While the public has been led to believe that a Russian double agent was poisoned by Moscow as payback, evidence shows that he had ties to the author of the Trump/Russia dossier.
The post Gov’t Forcing Media to Suppress Bombshell Skripal Case Details, Effectively Changing the Story appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
The Queen of England has a pre-written speech prepared for the outbreak of World War 3. As tensions between Russia and the United Kingdom continue to flare, the Queen’s speech is sparking fears of a nuclear war.
An Austrailian news source, News.Com.Au, reported that some people already fear a nuclear war is more likely that during the Cold War era. The speech was prepared for her back in the 1980s. It was originally revealed in 2013, but no one paid much attention until now. The address was written in the event nuclear war does occur, and she needs to address the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth.
The speech was released by the government under the 30-year rule, and is reflective of the time it was written, with a “planned” broadcast date of March 4, 1983. It was drawn up as part of a wargaming exercise. The script for a hypothetical broadcast has the monarch describing the threat to the “brave country” as “greater” than any other in history. It also mentions the Queen’s son Prince Andrew, then in the Royal Navy. The speech, devised by Whitehall officials at one of the most fraught Cold War periods, was never recorded.
Although it was only a simulation, the text of the Queen’s address (written as if broadcast at midday on Friday 4 March 1983) seeks to prepare the country for the ordeal of World War III. According to the BBC, it starts off by referring to the Queen’s traditional Christmas address:
The horrors of war could not have seemed more remote as my family and I shared our Christmas joy with the growing family of the Commonwealth. Now, this madness of war is once more spreading through the world and our brave country must again prepare itself to survive against great odds.
I have never forgotten the sorrow and the pride I felt as my sister and I huddled around the nursery wireless set listening to my father’s [George VI’s] inspiring words on that fateful day in 1939 [at the start of the World War II].
Not for a single moment did I imagine that this solemn and awful duty would one day fall to me.
But whatever terrors lie in wait for us all, the qualities that have helped to keep our freedom intact twice already during this sad century will once more be our strength. My husband and I share with families up and down the land the fear we feel for sons and daughters, husbands and brothers who have left our side to serve their country.
My beloved son Andrew is at this moment in action with his unit and we pray continually for his safety and for the safety of all servicemen and women at home and overseas. It is this close bond of family life that must be our greatest defense against the unknown. If families remain united and resolute, giving shelter to those living alone and unprotected, our country’s will to survive cannot be broken.
As we strive together to fight off the new evil, let us pray for our country and men of goodwill wherever they may be. God Bless you all.
It’s a little eerie, to say the least, that the UK, now neck deep in tensions with Russia had prepared a Cold War speech for their Queen. The current crisis with Russia began on March 4, when former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found slumped on a bench in Salisbury, England. UK Prime Minister Theresa May claimed they had been poisoned by a nerve agent called Novichok, one of the world’s deadliest.
While the pair remains in hospital, their prognosis is grim. And more importantly, what continues to be missed by most mainstream media outlets is that Skripal had connections to the Trump dossier author, Christopher Steele. Skripal had a close relationship with an unnamed security consultant who worked for Christopher Steele’s Orbis Business Intelligence.
A new report by the YouTube channel X22 Report claims that the deep state may want NSA leaker, Edward Snowden. Apparently, Snowden may have information that could take them all down.
Dave from the X22 Report begins by stating the obvious: big tech giants such as YouTube have been taking down news channels that don’t align with the deep state’s brand of tyranny. But he says to watch for people to dump stocks as the Internet Bill of Rights (IBOR) becomes more widely accepted (the regulation of tech giants to stop censorship). Because once freedom is speech is allowed online again, all of the information can come out, and Snowden may have more that will cripple the deep state.
Christopher Steele, who was responsible for the infamous Trump dossier, was connected with the Russian double-agent and ex-spy who was poisoned along with his daughter, with a nerve agent. (The British government is blaming Moscow for the attempted assassination. Or “wet works” as Dave put it.)
Dave also says the media hasn’t the slightest idea of what to do with the news that Donald Trump has reached out to North Korea in an attempt to discuss denuclearization. But Trump continues to circumvent the deep state and the mainstream media.
“The corporate media doesn’t know what to do with all this. They’re out there saying ‘Trump is a madman, he’s gonna bring us to war. Trump is a madman, these peace talks are gonna bring us to war.’ They really don’t want to admit that we might have peace with North Korea because this is not part of their agenda. Their agenda is to go to war. That’s what they wanted all along. The thing that the corporate media doesn’t know, is that Trump has already met with Kim Jong-Un. The meeting already took place. The deal is already set. Everything is already done. How do we know this? Trump was in China at the Forbidden City. Met with Kim Jong-Un there; with China, Russia, and the rest. Already agreed that North Korea will disarm and discussed reunification.”
But one of the biggest revelations is about NSA leaker Edward Snowden. “CIA intelligence operatives want Snowden badly,” says Dave.
“They know where Snowden is…if they really wanted to arrest him, they would just go in and take him…Why are the clowns, CIA intelligence agencies after Snowden? Well, most likely, I think he has evidence on the deep state; certain individuals within the deep state. And maybe even information on 9/11. They’re saying there’s and 85% probability the Snowden has the Hillary Rodham Clinton video, the raw video. And people are speculating that this video is Hillary having sex with a child.”
There is a lot of speculation in this particular report, but it’s important to look at things from an alternative view. We could not verify that Trump has already made a deal with Kim Jong-Un, nor could we (obviously) verify what information Edward Snowden has that he hasn’t made public yet.
But what we can agree with Dave on is: “We’ve been lied to all this time, and they’re still lying to us.”
(CN Op-ed) — Jane Mayer of The New Yorker and Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks are the latest progressives to jump on the anti-Trump, pro-Russiagate bandwagon. They have made it crystal clear that, in Mayer’s words, they are not going to let Republicans, or anyone else, “take down the whole intelligence community,” by God. Odd? Nothing is too […]
Former British MI-6 Intelligence Officer Christopher Steele, who was paid $168,000 by Fusion GPS’ Glenn Simpson to write and promote the dossier funded by the Democratic National Committee was a no-show in a civil court case.
The multi-million dollar libel case has brought against Buzzfeed after the media outlet published the unverified disinformation dossier at Steele’s insistence. Steele was paid to promote the fake dossier among select journalists in a smear campaign against President Donald Trump.
According to reports from Fox News, Steele was a no-show Monday for a long-requested deposition in London. The news comes as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., have announced a criminal referral on Steele.
Evan Fray-Witzer, a Boston-based attorney representing Russian tech tycoon Aleksej Gubarev in multi-million dollar civil litigation, described Monday’s U.K. court actions to Fox News. “My understanding is that Mr. Steele’s lawyers spent a good deal of time arguing why they thought he (Steele) should not be required to sit for a deposition and that ultimately the court took the entire matter under advisement.” Gubarev is suing the British-based Steele’s company Orbis Business Intelligence because the dossier also smeared Gubarev’s companies which include XBT Holdings and Webzilla. The dossier claimed the companies used “botnets and port traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs and steal data.” Fray-Witzer said, “Certainly with respect to Mr. Gubarev, Webzilla and XBT there has never been a single scrap of evidence about them in the dossier.”
As Fox News has reported based upon a review of British court records, Steele promoted and met with five media outlets repeatedly between the spring and fall of 2016. At the same time, Steele was also meeting with the FBI in Rome, according to reports.
Records obtained and reviewed by Fox News from related civil ligitation in Florida reveal that Steele maintains that even showing up for a deposition would “implicate state secrets in London.” Fray-Witzer stressed in that hearing that the British government “has not asserted” Steele’s claims. The attorney has said Steele “is asserting he can’t speak about things. We have pointed out that he’s spoken to anyone who is willing to listen, every journalist, and the FBI.”
This report was originally published by Paul Joseph Watson at InfoWars.com
The FISA memo confirms that the FBI relied on the notorious and hyper-partisan Steele dossier to justify its surveillance of the Trump campaign.
The memo has now been declassified and made public and can be read below.
House Intelligence Committee Report On FISA Abuses by The Federalist on Scribd
“The political origins of the Steele dossier were known to senior DOJ and FBI officials, but excluded from the FISA applications,” according to the Washington Examiner.
The Steele dossier was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC via Fusion GPS.
“DOJ official Bruce Ohr met with Steele beginning in the summer of 2016 and relayed to DOJ information about Steele’s bias. Steele told Ohr that he, Steele, was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected president and was passionate about him not becoming president.”
Clip: First details on "the memo" reported by Catherine Herridge: pic.twitter.com/cuklrBlpHR
— johnny dollar (@johnnydollar01) February 2, 2018
The memo also reportedly details how, “Andrew McCabe confirmed that no FISA warrant would have been sought from the FISA Court without the Steele dossier information.”
The memo proves everything we’ve been saying. The Obama administration conspired with the Clinton campaign to abuse the power of government in an effort to to sabotage Trump’s campaign.
In addition, the entire “Russian collusion” narrative is a hoax based on this hyper-partisan scheme.
Reaction to the revelations are already rolling in.
The memo reveals a clear violation of @realDonaldTrump and his campaign personnel’s Constitutional rights, as well as an attempt to use the intelligence community to alter a Presidential election.
This is high treason and people need to be prosecuted. #MemoDay
— Julian Assange ⌛️ (@TheRealJuIian) February 2, 2018
That time when Comey lied under oath and said he "looked carefully" and found "no information" regarding Trump surveillance in FBI and DOJ-> pic.twitter.com/H2mSCo8MRf
— Joslyne Raquel (@joslyne_raquel) February 2, 2018
Can you imagine if the Bush FBI had done this to Obama? The maniacal outrage in the Media, Schumer at the mic demanding heads…
— Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) February 2, 2018
DNC / Clinton’s pay for Steele dossier.
Obama’s FBI approves warrant based on dossier without disclosing funding.
Dossier leaks to Yahoo, which reports on allegations.
Obama’s FBI uses this article in FISA warrant application without disclosing its from Steele.
Felonies!
— Mike Cernovich
(@Cernovich) February 2, 2018
The saddest thing about this memo is that the revelations aren"t even news to some of us
New media and even Trump were reporting this a year ago and MSM/special interests said it was a conspiracy theory
— William Craddick (@williamcraddick) February 2, 2018
Now it is clear to all. The claims about how the "Nunes" memo would destroy "national security" were lies. Classification stickers are used by bureaucrats trying to obtain "political security" for their cronies. https://t.co/agGUiTeI9T
— Julian Assange ⌛ (@JulianAssange) February 2, 2018
Adam Schiff"s week long fearmongering about the memo endangering national security, sources or methods has been proven to be a complete lie.
There"s literally nothing in there that does that.
He really is #FullofSchiff.#MemoDay
— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) February 2, 2018
FBI used articles planted by Fusion GPS to corroborate the Steele dossier compiled by Fusion GPS, which they then leaked to produce more stories. There was a bouncing ball between media/govt/media to create and weaponize the Russia collusion narrative. pic.twitter.com/AW8HAmfWNj
— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) February 2, 2018
This isn"t just circular reporting uncovered by the Nunes memo. This is full-fledged #FakeNews #MemoDay Why does MSM even want to spin this? Because they are implicated, they cannot admit fault. pic.twitter.com/FOxJlZnts4
— James O"Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) February 2, 2018
Clinton campaign working w/ a foreign govt to concoct a damaging nonsense dossier on Trump, giving it to the FBI to open an investigation on Trump is CLEARLY proof Trump was colluding with a foreign govt #MemoDay
— Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) February 2, 2018
Reminder: Steele claims his dossier was based on Kremlin intelligence sources
We now know the FBI took Kremlin and Hillary campaign information and used it to spy on Trump
— Jack Posobiec
Memo shows FISA court was misled by Comey, McCabe, Yates, and Rosenstein. Will Rosenstein be fired? Will he have to recuse himself, in the least? @RealDonaldTrump may have to act.
— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) February 2, 2018
So Obama’s government, the #DNC, and members of the #MSM all conspired to fix a presidential election by deceiving a secret court allowed to spy on American citizens? Russians couldn’t have done a better job destroying sacred American institutions than #Democrats have.
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) February 2, 2018
What in this memo were FBI top brass & Dems panicking all week about being revealed aside from their own hyper-partisan corruption? #MemoDay
— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) February 2, 2018
REMINDER: Dossier maker Fusion GPS has PAID JOURNALISTS.
The memo proves the FBI, media, and intelligence agents were complicit in creating fiction to spy on President Trump.
Collusion.
Bribery.
Treason.#LockThemUphttps://t.co/uOqQ7HUdEM
— Andrew Meyer (@TheAndrewMeyer) February 2, 2018
House Intel memo key point: The FBI"s Andrew McCabe confirmed to the committee that no FISA warrant would have been sought from the FISA Court without the Steele dossier information. Story posting soon.
— Byron York (@ByronYork) February 2, 2018
“It’s a disgrace what’s going on in our country, a lot of people should be ashamed of themselves,” President Trump commented moments ago.
This article will be updated as information becomes available.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large of Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com.
(ZHE) —The just released FISA memo accuses senior officials at the DOJ of inappropriately using biased opposition research into then-candidate Trump to obtain surveillance warrants on transition team members as part of the federal investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia. According to the document, information from the the so-called Steele dossier was “essential” to the acquisition of surveillance […]
As president Donald Trump left last night’s State of the Union address, he was caught on a hot mic moment that should send shivers down the spines of leftists and the deep state. The president said he would 100% release the FISA memo.
Representative Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) approached Trump as he exited the House chamber following the State the Union address, and asked him to “release the memo.” Trump responded. “Don’t worry, 100 percent,” the president said with a wave of his hand.
The exchange was caught by television cameras filming the president after he delivered the address. The president’s comments also come as Congress awaits his decision on whether he will allow members to release the memo to the public, a question that has sharply divided lawmakers along party lines.
Speculation as to when the White House will release the memo following a vote to make it public by GOP lawmakers on Monday night. Many are suggesting that Trump wants the news cycle to focus on his speech until at least Thursday before there is any movement on the release of the memo.
The five-day deadline in which the memo has to be released ends on Saturday night. According to Info Wars, the classified Department of Justice memo is suspected to contain evidence of illegal FBI and DOJ spying on the Trump campaign, possibly at the behest of Hillary Clinton. According to journalist Sara Carter, the memo is so “explosive” that it could lead to “the end of Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel investigation into President Trump and his associates.”
According to the Washington Post, a White House spokesman confirmed early Wednesday that the administration’s official position is now that Trump will release the memo to the public. The simple fact that the Democrats and the FBI want this memo kept secret certainly makes everyone want to see it more.
The memo is said to suggest that British ex-spy Christopher Steele, the author of a now-famous dossier alleging Trump has ties to Russian officials, provided bad information to the FBI. Steele’s dossier work was paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign, and Trump has denied the allegations in it.
The very basic fact is that the left desperately wants this memo to remain a secret. That means, it should be released so the people can see for themselves that the mainstream media and Democrats have been lying to them to manipulate public opinion.
[image: RTR30QON © Kevin Lamarque / Reuters ]
A previous article explained it contains information about the Justice Department, the FBI and fake Trump dossier – prepared for Hillary Clinton and the DNC by former UK MI6 intelligence operative Christopher Steele.
It makes spurious accusations without evidence, alleging misconduct and collusion between Trump, his campaign team and Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign – including phony accusations of Russian US election interference.
It reveals alleged abusive tactics by high-level US officials. According to the Daily Beast, it names “FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, along with former FBI Director James Comey.”
Many GOP lawmakers are calling for the memo’s release, spearheaded by House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes.
Undemocratic Dems want its contents suppressed. The Daily Beast said it “learned that Hill Republicans are gearing up to use an obscure parliamentary rule to release it.”
So-called Rule X, subsection 11(g) explains a process for releasing classified material even if the president objects.
It’s rarely invoked. Now’s the time to expose Russiagate wrongdoing and hold responsible parties accountable.
According to the Daily Beast, “(u)nder the rule, if a clash occurs between the House intelligence committee and the executive branch over keeping something secret, the president gets five days to deliver objections that cite a danger to national security posed by disclosure.”
“Should the dispute persist, the committee can vote to take the matter to the full House of Representatives to consider. The full House’s debate is to occur in secret, with a public vote determining the outcome.”
“The president, however, can simply decide on his own to declassify anything. And in Trump’s case, his spokesperson is on the record supporting declassification.”
On Tuesday, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said “(w)e certainly support full transparency. We believe that’s at the House intel committee to make that decision at this point.”
“It sounds like there are some members in the House that have some real concern about what’s in that memo and feel very strongly that the American public should be privy to see it.”
The Trump Justice Department opposes release, its top congressional liaison Stephen Boyd saying:
“(I)t would be extraordinarily reckless for the Committee to disclose such information publicly without giving the Department and the FBI the opportunity to review the memorandum and to advise the (House intelligence committee) of the risk of harm to national security and to ongoing investigations that could come from public release,” adding:
The DOJ is “unaware of any wrongdoing,” a comment smacking of coverup. It’s unclear how many GOP House members read the memo, maybe all of them by now, several expressing outrage about its contents, calling for its release.
Under the hashtag #releasethememo, GOP House member Mark Meadows tweeted:
“I read the classified memo from House Intel, outlining stunning info on the last administration’s FISA and surveillance abuses that should NEVER happen in America. The public should be able to view the same memo I did.”
Another referred to Obamagate. On Facebook, actor Clint Eastwood remarked that “(o)ne day we will realize that the Barack Obama presidency was the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the American people.”
He’s right. They’re all dirty rotten scoundrels, with attribution to the film by the same name.
Russiagate is a colossal scam. There’s plenty about Trump to criticize. Nothing suggests illegal or improper behavior between him, his campaign team and Russia. No Russian election hacking occurred.
Most #Releasethememo tweets are from ordinary Americans wanting it released, calling for accountability if evidence proves wrongdoing by government officials.
Discrediting it by undemocratic Dems and other Trump opponents by claiming Russian trolls are behind it is part of the coverup effort.
The memo is a potential bombshell. “Hill Democrats and former FBI officials say it’s a ploy to damage public confidence in the FBI and undermine Mueller’s investigation,” the Daily Beast reported, adding:
“Republicans, meanwhile, say the memo contains massively disturbing evidence of FBI wrongdoing.”
Given public disclosure about the memo’s existence and alleged wrongdoing it details, release isn’t certain but seems likely – either in full or redacted form.
The post Memo Detailing Russiagate Abuses Names High-Level US Officials appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.
Several months ago it emerged that the Republican sponsor behind the Fusion GPS Trump project was hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, a fact which surprised many who expected that John McCain would be the GOP mastermind looking for dirt in Trump"s past. However, a new and credible McCain trail has emerged in the annals of the "Trump Dossier" after the Washington Examiner reported that the House Intelligence Committee issued a subpoena to an associate of John McCain over his connection with the salacious dossier containing unverified allegations about Trump and his ties to Russia, which many speculate served as the illegitimate basis for FISA warrants against the Trump campaign - permitting the NSA to listen in on Trump"s phone calls - and which the president yesterday slammed as "bogus" and a "crooked Hillary pile of garbage."
In the latest twist, committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) wants to talk to David Kramer, a former State Department official and current senior fellow at the McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University, about his visit to London in November 2016. During his trip, at McCain"s request Kramer met with the dossier"s author, former British spy Christopher Steele, to view “the pre-election memoranda on a confidential basis,” according to court filings and to receive a briefing and a copy of the Trump dossier. Kramer then returned to the U.S. to give the document to McCain. McCain then took a copy of the dossier to the FBI"s then-director, James Comey. But the FBI already had the document; Steele himself gave the dossier to the bureau in installments, reportedly beginning in early July 2016.
David Kramer
While McCain, recovering in Arizona from treatments for cancer, has long refused to detail his actions regarding the dossier, his associate Kramer was interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee on Dec. 19. The new subpoena stems from statements Kramer made in that interview. In the session, the Washington Examiner reports, Kramer told House investigators that he knew the identities of the Russian sources for the allegations in Steele"s dossier. But when investigators pressed Kramer to reveal those names, he declined to do so.
Now, he is under subpoena which was issued Wednesday afternoon, and directs Kramer to appear again before House investigators on Jan. 11.
As the ongoing government probe slowly turns away from Trump"s "collusion" with the Russians and toward the FBI "insurance policy" to allegedly prevent Trump from becoming president by fabricating a narrative of Russian cooperation with the Trump, knowing Steele"s sources will be a critical part of the congressional dossier investigation:
"If one argues the document is unverified and never will be, it is critical to learn the identity of the sources to support that conclusion. If one argues the document is the whole truth, or largely true, knowing sources is equally critical."
There is another reason to know Steele"s sources, and that is to learn not just the origin of the dossier but its place in the larger Trump-Russia affair. As the WashEx adds, there is a belief among some congressional investigators that the Russians who provided information to Steele were using Steele to disrupt the American election as much as the Russians who distributed hacked Democratic Party emails. In some investigators" views, they are the two sides of the Trump-Russia project, both aimed at sowing chaos and discord in the American political system.
Still, investigators who favor this theory ask a sensible question: "It is likely that all the Russians involved in the attempt to influence the 2016 election were lying, scheing, Kremlin-linked, Putin-backed enemies of America – except the Russians who talked to Christopher Steele?"
On the other hand, the theory is still just a theory, for now... and as the Examiner"s Byron York correctly points out, to validate -or refute - it House investigators will seek Steele"s sources – and is why they will try to compel Kramer to talk.
Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,
The original question the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign was to answer was a simple one: Did he do it?
Did Trump, or officials with his knowledge, collude with Vladimir Putin’s Russia to hack the emails of John Podesta and the DNC, and leak the contents to damage Hillary Clinton and elect Donald Trump?
A year and a half into the investigation, and, still, no “collusion” has been found. Yet the investigation goes on, at the demand of the never-Trump media and Beltway establishment.
Hence, and understandably, suspicions have arisen.
Are the investigators after the truth, or are they after Trump?
Set aside the Trump-Putin conspiracy theory momentarily, and consider a rival explanation for what is going down here:
That, from the outset, Director James Comey and an FBI camarilla were determined to stop Trump and elect Hillary Clinton.
Having failed, they conspired to break Trump’s presidency, overturn his mandate and bring him down.
Essential to any such project was first to block any indictment of Hillary for transmitting national security secrets over her private email server. That first objective was achieved 18 months ago.
On July 5, 2016, Comey stepped before a stunned press corps to declare that, given the evidence gathered by the FBI, “no reasonable prosecutor” would indict Clinton. Therefore, that was the course he, Comey, was recommending.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch, compromised by her infamous 35-minute tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton — to discuss golf and grandkids — seconded Comey’s decision.
And so Hillary walked. Why is this suspicious?
First, whether or not to indict was a decision that belonged to the Department of Justice, not Jim Comey or the FBI. His preemption of Justice Department authority was astonishing.
Second, while Comey said in his statement that Hillary had been “extremely careless” with security secrets, in his first draft, Clinton was declared guilty of “gross negligence” — the precise language in the statute to justify indictment.
Who talked Comey into softening the language to look less than criminal? One man was FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, whose wife, Jill, a Virginia state senate candidate, received a munificent PAC contribution of $474,000 from Clinton family friend and big bundler Terry McAuliffe.
Also urging Comey to soften the fatal phrase “gross negligence” was key FBI agent Peter Strzok. In text messages to his FBI lover Lisa Page, Strzok repeatedly vented his detestation of the “idiot” Trump.
After one meeting with “Andy” (McCabe), Strzok told Page an “insurance policy” was needed to keep Trump out of the White House.
Also, it appears Comey began drafting his exoneration statement of Hillary before the FBI had even interviewed her. And when the FBI did, Hillary was permitted to have her lawyers present.
One need not be a conspiracy nut to conclude the fix was in, and a pass for Hillary wired from the get-go. Comey, McCabe, Strzok were not going to recommend an indictment that would blow Hillary out of the water and let the Trump Tower crowd waltz into the White House.
Yet, if Special Counsel Robert Mueller cannot find any Trump collusion with the Kremlin to tilt the outcome of the 2016 election, his investigators might have another look at the Clinton campaign.
For there a Russian connection has been established.
Kremlin agents fabricated, faked, forged, or found the dirt on Trump that was passed to ex-British MI6 spy Christopher Steele, and wound up in his “dirty dossier” that was distributed to the mainstream media and the FBI to torpedo Trump.
And who hired Steele to tie Trump to Russia?
Fusion GPS, the oppo research outfit into which the DNC and Clinton campaign pumped millions through law firm Perkins Coie.
Let’s review the bidding.
The “dirty dossier,” a mixture of fabrications, falsehoods and half-truths, created to destroy Trump and make Hillary president, was the product of a British spy’s collusion with Kremlin agents.
In Dec. 26’s Washington Times, Rowan Scarborough writes that the FBI relied on this Kremlin-Steele dossier of allegations and lies to base their decision “to open a counterintelligence investigation (of Trump).” And press reports “cite the document’s disinformation in requests for court-approved wiretaps.”
If this is true, a critical questions arises:
Has the Mueller probe been so contaminated by anti-Trump bias and reliance on Kremlin fabrications that any indictment it brings will be suspect in the eyes of the American people?
Director Comey has been fired. FBI No. 2 McCabe is now being retired under a cloud. Mueller’s top FBI investigator, Peter Strzok, and lover Lisa, have been discharged. And Mueller is left to rely upon a passel of prosecutors whose common denominator appears to be that they loathe Trump and made contributions to Hillary.
Attorney General Bobby Kennedy had his “Get Hoffa Squad” to take down Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. J. Edgar Hoover had his vendetta against Dr. Martin Luther King.
Is history repeating itself — with the designated target of an elite FBI cabal being the President of the United States?
Authored by Andrew McCarthy via National Review,
Clinton campaign propaganda appears to have triggered Obama administration spying on Trump’s campaign...
The FBI’s deputy director Andrew McCabe testified Tuesday at a marathon seven-hour closed-door hearing of the House Intelligence Committee.
According to the now-infamous text message sent by FBI agent Peter Strzok to his paramour, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, it was in McCabe’s office that top FBI counterintelligence officials discussed what they saw as the frightening possibility of a Trump presidency.
That was during the stretch run of the 2016 campaign, no more than a couple of weeks after they started receiving the Steele dossier — the Clinton campaign’s opposition-research reports, written by former British spy Christopher Steele, about Trump’s purportedly conspiratorial relationship with Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia.
Was it the Steele dossier that so frightened the FBI? I think so.
There is a great deal of information to follow. But let’s cut to the chase: The Obama-era FBI and Justice Department had great faith in Steele because he had previously collaborated with the bureau on a big case. Plus, Steele was working on the Trump-Russia project with the wife of a top Obama Justice Department official, who was personally briefed by Steele. The upper ranks of the FBI and DOJ strongly preferred Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, to the point of overlooking significant evidence of her felony misconduct, even as they turned up the heat on Trump. In sum, the FBI and DOJ were predisposed to believe the allegations in Steele’s dossier. Because of their confidence in Steele, because they were predisposed to believe his scandalous claims about Donald Trump, they made grossly inadequate efforts to verify his claims. Contrary to what I hoped would be the case, I’ve come to believe Steele’s claims were used to obtain FISA surveillance authority for an investigation of Trump.
There were layers of insulation between the Clinton campaign and Steele — the campaign and the Democratic party retained a law firm, which contracted with Fusion GPS, which in turn hired the former spy. At some point, though, perhaps early on, the FBI and DOJ learned that the dossier was actually a partisan opposition-research product. By then, they were dug in. No one, after all, would be any the wiser: Hillary would coast to victory, so Democrats would continue running the government; FISA materials are highly classified, so they’d be kept under wraps. Just as it had been with the Obama-era’s Fast and Furious and IRS scandals, any malfeasance would remain hidden.
The best laid schemes . . . gang aft agley.
Strzok’s text about the meeting in McCabe’s office is dated August 16, 2016. As we’ll see, the date is important. According to Agent Strzok, with Election Day less than three months away, Page, the bureau lawyer, weighed in on Trump’s bid: “There’s no way he gets elected.” Strzok, however, believed that even if a Trump victory was the longest of long shots, the FBI “can’t take that risk.” He insisted that the bureau had no choice but to proceed with a plan to undermine Trump’s candidacy: “It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”
The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that, “according to people familiar with his account,” Strzok meant that it was imperative that the FBI “aggressively investigate allegations of collusion between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia.” In laughable strawman fashion, the “people familiar with his account” assure the Journal that Strzok “didn’t intend to suggest a secret plan to harm the candidate.” Of course, no sensible person suspects that the FBI was plotting Trump’s assassination; the suspicion is that, motivated by partisanship and spurred by shoddy information that it failed to verify, the FBI exploited its counterintelligence powers in hopes of derailing Trump’s presidential run.
But what were these “allegations of collusion between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia” that the FBI decided to “aggressively investigate”? The Journal doesn’t say. Were they the allegations in the Steele dossier? That is a question I asked in last weekend’s column. It is a question that was pressed by Chairman Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) and Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee at Tuesday’s sealed hearing. As I explained in the column, the question is critical for three reasons:
(1) The Steele dossier was a Clinton campaign product. If it was used by the FBI and the Obama Justice Department to obtain a FISA warrant, that would mean law-enforcement agencies controlled by a Democratic president fed the FISA court political campaign material produced by the Democratic candidate whom the president had endorsed to succeed him. Partisan claims of egregious scheming with an adversarial foreign power would have been presented to the court with the FBI’s imprimatur, as if they were drawn from refined U.S. intelligence reporting. The objective would have been to spy on the opposition Republican campaign.
(2) In June of this year, former FBI director James Comey testified that the dossier was “salacious and unverified.” While still director, Comey had described the dossier the same way when he briefed President-elect Trump on it in January 2017. If the dossier was still unverified as late as mid 2017, its allegations could not possibly have been verified months earlier, in the late summer or early autumn of 2016, when it appears that the FBI and DOJ used them in an application to the FISA court.
(3) The dossier appears to contain misinformation. Knowing he was a spy-for-hire trusted by Americans, Steele’s Russian-regime sources had reason to believe that misinformation could be passed into the stream of U.S. intelligence and that it would be acted on — and leaked — as if it were true, to America’s detriment. This would sow discord in our political system. If the FBI and DOJ relied on the dossier, it likely means they were played by the Putin regime.
We do not have public confirmation that the dossier was, in fact, used by the bureau and the Justice Department to obtain the FISA warrant. Publicly, FBI and DOJ officials have thwarted the Congress with twaddle about protecting both intelligence sources and an internal inspector-general probe. Of course, Congress, which established and funds the DOJ and FBI, has the necessary security clearances to review classified information, has jurisdiction over the secret FISA court, and has independent constitutional authority to examine the activities of legislatively created executive agencies.
In any event, important reporting by Fox News’ James Rosen regarding Tuesday’s hearing indicates that the FBI did, in fact, credit the contents of the dossier. It appears, however, that the bureau corroborated few of Steele’s claims, and at an absurdly high level of generality — along the lines of: You tell me person A went to place X and committed a crime; I corroborate only that A went to X and blithely assume that because you were right about the travel, you must be right about the crime.
Here, the FBI was able to verify Steele’s claim that Carter Page, a very loosely connected Trump-campaign adviser, had gone to Russia. This was not exactly meticulous gumshoe corroboration: Page told many people he was going to Russia, saw many people while there, and gave a speech at a prominent Moscow venue. Having verified only the travel information, the FBI appears to have credited the claims of Steele’s anonymous Russian sources that Page carried out nigh-treasonous activities while in Russia.
How could something like this happen? Well, the FBI and DOJ liked and trusted Steele, for what seem to be good reasons. As the Washington Post has reported, the former MI-6 agent’s private intelligence firm, Orbis, was retained by England’s main soccer federation to investigate corruption at FIFA, the international soccer organization that had snubbed British bids to host the World Cup. In 2010, Steele delivered key information to the FBI’s organized-crime liaison in Europe. This helped the bureau build the Obama Justice Department’s most celebrated racketeering prosecution: the indictment of numerous FIFA officials and other corporate executives. Announcing the first wave of charges in May 2015, Attorney General Loretta Lynch made a point of thanking the investigators’ “international partners” for their “outstanding assistance.”
At the time, Bruce Ohr was the Obama Justice Department’s point man for “Transnational Organized Crime and International Affairs,” having been DOJ’s long-serving chief of the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section. He also wore a second, top-echelon DOJ hat: associate deputy attorney general. That made him a key adviser to the deputy attorney general, Sally Yates (who later, as acting attorney general, was fired for insubordinately refusing to enforce President Trump’s so-called travel ban). In the chain of command, the FBI reports to the DAG’s office.
To do the Trump-Russia research, Steele had been retained by the research firm Fusion GPS (which, to repeat, had been hired by lawyers for the Clinton campaign and the DNC). Fusion GPS was run by its founder, former Wall Street Journal investigative journalist Glenn Simpson. Bruce Ohr’s wife, Nellie, a Russia scholar, worked for Simpson at Fusion. The Ohrs and Simpson appear to be longtime acquaintances, dating back to when Simpson was a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center. In 2010, all three participated in a two-day conference on international organized crime, sponsored by the National Institute of Justice (see conference schedule and participant list, pp. 27–30). In connection with the Clinton campaign’s Trump-Russia project, Fusion’s Nellie Ohr collaborated with Steele and Simpson, and DOJ’s Bruce Ohr met personally with Steele and Simpson.
Manifestly, the DOJ and FBI were favorably disposed toward Steele and Fusion GPS. I suspect that these good, productive prior relationships with the dossier’s source led the investigators to be less exacting about corroborating the dossier’s claims.
But that is just the beginning of the bias story.
At a high level, the DOJ and FBI were in the tank for Hillary Clinton. In July 2016, shortly before Steele’s reports started floating in, the FBI and DOJ announced that no charges would be brought against Mrs. Clinton despite damning evidence that she mishandled classified information, destroyed government files, obstructed congressional investigations, and lied to investigators. The irregularities in the Clinton-emails investigation are legion: President Obama making it clear in public statements that he did not want Clinton charged; the FBI, shortly afterwards, drafting an exoneration of Clinton months before the investigation ended and central witnesses, including Clinton herself, were interviewed; investigators failing to use the grand jury to compel the production of key evidence; the DOJ restricting FBI agents in their lines of inquiry and examination of evidence; the granting of immunity to suspects who in any other case would be pressured to plead guilty and cooperate against more-culpable suspects; the distorting of criminal statutes to avoid applying them to Clinton; the sulfurous tarmac meeting between Attorney General Lynch and former President Clinton shortly before Mrs. Clinton was given a peremptory interview — right before then–FBI director Comey announced that she would not be charged.
The blatant preference for Clinton over Trump smacked of politics and self-interest. Deputy FBI director McCabe’s wife had run for the Virginia state legislature as a Democrat, and her (unsuccessful) campaign was lavishly funded by groups tied to Clinton insider Terry McAuliffe. Agent Strzok told FBI lawyer Page that Trump was an “idiot” and that “Hillary should win 100 million to 0.” Page agreed that Trump was “a loathsome human.” A Clinton win would likely mean Lynch — originally raised to prominence when President Bill Clinton appointed her to a coveted U.S. attorney slot — would remain attorney general. Yates would be waiting in the wings.
The prior relationships of trust with the source; the investment in Clinton; the certitude that Clinton would win and deserved to win, signified by the mulish determination that she not be charged in the emails investigation; the sheer contempt for Trump. This concatenation led the FBI and DOJ to believe Steele — to want to believe his melodramatic account of Trump-Russia corruption. For the faithful, it was a story too good to check.
The DOJ and FBI, having dropped a criminal investigation that undeniably established Hillary Clinton’s national-security recklessness, managed simultaneously to convince themselves that Donald Trump was too much of a national-security risk to be president.
As I noted in last weekend’s column, reports are that the FBI and DOJ obtained a FISA warrant targeting Carter Page (no relation to Lisa Page). For a time, Page was tangentially tied to the Trump campaign as a foreign-policy adviser — he barely knew Trump. The warrant was reportedly obtained after the Trump campaign and Page had largely severed ties in early August 2016. We do not know exactly when the FISA warrant was granted, but the New York Times and the Washington Post have reported, citing U.S. government sources, that this occurred in September 2016 (see here, here, and here). Further, the DOJ and FBI reportedly persuaded the FISA court to extend the surveillance after the first warrant’s 90-day period lapsed — meaning the spying continued into Trump’s presidency.
The FBI and DOJ would have submitted the FISA application to the court shortly before the warrant was issued. In the days-to-weeks prior to petitioning the court, the FISA application would have been subjected to internal review at the FBI — raising the possibility that FBI lawyer Page was in the loop reviewing the investigative work of Agent Strzok, with whom she was having an extramarital affair. There would also have been review at the Justice Department — federal law requires that the attorney general approve every application to the FISA court.
Presumably, these internal reviews would have occurred in mid-to-late August — around the time of the meeting in McCabe’s office referred to in Strzok’s text. Thus, we need to understand the relevant events before and after mid-to-late August. Here is a timeline.
June 2016
In June 2016, Steele began to generate the reports that collectively are known as the “dossier.”
In the initial report, dated June 20, 2016, Steele alleged that Putin’s regime had been “cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years.” (Steele’s reports conform to the FBI and intelligence-agency reporting practice of rendering names of interest in capital letters.) The Kremlin was said to have significant blackmail material that could be used against Trump.
In mid-to-late June 2016, according to Politico, Carter Page asked J. D. Gordon, his supervisor on the Trump campaign’s National Security Advisory Committee, for permission to go on a trip to Russia in early July. Gordon advised against it. Page then sent an email to Corey Lewandowski, who was Trump’s campaign manager until June 20, and Hope Hicks, the Trump campaign spokeswoman, seeking permission to go on the trip. Word came back to Page by email that he could go, but only in his private capacity, not as a representative of the Trump campaign. Lewandowski says he has never met Carter Page.
July 2016
Page, a top-of-the-class graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy with various other academic distinctions, traveled to Moscow for a three-day trip, the centerpiece of which was a July 7 commencement address at the New Economic School (the same institution at which President Obama gave a commencement address on July 7, 2009). The New York Times has reported, based on leaks from “current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials,” that Page’s July trip to Moscow “was a catalyst for the F.B.I. investigation into connections between Russia and President Trump’s campaign.” The Times does not say what information the FBI had received that made the Moscow trip such a “catalyst.”
Was it the Steele dossier?
Well, on July 19, Steele reported that, while in Moscow, Page had held secret meetings with two top Putin confederates, Igor Sechin and Igor Diveykin. Steele claimed to have been informed by “a Russian source close to” Sechin, the president of Russia’s energy conglomerate Rosneft, that Sechin had floated to Page the possibility of “US-Russia energy co-operation” in exchange for the “lifting of western sanctions against Russia over Ukraine.” Page was said to have reacted “positively” but in a manner that was “non-committal.”
Another source, apparently Russian, told Steele that “an official close to” Putin chief of staff Sergei Ivanov had confided to “a compatriot” that Igor Diveykin (of the “Internal Political Department” of Putin’s Presidential Administration) had also met with Page in Moscow. (Note the dizzying multiple-hearsay basis of this information.) Diveykin is said to have told Page that the regime had “a dossier of ‘kompromat’” — compromising information — on Hillary Clinton that it would consider releasing to Trump’s “campaign team.” Diveykin further “hinted (or indicated more strongly) that the Russian leadership also had ‘kompromat’ on TRUMP which the latter should bear in mind in his dealings with them.”
The hacked DNC emails were first released on July 22, shortly before the Democratic National Convention, which ran from July 25 through 28.
In “late July 2016,” Steele claimed to have been told by an “ethnic Russian close associate of . . . TRUMP” that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of co-operation” between “them” (apparently meaning Trump’s inner circle) and “the Russian leadership.” The conspiracy was said to be “managed on the TRUMP side by the Republican candidate’s campaign manager, Paul MANAFORT, who was using foreign policy adviser, Carter PAGE, and others as intermediaries.”
The same source claimed that the Russian regime had been behind the leak of DNC emails “to the WikiLeaks platform,” an operation the source maintained “had been conducted with the full knowledge and support of TRUMP and senior members of his campaign team.” As a quid pro quo, “the TRUMP team” was said to have agreed (a) “to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue,” and (b) to raise the failure of NATO nations to meet their defense commitments as a distraction from Russian aggression in Ukraine, “a priority for PUTIN who needed to cauterise the subject.”
Late July to Early August 2016
The Washington Post has reported that Steele’s reports were first transmitted “by an intermediary” to the FBI and other U.S. intelligence officials after the Democratic National Convention (which, to repeat, ended on July 28). The intermediary is not identified. We do not know if it was Fusion, though that seems likely given that Fusion shared its work with government and non-government entities. Steele himself is also said to have contacted “a friend in the FBI” about his research after the Democratic convention. As we’ve seen, Steele made bureau friends during the FIFA investigation.
August 2016
On August 11, as recounted in the aforementioned Wall Street Journal report, FBI agent Strzok texted the following message to FBI lawyer Page: “OMG I CANNOT BELIEVE WE ARE SERIOUSLY LOOKING AT THESE ALLEGATIONS AND THE PERVASIVE CONNECTIONS.” The Journal does not elaborate on what “allegations” Strzok was referring to, or the source of those allegations.
On August 15, Strzok texted Page about the meeting in deputy FBI director McCabe’s office at which it was discussed that the bureau “can’t take that risk” of a Trump presidency and needed something akin to an “insurance policy” even though Trump’s election was thought highly unlikely.
September 2016
Reporting indicates that sometime in September 2016, the DOJ and FBI applied to the FISA court for a warrant to surveil Carter Page, and that the warrant was granted.
Interestingly, on September 23, 2016, Yahoo’s Michael Isikoff reported on leaks he had received that the U.S. government was conducting an intelligence investigation to determine whether Carter Page, as a Trump adviser, had opened up a private communications channel with such “senior Russian officials” as Igor Sechin and Igor Diveykin to discuss lifting economic sanctions if Trump became president.
It is now known that Isikoff’s main source for the story was Fusion’s Glenn Simpson. Isikoff’s report is rife with allegations found in the dossier, although the dossier is not referred to as such; it is described as “intelligence reports” that “U.S. officials” were actively investigating — i.e., Steele’s reports were described in a way that would lead readers to assume they were official U.S. intelligence reports. But there clearly was official American government involvement: Isikoff’s story asserts that U.S. officials were briefing members of Congress about these allegations that Page was meeting with Kremlin officials on Trump’s behalf. The story elaborated that “questions about Page come amid mounting concerns within the U.S. intelligence community about Russian cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee.” Those would be the cyberattacks alleged — in the dossier on which Congress was being briefed — to be the result of a Trump-Russia conspiracy in which Page was complicit.
Isikoff obviously checked with his government sources to verify what Simpson had told him about the ongoing investigation that was based on these “intelligence reports.” His story recounts that “a senior U.S. law enforcement official” confirmed that Page’s alleged contacts with Russian officials were “on our radar screen. . . . It’s being looked at.”
After his naval career, Page worked in investing, including several years at Merrill Lynch in Moscow. As my column last weekend detailed, he has been an apologist for the Russian regime, championing appeasement for the sake of better U.S.–Russia relations. Page has acknowledged that, during his brief trip to Moscow in July 2016, he ran into some Russian government officials, among many old Russian friends and acquaintances. Yet he vehemently denies meeting with Sechin and Diveykin. (While Sechin’s name is well known to investors in the Russian energy sector, Page says that he has never met him and that he had never even heard Diveykin’s name until the Steele dossier was publicized in early 2017.) Furthermore, Page denies even knowing Paul Manafort, much less being used by Manafort as an intermediary between the Trump campaign and Russia. Page has filed a federal defamation lawsuit against the press outlets that published the dossier, has denied the dossier allegations in FBI interviews, and has reportedly testified before the grand jury in Robert Mueller’s special-counsel investigation.
Even though the FISA warrant targeting Page is classified and the FBI and DOJ have resisted informing Congress about it, some of its contents were illegally and selectively leaked to the Washington Post in April 2017 by sources described as “law enforcement and other U.S. officials.” According to the Post:
The government’s application for the surveillance order targeting Page included a lengthy declaration that laid out investigators’ basis for believing that Page was an agent of the Russian government and knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of Moscow, officials said.
Among other things, the application cited contacts that he had with a Russian intelligence operative in New York City in 2013, officials said. Those contacts had earlier surfaced in a federal espionage case brought by the Justice Department against the intelligence operative and two other Russian agents. In addition, the application said Page had other contacts with Russian operatives that have not been publicly disclosed, officials said.
I’ve emphasized that last portion because it strongly implies that the FISA application included information from the Steele dossier. That is, when the Post speaks of Page’s purported “other contacts with Russian operatives that have not been publicly disclosed,” this is very likely a reference to the meetings with Sechin and Diveykin that Page denies having had — the meetings described in the dossier. Do not be confused by the fact that, by the time of this Post report, the Steele-dossier allegations had already been disclosed to the public by BuzzFeed (in January 2017). The Post story is talking about what the DOJ and FBI put in the FISA application back in September 2016. At that time, the meetings alleged in the dossier had not been publicly disclosed.
First: The FISA application’s reliance on 2013 events as a basis for suspicion in 2016 that Page was a foreign agent of Russia is curious. The 2013 investigation involved Russian intelligence operatives who were trying to recruit business people, such as Page, as sources — i.e., Page was being approached by Russia, not acting on Russia’s behalf. In the 2013 investigation, Page met with a Russian agent, whom he apparently did not realize was an agent. They met at an energy symposium in New York and Page did networking-type things: exchanging contact information and providing his jejune assessment of the energy sector’s prospects. The Russian agent described Page as an “idiot” in a recorded conversation. According to Page, he cooperated with the FBI and helped prosecutors in the case against one of the suspects — claims that the government could easily disprove if he is lying.
Second: In reporting on the FISA warrant that targeted Page, the Washington Post asserted that “an application for electronic surveillance under [FISA] need not show evidence of a crime.” That is not accurate.
Under federal surveillance law (sec. 1801 of Title 50, U.S. Code), the probable-cause showing the government must make to prove that a person is an agent of a foreign power is different for Americans than for aliens. If the alleged agent is an alien, section 1801(b)(1) applies, and this means that no crime need be established; the government need only show that the target is acting on behalf of a foreign power in the sense of abetting its clandestine anti-American activities.
By contrast, if the alleged agent is an American citizen, such as Page, section 1801(b)(2) applies: The government must show not only that the person is engaged in clandestine activities on behalf of a foreign power but also that these activities (1) “involve or may involve a violation of the criminal statutes of the United States”; (2) involve the preparation for or commission of sabotage or international terrorism; (3) involve using a false identity to enter or operate in the United States on behalf of a foreign power; or (4) involve conspiring with or aiding and abetting another person in the commission of these criminal activities. All of these involve evidence of a crime.
The only known suspicions about Page that have potential criminal implications are the allegations in the dossier, which potentially include hacking, bribery, fraud, and racketeering — if Russia were formally considered an enemy of the United States, they would include treason. The FBI always has information we do not know about. But given that Page has not been accused of a crime, and that the DOJ and FBI would have to have alleged some potential criminal activity to justify a FISA warrant targeting the former U.S. naval intelligence officer, it certainly seems likely that the Steele dossier was the source of this allegation.
In conclusion, while there is a dearth of evidence to date that the Trump campaign colluded in Russia’s cyberespionage attack on the 2016 election, there is abundant evidence that the Obama administration colluded with the Clinton campaign to use the Steele dossier as a vehicle for court-authorized monitoring of the Trump campaign — and to fuel a pre-election media narrative that U.S. intelligence agencies believed Trump was scheming with Russia to lift sanctions if he were elected president. Congress should continue pressing for answers, and President Trump should order the Justice Department and FBI to cooperate rather than — what’s the word? — resist.
Authored by Alex Christoforou via The Duran,
The Russiagate story concocted by Hillary Clinton and the DNC, who coincidently funded Fusion GPS (the firm behind the ‘Trump dossier’ that the entire Russia election meddling is based upon), is unraveling at record speed.
Mary Jacoby, the wife of Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, who is the man in the middle of the entire Russiagate scandal, boasted on Facebook about how ‘Russiagate,’ would not exist if it weren’t for her husband.
Tablet Magazine reports…
A Tablet investigation using public sources to trace the evolution of the now-famous dossier suggests that central elements of the Russiagate scandal emerged not from the British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s top-secret “sources” in the Russian government—which are unlikely to exist separate from Russian government control—but from a series of stories that Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and his wife Mary Jacoby co-wrote for TheWall Street Journal well before Fusion GPS existed, and Donald Trump was simply another loud-mouthed Manhattan real estate millionaire. Understanding the origins of the “Steele dossier” is especially important because of what it tells us about the nature and the workings of what its supporters would hopefully describe as an ongoing campaign to remove the elected president of the United States.
...
In a Facebook post from June 24, 2017, that Tablet has seen in screenshots, Jacoby claimed that her husband deserves the lion’s share of credit for Russiagate. (She has not replied to repeated requests for comment.)
“It’s come to my attention that some people still don’t realize what Glenn’s role was in exposing Putin’s control of Donald Trump,” Jacoby wrote. “Let’s be clear. Glenn conducted the investigation. Glenn hired Chris Steele. Chris Steele worked for Glenn.”
This assertion is hardly a simple assertion of family pride; it goes directly to the nature of what became known as the “Steele dossier,” on which the Russiagate narrative is founded.
The Gateway Pundit reports that the news of the Facebook post comes amid heightened scrutiny for the opposition research firm.
According to Fox News reporter Jake Gibson, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has called on a senior Justice Department attorney to look into appointing a special counsel to investigate recently demoted official Bruce Ohr’s contacts with Fusion GPS.
“Sessions on calls for a special counsel to look into Sr DOJ Official Bruce Ohr, and wife Nellie’s contacts with Fusion GPS during the summer and fall of 2016: I’ve put a Senior Attorney, with the resources he may need, to review cases in our office and make a recommendation to me, if things aren’t being pursued that need to be pursued, if cases may need more resources to complete in a proper manner, and to recommend to me if the standards for a special counsel are met, and the recommended one should be established,” tweeted Fox News reporter Jake Gibson on Tuesday.
Fox News‘ James Rosen and Jake Gibson recently reported the wife of Justice Department official Bruce G. Ohr worked for the opposition research firm during the 2016 presidential election.
Fox News reports…
Contacted by Fox News, investigators for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) confirmed that Nellie H. Ohr, wife of the demoted official, Bruce G. Ohr, worked for the opposition research firm last year. The precise nature of Mrs. Ohr’s duties – including whether she worked on the dossier – remains unclear but a review of her published works available online reveals Mrs. Ohr has written extensively on Russia-related subjects. HPSCI staff confirmed to Fox News that she was paid by Fusion GPS through the summer and fall of 2016.
In a statement to Fox News, a Justice Department spokesperson noted that…
“It is unusual for anyone to wear two hats as he has done recently. This person is going to go back to a single focus - director of our organized crime and drug enforcement unit. As you know, combatting transnational criminal organizations and drug trafficking is a top priority for the Attorney General.”
After Eight Hours Of Testimony And More Scheduled For Thursday, Congressional investigators tell Fox News that Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe dodged questions on the "Trump-Russia" dossier, and his testimony "contained numerous conflicts with the testimony of previous witnesses" so much that the House Intelligence Committee is planning to issue new subpoenas next week to Justice Department and FBI Personnel.
While HPSCI staff would not confirm who will be summoned for testimony, all indications point to demoted DOJ official Bruce G. Ohr and FBI General Counsel James A. Baker, who accompanied McCabe, along with other lawyers, to Tuesday’s HPSCI session. -Fox News
“It’s hard to know who’s telling us the truth,” said one House investigator after McCabe’s questioning - which was reportedly spearheaded by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC).
FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe
Individuals thought to be on the new subpoena list include demoted DOJ official Bruce Orr and FBI General Counsel James A. Baker. Notably absent, however, is Peter Strzok - the veteran counterintelligence agent in charge of both the Hillary Clinton email "matter" and the early Trump-Russia investigation who sent anti-Trump text messages to his mistress.
McCabe was described as a "friendly witness" to Democrats in the room, who tried to enlist McCabe in building a case against President Trump for obstruction of justice. "If he could have, he would have" said one witness in the closed door session.
When asked about how hard the FBI worked to verify the anti-Trump "dossier," McCabe stood by its credibility - despite the FBI"s unwillingness to pay former MI6 spy Christopher Steele an agreed upon $50,000 if he could verify the claims in the document which relied on senior Kremlin officials.
Per the New York Times
The agent said that if Mr. Steele could get solid corroboration of his reports, the F.B.I. would pay him $50,000 for his efforts, according to two people familiar with the offer.
Ultimately, he was not paid.
When asked about funding for the dossier, McCabe claimed he could not recall whether or not the Clinton campaign and the DNC funded the report - despite the alleged existence of documents which McCabe signed establishing his knowledge of its financing and provenance.
Curiously, ahead of McCabe"s Thursday appearance in front of the House Judiciary Committee for a "transcribed interview," the DOJ has announced that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe "will not be in a position to discuss matters that are within the scope of the investigation of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III."
Dep FBI Dir McCabe to appear before Hse Judiciary Cmte Thursday in classified setting for a "transcribed interview." DoJ tells cmte "McCabe will not be in a position to discuss matters that are within the scope of the investigation of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III.”
— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) December 20, 2017
The news comes a week after McCabe canceled a previously scheduled testimony after a Fox News report that the wife of Senior DOJ official Bruce Ohr worked for Fusion GPS, the company which created the Trump-Russia dossier.
Perhaps McCabe revealed too much to the House Intelligence Committee - because it appears the Judiciary Committee won"t be able to ask McCabe questions such as whether or not the FBI launched their Russia investigation based on the unverified Fusion GPS "Trump-Russia" dossier, which was funded in part by Hillary Clinton and the DNC and was created with the cooperation of high level Kremlin officials.
Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, Bruce Ohr, Nellie Ohr
If McCabe can"t talk about the genesis of the Trump-Russia investigation, it likely also means there will be no discussion of the anti-Trump text messages sent by the lead FBI investigator on both the Clinton email probe and the Trump-Russia investigation to his mistress - which includes the infamous "Insurance Policy" text.
Does this also mean the Clinton email investigation is off limits due to Peter Strzok"s involvement?
Was McCabe allowed to discuss his potential hatch act violation?
Perhaps little birds in the House Judiciary Committee will relay the details of tomorrow"s testimony to Fox News and we"ll be all the wiser.
