Tag Archives: Trump Dossier

Christopher Steele: The Real Foreign Influence in the 2016 Election?, by Peter Van Buren

Posted on February 16, 2018 | Leave a comment

How an intelligence disinformation campaign works. From Peter Van Buren at theamericanconservative.com:

His dossier was more than opposition research, it was part of a full-spectrum information operation.

Christopher Steele (Screen grab/CBSN)

Leaving aside the validity of what has become known as the “Steele dossier,” it’s important to look at how Christopher Steele was able to guarantee that the information in it would play a significant and ongoing role in American politics.

Steele, who is British, did far more than simply provide opposition research to the Democratic National Committee. He was able to make sure it reached the most influential people possible in politics, media and government to shape and influence the growing narrative of the 2016 presidential election. In other words, as a skilled professional intelligence officer, Steele ran a full-spectrum information operation against the United States. One could even call it information warfare.

This is what separates his work creating the dossier  (which a decent journalist with friends in Russia could have done) from his work insinuating the dossier into the highest reaches of American government and political society. For that, you need a real pro, an intelligence officer with decades of experience running just that kind of operation. Looking for foreign interference in the 2016 election? Let’s take a closer look at Christopher Steele.

Steele’s skill is revealed by the now familiar Nunes and Grassley memos, which show he used the same set of information in the dossier to create a collaboration loop, every intelligence officer’s dream, which is his own planted information used to surreptitiously confirm itself, right up to the point where the target country’s own intelligence service re-purposed it as evidence in the FISA (Foreign Intelligence  Surveillance Act) court.

Steele admits he briefed journalists off-the-record starting in summer and autumn 2016. His most significant hit came when in September 2016, journalist Michael Isikoff broke the story of Trump associate Carter Page’s alleged connections to Russia. Isikoff did not cite the dossier or Steele as sources, and in fact denied they were when questioned.

 

To continue reading: Christopher Steele: The Real Foreign Influence in the 2016 Election?

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How the Establishment Undermines American Democracy, by Philip M. Giraldi

Posted on January 22, 2018 | Leave a comment

Federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies have become partisan political actors. From Philip M. Giraldi at strategic-culture.org:

There is a growing consensus among many observers in Washington that the national security agencies have become completely politicized over the past seventeen years and are now pursuing selfish agendas that actually endanger what remains of American democracy. Up until recently it has been habitual to refer to such activity as the Deep State, which is perhaps equivalent to the Establishment in that it includes financial services, the media, major foundations and constituencies, as well as lobbying groups, but we are now witnessing an evolutionary process in which the national security regime is exercising power independently.

In a devastating critique former Central Intelligence Agency operations officer John Kiriakou has described how the Democratic Party, as part of its frenzied effort to bring down President Donald Trump, has embraced a whole group of former intelligence and law enforcement officers who appear to be on the same side in seeking a more responsible and accountable executive branch but who are in reality pursuing their own agenda.

Formerly intelligence and law enforcement agencies acted under the direction of the White House but without any political bias. Transitions from Democratic to Republican administrations were consequently seamless for the employees of CIA, FBI, DIA and the NSA, but this has changed. In the 2016 election a line-up of retired senior officers from those organizations openly supported the Clinton campaign and even went so far as to construct elaborate conspiracy theories regarding Trump and his associates, including the claim that Donald Trump is actually an agent of Russia.

The desire to discredit and ultimately delegitimize Trump even involved some active duty senior officers, including John Brennan, Director of CIA, who exploited Agency relationships with foreign intelligence services to develop information on Trump, and James Comey of the FBI who initiated an investigation of Trump’s associates. Both were involved in the later surfacing of the notorious Steele Dossier, a collection of fact mixed with fiction that sought to destroy the Trump presidency even before it began.

To continue reading: How the Establishment Undermines American Democracy

 

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Did Christopher Steele Write His Dossier, or Did a Russian Associate? by Joe Gilbert and Jack Cashill

Posted on January 20, 2018 | Leave a comment

One little-noted and incongrous aspect of Christopher Steele’s Trump Dossier is how poorly it’s written, especially for a guy who went to Cambridge. From Joe Gilbert and Jack Cashill at lewrockwell.com:

Among the few givens in the unfolding drama of alleged Russia-Trump collusion is that former MI6 intelligence officer Christopher Steele wrote the Donald Trump-Russia dossier, alternately known as the “Steele Dossier.”

This is the notorious document that purports to detail “Republican candidate Donald Trump’s activities in Russia and compromising relationship with the Kremlin.”

The above quote is from the subhead of the document, titled “Company Intelligence Report 2016/080.”  Yet the same subhead hints at a disturbing pattern evident throughout the document: it appears to be written by someone whose native language is something other than English.

The phrase should read, “Republican candidate Donald Trump’s activities in Russia and his compromising relationship with the Kremlin.”  As shall be seen, it is hard to believe that Christopher Steele actually wrote the original phrase or much of the rest of the eponymous dossier.

Christopher Steele, or “Chris Steele,” as he bylined his reporting, attended Cambridge University and wrote for the student publication, Varsity.  At Cambridge, he also served as president of the Cambridge Union Society, a debating club.

Contemporaries remember him as an “avowedly [l]eft-wing student with CND credentials.”  CND is shorthand for “Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament,” a British organization that was particularly active when Steele arrived at Cambridge in the early 1980s.  At the time, MI5 monitored CND for its reported communist ties.

As the British Guardian observed in an article on Steele, “Cambridge had produced some of MI6’s most talented cold war officials.  A few of them, it turned out – to great embarrassment – had secret second jobs with the KGB.”  But this is a story for another day.

The story for today is how a Cambridge journalist and debater could write a sentence like the following: “Alpha held ‘kompromat’ on Putin and his corrupt business activities from the 1990s whilst although not personally overly bothered by Alpha’s failure to reinvest the proceeds of its TNK oil company sale into the Russian economy since, the Russian president was able to use pressure on this count from senior Kremlin colleagues as a lever on Fridman and AVEN to make them do his political bidding.”

To continue reading: Did Christopher Steele Write His Dossier, or Did a Russian Associate?

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A Bombshell House Intelligence report exposing extensive FISA abuse could lead to the removal of senior government officials, by Sara Carter

Posted on January 19, 2018 | 4 comments

It remains to be seen if the intelligence report matches the billing in the headline, because it’s only been released to House members. So take it with a grain of salt until it’s released to the public, if it is released to the public. From Sara Carter at saracarter.com:

A review of a classified document outlining what is described as extensive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse was made available to all House members Thursday and the revelations could lead to the removal of senior officials in the FBI and Department of Justice, several sources with knowledge of the document stated. These sources say the report is “explosive,” stating they would not be surprised if it leads to the end of Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel investigation into President Trump and his associates.

The House Intelligence Committee passed the motion along party lines Thursday to make the classified report alleging extensive ‘FISA Abuse’ related to the controversial dossier available to all House members. The report contains information regarding the dossier that alleges President Trump and members of his team colluded with the Russians in the 2016 presidential election. Some members of the House viewed the document in a secure room Thursday.

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., offered the motion on Thursday to make the Republican majority-authored report available to the members.

“The document shows a troubling course of conduct and we need to make the document available, so the public can see it,” said a senior government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the document. “Once the public sees it, we can hold the people involved accountable in a number of ways.”

The government official said that after reading the document “some of these people should no longer be in the government.”

The document also apparently outlines “several problematic” issues with how FISA warrants were “packaged, and used” state several sources with knowledge of the report.

Over the past year, whistleblowers in the law enforcement and intelligence community have revealed to Congress what they believe to be extensive abuse with regard to FISA surveillance, as previously reported. 

To continue reading: A Bombshell House Intelligence report exposing extensive FISA abuse could lead to the removal of senior government officials

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WSJ Calls For End To Trump Dossier “Silly Season” – Declassify It & Let The Public Decide, by Kimberley Strassel

Posted on January 14, 2018 | Leave a comment

We may be on the verge of getting the full story on Fusion GPS’s Trump Dossier. It’s about time. From Kimberley Strassel at the Wall Street Journal via zerohedge.com:

Congress should work quickly to declassify documents and let the public decide…

There’s no such thing as a coincidence in Washington, so why the sudden, furious effort by Democrats and the media to give cover to the Steele dossier? As in, the sudden, furious effort that happens to coincide with congressional investigators’ finally being given access to FBI records about the Trump-Russia probe.

This scandal’s pivotal day was Jan. 3. That’s the deadline House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes gave the Federal Bureau of Investigation to turn over documents it had been holding for months. Speaker Paul Ryan backed Mr. Nunes’s threat to cite officials for contempt of Congress. Everyone who played a part in encouraging the FBI’s colonoscopy of the Trump campaign – congressional Democrats, FBI and Justice Department senior career staff, the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama political mobs, dossier commissioner Fusion GPS, the press corps – knew about the deadline and clearly had been tipped to the likelihood that the FBI would have to comply. Thus the dossier rehabilitation campaign.

Weeks before, the same crew had taken a desperate shot at running away from the dossier, with a New York Times special that attempted to play down its significance in the FBI probe. You can see why. In the year since BuzzFeed published the salacious dossier, we’ve discovered it was a work product of the Clinton campaign, commissioned by an oppo-research firm (Fusion), compiled by a British ex-spook on the basis of anonymous sources, and rolled out to the media in the runup to the election. Oh, and it appears to continue to be almost entirely false. When the best you’ve got is that a campaign orbiter made a public trip to Russia, you haven’t got much.

But with Congress about to obtain documents that show the dossier did matter, it was time for a new line. And so the day before the Nunes deadline, Fusion co-founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch broke their public silence to explain in a New York Times op-ed that what really matters was their noble intention – to highlight Donald Trump’s misdeeds. The duo took credit for alerting the “national security community” to a Russian “attack.”

To continue reading: WSJ Calls For End To Trump Dossier “Silly Season” – Declassify It & Let The Public Decide

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The Times Rides to Mueller’s Rescue, by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted on January 3, 2018 | Leave a comment

Patrick Buchanan eviscerates the NY Times recent attempt to “explain” why the FBI opened an investigation in July 2016 into the Trump campaign. From Buchanan at buchanan.org:

What caused the FBI to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign in July 2016, which evolved into the criminal investigation that is said today to imperil the Trump presidency?

As James Comey’s FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller have, for 18 months, failed to prove Donald Trump’s “collusion” with the Kremlin, what was it, in mid-2016, that justified starting this investigation?

What was the basis for the belief Trump was colluding, that he was the Manchurian candidate of Vladimir Putin? What evidence did the FBI cite to get FISA court warrants to surveil and wiretap Trump’s team?

Republican congressmen have for months been demanding answers to these questions. And, as Mueller’s men have stonewalled, suspicions have arisen that this investigation was, from the outset, a politicized operation to take down Trump.

Feeding those suspicions has been the proven anti-Trump bias of investigators. Also, wiretap warrants of Trump’s team are said to have been issued on the basis of a “dirty dossier” that was floating around town in 2016 — but which mainstream media refused to publish as they could not validate its lurid allegations.

Who produced the dossier?

Ex-British spy Christopher Steele, whose dirt was delivered by ex-Kremlin agents. And Steele was himself a hireling of Fusion GPS, the oppo research outfit enlisted and paid by the Clinton campaign and DNC.

Writes the Washington Times, Steele “paid Kremlin sources with Democratic cash.”

Yet, if Steele’s dossier is a farrago of falsehoods and fake news, and the dossier’s contents were used to justify warrants for wiretaps on Trump associates, Mueller has a problem.

Prosecutions his team brings could be contaminated by what the FBI did, leaving his investigation discredited.

Fortunately, all this was cleared up for us New Year’s Eve by a major revelation in The New York Times. Top headline on page one:

“Unlikely Source Propelled Russia Meddling Inquiry”

The story that followed correctly framed the crucial question:

“What so alarmed American officials to provoke the FBI to open a counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign months before the presidential election?”

The Times then gave us the answer we have been looking for:

“It was not, as Trump and other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign. Instead it was firsthand information from one of America’s closest intelligence allies.”

To continue reading: The Times Rides to Mueller’s Rescue

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As the Dossier Scandal Looms, the New York Times Struggles to Save Its Collusion Tale, by Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted on January 2, 2018 | Leave a comment

Admit it, it’s fun watching the New York Times flounder. From Andrew C. McCarthy at nationalreview.com:

The totality of the evidence undermines the Times’ collusion narrative.

‘ Trump Adviser’s Visit to Moscow Got the F.B.I.’s Attention.” That was the page-one headline the New York Times ran on April 20, 2017, above its breathless report that “a catalyst for the F.B.I. investigation into connections between Russia and President Trump’s campaign” was a June 2016 visit to Moscow by Carter Page.

It was due to the Moscow trip by Page, dubbed a “foreign policy adviser” to the campaign, that “the F.B.I. obtained a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court” in September — i.e., during the stretch run of the presidential campaign.

You’re to be forgiven if you’re feeling dizzy. It may not be too much New Year’s reverie; it may be that you’re reeling over the Times’ holiday-weekend volte-face: “How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt.”

Seven months after throwing Carter Page as fuel on the collusion fire lit by then-FBI director James Comey’s stunning public disclosure that the Bureau was investigating possible Trump campaign “coordination” in Russia’s election meddling, the Gray Lady now says: Never mind. We’re onto Collusion 2.0, in which it is George Papadopoulos — then a 28-year-old whose idea of résumé enhancement was to feign participation in the Model U.N. — who triggered the FBI’s massive probe by . . . wait for it . . . a night of boozy blather in London.

What’s going on here?

Well, it turns out the Page angle and thus the collusion narrative itself is beset by an Obama-administration scandal: Slowly but surely, it has emerged that the Justice Department and FBI very likely targeted Page because of the Steele dossier, a Clinton-campaign opposition-research screed disguised as intelligence reporting. Increasingly, it appears that the Bureau failed to verify Steele’s allegations before the DOJ used some of them to bolster an application for a spying warrant from the FISA court (i.e., the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court).

To continue reading: As the Dossier Scandal Looms, the New York Times Struggles to Save Its Collusion Tale

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Crisis for Mueller: Lindsey Graham calls for new Special Counsel to investigate Trump Dossier and FBI, by Alexander Mercouris

Posted on January 1, 2018 | Leave a comment

Lindsey Graham, no friend of President Trump, wants a special counsel to investigate the Trump Dossier. From Alexander Mercouris at theduran.com:

Strong Republican critic of Donald Trump ‘dismayed’ by confidential information about the Trump Dossier he has seen

Senator Lindsey Graham, previously one of President Trump’s most trenchant critics who back in July 2017 actually proposed a law to prohibit President Trump from firing Special Counsel Robert Mueller, has now made the extent of his disillusionment with the FBI’s conduct and with the whole Russiagate investigation crystal clear.

In an interview with Fox News Lindsey Graham says that after having reviewed confidential information about the Trump Dossier provided at the insistence of Congressional investigators he is filled with dismay and believes that a new Special Counsel must be appointed to investigate the FBI’s conduct and the Trump Dossier.

Here is how Byron York of the Washington Examiner reports Lindsey Graham’s comments

I’ve spent some time in the last couple of days, after a lot of fighting with the Department of Justice, to get the background on the dossier, and here’s what I can tell your viewers: I’m very disturbed about what the Department of Justice did with this dossier, and we need a special counsel to look into that, because that’s not in Mueller’s charter. And what I saw, and what I’ve gathered in the last couple of days, bothers me a lot, and I’d like somebody outside DOJ to look into how this dossier was handled and what they did with it.

Host Brian Kilmeade asked Graham, “So, you’ve found out something you did not know?

“Yes,” Graham answered.

Kilmeade asked whether Graham was disturbed by the contents of the dossier or how the Justice Department used it in the Trump-Russia investigation.

“I’ve been a lawyer most of my life, a prosecutor, and a defense attorney,” Graham began. He continued:

And the one thing I can say, every prosecutor has a duty to the court to disclose things that are relevant to the request. So any time a document is used to go to court, for legal reasons, I think the Department of Justice owes it to the court to be up-and-up about exactly what this document is about, who paid for it, who’s involved, what their motives might be. And I can just say this: After having looked at the history of the dossier, and how it was used by the Department of Justice, I’m really very concerned, and this cannot be the new normal.

(bold italics added)

To continue reading: Crisis for Mueller: Lindsey Graham calls for new Special Counsel to investigate Trump Dossier and FBI

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How Obama and Hillary Clinton Weaponized the ‘Dossier’, by George Szamuely

Posted on November 4, 2017 | 1 comment

This is a very good account of the down and dirty of the Trump dossier, and there was a lot of down and a lot of dirty. From George Szamuely at ronpaulinstitute.org:

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The Trump-Russia collusion story was a joint invention of the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign. It enabled the Obama administration to make use of the nation’s security and intelligence services to spy on Trump and his associates and to use whatever information they thereby gleaned to try to get Hillary into the White House. The failure of the scheme didn’t stop either Obama or the Clintons. Following the election debacle, an enraged Obama administration sought vengeance by disseminating the dossier as widely as possible with a view to undermining the incoming Trump administration and to ensuring that no rapprochement with Russia would be possible. In doing so, Obama and Clinton have thrown American politics into turmoil and have perhaps pushed the United States and Russia toward armed confrontation.

We have known the basic outlines of the Steele dossier story since January. The Steele dossier, we have been told, started off as a piece of opposition research prepared by Fusion GPS and financed by a Republican rival of Trump’s or perhaps a GOP NeverTrumper. Following Trump’s victory in the GOP primaries, the Democrats took over its funding. Fusion hired Christopher Steele, a former head of the Russia desk at MI6 who now ran his own corporate intelligence firm, Orbis Business Intelligence. Using the leads Steele had developed during his years at MI6, he reported back to his paymasters his shocking discovery: The Russians had been cultivating Trump for years in preparation for his run for the presidency. So shocked was Steele by this that he rushed to alert the FBI, MI6 and even select reporters.

Most of this story is pure fiction. Neither the GOP nor a primary rival of Trump’s had any involvement with the dossier. To be sure, in October 2015, the Washington Free Beacon, a neo-conservative Web site funded by hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, did hire Fusion to undertake opposition research on Trump. However, money for this undertaking dried up by May 2016.

To continue reading: How Obama and Hillary Clinton Weaponized the ‘Dossier’

 

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The Coming Russia Bombshells, by Kimberley Strassel

Posted on October 28, 2017 | 3 comments

The revelation that the DNC and Clinton campaign paid for the Trump dossier is only the first in a series of such revelations. So predicts Kimberley Strassel in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal via zerohedge.com.

The confirmation this week that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid an opposition-research firm for a “dossier” on Donald Trump is bombshell news. More bombshells are to come.

The Fusion GPS saga isn’t over. The Clinton-DNC funding is but a first glimpse into the shady election doings concealed within that oppo-research firm’s walls. We now know where Fusion got some of its cash, but the next question is how the firm used it. With whom did it work beyond former British spy Christopher Steele ? Whom did it pay? Who else was paying it?

The answers are in Fusion’s bank records. Fusion has doggedly refused to divulge the names of its clients for months now, despite extraordinary pressure. So why did the firm suddenly insist that middleman law firm Perkins Coie release Fusion from confidentiality agreements, and spill the beans on who hired it?

Because there’s something Fusion cares about keeping secret even more than the Clinton-DNC news – and that something is in those bank records. The release of the client names was a last-ditch effort to appease the House Intelligence Committee, which issued subpoenas to Fusion’s bank and was close to obtaining records until Fusion filed suit last week. The release was also likely aimed at currying favor with the court, given Fusion’s otherwise weak legal case. The judge could rule as early as Friday morning.

If the House wins, don’t be surprised if those records include money connected to Russians. In the past Fusion has worked with Russians, including lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who happened to show up last year in Donald Trump Jr.’s office.

FBI bombshells are also yet to come. The bureau has stonewalled congressional subpoenas for documents related to the dossier, but that became harder with the DNC-Clinton news. On Thursday Speaker Paul Ryan announced the FBI had finally pledged to turn over its dossier file next week.

Assuming the FBI is comprehensive in its disclosure, expect to learn that the dossier was indeed a major basis of investigating the Trump team – despite reading like “the National Enquirer,” as Rep. Trey Gowdy aptly put it. We may learn the FBI knew the dossier was a bought-and-paid-for product of Candidate Clinton, but used it anyway. Or that it didn’t know, which would be equally disturbing.

To continue reading: The Coming Russia Bombshells

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