Yesterday the founders of Fusion GPS, the research firm that hired Christopher Steele to looking to Russia and Trump connections penned a New York Times Op-ed asking for the House Intelligence committee to release the transcripts from their interview several weeks ago.
They say quite literally that Mueller is investigating the President, Devin Nunes at House Intel is running a “Fake Investigation” into Fusion GPS.
Today, amid a growing criminal inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, congressional Republicans are again chasing rabbits. We know because we’re their favorite quarry.
In the year since the publication of the so-called Steele dossier — the collection of intelligence reports we commissioned about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia — the president has repeatedly attacked us on Twitter. His allies in Congress have dug through our bank records and sought to tarnish our firm to punish us for highlighting his links to Russia. Conservative news outlets and even our former employer, The Wall Street Journal, have spun a succession of mendacious conspiracy theories about our motives and backers.
We are happy to correct the record. In fact, we already have.
Three congressional committees have heard over 21 hours of testimony from our firm, Fusion GPS. In those sessions, we toppled the far right’s conspiracy theories and explained how The Washington Free Beacon and the Clinton campaign — the Republican and Democratic funders of our Trump research — separately came to hire us in the first place.
In this piece the Fusion GPS founders clearly show that the only “Witch” that seems to interest Trump and Devin Nunes and their cabal of conspiracy theorists — is Hillary Clinton.
There are several key take-aways from their article that needed to be noted and highlighted.
1) Although Fusion GPS had been hired to do opposition research on Trump by both Republicans and Democrats, their subcontractor Christopher Steele of Orbus Business Intelligence was never specifically told who their final customer was. He didn’t even know about the DNC or Clinton Campaign providing funds for his research, and they didn’t know about him either — therefore the primary theory pushed by both Trump and Nunes that the intel reports produced by Steele were merely “Fake News” generated by the Clinton Campaign in order to harm Trump, is false.
Steele had no specific or hidden agenda, he was simply trying to discover what was really going on.
2) It was Steele’s own decision to take his information to the FBI because he was concerned about the severity of the potential crimes that were being exposed, and that when he did so the FBI took his information seriously because it confirmed several things that they already knew. There was no plot by the “Deep State” DOJ. In fact the FBI even offered to continue to pay for Steele’s research once their DNC client had ended their funding.
Oh, and if the Steele memos were merely a DNC funded hit job on Trump — why exactly did they never release them? They didn’t actually come out until after the election on January 10th, when published by Buzzfeed — what good did that do Clinton or Democrats?
Steele wrote the first of his memos on June 20, 2016, but by that time George Papadopoulos had already spoken to an Australian Diplomat in May and bragged that the Russians had “Dirt on Hillary” which they were apparently offering to the Trump campaign, ultimately through Natalia Veselnitskaya, and the Australians in turn had already alerted the FBI and CiA sparking their own investigation into Trump and Russia including requesting a FISA Warrant on Page, again in May, before Steele had even written anything about anyone involved in Russia.
In his memos Steele confirmed that Carter Page had travelled to Moscow and met with a top member of the Russian Oil company Rosneft and discussed an upcoming sale of 19% of their stock.
Mr. Page acknowledged his meeting with Russian government officials during sharp questioning by Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the committee, according to a congressional official familiar with the exchange.
...
In a video of a December 2016 speech he gave in Moscow, Mr. Page told the audience that he had met with an executive of Rosneft, another major Russian energy company. He said that person was a “friend.”
Technically Steele had said Page met with Igor Sechin, CEO of Rosneft which Page continues to deny — however he has admitted meeting the Deputy Russia Prime Minister Arkadiy Dvorkovich and also Andrey Baranov, the head of investor relations at Rosneft who “may have briefly mentioned” the sale of a significant portion of Rosneft stock. So — once you replace Sechin with Baranov — there’s ultimately a distinction without much meaningful difference when the original argument was “None of Trump’s surrogates met with Russians.”
Well, apparently, they did. A lot.
In addition to this the NSA had already picked up “chatter” between suspected Russian Military Intel operatives about the Trump campaign, particularly Michael Flynn who they believed they could influence.
Washington (CNN) Russian officials bragged in conversations during the presidential campaign that they had cultivated a strong relationship with former Trump adviser retired Gen. Michael Flynn and believed they could use him to influence Donald Trump and his team, sources told CNN.
The conversations deeply concerned US intelligence officials, some of whom acted on their own to limit how much sensitive information they shared with Flynn, who was tapped to become Trump's national security adviser, current and former governments officials said.
"This was a five-alarm fire from early on," one former Obama administration official said, "the way the Russians were talking about him." Another former administration official said Flynn was viewed as a potential national security problem.
Washington (CNN)US investigators wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort under secret court orders before and after the election, sources tell CNN, an extraordinary step involving a high-ranking campaign official now at the center of the Russia meddling probe.
The government snooping continued into early this year, including a period when Manafort was known to talk to President Donald Trump.
Some of the intelligence collected includes communications that sparked concerns among investigators that Manafort had encouraged the Russians to help with the campaign, according to three sources familiar with the investigation. Two of these sources, however, cautioned that the evidence is not conclusive.
At this point in time Russians had told Papadopoulos they had “Thousand of Clinton’s emails”, they had told Don Jr, Kushner and Manafort himself they had “Dirt” on Hillary Clinton and now after that you have the NSA/CiA picking up Russians talking about Manafort asking them for “Help” with their campaign against Clinton. Exactly what kind of “Help” could they possibly offer you think?
Might it be to release all their Hillary Clinton dirt? And perhaps the Russians were more inclined to do that once Don Jr made it clear they weren’t doing anything on sanctions until they actually got some of that “Dirt?”
3) The Fusion GPS founders suggested that Congress look at records from Deutsche Bank who have loaned Trump, Kushner and Manafort hundreds of $Millions in recent years while also being heavily involved in Russian money-laundering for which they were fined $630 Million. But instead the only bank records they’ve tried to access, were those of Fusion GPS in an effort to lay the “blame” for Steele’s dossier on the doorstep of Hillary Clinton. They argue that even going beyond that which was revealed by Steele, there is far more information about money-laundering involving Trump.
We told Congress that from Manhattan to Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., and from Toronto to Panama, we found widespread evidence that Mr. Trump and his organization had worked with a wide array of dubious Russians in arrangements that often raised questions about money laundering. Likewise, those deals don’t seem to interest Congress.
Between 2001 and 2007 63 Russian Oligarchs leased, rented or bought various Trump properties in South Florida spending upwards of $98.5 Million on them, many of these deals with Russian nationals in Manhattan reportedly were arranged through Bayrock Group LLC whose offices are located on the 24th floor of Trump Tower and whose managing director Felix Sater was a former Russian mobster who had become and FBI informant following his conviction on $40 Million stock fraud case.
Sater has since stated that he and Trump are headed for Prison. So that’s something, I would think.
In 2008 Trump sold a Palm Beach Mansion to Russian Oligarch Dimitry Rybolovlev for$95 Million after purchasing it just 2 years previously for only $45 Million. That same year Donald Jr. stated “We get a lot to money from Russia.” And then in 2014 Eric Trump said in an interview when discussing the funding of Trump Golf courses “Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”
Do tell?
4) Steele and Fusion GPS were not even aware of the Don Jr./Veselnitskay meeting and they didn’t inform their clients — neither the DNC or Hillary Clinton — of Steele’s decision to share his information with the FBI. Something frankly, that Don Jr himself should have done as soon as he received the email from Rob Goldstone that said “The Russian Government supports your father’s campaign.”
Even Steve Bannon has begun to admit that clear fact.
Bannon, speaking to author Michael Wolff, warned that the investigation into alleged collusion with the Kremlin will focus on money laundering and predicted: “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.”
He is particularly scathing about a June 2016 meeting involving Trump’s son Donald Jr, son-in-law Jared Kushner, then campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in New York. A trusted intermediary had promised documents that would “incriminate” rival Hillary Clinton but instead of alerting the FBI to a potential assault on American democracy by a foreign power, Trump Jr replied in an email: “I love it.”
The meeting was revealed by the New York Times in July last year, prompting Trump Jr to say no consequential material was produced. Soon after, Wolff writes, Bannon remarked mockingly: “The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor – with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers.
“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”
Yeah, exactamundo.
And that is exactly the problem, they didn’t call the FBI. They didn’t inform the FBI — even after they were told Russians may try to infiltrate them and they had to report if that happened — about their contacts with Foreign Nationals during the campaign. When eventually questioned about Russian contacts Papadopoulos lied. Michael Flynn lied. Manafort and his partner Gates have been indicted for their own money-laundering, much of which leads right back to Russia and Putin.
Chances are, Don Jr and Kushner are next.
It doesn’t matter what the public thinks, it doesn’t matter what the News reports — it’s matters what Mueller can prove in court.
And as Bannon suggests, Kushner and Junior could easily crack like an raw egg and give up exactly how much Trump knew and how much he has been involved in this cover up from the beginning starting with when he gave George Papadopoulos his marching orders on their very first one-on-one meeting.
Marianna Kakaounaki, an investigative reporter for the Greek newspaper Kathimerini, said Papadopoulos told her that Trump called him personally after he was hired to the campaign in March 2016. Trump later met with Papadopoulos one-on-one, when the aide told Trump about his ongoing efforts to set up a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kakaounaki said.
Around the same time, Trump told The Washington Post that Papadopoulos was an "excellent guy." The Trump administration maintains that Papadopoulos only met Trump on March 31 for a group photo shoot.
“I felt that he was probably lucky, having just met Trump in person and then Trump being interviewed and mentioning his name,” Kakaounaki told Politico. “That mention opened a lot of Greek doors for him, and probably in other countries too.”
Trump was in fact, in on this from the beginning. His fingers are deep in this pie from the initial kneading of the dough to final baking. That’s why Trump himself dictated a false statement claiming Junior meeting with Veselnitskaya was about “adoptions” when it really wasn’t.
Flying home from Germany on July 8 aboard Air Force One, Trump personally dictated a statement in which Trump Jr. said that he and the Russian lawyer had “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children” when they met in June 2016, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deliberations. The statement, issued to the New York Times as it prepared an article, emphasized that the subject of the meeting was “not a campaign issue at the time.”
The claims were later shown to be misleading.
Over the next three days, multiple accounts of the meeting were provided to the news media as public pressure mounted, with Trump Jr. ultimately acknowledging that he had accepted the meeting after receiving an email promising damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help his father’s campaign.
So not only did they fail to inform the FBI when they were, again, informed of criminal cyber espionage committed by the Russians — Trump himself quite brazenly attempted to cover it up with lies.
That’s why of course, Trump, has now decided to throw Bannon under the bus, then backs it up and hit him again, although he doesn't both to deny Bannon’s claim that failing to inform the FBI was potentially “treasonous” — because it was.
“When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind,” Trump wrote. “Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.”
Trump also hammered Bannon over his decision to enthusiastically endorse failed Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore, who lost last month’s shocking special election in Alabama.
“Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look,” Trump said. “Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my base.”
To which all I can now say is: Popcorn.