes the CIA exploitation of the assets and the targets legal and much easier. If Durham went into this intelligence rabbit hole, there would be a paper trail that leads back to Robert Mueller. Durham didn’t go there.
John Durham and IG Michael Horowitz both outlined how very specific exculpatory evidence was known to the FBI and Main Justice, yet that evidence was withheld from the FISA application used against Carter Page and/or it was ignored. The FBI fabricated information in the FISA and removed evidence that Carter Page was previously working for the CIA. This is what FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith was indicted and convicted for doing.
One week after the FBI and DOJ filed the second renewal for the Carter Page FISA [April 7, 2017], Yahoo News notes how Mike Pompeo delivered his first remarks as CIA Director:
[…] On April 13, 2017, wearing a U.S. flag pin on the left lapel of his dark gray suit, Pompeo strode to the podium at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank, to deliver to a standing-room-only crowd his first public remarks as Trump’s CIA director.
Rather than use the platform to give an overview of global challenges or to lay out any bureaucratic changes he was planning to make at the agency, Pompeo devoted much of his speech to the threat posed by WikiLeaks. (link)
Why would CIA Director Mike Pompeo be so concerned about Julian Assange and Wikileaks in April 2017?
In April of 2017 Pompeo’s boss, President Donald Trump, was under assault from the intelligence community writ large, and every deep state actor was leaking to the media in a frenzied effort to continue the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy.
The Trump-Russia effort was so all consuming that FBI Director James Comey was even keeping a diary of engagement with President Trump in order to support an ongoing investigation built on fraud – yet Mike Pompeo is worried about Julian Assange.
Again, here it is important to put yourself back into the time of reference. Remember, it’s clear in the text messages between FBI Agent Strzok and Lisa Page that Peter Strzok had a working relationship with what he called their “sister agency”, the CIA.
♦ Former CIA Director John Brennan admitted Peter Strzok helped write the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) which outlines the Russia narrative; and it was also Peter Strzok who authored the July 31st, 2016, “Electronic Communication” from the CIA to the FBI that originated FBI operation “Crossfire Hurricane.” Strzok immediately used that EC to travel to London to debrief intelligence officials around Australian Ambassador to the U.K. Alexander Downer.
In short, Peter Strzok was a profoundly overzealous James Bond wannabe who acted as a bridge between the CIA and the FBI. The perfect type of FBI career agent for 2016’s CIA Director John Brennan to utilize.
Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson hired CIA Open-Source analyst Nellie Ohr toward the end of 2015, at appropriately the same time as “FBI Contractors” were identified exploiting the NSA database and extracting information on a specific set of U.S. persons. One, if not the primary extractors, was identified as Rodney Joffe at Neustar. “The campaign plot was outlined by Durham in a 27-page indictment charging former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann with making a false report to the FBI. The plot was also outlined in the finished Durham report. Eight individuals who allegedly conspired with Sussmann but does not identify them by name. The sources familiar with the probe confirmed that the leader of the team of contractors was Rodney L. Joffe.” {Go Deep}
It was also Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson who was domestically tasked with a Russian lobbyist named Natalia Veselnitskaya. A little reported Russian Deputy Attorney General named Saak Albertovich Karapetyan was working as a double agent for the CIA and Kremlin. Karapetyan was directing the foreign operations of Natalia Veselnitskaya, and Glenn Simpson was organizing her inside the U.S as part of his Trump-Russia creation.
Glenn Simpson managed Veselnitskaya through the 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr. However, once the CIA/Fusion GPS operation using Veselnitskaya started to unravel with public reporting, back in Russia Deputy AG Karapetyan died in a helicopter crash.
Simultaneously timed in late 2015 through mid 2016, there was a domestic FBI operation using a young Russian named Maria Butina tasked to run up against Republican presidential candidates. According to Patrick Byrne, Butina’s handler, it was FBI agent Peter Strzok giving Byrne the instructions on where to send her. {Go Deep}
All of this context outlines the extent to which the FBI/CIA was openly involved in constructing a political operation that settled upon anyone in candidate Donald Trump’s orbit. A large international operation directed by the FBI/CIA and domestic operations seemingly directed by Peter Strzok operating with a foot in both agencies. [Strzok gets CIA service coin] Durham eviscerated the predicate for all of this in his report, yet stayed away from the part that leads to Robert Mueller in 2017.
Recap: ♦Mifsud tasked against Papadopoulos (CIA). ♦Halper tasked against Flynn (CIA), Page (CIA) and Papadopoulos (CIA). ♦Azra Turk, pretending to be Halper asst, tasked against Papadopoulos (FBI). ♦Veselnitskaya tasked against Donald Trump Jr. (CIA, Fusion GPS). ♦Butina tasked against Trump and Donald Trump Jr (FBI).
Additionally, Christopher Steele was a British intelligence officer hired by Fusion GPS to assemble and launder fraudulent intelligence information within his dossier. And we cannot forget Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch, who was recruited by Asst. FBI Director Andrew McCabe to participate in running an operation against the Trump campaign and create the impression of Russian involvement. Deripaska refused to participate.
All of this engagement directly controlled by U.S. intelligence, and all of this intended to give a specific Russia impression. This predicate was what John Durham was reviewing in November of 2019, and then released in his final report – while whitewashing the parts that led to the Mueller silo.
The key point of all that contextual background is to see how committed the CIA and FBI were to the constructed narrative of Russia interfering with the 2016 election. The CIA, FBI, and by extension the DOJ and a multitude of political operatives, put a hell of a lot of work into it.
We know John Durham looked at the construct of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA); and talking to CIA analysts who participated in the construct of the January 2017 report that bolstered the false appearance of Russian interference in the 2016 election. This context is important, because it ties in to the next part that involves Julian Assange and Wikileaks. This is where the motives of Mike Pompeo in mid/late 2017 come into play.
[…] By the summer of 2017, the CIA’s proposals were setting off alarm bells at the National Security Council. “WikiLeaks was a complete obsession of Pompeo’s,” said a former Trump administration national security official. (link)
On April 11th, 2019, the Julian Assange indictment was unsealed in the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA). From the indictment we discover it was under seal since March 6th, 2018:
(Link to pdf)
On Tuesday April 15, 2019, more investigative material was released. Again, note the dates: Grand Jury, *December of 2017* This means FBI investigation prior to….
The FBI investigation took place prior to December 2017, it was coordinated through the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) where Dana Boente was U.S. Attorney at the time. The grand jury indictment was sealed from March of 2018 until after Mueller completed his investigation, April 2019.
Why the delay?
What exactly was the DOJ waiting for from March 2018 to April 2019?
This timeframe is the peak of the Robert Mueller/Andrew Weissmann special counsel investigation.
Here’s where it gets interesting….
The Yahoo article outlines, “There was an inappropriate level of attention to Assange“, by the CIA according to a national security council official. However, if you consider the larger ramifications of what Julian Assange represented to all of those people inside and outside government interests who created the Trump-Russia collusion/conspiracy, well, there was actually a serious risk.
Remember, in May 2017 Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann effectively took over the DOJ. The purpose of the Mueller investigation was clearly to cover up the illegal operation that took place in the preceding year. The people exposed in the Trump-Russia targeting operation included all of those intelligence operatives previously outlined in the CIA, FBI and DOJ operations. These are the people John Durham did not indict.
The FBI submission to the Eastern District of Virginia Grand Jury in December of 2017 was four months after congressman Dana Rohrabacher talked to Julian Assange in August of 2017: “Assange told a U.S. congressman … he can prove the leaked Democratic Party documents … did not come from Russia.”
(August 2017, The Hill Via John Solomon) Julian Assange told a U.S. congressman on Tuesday he can prove the leaked Democratic Party documents he published during last year’s election did not come from Russia and promised additional helpful information about the leaks in the near future.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican who is friendly to Russia and chairs an important House subcommittee on Eurasia policy, became the first American congressman to meet with Assange during a three-hour private gathering at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where the WikiLeaks founder has been holed up for years.
Rohrabacher recounted his conversation with Assange to The Hill.
“Our three-hour meeting covered a wide array of issues, including the WikiLeaks exposure of the DNC [Democratic National Committee] emails during last year’s presidential election,” Rohrabacher said, “Julian emphatically stated that the Russians were not involved in the hacking or disclosure of those emails.”
Pressed for more detail on the source of the documents, Rohrabacher said he had information to share privately with President Trump. (read more)
Dana Rohrabacher later published this account of the events:
Knowing how much effort the CIA and FBI put into the Russia collusion-conspiracy narrative; and knowing that Assange could essentially destroy the baseline predicate for the entire Trump-Russia investigation – which included the use of Robert Mueller; it would make sense for corrupt government officials to take keen interest after this August 2017 meeting between Rohrabacher and Assange.
That contact between Rohrabacher and Assange explains why those same government officials would quickly gather specific evidence (related to Wikileaks and Bradley Manning) for a grand jury by December 2017.
Within three months of the grand jury seating (Nov/Dec 2017), the DOJ generated an indictment and sealed it in March 2018. The indictment remained sealed until the Mueller probe was complete. This is not accidental timing.
The EDVA sat on the Julian Assange indictment while the Mueller/Weissman probe was ongoing.
As soon as the Mueller probe ended, on April 11th, 2019, a planned and coordinated effort between the U.K. and U.S. was executed; Julian Assange was forcibly arrested and removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and the EDVA indictment was unsealed (link).
As a person who researched this fiasco, including the ridiculously false 2016 Russian hacking/interference narrative: “17 intelligence agencies”, Joint Analysis Report (JAR) needed for Obama’s anti-Russia narrative in December ’16, and then a month later the ridiculously political Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) in January ’17, this timing against Assange is not coincidental.
It doesn’t take a deep researcher to see the aligned Deep State motive to control Julian Assange, because the Mueller report was dependent on Russia cybercrimes, and that narrative is contingent on the Russia DNC hack story which Julian Assange disputes. Again, John Durham stayed away from it!
♦ This is critical. The Weissmann/Mueller report contains claims that Russia hacked the DNC servers as the central element to the Russia interference narrative in the U.S. election.
This claim is the fulcrum underpinning the Russia election interference narrative. However, this core and essential claim is directly disputed by Julian Assange, as outlined during the Dana Rohrabacher interview, and by Julian Assange’s on-the-record statements.
The predicate for Robert Mueller’s investigation was specifically due to Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The fulcrum for this Russia interference claim is the intelligence community assessment (Peter Strzok); and the only factual evidence claimed within the ICA is that Russia hacked the DNC servers; a claim only made possible by relying on forensic computer analysis from another Michael Sussmann partner, Shawn Henry at Crowdstrike, yes another DNC contractor and collaborator with the Clinton campaign.
The CIA held a massive conflict of self-interest problem surrounding the Russian hacking claim as it pertained to their own activity in 2016. The FBI and DOJ always held a massive interest in maintaining the Russian hacking claim. Robert Mueller and Andrew Weismann did everything they could to support that predicate; and all of those foreign countries whose intelligence apparatus participated with Brennan and Strzok also carried a self-interest in maintaining that Russia hacking and interference narrative.
Julian Assange was/is the only person with direct knowledge of how Wikileaks gained custody of the DNC emails; and Assange claimed he has evidence it was from an inside DNC leak, not from a DNC hack.
The Russian “hacking” claim was ultimately so important to the CIA, FBI, DOJ, ODNI and U.K Intelligence apparatus. Well, right there is the obvious motive to shut Assange down as soon as intelligence officials knew the Mueller report was going to be public. And that is exactly what Main Justice and the U.S. intelligence community did.
This is why John Durham never touched it.
All of them know what happened.
All of them know why Julian Assange was taken from the Embassy in London. A bag had to be thrown over Assange in order to retain the justification for the Weissmann/Mueller special counsel and the larger Russian election interference claims. None of the key players did not know this. They all know.
Start asking the right questions about the timeline of Assange being arrested. Ask about the DNC hack and Russian provenance according to Crowdstrike. Ask key and specific questions about the FBI working with Crowdstrike and about the DOJ and EDVA case against Assange.
DNC staffer Seth Rich likely downloaded the DNC emails then leaked them to Julian Assange. Seth Rich was killed under very suspicous circumstances and then Julian Assange was arrested on the day after Mueller’s report was released claiming the DNC email leak was from a Russian hack.
The Russians never hacked the DNC.
The people around the Deep State all know what happened. SO DO WE!
If the Seth Rich laptop has the evidence of how he transferred those DNC files, every single interest in Washington DC will be in alignment against that explosive discovery.
Centinel2012 