The efforts to promote the Trump-Russia Collusion hoax didn’t just exist in the FBI, CIA and State Department, but the Senate as well.
According to a new memo, under the late Sen. John McCain, the Armed Services Committee engaged a former FBI official and his nonprofit to produce a report on the matter, per Just the News.
The Senate committee endured a secret battle in federal court this summer to quash a subpoena that would have forced Thomas Kirk McConnell to hand over documents and testify about his dealings with former FBI analyst Dan Jones and his nonprofit, the Democracy Integrity Project.
Indeed, the progressive mega-donor was one of the financial backers of the Democracy Integrity Project, which raised more than $7 million in donations to pursue allegations of foreign interference in elections.
Per Just the News:
Documents show that Jones continues to stake his reputation on the theory, insisting there was and is good reason to believe it. His lawyers argued in a recent court filing that Alfa Bank should not be allowed to release documents publicly chronicling Jones' dealings with the Senate, including the complete 600-plus page report he filed in October 2018 with the committee and his contacts with a Democratic staffer on the committee.
"The report reached seven findings ... Those findings are accurate," his lawyer William Taylor argued in a Sept. 14 court filing. The Armed Services Committee first engaged his client's services in spring 2017 while McCain was chairman, the filing revealed, and Jones performed his work free of charge for more than a year through The Democracy Integrity Project, also known as TDIP.
"TDIP and Mr. Jones's analysis was conducted confidentially and pursuant to TDIP's public interest mission," the filing added. "TDIP was not paid for its analysis." The final report was never made public by the committee.
Jones and TDIP were called on by the Senate Armed Services Committee to investigate the Trump-Alfa allegations. Jones spent more than a year “rigorously analyzing” the data to produce a 687-page research paper. A contractor who worked with Jones and TDIP believes McCain’s team was fully aware of the research arrangement.
