My heart fell when David Gray called me to explain Mueller’s Special Counsel had scheduled me to appear a second time before the grand jury on Friday, November 3, 2018. David informed me we would have to leave for Washington on Tuesday, October 30, because Rhee, Zelinsky, and Goldstein wanted to meet with us on Wednesday and Thursday to prepare for the grand jury testimony.
My immediate reaction was that this was now headed to disaster. I was truly exhausted after the first round. Why couldn’t Zelinsky and company please be satisfied with the first grand jury appearance? They had testimony from me that they wanted, that’s what all the hand-shaking was about in that small conference room at the D.C. federal courthouse. That testimony was “locked in,” on the record, such that if I deviated at a trial from what I told the grand jury, that was another way to commit a felony. I had a lot of ways to lose in this increasingly punitive inquisition and almost no ways to win if I couldn’t tell Zelinsky what he wanted to hear.
That he wanted a second grand jury appearance meant to me that Zelinsky was determined to get me on the record disclosing who my source to Assange was. Since I knew I did not have a source, I was sure the nightmare would continue. This round, I expected Zelinsky would get even more granular, demanding that I remember more and more details about 2016. The more I thought about 2016, the murkier my memory became. I could no longer distinguish between what I actually remembered from what I remembered today as the way I wanted it to be, or the way I have reconstructed 2016 in my memory given all else that has happened in the two years since then.
I began to feel like I was caught as a character not taking drugs lost in a Hunter S. Thompson “fear and loathing” novel. Only this time, I had the fear and Mueller’s henchmen had the loathing. I was becoming increasingly convinced that I was being punished for writing books like “The Obama Nation” and “Where’s the Birth Certificate?”—two devastating exposés on Obama that have set the narrative that Obama is a closed Communist (partial raised by his mentor Frank Marshall Davis) with cultural sympathy for Islam—a president who was forced to produce a computer print-out form 2011 as “proof” Hawaii had authentic 1961 birth records that nobody in the public has ever seen.
Behind Rhee, Zelinsky, and Goldstein, I began to see the Clinton crime syndicate, the Obama mob, and the Soros-funded hard-left agenda. Where were we going with this, I asked myself over and over again? If Mueller was trying to break me, I feared he was dangerously close to accomplishing that goal.
I got together with David to plan for the next expensive trip to Washington. Typically, the only reimbursement I got from Mueller’s Special Counsel Office for these repeat trips to Washington was one-night’s accommodations for me (not for David Gray) at government rates, plus the cost of a round-trip Amtrak ticket.
I was determined to work with David to see if there was a way to avoid having to go back under the third degree with Mueller and Company.
“Can we please tell the prosecutors that I have had enough?” I asked David. “I don’t think I can go through any more of this.”
“If we do that, Mueller will just throw you in front of the grand jury anyway,” David explained. “You are still under subpoena and Mueller can force you to take the stand before the grand jury a second time.”
“So, what happens then?” I asked.
“You will be forced to answer questions and the grand jury will have an exact transcript of your testimony under oath,” David explained. “It will be much more difficult to walk back your grand jury testimony if you make a mistake. At least with the proffer process, you will be in the same type of interviews with Mueller and the FBI as you were before. It will be informal, and we will have a better chance to walk things back.”
I went back to asking why I didn’t just take the Fifth Amendment. Maybe I should have declined to testify from the beginning.
David reminded me that Mueller could always prosecute me for being a Roger Stone co-conspirator. By cooperating, David felt we had our best chance of remaining a witness.
All that made sense, except I still doubted I could tell Mueller what the prosecutors wanted to hear, and this time I felt Zelinsky would go for broke with the detailed question inquisition about a past I was having an increasingly difficult time remembering.
David and I resolved that our best shot was to ask the prosecutors to give us some of their evidence to review—hopefully the evidence they were planning to quiz me about when they got their hands on me again for what I was beginning to consider Round two of a heavy-weight bout between me, three Democratic prosecutors, an army of FBI, and a DOJ/FBI cast of thousands in the unseen background. Yes, I welcomed a chance to “duke it out” with Mueller but not when the deck was stacked against me so that I was sure to lose.
Mueller knew that once Zelinsky could get me to name a source to Assange, my testimony in court would be seen as “ratting” on Stone, “spilling the beans,” or some such characterization that would be certain to ruin my future with the conservative movement as an author who could be counted on to conduct exhaustive research and write books that told the truth.
Finally, Zelinsky agreed to send us six pages of my phone records, with three pages from July 26 to August 15, 2016 and three pages from October 3 to October 8, 2016, as a concession to David. The particular selection of these few phone records Mueller chose to share signaled to me that Rhee, Zelinsky, and Goldstein were still looking for someone that I spoke with by telephone to connect me with Assange around my trip to Italy in July and August 2016, and in the second period of October 4 through October 7, 2016, when Assange began dropping the Podesta file.
This was ironic because in one of his outbursts, Zelinsky insisted we would not find my “source” to Assange in my phone records or emails. If this were true, I wondered how Zelinsky imagined I was in touch with this mythical “source”—by smoke signal? So, why now was Zelinsky all of a sudden ready to share phone numbers, unless he planned somehow to trap me? With these phone records, Zelinsky was going more granular, a realization that worried me as I began anticipating hard-driving, detailed questions coming from the prosecutors on every phone call they considered important.
Printing out these pages, I went through the arduous task of identifying each and every phone call, writing in the margins the person I called and my best recollection of the purpose of the phone call. This took most of two days to complete. I realized I was averaging about twenty-five phone calls every day during those time periods, with the records showing a total of approximately three-hundred phone calls in total. No wonder I could not remember any given phone call in detail. I was shocked at how busy I had been through the 2016 presidential campaign.
Fortunately, I was successful in identifying all the calls. The next exercise I undertook was to see if there was anyone that I had spoken with by phone in the two time periods now under the microscope.
I noticed that I had talked on the phone with Tom Lipscomb both in July 2016, before I left for Italy, and again in the October 4–7, 2016 period that was the second focus of interest for Zelinsky and the other prosecutors. Lipscomb is a brilliant and well-known investigative reporter and editor in his own right. He is a senior fellow at the Annenberg Center for the Digital Fellow. He founded “Times Books” for the New York Times. I met Tom in 2004 when I was working with John O’Neill and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. In 2004, Tom broke several stories on questions about the military records of both John Kerry and George W. Bush. At that time, Tom was publishing in the Chicago Sun-Times and the New York Sun. While Tom and I have had a cordial professional relationship since 2004, we had an unfortunate falling-out in July 2018.
Tom had a habit of feeding me leads that he had developed from intelligence and other sources that he rarely disclosed to me. At various times, I would take Tom’s leads to follow them up myself. From time to time, I was able to publish articles based on research I conducted after Tom fed me the lead. A good example was an email Tom sent me on June 7, 2018. Tom had read my book “Killing the Deep State,” and he knew I was continuing to research the Deep State for a book I was contemplating to write on what was being called “SpyGate”—an apparent coup d’état plan hatched in 2015 by U.S. intelligence officials in conjunction with corrupt Deep State operatives in the DOJ and FBI. I believed the effort had been directed out of the White House by Barack Obama and Valerie Jarrett.
Tom, in his letter of June 7, 2018, was correcting me by directing my attention to British Intelligence.
Tom wrote the following two paragraphs to start his lengthy and detailed memo to me:
It was a GCHQ [Government Communications Headquarters, a division of British intelligence] operation designed to suck in the Obama Administration with a shiny toy irresistible to nitwits like Brennan [former head of the CIA under Obama] and Clapper [former Director of National Intelligence under Obama] and get them to drop it at Obama’s feet, and it worked like a charm. Comey [former head of the FBI] did just what he was told. And none of it had anything to do with the Hillary Clinton investigation.
Ever since BREXIT the British Establishment has been trying to undo it, with increasing success locally. Having Trump as POTUS could wreck the whole plan. GCHQ hoped to help defeat him or at least weaken his new regime with a manufactured scandal to keep him busy.
Tom was hinting that SpyGate originated with British Intelligence. His point was as early as 2015, British intelligence concocted the Fusion GPS infamous “Trump Dossier” to create dirt on Trump that could be leaked to the press. Also, under international intelligence agency agreements with the CIA, British intelligence could spy on U.S. citizens, while the CIA and NSA were restricted from doing so. British intelligence then fed their surveillance results and the early drafts of the Fusion GPS dossier with Brennan at CIA and Clapper at DNI.
When the information derived from British intelligence was shared with Obama, the cabal had the ammunition they needed to feed Comey at the FBI. Their goal was to create enough smoke for the DOJ to get FISA electronic surveillance over the Trump campaign. The FISA electronic surveillance was designed to provide corroborating evidence of the “Russia collusion” theory that Hillary and Podesta had created to divert attention from the sloppy cybersecurity maintained by Podesta, Hillary’s campaign, and the DNC—as well as to divert attention from the damaging content of the DNC emails being published by WikiLeaks.
Tom’s lead was consistent with the information I was developing for my new planned book on SpyGate. The point here is that I realized Tom Lipscomb might have been someone who could have shared with me information he was getting from Assange, or from a source close to Assange. Truthfully, I had no reason to suspect Tom was in contact with Assange, either directly or indirectly, but seeing Tom’s phone calls in July when I was preparing to leave for Italy and again in the key period when Assange began dropping the Podesta file in October 2016, I began to speculate that Tom may have gotten information about WikiLeaks from Peter Smith.
In 2012, Lipscomb introduced me to Peter Smith for the first time. Lipscomb explained that Smith was a multi-millionaire investor in Chicago who lived a double life as a secretive GOP operative. In 2012, Smith called me regularly as I flew as traveling press on Romney’s campaign airplane for the last three weeks of the presidential campaign. I remember telling Smith that Romney’s crowds were large and enthusiastic. The Romney campaign was working hard to beat Obama in his reelection effort, crisscrossing the country to make three or four different speeches at campaign stops in the battleground states.
I told Smith that I felt Hurricane Sandy may well have cost Romney the election. During the hurricane and the immediate aftermath, Romney took his campaign to Florida, where we rested until the hurricane news subsided. Obama, as president, traveled to New Jersey, one of the states hardest hit by the hurricane, and was photographed embracing Republican Governor Christie while touring the beaches in Atlantic City and promising massive federal aid. That photo opportunity, I believe, cost Governor Christie any chance he may have had of becoming president.
In the 2016 election cycle, Peter Smith came back into my life. My main contact with Smith came in September and October 2016, after I broke the news that Huma Abedin had been sending Hillary’s State Department emails to her personal Yahoo email account. This was another case when I connected the dots to figure out a key fact that impacted the 2016 election. How I figured this out goes back to my intel and detective skills. Judicial Watch had released a cache of Huma Abedin emails obtained from a FOIA request. I went through the rather boring exercise of examining each email to make a list of the email addresses involved. I was particularly interested in emails Huma sent using an address humamabedin@REDACTED.com. This email address used Huma’s middle initial to create a “ama” grouping of letters that had caught my attention. Among the hundreds of email addresses, I found one instance that the government censors had not redacted. That email read: humamabedin@yahoo.com. The “yahoo” fill-in met exactly the spaces in the many redacted instances of that email address that I found.
Peter Smith seized on this. He tried to find a legal basis to get Yahoo to release to him the IP addresses of anyone who had accessed Huma’s private email account. We realized that Huma was clearly violating national security laws by sending to her private email account Hillary’s State Department emails, several of which I identified as containing classified information. We suspected Huma may have shared her username and password with her Muslim Brotherhood friends in the Middle East. When Yahoo refused to give the information to Peter Smith, he and I speculated that if Huma was off-loading Hillary’s State Department to her Yahoo account, it was likely she was using a personal computer, not a State Department computer, to archive the emails. This led Peter and me to speculate that Huma used a laptop belonging to her husband, the notorious sexting criminal, the former Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner. Peter convinced his contacts at the New York Police Department to investigate. While we did not know for sure that Weiner was still sexting criminally, we figured sex perverts rarely quit. While FBI Director Comey had already closed down the federal criminal investigation of Hillary’s private email server, the NYPD convinced the FBI in New York to join the raid, given the investigation was to catch a sex criminal, not to target Hillary Clinton or Huma Abedin. The rest is history.
I recalled Peter Smith bragging that he was in touch with Assange. While I don’t recall ever talking with Peter Smith about what additional DNC material Assange planned to drop after July 22, 2016, I thought it was possible Peter and Lipscomb may have discussed this. Possibly, Lipscomb planted in my brain tips regarding Assange that Lipscomb got from Peter Smith. As I illustrated above, Lipscomb had a habit of planting information and investigate leads with me without disclosing his sources.
When David Gray let Zelinsky know I was examining this line of inquiry, Zelinsky was dismissive. “I don’t want to waste time with Corsi sending up trial balloons,” Zelinsky insisted. This was a constant Zelinsky refrain. Mueller’s prosecutors wanted me to remember what I could not remember. Zelinsky blew up when I tried to refresh my memory by reconstructing 2016 form the minimal information I had. Peter Smith died on May 14, 2017, in a suspicious suicide in a hotel room in Rochester, Minnesota. Zelinsky also objected to David Gray that he did not want me “trying to pin this on some dead guy.”
Reviewing these phone records, I also realize that Tom Lipscomb was connected to Total Banking Solutions, a New Jersey company that worked with banks nationwide. Given my extensive former career in financial services, Tom introduced me to the TBS principals and I agreed to accept a consulting contract with the company. TBS was in the business of brokering deposit accounts. Given the FDIC insurance limit of $250,00 per depositor, TBS had developed a multi-million-dollar business taking large deposits, typically in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and breaking them up into $250,000 pieces. The various pieces were then distributed among as many banks as it took. I considered this a circumvention of the spirit of the FDIC laws and I suggested to the TBS principals that we might go to London to see if we could get private insurance to cover larger deposits—a strategy that would obviate the need to break jumbo deposits into these $250,000 thousand chunks.
I involved Ted Malloch in the project. Ted had top connections with international insurance broker Willis Towers Watson, just as Ted had top level connections with PricewaterhouseCoopers. We planned a trip to London with TBS that was scheduled to take place immediately after Election Day in the United States, November 8, 2016. Ultimately, the project failed because TBS could get FDIC insurance over their thousands of $250,000 deposits at cut-rate government rates, compared to the private insurance that turned out to be costlier. I still consider my solution will be necessary should the public become aware of the billions of dollars in $250,000 size deposits that are brokered by TBS and its competitor companies among commercial banks in the United States. I doubt Congress is aware of the burdens this tactic places on FDIC, given that the TBS system by-passes the deposit limits Congress has put in place.
The genius behind the Total Banking Solutions is Dennis Santiago, the company’s Senior Managing Director for Compliance and Analytics. During the Reagan administration, Dennis worked as a strategic warfare systems designer, missile defense architect, and arms control analyst. He has twenty-eight years of experience in the finance industry plus ten years in the aerospace-defense industry. For TBS, Dennis invented the company’s Bank Monitor, a system that tests the safety and soundness of 100 percent of all depository institutions in the United States. Dennis’ model allows TBS to rate the safety of financial institutions into which the downsized $250,000 packages of deposits are to be placed. The TBS Bank Monitor is used by the financial industry, as well as federal and state agencies to assist in monitoring the systemic health of the U.S. banking system. In meetings with Lipscomb and me, Dennis showed a keen interest in Assange and I recall speculating with him what Assange’s next steps might be in the period after July 22, 2016.
I mention TBS because my phone records reflected a forty-seven minute phone call with Lipscomb on October 5, 2016. I figured the prosecutors might have suspected Lipscomb and I were discussing Assange. But then, I realized that later that day, I had scheduled a conference call with Total Banking Solutions to discuss the trip to London to meet with insurance agency Willis and Lloyds of London. Tom Lipscomb had an agreement with me and TBS to share in the revenue should we be able to get a deal together with TBS, Willis, and Lloyds. Ted Malloch also had an agreement to share in the revenue for arranging the Willis and Lloyds meetings in London. My notes reflected that Ted Malloch attended this conference call, but Tom Lipscomb and Dennis Santiago did not.
In truth, I do not believe Tom Lipscomb, Peter Smith, or Dennis Santiago had a direct link with Assange and I see no reason to think Lipscomb or Santiago were feeding me with information they derived from Assange. In September and October 2016, everyone concerned about presidential politics was talking about Assange and whether or not Assange would provide the “October Surprise” against Hillary. Assange had telegraphed to the world after July 22, 2016, that he had more DNC emails and that the emails, when made public, would be devastating to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. It was inevitable that Lipscomb, Santiago, and I would be speculating about Assange, given our mutual interest in seeing Donald Trump win the presidency. Even if one or more of us did have a link to Assange—which I do not believe was the case—I could see no crime even if we had shared information Assange had given us.
In analyzing the phone records, I also saw a series of calls that involved an article I was writing for WND.com on Libya. Here is the sequence of the calls and the explanation of the calls that I wrote up for David Gray to send to the Special Counsel:
JoAnne and James Moriarty phoned me just after I prepared this phone call analysis for Mueller. JoAnne and James explained to me that two FBI agents from the Special Prosecutor showed up at their doorstep, accompanied by the local sheriff. The FBI grilled JoAnne and James for three hours, they reported to me—interviewing them separately, not together. JoAnne and James explained to me that the main interest for the FBI was to determine if I had been a source for Julian Assange or if I had any connection with WikiLeaks.
JoAnne and James explained that the source of my many articles on Libya were Libyan tribesmen who were in exile in Egypt and that I had become a hero with the people of Libya for explaining how much the Libyan tribes have suffered at the hands of Secretary of State Clinton. JoAnne and James made it clear that I was not a source for Julian Assange and that we had never discussed WikiLeaks in our work on Libya.
I subsequently learned that the FBI also visited Tom Lipscomb. Given our estrangement that dated to July 2018, Lipscomb did not call me to let him know the FBI had visited with him in October. Knowing Tom, my guess is that Tom told the FBI that he had no ties to Assange or to WikiLeaks, and that he had no reason to believe I had ties either.
What surprised me, was the realization that I was still under investigation by the FBI. These visits confirmed to me that Rhee, Zelinsky, and Goldstein still refused to accept that I figured out accurately in August 2016 that Assange had Podesta’s emails and that he would release them in serial fashion starting in October that year. Clearly, the FBI had found this sequence of calls suspicious, especially with me placing a call to Perkins Coie, the law firm that represented both Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC during the 2016 presidential campaign.
I also saw that on October 7, 2016, I had three phone calls with Roger Stone. As I recall, Roger was concerned that Assange should be alerted to the fact the Billy Bush story was about to break. I told the FBI that my best recollection was that I told Roger that I would make an effort to get this word out to Assange, though I knew I had no direct or indirect link that could communicate this word to Assange. David Gray put me on notice that a press release during the morning of October 7, 2016 had announced to the world in advance that the Billy Bush tape would be dropped that day. I recall that Roger had made it clear to me the Billy Bush tape would had recorded Trump bragging about grabbing women by their genitals.
In the notes I sent to David for Mueller detailing my recollection of the phone calls, I noted the following:
In our subsequent discussions with Mueller’s prosecutors in Washington, this sequence turned out to be problematic because I could not remember if I had told both the WND and the TBS conference calls that day about the Billy Bush tape. Mueller’s henchmen again accused me of lying when they informed my memory that Malloch could have attended the TBS conference call was incorrect because Malloch was on a trans-Atlantic intercontinental flight at that time.
The FBI had the resources to research details like this in advance and, despite my repeated pleas that my memory was vague at best on these events, the FBI held me to a standard that every one of my answers had to be precisely correct, or I would be accused of lying. Truthfully, seeing my phone records in 2018 was the first time I recalled anything about these phone calls from 2016, and even then, I was doing what Zelinsky called “reconstruction.”
Before we headed back to Washington for the second grand jury appearance, David Gray had a phone conference with Rhee, Zelinsky, and Goldstein. David reported to me that in this conference call, Zelinsky had come across very aggressively.
“Tell Doctor Corsi that we are giving him one final chance to come back here to this time stop lying to us,” Zelinsky said. “Our patience with him is getting razor thin.”
This alarmed me. What about all those congratulatory handshakes with the prosecutors and the FBI following my first grand jury appearance? If I was lying then, it was hard to understand why Zelinsky shook my hand and say, “Not bad for an Ignatius man.”
Rhee tried to moderate Zelinsky’s aggressiveness by telling David that I had given them the impression that I was often “confused.” That was accurate, but more precisely, I was scared to death Zelinsky would press me on something out of the blue—something Zelinsky would spring on me to throw me off balance so he could see how I would respond.
“Doctor Corsi’s testimony before the grand jury was pivotal to us from any number of perspectives,” Rhee said, again moderating Zelinsky’s anger. “But we are having difficulty with the conflicting stories he keeps remembering.”
I repeatedly told Rhee, Zelinsky, and Goldstein that 2016 was two years ago and I did not remember it in detail. I found I could recall almost nothing from any particular email or phone call. When I finally opened my 2016 emails, I was startled by how much I had forgotten. The exercise with the eight pages of phone records was the same.
My conclusion was that Rhee, Zelinsky, and Goldstein felt like they had the cat in the bag in the moments after I finished testifying to the grand jury. They acted like they were ready to pop champagne. But when they took that testimony upstairs to Mueller, they were rebuked.
In round one, Rhee, Zelinsky, and Goldstein had failed to establish that I had a source to Assange. Lacking this, the evidence I provided against Stone was very weak. So, what if we had concocted a cover story to explain away Stone’s “Podesta’s time in the barrel” email. How many lies had Hillary Clinton told in her two attempts to run for the president? So, what if Roger Stone used my cover story to testify before the House Intelligence Committee. Roger could amend that testimony and Congress rarely pursues anyone for criminal charges of perjury.
Without the link to Assange, there was no “Russian Collusion” that could be pinned on Roger Stone. That’s why I was headed back to the grand jury. I expected the next round would press my memory to the breaking point.
I felt this was rapidly becoming an adversarial process, not the type of cooperation I expected to give Mueller’s Special Counsel office.
Rather than looking at documents to try to figure them out, I felt the process was rapidly becoming confrontational. What put me further on edge was Zelinsky’s perception that I was “lying.”
My intent from the beginning had been to tell the truth. Why otherwise would I have handed over my computers, my cellphone, my emails and everything else?
What was clear to me now was that the Special Prosecutor ability to examine every detail of my reporting, my business dealings, my communications with my wife—certainly more detail than I myself remembered.
Even when my memories were vague, Rhee, Zelinsky, and Goldstein could bore down for specific responses, in minute detail, aided by an endless budget and an army of FBI investigators ready to be sent into the field on a moment’s notice.
We need to cover one final point. The prosecutors also told David Gray that I had deleted emails on or around October 11, 2018. Their suspicion appeared to be that at Roger Stone’s instruction, I had deleted emails that would have shown I contacted Assange, either directly or indirectly, regarding the Billy Bush video.
I could not remember having done this and I’m sure I had no way to contact Assange in October 2016, or at any other time. But I decided to reload my laptop from the Time Machine for October 1, 2016, the only date saved by the Time Machine prior to October 11, 2016. Following that, I planned to reload October 18, 2016, from the Time Machine, the first date saved after October 11, 2016.
I struggled for hours and finally managed on October 28, 2016, to reload the laptop from October 1, 2016. But then, when I tried to reload October 18, 2016, the laptop finally died. I could not get the laptop to reboot successfully.
The result was that once again I would have to return to the Special Counsel without having the opportunity to see the data that I was certain to be grilled about. Even worse, the prosecutors told David that Quantico had been able to restore the deleted emails. So, the prosecutors and the FBI would again know what they were looking for and I would be in the dark when questioned.