Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson revealed in a new book titled, “Crime in Progress” which was released in November 2019, that he was first hired to investigate Donald Trump “in the fall of 2015″. The deep state began their counter-imtelligence into the Trump campaign at least as early as December 2015 according to Strzok-Page texts. ”Why? Because, as Newt Gingrich put it: “He didn’t belong to the secret society“.
The RussiaGate gambit to destroy Trump served a laundry list of purposes to cover it:
- Undermine his legitimacy before he even takes office.
- Accuse him of what Hillary actually did: collude with Russians and Ukrainians to effect the outcome of the election
- Paralyze Trump on his foreign policy desires to scale back the Empire
- Give aid and comfort to hurting progressives and radicalize them further undermining our political system
- Polarize the electorate over the false choice of Trump’s guilt.
- Paralyze the Dept. of Justice and Congress so that they would not uncover the massive corruption in the intelligence agencies in the U.S. and the U.K.
- Isolate Trump and take away every ally or potential ally he could have by turning them against him through prosecutor overreach.
As far as Russian collusion, I have to tell you in my book there’s a great story there. The kids, the Trump kids are traveling all over the world, heads of state are pulling them aside in 2017 and they’re saying, “Please tell your father how sorry we are about this Russian collusion nonsense.” So there you go. If you’re the president of China or president of France you can’t wait two years for the Mueller report. You have your own secret service, there’s 120 intelligence services in the world. Everyone of them checked this out. They knew within 24 hours that this was a bogus story. The future of their country depended on knowing that. So this has kind of lingered on a little too long.
(GatewayPundit) Activist Alexei Navalny became one of the key figures in the fake Russiagate conspiracy theory when he released a video linking Trump ex-campaign manager Paul Manafort to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, reported by the Telegraph in February 2018. At the same time, the Telegraph had to admit the video “does not specifically mention Donald Trump”. In addition, Oleg Deripaska “denied receiving briefings from the Trump campaign, although he admitted hiring Mr. Manafort as a consultant in previous years”, the Telegraph reported. Although it was a “big nothingburger”, it was fit to print in the NYT.
In 2009, opposition blogger Alexei Navalny emerged as leader of the Russian opposition and was portrayed as a hero by Western media. In 2010, he graduated from a half-year Yale Greenberg World Fellowship, which was originally called White House Fellows under Bill Clinton’s Presidency. The first program director of the Yale World Fellows was Dan Esty, energy and environmental policy adviser for the 2008 Obama campaign. Soon thereafter Navalny started an anti-corruption campaign in Russia that was supported early on by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Vladimir Putin accused Secretary Clinton of supporting Navalny in 2011, saying she sent “a signal” to “some actors in our country”.
At the same time, Navalny allegedly went to work for the Open Society Foundations (OSF) methadone program, which aimed to “bring together actors, alliances from different spheres (i.e. Navalny)”, as OSF documents leaked by DC Leaks showed 2015. George Soros supported a whole network of radical left-wing NGOs in Russia before being banned in 2015.
Navalny is still closely allied with exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who modeled his “Open Russia Foundation” on Soros’ network. Khodorkovsky’s London-based investigative research unit Dossier, which has often shared hacked documents from unknown sources, was also behind NYT 2018 claims Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was acting on behalf of the Russian government when she offered allegedly incriminating evidence to Donald Trump. Jr. in the infamous Trump Tower Meeting. It has since emerged Veselnitskaya met with Fusion GPS head Glenn Simpson before and after the June 9 2016 Trump Tower meeting, placing her closer to the Clinton opposition research campaign than the Kremlin.
Alexei Navalny and his brother Oleg were recently convicted of embezzling 26 million Rubles from French cosmetics firm Yves Rocher, with whom they had a Russian distribution deal 2008 to 2011, the Navalnys were represented in French court in Vannes, Brittany by attorneys William Bourdon and Amélie Lefebre of Association Sherpa, a whistleblower defense which also defended Edward Snowden and is supported by the Clinton Foundation‘s Humanity United, Freedom Fund and the Open Society Foundations. Although the plaintiff was French company Yves Rocher, who also sued for damages in France, Western media depicted it as some sort of sham trial instigated by Vladimir Putin. While Oleg was sent to prison for three years, Alexei Navalny was given a suspended sentence and remains free.
(LaRouche) Nothing of any truth about the assault on President Trump can be understood, unless one addresses the question of why all of this is occurring, along with the subsumed question of “cui bono?” This requires transcending the world of partisan politics and inside-the-beltway gossip, and the necessity for examining the strategic setting and implications surrounding the coup plot.
Everything that is now transpiring must be viewed within that truthful strategic context. During the eight years of the Obama presidency, and the prior Administration of George W. Bush, a profound shift in U.S. strategic policy took place. Obama, working closely with—and often under the direction of—the British, committed the United States to enforcing a global policy of Anglo-American hegemonism, what is sometimes referred to as a “uni-polar world.” This took the form of escalating provocations against Russia, and more recently the targeting of China. Currently, this imperial Anglo-American faction is determined to thwart China’s gigantic Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure development of Eurasia, Africa, Southwest Asia (the Middle East), and nations in Central and South America. This largest infrastructure development project in human history now involves more than 68 countries.
For the British, such geo-political designs are nothing new. British strategic policy since before World War I has been based on geopolitics. Under the theories of Lord Halford Mackinder, completely embraced by today’s Anglo-American foreign policy establishment, control of Eurasia dictates strategic mastery of the world. China is now establishing vast transportation and other infrastructure throughout Eurasia, a region which Anglo-American policy up until now had reserved as a primitive looting ground.
Unable to break from imperial axioms and join China’s offer of win-win cooperation, let alone offer a viable alternative model which promotes the general welfare, Barack Obama and the British adopted a strategy of geopolitical containment and provocation, a New Cold War policy. It began with the Anglo-American coup in Ukraine in 2014, pushing NATO right up to Russia’s borders, and involves hostile encirclement strategies against both Russia and China, employing color revolutions, economic sanctions, overt economic, cyber, and information warfare, provocative military maneuvers, development of new nuclear and other warfare capacities, and military support of insurgents and terrorists in states friendly and/or trading with Russia or China, such as Iran and Syria. All of this, of course, threatens the extinction of the human race.
In November 2016, it was the intention of Obama and the British that Hillary Clinton would continue this dangerous geo-political gambit. Donald Trump’s victory in that election stopped this mad drive to war just as it was turning very hot.
As we detailed in our original Mueller dossier, “Russiagate,”—which has roiled our nation since Summer 2016, has driven most members of Congress into a McCarthyite insanity so severe that you can literally picture them braying at the Moon at night, and has critically undermined Donald Trump’s presidency—has absolutely nothing to do with any hostile action by Russia against the United States. Its origins are to be found in the desperation of the British and American establishments, among individuals and interests who are frantic to re-impose the strategic outlook of the Obama Administration.
The Washington Post Reported in June 2017, right after the corrupt Mueller team was created, that former President Barack Obama and his CIA Head, John Brennan, had a secret team that met in August 2016 with regards to the Trump-Russia sham. The meeting included Obama, Brennan, Rice, Comey, Biden, Clapper, Kerry and Lynch – a who’s who of the criminal deep state cabal.
Italian Giulio Occhionero claims and it’s reported that:
Members of Italian intelligence were approached by Hillary Clinton, the Obama Administration, and the Deep State in order to frame Trump by PLANTING EVIDENCE on American servers to force Trump to step down from office.
In other words, members of Italian intelligence found a target in Occhionero, a Republican-sympathizer who had two servers for his company, Westland Securities, located in America. One was in Washington State, and the other in West Virginia.
The plan was for Italian Intelligence to hack into these servers, plant classified emails from Hillary’s servers inside these servers on American soil, and then alert the FBI.
The FBI would then raid these locations, “discover” these e-mails, investigate, link these servers to Trump…
And then force Trump to resign.
Occhionero believes that Obama and the former leader of Italy, Matteo Renzi, worked together on this plan and he provides reports of their meetings in Italy before the 2016 election and in early 2017.
It’s also suspected that former FBI Agent Bill Priestap may have identified connections with Italy which are redacted in his testimony to Congress.
An individual by the name of Full Spectrum Domino has added his own research into the mix:
Charted below is the critical Nine Day period with interwoven sub-plots. A higher-resolution version of the chart below appears here in downloadable PDF.
During the nine days in May 2017 noted above, the FBI led by Strzok and Page are working with two Italian agents to place classified Hillary emails on the servers of Occhionero’s companies in Seattle and West Virginia. At the same time Obama is with Italian Prime Minister Renzi in Milan.
While this is all going on, Comey is fired and McCabe takes over. Together with Rosenstein they connive to set up the Special Counsel with Mueller at the helm on the 9th day.
Strzok texts to Page, “We need to open the case we’ve been working on now while Andy [McCabe] is acting.” And then he texts, “We need to lock in [redacted which is assumed to be POTUS – President Trump] in a formal chargeable way soon.” This they did on day nine.
What the Deep State was counting on however was that the Italians would be able to place the Hillary data on Occhionero’s companies’ servers. However, this failed and it failed due to the Deep State’s own incompetence.
The emails are never placed on Occionero’s servers, the FBI never finds the emails, and the incident is never reported as a crime committed by a Republican Trump supporter. All due to the instigators blocking themselves from committing their crime.1
The Nunes Memo: Unraveling a British Fraud
Let us begin by examining the so-called Nunes Memo, a four page document by U.S. Representative Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), which was released to the public Feb. 2, 2018. That Memo concerns the documented fraud on the FISA court by the DOJ and FBI in obtaining surveillance of Trump foreign policy volunteer Carter Page. That fraud involved the DOJ/FBI use of a dirty dossier claiming ties between Trump and Russia, a dossier which was authored by British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. Steele, we now know, was working simultaneously for the FBI, MI6, and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, while providing salacious and bogus copy about Russia and Trump to numerous U.S. journalists. Steele told the journalists he was working with the FBI and other intelligence agencies to wrap his fake cash-for-trash allegations in an aura of legitimacy. He told the FBI he was not speaking to journalists and was reporting to the FBI out of a sense of duty and patriotism.
According to the Nunes Memo, the Obama Justice Department and James Comey’s FBI affirmatively misrepresented what they knew about Christopher Steele’s operation to the FISA Court and, instead, touted his credibility in order to obtain surveillance of a U.S. citizen, Carter Page, and the Trump campaign.
Stefan Halper is widely suspected of being Source 2 in the IG’s report on FISA abuse. Halper was tasked with monitoring Page and Papadopoulos, and all these conversations were wiretapped:
CH team tasked CHSs to interact with Page and Papadopoulos both during the time Page and Papadopoulos were advisors for the Trump campaign, and after Page and Papadopoulos were no longer affiliated with the Trump campaign. All of the CHS interactions were consensually monitored by the FBI.
(Note when the IG says the interactions were ‘consensually monitored’, it’s been said that the IG means that the FBI’s source was aware of wiretapping, not the target.)
Halper did not have allegiances to intelligence targets:
Case Agent 1 said that when he reopened Source 2, he told Source 2 that this was the “last opportunity” and that the FBI would not tolerate the issues that had arisen in the past. According to Case Agent 1, since that time Case Agent 1 has not experienced any aggressiveness, and has not seen any indication that Source 2 has questionable allegiances to intelligence targets.
(Note it’s unknown what issues arose in the past other than his indictment for cocaine use.)
Halper had no intention of joining Trump campaign, and offered up other names during the meeting as potential targets. However, the IG report indicates that no CHS’s (confidential human sources) were deployed by the FBI before Crossfire Hurricane was formerly opened on July 31, 2016. It is illegal to spy on American citizens without a warrant, and there can be no warrant if a case has not been formally opened based on probable cause.
This is problematic for Halper and the FBI as well because there is ample evidence that Halper was spying on Americans in the Trump campaign long before the Crossfire Hurricane fraudulent investigation even began, assuming the record in the IG report is correct. For example, Halper invited General Michael Flynn to an event in 2014 and we know Halper had interactions with Carter Page in June 2016, before Crossfire Hurricane.
The FBI team investigating alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election cultivated and maintained numerous sources close to Donald Trump during the election and the transition period when Trump was entering the White House. The FBI sources include one person who was in direct contact with Trump and who was utilized by one FBI agent to, “obtain insight into the incoming Trump administration.” Another source was described as voluntarily providing the FBI team probing Trump with large volumes of documents.
Yet another FBI source held a position in the Trump campaign and another was described as a Trump “supporter.” Another source was documented as attending a private gathering with Trump. These disclosures and others were made inside the Justice Department’s previously released 476-page Inspector General report on the FBI’s Russia collusion investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, reported Breitbart News.
The Page FBI surveillance was then used to feed a media frenzy based on a magical mystery tour of mainstream media by British Intelligence Agent Steele. The big lie generated, that Trump was a compromised agent of Vladimir Putin, became the theme of the last months of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, Clinton having paid for the bogus claim lock, stock, and barrel, with Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan fanning the British lie.
Steele’s dirty dossier was not only used to abuse the FISA law and attempt to swing an American election. It was and is the centerpiece of the entire FBI counterintelligence investigation of Trump and Russia—the subject that Robert Mueller is supposedly diligently investigating.
Far from being a competent intelligence product, Steele’s composite of 17 memos written from June through December 2016, is a British fraud, a hoax, an amateurish hodgepodge created and deployed for British strategic purposes. After more than 20 months of intense investigation, few, if any of its claims have panned out. Even former FBI Director James Comey admits that its claims are “salacious and unverified.” To take but one example, the claim that Donald Trump romped with Russian prostitutes in Moscow on a bed used once by the Obamas (Steele’s most depraved and salacious offering), appears to be the product of a drunken bar conversation between two wannabe hustlers, Sergei Millian and George Papadopoulos. Their conversation was overheard by another human being who reported it to Steele, or, alternatively, their conversation was recorded on a wire.
Another drunken conversation involving Papadopoulos, this one with the Australian Ambassador to London, Alexander Downer, in which Papadopoulos claims that the Russians have thousands of Clinton emails, was used by the FBI to corroborate Steele’s claims about Russian hacking. The Australian diplomat whose tip in 2016 prompted the Russia-Trump investigation previously arranged one of the largest foreign donations ($25 million) to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s charitable efforts, documents show.
Earlier, in 2001, it was another “sexed up” dossier that led to the Iraq War tragedy, that one based on the incredible and unbelievable claims of a hustler, the informant called “Curve Ball.” Analysts in both the CIA and MI6 doubted Curveball’s charges concerning Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, but those doubts were ignored by an Anglo-American chain of command bent on war. Following the war, both the UK and the U.S.A. finally admitted that Curveball was a con man and that his story, leading to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths and the birth of ISIS, was all a convenient lie, a hoax—information warfare at its finest.
It is no accident that the man intimately involved in concocting the 2001 sexed-up Iraq dossier, Sir Richard Dearlove, also counseled Christopher Steele regarding Steele’s dirty dossier against Donald Trump, according to the Washington Post. Dearlove, the former head of Britain’s MI6, is portrayed as a mentor to both Christopher Steele and his business partner, Chris Burroughs. The former British Ambassador to Russia, Sir Andrew Wood, is an associate of Steele and Burrows in their London-based firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, Ltd.
This British effort has been portrayed, accurately, as a “full-spectrum [british] information [warfare] operation”1 aimed at determining the result of the 2016 American election, and, following the election, poisoning the early Trump presidency and setting the stage for Trump’s impeachment. Since the techniques for such an operation are well known by spies on both sides of the Atlantic, there is little room to argue that the participating American intelligence personages working with Steele were somehow “duped” by his actions. Everything points to those in contact with Steele as being witting participants in a conspiracy against the United States. This is why the British government is prepared to invoke Britain’s “Official Secrets Act” to prevent Christopher Steele from testifying in a libel lawsuit brought against him in London by Alexander Gubarev, and in a similar suit brought against the publication BuzzFeed in the United States. The seventeenth Memo of Steele’s dirty dossier, published by BuzzFeed, falsely accuses Gubarev of conducting cyber-attacks against the Democratic Party and others on behalf of the Russian government.
Two Senators Continue the Case
Following the release of the “Nunes Memo” Feb. 2, and apoplectic fits over the nation’s airways and in its newspapers from those caught up in the British operation, Senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham secured a less-redacted version of their criminal referral of Christopher Steele to the United States Department of Justice for prosecution, releasing it Feb. 8. The criminal referral provides even more facts about the astonishing fraud on the FISA Court conducted by former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, James Comey and others. Senators Graham and Grassley believe that Steele lied to the FBI about his contacts with the media. Lying to the FBI, 18 U.S.C. § 1001 false statements, is the same felony Michael Flynn was charged with.
According to a February 11 article by Paul Sperry in Real Clear Investigations, the House Intelligence Committee will follow its explosive Nunes Memo detailing FBI and Justice Department’s illegalities while pimping Steele’s British product to the U.S. FISA Court, with a memo tracing the use of Steele’s dirty dossier by the State Department. That will be followed by a memo detailing the relationship of various Obama Administration intelligence officials to the Steele Dossier, including Leon Panetta, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, CIA chief John Brennan, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Sperry, citing a House Intelligence Committee source, notes that the Committee is particularly focused on Brennan, who “did more than anyone to promulgate the dirty dossier” and then lied to Congress about what he knew about it. It is anticipated that this investigation will lead, inexorably, to the center of the conspiracy against Trump which was hatched by the British in collusion with the Obama White House.
As our Mueller Dossier emphasizes, Christopher Steele’s dirty dossier is the foundational document for the coup being run against the President. Tracing its use, like a red dye, provides a reasonably complete map of the criminal conspiracy at issue. It leads from MI6 to the Obama White House. It involves the heads of the Obama national security apparatus including the FBI, the CIA, the DNI, the NSA, the Justice Department, the Department of Defense and the State Department and the Russian and Eurasian desks of all of these agencies. It involves practically everyone who ran the coup in Ukraine. It also obviously involves the Hillary Clinton Campaign and those forming her shadow government had she won the election. All of these people intersect British intelligence and Christopher Steele. All of the activities of British intelligence in the 2016 election need to be put under an investigative microscope. As for the journalists who worked with Steele—they have, for years, had a difficult time demonstrating that they are anything other than paid stenographers and copy editors for a wide variety of intelligence agencies.
Two key pieces of so-called “Russian collusion” evidence were totally debunked — the fake Russia dossier and the ‘black ledger’ which was used to smear Manafort. As TGP reported, the ‘black ledger’ was published by left-wing media outlets in the summer of 2016 in order to attack Paul Manafort and ultimately forced him out of his position as Trump’s campaign chairman. The ‘black ledger,’ just like the dossier, was used to purport evidence of Russian ties to President Trump’s 2016 campaign. John Solomon reported:
The ledger document, which suddenly appeared in Kiev during the 2016 U.S. election, showed alleged cash payments from Russian-backed politicians in Ukraine to ex-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
“The ledger was completely made up,” cooperating witness and Manafort business partner Rick Gates told prosecutors and FBI agents, according to a written summary of an April 2018 special counsel’s interview.
In a brief interview with Just the News, Gates confirmed the information in the summary. “The black ledger was a fabrication,” Gates said. “It was never real, and this fact has since been proven true.”
Gates’ account is backed by several Ukrainian officials who stated in interviews dating to 2018 that the ledger was of suspicious origins and could not be corroborated.
“The [NYT] article was completely false,” Gates is quoted as telling Mueller’s team in a written summary, Solomon reported. “As you now know there were no cash payments. The payments were wired. The ledger was completely made up.”
“The black ledger is an unofficial document,” Leschenko told John Solomon. “And the black ledger was not used as official evidence in criminal investigations because you know in criminal investigations all proof has to be beyond a reasonable doubt. And the black ledger is not a sample of such proof because we don’t know the nature of such document.” (source)
In our Mueller dossier, we focus on the motive for this crime, without which the list of names and events now under scrutiny loses its meaning. By their own report, in the Guardian, the British war against Donald Trump began in 2014-2015, with concerns about alleged Trump’s “softness” on Russia based on years of surveillance of Trump by MI6 and GCHQ. The Guardian claims that Robert Hannigan, the former head of GCHQ, was the principal whistleblower concerning an alleged Trump/Russia connection in 2015 based on GCHQ surveillance.
Whether such surveillance actually occurred, or whether the leak to the Guardian was designed to provide Christopher Steele’s shoddy claims the aura of gravitas for information warfare purposes, remains an open question. According to the Guardian account, Hannigan personally passed the evidence compiled by the GCHQ on Trump and Russia to CIA Director John Brennan in June 2016. It was then that Brennan launched a “major inter-agency investigation,” which included both the FBI and DNI James Clapper.
Steele’s first memo was completed June 20, 2016, and his first meeting with an FBI official was July 5, just weeks before Trump received the Republican nomination. Steele, a source for the FBI in Eurasian organized crime investigations and the FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) criminal prosecution, met with Michael Gaeta, then working for the FBI liaison office in Rome. Gaeta and Steele had collaborated previously on Eurasian organized crime investigations. Under FBI procedures, Gaeta became the case agent, overseeing Steele in operations against Trump beginning in September of 2016, operations which the FBI, at least on paper, controlled.
Big Problems for the Coup
Beginning in December 2017, the seemingly relentless drumbeat of the coup against the President began to slow. First, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz allowed the publication of text messages exchanged between Peter Strzok, the number two agent in the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division in charge of both Russiagate and the Clinton email investigation, and Lisa Page, his mistress, an FBI attorney. Both had served on Robert Mueller’s team until the summer of 2017, when the Inspector General briefed Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that text messages exchanged between them revealed bias against Donald Trump.
Horowitz is examining the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email case as well as the actions of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. McCabe did not recuse himself from the Clinton email case after his wife had received a campaign contribution in the hundreds of thousands of dollars from Clinton moneybags, then Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe. McCabe attended the meeting which arranged the contribution and then campaigned for his wife Jill as she sought a seat in the Virginia State Senate, a big problem under the Hatch Act and normal FBI procedures. It is claimed by FBI agents working the Clinton email case that McCabe stalled key steps in the Clinton email investigation. It is widely reported that a briefing from Horowitz about his preliminary findings was the major reason McCabe was abruptly fired from the FBI Jan. 29.
The texts between Strzok and Page reveal a seething anti-Trump bias and speak of an “insurance policy” against Trump emanating from a meeting in Andy McCabe’s office. It is widely assumed that the “insurance policy” was the Trump/Russia investigation, although Strzok had previously texted Page that there was “no there, there” with respect to claims that Donald Trump colluded with Russia.
This was followed by revelations that Mueller’s lead prosecutor, the ethically challenged Andrew Weissman, had met with reporters to discuss the case against former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, well prior to Manafort’s indictment. This is hardly the untraceable leaking for which Mueller is famous, and contravenes both Justice Department and ethical rules. As reported in our Mueller dossier, Weissman is famous for inventing new rules for criminal culpability, a practice he used throughout the Enron cases and the Arthur Anderson prosecution resulting in stunning rebukes from federal judges and from the U.S. Supreme Court. Weissman’s fawning praise of former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates for her grandstanding act of “resistance”—her refusal to defend the Trump Administration in court, which is the actual job of the Department of Justice—had also been revealed in December as the result of an FOIA lawsuit.
On Feb. 2, Devin Nunes, the Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, released his committee’s memo regarding the FBI and Department of Justice use of the Steele dossier in surveillance requests to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court regarding Trump volunteer foreign policy advisor Carter Page. On Feb. 6, Senators Grassley and Graham released a redacted version of their referral of Christopher Steele to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution, providing further details of the shocking FBI/DOJ fraud on the Foreign Intelligence Court.
Christopher Steele: Con-Man Extraordinaire
In using the Steele dossier in the first, October 21, 2016 FISA application for surveillance of Page, the FBI/DOJ officials, including James Comey and former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, left the fact that Steele’s work had been entirely paid for by the Clinton Campaign and the Democratic National Committee to a non-specific footnote referencing some generic “political” origin.
The FBI also attached a Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff to its FISA application concerning Page. The FBI affirmatively told the Court what Steele had apparently told them, that he only shared his work with Fusion GPS and the FBI, not the news media. This created the highly misleading impression that Isikoff’s article independently validated Steele’s allegations, which otherwise were uncorroborated, when, in fact, Isikoff’s article was based on a briefing by Steele himself. Moreover, Steele had already briefed the Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, and The New Yorker, in addition to Isikoff, at the time of the October 21, 2016 initial application to the FISA Court, for surveillance of Carter Page. Steele had also briefed David Corn of Mother Jones in October.
According to the Graham/Grassley account, when Corn published his Mother Jones article on October 31, it was clear to the FBI that Steele had lied to them about contacts with the news media. His informant status was terminated, but the FBI kept in contact with him through a very high-ranking back channel in the U.S. Department of Justice, Deputy Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr. Ohr’s wife, Nellie Ohr, likely worked for the CIA at the time and was also working for Steele’s U.S. business partner, Fusion GPS, which, with Steele, was heavily funded by the Clinton Campaign and the DNC for opposition research against Donald Trump. Steele confided to Ohr that he would do “anything” to prevent the election of Donald Trump, a fact which the Justice Department never revealed to the FISA court.
When the FBI/DOJ returned to the FISA Court in January 2017 to extend the Page surveillance, it engaged in yet another affirmative misrepresentation to the Court. While disclosing that Steele’s informant relationship had been terminated because of his contacts with the news media, the DOJ/ FBI claimed to the Court that Steele only talked to the media in anger when the Clinton email investigation was reopened, and the Trump investigation seemed stalled.
As Byron York notes in his excellent analysis for the Washington Examiner, the whole point of the “Chris-was-angry-so-he-talked-to-the-press story was to allow the FBI to claim that Steele’s pre-anger work—the dossier—was entirely credible.” In the renewal application, the FBI again affirmatively asserted that it did not believe that Steele was the source of Isikoff’s Sept. 23 article (which would, of course, call the bona fides of the entire FISA application into question).
Page has claimed publicly that he regularly briefed both the FBI and CIA about his dealings in Russia. According to the FBI, Page was targeted for recruitment by two Russian spies in 2013 who were subsequently prosecuted by the FBI. Page served as an FBI source in that investigation, during which the Russians repeatedly characterized Page as an “idiot” and not worth their time. The FBI cleared Carter Page of any wrongdoing in 2015 concerning the Russian spies. Yet the same FBI, knowing that the Russians considered Page an “idiot” and “not worth their time,” asked the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to credit Christopher Steele’s absurd assertion that in a deal negotiated by Carter Page, the Russians offered Page and other Trump associates a 19% stake in the state-owned oil company Rosneft, if Trump lifted sanctions against Russia.
While the Democrats argue that Page’s prior Russian involvement provides a basis for probable cause, independent of Christopher Steele, for a FISA warrant, the fact that the FBI cleared him in that prior case destroys that claim. The fact that Page has never subsequently been charged or attracted any significant interest from Robert Mueller also should tell you that the whole exercise was for a different purpose—using the fact of the surveillance and investigation to provide credibility for Christopher Steele’s black British lies to the news media about Donald Trump. The media reports, in turn, were heavily utilized by the Clinton campaign to discredit Donald Trump.
The Carter Page scandal is only one aspect of FISA abuse by the Obama Administration and the FBI. According to a heavily redacted report from the FISA Court itself released in April 2017, there were repeated and escalating abuses of FISA by Obama’s FBI and Justice Department. In December, Obama and crew substantially loosened the restrictions on receipt of raw surveillance intercepts, providing a cover and a defense to the leakers who attacked the Trump transition.
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