The report by Special Counsel John Durham makes clear beyond a shred of doubt that the Russia Hoax was the most atrocious weaponization of our government in American history. It was a crime like no other.

Biased juries and politics, rather than an ‘objective view of the law and the facts,’ may dictate whether a defendant is convicted or acquitted. //

Special Counsel John Durham breached neither ethics nor etiquette when he highlighted the difficulty of obtaining a conviction in a politically charged case when the jury holds opposing partisan views. He merely stated the reality on the ground in D.C.-area federal courts. And by his own actions prosecuting the J6 defendants solely in the nation’s capital, Attorney General Merrick Garland has confirmed that assessment by proving the corollary: Criminal cases against individuals viewed by the local populace as political pariahs make for easy convictions.

“Did the Durham Report’s Criticism of Juries Go Too Far?” The Washington Post’s headline from last week asked rhetorically. It was quite an ironic concern coming from the legacy outlet serially guilty of publishing fake news to propagate the Russia-collusion hoax. A better question for the “democracy dies in darkness” rag would be: Did Clinton and Democrats’ Dirty Politics Go Too Far?

But no, instead of focusing on the substantive content contained in the 300-plus pages of Durham’s report detailing malfeasance by the Department of Justice and FBI and the Clinton campaign’s responsibility for the scandal, The Washington Post focused on Durham’s introductory remarks explaining the “special care” the special counsel’s office used in making criminal charging decisions — decisions Durham stressed were “based solely on the facts and evidence developed in the investigation and without fear of, or favor to, any person.”

After noting the high burden the Constitution places on the government in criminal cases, Durham explained why, in numerous instances, he did not seek criminal charges even though the conduct deserved “censure or disciplinary action.”

“In examining politically-charged and high-profile issues such as these, the Office must exercise — and has exercised — special care,” Durham explained. “First, juries can bring strongly held views to the courtroom in criminal trials involving political subject matters,” Durham continued, “and those views can, in turn, affect the likelihood of obtaining a conviction, separate and apart from the strength of the actual evidence and despite a court’s best efforts to empanel a fair and impartial jury.”

Those taking umbrage at Durham’s remarks, claiming they erode faith in our justice system, seem to have missed that the Justice Department’s manual, “The Principles of Federal Prosecution,” quoted in the special counsel report, makes the same point.

Monday’s special counsel report detailed extensive evidence of Department of Justice and FBI misconduct concerning the launch and handling of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, and equally overwhelming proof of partisan motives and double standards. While the facts are critical of both the bureau and the DOJ, more scandalous is John Durham’s conclusion that the inexcusable targeting of a political opponent cannot be prevented absent a curing of the corrupted hearts and minds of law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Durham’s 306-page report opened with an executive summary capsulizing the results of the special counsel’s four-year investigation into the intelligence activities and investigations arising out of the 2016 presidential campaigns. While calling the findings “sobering,” and previewing the widespread misconduct on which the body of the report elaborated, Durham’s introductory comments emphasized he “does not recommend any wholesale changes in the guidelines and policies.”

It is here that Durham made his damning indictment of the DOJ and the FBI when he stressed that “the answer is not the creation of new rules but a renewed fidelity to the old.” Ultimately, he continued, justice “comes down to the integrity of the people who take an oath to follow the guidelines.” And “the promulgation of additional rules and regulations to be learned in yet more training sessions would likely prove to be a fruitless exercise if the FBI’s guiding principles of ‘Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity’ are not engrained in the hearts and minds of those sworn to meet the FBI’ s mission of ‘Protect[ing] the American People and Uphold[ing] the Constitution of the United States.’” //

For all the misconduct the special counsel exposed, it was [Pres. Gerald Ford's Attorney General] Levi’s warning that Durham left us. And that, I fear, is the most significant revelation to come from the investigation: that after four years of inspecting the underbelly of the FBI, Durham saw a creature reminiscent of the one running wild under Nixon.

Yesterday in these pages Margot Cleveland rightly noted that the most damning finding in the 306-page report from Special Counsel John Durham is not necessarily the FBI’s scandalous Crossfire Hurricane investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016, but that the egregious abuses of power detailed in the report cannot be remedied “absent a curing of the corrupted hearts and minds of law enforcement and intelligence agencies.”

For all the FBI’s blatant partisanship, its disregard of exculpatory evidence, and its outright deception to secure FISA warrants on Trump campaign associates, writes Cleveland, “what should terrify the country is not the catalog of malfeasance the special counsel recited — for mistakes and even gross failures can be corrected — but that Durham warned of corrupted hearts and minds, unfaithful to the people and their Constitution.”

For his part, Durham didn’t recommend any changes to FBI guidelines or policies, because no amount of reform will be sufficient if the people in charge feel free to disregard guidelines and policies whenever they see fit to do so. As such, wrote Durham, “the answer is not the creation of new rules but a renewed fidelity to the old. The promulgation of additional rules and regulations to be learned in yet more training sessions would likely prove to be a fruitless exercise if the FBI’s guiding principles of ‘Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity’ are not engrained in the hearts and minds of those sworn to meet the FBI’s mission of ‘Protect[ing] the American People and uphold[ing] the Constitution of the United States.’” //

That people like former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, along with the entire cast of villains and liars in the Durham report, rose to positions of such power, and then proceeded to abuse that power by arrogating to themselves the right to decide who should be president — a right that belongs solely to the American people — says something about the state of our republic.

What it says is this: We have produced, and are still producing, a totally corrupt elite bereft of any sense of “Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity,” to say nothing of moral virtue or the common good.

Put bluntly, an elite like that makes self-government in a republic of free citizens impossible. It also means that the elite will work to corrupt ordinary Americans, eroding their respect for the rule of law and fidelity to the Constitution. As the elites go, so eventually the entire country goes.

Seen in this light, the Durham report should be understood as a dire warning about the fate of our country. John Adams issued a similar warning when he penned his famous line, that “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” George Washington did the same in his farewell address when he said, “’Tis substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” //

The founders knew what we seem to have forgotten: Without a virtuous people, without citizens and leaders who believe in objective moral truth and understand themselves to be bound by it, we cannot be a free people, and we cannot sustain a republic. Laws alone, to say nothing of guidelines and policies, are not enough to support and sustain self-government. You need citizens who will respect and uphold the law, and leaders who actually believe in the principle of self-government — something our current crop of leaders clearly rejects.

Without a morally virtuous citizenry, the founders also knew we would eventually become a society not of free men and women, but of slaves to a tyrannical regime. That’s the real warning embedded in the Durham report. The corruption of the FBI, the CIA, and the entire federal intelligence community, which led to the Russia-collusion hoax and almost took down Trump’s campaign, and then his presidency, cannot be fixed with new rules and policies. It’s a moral failing, moral corruption, and it can only be fixed by a spiritual renewal in America, by a return to — let’s be honest — a civic culture shaped and guided by Christian moral virtue.

Any Republican who follows what the 2017 GOP did at the beginning of the hoax is an accomplice to Democrats’ radical institutional takeover. //

When Special Counsel John Durham released his explosive 306-page report about the Russian-collusion hoax on Monday, he merely confirmed what many of us already knew: the Obama Administration colluded with Democrats and the corporate media and weaponized the FBI to take down former President Donald Trump before he was even elected to office.

For years, the government, sworn to protect the people, created a partisan scheme to take down an American citizen because he threatened the deep state’s near-total grip on power. Durham’s report was critical because it exposed the years of corruption and “confirmation bias” fueling the “Russia Russia Russia” lies.

Durham uncovered several red flags that should have dissuaded the FBI from opening its ‘seriously flawed’ Crossfire Hurricane investigation.

Among the highlights was that they had absolutely nothing to justify going after the Trump campaign on Russia collusion. They had no information that the Trump campaign had been in contact with any Russian officials. They could not corroborate anything claimed in the Steele Dossier. Peter Strzok was essentially telling a London FBI employee that “there’s nothing to this.”

“Again, the FBI’s failure to critically analyze information that ran counter to the narrative of a Trump/Russia collusive relationship exhibited throughout Crossfire Hurricane is extremely troublesome,” the report said.

On top of that, the Report then took on who knew what when in pushing this story against the Trump team. It notes that the Clinton campaign plan to link Trump to Russia was known to the CIA and was briefed by CIA Director John Brennan to President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, AG Loretta Lynch, and FBI Director James Comey. //

Mike Lee @BasedMikeLee
·
🧵 1. The gravity of the misconduct uncovered by Mr. Durham cannot be overstated.
washingtonpost.com
Durham report sharply criticizes FBI’s 2016 probe of Trump campaign

2. The LEAST one can say of it is that it involved a malicious use of federal law-enforcement officers to conduct a contrived investigation utterly lacking any valid, factual foundation from the very beginning. That is itself incredibly troubling—and also unconstitutional.

3. But this was SO MUCH WORSE than that. It was an effort to use use a powerful, long-respected, federal law-enforcement agency to render a presidential candidate unelectable—entirely in the absence of any valid, good-faith basis for doing so.

4. So make no mistake—this can’t be dismissed as mere carelessness or even a severe example of garden-variety misconduct. No—this is as corrupt and as subversive of the Constitution as it gets.

5. Regardless of your political leanings or your feelings about Donald Trump, you should find this terrifying.

6. When federal law-enforcement agencies can undertake such a brazen effort to frame someone they don’t like to throw the outcome of an election—and then remain largely protected for seven years thereafter—popular sovereignty in America is under serious attack. //

The top line of the Durham report is incredibly simple. Namely, there was zero evidentiary basis for the FBI to pursue what would become Crossfire Hurricane, the infamous Trump-Russia investigation that was headed up by disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok. There was no hook, no justification, and no excuse for continuing to hound Trump throughout not only his 2016 candidacy but years into his presidency as well.

Despite knowing there was nothing to investigate, he FBI continued to push forward anyway until eventually, former FBI Director James Comey and the rest of his underlings got what they wanted: The Robert Mueller special counsel.

That was always the end goal. To ensure that Trump, even after he was elected and it became obvious no evidence of collusion existed, would be hobbled by an intrusive, headline-producing special counsel. In the end, the FBI succeeded in its quest. //

this was always about electoral interference. That was the goal from the word go, to diminish the Trump administration to the point that winning re-election in 2020 would be nearly impossible.

You don’t have to agree with Mr Carlson’s interpretation of the videos, to conclude that the Democrats in leadership, for their own part, have cherry-picked, hyped, spun, and in some ways appear to have lied about, aspects of January 6, turning a tragedy for the nation into a politicized talking point aimed at discrediting half of our electorate. //

The reason for a tightly scripted chain of command and an absolutely ironclad security plan in these buildings, is so that security crises such as the events of Jan 6 can never happen.

The fact that so much confusion in security practice took place on Jan 6, is hard to understand. //

There are other aspects of the Jan 6 breach that seemed anomalous to me from the start. I study the relationship in history of buildings such as The White House and the Capitol, to the US public; I follow the way in which the public is either welcomed into or barred from these structures.

In the media furore around Jan 6, it was erased from memory that the White House itself and the Capitol too have always been open to US citizens and foreign visitors. The interior of the Capitol is open to the public. These are public buildings. //

The violence of Jan 6 and its subsequent service as a talking point by the Democrats’ leadership, risks its use also to justify the closing off of our public buildings from US citizens altogether.

This would be convenient for tyrants of any party.

Leaving aside the release of the additional Jan 6 footage and how it may or may not change our view of US history —- I must say that I am sorry for believing the dominant legacy-media “narrative” pretty completely from the time it was rolled out, without asking questions.

Those who violently entered the Capitol or who engaged in violence inside of it, must of course be held accountable. (As must violent protesters of every political stripe anywhere.)

But in addition, anyone in leadership who misrepresented to the public the events of the day so as to distort the complexity of its actual history — must also be held accountable.

Jan 6 has become, as the DNC intended it to become, after the fact, a “third rail”; a shorthand used to dismiss or criminalize an entire population and political point of view. //

Republicans, conservatives, I am sorry.

I also believed wholesale so much else that has since turned out not to be as I was told it was by NPR, MSNBC and The New York Times. //

Because of lies such as these in legacy media — lies which I and millions of others believed — half of our nation’s electorate was smeared and delegitimized, and I myself was misled.

It damages our nation when legacy media put words in the mouths of Presidents and former Presidents, and call them traitors or criminals without evidence.

It damages our country when we cannot tell truth from lies. This is exactly what tyrants seek — an electorate that cannot know what is truth and what is falsehood. //

But I like the liars who are our current gatekeepers, even less.

The gatekeepers who lie to the public about the most consequential events of our time — and who thus damage our nation, distort our history, and deprive half of our citizenry of their right to speak, champion and choose, without being tarred as would-be violent traitors - deserve our disgust.

I am sorry the nation was damaged by so much untruth issued by those with whom I identified at the time.

I am sorry my former “tribe” is angry at a journalist for engaging in —- journalism.

I am sorry I believed so much nonsense.

Though it is no doubt too little, too late —

Conservatives, Republicans, MAGA:

I am so sorry.

Our federal government paid for Russian disinformation to frame the president of the United States for colluding with Russia.

Techno Fog @Techno_Fog
The FBI caught Steele primary subsource Igor Danchenko in a number of lies.

What did the FBI do in response?

It signed Danchenko up as a paid FBI confidential human source.

Durham's latest:
technofog.substack.com
Durham shocker: Danchenko was a paid FBI informant
3:20 PM · Sep 13, 2022

Durham dropped a pretty stunning revelation regarding Igor Danchenko, who is currently being prosecuted for lying to the FBI. Danchenko was the primary sub-source for the discredited Steele Dossier and was caught in several falsehoods regarding the document.

Now, we are learning that after those lies were known, the FBI didn’t stop using him as a source. On the contrary, they made him a paid confidential informant until the month before the 2020 presidential election. //

Techno Fog @Techno_Fog
·
The FBI caught Steele primary subsource Igor Danchenko in a number of lies.

What did the FBI do in response?

It signed Danchenko up as a paid FBI confidential human source.

Durham's latest

technofog.substack.com
Durham shocker: Danchenko was a paid FBI informant

Techno Fog @Techno_Fog

The purpose should be quite clear -

The FBI buries Danchenko from inquiry by making him a CHS.

In doing so, the FBI prevents discovery of its own misconduct.

Utterly corrupt and self-serving.
3:47 PM · Sep 13, 2022

Why bother hiding your cards when the media won’t challenge you?

Democrat lawyer Marc Elias knows what’s up. He shows us why the Democrats raided Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago.

Because this would never apply to anyone else, right? Looking at you, Hillary. //

Marc E. Elias @marceelias
·
The media is missing the really, really big reason why the raid today is a potential blockbuster in American politics.👇
8:09 PM · Aug 8, 2022

18 U.S. Code § 2071 – Concealment, removal, or mutilation generally: //

Marc E. Elias @marceelias
·
Replying to @marceelias
Yes, I recognize the legal challenge that application of this law to a president would garner (since qualifications are set in Constitution). But the idea that a candidate would have to litigate this is during a campaign is in my view a "blockbuster in American politics."
8:48 PM · Aug 8, 2022

As Mike Anton presciently wrote two weeks ago, the political persecution of Donald Trump is not about him at all, but about his representation of what a large block of voters want that the national security state refuses to allow.

The regime can’t allow Trump to be president not because of who he is (although that grates), but because of who his followers are. That class—Angelo Codevilla’s “country class”—must not be allowed representation by candidates who might implement their preferences, which also, and above all, must not be allowed. The rubes have no legitimate standing to affect the outcome of any political process, because of who they are, but mostly because of what they want.

Complaints about the nature of Trump are just proxies for objections to the nature of his base.

No wonder Democrats keep bleating loudly about “our democracy” — they know we don’t live in one presently. And this FBI raid is going to make a lot more people aware of it.

If Republicans continue to submit to this farcical arrangement, it will be more confirmation that America’s two-party system is also a pretense, and Republicans are merely a fake opposition party kept on life support to help some people believe our elections are legitimate.

Republicans’ promised hearings aren’t enough. Republicans also held hearing after hearing on Spygate, and nobody was brought to justice. They should be using every peaceful tool of dissent, protest, and refusing to cooperate, as well as preparing to replace the entire FBI and DOJ with completely apolitical staff. Anything Democrats want or need from Republicans from now on, including providing the appearance of a consenting two-party system, should be completely off limits until this banana republic governance ends.

As reported by Just the News on Wednesday, the latest information appears to be the most damning yet; particularly for the Department of Justice:

In the final hours of the Trump presidency, the U.S. Justice Department raised privacy concerns to thwart the release of hundreds of pages of documents that Donald Trump had declassified to expose FBI abuses during the Russia collusion probe, and the agency then defied a subsequent order to release the materials after redactions were made, according to interviews and documents.

The previously untold story of how highly anticipated declassified material never became public is contained in a memo obtained by Just the News from the National Archives that was written by then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows just hours before Trump left office on noon of Jan. 20, 2021. //

The documents that Trump declassified never saw the light of day, even though they were lawfully declassified by Trump and the DOJ was instructed by the president though Meadows to expeditiously release them after redacting private information as necessary. //

So let’s see: lawfully declassified documents, a very concise memo from Trump’s then chief of staff; yet the DOJ usurps presidential powers and blocks declassification, claiming some bogus security excuse.

Meadows told JTN on Tuesday he was “dismayed” that the DOJ ignored a lawful instruction from a sitting president and said it was part of a larger dynamic within the permanent federal bureaucracy (see: “deep state”) to repeatedly undercut Trump and protect itself. //

Meadows in his 2021 memo said White House lawyers told him the DOJ’s last-minute concerns were not legitimate because the executive office of the president was exempt from the Privacy Act.

In the interview on Tuesday night, he said he agreed in the final minutes of the presidency to let DOJ make redactions “out of an abundance of caution” and expected the DOJ would comply with Trump’s order. //

Former Trump adviser David Bossie, head of the Citizens United watchdog group — as I noted at the top, one of the groups targeted by the IRS — said the episode is a pointed reminder that the permanent bureaucracy in Washington wields so much power it can thwart the actions of a duly elected president. Not only true, as we’ve learned; but it should scare your socks off if you think about it, properly.

For Hillary Clinton to add her voice to the partisan witch hunt demands derision because she is the reason Trump and some of his voters doubt elections. //

The Russia collusion hoax she paid for and promoted is the reason Donald Trump and some of his voters believed (and maybe still do) that enemies of the former president hacked Dominion voting machines, flooded battleground states with counterfeit ballots, and engaged in other Machiavellian machinations to steal the 2020 election. Yet Clinton plays the puritan, blaming Trump’s refusal to accept Joe Biden’s victory as the cause of the violence that erupted at the capitol on January 6, 2021—all while she continues to insinuate some six years later that the presidency was stolen from her. //

Given what the Clinton campaign did to Trump during the 2016 campaign, with assistance throughout from high-level FBI and DOJ agents, and given what Clinton’s deep-state cronies did in an effort to remove Trump from office, Trump wasn’t crazy to believe the farfetched stories of a 2020 election steal: He would have been nuts not to.

Yet Clinton claims Trump is the one who “wage[d] a criminal conspiracy to overturn the results and prevent the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in American history.” The projection lives loudly within her.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/06/09/fbi_chief_comey_misled_congresss_gang_of_8_over_russiagate_lisa_page_memo_reveals_836434.html

Declassified for Durham’s probe, a March 2017 memo prepared by Lisa Page for FBI head James Comey’s meeting with Congress’ “Gang of Eight” — the bipartisan House and Senate leaders who oversee the most classified stuff — was a total cook-up job.

It advised Comey to present accusations that Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort and foreign policy adviser Carter Page were working with the Russian government as coming from a confidential Russia-based source with real intel-community chops. In fact, the FBI had already established that the root source was US-based former Brookings flunky Igor Danchenko’s utterly speculative gossip with an ex-girlfriend and a Democratic Party hack.

That, plus publicly reported info, was all Christopher Steele (a retired British spy who doesn’t even speak Russian) ever had to back up his “dossier.” And the FBI knew it since at least January 2017, when it interviewed Danchenko.

Comey hid all this during his meetings, and after. Yet the public only learned it years later, once the Durham probe began.

The Comey meeting where he served up these nonsense stories prompted both House and Senate Intelligence committees to open probes. But that was hardly the only poisoned fruit. FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, counterintelligence officer Peter Strzok, analyst Brian Auten and Justice attorney Kevin Clinesmith pretended the Danchenko “intel” was credible to get the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court’s OK for wiretaps on Carter Page and dupe the Justice Department to keep granting approval for Trump campaign surveillance (which did not corroborate the wild claims). Again, all while they knew Danchenko had admitted it was baseless.

For years, the media lionized these people as saviors of the Republic, even after special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe turned up zero evidence in support of their claims.

It was a purely political hit job from the start, by top members of the highest law- enforcement agency in the land, against a candidate-and-then-president they opposed. For all the justified anger at Trump over the Jan. 6 riot, this methodical and effective deception plot looks far more like an attempted coup.

Yet, other than losing their jobs, none of the plotters has paid any real price. Comey and Strzok both wrote best-sellers; McCabe even had his retirement benefits restored (after being fired for lying under oath) under the Biden administration.

Of course, most media have no interest in sharing the truth. They won Pulitzers and endless clicks from hyping Russiagate, using it to kneecap a president they despised.

What Mook’s testimony laid bare is that Hilary was fully aware of Mook’s dirty tricks and media plants and approved of them. Nonetheless, to this day, Hillary has continued her media assault on facts, claiming for the better part of five years that Trump was a Putin cat’s paw and an agent of Russia. Russia, according to Hillary, ruined her run for president and it’s that lie she will take to her grave — or prison. Whichever comes first.

Durham’s prosecutors claim Sussmann passed along the same information about Trump and Alfa Bank to the FBI in September 2016 at the behest of the Clinton campaign. Sussmann denies that, claiming he went to the FBI as a private citizen. Sussmann’s defense is akin to a child claiming he didn’t eat the cookies even with crumbs all over his face and hands. Equally, Mook claiming he didn’t know or suspect that Sussmann was, in fact, acting for or on behalf of the campaign, is suspect at best. //

From my perspective, this whole affair is far worse than Watergate. Dozens of politically motivated actors orchestrated and planned an obvious string of lies to bury Donald Trump. Watergate was a bunch of numbskulls LOOKING for dirt, not making it up. A coordinated effort to plant false information with the press and the FBI is a little worse in my mind.

If Baker, the man to whom Sussmann lied, adopts such a disinterested approach to justice, and Priestap, an assistant director at the FBI, shows disdain for the special counsel’s case, surely a jury of Sussmann’s peers will too.

The men and women of the jury live and work in D.C., with men and women like Sussmann, Baker, and Priestap. Their kids go to school together—literally in the case of one juror—and they likely can envision a friend or neighbor in Sussmann’s position.

While Sussmann’s lie was “material” in the legal sense, jurors seem likely to shrug the lie off as harmless, mentally parroting the woman several jurors acknowledged they donated money to when she ran for president in 2016: “What difference at this point does it make?”

I may be wrong. But I don’t think so.

Despite machinations attempting to hide the full truth of how Spygate conspiracies to entrap Donald Trump were spun, lots will come out into the open.

The Clinton campaign, the DNC, Perkins Coie, and Fusion GPS withheld or redacted numerous documents from the special counsel.

Late Wednesday, Special Counsel John Durham filed a motion to compel the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, Fusion GPS, and Perkins Coie to provide the judge presiding over the Michael Sussmann criminal case copies of unredacted documents previously withheld from the government. The Clinton campaign and DNC have claimed the withheld or redacted documents are protected by attorney-client privilege. //

While Durham argues in Wednesday’s motion to compel that the redacted documents are not protected by attorney-client privilege, he acknowledges that without reviewing the content of the material, that assessment cannot be fully made. Thus, at this point, the government first seeks a court order compelling the third parties to provide the unredacted documents to the court for an “in camera” review, meaning a confidential review by the court.

To the contrary, Durham argues that Fusion GPS’s “primary, if not sole, function” appears to be “to generate opposition research materials that the firm then shared widely with members of the media, the U.S. State Department, the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), and members of Congress.” The government adds that while Perkins Coie hired Fusion GPS purportedly to “support” Perkins Coie’s legal advice to its clients on “defamation, libel and similar laws in which accuracy is an essential legal element,” Fusion GPS’s actions were unrelated to any such advice.

Rather, as the motion notes, the “evidence makes clear that the primary purpose” “was to assemble and publicize allegations that would aid the campaign’s public relations goals.” And, as Durham adds, the D.C. Circuit has previously held that advice from “a medial, journalistic [or] political’ consultant that is not used in providing legal advice is not privileged.” //

Yesterday’s motion highlighted many of those public relation outreaches, arguing that Fusion GPS’ “role in promoting the wide dissemination of its own and others’ research would appear to contravene any notion that the primary purpose of their work was to aid confidential legal advice from [Perkins Coie] about potential libel and defamation litigation. “If anything,” the motion continued, Fusion GPS’s push for reporters to “hurry” to publish the Alfa Bank tale before resolving questions about its “authenticity” “would itself arguably create significant libel and defamation litigation risk,” the special counsel’s office quipped.