On Tuesday, Jerome “Swift-Boat Birtherman” Corsi decided to do something truly odd when he released a copy of a six-page draft plea agreement that the Special Counsel’s office had shared with his lawyers. Corsi has decided that he won’t take this plea and will fight things out in court, but in sharing the information with multiple media outlets he has helped fill out the timeline of the WikiLeaks/Russia conspiracy to torpedo the campaign of Hillary Clinton and put Vladimir Putin’s seeming puppet in the Oval Office.
The draft agreement does not contain a whole lot of information, as it is primarily concerned with demonstrating that Mr. Corsi has lied to federal investigators about his role in acting as a facilitator/intermediary between Julian Assange and Roger Stone. That this means that Corsi no doubt also served as a key link between Assange and Donald Trump is not mentioned. Yet, despite the brevity and sparseness of the document, it describes several key actions taken by Roger Stone and Mr. Corsi, and also the dates on which these actions were performed.
Initial news reports on this story have done an inadequate job of putting these dates in their full context, so I am going to do that now.
The first date is July 25, 2016. On that day, Roger Stone emailed Mr. Corsi, and instructed him to “get to” Julian Assange in the “Ecuadorian Embassy in London and get the pending” WikiLeaks “emails.” This was the first day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. It is three days after WikiLeaks published over 20,000 emails that had been pilfered from the Democratic National Committee by members of Russian military intelligence. It is one day after DNC chairwomen Debbie Wasserman Schultz felt compelled to resign as a result of those emails. It is the same day that the FBI announced that it was investigating the DNC hack and that intelligence sources were quoted as saying they suspected the Russians were responsible and had done it to help Donald Trump. It is the same day that Donald Trump was questioned about it and called it “a disgusting lie” for the Clinton campaign to suggest that the Russians were trying to help him. It is the day before three separate cybersecurity firms confirmed that the Russians were responsible, and one day before the intelligence community gave the same conclusion to President Obama’s White House. It is three days before Donald Trump publicly called on the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s private email server (which they immediately attempted to do). It is three days before Paul Manafort denied he had any connections to the Russians and said it was “absurd” to suggest that they were trying to help Donald Trump.
The second date is July 31, 2016. On that day, Roger Stone emailed Mr. Corsi and told him that he should dispatch Ted Malloch, an American living in London, to visit Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy. This occurred two days after it was revealed that the DCCC had also been hacked and two days after Russian intelligence officer Konstantin Kilimnik sent his famous Black Caviar email to his boss Paul Manafort saying that Russian oligarch Oleg Derispaska had important information to share with him and that he would travel to the United States to fill him in. It was the day after Christopher Steele met with FBI agent Bruce Ohr and his wife in a Washington DC hotel to discuss the evidence of collusion he had developed. It was the same day that the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into a possible Russia/Trump conspiracy that was codenamed Crossfire Hurricane. It is the same day that Donald Trump said that the people of Crimea were happier under Russian occupation.
The third date is August 2, 2016. On that day, Mr. Corsi emailed Roger Stone and explained what he had learned (presumably from Ted Malloch) about Julian Assange’s schedule for doing further email disclosures: “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back [from Europe]. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging…Time to let more than [the Clinton campaign chairman] to be exposed as in bed w enemy if they are not ready to drop HRC.”
August 2nd is the same day that Konstantin Kilimnik met with Paul Manafort at the Grand Havana Club, a cigar bar in Manhattan. It is two days before Roger Stone emailed Sam Nunberg and falsely or figuratively told him that he had “dined with Assange” the night before. It is also two days before Roger Stone appeared on Alex Jones’s InfoWars program and announced that Assange had damaging information about the Clinton Foundation. It is three days before Roger Stone had an article published by Breitbart News claiming that Guccifer 2.0 was solely responsible for the DNC hacks and that the Russians had nothing to do with it. It is one week before Roger Stone appeared before the Southwest Broward (County, Florida) Republican Organization and announced that he was in communication with Julian Assange. It is one week before Julian Assange appeared on Dutch television and first floated the Seth Rich conspiracy theory. It is one week before WikiLeaks denied having any communication with Roger Stone. It is ten days before Guccifer 2.0 began communicating with Roger Stone on Twitter and ten days before Guccifer 2.0 released the cellphone numbers and email addresses of every Democrat in the House of Representatives.
The next significant dates in the draft are a little different. According to the Special Counsel’s office, in between January 13 and March 1, 2017, Mr. Corsi erased all email correspondence that predated October 11, 2016. This gives us two time periods of interest.
On October 10, Trump declared “I love WikiLeaks!” at a Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania campaign event. October 11 is the exact day that John Podesta publicly accused Julian Assange of having forewarned Roger Stone back in August that he would be leaking his emails. As a reminder, WikiLeaks dumped Podesta’s emails on October 7, 2016, one hour after the news media began broadcasting the Access Hollywood “pussy grabbing” audio clip. It was quickly noted that Roger Stone had tweeted on August 21 that “it will soon be Podesta’s time in the barrel.” So, it is actually very telling that Corsi erased all emails prior to the date that Podesta began pointing the finger at Stone.
However, he didn’t make the decision to begin erasing these emails until January 13, 2017, exactly one week before the inauguration. This date came in a very significant time period. It is three days after BuzzFeed published the Steele Dossier. It is two days after Erik Prince had a secret meeting in the Seychelles with an emissary from Vladimir Putin named Kirill Dmitriev. It’s the same day that Donald Trump told the Wall Street Journal that he intended to lift sanctions on Russia. It is the same day that incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer publicly denied that Michael Flynn had discussed the lifting of sanctions on the phone with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
As for March 1, 2017, which is listed as the last day that Mr. Corsi may have been engaged in scrubbing his email, that is the day that the Washington Post reported that Jeff Sessions had engaged in discussions with Ambassador Kislyak during the campaign.
Mr. Corsi’s actions line up very well with some of the significant events and disclosures of the Russia affair. Collectively, they provide strong evidence that the Trump campaign knew of Russian responsibility for the hacks at the same time they were denying it and spinning alternative explanations like the Guccifer 2.0 and Seth Rich angles. It shows that Stone and Corsi were working the WikiLeaks angle at the same time that Manafort was getting his instructions from Moscow. It shows that they communicated with Assange and had foreknowledge that he had information on John Podesta and also that he would be leaking in the early October time period. Corsi’s attempts to cover his tracks coincide with major events, like Stone being accused of being in communication with Assange, the release of the Steele Dossier and the beginning of the Michael Flynn/Kislyak affair, and the exposure of Jeff Sessions which caused him to recuse himself from the investigation.
I don’t know why Mr. Corsi thought it would be helpful to himself or the Trump administration to release this information, but I am glad he did. We’ve never been closer to seeing proof that the president was involved in the crime of the century.