As an alternative to fact and reality more and more members of the GOP are falling for “corrupt FBI Secret Society” idea as an excuse to completely ignore everything that is going on with the Mueller investigation into Trump’s connections to Russia.
Case in point: Rep. Nan Hayworth (R-NY) tries to claim that the only “collusion” was by Steele, Comey, McCabe, Strzok and Page and the FBI and gets destroyed by for CIA Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash and Stephanie Ruhle.
Former CIA Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash pushed back on her claims:
“To believe that, you would have to believe that Donald Trump’s motivation [in firing Comey] was that he was looking out for Hillary Clinton,” Bash explained. “And I don’t think anybody believes that. You zoom back the lens, you see three elements basically attacking the FBI, launching a war on the men and women of the FBI.”
“You have the Russian intelligence services, you have the Trump organization,” he continued. “And now, I’m sorry to say you have some congressional Republicans who want to defend the president even though they used to be pro-law enforcement, they used to be pro-intelligence community. That view has shifted now and they have morphed into attacking the men and women of the FBI.”
House Judiciary Chairman Trey Gowdy and Rep. John Ratcliff (R-TX) my have claimed that Strzok and Page may have represented a “Secret Society” of anti-Trumpers inside the FBI and DOJ, but that is simply not the case.
The bigger problem is that crux of Hayworth’s claims are quite simply wrong as has been quite well described by Fusion GPS chief Glenn Simpson.
Simpson states that the DNC did not direct his investigations into Trump, and that he made the decision to hire Steele specifically to look into Trump’s financial connections with Russia because he kept making trips there but wasn’t doing deals — that he could detect — with them.
It was Steele’s own decision to take what he found to the FBI, which was contact between Russian intelligence assets and Trump surrogates which have been confirmed by the guilty plea by George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn, however the FBI had already been informed of these contacts by intelligence agencies in Estonia, the Diplomatic corp in Australia, and intercepts received by GCHQ in late 2015, long before Steele ever wrote his very first memo.
A source close to the investigation into President Donald Trump’s campaign and its ties to Russia says that there is now “specific concrete and corroborative evidence” that individuals within Trump’s immediate orbit coordinated with Russian intelligence operatives during the election.
The Guardian said on Thursday that the U.K.’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has been watching the Trump camp since late 2015, having noticed suspicious “interactions” between Trump associates and well-known Russian agents.
…
The Guardian has been told the FBI and the CIA were slow to appreciate the extensive nature of contacts between Trump’s team and Moscow ahead of the US election. This was in part due to US law that prohibits US agencies from examining the private communications of American citizens without warrants. “They are trained not to do this,” the source stressed.
“It looks like the [US] agencies were asleep,” the source added. “They [the European agencies] were saying: ‘There are contacts going on between people close to Mr Trump and people we believe are Russian intelligence agents. You should be wary of this.’
So the facts are actually the opposite of what Hayworth claims, the FBI and CIA didn’t jump all over information about Trump because they secretly supported Hillary Clinton. FBI ultimately began looking into this because CiA Director John Brennen sent them a referral after he received info from Estonia.
Estonia’s foreign intelligence service, the Information Board (EIB), last year listened in on a meeting in an unnamed eastern European country between an associate of Donald Trump and a pro-Putin member of the Russian State Duma, Newsweek reported on Wednesday.
While Newsweek was unable to say what the purpose of the meeting had been, a “Western intelligence official” was referred to as saying that the surveillance of the meeting was conducted “by or on behalf of” EIB.
…
“About that time, according to reports obtained by Western intelligence, a Trump associate met with a pro-Putin member of Russian parliament at a building in Eastern Europe maintained by Rossotrudnichestvo, an agency under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that is charged with administering language, education and support programs for civilians. While Newsweek could not determine the purpose of the meeting, a Western intelligence official said that surveillance of the meeting was conducted by or on behalf of the Estonian Information Board (EIB),” the article said.
It also stated that last year EIB advised government leaders that the Russian government posed the greatest near-term danger to the security of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. As a result, Trump’s apparent support for Putin during the campaign raised concerns with the Baltic governments that, with a Trump presidency, they would face increased national security threats from Russia.
From what we now know that meeting was most likely between George Papadopoulos and Sergei Mililan — who some have claimed is “Source D” in the Steele Memos — meeting in London on April 19th, 2016.
It wasn’t the case that the Steele “made up” the pee pee tape story — there were multiple sources for that story and apparently multiple tapes.
And the former MI6 agent is not the only source for the claim about Russian kompromat on the president-elect. Back in August, a retired spy told me he had been informed of its existence by "the head of an East European intelligence agency".
Later, I used an intermediary to pass some questions to active duty CIA officers dealing with the case file - they would not speak to me directly. I got a message back that there was "more than one tape", "audio and video", on "more than one date", in "more than one place" - in the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow and also in St Petersburg - and that the material was "of a sexual nature".
….
The claims of Russian kompromat on Mr Trump were "credible", the CIA believed. That is why - according to the New York Times and Washington Post - these claims ended up on President Barack Obama's desk last week, a briefing document also given to Congressional leaders and to Mr Trump himself
This CIA referral to the FBI occurred in April of 2016, during the same month George Papadopoulos was informed by Professor Joseph Mifsud in London that Russia “had thousands of Hillary’s Emails” — this information was shared with Australian Diplomat Alexander Downer in May and then with their counterparts in the U.S. in early June once the hack became public — whereas Steele’s very first memo wasn’t written until June 20th.
Jeff Sessions claimed under oath that he didn’t meet with “any Russians” or know of any Trump suggorates who met with Russians, yet he’d met with Kislyak personally twice, and he knew Papadopoulos had met with Russians because he personally turned down George’s proposal to have Trump meet Putin, which was clearly based on his repeated communications and meetings with Mifsud and Millian.
The core theory of the Mueller case is that Mifsud’s revelation to Papadopoulos obligated him to report this claim to the FBI, and by not doing that — and potentially sharing this information with others in the campaign who also didn't inform the authorities — they were participating in a conspiracy to coverup ongoing cyber crimes committed by the Russians.
Some of the hacks, including the GRU accessing the DNC and attacks on the DCCC and Podesta happened after Papadopoulos learned this information and could have either been prevented or detected soon if this information had been shared with the FBI.
This becomes even worse when we see that Trump Jr.’s demand for the “Hillary dirt” was before Wikileaks began to release the stolen emails from the DNC in June and John Podesta in October — meanwhile they remained in contact with Junior and Roger Stone — and that after Veselnitskaya asked for Magnitsky Act sanctions to be dropped, which Junior agreed to do as long as they got the dirt, the Trump administration went on to block anti-Russia planks in the RNC platform and made multiple attempts to cut Russia Sanctions leading right up to Michael Flynn’s statements to Ambassador Kislyak which he chose to lie about to the FBI.
It’s not required for them to specifically ask the Russians to attack the U.S. election for them to “collude” — that had already occurred — all that is required is for them to be aware of the attack then try to hide it, benefit from it, then reward it by lying about it, hyping the wikileaks releases and then attempting to drop sanctions.
They didn’t have to sign on the dotted line for this. They didn’t need a contract, all they needed was to understand what each other wanted — and the Don Jr/Veselnitskaya meeting established exactly that.
TrumpCo wanted the Hillary Dirt, the Russians wanted sanctions dropped — they both of then went out of their way to give each other exactly what they wanted. That’s exactly how “collusion” works.
If Mueller has documentation and emails — and I strongly suspect he does — to connect what Papadopoulos learned from Mifsud to Don Jr’s decision to meet with Veselnitskaya to obtain Russian “dirt” and/or “emails” on Hillary Clinton that he already knew they had and then, as we’ve seen afterward, Trump himself concocted a false cover story on Air Force One that the meeting was really “about adoptions” in order to protect the cover up as their attempts to satisfy Russia’s request to drop sanctions they are potentially liable for Misprision of Felony, Conspiracy, Obstruction of Justice and Aiding and Abetting a Crime after the fact.
Misprision of Felony:
- Whoever, having knowledge of the actual commission of a felony cognizable by a court of the United States, conceals and does not as soon as possible make known the same to some judge or other person in civil or military authority under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
Conspiracy:
- If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
Aiding and Abetting:
-
(a) Whoever commits an
offense against the
United States or
aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures its commission, is punishable as a principal.
-
(b) Whoever willfully causes an act to be done which if directly performed by him or another would be an
offense against the
United States, is punishable as a principal.
Obstruction of Justice:
- Whoever, with intent to avoid, evade, prevent, or obstruct compliance, in whole or in part, with any civil investigative demand duly and properly made under the Antitrust Civil Process Act, willfully withholds, misrepresents, removes from any place, conceals, covers up, destroys, mutilates, alters, or by other means falsifies any documentary material, answers to written interrogatories, or oral testimony, which is the subject of such demand; or attempts to do so or solicits another to do so; or
- Whoever corruptly, or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communication influences, obstructs, or impedes or endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede the due and proper administration of the law under which any pending proceeding is being had before any department or agency of the United States, or the due and proper exercise of the power of inquiry under which any inquiry or investigation is being had by either House, or any committee of either House or any joint committee of the Congress—
That’s in addition to Rampant Money Laundering, numerous FEC Violations the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and violations of the Trading with the Enemy Act.
Let me repeat one again — and the News hardly ever mentions this — two different hackers have pleaded guilty to being involved in that attack on the U.S. and both of them have independently confessed that they were directed to perform these hacks by the same FSB Major Dmitry Dokuchaev.
Karim Baratov, aka Kay, aka Karim Taloverov, aka Karim Akehmet Tokbergenov, 22, a Canadian national and resident, pleaded guilty today, to charges returned by a grand jury in the Northern District of California in February 2017. Baratov and three other defendants, including two officers of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), Russia’s domestic law enforcement and intelligence service, were charged with computer hacking and other criminal offenses in connection with a conspiracy to access Yahoo’s network and the contents of webmail accounts that began in January 2014. Baratov’s co-defendants, all of whom remain at large in Russia, are Dmitry Aleksandrovich Dokuchaev, 33, a Russian national and resident; Igor Anatolyevich Sushchin, 43, a Russian national and resident; and Alexsey Alexseyevich Belan, aka Magg, 29, a Russian national and resident.
….
The US Department of Justice believes that Baratov worked on the orders of FSB officers Dmitry Dokuchaev and his boss Igor Sushchina. Fourth involved in the attack on Yahoo! American law enforcers consider the hacker Alexei Belan, who is among the ten most wanted cybercriminals in the US.
…
As it became known to The Bell, Konstantin Kozlovsky, a hacker from Yekaterinburg, one of the main defendants in the Lurk case , stated about his involvement in the crackdown of the committee of the Democratic Party of the United States
...
Judging by the documents published on Kozlovsky's page, he first announced his work for the FSB in a letter of November 1, 2016. In it, he mentions and attacks on the servers of the Democratic Party committee. Kozlovsky writes that he was engaged in them on behalf of an FSB officer, whom he calls "Ilya." Later the hacker began to assert that under the pseudonym "Ilya" he was overseen by FSB major Dmitry Dokuchaev
This is the initial crime perpetrated by Russian Intelligence — everything TrumpCo did to cover, distract and reward this was after the fact.
Further, the argument that Steele’s dossier was used to generate FISA warrants against Manafort or Page is simply false. The FBI had first established a FISA Warrant on Manafort way back in 2014 because of his close financial ties with Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
A secret order authorized by the court that handles the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) began after Manafort became the subject of an FBI investigation that began in 2014. It centered on work done by a group of Washington consulting firms for Ukraine's former ruling party, the sources told CNN.
The surveillance was discontinued at some point last year for lack of evidence, according to one of the sources.
The FBI then restarted the surveillance after obtaining a new FISA warrant that extended at least into early this year.
The FISA Warrant to monitor Carter Page was requested in May 2016. again, before Steele wrote his memos. [Several applications were filed, the first that was fully approved was in October 2016],
The FBI obtained a secret court order last summer to monitor the communications of an adviser to presidential candidate Donald Trump, part of an investigation into possible links between Russia and the campaign, law enforcement and other U.S. officials said.
The FBI and the Justice Department obtained the warrant targeting Carter Page’s communications after convincing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power, in this case Russia, according to the officials.
The second FISA Warrant on Manafort was approved in October as part of an effort to examine odd transactions with Russian banks, and still wasn’t connected the anything derived from the Steele dossier.
As Glenn Simpson has stated, rather than being the catalyst to start any investigation the Steele Dossier was actually corroboration of many things that the FBI and CIA had already discovered from various sources.
We don’t believe the Steele dossier was the trigger for the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russian meddling. As we told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp.
The intelligence committees have known for months that credible allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia were pouring in from independent sources during the campaign. Yet lawmakers in the thrall of the president continue to wage a cynical campaign to portray us as the unwitting victims of Kremlin disinformation.
It really doesn’t matter that FBI Agent Peter Strzok talked smack about Trump while he was working on this case and the Hillary Case. He also talked smack about Eric Holder, Julianne Assange, Jeff Sessions, Bernie Sanders, Chelsey Clinton and Martin O’Malley — so the theory that he was purely and pro-Hillary anti-Trump zealot is false on it’s face and the fact is that once his text message were revealed he was removed from the Mueller case many months ago, so none of that has any impact on what Mueller is doing now.
Sorry but Strzok talking smack about Trump is not “Treason.” It doesn’t matter who at FBI interviewed Flynn, what matters is that he very obviously Lied During the Interview about his conversations with Russian regarding sanctions.
This is despite the fact that according to Steele, the New York Office of the FBI was stonewalling him so badly he called it “Trumpland.”
Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.
“The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent.
This atmosphere raises major questions about how Comey and the bureau he is slated to run for the next seven years can work with Clinton should she win the White House.
The currently serving FBI agent said Clinton is “the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel,” and that “the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.”
The agent called the bureau “Trumplandia”, with some colleagues openly discussing voting for a GOP nominee who has garnered unprecedented condemnation from the party’s national security wing and who has pledged to jail Clinton if elected.
Somehow I don't expect Nunes and the GOP to try investigating any of that which sounds like a pretty large potential violation of the Hatch Act.
{At least not on purpose, I strongly suspect that this “Secret Society” their trying to chase down is actually all the FBI and DOj personnel who weren’t a part of Trumpland, that’s why they could only share what they really thought in secret text messages, if they’d said it out loud at work they would’ve been seriously going against the grain of the prevailing culture, particularly if Trump won the election which is part of the alleged context of the text in question. There were surrounded in a sea of rabid Clinton-haters. [On further review of the texts, Page was actually complaining about being left out of a meeting because of another female DOJ official, so she wasn’t included in the “Secret Society” she was talking about — she was just being snarky.] In short, it’s the opposite of what the GOP thinks, but none of this proves anyone was sticking their thumb on the scale for any particular candidate.
According to reports 10% of the phones used by the FBI were affected by the glitched that removed the messages between Strzok and Page from December to May, so that’s a pretty sloppy way to delete just a few messages. [Those messages have subsequent been recovered]
Then there are the allegations that the FBI abused it’s surveillance authority — which had to be approved by the FISA Court and wasn’t approved until their third request — is based on a deceptive and falsified memo which was written by Devin Nunes partisan GOP staffers as noted here by Rep. Gerrald Nadler who has seen the source documentation.
Erin Burnett: Do you want to see [the Nunes Memo] released?
Nadler: I’m very hesitant to see it released because I’ve read it, as far as I know only the member of the Intelligence Committee and the Ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee have read the source..
Burnett: Where you have to go into a secret room or something…
Nadler: Yeah, a secret room, but more to the point I’ve read the source document. And I can’t comment on this classified document other than to say that it is profoundly misleading based on source documents. It’s a statement mostly of opinion and distortions written entirely by partisan staff and if you’ve read the source documents, which are highly classified and I don't think they’re proposing to unclassify those, you’d know that it is highly misleading and deliberately misleading. Now if they declassify the source documents, that would be a different story.
We now know that Trump and Sessions have attempted to have the FBI purged of those that might be loyal to James Comey, including Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, whom Trump asked “who he voted for” in the election and ranted about the “politics of his wife” after he first met him following the initial sacking of Comey.
We have more recent reports that Comey replacement FBI Director Wray has threatened to resign because of pressure being applied on him by Trump and Sessions to fire McCabe despite the fact that McCabe announced his retirement months ago and will be gone in March anyway, but Wray did cave to pressure to “clean house” in other areas by replacing supposed Comey loyalists FBI Counsel James Baker with Virginia US Atty Dana Boente, and Chief of Staff Jim Ribicki with an associate from this own former law firm Zachary Harmon.
This purge is Banana Republic business. Just like demanding “loyalty” from Comey and asking him to “let Flynn go” this is even more evidence of Obstruction. It’s the actions of a dictator pressing the key members of law enforcement under his thumb. That’s why it’s important the there is a Special Counsel which is protected from the abuse of power both by Trump and the GOP especially now that Mueller interviewed Sessions last week, and plans to interview Trump soon.
They are trying to play a game with public opinion by smearing the FBI, but the only place where this game really matters will be in the courts and before a jury that will ultimately conduct the trials against the many potential targets of this investigation which include Don Jr. Kushner, Bannon, Pence and even Trump himself.
They may try to duck and dodge the facts, but they will most likely fail.
Wednesday, Jan 24, 2018 · 1:29:33 PM PST · Frank Vyan Walton
I have to go, but I’m seeing reports on CNN that Devin Nunes has refused to allow other GOP members of the Senate Intel committee or the DOJ to even see the Secret Memo. Meanwhile Democrats who have access to the source data — such as Nadler — are crafting their own counter-memo to debunk it even before it’s released.
Popcorn!!
Wednesday, Jan 24, 2018 · 2:03:30 PM PST · Frank Vyan Walton
Maggie Haberman today asked Huckabee-Sanders exactly what Trump means when he says “There was no collusion.”
Her answer was that he meant that they won the election on the own by being a “stronger candidate”, not because they got any help from anyone else or some “made up hoax that was created to delegitimize” him. Which is bullshit because for one thing Trump mentioned the stolen documents released by Wikileaks over 164 Times during the end of the Campaign. They were absolutely dependent on those releases in the last days of the election when the Pussy Grab tape came out, which shutdown the Intelligence Agencies report about Russian interference that same day, only to later be overshadowed 30 mins later by the release of the Podesta emails.
Don Jr was in direct contact with them and even help promote their releases by sharing special search links that they had provided, but no — they “didn’t collude.” Sure, fine. whatever.
Haberman pressed again asking if he rejected the reporting from the intelligence Community on Russia?
Huckabee-Sanders then said essentially that Trump himself “didn’t participate” in that, that he “wasn’t involved in anything illegal”, “Stating the existence of something happening is very different from helping make it happen” which is a completely different argument from “we had no help!”
Clearly Russia did help them, that’s not really up for debate.
Haberman then asked if he was talking about “himself or his entire campaign” and then she suggests that there might have been some people in their campaign who knew about the Russian crimes, and may have either helped them or benefited from them, but those persons weren’t Trump and he didn’t know anything about it — which is now a completely different kettle of fish particularly since there have been two guilty pleas for lying the FBI and the first of those, Papadopoulos, DID KNOW ABOUT IT — and also this is still bullshit since he personally asked Russia to “Release the Missing Hillary Emails” out of his own mouth.
That was a direct attempt to “help make it happen.”