De achtergrond waartegen zich dit saga voltrekt.quote:A cabal is a group of people united in some close design together, usually to promote their private views or interests in an ideology, state, or other community, often by intrigue, usually unbeknown to persons outside their group...
Laat men duidelijk bewust worden wat deze verzekeringspolis inhoudt. Dit is het complete 'Russia collusion' complottheorie en alle bijbehorende -en daaropvolgende- FBI- en DoJ-samenwerkingsacties die onder auspiciën van een contra-inlichtingenoperatie van de FBI zijn ondernomen om een volledig valse premisse te genereren.quote:“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office that there’s no way he gets elected – but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”
Ja, klopt.quote:Op woensdag 17 januari 2018 20:21 schreef jogy het volgende:
Jemig, respect weer voor je lappen tekst, altijd machtig interessant om te lezen. Ook wel een beetje deprimerend maar ach, dat terzijde.
quote:Op woensdag 17 januari 2018 20:21 schreef jogy het volgende:
Jemig, respect weer voor je lappen tekst, altijd machtig interessant om te lezen. Ook wel een beetje deprimerend maar ach, dat terzijde.
Maar ook via gewoon gezond verstand is heel gemakkelijk op te maken dat dit narratief een zwakke poging is om de hoax opnieuw leven in te blazen. Het narratief ligt inmiddels aan de beademing en de defibrillator (the New York Times) moet eraan te pas komen om er weer schwung in te krijgen.quote:In an interview on CNN, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that when he left his Obama administration job on Jan. 20, 2017, George Papadopoulos “was not a name on my radar scope.”
Ik heb deze gisteren voor het eerst gezien en ik kan je vertellen dat deze hier veel indruk heeft gemaakt.quote:Op woensdag 17 januari 2018 22:03 schreef ChrisCarter het volgende:
Ah, ik wilde net die video van die Haitiaan posten ja.
quote:Chad Pergram from FOX News tweeted on Friday that the DOJ turned over some of the 1.2 million documents requested to the House Intelligence Committee.
Pas de laatste twee maanden begonnen mensen zoals Strzok, McCabe, Priestap, Ohr en anderen in te zien hoe Sessions, Horowitz (en Trump) hen hadden bespeeld , terwijl ze dachten de controle te hebben en de impeachmentprocedure van een president construeerden.twitter:ChadPergram twitterde op vrijdag 12-01-2018 om 23:56:01 DoJ turns over some of the 1.2 million documents requested by Hse Judiciary Cmte as part of Congressional probe into DoJ & the election reageer retweet
Dat was bij deze amendement. De re-autorisatie van de FISA Section 702. Rand Paul (R) en Ron Wyden (D) waren daarvan de aanjagers, maar dit werd gepareerd door een zogenaamde cloture.quote:Op donderdag 18 januari 2018 23:28 schreef ChrisCarter het volgende:
Werd er niet gefilibusterd weer een dezer dagen tegen een beperkende wet weer?
Ergens in het begin van 2016 werd het hoofd van de Nationale Veiligheidsdienst (NSA), admiraal Micheal Rogers, bewust van "aanhoudende" en "opzettelijke" schendingen van FISA en beval een uitgebreide review. Verder stopt hij alle FISA-702(17) “About Queries” permanent.quote:FBI gave raw Section 702–acquired information to a private entity that was not a federal agency and whose personnel were not sufficiently supervised by a federal agency for compliance minimization procedures.”
Later die maand wordt de voorzitter van de House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, voor de eerste keer informatie getoond van verscheidene mensen binnen het team van Trump, die zijn opgepikt in de incidentele surveillance. Hij ziet dat de informatie uit deze surveillance vervolgens zijn onthuld en is verspreid binnen de inlichtingengemeenschap, hoewel er geen legitieme onderzoeksreden leek te zijn waarom hun namen op deze manier werd gedeeld.twitter:realDonaldTrump twitterde op zaterdag 04-03-2017 om 13:02:48 How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy! reageer retweet
Dit geeft dus tientallen mensen directe toegang tot geheime informatie inclusief daaraan gekoppeld bekend gemaakte identiteiten, dat potentieel voor specifieke partijpolitieke doeleinden gebruikt kan worden.quote:[…] But while through most of its history the document has been marked “For the President’s Eyes Only,” the PDB has never gone to the president alone. The most restricted dissemination was in the early 1970s, when the book went only to President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who was dual-hatted as national security adviser and secretary of state.
In other administrations, the circle of readers has also included the vice president, the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with additional White House staffers.
By 2013, Obama’s PDB was making its way to more than 30 recipients, including the president’s top strategic communications aide and speechwriter, and deputy secretaries of national security departments.
Bron
Bronquote:From Conspiracy Theories to Conspiracies
Not all conspiracy theorists are unhinged paranoids—even when they insist there was a loosely organized if not sometimes incoherent effort to destroy Donald Trump’s candidacy beyond the bounds of “normal” politics and later a renewed and unprecedented endeavor to abort his presidency.
After all, did anyone believe that in the year 2017 the losing side in an American election would immediately dub itself the “Resistance”—channeling the World War II nomenclature of the guerrilla campaign against the Nazi occupation of France? Or that the defeated candidate Hillary Clinton would formally embrace the imagery of liberationist patriots fighting a Nazi-like Trump’s occupation of the United States?
One ingredient for removing a president would entail a nonstop effort by the opposition to use the courts, the legislative branch, the investigatory agencies, and the administrative state to discredit, undermine, and remove an elected government. In modern terms, that might entail opponents suing to challenge the legitimacy of the election, perhaps by charging in court that according to “experts,” voting machines were dysfunctional and thus some state tallies were null and void.
The effort might embrace trying to subvert the Constitution by pressuring state electors not to honor their constitutionally defined responsibilities to vote in accordance with the popular vote in their respective states. It might also include an effort to introduce articles of impeachment in the House.
A resistance might sue under the 25th Amendment to find the president non compos mentis, accompanied by a popular campaign to clinically diagnose the president as mentally unfit or physically decrepit. Or a resistance might use the courts to seek the removal of an elected president on grounds he was a rank profiteer and had violated the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution—or to file suits with cherry-picked liberal judges to delay and stop the president’s executive orders. On the petty side, an organized effort to discredit a president would range from boycotting the Inauguration to deliberately holding up and delaying confirmation of his appointees.
In fact, in just Trump’s first year we have seen all these things and more.
Pop Culture Provocations
Any “resistance” aimed at removing a president would also involve the proverbial street and popular culture. A good way might be to implant to such a degree the idea of killing or harming the president that it would become something more than just a sick fantasy, but become contextualized as an act of near patriotism across the broader culture. Celebrities accordingly might dream out loud at rallies of blowing up the White House. Or a movie star might announce to his audience his hopes for a repeat of a John Wilkes Booth-style assassination. Or a state legislator might post hopes that someone would kill the president. Or a rapper might release a video in which the president is shown shot. Or a comedian on camera might hold up a facsimile of the bloody severed head of the president. Or a New York troupe might perform public plays in which the president each evening is ritually stabbed to death.
We might also see and hear ad nauseam from actors and other celebrities expressing desires to beat him to a pulp, or hang him, or shoot him—all the insidious efforts not of those easily disregarded as unhinged, but of those with public personas, and with the effect of incrementally normalizing violence against the president. Late night comedians might vie with each other in their profanity and scatology, ridiculing the president with references to him fellating a foreign leader. Who knows, a secret service agent might even post a brag that she would not be willing to “take a bullet” to defend the likes of this president. Or a left-wing zealot might think shooting Republican congressmen was doing his part to thwart the evil Trump agenda.
All that, too, transpired in Trump’s first year.
Blue, anti-Trump states might seek to nullify federal law, in the fashion that the states of the Old South insisted that they were not subject to federal jurisdictions. California, for example, might declare itself a sanctuary state, a declaration that would forbid federal immigration agents from enforcing fully the law. Or the states might incessantly sue the president’s administration on everything from immigration to environmental policy—such that every two weeks California is ritually filing a new suit in a friendly court to curtail federal government jurisdiction over state residents. The California governor might declare the president an immoral agent who had no fear of God, as grandees in his state talked of Calexit, a secession from the president’s United States. Or the California legislature might dream of subverting the new federal code curtailing state tax deductions in adolescent ways that would earn any taxpayer who tried such a con an IRS indictment.
In fact, in just Trump’s first year, we have seen all those efforts transpire as well.
Control the Media, Control the Narrative
In historian Edward Luttwak’s semi-serious Coup d’état: A Practical Handbook, control of the media is essential to abort a leader’s term. Ideally, a resistance should hope to so influence or enlist popular television, radio, electronic media and print journalism to ensure that 90 percent of all coverage of the president would be classified as negative. Reporters would issue fake news reports, ranging from stories that the president deliberately phoned a foreign leader and threatened invasion, or in racist fashion had insulted minorities by removing the bust of a black civil rights icon from the West Wing. Some reporters would use on-air obscenity and scatology in expressing their hatred of the president, in efforts to normalize the once abnormal. The more theoretical would ponder the need to jettison disinterested reporting, claiming that the danger of Trump justified biased coverage. The deep-state media might brand as believable a fake-news, tell-all book about the secret and private lives of the Trump inner circle.
All of that happened in 2017. And it’s still happening.
What better way to derail a presidency would there be than to allow a blank-check special counsel to search out alleged criminal activity on the part of the president? We have seen FBI Director James Comey confess that he deliberately leaked, likely illegally, confidential notes of a meeting with president Trump to the media, with the expressed intent of creating a “scandal” requiring a “special counsel”—a gambit that worked to perfection when Comey’s close friend, former FBI Director Robert Mueller was appointed.
To facilitate those efforts, the counsel would appoint to his team several attorneys who despised the very target of their investigation. In fact, many special investigators have given generously to the campaign of Trump’s past political opponent Hillary Clinton and in at least one case had worked previously for the Clinton Foundation. Note that after nearly a year, the Mueller investigation has not indicted anyone on collusion charges and is unlikely to. Rather, in special counsel trademark, low-bar fashion, it is seeking to indict and convict suspects for not telling the whole truth during interrogations, or violating other statutes. As Peter Strzok—once one of the FBI’s lead investigators in the Mueller investigation—concluded of the “collusion” allegation to his mistress Lisa Page: there was “no big there there.”
The FBI itself would have earlier trafficked in a fraudulent document funded by the Clinton campaign to “prove” Trump and his team were such dangers to the republic that they required surveillance under FISA court warrants and thus should surrender their constitutional rights of privacy. The ensuing surveillance, then, would be widely disseminated among Obama Administration officials, with the likely intent that names would be unmasked and leaked to the anti-Trump press—again, in efforts to discredit, first, the Trump campaign, and later the Trump transition and presidency. A top official of the prior Department of Justice would personally consult the authors of the smear dossier in efforts to ensure that its contents would become useful and known.
In fact, all that and more has already transpired.
Subversion as Plain as Day
Key officials of the prior government would likewise weigh in constantly to oppose the subsequent Trump agenda and demonize their own president. Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and Ben Rhodes would warn the country of the threats posed by their successor, but fail to disclose that they had previously requested to view FISA surveillance of the Trump team and to unmask the names of U.S. citizens which predictably soon appeared in media reports. Former Secretary of State John Kerry, according to the Jerusalem Post, assured a prominent Palestinian government leader, “that he should stay strong in his spirit and play for time, that he will not break and will not yield to President Trump’s demands.” Kerry reportedly further assured the Palestinian representative that the president may not be in White House for much longer and would likely not complete his first term. In sum, the former American secretary of state all but advised a foreign government that his own president is illegitimate and thus to be ignored or resisted in the remaining time before he is removed.
If any of these efforts were undertaken in 2009 to subvert the presidency of Barack Obama popular outrage might well have led to criminal indictments. If Hollywood grandees had promised to do to Barack Obama what they boast doing to Donald Trump, the entire industry would have been discredited—or given the Obama investigatory treatment.
Indeed, in many cases between 2009-2017, U.S. citizens the Obama Administration found noncompliant with its agendas became targets of the IRS for their political activity or monitored by the Justice Department. The latter included reporters from the Associated Press and James Rosen of Fox News. Many a journalist’s sources were prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917. In another case, a filmmaker had his parole revoked and was scapegoated and jailed to advance a false administration narrative about the death of four Americans in Benghazi. Still others were surveilled by using fraudulent documents to obtain FISA court orders.
Everyone should be keen to distinguish conspiracies from conspiracy theories. The above are real events, not the tales told by the paranoid.
In contrast, unhinged conspiracy theorists, for example, might obsess yet again over the machinations of multibillionaire and leftist globalist bogeyman George Soros, and float wild yarns that he would fly to Davos to assure the global elite that he considers Trump “a danger to the world,” while reassuring them that the American president was “a purely temporary phenomenon that will disappear in 2020—or even sooner.” . . .
Wat ik heb begrepen is dat Adrew McCabe en Peter Strzok achter de beslissing zaten om Flynn te vervolgen, terwijl een derde agent, die samen met Strzok Flynn in het Witte Huis had verhoord, "no wrong-doing" zag. Het is natuurlijk in de zaak Flynn heel belangrijk voor hem dat er een getuigenverklaring van deze agent beschikbaar komt.quote:Mueller team seeks delay in Flynn sentencing
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team has postponed the sentencing of former national security adviser Michael Flynn due to the “status” of the investigation, raising questions as to what the development means for the direction of the Russia probe.
A one-page "Joint Status Report" filed Wednesday in federal court in Washington gave notice that they would file another such report within 90 days.
“Due to the status of the Special Counsel’s investigation, the parties do not believe that this matter is ready to be scheduled for a sentencing hearing at this time,” the document, signed by Mueller and Flynn attorneys Robert Kelner and Stephen Anthony, said.
“The parties shall file a joint status report by no later than May 1, 2018, stating whether the matter should be scheduled for sentencing or whether a deadline should be set for filing another joint status report,” said a related order signed by Judge Emmet G. Sullivan.
[...]
The delay could suggest Flynn is continuing to provide information.
Such a delay in sentencing, according to a former high-ranking Justice Department official, is common in federal investigations.
“This is very, very common for a cooperating defendant,” the former official, James Trusty who served under both the Bush and Obama administrations, told Fox News. “They don’t want to tell the judge to sentence Flynn until they can tell the judge that he helped in the case.”
Trusty said that if Flynn were ever asked to testify in a trial, he would be “a better witness” if still facing the prospect of sentencing.
Flynn could be sentenced to federal prison for up to five years for making false statements to the FBI.
“It’s a routine play that federal sentencing gets put off until you’re done cooperating,” Trusty said, adding that this does not give any insight into the “pace” of Mueller’s probe, but rather the “existence of it.”
“They are basically saying ‘we may use Flynn for more information,’ but who knows where they think he fits in the grand scheme of the investigation,” Trusty said. “They obviously think he still has some potential, affirmative work to do.”
--> But another former U.S. official told Fox News the decision to delay Flynn’s sentencing could be related to the judge presiding over the case.
U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Rudolph Contreras took Flynn’s guilty plea on Dec. 1, 2017 – but just days later, Contreras recused himself from the case.
A court spokesperson told Fox News that the courts do not disclose grounds for recusal.
“It may very well be that the guilty plea cannot stand because of all of this,” former federal prosecutor Joseph diGenova told Fox News Thursday, noting that Contreras also is a judge on the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. <---
Requests for FISA warrants are made through the court, and target suspected foreign spies inside the U.S. The court has been at the center of controversy over a congressional memo said to detail surveillance abuses tied to the 2016 campaign.
But in reference to Flynn’s guilty plea, a source close to the court told Fox News Thursday that Contreras’ recusal doesn’t affect the status of the plea. Bron
To be continued...quote:“What we will do in phase two is follow the facts where they lead, and when we get enough facts, we will figure out a way to let the American people know,” --Nunes
Hoezo?quote:
Dank u.quote:
Ik vraag waarom jij het fascinerend vindt.quote:
Omdat ik allerlei dingen lees die ik helemaal niet wist en dat er dingen gebeuren die je niet voor mogelijk hield.quote:Op dinsdag 6 februari 2018 22:03 schreef Fir3fly het volgende:
[..]
Ik vraag waarom jij het fascinerend vindt.
Oh wacht, je gelooft echt dat wat hij schrijft enige relatie heeft met de werkelijkheid?quote:Op dinsdag 6 februari 2018 22:09 schreef Lavenderr het volgende:
[..]
Omdat ik allerlei dingen lees die ik helemaal niet wist en dat er dingen gebeuren die je niet voor mogelijk hield.
Ik stel voor dat je puntsgewijs aangeeft waarmee je het niet eens bent, per punt een aantal argumenten aanvoert -die jouw werkelijkheid reflecteren- en dan zal ik ingaan op deze argumenten.quote:Op dinsdag 6 februari 2018 22:09 schreef Fir3fly het volgende:
[..]
Oh wacht, je gelooft echt dat wat hij schrijft enige relatie heeft met de werkelijkheid?
Heb jij alle rapporten gelezen? En wat denk je er zelf van?quote:Op dinsdag 6 februari 2018 22:09 schreef Fir3fly het volgende:
[..]
Oh wacht, je gelooft echt dat wat hij schrijft enige relatie heeft met de werkelijkheid?
Je moet even goed lezen wat hij schrijft, hij post een flinke lap tekst met wat rapporten, maar trekt dan een hele hoop ongefundeerde conclusies zonder enige onderbouwing.quote:Op dinsdag 6 februari 2018 22:28 schreef Lavenderr het volgende:
[..]
Heb jij alle rapporten gelezen? En wat denk je er zelf van?
quote:FBI informant on Uranium One Breaks Silence
An informant who spent years gathering information on the Russian energy and uranium market industry for the FBI, met staff members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, House Oversight, and House Intelligence Committees on Wednesday. He gave explosive testimony on his years as an undercover informant providing information to the FBI on Russian criminal networks operating in the United States. He also contends in his testimony, and written briefs, to the FBI that Russia attempted to hide its ongoing aid to help sustain Iran’s nuclear industry, at the time the Obama administration approved the sale of 20 percent of U.S. uranium mining rights to Russia.
William D. Campbell, an American businessman, provided extensive information on other counterintelligence issues to the FBI for decades and he had also provided information to the CIA on various issues during his time overseas.
“For several years my relationship with the CIA consisted of being debriefed after foreign travel,” Campbell noted in his testimony, which was obtained by this reporter. “Gradually, the relationship evolved into the CIA tasking me to travel to specific countries to obtain specific information. In the 1990’s I developed a working relationship with Kazakhstan and Russia in their nuclear energy industries. When I told the CIA of this development, I was turned over to FBI counterintelligence agents.”
The informant’s attorney, Victoria Toensing partner at the firm DiGenova & Toensing, said the following:
“Mr. Campbell testified for over four hours until he answered every question from three Congressional committees; the Senate Judiciary, House Oversight and House Intelligence committees.
He recounted numerous times that the Russians bragged that the Clintons’ influence in the Obama administration would ensure CIFIUS approval for Uranium One. And he was right.”
The recent revelations over the past year regarding Campbell’s undercover work for the FBI, sparked a Department of Justice investigation into the Obama Administration’s handling of the sale of U.S. uranium mining assets to Russia. On Wednesday, he shared with the committee information he provided to the FBI and has in the past described his frustration with the Obama administration’s failure to stop Russia’s nuclear giant from purchasing 20 percent of American uranium mining assets.
Campbell testified before numerous Congressional investigators that his extensive counterintelligence work on Russia and stated that during his time as an informant, he obtained information that Russia was continuing to aid the Iranian government. According to Campbell Russia provided the resources necessary for the nation’s nuclear reactors, despite promises that they were not sharing such technology with Iran.
In an April 16, 2010, summary brief provided to his former FBI handlers and obtained by this reporter, he stressed his deep concerns about Tenex, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Russian state nuclear arm Rosatom and its ongoing work to provide Iran with the technology needed for its nuclear reactor program.
At the time, Rosatom was seeking the approval to purchase the Canadian mining company Uranium One.
“TENEX continues to supply Iran with fuel through their Russian company TVEL,” stated Campbell in a 2010 brief provided to the FBI. TVEL is a Russian nuclear fuel cycle company headquartered in Moscow. “They (TVEL) continue to assist with construction consult and fabricated assemblies to supply the reactor. Fabricated assemblies require sophisticated engineering and are arranged inside the reactor with the help and consult of TVEL.”
Campbell informed the FBI of the close relationship between TVEL and TENEX, both a part of the Rosatom group. He stated in his brief that while spending time with the Russian executives from both Rosatom and Tenex, that any mention of “TVEL is a subject that is serious to all when mentioned. I do not even raise the subject of TVEL to our friends, but occasionally they speak of it and always in a guarded manner.”
In the briefs, he informed the FBI that “occasionally someone will mention having been in Iran but usually it is long after the fact.”
“His response was a smile and shoulder shrug”
And when he asked the Russians about these connections, he stated that they “occasionally speak of the relationship, i.e. equipment, consulting. I asked Vadim (Mikerin) if they felt there was a serious problem, and would they adhere to sanctions and western opinion. His response was a smile and shoulder shrug.”
But Campbell had provided the FBI with evidence of the criminal network and delivered the information to the FBI. which was monitoring his work as an informant and approving his transfer of bribery money to the Russians. Those transfers, which were made in bulk $50,000 sums and at times delivered in cash, occurred between senior executives of the American transportation company and the Russian executives connected to Rosatom. He had given the FBI irrefutable evidence showing how contracts obtained from the same Russian energy company Tenex, were based on contract bribery and other nefarious actions, he said.
Senior members of the FBI, Department of Treasury, Department of Energy and Department of Justice were also briefed on Campbell’s information and were apprised of the various facets pertaining to Russia’s acquisition of the Canadian company. In fact, Campbell had been told by his FBI handlers that his work had made it at least twice into President Obama’s classified presidential daily briefings.
“The Russians expressed a sense of urgency to secure new U.S. uranium business because they knew that the two-decades-old “Megatons to Megawatts” program would cease in 2013,” Campbell said. “Then Russia would no longer be guaranteed a market to sell recycled nuclear warhead materials as peaceful reactor fuel in the United States. I gathered evidence for the FBI by moving closer and closer to the Russians’ key nuclear industry players, including those inside the United States and high-ranking Russian officials who would visit.”
Despite the insurmountable evidence collected by Campbell, the Obama administration’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States approved Russia’s purchase of Uranium One in the fall of 2010.
That approval by the Obama administration gave Moscow extensive rights to buy and sell more atomic fuels.
“I was speechless and angry in October 2010 when CFIUS approved the Uranium One sale to Rosatom. I was deeply worried that TLI continued to transport sensitive uranium despite the fact that it had been compromised by the bribery scheme,” stated Campbell in his testimony to lawmakers. “I expressed these concerns repeatedly to my FBI handlers. The response I got was that “politics” was somehow involved. I remember one response I got from an agent when I asked how it was possible CFIUS would approve the Uranium One sale when the FBI could prove Rosatom was engaged in criminal conduct. His answer: “Ask your politics.”
It wasn’t until years later in 2015 that American businessman Daren Condrey, whose company Transportation Logistics International, plead guilty to conspiring to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and conspiring to commit wire fraud, according to the DOJ.
Russian national Vadim Mikerin, who was a top official of the Russian nuclear arms subsidiary Tenex and would later become president of Tenam the American subsidiary of Rosatom, was also sentenced in December 2015. Mikerin, who only plead guilty to money laundering, was arrested for a racketeering scheme that dated back to 2004. He was sentenced to 48 months in prison.
Boris Rubizhevsky, another Russian national from New Jersey, who was president of the security firm NEXGEN Security, was also involved in the conspiracy and plead guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering in 2015. He served as a consultant to Tenam and to Mikerin. Rubizhevsky was sentenced to prison last year along with three years of supervised release and a $26,500 fine, according to a recent Reuters report.
And Mark Lambert, 54, a co-owner of Transportation Logistics International, was charged this month on an “11-count indictment with one count of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and to commit wire fraud, seven counts of violating the FCPA, two counts of wire fraud and one count of international promotion money laundering,” as stated in the DOJ press release. Lambert’s charges stem from an alleged scheme to bribe Mikerin in order to secure contracts with TENEX, according to the DOJ release.
Lambert is fighting the charges, according to a Reuters report.
The Informant
Campbell, whose from the South Eastern United States, founded a company in 1981 early in his career that focused on agriculture and energy consulting for foreign companies.
He was the Chief Operating Officer, and “led the company’s expansion into Europe and the Middle East,” stated Toensing.
During his time working in the Middle East in the 1980s he came into possession of information he thought would be of interest to the U.S. government and “contacted the local FBI office and presented the plans to an agent,” he relayed to congressional members.
That was the beginning of Campbell’s informant with the FBI.
In the 1990’s Campbell traveled to Kazakhstan and Russia developing relationships in their nuclear energy industries. It was at that point that the Campbell also gave began providing information to the FBI’s counterintelligence agents.
“Through my energy consulting, I began to make inroads into the Russian nuclear industry, first in Kazakhstan through Swiss contacts and then in Russia,” Campbell’s statement said. “My FBI assignments included providing information about Russian efforts to secure large swaths of Kazakh uranium in the 1990’s and again around the time former President Bill Clinton visited the region as a private citizen in 2005, accompanied by a donor to his Foundation, Frank Giustra.”
He was reimbursed for his expenses and at times receive a modest compensation for his work with the FBI, he testified.
“By far the largest and most significant payment I received was in January 2016,” he noted. “The FBI presented me a $50,000-plus check thanking and commending me for my work from 2009 to 2014 in the investigation of the Russian nuclear energy industry.”
“Putin wanted Russia to dominate the world’s uranium supply, a goal of crucial interest to the U.S. government. At the same time, the Russian companies – Rosatom and Tenex – were engaged in racketeering,” his testimony stated.
Campbell, who was using the money paid to him by the FBI for his work and expressed his frustration to the FBI over their failure to reimburse him approximately $500,000 he had spent on payments to facilitate the undercover case, Toensing added.
In January 2016 the FBI invited him to a dinner in Crystal City, Virginia, where they presented him with a check for just over $50,000 and thanked him for his work, said Toensing. A copy of the check has been obtained by this reporter.
In 2016, Campbell filed a lawsuit in Maryland federal court against the Russian nuclear entities asking for the return of the money he had to launder out of his own paychecks. His lawyers were advised by the DOJ a few days of filing the lawsuit that prosecutors in the Fraud Section of the Justice Department under then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, demanded the withdrawal the lawsuit. According to a letter, obtained by this reporter, the DOJ threatened to destroy Campbell’s reputation and prosecute him for violating a non-disclosure agreement he had signed with the FBI.
Late last year, the Department of Justice under Attorney General Jeff Sessions lifted Campbell’s NDA agreement so he could speak to Congress about his case and involvement in the investigation.
Campbell’s Briefs and Reports
The Russians were working to secure their global expansion of the energy market and according to his briefings to the FBI on August 2011, that “the Russians are going to do what they need to do to secure their influence, whether it’s in Europe, Iran or any other part of the world…they know that nobody’s in a position to stop them… not even us…unless we want to run a huge risk of massive confrontation.”
More importantly noted Campbell, the “fuel fabricators to Iran are being flown by Russian air transport due to the sensitive nature of the equipment. Taking them overland or by sea makes no sense when they can have them inside Iran in a matter of hours.”
But by 2010, the Russian government was working diligently to get approval from the Obama administration to purchase Uranium One. They wanted to downplay their relationship with Iran and were afraid that Republicans, who were against the proposed deal, would find a way to stop the approval process.
They hired lobbying firms and sought the counsel of American experts in the energy market.
Cherly Moss Herman, currently with the United States Department of Energy but who worked as private energy consultant on environmental issues at the time, produced a detailed report for the Russian nuclear company, as previously reported.
The document Moss Herman wrote as a consultant in 2010 was for TENAM/Tenex, according to the consulting memorandum she provided to the Russian subsidiary. TENAM is a fully-owned U.S. subsidiary of Tenex, which is 100 percent owned by the Russian state-controlled nuclear Rosatom, according to public documentation.
Titled “Policy/Legislative Issues Affecting the Business Climate in the U.S. for TENAM/Tenex,” the memorandum discussed the Department of Energy’s uranium regulations. She is now employed at the DOE’s Office Nuclear Energy where she? develops sustainable fuel cycles.
The Moss October 7, 2010, report discusses the congressional atmosphere regarding uranium, specifically states that “some Republicans truly fear the entry of Russia into the U.S. market, as demonstrated by the fact that they are taking steps to block the purchase of Uranium One ….”
Her memo outlined methods for the Obama administration to loosen U.S. restrictions on Rosatom to not only export nuclear materials but also secure billions of dollars in new uranium sales to American utilities, according to the report.
In late 2010, the Russians succeeded at doing both, while at the same time their companies were engaged in a criminal racketeering enterprise on U.S. soil.
Moss Herman’s 2010 memorandum outlined “the current status, including background information, and discussion on a few key issues that could affect the business climate for TENAM/Tenex’s directly and also introduces a number of other issues that could also have an impact on the nuclear business climate in the United States.”
“Some Republicans truly fear the entry of Russia into the U.S. market, as demonstrated by the fact that they are taking steps to block the purchase of Uranium One by Atomredmetzoloto,” she stated.
Atomredmetzoloto, known as ARMZ, is the mining arm of Rosatom. On June 8, 2010, Uranium One announced it had signed an agreement that would give “not less than 51%” of the company to JSC Atomredmetzoloto, or ARMZ. According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Uranium One has two licensed mining operations in Wyoming that amount to about “20 percent of the currently licensed uranium in-situ recovery production capacity in the U.S.” Bron
Nog een aantal voorbeelden van het (potentieel) schenden van de Constitutie.quote:"The Rosen affair is as flagrant an assault on civil liberties as anything done by George W. Bush’s administration, and it uses technology to silence critics in a way Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of. To treat a reporter as a criminal for doing his job — seeking out information the government doesn’t want made public — deprives Americans of the First Amendment freedom on which all other constitutional rights are based."
quote:The Media Stopped Reporting The Russia Collusion Story Because They Helped Create It
The press has played an active role in the Trump-Russia collusion story since its inception. It helped birth it.
Half the country wants to know why the press won’t cover the growing scandal now implicating the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice, and threatening to reach the State Department, Central Intelligence Agency, and perhaps even the Obama White House.
After all, the release last week of a less-redacted version of Sens. Charles Grassley and Lindsey Graham’s January 4 letter showed that the FBI secured a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to search the communications of a Trump campaign adviser based on a piece of opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The Fourth Amendment rights of an American citizen were violated to allow one political party to spy on another.
If the press did its job and reported the facts, the argument goes, then it wouldn’t just be Republicans and Trump supporters demanding accountability and justice. Americans across the political spectrum would understand the nature and extent of the abuses and crimes touching not just on one political party and its presidential candidate but the rights of every American.
That’s all true, but irrelevant. The reasons the press won’t cover the story are suggested in the Graham-Grassley letter itself.
Steele Was a Media Informant
The letter details how Christopher Steele, the former British spy who allegedly authored the documents claiming ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, told the FBI he wasn’t talking to the press about his investigation. In a British court, however, Steele acknowledged briefing several media organizations on the material in his dossier.
According to the British court documents, Steele briefed the New York Times, Washington Post, Yahoo! News, The New Yorker, and CNN. In October, he talked to Mother Jones reporter David Corn by Skype. It was Corn’s October 31 article anonymously sourced to Steele that alerted the FBI their informant was speaking to the press. Grassley and Graham referred Steele to the Department of Justice for a criminal investigation because he lied to the FBI.
The list of media outfits and journalists made aware of Steele’s investigations is extensive. Reuters reported that it, too, was briefed on the dossier, and while it refrained from reporting on it before the election, its national security reporter Mark Hosenball became an advocate of the dossier’s findings after November 2016.
BBC’s Paul Wood wrote in January 2017 that he was briefed on the dossier a week before the election. Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald likely saw Steele’s work around the same time, because he published an article days before the election based on a “Western intelligence” source (i.e., Steele) who cited names and data points that could only come from the DNC- and Clinton-funded opposition research.
A line from the Grassley-Graham letter points to an even larger circle of media outfits that appear to have been in contact with either Steele or Fusion GPS, the Washington DC firm that contracted him for the opposition research the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee commissioned. “During the summer of 2016,” the Grassley-Graham letter reads, “reports of some of the dossier allegations began circulating among reporters and people involved in Russian issues.”
Planting the Carter Page Story
Indeed, it looks like Steele and Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson may have persuaded a number of major foreign policy and national security writers in Washington and New York that Trump and his team were in league with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Those journalists include New Yorker editor David Remnick, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, former New Republic editor Franklin Foer, and Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum.
A Foer story published in Slate on July 4, 2016 appears to be central. Titled “Putin’s Puppet,” Foer’s piece argues the Trump campaign was overly Russia-friendly. Foer discusses Trump’s team, including campaign convention manager Paul Manafort, who worked with former Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovich, a Putin ally; and Carter Page, who, Foer wrote, “advised the state-controlled natural gas giant Gazprom and helped it attract Western investors.”
That’s how Page described himself in a March 2016 Bloomberg interview. But as Julia Ioffe reported in a September 23, 2016 Politico article, Page was a mid-level executive at Merrill Lynch in Moscow who played no role in any of the big deals he boasted about. As Ioffe shows, almost no one in Moscow remembered Page. Until Trump read his name off a piece of paper handed to him during a March interview with the Washington Post, almost no one in the Washington foreign policy world had heard of Page either.
So what got Foer interested in Page? Were Steele and Simpson already briefing reporters on their opposition research into the Trump campaign? (Another Foer story for Slate, an October 31, 2016 article about the Trump organization’s computer servers “pinging” a Russian bank, was reportedly “pushed” to him by Fusion GPS.) Page and Manafort are the protagonists of the Steele dossier, the former one of the latter’s intermediaries with Russian officials and associates of Putin. Page’s July 7 speech in Moscow attracted wide U.S. media coverage, but Foer’s article published several days earlier.
The Slate article, then, looks like the predicate for allegations against Page made in the dossier after his July Russia trip. For instance, according to Steele’s investigations, Page was offered a 19 percent stake in Rosneft, one of the world’s energy giants, in exchange for help repealing sanctions related to Russia’s 2014 incursion into Ukraine.
Building an Echo Chamber of Opposition Research
Many have noted the absurdity that the FISA warrant on Page was chiefly based, according to a House intelligence committee memo, on the dossier and Michael Isikoff’s September 23, 2016 news story also based on the dossier. But much of the Russiagate campaign was conducted in this circular manner. Steele and Simpson built an echo chamber with their opposition research, parts of the law enforcement and intelligence communities, and the press all reinforcing one another. Plant an item in the open air and watch it grow—like Page’s role in the Trump campaign.
Why else was Foer or anyone so interested in Page? Why was Page’s Moscow speech so closely watched and widely covered? According to the Washington Post, Page “chided” American policymakers for an “often-hypocritical focus on democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change” in its dealings with Russia, China, and Central Asia.
As peculiar as it may have sounded for a graduate of the Naval Academy to cast a skeptical eye on American exceptionalism, Page’s speech could hardly have struck the policy establishment as shocking, or even novel. They’d been hearing versions of it for the last eight years from the president of the United States.
In President Obama’s first speech before the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), on September 23, 2009, he insisted that no country, least of all America, has the right to tell other countries how to organize their political lives. “Democracy cannot be imposed on any nation from the outside,” said Obama. “Each society must search for its own path, and no path is perfect. Each country will pursue a path rooted in the culture of its people and in its past traditions.”
Obama sounded even more wary of American leadership on his way out of office eight years later. In his 2016 UNGA speech, the 2009 Nobel laureate said: “I do not think that America can — or should — impose our system of government on other countries.” Obama was addressing not just foreign nations but perhaps more pointedly his domestic political rivals.
In 2008 Obama campaigned against the Iraq War and the Republican policymakers who toppled Saddam Hussein to remake Iraq as a democracy. All during his presidency, Obama rebuffed critics who petitioned the administration to send arms or troops to advance U.S. interests and values abroad, most notably in Ukraine and Syria.
In 2016, it was Trump who ran against the Republican foreign policy establishment—which is why hundreds of GOP policymakers and foreign policy intellectuals signed two letters distancing themselves from the party’s candidate. The thin Republican bench of foreign policy experts available to Trump is a big reason why he named the virtually unknown Page to his team. So why was it any surprise that Page sounded like the Republican candidate, who sounded like the Democratic president?
Why Didn’t the Left Like Obama’s Ideas from a Republican?
On the Right, many national security and foreign policy writers like me heard and were worried by the clear echoes of Obama’s policies in the Trump campaign’s proposals. Did those writing from the left side of the political spectrum not see the continuities?
Writing in the Washington Post July 21, 2016, Applebaum explained how a “Trump presidency could destabilize Europe.” The issue, she explained, was Trump’s positive attitude toward Putin. “The extent of the Trump-Russia business connection has already been laid out, by Franklin Foer at Slate,” wrote Applebaum. She named Page and his “long-standing connections to Russian companies.”
Even more suggestive to Applebaum is that just a few days before her article was published, “Trump’s campaign team helped alter the Republican party platform to remove support for Ukraine” from the Republican National Committee’s platform. Maybe, she hinted, that was because of Trump aide Manafort’s ties to Yanukovich.
Did those talking points come from Steele’s opposition research? Manafort’s relationship with Yanukovich had been widely reported in the U.S. press long before he signed on with the Trump campaign. In fact, in 2007 Glenn Simpson was one of the first to write about their shady dealings while he was still working at the Wall Street Journal. The corrupt nature of the Manafort-Yanukovich relationship is an important part of the dossier. So is the claim that in exchange for Russia releasing the DNC emails, “the TRUMP team had agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue.”
The reality, however, is that the Trump campaign team never removed support for Ukraine from the party platform. In a March 18, 2017 Washington Examiner article, Byron York interviewed the convention delegate who pushed for tougher language on Russia, and got it.
“In the end, the platform, already fairly strong on the Russia-Ukraine issue,” wrote York, “was strengthened, not weakened.” Maybe Applebaum just picked it up from her own paper’s mis-reporting.
For Applebaum, it was hard to understand why Trump would express skepticism about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, except to appease Putin. She referred to a recent interview in which Trump “cast doubt on the fundamental basis of transatlantic stability, NATO’s Article 5 guarantee: If Russia invades, he said, he’d have to think first before defending U.S. allies.”
The Echoes Pick Up
In an article published the very same day in the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg made many of the very same observations. Titled “It’s Official: Hillary Clinton is Running Against Vladimir Putin,” the article opens: “The Republican nominee for president, Donald J. Trump, has chosen this week to unmask himself as a de facto agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin.” What was the evidence? Well, for one, Page’s business interests.
Trump’s expressed admiration for Putin and other “equivocating, mercenary statements,” wrote Goldberg, are “unprecedented in the history of Republican foreign policymaking.” However, insofar as Trump’s fundamental aim was to find some common ground with Putin, it’s a goal that, for better or worse, has been a 25-year U.S. policy constant, across party lines. Starting with George W.H. Bush, every American commander-in-chief since the end of the Cold War sought to “reset” relations with Russia.
But Trump, according to Goldberg, was different. “Trump’s understanding of America’s role in the world aligns with Russia’s geostrategic interests.” Here Goldberg rang the same bells as Applebaum—the Trump campaign “watered down” the RNC’s platform on Ukraine; the GOP nominee “questioned whether the U.S., under his leadership, would keep its [NATO] commitments,” including Article 5. Thus, Goldberg concluded: “Donald Trump, should he be elected president, would bring an end to the postwar international order.”
That last bit sounds very bad. Coincidentally, it’s similar to a claim made in the very first paragraph of the Steele dossier — the “Russian regime,” claims one of Steele’s unnamed sources, has been cultivating Trump to “encourage splits and divisions in the western alliance.”
The West won the Cold War because the United States kept it unified. David Remnick saw it up close. Assigned to the Washington Post’s Moscow bureau in 1988, Remnick witnessed the end of the Soviet Union, which he documented in his award-winning book, “Lenin’s Tomb.” So it’s hardly surprising that in his August 3, 2016 New Yorker article, “Trump and Putin: A Love Story,” Remnick sounded alarms concerning the Republican presidential candidate’s manifest affection for the Russian president.
Citing the “original reporting” of Foer’s seminal Slate article, the New Yorker editor contended “that one reason for Trump’s attitude has to do with his business ambitions.” As Remnick elaborated, “one of Trump’s foreign-policy advisers, has longstanding ties to Gazprom, a pillar of Russia’s energy industry.” Who could that be? Right—Carter Page. With Applebaum and Goldberg, Remnick was worried about Trump’s lack of support for Ukraine and the fact that Trump “has declared NATO ‘obsolete’ and has suggested that he might do away with Article 5.”
Where Did All These Echoes Come From?
This brings us to the fundamental question: Is it possible that these top national security and foreign policy journalists were focused on something else during Obama’s two terms in office, something that had nothing to do with foreign policy or national security? It seems we must even entertain the possibility they slept for eight years because nearly everything that frightened them about the prospects of a Trump presidency had already transpired under Obama.
The Trump team wanted to stop short of having the RNC platform promise lethal support to Ukraine—which was in keeping with official U.S. policy. Obama didn’t want to arm the Ukrainians. He ignored numerous congressional efforts to get him to change his mind. “There has been a strong bipartisan well of support for quite some time for providing lethal support,” said California Rep. Adam Schiff. But Obama refused.
As for the western alliance or international order or however you want to put it, it was under the Obama administration that Russia set up shop on NATO’s southern border. With the Syrian conflict, Moscow re-established its foothold in the Middle East after 40 years of American policy designed to keep it from meddling in U.S. spheres of influence. Under Obama, Russia’s enhanced regional position threatened three U.S. allies: Israel, Jordan, and NATO member Turkey.
In 2012, Moscow’s Syrian client brought down a Turkish air force reconnaissance plane. According to a 2013 Wall Street Journal article, “Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan raised alarms in the U.S. by suggesting that Turkey might invoke NATO’s Article V.” However, according to the Journal, “neither the U.S. nor NATO was interested in rushing to Article V… NATO was so wary of getting pulled into Syria that top alliance officials balked at even contingency planning for an intervention force to protect Syrian civilians. ‘For better or worse, [Syrian president Bashar al- Assad] feels he can count on NATO not to intervene right now,’ a senior Western official said.”
Whatever one thinks of Obama’s foreign policy, it is hardly arguable that he—wisely, cautiously, in the most educated and creative ways, or unwisely, stupidly, cravenly, the choice of adjectives is yours—ceded American interests and those of key allies in Europe and the Middle East in an effort to avoid conflict with Russia.
When Russia occupied Crimea and the eastern portion of Ukraine, there was little pushback from the White House. The Obama administration blinked even when Putin’s escalation of forces in Syria sent millions more refugees fleeing abroad, including Europe.
Was Anyone Paying Attention When This Happened?
Surely it couldn’t have escaped Applebaum’s notice that Obama’s posture toward Russia made Europe vulnerable. She’s a specialist in Europe and Russia—she’s written books on both. Her husband is the former foreign minister of Poland. So how, after eight years of Obama’s appeasement of a Russia that threatened to withhold natural gas supplies from the continent, did the Trump team pose a unique threat to European stability?
What about Goldberg? Is it possible that he’d never bothered to research the foreign policy priorities of a president he interviewed five times between 2008 and 2016? In the last interview, from March 2016, Obama told him he was “very proud” of the moment in 2013 when he declined to attack Assad for deploying chemical weapons. As Obama put it, that’s when he broke with the “Washington playbook.” He chose diplomacy instead. He made a deal with Russia over Assad’s conventional arsenal—which Syria continued to use against civilians throughout Obama’s term.
Again, regardless of how you feel about Obama’s decisions, the fact is that he struck an agreement with Moscow that ensured the continued reign of its Syrian ally, who gassed little children. Yet only four months later, Goldberg worried that a Trump presidency would “liberate dictators, first and foremost his ally Vladimir Putin, to advance their own interests.”
Remnick wrote a 2010 biography of Obama, but did he, too, pay no attention to the policies of the man he interviewed frequently over nearly a decade? How is this possible? Did some of America’s top journalists really sleepwalk through Obama’s two terms in office, only to wake in 2016 and find Donald Trump and his campaign becoming dangerously cozy with a historical American adversary?
All’s Fair in War and Politics
Of course not. They enlisted their bylines in a political campaign on behalf of the Democratic candidate for president and rehearsed the talking points Steele later documented. But weren’t the authors of these articles, big-name journalists, embarrassed to be seen reading from a single script and publishing the same article with similar titles within the space of two weeks? Weren’t they worried it would look like they were taking opposition research, from the same source?
No, not really. In a sense, these stories weren’t actually meant to be read. They existed for the purpose of validating the ensuing social media messaging. The stories were written around the headlines, which were written for Twitter: “Putin’s Puppet”; “It’s Official: Hillary Clinton is Running Against Vladimir Putin”; “Trump and Putin: A Love Story”; “The Kremlin’s Candidate.” The stories were vessels built only to launch thousands of 140-character salvos to then sink into the memory hole.
Since everyone took Clinton’s victory for granted, journalists assumed extravagant claims alleging an American presidential candidate’s illicit ties to an adversarial power would fade just as the fireworks punctuating Hillary’s acceptance speech would vanish in the cool November evening. And the sooner the stories were forgotten the better, since they frankly sounded kooky, conspiratorial, as if the heirs to the Algonquin round table sported tin-foil hats while tossing back martinis and trading saucy limericks.
Yes, the Trump-Russia collusion media campaign really was delusional and deranged; it really was a conspiracy theory. So after the unexpected happened, after Trump won the election, the Russiagate campaign morphed into something more urgent, something twisted and delirious.
Quick, Pin Our Garbage Story on Someone
When CNN broke the story—co-written by Evan Perez, a former colleague and friend of Fusion GPS principals—that the Obama administration’s intelligence chiefs had briefed Trump on the existence of the dossier, it not only cleared the way for BuzzFeed to publish the document, it also signaled the press that the intelligence community was on side. This completed the echo chamber, binding one American institution chartered to steal and keep secrets to another embodying our right to free speech. We know which ethic prevailed.
Now Russiagate was no longer part of a political campaign directed at Trump, it was a disinformation operation pointed at the American public, as the pre-election media offensive resonated more fully with the dossier now in the open. You see, said the press: everything we published about Trump and Putin is really true—there’s a document proving it. What the press corps neglected to add is that they’d been reporting talking points from the same opposition research since before the election, and were now showcasing “evidence” to prove it was all true.
The reason the media will not report on the scandal now unfolding before the country, how the Obama administration and Clinton campaign used the resources of the federal government to spy on the party out of power, is not because the press is partisan. No, it is because the press has played an active role in the Trump-Russia collusion story since its inception. It helped birth it.
To report how the dossier was made and marketed, and how it was used to violate the privacy rights of an American citizen—Page—would require admitting complicity in manufacturing Russiagate. Against conventional Washington wisdom, the cover-up in this case is not worse than the crime: Both weigh equally in a scandal signaling that the institution where American citizens are supposed to discuss and debate the choices about how we live with each other has been turned against a large part of the public to delegitimize their political choices.
This Isn’t the 27-Year-Olds’ Fault
I’ve argued over the last year that the phony collusion narrative is a symptom of the structural problems with the press. The rise of the Internet, then social media, and gross corporate mismanagement damaged traditional media institutions. As newspapers and magazines around the country went bankrupt when ownership couldn’t figure out how to make money off the new digital advertising model, an entire generation of journalistic experience, expertise, and ethics was lost. It was replaced, as one Obama White House official famously explained, by 27-year-olds who “literally know nothing.”
But the first vehicles of the Russiagate campaign were not bloggers or recent J-school grads lacking wisdom or guidance to wave off a piece of patent nonsense. They were journalists at the top of their profession—editors-in-chief, columnists, specialists in precisely the subjects that the dossier alleges to treat: foreign policy and national security. They didn’t get fooled. They volunteered their reputations to perpetrate a hoax on the American public.
That’s why, after a year of thousands of furious allegations, all of which concerning Trump are unsubstantiated, the press will not report the real scandal, in which it plays a leading role. When the reckoning comes, Russiagate is likely to be seen not as a symptom of the collapse of the American press, but as one of the causes for it.
quote:How The Media Enable Rep. Adam Schiff’s Russian Bot Conspiracy Theories
For more than a year, Adam Schiff has been hopping to all the TV stations claiming, without benefit of specifics, the existence of a vast conspiracy between President Trump and Russia.
Last week, Laurence Tribe suggested, without evidence, that a plane crash in Russia was related to fallout from the Russian dossier operation orchestrated and funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Tribe is a Harvard Law professor, a passionate critic of President Donald Trump, and a known Russia conspiracy theorist. So it should have been surprising that the same day he was tweeting out plane crash conspiracy theories, he also argued in a “facially absurd” op-ed in The New York Times that Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., should be charged with obstruction of justice — no, really — for performing congressional oversight of the FBI.
Then again, it was only last March that The New York Times published another Russia conspiracy theorist named Louise Mensch talking about Russian hacking. Yes, the same Louise Mensch who believes that the “Marshal of the Supreme Court” told Trump about his impeachment and that Steve Bannon faces the death penalty for espionage.
(Forget it, she’s rolling.)
When it comes to the Russia-Trump collusion theory, a bit more journalistic rigor is in order. One of the most enthusiastic promulgators of a Russia-Trump collusion theory is Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking member on Nunes’ House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. For more than a year, Schiff has been hopping around all the TV stations claiming, without benefit of specifics, the existence of a vast conspiracy between Trump and Russia.
Leaks from his committee that advance this theory frequently get published, even if they fail to hold up under scrutiny. But even his public actions shouldn’t be accepted so uncritically.
Experts Refute The Russia Charge
On January 23, public interest in the memo from the majority of the intelligence committee had been high, as evidenced by the demand to #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag on Twitter and Facebook. When the hashtag went viral, Schiff had a theory that it wasn’t the American public that was interested in abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Nope, it was Russians! Secret Russian bots were trying to make it look like Americans were interested in FISA abuse against a Trump campaign affiliate.
Schiff put out a press release pressuring private companies to investigate whether Russians using their platform were behind the spread of the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag. The letter demanded that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg perform an “in-depth forensic examination” on the “ongoing attack by the Russian government through Kremlin-linked social media actors directly acting to intervene and influence our democratic process.”
The Daily Beast quickly put out a story with an anonymous Twitter source denying that Russian bots were behind the spread of the hashtag. The story said the theory was bunk, according to “an early in-house analysis” that concluded the hashtag was mostly pushed by eager Americans:
But that was just an anonymous source at Twitter. Twitter itself publicly responded on January 26 with a letter saying an investigation “has not identified any significant activity connected to Russia with respect to Tweets posting original content to this hashtag.” The letter went on to note that #ReleaseTheMemo “was also used by several prominent, verified U.S. accounts on the evening of Thursday, January 18. Typically, hashtag use by high-profile accounts, including those with high numbers of followers, plays a role in driving conversations around a hashtag on Twitter.”
Facebook responded with a letter that said this was a Twitter hashtag, not a Facebook one, and added that the company would continue to update Congress on any Russian interference. Schiff went back and asked for more information and pressured social media companies for more action.
Facebook slapped it down again, saying, “To date, our internal Information Security team has not become aware of information or activity of a sort that would prompt further review.” Facebook explained that it monitors and assesses thousands of detailed account attributes such as location information and connections to others on the platform, and it hadn’t detected any significant Kremlin activity.
Media Coverage of the Russian Bot Story
When Schiff advanced his theory that it was Russian bots — not Americans — who cared about FISA abuse, he received typical friendly media coverage. But when Twitter and Facebook refuted the claim, media outlets either downplayed it or pretended it didn’t matter.
Politico is one outlet that heavily pushed the idea of Russian bots being behind the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag, despite the denials of officials at Facebook and Twitter. In January, PoliticoPro ran a story that acknowledged Twitter had found no evidence of any significant Russian bot activity before this odd section that pretended denial had never happened: “Schiff and Feinstein said the companies must deactivate the bot accounts if they violate user policies. They want Twitter and Facebook to notify users who may have seen posts from the bots and to describe how they’ll prevent similar foreign influence campaigns in the future.”
Even after more denials from Facebook and Twitter were issued, Politico continued to go all-in on Schiff’s idea that Russian bots were behind the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag, repeating his accusations. This article mentions The Daily Beast’s anonymous Twitter source, saying Russian bots weren’t behind the hashtag, omitting the on-the-record Twitter letters saying the same thing. This article mentions the Twitter denial, but it’s placed in the middle of the story with absolutely no consequence, as if it’s irrelevant.
Natasha Bertrand, a reporter who facilitates messages from Fusion GPS, the group that authored the infamous Russia dossier on behalf of the Clinton campaign, wrote a piece headlined “Russia-linked Twitter accounts are working overtime to help Devin Nunes and WikiLeaks.”
Her story and many others uncritically accept and promote a secretive group’s unverified claim of a Russian conspiracy. The Alliance for Securing Democracy runs an operation called Hamilton 68 that it claims tracks Russian bots, though it’s impossible to assess the claim because of the group’s methodology. The advisory council for the alliance includes NeverTrump stalwarts such as Bill Kristol and David Kramer, the man Sen. John McCain sent to London to pick up the discredited Russian dossier from Christopher Steele.
Hamilton 68’s claim — later refuted by Twitter and Facebook — formed the entire basis of Schiff’s theory that it was Russian bots, not real Americans, who wanted to learn about FISA abuse by the FBI. Asked to respond to Hamilton 68’s claim, Twitter responded, “Because the Hamilton Dashboard’s account list is not available to the public, we are unable to offer any specific context on the accounts it includes.” They added, “We have offered to review the list of accounts contained in the Dashboard and this offer remains open.”
In other words, Hamilton 68 won’t let anyone review their dashboard to determine in any way if they’re tracking actual Russian propaganda bots, or just conservative Americans who, for instance, care about FISA abuse. Yet Hamilton 68’s claims are repeated uncritically by a media that asks no questions about the methodology.
Yesterday’s front page at The New York Times is a great example of how much the media are willing to publicize claims they have in no way independently verified:
As journalist Glenn Greenwald of Edward Snowden fame noted:
Uitklappen
Russian bot hysteria is taking over many in the media. This week both Newsweek and RawStory were duped by a false story alleging that Russian bots forced Al Franken from office over his sexual harassment of women.
Thankfully, some other voices are making their way in this hysterical climate. Adrian Chen wrote the definitive piece on Russian troll farms back in 2015 for the New York Times Sunday Magazine. It is well worth a read for anyone wanting a factual look at how Russian troll armies work and how to guard against them. His piece centers on the very same Internet Research Agency whose members were indicted by Robert Mueller on Friday. He knocked down the Russian bot hysteria on MSNBC:
Klik
Masha Gessen is a vehement and long-standing Putin critic. She has written a book warning about Putin and many articles comparing Putin and Trump. Even she, in a new article for The New Yorker, mocks the hysteria over the troll farms and says of the Russian bot operation that it was “not at all sophisticated, and about as bold as, say, keying a neighbor’s car under the cover of night.”
Russian disinformation campaigns have been a real thing going back decades, but the implication that bots are a particularly significant force in turning political debate poisonous is ridiculous. It’s juvenile enough for Schiff to peddle his conspiracy theories. Journalists should show a bit more restraint before uncritically broadcasting them further.
quote:Did China Hack The CIA In Massive Intelligence Breach From 2010 To 2012?
Both the CIA and the FBI declined to comment on reports saying the Chinese government killed or imprisoned 18 to 20 CIA sources from 2010 to 2012 and dismantled the agency's spying operations in the country. It is described as one of the worst intelligence breach in decades, current and former American officials told the New York Times.
Investigators were uncertain whether the breach was a result of a double agent within the CIA who had betrayed the U.S. or whether the Chinese had hacked the communications system used by the agency to be in contact with foreign sources. The Times reported Saturday citing former American officials from the final weeks of 2010 till the end of 2012, the Chinese killed up to 20 CIA sources.
Officials also said the number of U.S. assets lost to China were comparable to the loss of assets in the Soviet Union and Russia because of the two infamous spies Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.
Ames had joined CIA in 1962 in a low-level position. Over the years, he worked on several interesting cases but financial constraints started building up due to troubles in his personal life. In 1985, Ames went to the Soviet Embassy in Washington D.C. and offered secrets to the KGB — Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti, the committee for the security of the Soviet Union — and started receiving money from them. In 1994, Aimes was arrested for spying for Russia and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, according to the website of CIA.
Hanssen is considered the "most damaging spy" in FBI history for disclosing confidential information about the U.S. to the Soviet Union and Russia. On Feb. 18, 2001, he was arrested and charged with committing espionage on behalf of the intelligence services of the former Soviet Union and its successors, and was also sentenced to prison without the possibility of parole, according to the website of FBI.
China has reportedly attempted to disrupt American spying efforts several times in the past. In 2015, the U.S. pulled out spies from China as a result of a cyber attack that compromised the personal data of 21.5 million government workers, CNN had reported citing a U.S. official.
On that occasion, the U.S. suspected Chinese hackers were responsible for the breach at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which exposed the fingerprints of 5.6 million government employees. The hack reportedly had a huge impact on U.S. national security, in part because the hacked data included information from U.S. government forms used for security clearances.
In April, ahead of President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping's summit, a hacking group that pursues Chinese government interests broke into the website of the National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC). They left a malicious link on web pages where members of NFTC register for upsoming meetings, Reuters reported citing researchers at Fidelis Cybersecurity and a person familiar with the trade group.
The FBI and the NFTC had declined to comment. A spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
quote:Sessions: DOJ inspector general to probe FISA abuse allegations
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Tuesday the inspector general of the Department of Justice will probe allegations of government surveillance abuse, in light of the memos released on Capitol Hill about FBI and DOJ efforts to obtain FISA warrants to surveil a Trump campaign adviser.
“We believe the Department of Justice must adhere to the high standards in the FISA court,” Sessions said during a news conference Tuesday. “Yes it will be investigated. And I think that's just the appropriate thing the inspector general will take that as one of the matters he'll deal with.”
Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee released a memo in February detailing the DOJ and FBI’s surveillance of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, saying an infamous, unverified dossier funded by Democrats "formed an essential part" of the application to spy on him. Democrats released a rebuttal memo on Sunday.
The White House responded to the GOP memo by saying it “raises serious concerns about the integrity of decisions made at the highest levels of the Department of Justice and the FBI to use the government’s most intrusive surveillance tools against American citizens.”
In an earlier interview on Fox News’ "Sunday Morning Futures," Sessions told host Maria Bartiromo that there would be an investigation into how the FBI used the dossier to secure a wiretap.
“Let me tell you, every FISA warrant based on facts submitted to that court have to be accurate,” he said. “That will be investigated and looked at, and we are not going to participate at the Department of Justice in providing anything less than the proper disclosure to the court before they issue a FISA warrant.”
The involvement of the inspector general is significant.
Over the last year, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz has been conducting a review of the FBI and DOJ’s actions related to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. A final report on the investigation is expected within several months.
vanaf 10:26quote:I can guarantee that. And I can guarantee that, not because I give Attorney General Lynch a directive, that is institutionally how we have always operated. I do not talk to the Attorney General about pending investigations. I do not talk to FBI directors about pending investigations. We have a strict line, and always have maintained it, previous precedent.
Brieven van Rosemary M. Collyer aan Bob Goodlatte en Devin Nunes.quote:FISA court responds to Republican leaders' requests for info on Trump aide surveillance
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court sent response letters to Republican leaders who requested certain documents related to investigations into surveillance of a Trump campaign aide, saying the court is analyzing the unusual requests.
Judge Rosemary Collyer, who presides over the national security court, explained in the letters dated Thursday and sent to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes and House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte that the requests the court have received this year are the first of their kind and thus a path forward has yet to be determined.
"Before 2018, the Court had never received a request from Congress for documents related to any specific FISA application. Thus, your requests — and others I have recently received from Congress — present novel and significant questions," Collyer wrote in her letter to Nunes.
Nunes, R-Calif., wants FISC to turn over transcripts from hearings related to the FBI and Justice Department’s application for and renewals of a warrant to conduct surveillance on a Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page. Goodlatte, R-Va., sent a similar request to FISC last month, and also reached out to the heads of the Justice Department and FBI.
A memo compiled by Nunes and Republican staff in the House Intelligence Committee made public earlier this month alleged officials within the DOJ and the FBI used information contained in an unverified and salacious dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, in its application to secure the warrant. The memo also claims officials within the law enforcement agencies did not include information that the research for the dossier was funded by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
However, that point has been brought into question in recent days as Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., a member of House Intelligence, who claimed in a meeting this week that the FISA court judge “was alerted” to the political origins of the "Trump dossier."
Collyer wrote that any such transcripts would be classified and noted that a "typical process of considering an application" would not include a "systematic record of questions we ask or responses the government gives."
Collyer further explained that the court's considerations involve the prerogatives of the legislative branch as well as the executive branch, "including its responsibility for national security and its need to maintain the integrity of any ongoing law enforcement investigations."
Collyer also suggested that the Justice Department and the FBI would likely be in a better position, due to "separation of powers considerations," to respond with much of the same information.
The release of the Republican memo which sparked these requests to FISC was fiercely opposed by Democrats, the FBI, and the DOJ. President Trump allowed the release of the report in unredacted form, but Democrats warned some of its sensitive information might be misleading without proper context or omitted facts.
Democrats have tried to secure the public release of their own rebuttal memo, but last week, President Trump blocked their efforts and sent it back to the House Intelligence Committee for review.
In a letter transmitted to the House Intelligence Committee late Friday, White House counsel Don McGahn explained Trump was “inclined to declassify” the Democrats' memo, but he wouldn't be doing so over national security concerns, following a review by top spy and law enforcement officials, including Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
McGahn also said Trump directed the Justice Department to give “technical assistance” to the intelligence committee if they decide they want to “revise” the memo to “mitigate the risks identified," and that the White House is ready to review any new draft offered in the future.
quote:FBI lacked corroboration for Page wiretap; discredited dossier writer Steele ID’d as Yahoo source
Two pieces of evidence that have come together prove anti-Trump dossier writer Christopher Steele was the key source for a Yahoo News story that the FBI cited to support its wiretap application.
Identifying the source of that September 2016 article on Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page has taken on added importance in recent weeks.
First, Rep. Devin Nunes, California Republican and chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, issued a declassified memo on Feb. 2. It said the FBI relied greatly on Mr. Steele’s discredited Democrat-financed dossier to obtain a surveillance warrant on Mr. Page.
To bolster the dossier’s charge that Mr. Page met with two Kremlin figures in Moscow, the FBI cited the Yahoo News article, which said the same thing.
But the Nunes memo said the FBI, in its Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act application, wasn’t corroborating the dossier because the Page accusation in Yahoo came from the same source: Mr. Steele.
“The Carter Page FISA application also cited extensively a September 23, 2016 Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff, which focuses on Page’s July 2016 trip to Moscow,” the memo states. “This article does not corroborate the Steele dossier because it is derived from information leaked by Steele himself to Yahoo News.”
Mr. Nunes cited Mr. Steele’s testimony, through his attorneys, in a London court case in which he is being sued for libel.
Then came a Democratic rebuttal from Rep. Adam B. Schiff of California, a leading dossier supporter.
Mr. Schiff, the House intelligence committee’s top Democrat, said Republicans failed to “cite evidence that Steele disclosed to Yahoo details included in the FISA warrant, since the British Court filings to which they refer do not address what Steele may have said to Yahoo.”
This assertion is important to Democrats. They are trying to bolster the FBI as it pursues collusion charges between the Trump campaign and Russia, and also support Mr. Steele, whose unverified accusations they have repeatedly cited.
The two pieces of evidence that say Mr. Steele was in fact the source:
⦁ In the London court case, Mr. Steele acknowledged that he came to the U.S. in September 2016 at the request of Fusion GPS, which paid him with Democratic Party money. He met with a number of major news representatives, including The New York Times and The Washington Post as he tried to sell his explosive charges. Included in Mr. Steele’s list of appointments was a meeting with Mr. Isikoff.
Mr. Isikoff subsequently wrote a story that matched the dossier. Both the dossier and the Yahoo story said Mr. Page met with two U.S.-sanctioned Russians, Rosneft oil chief Igor Sechin and Vladimir Putin aide Igor Diveykin. Mr. Isikoff sourced the information not to Mr. Steele but to a “Western intelligence source.”
Mr. Page, whose trip to Moscow was for a public speech at a university, has repeatedly denied under oath that he met the two men. The former Moscow resident and energy investor has decried the investigation into him, including the nearly one-year-long wiretap, which he says found no wrongdoing.
⦁ After Mr. Schiff wrote his rebuttal to the Nunes memo on Jan. 31, Mr. Isikoff, a longtime journalist in Washington with a number of scoops to his credit, posted an edition of his podcast, “Skullduggery,” on Feb. 2. Through the Nunes memo, Mr. Isikoff had just learned and said he was surprised that the FBI relied on his article before the FISA court judge.
He told about being summoned by his “old friend,” Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, to a private room in a Washington hotel to meet the former spy from Britain.
“Steele tells me an amazing story,” Mr. Isikoff said. “One of Donald Trump’s foreign policy advisers, Carter Page, had flown to Moscow and held private talks with close associates of Vladimir Putin about lifting U.S. sanctions against Russia. And Steele tells me something else that day that gets my attention. He has taken this information to the FBI, and the bureau is very interested. Why were they interested? What did the bureau know that would prompt them to take the next step of launching an investigation into an adviser to the Republican nominee for president?”
Mr. Isikoff subsequently wrote the article that ended up in the FBI’s FISA petition. His podcast sealed the case for Mr. Nunes.
This prompts the question: Why did the FBI believe that the dossier section about Mr. Page and the Isikoff article came from collaborating sources?
The answer lies in a declassified referral sent to the Justice Department from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican.
The two said the evidence suggests that Mr. Steele lied to the FBI when he denied being the source. They have asked the Justice Department to investigate him.
“The FBI repeatedly represented to the court that Mr. Steele told the FBI he did not have unauthorized contacts with the press about the dossier prior to October 2016,” the senators’ referral said. “The FISA applications make these claims specifically in the context of the September 2106 Yahoo News article. But Mr. Steele has admitted — publicly before a court of law — that he did have such contacts with the press at this time and his former business partner Mr. Simpson has confirmed it to the committee.”
The referral says that the FBI either submitted false information or “Mr. Steele made materially false statements to the FBI when he claimed he provided the dossier information only to his business partner and the FBI.”
Dank U.quote:Op woensdag 7 maart 2018 16:59 schreef Lavenderr het volgende:
Dellipder, bedankt voor al je informatieve posts
quote:DOJ Announces Fast and Furious Documents Withheld by Eric Holder Will Be Released
The Department of Justice announced Wednesday additional documents related to the Operation Fast and Furious scandal during the Obama administration will be released to the House Oversight Committee. The documents were previously withheld by Attorney General Eric Holder, who was voted in civil and criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to turn them over.
“The Department of Justice under my watch is committed to transparency and the rule of law. This settlement agreement is an important step to make sure that the public finally receives all the facts related to Operation Fast and Furious,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions released in a statement.
The Department stated the document release is part of “the conditional settlement agreement, filed in federal court in Washington D.C.” and “would end six years of litigation arising out of the previous administration’s refusal to produce documents requested by the Committee.”
During an interview with Fox and Friends Tuesday, the brother of slain Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry called on the Trump administration to reopen the investigation into the operation and to release previously withheld documents.
"We need to find out the truth, exactly what happened, how it happened, why it happened. We need Mr. Trump, President Trump, to unseal the documents, reverse executive privilege so that we know what happened, and that we can hold the people accountable that are responsible," Kent Terry said.
Terry was murdered by Mexican cartel rip crew members in December 2010. They were carrying guns illegally trafficked by ATF to Mexico through the Fast and Furious program.
Operation Fast and Furious was a secret ATF program, overseen heavily at the highest levels at the Department of Justice, which took place between September 2009 and December 2010. ATF agents repeatedly and knowingly allowed individuals working for Mexican cartels to traffic thousands of AK-47s, .50 caliber rifles and handguns into Mexico. The operation ended in 2010 when Agent Terry was murdered and years of coverups surrounding his death and the extent of the operation ensued. Hundreds, if not thousands of Mexican citizens have been murdered as a result of the U.S. government putting guns into the hands of narco-terrorists and a number of firearms trafficked during the operation have been found at additional crime scenes in the United States.
quote:Who Believes in Russiagate?
Knowledgeable reporters on the left and right are frightened by the spread of an elite conspiracy theory among American media
Half the country hates Donald Trump, and even the half that thinks he’s doing a good job often flinch from his boorishness, his nasty public attacks, sometimes even on his own aides.
For all the top talent he says he’s surrounded himself with, the president repeatedly attracts among the worst that Washington -and New York- have to offer. No doubt that’s one reason why whatever is thrown at him seems to stick.
At the same time, there is a growing consensus among reporters and thinkers on the left and right -especially those who know anything about Russia, the surveillance apparatus, and intelligence bureaucracy -that the Russiagate-collusion theory that was supposed to end Trump’s presidency within six months has sprung more than a few holes. Worse, it has proved to be a cover for U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement bureaucracies to break the law, with what’s left of the press gleefully going along for the ride. Where Watergate was a story about a crime that came to define an entire generation’s oppositional attitude toward politicians and the country’s elite, Russiagate, they argue, has proved itself to be the reverse: It is a device that the American elite is using to define itself against its enemies—the rest of the country.
Yet for its advocates, the questionable veracity of the Russiagate story seems much less important than what has become its real purpose -elite virtue-signaling. Buy into a storyline that turns FBI and CIA bureaucrats and their hand-puppets in the press into heroes while legitimizing the use of a vast surveillance apparatus for partisan purposes, and you’re in. Dissent, and you’re out, or worse -you're defending Trump.
Recently, a writer on The New Yorker blog named Adrian Chen gave voice to the central dilemma facing young media professionals who struggle to balance their need for social approval with the demands of fact-based analysis in the age of Trump. In an article pegged to special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments of the Internet Research Agency, Chen referenced an article he had written about the IRA for The New York Times Magazine several years ago. After the Mueller indictments were announced, Chen was called on to lend his expertise regarding Russian troll farms and their effect on the American public sphere -an offer he recognized immediately as a can’t-win proposition.
“Either I could stay silent,” wrote Chen, “and allow the conversation to be dominated by those pumping up the Russian threat, or I could risk giving fodder to Trump and his allies.”
In other words, there’s the truth, and then there’s what’s even more important -sticking it to Trump. Choose wrong, even inadvertently, Chen explained, no matter how many times you deplore Trump, and you’ll be labeled a Trumpkin. That’s what happened to Facebook advertising executive Rob Goldman, who was obliged to apologize to his entire company in an internal message for having shared with the Twitter public the fact that “the majority of the Internet Research Agency’s Facebook ads were purchased after the election.” After Trump retweeted Goldman’s thread to reaffirm that Vladimir Putin had nothing to do with his electoral victory, the Facebook VP was lucky to still have a job.
Chen’s article serves to explain why Russiagate is so vital to The New Yorker, despite the many headaches that each new weekly iteration of the story must be causing for the magazine’s fact-checkers. According to British court documents, The New Yorker was one of the publications that former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele briefed in September 2016 on the findings in his now-notorious dossier. In a New Yorker profile of Steele this week -portraying the spy-for-corporate-hire as a patriotic hero and laundering his possible criminal activities -Jane Mayer explains that she was personally briefed by Steele during that time period.
The New Yorker has produced tons of Russiagate stories, including a small anthology of takes on the Mueller indictments alone. Of course there’s one by the recently-hired Adam Entous, the former Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the news that the Washington firm Fusion GPS, which produced the Steele dossier, had been hired by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee -a story that helped Fusion GPS relieve some of the pressure congressional inquiries had put on the firm to release its bank records. No doubt Entous will continue to use his sources, whoever they are, to break more such stories at The New Yorker.
One person at The New Yorker who won’t get on board with the story is Masha Gessen. Born in Moscow, Gessen knows first-hand how bad Putin is and dislikes Trump only a little less than she dislikes the Russian strongman. Yet in a recent New Yorker piece, Gessen mocked Mueller’s indictments: “Trump’s tweet about Moscow laughing its ass off was unusually (perhaps accidentally) accurate,” she wrote. “Loyal Putinites and dissident intellectuals alike are remarkably united in finding the American obsession with Russian meddling to be ridiculous.”
Another native Russian-speaking reporter, Julia Ioffe, formerly with The New Republic and more recently, The Atlantic, has some similar reservations. In a September 2016 article for Politico, she threw cold water on the legend of Carter Page, master spy and wheeler-dealer. As Ioffe reported, virtually no one in Moscow had ever heard of Page.
From the beginning, Gessen saw the collusion story as dangerous, not because she supported Trump but because it fed into a fantasy that convinced Trump’s opponents that they need not bother with the difficult and boring work of procedural politics. And who were the would-be agents of America’s salvation? Spies -the former British spy allegedly responsible for the dossier and countless American intelligence officials using anonymous press leaks to manipulate the American public.
“The backbone of the rapidly yet endlessly developing Trump-Putin story,” Gessen wrote in The New York Review of Books nearly a year ago, “is leaks from intelligence agencies, and this is its most troublesome aspect.”
The specter of an intelligence bureaucracy working in tandem with the press to preserve the prerogatives of a ruling clique is the kind of thing that someone who knows Russia from the inside and actually fears the specter of authoritarian government would naturally find worrying. And not surprisingly, concerns over the role of the intelligence community and its increasingly intrusive methods motivate other Russiagate critics on the left, like Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept, historian Jackson Lears writing at the London Review of Books, and Stephen Cohen at The Nation.
“One of the most bizarre aspects of Russiagate,” writes Lears, “is the magical transformation of intelligence agency heads into paragons of truth-telling -a trick performed not by reactionary apologists for domestic spying, as one would expect, but by people who consider themselves liberals.”
Cohen, a distinguished if often overly sympathetic historian of the Soviet Union, was even more alarmed. “Was Russiagate produced by the primary leaders of the US intelligence community?” asks Cohen, referring to former CIA director John Brennan as well as ex-FBI chief James Comey. “If so, it is the most perilous political scandal in modern American history and the most detrimental to American democracy.”
Yes, the left hates Trump. I didn’t vote for him, either. But what Gessen, Greenwald, Lears, and Cohen all understand is that Russiagate isn’t about Trump. He’s just a convenient proxy for the real target. Their understanding is shared by writers on the right, like Andrew McCarthy, a former lawyer at the Department of Justice, who has unfolded the Russiagate affair over the last year in the pages of National Review, where he has carefully explained how the DOJ and FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to spy on Carter Page and violate the privacy of an American citizen.
What unites Gessen, Greenwald, Lears, and McCarthy obviously isn’t politics—rather, it’s the recognition that the Russiagate campaign represents an attack on American political and social institutions, an attack on our liberties, an attack on us. Russiagate is a conspiracy theory, weaponized by political operatives, much of the press, as well as high-level intelligence and law enforcement bureaucrats to delegitimize an American election and protect their own interests, which coincide with those of the country’s larger professional and bureaucratic elite. [...]
quote:[...] The story of how the Russiagate collusion myth was made and marketed is much easier to understand -it’s social. Imagine a map of professional, academic, and family networks that connect people across professions like law, journalism, public relations, and lobbying, which intersect with political institutions, like the permanent bureaucracies that staff places like the FBI, CIA, Congress, and the White House. That map is largely blue, but there’s lots of red there, too.
The story of how spies and journalists came to collaborate on a disinformation campaign is also, as the left may not be surprised to find, partly explained by economics. With the rise of the internet and social media, and the resulting collapse of print advertising, it was no longer necessary for the media to mass so close to New York City ad firms. Surviving old-media outlets and their new-media cousins moved much of their operations to Washington, which offered one-stop shopping for “national” stories. Having insulated itself from the 2008 economic collapse, the capital thrived. Ambitious and inexperienced young journalists flocked to where the jobs were, staffing startup news and social media operations -which were often simply partisan war rooms that produced and solicited opposition research -just in time to cover Obama’s historic presidency.
For those like Gessen, Cohen, Lears, and others on the left who don’t understand how and when American journalists got in bed with the country’s spies, it started several years before Trump or Russiagate. It was while reporting on the Obama administration that the press came to rely on the White House’s political operatives, including intelligence officials, for sources and stories about American foreign policy. It got worse when the Obama administration started spying on its domestic opponents during the Iran deal, when the Obama administration learned how far it could go in manipulating the foreign-intelligence surveillance apparatus for domestic political advantage. As Adam Entous, then of The Wall Street Journal, wrote in a December 2015 article, “the National Security Agency’s targeting of Israeli leaders and officials also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups.”
Obama administration officials had leaked the story to Entous in order to shape its reception. After all, the real news was pretty bad—Obama had spied on Americans and the Americans he spied on, Congress and Jewish community leaders, knew it. But in Entous’ account, it was only by accident that the National Security Agency had listened in on Americans opposed to the Iran deal, opponents whose communications had simply been “swept up.” While Entous’ evident lack of skepticism about that account was hardly good reporting, it was perfectly in keeping with the maxim of not biting the hand that feeds you.
What the White House really wanted to know, on Entous’ telling, was what the Israeli prime minister and his ambassador to Washington were doing to contest the Iran deal. Except, neither Benjamin Netanyahu nor Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer makes U.S. policy: Congress does. As I explained in an April Tablet article, the purpose of the spying campaign was to help the White House fight U.S. legislators and other Americans critical of the deal -i.e., to win a domestic political battle. A pro-Israel political operative who was deeply involved in the Iran deal fight told me last year, “The NSA’s collections of foreigners became a means of gathering real-time intelligence on Americans.” With the Iran deal, as would later happen with Russiagate, the ostensible targets of intelligence collection -Israel, then Russia- were simply instruments that the Obama administration used to go after the real bad guys, namely its enemies at home.
The same process of weaponizing foreign-intelligence collection for domestic political purposes that the Obama administration road-tested during the Iran-deal fight was used to manufacture Russiagate and get it to market. Except instead of keeping a close hold of the identities of those swept up during “incidental collection” of U.S. persons, departing Obama White House officials leaked the names to friendly reporters.
Leaking classified intelligence is a felony, which means that Obama officials, many in the intelligence community, who leaked the names of Americans whose communications were intercepted to the press, were breaking the law. A crucial concern, then, was the trustworthiness of the intermediaries chosen to publish classified intelligence. It is to those intermediaries that anyone seeking to understand how the press became an instrument of the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy’s information war must now turn.
Entous, now The New Yorker’s man in Washington, had already proved his trustworthiness by shaping the story about Obama administration spying on congressional and American Jewish-community leaders in a way that was favorable to the administration, and disguised blatant abuses of power. More stories would now come his way, courtesy of the U.S. intelligence community.
One of Entous’ most famous Russia-related scoops was a Dec. 31, 2016, Washington Post article reporting that “according to US officials,” Russians hackers had penetrated the computer system of a Vermont dam. As it turns out, the story was entirely wrong.
A statement from Burlington Electric released shortly after the Post’s story explained that a laptop unconnected to the company’s grid was affected by malware. There was no threat to the dam, never mind “the nation’s electrical grid,” as the anonymous U.S. officials quoted in the Entous story had claimed.
In other words, there was no story -which Entous or his co-writer would have discovered had they contacted the electricity company. They didn’t, because the story was not sourced to original reporting -i.e. discovering from sources on location in Vermont that the state’s electrical grid had in fact been compromised. In support of reporting like that, the journalists might well have sought supporting information or quotes from government officials, named or even anonymous. Instead, their story started with anonymous U.S. officials, who leaked to Entous and his colleague for the evident purpose of advancing the Russiagate narrative. Russia was everywhere -from a dam in Vermont to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
If Entous’ story about the Obama administration’s spying on Congress and U.S. Jewish leaders showed that the reporter was trustworthy, the Vermont-dam article showed he wasn’t going to ask many questions of the officials who pointed him toward a nonexistent story, whose purpose appeared to have less to do with the health of the state of Vermont than with fear-mongering about Russia.
Clearly, someone noticed. In the March 1, 2017, Washington Post, Entous was lead byline on an article breaking the news that Attorney General Jeff Sessions met twice with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. A July 21, 2017, Post story on which Entous had the lead byline alleged that Sessions had discussed campaign-related matters with Kislyak. The latter story provides evidence of how the March and July articles were produced -U.S. officials leaked classified intelligence regarding intercepts of Kislyak’s communications with Moscow, in which he discussed Sessions. Officials then unmasked the identity of the attorney general and leaked it to Entous and the other reporters on the story.
Following close on the heels of those two pass-through DC-based “scoops,” Entous was lead byline on an April 3, 2017, story reporting a meeting in the Seychelles between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian banker, reportedly to set up a back channel between Trump and Putin. After publication of the story, Prince said he was shown “specific evidence” by sources from the intelligence community that his name was unmasked and given to the paper. “Unless The Washington Post has somehow miraculously recruited the bartender of a hotel in the Seychelles,” Prince told the House Intelligence Committee in December, “the only way that’s happening is through SIGINT [signals intelligence].” Recent news reports suggest that Prince’s meeting has become a key focus of the Mueller investigation. If those reports are accurate, it seems even more likely that classified intelligence was purposefully being leaked to put pressure on Prince. A week later, on April 11, 2017, Entous is bylined on yet another story based on a leak of classified intelligence that once again violated the privacy rights of an American citizen when the Post broke the news that the FBI secured a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant on Carter Page.
If you think Russiagate is real, then you will probably conclude that Sessions, Prince, and Page are all part of a single, monstrous criminal conspiracy -and that Adam Entous is one of the most important journalists in American history, an indefatigable shoe-leather reporter who helped whistleblowers inside the federal government put the truth before the American public, like Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and Neil Sheehan combined. If you think the collusion story is nonsense, then Entous is just a political operative with a convenient byline. And if you think Russiagate is a campaign of political warfare waged in the shadows by bureaucrats who violated the privacy of American citizens in order to undo election results they disagreed with, then Entous is something worse—an asset whom sectors of the intelligence community have come to rely on in order to manipulate the public.
quote:The CIA Democrats: Part one
An extraordinary number of former intelligence and military operatives from the CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department are seeking nomination as Democratic candidates for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. The potential influx of military-intelligence personnel into the legislature has no precedent in US political history.
If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives on November 6, as widely predicted, candidates drawn from the military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as many as half of the new Democratic members of Congress. They will hold the balance of power in the lower chamber of Congress.
Both push and pull are at work here. Democratic Party leaders are actively recruiting candidates with a military or intelligence background for competitive seats where there is the best chance of ousting an incumbent Republican or filling a vacancy, frequently clearing the field for a favored “star” recruit.
A case in point is Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA operative with three tours in Iraq, who worked as Iraq director for the National Security Council in the Obama White House and as a top aide to John Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence. After her deep involvement in US war crimes in Iraq, Slotkin moved to the Pentagon, where, as a principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, her areas of responsibility included drone warfare, “homeland defense” and cyber warfare.
Elissa Slotkin
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has designated Slotkin as one of its top candidates, part of the so-called “Red to Blue” program targeting the most vulnerable Republican-held seats—in this case, the Eighth Congressional District of Michigan, which includes Lansing and Brighton. The House seat for the district is now held by two-term Republican Representative Mike Bishop.
The Democratic leaders are promoting CIA agents and Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. At the same time, such people are choosing the Democratic Party as their preferred political vehicle. There are far more former spies and soldiers seeking the nomination of the Democratic Party than of the Republican Party. There are so many that there is a subset of Democratic primary campaigns that, with a nod to Mad magazine, one might call “spy vs. spy.”
The 23rd Congressional District in Texas, which includes a vast swathe of the US-Mexico border along the Rio Grande, features a contest for the Democratic nomination between Gina Ortiz Jones, an Air Force intelligence officer in Iraq, who subsequently served as an adviser for US interventions in South Sudan and Libya, and Jay Hulings. The latter’s website describes him as a former national security aide on Capitol Hill and federal prosecutor, whose father and mother were both career undercover CIA agents. The incumbent Republican congressman, Will Hurd, is himself a former CIA agent, so any voter in that district will have his or her choice of intelligence agency loyalists in both the Democratic primary and the general election.
CNN’s “State of the Union” program on March 4 included a profile of Jones as one of many female candidates seeking nomination as a Democrat in Tuesday’s primary in Texas. The network described her discreetly as a “career civil servant.” However, the Jones for Congress website positively shouts about her role as a spy, noting that after graduating from college, “Gina entered the US Air Force as an intelligence officer, where she deployed to Iraq and served under the US military’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy” (the last phrase signaling to those interested in such matters that Jones is gay).
According to her campaign biography, Ortiz Jones was subsequently detailed to a position as “senior advisor for trade enforcement,” a post President Obama created by executive order in 2012. She would later be invited to serve as a director for investment at the Office of the US Trade Representative, where she led the portfolio that reviewed foreign investments to ensure they did not pose national security risks. With that background, if she fails to win election, she can surely enlist in the trade war efforts of the Trump administration.
How this article was prepared
The House of Representatives is currently controlled by the Republicans, with a majority of 238 compared to 193 Democrats. There are four vacancies, one previously held by the Democrats. To reach a majority of 218 seats in the next Congress, the Democrats must have a net gain of 24 seats.
The DCCC has designated 102 seats as priority or competitive, including 22 seats where the incumbents are not running again (five Democrats and 17 Republicans), and 80 seats where Republican incumbents could be defeated for reelection in the event that polls predicting a sizeable swing to the Democrats in November prove accurate.
The World Socialist Web Site has reviewed Federal Election Commission reports filed by all the Democratic candidates in these 102 competitive districts, focusing on those candidates who reported by the latest filing date, December 31, 2017, that they had raised at least $100,000 for their campaigns, giving them a financial war chest sufficient to run in a competitive primary contest. In addition, there a few cases where a candidate had less than the $100,000 cutoff, but was unchallenged for the nomination, or where last-minute retirement or resignation has led to late entry of high-profile candidates without an FEC report on file. These have also been included.
The total of such candidates for the Democratic nomination in the 102 districts is 221. Each has a website that gives biographical details, which we have collected and reviewed for this report. It is notable that those candidates with a record in the military-intelligence apparatus, as well as civilian work for the State Department, Pentagon or National Security Council, do not hide their involvement, particularly in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They clearly regard working as a CIA agent in Baghdad, an Army special ops assassin in Afghanistan, or a planner for drone missile warfare in the White House or Pentagon as a star on their résumé, rather than something to conceal.
One quarter of all the Democratic challengers in competitive House districts have military-intelligence, State Department or NSC backgrounds. This is by far the largest subcategory of Democratic candidates. National security operatives (57) outnumber state and local government officials (45), lawyers (35), corporate executives, businessmen and wealthy individuals (30) and other professionals (19) among the candidates for Democratic congressional nominations.
Of the 102 primary elections to choose the Democratic nominees in these competitive districts, 44 involve candidates with a military-intelligence or State Department background, with 11 districts having two such candidates, and one district having three. In the majority of contests, the military-intelligence candidates seem likely to win the Democratic nomination, and, if the Democrats win in the general election, would enter Congress as new members of the House of Representatives.
There are some regional differences. In the Northeast, 21 of the 31 seats targeted by the Democrats have military-intelligence candidates. This area, not the South or Midwest, has the highest proportion of military-intelligence candidates seeking Democratic nominations.
In the West, only 7 of the 23 targeted seats have military-intelligence candidates, while in a half dozen seats the leading candidates are self-funded millionaires, mainly from the IT industry. There has been a wave of Republican retirements in California and wealthy people are bidding for these seats.
The military-intelligence candidates are disproportionately favored by the party apparatus, encouraged to run in districts that are the most likely takeover targets. Military-intelligence candidates account for 10 of the 22 districts selected for the most high-profile attention as part of the “red-to-blue” program, or nearly half. In some cases, military-intelligence candidates have amassed huge campaign war chests that effectively shut out any potential rivals, an indication that the financial backers of the Democratic Party have lined up behind them.
quote:The CIA Democrats: Part two
Agents and war commanders
There are 57 candidates for the Democratic nomination in 44 congressional districts who boast as their major credential their years of service in intelligence, in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, at the State Department, or some combination of all three. They make up the largest single occupational group running in the Democratic primaries that began March 6 in Texas and extend through mid-September, selecting the candidates who will appear on the general election ballot on November 6.
Aside from their sheer number, and the fact that more than 40 percent, 24 of the 57, are women, there are other aspects worth considering.
Agents, but no longer secret
First: The number of candidates who openly proclaim their role in the CIA or military intelligence. In years past, such activities would be considered confidential, if not scandalous for a figure seeking public office. Not only would the candidates want to disguise their connections to the spy apparatus, the CIA itself would insist on it, particularly for those who worked in operations rather than analysis, since exposure, even long after leaving the agency, could be portrayed as compromising “sources and methods.”
This is no longer the case. The 2018 candidates drawn from this shadow world of espionage, drone murders and other forms of assassination positively glory in their records. And the CIA and Pentagon have clearly placed no obstacles in the way.
We’ve already reviewed the cases of Elissa Slotkin, running in Michigan’s 8th District, who served three tours with the CIA in Baghdad, and Gina Ortiz Jones, an Air Force intelligence officer in Iraq, running for the Democratic nomination in the 23rd District of Texas. There are many others.
Abigail Spanberger, seeking the Democratic nomination in a district in the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia, has the following declaration at the top of her campaign website: “After nearly a decade serving in the CIA, I’m running for Congress in Virginia’s 7th District to fight for opportunity, equality and security for all Americans. My previous service as a law enforcement officer, a CIA officer, and a community volunteer has taught me the value of listening.” Indeed!
Abigail Spanberger's campaign website
Spanberger worked for the CIA as an operations officer, in which capacity, “She traveled and lived abroad collecting intelligence, managing assets, and overseeing high-profile programs in service to the United States.” Her opponent for the Democratic nomination is a career Marine Corps pilot, Dan Ward, in one of nearly a dozen contests involving multiple military-intelligence candidates.
Jesse Colvin, running in the 1st District of Maryland, spent six years in Army intelligence, including four combat deployments to Afghanistan and a year near the Demilitarized Zone between North Korea and South Korea. According to his campaign biography, “I am a proud graduate of the US Army’s Ranger Course, the premier leadership school in the military. I am even more honored to have served in the 75th Ranger Regiment—the Army Rangers. Rangers lead in many key roles throughout the Special Operations Forces’ (SOF) community, and I am lucky to have served and led with men and women of this caliber.”
His biography continues: “As a Ranger, my four combat deployments in Afghanistan took place within a Joint Special Operations Task Force. I led intelligence teams whose work facilitated capture/kill missions of Taliban, al-Qaeda and other terrorist leaders. I managed a lethal drone program. I ran human intelligence sources. Every day, my team and I made dozens of decisions whose outcomes carried life and death consequences for my fellow Rangers, our Afghan partners, and Afghan civilians.”
Jesse Colvin (front right) with his unit in Afghanistan
Jeffrey Beals, seeking the Democratic nomination in the 19th District of New York, is now a school teacher, but writes on his website, “After beginning my career as a CIA intelligence officer, I joined the State Department … I answered the call to help our country in Iraq in 2004 and became one of the longest serving US diplomats of the Iraq War. Fluent in Arabic, I faced down insurgents to set up the first diplomatic talks between our ambassador, our generals and the insurgency. I helped bring warring factions together to create a constitution for Iraq and was decorated by both the US Army and the State Department.”
Unfortunately for Beals, his fundraising, $174,000 by December 31, 2017, is dwarfed by that of another military-intelligence rival for the nomination, Patrick Ryan, a West Point graduate with two tours of duty in Iraq, “including a tour as the lead intelligence officer for an infantry battalion of 1,000 soldiers and officers responsible for ground operations in Mosul,” according to his campaign website. Ryan had raised $906,000 by December 31, and two other candidates in that district, a politically connected lawyer and a medical device manufacturer, had raised more than one million dollars each, all seeking to challenge two-term Republican incumbent John Faso in the Hudson Valley district.
Jonathan Ebel, running in the 13th District of Illinois, served four years as a naval intelligence officer, including on the staff of the US European Command in Stuttgart, Germany during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He now teaches religion at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Then there is Shelly Chauncey, seeking the Democratic nomination in the 5th District of Pennsylvania, in the Philadelphia suburbs. Her website strikes a feminist note:
“Shelly served her nation for more than a decade with the Central Intelligence Agency. She began her career as a secretary and worked her way up to become a counter-intelligence officer. Shelly served as an undercover officer with the CIA in Latin America, East Asia and throughout the United States, providing logistical and counter-intelligence support to operatives abroad.”
The reference to undercover operations “throughout the United States” underscores the role of the intelligence apparatus in spying on the American people, although the CIA is, by law, prohibited from such activity.
Another campaign website touches on the domestic operations of the US spy machine. Omar Siddiqui, running in California’s 48th District, describes his background as follows: “On the front lines of national defense, Mr. Siddiqui serves as a private advisor and consultant to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on issues of national security and counter-terrorism and was formerly an advisor and community partner with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Mr. Siddiqui is presently director of special projects of the FBI National Citizens Academy Alumni Association…”
Commanders and planners of the Iraq War
Barack Obama won the Democratic presidential nomination and the 2008 election in large measure by presenting himself as an opponent of the war in Iraq launched under George W. Bush. Once in office, however, he retained Bush’s defense secretary, former CIA Director Robert Gates, and continued the war for another three years, as well as escalating the long-running US war in Afghanistan.
It is noteworthy in this context that so many of the military-intelligence candidates for Democratic congressional nominations boast of their roles in the war in Iraq and even, in some cases, present it as the high point of their professional and even personal lives.
Thus Elissa Slotkin, already referred to above, met her future husband, the pilot of an Apache helicopter gunship, while working as a CIA agent in Baghdad. Dan McCready, a Marine Corps veteran turned “clean energy” multi-millionaire, backed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for the Democratic nomination in the 9th District of North Carolina, even claims to have found Jesus in Iraq, where he was baptized in water from the Euphrates River.
The Iraq War veterans are either officers, giving them command responsibility in one of the great crimes of the 21st century, or served in special forces units like the Army Rangers and the Navy SEALs, engaging in covert operations that were among the bloodiest and most brutal of the war, or had high-level responsibility at the Pentagon or the National Security Council.
Daniel Helmer, running in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District against five other well-financed candidates—including former State Department official Alison Friedman, who has already topped the $1 million mark—says remarkably little about what he did in Afghanistan and Iraq, although his photograph in military fatigues is on the front page of his website. But Helmer boasts perhaps the most extensive list of endorsements by retired national security officials of any candidate in the country, including eight generals and admirals, two former deputy directors of the CIA, Avril Haines and David Cohen, and Michele Flournoy, former under secretary of defense for policy. What he did to earn their support is left to the imagination.
Richard Ojeda, elected as a West Virginia state senator in 2016, is now seeking the Democratic nomination in the 3rd Congressional District, covering the southern third of the state. As the WSWS has reported, Ojeda has based his political career on more than two decades in the US Army Airborne, including repeated tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he reached the rank of major. His last post was as executive director of Army recruiting in Beckley, seeking to convince youth in West Virginia and Virginia to become cannon fodder for the Pentagon.
Josh Butner, running in the 50th District of California against Republican Duncan Hunter, Jr., “served for 23 years in the United States Navy where he saw multiple combat deployments, most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan.” The career Navy SEAL says almost nothing about what he actually did in the top military assassination unit, but that is to be expected. His campaign website features the slogan “Service, Country, Leadership,” alongside a photograph of Butner in desert fatigues.
Dan Feehan is running to succeed incumbent Democrat Tim Walz in the 1st Congressional District of Minnesota, after Walz announced his candidacy for governor of that state. From 2005 to 2009, according to his campaign biography, Feehan “served as an active duty soldier and completed two combat tours of duty as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom.” He then joined the Obama administration, first as a White House aide, then as an acting assistant secretary of defense in the Pentagon.
Andy Kim, running in the 3rd District of New Jersey, has actually raised more money than the incumbent Republican, Tom MacArthur. Kim worked at the Pentagon and as a strategic adviser to generals David Petraeus and John Allen while they were in command of US forces in Afghanistan. He then moved to the National Security Council, where he was Obama’s director for Iraq for two years.
Maura Sullivan, seeking the Democratic nomination in New Hampshire’s 2nd District, where incumbent Democrat Carol Shea-Porter is retiring, was a Marine Corps officer, rising to the rank of captain and deploying to Fallujah, Iraq, scene of some of the bloodiest battles and most horrific US war crimes of that war. She too joined the Obama administration as a civilian administrator at both the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Pentagon.
Jason Crow is running in Colorado’s 6th Congressional District against incumbent Republican Mike Coffman, where he was selected by the DCCC as one of its top candidates in the “Red-to-Blue” program. He is a veteran of the 82nd Airborne Division, leading a paratrooper platoon during the invasion of Iraq. He then joined the Army Rangers and served two tours in Afghanistan “as part of the Joint Special Operations Task Force,” where he rose to the rank of captain.
Matthew Morgan had a 20-year career in the Marine Corps “where I would deploy routinely overseas, culminating in several senior staff roles where I’d provide counsel to numerous military leaders, including the secretary of defense.” He did two tours in Iraq and also worked in counterterrorism on the Horn of Africa. Now he is the unopposed candidate for the Democratic nomination in Michigan’s 1st Congressional District, which has switched back and forth between the two big business parties and is currently held by first-term Republican Jack Bergman.
quote:The CIA Democrats: Part three
From the State Department to Capitol Hill
The final category of military-intelligence candidates consists of veterans of the US State Department during the Obama years, most of them former aides to Hillary Clinton. These are among the best financed and most publicized of the likely Democratic nominees. In the event of a Democratic “wave” in November, most would find themselves with seats in Congress.
Tom Malinowski, a former congressional aide and Clinton administration official, headed the Washington office of Human Rights Watch for 13 years before joining the Obama administration under Secretary of State John Kerry as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor. He is seeking the Democratic nomination in New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District against incumbent Republican Leonard Lance.
Lauren Baer was a legal adviser to both Secretaries Clinton and Kerry, as well as US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power. She is now seeking the Democratic nomination in the 18th District of Florida, where her principal opponent is Pam Keith, a former judge advocate general in the US Navy and now general counsel to Florida Power & Light. Both women push additional buttons for identity politics, as Baer is openly gay and Keith is African-American.
Nancy Soderberg is a longtime US foreign policy figure going back to the Clinton administration, first at the National Security Council, then as deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs, then as an alternate US representative at the UN Security Council with the rank of ambassador. She has spent much of her time since then heading private overseas operations like the International Crisis Group, while playing a prominent role in the Florida Democratic Party. She is effectively unchallenged for the Democratic nomination in Florida’s 6th Congressional District (Daytona Beach), where the incumbent Republican Ron DeSantis is running for governor.
Edward Meier was a senior adviser to the State Department. According to his campaign website, he “was responsible for coordinating the military-to-civilian transition in Iraq—ensuring our diplomats and aid workers would be safe and secure after the withdrawal of US troops. In this role, he traveled to Iraq on multiple official trips working closely with the US military and the Iraqi government. …” He went on to be director of policy outreach for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Meier fell short Tuesday in his bid for the Democratic nomination in the 32nd District of Texas, finishing fourth out of five Democrats running against incumbent Republican Pete Sessions in a suburban Dallas district Clinton carried over Donald Trump, even though he spent the most money.
Sara Jacobs is another State Department official turned Clinton campaign aide, working on “conflict zones in East and West Africa,” particularly the campaign against Boko Haram in Nigeria, and helping to “spearhead President Obama’s efforts to improve governance in the security sector of our counterterrorism partners,” according to her campaign website. She was a foreign policy adviser to the Clinton campaign and is now seeking the Democratic nomination in California’s 49th District, where incumbent Darrell Issa is retiring.
Jacobs is the best-financed Democrat in the race, as befits the granddaughter of Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs, but at age 29 she would be the youngest congresswoman ever, and she has been snubbed in favor of several more experienced rivals by recent Democratic Party caucuses. One of her opponents is Douglas Applegate, a career Marine Corps judge advocate general with combat tours in Fallujah, Baghdad and Ramadi, who narrowly lost the 2016 race to Issa.
Talley Sergent, yet another State Department official turned Clinton campaign aide, is running in West Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District, which includes Charleston, against two-term incumbent Republican Alex Mooney. A former aide to Senator Jay Rockefeller, Sergent worked on slavery and sex trafficking at the State Department, then managed Clinton’s disastrous campaign in West Virginia before becoming a public relations executive for The Coca-Cola Co.
Challenging her for the Democratic nomination is Aaron Scheinberg, West Point graduate and Iraq War veteran, deployed first as a platoon leader in the 4th Infantry Division, then as a civil affairs officer in Haswah, Iraq. Scheinberg is now executive director of The Mission Continues, a nonprofit promoting the employment of veterans, whose board of directors includes such figures as Michele Flournoy, Pentagon undersecretary in the Obama administration; Meghan O’Sullivan, Iraq director for the National Security Council under George W. Bush; and retired General Ray S. Odierno, former commander of US forces in Iraq.
Jessica Morse was Iraq country coordinator for the State Department in the course of “over a decade as a national security strategist,” according to her website. She worked for the US Agency for International Development, a longtime CIA front, then as adviser to the US Pacific Command, where she “strengthened the US-India defense relationship … and worked to counter terrorist threats in South Asia.” Her opponent for the Democratic nomination in the 4th District of California, to face Republican incumbent Tom McClintock, is another former State Department officer, Regina Bateson, who was a vice-consul in Guatemala and “studied terrorist travel and border security,” according to her campaign website.
A stealth candidate—and some celebrities
The American corporate media has been slow to comment on the extraordinary influx of military and intelligence officers into the Democratic Party’s 2018 congressional campaign. The media prefers to cover the campaign from the standpoint of secondary characteristics, focusing on the great number of women running for office, mainly as Democrats, supposedly in response to Trump’s misogyny.
An exception to this pattern was the article February 8 by the Capitol Hill publication Roll Call, under the headline, “Active-Duty Candidates Can Run—But Can They Campaign?” The article profiled a Tennessee Democratic congressional candidate, Matt Reel, who was called up from his reserve status for a five-month deployment with the 20th Special Forces Group (Green Berets). According to the article, “Even Matt Reel’s staff doesn’t know where he’s deployed.”
Matt Reel
Reel announced his campaign for the 7th District seat shortly after incumbent Republican Marsha Blackburn announced that she was leaving the House of Representatives to run for the US Senate seat from Tennessee currently held by Bob Corker, who is retiring. Because of the late announcements, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has not yet targeted the district and Reel is not included in the figures cited earlier in this article.
The unusual situation for Reel is that, under Pentagon rules, he cannot direct his own campaign while he is on active duty. His aides and supporters can continue to campaign, but he is barred communicating with them in any way. Reel is not even allowed to tell them where he is, since the military deployment is covert. This truly “dark horse" candidate left his campaign having shot a few commercials and other video material, and will return a month or so before the August 2 primary.
Reel is one more example of a candidate from the “black ops” section of the military running as a Democrat. In his case, the two cannot be separated: he has been a Democratic Party functionary and a Green Beret since completing college. A former chief of staff to Alabama Representative Terri Sewell, his most recent position was deputy staff director for the Democrats on the House Veterans Affairs Committee.
While Reel is considered an extreme long-shot as a candidate, running in a district won by the Republicans in 2016 by a 3-1 margin, the DCCC is heavily promoting a number of career military candidates, most of them women, as star recruits for the most competitive districts in 2018, those where a switch from Republican to Democratic control is most likely. These candidates have access to funding far beyond what would be expected for first-time candidates without huge personal resources.
Running in the 31st District of Texas is Mary Jane Hegar, a helicopter pilot and certified military celebrity—Angelina Jolie is cast to play her in a biographical film based on her memoir, Shoot Like a Girl: One Woman’s Dramatic Fight in Afghanistan and on the Home Front. Hegar came to prominence through a lawsuit against the Pentagon policy of barring women from combat. Opposing her for the nomination to face incumbent Republican John Carter is Kent Lester, a West Point graduate and career military officer who retired as a lieutenant colonel after deployments to Panama and Bosnia, among other locations.
Shoot Like A Girl
In Virginia’s 2nd District, which encompasses the Norfolk-Hampton Roads area with its complex of naval bases and shipyards, the DCCC has promoted Elaine Luria, one of the first Navy women to serve as an officer on a nuclear-powered ship, as its favored candidate under the “Red-to-Blue” program. Luria has “deployed six times to the Middle East and Western Pacific as a nuclear-trained surface warfare officer.” She was second-in-command of a guided missile cruiser and commanded assault craft supporting a Marine Corps deployment.
Other military candidates who had already raked in more than one million dollars in campaign funds in 2017, the year before the election, and have been widely publicized in local media in their districts, include:
Mikie Sherrill, a career Navy helicopter pilot, with ten years’ active service in Europe and the Middle East, now a federal prosecutor. She reported raising $1,230,000 by December 31, 2017 for her campaign for the Democratic nomination in New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District, where incumbent Republican Rodney Freylingheusen is retiring.
Chrissy Houlahan, a former US Air Force captain, has raised $1,228,000 for her campaign in Pennsylvania’s 6th Congressional District, against incumbent Republican Ryan Costello.
Amy McGrath, a career Marine fighter pilot with 89 missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, has raised $1,133,000 for her campaign in Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District against incumbent Republican Andy Barr.
Some political conclusions
There is growing popular hostility to the Trump administration, but within the political straitjacket of the two-party system, it is trapped without any genuine outlet. In November 2016, faced with the choice of equally repugnant ruling class figures—Hillary Clinton, the longtime stooge of Wall Street and the Pentagon, and Donald Trump, the corrupt billionaire from the financial underworld of real estate swindling and casino gambling—millions refused to vote. But disappointment and anger over the bankrupt, right-wing policies of the Obama administration led a sufficient number of working people to vote for Trump, particularly in devastated industrial states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, that he could eke out an Electoral College victory despite losing the popular vote.
The 2018 elections could well see a similar process, but in reverse. Angered by the tax cuts for the wealthy and big business, the gutting of social programs like Medicaid and food stamps, the attacks on immigrants and democratic rights more generally, and Trump’s threats of military violence and even nuclear war, millions of working people, however reluctantly, will go to the polls to cast their ballots for the official “opposition,” the Democratic Party, which does not actually oppose Trump at all.
It is by no means certain that the Democrats will win control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm election on November 6. But the details presented in this report demonstrate that a Democratic victory would in no sense represent a shift to the left in capitalist politics.
In a sense, the Democratic Party’s promotion of a large number of military-intelligence candidates for competitive districts represents an insurance policy for the US ruling elite. In the event of a major swing to the Democrats, the House of Representatives will receive an influx of new members drawn primarily from the national security apparatus, trusted servants of American imperialism.
Parenthetically, it should be noted that there would be no comparable influx of Bernie Sanders supporters or other “left”-talking candidates in the event of a Democratic landslide. Only five of the 221 candidates reviewed in this study had links to Sanders or billed themselves as “progressive.” None is likely to win the primary, let alone the general election.
When the dust clears after November 6, 2018, there will almost certainly be more former CIA agents in the Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives than former Sanders activists. It is the military-intelligence operatives who constitute the spine of the Democratic Party, not the Sanders “Our Revolution” group. This is a devastating verdict on the claims of the Vermont senator, backed by various pseudo-left groups, that it is possible to reform the Democratic Party and push it to the left.
The preponderance of national security operatives in the Democratic primaries sheds additional light on the nature of the Obama administration. Far from representing a resurgence of liberal reformism, as apologists for the Democrats like the International Socialist Organization claimed at the time of his election, Obama’s eight years in office marked the further ascendancy of the military-intelligence apparatus within the Democratic Party.
This is demonstrated by the subsequent role of his top personnel. Among the former Obama civilian officials who are running in the Democratic primaries for seats in the House of Representatives, 16 served in the State Department, Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security or National Security Council, while only five served in domestic agencies. One of those, Haley Stevens, was chief of staff for the Obama auto industry task force, which imposed 50 percent wage cuts on newly hired auto workers. Among the five, only Stevens is considered a likely winner in the primary.
The Democratic Party has always been a party of the American capitalist class, and that means, from the dawn of the 20th century on, it has been a party of imperialism and imperialist war, whatever the occasional “peace” noises made by its candidates for the purpose of diverting and derailing mass antiwar sentiment among the American people.
For more than a century, a major political task of the Marxist movement in the United States has been to combat illusions in the Democratic Party, particularly those engendered by its comparatively brief periods of reformist politics, under President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, and again during the Kennedy-Johnson years of the 1960s. The struggle against the Democratic Party, as well as the Republicans, remains the main focus of the effort to establish the political independence of the working class.
But the 2018 campaign represents something qualitatively different. Neither party offers any credible prospect of significant social reform. Both offer right-wing nostrums, laced with militarism, while seeking to split the working class along the lines of race, gender and national origin.
The campaign takes place in the wake of more than a year of unrelenting focus by the Democrats on the anti-Russian campaign, a narrative claiming that Trump’s victory in the presidential election was the result of Russian interference and that Trump is, for all practical purposes, a Russian stooge in the White House.
Not a shred of evidence has been provided either of Russian interference or of collusion with Russia on the part of the Trump campaign. Nor is there any suggestion that there was any significant element of fraud in either the vote or its tabulation by local and state governments.
But the Democratic Party has deliberately sought to whip up and appeal to the most right-wing, McCarthyite, chauvinist sentiments. It denounces Trump not for his right-wing policies, his immigrant baiting, his consorting with fascists and white supremacists, or his tax cut bonanza for the wealthy, but because he is allegedly insufficiently committed to confronting Russia militarily in the Middle East, Central Asia, Ukraine, Eastern Europe and the Baltic.
Clinton ran in 2016 as the favored candidate of the military-intelligence apparatus, amassing hundreds of endorsements by retired generals, admirals and spymasters, and criticizing Trump as unqualified to be the commander-in-chief.
This political orientation has developed and deepened in 2018. The Democratic Party is running in the congressional elections not only as the party that takes a tougher line on Russia, but as the party that enlists as its candidates and representatives those who have been directly responsible for waging war, both overt and covert, on behalf of American imperialism. It is seeking to be not only the party for the Pentagon and CIA, but the party of the Pentagon and CIA.
This is not merely a result of the political psychology or even the career paths of those who make up the upper echelon of the Democratic Party. It has a social and class character. The Democratic Party has long abandoned even a limited role as a party pledging social reforms in the interests of working people as a whole, in favor of the promotion of privileges for sections of the upper-middle class, doled out on the basis of identity politics.
The Democrat Party proposes a certain redistribution of wealth and power within the most privileged layer of the population, while leaving the essential social structure unchanged, with society divided between the super-rich at the top, a privileged upper-middle class, perhaps ten percent or less, and below them, the vast majority of working people, whose conditions of life continue to deteriorate as the economic “recovery” from the 2008 Wall Street crash approaches its tenth year.
The upper-middle-class layer that provides the “mass” base of the Democratic Party has moved drastically to the right over the past four decades, enriched by the stock market boom, consciously hostile to the working class, and enthusiastically supportive of the military-intelligence apparatus which, in the final analysis, guarantees its own social position against potential threats, both foreign and domestic. It is this social evolution that now finds expression on the surface of capitalist politics, in the rise of the military-intelligence “faction” to the leadership of the Democratic Party.
quote:Obamagate: Exposing the Obama deep state
Obama’s third term has begun. Our Republic is in danger
After Trump secured the nomination, Obama’s people filed a wiretapping request. As he was on the verge of winning, they did it again. After he won, they are doing everything they can to bring him down.
It was always going to come down to this.
One is the elected President of the United States. The other is the Anti-President who commands a vast network that encompasses the organizers of OFA, the official infrastructure of the DNC and Obama Anonymous, a shadow government of loyalists embedded in key positions across the government.
A few weeks after the election, I warned that Obama was planning to run the country from outside the White House. And that the “Obama Anonymous” network of staffers embedded in the government was the real threat. Since then Obama’s Kalorama mansion has become a shadow White House. And the Obama Anonymous network is doing everything it can to bring down an elected government.
Valerie Jarrett has moved into the shadow White House to plot operations against Trump. Meanwhile Tom Perez has given him control of the corpse of the DNC after fending off a Sandernista bid from Keith Ellison. Obama had hollowed out the Democrat Party by diverting money to his own Organizing for America. Then Hillary Clinton had cannibalized it for her presidential bid through Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Donna Brazile. Now Obama owns the activist, OFA, and organizational, DNC, infrastructure.
But that’s just half the picture.
Obama controls the opposition. He will have a great deal of power to choose future members of Congress and the 2020 candidate. But he could have done much of that from Chicago or New York. The reason he didn’t decide to move on from D.C. is that the nation’s capital contains the infrastructure of the national government. He doesn’t just want to run the Democrats. He wants to run America.
The other half of the picture is the Obama Deep State. This network of political appointees, bureaucrats and personnel scattered across numerous government agencies is known only as Obama Anonymous.
Obama Inc. had targeted Trump from the very beginning when it was clear he would be the nominee.
Trump had locked down the GOP nomination in May. Next month there was a FISA request targeting him. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court denied the request, and it is still unknown whether the request targeted Trump, or only his associates, but it’s silly to pretend that the submission of such a request a month after he became the presumptive GOP nominee was apolitical.
The second, narrower, FISA request came through in October. This one was approved. The reason for getting a FISA request in October was even more obvious than June. October is the crucial month in presidential elections. It’s the month of the “October Surprise” when the worst hit pieces based on the keenest opposition research is unleashed. Obama’s opposition research on Trump involved eavesdropping on a server in Trump Tower. Nixon would have been very jealous.
After the election, Obama Inc. began to spread out its bets. Some of his people migrated into his network of political organizations. Others remained embedded in the government. While the former would organize the opposition, the latter would sabotage, undermine and try to bring down Trump.
An unprecedented campaign for full spectrum dominance was being waged in domestic politics.
Political opposition wasn’t a new phenomenon; even if a past president centralizing control of the organizational and activist arms of his party to wage war on his successor was unprecedented. But weaponizing unelected government officials to wage war on an elected government was a coup.
Obama Anonymous conducted its coup in layers. The first layer partnered congressional Democrats with OA personnel to retain control of as much of the government as possible by the Obama Deep State. They did it by blocking Trump’s nominees with endless hearings and protests. The second layer partnered congressional Democrats with the deeper layer of Obama operatives embedded in law enforcement and intelligence agencies who were continuing the Obama investigations of Trump.
This second layer sought to use the investigation to force out Trump people who threatened their control over national security, law enforcement and intelligence. It is no coincidence that their targets, Flynn and Sessions, were in that arena. Or that their views on Islamic terror and immigration are outside the consensus making them easy targets for Obama Anonymous and its darker allies.
These darker allies predate Obama. The tactics being deployed against Trump were last used by them in a previous coup during President Bush’s second term. The targets back then had included Bush officials, an Iran skeptic, pro-Israel activists and a Democrat congresswoman. The tactics, eavesdropping, leaks, false investigations, dubious charges and smear campaigns against officials, were exactly the same.
Anyone who remembers the cases of Larry Franklin, Jane Harman and some others will recognize them. Before that they were used to protect the CIA underestimates of Soviet capabilities that were broken through by Rumsfeld’s Halloween Massacre and Team B which helped clear the way for Reagan’s defeat of the Soviet Union.
Under Bush, the Deep State was fighting against any effort to stop Iran’s nuclear program. It did so by eliminating and silencing opposition within the national security establishment and Congress through investigations of supposed foreign agents. That left the field clear for it to force a false National Intelligence Estimate on President Bush which claimed that Iran had halted its nuclear program.
Obama broke out the same tactics when he went after Iran Deal opponents. Once again members of Congress were spied on and the results were leaked to friendly media outlets. Before the wiretapping of Trump’s people, the NSA was passing along conversations of Iran Deal opponents to the White House which were used to coordinate strategy in defense of the illegal arrangement with Islamic terrorists.
The same wall between government and factional political agendas that Nixon’s “White House Plumbers” had broken through on the way to Watergate had been torn down. NSA eavesdropping was just another way to win domestic political battles. All it took was accusing the other side of treason.
And worse was to come.
During the Iran Deal battle, the NSA was supposedly filtering the eavesdropped data it passed along.
In its last days, Obama Inc. made it easier to pass along unfiltered personal information to the other agencies where Obama loyalists were working on their investigation targeting Trump. The NSA pipeline now makes it possible for the shadow White House to still gain intelligence on its domestic enemies.
And the target of the shadow White House is the President of the United States.
There is now a President and an Anti-President. A government and a shadow government. The anti-President controls more of the government through his shadow government than the real President.
The Obama network is an illegal shadow government. Even its “light side” as an opposition group is very legally dubious. Its “shadow side” is not only illegal, but a criminal attack on our democracy.
When he was in power, Obama hacked reporters like FOX News’ James Rosen and CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson. He eavesdropped on members of Congress opposed to the Iran Deal. Two men who made movies he disliked ended up in jail. But what he is doing now is even more deeply disturbing.
Obama no longer legally holds power. His Deep State network is attempting to overturn the results of a presidential election using government employees whose allegiance is to a shadow White House. Tactics that were illegal when he was in office are no longer just unconstitutional, they are treasonous.
Obama Inc. has become a state within a state. It is a compartmentalized network of organizations, inside and outside the government, that claim that they are doing nothing illegal as individual groups because they are technically following the rules within each compartment, but the sheer scope of the illegality lies in the covert coordination between these “revolutionary cells” infecting our country.
It is a criminal conspiracy of unprecedented scope. Above all else, it is the most direct attack yet on a country in which governments are elected by the people, not by powerful forces within the government.
"We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain,” President Lincoln declared at Gettysburg. “That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Obama’s shadow government is not just a war on President Trump. It is a war on that government of the people, by the people and for the people. If he succeeds, then at his touch, it will perish from the earth.
Obama’s third term has begun. Our Republic is in danger.
quote:Unlawful FISA Spying Widespread Under Obama Administration
Relaxation of privacy policies paved the way for FBI and NSA to spy on Americans
The FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA), under the Obama administration, committed numerous violations of procedures intended to safeguard Americans’ personal data and communications collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Under the section, which was part of amendments to FISA passed in 2008 by then-President George W. Bush, the intelligence community has broad powers to collect internet and telephone data to spy on foreign nationals.
Procedures to protect Americans’ data collected under the program were weakened under then-President Barack Obama in 2011, allowing the NSA to search through Americans’ data using their names. Previously, these types of searches, known as “queries using United States person identifiers,” were prohibited.
In its ruling in 2011, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) said the “relaxation of the querying rules” would be limited to queries “reasonably likely to yield foreign intelligence information.”
The FISC at the time also approved the broader collection of so-called upstream data, which is all internet data traveling through key internet backbone carriers.
However, in subsequent years, policies intended to defend against the misuse of this power, called minimization and targeting procedures, were systematically broken, resulting in numerous violations.
A declassified top-secret FISC report released in April 2017 revealed that the NSA had an 85 percent noncompliance rate when it came to searches involving Americans.
The 702 system, which was never designed to spy on Americans, but rather to safeguard U.S. national security, had become a powerful spying tool in the hands of the government.
Problems with the FISA system received nationwide attention in February after a declassified House intelligence committee memo revealed that the FBI and the Department of Justice had obtained a FISA warrant on Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page, using information paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
The initial warrant, and its three subsequent renewals, could have been used to spy on anyone who was in contact with Page, including members of the Trump campaign. The NSA is allowed to analyze communications “three hops” from its original target. Anyone in direct communication with Page is one hop away; anyone in communication with those talking to Page is two hops away; and anyone talking to those who are twice removed from Page is three hops away.
Last year, it was already revealed that top Obama officials, including national security adviser Susan Rice and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power, used so-called unmasking requests to obtain communications belonging to specific members of the Trump campaign and transition team.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said on March 7 that he has appointed a person outside of Washington to look into the allegations of FISA abuse. Sessions’s statement came in response to a letter signed by 13 members of Congress calling for the appointment of a second special counsel to investigate the alleged abuse.
Problems With the FBI
According to the declassified top-secret FISC report, the FBI provided access to sensitive 702 data to employees that were not authorized to have access to the data. In some cases, this data was then exported by the employees, and it is unclear how it was subsequently used.
The agency also provided contractors with access to raw 702 data. The contractors maintained access to the data, even after their work for the FBI was finished.
In one case, an unauthorized private entity was given access by the FBI to 702 data. The unnamed private entity is mostly staffed by private contractors, whose access to 702 data was not controlled or monitored.
The “contractors had access to raw FISA information that went well beyond what was necessary to respond to the FBI’s requests,” wrote the FISC, in its report.
The FBI discontinued the private entity’s access to raw FISA data in April 2016, the same month in which the Clinton campaign and the DNC used law firm Perkins Coie to retain Fusion GPS to produce the so-called Trump dossier.
The dossier would eventually lead to the FBI obtaining the FISA warrant on Carter Page in October 2016.
While the FISC did recertify the FBI’s minimization procedures as being constitutional it wrote that it was “nonetheless concerned about the FBI’s apparent disregard of minimization rules and whether the FBI may be engaging in similar disclosures of raw Section 702 information that have not been reported.”
The scope of the FBI’s accessing of Americans’ data is unclear, as the government is not required to provide the FISC with numbers on violations. In the NSA’s case, it told the court that it was unable to provide a number for how many times Americans’ data had been unlawfully accessed. The scope of the NSA’s violations also remains unclear.
In response to the problems, as well as an internal review by the agency, the NSA stopped the collection of what are called multicommunication transactions (MCTs) to minimize violations. The term MCTs refers to the NSA’s mass collection of communications while targeting one communication.
The FBI and CIA will no longer have access to upstream data collected by the NSA at key internet junctions.
In January, President Donald Trump ordered his director of national intelligence to develop procedures for law enforcement agencies to obtain the identities of Americans in intelligence reports. This practice of unmasking is what was used to spy on the Trump campaign during the elections.
Trump did authorize Section 702 in January for another six years, stressing the importance of the program for national security.
quote:Explosive Text Messages Reveal Judge in Flynn Case Was Friends with Strzok
Newly redacted text messages discovered by congressional investigators reveal that an embattled FBI agent at the center of the Russia investigation controversy was close friends with a District of Columbia judge who recused himself from the criminal case over former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, congressional members said, and text documents show.
The never before seen text messages, which were a part of the texts given to congress by the Department of Justice, show that FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok and his paramour FBI attorney Lisa Page discussed Strzok’s relationship with U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras, who presided over a Dec. 1, 2017 hearing where former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Strzok was removed from Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel’s Office last year after anti-Trump text messages between him and his FBI agent lover were discovered by the DOJ’s Inspector General Michael Horowitz. But on Dec. 7, without warning, Judge Rudolph Contreras was removed as the presiding judge on Flynn’s case. Little information was given at the time as to why Contreras was removed.
DOJ officials did not immediately respond for comment.
In a text message chain from Page to Strzok on July, 25, 2016 she writes, “Rudy is on the FISC! Did you know that? Just appointed two months ago.” At that point, the pair continues to discuss other issues but comes back to Contrares, “I did. We talked about it before and after. I need to get together with him.” Then later Strzok appears to return to his discussion about Contreras.
Page: “Thought of it because you had to Google FISC judges and him there. I’m telling you.”
Strzok: “….She brought up a good point about being circumspect in talking to him in terms of not placing him into a situation where he’d have to recuse himself.”
Page: “I can’t imagine you either one of you could talk about anything in detail meaningful enough to warrant recusal.” Page then goes back to discussing a different issue saying, “Anyway, maybe you meant to, but didn’t.’
Strzok: “Really? Rudy. I’m in charge of espionage for the FBI. Any espionage FISA comes before him, what should he do? Given his friend oversees them?”
Page: “Standards for recusal are quite high. I just don’t think this poses an actual conflict. And he doesn’t know what you do?”
Strzok: “Generally he does know what I do. Not the level or scope or area but he’s super thoughtful and rigorous about ethics and conflicts. (redacted) suggested a social setting with others would probably be better than a one on one meeting. I’m sorry, I’m just going to have to invite you to that cocktail party. Of course you’ll be there. Have to come up with some other work people cover for action.”
Page: “Why more? Six is a perfectly fine dinner party.”
Investigators working with Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Rep. Mark Meadows, both with the House Oversight Committee, discovered the text messages during their ongoing investigation into the FBI’s handling of the alleged Trump-Russia collusion investigation, the Congressional members told this reporter. Under rules established by DOJ officials, congressional investigators could only review the less redacted version of the pairs’ text messages at DOJ headquarters and only the highly redacted version of the texts were allowed to be removed during the ongoing process, they said. Of the 1.2 million documents collected by Horowitz’s team, the House Oversight Committee has only received 3,162 “unique documents,” they added.
“Why did Contreras recuse himself?” said Jordan. “Text messages show he had a relationship with Strzok… Why did the DOJ make it difficult for us to get the information? To me those are the two fundamental questions. We don’t know that answers to either one of those ”
Jordan noted that the text messages provide some context but that some of the communications are not completely clear. He added what is “clear is that the back and forth exchange shows that Strzok and Page were friends. But we don’t know if the discussion regarding recusal has anything to do with Russia or if they were referring to another case. What we do know is that Contreras recused himself after the guilty plea but we still don’t know why?”
Meadows added that a “recusal for a judge is very high bar,” added Meadows. “I think from my stand point we’re asking the department of justice and the FBI to give us the documents we need to do proper oversight. Failing to be able to be able to provide Congress with those documents in an expeditious manner would certainly strengthen the case for a special prosecutor.”
Meadows also stated that the DOJ’s failure to be forthright with the information makes it extremely difficult for Congress to conduct oversight.
“The only thing we would not have access to is grand jury material and some classified documents,” said Meadows. “There is no reason why we cannot get the same documents the Inspector General has.”
Dat viel mij ook al op ja. Smerig staaltje framing.quote:In dit proces is de president niet betrokken, ondanks de pogingen van CNN en The Washington Post om hiervan een talking point te maken.
Nee hoor. Trump heeft het al een tijdje op deze kerel gemunt en dat is precies wat de pers ook report. Zoals gewoonlijk verdraait redpilled de feiten weer eens.quote:Op zaterdag 17 maart 2018 14:25 schreef ChrisCarter het volgende:
[..]
Dat viel mij ook al op ja. Smerig staaltje framing.
Op zich is het begrijpelijk vanuit de optiek van sommige journalisten, omdat er nu eenmaal veel lijntjes zijn tussen hen en DoJ en FBI officials en politieke officials die anti-Trump zijn.quote:Op zaterdag 17 maart 2018 14:25 schreef ChrisCarter het volgende:
[..]
Dat viel mij ook al op ja. Smerig staaltje framing.
Het nadeel van de grote nieuws netwerken en hun ongelooflijke partijdigheid is dat ze het publiek geen dienst bewijzen door hun manier van berichtgeven.quote:Op zaterdag 17 maart 2018 14:08 schreef dellipder het volgende:
Eventuele aanbevelingen voor strafrechtelijke vervolging zullen ook vanuit het bureau komen waar McCabe werkzaam was en deze aanbevelingen worden gedaan door zijn oud-collega's.
McCabe heeft dit lot zelf over zich afgeroepen en het verlies van zijn pensioen is het minste waarover hij bezorgd zou moeten zijn.
Onderbouw het dan als het zulke shit is. Dellipder is heel relevant bezigquote:Op maandag 19 maart 2018 12:47 schreef Tingo het volgende:
Amazing that anyone takes the time to read this complete and utter time-wasting shit - never mind beleive it.
TV political drama portrayed as real.imo.quote:Op maandag 19 maart 2018 13:02 schreef ChrisCarter het volgende:
[..]
Onderbouw het dan als het zulke shit is. Dellipder is heel relevant bezig
Eindelijk die diepe onderbouwing waar we naar zochten.quote:Op maandag 19 maart 2018 13:07 schreef Tingo het volgende:
[..]
TV political drama portrayed as real.imo.
Doe eens niet. Wees blij dat iemand de moeite neemt om uitgebreide stukken te plaatsen.quote:Op maandag 19 maart 2018 12:47 schreef Tingo het volgende:
Amazing that anyone takes the time to read this complete and utter time-wasting shit - never mind beleive it.
quote:Op maandag 19 maart 2018 12:47 schreef Tingo het volgende:
Amazing that anyone takes the time to read this complete and utter time-wasting shit - never mind beleive it.
Ik reageer meestal niet op deze en soortgelijke berichten, maar ik ben jou nog niet tegengekomen bij mijn berichten, dus ik maak hier een uitzondering.quote:Op maandag 19 maart 2018 13:07 schreef Tingo het volgende:
[..]
TV political drama portrayed as real.imo.
quote:John Bolton reportedly set to fire dozens of White House officials amid leaking problem
Incoming national security adviser John Bolton is reportedly poised to remove dozens of White House officials when he starts his new job early next month.
Among those who will get the boot will be Obama administration holdovers and anyone who isn't loyal to President Trump, sources told Foreign Policy.
“Bolton can and will clean house,” one former White House official was quoted as saying.
On Thursday, Trump announced that Bolton would replace H.R. McMaster as head of the National Security Council -- a move that would be effective on April 9.
Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under former President George W. Bush, hinted in follow-up interviews Thursday on Fox News and Fox Business that he would be a strong force to solve the White House's lingering issue with leaks, particularly those of a national security nature.
"It's not for them to put in jeopardy the other 300 plus million American citizens just because they think their morality is better than everybody else's," Bolton said of the leakers on Fox Business.
The issue is so prevalent, the New York Times reported Friday that Trump himself has told Bolton that he needs to plug up the leaks.
McMaster's exit followed a recent high-profile leak where briefing materials for a phone call between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin from Trump’s national security advisers were leaked.
quote:COLLUSION DELUSION: New Documents Show OBAMA Officials, FBI COORDINATED in Anti-Trump Probe
Former Sen. Harry Reid asked James Comey to investigate Trump
Documents obtained by congressional investigators suggest possible coordination by Obama White House officials, the CIA and the FBI into the investigation into President Donald Trump’s campaign. Those senior Obama officials used unsubstantiated evidence to launch allegations in the media that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, according to newly discovered documents and communications obtained by Congress.
The documents also reveal that former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, sent a letter on Aug. 29, 2016, asking then FBI Director James Comey to investigate the allegations, which were presented to him by then CIA Director John Brennan. Brennan had briefed Reid privately days earlier on the counterintelligence investigation and documents suggest Reid was also staying in close touch with Comey over the issues. The Gang of Eight is a group of eight lawmakers who have access to the most highly classified information and often meet on Capitol Hill to be briefed on classified material.
The documents, which include text messages from embattled FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok and his paramour Lisa Page, also reveal that former Obama White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough was involved in the initial investigation into Trump’s campaign. Comey, Brennan and McDonough the “highest-ranking officials at the FBI, CIA and White House” were working in concert to ensure an investigation was initiated, congressional members told this reporter.
Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was deeply troubled by the findings.
“We’ve been asking for documents with little cooperation of the DOJ and FBI — we’re having to find these unreacted documents on our own,” said Meadows, who’s also chairman of the House Freedom Caucus. “It appears there was a coordination between the White House, CIA, and FBI at the onset of this investigation and it’s troubling.”
Meadows said a meeting that John Moffa, who was part of the counterintelligence division at the FBI, meets with Denis McDonough on August 10, (2016),” Meadows added. “What we’re finding is the more we dig the more we realize that there appeared to be a willful coordination between multiple groups outside the Department of Justice and FBI. Moffa was also the FBI agent who helped draft Comey’s July 5, 2016, exoneration letter to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
Meadows said the documents suggest Reid’s briefing from Brennan “was used in Michael Isikoff’s Yahoo News story.”
Isikoff’s article was used as evidence for the FBI’s FISA warrant being granted against Carter Page. Page was a short-term volunteer advisor on the Trump campaign, who was spied on by the FBI. Congress and the Department of Justice are investigating the FBI’s conduct in obtaining a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant in October 2016 to spy on Page. Page was a central figure in an unverified dossier put together by former British Spy Christopher Steele alleging the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.
In April 2017 The New York Times published the first story about Brennan’s counterintelligence briefing to Reid regarding Trump. The briefings to Gang of Eight congressional members suggested Russia might be helping Trump win the election. Brennan alluded to the unverified information that members of the Trump campaign may be colluding with the Russians. The information briefed to the lawmakers expanded the number of people who were aware of the unverified allegations, and played a significant role in the increase of leaks to the media, according to the information obtained by the committee.
“A chain of events suggest the FBI encouraged Reid to write this letter to legitimize its surveillance of Carter Page”
A congressional investigator told this reporter that they believe the FBI was involved in the briefing to Reid but are still waiting for confirmation.
In the letter from Reid to Comey, he cites information Brennan shared with him that Trump advisor, referencing Carter Page, and other “high ranking sanctioned individuals” in Moscow were meeting. Reid asks Comey to launch an investigation by the FBI into the Trump Campaign and the Kremlin.
The letter, which was obtained by this reporter, refers to reports briefed by Brennan but gives “almost no evidence” regarding the Trump campaign and Russia, according to congressional investigators.
For example, the letter only states that “questions have been raised about whether a Trump advisor who has been highly critical of U.S. and European economic sanctions on Russia, and who has conflicts of interests due to his investments in Russian energy conglomerate Gazprom, met with high-ranking sanctioned individuals in Moscow in July of 2016.”
Congressional investigators also note that newly revealed text messages between Strzok and Page also show possible coordination between the FBI, CIA and the Democrats.
Shortly after Reid’s letter was revealed in a New York Times article on August 30, 2016, Strzok texts Page saying, “here we go.” He included a link to the story in the text message.
Congressional investigators suggest that the pair were creating inferences “that they knew it would create public calls for an investigation into Russian interference.”
Sept. 23, 2016, Isikoff article, which cites Reid’s letter, is also another example of possible coordination, congressional investigators state. The FBI used the Yahoo news article as part of the evidence in their application to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page.
“This sequence of events strongly suggests the FBI encouraged Reid to write this letter to legitimize its surveillance of Carter Page,” congressional investigators stated.
Congressional Findings:
• What began as an investigation into allegations of Russian cyber hacking of the DNC was eventually broadened into an investigation of the Trump campaign.
• By sending high-ranking officials and led to brief members of Congress on the possibility of Russian interference in the 2016 election, the DNC hack, and the possibility Trump campaign associates were in contact with Russia, the FBI was given cover for the investigation they had recently opened on Trump with questionable legal justification.
• The intelligence community has admitted Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election were only the most “recent expression” of their longstanding desire to undermine US elections.
• It appears based on the information “insurance policy” in case Trump won, these briefings by the intelligence community to Congress, which led to several members calling for investigations into Russian interference and Trump, were perfectly timed to plant seeds of doubt in the outcome of the 2016 election.
• By utilizing the FBI’s cyber division to look into the DNC hack, the agents exhibiting improper political biases from the FBI’s counterintelligence division, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok, were offered cover.
quote:The Real Collusion Story
In a textbook example of denial and projection, Trump foes in and out of government wove a sinister yarn meant to take him down.
Barack Obama keeps a close watch on his emotions. “I loved Spock,” he wrote in February 2015 in a presidential statement eulogizing Leonard Nimoy. Growing up in Hawaii, the young man who would later be called “No-Drama Obama” felt a special affinity for the Vulcan first officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise. “Long before being nerdy was cool, there was Leonard Nimoy,” the eulogy continued. “Leonard was Spock. Cool, logical, big-eared and level-headed.”
It is the rare occasion when Obama lets his Spock mask slip. But November 2, 2016, was just such a moment. Six days before the presidential election, when addressing the Congressional Black Caucus, he stressed that the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, threatened hard-won achievements of blacks: tolerance, justice, good schools, ending mass incarceration — even democracy itself. “There is one candidate who will advance those things,” he said, his voice swelling with emotion. “And there’s another candidate whose defining principle, the central theme of his candidacy, is opposition to all that we’ve done.”
The open display of emotion was new, but the theme of safeguarding his legacy was not. Two months earlier, on July 5, in Charlotte, N.C., Obama delivered his first stump speech for Hillary Clinton. He described his presidency as a leg in a relay race. Hillary Clinton had tried hard to pass affordable health care during Bill Clinton’s administration, but she failed — and the relay baton fell to the ground. When Obama entered the White House, he picked it up. Now, his leg of the race was coming to an end. “I’m ready to pass the baton,” he said. “And I know that Hillary Clinton is going to take it.”
But he was less certain than he was letting on. Hillary Clinton was up in the polls, to be sure, but she was vulnerable. Three weeks earlier, on June 15, a cyberattacker fashioning himself as Guccifer 2.0 had published a cache of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee (DNC). They proved, as supporters of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders had long alleged, that the DNC had conspired with the Clinton campaign to undermine their candidate. Sanders was still withholding his endorsement of Clinton for president, even though her nomination as the Democratic candidate was now a foregone conclusion. At the very moment when Clinton had expected the Democratic party to unite behind her, its deepest chasm seemed to be growing wider. In contrast to Clinton, Obama held some sway over the Sanders insurgents. He came to Charlotte to urge them to support Clinton against their shared enemy, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump.
The insurgency was not the only Clinton vulnerability on Obama’s mind. He had come to Charlotte, in addition, to deflect attention from the news conference that James Comey, the director of the FBI, had held that morning in Washington, D.C. The investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server was complete, Comey announced. The FBI would recommend no criminal charges — that was the honey. But Comey administered it with a dose of vinegar. He dwelled on Clinton’s mishandling of classified material in such detail that it sounded as if he was laying the foundation for an indictment. The decision not to charge Clinton, his statement signaled, was an exercise in prosecutorial restraint, not a true exoneration.
From the perspective of the voters, Clinton’s twin email travails — the hack of the DNC and the investigation into her server — were two faces of a single problem. Call it “Clinton, Inc.” Sanders and Trump were painting Clinton as Wall Street’s darling, the establishment candidate. She was the greatest defender and a prime beneficiary of a rigged political and financial system. Comey’s statement had played directly into the hands of the Sanders insurgents. It left the distinct impression that laws are for the little people; they simply don’t apply to Hillary Clinton, because, well, she’s Hillary Clinton.
Which points to Obama’s third and final job at Charlotte: humanizing the queen. “I saw how she treated everybody with respect, even the folks who aren’t, quote/unquote, ‘important,’” Obama testified. He enlarged Clinton’s humility before the crowd, because it was invisible to the naked eye. With his jacket and tie off, the cuffs of his sleeves turned, and a winning smile spread from ear to ear, Obama came to loan Hillary Clinton his common touch.
Passing the baton to her was a team effort, however. It demanded hard work from countless enablers. These included not just Democrats but also many Republicans, who shared the conviction that Trump represented an extraordinary threat to our democracy. Desperate times call for desperate measures. To block Trump, Clinton’s supporters bent rules and broke laws. They went to surprising lengths to strengthen her while framing him — both in the sense of depicting him in a particular light and of planting evidence against him.
quote:Joe Friday
When it comes to ongoing FBI criminal investigations, presidents typically refrain from describing their preferred outcomes. They fear the appearance of exerting undue influence over Lady Justice. But in the case of Hillary Clinton’s email abuses, Obama made an exception. “She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy,” he remarked in a TV interview in April 2016. She has displayed “a carelessness in terms of managing emails,” he allowed. “But I also think it is important to keep this in perspective.”
Well-intentioned but careless, said the commander in chief. Three months later, the FBI finished its investigation, and James Comey arrived at an identical conclusion. “Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information,” he said in his July 5 statement, “there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” Well-intentioned but careless — Comey was locked in a Vulcan mind-meld with his boss.
As a political move, highlighting Clinton’s intentions was astute. It had a commonsense feel. Americans instinctively take intentions into account when determining guilt. As a strict matter of law, however, it was vapid. The mishandling of classified information falls into the category of a “non-intent crime.” It’s a type of objective recklessness, like running over a pedestrian while blowing through a red light. Violations of this sort trigger criminal liabilities regardless of the offender’s state of mind.
But let’s assume that some clever lawyer in the Department of Justice discovered a very learned and superficially compelling rationale for applying Obama’s fictive standard of intent. Even so, Hillary Clinton couldn’t clear the hurdle. The sheer volume of classified material the FBI recovered from her server constituted proof of intent. “Fifty-two email chains . . . contain classified information,” Comey said.
Particularly damning was the form this material took. It is impossible to paste a classified document into an unclassified email accidentally, because the three computer systems (Unclassified, Confidential/Secret, and Top Secret) are physically separate networks, each feeding into an independent hard drive on the user’s desk. If a classified document appears in an unclassified email, then someone downloaded it onto a thumb drive and manually uploaded it to the unclassified network — an intentional act if ever there was one.
One of Clinton’s emails suggests that downloading and uploading material in this fashion was a commonplace activity in her office. In June 2011, a staffer encountered difficulty transmitting a document to her by means of a classified system. An impatient Clinton instructed him to strip the classified markings from the document and send it on as an unclassified email. “Turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure,” Clinton instructed.
On three separate occasions staffers got sloppy and failed to strip the “nonpapers” of all markings that betrayed their classified origins. The FBI recovered one email, for example, that contained a “C” in parenthesis in the margin — an obvious sign that the corresponding paragraph was classified “Confidential.” When an agent personally interviewed Clinton, on July 2, he showed her the document and asked whether she understood what the “C” meant. For anyone who has ever held a security clearance, “C’s” in the margins are more ubiquitous than “C’s” on water faucets — and no more baffling. But Clinton played the ditzy grandmother. She had simply assumed, she said, that the “C” was marking an item in an alphabetized list.
In the 2,500-year life of the alphabet, this was a first: a list that started with the third letter and contained but a single item. The explanation was laughable, but any sensible answer would have constituted an acknowledgement of malicious intent. Her only out was the “well-intentioned but careless” script that Obama had written for her. In other words, she lied to the FBI — a felony offense.
Before she ever told this howler, however, Comey had already prepared a draft of his statement exonerating her. The FBI let Hillary Clinton skate.
But give Comey his due. If he had followed the letter of the law, the trail of guilt may have led all the way to Obama himself. As Andrew C. McCarthy has demonstrated at National Review Online, Obama used a dummy email account to communicate with Clinton via her private server. Did this make Obama complicit in Clinton’s malfeasance? Anyone in Comey’s position would have thought twice before moving to prosecute her — and not only because the case might have ensnared the president himself. The FBI must enforce the law, but it must also be seen to be enforcing it. As a rule, these two imperatives buttress each other. During the 2016 election, Comey faced extraordinary circumstances. If he had followed the law to the letter, he would have toppled the leading candidate for president and decapitated the Democratic party. Clinton’s supporters, more than 50 percent of the electorate, would have erupted in outrage, screaming that a politicized FBI had thrown the election to Donald Trump.
Guarding the bureau’s reputation for impartiality is a serious concern. But it is nevertheless a thoroughly political concern. Comey would have us believe that it was a unique moment in his career, the singular entry into the political arena of an otherwise apolitical servant of the law. Truth be told, Comey loves being in the thick of it, but not because he is a partisan brawler. He is not. It is the drama that he relishes — the grand stage. His favorite role is that of Joe Friday, the no-nonsense lawman, the guardian of legal processes before the encroachments of dirty politicians.
Joe Friday, however, was a simple detective, a confirmed bachelor, content to live quietly with his mother and his parakeet. And, of course, he was a TV fiction. In real life, humble straight shooters get clobbered with a brick before they ever reach the limelight. In real life, snagging the big part often requires the equivalent of leaving a bloody horsehead in the producer’s bed.
quote:McCabe and the Lovers
And it requires a supportive staff. Midyear Exam, the codename for the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, relied on a team of men and women with the right stuff — a quality that is hard to define but easy to recognize.
The right stuff did not require strong Democratic credentials, but they certainly helped. Andrew McCabe, the deputy director of the FBI, led the team. McCabe was not your FBI gumshoe of old. He spent no time in his younger days chasing bank robbers in Des Moines. He was part of a new breed — the post-9/11 FBI leadership, for whom the career fast track was counterterrorism. He came of age at the intersection of law enforcement with national security, shuttling between D.C. and New York. Along the way, he developed a valuable personal network. His wife, Jill, ran as a Democrat for a Virginia state-senate seat in 2015. The political organization of Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, one of Hillary Clinton’s very closest associates, gave her nearly $500,000.
Perhaps more important than having Democratic credentials was having a heightened understanding of the needs of senior leadership — in the FBI, certainly, but also in the DOJ. Right across the street from the J. Edgar Hoover Building sat Attorney General Loretta Lynch. She would be scrutinizing Midyear Exam in every detail. And not just Lynch. Hillary Clinton herself would be watching closely — and would be brought in for questioning, too. Being willing and able to treat her with kid gloves was essential. She “might be our next president,” team member Lisa Page reminded Peter Strzok, the agent in charge of Midyear Exam. Referring to Clinton’s upcoming FBI interview, Page wrote, “The last thing you need us going in there loaded for bear.”
Like McCabe, Strzok had pursued a career at the nexus of law enforcement and counterterrorism. But he was less overtly political. A John Kasich sympathizer, he was by nature a middle-of-the-roader, and a Republican-leaning one, at that. Clinton left him cold. But Trump left him even colder — and his active personal life helped concentrate his mind on that antipathy. Strzok was having an affair with Page, who was an FBI lawyer on McCabe’s staff. Both were married. Page’s politics were typical of highly educated people in D.C.: She detested Trump and his supporters. He is “a loathsome human being,” she texted to Strzok, who readily agreed. After Trump captured the nomination, hostility to him quickly became part of their private idiom.
If “the ultimate aphrodisiac,” as Henry Kissinger famously claimed, is power, then wielding it together with an illicit lover must be the pinnacle of eroticism. Together, Strzok and Page explored the power of secrets, routinely leaking to the press to shape political outcomes. “Still on the phone with Devlin,” Page texted to Strzok, referring to former Wall Street Journal national-security reporter Devlin Barrett. Big news about the Hillary Clinton email story was breaking when Devlin and Page were on the phone together. “You might wanna tell Devlin he should turn on CNN, there’s news on,” Strzok texted back.
Page: He knows. He just got handed a note.
Strzok: Ha. He asking about it now?
Page: Yeah. It was pretty funny.
Influencing the nation’s politics was routine. And ridiculously easy: one quick call to “Devlin,” and boom! The world changed.
Deploying secrets for political effect — deciding which to keep, which to tell, and how to tell them — was a task that they approached with alacrity. The ultimate goal, of course, was not propping up Hillary Clinton so much as maximizing the power and autonomy of the FBI. In pursuing this goal, McCabe and the two lovers demonstrated the very essence of the right stuff: a breezy comfort with bending the law to the demands of politics.
They honed their skills on Midyear Exam. As that test ended, an even bigger one loomed before them. At the end of July, Comey and McCabe would officially open an investigation into Russian meddling in the election, including possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign. On July 5, the day of Comey’s press conference on Clinton’s emails, a former British spy, Christopher Steele, flew to Rome to meet an old FBI contact. The information he brought had weighty implications for the impending investigation. But neither the information nor the implications are what we have been led to believe.
quote:The Super Spy
Steele — a former British spy and a Russia expert — was working on contract to Fusion GPS, a Washington-based public-relations firm, which, in turn, was on contract to a D.C. law firm, which, in turn, was on contract to the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC. Steele, that is to say, was working for Hillary Clinton. His job, among other things, was to collect opposition research on Trump from his network of Russian sources.
When Steele arrived in Rome, his famous “dossier” did not exist. The dossier, as we have come to know it, is some 17 reports that he compiled between June and December 2016. In early July, Steele had been working on the Clinton account for only a few weeks and had written but one report, dated June 20. It claimed that Trump was Vladimir Putin’s Manchurian candidate. “[The] Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting, and assisting Trump for at least 5 years,” Steele reported. Putin’s goal was “to sow discord and disunity both within the US itself, but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance.” The Russian leader supported Trump, mainly, by supplying “valuable intelligence on his opponents, including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.”
Putin had offered lucrative financial contracts, but Trump had turned them down. The wily Russian, however, had managed to get his hooks into Trump due to the American’s “sexual perversion.” During a visit to Moscow in 2013, Trump had hired prostitutes to stay with him in the same hotel suite used by the Obamas on one of their trips. The FSB, Russia’s secret police, had fitted the room with cameras and recording equipment. Trump had the prostitutes defile Obama’s bed by putting on a “golden shower” performance for him. All of it was caught on tape.
Earthshaking news: Vladimir Putin was blackmailing Donald J. Trump. No doubt, Steele’s FBI handler rushed this report to his superiors in Washington, D.C. They, in turn, raced it straight to Obama’s desk. Sorry, wrong. According to the New York Times, Steele’s explosive revelations wound their way to the J. Edgar Hoover Building only slowly. It took weeks before they appeared in Strzok’s in-box. Why?
Mike Morell, the former deputy director of the CIA, helps explain the delay. Morell did some digging into Christopher Steele’s dossier and shared the results of his research at a public forum in Washington, D.C., in March 2017. Steele, according to Morell, did not have direct access to the Russians whom he labeled as his “sources” — people who included former officers in the FSB. He “communicated” with them, if that is the right word, through paid intermediaries, who paid the so-called sources.
The chances of Steele having been played were thus great. Morell explained it like this:
If you’re paying somebody, particularly former FSB officers, they are going to tell you truth and innuendo and rumor, and they’re going to call you up and say, “Hey, let’s have another meeting, I have more information for you,” because they want to get paid some more.
This process, Morell said, “takes you nowhere.”
Steele’s report was, in a word, junk. And Morell, the man who expressed that opinion, was not just a seasoned intelligence professional; he was also a staunch supporter of Hillary Clinton for president. Nor did Steele’s FBI handler in Rome set off an alarm in Washington, because he, presumably, was also a seasoned professional who knew junk when he saw it. And he had many additional reasons to doubt the veracity of Steele’s reporting — reasons that Morell refrained from broaching. How, for example, could Steele be sure that the former FSB officers in his network were fully retired? The convoluted pipeline between Moscow and London gave Russian intelligence too many opportunities to inject disinformation into the flow of reports to London.
And let’s not neglect the glaring issue of plausibility. When in the history of the rivalry between the West and Russia has it been possible for a British spy to call up sources in Moscow and gain immediate access to the deepest secrets of the Kremlin? Steele, relying only on his wits, unearthed gems the likes of which glittered only in the dreams of the CIA, Mossad, and MI6, the greatest intelligence-gathering organizations on earth. To believe that tale, we must assume that Steele, like James Bond, is no ordinary secret agent. He’s a super spy.
Then there’s the little matter of Steele’s personal bias. According to one well-informed associate, Steele was “passionate about” preventing Trump from winning the election. His financial incentives, of course, oriented him in exactly the same direction. He was a paid piper — and he got paid only for collecting information detrimental to Trump. Isn’t it possible — likely, even — that his shadowy paymasters in the demimonde of the Clinton campaign were calling the tune?
Steele’s reports certainly harmonized beautifully with the campaign’s propaganda. On June 2, in a speech in San Diego, Hillary Clinton unveiled her main line of attack on Donald Trump’s foreign policy. His ideas, she said, were “dangerously incoherent.” In fact, they weren’t “even really ideas — just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds, and outright lies.” Particularly mystifying was his attitude toward the Russian dictator: “He said if he were grading Vladimir Putin as a leader, he’d give him an A. . . . I’ll leave it to the psychiatrists to explain his affection for tyrants.”
But the demimonde wasn’t about to leave it to mental-health professionals. It hired instead a British super spy. He immediately explained that Putin was extorting Trump. Two weeks after that, he flew to Rome to share his explanation with the FBI. By the time he left Rome, his handler might not have guessed that the Clinton campaign was funding the spy’s work. The political nature of Steele’s mission, however, would have been obvious.
In Rome on July 5, the FBI was beginning to acquire a new secret. But it was not the one contained in Steele’s report. The Clinton campaign, the FBI would soon learn with certainty, was intent on framing Trump as Putin’s puppet. That secret was truly explosive — and perhaps thrilling for the two lovers on McCabe’s staff. In time, all of them —Strzok, Page, McCabe, and Comey — would all mishandle it, damaging their careers irreparably. In July, however, they were not yet in a rush to ruination. The team with the right stuff cautiously watched and waited. Not until September would they take their fateful missteps.
quote:The Birth of the Collusion Thesis
On July 22, WikiLeaks released the largest cache of DNC emails. The plan behind the hack now became clear: to sabotage the Democratic National Convention, which opened in Philadelphia on July 25. While Clinton was organizing a celebration of Democratic unity, Guccifer 2.0 was working to flood the convention floor with enraged Bernie Sanders insurgents. In the event, Clinton managed to prevent the protests from ruining the convention. But they did damage her theater of power — and they also handed Trump a fresh opportunity to broadcast his “Crooked Hillary” theme. He took obvious delight in the rage of the Sanders followers. “An analysis showed that Bernie Sanders would have won the Democratic nomination if it were not for the Super Delegates,” Trump tweeted on the eve of the convention.
The statement hit Clinton like an iron bar to her kneecap. The thought that a malevolent foreign actor was helping Trump deliver the blow only increased the pain. Most observers assumed that Russian state-backed hackers stood behind Guccifer 2.0 (an assumption that has grown stronger with time). If Trump felt sheepish about benefiting from such people, he hid it well. “I will tell you this, Russia. If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said on July 27, referring to Hillary Clinton’s messages that the FBI never recovered during its investigation of her private server.
In the eyes of his supporters, Trump’s appeal to Putin was a stage whisper, a mock gesture — and a pointed dig at Clinton. In her rush to hide emails from the FBI, Trump implied, she had delivered them up to Putin on a platter. But his brand of humor was lost on Clinton and her team. To them, the appeal to Putin was sinister. “I just think that’s beyond the pale,” said Clinton loyalist and former CIA director Leon Panetta. To shame Trump before the voters, the campaign shifted its rhetoric perceptibly. In June, Clinton had depicted Trump’s attitude toward Putin as irrational. Now the two were said to be in a partnership — a “bromance” was how John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, described it. “This has to be the first time that a major presidential candidate has actively encouraged a foreign power to conduct espionage against his political opponent,” said senior Clinton policy aide Jake Sullivan. “This has gone from being a matter of curiosity, and a matter of politics, to being a national-security issue.”
Shaming was all well and good, but it only resonated among committed voters. Winning the election required convincing independents that Trump was more than just a passive beneficiary of the DNC hack; he had to be an accomplice. Clinton’s campaign thus posted five questions on its website:
1. What’s behind Trump’s fascination with Vladimir Putin?
2. Why does Trump surround himself with advisers with links to the Kremlin?
3. Why do Trump’s foreign policy ideas read like a Putin wish list?
4. Do Trump’s still-secret tax returns show ties to Russian oligarchs?
5. Why is Trump encouraging Russia to interfere in our election?
Each question was followed by a short answer, leading to the inevitable conclusion that Trump was actively conspiring with Putin.
And so, the collusion thesis was born. The website did not spell out the details of the conspiracy, but the campaign’s demimonde left nothing to the imagination. Christopher Steele had discovered Russian “sources” who painted a vivid picture of the plot. Putin had decided against releasing the compromising videos of Trump. The Manchurian candidate was proving just too beneficial to Russia. In fact, a full-blown alliance had formed between Putin and Trump. Based on their “mutual interest in defeating . . . Hillary Clinton,” they struck a grand bargain: Putin would help elect Trump, who would deliver a supine American policy on Ukraine and NATO defense.
The super spy’s network was remarkable. His Russian sources were as close to Trump as they were to Putin. “An ethnic Russian close associate” of Trump’s “admitted that there was a well-developed conspiracy” between him and the Russians. Another source revealed more: The DNC hack was carried out “with the full knowledge and support of Trump and senior members of his campaign team.” There it was: the proof the Clinton campaign needed. The great crime against Hillary Clinton was a joint Russian-American operation, and Trump was in on it from the beginning.
Steele’s startling discoveries hardly stopped there. But before revealing more, let’s pause and consider the purpose of his reports. How, precisely, did his direct employer, Fusion GPS, use them?
quote:The Super Duo
To hear Glenn Simpson tell it, his company, Fusion GPS, is a research organization. “What we do is provide people with factual information,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August 2017. “Our specialty is public record information.” In truth, Simpson’s true specialty is not research but persuasion — more specifically, persuasion of reporters. He has a talent for convincing journalists to publish stories, true or not, that benefit his clients. In short, he is a public-relations flack.
But Simpson is no ordinary PR man; he’s a super flack. In the first decade of this century, he was in his early forties and working as an investigative journalist for the Wall Street Journal. He was reaching the pinnacle of his profession just as the Internet was gutting the print media. Simpson, however, had a marketable talent. “I call it journalism for rent,” he said at a public forum in August 2017. Journalism as we once knew might be dead, but deep-pocketed clients still needed to get stories into the press. And they needed to block other stories from being published. Simpson knew almost every member of the Washington press corps personally, and he understood the constraints under which they worked — what it took to get a story past an editor. He handed them canned articles. They got scoops; he got happy clients.
When pitching stories on Trump-Putin collusion, Simpson eventually discovered the great benefit of placing Christopher Steele directly in front of reporters. In September and October, he would fly the spy from London to the United States so the two of them could brief major media outlets as a team. Before that, in July and August, Simpson did not have the benefit of Steele’s physical presence. But neither was he alone. He still had the super spy’s reports — James Bond in a briefcase.
Con men stoke the greed of their marks by letting them catch glimpses of suitcases bulging with cash. Simpson gave his marks a sense that he was similarly loaded — but with valuable information, not money. “In September 2016, Steele and I met in Washington and discussed the information now known as the ‘dossier,’ ” wrote Jonathan Winer, in the Washington Post. A former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state, Winer admitted passing Steele’s information to his superiors. “I was allowed to review, but not to keep, a copy of these reports to enable me to alert the State Department,” he explained. Simpson, we infer, would let journalists catch a glimpse of the super spy’s “raw intelligence.” Then he would quickly take the document back — because, you understand, it was just too sensitive to leave lying around.
If journalists feared that Steele’s startling reports (such as, for example, the one about the golden shower) contained Russian disinformation, Simpson had a well-rehearsed spiel at the ready to reassure them. He inadvertently shared it before the House Intelligence Committee in November 2017. Steele, Simpson explained, had a “standard presentation” for journalists to explain how he avoided falling prey to the diabolical Russians. Sliding into the first person, he rattled off Steele’s lines:
I was the lead Russianist at Ml6 in the final years of my career. And I was previously stationed in Moscow. And I speak Russian. And I’ve done Russian intelligence/counterintelligence issues all my life. And the central problem when you’re a Russian intelligence expert is disinformation, and that the Russians have . . . a long history and an advanced capability in disinformation. And so . . . before we go any further, I just want you to know that . . . this is . . . the fundamental problem with my profession. And it should be assumed that in any sort of intelligence gathering . . . there will be some disinformation. And I’m trained to spot that and filter it out, but . . . you should understand that . . . no one’s perfect.
Simpson then switched to the first-person plural. Perhaps, when briefing journalists, this was the point at which he would speak, in his own voice, as the leader of the talented and experienced team at Fusion GPS:
And so we’ve essentially filtered out everything that we think is disinformation, and we’re not going to present that to you here. We’re going to present to you things that we think come from credible sources, but we’re not going to warrant [sic] to you . . . that this is all true.
Simpson staked the credibility of the dossier on just one thing: Steele’s super awesomeness. On his own, Simpson would have been flacking salacious rumor, but paired with Steele, he was briefing “credible intelligence.” Together, they became a super duo.
The purpose of the dossier would change over time. In July and August, the goal was not to get Steele’s reports directly into the press. Nobody knew better than Simpson, a highly experienced reporter, that Steele’s claims were unverifiable and, therefore, unprintable. The best he could achieve was an article that reinforced the main suppositions of the collusion thesis — an article such as “Trump and Putin: A Love Story,” which David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, wrote and published in early August. “Putin,” sees in Trump a grand opportunity,” Remnick explained. “He sees in Trump weakness and ignorance, a confused mind. He has every hope of exploiting him.”
Remnick stopped just short of claiming that Putin was actually blackmailing Trump, but his depiction of their relations matched, in general, the story that emerged from Steele’s reports. Remnick took pains, for example, to instruct readers:
The gathering of kompromat — compromising material — is a familiar tactic in Putin’s arsenal. For years, the Russian intelligence services have filmed political enemies in stages of sexual and/or narcotic indulgence, and have distributed the grainy images online.
Did Remnick personally rely on a Fusion GPS briefing? We do not know. Jane Mayer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, recently confessed that she received a briefing, in September, directly from super spy himself — so the potential for communication certainly existed. Regardless of what inspired Remnick, his approach represented a win for Simpson. If, with the help of the dossier or any other tool of persuasion, he could convince journalists that Putin was blackmailing Trump with compromising videos, then it was just that much easier to convince them to report stories about, say, the danger to the Western alliance that Trump represented — a story that would require nothing more than stringing together a few quotes from Trump with a few ominous warnings from foreign-policy experts. The dossier, in short, helped Simpson sell a master narrative.
quote:A Diabolical Mastermind
By choosing to convince voters that Trump was somehow an accomplice to the DNC hack, the Clinton campaign had set itself a difficult challenge: defining the role of Putin’s American partners in crime. After all, the hack did not require the assistance of a Tom Cruise character. No one broke into DNC headquarters, crawled through a ventilator shaft, rappelled from a cable, and slid a disk into a hard drive. The hackers carried out the operation unilaterally, electronically, and probably from offshore. They required no accomplices on American soil.
Steele solved this problem by finding “sources” who revealed that the crucial contributions of Trump’s team came in the planning stages. As it turns out, Steele reported, the idea to hack the DNC actually originated from the American side. It was Trump’s team that defined the objective of the operation: “leaking the DNC e-mails to Wikileaks during the Democratic Convention” in order “to swing supporters of Bernie Sanders away from Hillary Clinton and across to Trump.”
This report solved half of the Clinton campaign’s problem: It established Trump’s guilt. But a conspiracy can’t grab the popular imagination if it is devoid of actual conspirators. Here again, the super spy’s “sources” came to the rescue. On the day-to-day level, the job of managing the Trump-Putin collusion fell to Paul Manafort, who, at that time, was still Trump’s campaign manager. But Manafort was not the architect of the DNC hack. Fortunately, the super spy was running a mole who was able to identify that criminal genius. The plot, Steele reported, “was conceived and promoted by Trump’s foreign policy adviser Carter Page.”
Here the super spy’s vaunted ability to filter out Russian disinformation appears to have failed him. Carter Page (who is no relation to Lisa Page on McCabe’s team) played a negligible role in the campaign. The Trump people had placed him on a team of foreign-policy advisers, to be sure, but they had thrown the group together in haste to counter the accusation that the campaign lacked an expert bench. Page did not know Donald Trump personally. He worked in finance, with a focus on investing in Russia’s energy sector, but he had no notable achievements to his name. A former boss described him, very unkindly, as “a gray spot,” a man “without any special talents or accomplishments.”
Steele’s allegations against Page make sense only in a Marvel Comics universe. Carter Page: by day, a mild-mannered businessman; by night, a diabolical mastermind.
The role that the super spy ascribed to Page may have been absurd, but what choice did he have? The conspiracy needed a face. That person had to have plausible connections to Russia plus a certain amount of visibility. In Trump’s orbit, there were only two candidates: Manafort and Page. Manafort’s ties, however, were to Ukraine, not Russia — and he was too well known. He had been working in Washington since the Reagan era.
Page, by contrast, had direct connections to Russia, having lived in Moscow for some three years. The modesty of his career was actually a plus, because Clinton’s propagandists could present it as shadowy rather than unsuccessful. For an unknown, Page was surprisingly visible. His trip to Moscow in July 2016 had received significant press attention, not least because he had expressed opinions in favor of rapprochement with Russia and critical of American foreign policy.
With the aid of Fusion GPS, the Clinton campaign rolled out their master narrative on Trump-Putin collusion. A new orthodoxy immediately gripped the establishment press, which amplified the overwrought propaganda, complete with suggestions of dirty deals, dark conspiracies, and blackmail. It was Jeffrey Goldberg, the national correspondent (now editor) of The Atlantic, who first trumpeted the new line. In his aptly titled article, “It’s Official: Hillary Clinton Is Running against Vladimir Putin,” Goldberg alleged that Trump “has chosen . . . to unmask himself as a de facto agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin.”
In “Putin’s Puppet,” Franklin Foer of Slate examined the matter from the Russian side: “Vladimir Putin has a plan for destroying the West — and that plan looks a lot like Donald Trump,” he wrote. David Remnick’s article discussing Putin’s affinity for grainy sex videos made identical points. All three authors noted, with grave concern, the Russian ties of Paul Manafort and . . . Carter Page.
With the exception of Fox News, the broadcast media beat the same drum. CNN might not have accused Page of masterminding the hack of the DNC, but it recognized a dangerous man when it saw one. On August 8, for example, it devoted a long segment entirely to Page. “What’s really remarkable here,” Jim Sciutto, CNN’s chief national-security correspondent told anchorman Wolf Blitzer, is that Page’s positions “match almost word for word the positions of the Kremlin, on, for instance, alleged U.S. orchestration of pro-democracy in and around Russia. And that is sparking concern from Russia experts and former policy makers even inside the GOP.”
So Page was “sparking concern” even among Never-Trump Republicans? How ominous! But imagine how much more ominous it would have sounded if journalists could have reported that Page was also sparking concern in the FBI! At that moment, John Brennan, the director of the CIA, was doing his damnedest to hand journalists precisely that story.
quote:A Ventriloquist and His Dummy
While the establishment press was singing in harmony with the Clinton campaign, a cacophonous debate erupted inside government. At the end of July, James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, said at a public forum that the intelligence community was not “ready yet to make a call on attribution” — not ready, that is, to attribute the DNC hack to Putin. Clapper was also unready to say that the intention of the hackers was to get Trump elected. The goal, he said, may simply have been “to stir up trouble.” When combined with similar comments by other intelligence officials, Clapper’s statements undercut Hillary Clinton’s efforts to brand Trump as Putin’s active accomplice.
Enter John Brennan. In early August, Brennan launched a personal campaign to force a consensus in support of Clinton’s propaganda. Before long, Clapper became his partner in this effort. They would succeed, however, only after the election — and then only by establishing an ad hoc and highly unorthodox intelligence-assessment team. To man the team, Brennan and Clapper handpicked a small number of analysts, tasking them with reaching a consensus before the inauguration of Donald Trump. The team, no surprise, did not disappoint. In January 2017, it produced the “consensus” that Brennan had been trying to orchestrate for the previous five months. By then, it was still useful as a propaganda tool against President Donald Trump, though it had arrived far too late to help Hillary Clinton win the election.
Of course, Brennan has never admitted his political motives. On the contrary, according to an in-depth Washington Post investigation (based on interviews with either Brennan himself or people very close to him), the CIA director claimed to be in possession of eye-popping intelligence reports about the DNC hack. These reports supposedly “captured Putin’s specific instructions on the operation’s audacious objectives — defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump.” Yet even if this intelligence trove actually did exist and truly did convince the CIA director, it obviously did not have the same persuasive impact on his colleagues, as evidenced by Brennan’s failure to deliver a consensus assessment of Putin’s motives.
In his mission to transform the intelligence community into an official choir of the Clinton campaign, Brennan ran up against a 6’7″ wall in the form of James Comey. According to the New York Times, in August 2016, “a critical split” emerged between “the CIA and counterparts at the FBI, where a number of senior officials continued to believe . . . that Russia’s cyberattacks were aimed primarily at disrupting America’s political system, and not at getting Mr. Trump elected.” As a component of this disagreement, Brennan may also have pressured Comey to investigate possible collusion with Russia by aides and associates of Trump.
By law, the CIA cannot spy on Americans; only the FBI has the authority to investigate citizens. But the CIA can share reports with the FBI about efforts by foreign agents to suborn individual Americans, and it can strongly urge the bureau to take action on the basis of those leads. Brennan, it would appear, did just that in July 2016.
That was the moment when the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian efforts to influence the Trump campaign. As we mentioned, Peter Strzok, who had been in charge of Midyear Exam, took charge of this investigation, too. The genesis and scope of it, however, is shrouded in a fog of deliberate misinformation. From the little we know, the probe seems to have centered on George Papadopoulos, a young foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign. Acting mostly on his own initiative, Papadopoulos reached out to Russians in the hopes of brokering a meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. In the process, he may have bumped into Russian intelligence agents.
Papadopoulos’s activities took place, primarily, in London — a part of the world where the CIA has greater reach than the FBI. How did Comey come to learn of them? The answer is unclear, but certain clues point to Brennan.
One of these is Brennan’s own testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in March 2017. The CIA, he explained, had shared certain information with the FBI — an apparent reference to the Papadopoulos leads. This was information, he said, “that required further investigation by the bureau to determine whether or not U.S. persons were actively conspiring, colluding with Russian officials.” Was Brennan taking responsibility for kick-starting the investigation into the Trump campaign? He seemed to be saying that he had dropped the Papadopoulos file on Comey’s desk and said, “Investigate Trump!”
If this supposition about the origins of the investigation in July is correct, it may also help explain Brennan’s behavior in late August, when he grew increasingly exasperated with Comey. In an effort to gain allies, Brennan turned to friends in Congress for help. With the blessing of Obama, he organized a series of briefings for the so-called Gang of Eight — the Democratic and Republican leaders in both chambers of Congress, and the chairs and ranking minority members on the Senate and the House intelligence committees. According to the New York Times, Brennan told these senior lawmakers that he “had information indicating that Russia was working to help elect Donald J. Trump president,” a view that was not supported by an authoritative intelligence assessment.
Obama and Brennan explained the briefings as an effort to forge bipartisan unity in the face of the Russian threat. But if Brennan couldn’t force a consensus inside the intelligence community, how could he possibly convince Republicans and Democrats to join hands — during a polarizing election, no less?
This high-minded bipartisanship was simply cover for a highly partisan move. The true motive of the briefings was to ventriloquize the Democrats on the Hill. If Brennan himself had gone public with his claims about Putin, he would have called down attacks on himself for passing off Clinton propaganda as an official intelligence assessment — and for meddling, as the director of the CIA, in domestic politics. Democratic lawmakers who received his briefings, however, operated under no such constraints. They were perfectly free to pass along Brennan’s views to the public as their own. They became the ventriloquist’s dummies, moving their lips mechanically as the CIA director spoke.
Brennan placed one of them center stage. On August 25, he gave a briefing that differed from the others; he tailored its content especially to the bare-knuckle politics of its recipient, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. During the 2012 election, Reid had assisted President Obama by falsely claiming that his Republican presidential challenger, Mitt Romney, had paid no taxes for ten years. When later asked if spreading a false rumor wasn’t reminiscent of McCarthyism, Reid responded, “They can call it whatever they want. Romney didn’t win, did he?” With the certain knowledge that Reid, who was in any case retiring after the 2016 election, would do whatever it took to win, Brennan indulged his own partisan political passions. He told Reid, according to the New York Times, “that unnamed advisers to Mr. Trump might be working with the Russians to interfere in the election.”
If Reid’s response is anything to go by, Brennan did much more than that: He briefed the senator on information taken directly from Steele’s dossier; and he complained about the recalcitrance of the director of the FBI. Two days after the briefing, Reid wrote a letter to Comey, which he immediately shared with the press. Claiming there was mounting evidence of “a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign,” Reid demanded that the FBI launch an immediate investigation. The American people, he wrote, deserve all the facts “before they vote this November.”
The Trump campaign, Reid continued bluntly, “has employed a number of individuals with significant and disturbing ties to Russia and the Kremlin.” He was particularly concerned with Trump associates who may have served as what he called “complicit intermediaries” between the Russian government and hackers. “The prospect of individuals tied to Trump, Wikileaks, and the Russian government coordinating to influence our election raises concerns of the utmost gravity and merits full examination.” In an unmistakable reference to Steele’s reports on Carter Page, Reid informed Comey that “questions have been raised” about a Trump adviser who allegedly “met with high-ranking sanctioned individuals while in Moscow.”
Serving as Brennan’s dummy, Reid publicized the Marvel Comics rendering of Carter Page, and he demanded that the FBI launch an investigation on the basis of it. Before long, Comey would obey.
quote:The Cutout
Shortly after Reid’s letter, Obama asked the FBI for an update on its investigation of Russian tampering with the election. The president, Lisa Page texted to her lover Peter Strzok, “wants to know everything we’re doing.” The text probably refers to Obama’s preparations for the G-20 meeting in China, where he personally lodged a complaint with Putin about the Russian hacking. But the request is intriguing. Obama was engaging the FBI just as it stood ready to use the allegations of the Steele dossier as a basis for broadening its investigation of Trump. When Comey informed Obama about “everything we are doing,” did he discuss the Carter Page allegations? Did he note their source, Christopher Steele? And what about the president himself? Did Obama nudge Comey to comply with the demands of Brennan and Reid?
Whatever signals the president may have sent, McCabe and his lovebirds certainly began supporting the efforts of Brennan and Reid to paint Trump as Putin’s puppet. The form of support was nuanced and clandestine. If Peter Strzok and Lisa Page had contacted their favorite reporter, Devlin Barrett, and leaked the fact that a Trump adviser was coming under investigation, the leak would have implicated the FBI. Trump and his supporters would then have castigated Comey, accusing him of intervening in politics. To avoid such problems, the lovers used a pair of cutouts — intermediaries who laundered the FBI’s information in the same way that Reid had laundered information for Brennan.
Who better to play this role than the super duo, Simpson and Steele? Either directly or through an intermediary, Strzok shared with Steele the news of the impending investigation of Carter Page. He did so with the certain knowledge that Steele would channel it to Simpson, who, in turn, would incorporate it into his standard press briefings. (FBI representatives would later deny having used Steele as a cutout with the press, but their self-defense, as we shall see below, is demonstrably false.)
The experience of the journalist Julia Ioffe demonstrates how diligent Simpson was at spreading the news that Strzok was surreptitiously feeding him. In mid September, Ioffe published a profile on Carter Page for Politico. “As I started looking into Page,” she relates, “I began getting calls from two separate ‘corporate investigators’ digging into what they claim are all kinds of shady connections Page has to all kinds of shady Russians.” One of those investigators was, presumably, Simpson; the other one probably represented another dank corner of the Clinton demimonde. Both emphasized an allegation that came directly from Steele’s dossier: namely, that Page, during his trip to Moscow in July, had met with Igor Sechin, who is a key Putin ally and the chairman of the Russian state oil company. The “corporate investigators,” however, now had something else to push, something new and very newsworthy: “The FBI was investigating Page.”
As knowledge of the FBI’s interest in Carter Page spread, Steele’s credibility soared. To exploit the opportunity, Simpson flew Steele to the United States to brief select media outlets in person. Thanks to the information that McCabe’s team was leaking to the press through Steele, Simpson could repackage the super spy. No longer just a former MI6 operative working as an “independent” researcher, Steele was now a trusted colleague of the FBI’s. He possessed unique insight into the fears of American counterintelligence officials about Trump’s nefarious relations with Putin.
For the first time, Steele agreed to go on the record as a quoted source for journalists. This round of briefings generated an article, written by veteran Yahoo reporter Michael Isikoff. Entitled “U.S. Intel Officials Probe Ties between Trump Adviser and Kremlin,” it focused, naturally, on Carter Page. Isikoff reported that American officials had “received intelligence reports” that Page had met with Sechin. “At their alleged meeting,” Isikoff reported, “Sechin raised the issue of the lifting of sanctions with Page, the Western intelligence source said.” A Western intelligence source? That would be Christopher Steele. By identifying the super spy in this manner, Isikoff disguises (wittingly or unwittingly) Steele’s identity as a Clinton operative and as the author and disseminator of the reports in question. The moniker had the added benefit of making Steele seem to work for a Western government, creating the illusion of transatlantic trepidation about the cunning Carter Page.
Confirmation of the article’s central claims came from two other sources. The first was a “senior U.S. law enforcement official,” who told Isikoff that Page’s meetings in Moscow were “being looked at.” Would that be Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, or Lisa Page? The second confirmation came from “a congressional source familiar with . . . briefings” that lawmakers had received about Carter Page’s meetings in Moscow. Would that be Harry Reid? Whether these were indeed the correct identities, it is obvious where Isikoff found his sources: on Glenn Simpson’s Rolodex. Here was a story processed and canned in Fusion GPS’s information factory. All Isikoff had to do was add water and shake. His sources were all part of a single network conspiring to hoodwink the public.
Why did Comey participate in this fraud? Perhaps it was to get Brennan and Reid off his back. On the risk side of the ledger, the dangers were minimal. Today the Isikoff article is a fingerprint on a hot bullet casing, irrefutable proof placing the FBI at the scene of the crime. But in September 2016, the chances of anyone ever tying the bureau to it were negligible. Although the article announced with great flourish the opening of an investigation into Carter Page, it’s not even clear that, at this point, Page was truly an official target of the probe.
The important thing to Brennan and Reid was helping Hillary Clinton win the election. What they desired most from the FBI was a public statement that the Trump team was under investigation for conspiring with Putin. With the Isikoff article, Comey didn’t fully satisfy them, but he threw them a bone.
On the reward side of the ledger, he showed Hillary Clinton and her friends that he was, despite everything, a team player. And his contribution to the team effort was indeed significant. The FBI’s leaks were indispensable in giving super-flack Glenn Simpson a stable of seemingly independent sources willing to go on the record about the grave concern sweeping the Western world about, of all people, Carter Page.
quote:Get Carter
“Mr. Page is not an advisor and has made no contribution to the campaign,” said a Trump spokesman in reaction to the media storm over the Isikoff article. If Carter Page thought this disavowal would return some normalcy to his life, he was sadly mistaken. It actually put a target on his back. So long as he was officially affiliated with the Trump campaign, Comey would no doubt hesitate to seek a surveillance warrant, for fear of laying the FBI open to the charge of engaging in politically motivated spying. After the disavowal, Comey had more room for maneuver. He therefore gave the go-ahead to seek a surveillance warrant.
Widening the probe to include Page carried a little additional risk for Comey, but not much. If Clinton were to win the election, as everyone expected, then she would never punish him for the move. If Trump were to win and learn about the probe, it would certainly enrage him. But the investigation could also be useful as leverage. Peter Strzok put it well in a text to Lisa Page a month earlier. On August 15, 2016, referring to the possibility of a Trump victory, Strzok wrote:
I want to believe the path u threw out 4 consideration in Andy’s [McCabe’s] office — that there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event u die be4 you’re 40.
Strzok, presumably, was saying that a counterintelligence operation against Trump and his team would give the FBI leadership a species of job insurance, similar to the job insurance that J. Edgar Hoover enjoyed in his day. Presidents dared not fire Hoover, because he kept a black book on them all.
Strzok’s team began the process of seeking a surveillance warrant on Carter Page from the court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA. The FISA court’s proceedings are not public, because they treat top-secret intelligence. To seek a warrant against Carter Page required the FBI to show probable cause that he was acting as an agent of Russia. In preparation for the warrant application, the FBI flew Steele to Rome for a face-to-face meeting with his main FBI contact. According to the New York Times, the handler told Steele that the FBI “would pay him $50,000” if he “could get solid corroboration of his reports.” It was an incriminating admission. Steele’s reports on Page’s Moscow trip were two months old. The U.S. government — that is, the FBI and the CIA — hadn’t produced an iota of corroboration — and yet on the basis of those stale reports, it had suddenly decided to target Page as a probable agent of a foreign power.
Why? Because without the Carter Page who appeared in the Steele dossier — without the Marvel Comics villain, there existed no credible intelligence pointing to a criminal conspiracy between Trump and Putin. If the investigation was to be sufficiently broad to dig up dirt on Trump, it had to include the fanciful allegations against Page. These, however, were impossible to corroborate — because they were fictive. They did, however, include one claim that, if shorn of context, wasn’t as transparently silly as the others: namely, that Page had met with Sechin, the chairman of the Russian state oil company. To be sure, Steele’s report of the meeting contained the outlandish claim that Page had negotiated with Sechin on lifting American sanctions against Russia. But if McCabe’s team were to downplay this aspect as much as possible and focus instead on whether the meeting actually took place (it didn’t) — well, that could make it appear like a worrisome allegation calling out for a sober follow-up.
The super spy sprang into action. He tapped his daisy chain of paid Russian informants, and before McCabe’s team submitted the FISA warrant application, he produced some short reports supposedly confirming the meeting with Sechin. Steele discovered in his network another “source”: the friend of one of Sechin’s friend, who had heard from Sechin and from Sechin’s personal assistant that indeed Sechin had met with Page. Confirmation?! The “source” also reported that Sechin offered Page, in return for Trump lifting of U.S. sanctions on Russia, a personal reward: a 19 percent stake in the Russian state-owned oil company — a haul worth millions upon millions, or probably billions.
No mere criminal mastermind, Page was master negotiator as well! Cartoonish depictions such as this constitute the primary basis on which the FBI made the case that Page was probably a foreign agent and that, in addition, he had probably broken American law — the legal standard for issuing surveillance warrants. The application for a warrant against Page is locked behind a top-secret classification. But McCabe testified before the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017 that without Steele’s information, the FBI could not have secured a surveillance warrant. And according to Senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham, who have read the original warrant application and the three renewal applications, “the bulk” of the material on which the FBI made its case against Page came in the Steele dossier. What is more, the application contained, in the words of the two senators, “no additional information corroborating the dossier allegations” — no additional information, that is, except for one newspaper article: the Isikoff piece.
McCabe’s team supported an application based primarily on Steele’s allegations by offering the judges an article that itself was based solely on Steele’s reports.
quote:Alfa Shmalfa
Placing Page under surveillance marked the high point of the cooperation between McCabe’s team and the super duo Simpson and Steele. But nefarious partnerships are prone to unravel; and when they do, they unravel quickly. Only ten short days after McCabe’s team pulled the wool over the eyes of the FISA-court judges, Simpson and Steele broke off relations with the FBI in a fit of anger and bitterness.
Relations started to fray amid an effort by the super duo to stage a repeat of their Isikoff triumph. At some point in October, Simpson brought Steele to the United States for a second round of in-person briefings with major news outlets. Unfortunately, not one of these outlets has seen fit to disclose the subject of the briefings, so their precise details are sketchy. Still serving as FBI cutouts, the super duo probably updated reporters on the FISA warrant application and other aspects of the Trump-Russia investigation. If so, they may have intended for that information to serve as filler in articles about a new scoop that Simpson was offering reporters. A journalist whom Fusion GPS briefed at that time subsequently told the Washington Times that Simpson was pushing a story about a secret computer link-up between Trump and a Russian bank.
According to the New York Times, news of the link-up had started to see the light of day thanks to the “classified” briefings that Brennan had organized for trusted Democrats on Capitol Hill. Intelligence officers disclosed, in the words of the Times, “the possibility of financial ties between Russians and people connected to Mr. Trump,” including “a mysterious computer back channel between the Trump Organization and the Alfa Bank, which is one of Russia’s biggest banks and whose owners have longstanding ties to Mr. Putin.” John Brennan had designed those briefings to be leaky, so it should come as no surprise that word of the Alfa Bank investigation flowed directly to Fusion GPS.
Following the winning formula that had produced the Isikoff article, Simpson provided reporters with the scoop. At first, the plan proceeded flawlessly. Franklin Foer of Slate ran a breathless story about the secret communications between the servers. Do we know with certainty that Foer’s information came directly from Fusion GPS? No. It’s certainly possible that, as we saw in the case of Julia Ioffe, some other agent emerged from the shadows of the Clinton demimonde to serve it up to him. Whatever the source of the information, Foer thought he might just have discovered the greatest piece of incriminating evidence yet — and Hillary Clinton agreed.
The speed and enthusiasm of her endorsement suggest more than a measure of coordination. She immediately sent out not one, but two tweets flagging Foer’s piece. One of them attached a statement from her campaign, which added heart palpitations and comic-book imagery to Foer’s breathlessness. Slate’s discovery of a “secret hotline,” the statement said, might unlock the mystery behind Trump’s love for Putin, and it might also explain why Russia was “masterminding” cyber theft designed “to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign.” The Clinton campaign called on the FBI to investigate.
Clearly, this was the cue for McCabe’s lovers to chime in. Their role was to affirm by means of a leak that the FBI was taking very seriously this threat to national security, investigating with all the diligence that the American people expect of their premier law-enforcement agency. Foer’s story came out on October 31 — a week and a day before the voters went to the ballot box. If McCabe’s team had stuck to the script, the media would have spent the final week before the election talking of nothing but the “secret hotline” that connected Putin to the lair of his evil minion high atop Trump Tower.
But McCabe’s team double-crossed Steele and Simpson — or so the super duo must have felt. On the same day the Slate article appeared, the New York Times reported that the FBI had investigated the link between Alfa Bank and Trump Tower. The Bureau, the Times said, had concluded “that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts.” This single sentence wiped out weeks of diligent work by Fusion GPS. As if to console Simpson and Steele, the article did reveal that the FBI, all summer long, had been conducting an investigation into the potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. And the Times even disclosed details of the probe — information that came courtesy, one assumes, of briefings from Fusion GPS.
But to Simpson and Steele the inclusion of those details was the bitterest of consolation. The damage the Times visited on their propaganda campaign was not limited to undermining the Alfa Bank story. The article included two additional facts, each as destructive as the other: The FBI’s wide-ranging investigation into Trump had revealed no collusion with Putin, and the FBI did not even believe that Putin was trying to get Hillary Clinton elected. In a convulsive fit of journalistic integrity, the Times had rejected Fusion GPS’s master narrative — and it had done so on the basis of authoritative leaks from the FBI. Someone in the J. Edgar Hoover Building had dropped a pallet of bricks on Simpson and Steele. Who?
quote:The Return of Joe Friday
The collapse of the “secret hotline” story was part of a larger falling-out between the FBI and the super duo — and not by any means the most important part. The event that truly doomed their relations was an announcement, on October 28, that the FBI was reopening the Clinton email investigation. And the character standing at the center of that decision was James Comey.
The bureau had learned that Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s trusted right hand, had forwarded thousands of emails to a computer in her home, which Anthony Weiner had put to personal use. Weiner was a former congressman, and he was Abedin’s husband. But he was also a criminal under investigation by the FBI. In her “well-intentioned but careless” use of government correspondence, Abedin had streamed thousands of official emails to the laptop of a pedophile.
James Comey’s July statement closing the Clinton email case coincided with Guccifer 2.0’s release of the DNC emails, and it helped build the impression of Hillary Clinton as the entitled CEO of Clinton, Inc. This reopening of the case, coming just a week before the election, was also timed for maximum visibility and carried a similar political valence. It was the third in a string of blows that Clinton received in the final stage of the election. The first came at a September 11 memorial commemoration in New York, where she had stumbled badly and seemed to faint, raising doubts about her stamina and health. On October 7, WikiLeaks published the first trove of emails stolen, presumably by Russian intelligence, from her campaign manager John Podesta. The emails were further grist for the mill of those who argued that Bill and Hillary Clinton were running a Tammany Hall for the 21st century. With Clinton stumbling, both literally and figuratively, the director of the FBI seemed determined to knock her back down.
What was he thinking? Comey now claims that he assumed Hillary Clinton would win. He feared that, after the election, people would come to learn that he had hidden the issue of Abedin’s laptop from the public, and they would accuse him of giving unfair consideration to Clinton. That calculation may indeed have been part of his thinking. But he may also have been hedging against a Trump victory. The announcement about the laptop was a card that he could play to ingratiate himself to Trump — to offset the damage of the leaks about the Russia investigation. On top of those machinations, there was the old story: Comey’s love of the spotlight. Here he was again in a national drama playing the entirely principled and apolitical lawman. He was in Joe Friday heaven.
For their part, Clinton and her camp read the FBI director’s move as treachery most vile. In a scream of rage masquerading as a letter to Comey, Harry Reid spoke for the team. Comey, he wrote, was breaking the law by engaging in partisan political activity in support of Trump. Whereas Comey never hesitated to publicize damaging “innuendo” against Clinton, he was protecting Trump from public humiliation. “It has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers, and the Russian government — a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every opportunity,” Reid fumed. “The public has a right to know this information.” To underscore that point, he published the letter immediately.
Glenn Simpson and Christopher Steele shared the sense of betrayal. Simpson later testified to the House intelligence committee:
At that point I felt like the rules had just been thrown out and that Comey had violated . . . one of the more sacrosanct policies, which is not announcing law enforcement activity in the closing days of an election. . . . We decided that if James Comey wasn’t going to tell people about this investigation that, you know, he had violated the rules, and [it] would only be fair if the world knew that both candidates were under FBI investigation.
So Simpson and Steele “began talking to the press.”
And with that, the super duo brought about the end of their secret partnership with McCabe’s team. The bureau expects its cutouts to behave as cutouts: that is to say, they must launder secrets. Sensitive and classified information must never appear in the press in a form that betrays its FBI origins.
Comey announced the reopening of the Clinton email case on Friday, October 28. Simpson moved quickly. He arranged a Skype interview between Steele, who was now back in London, and David Corn, a veteran journalist at Mother Jones. On October 31, Corn reported that “a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence” told him “that in recent months he provided the bureau with memos, based on . . . Russian sources, contending that the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump — and that the FBI requested more information from him.” The FBI response, Steele told Corn, was “shock and horror.” In August, the FBI asked for more of Steele’s memos. “It’s quite clear there was or is a pretty substantial inquiry going on.” To ensure that Corn understood the nature of the inquiry, Steele shared with him the text of the reports that he had given to the Bureau.
Steele’s decision to expose his partnership with the FBI gave McCabe’s team no choice but to terminate the relationship. The break-up was ugly, but its very messiness would later prove useful. In late 2017, congressional investigators would begin questioning the FBI’s senior leaders about the role Steele had played as a cutout. The senior leaders would point to the break-up as proof of the FBI’s integrity. Steele, they said, had been lying all along to the Bureau about his work with journalists. McCabe’s team had no idea that he was funneling the FBI’s secrets to the media. It was the Mother Jones interview that alerted them to Steele’s duplicity; the moment it became clear, they immediately terminated the relationship.
This alibi won’t wash. McCabe’s team was fully aware, in September, that Steele stood behind the Isikoff article. In fact, the appearance of “a senior U.S. law enforcement official” in the article implicates McCabe’s team more or less directly. In short, Steele’s FBI handlers were aware of his role in leaking information at that time, and it caused them no consternation. On the contrary, after the Isikoff article, the FBI drew Steele even closer, flying him to Rome and offering him $50,000. His work as a cutout received further tacit commendation when McCabe’s team used the Isikoff article to dupe the FISA-court judges.
The troubles that eventually befell Steele and McCabe’s team have no bearing on the simple facts: They worked as partners in prosecuting a campaign of innuendo against Carter Page in September, and again in placing him under surveillance in October. What is more, the surveillance order went beyond McCabe’s team, to the highest levels in the FBI and the DOJ. James Comey had to sign off on that decision — and that fact implicates him in a serious abuse of power.
Steele’s description of Carter Page’s activities in Moscow is comical. We have a word to describe the use of fabricated evidence to make an innocent man appear guilty: The Obama administration framed Carter Page. But not only Carter Page. According to Steele’s dossier, Page was in Moscow to cut a deal on another’s behalf: He was an emissary — the trusted agent of Donald Trump. Without Steele’s allegations against Carter Page — without, that is, the story of Page negotiating with Sechin to remove the sanctions — there was no credible allegation of a Trump-Putin conspiracy. The FBI, therefore, carried out a campaign of innuendo against Donald Trump in September. And the Obama administration placed him under investigation in October, if not earlier. The Obama administration framed Donald Trump.
quote:Second Sight
During the Watergate scandal, the press popularized the phrase “the non-denial denial.” The Nixon White House had a special talent for issuing statements that sounded like categorical denials of allegations but that, upon close parsing, affirmed them to be true. In the matter of the Steele dossier, Obama officials, some of their allies in Congress, and senior leaders in the FBI have developed an analogous ploy: the “non-verification verification.” These are statements that distance the speaker from the laughable fantasies of the Steele dossier while still affirming that the tale of collusion it weaves must be taken seriously.
The unrivaled master of the move is John Brennan. In a recent appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Brennan defended the FBI’s use of the Steele dossier in its FISA warrant application. He railed against the FBI’s critics, whom he depicted as partisan hacks. He played the role of sober intelligence professional. Expressing his personal appraisal of the dossier when he was still director of the CIA, he said, “There were things in that dossier that made me wonder whether or not they were, in fact, accurate and true.”
Exactly what things? Was it the dossier’s view of Page as the diabolical mastermind of the DNC hack that struck the CIA director as credible? Avoiding the dossier’s specific allegations, Brennan maintained his front and asserted, with the somber tone of a button-down national-security professional, that Steele’s reports contain valuable intelligence leads. “I think Jim Comey has said that it contained salacious and unverified information,” Brennan continued. “Just because it was unverified didn’t mean it wasn’t true.”
The non-verification verification is central to the distinctive nature of the Obama administration’s abuse of power. Most of our debate has focused on how the FBI used the Steele dossier to validate the investigation of Carter Page. This issue is important, to be sure, but it must not deflect us from seeing that the reverse is also true: The administration deliberately used the investigation of Page to validate the dossier.
Consider, again, the coy Brennan. When questioners push him to explain what in the Steele dossier he finds compelling, he habitually takes shelter behind secret sources — evidence hidden behind a classified screen, where only he, the chief intelligence professional, was permitted to see it. “I was aware of intelligence . . . about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether . . . those individuals were cooperating with the Russians . . . and it served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion [or] cooperation occurred.”
John Brennan sees things that we cannot see. If he indeed has access to secrets that transform stories from Marvel Comics into the stuff of everyday reality, then he has done a very poor job of explaining what they are. Moreover, no disinterested intelligence professional has supported him. Brennan’s somber and self-righteous appeal to hidden secrets is the oldest con in the book. Just replace his top-secret computer monitor with a crystal ball or dried chicken bones, and his scam is the same one that Gypsy fortunetellers ran on superstitious peasants in early-modern Europe, or that soothsayers were operating in Homer’s Greece.
With respect to the framing of Trump, however, the second-sight scam required elaborate orchestration, the work of many hands. The key was the double-tracking of the dossier. Hillary Clinton’s enablers channeled it simultaneously into the press and into the government. They then recruited people inside government to verify to the outsiders that it was a serious document, a guide to the intelligence that reporters were not allowed to see. Without this double-tracking and official or quasi-official authentication, journalists would never have believed that they were catching a glimpse of what Brennan and the FBI saw in their crystal balls — pardon me, their top-secret monitors. And without leaks about investigations, journalists would have had no dossier-related news to report. Official statements that the dossier “was being looked into” transformed it into a legitimate topic for reputable news outlets.
This con failed in its primary goal of preventing the election of Trump, but it was nevertheless a partial success. It instilled in a significant portion of the American public the conviction that Trump indeed conspired with Putin. This conviction is especially prevalent among the lofty-minded — a class of people that includes Republicans as well as Democrats.
The bipartisan character of the delusion was the greatest factor that legitimated the appointment of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel leading the investigation into Trump’s alleged relations with Russia. The lofty-minded have greeted every indictment that Mueller has handed down as confirmation of their collusion delusion. In reality, those indictments only prove that a phalanx of crack investigators armed with nearly unlimited resources, a grand jury, and an expansive mandate can draw blood almost at will. If a similar phalanx were to target Hillary Clinton and the shenanigans surrounding the Clinton Foundation, how much blood would flow? In other words, Mueller’s indictments are just the latest form of the non-verification verification.
Regardless of Mueller’s intentions, his probe serves as precisely the kind of “insurance policy” that Strzok seems to have been discussing with his lover, Lisa Page, in August 2016. Trump cannot shut down the Mueller probe and excise the rot in the DOJ and the FBI without appearing to obstruct justice. In practical terms, then, the Mueller probe is the cover-up.
Of course, the lofty-minded refuse to see it this way. The political damage that Mueller’s team is inflicting on Trump helps explain why a surprising number of people mount passionate and sincere defenses of the dossier and the super spy who compiled it. The logic of partisan politics will always lead a significant percentage of people to insist, with varying degrees of true belief, that a sow’s ear really is a silk purse. But partisanship is not by any means the only factor at work here. Even people with well-deserved reputations for intellectual seriousness passionately defend the integrity of Christopher Steele, a man whom the New York Times insists on calling, despite all contrary evidence, “a whistleblower.”
For a complete understanding of the dossier’s tenacious hold on lofty minds, one must supplement conventional political analysis with psychology. What we are witnessing is nothing less than a textbook case of denial and projection — the most perfect case imaginable.
The event that shaped the dossier more than any other was the hack of the DNC. Guccifer 2.0 first began releasing documents on June 15. A week later, Steele produced his first report. The Hillary Clinton that emerged from the DNC emails was preternaturally unsuited to a populist moment. Here she was: the Hillary Clinton who made high-priced speeches to Wall Street on the eve of the Iowa caucuses. Here was the co-executive of the international slush funds of the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative. Here was the power-hungry political boss who worked with the DNC to fix the Democratic primaries. Clinton’s supporters instinctively understood the size of the wound that the hack opened up, and they worked frantically to cauterize it — which meant deflecting attention from the greed, entitlement, and sleaze that characterized Clinton, Inc.
The dossier quickly became a tool for denying the deficiencies of Bill and Hillary Clinton, projecting them onto Donald Trump. Is Bill Clinton a sexual predator? That’s nothing. Trump pays teams of prostitutes to pee on him! Did Hillary Clinton preside over the failed “reset” with Russia? That’s nothing. Putin is blackmailing Trump, and he fears Hillary! Did Bill Clinton pocket a $500,000 fee for a speech he gave in Moscow, shortly before the sale of American uranium to Russian interests? That’s nothing. Trump’s been dependent on Putin for years! Do the emails from the DNC prove that Hillary Clinton rigged the primaries? That’s nothing. Trump conspired with Putin to rig the entire election!
In the wake of the DNC hack, leading figures in the press and senior officials in the Obama administration faced a choice. They could depict Carter Page as he really was: an unknown man of modest accomplishments who played no role of note in the Trump organization. Or they could conspire with Fusion GPS to promote the fiction that he was a sly operative in a sinister network. In a fateful choice, they opted for dishonesty and deception over truth.
Once the enablers of Hillary Clinton compromised their own integrity, they internalized her program of denial and projection. Their own egos are now invested in perpetuating it. To avoid owning up to their shortcomings, they insist, in ever-shriller tones, on the personal integrity of the super spy and the credibility of his reports. The mere acknowledgement of a simple truth — that the “dossier” is junk — would constitute an admission either of deep professional malfeasance or of gob-smacking gullibility.
Choose your poison: You duped people and thereby abetted a gross abuse of power; or you were yourself badly duped. That is the dilemma that the lofty-minded now face. The choice is excruciating. It requires abandoning satisfying self-images and embracing painful self-truths — while also handing a well-deserved victory to a hated political enemy. As a consequence, the Steele dossier has proved to be as consequential as it is asinine.
De "Russia collusion delusion" is de samenzweringstheorie gebleken waar niet alleen Hillary Clinton is in gaan geloven, maar een behoorlijk aantal mensen.quote:The Greatest Denier
Of course, no one is in deeper denial than Hillary Clinton herself. After she had conceded to Trump on the night of the election, Obama called her. Taking the phone, she said, “Mr. President, I’m sorry.”
Sorry, no doubt, that the baton had fallen to the ground once again. Sorry that she would not be the first female president. Sorry that she would not hold the reins of power. But was contrition an aspect of any component of her sorrow?
If there is one thing Hillary Clinton does not do well, it is contrition. In an interview last September, she clung to the fiction that the election was stolen. Her belief that Trump conspired with Putin was absolute. “There certainly was communication, and there certainly was an understanding of some sort,” Clinton said. She had “no doubt” that Putin sought a Trump victory, that there was “a tangle of financial relationships” between Trump and Russia, and that Trump’s associates “worked really hard to hide their connections with Russians.” Were those, in her mind, clear signs of collusion? “I’m convinced of it,” she said.
She will remain convinced until the day she dies. The alternative, a rigorous examination of conscience, is too painful to contemplate. How much longer will Hillary Clinton’s damaged psyche hold America hostage?
quote:Beyond the Memo
An investigative report based on the memo, a declassified FISC report, and public records on how the Trump team was spied on
A declassified House Intelligence Committee memo reveals how the unverified Fusion GPS dossier—opposition research paid for by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC)—was used by the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) to obtain a FISA surveillance warrant to spy on Donald Trump presidential campaign volunteer Carter Page.
The memo details how the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was intentionally left in the dark about the source of the allegations that led it to approve the spy warrant in October 2016.
It reveals that top FBI and DOJ officials signed off on the initial warrant and three subsequent renewals, including President Donald Trump’s deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein.
In one instance, the FBI and DOJ used a Yahoo News article based on the Trump dossier as evidence to extend its FISA warrant, despite the unverified information having come from the same source.
The memo does not reveal how the FISA warrant was subsequently used.
The Epoch Times used additional sources, including a declassified top-secret report of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to paint a fuller picture of the apparent abuse of power.
After the initial FISA warrant was approved, dozens, if not hundreds of so-called unmasking requests were made by senior members of then-President Barack Obama’s administration.
It also opened the floodgates to a number of intelligence leaks to media organizations, which served to turn public opinion against Donald Trump.
Continuing well after Trump was elected, the spying and leaking raise serious concerns about apparent efforts by the Obama administration, the DNC, and the Clinton campaign to prevent Trump from being elected and to delegitimize him once he was in office.
Verwar kwantiteit niet met kwaliteit. Er worden hier enorme lappen tekst gekopiepeest, maar waar gaat dit topic eigenlijk over? Kan iemand mij in maximaal 5 zinnen uitleggen wat het onderwerp van dit topic is?quote:Op woensdag 4 april 2018 19:11 schreef Lavenderr het volgende:
@dellipder
Dank voor al je inhoudelijke BNW-posts.
Alles spinnen wat er in de VS gebeurt zodat iedereen die deze drek leest er van overtuigd raakt dat de DNC, FBI en DoJ samenspannen op elke mogelijke manier om Trump dwars te zitten.quote:Op donderdag 5 april 2018 18:45 schreef Terecht het volgende:
[..]
Verwar kwantiteit niet met kwaliteit. Er worden hier enorme lappen tekst gekopiepeest, maar waar gaat dit topic eigenlijk over? Kan iemand mij in maximaal 5 zinnen uitleggen wat het onderwerp van dit topic is?
Daar heb je gelijk in, maar ik heb wel respect voor de moeite die dellipder in zijn posts steekt. Kan ik het allemaal helemaal volgen? Nee.quote:Op donderdag 5 april 2018 18:45 schreef Terecht het volgende:
[..]
Verwar kwantiteit niet met kwaliteit. Er worden hier enorme lappen tekst gekopiepeest, maar waar gaat dit topic eigenlijk over? Kan iemand mij in maximaal 5 zinnen uitleggen wat het onderwerp van dit topic is?
Lees voor de grap nog eens de OP. Er is na de eerste paragraaf al geen touw meer aan vast te knopen. Dat is niet voor niets; dit soort type samenzweringsdraadjes bestaan bij de gratie van vaagheid. Zodra je bondig en helder formuleert wat de kern van de zaak is zakt het als een pudding in elkaar. Voorbeeld: het ronde huis topicreeks.
QAnon kortom? Dat is een allesomvattende samenzweringstheorie waarin er sprake is van een manicheistische strijd van Goed (Trump en zijn maatjes) tegen Kwaad (de zogenaamde deep state waaronder de DNC, FBI en DoJ deel van uit maken).quote:Op donderdag 5 april 2018 18:50 schreef Fir3fly het volgende:
[..]
Alles spinnen wat er in de VS gebeurt zodat iedereen die deze drek leest er van overtuigd raakt dat de DNC, FBI en DoJ samenspannen op elke mogelijke manier om Trump dwars te zitten.
Het idee dat Trump gewoon daadwerkelijk een complete idioot is komt nooit op.
Jup. Zelfde bronnen, zelfde talking points.quote:Op donderdag 5 april 2018 18:54 schreef Terecht het volgende:
[..]
QAnon kortom? Dat is een allesomvattende samenzweringstheorie waarin er sprake is van een manicheistische strijd van Goed (Trump en zijn maatjes) tegen Kwaad (de zogenaamde deep state waaronder de DNC, FBI en DoJ deel van uit maken).
Dat je het niet kan volgen is een feature en niet een bug. Het doel van dit soort samenzweringstheorieen is niet om de samenzwering op te lossen, maar om de zoektocht naar aanwijzingen die het complot zogenaamd zouden blootleggen zolang mogelijk te bestendigen. Hoe vager het onderwerp, hoe groter je voor jezelf het zoekgebied maakt. Zou je concreet worden dan vernauw je juist de bandbreedte van je zoektocht en dat ondermijnt het doel.quote:Op donderdag 5 april 2018 18:52 schreef Lavenderr het volgende:
[..]
Daar heb je gelijk in, maar ik heb wel respect voor de moeite die dellipder in zijn posts steekt. Kan ik het allemaal helemaal volgen? Nee.
En vwb Het Ronde Huis? Dat heeft toch een aantal jaar prima gelopen. Ondanks alle werkgroepen en éénmansgroepen, stokers, schelders en criticasters die enorm veel moeite deden het topic de nek om te draaien. Het heeft diverse boeken opgeleverd dus het was zeker de moeite waard.
quote:All Russiagate Roads Lead To London As Evidence Emerges Of Joseph Mifsud’s Links To UK Intelligence
Over the last few months, Professor Joseph Mifsud has become a feather in the cap for those pushing the Trump-Russia narrative. He is characterized as a “Russian” intelligence asset in mainstream press, despite his declarations to the contrary. However, evidence has surfaced that suggests Mifsud was anything but a Russian spy, and may have actually worked for British intelligence. This new evidence culminates in the ground-breaking conclusion that the UK and its intelligence apparatus may be responsible for the invention of key pillars of the Trump-Russia scandal. If true, this would essentially turn the entire RussiaGate debacle on its head.
To give an idea of the scope of this report, a few central points showing the UK connections with the central pillars of the Trump-Russia claims are included here, in the order of discussion in this article:
1. Mifsud allegedly discussed that Russia has ‘dirt’ on Clinton in the form of ‘thousands of emails’ with George Papadopoulos in London in April 2016.
2. The following month, Papadopoulos spoke with Alexander Downer, Australia’s ambassador to the UK, about the alleged Russian dirt on Clinton while they were drinking at a swanky Kensington bar, according to The Times. In late July 2016, Downer shared his tip with Australian intelligence officials who forwarded it to the FBI.
3. Robert Goldstone, a key figure in the ‘Trump Tower’ part of the RussiaGate narrative, sent Donald Trump Jr. an email claiming Russia wanted to help the Trump campaign. He is a British music promoter.
4. Christopher Steele, ex-MI6, who worked as an MI6 agent in Moscow until 1993 and ran the Russia desk at MI6 HQ in London between 2006 and 2009. He produced the totally unsubstantiated ‘Steele Dossier’ of Trump-Russia allegations, with funding from the Clinton campaign and the DNC.
5. Robert Hannigan, the head of British spy agency GCHQ, flew to Washington DC to share ‘director-to-director’ level intelligence with then-CIA Chief John Brennan.
Each of these strands of UK-tied elements of the Russiagate narrative can be substantially dismantled on close inspection. This untangling process leads to the surprising conclusion that UK intelligence services fabricated evidence of collusion in order to create the appearance of a Trump-Russia connection.
This trend begins with Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese scholar with an eclectic academic history who Quartz described as an “enigma,” while legacy press has enthusiastically characterized him as a central personality in the Trump-Russia scandal. The New York Times described Mifsud as an “enthusiastic promoter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia”, citing his regular involvement in the annual meetings of the Valdai Discussion Club, a Russian-based think-tank, as well as three short articles he wrote in support of Russian policies.
Mifsud strongly denied claims that he was associated with Russian intelligence, telling Italian newspaper Repubblica that he was a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and the Clinton Foundation, adding that his political outlook was “left-leaning.” Last month, Slate reported Mifsud had ‘disappeared’, as did some of the other figures linking the UK to the Trump-Russia scandal. This aspect will be discussed in more detail below.
To contextualize Mifsud’s eclectic academic career in terms of intelligence service, it is helpful to note that research undertaken by this author and Suzie Dawson as part of the Decipher You project has repeatedly shown the close ties – an outright merger in many cases – between the intelligence community and academia. This enmeshment also takes place with think-tanks, NGOs, and in the corporate sphere. In this light, Mifsud’s brand of ‘scholarship’ becomes far less mysterious.
Mifsud’s alleged links to Russian intelligence are summarily debunked by his close working relationship with Claire Smith, a major figure in the upper echelons of British intelligence. A number of Twitter users recently observed that Joseph Mifsud had been photographed standing next to Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee at Mifsud’s LINK campus in Rome. Newsmax and Buzzfeed later reported that the professor’s name and biography had been removed from the campus’ website, writing that the mysterious removal took place after Mifsud had served the institution for “years.”
WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange likewise noted the connection between Mifsud and Smith in a Twitter thread, additionally pointing out his connections with Saudi intelligence: “[Mifsud] and Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee and eight-year member of the UK Security Vetting panel both trained Italian security services at the Link University in Rome and appear to both be present in this [photo].”
The photograph in question originated on Geodiplomatics.com, where it specified that Joseph Mifsud is indeed standing next to Claire Smith, who was attending a: “…Training program on International Security which was organised by Link Campus University and London Academy of Diplomacy.” The event is listed as taking place in October, 2012. This is highly significant for a number of reasons.
Claire Smith standing with Joseph Mifsud, on the left side of the back row.
First, the training program Smith attended with high-ranking members of the Italian military was organized by the London Academy of Diplomacy, where Joseph Mifsud served as Director, as noted by The Washington Post. That Claire Smith was training military and law enforcement officials alongside Mifsud in 2012 during her tenure as a member of the UK Cabinet Office Security Vetting Appeals Panel, which oversees the vetting process for UK intelligence placement, strongly suggests that Mifsud has been incorrectly characterized as a Russian intelligence asset. It is extremely unlikely that Claire Smith’s role in vetting UK intelligence personnel would lead to her accidentally working with a Russian agent.
The connection between Mifsud and Smith does not end at bumped elbows in a photograph. Mifsud’s LinkedIn profile lists the University of Stirling as a place of occupation in connection with his service as Director of the London Academy of Diplomacy (LAD), where Claire Smith served as a visiting professor from 2013-2014 according to her LinkedIn profile. This adds yet another verifiable connection between a man who is at the center of already-flimsy Trump-Russia allegations and a high-ranking British intelligence figure.
Claire Smith’s LinkedIn profile details her service on the Security Vetting Appeals Panel while also occupied as a visiting Professor at Stirling University
Claire Smith also hosted a seminar titled “Making Sense of Intelligence” at the University of Stirling. The event registration form describes her career, including her service as Deputy Chief of Assessments Staff in the Cabinet Office, as a member of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee and her completion of an eight-year term as a member of the UK Security Vetting and Appeals Panel.
A particularly compelling factor indicating that Mifsud’s working relationship with Claire Smith suggests his direct connection with UK intelligence is Smith’s membership of the UK’s [url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170131143042/https://www.gov.uk/govern(...)0114301808.pdf]Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC)[/url], a supervisory body overseeing all UK intelligence agencies. The JIC is part of the Cabinet Office and reports directly to the Prime Minister. The Committee also sets the collection and analysis priorities for all of the agencies it supervises. Claire Smith also served as a member of the UK’s Cabinet Office.
In summary, Mifsud’s appearance with Claire Smith at the LINK campus, in addition to her discussion on intelligence at yet another university where Mifsud was also employed, as well as her long-standing role in UK intelligence vetting and her position as a member of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee, would suggest that the roving scholar is not a Russian agent, but is actually a UK intelligence asset. The possibility that such a high-ranking member of this extremely powerful intelligence supervisory group was photographed standing next to a “Russian” asset unknowingly is patently absurd. This finding knocks the first pillar out from under the edifice of the Trump-Russia allegations. It provides an initial suggestion of the UK’s involvement in procuring the ‘evidence’ that fueled the debacle.
Claire Smith is not the only British official associated with Mifsud. He was a speaker at an event by the Central European Initiative alongside former British diplomat Charles Crawford, whose postings included Moscow, Sarajevo, Belgrade and Warsaw. Crawford is listed as a visiting Professor with the same London Academy of Diplomacy (LAD) where Mifsud served as Director, associated with Stirling University. This adds more weight to the idea that Mifsud is a familiar figure among the upper echelons of the UK intelligence and foreign policy establishment.
The final nail in the coffin of the theory that Mifsud is a Russian spy is this photograph of Mifsud standing next to Boris Johnson, the UK Foreign Secretary, as reported by The Guardian. The photograph, taken in October 2017 – nearly a full year after the US Presidential election and nine months after Mifsud’s name appeared in newspaper headlines worldwide as allegedly involved in Russian meddling in that election – is either highly embarrassing for the hapless Mr Johnson, or it’s not, because Joseph Mifsud is actually a valued and security-vetted asset to the United Kingdom.
Image via The Guardian: Boris Johnson pictured at the dinner with the ‘London professor’, Joseph Mifsud (left) and Prasenjit Kumar Singh.
Another aspect of the RussiaGate claims tied to the UK includes the reported conversation between George Papadopoulos and Alexander Downer, Australia’s High Commissioner to the UK who was based in London. The pair reportedly spoke about the alleged Russian ‘dirt’ on Hillary Clinton while they were drinking at a swanky bar in London. According to Lifezette, Downer is closely tied with The Clinton Foundation via his role in securing $25 million in aid from his country to help the Clinton Foundation fight AIDS.
He is also a member of the advisory board of London-based Hakluyt & Co, an opposition research and intelligence firm set up in 1995 by three former UK intelligence officials and described as “a retirement home for ex-MI6 [British foreign intelligence] officers, but it now also recruits from the worlds of management consultancy and banking”. Whereas opposition research group Fusion GPS has received all the media attention so far, Lifezette states that Hakluyt is “a second, even more powerful and mysterious opposition research and intelligence firm… with significant political and financial links to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign”.
Yet another UK link to a central pillar of the Trump-Russia narrative is British music promoter Robert Goldstone, who was reported to have organized a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Russian nationals in June 2016. In the email chain setting up the Trump Tower meeting, both before and after the meeting, the only real ‘evidence’ of collusion with Russia come from Goldstone’s own emails; none-too-subtle heavy hints about ‘Russian help’ dropped by Goldstone but later – after the emails became public – walked back by him as “hyping the message and… using hot-button language to puff up the information I had been given.”
Some have speculated that Goldstone was also involved with British or US intelligence efforts to concoct the RussiaGate narrative. As soon as his name emerged in the press, Goldstone – like Christopher Steele and Joseph Mifsud – went into ‘hiding’. Multiple press reports claimed he had done so out of fear for his safety, a claim also made about Christopher Steele when his name first became public. Indeed, the UK government issued a DA Notice (a press suppression advisory notice) to the British press to suppress the ex-spy Steele’s name. It is notable that, of all the people swept up into the ever-burgeoning RussiaGate investigation, it is only the UK-linked witnesses – Mifsud, Steele, Goldstone – who have felt the need to go into hiding when their role has been exposed.
The New York Times summed up the contents of Christopher Steele’s dossier: “Mr. Steele produced a series of memos that alleged a broad conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to influence the 2016 election on behalf of Mr. Trump. The memos also contained unsubstantiated accounts of encounters between Mr. Trump and Russian prostitutes, and real estate deals that were intended as bribes.”
Press reports also relate that Steele was ordered by an English court to appear for a videotaped deposition in London as part of an ongoing civil litigation against Buzzfeed for publishing the unverified dossier, for which Steele was paid $168,000 by Glenn Simpson’s company Fusion GPS, who were in turn paid by Mark Elias of law firm Perkins Coie, lawyers to both the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC.
In his thread on the role of UK intelligence interference in the 2016 US Presidential race, Assange also noted how Christopher Steele used another former UK ambassador to Moscow, Sir Andrew Wood, to funnel the dossier to Senator John McCain in a way that moved the handover out of London, to Canada. It’s often said that no one ever really leaves the UK security services when they retire – many ‘former’ MI6 or MI5 officers’ private intelligence businesses are dependent on maintaining good contacts among their ex-colleagues – so it is interesting to note that Sir Andrew Wood says he was “instructed” — by former British spy Christopher Steele — to reach out to the senior Republican, whom Wood called “a good man,” about the unverified document.
Lastly, Robert Hannigan, former head of British intelligence agency GCHQ, is another personality of note in the formation of the RussiaGate narrative and its surprisingly deep links to the UK. The Guardian noted that Hannigan announced he would step down from his leadership position with the agency just three days after the inauguration of President Trump, on 23 January 2017. Jane Mayer in her profile of Christopher Steele published in the New Yorker also noted that Hannigan had flown to Washington D.C. to personally brief the then-CIA Director John Brennan on alleged communications between the Trump campaign and Moscow. What is so curious about this briefing “deemed so sensitive it was handled at director-level” is why Hannigan was talking director-to-director to the CIA and not Mike Rogers at the NSA, GCHQ’s Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partner.
The central supporting pillars of the RussiaGate allegations hinge on figures with close ties to British intelligence and UK nationals. Even establishment media like The Guardian reported that British spies from GCHQ were the first to alert US authorities to so-called Russian interference. Did the entire narrative originate with UK intelligence groups in an effort to create the appearance of Russian collusion with the Trump Presidential campaign, much as the Guccifer 2.0 persona was used in the US to discredit WikiLeaks’ publication of the DNC emails?
If it was not Russia at the heart of a complex operation to topple the Clinton campaign in 2016, then was British Intelligence responsible for creating false narratives and mirage-like ‘evidence’ on which the Trump-Russia scandal could hinge?
Put another way, if UK intelligence is responsible for manufacturing the Trump-Russia allegations, it suggests that the UK’s efforts formed an international arm running concurrently with domestic US ‘Deep State’ efforts to sabotage Trump’s presidential campaign and/or oust him once he had been elected.
Is British intelligence involvement in RussiaGate, as outlined above, the international version of CrowdStrike and former FBI figures manufacturing the Guccifer 2.0 persona specifically to smear WikiLeaks via false allegations of a Russian hack of the DNC? Have we been looking in the wrong place – at the wrong country – to unearth the so-called ‘foreign meddling’ in the 2016 US election all along?
quote:The Awan IT Scandal Put Congressional Data at Risk
Congressional IT workers paid by 44 House Democrats gained unauthorized access to sensitive networks
The emails and personal files of at least 44 House Democrats could have been stolen and transferred overseas by their own IT workers, in a scandal that has been quietly brewing in Congress.
At the center of the controversy are Imran Awan, his brother Abid Awan, and five other family members and associates.
They worked as shared IT employees for 44 House Democrats and had access to the House members’ sensitive data, including emails, calendars, constituents’ data, and personal files, despite having little to no IT experience.
All of the 44 House members had waived the background check on the employees, according to an inspector general’s report. Some of the members serve on committees that handle sensitive and sometimes classified information, such as the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Committee on Homeland Security, and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
The IT workers were paid an estimated $7 million by Congress since 2004, despite the fact that some of them were often not seen at work and in some cases worked remotely from Pakistan.
In September 2016, the House Office of Inspector General warned House leadership and the Committee on House Administration that the IT workers had made unauthorized logins on systems of House members they were not employed by, and in some cases continued to log in to the computers of members who had previously fired them. They also logged in using the personal credentials of congressmen, the office found.
The findings came during the heat of the 2016 presidential race and as WikiLeaks was publishing emails taken from the Democratic National Committee, which was chaired by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), who had employed Imran Awan since 2005.
Despite the findings, access to congressional servers by the IT workers was not restricted until months later, after the election.
An analysis spanning seven months by the IG found that the five IT workers made excessive logons to a server belonging to a group similar to the DNC, the House Democratic Caucus. A total of 5,735 logons were recorded, an average of 27 times per day.
“Excessive logons are an indication that the server is being used for nefarious purposes and elevated the risk that individuals could be reading and/or removing information,” said the IG in the briefing, which was not publicly released.
The IG briefing also reveals that Dropbox had been installed on at least two computers that were uploading files online, in defiance of House policy. The Dropbox accounts contained thousands of files, which, according to the IG, contained information that was likely sensitive.
The House leaders, Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi, did not ban the five IT workers from the network until Feb. 2, 2017, when their access was blocked by the sergeant at arms. The Committee on House Administration put out a statement that acknowledged “suspicious activity” and said a “theft investigation” was ongoing.
Awan Family
Imran Awan, who immigrated from Pakistan to the United States in 1997 under the diversity lottery program, was hired in 2004—the same year he gained citizenship—by Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.), Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), and, soon after, Wasserman Schultz.
Imran quickly began earning among the highest salaries on Capitol Hill. After his salary hit a pay cap under congressional rules that prevent staffers from earning more than congressmen, other Democrats began adding Imran’s relatives to their own payrolls as IT aides, even though they did not have any background in IT.
In 2005, Imran’s brother Abid joined the payroll, and in 2007 Imran’s wife, Hina Alvi Awan, was added.
In 2011, Abid Awan’s wife, Ukrainian-born Natalia Sova, was added to the congressional payroll. Civil court documents show that during this time, Abid and his wife were running a used car dealership named Cars International A, which accepted a loan from Ali al-Attar, an Iraqi political figure of Iranian heritage who is wanted by the IRS and FBI on unrelated tax fraud charges.
In 2012, Abid Awan filed for bankruptcy, discharging $1.1 million in debts, despite his high salary. Documents showed that Abid Awan owed money to a man named Rao Abbas, who reportedly worked at McDonald’s. Shortly after, several House Democrats began paying Abbas as their ostensible IT aide.
In 2014, the youngest Awan brother, Jamal, was added to the payroll at age 20 and was soon earning as much as a congressman.
In total, the IT workers received $7 million in congressional pay and were responsible for the IT of 1 in every 5 House Democrats, or 44 in total.
Imran Awan himself took frequent trips to Pakistan and told associates he worked remotely from that country, The Daily Caller reported.
Background checks on the Awans and their associates were waived despite a number of red flags. Background checks are designed, in part, to reveal weaknesses, such as financial difficulty, that could be exploited by outside actors.
Suspicious Activity on Server
The House Democratic Caucus, whose server was identified as ground zero of the cybersecurity problems, was led by Becerra from 2013 to January 2017, when he became California’s attorney general.
The total logons onto the system, 5,735 during a seven-month period, were considered suspicious, as the computers in offices managed by the shared IT employees were accessed in total less than 60 times during the same time period.
The IG investigation also revealed that the “pattern of login activity suggests steps [were] being taken to conceal their activity.” This included the use of active role servers, which could have been used to grant access on a temporary basis and could have been used to evade network monitoring.
The Democratic Caucus server “could be used to store documents taken from other offices or evidence of other illicit activity,” according to the IG presentation.
The unusual login activity could also indicate computers were “used as a launching point to access other systems for which access may be unauthorized.”
The installation of Dropbox on two Democratic Caucus computers used by the IT workers raises concerns that those computers could have been used to transfer data out of Congress to other groups or nation-states.
According to other congressional IT workers, congressional staff and IT workers are prohibited from using Dropbox due to security concerns.
“While file sharing sites, such as Dropbox, have legitimate business purposes, use of such sites is also a classic method for insiders to exfiltrate data from an organization,” the IG report states.
Sensitive Data and Potential Blackmail
Among the data hosted on the IT systems of House members are emails, calendars, House members’ personal files, and personal information of constituents who have contacted their representative’s office.
Such sensitive data could prove useful to companies and other entities around the world.
“We know that there are countries and companies, entities around the world, who would pay a lot of money to have access to some members’ calendars, to their e-mails, see who they are meeting with, see what they’re saying about those meetings, that could be very valuable information,” said Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), during an informal hearing on the issue in Congress on Oct. 10, 2017.
In certain cases, personal files and data could also be used to blackmail politicians.
Investigations
Following its warning to House leadership on Sept. 20, 2016, the Office of Inspector General provided another briefing on Sept. 30, warning of “continuing unauthorized access” by the IT workers.
The investigation was then taken away from the inspector general in October and handed over to Capitol Police, despite the police having no cybersecurity expertise. In January, Imran Awan was able to travel to Pakistan unimpeded.
A server belonging to the House Democratic Caucus was stolen after the inspector general’s report named it as evidence in a hacking probe, three senior government officials told The Daily Caller. Around the same time, the head of the caucus, Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.), left Congress to become California’s attorney general.
On Feb. 2, 2017, the sergeant at arms officially banned the IT workers from the House network. A day later, most of the 44 House Democrats ended their contracts with the IT workers and fired them.
Wasserman Schultz did not fire Imran, saying the IT worker could service her technology needs without connecting to the House network. She also added Hina Alvi Awan as a second IT aide well after the investigation was underway.
In March 2017, Hina left for Pakistan with her children without notifying their schools. Prosecutors say that FBI agents had been surveilling her, and that they approached her at the airport, where she refused to speak to them. A search revealed Hina was carrying $12,400 in cash and many of her personal belongings, some packed in cardboard boxes. Despite this, she was allowed to board the plane.
When Imran Awan tried to leave the country on July 24, the FBI arrested him at the airport. A month later, on Aug. 17, both Imran and Hina were indicted for bank fraud. In September, Hina reached a deal with prosecutors to return to the United States from Pakistan.
Missing IT Equipment
The initial investigation by the Office of Inspector General also found that the shared IT employees were involved in irregular purchases of technology, such as iPads, iPhones, and other equipment.
Under congressional rules, inventory must be kept of all purchases by House members of equipment that has a purchase price of $500 or more. The IG found that some offices that employed the Awans were signing off on forms that manipulated pricing to make expensive products appear like they cost less than that.
Examples of purchases made this way include an iPad with an original cost of $799, that was billed for $499 together with Apple Care that was billed for $350, despite its actual cost being $88. To accomplish this, the Awans allegedly worked with CDW Government, a major government contractor, which says it is cooperating with prosecutors but has been told it is not a target.
The IG report also found that 75 pieces of equipment with a total purchase price of $118,416 went missing from one of the offices where Abid Awan worked. The office was later revealed to be that of Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.). The missing equipment included laptops, iPads, TVs, video conferencing equipment, and computers. The IG report said Abid Awan, who was responsible for the equipment, made contradicting statements about it.
Family members of the Awans told The Daily Caller that they shipped a significant number of devices, such as iPads and iPhones, to Pakistan.
But one of Imran Awan’s lawyers said it was congressmen who wanted invoices falsified. “This is what experienced members of Congress expect: to expedite things, they adjust the pricing,” Aaron Page told The Daily Caller.
Abid Awan’s attorney, Jim Bacon, told The Washington Post: “In a fluid situation, you do what you’re ordered to do. … It sounds to me like there’s a lot of scapegoating here.”
Wasserman Schultz’s Laptop
Two months after being banned from the House IT network by the sergeant at arms, Imran Awan left a laptop with a username “RepDWS” in a phone booth, along with a letter to prosecutors and copies of his House ID card and driver’s license, according to a Capitol Police report. The bag was found by Capitol Hill police and seized.
During a televised hearing on May 18, 2017, Wasserman Schultz threatened the Capitol Police chief with “consequences” if the laptop was not returned. She hired a lawyer in an attempt to prevent prosecutors from looking at the contents of the laptop.
In August 2017, Wasserman Schultz seemingly changed course, saying: “This was not my laptop. I have never seen that laptop. I don’t know what’s on the laptop.”
Emails of Wasserman Schultz released by WikiLeaks reveal that Imran Awan had the login to her iPad. This means he would have had access to all of her personal information, including her calendar, emails, and notes.
In an October court appearance, Imran Awan’s lawyer, Chris Gowen, said he feels “very strongly” that the “RepDWS” laptop should not be used as evidence, citing attorney-client privilege. Both Imran Awan and Wasserman Schultz have been provided with an image of its hard drive.
In the six months since, prosecutors have postponed the next court date four times, pointing to “voluminous discovery” and discussions about the attorney-client privilege argument. Observers of the justice system say such delays would not be necessary for a bank fraud case and tare a sign that prosecutors are stalling while they build the cybersecurity and fraud cases.
Imran Awan remains out of jail with a GPS tracking monitor, which his lawyer has repeatedly requested be removed. On Dec. 18 prosecutors objected to that request. “Taking into account (1) Awan’s strong connections to Pakistan, (2) the wealth he already transferred there, and (3) his attempt to depart to Pakistan while knowing he was under investigation, the government asserts that Awan is a flight risk,” they wrote.
Deze quoten we even, gaat lachen worden dan !quote:Op zaterdag 14 april 2018 10:17 schreef dellipder het volgende:
• Het onderzoek over de verkiezingen en verkiezingsgerelateerde zaken, verwacht in mei (dit wordt de klapper)
Neen. We weten al lang wat dat 'onderzoek' gaat opleveren.quote:Op zaterdag 14 april 2018 10:28 schreef dellipder het volgende:
De FISC-review wordt natuurlijk ook onthullend.
'Memogate' vertelt je alles wat je wil weten. Er was geen FISA abuse. Dit rapport zal niets anders kunnen concluderen, zie de memo van de Democratische leden van de Intelligence Committee.quote:Op zaterdag 14 april 2018 10:39 schreef dellipder het volgende:
Wie is in hemelsnaam "we"? En nee er is niks bekend. Er wordt nu een verwijzing gemaakt naar "additionele potentieel belangrijke informatie", maar verder is het in het duister tasten wat het OIG-team precies onderzoekt en welke documenten en informatie men heeft verzameld (er is alleen bekend dat het 1.2 miljoen documenten betreft, quo scoop op het eerste aanzicht redelijk indrukwekkend).
Ik heb geen enkel artikel gelezen die verwijzen naar lekken over de bevindingen van Micheal Horowitz en zijn team.
Daarvoor al de krant van de moonies "the washington times"quote:Op vrijdag 13 april 2018 18:19 schreef Vis1980 het volgende:
The epoch times... in China weten ze het vast allemaal.
Dat klopt, daar zet Nunes hard op in. Hij vergeet daarbij even dat die dingen totaal irrelevant zijn voor de FISA application. Nunes probeert een verhaaltje te spinnen door Steele en anderen waar hij mee in contact is gekomen zo zwart mogelijk te maken, om iedereen te doen vergeten dat een FISA applicatie uitgegeven wordt op basis van informatie ongeacht de bron. Het is dan ook niet verwonderlijk dat Nunes' memo alleen maar focust op persoonlijke aanvallen op Steel en de zijnen en niet op de daadwerkelijke inhoud van de FISA applicatie.quote:Op zaterdag 14 april 2018 10:49 schreef dellipder het volgende:
Wat ik heb geleerd van dit schandaal komt uit op een heel andere conclusie. Met name het statement onder ede van Andrew McCabe en de circulair sourcing van het artikel van Micheal Isikoff.
Dat klopt, dat benadruk je graag. Want dan kun je weer het verhaaltje spinnen dat het allemaal gaat ontploffen in het gezicht van die Democraten.quote:Op zaterdag 14 april 2018 11:02 schreef dellipder het volgende:
Devin Nunes heeft niets met het onderzoek van Micheal Horowitz te maken. De OIG doet onderzoek naar aanleiding van beschuldigingen van de diverse comités, maar dit onderzoek was initieel gestart op verzoek van Elijah Cummings en John Conyers over de manier waarop de FBI de e-mail controverse behandelde.
En waarom niet? Net zoals Nunes kun je dat wel leuk impliceren, maar dan heb je nog niets. Het enige dat de memo stelt is dat ze Page een 'idiot' vonden. Dan moet de lezer natuurlijk denken dat het dat minder waarschijnlijk maakt dat Page zou samenwerken met zo iemand. Zoals vrijwel alles in die memo, een non-sequitur.quote:Op zaterdag 14 april 2018 11:12 schreef dellipder het volgende:
Het argument over Carter Page waaraan wordt gerefereerd is het feit dat hij een UCE in de zaak Evgeny Buryakov was en het bevelschrift dat bemachtigd werd door de DoJ en FBI en FISA titel 1, terwijl Page op Fox en andere outlets zijn interviews heeft gehouden.
Deze zaken stroken niet met elkaar.
Reactie op Nunes memo van de Democratische minderheid van het comité.quote:Op zaterdag 14 april 2018 11:20 schreef dellipder het volgende:
Het zou natuurlijk wel handig zijn als je het hebt over "kunnen lezen" dan citaten en/of artikelen overlegt.
Dat doe ik wel, dat 'onderzoek' heeft even weinig waarde als die memo van Nunes.quote:Op zaterdag 14 april 2018 11:35 schreef dellipder het volgende:
Sowieso houdt jouw uitgangspunt geen rekening met de criminal referral van Chuck Grassley en Lindsey Graham, die een eigen onderzoek deden en met hun bevindingen de zogenaamde Nunes-memo onderbouwen.
Behalve dan dat men exact hetzelfde onderwerp onderzoekt, met exact dezelfde toegang tot documenten (via Gowdry). Het feit dat men ondanks dat alleen met zo'n partisan vodje kon komen zegt meer dan genoeg.quote:Op zaterdag 14 april 2018 11:35 schreef dellipder het volgende:
Het belangrijkste is en blijft dat Devin Nunes en zijn onderzoek NIETS heeft te maken met het onderzoek van IG Micheal Horowitz en zijn team
Hoe het eigenlijk gegaan is kun je hier lezen.quote:Op dinsdag 17 april 2018 20:08 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:
Heb zo'n idee dat TS zijn teksten letterlijk overneemt uit een of ander Reddit-topic voor Trump-aanhangers die wanhopig op zoek zijn naar manieren om alle onderzoeken naar de POTUS richting de Democraten/Trumps tegenstanders te draaien.
quote:FEDS DROP BOMBSHELL: Comey & Lynch Colluded with Clinton Campaign to Entrap, Wiretap Trump; Illegal Scheme Involved Entire U.S. Intel Community
Loretta Lynch’s Justice Department and James Comey’s FBI worked together with the Hillary Clinton campaign to entrap Donald Trump and associates — including his eldest son — prior to the 2016 presidential election, according to records and testimony of federal law enforcement insiders.
One high ranking official in the Justice Department called it a sweeping “highly illegal” scheme to ensure Hillary Clinton’s election to the White House.
“This was clearly a scheme using Justice (Department) resources and State (Department) resources to get the Russian lawyer into the United States,” one Justice Department insider said. “Who has the power to do this? Only the people at the very top.”
Lynch. Comey. Andrew McCabe. Preet Bhahara. Sally Yates.
And according to high ranking FBI sources, the Bureau played a definitive role in plotting this sweeping privacy breach. But the FBI had much help from the NSA, CIA, the Office of of the Director of National Intelligence, Treasury financial crimes division under DHS, and the Justice Department, federal law enforcement sources confirmed.
John Brennan. James Clapper. Jeh Johnson.
That places the Barack Obama administration directly into this illegal soup, led by Lynch, Yates, Comey and the FBI’s McCabe and associates.
In fact, Hillary Clinton along with the DNC bankrolled Fusion GPS to set up Donald Trump Jr. in the large scheme to undercut his father’s path to the presidency, sources said.
The Russian lawyer who set up Donald Trump Jr. — Natalia Veselnitskaya — was paid by Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS was paid by Hillary Clinton and the DNC.
Veselnitskaya and Fusion GPS worked together on another caper in 2014, two years before the Trump Jr. operation. In Russia.
Veselnitskaya was barred from entering the United States. Federal law enforcement sources said Lynch and Comey — using Preet Bhahara’s clout in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the southern district of New York — ensured she was granted a special visa for entry, just to set up the Trump inner circle.
A Justice Department official said Clinton likely never expected her campaign’s role and finances to be uncovered and broke a host of federal laws while trying to get elected in 2016, including bringing Veselnitskaya — who was previously barred from entering the United Stated — into Manhattan for the Trump sit down.
Using research firm Fusion GPS as a buffer, Clinton and associates are now linked to financing a scheme to set up the controversial Trump Jr. meeting at Trump Tower before the 2016 presidential election.
Fusion GPS is already on the legal hot seat for commissioning the Dodgy Dossier on Trump, hiring former British spy Christopher Steele to compile the bogus manifesto with the financial backing of the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign, as well as the FBI.
But these new revelations — that Fusion GPS played a key role in setting up President Trump’s elder son to make it look like he was colluding with the Russians to beat Hillary — pushes this scandal into a new and more troubling orbit.
Soon after the meeting, Clinton and her campaign flunkies began slamming Trump for his links to Russia and Vladimir Putin, a chorus that continues to this day.
But it appears now this loud chorus was a manufactured arrangement of lies from a paid choir.
Especially since this scheme was backed by Hillary-Clinton dollars which implicates Clinton and her campaign in helping orchestrate the Russian sit down to entrap members of the Trump family.
Perhaps even more alarming, it is now alleged Barack Obama’s Justice Department and FBI helped sneak the Russian lawyer into the United States for the Trump Tower meeting, the insider said. She was previously banned from entering the country (more on that below).
If you are paying attention, this scandal is shaping up into a serious and disturbing criminal plot.
The Democrats and Clinton herself lambasted Trump Jr. for meeting with Russian lawyer The Democrats alleged Trump Jr. was working a backroom and illegal deal at the behest of his father. The meeting has been part of U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s criminal investigation and Trump Jr. has testified at the Senate level to explain the meeting. Trump Jr., corroborated by evidence since the investigation began, met with the Russian delegation for anything but illegal reasons.
No collusion, as the Democrats have cried out for, has been proven on Trump Jr.’s part or that of his father. Nor does it appear it ever will be.
Fusion GPS has been fighting Congress in federal court to keep its banking records private, battling a federal subpoena to turn over the details of money coming in and flowing out of the Virginia-based research firm.
Following the Trump Tower sit down with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, investigators began digitally wiretapping Paul Manafort, Trump Jr., and Jared Kushner who were also at the meeting.
Federal agents previously disclosed to True Pundit that after the concocted Russian meeting, the British spy agency GCHQ could officially justify wiretapping Trump associates as an intelligence front for NSA because Russian lawyer Veselnitskaya was considered an international security risk and prior to the June sit down was not even allowed entry into the United States or the UK, federal sources said.
Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who spearheaded the Trump Tower meeting with the Trump campaign trio, was previously barred from entering the United Sates due to her alleged connections to the Russian FSB (the modern replacement of the cold-war-era KGB).
Yet mere days before the June meeting, Veselnitskaya was granted a rare visa to enter the United States from Preet Bharara, the then U.S. Attorney for the southern district of New York. Bharara could not be reached for comment and did not respond the a Twitter inquiry on the Russian’s visa by True Pundit.
Now, according to new Intel gems from a White House insider, Fusion GPS may have played a role in paying Veselnitskaya’s way into the United States as well as a possible stipend, travel expenses and accommodations.
Veselnitskaya returned to Russia after the meeting, sources confirmed.
Federal law enforcement sources said Bharara was simply following the orders of Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who lobbied the State Department to issue the disavowed Russian a B1/B2 non-immigrant visa. This permitted Veselnitskaya entry into the United States for the sole purpose of entrapping Trump associates to use as fuel to commission wiretaps, federal sources said.
Veselnitskaya may have been paid as well by the U.S. government, FBI sources said. It was reported previously by True Pundit that Steele, who compiled the Trump dossier was paid at least $100,000 from FBI funds as well. But that came later, after the wiretapping was well underway.
The illegal eavesdropping started long before Steele’s dossier. Federal sources said the wiretaps on Trump insiders began in late 2015, almost a year before the 2016 election. The targets then were Flynn and Page, sources confirmed. When no smoking gun was recovered from those initial taps, U.S. intelligence agencies moved to broaden the scope through their newly-formed alliance.
Intelligence garnered from the British eavesdropping, which again was merely a front for the NSA, was then used in August 2016 to secure a legitimate FISA warrant on Manafort, Trump Jr. and Kushner. That warrant was issued on or about September, 2016, federal sources confirm.
It was the third time the cabal of U.S. intelligence agencies sought a FISA warrant for the Trump associates and this time it was approved.
FBI sources said finally obtaining the FISA warrant was important because it provided the agencies cover for previous illegal wiretapping which they believed would never be discovered.
Here is what we now know, per intelligence gleaned form federal law enforcement sources with insider knowledge of what amounts to a plot by U.S. intelligence agencies to secure back door and illegal wiretaps of President Trump’s associates:
• Six U.S. agencies created a stealth task force, spearhead by CIA’s Brennan, to run domestic surveillance on Trump associates and possibly Trump himself.
• To feign ignorance and to seemingly operate within U.S. laws, the agencies freelanced the wiretapping of Trump associates to the British spy agency GCHQ.
• The decision to insert GCHQ as a back door to eavesdrop was sparked by the denial of two FISA Court warrant applications filed by the FBI to seek wiretaps of Trump associates.
• GCHQ did not work from London or the UK. In fact the spy agency worked from NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, MD with direct NSA supervision and guidance to conduct sweeping surveillance on Trump associates.
• The illegal wiretaps were initiated months before the controversial Trump dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.
• The Justice Department and FBI helped set up the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner with controversial Russian officials to make Trump’s associates appear compromised.
• Following the Trump Tower sit down, GCHQ began digitally wiretapping Manafort, Trump Jr., and Kushner.
• After the concocted meeting by the Deep State, the British spy agency could officially justify wiretapping Trump associates as an intelligence front for NSA because the Russian lawyer at the meeting Veselnitskaya was considered an international security risk and prior to the June sit down was not even allowed entry into the United States or the UK, federal sources said.
• By using GCHQ, the NSA and its intelligence partners had carved out a loophole to wiretap Trump without a warrant. While it is illegal for U.S. agencies to monitor phones and emails of U.S. citizens inside the United States absent a warrant, it is not illegal for British intelligence to do so. Even if the GCHQ was tapping Trump on U.S. soil at Fort Meade.
• The wiretaps, secured through illicit scheming, have been used by U.S. Special Counsel Robert
Mueller’s probe of alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 election, even though the evidence is considered “poisoned fruit.”
Manafort was wiretapped. Cater Page was wiretapped. Trump Jr. was wiretapped. Kushner was wiretapped. Gen. Michael Flynn was wiretapped. And likely there were others.
And none of it was very legal.
In fact, most of it was very illegal, according to federal law enforcement sources who are blowing the whistle on a sweeping scheme to undermine the Executive branch and the electorate’s choice for president of the United States.
Perhaps this all helps explain the nervous Tweets and public tantrums from the compromised former leaders of the U.S. intelligence agencies.
You can't stump the Trump.quote:Op woensdag 18 april 2018 19:51 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:
Zozo, elf handtekeningen. Clinton en Coney zijn nu echt de lul.
Ik heb TS al wat schokkende momenten zien aankondigen, maar tot dusver blijven de Democraten buiten schot en wordt Team Trump verder in het nauw gedreven. Hoe werkt dat precies?
De kring om hem heen wordt anders aardig gestumpt, wat de fuck dat ook betekent.quote:
Ik weet het ook niet.quote:Op woensdag 18 april 2018 20:02 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:
[..]
De kring om hem heen wordt anders aardig gestumpt, wat de fuck dat ook betekent.
Nee, het is een hoop werk om te cherrypicken en alles te spinnen. Je concentreert je bijvoorbeeld enorm op de vermeende belangenverstrengeling van McCabe terwijl daar juist totaal geen sprake van was en ook niets te maken had met zijn ontslag. Het feit dat hij lekte had niets met hemzelf te maken, maar eerder met het tegenspreken van lekken uit het anti-Clinton kamp in NYC. Maar daarover zul je in dit topic niets over lezen omdat dat niet overeenkomt met je verhaal.quote:Op woensdag 18 april 2018 21:51 schreef dellipder het volgende:
Het is een hoop werk om het allemaal bij te houden,
Het artikel ging over belangenverstrengeling. Een valse aantijging. Dat probeer je leuk te spinnen maar waar het artikel over ging was eigenlijk niet relevant; daar is hij ook niet voor ontslagen.quote:Op donderdag 19 april 2018 00:12 schreef dellipder het volgende:
Andrew McCabe heeft bijna een jaar lopen liegen over acties die hij ondernam via de SC en de AD/OPA over het Devin Barrret-artikel dat ging over belangenverstrengeling. Dit is wat er gebeurd is. Dit staat letterlijk in de introductiepagina van het OIG-rapport.
https://thehill.com/polic(...)edia-to-help-himselfquote:"Het tegenspreken van het anti-Clinton kamp" als motief voor het lekken staat niet in het rapport.
Wel dus. En nog een keer:quote:According to the Horowitz report, the disclosures were in part designed “to rebut a narrative that … questioned McCabe’s impartiality in overseeing FBI investigations involving former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and claimed that McCabe had ordered the termination of the [Clinton Foundation] Investigation due to Department of Justice pressure.”
Oftewel, McCabe wilde het 'narratief' dat gespind werd in bepaalde media tegenspreken dat de FBI onder druk van Lynch gestopt was met het onderzoeken van Clinton. Het probleem was alleen het volgende:quote:The disclosure to Barrett, the report states, “effectively confirmed the existence” of the Clinton Foundation investigation — something then-Director James Comey was at that point refusing to do.
According to the report, McCabe said that he did not view the disclosures to Barrett as confirming the existence of the investigation because the purpose was to demonstrate the FBI’s independence and “there really wasn’t any discussion of the case, of the merits of the case, the targets and subjects of the case.”
At the time, Republicans were concerned that the Obama-era Justice Department, led by then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, was putting pressure on the bureau to shut down the Clinton probes. Barrett, according to the report, had sources who were telling him McCabe had given an order to “stand down” on the investigation.
Oftewel, zijn methode was fout. Hij had niet moeten lekken en ook daarover niet moeten liegen.quote:The IG found McCabe’s rationale for the disclosure unpersuasive.
“Had McCabe’s primary concern actually been to reassure the public that the FBI was pursuing the [Clinton Foundation] investigation despite the anonymous claims in the article, the way that the FBI and the Department would usually accomplish that goal is through a public statement reassuring the public that the FBI is investigating the matter,” it reads.
James Comey wordt nu door de OIG Micheal Horowitz onderzocht voor het ongeautoriseerd lekken van overheidsinformatie naar de media. Comey heeft naar verluidt elementen uit een memo zelf geredigeerd in een poging om geheimen te beschermen voordat hij de documenten overhandigde aan zijn vriend Daniel Richman. Dit betekent dat hij als FBI-directeur zelf oordeelde dat de informatie uit de memo geheim was.quote:Nunes, Gowdy, Goodlatte Statement on Comey Memos
Washington, April 19, 2018
Today House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Ca.), House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) issued the following statement:
"We have long argued former Director Comey's self-styled memos should be in the public domain, subject to any classification redactions. These memos are significant for both what is in them and what is not.
Former Director Comey's memos show the President made clear he wanted allegations of collusion, coordination, and conspiracy between his campaign and Russia fully investigated. The memos also made clear the ‘cloud’ President Trump wanted lifted was not the Russian interference in the 2016 election cloud, rather it was the salacious, unsubstantiated allegations related to personal conduct leveled in the dossier.
The memos also show former Director Comey never wrote that he felt obstructed or threatened. While former Director Comey went to great lengths to set dining room scenes, discuss height requirements, describe the multiple times he felt complimented, and myriad other extraneous facts, he never once mentioned the most relevant fact of all, which was whether he felt obstructed in his investigation.
The memos also make certain what has become increasingly clear of late: former Director Comey has at least two different standards in his interactions with others. He chose not to memorialize conversations with President Obama, Attorney General Lynch, Secretary Clinton, Andrew McCabe or others, but he immediately began to memorialize conversations with President Trump. It is significant former Director Comey made no effort to memorialize conversations with former Attorney General Lynch despite concerns apparently significant enough to warrant his unprecedented appropriation of the charging decision away from her and the Department of Justice in July of 2016.
These memos also lay bare the notion that former Director Comey is not motivated by animus. He was willing to work for someone he deemed morally unsuited for office, capable of lying, requiring of personal loyalty, worthy of impeachment, and sharing the traits of a mob boss. Former Director Comey was willing to overlook all of the aforementioned characteristics in order to keep his job. In his eyes, the real crime was his own firing.
The memos show Comey was blind to biases within the FBI and had terrible judgment with respect to his deputy Andrew McCabe. On multiple occasions he, in his own words, defended the character of McCabe after President Trump questioned McCabe.
Finally, former Director Comey leaked at least one of these memos for the stated purpose of spurring the appointment of Special Counsel, yet he took no steps to spur the appointment of Special Counsel when he had significant concerns about the objectivity of the Department of Justice under Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
As we have consistently said, rather than making a criminal case for obstruction or interference with an ongoing investigation, these memos would be Defense Exhibit A should such a charge be made."
quote:Comey’s Memos Indicate Dossier Briefing Of Trump Was A Setup
Newly released memos from former FBI director James Comey indicate that an early 2017 briefing for Trump on the contents of an unverified dossier was part of a setup to enable media to report on the the most salacious details of the dossier.
Newly released memos written by former FBI director James Comey indicate that an early 2017 briefing for then-President-elect Donald Trump about the contents of an infamous dossier was held so it could be leaked to media outlets eager to report on the dossier’s allegations. In multiple memos, Comey specifically mentioned that CNN had the dossier and wanted a “news hook” that would enable the network to report on its most salacious allegations even though they had not been verified.
“I said the Russians allegedly had tapes involving him and prostitutes at the Presidential Suite at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow from about 2013,” Comey wrote of his conversation with Trump in a classified memo that was released in redacted form late Thursday. “I said I wasn’t saying this was true, only that I wanted him to know both that it had been reported and that the reports were in many hands.”
No media organizations had reported the allegations at the time Comey briefed Trump.
“I said media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook,” Comey added in his memo about the briefing with Trump on January 6, 2017.
In another classified memo written on January 28, 2017, Comey wrote that in a separate meeting Trump mentioned the allegation about the alleged tape of prostitutes at a hotel and called it “fake news.”
“I explained again why I had thought it important that he know about it,” Comey wrote. “I also explained that one of the reasons we told him was that the media, CNN in particular, was telling us they were about to run with it.”
Of the many thousands of articles promoting a still-unproven theory of treasonous collusion between President Donald Trump and Russia, few were as significant as CNN’s January 10 story “Intel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him.” Extremely well-placed sources told CNN that the Obama administration’s top intelligence appointees had briefed Obama, Biden, and Trump all about a dossier they took incredibly seriously and considered credible. And it sounded really bad, as the headline indicated.
“Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump,” CNN declared. BuzzFeed published the actual dossier within minutes of CNN’s story going live, showing the world that the dossier was riddled with salacious gossip that lacked even a possibility of corroboration.
Keep in mind that nothing we now know about the dossier had been reported at the time. It wasn’t yet reported that it was used by the FBI to provide a substantial basis to wiretap at least one Trump affiliate despite the fact it was unverified. It wasn’t yet reported that the product was bought and paid for as a Hillary Clinton campaign operation, or that it was secretly funded by the DNC using a law firm as a pass-through to hide its provenance in federal campaign filings. It wasn’t yet reported that its author’s working relationship with the FBI was terminated because he had lied to the agency about how he wouldn’t talk to the media.
After nearly a year of wrangling, the seven memos written by Comey were finally handed over on Thursday to Congress, which oversees the operation and funding of the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ). The memos purport to show Comey’s version of his interactions with the president before Comey was fired last May. According to Daniel Richman, the original recipient of Comey’s leaks who now claims to be his personal attorney, Comey gave him four memos. Four of the seven memos are classified, meaning that at least one of the memos he leaked was classified. By his own account, Comey orchestrated these leaks to the media in order to launch an aggressive special counsel to avenge his firing by Trump in May 2017. The memos given to Congress on Thursday were quickly leaked to the media.
The first memo was sent on January 7, 2017, to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, General Counsel James Baker, and James Rybicki, Comey’s chief of staff. McCabe has since been fired from the FBI and referred to DOJ for criminal prosecution for repeatedly lying under oath about leaking. Baker was reassigned. And Rybicki was replaced in January of 2018.
There are two things in the memo that are worth highlighting as relate to that blockbuster CNN story from January 10, 2017.
First, Comey claims that briefing the president-elect was the brainchild of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
“I said there was something that Clapper wanted me to speak to the [president-elect] about alone or in a very small group,” Comey wrote. More on that in a bit.
“I then executed the session exactly as I had planned,” Comey noted before going into details of what he claimed he told the president-elect. He wrote that he told him about the now-infamous prostitute pee-pee videotape claims contained in the dossier. Then he wrote:
“I said I wasn’t saying this was true, only that I wanted him to know both that it had been reported and that the reports were in many hands. I said media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give them the excuses to write that the FBI has the material or [REDACTED] and that we were keeping it very close-hold. He said he couldn’t believe they hadn’t gone with it. I said it was inflammatory stuff that they would get killed for reporting straight up from the source reports.
Such a close-hold that someone at a very high level in the Obama administration gave the information to CNN almost immediately. CNN broke the news of the dossier and Comey’s briefing of the president just four days later.
With Comey claiming that Clapper wanted him to brief POTUS, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence final report on Russia has something of interest. The report, which was downplayed and panned by CNN, included a finding of interest related to discussions of the dossier with the media:
Finding #44: Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, now a CNN national security analyst, provided inconsistent testimony to the Committee about his contacts with the media, including CNN.”
So Comey, at Clapper’s expressed behest, told Trump that CNN was “looking for a news hook” to publish dossier allegations. He said this in the briefing of Trump that almost immediately leaked to CNN, which provided them the very news hook they sought and needed.
This briefing, and the leaking of it, legitimized the dossier, which touched off the Russia hysteria. That hysteria led to a full-fledged media freakout. During the freakout, Comey deliberately refused to say in public what he acknowledged repeatedly in private — that the President of the United States was not under investigation. He even noted in his memos that he told the president at least three times that he was not under investigation. Comey’s refusal to admit publicly what he kept telling people privately led to his firing.
That led to Comey leaking multiple memos in order to get a special counsel appointed out of revenge. That special counsel has utterly distracted multiple agencies and embroiled all three branches of government at the highest levels. All over a document that was secretly funded by Hillary Clinton and the DNC, contracted by a Democrat research firm with ties to the Kremlin, and authored by a shady foreign spy whose relationship with the FBI was terminated because he lied to them.
quote:Is 'can't prove untrue' new standard in Trump probe?
When a political figure is accused of wrongdoing, a conversation begins among journalists, commentators, and public officials. Are the charges true? Can the accusers prove it?
That's the way it normally works. But now, in the case of the Trump dossier – the allegations compiled by a former British spy hired by the Clinton campaign to gather dirt on presidential candidate Donald Trump – the generally accepted standard of justice has been turned on its head. Now, the question is: Can the accused prove the charges false? Increasingly, the president's critics argue that the dossier is legitimate because it has not been proven untrue.
It's an argument heard at the highest levels of government, academics, and media.
"Not a single revelation in the Steele dossier has been refuted," noted Sen. Dianne Feinstein, top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, in February.
In late December, Laurence Tribe, the Harvard law professor, tweeted a message about the allegations against Trump to his followers: "Retweet if, like me, you're aware of nothing in the [Trump] dossier that has been shown to be false."
"The dossier has not been proven false," said MSNBC anchor and former George W. Bush aide Nicolle Wallace in February.
More recently, Chuck Todd, moderator of NBC's "Meet the Press," asked former CIA Director John Brennan, "So far with this dossier, nothing yet has been proven untrue. How significant is that?"
"As Jim Comey has said, I think very famously, these were salacious and unverified allegations," Brennan responded. "Just because they were unverified does not mean they were not true."
That's where the Trump dossier story stands today. No one has proved that the most serious allegations are true. But since no one has proved them false, either, some in the political class act as if they were true.
What is still unclear is how much effort the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies put into trying to prove the dossier's allegations. Fired FBI Director James Comey noted in his January 28, 2017 memo that Trump asked that the FBI investigate the dossier's so-called "golden showers" allegation – the charge that Trump watched as prostitutes performed a kinky sex show in a Moscow hotel room in 2013. Comey, by his own account, demurred.
"I replied that it was up to him," Comey wrote, "but I wouldn't want to create a narrative that we were investigating him, because we are not and I worried such a thing would be misconstrued. I also said that it is very difficult to disprove a lie."
In an interview with ABC News, Comey repeated the story and added, "It's very difficult to prove something didn't happen."
For his part, Comey – who, as John Brennan noted, once called the dossier "salacious and unverified" – still won't vouch for its truthfulness. Instead, Comey makes a much softer claim, saying that the "core" of the dossier – the big-picture conclusion that Russia tried to interfere with the 2016 presidential election – is "consistent with the other information we'd gathered during the intelligence investigation."
By the way, when it comes to the most spectacular allegation in the dossier – the sex story – even the dossier's author doesn't have much faith in its veracity.
In the new book Russian Roulette, authors Michael Isikoff and David Corn note that Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the dossier, once said there was perhaps a 50-50 chance of the Moscow sex episode being true. Glenn Simpson, head of the opposition research company Fusion GPS, which commissioned the dossier, reportedly considered the Russian source for the story a "big talker" who might have made it up to impress Steele.
But now, some leading lights in the political conversation defend the dossier by arguing that it has not been proven untrue – as if that, instead of proof of truth, were the standard to apply to such consequential allegations.
"Setting aside the absurd and patently unfair 'guilty until proven innocent' standard that thinking requires, it also ignores the fact that the FBI has never tried to disprove it," Republican Rep. John Ratcliffe, a former federal prosecutor who now serves on the House Judiciary Committee, said in a recent text exchange. "When the president asked the FBI to do exactly that, one of Jim Comey's secret memos documents the response: [Comey] told him it is 'very difficult to disprove a lie.'"
Yes, it is. And that's something to keep in mind whenever someone suggests the dossier is worthwhile because it hasn't been proven false.
quote:Unpacking the Other Clinton-Linked Russia Dossier
A copy of the little-publicized second dossier in the Trump-Russia affair, acquired by RealClearInvestigations, raises new questions about the origins of the Trump investigation, particularly about the role of Clinton partisans and the extent to which the two dossiers may have been coordinated or complementary operations.
The second dossier -- two reports compiled by Cody Shearer, an ex-journalist and longtime Clinton operative -- echoes many of the lurid and still unsubstantiated claims made in the Steele dossier, and is receiving new scrutiny. On Sunday, Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a TV interview that his panel is shifting its investigative focus concerning the origins of the Russia investigation from the FBI to the State Department. This probe will include the Shearer dossier.
In late September 2016, Sidney Blumenthal, a close Clinton confidant and colleague of Shearer’s, passed Shearer’s dossier on to State Department official Jonathan M. Winer, a longtime aide to John Kerry on Capitol Hill and at Foggy Bottom.
According to Winer’s account in a Feb. 8, 2018 Washington Post op-ed, he shared the contents of the Shearer dossier with the author of the first dossier, ex-British spy Christopher Steele, who submitted part of it to the FBI to further substantiate his own investigation into the Trump campaign. Steele was a subcontractor working for the Washington, D.C.-based communications firm Fusion GPS, which was hired by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee to compile opposition research on her Republican opponent.
Steele’s 35-page dossier was used as evidence in October 2016 to secure from a secret court a surveillance warrant on volunteer Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Among issues the intelligence panel will likely want clarified is whether the FBI also used Shearer’s material as evidence in obtaining the FISA warrant.
Shearer did not respond to phone calls and emails seeking comment. Attempts to reach Winer by email were unsuccessful. And efforts to reach Blumenthal through his publisher were unsuccessful.
The copy of the Shearer memo provided to RealClearInvestigations is made up of two four-page reports, one titled “Donald Trump—Background Notes—The Compromised Candidate,” the other “FSB Interview” – the initials standing for the Russian Federal Security Service.
The only Trump campaign figures named are Donald Trump himself and his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, misspelled as “Manniford.” Shearer may be hinting at a third person when he quotes, without substantiation, a Turkish businessman saying a Russian source knows of a “cut out” or intermediary through whom the prospective “president of the U.S.” would communicate “into President Putin’s office." The version of the two memos RCI has seen is undated.
For the first report, Shearer claims he interviewed journalists and various media personalities, as well as the unnamed Turkish businessman with “excellent contacts within the FSB.” The businessman appears to be relaying information from what Shearer describes as the Turk’s “FSB guy.” The second report, “FSB Interview,” is an account of an interview with a source identified as an FSB agent. It’s not clear if the Turkish businessman’s FSB source in the first report is the same person Shearer interviews in the second. Neither is named.
The first Shearer report, “Donald Trump—Background Notes,” begins much like the Steele dossier. It alleges that Trump has been compromised by Russia and has engaged in illegal financial transactions with Russian figures: “At a time in the early l990’s when he was under severe financial stress Donald Trump visited Moscow in search of investors,” writes Shearer.
“Since the Trump name wasn’t worth much at that stage,” Shearer continues, “Trump’s only luck was in establishing relationships with oligarchs who needed someone to help them launder their money; which is what Trump did in return for some capital.” Shearer offers no source for these allegations, or proof of these transactions.
Like the Steele dossier, Shearer’s memo passes along unsubstantiated gossip about Trump’s sex life: According to Shearer’s FSB source, it was “From observing Trump for years in previous visits to Moscow, the FSB knew he had a weakness for women.”
Shearer’s FSB source told him “that he knew that Trump eventually learned that he had been flipped in a honeypot operation in Moscow.” Shearer’s memo echoes the most notorious, and salacious, item in the Steele dossier. Shearer’s FSB source claims that Trump was “filmed twice in Moscow in November 2013, during the Miss Universe pageant. Once in the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel.” The FSB source “believes a copy of the sex videos is in Bulgaria, Israel and FSB political unit vaults in Moscow."
Shearer claims that his Turkish businessman source is able to confirm in 15 minutes with a phone call to his “FSB guy” that Trump was “compromised.” Shearer writes in the first report that he has “asked the FSB source for documentation, photos and other related materials and talking sources who will verify this story.” Evidently, none were made available to Shearer.
As in the Steele dossier, Shearer’s ostensible Russian sources explain that the explicit purpose of the FSB operation is to elect Trump. The Turk’s FSB source says it was “launched with a wild-eyed fantasy of electing someone president of the U.S. who communicated through a cut out into President Putin’s office.”
Again as in the Steele dossier, there are allegations of Russia stealing Clinton emails and tampering with voting machines. According to the Turkish businessman’s contact: “The Trump operation also involved hacking his opponents and trying to alter votes on election day.”
The Shearer memos also describe a split in Russia’s ruling circles, a la the Steele dossier. One side is eager to help Trump, another thinks it’s unwise to get in the middle of American politics. Shearer’s FSB source presents himself as a member of the moderate faction. He claims he is spilling the beans to Shearer in order to help restore U.S.-Russia relations. Shearer’s source says: “By helping expose and embarrass Putin in regards to what he has done with Trump—which has spiraled out of control—might eventually improve relations between the U.S. and Russia; because what he has done is dangerous.”
Was the Shearer Dossier Used for the FISA Warrant?
Rep. Nunes is not the first Republican to question what role the Shearer memo may have played in the FBI’s investigation into the Trump team and its possible role in securing the warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Chairman Charles Grassley and Sen. Lindsey Graham of the Senate Judiciary Committee alluded to the Shearer document in a memorandum attached to a Jan. 4, 2018 letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein referring Steele to the Department of Justice for a criminal inquiry. In their redacted classified memorandum, the two Republican senators hint at the possibility that the FBI’s probe into the Trump team’s possible ties to Russia is the result of an operation managed by the Clinton inner circle.
“One memorandum by Mr. Steele that was not published by BuzzFeed is dated October 19, 2016,” write Grassley and Graham. “Mr. Steele’s memorandum states that his company ‘received this report from [REDACTED] US State Department,’ that the report was second in a series, and that the report was information that came from a foreign sub-source who ‘is in touch with [REDACTED], a contact of [REDACTED], a friend of the Clintons, who passed it to [REDACTED].’ It is troubling enough that the Clinton campaign funded Mr. Steele’s work, but that these Clinton associates were contemporaneously feeding Mr. Steele’s allegations raises additional concerns about his credibility.”
Writing in his Feb. 8 Washington Post op-ed about getting the Shearer memo from Sidney Blumenthal in September 2016, Obama State Department official Winer explained that soon after the Blumenthal meeting, he met with Christopher Steele. Winer had known Steele, a longtime associate who often used Winer as his point of contact at the State Department. Steele had shown Winer the memos he’d written on Trump’s possible ties to Russia.
Winer asserted that in reading Shearer’s memo, he was “struck … how some of the material echoed Steele’s but appeared to involve different sources.” He shared Shearer’s memo with Steele, who described it as “potentially ‘collateral’ information,” presumably to buttress his own findings. The FBI, as Winer explained, had asked Steele to provide any supporting information. From the Grassley-Graham letter, it appears that Steele gave the FBI the Shearer report titled “FSB Interview,” “the second in a series.” He either withheld the first, "The Compromisaed Candidate" report, or Winer never gave it to him.
During the same period, late summer and early fall, the FBI was seeking a FISA warrant on Carter Page. A Department of Justice spokesperson declined comment when RCI emailed to ask if the Shearer memo was used as part of the Steele dossier to secure the warrant on Page’s communications that was granted Oct. 21, 2016.
When news of the Shearer memo broke more than a year later, the Guardian reported in a Jan. 30, 2018 article that the FBI “is still assessing details in the ‘Shearer memo’ and is pursuing intriguing leads.” The memo, the Guardian explained, “was initially viewed with skepticism, not least because he had shared it with select media organizations before the election.”
Even as his FSB memo was provided to the FBI before the election, it appears that Shearer was shopping his information to press outfits while also comparing rumors with leading journalists. Shearer’s first report, “The Compromised Candidate,” is a record of various journalists and media personalities explaining how they’ve heard the same rumors, and even tried, unsuccessfully, to report the story that Shearer is pushing in the second report.
For instance, according to the first report, Brian Ross from ABC News told Shearer that he, too, heard Trump was “compromised sexually in Moscow right before the beauty contest he was hosting.”
Ross was suspended by ABC News after incorrectly reporting that Trump had directed campaign adviser, and later National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn to make contact with Russian officials before the 2016 election. Shearer writes in his memo that Ross told him that if there were a “talking head source” who could corroborate Shearer’s claims regarding Trump’s sexual activities in Russia, “[Ross] would fly to Moscow to tape and air for broadcast” an interview with the source. After I emailed Ross for comment, an ABC spokesperson responded to say that ABC does not “comment on our reporting process.”
In the same report, Shearer quotes a conversation with former CIA officer Robert Baer, again hinting at another intermediary between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Shearer writes that Baer told him “the Russians had established an encrypted communication system with a cut out between the Trump campaign and Putin.”
Baer told RCI that “he’d heard that story from acquaintances at the New York Times who were trying to run the story down.”
Baer said he remembered speaking with Shearer about Trump and Russia in “March or April” of 2016. If Baer’s memory is correct then Shearer was investigating the Trump story at around the same time the Clinton campaign and the DNC hired Fusion GPS to compile opposition research on the Trump campaign.
Shearer writes in his first report that he was told by Alan Cullison of the Wall Street Journal that Fusion GPS principals, and former Journal reporters, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch (Shearer misspells both names in the memo) had been hired by the DNC to “rack [sic] down Trump compromised story.”
In a Feb. 9, 2018 Wall Street Journal story about the Shearer memo and the appearance of a Journal employee, Cullison, in one of Shearer’s two reports, a spokesman for Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Journal, disputed Shearer’s claim.
“Among the many inaccuracies in Mr. Shearer’s account of his conversations with our reporter in summer 2016 is his claim that the Journal knew who was funding Fusion GPS’s efforts,” Steve Severinghaus told the Journal . “The WSJ reporter had no such knowledge until it became public.”
The inaccuracies in Shearer’s account fuel suspicions that he misidentified the source of the information on who was funding the Steele dossier. What matters is that Shearer knew who was paying for Fusion GPS’s work on Trump. More important, if Steele received both of Shearer’s reports in September 2016, that would contradict the information in the FBI’s warrant application that said Steele didn’t know who was paying for his work. The source of the funding was right there in Shearer's first memo. The FBI's warrant application, however, says Simpson “never advised Source No. 1 [Mr. Steele] as to the motivation behind the research into candidate’s #1 [Mr. Trump’s] ties to Russia.” If Steele had both of Shearer’s reports, he knew he was being paid by the DNC.
The members of the press corps whom Simpson and Steele were briefing during that period almost certainly knew who was paying. Shearer’s notes, according to the Feb. 9, 2018 Journal article, “circulated in political and journalistic circles in Washington in late 2016.” Whoever saw both of Shearer’s reports would have known that the DNC was paying for the Fusion GPS campaign—long before the information became public a year later, in October 2017.
Cullison, who declined to comment for this story, was the Wall Street Journal’s Moscow correspondent for 20 years. The memo has him telling Shearer that since May 2016 he, too, had been looking into rumors of Trump’s activities in Moscow, including allegations of his sexual activities.
“Our reporter was unable to corroborate these allegations,” WSJ spokesperson Severinghaus said in the February Journal article, “and determined the information provided by Mr. Shearer did not meet our high standards for fair and accurate reporting.”
To this date, no journalist has been able to confirm on its own any of the incendiary allegations of Trump-Russia collusion story since the rumors surfaced during the 2016 presidential campaign. The first accounts of the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia were published by Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News (Sept. 23, 2016) and David Corn of Mother Jones (Oct. 31). Both were sourced to Steele’s research.
Shearer’s first report shows that the story was circulating through the press corps for months, and no one was able to confirm it.
Shearer tried to drum up interest in the collusion narrative but no one in the press was biting. No one was willing to sink time and prestige on material sourced to unnamed Russian intelligence officials that was provided by a Clinton political operative whose partner, Sidney Blumenthal, had an even more controversial reputation.
But it would be different if it came from someone else, an intelligence operative whose American handlers worked up a suitable legend of his exploits in a glamorous, allied clandestine service, and his deep knowledge of all things Russian. So what did it matter if Steele had become an executive in a corporate intelligence firm whose official cover had been blown a decade before and who hadn’t been to Russia in years? The byline of a former MI6 agent could credential a compendium of unsubstantiated rumors when the names of Clinton confederates Cody Shearer and Sidney Blumenthal could not.
Shearer, Blumenthal and Their Clinton Pedigrees
Cody Shearer was raised in a media family, which was also a Clinton family. His father was Lloyd Shearer, who wrote a Hollywood gossip column for Parade magazine under the pseudonym Walter Scott. The Shearers’ Brentwood, Calif., home, says a source who knows the Shearer family, “was a real West Coast political center. You’d find actors and TV people rubbing elbows with politicians, like Bill Clinton. The Shearer kids all hitched their wagons to the Clintons. And once he became president they all came with him to Washington.”
The eldest Shearer sibling, Derek, became Clinton’s ambassador to Finland. Cody’s late twin sister, Brooke, served as an aide to Hillary Clinton during the 1992 campaign and later worked in the Clinton White House. Brooke also worked as a private investigator for Terry Lenzner, who helped dig up dirt on one of Bill Clinton’s accusers, Paula Corbin Jones.
Brooke Shearer was married to Clinton’s former Oxford classmate Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration. Talbott is now president of Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. Cody Shearer apparently traded on his brother-in-law’s position.
In the mid-’90s, during the middle of the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, Shearer represented himself to associates of Bosnian-Serb President Radovan Karadzic as an agent of the State Department. Shearer told his Serbian contacts that he was in contact with Talbott, as well as President Clinton. The Serbs gave Shearer at least $25,000 in exchange for the help he promised in ameliorating impending war crimes charges against Karadzic. It’s not clear whether his promised assistance helped, since Karadzic was found guilty of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in 2016 at the International Criminal Tribunal. Talbott reportedly knew of his brother-in-law’s efforts but was unsuccessful in stopping him.
“Cody was the black sheep of the family,” says the Shearer family acquaintance. “No one really knew what he was going to do for a living, and lots of people are still unsure what he does. When he went to Washington, he got close to Sidney Blumenthal.”
lumenthal is the former Washington Post and New Yorker writer who earned enmity from some of his colleagues for using his pen and position to defend the Clintons and attack their rivals. In 1997, he joined the White House as a senior adviser. When he took that job, the joke within the White House press corps was that Blumenthal should put in for “back pay.”
It surprised few veterans of the White House press corps that Blumenthal and Fusion GPS would surface together in the Trump-Russia story.
Simpson has previously described what he does as “journalism-for-hire,” and his organization provides journalists with enough leads for stories and sources that many print and broadcast outlets in Washington and New York consider him a valued asset. And few journalists have been willing to bite the hand that feeds them. As one Fusion GPS target, William Browder, told me last year, “I discovered that Glenn Simpson was so deeply embedded as a source for different stories, no one wanted to write a story about him.”
But the “Steele dossier” is an example of another kind of service that Fusion GPS offers clients—partisan attacks disguised as journalism, such as the smear campaign in defense of Venezuelan oligarchs whose corruption was revealed by journalists Alek Boyd and Thor Halvorssen.
Most famously, Fusion GPS went after Browder on behalf of Kremlin-affiliated business interests that sought to undo the U.S. sanctions legislation on Putin allies that Browder spearheaded. If it seems strange that many of the media figures attacking Trump for his ostensibly pro-Putin positions have signed up to attack an anti-Putin activist like Browder, one explanation is that they are longtime associates of Glenn Simpson and the recipients of Fusion GPS tips and leaks.
As for Blumenthal, his fierce loyalty to the Clintons has led him to cross lines in the past, most notoriously by leading the press campaign to discredit Monica Lewinsky.
During the 2008 Democratic primaries, Blumenthal directed journalists to investigate Barack Obama’s birth certificate, suggesting that Hillary Clinton’s opponent was secretly Kenyan—a theme later picked up by Donald Trump.
Participating in the birther narrative was enough to keep Blumenthal out of Hillary Clinton’s State Department. When the newly appointed secretary of state wanted to bring him on board, Obama White House officials nixed it.
But that wasn’t enough to keep Blumenthal at bay. He was drawing a check from the Clinton Foundation when he started to email Secretary of State Clinton about the situation in Libya after the United States helped topple Moammar Gaddafi in October 2011. Blumenthal’s private intelligence unit included former CIA operative Tyler Drumheller, now deceased, and Cody Shearer.
According to a New York Times report, “much of the Libya intelligence that Mr. Blumenthal passed on to Mrs. Clinton appears to have come from a group of business associates he was advising as they sought to win contracts from the Libyan transitional government.”
One of the Clinton aides responsible for keeping Blumenthal in check was Jake Sullivan, an adviser to her 2008 campaign who became her deputy chief of staff at the State Department and later the department’s director of policy planning. Blumenthal sent 25 Libya memos to Clinton, which she frequently forwarded to Sullivan, who then distributed them to colleagues. “In many cases,” the Times reported, “Mr. Sullivan would paste the text from the memos into an email and tell the other State Department officials that they had come from an anonymous ‘contact’ of Mrs. Clinton.”
So, why did some State Department officials take Blumenthal seriously when he came forward with Shearer’s memo on Trump and Russia? Why did Jonathan Winer pass it on to Steele?
According to his own account, Winer had known Steele since 2009. They were both working on Russia-related issues in the private sector. At the outset of Russia’s incursion into Ukraine and later annexation of Crimea, Steele shared reports he’d written for an undisclosed private client with Winer. He forwarded them to other State Department officials, like Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland. Winer says that over the course of the two-year crisis, he shared more than 100 of Steele’s reports on Ukraine and Crimea with his colleagues.
According to Winer, Steele came forward with the Trump memos in mid-September 2016. Winer took notes and passed them on to Nuland. Both State Department officials agreed that Secretary of State John Kerry needed to know what Steele had found. Although her chronology differed from Winer's, Nuland recalled on CBS’s “Face the Nation” in February that after seeing the material she concluded that “this needs to go the FBI.”
Presumably, the House Intelligence Committee will ask Nuland and Winer to clarify the timeline. Perhaps that will illuminate the State Department’s role and whether it helped initiate the probe into the Trump campaign by passing Steele’s notes to the FBI. The committee may also be curious to know why former senior government officials played any role in Steele’s investigation at all.
The standard explanation for Winer and Nuland’s actions is that they trusted Steele. They knew his work on Ukraine. He was a former intelligence officer from one of America’s oldest allies, so his information on Trump had to be taken seriously. The stakes were enormous—a candidate for the highest office in the land might be compromised by a foreign, often adversarial, government.
But there’s another way to see it.
The U.S. and U.K. are part of an intelligence-sharing arrangement known as the “Five Eyes,” which includes the three other major English-speaking world powers: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The arrangement is premised on trust. All five members trust each other not only to share information vital to their national security but also to not collect intelligence against each other by spying on officials, or businessmen and each other’s citizens. When former British spy Christopher Steele brought his memos to Winer, one senior U.S. intelligence official explained to RCI, “Steele was violating the fundamental premise of the Five Eyes relationship.”
Further, even if Winer had no idea who was funding Steele’s work or that it was opposition research, Steele was a foreign national spying on a fundamental American political institution, a presidential campaign. If he had possession of the Shearer memo disclosing that the DNC had hired Simpson and Fritsch, Winer knew at the very least that there was a politically funded campaign to find dirt on the Republican candidate—a campaign that certainly resembled Steele’s research. This appears not to have bothered Winer, who turned Shearer’s memos over to Steele.
As with Winer, RCI tried unsuccessfully for comment from Sullivan, a well-respected foreign policy hand who was in line to become Hillary Clinton’s White House national security adviser. According to Clinton campaign Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri, she and Sullivan took the lead in briefing the press on the Trump-Russia collusion story, starting in July 2016 at the Democratic National Convention. After a Slate story asserted that a Trump organization computer server was communicating with a Russian bank, Sullivan issued a statement from the campaign under his own name, claiming, “This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow. … This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia.”
What RCI wanted to ask Sullivan was whether he would have approached the Trump-Russia collusion story differently had he known of Shearer and Blumenthal’s involvement.
As for whether the Clinton campaign was aware of the Steele dossier, there is no doubt. A long profile of Steele in the New Yorker magazine shows that Marc Elias, the lawyer for the firm that hired Fusion GPS on behalf of the campaign, “summarized some of the information to top campaign officials, including the campaign manager Robby Mook.”
If Sullivan was briefed on Steele’s investigation, it surely would’ve sounded more serious than a Cody Shearer project. Perhaps that was the point. In fact, that was Glenn Simpson’s innovation. He ran the same sort of shop Sidney Blumenthal did, and the same sort of campaign. They were both working on the collusion story. The difference is that Christopher Steele’s byline gave it the appearance of credibility—even if it included Cody Shearer’s work.
As it turned out, it didn’t really matter. So what if Blumenthal and Fusion GPS were both parts of a multi-channel Clintonworld operation to manufacture evidence against Trump to feed through various channels to the FBI? It didn’t matter so long as Hillary got elected.
Nee hoor, dat doen anderen. Hij vertaalt gewoon de talking points.quote:Op zaterdag 28 april 2018 19:54 schreef Lavenderr het volgende:
Dankjewel Dellipder. Wat een werk steek jij hier in
Dat is toch mooi? Scheelt ons weer vertaalwerk.quote:Op zaterdag 28 april 2018 20:00 schreef Fir3fly het volgende:
[..]
Nee hoor, dat doen anderen. Hij vertaalt gewoon de talking points.
Het probleem is alleen dat hij dat selectief doetquote:Op zaterdag 28 april 2018 20:03 schreef Lavenderr het volgende:
[..]
Dat is toch mooi? Scheelt ons weer vertaalwerk.
Zit wat in, maar daar heeft iedereen weleens een handje van. Het is maar net wat er in de kraam te pas komt.quote:Op zaterdag 28 april 2018 20:11 schreef ATuin-hek het volgende:
[..]
Het probleem is alleen dat hij dat selectief doet
quote:RUSSIA REPORT: Three Major Take-Aways
Republican members clear Trump; Object to 'excessive and unjustified redactions'
The House Intelligence Committee released its long-anticipated and highly redacted Russian intelligence report Friday clearing President Donald Trump’s campaign from “colluding” with Russians in the 2016 presidential election and chiding the intelligence community for “significant intelligence tradecraft failings” as the committee found no evidence to date that collusion had occurred.
The 248-page report, of which some pages were completely redacted after review by FBI and DOJ officials, have raised the ire of committee Republicans and will lead to a review of the report once again in an effort to un-redact elements of the report that the Committee says does not relate to the classified material. Numerous Congressional committees have complained openly that the DOJ and FBI continue to “stonewall” their investigations and have slow rolled documents needed for adequate oversight of the highly controversial investigations into Trump and the Bureau’s handling of former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server for government business.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-CA, said in a press release that due to public interest and the importance of the report the Committee chose to make the report public. Nunes has had to threaten Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray with contempt of Congress before documents have been provided. It’s a battle that he continues to fight but one that has slowed down the progress of the Committee’s investigations, say congressional sources, familiar with the investigations.
Nunes stated in the press release that “we object to the excessive and unjustified number of redactions, many of which do not relate to classified information. The Committee will convey our objections to the appropriate agencies and looks forward to publishing a less redacted version in the near future.”
Three Major Takeaways from the Russia Report’s Findings:
1. Flynn Didn’t Lie
Former National Security Advisor Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the embattled three-star general who was fired by the White House for allegedly misleading Vice President Mike Pence about his conversation with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, did not lie to the FBI special agents who interviewed him at the White House in January 2017.
This is important because Flynn eventually plead guilty to one count of making false statements about his December 2016 phone conversation with Kislyak to DOJ Special Counsel Robert Mueller, “even though the Federal Bureau of Investigation agents did not detect any deception during Flynn’s interview.”
It is odd that Flynn would plead guilty to one count of lying when the agents didn’t believe that he was purposefully misleading them but close friends and associates of Flynn told this reporter that he has been forced to sell his home in northern Virginia in an effort to keep up with mounting legal fees and that he couldn’t afford to keep fighting the Special Counsel.
Even more bizarre is that one of the two agents who conducted the interview was FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok, who is now under investigation himself for sending vehemently anti-Trump text messages to his paramour FBI Attorney Lisa Page, as previously reported. Strzok, who was the former Deputy Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division, was removed from the Special Counsel’s investigation after the DOJ Inspector General uncovered the anti-Trump texts, which also appeared to contain information on the investigations. Strzok was moved to the Human Resources division of the FBI. Both Page and Strzok continue to work with the FBI but are believed to be cooperating with the DOJ investigations, according to sources.
Highly classified Intelligence Leaks
Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak was leaked to columnist David Ignatius with the Washington Post on January, 12. The transcripts of the phone conversation is considered highly classified leak and a violation of federal law. It is currently under investigation and was believed by Republicans to have come from a senior level Obama administration official and considered highly classified.
Flynn was asked by a Presidential Transition Team member to contact foreign governments
Moreover, according to the report, the “on or about December 22, 2016, ‘a very senior member of the Presidential Transition Team’ (PTI) directed General Flynn to contact representatives of foreign governments. This request concerned a resolution about Israeli settlements submitted by Egypt to the U.N. Security Council around December 21, 2016. Later, on December 22, General Flynn contacted Ambassador Kislyak and ‘requested that Russia vote against or delay the resolution.’ The next day, Ambassador Kislyak informed General Flynn that Russia would not comply On December 29, 2016, President Obama ‘authorized a number of actions’ – including new sanctions-‘in response to the Russian government’s aggressive harassment of U.S. officials and cyber operations aimed at the U.S. election in 2016.’
After the sanction was placed on Russia at the end of the Obama administration the report found that Gen. Flynn had discussed with a senior transition team member “what, if anything, to communicate to the Russian Ambassador about the U.S. sanctions.”
Comey walks back on Flynn
Even former FBI Director James Comey, who was fired by President Trump last year, had apparently told Congress that the agents did not believe Flynn had lied. Although, in recent interviews to promote his book A Higher Loyalty, Comey is saying now that he has no recollection of what the agents may or may not have thought. His statements contradict the findings of the Russia report and previous stories that suggest he knew the agents did not believe Flynn lied to them.
Flynn redactions
The Russia report, however, is highly redacted and it appears by reading the report that there was more information on Flynn that has yet to be made public. If it is eventually redacted we may have more answers than questions on what Flynn did and possibly what Comey knew.
2. Clapper Leaked the Dossier To Numerous Reporters
In early March, I reported that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper may have leaked information to CNN regarding the classified briefings given to then president-elect Trump on former British spy Christopher Steele’s dossier, which claimed the Russians had compromising information on the president-elect.
Clapper’s role became more apparent when the Comey’s memos about his interactions with Trump were released to the public. In the memos, Comey admits that it was Clapper who asked him to brief Trump on the dossier and Comey has repeated that in a number of interviews over the past several weeks. He also noted that he told Trump that CNN and other news outlets had the dossier and were looking for a “news hook.”
“I said there was something that Clapper wanted me to speak to the [President-elect] about alone or in a very small group,” Comey said.
“I said there was something that Clapper wanted me to speak to the [President-elect] about alone or in a very small group,” Comey said.
In an interview with Fox News Bret Baier, Comey discusses briefing the President on the more salacious parts of the dossier.
BAIER: The intel briefing at Trump Tower. You briefed the president-elect on the sliver of the dossier, really the salacious part about the prostitutes in Moscow and that allegation.
COMEY: Correct.
BAIER: Didn’t include anything broader than that, right?
COMEY: Correct. My mission in that private briefing was just to tell him about that slice of it.
Russia report evidence on Clapper
The Russia report discovered that Clapper, who is now a CNN national security analyst, “provided inconsistent testimony to the Committee about his contacts with the media, including CNN.”
They noted that when Clapper was initially asked about leaks related to the dossier in July 2017, Clapper denied “discussing the dossier compiled by Steele or any other intelligence related to Russia hacking of the 2016 election with journalists.”
But according to the report, Clapper eventually acknowledged discussing the “dossier with CNN journalist Jake Tapper.” He also admitted that he may have told other journalists about the dossier.
“Clapper’s discussion with Tapper took place in early January 2017, around the time IC leaders briefed President Obama and President-elect Trump, on ‘the Christopher Steele information,’ a two-page summary of which was ‘enclosed in’ the highly-classified version of the ICA,” the Russia report states.
On Jan. 10, 2017, Tapper published an article on CNN’s Tapper referring to the briefing and the classified documents. It noted that the “classified documents presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump included allegations…about Mr. Trump that was included in a two-page synopsis . . . appended to a report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.” It also mentioned that it was “derived from memos compiled by a former British intelligence analyst operative.”
Those claims were sourced to “multiple U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the briefings. The next day, Clapper issued a statement describing a call with President-elect Trump in which Clapper “expressed my profound-dismay at the leaks that have been appearing the in the press.”
After CNN published the briefing, Buzzfeed then published the dossier and the Russia collusion story was well underway, according to the report and numerous congressional officials.
3. Former Feinstein Staffer Continues Where Fusion GPS Left Off
Last but not least, as first reported by Sean Davis with The Federalist, a former staff member for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, is helping direct a continued investigation into President Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.
The Fusion GPS investigation, which was paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign and DNC, is being picked up by Daniel J. Jones, a former Feinstein staffer. According to Davis, the former staffer “is intimately involved with ongoing efforts to retroactively validate a series of salacious and unverified memos produced by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent, and Fusion GPS.”
Jone’s name appears to be redacted in the Russia report but his company, “Penn Quarter Group” is mentioned in its continuing efforts to investigate Trump and apparently they have raised $50 million to continue the investigation, according to a more detailed story by the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross.
Davis noted that congressional documents and texts leaked between Sen. Mark Warner,D-Va. and Oleg Daripaska, a registered foreign agent for a Russian aluminum oligarch “indicate that Daniel J. Jones is intimately involved with ongoing efforts to retroactively validate a series of salacious and unverified memos produced by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent, and Fusion GPS. The dossier, which declassified documents show was used as a basis for securing secret wiretaps on Trump campaign affiliates, was reportedly jointly funded by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.”
Alleen selectief bij enigszins objectieve bronnen, de alt-rechtse bronnen en bronnen zoals de moonies krant worden gewoon in zijn geheel geplaatst.quote:Op zaterdag 28 april 2018 20:11 schreef ATuin-hek het volgende:
[..]
Het probleem is alleen dat hij dat selectief doet
Worden jullie nou vrolijk van dit topic, dat door TS wordt gebruikt als zijn persoonlijke propagandakanaal?quote:Op zaterdag 28 april 2018 19:54 schreef Lavenderr het volgende:
Dankjewel Dellipder. Wat een werk steek jij hier in
Nou, zover wil ik niet gaan hoor.quote:Op maandag 30 april 2018 13:09 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:
[..]
Worden jullie nou vrolijk van dit topic, dat door TS wordt gebruikt als zijn persoonlijke propagandakanaal?
Mee eens. Niet geïnteresseerden hoeven het niet te lezen. Het is niet verplicht om te reageren.quote:Op maandag 30 april 2018 15:50 schreef jogy het volgende:
Persoonlijk heb ik diep respect voor de moeite die dellipder in zijn posts en topics steekt. Hij kan het ook gewoon op een blog plempen met de reacties uit, dan zou het een propagandakanaal idee kunnen zijn. Lijkt me.
Nondeju. Ik zie het nu pas.quote:
Ga je gang!quote:Op maandag 30 april 2018 15:57 schreef Fir3fly het volgende:
Niemand hoeft te reageren, en vrijwel niemand doet dat dan ook. Als je het allemaal zo geweldig vindt ga dan de discussie aan. Geef eens een mening. Stel eens een vraag.
Om de zoveel tijd roepen hoe geweldig het is dat iemand zo veel tijd steekt in deze onzin, daar moeten we het van hebben .
Al regelmatig gedaan. Ik had het dan ook vooral tegen jou.quote:
Oh? Hoe dat zo?quote:Op maandag 30 april 2018 16:20 schreef Fir3fly het volgende:
[..]
Al regelmatig gedaan. Ik had het dan ook vooral tegen jou.
Ok...quote:
Ik lees in dit topic en als ik een vraag had, had ik die gesteld. Tot nu toe vind ik het vooral informatief.quote:Op maandag 30 april 2018 16:36 schreef Fir3fly het volgende:
[..]
Ok...
Je reageert in dit topic. Wat is je mening? Ben je van plan te reageren op de inhoud? Heb je misschien een vraag?
Ik weet niet of je conclusies juist zijn, maar als je vindt dat Redpill informatie verdraait, of zelfs liegt, kun je dat dan aantonen aan de hand van voorbeelden?quote:Op maandag 30 april 2018 15:58 schreef Chewie het volgende:
Ach het is een beetje jammer dat alles wat redpill schrijft/google translate domweg leugens zijn en dat er geen touw aan vast te knopen is (wat uiteraard een beproefde methode is bij dit soort complotten)
Het is ook wel bijzonder dat redpill of de originele schrijver bronnen als Huffingtonpost nogal verknipt zodat het in het cabal plaatje lijkt te passen (je komt er pas achter dat het niet zo is als je het artikel waar de knipseltjes uitkomen gaat lezen) en bronnen die er precies zo over lijken te denken als redpill zoals de moonies krant the Washington Times wel correct geplaatst worden.
Dan lijkt me er toch een duidelijk politiek motief achter de hersenspinsels van redpill (of de echte schrijver) te zitten en zo te merken is dat een niet echt heel fris motief.
quote:Fifteen Things To Know About ‘Pakistani Mystery Man’ Imran Awan
The “Pakistani Mystery Man” is Imran Awan, who worked as Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s email server administrator in the House of Representatives. Nearly his entire family then joined the payroll of other Democrats, until they worked for 1 in 5 House Democrats and had — as the House inspector general called it — the ‘keys to the kingdom‘ and ability to access any file.
1. Imran worked for Debbie Wasserman Schultz since 2004 and had the passwords to her devices
A search of his name on WikiLeaks shows the DNC summoned Imran when they needed her device unlocked.
2. During the 2016 election, the House’s Office of Inspector General warned that Imran and his family were making “unauthorized access” to data
A September 30, 2016, presentation alleged Imran Awan and his family members were logging into the servers of members who had previously fired him, funneling data off the network, and that evidence “suggests steps are being taken to conceal their activity.”
The Awan group’s behavior mirrored a “classic method for insiders to exfiltrate data from an organization,” the briefing materials allege. The presentation especially found problems on one server: that of the House Democratic Caucus, an entity similar to the DNC that was chaired at the time by then-Rep. Xavier Becerra.
3. The Awan group was left on the House computer network until February 2, 2017 — days after Donald Trump’s inauguration
Police then banned the Awan group from the network. The Committee on House Administration put out a statement saying “House Officials became aware of suspicious activity and alleged theft committed by certain House IT support staff.” Since then, no official body has ever publicly provided any information about the case. But the IG report, obtained by TheDCNF, shows that theft was not the primary issue being warned about.
4. Shortly after the IG report came out in September 2016, the Caucus server — identified as prime evidence in the cybersecurity case — physically disappeared
Authorities took the disappearance as evidence tampering, they said. Becerra said he won’t discuss the incident because of an ongoing criminal investigation.
5. Wasserman Schultz declined to fire Imran despite knowing he was suspected of cyber-security violations, even though she had just lost her job as DNC chair after its anemic handling of its data breach
Her office claimed Imran could work on “websites and printers” without accessing the network. Watchdog group FACT has filed an ethics complaint saying this was impossible, and a cybersecurity publication called the judgment negligent.
6. After Imran was banned from the network, he left a laptop with the username RepDWS in a phone booth
Along with a letter to prosecutors and a copy of his ID. Capitol Police found the laptop at midnight and seized it because they recognized Imran as a criminal suspect. Wasserman Schultz still didn’t fire Imran. Instead, she threatened Capitol Police Chief Matthew R. Verderosa with “consequences” if he didn’t give it back, implying it was “a member’s laptop.” The police chief refused.
She hired a lawyer to block prosecutors from examining the laptop, then later said, “This was not my laptop. I have never seen that laptop.” Imran’s lawyer then said he “very strongly” believes the laptop cannot be examined because of “attorney-client privilege.” Imran left a note with that phrase near the backpack.
7. The FBI began surveiling the family but let Imran’s wife, Hina Alvi, leave the country
She flew to Pakistan with cardboard boxes of possessions, FBI agents said in an affidavit. They approached her at the airport, but she refused to talk to them. They found $12,000 in cash but let her board anyway, writing they do “not believe that Alvi has any intention to return to the United States.”
8. Prosecutors arrested Imran at the airport after he began liquidating assets
Imran and his wife had wired $300,000 to Pakistan after allegedly both cashing out a federal retirement account and taking a second mortgage under allegedly false pretenses. The FBI arrested Imran at the airport, and he was charged with bank fraud. Democrats have claimed the case is therefore about bank fraud, but prosecutors imply in court papers the bank fraud occurred because The Awans learned they were under investigation for other activities. “Based on the suspicious timing of that transaction, Awan and Alvi likely knew they were under investigation at that time,” prosecutors wrote of the money moves.
Imran’s lawyer is a former aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Wasserman Schultz’s brother is an attorney at the same prosecutor’s office that is handling the case, the US Attorney for the District of Columbia.
9. A former business partner of Imran’s father says the father handed over USBs of data to a Pakistani official and that Imran claimed he power to ‘change the US president’
The FBI never interviewed the business partner. TheDCNF traveled in Pakistan where numerous locals alleged that Imran traveled that country with an entourage of Pakistani government agents, and routinely boasted about mysterious political influence.
10. Nearly Imran’s entire family was on the House payroll at high salaries, despite most of them having no training in IT — Democrats failed to vet them
All 44 of their House employers exempted them from background checks despite the House policy encouraging checks.
Among the red flags in Imran’s brother’s Abid’s background were a $1.1 million bankruptcy; six lawsuits against him or a company he owned; and at least three misdemeanor convictions.
11. House Dems Hired A Fired McDonald’s Worker As E-mail Administrator
Rao Abbas was added to Reps. Emanuel Cleaver and Ted Deutch’s payroll shortly after court paperwork showed Abid owed him money.
12. Money from an Iraqi political figure
Imran and Abid operated a car dealership referred to as CIA that took $100,000 from an Iraqi government official who is a fugitive from U.S. authorities, according to a business partner’s testimony in a civil lawsuit.
After Imran was banned from the House network, an email address that belonged to him, 123@mail.house.gov, appeared to still be active and invoked the name of a “national security and foreign affairs” specialist for Rep. Andre Carson, an intelligence committee member.
13. The cybersecurity investigation started after allegedly falsified invoices caught administrators’ attention, and the Awans’ lawyers blamed members
No one has been charged for “unauthorized access” or falsified invoices, and Imran’s court date has been postponed five times. It is now scheduled for May 4, 2018.
14. The Awans’ relatives, colleagues and tenants say they would ‘do anything for money’
Their own stepmother alleges they wiretapped, extorted her and held her captive.
15. Imran’s own wife, Hina Alvi, filed a lawsuit in Pakistan in September 2017 alleging he controlled Hina with violent threats
Wasserman Schultz said police might be Islamophobic, but Imran was the subject of repeated calls to police by multiple Muslim women.
Jij kunt er chocola van maken? Werkelijk?quote:Op maandag 30 april 2018 16:47 schreef Lavenderr het volgende:
[..]
Ik lees in dit topic en als ik een vraag had, had ik die gesteld. Tot nu toe vind ik het vooral informatief.
Niet van alles moet ik eerlijk zeggen. Maar ik vind het wel fijn leesvoer en echt iets voor BNW.quote:Op maandag 30 april 2018 20:06 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:
[..]
Jij kunt er chocola van maken? Werkelijk?
Wat de Reddit-users doen van wie TS deze informatie jat, is met hagel schieten om verwarring te zaaien. Gewoon zoveel mogelijk lappen tekst met allerlei gezochte dwarsverbanden in elkaar steken, zodat het lijkt alsof het een plausibel geheel is. Allemaal bedoeld om de aandacht af te leiden van het onderzoek naar de Trump-campagne.
Is jullie niet opgevallen dat TS al verschillende keren heeft geroepen dat er schokkende onthullingen zitten aan te komen en de DNC nu echt de lul is.
Geen van die voorspellingen is uitgekomen. Intussen worden Trump en zijn entourage wel steeds verder in het nauw gedreven door Mueller.
Het is inderdaad uiterst geschikt voor BNW. Goed punt.quote:Op maandag 30 april 2018 20:09 schreef Lavenderr het volgende:
[..]
Niet van alles moet ik eerlijk zeggen. Maar ik vind het wel fijn leesvoer en echt iets voor BNW.
Deze post bijvoorbeeld, hierin plakt redpill een screenprintje bij van een artikel van huffingtonpost, nu lijkt dat screenprintje (wat gewoon van reddit afkomstig blijkt te zijn) prima te passen in zijn verhaaltje maar lees je het hele artikel door dan lijkt het toch iets anders te liggen.quote:Op maandag 30 april 2018 17:10 schreef Enneacanthus_Obesus het volgende:
[..]
Ik weet niet of je conclusies juist zijn, maar als je vindt dat Redpill informatie verdraait, of zelfs liegt, kun je dat dan aantonen aan de hand van voorbeelden?
Misschien wel. Maar iedereen kan toch screenshots van twitter maken?quote:Op dinsdag 1 mei 2018 09:46 schreef Chewie het volgende:
Is redpill "Trumpsoldier" op twitter?
https://twitter.com/DaveNYviii
Daar lijken namelijk wel veel van de gebruikte screenshots in dit topic vandaan te komen
Gelet op de naam durf ik de voorspelling wel aan: Trumpsoldier is een gevalletje RWA. dellipder en andere FOK!iaanse Trump fan boys kun je ook in die categorie scharen. Wat is een RWA? Leesvoer: http://theauthoritarians.org/Downloads/TheAuthoritarians.pdfquote:Op dinsdag 1 mei 2018 09:46 schreef Chewie het volgende:
Is redpill "Trumpsoldier" op twitter?
https://twitter.com/DaveNYviii
Daar lijken namelijk wel veel van de gebruikte screenshots in dit topic vandaan te komen
Dat lijkt me juist gezien de "informatie" van redpil wel de goede insteek, dit "nieuws" komt namelijk uit een bepaalde hoek het enige wat redpill doet is het door de google translate heenhalen.quote:Op dinsdag 1 mei 2018 11:44 schreef ChrisCarter het volgende:
We gaan hier geen analyse doen wie in welke hoek past.
Dankuquote:Op dinsdag 1 mei 2018 12:07 schreef Vis1980 het volgende:
Mag ik wel even zeggen dat ik de moderators erg fair vind in BNW? Petje af!
En dit is niet sarcastisch bedoeld.
Nee. Het is niet dat ik geen artikelen lees van “anti-Trump Resistance” en “Never Trumpers” , zoals Glenn Beck, Guy Benson of in dit geval Benjamin Wittes -en daar valt voor mij in elk geval beter doorheen te komen dan bijvoorbeeld een Rachel Maddow of een Seth Abramson, maar ik schat dit soort pennenvruchten overwegend meer in op waarde van de wens die vader is van de gedachte.quote:Op donderdag 3 mei 2018 19:34 schreef Lavenderr het volgende:
https://www.lawfareblog.com/game-theory-trump-subpoena
Deze had jij hier nog niet geplaatst toch, dellipder?
bronquote:'In 2009, my wife and I moved to my hometown of East Aurora, New York to have a family. Making far less money back home, we had a far better quality of life. That is, until the Trump-Russia narrative took off. Today, I can’t possibly pay the attendant legal costs and live near my aging father, raising my kids where I grew up.
'Your investigation and others into the allegations of Trump campaign collusion with Russia are costing my family a great deal of money – more than $125,000 - and making a visceral impact on my children.
'Now I must to move back to Washington, New York City, Miami or elsewhere, just so I can make enough money to pay off these legal bills. And I know I have you to thank for that.
'Here’s how I know: how many of you know Daniel Jones, former Senate Intelligence staffer for Senator Dianne Feinstein? Great guy, right? Most of you worked with him. One of you probably just talked to him this morning.
'Of course, very few of us in flyover country knew Daniel until recently. Now we know that he quit his job with your Senate committee not long ago to raise $50 million from ten rich Democrats to finance more work on the FusionGPS Russian dossier. The one the FBI used to get a FISA warrant and intimidate President Donald Trump, without anyone admitting -- until months after it was deployed -- that it was paid for by Hillary Clinton.
'In fact, good old Dan has been raising and spending millions to confirm the unconfirmable – and, of course, to keep all his old intel colleagues up-to-speed on what FusionGPS and British and Russian spies have found. Got to keep that Russia story in the news.
'Of course Dan’s in touch with you guys. We know from the news that he’s been briefing Senator Mark Warner, vice chairman of this committee. Which one of you works for Senator Warner? Please give Danny my best.
'I saw some of his handiwork just last month. Remember this lede paragraph, from McClatchy on April 13?
'The Justice Department special counsel has evidence that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and confidant, Michael Cohen, secretly made a late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
'That’s your pal Dan, isn’t it? He came up with some kind of hollow proof that Michael Cohen was in Prague meeting with Russians when he wasn’t. He tried to sell that to reporters, and they didn’t buy it because it doesn’t check out. So, to get a reporter to write up his line of bull, he gave the documents to the Office of Special Counsel.
'We know that’s likely, because he’s told people he’s briefing investigators.
'So, technically, the special counsel’s office has evidence. Your pal Dan gave them more of the Democrats’ dossier, funded by more Democrats, provided again by Russian and British spies. Information no reporter would write up, but now there’s an angle: the Special Counsel has it. Now it’s a story.
'It’s a clever but effective ruse. That’s a story, just like when reporter Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News wrote this gem on September 16, 2016:
'“…U.S. officials have since received intelligence reports that during that same three-day trip, Page met with Igor Sechin, a longtime Putin associate … a well-placed Western intelligence source tells Yahoo News. That meeting, if confirmed, is viewed as especially problematic by U.S. officials…”
'Dozens of stories were written from the Isikoff piece, doing real damage to the Trump campaign. Of course, now we know Isikoff’s reference to “intelligence reports” was just him renaming a dossier funded by Democrats and dug up by his longtime pal Glenn Simpson and some foreign spies. Once Simpson gave his Clinton campaign opposition research to the feds, it was news.
'This was especially true after Isikoff intentionally labeled the campaign materials as intelligence – just like McClatchy called Dan’s information “evidence.”
'But who is McClatchy’s second source? It couldn’t be Dan; he was the first source. It couldn’t be Simpson; he works for Dan. It can’t be the Mueller investigation; they kicked the McClatchy story to the curb with aplomb. So who could it be – perhaps one of his former Senate Intelligence colleagues? I mean, you’re all in this together. You’re the swamp.
'What America needs is an investigation of the investigators. I want to know who is paying for the spies’ work and coordinating this attack on President Donald Trump? I want to know who Dan Jones is talking to across the investigations – from the FBI, to the Southern District of New York, to the OSC, to the Department of Justice, to Congress.
'Forget about all the death threats against my family. I want to know who cost us so much money, who crushed our kids, who forced us out of our home, all because you lost an election.
'I want to know because God Damn you to Hell.'
Het is meer de media die dit scenario graag uitgespeeld zien worden.quote:Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 21:13 schreef Lavenderr het volgende:
@dellipder
'Het is niet heel waarschijnlijk dat de DoJ een zittende president dagvaardt voor een getuigenverklaring. In de kwestie waar Ken Starr de zittende president dagvaarde hoefde Bill Clinton niet voor de grand jury te verschijnen. Bovendien kan zo'n dagvaarding worden aangevochten en als het een rechtsgang betreft dat helemaal leidt tot aan de Supreme Court zijn we maanden of mogelijk jaren verder'.
Dus zoiets wordt niet snel gedaan als het zo lang duurt. Plus het heeft weinig zin want misschien is in die tijd de president al opgevolgd.
Haha, jij en praten over "de wens die de vader is van de gedachte". Echt grappig. Ook als je dan nog dit schrijft:quote:Op zaterdag 5 mei 2018 11:24 schreef dellipder het volgende:
[..]
Nee. Het is niet dat ik geen artikelen lees van “anti-Trump Resistance” en “Never Trumpers” , zoals Glenn Beck, Guy Benson of in dit geval Benjamin Wittes -en daar valt voor mij in elk geval beter doorheen te komen dan bijvoorbeeld een Rachel Maddow of een Seth Abramson, maar ik schat dit soort pennenvruchten overwegend meer in op waarde van de wens die vader is van de gedachte.
Nu vind ik het artikel an sich redelijk genuanceerd, maar in zijn opzet wel voorbij gaan aan de ernst van de gehele “Russia collusion”/Robert Mueller, special counsel-kwestie.
Dat schrijft iemand die zelf ellenlange stukjes post ( ik neem aan dat je knipt en plakt, zoals anderen al hebben geschreven), in de hoop dat mensen door de bomen jouw verwaarloosde bos niet aantreffen. Maar toevallig ben ik hovenier, dus met bossen heb ik te maken.quote:Op zondag 13 mei 2018 11:28 schreef dellipder het volgende:
Vorige week las ik weer een ellenlange nietszeggend En zoals gebruikelijk ergens diep in het artikel verstopt, als de meeste lezers zijn afgehaakt, de erkenning dat de inhoud de verwachtingen van de titel van het stuk niet waarmaakt.
Wat is er dan zo inhoudelijk aan?quote:Op woensdag 23 mei 2018 20:29 schreef Lavenderr het volgende:
en dat is zonde, want het is allemaal inhoudelijk en het blijft niet bij een simpele kreet.
Heb ik al gedaan, en al meerdere keren aangegeven dat het allemaal luchtfietserij is. Dus nogmaals, wat is er dan zo inhoudelijk?quote:
Dat is jouw mening.quote:Op woensdag 23 mei 2018 20:49 schreef Fir3fly het volgende:
[..]
Heb ik al gedaan, en al meerdere keren aangegeven dat het allemaal luchtfietserij is. Dus nogmaals, wat is er dan zo inhoudelijk?
! Kom op zeg, de ironie doet bijna pijn .quote:Op woensdag 23 mei 2018 20:51 schreef Lavenderr het volgende:
[..]
Dat is jouw mening.
Post zelf eens een inhoudelijk bericht, ipv deze makkelijke kritiek.
Sterkte ermee.quote:Op woensdag 23 mei 2018 20:52 schreef Fir3fly het volgende:
[..]
! Kom op zeg, de ironie doet bijna pijn .
Er zijn zo weinig reacties, omdat het onbegonnen werk is. Als je kritiek post, komt redpil gelijk persoonlijke berichtjes sturen dat hij daar niet van gediend is.quote:Op woensdag 23 mei 2018 18:56 schreef Berjansu het volgende:
[..]
Haha, jij en praten over "de wens die de vader is van de gedachte". Echt grappig. Ook als je dan nog dit schrijft:
[..]
Dat schrijft iemand die zelf ellenlange stukjes post ( ik neem aan dat je knipt en plakt, zoals anderen al hebben geschreven), in de hoop dat mensen door de bomen jouw verwaarloosde bos niet aantreffen. Maar toevallig ben ik hovenier, dus met bossen heb ik te maken.
Al jouw dingen zijn geschreven door iemand die een Trump aanhanger is. Niets meer en niets minder.
Je haalt allemaal zaken aan die niks met elkaar te maken hebben en dan verbind je er een conclusie aan. Kan hier niet echt vrolijk van worden, moet ik zeggen.
Lavenderr schreef dat ze het interessant vond. En dat is een positief punt. Dat mag natuurlijk. Maar het is vooral erg interessant van psychologisch oogpunt. Zo zijn al die verhalen die pro Trumpers ervan maken wel interessant voor psychologen. Hoe ze niet naar de buitenkant van Trump kijken, en die buitenkant is weerzinwekkend. Bijvoorbeeld het feit dat Trump van alles regelt via twitter (waar hij gelukkig van bijna iedereen weerwoord krijgt). Ook dat Trump meteen kwam met fakenieuws. Dat zijn inauguratie het best bekeken was, en dat er meer mensen bij hem stonden dan bij Obama. Terwijl dit duidelijk niet zo was. Een psycholoog zou dit een narcistisch trekje vinden. De rest van zijn teksten zijn ook overduidelijk die van een narcist. (its huge, never seen by a president before etc) Maar ook de reacties van Trump aanhangers zijn voer voor psychologen. Waarom houden ze iemand de hand boven het hoofd? Waarom verzinnen ze een deep state en laten ze hier Trump tegen vechten, zodat hij de held kan zijn? Want geloof mij, zonder het bedenken van een vijand waar Trump tegen vecht zou hij allang door Trump aanhangers ook ontmaskerd zijn. Hij schijnt zelfs seks te hebben gehad in Rusland en hierdoor extreem chantabel te zijn geweest. Geen wonder dat ze eerder Trump dan Clinton in het witte huis wilden hebben. Maar dit is allemaal "fake nieuws" voor de Trumpisten en daarmee is de zaak gesloten. Want ja, alle fakenews komt van de deep state. En zo kan Trump alles doen, alles als fakenieuws wegzetten en blijven de gelovigen gelovig. Sterker nog, hoe meer bewijzen er zijn tegen Trump, hoe meer de deep state hiervan de schuld krijgt en hoe sterker Trump wordt. De wereld op zijn kop.
Een persoonlijkere vraag zou zijn aan Redpil: Waarom schrijft hij/zij zoveel terwijl er bijna niemand op reageert? Het is net een autist die niet weet wanneer mensen niet geïnteresseerd zijn en maar door blijft lullen.
Kan het ook zijn dat Redpil dit schrijft om het eigen gevoel op te vijzelen?
quote:Op woensdag 30 mei 2018 13:38 schreef Vis1980 het volgende:
[..]
Er zijn zo weinig reacties, omdat het onbegonnen werk is. Als je kritiek post, komt redpil gelijk persoonlijke berichtjes sturen dat hij daar niet van gediend is.
Maargoed, het is natuurlijk wel zo dat je in BNW kan fantaseren wat je wilt. Wat dat te gaat zit hij niet voor niets in dit gedeelte van het forum. Verder is het best vermakelijk om te zien in wat voor bochten sommige aanhangers zich wringen. Van mij mag het gewoon blijven.
Dat zeg ik, toch?quote:
Ik vind het ook vermakelijk. Vooral omdat Redpiller maar blijft posten terwijl er kritiek is en die negeert hij/zij. Alleen positieve dingen (bijvoorbeeld Lavenderr) lijken tot hemhaar door te dringen..quote:Op woensdag 30 mei 2018 13:38 schreef Vis1980 het volgende:
[..]
Er zijn zo weinig reacties, omdat het onbegonnen werk is. Als je kritiek post, komt redpil gelijk persoonlijke berichtjes sturen dat hij daar niet van gediend is.
Maargoed, het is natuurlijk wel zo dat je in BNW kan fantaseren wat je wilt. Wat dat te gaat zit hij niet voor niets in dit gedeelte van het forum. Verder is het best vermakelijk om te zien in wat voor bochten sommige aanhangers zich wringen. Van mij mag het gewoon blijven.
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