2020’s best wacky GOP theory: It was only a stray Italian satellite stealing votes from Trump and Kari Lake. There’s only one more step to the mounting of a laser on it.
Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in the fall of 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump. The specifics of the tip and how they handled the investigation remain unclear, but Mr. Durham brought no charges over it.
bethesda 1971 in DK opined on this: "Remember — Mueller never investigated Trump’s financial ties because Rosenstein lied to him and told him a separate counterintelligence investigation was doing that. An investigation that never happened. (Was McGonigal involved there?) So now we have this — along with, of course, Trump Tower Moscow, Deutsche Bank and on and on. Durham desperately tried to discredit the FBI’s Russian investigation and came up empty, with two acquittals. Bad enough. But did he cover up evidence of a Trump crime? There is a desperate struggle to control the Trump-Russia narrative. It infects everything. Look at Twitter for Adam Schiff trending because he’s being kicked off the Intelligence Committee. You will see thousands of tweets saying “About time. He created the Russia Hoax.” Millions of Republicans believe that as an article of faith. Yet just this week we have this Durham revelation and the McGonigal arrest. That won’t matter to the reprogrammable Trump supporters and their enablers. But it’s up to us to spread the truth to anyone who’s not one of them." www.dailykos.com/...
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I'm fascinated by this new little wrinkle: the ITALIAN authorities told Dunham and Barr about all-new @realDonaldTrump"irregularities".
What new racket has Trump got that has to do with Italy?
Interviews by The Times with more than a dozen current and former officials have revealed an array of previously unreported episodes that show how the Durham inquiry became roiled by internal dissent and ethical disputes as it went unsuccessfully down one path after another even as Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr promoted a misleading narrative of its progress.
Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in the fall of 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump. The specifics of the tip and how they handled the investigation remain unclear, but Mr. Durham brought no charges over it.
Mr. Durham used Russian intelligence memos — suspected by other U.S. officials of containing disinformation — to gain access to emails of an aide to George Soros, the financier and philanthropist who is a favorite target of the American right and Russian state media. Mr. Durham used grand jury powers to keep pursuing the emails even after a judge twice rejected his request for access to them. The emails yielded no evidence that Mr. Durham has cited in any case he pursued.
There were deeper internal fractures on the Durham team than previously known. The publicly unexplainedresignation in 2020of his No. 2 and longtime aide, Nora R. Dannehy, was the culmination of a series of disputes between them over prosecutorial ethics. A year later, two more prosecutors strongly objected to plans toindict a lawyerwith ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign based on evidence they warned was too flimsy, and one left the team in protest of Mr. Durham’s decision to proceed anyway. (A juryswiftly acquittedthe lawyer.)
Now, as Mr. Durham works on a final report, the interviews by The Times provide new details of how he and Mr. Barr sought to recast the scrutiny of the 2016 Trump campaign’s myriad if murky links to Russia as unjustified and itself a crime.
“Although the statement in the Facebook post is fabricated, Scott Perry has voiced the baseless claim that an Italian defense contractor used a military satellite to manipulate votes in the 2020 election, according to the Washington Post.”
Mark Meadows exchanged texts with 34 members of Congress about plans to overturn the 2020 election. One such text: Conspiracy theories about Italian satellite rigging voting machines and the C.I.A. director in cahoots with the British government to steal the election for Biden.
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U.S. Rep. Scott Perry shared plan to seize voting machines nationwide: report https://t.co/Zbf4SWHVm0
