Did Senator Mark Warner and then-FBI Director Comey 'collude' on Russiagate?

The U.S. was in talks for a deal with Julian Assange but then FBI Director James Comey ordered an end to negotiations after Assange offered to prove Russia was not involved in the DNC leak, as Ray McGovern explains.

An explosive report by investigative journalist John Solomon on the opinion page of Monday's edition of The Hill sheds a bright light on how Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and then-FBI Director James Comey collaborated to prevent WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange from discussing "technical evidence ruling out certain parties [read Russia]" in the controversial leak of Democratic Party emails to WikiLeaks during the 2016 election.

A deal that was being discussed last year between Assange and U.S. government officials would have given Assange "limited immunity" to allow him to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been exiled for six years. In exchange, Assange would agree to limit through redactions "some classified CIA information he might release in the future," according to Solomon, who cited "interviews and a trove of internal DOJ documents turned over to Senate investigators." Solomon even provided a copy of the draft immunity deal with Assange.

But Comey's intervention to stop the negotiations with Assange ultimately ruined the deal, Solomon says, quoting "multiple sources." With the prospective agreement thrown into serious doubt, Assange "unleashed a series of leaks that U.S. officials say damaged their cyber warfare capabilities for a long time to come." These were the Vault 7 releases, which led then CIA Director Mike Pompeo to call WikiLeaks "a hostile intelligence service."

Solomon's report provides reasons why Official Washington has now put so much pressure on Ecuador to keep Assange incommunicado in its embassy in London.

The report does not say what led Comey to intervene to ruin the talks with Assange. But it came after Assange had offered to "provide technical evidence and discussion regarding who did not engage in the DNC releases," Solomon quotes WikiLeaks' intermediary with the government as saying. It would be a safe assumption that Assange was offering to prove that Russia was not WikiLeaks' source of the DNC emails.

If that was the reason Comey and Warner ruined the talks, as is likely, it would reveal a cynical decision to put U.S. intelligence agents and highly sophisticated cybertools at risk, rather than allow Assange to at least attempt to prove that Russia was not behind the DNC leak.

The greater risk to Warner and Comey apparently would have been if Assange provided evidence that Russia played no role in the 2016 leaks of DNC documents.

Missteps and Stand Down

In mid-February 2017, in a remarkable display of naiveté, Adam Waldman, Assange's pro bono attorney who acted as the intermediary in the talks, asked Warner if the Senate Intelligence Committee staff would like any contact with Assange to ask about Russia or other issues. Waldman was apparently oblivious to Sen. Warner's stoking of Russia-gate.

Warner contacted Comey and, invoking his name, instructed Waldman to "stand down and end the discussions with Assange," Waldman told Solomon. The "stand down" instruction "did happen," according to another of Solomon's sources with good access to Warner. However, Waldman's counterpart attorney David Laufman, an accomplished federal prosecutor picked by the Justice Departent to work the government side of the CIA-Assange fledgling deal, told Waldman, "That's B.S. You're not standing down, and neither am I."

But the damage had been done. When word of the original stand-down order reached WikiLeaks, trust evaporated, putting an end to two months of what Waldman called "constructive, principled discussions that included the Department of Justice."

The two sides had come within inches of sealing the deal. Writing to Laufman on March 28, 2017, Waldman gave him Assange's offer to discuss "risk mitigation approaches relating to CIA documents in WikiLeaks' possession or control, such as the redaction of Agency personnel in hostile jurisdictions," in return for "an acceptable immunity and safe passage agreement."

On March 31, 2017, though, WikiLeaks released the most damaging disclosure up to that point from what it called "Vault 7" - a treasure trove of CIA cybertools leaked from CIA files. This disclosure featured the tool "Marble Framework," which enabled the CIA to hack into computers, disguise who hacked in, and falsely attribute the hack to someone else by leaving so-called tell-tale signs - like Cyrillic, for example. The CIA documents also showed that the "Marble" tool had been employed in 2016.

Misfeasance or Malfeasance

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which includes among our members two former Technical Directors of the National Security Agency, has repeatedly called attention to its conclusion that the DNC emails were leaked - not "hacked" by Russia or anyone else (and, later, our suspicion that someone may have been playing Marbles, so to speak).

In fact, VIPS and independent forensic investigators, have performed what former FBI Director Comey - at first inexplicably, now not so inexplicably - failed to do when the so-called "Russian hack" of the DNC was first reported. In July 2017 VIPS published its key findings with supporting data.

Two month later, VIPS published the results of follow-up experiments conducted to test the conclusions reached in July.

Why did then FBI Director Comey fail to insist on getting direct access to the DNC computers in order to follow best-practice forensics to discover who intruded into the DNC computers? (Recall, at the time Sen. John McCain and others were calling the "Russian hack" no less than an "act of war.") A 7th grader can now figure that out.

Asked on January 10, 2017 by Senate Intelligence Committee chair Richard Burr (R-NC) whether direct access to the servers and devices would have helped the FBI in their investigation, Comey replied: "Our forensics folks would always prefer to get access to the original device or server that's involved, so it's the best evidence."

At that point, Burr and Warner let Comey down easy. Hence, it should come as no surprise that, according to one of John Solomon's sources, Sen. Warner (who is co-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee) kept Sen. Burr apprised of his intervention into the negotiation with Assange, leading to its collapse.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer and then a CIA analyst for a total of 30 years and prepared and briefed, one-on-one, the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985.

McGovern and Wilson’s pal Ellesberg:

Endorsers of the [World Can’t Wait] Call to Drive Out the Bush Regime Include:
James Abourezk, Aris Anagnos, Rocky Anderson, Anti-Flag, Edward Asner, Russell Banks, Ed Begley Jr., Harry Belafonte, St. Clair Bourne, Gabriel Byrne, Margaret Cho, Ward Churchill, Paulette Cole, US Rep John Conyers Jr., John Densmore, Jesse Diaz Jr., Michael Eric Dyson, Steve Earle, Niles Eldredge, Daniel Ellsberg**, Eve Ensler, Laura Flanders, Jane Fonda, Martin Garbus, Senator Mike Gravel, Andre Gregory, Sam Hamill, Suheir Hammad, Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Jr., Mumia Abu-Jamal, Rickie Lee Jones, Sarah Jones, Brig. Gen. (Ret) Janis Karpinski, Jonathan Kozol, Rabbi Michael Lerner, US Rep. Cynthia McKinney, Robin Meyers, Mark Crispin Miller, Tom Morello, Viggo Mortensen, John Nichols, US Rep. Major Owens, Grace Paley, Harvey Pekar, Sean Penn, Michelle Phillips, Harold Pinter, Michael Ratner, Mark Ruffalo, US Rep. Bobby Rush, Susan Sarandon, Richard Serra, Jeff Sharlet, Rev. Al Sharpton, Cindy Sheehan, Martin Sheen, Nancy Spero, Gloria Steinem, Lynne Stewart***, Serj Tankian, Sunsara Taylor, Studs Terkel, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Walker, Naomi Wallace, US Rep. Maxine Waters, Cornel West, Ann Wright, Howard Zinn, and thousands more who have already joined us.
http://worldcantwait.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2538&Itemid=2
34 posted on ?2?/?20?/?2010? ?10?:?33?:?56? ?PM by ETL (ALL (most?) of the Obama-commie connections at my FR Home page: http://www.freerepublic.com/~etl/)
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** see PENTAGON PAPERS
*** see BLIND SHIEKH ABDURAHMAN’S “SECRET DOVE”

2005 : (THE “WORLD CAN’T WAIT TO DRIVE OUT THE BUSH REGIME” MOVEMENT [see 2005] OF THE MAOIST “REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNIST PARTY” a/k/a RCP a/k/a REVCOM IS FOUNDED BY CHARLES CLARK KISSINGER OF THE RCP [see ]) From David Horowitz’s FrontpageMag.com /DiscoverTheNetworks.org:
Profile: World Can’t Wait (WCW)
*Revolutionary communist movement that stages protests against the Bush administration
*Organizes college and high-school students
*Founded in June 2005 by Charles Clark Kissinger, a longtime leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7213
_____________________________________________________________
The RCP calls for the armed overthrow of the U.S. government...
From the website of the Revolutionary Communist Party (revcom.us or rwor.org) :
“Create Public Opinion, Seize Power: We are preparing minds and organizing forces for the time when there is a major crack in the system, whenever it comes and wherever it comes from: an opening that makes it possible to bring the future Revolutionary Army of the Proletariat (R.A.P.) into the field and wage a revolutionary armed struggle that actually has a chance of winning.
And we have said that building our party itself is the most important part of organizing forces for revolution. This is true now, and it is true looking forward to the creation of that future R.A.P. and the waging of that armed struggle.”:
http://revcom.us/a/v20/1000-1009/1000/barw.htm
_______________________

Government promotes film about Pentagon Papers leaker Ellsberg
AP ^ | January 15, 2011 | Matthew Lee
Posted on ?1?/?16?/?2011? ?1?:?29?:?57? ?PM by epithermal
WASHINGTON — Even as prosecutors build a case against the Army private suspected of passing hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, the State Department is promoting a documentary film that celebrates Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg.
Amid its struggle to contain damage from the WikiLeaks revelations, the State Department announced Saturday that “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers” has been selected as one of 18 films that will tour the world this year as part of its “American Documentary Showcase” program.
-snip-
Among the other documentaries chosen for this year’s showcase are “If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front,” which deals with the radical environmental group that some regard as a terrorist organization; “Freedom Riders,” which traces the experiences of civil-rights advocates in 1961; and “No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson,” which examines the youthful legal troubles of the basketball star.
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.nwsource.com ...
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The Ellsberg film was produced by major Obama donor/fundraiser Jodie Evans, who co-founded Code Pink.
Political favor?
7 posted on ?1?/?16?/?2011? ?3?:?47?:?29? ?PM by kristinn
**********

The curious thing about the Pentagon Papers is that everyone bought a copy of the book for their coffee table, but as near as I can tell, hardly anyone actually read it.
It was pretty boring.
The propaganda meme was that it showed that Nixon and the Republicans were responsible for some sort of mess in Vietnam.
I actually took the trouble to read the whole thing at the time, as it was published as a supplement to the NY Times. The only really interesting point, IMHO, was that John F. Kennedy ordered the CIA to assassinate our ally, Ngo Dinh Diem. He did so, I think, because Deim was a Catholic, and because the press presented him as a horrible dictator who was responsible for Buddhists setting themselves on fire. Kennedy didn’t want to be thought of as doing a favor for a fellow Catholic, since he was still busy living his Catholicism down. So he went with the Buddhist meme and had Diem assassinated.
Needless to say, that did huge damage to the war effort. South Vietnam never really recovered as a useful military ally, so our troops had to do all the work.
Somehow or other, the press managed never to mention this awkward fact, even though it was certainly the biggest revelation in the entire secrets leak.
4 posted on ?1?/?15?/?2011? ?4?:?10?:?46? ?PM by Cicero (Marcus Tullius)
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‘Scared and Demoralized’ By Trump - Meryl Streep Met with De Niro to Plot New Movie ‘The Post’, MRC TV ^ | December 14, 2017 | Mark Judge
Posted on ?12?/?14?/?2017? ?11?:?36?:?12? ?PM by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
‘The Post,” the new movie starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, is three things: a film about the Pentagon Papers, classified documents about the Vietnam War that were leaked to the media in 1971, a film about the press and Donald Trump, and, finally, an indictment about Harvey Weinstein and sexism in Hollywood.
According to Streep, who is interviewed on December 14 in the Washington Post, the film is mostly about sexism. Streep says that the new film came from a place of “grievance” about sexism.
“People were really scared and demoralized [after Trump was elected],” Streep told the Post. But her passion for the film came from a different place. “The passion, honestly, that I had wasn’t political on that end,” Streep said. “It was political on the feminist end. I wish that my citizen heart beat harder than the one that feels the grievance, but that’s the way it goes.”

Still, for openly liberal Streep, the political component is too strong to totally ignore. Hornaday reports that “Streep recalled the days immediately after the election when, alarmed by reports of possible Russian hacking, she got together with Robert De Niro, producer Jane Rosenthal and others (including a former FBI agent) to discuss their anxieties.”

[I actually took the trouble to read the whole thing at the time, as it was published as a supplement to the NY Times. The only really interesting point, IMHO, was that John F. Kennedy ordered the CIA to assassinate our ally, Ngo Dinh Diem. He did so, I think, because Deim was a Catholic, and because the press presented him as a horrible dictator who was responsible for Buddhists setting themselves on fire. Kennedy didn’t want to be thought of as doing a favor for a fellow Catholic, since he was still busy living his Catholicism down. So he went with the Buddhist meme and had Diem assassinated.
Needless to say, that did huge damage to the war effort. South Vietnam never really recovered as a useful military ally, so our troops had to do all the work.]

Thanks. I’ve known of JFK’s involvement for a while, but not how it came out. There’s a lot of JFK worship here and elsewhere, but I’ve always thought the guy was an inattentive dilettante who had his speechwriters use big words, much like Obama. The one thing JFK had going for him is that he was hawkish on the Communist threat. How much was conviction, and how much was the Democratic fashion of the time, like the views of his easily flustered cabinet members who became peaceniks, is an open question.

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