Watched a clip of one of Schiff's demolition of Durham again. Realized Druahm was trying to throw the fact that Schiff got a prank call by some fake Russians in his face. Schiff reported the call to the FBI. Ut was really out of bounds and made clear Durham was nothing more than a hack.
Yep, Durham lied to congress.
The former special counsel denied two essential facts of the Trump-Russia scandal.
www.motherjones.com
This meeting signaled to Moscow that the Trump camp was receptive to Russian endeavors to intervene in the election to boost Trump’s chances, and Schiff expressed surprise that Durham found it insignificant. “Are you really trying to diminish the importance of what happened here?” he asked.
Durham answered: “The more complete story is that they met, and it was a ruse, and they didn’t talk about Mrs. Clinton.”
That is not true.
The
report produced by special counsel Robert Mueller notes that the Russian emissary, a lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya, did discuss Clinton: “Participants agreed that Veselnitskaya stated that the Ziff brothers [an American family investment firm] had broken Russian laws and had donated their profits to the DNC or the Clinton Campaign. She asserted that the Ziff brothers had engaged in tax evasion and money laundering in both the United States and Russia.” (There was
no evidence that Ziff Brothers Investments had engaged in wrongdoing.)
The Mueller report points out that Trump Jr. zeroed in on this: “Trump Jr. asked follow-up questions about how the alleged payments could be tied specifically to the Clinton Campaign, but Veselnitskaya indicated that she could not trace the money once it entered the United States.” The report quotes a participant in the meeting recalling “that Trump Jr. asked what they [the Russians] have on Clinton.”
Durham’s characterization of the meeting—that it had nothing to do with Clinton—lined up with what the Trump camp first claimed when the meeting was revealed a year afterward, in 2017. At that time, Trump Jr.
issued a false statement dictated by his father that insisted the conversation had focused “primarily” on the adoption of Russian children by Americans. That was a phony cover story. Later on, when more information came out, even the elder Trump
conceded that the point of the meeting was to gather negative information on Clinton from a foreign adversary. “This was a meeting to get information on an opponent,” Trump said. Yet years later, Durham was still pushing the original disinformation about the meeting propagated by Trump and his allies.
In a subsequent exchange with Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), Durham misled the committee about another key element of the Trump-Russia scandal. McClintock observed that the “central charge in the Russia collusion hoax was that Trump campaign operatives were in contact with Russian intelligence sources.”
Replying to that remark, Durham said, “There was no such evidence.”
That’s not true.
While running Trump’s campaign in the summer of 2016, Manafort had regular contact with Konstantin Kilimnik, a former Manafort employee in Ukraine who has been repeatedly identified by US government officials as a Russian agent.
In a
detailed, bipartisan 2020 report, the Senate Intelligence Committee, then chaired by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, called Kilimnik “a Russian intelligence officer.” A year earlier, the Mueller report said, “The FBI…assesses that Kilimnik has ties to Russian intelligence.” The US Treasury in 2021
declared Kilimnik was a “known Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf.” The department added, “During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, Kilimnik provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy.” In 2018, Mueller
indicted Kilimnik on charges of obstruction of justice.
The contacts between Manafort and Kilimnik have been well chronicled by Mueller, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and media reports. Durham should be well-versed in this. Manafort and Kilimnik met secretly in a Manhattan cigar bar. Manafort handed Kilimnik Trump campaign polling data that were to be passed to an oligarch close to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and he arranged to continue sharing sensitive campaign information through Kilimnik.
Kilimnik also wanted something from Manafort. He asked Manafort to secure Trump’s backing for a Kremlin-approved “peace plan” for Ukraine that would have entailed creating an autonomous zone in eastern Ukraine, a scheme Manafort knew would offer a “’backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine,” according to the Senate report. This
sounds like an early attempt to gain Trump’s assistance in securing what Russia later invaded Ukraine to obtain.