Now, fair notice: I’m heading pretty deep into the weeds here, so here’s the TL;DR:

In paragraphs 2 through 7, under the heading FACTUAL BACKGROUND, Durham details important points about the indictment that show Sussman working with Rodney Joffe and his firm Neustar, who passed information to researchers under a DARPA contract at Georgia Tech and coordinated an effort to build up a falsified case for investigating Trump’s connections to Russia. This also involved the Clinton campaign, and the Clinton campaign’s general counsel — a familiar name, Marc Elias. This data was, to put it gently, massaged in order to make an incriminating case against Trump that fed into the Clinton campaign’s other efforts, like the “dossier,” and thus into the fraudulent FISA warrants and more intelligence operations against the Trump campaign.

You can see why this caused a lot of agitation on the Democrats’ side: Durham is laying out a case that Perkins Coie, through Sussman and with the active participation of Mark Elias, purposefully manufactured evidence against Trump that factored into the four-year investigation into “Russian collusion”.

I’ve talked to several lawyer friends, and frankly, this appears to indicate many violations of law — too many to list. But plenty that would send mere politically unconnected mortals to Leavenworth for the rest of their lives.

Now, into the weeds.

this case might resurface in the future, as the Supreme Court appears to be set to refine how the Voting Rights Act can be used. In the past few years, the Supreme Court has transformed the Voting Rights Act from an un-Constitutional means of mass punishment and imposing collective guilt to something that is merely offensive to the Constitutional right of states to set “time, place, and manner” of elections and a tool for the left to interject chaos and ad hoc rules in defiance of state law. There is a very good chance that five justices will drag Chief Justice John Roberts to outlaw the use of race in setting voting district boundaries.

For those hesitant in getting jabbed with the relatively new technology represented by mRNA vaccines, it might be reassuring to know that the old-fashioned way still works. In fact, laboratory studies found that two doses of the Sanofi-GSK vaccine stimulated the production of more neutralizing antibodies than mRNA vaccines already on the market, according to the companies.

“That’s a pincer movement. Religions themselves have failed and the secular world. It is the overwhelming dynamo of society. I’ve said for years, secular societies influenced religions much more than religions have influenced secular society in the last hundred years,” Prager noted during the interview.

Much of the loss of religion in our society, Prager observed, is based on Americans forgetting the influence of their faith.

“People forgot what their religion is about, you know. They went on automatic pilot. They didn’t teach their kids what America means. And so America doesn’t mean much to most kids. And the same with the religions, Judaism and Christianity. They didn’t teach their kids why the religion is so relevant to society,”

Prager notes, “I’m not blaming them.” Instead, he highlights, “I’m just describing a reality. That’s what happened. They didn’t convey the meaning, and so the kids just dropped it.” //

You know who opposed Soviet communism? Pope John Paul II from Poland, and Muslims in Afghanistan, and the Jews in the Soviet Union. These were the nemeses of the Soviet Union. You either worship the God of the Judeo-Christian world or the god of Marx. That’s what it really amounts to,” Prager shared. //

“I can tell you what has worked for me,” Prager answered. “For almost half a century explaining to people rationally why God and the Bible are necessary. That’s why I’ve embarked on this massive project of a five-volume commentary on the first five books of the Bible called the Rational Bible.” //

“My vehicle to God is purely through reason. I admit I don’t have a mystical bone in my body. I envy people who do, but I don’t. My vehicle to God and religion is purely through reason. But I have found that that is the most persuasive way to touch people, at least to the times in which we live,” Prager explained.

Matthew Dowd @matthewjdowd
If you are blaming Biden today for what Putin is doing in Ukraine please take down the American flag from your home or social media account and replace it with the Russian flag. It will help us all know where you clearly stand.
8:54 AM · Feb 22, 2022 //

Garrett M. Graff @vermontgmg
One thing worth keeping in my mind today: There’s a straight line from Russia’s attack on the US election in 2016 to 1/6 to today’s new invasion of Ukraine. The chaos that Russia unleashed with the election of Trump weakened us to the point Putin feels confident invading Europe.
7:05 AM · Feb 24, 2022 //

John Harwood @JohnJHarwood
another way of stating Garrett's point:

the Russian thug now attacking Ukraine helped Donald Trump become president because he thought that would some day make this kind of attack easier to pull off

he was right in the short term

longer term, TBD //

Europe was never going to be enough to deter Russian movement into Ukraine. It was always going to come down to whether or not the U.S. would be tough enough to deter it a bit longer. Afghanistan showed that we are not, and so Putin began speeding up his plans.

That’s not to say that Russia is doing this because of anything happening in Washington. It’s simply to say that the last barrier to doing it was the U.S. and Biden completely tore down that barrier himself.

So, no, Russia didn’t get Trump elected, much less as part of a plan to take over Ukraine. And, no, Trump isn’t responsible for what’s happening now. Weak leadership in the U.S. at this very moment gave Putin all the confidence he needed.

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