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A Timeline Of Events Surrounding The Russian Hack Narrative

A Timeline Of Events Surrounding The Russian Hack Narrative

An awesome timeline by reddit user RulerOfSlides:
Russia-Wiretapping hypotheses only timeline

I think I’ve got some of this worked out. The pieces are really starting to come together. First, what we learned recently:

  • Andrew McCabe gets manipulated/bribed into hiring a former MI6 agent to “research” (read: bullshit) the Trump dossier. Ties directly to the Clinton campaign (his wife received money from them or donated, iirc).
  • Hillary Clinton was confirmed to have access to intelligence and classified files after she left office as Secretary of State.
  • CrowdStrike recently redacted their statements that were used to support their claims of Russian interference in the election. They also were the only ones to look at the DNC’s servers; the FBI was prohibited to do so by the DNC itself.
  • Hillary Clinton and the head of CrowdStrike, Dimitri Alperovitch, were both ranking members of the Atlantic Council, a Soros-financed think tank.
  • Susan Rice requested that all intelligence relating to the Trumps (his whole family), gathered across a period of several years going back to 2013 (possibly earlier) be unmasked.
  • Jeh Johnson may also have been involved in unmasking Trump-related intelligence, but that connection is tenuous at best.
  • EDIT: I neglected to mention Evelyn Farkas, who accidentally disclosed the fact that the Obama administration had been spying on members of Trump’s campaign, as well as some of his friends is also a member of the Atlantic Council. She also had worked under the Clinton campaign since around 2015, and in her previous job dealt with Russia/Ukraine foreign policy.
  • EDIT II: Cernovich reported a few moments ago that three people close to Obama who had the authorization to unmask intelligence reports were Susan Rice, John Brennan, and Loretta Lynch – all three of whom were key players in the Russia narrative.
  • EDIT III: Developing possibility that Flynn and Trump may have cooperated to catch the spying apparatus/”Council of Evil” that Obama left behind, going off of a foreign intelligence tip. I have incorporated this into the timeline.
  • 4/3/2017 EDIT IV: Bloomberg now reporting on Rice’s unmasking efforts. The big takeaway here is that Nunes made a visit to the White House before his press conference to view the National Security Council systems that held the logs of Rice’s requests to unmask people that intelligence had been gathered on. I think this explains why Bannon was added to the NSC – Trump has eyes and ears in an area that he would otherwise have been blind to. It probably aided in gathering information about what was going on, too. (It’s also funny to see the media clinging to the literal definition of “wiretapping”). Adam Schiff also viewed these logs, hence his decided reluctance to properly comment on what was found.
  • 4/3/2017 EDIT V: Adding some small additional details that I uncovered from digging through the Podesta files. Podesta ID #34639, which better detectives than I concluded that this showed an effort at tying up Trump, Assange, and Russia. The screenshot is dead, sadly, but this happened in March 2016. Podesta ID #17020 also establishes a tenuous but still-present connection between Podesta and the Atlantic Council.
  • 4/4/2017 EDIT VI: As of a few hours ago, we now know slightly more about what happened with the fake Trump dossier. Steele was not paid directly by the FBI as originally speculated – that deal appears to have fallen through, but McCabe was closely involved in negotiating that payment, leaving the Clinton connection valid. The firm involved with it, Fusion GPS, began working on the dossier in September 2015, hired by an anti-Trump Republican donor. That deal was broken off some time after that, and then a Democratic supporter of Clinton started paying Fusion GPS to keep going, and this is the point where Steele was brought into the project.
  • 4/4/2017 EDIT VII: Contents of one of the Department of State emails (sent on November 21, 2009) recently declassified by the FBI indicate that Clinton’s infamous server was established to work around the intelligence-gathering systems that would later be used against President-elect Trump, or an ancestor to those systems. I unfortunately don’t remember who originally found this; I can’t be credited with this discovery – only integrating it into the timeline.
  • 4/5/2017 EDIT VIII: Apparently Susan Rice had a lot of friction with, of all the agencies, the NSA. One fellow ‘pede summarized this very nicely. I have a feeling that this gives Rogers adequate motive to go to Trump Tower about the unmasking on November 22 – she was horribly unpopular, possibly even coming to blows with Rogers himself.
  • 4/5/2017 EDIT IX: New information seems to implicate the one and only John Brennan as the man who ordered enhanced surveillance on key Trump allies, including General Flynn, Erik Prince (head of Blackwater and a top CIA critic), and Sean Hannity. Brennan was also the one to order Susan Rice to unmask those Trump allies. I’ve placed this in its rightful spot on the timeline.
  • 4/5/2017 EDIT X: Man, today is the gift that keeps on giving. Fox published an article describing that the intelligence reports involved here were uncomfortably detailed, but that’s not what I’m interested in. This report gives us a better understanding of when the unmasking campaign began, (concurrent with the Obama administration’s “investigation” into the DNC leaks) and tells us that only one agency would have the capability to fully trace back the paper trail that led back to Rice, as well as the fact that only one agency could approve unmasking requests – the NSA.
  • 4/6/2017 EDIT XI: Further information about Clinton’s continued access to classified material even after leaving her post as Secretary of State in 2013 has surfaced, for the purpose of “writing her memoir” (emphasis on air-quotes mine). Beyond Clinton, six staffers had access to the same classified intelligence. I have a feeling that the six people are on this list – specifically, the five people involved with management and strategy (Mook, Benenson, Renteria, Podesta, and Abedin) and Cheryl Mills. This would explain classified information ending up on Weiner’s laptop, and Mills’ request for partial immunity in the email investigation back in September.
  • 4/6/2017 EDIT XII: At the risk of making this seem implausible by not citing sources (who I’d like to keep private, though they are an active member of this community I have received permission to cite this source), it seems likely that Nunes discovered that he himself was unmasked by Brennan, McCabe, and/or Obama’s combined orders (there are three points where unmaskings were ordered, it would seem – by McCabe before the election, by Obama starting in December, and then again by Brennan after the new intelligence-dissemination rules went into effect in January) – that’s why he stepped away from the investigation. Nunes was on the Trump transition team as of December 1, 2016.
  • 4/8/2017 EDIT XIII: New Wikileaks release indicates that Guccifer 2.0, an individual supposedly responsible for leaking the DNC emails to Wikileaks (in addition to other doccuments) was neither Russian (with 97% certainty) and may have been a staffer named Warren Flood (or someone that stole his computer). Wikileaks does not indicate that the DNC knew Seth Rich was the leaker, however, because when Rich was discussed in Guccifer 2.0’s messages to a certain actress, he had been dead for over a month.
  • 4/12/2017 EDIT XIV: CNN accidentally admits (screenshot) that John Podesta had ties to Russia via the Podesta Group. The Podesta Group represents, among other things, the interests of Sberbank of Russia, which itself is owned by the Central Bank of Russia – which is part of the Russian government. The filing of the Podesta Group as a foreign agent is highly suspect on top of that. Perhaps the Russia narrative originated not out of revenge, but simply because the Clinton campaign (itself tied to Russia) assumed that Trump’s campaign was doing the exact same thing they were.
  • 4/18/2017 EDIT XV: I have been informed of an excellent summary of Obama-era wiretapping activities. Of note is that the single successful FISA request revolved around Carter Page’s alleged Russian connections, likely stemming from very close ties to the Russian government. This opened the door to Trump himself being officially spied on.
  • 4/18/2017 EDIT XVI: CNN accidentally admits, for the second time, more evil things. The Steele dossier was used by the FBI to justify FISA approval of surveillance of Carter Page. Bear in mind that Steele was under negotiation to be paid by Deputy Director McCabe for the dossier, and that Comey himself informed the Trump administration of what was in it. What does this mean? This means that the FBI knew it was full of shit (also why Steele was never paid), but it was still used in a court of law as evidence. Page is currently being leveraged because, being a Russian sympathizer, he is the weakest link in the Trump campaign and the most easily painted as a pro-Russian agent – and he was far removed from Trump’s inner circle. This is the length they had to go to to find some kind of Russian ties – faking evidence and hunting for Russian sympathizers, the latter of which was just found recently.
  • 4/23/2017 EDIT XVII: Kind of small, but still important – the Failing NYT confirmed that the FBI indeed attempted to pay Steele $50,000 for the dossier – if he could prove the claims in it. It appears that Carter Page’s visits to Moscow in 2016 – though they were innocuous, and though Page never met with Trump – were the legal foundation for much of the “Russian ties” claims (used for the FSIA request). The source of the Page-Russia connection, beyond Steele, was identified as Sergei Millian, a particularly shady Belarusian-American businessman. Page was also detested by the Trump campaign, and a cease-and-desist for calling himself a Trump advisor was sent to him in December 2016.
  • 4/25/2017 EDIT XVIII: Christopher Steele admitted that the claims in his dossier were 100% unverified. Apparently he’s going to court over the fact that the contents of the dossier were printed; there’s also some additional details of interest in here. The “hacker” that Steele claimed was involved in all this was Aleksej Gubarev, who runs a web-hosting company, XBT Holdings. Additionally, it seems that it was not Steele himself who released the dossier to the media; instead, Fusion GPS took it and leaked it to try and damage the Trump administration’s credibility. Steele did have less formal communications with the media, though. We now have a place for the meeting between Steele and the FBI – Rome, Italy, at some unknown time.
  • 5/13/2017 EDIT XIX: Big league news, if true. A Russian citizen has come forward and claimed that the FBI wanted to frame him for the DNC leaks, offering US citizenship and a dismissal of charges in return. The FBI apparently visited him several times – notably “mid-November” 2016, and February 7, 2017. He was arrested on unrelated charges on October 5, 2016. The relevant dates have been added.
  • 5/15/2017 EDIT XX: The family of Seth Rich hired a private investigator, who today announced that there is evidence he was in contact with Wikileaks prior to his death. There is evidence, too, that local police were told to step back from the investigation into his murder.
  • 5/17/2017 EDIT XXI: More information from one of the chans about Seth Rich. Also some potentially interesting deaths that occurred around the same timeframe – Joe Montano, the DNC chairman before Wasserman-Schultz and aide to Tim Kaine (July 25, 2016); and Shawn Lucas, head of a class-action lawsuit against Wasserman-Schultz for rigging the DNC primary (August 2, 2016).
  • 5/17/2017 EDIT XXII: Lucky timing on this. I was just about to go to bed, and happened across someone else on this domreddit linking Podesta email number 25651, which describes the best approach to stopping Trump as leveraging his “bromance with Putin.” This was sent by Brent Budowsky, a Huffington Post contributor and a writer for The Hill. Looks like Syria might have been one of the deciding factors on getting the Clinton campaign to turn against Russia. What is more significant is that this email was sent on December 21, 2015 – a whole three months before the earliest construction of the “Russian hacker” narrative.

My timeline, approximately:

  • EDIT XXII: The December 21, 2015 email exchange between Bret Budowsky and John Podesta occurs, touching upon ISIS and the continuation of Obama-era foreign policy surrounding Syria, in which Budowsky advises Podesta to make a departure from then-current policy for fear of it becoming political baggage. A notable quote: “But at the least she should not be branding and infecting herself with Obama’s policy towards Syria and ISIS by offering such high and direct praise for it.” I suspect this is the genesis of the Russia narrative, and the reason why the Clinton campaign went so far down the anti-Russia path.
  • The Obama administration most likely had been gathering intelligence on every GOP candidate – either as part of their expanded intel operations or as an intentional, focused sabotage plan. This information would likely have been contained in the President’s Daily Briefings, which Nunes is rumored to have investigated on March 22 – just before making the announcement that Trump’s wiretapping claims were correct. EDIT IV: Though Nunes may have viewed the President’s Daily Briefings at some point in his investigation, or intends to, it seems that the linchpin for Nunes was viewing the logs of Rice’s unmasking attempts.
  • Clinton got wind of this investigation through her ability to access intelligence files and other means (i.e., direct ties to people in DC who were active in intelligence-gathering). This is where the “Russian hacker” narrative began, possibly bolstered by her relationship with Alperovitch – who is a Russian expat and absolutely loathes Vladimir Putin. She may have built a narrative out of CrowdStrike’s report, hopeful that the intel-gathering by the Obama administration would uncover further information about Russian interference. EDIT: Evelyn Farkas, who had been involved in Russia/Ukraine affairs, may also have been involved with this, again through the Atlantic Council. EDIT V: Upon digging through the Podesta files, it would seem that the Trump/Russia connection narrative was constructed just before March 16, 2016. The Atlantic Council had a meeting about “combating far-right extremism in Europe” on March 22 – less than a week later. I think it’s possible that the Atlantic Council meeting on the 22nd was when the Clinton campaign, represented by John Podesta (who was in DC the day before the meeting, according to this – Clinton herself was in Washington state) exchanged information with CrowdStrike. EDIT VII: Since we can now establish that Clinton was aware of a covert spying system as far back as 2009, it’s possible that she counted on that same system to uncover some kind of Trump/Russia connection. EDIT XI: Now we also know that there’s a strong possibility that six of Clinton’s staffers also had access to classified intelligence – I wouldn’t be surprised if they were involved in dissemination, either.
  • On June 12, 2016, Julian Assange teases the release of the DNC’s emails, some three weeks after the latest possible date they could have been collected.
  • June 14, 2016 is the earliest date that has been connected to the official release of CrowdStrike’s report on the DNC “hack.” It may have been released the day after, too.
  • EDIT XIII: Guccifer 2.0 emerges onto the scene on June 15, 2016, and claims responsibility for the DNC hacks that were teased by Julian Assange barely three days earlier. Signs indicate that this may have been some kind of damage control by the DNC, coming off of the Podesta-Atlantic Council-CrowdStrike exchange that likely happened the previous month – basically, releasing “additional” information while lazily incorporating Russian “fingerprints” (i.e., writing the metadata in Cyrillic) into those releases as a means of shifting the blame to Russian influence. This is the second-earliest point at which “Russian ties” had been discussed publicly, and I have a feeling that the DNC took marching orders from the Clinton campaign (who had a discussion about Trump/Putin/Assange ties two months before, likely because they sensed a threat) in trying to sabotage Trump. Based off of some things that Guccifer 2.0 misinterpreted, it seems that he had zero connection to CrowdStrike’s report aside from reading it, so some insulation existed between the DNC and Clinton campaign.
  • EDIT XX: On July 10, 2016, Seth Conrad Rich, a DNC staffer, is murdered in Washington D.C.
  • On July 22, 2016, Wikileaks begins the release of 44,000 emails from the DNC spanning a period from January 2015 to May 25, 2016.
  • EDIT III: Oh boy. This – roughly July or August – is about the point at which, should the possibility laid out by Jonathan Langdale be correct (which Flynn’s apparent “thumb’s-up” lends extra credence to), Russia was responsible for approaching the Trump campaign and making them aware of the surveillance that was going on. Basically, Trump and Flynn laid out a trap for the “Council of Evil” (which I’ve come to call the Lynch/Rice/McCabe/Brennan/Clapper circle that seems to have been the main people involved with the Russia narrative) and the deep state, in which Flynn would be made to seem untrustworthy in order to draw out and embolden leakers. They couldn’t do anything about it, like go public with it, because it would jeopardize their chances of winning the election and thus prevent the campaign from investigating it further. Additionally, the FBI’s actions with Clinton made them seem untrustworthy; it was readily obvious as well that the DoJ was compromised after Bill’s infamous meeting with Lynch on the tarmac – meaning they had nowhere to turn but inwards.
  • CrowdStrike’s report, which formed the backbone of Russian hacking allegations, found its way through the three-letter agencies and eventually indirectly caused the last FISA request over a Trump-controlled server to go through. [EDIT III: This may have been motivated by Russia’s detection of Trump’s surveillance as hypothesized by Langdale] Several previous requests had been made, probably because the former (above EDIT III) bullet point happened in around June or July. The FBI found nothing while investigating it. EDIT II: Loretta Lynch’s ability to view unmasked intelligence documents may have played a role in allowing the FISA request to go through – likely as a way of building evidence for the brewing Russian hackers narrative.
  • EDIT XXI: On August 9, 2016, Wikileaks officially offers $20,000 for information about Seth Rich’s murder.
  • EDIT VI: At around this point, the funding for Fusion GPS to create the Trump dossier dries up, shifting away from the unknown Democrat. Clinton, fearing that the Russian hacking narrative is on shaky grounds, indirectly pays off Andrew McCabe to come up with some kind of dirt on Trump. McCabe then begins negotiating hiring Fusion GPS, who has brought Christopher Steele, a former MI6 agent, into their investigation. The money never makes it to Fusion GPS, and Steele spends several months “working” on it, sends it off to the mainstream media, and it floats around for several months until Buzzfeed publishes it as a means of undermining the Trump administration. Bear in mind that, by this point, the dossier had been in development for over a year.
  • McCabe believes Steele’s then-incomplete dossier, as well as CrowdStrike’s claims, and then begins to plan a soft overthrow of the Trump administration starting with the weakest link – Mike Flynn. Flynn is later forced out due to his own faults, [EDIT III: My original assumption here may be untrue, and this may have been part of a grander plan] but the assault doesn’t stop there. Comey may have been aware of McCabe’s actions, but ignored them. [EDIT XVII: This has been basically confirmed – the FBI knew of the dossier.]
  • EDIT XIX: Yevgeniy Nikulin, a Russian national, is arrested on October 5, 2016 by the Russian government over unrelated hacking charges (on the order of the US government). Two days later (October 7), the DNI (Clapper) and DHS (Jeh Johnson) jointly stated that Russia was behind the DNC server hack, as well as the Podesta leaks.
  • On October 7, 2016, Wikileaks begins releasing the Podesta emails, covering a period from approximately 2006 to March 21, 2016.
  • In the third Presidential debate on October 19, 2016 Clinton makes the first public accusation that “Russian hackers” interfered with the election.
  • This is about the point where the media begins to go crazy over the “Russian ties” allegations, bolstered in some form or another by the CrowdStrike claims, Steele’s dossier, and quite possibly leaks from McCabe’s anti-Trump crusade in a kind of Deep Throat Jr. situation. I have a suspicion that McCabe and his FBI-based allies (the “McCabe 16” mentioned in the True Pundit article) were the source of the narrative. EDIT II: The CIA under Brennan – because of his access to unmasked intelligence reports – may also have been involved with leaks to the media, especially via the Washington Post, which some have deemed the “mouthpiece of the CIA.”
  • On October 22, 2016, Gavin MacFayden – Seth Rich’s rumored contact at Wikileaks – dies of lung cancer in London. He had apparently been ill for quite some time (I personally don’t consider his death suspicious – only that it makes it harder to piece together the truth).
  • EDIT IX: This is approximately Election Day. If the anonymous sources are indeed correct, then this is the point at which CIA director John Brennan orders enhanced surveillance on people in Trump’s inner circle – like Mike Flynn (already targeted by the FBI under McCabe), Erik Prince, and Sean Hannity. He may have also provided Rice with the specific documents or directions to find them that were later disseminated at the Obama administration’s behest starting sometime in December. Flynn was chosen due to the ease at which he could be leveraged; Hannity was chosen due to his apparent close ties to both Trump and Julian Assange, and Prince may have been focused on due to a long-standing personal feud with Brennan. The enhanced surveillance continues from November 8 to January 20. Note as well that this failed to turn up anything of note, as Director Clapper left office on January 20 and reported on March 6, 2017 that no evidence of Trump-Russia ties existed. In other words, the enhanced surveillance failed.
  • EDIT XIX: Nikulin receives his first visit from the FBI in “mid-November,” mere days before John McCain learns of Steele’s dossier.
  • EDIT VI: Thanks to the Daily Caller, we now know that John McCain learned about the dossier at the Halifax International Security Forum, which took place between November 18 and November 20, 2016. The person involved in bringing it to his attention was Sir Andrew Wood. Wood was a former ambassador for the UK to Russia, and knew Steele from his time at MI6. I have a suspicion that the exact date the discussion about the dossier happened was November 19, because Wood was involved in a panel on “Maidan, Crimea and the Obstacles to Democracy in Ukraine” on that date according to the agenda. Wood flew back to the UK, met with Steele, and handed the dossier off to McCain between November 19 (the last date I can confirm with reasonable certainty Wood was present in Halifax) and December 9, when McCain gave the dossier to James Comey during a meeting. Comey then briefed Trump on the existence of the dossier – which suggests to me that he was unaware of McCabe’s actions in trying to hire Fusion GPS – and once that meeting became known to the press, BuzzFeed published the complete dossier. EDIT XVI: Now we know that Steele’s dossier, likely the complete version handed to Comey, was used to bolster the FBI’s FISA request. Highly suspicious, and indicates the document was laundered.
  • EDIT X: Early December 2016. The Obama administration announces the beginning of an investigation into the DNC hacks, and the requests for unmasked intelligence reports relating to this begin at around this point. I think it’s likely that someone higher-up than Susan Rice ordered the unmasking, as the aforementioned paper trail through the NSA would have been immediately suspicious to the incoming Trump administration. This may also explain Rogers’ visit to Trump Tower, as unmasking in a less official manner had been going on for many months up to this point – this would merely be the latest effort to direct it at the Trump administration. I suspect the higher-up who ordered Rice to do this was most likely John Brennan; he intended Rice to be his fall guy when Trump caught up to what was going on.
  • The real unmasking begins once Obama amends EO 12333 to encourage free sharing of information between the three-letter agencies, on January 12. The new rules were signed by Clapper on December 15, so it’s reasonable to assume they had been floating around for a decently long time before that. Less than a month before Clapper agrees to them, NSA head Admiral Rogers visits Trump in an infamous “unscheduled meeting,” which draws ire from the rest of the intelligence community. It’s obvious at this point that this was in order to warn the new administration of what was going on behind closed doors, likely including the information sharing.
  • Susan Rice orders the unmasking of all Trump-related intelligence at some point after the information sharing rules go into effect. This allowed intelligence previously collected on Trump and his family to be widely disseminated between the FBI, CIA, and NSA, and thus exponentially increased the chances of leakers spreading that information to the press – which can (and did) happen. McCabe was involved in this due to his desire to force Flynn and then Trump out of office. Jeh Johnson may also have been involved in the unmasking process as well, but it’s unclear as to what his position was.
  • EDIT III: The trap from before the election was set; Flynn volunteered to be the fall guy as already a kind of black sheep in the administration (by being the sole Democrat), and he baited the intelligence community into going after him just before the new inter-agency intelligence sharing rules took effect. It worked like a charm – the media latched on to it, and Flynn handed Trump his resignation letter as the whole intelligence community fell for it hook, line, and sinker. It was now obvious who the leakers were and where they were coming from.
  • EDIT XIX: Nikulin receives his second visit from the FBI on February 7, 2017. Note that this happened after the unmasking scandal began falling apart in the waining days of the Obama administration.
  • EDIT II: Cernovich revealed tonight that H. R. McMaster was responsible for discovering Rice’s actions, and he was responsible for sending an aide to Nunes in order to blow the lid open on what was going on. This happened between February 20 (when he assumed office) and March 22 (when Nunes held his press conference). EDIT III: Flynn, it should be noted, resigned seven days before McMaster took office; I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he uncovered what Rice was doing in just over a month – Flynn’s dismissal drew all the termites out of the woodwork, and emboldened them in attempting to leak new, “damaging” information. The only effect this had was to highlight the leakers.
  • The White House figures out all of this, or some key portions of this, between January 20 and March 4. Thus follows Trump’s series of tweets discussing “wiretapping,” and the rest is history. EDIT IV: It wasn’t until early March that Rice was pinned down as the unmasker by lawyers at the White House, so I tend to think that Trump reported on “wiretapping” almost as soon as the smoking gun was found.




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