3 July 2020 -Maxwell, Weiner and more

Someday, hopefully, the victims of the Jeffrey Epstein pedophile pyramid will find some peace on this earth. Unfortunately, before then, and before we promise cheques to them that our bodies can’t guarantee – we must find all the perpetrators. Wherever they might creep. And regardless of whose toes we may need to step on.

The arrest of Ghislaine Maxwell yesterday was a most welcome development in the process. Now, we need to reframe her usefulness, into something actually useful. What does that look like you might ask?

Let’s start by framing the questions in the present. There are girls & boys caught in pedophile rings, currently and actively being abused and trafficked around the globe. Ghislaine Maxwell must certainly have answers to who and where they might be located, or at least where and to who – authorities start applying their resources.

Let’s not pretend that Ghislaine Maxwell only has answers to characters from the past.

Who are the list of unknown, wealthy enablers, abusers, and facilitators? Ghislaine Maxwell has luxuriated in the same swamp as these reptiles, so she has plenty of the information we need access to immediately. It is time time to shed a little light into so much darkness.

If the conclusion of Ghislaine Maxwell’s case by the Southern District of New York is merely a jail sentence for Maxwell and no follow-up investigations into other parties then we have failed the children I began this article highlighting.

My optimism is limited. In the first 24 hours, post-Maxwell’s custody and still no-one in mainstream media is screaming for answers to these questions.

The Southern District of New York is itself the subject of much political claim and counter claim at the moment.

Is it a coincidence that the removal of the previous SDNY Berman has coincided so quickly with the arrest of Maxwell?

Well the answer, at this point, depends on which side of the #EpsteinDidntKillHimself divide you reside. We all need a little more clarity on the reasoning and timing of this decision.

It is the same fired SDNY that many have accused of stonewalling the release of materials on former congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Weiner just so happens to have been convicted and jailed for his interactions with a 15-year-old girl. If the stonewalling is true, the question is why?

Given the speed with which Audrey Strauss, the Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, pursued Maxwell – I ‘m at least hopeful of news on this laptop very soon. It is a sad state of affairs that unless a subject has specific reference to Donald Trump, the media are not likely to dedicate significant resources to inform you about it.

The unclassified FBI report from 2016 below details how important all this might be. What is clear, is that the mainstream press is not pursuing it, post the installation of the new DA in SDNY. Nor post the arrest of Maxwell for the matter.

In the current climate, what the Press choose not to pursue is often more enlightening than the narratives that they do.

It is astounding to me given the level of leakage pouring out of the intelligence services during the last 4 years, that very little has come to light on the contents of this laptop. Much chatter about the e-mails but very little about any other substantive material found. Maybe there isn’t anything there but it would be nice to put it to bed for once and for all.

As we can see, from the title of the above document, the FBI case file ID frames what was on the laptop – as an investigation into the producers of child pornography. Not possessors but producers. That is interesting. Maybe it’s a quirk of FBI language but worth mentioning all the same.

In hindsight, I still don’t know if it was colossally good timing or bad timing for the general public that this seizure and initial investigation took place in October 2016 a few weeks before the 2016 Presidential election.

Obviously, if the investigation had not been during the final weeks of the Presidential election campaign and that fraught environment perhaps the original investigators may not have had their hands tied to such a degree.

Due to the nature of the warrant, the agent investigating needed to be of the view the header of an e-mail gave him probable cause that if he opened an e-mail it would contain CP which I take to mean child pornography. As a result, the below types of correspondence were not initially examined in Oct 2016.

a) No substantive investigation of e-mails between Abedin and Clinton in Oct 2016

b) No substantive investigation of emails between Abedin and her husband in Oct 2016

By June 2018 when the Inspector General and DOJ report rolled around, their report below indicates they questioned Randy Coleman, the Assistant Director of Counter-Terrorism in the FBI, about the specific contents of Weiner’s Laptop, IPAD, and iPhone and it broadly fell into 2 categories

Wiener’s sexually explicit communications with a 15-year-old girl and 340,000 plus emails. However, other highly inflammatory information from Coleman’s own notes is not particularly explicitly explored. And by the time of the IG Investigation is vaguely remembered by a series of people including Coleman and senior FBI leaders.(See the Report excerpt below).

It is this other information under two sub-headings that may be relevant today. One is not necessarily related to the other, I might add, but are listed one after another in the IG notation of Coleman’s Oct 4, 2016 notes.

1. Hillary Clinton and the Clinton foundation
2. Crimes against Children

We need to reframe questions about contents of this Laptop to refocus investigative efforts around these two points. The FBI and IG don’t delve sufficiently deep into what the FBI were referring to here.

Instead, the conversation and framing revolve around e-mail belonging to Weiner and some e-mail belonging to his wife Huma Abedin stored on the laptop. For the unaware Abedin provides the link to Hillary Clinton, as one of her long time aides and trusted confidantes.

Let me also say that nothing in the FBI reports point to a link between the Clinton emails and the explicit content on Weiner’s laptop. That we know of that is. But the questions about the full contents of this laptop need to be asked and asked thoroughly in light of these FBI notes below.

We should note, that this FBI investigation played second fiddle to the concurrent investigation that was running in relation to Russian election interference, which we know now, spiraled into spying of the Trump campaign. In turn, this led to 3 years of Russia Gate and Russia collusion conspiracy theories. Suffice to say, there was a lot going on in October 2016.

The FBI interviews by the IG, and in the IG report above, admit as much. It is amazing to me, that the same Federal cast of characters is again seemingly centrally involved in the Weiner laptop investigation. Comey, McCabe, Strok, Page & Priestap all crop in the above IG investigative correspondence.

The IG report finds that the Russia investigation was prioritized at the possible expense of the investigation into Anthony Weiner’s laptop. A possible explanation for this is that the FBI gives the impression, to the IG at least, that ” email’s had been found in lots of other places that ultimately weren’t worth pursuing “

That is quite an interesting statement considering that Comey re-opened an investigation into Hilary Clinton’s e-mail issues, approximately 10 -14 days after the Weiner laptop, was finally and successfully backed up and scanned. The contents were obviously worrying enough. To do this, a week before a Presidential election, knowing full well, that doing so, could influence the result – are not the actions of the unconcerned.

I mean approximately 340,000 e-mails were found on Weiner’s laptop according to the above official documents, a big portion of which were between Huma Abedin & Hillary Clinton and various 3rd parties that were copied on some of the correspondence. A small number were much later found to have also contained classified information.

Obviously, as Comey has stated, what the FBI found on the Weiner comms devices was the tipping point that forced Comey to re-open the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton at so sensitive a time.

Imagine if it came to public light that the FBI had prior knowledge of the Abedin & Clinton correspondence on Weiner’s laptop and did absolutely nothing to investigate it.

This was on top of the controversy already engulfing her then, on emails deleted from her private e-mail server. Up to May 2016, no answer had been provided to the public as to whether those other 31,000 emails deleted by Hillary Clinton as personal had been or could be recovered. Based on the Weiner findings, the FBI obtained a new search warrant to allow them to review Abedin’s emails in late October 2016.

Again, how very problematic it would have been for Mr. Comey and the FBI, if this leaked out after the election. Viewed from this aspect, the Clinton investigation might be seen as an ass-saving exercise by the upper echelons of the FBI.

Remember, Comey thought Clinton was a dead certainty to win the Presidential election – he has admitted this in his book ” A Higher Loyalty “

“Like many others, I was surprised when Donald Trump was elected president. I had assumed from media polling that Hillary Clinton was going to win. I have asked myself many times since if I was influenced by that assumption. I don’t know. Certainly not consciously, but I would be a fool to say it couldn’t have had an impact on me.”

I would say you’d have to be a fool to believe he wasn’t influenced by his underlying assumption. It could be argued that the FBI investigation was really a pretense of an investigation. Not dissimilar to a National Security Advisor emailing herself in the midst of her last moments in office. Futile but the appearance of doing something nonetheless.

While the investigation was opened at a very inconvenient time – very little seems to have come out of it. Specifically in relation to the Weiner laptop and how it interfaced with the broader Clinton investigation.

We should mention, that Clinton can make the perfectly plausible argument that she has no control over who or what device Abedin used to open her e-mails. And that the activities of Abedin’s husband are in no way connected to her. What is not in doubt is that the contents of this Laptop are still under a cloud of suspicion 4 years later.

Is there a connection between contents on Weiner’s laptop and Ghislaine Maxwell?

The answers reside in both the Southern District of New York and a cell with faulty CCTV coverage.

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