Quote:The ongoing political circus in the capital of the world's most powerful empire opens almost daily with a new act each day showcasing an even more bizarre and more revealing display of the internal rot of a culture and a political system in decline.
The day before Donald Trump's first State of the Union address, the Russia-gate drama took an unexpected and dangerous turn with the vote by the House Intelligence Committee to release a now classified memo that alleges that senior members of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) may have misled the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA court) in order to secure a warrant to engage in what Republicans assert is a politically motivated effort that spied on the Trump campaign before he won the 2016 election and attempted to undermine his presidency.
Right-wing neoliberal Democrats who have engaged in a vigorous defense of the intelligence agencies of the U.S. state are concerned about the possible fallout with the public. They argue Republicans are deliberately undermining confidence in U.S. institutions by irresponsibly hurling allegations that support a growing public perception that the government and the individuals who populate governmental institutions are inherently corrupt.
Republicans now refer to this as "FBI-gate" and Democrats counter by appealing to the dubious belief that the FBI is some kind of neutral political force populated by people of unreproachable characterthose who would never engage in the kind of crass partisanship being alleged by Republicans in Congress.
Even members of the Congressional Black Caucus the one caucus that traditionally has always been wary of the FBI because of its history abuse against Black activists, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. joined in the effort to prop up this institution and its former director Robert Mueller.
This new narrative of FBI integrity and neutrality is predicated on the assumption that most of the public has forgotten or is unaware of the notorious history of the FBI and its founder, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover was a racist anti-Semite and fascist sympathizer. He shared his obsessive anti-communism and anti-Semitism with Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's Gestapo chief, who Hoover corresponded with personally and kept on the FBI's mailing list right up until the eve of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939.
As the nation's political police, the FBI has been at the center of domestic repression and political manipulation for decades. From Hoover's early career working as special assistant to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, when Hoover was given the responsibility to plan and execute the infamous "Palmer raids" in which thousands were arrested in twenty-three states for "subversive activities," to his and the FBI's role in the first McCarthy period of repression in the 1950s through to the COINTELPRO program against the anti-war, Black Liberation and Civil Rights movement. The intelligence gathering, counter-insurgent role of the FBI has been consistent.
When the history and role of the FBI is objectively understood as a central component of the repressive state apparatus, it is not farfetched to accept the meaning of the August 2016 message Peter Strzock, the director of the FBI's counter-intelligence division, sent to Lisa Page, a high-level official with whom he was romantically involved. In that message, it is clear that Strzock thought it prudent to develop a strategy to undermine a Trump presidency, even when the chance of Trump getting elected seem impossible to many.
Strzock is quoted as texting to Page over a secure device:
I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy's officethat there's no way he [Trump] gets electedbut I'm afraid we can't take that risk. It's like an insurance policy in the unlikely event that you die before you're 40.
This quote reveals two things: (1) the thinking of individuals who hold institutional power and are well versed in the exercise of "extra-democratic" institutional power, or what some refer to as the power of the Deep State; and (2) the specific rationale for implementing what appears to have been a classic counter-intelligence project to influence, manipulate and control a political process, in this case the election for the presidency of the United States.
In response to the information coming out about the memo and the explosive allegations of governmental malfeasance, Rep. Adam Schiff, ranking Democratic member of House Intelligence Committee made the laughable statement that the vote to release the memo "politicize(s) intelligence process." Perhaps Schiff hoped that the public had forgotten all of the instances of politicized intelligence from the manufactured data supporting the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to the manufactured data about the existence of weapons of mass destruction that justified the disastrous attack on Iraq.
But what Schiff, as well as some Republicans, are concerned with is how the public will process and respond to the existence of a massive, coordinated effort to exercise unelected political power.
They are concerned the extent of the coordination between the state and elements of financial and corporate sectors exposes the hidden reality of how real power is exercised in Washington and the financial center in New York, the power behind the reach of the atrophied mechanisms of democratic accountability and control.
Beyond the Circus: Strengthening the Ideological and Political Mechanisms of Domination
It's ironic, or perhaps just a reflection of the power of propaganda, that it is now just becoming apparent that while the attention of the people was mobilized and directed to fictitious external sources of electoral interference by the Russians, the real culprits working to undermine the limited democracy that does exist were always in the United States and in plain sight.
They are the ones who re-authorized extending FISA section 702 that allows the state to collect communications from U.S. citizens and even tap into communications databases of companies like Google to collect information without a warrant. They supported inserting provisions of the "Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act" into the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) as one of Obama's last legislative acts. They were silent as the government prosecuted whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, which justified expanded National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance and called for the head of former federal contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden. They think it is a good idea for Facebook to establish "counter speech" controls and for Google to adjust its algorithms to bury alternative news sites and sources of "radical" analysis.
And while Trump has been a useful idiot for the Deep State, it is important to clearly identify the forces driving this process and giving it political legitimacyliberal Democrats!
Despite the phony news of economic prosperity that came out of Trump's State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, the more insightful and "responsible" members of the ruling elite recognize the explosive potential of real opposition to the elite agenda and understand the crisis of confidence in and legitimacy of the system will continue to deepen.
The recognition of that has resulted in ruling-class elements being united in one very important area "domestic national security." That is to say not the threat of "terror attacks" or other physical threats, but the security that the ruling class is attempting to acquire for itself by strengthening the repressive state apparatus against the people. Using the gift of "Russia-gate" given to it by the Democrats, the state, in collaboration with the capitalist communication sector, has attempted to tighten its ideological grip on the public by limiting the range of information available to the public.
The neo-liberal right has always understood much better than many elements of the left what Cuba revolutionary Jose Marti meant when he said that "trenches of ideas are more powerful than weapons."
So, while we are entertained by the theatrics of Trump and shudder with horror after his latest antic, the real forces of totalitarianism are working right under our noses, normalizing the capitalist dictatorship in the name of upholding freedom.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
Quote:The FBI officials guilty of letting Hillary off the hook, of getting a FISA warrant based on garbage, of planning to neutralize Trump or get him impeached, of altering records, of hiding records, of stonewalling, of destroying evidence, of failing to investigate when they should have, and of spying where they shouldn't have, among their assorted misdeeds, are all going to be canned and perhaps indicted for their misdeeds.
The entire Russian concoction was fake from A to Z, only devised as a political maneuver to stop Trump and save Clinton. We have known this almost from the time the golden showers dossier was published. It has taken time for the whole story to be dug out. We knew a long time ago that the FBI relied on this dossier.
The desperation of these people is mirrored in the fake press headlines that are increasingly remote from the realities of this case. They too are desperate to maintain their narrative and their credibility.
It is now supposed to be "news" that Trump asked Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in December if he was on his team. The headlines act as if there was something wrong about a president asking such a question. Trump knew what to ask because he had information that we are only now getting, which is that Rosenstein was likely to be one of those who had sought the FISA warrant based on nothing concrete. We are being told this:
"A controversial Republican memo alleging surveillance abuse specifically names FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein along with former FBI Director James Comey."
Trump had every right to inquire of Comey and Rosenstein. He has every right to have considered firing them or Mueller or anyone else tainted with this major scandal within the FBI and with tentacles reaching into other intelligence agencies and back to Obama and his motley crew.
Trump has given them all more than enough rope to hang themselves. He has played his hand with great skill. If all that Mueller can come up with is a charge of Trump's obstructing justice based on his making inquiries to smoke out those who were against him and had used underhanded means, then Mueller too will fall. He will be discredited again, as he has been in the past, if he chooses such a course of action and persists in it. He'd be wise to wrap up his investigation quickly and move out of the line of fire.
Trump has the upper hand and he's going to clean this sector of the swamp or at least expose its perfidy.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
Quote:In the light of the suggestion in the Nunes memo that Steele was a longtime FBI source' it seems worth sketching out some background, which may also make it easier to see some possible reasons why he was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.'
There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this.
Important support for these strategies was provided by the StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky.
The question of what links these had, or did not have, with elements in U.S. intelligence agencies is thus a critical one.
In making some sense of it, the fact that one key figure we know to have been involved in this network was missing at the Inquiry the former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared on the Iranian island of Kish in March 2007 is important.
Unfortunately, I only recently came across a book on Levinson published in 2016 by the New York Times' journalist Barry Meier, which is now hopefully winging its way across the Atlantic. From the accounts of the book I have seen, such as one by Jeff Stein in Newsweek', it seems likely that its author did not look at any of the evidence presented at Owen's Inquiry.
Had he done so, Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko's death. A Radio 4 programme on 16 December 2006, presented by the veteran BBC presenter Tom Mangold, had been wholly devoted to an account by Shvets, backed up by Levinson. Both of these were, like Litvinenko, supposed to be impartial due diligence' operatives.
The notion that any of them might have connections with Western intelligence agencies was not considered. The publicly available evidence of the involvement of Shvets, whose surname means cobbler' or shoemaker' in Ukrainian, in the processing of the tapes of conversations involving the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma supposedly recorded by Major Melnychenko, which had played a crucial role in the 2004-5 Orange Revolution' was not mentioned.
Still less was it mentioned that claims that the very dangerous late Soviet Kolchuga system, which made it possible the kind of identification of incoming aircraft which radar had traditionally done, without sending out signals which made the destruction of the facilities doing it possible, had been sold by Kuchma to Iraq had proven spurious.
What Shvets had done had been to take genuine audio in which Kuchma had discussed a possible sale, and edit it to suggest a sale had been completed.
As a former television current affairs producer, I can talk to you of the marvels which London audio editors can produce, very happily. Unfortunately, the days when not all BBC and Guardian' journalists were corrupt stenographers for corrupt and incompetent spooks, as Mangold and his like have been for Steele and Levinson, are long gone.
All this has become particularly relevant now, given that Simpson has placed the notorious Jewish Ukrainian mobster Semyon Mogilevich and the Solntsevskaya Bratva' mafia group centre stage in his accounts not simply of Trump and Manafort, but also of William Browder. For most of the Nineties, Levinson had been a, if not the, lead FBI investigator on Mogilevich.
(On this, see the 1999 BBC Panorama' programme The Billion Dollar Don', also presented by Tom Mangold, which has extensive interviews both with Mogilevich and Levinson at
In the months leading up to Levinson's disappearance, a key priority for the advocates of the strategy I have described was to prevent it being totally derailed by the patently catastrophic outcome of the Iraqi adventure.
Compounding the problem was the fact that this had created the Shia Crescent', which in turn exacerbated the potential existential threat' to Israel posed by the steadily increasing range, accuracy and numbers of missiles available to Hizbullah in hardened positions north of the Litani.
These, obviously, provided both a deterrent' for that organisation and Iran, and also a radical threat to the whole notion that somehow Israel could ever be a safe haven' for Jews, against the supposedly ineradicable disposition of the goyim' sooner or later to, as it were, revert to type. The dreadful thought that Israel might not be necessary had to be resisted at all costs.
Even more threatening were suggestions from the Russian side that it was foolish to think one could use jihadists without risking blowback', and that there might be an overwhelming common interest in combating Islamic extremism.
Another priority was to counter the pushback in the American intelligence community' and military, which was to produce the drastic downgrading of the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme in the November 2007 NIE and then the resignation of Admiral William Fallon as head of Centcom' the following March.
So in 2005 Shvets came to London. He and his audio editors had another bite at the cherry' of the Melnychenko tapes, so that material that did in fact establish that both the SBU and FSB had collaborated with Mogilevich could be employed to make it seem that Putin had a close personal relationship with the mobster.
All kinds of supposedly respectable American and British academics, like Professors Karen Dawisha and Robert Service, have fallen for this, hook, line and sinker. It gives a new meaning to the term useful idiot.'
In a letter sent in December that year by Litvinenko to the Mitrokhin Commission', for which his Italian associate Mario Scaramella was a consultant, this was used in an attempt to demonstrate that Mogilevich, while acting as an agent for the FSB and under Putin's personal krysha', had attempted to supply a mini atomic bomb' aka suitcase nuke' to Al Qaeda. Shortly after the letter was sent Scaramella departed on a trip to Washington, where he appears to have got access to Aldrich Ames.
At precisely this time, as Meier explains, Levinson was in the process of being recruited by a lady called Anne Jablonski who then worked as a CIA analyst. It appears that she was furious at the failure of the operational side at the Agency to produce evidence which would have established that Iran did indeed have an ongoing nuclear programme, and she may well have hoped would implicate Russia in supplying materials.
It also seems likely that, quite possibly in a different but related entrapment operation, related to propaganda wars in which claims and counter claims about a polonium-beryllium initiator' as the crucial missing part which might make a suitcase nuke' functional, Litvinenko accidentally ingested fatal quantities of polonium. A good deal of evidence suggests that this may have been at Berezovsky's offices on the night before he was supposedly assassinated.
It was, obviously, important for Steele et al to ensure that nobody looked at the StratCom' wars about suitcase nukes.' Here, a figure who has played a key role in such wars in relation to Syria plays an interesting minor one in the story.
Some time following the destruction of the case for an immediate war by the November 2007 NIE, a chemical weapons specialist called Dan Kaszeta, who had worked in the White House for twelve years, moved to London.
In 2011, in addition to founding a consultancy called Strongpoint Security', he began a writing career with articles in CBRNe World.' Later, he would become the conduit through which the notorious hexamine hypothesis', supposedly clinching proof that the Syrian government was responsible for the sarin incidents at Khan Sheikhoun, Ghouta, Saraqeb, and Khan Al-Asal, was disseminated.
Having been forced by the threat of a case being opened against them under human rights law into resuming the inquest into Litvinenko's death, in August 2012 the British authorities appointed Sir Robert Owen to conduct it. (There are many honest judges in Britain, but obviously, if one sets out to find someone who will cover up' for the incompetence and corruption of people like Steele, as Lord Hutton did before him, you can find them.)
That same month, a piece appeared in CBRNe World' with the the strapline: Dan Kaszeta looks into the ultimate press story: Suitcase nukes', and the main title Carry on or checked bags?' Among the grounds he gives for playing down the scare:
Some components rely on materials with shelf life. Tritium, for example, is used in many nuclear weapon designs and has a twelve year half-life. Polonium, used in neutron initiators in some earlier types of weapon designs, has a very short halflife. US documents state that every nuclear weapon has "limited life components" that require periodic replacement (do an internet search for nuclear limited life components and you can read for weeks).'
What Kaszeta has actually described are the reasons why polonium is a perfect StratCom' instrument. In terms of scientific plausibility, in fact there were no suitcase nukes', and in any case initiators' using polonium had been abandoned very early on, in favour of ones which lasted longer.
For StratCom' scenarios, as experience with the hexamine hypothesis' has proved, scientific plausibility can be irrelevant.
What polonium provides is a means of suggesting that Al Qaeda have in fact got hold of a nuclear device which they could easily smuggle into, say, Rome or New York, or indeed Moscow, but there is a crucial missing component which the FSB is trying to provide to them. By the same token, of course, that missing component could be depicted as one that Berezovsky and Litvinenko are conspiring to suppl to the Chechen insurgents.
In addition, the sole known source of global supply is the Avangard plant at Sarov in Russia, so the substance is naturally suited for StratCom' directed against that country, which its intelligence services would rather naturally try to make boomerang.'
According to Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele is a boy scout.' This seems to me quite wrong but, even if it were true, would you want to unleash a boy scout' into these kinds of intrigue?
As it is not clear why Kaszeta introduced his accurate but irrelevant point about polonium into an article which was concerned with scientific plausibility, one is left with an interesting question as to whether he cut his teeth on StratCom' attempting to ensure that nobody seriously interested in CBRN science followed an obvious lead.
In relation to the question of whether current FBI personnel had been involved in the kind of StratCom' exercises, I have been describing, a critical issue is the involvement of Shvets and Levinson in the Alexander Khonanykhine affair back in the Nineties, and the latter's use of claims about the Solntsevskaya to prevent the key figure's extradition. But that is a matter for another day.
A corollary of all this is that we cannot yet at least be absolutely confident that the account in the Nunes memo, according to which Steele was suspended and then dismissed as an FBI source for what the organisation is reported to define as the most serious of violations' the unauthorised disclosure of a relationship with the organisation is necessarily wholly accurate.
Who did and did not authorise which disclosures to the media, up to and including the extraordinary decision to have the full dossier, including claims about Aleksej Gubarev and the Alfa oligarchs, in flagrant disregard of the obvious risks of defamation suits, and who may be trying to pass the buck to others, remains I think less than totally clear.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
Quote:Based on the memo released today by the House Intelligence Committee (read it here), current and former members of the FBI and the Department of Justice who signed off on applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court will likely face contempt of court charges. Who? James Comey, Andy McCabe, Sally Yates, Dana Boente and Rob Rosenstein. The effectively lied to a Federal judge. That is not only stupid but illegal.
Here are the critical points from the Nunes memo that you should commit to memory.:
The Steele Dossier played a critical role in obtaining approval from the FISA court to carry out surveillance of Carter Page according to former FBI Deputy Director Andy McCabe.
Christopher Steele was getting paid by the DNC and the FBI for the same information.
No one at either the FBI nor the DOJ disclosed to the court that the Steele dossier was paid for by an opposition political campaign.
The first FISA warrant was obtained on 21 October 2016 based on a story written by Michael Isikoff for Yahoo News based on information he received directly from Christopher Steele--THE FBI DID NOT DISCLOSE IN THE FISA APPLICATION THAT STEELE WAS THE ORIGINAL SOURCE OF THE INFORMATION.
Christopher Steele was a long standing FBI "source" but was terminated as a source after telling Mother Jones reporter David Corn that he had a relationship with the FBI.
The FBI signers of the FISA applications/renewals were James Comey and Andy McCabe.
The DOJ signers of the FISA applications/renewals were Sally Yates, Dana Boente and Rod Rosenstein
Even after Steele was terminated by the FBI, he remained in contact with Deputy Attorney General Bruce Our, whose wife worked for FUSION GPS and was involved with the Steele dossier.
If you go back and read carefully what Isikoff reported in September 2016 it appears that the CIA and the DNI (as well as the FBI) are implicated in spreading the disinformation about Trump and Russia. Isikoff wrote:
U.S. intelligence officials are seeking to determine whether an American businessman identified by Donald Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers has opened up private communications with senior Russian officials including talks about the possible lifting of economic sanctions if the Republican nominee becomes president, according to multiple sources who have been briefed on the issue. . . .
But U.S. officials have since received intelligence reports that during that same three-day trip, Page met with Igor Sechin, a longtime Putin associate and former Russian deputy prime minister who is now the executive chairman of Rosneft, Russian's leading oil company, a well-placed Western intelligence source tells Yahoo News.
Who were the "intelligence officials" briefing the select members of the House and Senate? That will be one of the next shoes to drop. We are likely to learn in the coming days that John Brennan and Jim Clapper were also trying to help the FBI build a fallacious case against Trump.
The rats will start scrambling in earnest for the lifeboats. The Trump coup has failed.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
Quote:Based on the memo released today by the House Intelligence Committee (read it here), current and former members of the FBI and the Department of Justice who signed off on applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court will likely face contempt of court charges. Who? James Comey, Andy McCabe, Sally Yates, Dana Boente and Rob Rosenstein. The effectively lied to a Federal judge. That is not only stupid but illegal.
Here are the critical points from the Nunes memo that you should commit to memory.:
The Steele Dossier played a critical role in obtaining approval from the FISA court to carry out surveillance of Carter Page according to former FBI Deputy Director Andy McCabe.
Christopher Steele was getting paid by the DNC and the FBI for the same information.
No one at either the FBI nor the DOJ disclosed to the court that the Steele dossier was paid for by an opposition political campaign.
The first FISA warrant was obtained on 21 October 2016 based on a story written by Michael Isikoff for Yahoo News based on information he received directly from Christopher Steele--THE FBI DID NOT DISCLOSE IN THE FISA APPLICATION THAT STEELE WAS THE ORIGINAL SOURCE OF THE INFORMATION.
Christopher Steele was a long standing FBI "source" but was terminated as a source after telling Mother Jones reporter David Corn that he had a relationship with the FBI.
The FBI signers of the FISA applications/renewals were James Comey and Andy McCabe.
The DOJ signers of the FISA applications/renewals were Sally Yates, Dana Boente and Rod Rosenstein
Even after Steele was terminated by the FBI, he remained in contact with Deputy Attorney General Bruce Our, whose wife worked for FUSION GPS and was involved with the Steele dossier.
If you go back and read carefully what Isikoff reported in September 2016 it appears that the CIA and the DNI (as well as the FBI) are implicated in spreading the disinformation about Trump and Russia. Isikoff wrote:
U.S. intelligence officials are seeking to determine whether an American businessman identified by Donald Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers has opened up private communications with senior Russian officials including talks about the possible lifting of economic sanctions if the Republican nominee becomes president, according to multiple sources who have been briefed on the issue. . . .
But U.S. officials have since received intelligence reports that during that same three-day trip, Page met with Igor Sechin, a longtime Putin associate and former Russian deputy prime minister who is now the executive chairman of Rosneft, Russian's leading oil company, a well-placed Western intelligence source tells Yahoo News.
Who were the "intelligence officials" briefing the select members of the House and Senate? That will be one of the next shoes to drop. We are likely to learn in the coming days that John Brennan and Jim Clapper were also trying to help the FBI build a fallacious case against Trump.
The rats will start scrambling in earnest for the lifeboats. The Trump coup has failed.
The Nunes short story has already been shredded over the weekend. As I pointed out previously, Nunes was on Trump's transition team and was part of the whole "unmasking" fiasco last year, after which he supposedly recused himself from the Russia investigation. That turned out not to be true. But the subject of the surveillance, Carter Page,is a man who has been up Putin's ass for years. He lived in Russia, made speeches attacking the US from Russia, wrote in a letter in 2013: "Over the past half year, I have had the privilege to serve as an informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin…" http://time.com/5132126/carter-page-russia-2013-letter/
And it's surprising to anyone that this guy was under US surveillance? Officially, he left the Trump campaign in September 2013, and the first FISA warrant wasn't granted until October. So I don't know why Trump thinks this is an attack on him.
The memo itself (on page 4) actually states that the FBI investigation into Trump-Russia began in the summer of 2016 because of George Papadopolous, NOT because of the dossier.
"Officials familiar with the matter told The Washington Post and The New York Times that the DOJ made it clear to the court that information contained in a dossier they submitted as part of a FISA application to surveil Page was politically motivated." http://www.businessinsider.com/nunes-mem...ked-2018-2
To those not familiar with the US legal system, it is a common practice of police and judges to rely on evidence that came from sources considered "biased" or having other motivations (such as drug dealers testifying against a mob boss, for example). This happens every friggin' day in US courts.
Democrats on the House Intel Committee say that the memo is lying about Andrew McCabe's still-unreleased testimony.
"Consider, first, the obvious timing problem. The Nunes memo begins with a FISA application dated October 21, 2016. That date is significant for a number of reasons. As an initial matter, coming less than 20 days before the election, it seems a particularly poor way of trying to influence the outcome of the election. A FISA application just a few days before November 9 would not actually have produced any evidence until well after the electionmaking Nunes' implicit charge of a corrupted investigation chronologically implausible. In addition, the focus on this date has to deal with the uncomfortable fact that the surveillance of Page it authorized started roughly a month after Page officially left the Trump campaignso, again, it is a poor way of effectuating a bias against Trump to collect evidence relating to the actions of a former campaign volunteer." https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/...nse-216928
Even four Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee aren't buying the idea that The Memo exonerates Trump.
MARGARET BRENNAN: The memo has no impact on the Russia probe?
REP. TREY GOWDY: No not to me, it doesn't and I was pretty integrally involved in the drafting of it. There is a Russia investigation without a dossier. So to the extent the memo deals with the dossier and the FISA process, the dossier has nothing to do with the meeting at Trump Tower. The dossier has nothing to do with an email sent by Cambridge Analytica. The dossier really has nothing to do with George Papadopoulos' meeting in Great Britain. It also doesn't have anything to do with obstruction of justice. So there's going to be a Russia probe, even without a dossier. https://www.npr.org/2018/02/04/583122003...-a-dossier
"Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, said Sunday he does not believe that the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act memo vindicates President Trump from special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin in the lead-up to the 2016 election. "I don't," Hurd told ABC when asked whether Trump and his former campaign aides were absolved from any problematic conduct in light of the memo being made public. "I don't agree with some of my colleagues that say, who are always using the word 'explosive.' I'm not shocked that elected officials are using hyperbole and exaggerations," the Texas Republican continued." http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/will-h...le/2648059
REP. CHRIS STEWART, R-UTAH, INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE: I think it would be a mistake for anyone to suggest that the special counsel shouldn't complete his work. I support his work. I want him to finish it. I hope he finishes it as quickly as possible. This memo has frankly nothing at all to do with a special counsel. It was one of the criticisms of people last week and before that who had never seen the memo who said, you know, this is to impugn the integrity and the work of the special counsel. As you know now, Chris, it has nothing to do with at all with that. They're very separate. I hope the special counsel will complete his work and work to the American people. http://www.foxnews.com/transcript/2018/0...-memo.html
"A Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee on Sunday said the release of a GOP memo detailing how the FBI used Democrat-funded information to snoop on one of President Trump's campaign aides is about government oversight not "vindication" for a White House besieged by probes into possible ties with Russia. "I think this is a separate issue," Rep. Brad Wenstrup, Ohio Republican, told CNN's State of the Union." https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201...ndication/
"In 2013, Page got on the radar of FBI counterintelligence thanks to his connections to a ring of New York-based operatives of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service or SVR. Those three spiestwo who were posing as Russian diplomats and a third Illegal who was masquerading as a businessmanwere gathering intelligence on Wall Street until they were exposed in January 2015. The two Legals fled the country prior to their arrest while the SVR Illegal, Evgeny Buryakov, was taken into custody. Buryakov admitted he was a spy and was sent back to Russia a little over two years later. Carter Page was an operational target of that SVR ring. As court documents reveal, Page wanted to be a player and made himself available for recruitment by the Russian spies. The SVR sensed that he was a poseurone of the Russians called Page "an idiot"yet they maintained operational contacts with him. The FBI talked to Page to ascertain his agenda; he was assessed as a less-than-loyal American, based on his clandestine links to the SVR. It's no surprise then, that when Page popped up in the Trump campaign in 2016, the FBI thought he merited another look....Indeed, Nunes added fuel to the fire by stating yesterday on Fox News, "The only area that I am familiar with that we left out would be the history of Carter Page… I don't believe somebody like Mr. Page should be a target of the FBI." It seems the HPSCI chair has discovered a Constitutionally-protected right to work clandestinely with a hostile foreign intelligence service against the United States, a right that has never been detected by any actual law experts. To make matters worse, Nunes also admitted that he never actually read the FISA warrant applications that form the cornerstone of his diatribe against the FBI." http://observer.com/2018/02/devin-nunes-...stigation/
This is what an incredible moron "Intelligence" Chairman Nunes is.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) insisted Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos never met the president but a former U.S. Attorney smacked down his easily rebutted claim.
Nunes appeared Monday on "Fox & Friends," where he tried to walk back unintentionally damaging evidence from a memo issued by his office about the special counsel probe in which Papadopoulos pleaded guilty.
"If Papadopoulos was such a major figure, you had nothing on him, you know, the guy lied," Nunes told Fox News. "As far as we can tell, Papadopoulos never even knew who never even had met with the president."
However, the former foreign policy adviser was photographed meeting during the campaign with Trump and then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL).
That fact wasn't lost on Preet Bharara, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
"This man @DevinNunes is the chair of the Intelligence Committee," Bharara tweeted. "There is literally a picture of Papadopoulous meeting with the President. As far as we can tell, Nunes is not good at his job."
Quote:In 2013 Carter Page was working as an "under-cover employee" (UCE) of the FBI, helping them to build a case against "Evgeny Buryakov". In March 2016 Carter Page remained their informant pre-trial leading to a pleading of guilty from Buryakov.
[Note Pay close attention to dates, names in descriptions amid all citations]
Sources: ♦ In 2013 the U.S. Department of Justice, Southern District of New York, announced an indictment against a Russian Operative Evgeny Buryakov. LINK HERE In March of 2016 Buryakov pleaded GUILTY:
Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and John P. Carlin, Assistant Attorney General for National Security, announced that EVGENY BURYAKOV, a/k/a "Zhenya," pled guilty today to conspiring to act in the United States as an agent of the Russian Federation, without providing prior notice to the Attorney General.
[…] The FBI obtained the recordings after Sporyshev attempted to recruit an FBI undercover employee ("UCE-1"), who was posing as an analyst from a New York-based energy company. In response to requests from Sporyshev, UCE-1 provided Sporyshev with binders containing purported industry analysis written by UCE-1 and supporting documentation relating to UCE-1's reports, as well as covertly placed recording devices.(more)
♦ In 2016 Reuters published an article, based on the ongoing court case, going into detail about court records and how the FBI built their case. Reuters also describes the FBI UCE-1 (Under-Cover Employee) with strong detail. LINK HERE
NEW YORK (Reuters) The FBI eavesdropped on meetings involving Russian intelligence personnel in New York City, including a suspected spy posing as a trade representative, by hiding recorders in binders containing supposedly confidential information about the energy sector, U.S. prosecutors said.
The hours of covert recordings from 2013 were disclosed in papers filed in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday in the case of Evgeny Buryakov, a Russian citizen who U.S. prosecutors say posed as a banker while participating in a Cold War-style spy ring.
[…] According to prosecutors, in April 2012, Sporyshev met an undercover FBI employee posing as an analyst at a New York energy firm at an oil and gas industry conference.
Over the next two years, they met to discuss the industry and other economic and political issues, prosecutors said, with Sporyshev providing gifts and cash for information.
In 2013, the FBI employee began providing Sporyshev with the binders containing purported industry analysis he wrote, supporting documents, and "covertly placed recording devices," prosecutors wrote. (more)
♦ In April 2017, writing a story about Carter Page (trying to enhance/affirm the Russian narrative), the New York Times outlined Page's connections to the Trump campaign. However, New York Times also references Page's prior connection to the Buryakov case. If you ignore the narrative, you discover the UCE1 description is Carter Page. READ [Notice how the story is shaped] LINK HERE:
Russian intelligence operatives tried in 2013 to recruit an American businessman and eventual foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign who is now part of the F.B.I. investigation into Russia's interference into the American election, according to federal court documents and a statement issued by the businessman.
The businessman, Carter Page, met with one of three Russians who were eventually charged with being undeclared officers with Russia's foreign intelligence service, known as the S.V.R.
The F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Page in 2013 as part of an investigation into the spy ring, but decided that he had not known the man was a spy, and the bureau never accused Mr. Page of wrongdoing.
The court documents say that Mr. Page, who founded an investment company in New York called Global Energy Capital, provided documents about the energy business to one of the Russians. […] To record their conversations, the F.B.I. inserted a listening device into binders that were passed to the Russian intelligence operatives during an energy conference, according to a former United States intelligence official. (more)
When you read The Times article (2017), against the backdrop of the Reuters article (2016), and the DOJ release (2016) it is transparently clear that Carter Page was the Under-Cover Employee (UCE1) of the FBI in the 2013 case.
Carter Page was working for the FBI. Page was the "analyst from a New York-based energy company" who "began providing Sporyshev with the binders".
However, in 2017 the New York Times, using information from "a former intelligence official", conflates the FBI/Page Relationship. Heck, the NY Times tries to entirely change the relationship between Carter Page and the FBI.
Why?
Likely because on October 21st 2016 the FBI claimed to a FISA Court; to gain a "Title I" surveillance warrant; that Carter Page was working on behalf of a foreign government.
Carter Page was an FBI Under-Cover Employee in 2013, and remained the primary FBI witness through May of 2016 throughout the case.
If Carter Page was working as a UCE (FBI undercover employee), responsible for the bust of a high level Russian agent in 2013 -and remained a UCE- throughout the court case UP TO May of 2016, how is it possible that on October 21st 2016 Carter Page is put under a FISA Title 1 surveillance warrant as an alleged Russian agent?
Conclusion: He wasn't. The DOJ National Security Division and the FBI Counterintelligence Division, knew he wasn't. The DOJ-NSD and FBI flat-out LIED.
Now, go back to the March 2016 DOJ Press Release of the guilty pleading for Evgeny Buryakov, announced from the New York office:
…"Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and John P. Carlin, Assistant Attorney General for National Security, announced"…
Because "FISA Title I" surveillance authority against a U.S. citizen is so serious (the U.S. government is essentially calling the target a spy), only a few people are authorized to even apply for such surveillance warrants. One of the four people authorized to make such a filing is the Asst. Attorney General who is head of the National Security Division of the DOJ. That person is John P Carlin.
The same John P Carlin who, together with the FBI counterintelligence unit, conscripted Carter Page as an FBI Under-Cover Employee, gains a guilty plea, then turns around and six months later accuses Page of being a Russian Spy.
Why? Likely because the DOJ-NSD and FBI CoIntel needed to find a legal way to spy on the Trump campaign. The 2016 FISA Title 1 surveillance of former FBI employee Carter Page became that legal way. ["The Insurance Policy"]
In October of 2016, at approximately the same time the DOJ was making the FISA Court filing against Page, and successfully gaining the surveillance warrant, Asst. Attorney General John P Carlin resigns as head of the DOJ-NSD. SEE HERE Did Carlin resign in protest? or, did Carlin resign knowing he too had served a larger purpose?
The entire FISA Title I surveillance authority over Carter Page was cover, most likely retroactive cover, for the DOJ and FBI conducting surveillance on the Trump campaign.
The DOJ-National Security Division and FBI Counterintelligence Unit didn't care about Page because to them he was a useful tool. It wasn't Page they needed, per se', they just needed someone, anyone, who had contact with the Trump campaign that they could apply the label "foreign agent" upon. The DOJ/FBI just needed someone they could position to gain the FISA "Title I" surveillance approval that would retroactively make all prior campaign surveillance legal. Who Carter Page was simply checked the right boxes.
Page wasn't a "plant", or a "participant", he was a useful body upon which they could attach a label to justify their surveillance and monitoring. Nothing more.
Clear enough?
Carter Page testified to the House Intelligence Committee that DOJ-FBI officials leaked his identity, his role in the Buryakov case, to the media. This is secondary and direct confirmation from Page himself that he was indeed the FBI UCE-1
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
The unofficial coroner to MI6, Lionel Tooth, has this morning issued an official death certificate for Mr. Steele.
At a packed press conference in the Snug of MI6's in-house pub, the Kiss Me Hardy, Dr. Tooth insisted that Mr. Steele was the most obviously dead-man-walking he had the misfortune to observe since "that chap Kelly or perhaps the Bulgarian one, Georgi Markedmanandoff."
In response to tentative objections from a quivering BBC reptile who had the temerity to point out that both Mr. Steele and his mullet appeared to be very much alive and hiding, Tooth insisted that Mr. Steele's continued respiration was "a mere technicality" and "something of an optical illusion." "Trust me," added the government's foremost expert on Amazonian toxins, "he's a goner."
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
