A Big Question Nobody's Asking About The Classified Annex

I've been looking at the Durham Report Classified Annex and various interpretations on the web, and nobody so far seems to have mentioned a passage on page 2. As of late spring 2016:

According to [then-Democrat Natinal Committee Chair Debbie] Wasserman-Schulz, FBI, so, far, does not have persuasive evidence against Hillary Clinton because of timely deletion of relevant data from mail servers.

Obama has no intention to darken the final part of his presidencey and "legacy" by the scandal surrounding the main contender from the DP. To solve the problem, the President puts pressure on FBI Director James Comey through Attorney General Lynch, however, so far without concrete results.

Comey gravitates toward Republicans, and apparently, intends to prolong the investigation so that the scandal would keep going until the presidential election to jeapordize the chances of the DP to win the presidential race.

These assessments were apparently made before the FBI investigation of the Clinton off-site e-mail server was concluded. According to Wikipedia,

In late June 2016, it was reported that Bill Clinton met privately with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on her private plane on the tarmac at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Officials indicated that the 30 minute meeting took place when Clinton became aware that Lynch's plane was on the same tarmac at the airport. When the meeting became public, Lynch stated that it was "primarily social" and "there was no discussion of any matter pending for the department or any matter pending for any other body." Lynch was criticized for her involvement in the meeting and was called on by some critics to recuse herself from involvement in the FBI's investigation of the email case. In response, she stated "The F.B.I. is investigating whether Mrs. Clinton, her aides or anyone else broke the law by setting up a private email server for her to use as secretary of state," but "the case will be resolved by the same team that has been working on it from the beginning" and "I will be accepting their recommendations."

. . . On July 5, 2016, FBI Director Comey announced in a statement he read to press and television reporters at FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, that the FBI had completed its investigation and was referring it to the Justice Department with the recommendation "that no charges are appropriate in this case. He added, "Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case."

For now, all anyone can surmise is that according to the Annex, Comey had been resisting any pressure from Lynch regarding the FBI investigation of the e-mail server. But after the tarmac meeting between Lynch and Bill Clinton, Lynch was more successful in influencing Comey to pull investigative punches, which resuited in Comey's July 5 "no reasonable prosecutor" announcement. But this wasn't the end of the story -- back to the Wikipedia link:

In early October 2016, FBI criminal investigators working on a case involving former Congressman Anthony Weiner sending sexually explicit texts to a fifteen-year-old girl discovered emails from Weiner's estranged wife, Huma Abedin, vice chair of Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, that they considered potentially relevant to the Clinton server investigation.

. . . FBI officials reportedly decided to disclose the development despite its potential effect on the pending presidential election to preempt the possibility that it would be leaked in another way.

. . . Comey informed Congress of this additional investigation despite having been advised by Justice Department officials that such an announcement would violate department policies and procedures, including a policy not to comment on investigations close to an election. Comey later explained, in a letter to FBI employees, "We don't ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed." Law enforcement sources added that he feared he would be accused of concealing relevant information if he did not disclose it.

These developments were characterized at the time as an "October surprise". It's hard to escape a sense that Comey was recalibrating his own position: before July 2016, the estimate of the intelligence community appears to have been that Comey leaned Republican (he'd been Dubya's Deputy Attorney General, after all) and would push back against Lynch's pressure to go easy on the e-mail investigation. But possibly related to the Clinton-Lynch tarmac meeting, something happened to change Comey's stance, and he made the "no reasonable prosecutor" announcement.

But then, with new developments in the case, he reopened the e-mail investigation, and he notified Congress that he had done this, only two weeks before the election. The news of this was viewed as changing the outcome of the election:

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said Monday that ex-FBI Director James Comey was “the single biggest factor” in shifting momentum toward President Trump in the closing days of the 2016 campaign.

Christie said on “The Hugh Hewitt Show” that Comey’s decision to reopen an investigation into then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server reshuffled the race after an “Access Hollywood” recording in which President Trump described groping women had dominated headlines for days.

Belatedly realizing what he had done, Comey seema to have tried to fix things, bvt to no avail. Per the Wikipedia link,

On November 6, in another letter to Congress, Comey stated that, after working "around the clock" to review all of the newly discovered emails, the FBI had not changed the conclusion it reached in July. An unnamed government official added that the newly discovered emails turned out to be either personal or duplicates of emails previously reviewed, and that Comey's letter represents a conclusion of the investigation.

It's plain that Comey had been digging himself a hole, at least with Democrats and the continuing deep state, and he would need to dig his way out of it. The Annex focuses mostly on the Hillary Clinton's campagin strategy of linking Trump to Russia, and it has nothing to say about Comey's conduct during the 2016-17 Trump transition. The key event was Comey's one-on-one meeting with Trump following an intelligence briefing on January 6, 2017. So far, we have only Comey's version, which he gave the Sanate Intelligence Committer on June 8, 2017, after Trump had fired him:

At the conclusion of that briefing, I remained alone with the President-Elect to brief him on some personally sensitive aspects of the information assembled during the assessment.

. . . The Director of National Intelligence [James Clapper] asked that I personally do this portion of the briefing because I was staying in my position and because the material implicated the FBI’s counter-intelligence responsibilities. . . . Although we agreed it made sense for me to do the briefing, the FBI’s leadership and I were concerned that the briefing might create a situation where a new President came into office uncertain about whether the FBI was conducting a counter-intelligence investigation of his personal conduct.

Gee, d'ya think? Of course, the contents of the report were the purest moonshine, and Trump more than anyone would recognize this. Comey laid the foundation for his ouster right then. Comey explained farher down:

[P]rior to the January 6 meeting, I discussed with the FBI’s leadership team whether I should be prepared to assure President-Elect Trump that we were not investigating him personally. That was true; we did not have an open counter-intelligence case on him. We agreed I should do so if circumstances warranted. During our one-on-one meeting at Trump Tower, based on President-Elect Trump’s reaction to the briefing and without him directly asking the question, I offered that assurance.

As best I can parse this out, what Comey was saying, and what Trump must have understood, wasn't just that the FBI had dirt on him that they knew to be false, but that they'd use it to damage him if it suited their purpose. But they'd give him the courtesy of letting him know before they did it.

Beyond that, Comey by his account discussed this strategy, at minimum, with Clapper, Comey also ran this by the other FBI top brass (likely Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok), and they all agreed to it. Comey goes on,

I felt compelled to document my first conversation with the President-Elect in a memo. To ensure accuracy, I began to type it on a laptop in an FBI vehicle outside Trump Tower the moment I walked out of the meeting. Creating written records immediately after one-on-one conversations with Mr. Trump was my practice from that point forward. This had not been my practice in the past.

Again, what Comey is ssying here is that he has really, really disturbing info on Trump, that he's compromised, that he's a Russian agent. This is material he's been aware of for maybe a year, and at least before July, the intellgence community felt he was skeptical about it, and he leaned Republican. Then Bill Clinton met with Loretta Lynch, and whether or not that was the cause, everything changed, and he was with the program, until in October, he got all wobbly until somebody got him back with the program.

At which point it looks like maybe Clapper, maybe someone else told him they were gonna play the Russia card at some point and push Trump out, because he's a Russian agent. I'm sure there were other conversations among this group we have yet to hear, but this is starting to look like the outlines of a plan -- first, minimize the e-mail server and get Hillary elected. Then, when she loses (in large part due to Comey's bumbling), spread the worfd that Trump is a Russian agent and push him out, maybe via the 25th Amendment, or maybe just force his resignaion a la Nixon, but definitely with the FBI's connivance.

That phase ended when Trump fired Comey.