"One big blanket cover-up operation"

In the Conservative Treehouse, Sundance writes,

If you read the Weissmann/Mueller report carefully one aspect stands out strongly; the Mueller investigation was fully committed to The Steele Dossier. An inordinate amount of the report is focused on justifying their investigative validity and purpose in looking at the claims within the Steele Dossier.

Repeatedly, the investigative unit references their mandate based around the Steele Dossier, and the mid-summer 2016 origin of the FBI counterintelligence operation.

Why? Why was/is Crossfire Hurricane (July ’16) and the Steele Dossier (Oct. ’16) so important to the principle intelligence apparatus, and the Mueller team (’17, ’18, ’19)?

I believe former NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers has told us the answer. In early 2016 Rogers caught on to a massive and pre-existing weaponization of government surveillance and the use of collected NSA metadata for political spy operations. Everything, that comes AFTER March 2016 is one big blanket cover-up operation….. ALL OF IT.

The Russian election interference narrative; the use of Joseph Mifsud, Stefan Halper, the London and Australian embassy personnel; Erika Thompson, Alexander Downer, U.S. DIA officials; everything around Crossfire Hurricane; and everything after to include the construct of the Steele Dossier; all of it was needed for the creation of an ‘after-the-fact‘ plausible justification to cover-up what Mike Rogers discovered in early 2016, AND the downstream unmasked records that existed in the Obama White House SCIF.

Fusion GPS was not hired in April 2016 to research Donald Trump. The intelligence community was already doing surveillance and spy operations. They already knew everything about the Trump campaign. The Obama intelligence community needed Fusion GPS to give them a justification for pre-existing surveillance and spy operations.

That’s why the FBI, and later the Mueller team, are so strongly committed to, and defending, the formation of the Steele Dossier and its dubious content.

...Remember, the special counsel was a continuance of the FBI counterintelligence operation which officially began on July 31st, 2016. [The unofficial beginning was much earlier]

Understanding now that Mueller is saying from Day One he was investigating the Steele Dossier; here’s where we all need to question the assumptions.

Why is the Steele Dossier so important?

From the beginning most people have thought the Fusion-GPS objective was to dig up dirt on Trump for political exploitation. However, with all the recent information outlined there’s actually a more significant role for Fusion.

The overall intelligence apparatus of the U.S. government was already conducting political surveillance on their political opposition. The systems of the intelligence apparatus such as FISA-702(16)(17) databases searches were being exploited months (if not years) beforehand.

When NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers discovered the use of the database he shut down contractor access on April 18th, 2016.

...Regardless of anything happening to stop them, the intelligence community was conducting surveillance of their political opposition. To validate that surveillance the intelligence community needed a plausible FBI counterintelligence operation. That’s where John Brennan (CIA) comes in.

...The Steele Dossier is the investigative virus the FBI wanted inside the system. To get the virus into official status, they used the FISA application as the delivery method and injected it into Carter Page. The FBI already knew Carter Page; essentially Carter Page was irrelevant, what they needed was the Dossier in the system {Go Deep}.

With the communication from Alexander Downer (foundation for the EC), in conjunction with the Steele Dossier (foundation for the Page FISA), the CIA and FBI now held a plausible -albeit fraudulently obtained- basis to explain/justify all of their 2015 and 2016 political spying and surveillance activity. This is their insurance policy.

...Fusion GPS was not hired to research Trump, the intelligence community was already doing surveillance and spy operations. The intelligence community needed Fusion GPS to give them a plausible justification for already existing surveillance and spy operations.

Read more here.

The Nunes memo and the Steele dossier

Here are some excerpts from points made at Bookworm Room about the Nunes memo.

One, several of the top people at the FBI and the DOJ, using both lies of omission and commission, falsified applications for FISA warrants to use on Carter Page, a member of Trump’s campaign team.

Two, a person can infer from the memo that those warrants did not result in any useful information.

...Three, the fact that the Steele Dossier, rather than independently developed or corroborated facts, was the basis for a finding of probable cause to get a FISA warrant calls throws into stark relief the question of whether Rod Rosenstein acted lawfully when he appointed Robert Mueller to conduct an intelligence, not a criminal investigation.

...Four...The memo’s central point is that various people in the FBI and DOJ leadership knowingly applied for and received four FISA warrants under false pretenses. ...Further, FBI and DOJ officials knew, but did not include in the request for the warrant, that the Steele Dossier on which they relied was opposition research for which the DNC paid. Nor did the FBI and DOJ officials include in the warrant that Steele had stated that he was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being President.”

...Another point made in the House Memo, it seems to me, is the most critical. A separate FBI unit had attempted to validate the information in the Steele Dossier. The unit declared it “minimally validated.” As I read that, it means that there were some innocuous facts that could be validated; e.g., that Carter Page in fact took a trip to Russia and while there, spoke at the Higher Economics School.

She goes on to take a look at the dossier allegations here.

"Unverified!"

Andrew McCarthy writes at National Review,

...In the stretch run of the campaign, Fusion — which, again, was being paid by the Clinton campaign (through lawyers) — induced Steele to brief Clinton-friendly media about his findings. Steele provided this information to the New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo News, The New Yorker, CNN, and Mother Jones. In so doing, he appears to have conveyed the same tone of certainty in which the dossier is couched — the same confidence about his informants and alarm about their Trump allegations.

...Things changed, though, when Steele was sued for libel after the dossier was published in early 2017. Suddenly, when he was in a forum where it was clear to him that making exaggerated or false claims could cost him dearly, he decided his allegations were not of such “huge significance” after all — as Rowan Scarborough detailed in a Washington Times news story.

...One of the libel suits against Steele was filed in London by Aleksej Gubarev, whom Steele accused of participating in Russian intelligence hacking. To defend against the suit, Steele and his attorneys had no choice but to respond to interrogatories. In answering, Steele markedly downgraded the seriousness of his dossier reports.

According to Steele’s courtroom version, the dossier is merely a compilation of bits of “raw intelligence” that were “unverified” and that he passed along because they “warranted further investigation” — i.e., not because he could vouch for their truthfulness. He gave them to American and British government officials, he maintains, only because they raised potential national-security threats, not because they actually established any such threats. That, he now says, was for government investigators to figure out. In sum, Steele’s defamation defense is not that what he wrote was true but that his reports “must be critically viewed in light of the purpose for and circumstances in which the information was collected.”

There is laugh-out-loud stuff here: Steele’s declamation of his profound commitment to discretion and secrecy lest his “raw,” “unverified,” and possibly false reports defame anyone. He claimed that he and Fusion GPS had a solemn agreement not to disclose his work . . . except for whenever they decided to disclose his work — including to Fusion’s clients and to major press organs during the stretch run of a contentious presidential election. But not to worry: These discussions were “off the record,” a term Steele claims to have understood to mean “to be used for the purpose of further research but would not be published or attributed.” Right. Somehow though, when his briefings to journalists about his reports were published, he kept doing the briefings.

It would be another five months before we learned that the Clinton campaign was paying for this Trump–Russia narrative. Here, then, is the problem for the FBI: Even if Steele had represented that his shocking information about Donald Trump was ripe dead certain, that the dossier had come down from Mount Sinai, the bureau would still have been obliged to treat it as unverified gossip.

Yet, Steele says his information was unverified, and the FBI has acknowledged that Steele’s information was unverified. So . . . what did the FBI and the Justice Department represent to the FISA court to get a surveillance warrant against Page? Or, to put it another way, if the Obama administration did not hesitate to urge Steele’s uncorroborated claims on Congress, would it have resisted urging them on a federal judge?

Read more here.

Compelling McCain's man to talk

Byron York reports at the Washington Examiner,

House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes has issued a subpoena to David Kramer, a former State Department official who, in late November 2016, traveled to London to receive a briefing and a copy of the Trump dossier from its author, former British spy Christopher Steele. Kramer then returned to the U.S. to give the document to Sen. John McCain.

Kramer is a senior fellow at the McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University.

McCain later 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.

McCain, recovering in Arizona from treatments for cancer, has long refused to detail his actions regarding the dossier. For his part, 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, 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. The subpoena, issued Wednesday afternoon, directs Kramer to appear again before House investigators on Jan. 11.

Knowing Steele's sources is a critical part of the congressional dossier investigation, for both sides. 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.

Beyond that, 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. There is a growing 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.

Investigators who favor this theory ask a sensible question: Is it likely that all the Russians involved in the attempt to influence the 2016 election were lying, scheming, 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 that is one reason House investigators seek Steele's sources – and why they will try to compel Kramer to talk.

Everyone was colluding with the Russians except Trump

Finally, someone has written something clearly explaining the Steele dossier and Russian collusian. That someone is Mark Steyn.

How to Steele an Election

Christopher Steele, on Her Majesty*'s Secret Service (*Queen Hillary)

From Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes:

"Mostly she was mad - mad that she'd lost and that the country would have to endure a Trump presidency... Hillary kept pointing her finger at Comey and Russia. 'She wants to make sure all these narratives get spun the right way,' this person said.

That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument."

"Mook" is campaign manager Robby of that ilk, and "Podesta" is John, her campaign chairman and, with his brother Tony Podesta, one of the two Podestas who founded the Podesta Group, now under investigation for violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Notice Mr Allen and Miss Parnes' choice of words: Whether or not the election in reality "wasn't entirely on the up-and-up", Messrs Mook and Podesta and the rest of the Clinton team decided to "engineer the case" that it wasn't.

And engineering-wise they did a pretty impressive job, as you'll know if you're one of the impressionable rubes who gets his news from ABC, CBS, NBC or CNN. If the campaign team had worked its precision engineering half as well on the actual campaign, they would have won the election "on the up-and-up" and saved themselves the need for a post-election campaign.

By "Russian hacking" of the election, they mean that some Internet trolls from halfway round the world bought a few fake Facebook ads, half of which weren't seen until after election day. For purposes of comparison, the one hundred grand these trolls spent to "interfere" in the US election works out at less than two per cent of what Hillary paid a high-ranking spy of a foreign power to interfere in the US election ...and post-election.

It started in April 2016, when it became clear that Trump was going to win the Republican nomination. The Hillary campaign and the DNC gave millions of dollars to Marc Elias, a Clinton lawyer, who in turn hired Fusion GPS, who in turn hired former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. Why use Mr Elias as a cutout? Because Hillary and the DNC could then itemize the expense as "legal services" rather than list payments to Mr Steele, which would be in breach of federal law.

Mr Steele used to be head of "the Russia house", to go all John le Carré on you. So he asked his contacts in Moscow to come up with some stuff on Trump, and they responded with some pretty thinnish material that Steele managed to stretch out to a total of about 33 pages. I can tell you, after six years in the fetid craphole of the District of Columbia Superior Court for the Mann vs Steyn case, that the most routine procedural motion therein runs at least three times the length. The most "salacious" (in James Comey's word) assertion of the dossier is that Trump likes getting urinated on by Russian hookers. Having met him, I regard this as most unlikely: He is a germaphobe who resents having to do all the unhygienic gladhanding required in American politics. I find it easier to imagine almost any other Republican bigshot enjoying the erotic frisson of micturition, if only from Chuck Schumer. But judge for yourself: You can read the dossier here.

At which point things took a strange and disturbing turn. Steele's dossier was passed along to the FBI. It seems a reasonable inference, to put it as blandly as possible, that the dossier was used to justify the opening of what the Feds call an "FI" (Full Investigation), which in turn was used to justify a FISA order permitting the FBI to put Trump's associates under surveillance. Indeed, it seems a reasonable inference that the dossier was created and supplied to friendly forces within the bureau in order to provide a pretext for an FI, without which surveillance of the Trump campaign would not be possible.

In October 2016, things took a stranger and more disturbing turn. Steele "reached an agreement with the FBI a few weeks before the election for the Bureau to pay him to continue his work". In other words, the permanent bureaucracy and the ruling party were collaborating to get the goods on their political opponent, by illegally paying a foreign spy to interfere with the election. Why would the most lavishly funded investigative agency on the planet need the services of a British subject and his modest consulting firm? Not just for plausible deniability but also for plausible reliability: Hey, investigating Trump would never have occurred to us, but the former head of the Russia desk at MI6 thought we ought to know about this... Which, in case you haven't noticed, is the precise equivalent of Bush crediting British intelligence as the unimpeachable source for his belief that Saddam Hussein was seeking to acquire yellowcake from Niger.

A month later, Trump did the impossible and won the election. And within twenty-four hours Mook and Podesta had begun "engineering the case" that the election "wasn't entirely on the up-and-up". On November 18th, Andrew Wood, formerly British Ambassador in Moscow, and John McCain, the Senator from Arizona and fierce Never Trumper, met at the Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia. Sir Andrew told Senator McCain about the dossier and said he'd known Steele when they were both on Her Majesty's service in Russia and that he was a splendid chap, very sound and awfully decent.

[UPDATE! Steve McIntyre, slayer of hockey sticks, notes that Andrew Wood is not merely a former ambassador but an Associate of Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd (Steele's company).]

One month after the election, on December 9th, McCain met with FBI Director Comey and handed over the dossier. It is not known if Comey replied, "Oh, this old thing? As a matter of fact, we used it as a pretext to get surveillance warrants on Trump. Do you know what it's like to sit through hours of phone transcripts about how 'The Apprentice"s ratings have tanked since they hired that loser Schwarzenegger?"

Do you sense the ground shifting here? At some point someone somewhere might well have genuinely believed they were asking Christopher Steele to find something on Trump that Hillary could use to destroy him in the media and win the election. Mr Steele failed to deliver. This is not necessarily his fault: There may, indeed, be nothing to deliver.

But there was enough of a pseudo-dossier, by the debased standards of the bloated US "intelligence community", to be used as a pretext to get the rubber-stamp FISA court to approve 24/7 surveillance of everyone around Trump - and maybe that would turn up something to destroy him.

But, again, it didn't. Every sentient creature knows that - because everyone understands that if they'd found anything they'd have leaked it.

So once again the worthless dossier was pressed into service, this time to bolster the case that the Russians had stolen the election from Hillary. During the stupid and anachronistic two-and-a-half-month electoral "transition", the outgoing Administration worked round the clock to de-legitimize and cripple their successors. The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, a dismal and deeply compromised individual, told Jim Comey to set up a meeting with Trump and present him with the dossier. Which he did. Supposedly, Comey felt that he needed to disclose to the President the existence of a report of his supposed sexual predilections: So the G-Man briefed the Pee-Man. As I said to Tucker Carlson on Wednesday, it is yet another reasonable inference that the only purpose of this meeting was to enable the leaking of the meeting - and thereby damage the incoming President: The briefing was arranged as cover for the leak thereof.

All this from one dodgy dossier compiled by an MI6 agent with deep ties to FSB operatives in Russia. Has any one foreigner so interfered in a US election as Christopher Steele? Hillary and her chums needed Steele for oppo research. The Deep State needed Steele as a cover for wiretapping the Trump team. The Never Trumpers needed Steele to mire the incoming President and hobble him from the get-go. And the outgoing Administration needed Steele to bolster their narrative that Trump and the Russians had colluded to steal the election. In fact, Trump seems to have fewer "ties" to Russia than almost any other multinational businessman of comparable wealth, and certainly fewer ties than the corrupt Clintons.

Many things can be deduced from this scandal: Robert Mueller should retire, preferably somewhere far, far away. James Comey should be charged, convicted and jailed. So should senior figures in the Clinton campaign. And those large sections of the "intelligence community" that have gone rogue and spend more time subverting their own government than any foreign enemies need to be overhauled from top to toe, or, more likely, put out of business entirely.

Thus Washington's vast wilderness of distorting mirrors: as I told Tucker Carlson, everyone was colluding with the Russians except Trump - Hillary, the DNC, Democrat lawyers, the FBI, all frantically pointing fingers at the only non-colluding guy in the room. No man anywhere has ever been less in need of a "golden shower" than Donald J Trump. He is surrounded on all sides by powerful forces leaking on him incessantly.