On Kirk McConnell

We previously covered the existence of a classified global data collection program (over 2 years ago!) based on an email sent from Kirk McConnell who worked as a staffer in the Senate.

I’d been toying with the idea McConnell could have been involved with Daniel Jones, when I came across this piece from Chuck Ross establishing that McConnell was the one who asked Daniel Jones to investigate the Alfa Bank allegations for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Perhaps I missed it at the time, or perhaps I’d forgotten about McConnell being subpoenaed in the Alfa Bank v John Doe case.

That called to mind the New Yorker article in 2018 (published 4 days after Daniel Jones completed his report) which cites a “Capitol Hill” source who describes the capabilities of “Max”, a.k.a Rodney Joffe:

In re-reading this part of the article I saw the reference to the Capitol Hill aide who is likely to be Kirk McConnell, but I also realized that Dexter Filkins met with Michael Sussmann. Sussmann was engaged as Joffe’s lawyer for the purposes of the Alfa Bank matters. That should have come up in Special Counsel Durham’s disputes over attorney client privilege, because with an attorney speaking to journalists about the details of the claims, that should have eroded privilege.

One other tidbit worth mentioning: we’d previously established “Paul” and “Leto” as referenced in the New Yorker article as Mikey Dickerson and Matt Weaver.

They worked directly with Rodney Joffe for Daniel Jones’ investigation:

Which means millions more dollars were wasted on something the FBI had disproven in days.

We still don’t have answers on Dickerson’s role in fabricating tens of thousands of fake Russian twitter accounts, which took place at the same time as the Daniel Jones investigation into the Alfa Bank claims (and to which Daniel Jones had a nexus via TDIP). Who else was connected to that scheme?