Even at that time (in early 2017) Leake wrote, “that it was possible to take down a sitting President of the United States by publishing the assertions of anonymous sources from within the state bureaucracy, then our government by elected officials was over, and our true masters were the unnamed intelligence officials.”
Federal officials, including CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein all knew that the so-called “Steele Dossier,” which alleged that Donald Trump had been entertained by “Russian prostitutes urinating on a bed once occupied by President Obama in a Moscow hotel suite,” were entirely unsubstantiated and false.
Nonetheless, these false allegations were used not only to rationalize the launch of the FBI’s counterintelligence effort, “Crossfire Hurricane,” but also to justify the bogus FISA warrant which allowed the FBI to spy on Donald Trump, and members of his campaign, when he was President-elect, and, again, when he was President.
Strangely enough, Durham never investigated or addressed false allegations that the DNC computer servers were the target of an online hack by Russian intelligence operatives. The FBI actually admitted in my trial that they had never actually inspected the DNC computer servers, relying instead on the assertions of CrowdStrike, a Democrat forensic IT firm whose “report” alleged this act by “the Russians.”
Interestingly, the CrowdStrike report was withheld from my defense attorneys at trial— although CrowdStrike Chief Security Officer Shawn Henry, who conveniently happens to be a former deputy to FBI Director Robert Mueller, admitted under oath to the House Intelligence Committee that the report contained no proof whatsoever that the Russians hacked the DNC, obtaining the embarrassing chain of e-mails published by WikiLeaks.
Twitter owner Elon Musk recently revealed that the intelligence agencies had full access to all of the Direct Message data on Twitter, an egregious violation of the Fourth Amendment. This explains why I was contacted by a leftist news site regarding my brief exchange of messages on Twitter with an entity calling themselves “Guccifer 2.0.”
My immediate reaction was to completely publicly release all of the exchanges which took place almost three months after WikiLeaks published the DNC and Clinton e-mails that were allegedly “hacked” from the Democratic National Committee. Based on the content, context and timing, these Twitter Direct Messages are entirely innocuous and certainly provide no evidence of collusion, collaboration, or any other crime. After my unconditional presidential pardon, Robert Mueller recycled this false narrative in an Op-Ed for The Washington Post in which he said that I was “in touch with Russian intelligence asset(s).”
While it is the assertion of both Special Counsel Mueller and CIA Director John Brennan that Guccifer 2.0 was a “Russian intelligence hacker” responsible for the “hacking” of the DNC, I believe that neither of these claims are proven. In fact, there is substantially more evidence that Guccifer 2.0 was a cutout for U.S. intelligence! Nonetheless, like birds jumping off a telephone wire, the fake news media widely reported that “Trump advisor Roger Stone admitted his contact with a Russian intelligence agent.” Incredibly, this entire false narrative would be recycled almost two years later in the run-up to my trial, when it was leaked that the FBI had “discovered” these Direct Messages in their investigation of me. Once again, ignoring that I myself released the material and that the contents and timing were benign.
Bitter-enders in the fake news media who continue, even today, to recycle the false narrative that Robert Mueller’s investigation and the Senate Intelligence Committee yielded evidence of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign and point to my conviction fail to note that the judge in my case approved a motion by the government prosecutors in which the government insisted that they were not required to prove Russian collusion in order to convict me of obstructing their investigation into Russian collusion! In fact, the Senate Intelligence Report is complete bunk.
Indeed, I was ultimately convicted of lying to Congress under oath in my voluntary testimony regarding “Russian collusion” which we now know, definitely, never took place. How can one lie about something that never happened?
The most troubling aspect of Mr. Durham’s report is the simple question of timing. What did Mr. Durham know three days ago when he released his report, that he did not know prior to the November 8th 2020 election?
Why did Mr. Durham delay publication of his final report until he was certain that the 5-year statute of limitations under which Hillary Clinton and her aides, as well as the top intelligence and judiciary officials of the Obama and Trump Administration, could have been prosecuted for the crimes he documented?
Durham’s revelations are not surprising to me. In fact, on November 3rd, 2020, Election Day, the busiest news day of the year, the U.S. Department of Justice was forced, by federal court order, to release the last remaining, heavily redacted and long-hidden sections of Robert Mueller’s report, in which even he could not sugarcoat the fact that he had found “no factual evidence” of my involvement in Russian collusion, WikiLeaks collaboration, or any other crime.
In fact, any misstatement I made under oath was immaterial and hid no underlying crime, including either Russian collusion or WikiLeaks collaboration—although even Mueller admitted that if he had found evidence of my coordination with WikiLeaks, which he did not, those actions would not have been illegal.
In the two days since the release of Durham’s report, I have been inundated by supporters and others urging me to sue those responsible for my malicious and vindictive prosecution.
Sadly, I don’t have a lawsuit. As previously noted, the judge granted a motion at my trial that the government did not have to prove Russian collusion in order to convict me for obstructing their investigation of the “Russian collusion” that they knew did not exist. I have no legal recourse because of the clever and narrow way my indictment was structured. I made honest misstatements, but none of them were material or hid any underlying crime. The real purpose of my indictment was to pressure me into falsely testifying against President Trump by saying that some 26 documented phone calls between us in 2016 pertained to Russian collusion and the WikiLeaks disclosures. I refused to lie.
The government never established that I had any meaningful exchange with Julian Assange or WikiLeaks, nor that I had received any material from them and passed it on to the Trump campaign, or anyone else. The government ignored the fact that Julian Assange had announced that he would release material on Hillary Clinton in late October and pretended that my knowledge of this general fact was somehow a secret.
Government witness Randy Credico testified that he had never told me that the WikiLeaks disclosures would come in October and that they would be powerful and that he had learned this from a woman lawyer who worked for Assange. Credico lied but my lawyers failed to produce text messages from Credico, which confirms both claims. In other words, he perjured himself for Mueller leading to my conviction.
The saddest takeaway from this entire escapade is that Donald Trump was absolutely right about the Russian collusion hoax—but no one will be held accountable or prosecuted for their treasonous crimes. In the meantime, post-pardon, my wife and I are still harassed with 11 baseless, meritless, frivolous, but highly sensationalized civil lawsuits in an effort to further drag my name through the mud and generate tens of thousands of dollars in attorney fees for us. You can help by going to StoneDefenseFund.com.