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Thread: Transition into Trump

  1. Link to Post #3841
    Avalon Member norman's Avatar
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    Default Re: Transition into Trump

    I'd like Trump to hire Catherine Fitts

    At this rate, it could actually happen !



    Meanwhile, here's Joel Skousen's opinion of John Bolton, 'the war hawk', and what it might mean for the North Korea situation.

    MP3
    https://app.box.com/s/1drep34zlbhia605aeub930tlhorm740
    Last edited by norman; 23rd March 2018 at 07:12.
    ..................................................my first language is TYPO..............................................

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    Default Re: Transition into Trump

    Giddy Up – DOJ Admits They Have a Grand Jury Empaneled in FBI and DOJ Investigation…

    Posted on March 22, 2018
    by sundance

    Today chairman Bob Goodlatte sends a formal subpoena to the DOJ (Inspector General Michael Horowitz) for documents regarding the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server, potential abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility recommendation to fire former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

    However, it’s not the subpoena that should make the news. Pay close attention to the DOJ response.

    House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) is one of the top three people throughout the entirety of congress with a comprehensive knowledge of the events surrounding the investigations of the FBI and DOJ. Chairman Goodlatte is one of only four people outside the DOJ who have read the full DOJ FISA application used for a Title-1 Surveillance warrant of Carter Page.

    The House Judiciary Committee holds the primary statutory oversight over the U.S. Department of Justice. Additionally, Chairman Goodlatte is the congressional office working closest with DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz. In short, Goodlatte is the center of all ‘oversight’ information circling the investigations into the DOJ and FBI.

    However, all of that said, even Chairman Bob Goodlatte doesn’t, and shouldn’t, know what criminal investigations are underway. We’ve explained this dynamic of disconnect numerous times. We really began emphasizing this when AG Jeff Sessions admitted he brought in a prosecutor from outside Washington DC to work with Inspector General Horowitz.

    You can read the Goodlatte Subpoenas – HERE – along with the letter that accompanies his demand. However, more important is the response from the DOJ as communicated by Fox News journalist Chad Pergram (emphasis mine):

    Oh, what’s that? Yes, the DOJ has to review the demand for evidence because release of those documents might conflict with ongoing Grand Jury information (evidence). Yes, that means a Grand Jury is impaneled, exactly as we expected.

    Yes, that also means there are “law enforcement actions” currently ongoing as a result of the prosecutor assigned to reviewing the evidence discovered by Inspector General Horowitz.

    Are there still those who doubt?

    There has been a great deal of consternation, directed toward AG Jeff Sessions surrounding the ongoing FISA abuse scandal and the larger issues of unlawful DOJ and FBI conduct in their political investigation of candidate Donald Trump. It is a matter of great division amid people who follow the details. Yet there is overwhelming evidence he assigned a prosecutor to conduct a criminal investigation of the FBI and DOJ “small group” a long time ago. Now we know, with certainty, a GRAND JURY is empaneled.
    … I have appointed a person outside of Washington, many years in the Department of Justice to look at all the allegations that the House Judiciary Committee members sent to us; and we’re conducting that investigation. (read more)

    Quote
    Shannon Bream @ShannonBream
    AG’s office confirms this is NOT the IG, but a separate “senior federal prosecutor” outside DC. https://twitter.com/brandon_and_so …

    4:20 PM - Mar 8, 2018
    Evidence of this prosecutor, and the Grand Jury, was also visible within the firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. –SEE HERE– We’ve been talking about this since it became obvious someone was giving information to congressional investigators.

    ♦First, the question: If Jeff Sessions has appointed a prosecutor to work with Inspector General Horowitz, why do congressional reps keep asking for a second special counsel?

    The answer is a lot simpler than we might think: They don’t know.

    The legislative branch of the government doesn’t know what the criminal investigations are of the executive branch of government; AND AG Jeff Sessions has repeatedly said his intention is to restore the proper, appropriate and professional standards of the U.S. Department of Justice. (ie. no talking about criminal investigations)

    Within this specific investigation there is a triple role. ¹A DOJ Inspector General conducting an internal investigation; ² Appropriate congressional oversight; and ³ the collection of evidence that might also be used in criminal indictments.

    Within the IG collection of evidence there are two competing issues: #1) Evidence of misconduct and political bias (shared openly with congress and oversight); and #2) evidence of illegal activity (retained from congress to preserve integrity of evidence for later used in criminal proceedings); this is where the “outside DC prosecutor” comes in.

    Which brings us to point #2

    ♦Accusations of DOJ hiding evidence from congress.

    Several congressional representatives have stated the information about Judge Rudolph Contreras was not readily know because his association with Peter Strzok was redacted within text messages sent from DOJ to congress. Therefore the DOJ is trying to hide damaging information. That claim is not the correct framework/context.

    Congress as a whole (reps, staff and investigators) can go to the DOJ and look at ALL unredacted text messages. However, if congressional staff wish to take copies with them the copies must be redacted. Why? Because, just like the Contreras issue within the Strzok and Page text messages, there’s a possibility specific texts are evidence of a crime.

    Go back to December 2nd, 2017, when the first reports of the IG investigative findings were hitting the news media and you’ll note IG Horowitz said he has no issues with congressional oversight getting his investigative evidence with the approval FROM the DOJ. In this example the “prosecutor”, working with Horowitz, has to make a determination if a potential criminal case would be compromised by allowing the release of specific information/evidence gathered by the Inspector General.

    Lastly, where all this appears to be going. It is not likely there will be a ‘second special counsel’ per se’. With a prosecutor already working with Inspector General Horowitz that person already has a thorough knowledge of all the evidence. As soon as the IG publishes his report, the prosecutor can begin subpoenaing witnesses. And now we know there’s already a Grand Jury seated somewhere hearing the criminal evidence he/she has carved out from the overwhelming IG evidence as collected.

    You and I might be frustrated with the pace of the activity for a myriad of righteous reasons. However, we must also remind ourselves of the scale and scope of the corruption here that is inherent within the BIG PICTURE. All of this was done on purpose. None of this was accidental.

    The prosecutor could, likely would, be having to outline the biggest political conspiracy in the history of politics. It is entirely possible officials within the CIA, NSA, DOJ, FBI, State Department, ODNI, and national security apparatus along with the Obama White House, Clinton campaign officials, politicians, career bureaucrats and possibly judges are all entwined and involved.

    Add into this likelihood the complicit ideological media who will go absolutely bananas about any single member of their team being indicted; and a better than average chance the media will follow instructions from their leadership and send tens-of-thousands of low-info sycophants into the streets in protest, and well… you see the picture.

    The left only know one narrative: “Jeff Sessions is doing Trump’s evil bidding.” That’s it. That’s the drumbeat. 24/7/365 That’s the narrative pushed over and over.

    Just look at the media reaction to Andrew McCabe’s simple firing, which Trump had nothing to do with, and think about what their response would be to indictments?

    The Conservative Treehouse
    Last edited by turiya; 23rd March 2018 at 13:31.

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    Default Re: Transition into Trump

    Quote Posted by norman (here)
    I'd like Trump to hire Catherine Fitts

    At this rate, it could actually happen !



    Meanwhile, here's Joel Skousen's opinion of John Bolton, 'the war hawk', and what it might mean for the North Korea situation.

    MP3
    https://app.box.com/s/1drep34zlbhia605aeub930tlhorm740

    I was sent a form to fill out when Trump was interviewing people in Trump Tower for cabinet positions. I recommended both Catherine Austin Fitts & Paul Craig Roberts as people he could trust. Also suggesting (whistleblower) Philip Haney (formerly of DHS) as DHS Department Head.

    Probably never got the message, screened & thrown out by the likes of people similar to GOP Reince Priebus...

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    Default Re: Transition into Trump

    Quote

    As a matter of National Security I've signed the Omnibus Spending Bill. I say to Congress: I will NEVER sign another bill like this again. To prevent this omnibus situation from ever happening again, I'm calling on Congress to give me a line-item veto for all govt spending bills!

    4:01 PM - 23 Mar 2018
    Last edited by turiya; 24th March 2018 at 00:51.

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    Default Re: Transition into Trump

    Just found out some strange collateral damage (?) from Congress recently passing an anti-sex trafficking bill - HR1865 (H.R.1865 - Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017).. Craigslist & Reddit have just shut down their Personals Ads sections. I've met people who've dated from Craigslist and that section has been around a long time and are free as opposed to sites like match.com where you pay. I wonder if the pay sites feel as unnerved. I went to the craigslist site to see if it was just disappeared or was there a notice.

    Here is the notice posted on Craigslist:

    "US Congress just passed HR 1865, "FOSTA", seeking to subject websites to criminal and civil liability when third parties (users) misuse online personals unlawfully.

    Any tool or service can be misused. We can't take such risk without jeopardizing all our other services, so we are regretfully taking craigslist personals offline. Hopefully we can bring them back some day.

    To the millions of spouses, partners, and couples who met through craigslist, we wish you every happiness!"

    Things are happening for sure but they just all seem a little 'off'.

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    Default Re: Transition into Trump

    Nobody Escapes, It's All Being Setup
    To Close All The Exits - Episode 1528b

    (Mar 23, 2018)
    Description:
    • Trump is making this move to collapse the central bank system.
    • The house intel probe has come to an end, no collusion discovered.
    • Facebook is trying to cover up what they really do, this is not the only company that sells private data.
    • The push is on to have banks control who can purchase weapons.
    • Turkey claims the captured weapons supplied to the Kurds by the US.
    • Russia and US begin talks on Syria.
    • Rand Paul says the deep state does exist.
    • The push is on to take down the deep state, it is all being setup to bring down the central bank system that funds the deep state, bring those who committed crimes to justice and to reset the entire system.
    • All exists have been blocked, nobody will escape, nobody.

    Political/Rights
    House Intel Committee Votes To Release Russia Probe Report
    • In a vote that was widely expected since the House Intelligence Committee announced it had concluded its probe into Russia’s purported collusion and election meddling, finding that the Intelligence Community’s allegations about Russia’s role were overblown.
    • On Thursday, the committee voted along party lines to formally end the investigation and released a report saying they found no evidence of collusion between Trump and associates of the Kremlin

    Source: zerohedge.com


    Facebook’s data gold rush: Web giant’s takings soared by £12BILLION after it let companies hoover up users’ data
    • The social media giant practically doubled its takings every year after opening up profiles to ‘tens of thousands’ of app developers
    • During data gold-rush, which lasted from 2009 to 2015, appears almost anyone who described themselves as a ‘developer’ could freely mine its database
    • In this period, the technology firm’s revenues rose sharply, from million in 2009 to nearly billion by 2015
    Source: dailymail.co.uk


    The Deep State Breaks Surface
    • Cambridge Analytica is owned by a British company, SCL Ltd, which in effect does exactly the same activities in the UK that Cambridge Analytica was undertaking in the US.

    • looking at the board memebers a name jumped out at me of course was Lord Ivar Mountbatten, direct descendant of Queen Victoria and scion of the family closest friends with that of the UK’s unelected monarch. The only person listed by Companies House as having “significant control” – ie over 25% of the shares – is Roger Gabb, the wine merchant known for large donations to the Tory Party.
    • The most worrying aspect of this is that SCL is paid by the British government to manipulate public opinion particularly in the fields of “Security” and “Defence”, and still more worryingly SCL –
    • A closer look and you find that Cambridge Analytica is a mere offshoot of Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL Group) – an organisation with its roots deeply embedded within the British political, military and royal establishment.
    • The organisation boasts that it has conducted “behavioral change programs” in over 60 countries and its clients have included the British Ministry of Defence, the US State Department and NATO.
    • In addition, SCL also carries a secret clearance as a ‘list X’ contractor for the MOD. A List X site is a commercial site on British soil that is approved to hold UK government information marked as ‘confidential’ and above. Essentially, SCL got the green light to hold British government secrets on its premises.Meanwhile, the US State Department has a contract for $500,000 with SCL. According to an official, this was to provide “research and analytical support in connection with our mission to counter terrorist propaganda and disinformation overseas.” This was not the only work that SCL has been contracted for with the US government, the source added.
    • Indeed, it seems evident that the organisation is a product of murky alliances formed between venture capitalists and former British military and intelligence officers
    • International deception and meddling is the name of the game for SCL. We finally have the most concrete evidence yet of shadowy actors using dirty tricks in order to rig elections. But these characters aren’t operating from Moscow intelligence bunkers.Instead, they are British, Eton educated, headquartered in the city of London and have close ties to Her Majesty’s government.
    Source: craigmurray.org.uk


    Citigroup Enforces Gun Control Restrictions On Customers
    • Seemingly following Andrew Ross Sorkin’s suggestions, and echoing the virtue-signaling from Dick’s Sporting Goods et al., megabank Citigroup is setting restrictions on the sale of firearms by its business customers.
    • As a reminder, Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote in the NY Times that banks could control guns, if Washington won’t.
    Here’s an idea.
    What if the finance industry — credit card companies like Visa, Mastercard and American Express; credit card processors like First Data; and banks like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — were to effectively set new rules for the sales of guns in America?
    Collectively, they have more leverage over the gun industry than any lawmaker. And it wouldn’t be hard for them to take a stand.
    PayPal, Square, Stripe and Apple Pay announced years ago that they would not allow their services to be used for the sale of firearms.
    Source: zerohedge.com


    War
    Turkey claims US-made weapons found with Kurdish PKK
    • Troops from the Turkish Army discovered and seized two AT-4 unguided anti-tank weapons from PKK forces during counter-terrorist operations in southeastern parts of the country on Wednesday, according to an official Twitter account operated by the Turkish Armed Forces.
    • Although the AT-4 armament was developed and produced in Sweden by Saab Bofors Dynamics, it’s believed that the US originally supplied the launchers to Kurdish-led forces in Syria, before they were handed over to PKK combatants to be used against the Turkish army.
    Source: almasdarnews.com


    ‘Assad must go’ mantra no longer viable, UK Foreign Secretary says
    • UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said Wednesday that while Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad may fear punishment for civilian deaths in the country, the old slogan of “Assad must go” is no longer tenable.
    • “Johnson added that with Assad currently controlling 75 percent of the population and 50 percent of the territory, there is “a huge amount of slaughter still to come,” so the best thing would be “to get round the table in Geneva and begin the process of a new constitutional settlement for Syria.”
    Source: almasdarnews.com


    Russian, US military chiefs meet to discuss Syria
    • General of the Army Valery Gerasimov, the head of Russia’s General Staff, and Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford discussed Syria on the phone and agreed on further contacts, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Wednesday.
    • They “discussed issues concerning the situation in the Syrian Arab Republic along with other pressing issues of mutual interest,” it added.
    • “Gerasimov and Dunford agreed to continue bilateral contacts,” the ministry said.
    Source: almasdarnews.com


    False Flags
    Rand Paul Admits “Absolutely, The Deep State Exists”
    • Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said that the term “deep state” accurately describes how an unelected bureaucracy of national security officials in positions of power exert influence without Congressional oversight.

    “Absolutely, there is a deep state, because the deep state is the intelligence agencies that do not have oversight,” he said.
    “Only eight people in Congress know what they’re doing, and traditionally, those eight people have been a rubber stamp to let the intelligence communities do whatever they want. There is no skeptic among the eight people that are supposedly overseeing the intelligence community.”
    • The “Gang of Eight” that Paul referenced is made up of the majority and minority leaders of the House of Representatives and Senate, along with the chairmen and ranking members of the two intelligence committees, and are the select few members of Congress with real-time access to America’s most sensitive intelligence.
    • Paul pointed out that he believed Obama-era CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and others used intelligence collected “without any judicial warrants” for political purposes, in addition to “try to bring Trump down.”
    “John Brennan and James Clapper were doing whatever the hell they wanted, without any judicial warrants, and I think there were numerous people in the Obama administration who were using intelligence — one, to try to bring Trump down; but two, also, they were using it for political purposes,” he said.
    “And this is very, very worrisome.”

    Source: zerohedge.com


    H.R. McMaster replaced by John Bolton as national security adviser
    • Breaking: H.R. McMaster replaced by John Bolton as national security adviser McMaster has been replaced by former Ambassador to the United Nations [Bush’s Deep State warmonger] John Bolton as national security adviser, President Trump tweeted Thursday. “I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor,” Mr. Trump wrote. “I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9.”

    The White House
    EO 13818: Blocking the Property of Persons Involved in Serious Human Rights Abuse or Corruption

    EO 13815: Resuming the United States Refugee Admissions Program With Enhanced Vetting Capabilities

    EO 13799: Establishment of Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity]

    EO 13798: Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty

    EO 13796: Addressing Trade Agreement Violations and Abuses

    EO 13793: Improving Accountability and Whistleblower Protection at the Department of Veterans Affairs

    EO 13788: Buy American and Hire American

    EO 13780: Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States

    EO 13778: Restoring the Rule of Law, Federalism, and Economic Growth by Reviewing the “Waters of the United States” Rule

    EO 13773: Enforcing Federal Law With Respect to Transnational Criminal Organizations and Preventing International Trafficking

    EO 13767: Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements

    EO 13825: 2018 Amendments to the Manual for Courts-Martial, United States

    EO 13823: Protecting America Through Lawful Detention of Terrorists
    x22Report.com

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    Default Re: Transition into Trump

    Q: EVIL IS EVERYWHERE
    (Mar 22, 2018)
    Description:
    • On March 10th #Q posted the words 'EVIL IS EVERYWHERE'.
    • He wasn't kidding.
    • Just imagine what would be happening right now if Rothschild's puppet Hillary was in the Oval office.
    • But instead, former Presidents of western nations like Nicolas Sarkozy, another Rothschild puppet, are being ARRESTED for corruption.
    • The storm is not only coming.
    • It's here.
    ________________________


    Former French President Sarkozy Arrested "Over Campaign Financing"


    by Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/20/2018 - 06:27


    Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was arrested on Tuesday morning in connection with a probe into the financing of his successful 2007 presidential run which allegedly included funding from late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

    Sarkozy - who was president of France from 2007 until 2012 - is said to have accepted €50MM from Gaddafi's regime, claims which have been repeated by the late Libyan dictator's son and French businessman Ziad Takieddine, SkyNews reported. That amount would be more than double the legal spending limit in French elections at that time, which was €21MM. Alleged payments would also violate French laws on foreign financing and declaring the source of campaign funds.

    Nicolas Sarkozy (L) greets Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2007 in Paris

    Sarkozy and his campaign manager have repeatedly denied accepting money from Libya. According to Le Monde, this is the first time Mr Sarkozy has been questioned in relation to this investigation, which was opened in April 2013. Sarkozy has already been ordered to stand trial in a separate case, concerning the financing of his 2012 re-election campaign, when he lost to Francois Hollande. He has denied that the unsuccessful 2012 re-election campaign received illegal funding.

    The former president can be held for up to 48 hours and presented to a magistrates' court for indictment if police seek charges.

    In March 2011, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the late dictator's son, told Euronews: "Sarkozy has to give back the money he accepted from Libya to finance his electoral campaign. We financed his campaign and we have the proof…

    "The first thing we're demanding is that this clown gives back the money to the Libyan people."

    Takieddine claims he delivered three suitcases stuffed with cash to Paris between 2006 and 2007, and handed them over to Mr Sarkozy in the interior ministry when he was a minister.

    Sarkozy, who was president from 2007 to 2012, attempted to stage a comeback for the 2017 election, but failed to convince the voters in his own party to support him and had to concede to Francois Fillon and Alain Juppe.

    Of course, if only Sarkozy had done what other developed country leaders do, and opened a foundation to accept all these foreign bribes donations, all of this unpleasantness could have been avoided.
    ZeroHedge
    Last edited by turiya; 28th March 2018 at 19:13.

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    Default Re: Transition into Trump

    "Rothschilds & Rockefellers Need To Go Down To Free America..."



    "... the Clintons, Obama, the Bush family, and Soros are middle-level people. These are puppets of the globalist syndicate... These people are in the Rothschild and Rockefeller axis..."
    • Mar 25, 2018 5:01 PM


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    Default Re: Transition into Trump

    Judge Jeanine Hints at
    Trump’s Trojan Horse, 2120

    (Mar 25, 2018)
    Description:
    Last night, Judge Jeanine hinted at what Trump is apparently planning after passage of the latest budget deal. The White House put out a letter from the President to the Speaker of the House invoking his authority to designate an emergency requirement regarding all funding pursuant to the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985 to build the wall.

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    Default Re: Transition into Trump

    Clock Activated, Stage Set, Wait For
    The Boom, Boom, Boom! - Episode 1529b

    (Mar 26, 2018)
    Description:
    • Facebook has been collecting contacts, phone number and everything else.
    • The FTC has opened an official investigation into Facebook, this will spread to the other social media giants.
    • Trump’s new pick John Bolton has everyone scratching their heads why, we must be going to war, this hypothesis is most likely wrong.
    • Once North Korea’s peace talks are concluded, the next stop is Iran, Bolton will be crucial for this plan.
    • Russia says something strange just happened with regards to the chemical database, an entry is missing.
    • Iran want to mine oar in Afghanistan.
    • Kim Jong Un is on his way to China.
    • Q reports that the stage is set, its a go, the clock is activated, 5×5 release coming soon.
    ___________________________________

    Political/Rights
    Facebook Has Been Storing Logs Of Phone Calls, Text Messages For Years: Report
    • Facebook has also maintained a comprehensive record of phone calls and text messages on Android devices.
    • Last week, New Zealander Dylan McKay requested his data from Facebook. Upon unzipping the downloaded file, McKay discovered that Facebook had stored around two years’ worth of metadata from phone calls he had made or received.
    • Others have reported similar data logged from their devices:
    • Facebook explained that users’ contacts were uploaded in a “widely used practice.”
    Source: zerohedge.com


    The FTC Is Officially Investigating Facebook for the Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal
    • The Federal Trade Commission announced on Monday that it has opened an investigation into Facebook and whether it violated its stated privacy policy.
    • Though many people predicted this would happen, it’s finally official: The Federal Trade Commission is investigating Facebook for its involvement in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
    • On Monday, Tom Pahl, the acting director of the FTC’s bureau of consumer protection, released a statement confirming the agency had launched an investigation into whether or not the social media platform violated its state privacy policy.
    Source: motherboard.com


    John Bolton is already a lame duck — and he knows it
    • The choice of Bolton makes no sense for Trump, on several levels. First, Trump ran as an anti-war candidate and just picked the most pro-war national security adviser he could find. Second, Trump ran against the Washington swamp, yet picked a classic Republican foreign policy Washington insider, as Bolton has essentially spent his entire career in D.C. And third, Trump prides himself on being a success, yet he’s picked someone who has been at the heart of the greatest foreign policy failures of the past two decades.
    Source: thehill.com


    Trump’s New National Security Adviser Threatens To Change “Iranian Regime” By 2019 (Video)
    • The new national security adviser of US President Donald Trump, John Bolton, promised members of the Iranian opposition that the Iranian regime will be overthrown by 2019 during a meeting in the French capital of Paris eight months ago, the Intercept reported on March 25.
    Source: southfront.org


    Keep Your Friends Close, But Your Enemies Closer”
    Geopolitical/Police State
    U.S. Announces Expulsion Of 60 Russian Diplomats, Over Dozen Of States Follows. What Is Behind?
    • U.S. ordered the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats and the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle.
    “The United States takes this action in conjunction with our NATO allies and partners around the world in response to Russia’s use of a military-grade chemical weapon on the soil of the United Kingdom, the latest in its ongoing pattern of destabilizing activities around the world,” the White House’s Press Secretary said in a statement.
    • On the same time, 15 EU member states, Canada and Ukraine also announced the expulsion of Russian diplomats: Poland [4 diplomats], Lithuania [3 diplomats], Latvia [1 diplomat], Estonia [1 diplomat], Germany [4 diplomats], France [4 diplomats], Denmark [2 diplomats], Ukraine [13 diplomats], the Czech Republic [3 diplomats], the Netherlands [2 diplomats], France [4 diplomats], Italy [2 diplomats], Canada [4 diplomats], Romania [1 diplomat], Finland [1 diplomat], Croatia [1 diplomat] and Sweden [1 diplomat].
    “Fourteen out of 28 EU member-states have decided to expel diplomats from the Russian Federation as a measure of solidarity with London on the Skripal case… Additional measures, including further sanctions within the common EU framework, cannot be excluded in the coming days and weeks,” European Council President Donald Tusk said commenting on the decision of the EU states.
    • The Ukrainian regime used the Skripal case to further decrease the diplomatic relations with Russia.
    • It is important to note that 12 of the 60 diplomats expelled from the US formed part of the Russian mission to the United Nations. This move is in contrary to the basic norms of the international law.
    • On the same time, more and more experts and media outlets point out multiple strange facts surrounding the Skripal case and question the alleged Russian involvement in it. Some of them go further drawing attention to a possible British trance behind the poisoning and describing the incident as a pre-planned provocation.
    Source: southfront.org

    Russia Says U.S. Made Nerve Agent Used on Skripal
    • A chemical weapons expert says an American database has been tampered to remove references to A-234.
    • The Russian Defense Ministry states the nerve agent A-234, which it says was used against former double agent Sergey Skripal, was developed in the U.S.
    • A-234 is a nerve agent closely associated with Novichok, which was developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s. It’s also been widely reported that Western chemical weapons experts had created an alternative version that easily identifiable from the original Soviet design.
    • “Everything depends on the dose and on the method of application. This substance can be applied on the skin, by spraying in the form of an aerosol, let’s say, from a can, by adding it to food. It depends on the type of application and the dosage, lesions may be of different kinds of severity.
    • “All that we know is that all substances of this class are very difficult to overcome in case of injuries, and the antidote therapy will hardly bring about the desired effect.”
    • Rybalchenko said the MoD has documentation to support that the U.S. already had a version of A-234 on file in 1998, suggesting it was acquired prior to that. But in the years that followed, it inexplicably disappeared from the National Bureau of Standards database—the exact opposite of what the Russian expert said should normally happen:
    • Russian officials say they still have not received a requested sample from the nerve agent used to attack Skripal, which they hope to analyze independently to confirm their hypothesis.
    Source: trunews.com
    War
    Iran proposes investment in Afghan iron ore project
    • Afghanistan says Iran has asked to extract iron ore from a mine in Herat but the two neighbors have yet to reach an agreement on where to process it.
    • “We have a policy based on which extracted mineral resources should be processed inside Afghanistan,”
    • The Sangan mine which Iran is interested to invest in is shared by the two countries but Tehran has already started tapping its part of the reserves.
    This photo on the official website of Sangan Iron Ore Complex shows western CS mine in December 2017.
    • A United States Geological Survey study has estimated potential value of Afghanistan’s deposits as much as $1 trillion. However, latest geological studies by Afghan officials hint at figures three times larger.
    • Gold, silver and platinum are some of the precious elements identified in Afghanistan but the country has also been labeled as the potential “Saudi Arabia of lithium” thanks to deposits of the raw material used in phone and electric car batteries.
    Source: presstv.ir


    Kim Jong Un Takes Mystery, High Security Train To Beijing For Surprise Visit
    • Kim Jong Un has made an unexpected visit to Beijing in his first known trip outside North Korea since taking power seven years ago

    • Hours ago, footage of a mysterious, high security train was captured entering Beijing – leading to speculation that it may have been the North Korean leader.
    Source: zerohedge.com


    Q
    Clock activated. RED_CASTLE. GREEN_CASTLE. Stage_5:5[y] Q
    Is the stage set for a drop of HRC +++ + +++++(raw vid 5:5). EX-rvid5774. We have it all.
    x22Report.com
    Last edited by turiya; 27th March 2018 at 13:20.

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    Default Re: Transition into Trump

    Looks like Dave of x22Report.com has gotten it right (above post)... as Trump just tweeted how he's going to fund the border wall!
    (Emphasis is mine.)
    Quote

    Because of the $700 & $716 Billion Dollars gotten to rebuild our Military, many jobs are created and our Military is again rich. Building a great Border Wall, with drugs (poison) and enemy combatants pouring into our Country, is all about National Defense. Build WALL through M!

    3:33 AM - 25 Mar 2018


    .
    Last edited by turiya; 27th March 2018 at 13:22.

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    Default Re: Transition into Trump

    While the Trump storm begins to build into a rage, the calm before Stormy Daniels has people falling asleep at the wheel... could be even dopey stormy Daniels, at that.... per Mark Dice...

    60 Minutes NothingBurger
    (Mar 26, 2018)










    .

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    Default Re: Transition into Trump

    Mark Dice covers the Zuckerberger Facebook debacle.... use of face recognition A.I....

    Mark Zuckerberg is Scum of the Earth
    (Mar 28, 2018)
    ___________________________

    Whoops! - Wrong Again
    (Mar 27, 2018)




    Last edited by turiya; 28th March 2018 at 14:05.

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    Default Re: Transition into Trump

    SGT Report... interview with Bill Holter....



    CABAL ON THE RUN -- Bill Holter
    (Mar 27, 2018)



    Former French President Sarkozy Arrested "Over Campaign Financing"


    by Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/20/2018 - 06:27

    Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was arrested on Tuesday morning in connection with a probe into the financing of his successful 2007 presidential run which allegedly included funding from late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

    Last edited by turiya; 28th March 2018 at 19:16.

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    Default Re: Transition into Trump

    Trump's Southern Border WALL underway...
    Quote

    Great briefing this afternoon on the start of our Southern Border WALL!



    12:47 PM - 28 Mar 2018

    Last edited by turiya; 28th March 2018 at 22:18.

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    Default Re: Transition into Trump

    Roseanne Barr on Supporting Donald Trump
    (Mar 23, 2018)
    ______________________

    Roseanne Barr & John Goodman
    on "Roseanne" Return

    (Mar 23, 2018)
    ______________________

    Roseanne Barr & John Goodman
    Address Writers' Room Rumors

    (Mar 23, 2018)
    ______________________



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    Default Re: Transition into Trump

    Trump starts @ ~ 3m48s... we're getting out of Syria @ 30:48...

    President Donald Trump Delivers Remarks
    On Infrastructure To Ohio Union Workers

    (5 hours ago)

    VIDEO
    Description:
    President Donald Trump travels to Richfield, Ohio to visit a union training facility for welding and heavy equipment to talk about rebuilding infrastructure in America.
    Last edited by turiya; 30th March 2018 at 00:11.

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    Default Re: Transition into Trump

    The Great Awakening Is Here,
    The Choice Is Yours - Episode 1532b

    (Mar 29, 2018)
    Description:
    • Facebook, Google, Amazon and other social media platforms are in trouble, they will all be investigated.
    • Clinton speaking engagements are drying up, her payment per speech is down 90%.
    • Investigators are now linking Obama to the FISA spying.
    • Investigations are now officially open looking into the Clinton email and Uranium deal.
    • Yulia is now waking up, will the deep state silence her.
    • Kim Jong Un had a successful trip to China, the dates are being set for peace talks.
    • Trump has made the announcement that the troops are coming home from middle east.
    • Q’s boards has been attacked.
    • Q it letting everyone know it is time to wake up, stories in the corporate media are now being pushed to begin the process.
    • CEOs are resigning, other scandals are being brought into the light, the deep state is panicking, they are afraid.
    ________Relevant Articles_________

    Political/Rights
    Facebook could be fined millions for violating consent deal — RT US News
    • Former Federal Trade Commission officials said that the social media giant may be liable for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fines for breaching a 2011 consent agreement to protect user data.
    • FTC’s consumer protection bureau, said that the social media giant could be fined $40,000 per violation per day, and that the bill might add up to hundreds of millions.Under the terms of the 2011 agreement with the FTC, Facebook was barred from making deceptive privacy claims, and was bound to get users’ consent before sharing their data. The agreement also required third-party auditing of Facebook’s privacy practices for 20 years, and required the company to delete user data within 30 days of account deactivation.
      • The FTC is now investigating whether data transferred to third parties, as was the case in the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, was done in violation of the agreement.
    Source: rinf.com


    Think Facebook knows a lot about you? Google is WORSE! From deleted files to location history, IT expert reveals the extent of the personal data the search giant holds on you
    • google’s data archive was almost ten times larger than scandal hit Facebook’s
    • Google was constantly track peoples location in the background, including how long it took to travel between various points.
    • It also held details about hobbies and interests, as well as guesses on his possible weight and income.
    • If you have location tracking turned on via your smartphone, tablet or other connected device and they’re switched on, Google stores details of everywhere you’ve been.
    • WHAT DOES YOUR DATA FILE HOLD? GOOGLE VS FACEBOOK
    • Google
      Every search made – even if it’s been cleared from your browser or device history
      Every event in your Google calendar – including whether you attended
      Every location you have visited – including how long it took you to get there, how long you stayed and when you left
      Every image and file you have downloaded
      Every file you’ve ever uploaded to Google Drive – even if they’ve been deleted
      Every Google Fit workout you’ve done
      Every photo you have taken – including metadata on where and when it was shot
      Every ad you’ve ever viewed or clicked on
      Every marketing topic that might interest you – based on factors like your age, gender, location and web activity
      Every app you’ve ever searched for, installed or launched
      Every YouTube video you’ve ever searched for or watched
      Every email you ever sent or received – including deleted messages and spam


      Facebook
      Every Messenger message you have sent or received
      Every Facebook friend you have connected with
      Every Facebook voice call you have made
      Every smartphone contact
      Every text message sent or recievd
      • Every phone call made or received
      • Every file you have sent or receieved
      • Every time you signed into Facebook, and from where
      • Every stickers emoji you have ever sent
    • Events you’ve attended
    • Your YouTube history
    • Google knows all of your YouTube browsing history.
    • This can reveal a multitude of personal details about you, ranging from your political and religious beliefs, to mental and physical health issues
    Source: dailymail.co.uk


    Hillary Clinton Suffers 90% Cut In Speech Fee
    • Hillary Clinton is taking a massive 90% cut to her typical speaking fee for an engagement at one of New Jersey’s most prestigious universities.

    • Clinton famously charged $300,000 for a speech at another prestigious state school – UCLA – back in 2014, with a fee of $250,000 generally accepted as the norm.
    Source: zerohedge.com


    Leaked Texts Suggest Coordination Between Obama White House, CIA, FBI And Dems To Launch Trump-Russia Probe
    • Congressional investigators looking into the origins of Special Counsel Mueller’s Russia probe believe they’ve found a smoking gun that could justify the appointment of a special counsel to investigate whether the Obama administration exerted undue influence over the FBI.
    • A series of text messages between FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok and DOJ lawyer Lisa Page have revealed the involvement of Denis McDonough, Obama’s chief of staff, John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in helping create an atmosphere of paranoia that gave them the political cover to launch the Russia probe back in the summer of 2016.
    Denis McDonough
    • texts between Strzok and Page “strongly” suggest coordination between the White House, two independent intelligence agencies, and a Democratic Congressional leader. That would “contradict” the Obama administration’s claims of non-involvement.

    Source: zerohedge.com


    Inspector General Confirms Probe Of FBI’s Criminal FISA Warrant Abuse To Spy On Trump
    The DOJ’s Inspector General Michael Horowitz announced Wednesday that he is expanding his internal investigation into alleged FBI abuses surrounding Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications – and will be examining their relationship with former MI6 spy Christopher Steele. The announcement follows several requests from lawmakers and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
    • “The OIG will initiate a review that will examine the Justice Department’s and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s compliance with legal requirements, and with applicable DOJ and FBI policies and procedures, in applications filed with the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) relating to a certain U.S. person,” the statement reads.
    • It should be noted that the OIG’s current investigation and upcoming report – which led to former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s firing, is focused on the agency’s handling of the Clinton email investigation. This new probe will focus on FISA abuse and surveillance of the Trump campaign
    Source: zerohedge.com

    Geopolitical/Police State
    Yulia Skripal, Poisoned in UK, Reportedly Regains Consciousness, Ability to Talk
    • Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said that Moscow demands the consulate access to Yulia Skripal following reports that she had “improved rapidly,” regaining the ability to talk.
    Source: sputniknews.com

    War
    Trip to China was successful,
    What made this trip so important. In the past Kim Jong Un couldn’t leave his country because of the fear of regime change by those in government, today that fear is gone and he is able to travel outside of his country
    North, South Korea Set April 27 As Date For Historic Summit
    • The date for the first meeting between a North Korean and South Korean leader in a decade has been set for April 27, South Korean officials told US media. For the first time since the Korean War broke out in 1948, a North Korean leader will cross the DMZ to attend the meetings, which are set to be held in South Korea
    • As a reminder, talks between the US and the North, which are tentatively expected to be held at the DMZ, are set for May.
    Source: zerohedge.com


    Trump: “We’re Coming Out Of Syria Very Soon; Others Can Take Care Of It Now”
    • President Donald Trump made a surprise announcement on Thursday afternoon, stating during a speech in Richfield, Ohio dedicated to Trump’s infrastructure week, that US forces will be withdrawing from Syria, citing the defeat of ISIS and the need to defend US borders and rebuild crumbling infrastructure: “We’re coming out of Syria very soon. Let the other people take care of it now.” Others like Russia perhaps?
    • The US spent $7 trillion in the Middle East, Trump said, describing how the US would build schools only for insurgents to destroy them, while there was no funding to build schools in Ohio: “We build a school, they blow it up. We rebuild the school, they haven’t blown it up yet, but they will.”
    Source: zerohedge.com


    Q
    MSM talking about red v. blue pill?
    Matrix reference?
    Coincidence?
    • Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) explains to Neo that the Matrix is an illusory world created to prevent humans from discovering that they are slaves to an external influence. Holding out a capsule on each of his palms, he describes the choice facing Neo:
    This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.
    • The red pill would free him from the enslaving control of the machine-generated dream world and allow him to escape into the real world, but living the “truth of reality” is harsher and more difficult. On the other hand, the blue pill would lead him back to stay in the comfortable simulated reality of the Matrix.
    • The red pill is a one-way street
    Resignations from Sept to Dec:
    Equifax CEO Richard Smith Sep. 26, 2017
    Dentsply Sirona Inc CEO Jeffrey T. Slovin Oct. 2, 2017
    Greater Naples CEO Paul Thein Oct. 4, 2017
    Pepsico CEO D Shivakumar Oct. 9, 2017
    Samsung CEO Kwon Oh-hyun Oct. 12, 2017
    Oman Air CEO Paul Gregorowitsch Oct. 16, 2017
    ASCENDAS Funds Management CEO Chia Nam Toon Oct. 20, 2017
    Hudson’s Bay CEO Gerald Storch Oct. 20, 2017
    Red Cross Texas Gulf Coast Region CEO David Brady Oct. 28, 2017
    BuildDirect CEO Jeff Booth Oct. 29, 2017
    Podesta Group founder Tony Podesta Oct. 30, 2017
    Menninger Clinic CEO Dr. C. Edward Coffey Oct. 31, 2017
    Renaissance Technologies CEO Robert Mercer Nov. 2, 2017
    Ardent Leisure CEO Simon Kelly Nov. 7, 2017
    El Al CEO David Maimon Nov. 8, 2017
    Altice CEO Michel Combes Nov. 9, 2017
    Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane CEO Themba Dlamini Nov. 14, 2017
    James Cancer Hospital CEO Michael Caligiuri Nov. 16, 2017
    PR Electric Power Authority CEO Ricardo L. Ramos Nov. 17, 2017
    Ellies CEO Wayne Samson Nov. 21, 2017
    Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman Nov. 22, 2017
    Oi SA CEO Marco Schroeder Nov. 24, 2017
    Tumblr CEO David Karp Nov. 27, 2017
    London Stock Exchange CEO Xavier Rolet Nov. 28, 2017
    Bruce Telecom CEO Bart Cameron Nov. 29, 2017
    TravelCenters of America LLC CEO Thomas O’Brien Nov. 30, 2017
    Tricentennial Commission CEO Edward Benavides Nov. 30, 2017
    City Light CEO Larry Weis Dec. 4, 2017
    Steinhoff’s R100bn CEO Markus Jooste Dec. 5, 2017
    Uchumi Supermarkets CEO Julius Kipng’etich Dec. 6, 2017
    Chicago Public Schools CEO Forrest Claypool Dec. 8, 2017
    Deutsche Boerse CEO Carsten Kengeter Dec. 8, 2017
    Nation Media Group CEO Joe Muganda Dec. 11, 2017
    Cheil Worldwide CEO Daiki Lim Dec. 11, 2017
    Fenway Health CEO Dr. Stephen L. Boswell Dec. 11, 2017
    Diebold/Nixdorf CEO Andy Mattes Dec. 14, 2017
    Diebold/Nixdorf CEO Andy Mattes Dec. 14, 2017
    AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson Dec. 15, 2017
    Vast Resources CEO Roy Pitchford Dec. 18, 2017
    Spackman Entertainment Group CEO Charles Spackman Dec. 18, 2017
    ESPN President John Skipper Dec. 18, 2017
    Innogy CEO Peter Terium Dec. 20, 2017
    Papa John CEO John Schnatter Dec. 22, 2017
    NYPD Police Chief Carlos Gomez retires Dec. 22, 2017
    Alphabet Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt Dec. 22, 2017
    Founder of Alleged ‘Sex Cult’ Arrested and Charged With Sex Trafficking
    • The leader of an alleged “sex cult” accused of branding its female members has been arrested and charged with sex trafficking, the Associated Press reports.
    • Keith Raniere and his group, Nxivm (pronounced nex-e-um), were thrust into the spotlight in October following a New York Times exposé. Women who joined the Albany-based group were told it was a self-help organization meant to empower them — the organization’s site describes it as “a community guided by humanitarian principles that seek to empower people and answer important questions about what it means to be human.”
    • Instead, they say they were referred to as “slaves” and subject to ritual humiliations and even brandings. They were also allegedly told to starve themselves to achieve Raniere’s standard of beauty and to have sex with him.
    Source: thecut.com


    New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s father has ties to a sex cult whose leader was just arrested at a luxury villa in Mexico and deported back to the US to face labor and sex trafficking charges
    • Gillibrand’s father Doug Rutnik has tied to alleged sex cult leader Keith Raniere
    • Rutnik was hired as a lobbyist for Raniere in 2004 and was later sued by him
    • Raniere, 57, was arrested in Mexico on Sunday and extradited to Texas and charged with sex trafficking and forced labor conspiracy
    • ‘Senator Gillibrand had never heard of this group until she recently read about them in the newspaper,’ said spokesman Glen Caplin.
      ‘She is glad that federal and state prosecutors have taken action in this case.’

    Source: dailymail.co.uk
    /CM/ locked out of /GA/
    /GA/ is dead.
    Sniffer detects traces of bypass override.
    Layers upon layers.
    New approach to silence.
    New Board will be created.
    Team to secure.
    Time to complete 1-2.
    You are safe.
    THEY are terrified.
    Sleep well, Patriot.
    You elected us to keep you safe.
    We will not fail.
    /GA/ will change.
    Notification will be made.
    Where we go one, we go all.

    HRC 2.12.09 Very BAD!
    x22Report.com
    Last edited by turiya; 30th March 2018 at 00:56.

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    Default Re: Transition into Trump

    Mar 29 2018

    982
    Mar 29 2018 00:27:26 (EDT) Q !xowAT4Z3VQ ID: e2706e 827855

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/...dnc-fbi-media/
    Truth.
    Q
    ________________________


    White House
    The Real Collusion Story

    By Michael Doran
    March 13, 2018 6:30 AM

    Hillary Clinton at a “Get Out the Vote” rally in Concord, N.H., February 6, 2016. (Brian Snyder/Reuters)
    In a textbook example of denial and projection, Trump foes in and out of government wove a sinister yarn meant to take him down.

    Barack Obama keeps a close watch on his emotions. “I loved Spock,” he wrote in February 2015 in a presidential statement eulogizing Leonard Nimoy. Growing up in Hawaii, the young man who would later be called “No-Drama Obama” felt a special affinity for the Vulcan first officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise. “Long before being nerdy was cool, there was Leonard Nimoy,” the eulogy continued. “Leonard was Spock. Cool, logical, big-eared and level-headed.”

    It is the rare occasion when Obama lets his Spock mask slip. But November 2, 2016, was just such a moment. Six days before the presidential election, when addressing the Congressional Black Caucus, he stressed that the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, threatened hard-won achievements of blacks: tolerance, justice, good schools, ending mass incarceration — even democracy itself.
    “There is one candidate who will advance those things,” he said, his voice swelling with emotion. “And there’s another candidate whose defining principle, the central theme of his candidacy, is opposition to all that we’ve done.”
    The open display of emotion was new, but the theme of safeguarding his legacy was not. Two months earlier, on July 5, in Charlotte, N.C., Obama delivered his first stump speech for Hillary Clinton. He described his presidency as a leg in a relay race. Hillary Clinton had tried hard to pass affordable health care during Bill Clinton’s administration, but she failed — and the relay baton fell to the ground. When Obama entered the White House, he picked it up. Now, his leg of the race was coming to an end.
    “I’m ready to pass the baton,” he said. “And I know that Hillary Clinton is going to take it.”
    But he was less certain than he was letting on. Hillary Clinton was up in the polls, to be sure, but she was vulnerable. Three weeks earlier, on June 15, a cyberattacker fashioning himself as Guccifer 2.0 had published a cache of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee (DNC). They proved, as supporters of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders had long alleged, that the DNC had conspired with the Clinton campaign to undermine their candidate. Sanders was still withholding his endorsement of Clinton for president, even though her nomination as the Democratic candidate was now a foregone conclusion. At the very moment when Clinton had expected the Democratic party to unite behind her, its deepest chasm seemed to be growing wider. In contrast to Clinton, Obama held some sway over the Sanders insurgents. He came to Charlotte to urge them to support Clinton against their shared enemy, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump.

    The insurgency was not the only Clinton vulnerability on Obama’s mind. He had come to Charlotte, in addition, to deflect attention from the news conference that James Comey, the director of the FBI, had held that morning in Washington, D.C. The investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server was complete, Comey announced. The FBI would recommend no criminal charges — that was the honey. But Comey administered it with a dose of vinegar. He dwelled on Clinton’s mishandling of classified material in such detail that it sounded as if he was laying the foundation for an indictment. The decision not to charge Clinton, his statement signaled, was an exercise in prosecutorial restraint, not a true exoneration.

    From the perspective of the voters, Clinton’s twin email travails — the hack of the DNC and the investigation into her server — were two faces of a single problem. Call it “Clinton, Inc.” Sanders and Trump were painting Clinton as Wall Street’s darling, the establishment candidate. She was the greatest defender and a prime beneficiary of a rigged political and financial system. Comey’s statement had played directly into the hands of the Sanders insurgents. It left the distinct impression that laws are for the little people; they simply don’t apply to Hillary Clinton, because, well, she’s Hillary Clinton.

    Which points to Obama’s third and final job at Charlotte: humanizing the queen. “I saw how she treated everybody with respect, even the folks who aren’t, quote/unquote, ‘important,’” Obama testified. He enlarged Clinton’s humility before the crowd, because it was invisible to the naked eye. With his jacket and tie off, the cuffs of his sleeves turned, and a winning smile spread from ear to ear, Obama came to loan Hillary Clinton his common touch.

    Passing the baton to her was a team effort, however. It demanded hard work from countless enablers. These included not just Democrats but also many Republicans, who shared the conviction that Trump represented an extraordinary threat to our democracy. Desperate times call for desperate measures. To block Trump, Clinton’s supporters bent rules and broke laws. They went to surprising lengths to strengthen her while framing him — both in the sense of depicting him in a particular light and of planting evidence against him.

    Joe Friday
    When it comes to ongoing FBI criminal investigations, presidents typically refrain from describing their preferred outcomes. They fear the appearance of exerting undue influence over Lady Justice. But in the case of Hillary Clinton’s email abuses, Obama made an exception. “She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy,” he remarked in a TV interview in April 2016. She has displayed “a carelessness in terms of managing emails,” he allowed. “But I also think it is important to keep this in perspective.”

    Well-intentioned but careless, said the commander in chief. Three months later, the FBI finished its investigation, and James Comey arrived at an identical conclusion. “Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information,” he said in his July 5 statement, “there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” Well-intentioned but careless — Comey was locked in a Vulcan mind-meld with his boss.

    As a political move, highlighting Clinton’s intentions was astute. It had a commonsense feel. Americans instinctively take intentions into account when determining guilt. As a strict matter of law, however, it was vapid. The mishandling of classified information falls into the category of a “non-intent crime.” It’s a type of objective recklessness, like running over a pedestrian while blowing through a red light. Violations of this sort trigger criminal liabilities regardless of the offender’s state of mind.

    But let’s assume that some clever lawyer in the Department of Justice discovered a very learned and superficially compelling rationale for applying Obama’s fictive standard of intent. Even so, Hillary Clinton couldn’t clear the hurdle. The sheer volume of classified material the FBI recovered from her server constituted proof of intent. “Fifty-two email chains . . . contain classified information,” Comey said.

    Particularly damning was the form this material took. It is impossible to paste a classified document into an unclassified email accidentally, because the three computer systems (Unclassified, Confidential/Secret, and Top Secret) are physically separate networks, each feeding into an independent hard drive on the user’s desk. If a classified document appears in an unclassified email, then someone downloaded it onto a thumb drive and manually uploaded it to the unclassified network — an intentional act if ever there was one.

    One of Clinton’s emails suggests that downloading and uploading material in this fashion was a commonplace activity in her office. In June 2011, a staffer encountered difficulty transmitting a document to her by means of a classified system. An impatient Clinton instructed him to strip the classified markings from the document and send it on as an unclassified email. “Turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure,” Clinton instructed.

    On three separate occasions staffers got sloppy and failed to strip the “nonpapers” of all markings that betrayed their classified origins. The FBI recovered one email, for example, that contained a “C” in parenthesis in the margin — an obvious sign that the corresponding paragraph was classified “Confidential.” When an agent personally interviewed Clinton, on July 2, he showed her the document and asked whether she understood what the “C” meant. For anyone who has ever held a security clearance, “C’s” in the margins are more ubiquitous than “C’s” on water faucets — and no more baffling. But Clinton played the ditzy grandmother. She had simply assumed, she said, that the “C” was marking an item in an alphabetized list.

    In the 2,500-year life of the alphabet, this was a first: a list that started with the third letter and contained but a single item. The explanation was laughable, but any sensible answer would have constituted an acknowledgement of malicious intent. Her only out was the “well-intentioned but careless” script that Obama had written for her. In other words, she lied to the FBI — a felony offense.

    Before she ever told this howler, however, Comey had already prepared a draft of his statement exonerating her. The FBI let Hillary Clinton skate.

    But give Comey his due. If he had followed the letter of the law, the trail of guilt may have led all the way to Obama himself. As Andrew C. McCarthy has demonstrated at National Review Online, Obama used a dummy email account to communicate with Clinton via her private server. Did this make Obama complicit in Clinton’s malfeasance? Anyone in Comey’s position would have thought twice before moving to prosecute her — and not only because the case might have ensnared the president himself. The FBI must enforce the law, but it must also be seen to be enforcing it. As a rule, these two imperatives buttress each other. During the 2016 election, Comey faced extraordinary circumstances. If he had followed the law to the letter, he would have toppled the leading candidate for president and decapitated the Democratic party. Clinton’s supporters, more than 50 percent of the electorate, would have erupted in outrage, screaming that a politicized FBI had thrown the election to Donald Trump.

    Guarding the bureau’s reputation for impartiality is a serious concern. But it is nevertheless a thoroughly political concern. Comey would have us believe that it was a unique moment in his career, the singular entry into the political arena of an otherwise apolitical servant of the law. Truth be told, Comey loves being in the thick of it, but not because he is a partisan brawler. He is not. It is the drama that he relishes — the grand stage. His favorite role is that of Joe Friday, the no-nonsense lawman, the guardian of legal processes before the encroachments of dirty politicians.

    Joe Friday, however, was a simple detective, a confirmed bachelor, content to live quietly with his mother and his parakeet. And, of course, he was a TV fiction. In real life, humble straight shooters get clobbered with a brick before they ever reach the limelight. In real life, snagging the big part often requires the equivalent of leaving a bloody horsehead in the producer’s bed.

    McCabe and the Lovers
    And it requires a supportive staff. Midyear Exam, the codename for the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, relied on a team of men and women with the right stuff — a quality that is hard to define but easy to recognize.

    The right stuff did not require strong Democratic credentials, but they certainly helped. Andrew McCabe, the deputy director of the FBI, led the team. McCabe was not your FBI gumshoe of old. He spent no time in his younger days chasing bank robbers in Des Moines. He was part of a new breed — the post-9/11 FBI leadership, for whom the career fast track was counterterrorism. He came of age at the intersection of law enforcement with national security, shuttling between D.C. and New York. Along the way, he developed a valuable personal network. His wife, Jill, ran as a Democrat for a Virginia state-senate seat in 2015. The political organization of Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, one of Hillary Clinton’s very closest associates, gave her nearly $500,000.

    Perhaps more important than having Democratic credentials was having a heightened understanding of the needs of senior leadership — in the FBI, certainly, but also in the DOJ. Right across the street from the J. Edgar Hoover Building sat Attorney General Loretta Lynch. She would be scrutinizing Midyear Exam in every detail. And not just Lynch. Hillary Clinton herself would be watching closely — and would be brought in for questioning, too. Being willing and able to treat her with kid gloves was essential. She “might be our next president,” team member Lisa Page reminded Peter Strzok, the agent in charge of Midyear Exam. Referring to Clinton’s upcoming FBI interview, Page wrote, “The last thing you need us going in there loaded for bear.”

    Like McCabe, Strzok had pursued a career at the nexus of law enforcement and counterterrorism. But he was less overtly political. A John Kasich sympathizer, he was by nature a middle-of-the-roader, and a Republican-leaning one, at that. Clinton left him cold. But Trump left him even colder — and his active personal life helped concentrate his mind on that antipathy. Strzok was having an affair with Page, who was an FBI lawyer on McCabe’s staff. Both were married. Page’s politics were typical of highly educated people in D.C.: She detested Trump and his supporters. He is “a loathsome human being,” she texted to Strzok, who readily agreed. After Trump captured the nomination, hostility to him quickly became part of their private idiom.

    If “the ultimate aphrodisiac,” as Henry Kissinger famously claimed, is power, then wielding it together with an illicit lover must be the pinnacle of eroticism. Together, Strzok and Page explored the power of secrets, routinely leaking to the press to shape political outcomes. “Still on the phone with Devlin,” Page texted to Strzok, referring to former Wall Street Journal national-security reporter Devlin Barrett. Big news about the Hillary Clinton email story was breaking when Devlin and Page were on the phone together. “You might wanna tell Devlin he should turn on CNN, there’s news on,” Strzok texted back.
    Page: He knows. He just got handed a note.

    Strzok: Ha. He asking about it now?

    Page: Yeah. It was pretty funny.
    Influencing the nation’s politics was routine. And ridiculously easy: one quick call to “Devlin,” and boom! The world changed.

    Deploying secrets for political effect — deciding which to keep, which to tell, and how to tell them — was a task that they approached with alacrity. The ultimate goal, of course, was not propping up Hillary Clinton so much as maximizing the power and autonomy of the FBI. In pursuing this goal, McCabe and the two lovers demonstrated the very essence of the right stuff: a breezy comfort with bending the law to the demands of politics.

    They honed their skills on Midyear Exam. As that test ended, an even bigger one loomed before them. At the end of July, Comey and McCabe would officially open an investigation into Russian meddling in the election, including possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign. On July 5, the day of Comey’s press conference on Clinton’s emails, a former British spy, Christopher Steele, flew to Rome to meet an old FBI contact. The information he brought had weighty implications for the impending investigation. But neither the information nor the implications are what we have been led to believe.

    The Super Spy
    Steele — a former British spy and a Russia expert — was working on contract to Fusion GPS, a Washington-based public-relations firm, which, in turn, was on contract to a D.C. law firm, which, in turn, was on contract to the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC. Steele, that is to say, was working for Hillary Clinton. His job, among other things, was to collect opposition research on Trump from his network of Russian sources.

    When Steele arrived in Rome, his famous “dossier” did not exist. The dossier, as we have come to know it, is some 17 reports that he compiled between June and December 2016. In early July, Steele had been working on the Clinton account for only a few weeks and had written but one report, dated June 20. It claimed that Trump was Vladimir Putin’s Manchurian candidate. “[The] Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting, and assisting Trump for at least 5 years,” Steele reported. Putin’s goal was “to sow discord and disunity both within the US itself, but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance.” The Russian leader supported Trump, mainly, by supplying “valuable intelligence on his opponents, including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.”

    Putin had offered lucrative financial contracts, but Trump had turned them down. The wily Russian, however, had managed to get his hooks into Trump due to the American’s “sexual perversion.” During a visit to Moscow in 2013, Trump had hired prostitutes to stay with him in the same hotel suite used by the Obamas on one of their trips. The FSB, Russia’s secret police, had fitted the room with cameras and recording equipment. Trump had the prostitutes defile Obama’s bed by putting on a “golden shower” performance for him. All of it was caught on tape.

    Earthshaking news: Vladimir Putin was blackmailing Donald J. Trump. No doubt, Steele’s FBI handler rushed this report to his superiors in Washington, D.C. They, in turn, raced it straight to Obama’s desk. Sorry, wrong. According to the New York Times, Steele’s explosive revelations wound their way to the J. Edgar Hoover Building only slowly. It took weeks before they appeared in Strzok’s in-box. Why?

    Mike Morell, the former deputy director of the CIA, helps explain the delay. Morell did some digging into Christopher Steele’s dossier and shared the results of his research at a public forum in Washington, D.C., in March 2017. Steele, according to Morell, did not have direct access to the Russians whom he labeled as his “sources” — people who included former officers in the FSB. He “communicated” with them, if that is the right word, through paid intermediaries, who paid the so-called sources.

    The chances of Steele having been played were thus great. Morell explained it like this:
    If you’re paying somebody, particularly former FSB officers, they are going to tell you truth and innuendo and rumor, and they’re going to call you up and say, “Hey, let’s have another meeting, I have more information for you,” because they want to get paid some more.
    This process, Morell said, “takes you nowhere.”

    Steele’s report was, in a word, junk. And Morell, the man who expressed that opinion, was not just a seasoned intelligence professional; he was also a staunch supporter of Hillary Clinton for president. Nor did Steele’s FBI handler in Rome set off an alarm in Washington, because he, presumably, was also a seasoned professional who knew junk when he saw it. And he had many additional reasons to doubt the veracity of Steele’s reporting — reasons that Morell refrained from broaching. How, for example, could Steele be sure that the former FSB officers in his network were fully retired? The convoluted pipeline between Moscow and London gave Russian intelligence too many opportunities to inject disinformation into the flow of reports to London.

    And let’s not neglect the glaring issue of plausibility. When in the history of the rivalry between the West and Russia has it been possible for a British spy to call up sources in Moscow and gain immediate access to the deepest secrets of the Kremlin? Steele, relying only on his wits, unearthed gems the likes of which glittered only in the dreams of the CIA, Mossad, and MI6, the greatest intelligence-gathering organizations on earth. To believe that tale, we must assume that Steele, like James Bond, is no ordinary secret agent. He’s a super spy.

    Then there’s the little matter of Steele’s personal bias. According to one well-informed associate, Steele was “passionate about” preventing Trump from winning the election. His financial incentives, of course, oriented him in exactly the same direction. He was a paid piper — and he got paid only for collecting information detrimental to Trump. Isn’t it possible — likely, even — that his shadowy paymasters in the demimonde of the Clinton campaign were calling the tune?

    Steele’s reports certainly harmonized beautifully with the campaign’s propaganda. On June 2, in a speech in San Diego, Hillary Clinton unveiled her main line of attack on Donald Trump’s foreign policy. His ideas, she said, were “dangerously incoherent.” In fact, they weren’t “even really ideas — just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds, and outright lies.” Particularly mystifying was his attitude toward the Russian dictator: “He said if he were grading Vladimir Putin as a leader, he’d give him an A. . . . I’ll leave it to the psychiatrists to explain his affection for tyrants.”

    But the demimonde wasn’t about to leave it to mental-health professionals. It hired instead a British super spy. He immediately explained that Putin was extorting Trump. Two weeks after that, he flew to Rome to share his explanation with the FBI. By the time he left Rome, his handler might not have guessed that the Clinton campaign was funding the spy’s work. The political nature of Steele’s mission, however, would have been obvious.

    In Rome on July 5, the FBI was beginning to acquire a new secret. But it was not the one contained in Steele’s report. The Clinton campaign, the FBI would soon learn with certainty, was intent on framing Trump as Putin’s puppet. That secret was truly explosive — and perhaps thrilling for the two lovers on McCabe’s staff. In time, all of them —Strzok, Page, McCabe, and Comey — would all mishandle it, damaging their careers irreparably. In July, however, they were not yet in a rush to ruination. The team with the right stuff cautiously watched and waited. Not until September would they take their fateful missteps.
    Hillary Clinton greets supporters at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Pa., July 28, 2016.
    The Birth of the Collusion Thesis
    On July 22, WikiLeaks released the largest cache of DNC emails. The plan behind the hack now became clear: to sabotage the Democratic National Convention, which opened in Philadelphia on July 25. While Clinton was organizing a celebration of Democratic unity, Guccifer 2.0 was working to flood the convention floor with enraged Bernie Sanders insurgents. In the event, Clinton managed to prevent the protests from ruining the convention. But they did damage her theater of power — and they also handed Trump a fresh opportunity to broadcast his “Crooked Hillary” theme. He took obvious delight in the rage of the Sanders followers. “An analysis showed that Bernie Sanders would have won the Democratic nomination if it were not for the Super Delegates,” Trump tweeted on the eve of the convention.

    The statement hit Clinton like an iron bar to her kneecap. The thought that a malevolent foreign actor was helping Trump deliver the blow only increased the pain. Most observers assumed that Russian state-backed hackers stood behind Guccifer 2.0 (an assumption that has grown stronger with time). If Trump felt sheepish about benefiting from such people, he hid it well. “I will tell you this, Russia. If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said on July 27, referring to Hillary Clinton’s messages that the FBI never recovered during its investigation of her private server.

    In the eyes of his supporters, Trump’s appeal to Putin was a stage whisper, a mock gesture — and a pointed dig at Clinton. In her rush to hide emails from the FBI, Trump implied, she had delivered them up to Putin on a platter. But his brand of humor was lost on Clinton and her team. To them, the appeal to Putin was sinister. “I just think that’s beyond the pale,” said Clinton loyalist and former CIA director Leon Panetta. To shame Trump before the voters, the campaign shifted its rhetoric perceptibly. In June, Clinton had depicted Trump’s attitude toward Putin as irrational. Now the two were said to be in a partnership — a “bromance” was how John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, described it. “This has to be the first time that a major presidential candidate has actively encouraged a foreign power to conduct espionage against his political opponent,” said senior Clinton policy aide Jake Sullivan. “This has gone from being a matter of curiosity, and a matter of politics, to being a national-security issue.”

    Shaming was all well and good, but it only resonated among committed voters. Winning the election required convincing independents that Trump was more than just a passive beneficiary of the DNC hack; he had to be an accomplice. Clinton’s campaign thus posted five questions on its website:
    1. What’s behind Trump’s fascination with Vladimir Putin?
    2. Why does Trump surround himself with advisers with links to the Kremlin?
    3. Why do Trump’s foreign policy ideas read like a Putin wish list?
    4. Do Trump’s still-secret tax returns show ties to Russian oligarchs?
    5. Why is Trump encouraging Russia to interfere in our election?
    Each question was followed by a short answer, leading to the inevitable conclusion that Trump was actively conspiring with Putin.

    And so, the collusion thesis was born. The website did not spell out the details of the conspiracy, but the campaign’s demimonde left nothing to the imagination. Christopher Steele had discovered Russian “sources” who painted a vivid picture of the plot. Putin had decided against releasing the compromising videos of Trump. The Manchurian candidate was proving just too beneficial to Russia. In fact, a full-blown alliance had formed between Putin and Trump. Based on their “mutual interest in defeating . . . Hillary Clinton,” they struck a grand bargain: Putin would help elect Trump, who would deliver a supine American policy on Ukraine and NATO defense.

    The super spy’s network was remarkable. His Russian sources were as close to Trump as they were to Putin. “An ethnic Russian close associate” of Trump’s “admitted that there was a well-developed conspiracy” between him and the Russians. Another source revealed more: The DNC hack was carried out “with the full knowledge and support of Trump and senior members of his campaign team.” There it was: the proof the Clinton campaign needed. The great crime against Hillary Clinton was a joint Russian-American operation, and Trump was in on it from the beginning.

    Steele’s startling discoveries hardly stopped there. But before revealing more, let’s pause and consider the purpose of his reports. How, precisely, did his direct employer, Fusion GPS, use them?

    The Super Duo
    To hear Glenn Simpson tell it, his company, Fusion GPS, is a research organization. “What we do is provide people with factual information,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August 2017. “Our specialty is public record information.” In truth, Simpson’s true specialty is not research but persuasion — more specifically, persuasion of reporters. He has a talent for convincing journalists to publish stories, true or not, that benefit his clients. In short, he is a public-relations flack.

    But Simpson is no ordinary PR man; he’s a super flack. In the first decade of this century, he was in his early forties and working as an investigative journalist for the Wall Street Journal. He was reaching the pinnacle of his profession just as the Internet was gutting the print media. Simpson, however, had a marketable talent. “I call it journalism for rent,” he said at a public forum in August 2017. Journalism as we once knew might be dead, but deep-pocketed clients still needed to get stories into the press. And they needed to block other stories from being published. Simpson knew almost every member of the Washington press corps personally, and he understood the constraints under which they worked — what it took to get a story past an editor. He handed them canned articles. They got scoops; he got happy clients.

    When pitching stories on Trump-Putin collusion, Simpson eventually discovered the great benefit of placing Christopher Steele directly in front of reporters. In September and October, he would fly the spy from London to the United States so the two of them could brief major media outlets as a team. Before that, in July and August, Simpson did not have the benefit of Steele’s physical presence. But neither was he alone. He still had the super spy’s reports — James Bond in a briefcase.

    Con men stoke the greed of their marks by letting them catch glimpses of suitcases bulging with cash. Simpson gave his marks a sense that he was similarly loaded — but with valuable information, not money. “In September 2016, Steele and I met in Washington and discussed the information now known as the ‘dossier,’ ” wrote Jonathan Winer, in the Washington Post. A former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state, Winer admitted passing Steele’s information to his superiors. “I was allowed to review, but not to keep, a copy of these reports to enable me to alert the State Department,” he explained. Simpson, we infer, would let journalists catch a glimpse of the super spy’s “raw intelligence.” Then he would quickly take the document back — because, you understand, it was just too sensitive to leave lying around.

    If journalists feared that Steele’s startling reports (such as, for example, the one about the golden shower) contained Russian disinformation, Simpson had a well-rehearsed spiel at the ready to reassure them. He inadvertently shared it before the House Intelligence Committee in November 2017. Steele, Simpson explained, had a “standard presentation” for journalists to explain how he avoided falling prey to the diabolical Russians. Sliding into the first person, he rattled off Steele’s lines:
    I was the lead Russianist at Ml6 in the final years of my career. And I was previously stationed in Moscow. And I speak Russian. And I’ve done Russian intelligence/counterintelligence issues all my life. And the central problem when you’re a Russian intelligence expert is disinformation, and that the Russians have . . . a long history and an advanced capability in disinformation. And so . . . before we go any further, I just want you to know that . . . this is . . . the fundamental problem with my profession. And it should be assumed that in any sort of intelligence gathering . . . there will be some disinformation. And I’m trained to spot that and filter it out, but . . . you should understand that . . . no one’s perfect.
    Simpson then switched to the first-person plural. Perhaps, when briefing journalists, this was the point at which he would speak, in his own voice, as the leader of the talented and experienced team at Fusion GPS:
    And so we’ve essentially filtered out everything that we think is disinformation, and we’re not going to present that to you here. We’re going to present to you things that we think come from credible sources, but we’re not going to warrant [sic] to you . . . that this is all true.
    Simpson staked the credibility of the dossier on just one thing: Steele’s super awesomeness. On his own, Simpson would have been flacking salacious rumor, but paired with Steele, he was briefing “credible intelligence.” Together, they became a super duo.

    The purpose of the dossier would change over time. In July and August, the goal was not to get Steele’s reports directly into the press. Nobody knew better than Simpson, a highly experienced reporter, that Steele’s claims were unverifiable and, therefore, unprintable. The best he could achieve was an article that reinforced the main suppositions of the collusion thesis — an article such as “Trump and Putin: A Love Story,” which David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, wrote and published in early August. “Putin,” sees in Trump a grand opportunity,” Remnick explained. “He sees in Trump weakness and ignorance, a confused mind. He has every hope of exploiting him.”

    Remnick stopped just short of claiming that Putin was actually blackmailing Trump, but his depiction of their relations matched, in general, the story that emerged from Steele’s reports. Remnick took pains, for example, to instruct readers:
    The gathering of kompromat — compromising material — is a familiar tactic in Putin’s arsenal. For years, the Russian intelligence services have filmed political enemies in stages of sexual and/or narcotic indulgence, and have distributed the grainy images online.
    Did Remnick personally rely on a Fusion GPS briefing? We do not know. Jane Mayer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, recently confessed that she received a briefing, in September, directly from super spy himself — so the potential for communication certainly existed. Regardless of what inspired Remnick, his approach represented a win for Simpson. If, with the help of the dossier or any other tool of persuasion, he could convince journalists that Putin was blackmailing Trump with compromising videos, then it was just that much easier to convince them to report stories about, say, the danger to the Western alliance that Trump represented — a story that would require nothing more than stringing together a few quotes from Trump with a few ominous warnings from foreign-policy experts. The dossier, in short, helped Simpson sell a master narrative.

    A Diabolical Mastermind

    By choosing to convince voters that Trump was somehow an accomplice to the DNC hack, the Clinton campaign had set itself a difficult challenge: defining the role of Putin’s American partners in crime. After all, the hack did not require the assistance of a Tom Cruise character. No one broke into DNC headquarters, crawled through a ventilator shaft, rappelled from a cable, and slid a disk into a hard drive. The hackers carried out the operation unilaterally, electronically, and probably from offshore. They required no accomplices on American soil.

    Steele solved this problem by finding “sources” who revealed that the crucial contributions of Trump’s team came in the planning stages. As it turns out, Steele reported, the idea to hack the DNC actually originated from the American side. It was Trump’s team that defined the objective of the operation: “leaking the DNC e-mails to Wikileaks during the Democratic Convention” in order “to swing supporters of Bernie Sanders away from Hillary Clinton and across to Trump.”

    This report solved half of the Clinton campaign’s problem: It established Trump’s guilt. But a conspiracy can’t grab the popular imagination if it is devoid of actual conspirators. Here again, the super spy’s “sources” came to the rescue. On the day-to-day level, the job of managing the Trump-Putin collusion fell to Paul Manafort, who, at that time, was still Trump’s campaign manager. But Manafort was not the architect of the DNC hack. Fortunately, the super spy was running a mole who was able to identify that criminal genius. The plot, Steele reported, “was conceived and promoted by Trump’s foreign policy adviser Carter Page.”

    Here the super spy’s vaunted ability to filter out Russian disinformation appears to have failed him. Carter Page (who is no relation to Lisa Page on McCabe’s team) played a negligible role in the campaign. The Trump people had placed him on a team of foreign-policy advisers, to be sure, but they had thrown the group together in haste to counter the accusation that the campaign lacked an expert bench. Page did not know Donald Trump personally. He worked in finance, with a focus on investing in Russia’s energy sector, but he had no notable achievements to his name. A former boss described him, very unkindly, as “a gray spot,” a man “without any special talents or accomplishments.”

    Steele’s allegations against Page make sense only in a Marvel Comics universe. Carter Page: by day, a mild-mannered businessman; by night, a diabolical mastermind.

    The role that the super spy ascribed to Page may have been absurd, but what choice did he have? The conspiracy needed a face. That person had to have plausible connections to Russia plus a certain amount of visibility. In Trump’s orbit, there were only two candidates: Manafort and Page. Manafort’s ties, however, were to Ukraine, not Russia — and he was too well known. He had been working in Washington since the Reagan era.

    Page, by contrast, had direct connections to Russia, having lived in Moscow for some three years. The modesty of his career was actually a plus, because Clinton’s propagandists could present it as shadowy rather than unsuccessful. For an unknown, Page was surprisingly visible. His trip to Moscow in July 2016 had received significant press attention, not least because he had expressed opinions in favor of rapprochement with Russia and critical of American foreign policy.

    With the aid of Fusion GPS, the Clinton campaign rolled out their master narrative on Trump-Putin collusion. A new orthodoxy immediately gripped the establishment press, which amplified the overwrought propaganda, complete with suggestions of dirty deals, dark conspiracies, and blackmail. It was Jeffrey Goldberg, the national correspondent (now editor) of The Atlantic, who first trumpeted the new line. In his aptly titled article, “It’s Official: Hillary Clinton Is Running against Vladimir Putin,” Goldberg alleged that Trump “has chosen . . . to unmask himself as a de facto agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

    In “Putin’s Puppet,” Franklin Foer of Slate examined the matter from the Russian side: “Vladimir Putin has a plan for destroying the West — and that plan looks a lot like Donald Trump,” he wrote. David Remnick’s article discussing Putin’s affinity for grainy sex videos made identical points. All three authors noted, with grave concern, the Russian ties of Paul Manafort and . . . Carter Page.
    With the exception of Fox News, the broadcast media beat the same drum. CNN might not have accused Page of masterminding the hack of the DNC, but it recognized a dangerous man when it saw one. On August 8, for example, it devoted a long segment entirely to Page. “What’s really remarkable here,” Jim Sciutto, CNN’s chief national-security correspondent told anchorman Wolf Blitzer, is that Page’s positions “match almost word for word the positions of the Kremlin, on, for instance, alleged U.S. orchestration of pro-democracy in and around Russia. And that is sparking concern from Russia experts and former policy makers even inside the GOP.”

    So Page was “sparking concern” even among Never-Trump Republicans? How ominous! But imagine how much more ominous it would have sounded if journalists could have reported that Page was also sparking concern in the FBI! At that moment, John Brennan, the director of the CIA, was doing his damnedest to hand journalists precisely that story.
    CIA director John Brennan testifies on Capitol Hill, June 16, 2016.
    (Continued in the Next Post)
    Last edited by turiya; 30th March 2018 at 03:41.

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    White House
    The Real Collusion Story (Part 2)

    A Ventriloquist and His Dummy
    While the establishment press was singing in harmony with the Clinton campaign, a cacophonous debate erupted inside government. At the end of July, James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, said at a public forum that the intelligence community was not “ready yet to make a call on attribution” — not ready, that is, to attribute the DNC hack to Putin. Clapper was also unready to say that the intention of the hackers was to get Trump elected. The goal, he said, may simply have been “to stir up trouble.” When combined with similar comments by other intelligence officials, Clapper’s statements undercut Hillary Clinton’s efforts to brand Trump as Putin’s active accomplice.

    Enter John Brennan. In early August, Brennan launched a personal campaign to force a consensus in support of Clinton’s propaganda. Before long, Clapper became his partner in this effort. They would succeed, however, only after the election — and then only by establishing an ad hoc and highly unorthodox intelligence-assessment team. To man the team, Brennan and Clapper handpicked a small number of analysts, tasking them with reaching a consensus before the inauguration of Donald Trump. The team, no surprise, did not disappoint. In January 2017, it produced the “consensus” that Brennan had been trying to orchestrate for the previous five months. By then, it was still useful as a propaganda tool against President Donald Trump, though it had arrived far too late to help Hillary Clinton win the election.

    Of course, Brennan has never admitted his political motives. On the contrary, according to an in-depth Washington Post investigation (based on interviews with either Brennan himself or people very close to him), the CIA director claimed to be in possession of eye-popping intelligence reports about the DNC hack. These reports supposedly “captured Putin’s specific instructions on the operation’s audacious objectives — defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump.” Yet even if this intelligence trove actually did exist and truly did convince the CIA director, it obviously did not have the same persuasive impact on his colleagues, as evidenced by Brennan’s failure to deliver a consensus assessment of Putin’s motives.

    In his mission to transform the intelligence community into an official choir of the Clinton campaign, Brennan ran up against a 6’7″ wall in the form of James Comey. According to the New York Times, in August 2016, “a critical split” emerged between “the CIA and counterparts at the FBI, where a number of senior officials continued to believe . . . that Russia’s cyberattacks were aimed primarily at disrupting America’s political system, and not at getting Mr. Trump elected.” As a component of this disagreement, Brennan may also have pressured Comey to investigate possible collusion with Russia by aides and associates of Trump.

    By law, the CIA cannot spy on Americans; only the FBI has the authority to investigate citizens. But the CIA can share reports with the FBI about efforts by foreign agents to suborn individual Americans, and it can strongly urge the bureau to take action on the basis of those leads. Brennan, it would appear, did just that in July 2016.

    That was the moment when the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian efforts to influence the Trump campaign. As we mentioned, Peter Strzok, who had been in charge of Midyear Exam, took charge of this investigation, too. The genesis and scope of it, however, is shrouded in a fog of deliberate misinformation. From the little we know, the probe seems to have centered on George Papadopoulos, a young foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign. Acting mostly on his own initiative, Papadopoulos reached out to Russians in the hopes of brokering a meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. In the process, he may have bumped into Russian intelligence agents.

    Papadopoulos’s activities took place, primarily, in London — a part of the world where the CIA has greater reach than the FBI. How did Comey come to learn of them? The answer is unclear, but certain clues point to Brennan.

    One of these is Brennan’s own testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in March 2017. The CIA, he explained, had shared certain information with the FBI — an apparent reference to the Papadopoulos leads. This was information, he said, “that required further investigation by the bureau to determine whether or not U.S. persons were actively conspiring, colluding with Russian officials.” Was Brennan taking responsibility for kick-starting the investigation into the Trump campaign? He seemed to be saying that he had dropped the Papadopoulos file on Comey’s desk and said, “Investigate Trump!”

    If this supposition about the origins of the investigation in July is correct, it may also help explain Brennan’s behavior in late August, when he grew increasingly exasperated with Comey. In an effort to gain allies, Brennan turned to friends in Congress for help. With the blessing of Obama, he organized a series of briefings for the so-called Gang of Eight — the Democratic and Republican leaders in both chambers of Congress, and the chairs and ranking minority members on the Senate and the House intelligence committees. According to the New York Times, Brennan told these senior lawmakers that he “had information indicating that Russia was working to help elect Donald J. Trump president,” a view that was not supported by an authoritative intelligence assessment.

    Obama and Brennan explained the briefings as an effort to forge bipartisan unity in the face of the Russian threat. But if Brennan couldn’t force a consensus inside the intelligence community, how could he possibly convince Republicans and Democrats to join hands — during a polarizing election, no less?

    This high-minded bipartisanship was simply cover for a highly partisan move. The true motive of the briefings was to ventriloquize the Democrats on the Hill. If Brennan himself had gone public with his claims about Putin, he would have called down attacks on himself for passing off Clinton propaganda as an official intelligence assessment — and for meddling, as the director of the CIA, in domestic politics. Democratic lawmakers who received his briefings, however, operated under no such constraints. They were perfectly free to pass along Brennan’s views to the public as their own. They became the ventriloquist’s dummies, moving their lips mechanically as the CIA director spoke.

    Brennan placed one of them center stage. On August 25, he gave a briefing that differed from the others; he tailored its content especially to the bare-knuckle politics of its recipient, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. During the 2012 election, Reid had assisted President Obama by falsely claiming that his Republican presidential challenger, Mitt Romney, had paid no taxes for ten years. When later asked if spreading a false rumor wasn’t reminiscent of McCarthyism, Reid responded, “They can call it whatever they want. Romney didn’t win, did he?” With the certain knowledge that Reid, who was in any case retiring after the 2016 election, would do whatever it took to win, Brennan indulged his own partisan political passions. He told Reid, according to the New York Times, “that unnamed advisers to Mr. Trump might be working with the Russians to interfere in the election.”

    If Reid’s response is anything to go by, Brennan did much more than that: He briefed the senator on information taken directly from Steele’s dossier; and he complained about the recalcitrance of the director of the FBI. Two days after the briefing, Reid wrote a letter to Comey, which he immediately shared with the press. Claiming there was mounting evidence of “a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign,” Reid demanded that the FBI launch an immediate investigation. The American people, he wrote, deserve all the facts “before they vote this November.”

    The Trump campaign, Reid continued bluntly, “has employed a number of individuals with significant and disturbing ties to Russia and the Kremlin.” He was particularly concerned with Trump associates who may have served as what he called “complicit intermediaries” between the Russian government and hackers. “The prospect of individuals tied to Trump, Wikileaks, and the Russian government coordinating to influence our election raises concerns of the utmost gravity and merits full examination.” In an unmistakable reference to Steele’s reports on Carter Page, Reid informed Comey that “questions have been raised” about a Trump adviser who allegedly “met with high-ranking sanctioned individuals while in Moscow.”

    Serving as Brennan’s dummy, Reid publicized the Marvel Comics rendering of Carter Page, and he demanded that the FBI launch an investigation on the basis of it. Before long, Comey would obey.
    President Obama and Hillary Clinton at a campaign rally in Charlotte, N.C., July 5, 2016.
    The Cutout
    Shortly after Reid’s letter, Obama asked the FBI for an update on its investigation of Russian tampering with the election. The president, Lisa Page texted to her lover Peter Strzok, “wants to know everything we’re doing.” The text probably refers to Obama’s preparations for the G-20 meeting in China, where he personally lodged a complaint with Putin about the Russian hacking. But the request is intriguing. Obama was engaging the FBI just as it stood ready to use the allegations of the Steele dossier as a basis for broadening its investigation of Trump. When Comey informed Obama about “everything we are doing,” did he discuss the Carter Page allegations? Did he note their source, Christopher Steele? And what about the president himself? Did Obama nudge Comey to comply with the demands of Brennan and Reid?

    Whatever signals the president may have sent, McCabe and his lovebirds certainly began supporting the efforts of Brennan and Reid to paint Trump as Putin’s puppet. The form of support was nuanced and clandestine. If Peter Strzok and Lisa Page had contacted their favorite reporter, Devlin Barrett, and leaked the fact that a Trump adviser was coming under investigation, the leak would have implicated the FBI. Trump and his supporters would then have castigated Comey, accusing him of intervening in politics. To avoid such problems, the lovers used a pair of cutouts — intermediaries who laundered the FBI’s information in the same way that Reid had laundered information for Brennan.

    Who better to play this role than the super duo, Simpson and Steele? Either directly or through an intermediary, Strzok shared with Steele the news of the impending investigation of Carter Page. He did so with the certain knowledge that Steele would channel it to Simpson, who, in turn, would incorporate it into his standard press briefings. (FBI representatives would later deny having used Steele as a cutout with the press, but their self-defense, as we shall see below, is demonstrably false.)

    The experience of the journalist Julia Ioffe demonstrates how diligent Simpson was at spreading the news that Strzok was surreptitiously feeding him. In mid September, Ioffe published a profile on Carter Page for Politico. “As I started looking into Page,” she relates, “I began getting calls from two separate ‘corporate investigators’ digging into what they claim are all kinds of shady connections Page has to all kinds of shady Russians.” One of those investigators was, presumably, Simpson; the other one probably represented another dank corner of the Clinton demimonde. Both emphasized an allegation that came directly from Steele’s dossier: namely, that Page, during his trip to Moscow in July, had met with Igor Sechin, who is a key Putin ally and the chairman of the Russian state oil company. The “corporate investigators,” however, now had something else to push, something new and very newsworthy: “The FBI was investigating Page.”

    As knowledge of the FBI’s interest in Carter Page spread, Steele’s credibility soared. To exploit the opportunity, Simpson flew Steele to the United States to brief select media outlets in person. Thanks to the information that McCabe’s team was leaking to the press through Steele, Simpson could repackage the super spy. No longer just a former MI6 operative working as an “independent” researcher, Steele was now a trusted colleague of the FBI’s. He possessed unique insight into the fears of American counterintelligence officials about Trump’s nefarious relations with Putin.

    For the first time, Steele agreed to go on the record as a quoted source for journalists. This round of briefings generated an article, written by veteran Yahoo reporter Michael Isikoff. Entitled “U.S. Intel Officials Probe Ties between Trump Adviser and Kremlin,” it focused, naturally, on Carter Page. Isikoff reported that American officials had “received intelligence reports” that Page had met with Sechin. “At their alleged meeting,” Isikoff reported, “Sechin raised the issue of the lifting of sanctions with Page, the Western intelligence source said.” A Western intelligence source? That would be Christopher Steele. By identifying the super spy in this manner, Isikoff disguises (wittingly or unwittingly) Steele’s identity as a Clinton operative and as the author and disseminator of the reports in question. The moniker had the added benefit of making Steele seem to work for a Western government, creating the illusion of transatlantic trepidation about the cunning Carter Page.

    Confirmation of the article’s central claims came from two other sources. The first was a “senior U.S. law enforcement official,” who told Isikoff that Page’s meetings in Moscow were “being looked at.” Would that be Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, or Lisa Page? The second confirmation came from “a congressional source familiar with . . . briefings” that lawmakers had received about Carter Page’s meetings in Moscow. Would that be Harry Reid? Whether these were indeed the correct identities, it is obvious where Isikoff found his sources: on Glenn Simpson’s Rolodex. Here was a story processed and canned in Fusion GPS’s information factory. All Isikoff had to do was add water and shake. His sources were all part of a single network conspiring to hoodwink the public.

    Why did Comey participate in this fraud? Perhaps it was to get Brennan and Reid off his back. On the risk side of the ledger, the dangers were minimal. Today the Isikoff article is a fingerprint on a hot bullet casing, irrefutable proof placing the FBI at the scene of the crime. But in September 2016, the chances of anyone ever tying the bureau to it were negligible. Although the article announced with great flourish the opening of an investigation into Carter Page, it’s not even clear that, at this point, Page was truly an official target of the probe.

    The important thing to Brennan and Reid was helping Hillary Clinton win the election. What they desired most from the FBI was a public statement that the Trump team was under investigation for conspiring with Putin. With the Isikoff article, Comey didn’t fully satisfy them, but he threw them a bone.

    On the reward side of the ledger, he showed Hillary Clinton and her friends that he was, despite everything, a team player. And his contribution to the team effort was indeed significant. The FBI’s leaks were indispensable in giving super-flack Glenn Simpson a stable of seemingly independent sources willing to go on the record about the grave concern sweeping the Western world about, of all people, Carter Page.
    FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe speaks at a press conference, July 20, 2016.
    Get Carter
    “Mr. Page is not an advisor and has made no contribution to the campaign,” said a Trump spokesman in reaction to the media storm over the Isikoff article. If Carter Page thought this disavowal would return some normalcy to his life, he was sadly mistaken. It actually put a target on his back. So long as he was officially affiliated with the Trump campaign, Comey would no doubt hesitate to seek a surveillance warrant, for fear of laying the FBI open to the charge of engaging in politically motivated spying. After the disavowal, Comey had more room for maneuver. He therefore gave the go-ahead to seek a surveillance warrant.

    Widening the probe to include Page carried a little additional risk for Comey, but not much. If Clinton were to win the election, as everyone expected, then she would never punish him for the move. If Trump were to win and learn about the probe, it would certainly enrage him. But the investigation could also be useful as leverage. Peter Strzok put it well in a text to Lisa Page a month earlier. On August 15, 2016, referring to the possibility of a Trump victory, Strzok wrote:
    I want to believe the path u threw out 4 consideration in Andy’s [McCabe’s] office — that there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event u die be4 you’re 40.
    Strzok, presumably, was saying that a counterintelligence operation against Trump and his team would give the FBI leadership a species of job insurance, similar to the job insurance that J. Edgar Hoover enjoyed in his day. Presidents dared not fire Hoover, because he kept a black book on them all.

    Strzok’s team began the process of seeking a surveillance warrant on Carter Page from the court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA. The FISA court’s proceedings are not public, because they treat top-secret intelligence. To seek a warrant against Carter Page required the FBI to show probable cause that he was acting as an agent of Russia. In preparation for the warrant application, the FBI flew Steele to Rome for a face-to-face meeting with his main FBI contact. According to the New York Times, the handler told Steele that the FBI “would pay him $50,000” if he “could get solid corroboration of his reports.” It was an incriminating admission. Steele’s reports on Page’s Moscow trip were two months old. The U.S. government — that is, the FBI and the CIA — hadn’t produced an iota of corroboration — and yet on the basis of those stale reports, it had suddenly decided to target Page as a probable agent of a foreign power.

    Why? Because without the Carter Page who appeared in the Steele dossier — without the Marvel Comics villain, there existed no credible intelligence pointing to a criminal conspiracy between Trump and Putin. If the investigation was to be sufficiently broad to dig up dirt on Trump, it had to include the fanciful allegations against Page. These, however, were impossible to corroborate — because they were fictive. They did, however, include one claim that, if shorn of context, wasn’t as transparently silly as the others: namely, that Page had met with Sechin, the chairman of the Russian state oil company. To be sure, Steele’s report of the meeting contained the outlandish claim that Page had negotiated with Sechin on lifting American sanctions against Russia. But if McCabe’s team were to downplay this aspect as much as possible and focus instead on whether the meeting actually took place (it didn’t)well, that could make it appear like a worrisome allegation calling out for a sober follow-up.

    The super spy sprang into action. He tapped his daisy chain of paid Russian informants, and before McCabe’s team submitted the FISA warrant application, he produced some short reports supposedly confirming the meeting with Sechin. Steele discovered in his network another “source”: the friend of one of Sechin’s friend, who had heard from Sechin and from Sechin’s personal assistant that indeed Sechin had met with Page. Confirmation?! The “source” also reported that Sechin offered Page, in return for Trump lifting of U.S. sanctions on Russia, a personal reward: a 19 percent stake in the Russian state-owned oil company — a haul worth millions upon millions, or probably billions.

    No mere criminal mastermind, Page was master negotiator as well! Cartoonish depictions such as this constitute the primary basis on which the FBI made the case that Page was probably a foreign agent and that, in addition, he had probably broken American law — the legal standard for issuing surveillance warrants. The application for a warrant against Page is locked behind a top-secret classification. But McCabe testified before the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017 that without Steele’s information, the FBI could not have secured a surveillance warrant. And according to Senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham, who have read the original warrant application and the three renewal applications, “the bulk” of the material on which the FBI made its case against Page came in the Steele dossier. What is more, the application contained, in the words of the two senators, “no additional information corroborating the dossier allegations” — no additional information, that is, except for one newspaper article: the Isikoff piece.

    McCabe’s team supported an application based primarily on Steele’s allegations by offering the judges an article that itself was based solely on Steele’s reports.

    Alfa Shmalfa
    Placing Page under surveillance marked the high point of the cooperation between McCabe’s team and the super duo Simpson and Steele. But nefarious partnerships are prone to unravel; and when they do, they unravel quickly. Only ten short days after McCabe’s team pulled the wool over the eyes of the FISA-court judges, Simpson and Steele broke off relations with the FBI in a fit of anger and bitterness.

    Relations started to fray amid an effort by the super duo to stage a repeat of their Isikoff triumph. At some point in October, Simpson brought Steele to the United States for a second round of in-person briefings with major news outlets. Unfortunately, not one of these outlets has seen fit to disclose the subject of the briefings, so their precise details are sketchy. Still serving as FBI cutouts, the super duo probably updated reporters on the FISA warrant application and other aspects of the Trump-Russia investigation. If so, they may have intended for that information to serve as filler in articles about a new scoop that Simpson was offering reporters. A journalist whom Fusion GPS briefed at that time subsequently told the Washington Times that Simpson was pushing a story about a secret computer link-up between Trump and a Russian bank.

    According to the New York Times, news of the link-up had started to see the light of day thanks to the “classified” briefings that Brennan had organized for trusted Democrats on Capitol Hill. Intelligence officers disclosed, in the words of the Times, “the possibility of financial ties between Russians and people connected to Mr. Trump,” including “a mysterious computer back channel between the Trump Organization and the Alfa Bank, which is one of Russia’s biggest banks and whose owners have longstanding ties to Mr. Putin.” John Brennan had designed those briefings to be leaky, so it should come as no surprise that word of the Alfa Bank investigation flowed directly to Fusion GPS.

    Following the winning formula that had produced the Isikoff article, Simpson provided reporters with the scoop. At first, the plan proceeded flawlessly. Franklin Foer of Slate ran a breathless story about the secret communications between the servers. Do we know with certainty that Foer’s information came directly from Fusion GPS? No. It’s certainly possible that, as we saw in the case of Julia Ioffe, some other agent emerged from the shadows of the Clinton demimonde to serve it up to him. Whatever the source of the information, Foer thought he might just have discovered the greatest piece of incriminating evidence yet — and Hillary Clinton agreed.

    The speed and enthusiasm of her endorsement suggest more than a measure of coordination. She immediately sent out not one, but two tweets flagging Foer’s piece. One of them attached a statement from her campaign, which added heart palpitations and comic-book imagery to Foer’s breathlessness. Slate’s discovery of a “secret hotline,” the statement said, might unlock the mystery behind Trump’s love for Putin, and it might also explain why Russia was “masterminding” cyber theft designed “to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign.” The Clinton campaign called on the FBI to investigate.

    Clearly, this was the cue for McCabe’s lovers to chime in. Their role was to affirm by means of a leak that the FBI was taking very seriously this threat to national security, investigating with all the diligence that the American people expect of their premier law-enforcement agency. Foer’s story came out on October 31 — a week and a day before the voters went to the ballot box. If McCabe’s team had stuck to the script, the media would have spent the final week before the election talking of nothing but the “secret hotline” that connected Putin to the lair of his evil minion high atop Trump Tower.

    But McCabe’s team double-crossed Steele and Simpson — or so the super duo must have felt. On the same day the Slate article appeared, the New York Times reported that the FBI had investigated the link between Alfa Bank and Trump Tower. The Bureau, the Times said, had concluded “that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts.” This single sentence wiped out weeks of diligent work by Fusion GPS. As if to console Simpson and Steele, the article did reveal that the FBI, all summer long, had been conducting an investigation into the potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. And the Times even disclosed details of the probe — information that came courtesy, one assumes, of briefings from Fusion GPS.

    But to Simpson and Steele the inclusion of those details was the bitterest of consolation. The damage the Times visited on their propaganda campaign was not limited to undermining the Alfa Bank story. The article included two additional facts, each as destructive as the other: The FBI’s wide-ranging investigation into Trump had revealed no collusion with Putin, and the FBI did not even believe that Putin was trying to get Hillary Clinton elected. In a convulsive fit of journalistic integrity, the Times had rejected Fusion GPS’s master narrative — and it had done so on the basis of authoritative leaks from the FBI. Someone in the J. Edgar Hoover Building had dropped a pallet of bricks on Simpson and Steele. Who?
    FBI director James Comey testifies on Capitol Hill, July 7, 2016.
    The Return of Joe Friday
    The collapse of the “secret hotline” story was part of a larger falling-out between the FBI and the super duo — and not by any means the most important part. The event that truly doomed their relations was an announcement, on October 28, that the FBI was reopening the Clinton email investigation. And the character standing at the center of that decision was James Comey.

    The bureau had learned that Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s trusted right hand, had forwarded thousands of emails to a computer in her home, which Anthony Weiner had put to personal use. Weiner was a former congressman, and he was Abedin’s husband. But he was also a criminal under investigation by the FBI. In her “well-intentioned but careless” use of government correspondence, Abedin had streamed thousands of official emails to the laptop of a pedophile.

    James Comey’s July statement closing the Clinton email case coincided with Guccifer 2.0’s release of the DNC emails, and it helped build the impression of Hillary Clinton as the entitled CEO of Clinton, Inc. This reopening of the case, coming just a week before the election, was also timed for maximum visibility and carried a similar political valence. It was the third in a string of blows that Clinton received in the final stage of the election. The first came at a September 11 memorial commemoration in New York, where she had stumbled badly and seemed to faint, raising doubts about her stamina and health. On October 7, WikiLeaks published the first trove of emails stolen, presumably by Russian intelligence, from her campaign manager John Podesta. The emails were further grist for the mill of those who argued that Bill and Hillary Clinton were running a Tammany Hall for the 21st century. With Clinton stumbling, both literally and figuratively, the director of the FBI seemed determined to knock her back down.

    What was he thinking? Comey now claims that he assumed Hillary Clinton would win. He feared that, after the election, people would come to learn that he had hidden the issue of Abedin’s laptop from the public, and they would accuse him of giving unfair consideration to Clinton. That calculation may indeed have been part of his thinking. But he may also have been hedging against a Trump victory. The announcement about the laptop was a card that he could play to ingratiate himself to Trump — to offset the damage of the leaks about the Russia investigation. On top of those machinations, there was the old story: Comey’s love of the spotlight. Here he was again in a national drama playing the entirely principled and apolitical lawman. He was in Joe Friday heaven.

    For their part, Clinton and her camp read the FBI director’s move as treachery most vile. In a scream of rage masquerading as a letter to Comey, Harry Reid spoke for the team. Comey, he wrote, was breaking the law by engaging in partisan political activity in support of Trump. Whereas Comey never hesitated to publicize damaging “innuendo” against Clinton, he was protecting Trump from public humiliation. “It has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers, and the Russian government — a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every opportunity,” Reid fumed. “The public has a right to know this information.” To underscore that point, he published the letter immediately.

    Glenn Simpson and Christopher Steele shared the sense of betrayal. Simpson later testified to the House intelligence committee:
    At that point I felt like the rules had just been thrown out and that Comey had violated . . . one of the more sacrosanct policies, which is not announcing law enforcement activity in the closing days of an election. . . . We decided that if James Comey wasn’t going to tell people about this investigation that, you know, he had violated the rules, and [it] would only be fair if the world knew that both candidates were under FBI investigation.
    So Simpson and Steele “began talking to the press.”

    And with that, the super duo brought about the end of their secret partnership with McCabe’s team. The bureau expects its cutouts to behave as cutouts: that is to say, they must launder secrets. Sensitive and classified information must never appear in the press in a form that betrays its FBI origins.

    Comey announced the reopening of the Clinton email case on Friday, October 28. Simpson moved quickly. He arranged a Skype interview between Steele, who was now back in London, and David Corn, a veteran journalist at Mother Jones. On October 31, Corn reported that “a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence” told him “that in recent months he provided the bureau with memos, based on . . . Russian sources, contending that the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump — and that the FBI requested more information from him.” The FBI response, Steele told Corn, was “shock and horror.” In August, the FBI asked for more of Steele’s memos. “It’s quite clear there was or is a pretty substantial inquiry going on.” To ensure that Corn understood the nature of the inquiry, Steele shared with him the text of the reports that he had given to the Bureau.

    Steele’s decision to expose his partnership with the FBI gave McCabe’s team no choice but to terminate the relationship. The break-up was ugly, but its very messiness would later prove useful. In late 2017, congressional investigators would begin questioning the FBI’s senior leaders about the role Steele had played as a cutout. The senior leaders would point to the break-up as proof of the FBI’s integrity. Steele, they said, had been lying all along to the Bureau about his work with journalists. McCabe’s team had no idea that he was funneling the FBI’s secrets to the media. It was the Mother Jones interview that alerted them to Steele’s duplicity; the moment it became clear, they immediately terminated the relationship.

    This alibi won't wash. McCabe's team was fully aware, in September, that Steele stood behind the Isikoff article. In fact, the appearance of “a senior U.S. law enforcement official” in the article implicates McCabe’s team more or less directly. In short, Steele’s FBI handlers were aware of his role in leaking information at that time, and it caused them no consternation. On the contrary, after the Isikoff article, the FBI drew Steele even closer, flying him to Rome and offering him $50,000. His work as a cutout received further tacit commendation when McCabe’s team used the Isikoff article to dupe the FISA-court judges.

    The troubles that eventually befell Steele and McCabe’s team have no bearing on the simple facts: They worked as partners in prosecuting a campaign of innuendo against Carter Page in September, and again in placing him under surveillance in October. What is more, the surveillance order went beyond McCabe’s team, to the highest levels in the FBI and the DOJ. James Comey had to sign off on that decision — and that fact implicates him in a serious abuse of power.

    Steele’s description of Carter Page’s activities in Moscow is comical. We have a word to describe the use of fabricated evidence to make an innocent man appear guilty: The Obama administration framed Carter Page. But not only Carter Page. According to Steele’s dossier, Page was in Moscow to cut a deal on another’s behalf: He was an emissary — the trusted agent of Donald Trump. Without Steele’s allegations against Carter Page — without, that is, the story of Page negotiating with Sechin to remove the sanctions — there was no credible allegation of a Trump-Putin conspiracy. The FBI, therefore, carried out a campaign of innuendo against Donald Trump in September. And the Obama administration placed him under investigation in October, if not earlier. The Obama administration framed Donald Trump.

    Second Sight
    During the Watergate scandal, the press popularized the phrase “the non-denial denial.” The Nixon White House had a special talent for issuing statements that sounded like categorical denials of allegations but that, upon close parsing, affirmed them to be true. In the matter of the Steele dossier, Obama officials, some of their allies in Congress, and senior leaders in the FBI have developed an analogous ploy: the “non-verification verification.” These are statements that distance the speaker from the laughable fantasies of the Steele dossier while still affirming that the tale of collusion it weaves must be taken seriously.

    The unrivaled master of the move is John Brennan. In a recent appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Brennan defended the FBI’s use of the Steele dossier in its FISA warrant application. He railed against the FBI’s critics, whom he depicted as partisan hacks. He played the role of sober intelligence professional. Expressing his personal appraisal of the dossier when he was still director of the CIA, he said, “There were things in that dossier that made me wonder whether or not they were, in fact, accurate and true.”

    Exactly what things? Was it the dossier’s view of Page as the diabolical mastermind of the DNC hack that struck the CIA director as credible? Avoiding the dossier’s specific allegations, Brennan maintained his front and asserted, with the somber tone of a button-down national-security professional, that Steele’s reports contain valuable intelligence leads. “I think Jim Comey has said that it contained salacious and unverified information,” Brennan continued. “Just because it was unverified didn’t mean it wasn’t true.”

    The non-verification verification is central to the distinctive nature of the Obama administration’s abuse of power. Most of our debate has focused on how the FBI used the Steele dossier to validate the investigation of Carter Page. This issue is important, to be sure, but it must not deflect us from seeing that the reverse is also true: The administration deliberately used the investigation of Page to validate the dossier.

    Consider, again, the coy Brennan. When questioners push him to explain what in the Steele dossier he finds compelling, he habitually takes shelter behind secret sources — evidence hidden behind a classified screen, where only he, the chief intelligence professional, was permitted to see it. “I was aware of intelligence . . . about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether . . . those individuals were cooperating with the Russians . . . and it served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion [or] cooperation occurred.”

    John Brennan sees things that we cannot see. If he indeed has access to secrets that transform stories from Marvel Comics into the stuff of everyday reality, then he has done a very poor job of explaining what they are. Moreover, no disinterested intelligence professional has supported him. Brennan’s somber and self-righteous appeal to hidden secrets is the oldest con in the book. Just replace his top-secret computer monitor with a crystal ball or dried chicken bones, and his scam is the same one that Gypsy fortunetellers ran on superstitious peasants in early-modern Europe, or that soothsayers were operating in Homer’s Greece.

    With respect to the framing of Trump, however, the second-sight scam required elaborate orchestration, the work of many hands. The key was the double-tracking of the dossier. Hillary Clinton’s enablers channeled it simultaneously into the press and into the government. They then recruited people inside government to verify to the outsiders that it was a serious document, a guide to the intelligence that reporters were not allowed to see. Without this double-tracking and official or quasi-official authentication, journalists would never have believed that they were catching a glimpse of what Brennan and the FBI saw in their crystal balls — pardon me, their top-secret monitors. And without leaks about investigations, journalists would have had no dossier-related news to report. Official statements that the dossier “was being looked into” transformed it into a legitimate topic for reputable news outlets.

    This con failed in its primary goal of preventing the election of Trump, but it was nevertheless a partial success. It instilled in a significant portion of the American public the conviction that Trump indeed conspired with Putin. This conviction is especially prevalent among the lofty-minded — a class of people that includes Republicans as well as Democrats.

    The bipartisan character of the delusion was the greatest factor that legitimated the appointment of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel leading the investigation into Trump’s alleged relations with Russia. The lofty-minded have greeted every indictment that Mueller has handed down as confirmation of their collusion delusion. In reality, those indictments only prove that a phalanx of crack investigators armed with nearly unlimited resources, a grand jury, and an expansive mandate can draw blood almost at will. If a similar phalanx were to target Hillary Clinton and the shenanigans surrounding the Clinton Foundation, how much blood would flow? In other words, Mueller’s indictments are just the latest form of the non-verification verification.

    Regardless of Mueller’s intentions, his probe serves as precisely the kind of “insurance policy” that Strzok seems to have been discussing with his lover, Lisa Page, in August 2016. Trump cannot shut down the Mueller probe and excise the rot in the DOJ and the FBI without appearing to obstruct justice. In practical terms, then, the Mueller probe is the cover-up.

    Of course, the lofty-minded refuse to see it this way. The political damage that Mueller’s team is inflicting on Trump helps explain why a surprising number of people mount passionate and sincere defenses of the dossier and the super spy who compiled it. The logic of partisan politics will always lead a significant percentage of people to insist, with varying degrees of true belief, that a sow’s ear really is a silk purse. But partisanship is not by any means the only factor at work here. Even people with well-deserved reputations for intellectual seriousness passionately defend the integrity of Christopher Steele, a man whom the New York Times insists on calling, despite all contrary evidence, “a whistleblower.”

    For a complete understanding of the dossier’s tenacious hold on lofty minds, one must supplement conventional political analysis with psychology. What we are witnessing is nothing less than a textbook case of denial and projection — the most perfect case imaginable.

    The event that shaped the dossier more than any other was the hack of the DNC. Guccifer 2.0 first began releasing documents on June 15. A week later, Steele produced his first report. The Hillary Clinton that emerged from the DNC emails was preternaturally unsuited to a populist moment. Here she was: the Hillary Clinton who made high-priced speeches to Wall Street on the eve of the Iowa caucuses. Here was the co-executive of the international slush funds of the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative. Here was the power-hungry political boss who worked with the DNC to fix the Democratic primaries. Clinton’s supporters instinctively understood the size of the wound that the hack opened up, and they worked frantically to cauterize it — which meant deflecting attention from the greed, entitlement, and sleaze that characterized Clinton, Inc.

    The dossier quickly became a tool for denying the deficiencies of Bill and Hillary Clinton, projecting them onto Donald Trump. Is Bill Clinton a sexual predator? That’s nothing. Trump pays teams of prostitutes to pee on him! Did Hillary Clinton preside over the failed “reset” with Russia? That’s nothing. Putin is blackmailing Trump, and he fears Hillary! Did Bill Clinton pocket a $500,000 fee for a speech he gave in Moscow, shortly before the sale of American uranium to Russian interests? That’s nothing. Trump’s been dependent on Putin for years! Do the emails from the DNC prove that Hillary Clinton rigged the primaries? That’s nothing. Trump conspired with Putin to rig the entire election!

    In the wake of the DNC hack, leading figures in the press and senior officials in the Obama administration faced a choice. They could depict Carter Page as he really was: an unknown man of modest accomplishments who played no role of note in the Trump organization. Or they could conspire with Fusion GPS to promote the fiction that he was a sly operative in a sinister network. In a fateful choice, they opted for dishonesty and deception over truth.

    Once the enablers of Hillary Clinton compromised their own integrity, they internalized her program of denial and projection. Their own egos are now invested in perpetuating it. To avoid owning up to their shortcomings, they insist, in ever-shriller tones, on the personal integrity of the super spy and the credibility of his reports. The mere acknowledgement of a simple truth — that the “dossier” is junk — would constitute an admission either of deep professional malfeasance or of gob-smacking gullibility.

    Choose your poison: You duped people and thereby abetted a gross abuse of power; or you were yourself badly duped. That is the dilemma that the lofty-minded now face. The choice is excruciating. It requires abandoning satisfying self-images and embracing painful self-truths — while also handing a well-deserved victory to a hated political enemy. As a consequence, the Steele dossier has proved to be as consequential as it is asinine.

    The Greatest Denier
    Of course, no one is in deeper denial than Hillary Clinton herself. After she had conceded to Trump on the night of the election, Obama called her. Taking the phone, she said, “Mr. President, I’m sorry.”

    Sorry, no doubt, that the baton had fallen to the ground once again. Sorry that she would not be the first female president. Sorry that she would not hold the reins of power. But was contrition an aspect of any component of her sorrow?

    If there is one thing Hillary Clinton does not do well, it is contrition. In an interview last September, she clung to the fiction that the election was stolen. Her belief that Trump conspired with Putin was absolute. “There certainly was communication, and there certainly was an understanding of some sort,” Clinton said. She had “no doubt” that Putin sought a Trump victory, that there was “a tangle of financial relationships” between Trump and Russia, and that Trump’s associates “worked really hard to hide their connections with Russians.” Were those, in her mind, clear signs of collusion? “I’m convinced of it,” she said.

    She will remain convinced until the day she dies. The alternative, a rigorous examination of conscience, is too painful to contemplate. How much longer will Hillary Clinton’s damaged psyche hold America hostage?
    Source: NationalReview.com
    Last edited by turiya; 30th March 2018 at 03:46.

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