Durham Annex Released

Senator Grassley has released the classified annex to the Durham report. There are a few redactions, but the report largely covers purported emails of Leonard Benardo, an executive at Open Society Foundations:

On page 4, the Annex references what we understand to be the Renteria memo which was previously reported to have arrived in March 2016. The Russian March memorandum goes beyond the purported Lynch-Renteria conversations and suggests Clinton was preparing “scandalous revelations” with the support of special services. Durham offers us this:

Durham suggests the Russians had picked up on Steele’s work and that of Fusion GPS. That needs more explanation. It was known Fusion GPS was active at the time, but they were not engaged by Perkins Coie for Hillary until April 2016, and Steele wasn’t engaged for Clinton until later. This raises more questions.

A March 2016 FBI meeting on the intelligence from the Dutch concluded the reports were not credible. We then get a heavily redacted section that leads into the Clinton Plan intelligence:

First, this is at odds with our report in April that suggested Palmieri was the foreign policy advisor noted in the Durham report, something that we pushed back on and sought clarity and additional sources on. The foreign policy advisor is instead Julianne Smith, which does make more sense as Palmieri’s title was communications director.

The quoted Russian memo continues:

That Russian memo, Durham suggests, is based on the following email (multiple versions exist) from Benardo (redactions make it difficult to get all of the context):

The next few paragraphs are too frustratingly redacted to make sense of, but we are offered another Bernardo email:

Durham confirmed that Benardo had in fact been hacked, and Durham stated they could identify “certain emails, attachments, and documents that contain language and references with the exact same or similar verbiage.” In an interview, Benardo suggested he didn’t know any “Julie” and disputed the authenticity of the emails.

Olympic doping was in the news at the time of Bernardo’s email, but it’s unclear why Benardo places that on the level of hampering US elections. The World Anti-Doping Agency was hacked in August 2016 (allegedly by Fancy Bear and 3 of the same Russians indicted for the DNC hack were indicted for it) and in our opinion it’s an unusual reference.

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The second section of the annex relates to Carter Page, and suggests that a redacted email he’d sent was used as the basis of FISA warrants against him, despite Page being interviewed 5 separate times and the FBI never asking Page about the email. The email apparently was used to bolster the dossier allegations that he’d met with senior Russian officials despite the email not stating anything of the kind.

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Our March report stands up and goes further than the Annex offers.

In April we’d reported on an email purportedly between Jennifer Palmieri and Benardo containing a suggestion that part of their plan involved having the FBI “amplify” their allegations. That email was not cited in the annex released today.

There are clear indications that additional emails around Benardo exist, both in March and July of 2016. For now, we are unpublishing the April report while we seek verification of certain details.

There is much to absorb in this annex, we will likely revisit this with a stream or chat today.