Editors note: The following account was taken directly from the blog post written by Patrick Byrne on his website, Deep Capture. Although UncoverDC has summarized the story, we highly recommend reading it in full here along with its substories. Please devote the time to read this, and come to your own conclusions.
On August 22, 2019, (now former) CEO of Overstock, Patrick Byrne, appeared in a series of major media interviews, where he alleged that the FBI engaged him to rekindle a relationship with a Russian woman named Maria Butina - even though Byrne had informed the FBI he was worried at the time that she may be attempting to contact various political figures on behalf of Russia. Maria Butina plead guilty in December of 2018 to one count of conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign official. She was arrested six months earlier in July. Butina was released this past October and deported to her home country of Russia.
However, that wasn't the only thing Byrne said in his appearances.
For approximately 14 months Byrne kept the major details of his interactions with the FBI hidden, but about ten days ago in a long and detailed blog post on his website, he relayed stunning information about his past and his involvement in what has now come to be known as Spygate. UncoverDC will recount the major points here, but recommend reading the post in its entirety.
2005-2006
Patrick Byrne went to Washington, DC to expose Wall Street by stating he believed there was a crack in the national capital market’s settlement system which led to 200 indictments and more than 100 people went to prison. He spoke with the Senate Judiciary Committee and also the FBI.
During that time he had several meetings with then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter. In one such meeting, he walked into a room and there was “a group of Senators waiting for [him], led by Chairman Specter”. Byrne goes on to explain the meeting, “They made a speech. They told me that if one understands the Constitutional structure, one understands that the Senate Judiciary Committee is the bulwark that protects rule of law for the USA. That is because the Senate Judiciary Committee has jurisdiction regarding corruption in the USA ('anything touched by a civil or criminal penalty'). The Senate Judiciary’s authority to look into corruption trumps the authority of anyone else in government. And given that pretty much any activity one can imagine could be touched by a civil or criminal penalty, in practice this all adds up to the following: in the name of stopping corruption, the United States Senate Judiciary Committee has the authority to look into anything in the United States of America that it desires.”
Byrne continued, “With senators from both parties standing around me nodding, Chairman Specter told me they agreed with me, they thought that I was right about what I had been saying publicly with increasing volume over 2005-2006, that some form of systemic corruption was taking over the United States government. They were not even sure what it was, but that it was like it was a foreign nation subverting our government yet they could not pinpoint it, and they had learned that it could not even be fought from within the government.”
Byrne stated that during this meeting they told him they were giving him a “blanket immunity” by showing him a letter that is being kept in a safe in the DOJ. They held the letter up so he could read it but he was not even allowed to touch it. This letter states, as Byrne recalls, that until his death, “The first paragraph had language about their growing concern that some kind of deep systemic corruption was infiltrating and corrupting the federal institutions of the United States. The second paragraph started with a sentence along the following lines: The United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary requests that Patrick M. Byrne be afforded extraordinary latitude under the laws of the United States of America to pursue his activities investigating and disrupting corruption within the federal government.” Byrne added, “Chairman Specter said, ‘This is not a pardon, you can’t go kill anyone, but for the rest of your life this letter is going to be sitting in a safe at the Department of Justice, and it will make it extremely unlikely any prosecutor is going to touch you in the future’.”
2008
In 2008, as per Byrne, a law was passed that gave authority to the Director of the CIA to sign a piece of paper and, in a sense, “take the steering wheel” of the FBI regarding certain matters.
2015
On July 9, 2015, Patrick Byrne attended a conference (FreedomFest) in Las Vegas where meets Maria Butina, who initially introduces herself as a Russian Gun Rights Advocate. It is only later that she says she is actually a Special Assistant to the Vice Chairman of the Central Bank of Russia and admits she was sent to the conference to meet Byrne specifically. Byrne sets up a lunch meeting for 90 minutes with Butina at his hotel suite the following day, where the two discuss Russia and her connection with 93-year-old Russian Oligarch Mikhail Kalashnikov, who asked her to head the Gun Rights Advocacy Group.
As per Byrne, Butina asked him to give a speech to the Central Bank in the Altai Mountains in Russia. She wanted him to speak about the blockchain, Milton Friedman, the Austrian School…. “And a future for US and Russia that is a path besides war”.
After the meeting, Byrne contacted federal authorities, feeling he had a duty to do so, given his security clearance, and informed them of the meeting with Butina and the request to go to Russia. Byrne recalled, “Later, it was confirmed to me that my news was received and shared across certain circles that evening, Friday, July 10, 2015. That is when the Maria/Russian investigation started (at the latest), not July 2016. That is the cover-up.”
It’s important to note here that Byrne had a romantic relationship with Butina that was completely organic in nature, and ultimately ended naturally. He re-engaged with her at the behest of the FBI, and kept that relationship completely platonic and gentlemanly.
September 2015 - By this time, as per Byrne, he is having regular communication with Butina with the goal of establishing a “falling in love” ruse (which actually developed into a real relationship) so he can go to Russia for the speech all the while he is in communication with the FBI. Since he contacted them after the July “chance meeting” with Butina. “They [The FBI] seemed to suggest that I should learn more, then they would decide. But they emphasized that they were not sure. Messages went back and forth for two months.”
Byrne stated, “In an effort to make things clear, I sent a binary message along the lines of: Not wanting to get in a hassle with the U.S. government, I am not going to meet Maria again unless I hear the word, 'Greenlight.' They responded: 'Greenlight'.”
Between November 2015 and December 2015, Butina said that she got word from Aleksandr Torshin (a Russian politician) that four people would be in the running for the White House: Clinton, Trump, Rubio, or Cruz. He allegedly wanted her to focus on them so that she could have contacts in a new administration. Byrne relays that not long after, she mentioned she had made a contact in the Clinton camp and was now actively working on the other 3.
By December 2015 Byrne says he was having regular face-to-face meetings with the FBI to discuss Butina and how he should proceed. In late 2015, two FBI agents that Byrne was familiar with from the Wall Street 2005-2006 case told him, “We need you to shift to working on something more important. The Bureau is setting Hillary Clinton up in a sting. We need you to arrange a bribe for her.” Byrne relays that the FBI told him “There are two groups in the FBI investigating the Clintons. There is a group looking into Hillary’s emails, but we think that is a whitewash. Yet there is a group of agents in New York City looking into her finances, and they want to put her ass in stir.”
According to Byrne, the FBI agents explained, "Comey had been blocking such 'aggressive investigative techniques' (e.g., a sting) on Hillary, claiming there was insufficient predicate acts to establish that she had a prior disposition." Byrne continued, "Recently information had come in, however, that Hillary had accepted a bribe in the low tens of millions of dollars. They told me who it was from (a foreign government) and how it was done. The FBI agents in New York had leveraged that information to force Comey to sign off on setting Hillary up in a bribery sting." He went on, "Now those New York agents were asking for my help. It was believed that a different foreign government (of a country to which I had never traveled) wanted to pay Hillary a bribe (in the teens-millions) in return for having Hillary privately pledge what one aspect of President Hillary’s policy towards their nation would be. My assignment was to create the following end-state: within two months, Hillary Clinton and that government’s bagman are to be somewhere together alone in a room for 10 minutes. You take it from there, Byrne."
Byrne says he was asked by New York FBI agents to set up a meeting with Hillary Clinton and a foreign government's "bagman” to facilitate Hillary pledging one aspect of her presidential policy towards that foreign government. The assignment broke down into Steps A – B – C – D, with “D” being, Hillary Clinton walks into a room alone and spends 10 minutes with a bagman. Within 5 weeks he says he achieved A – B – C. In addition, Hillary was 13 hours away from walking into a room alone (using a method which would keep any record from appearing in Hillary’s schedule) to spend 10 minutes with that government’s bagman, where that government’s desires would be expressed and money offered. Byrne was not in the room when it happened and could not say for sure what happened over the next 13 hours.
Days later, Byrne says he was summoned once more by the FBI and they scrubbed the mission asking that he forget the entire conversation ever took place. "You must erase every second of this from your memory,” they said.
They further explained, “Hillary Clinton is going to be our next president and nothing can stop that now. The day she becomes President, the first thing she is going to do is send her people over to the FBI and find out who was part of investigating her, and we are all going to be destroyed. That includes you, Patrick. This mission has been scrubbed from the highest level.”
2016
Byrne says that after several weeks, he requested another meeting with the FBI. He was unsettled by the last meeting and wanted more clarity. The agents elaborated, “What’s going on, Patrick is that at this point President Obama has his people across the federal bureaucracy, but especially the Department of Justice. Hillary is going to be president for eight years and nothing is going to stop that, but while she’s president the evidence about bribery that you were part of gathering is going to be sitting on a “Bunsen burner” inside the DOJ, and the hand on that Bunsen burner is going to be the hand of one of Barack Obama’s people. If Hillary is a good girl, defends Obamacare, etc., that hand will keep the Bunsen burner on “Low”. If she is a bad girl, starts thinking for herself, that hand [mimes twisting a dial] will turn the Bunsen burner to “High”. That way, for the eight years she is President, Hillary is going to be managed by Barack Obama. Then Hillary is going to step down, and Michelle is going to run… And Patrick, that’s the plan.”
Byrne recounts that he said, “I got it,” to the three federal agents as he thought to himself, “I am going to fuck this program up on a world-historic scale….. the moment I get a kill-shot.”
In early 2016, Byrne says he received an invitation to spend an hour with one of the Republican presidential candidates and the federal agents said it was a good idea for him to take Butina with him for the meeting. By having Butina sit in and observe even the first 10 minutes of this meeting with that candidate, says Byrne, it probably allowed them to obtain a FISA warrant to surveil that candidate afterward.
In March 2016, Butina told Byrne that she might have an opportunity to meet with Donald Trump, Jr. at a convention of conservatives in the South somewhere. Byrne knew of the time and place of the meeting and suggested to the FBI that he propose whisking her off to the Bahamas for the weekend. The FBI told him to “Back Off” and to let the meeting with Butina and Donald Trump, Jr. happen.
He states that they knew Butina was breaking the law by having these meetings and acting as an unregistered foreign agent. “The USG knew she was having those meetings all along, generally before she had them. From me. They let it all happen, on purpose, I promise. They played dumb but they were just playing me for a fool.”
During the same month, Byrne recounts that Butina told him that she had made arrangements for him to give a keynote speech at an upcoming conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, hosted by the Ministry of Finance (he admits he doesn’t remember if this was the department or not) and that President Putin was to be in St. Petersburg on the same day. Byrne said in the blog that she would be able to get him an hour with the Russian President, as she acted as the translator. Byrne informed the FBI and they responded “[that] Butina has been analyzed, she is just another grad student, but going to Russia to meet Putin is too dangerous, and we want you to break up with her. Get her out of your life.” So he abruptly broke up with her over a text message.
In July of 2016, Byrne was called in again by federal agents and they asked him to rekindle the relationship with Butina. The federal agents said that they insisted that in their careers they never heard of such a request and they were extremely discomfited by it. He accepted because they said that Russia was trying to subvert our election. He was repeatedly told “These instructions are skipping the chain of command, and are coming personally from X, Y, and Z.” Higher-ups were apparently pulling the strings.
The federal agents said, “This mission is being supervised by Director Brennan himself at the personal request of the President. As this proceeds, we will go from [our] meeting with you directly back to our offices to report over video conference to Directors Comey and Brennan. We three want you to know that you have every right to turn this request down, and no one will think lesser of you.”
Byrne writes that he agreed to rekindle his relationship with Butina. He explains, “Simultaneously I decided that while I would get them the information they wanted, I would actually conduct a mock affair with Maria, shielding (and not shagging) her while I instead set up Directors Brennan and Comey on rape and (with luck) murder charges.” Byrne began telling the agents that he got Maria intoxicated one night and took advantage of her. "NONE of that with Maria really happened. I was simply setting up a sting on my chain-of-command (whoever was above these agents). In the summer of 2019, Maria was interviewed in her prison cell about these events by the FBI and by a reporter (Sara Carter, as I recall), and my understanding is that she said, 'Patrick was completely gentlemanly towards me, I’ve [never] met such a gentleman, he was totally proper with me, so old-fashioned, he had me sleep in the guest room, he treated me like a lady'."
October 2016 was the month that Candidate Trump was publicly excoriated for the Access Hollywood tape, and Byrne stated, [it] “was also the month that Directors Brennan and Comey were informed (misinformed, but informed) that I had manipulated, seduced, drugged, raped, plotted to murder Maria Butina, and proposed that I do so… and they kept me “romancing” her for five more months.”
2017
Byrne says that in February-March of 2017 Butina began offering to ditch DC and come live with Byrne in Utah, finishing her degree at the University of Utah. The agents told him to break it off with her again so she would stay in DC. They said they were learning a lot by watching her because she was having dinners with people and posting photos about it on Facebook and they were able to see who she was meeting with and when.
Byrne takes Butina's imprisonment seriously, as he says he was aware of what was happening behind the scenes. He says that the prosecutor in charge of the case, Erik Kenerson, three years later stood up in Judge Chutkan’s courtroom to say, “Those dinners Maria Butina had around Washington did grave damage to our national security!” Byrne writes of the prosecutor and Chutkan railroading her, "putting her away for 18 months in a windowless closet the size of a shower stall, where three times/day a guard slid a bowl of mush to her through the mail slot in her closet’s door."
Byrne believes that he offered up Butina to the Deep State as bait and they took it. He regrets his part in her having to have spent 18 months in prison. He was told the Chain of Command was Peter Strzok, Andrew McCabe, James Comey, and John Brennan. Based on his telling, Byrne says that one of those men "signed off on an aggravated- rape-with-possible-homicide… so that their Russia Collusion Delusion would have one actual live Russian (and a striking redhead at that) to trot before the public when they decided to spring Russiagate."
Byrne explained, “Russiagate is not about Trump. It was a setup on the Republican Party that was crafted in 2015. Trump came along, won the nomination, and then the White House, but along the way crashed into a pre-canned scandal that was in the works before he was President, before he was the nominee, and quite possibly, before he even declared.
He continued, “The Russiagate scandal is not only not about Trump, it’s not even mostly about Russia. It is primarily a manifestation of corruption at the highest reaches of our federal government: they set up a bribery-blackmail soft-coup on Hillary as they prepackaged a Russiagate scandal such that any day they wanted to they could grab that Can-O-Scandal, shake it up, crack it open, and spray it all over the Republican Party. I say this as the guy they had bribing Hillary and shagging Maria, so I think I know wherefrom I speak.”
2019
In 2019, Byrne left Overstock. The news was highly publicized. Byrne states in his blog that he left for these reasons: “because he had been tricked into a soft-coup conducted by Obama against Hillary, and when he realized it he got even by setting up the Directors of the FBI and CIA in a sting involving aggravated-rape-and-murder to which they (or someone in his chain-of-command) signed off. Then the DeepState offered Byrne a billion-dollar bribe and when he refused it Peter Strzok’s wife opened an SEC investigation of the firm and threatened criminal referrals (not knowing that somewhere in DC there is a magic letter that says Byrne isn’t to be prosecuted). That’s why I thought it might be in shareholders’ interests to complete the Retail U-turn (waiting to get Retail back to EBITDA-positive Q2 2019) then punch out, divorcing himself from the firm (so there was no point in destroying it to get at Byrne), and go public (as he did on Fox News and CNN just over a year ago) about just enough of this (i.e., part of the Butina story) to warn the public 'It’s all a lie, it’s all political espionage' while keeping the bribery-blackmail sting and rape-murder stings quiet (so that the legitimate feds could conduct their investigation).”
Towards the end of the post, Byrne shares some interesting bits about what may be happening and what he says he told investigators along the way, stating:
"The first thing that happens is that John Durham is going to finish investigating everything you just read here. I bet he has a lot of other threads, but I bet this soft-coup one is one of the more important. I wish again to caution the reader against (at this point) believing President Obama or Michelle were part of any of this: this feels more like a CIA Director than a community organizer to me. And since this is such a hall of mirrors, it is entirely possible that some entirely different group within the government rigged the whole thing up.
A “Deep State,” if you will.
So let us see what Mr. Durham has found. For what you have just read, dear reader, is a written version of the story I told the Justice Department last April. This is what they are investigating. Among other wicked allegations, I am sure. But I can promise you, dear reader, it’s true."
And:
"They might remember that somewhere in a safe in Washington, DC there is a magic letter from 2006, which has been located and had its existence confirmed to two journalists. It says that I am going to take on the systemic corruption subverting the federal institutions of the US Government (or something like that), and asks of the future that I be shown “extraordinary latitude under the laws of the United States of America” when I do it. Which, if I am not mistaken, describes where I found myself in 2015-2016 (realizing the MIB and I had been used in a soft-coup by our chain-of-command), what I decided to do about it (somehow blowing-up that chain-of-command when the opportunity arose), why I seized the Maria Butina opportunity when I crossed with it again (by leading them to suspect I had committed horrific crimes against Maria Butina), and what I am doing now (by going public).
This is the end of the DeepCapure Project. If this does not do the trick, nothing will. From 2006 forward, from my conflagration with Wall Street to the bribing of Hillary and creation of an aggravated rape-murder sting on Brennan and Comey, this 14 year, $40 million project involved essays and actions that were undertaken to support a mission with which, as far as I was concerned, I had been charged by the American people, via their agents the Senate that they had elected in 2006, via its agent the Senate Judiciary Committee (which holds final authority to investigate corruption in the USA), via its Chairman Arlen Specter. My assignment was to take on corruption “across the institutions of the federal government” that had been subverted by a network of goons across the executive levels of regulators such as the SEC, law enforcement, intelligence: in the end, even the Inspectors General and courts and Special Counsels and all the mechanisms that are supposed to locate and curtail corruption have themselves been compromised, as has surely been demonstrated."
Byrne ends with this: “To the shade of Chairman Arlen Specter and to those other Senate Institutionalists (living or dead) who summoned me alone to a room in Washington, DC one Indian summer day in 2006, and to the 325 million people who elected them, I have a final comment...
"You told me to find you the Deep State, I found you the Deep State."
