Continuing on from yesterday’s article: identification of the April 25-26, 2017 Strzok Lync messages requires prior solution of a difficult problem in walkafyre’s remarkable program to identify the redacted subjects of all the Mueller 302s: see his site here.
In volume 10 of the Mueller 302 releases, on pages 591, 593 and 595, there were three distinctive 302s, all of which were totally redacted except for the first paragraph. All three looked much like the excerpt shown below. Seemingly impenetrable.
The three interviews (like only a small minority of 302s) had been classified “SECRET//NOFORN” under “Reason: 1.4b” and had been declassified on August 5, 2020. In all three 302s, everything except the first paragraph was totally redacted. Even the exact interview dates (almost uniquely in Mueller corpus) had been redacted, though the drafting dates (March 29, 2017, April 26, 2017 and May 22, 2017) and filing dates (April 3, 2017; May 5, 2017 and June 5, 2017) were not. The target’s surname was 5 characters in length, while his full name was 15 characters in length. (Latter requires inspection of paragraph indents - not shown here.)
The Bates numbers of the three 302s are B5325, B5327 and B5329. Walkafyre observed early on that the Bates numbers were locally in alphabetical order. Like five decks of cards, each cut a couple of times, then re-assembled. These three 302s occurred in a very interesting range: B5319 (September 14, 2016) was convincingly identified by walkafyre as Alexandra Chalupa and B5331 (September 26, 2016) firmly identified also by walkafyre as Oleg Deripaska, though both are heavily to totally redacted. These are both interesting analyses that I’ll try to write up. While the order is mostly by surname, occasionally a 302 is ordered by first name. So we’re looking for someone with a surname or first name in range Cha-Der, with a 5-character surname and full name (maybe with middle initial, maybe not) of 15 characters: 6 character first name if initial used, 9 character first name if not. The 6-character first name is the more likely.
Earlier in 2020, the DOJ had released a list of Mueller interviews and dates of interviews, though most names were redacted. For each of the three 302s in question, there was a redacted interview one day earlier (first two only shown below). Thus the interview dates (redacted in the 302s) can be identified as the March 28, 2017, April 25, 2017 and May 19, 2017 interviews in Mueller list with high probability/near certainty. There was only one April 25, 2017. It appears likely to be associated with the Strzok Lync message (though this was not part of the original identification.)
The May 19, 2017 interview, listed by Mueller as shown below, almost certainly corresponds to the 302 drafted on May 22, 2017.
Still not much to go on.
The answer was in redacted footnote 5 to Chapter 6 of the Nunes Report, which had stated that “ongoing lines of effort include (1) continued oversight of DOJ and FBI (see Appendix H for.relevant correspondence); (2) inquiries into the State Department's handling of information from Steele, including the dossier[4]; and (3) post-election anti-Trump research by Steele and/or Fusion GPS[5]”.
The citation in Footnote 5, shown below, was to the leader of the Penn Quarter Group, known to be Democrat operative Daniel Jones, and in the middle stated “in late March 2017, Jones met with FBI regarding [Penn Quarter Group]. Jones reportedly told the FBI that Penn Quarter “was being funded by 7 to 10 wealthy donors in New York and California, who had provided approximately $50 million”, that Penn Quarter had “secured the services of Steele, his associate [maybe Chris Burrows], and Fusion GPS to continue exposing Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential election” and planned to “share the information” with Congress and the press, also offering to provide its holdings to FBI, citing “[Daniel Jones], FD-302, Mar. 28, 2017”.
Jones’ surname has 5 characters; his full name with initial (Daniel J. Jones) has 15 characters. From this, we can conclusively say that Daniel “Dan” Jones was the subject of not just the March 28, 2017 interview, but also interviews on April 25, 2017 and May 19, 2017 - the latter only a few days after appointment of Mueller.
Now that we know that Dan Jones was the interviewee for these three 302s, an obvious question is why these interviews were unusually accorded SECRET/NOFORN status? Why should a Democrat operative and Fusion GPS client be entitled to identity protection not afforded to others?
In any event, re-visiting the Strzok Lync message at the top, we can now fill in the remaining redaction. Strzok stated: “Need background on [Dan Jones]. Would he take his write up on Manafort that he gave us to the press? Would his subsources?”
One other text from April 25, 2017 was already in the Grassley production of Strzok texts: an inquiry about in between the two April 25 Lync messages, asking whether the “source [was] available for recontact?”
Now that we know that Strzok’s Lync messages of April 25-26, 2017 were about Dan Jones, let’s go back and see if, by any remote chance, details of the March 28, 2017 or May 25, 2017 meetings between FBI and Jones have somehow passed by the FBI censors.
Sure enough, on March 28, 2017, REDACTED reported to Strzok that he “just left a meeting with the current Fusion GPS client who wants to share their holdings”. But the redactions are important - they refer to “the list of all [XXXX] related to CROSSFIRE and REDACTED”. What is being hidden? SSCI, which, with the FBI, was more or less ground zero of the lawfare insurrection, was “pinging” FBI for information. (All three Lync versions are identically redacted in this case.)
However, there was nothing in the (heavily culled) Lync messages from the few days around May 19, 2017 that appears connected to the Dan Jones interview, though these texts from opening days of Mueller are interesting:
FBI agent Vandeu….. (SM: identification by readers requested) told Strzok that they had the LHM (Letterhead Memorandum) on a unknown CHS that they “will push in light of overnight news on Assange” - which was that Sweden had dropped the spurious rape investigation. A few days later (May 22), they note that PC [Public Corruption] squad at WFO is planning to open the (REDACTED) case. The long comment on May 23 was about negotiations for SSCI to talk to Steele. And on May 26, they want to get in touch with the disloyal “analyst at the WH who might have the read out on the Trump-Kislyak/Lavrov meeting”. Is this an early avatar of Eric Ciaramella?
As a temporary summary, in the past year, we learned a lot about Dan Jones, through his important, even pivotal, role in perpetuating the Alfa Bank hoax through 2017. In spring 2017, Jones had even been retained by McCain’s Armed Services Committee to report to them on the Alfa Bank allegations (which actual specialists at the FBI had disdained.) The information that Dan Jones, in association with Fusion, was simultaneously disseminating a dossier report on Manafort - a dossier that has remained concealed by FBI and Senate Intelligence Committee to this day - is new information. We have previously had occasional glimpses of this dossier (e.g. in Steele’s FBI interview in September 2017 six months later), but the document provided by Dan Jones to the FBI in April 2017 - the very eve of Mueller investigation - remains suspiciously concealed.
In next post, I’ll see if we can figure out which FBI agents were involved in the Dan Jones interview. One is obvious, but it’s interesting to be able to prove it. It’s a small issue, but pondering this question raises some other questions. In future posts, I’ll also consider other information about the “Dan Jones Dossier”.
Update (Dec 5, 2022): The identification of Dan Jones as the March 28, 2017 was confirmed by Jones himself in a letter to FBI that Jones included as an attachment to a pleading in the Alfa Bank case. Jones stated that he had been “assured” by the FBI Special Agents that “his identity would be protected from exposure and that any information Mr. Jones provided to the FBI would not be associated with him”. Given that Jones had no first hand knowledge of anything, was actively political and was actively trying to disseminate rumors and uncorroborated allegations in order to undermine incoming administration, why would he be entitled to any special protection?
Search this piece for Manafort: https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/just-released-trump-russia-documents-show-anti-trump
Re: the infamous NYT's Feb 14, 2017 fake anti-Trump report.
Question on the table is, who leaked all of these fabricated lies to the NYT's. Certainly wasn't Peter Strzok.
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Doc is here:: https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Annotated%20New%20York%20Times%20Article.pdf
In 2007 Jones joined intel committee staff of Diane Feinstein. Wrote Senate “Torture Report” was lauded by left , and played by Adam Driver in The Report movie. Penn Quarter was formed to “expose foreign influence” in us elections but was just a continuation of (or payoff for?) Fusion gps spinning tales abt Trump. Michael Caputo blames Jones for feeding false info abt him to ssic. Kept going his ‘research’ even after mueller report. Founded Democracy integrity project funded partly funded by Soros.