By Hans Mahncke (originally published on September 6, 2022)

Lawyers for Igor Danchenko, who was the primary source for British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s infamous dossier on Donald Trump in 2016, have filed a motion to dismiss charges brought against Danchenko by special counsel John Durham. Durham alleges that Danchenko lied to the FBI about his sources used in the dossier. Danchenko is scheduled to stand trial next month.

While filing a motion to dismiss is a routine legal maneuver that the trial judge will almost certainly reject, some of the arguments presented by Danchenko’s attorneys present Durham with a number of new problems he will need to overcome if he is to secure a conviction. 

Earlier this year, Durham suffered a humiliating loss when a jury swiftly acquitted Clinton 2016 presidential campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann on a similar charge of lying to the FBI. He will be mindful of not losing another case, which would considerably increase the pressure for Durham to end his probe.Continue Reading

Originally Published 9/5/22

Thanks to Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, we know that a large number of agencies within the Biden administration actively coordinated with a variety of social media platforms to censor and suppress posts about COVID-19 that they deemed to be misinformation.

Schmitt has “received a number of documents that clearly prove that the federal government has an incestuous relationship with social media companies and clearly coordinate to censor freedom of speech.” In a new filing, Schmitt called the censorship activities “a massive, sprawling federal ‘Censorship Enterprise,’ which includes dozens of federal officials across at least eleven federal agencies.”Continue Reading

By Jeff Carlson & Hans Mahncke

Originally Published 8/31/22

We now know with certainty that the FBI actively worked to alter the outcome of a U.S. presidential election.

As the larger ramifications of their actions are being digested, some additional questions come to mind. How did the FBI know the New York Post was about to run a story on the laptop? Was the FBI’s cover-up of Hunter Biden’s laptop also related to President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial? And why is it that the FBI had a physical office located within Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau since June 2016?

And finally the big question: Was the subsequent FBI investigation of Hunter Biden designed to actually protect him and his father, President Joe Biden—and, perhaps more importantly, protect the FBI?Continue Reading

By Hans Mahncke (originally published on August 31, 2022)

In a late-night filing on Aug. 30 in response to former President Donald Trump’s motion for an independent party to scrutinize documents seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate, the Department of Justice (DOJ) urged a judge not to grant the motion.

Much attention has focused on a photograph attached to the DOJ’s filing. The photograph shows a number of documents marked “Top Secret” laid out on a carpet at Mar-a-Lago. The DOJ’s accompanying filing claims that the items in the photograph were recovered from the “45 office,” which it defines as “the former President’s office space at the Premises.”

Trump and his legal team have insisted that he declassified the documents in his possession and, therefore, it doesn’t matter what the markings on the papers are. The DOJ appears to have been prepared for that argument.Continue Reading

By Hans Mahncke (originally published on August 29, 2022)

Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast that Facebook censored the Hunter Biden laptop story because of warnings it had received from the FBI.

In response to Zuckerberg’s statement, the FBI issued a vague statement late on Aug. 26, claiming that it had warned Facebook of “potential threat information.” Notably, the FBI didn’t dispute Zuckerberg’s account.

Any kind of collusion or cooperation between government actors and private companies to censor U.S. citizens is a direct infringement of the First Amendment. But what the FBI did may be much worse than that as it now appears that the bureau actively interfered in the 2020 election to gift Joe Biden the presidency.Continue Reading

By Hans Mahncke (originally published on August 22, 2022)

The Russiagate saga went into overdrive in May 2017 when President Donald Trump fired FBI director James Comey, marking the start of a two-year investigation that seriously hobbled Trump’s presidency. If we were to believe the corporate media, it was the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who came up with the idea of firing Comey.

Not so, says Kushner in his new memoir. The real story of Comey’s firing is that Trump noticed that something “was off” about Comey when he testified before Congress in the weeks ahead of his firing. Over dinner with Kushner and Melania and Ivanka Trump, President Trump told the others that Comey’s testimony was “erratic and inauthentic” and started drafting a letter firing Comey.

Trump’s intuition was remarkably accurate. As we recently found out from documents released as part of the Durham investigation, Comey lied to Congress during those crucial weeks, talking up the Russia investigation while concealing the fact that all investigative leads had collapsed.Continue Reading

Originally published on 8/19/22

Following the FBI’s raid of the residence of former President Donald Trump, there’s been much speculation about the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) motivation. Was it done to prevent Trump from running again in 2024, or was the raid related to documents and evidence surrounding the Jan. 6 commission?

While these factors may have had some bearing on the FBI’s raid, some entirely different, and potentially larger, factors may be at play.

It’s likely that the FBI’s raid was driven by intelligence community fears over information that was contained within those documents relating to the Russiagate hoax.Continue Reading

By Hans Mahncke (originally published on June 21, 2022)

World Health Organization (WHO) Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus reportedly admitted to a senior European politician that the virus that causes COVID-19 most likely came out of a Wuhan lab. The Daily Mail reports that Tedros made the admission citing a catastrophic lab accident.

The disclosure comes on the heels of a WHO investigative report that was published earlier this month, concluding that the pandemic may have started at a Wuhan lab and that Chinese authorities have been blocking access to crucial data.

At the same time, Jeffrey Sachs, leader of the Lancet Commission on COVID-19, now says that he is convinced that the pandemic started in a lab and that SARS-CoV-2 was created with the aid of U.S. biotechnology.Continue Reading

By Hans Mahncke (originally published June 8, 2020)

A newly released FBI affidavit implicates the president of the Brookings Institution, retired four-star Marine Gen. John Allen, in an alleged backchannel effort in 2017 to lobby then-Trump administration national security adviser H.R. McMaster, as well as other U.S. government officials, on behalf of the government of Qatar.

Allen is alleged to have made false statements and concealed documents from the FBI in connection with his lobbying efforts.

He has been put on leave by Brookings, whose website states: “As of June 8, 2022, John R. Allen is on leave from the Brookings Institution.”Continue Reading

By Hans Mahncke (May 31, 2022)

The Russiagate saga began in early 2016 as a scheme by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign to vilify her rival, Donald Trump, as an agent of the Kremlin. Clinton’s scheme comprised two prongs: former British spy Christopher Steele’s fictitious dossier and Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann’s false Alfa Bank data.

While special counsel John Durham’s Russiagate investigation, having focused on those two prongs, is now in serious jeopardy with the acquittal of Sussmann, very little attention has been paid to how the FBI weaponized Clinton’s scheme to turn up the heat on Trump.

Documents made public at Sussmann’s trial add to a growing body of evidence that Clinton’s scheme gradually converged with FBI leadership’s own scheme. What started out as a political smear campaign carried out by a political candidate became co-opted by the nation’s top law enforcement agency to not only damage a sitting president, but to try to remove him from office.Continue Reading