Picking up from Part I.
Meanwhile, the superiors were starting to take an interest in Dynamo, in an inquiry on his (or her) identity that
together with a recommendation from the Bureau’s newly formed Foreign Influence Task Force that Dynamo ought to be terminated as a source, because he’d associated with known Russian purveyors of disinformation; this struck the whistleblower as especially weird, since Dynamo had been so important in exposing Russian disinformation, which he could hardly have done without the association.
Not only did management make these efforts to detach the whistleblower from his best source, but also began pressuring him personally on the subject of what he was and wasn’t allowed to work on:
And as if that wasn’t spooky enough, direct personal harassment:
And when it comes to trying to figure out who it is in New York who’s having him tortured, he comes up with a truly pregnant name:
I think that pretty much brings it all together. The whistleblower and Dynamo were irresistibly drawn into a web of Trump-Russia intrigue featuring so many of the key players in the stories we tell, from Telizhenko (associate of Dmytro Firtash and Andrii Derkach in the efforts to save Firtash from criminal prosecution and to obtain hacked computer files to introduce into the Hunter Biden laptop at the FBI or the disk copy distributed by Giuliani and confederates to their favored Murdoch news media and eventually Catherine Herridge’s desk at CBS) to Deripaska (Paul Manafort’s boss in his Ukraine work and subsequently the conduit of confidential US election information to Russian intelligence through Manafort and Kilimnik).
And an unremitting and ultimately successful effort to suppress their findings on these subjects organized in the FBI field office where the October Surprise of 2016 (the discovery of the Huma Abedin laptop and its possible classified information, of which there of course wasn’t any, but it did its intended damage on Election Day) was orchestrated to blindside Jim Comey and where Agent McGonigall sold services to Deripaska, for which he has now been convicted.
And Giuliani always there at the center of the intrigue, with his propagandists (like Solomon) and thugs (poor Lev and Igor) and attorneys (like Toensing and DiGenova), and business associates (Rick Perry and the rest of the Amigos) in a way somehow even more louche than Trump himself.
I leave it to the reader to build the contrast between this kind of whistleblower and the kind of phony produced on a weekly basis for the Republicans of the House of Representatives. To me it’s a lot more like the whistleblower testimony eventually traced to Alexander Vindman, a brave effort to expose some of the worst corruption in our history.
And a sign to me that the exposure will, ultimately, succeed, even as Trump and Giuliani go on trial for some of their more recent crimes. The worst crime mob in Trump’s orbit was always the one working for Russian interests in Ukraine, in return for assistance to Trump (sometimes financial, sometimes political), and it too will have to go on trial one of these days. I thought we should all be totally out of our minds over it.
Damn. Guess I hafta ride back over to Oleg's place and piss thru the gate AGAIN...
This rumination from Josh today (which I suspect you've already seen) muses along similar — albeit more abstracted — lines:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-rise-of-the-global-oligarchs