Vincent J. Curtis
31 Dec 2017
The previous posting on The New York Times story concerning
the origin of the “Russia Inquiry” determined that the Mueller investigation
leaked the story; that the leaker was likely Peter Strozk; and that the purpose
of the story was to provide an alternative theory as to how the FISA court
granted wiretaps against members of the Trump campaign, i.e. that the primary
evidence presented to the FISA court was not the Steele Dossier (created and paid
for by the Hillary campaign), but something else.
The contradictions in the story will now be analyzed to show
that the alternative theory and the proof offered in the Times story does not
hold up.
The theory floated by the Mueller team is that George
Papadopoulos, aged 28, was having drinks in a London bar in May, 2016, with an
Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer.
In the course of drunken revelry, Papadopoulos let slip to the
Australian that he had been told (by Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic) that
Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Hillary Clinton, stolen in
an effort to damage her campaign. When
WikiLeaks published the emails hacked from the DNC more than two months later, the Australian government
allegedly alerted the FBI to the conversation, indicating that a Trump campaign
official seemed to have prior knowledge of this. And it was on this basis that the FBI opened
its Russian investigation into the Trump campaign and that this was the basis
for the FISA court wiretaps authorized against Carter Page and Paul Manafort.
Let’s stop here and assess.
What Papadopoulos allegedly told the Australian diplomat while drunk in
London was hearsay upon hearsay. What
the diplomat told his government was further hearsay. And hearsay piled on hearsay muttered in
Britain by a drunk with tenuous ties to the Trump campaign (which was going on
in America, by the way) whose contact with Russia was a Maltese academic formed
the basis of the application to the FISA court for a wiretap. Not on George Papadopoulos, but on Carter
Page and Paul Manafort! This is weird.
In May, 2016, the only emails potentially embarrassing to Hillary
Clinton that were known were those 33,000 emails deleted and bleachbitted from
her secret, private server. Possibly a
state actor, like Russia, could have hacked her server and have got those 33,000
private emails before she had the server destroyed. But the emails put online by WikiLeaks were
not of Hillary, but of the Democratic National Committee, and were embarrassing
to Hillary only in the sense that they showed the fix was in for her by the
DNC. The theory that the hacking of the
DNC server was by "Russia" was floated by the Democrats at the time - so as to deflect
attention from the fact that these emails were authentic. Hence, it is something of a mystery how the Australian
government would (a) associate the WikiLeaks-DNC hack with what George
Papadopoulos said months earlier in a London wine bar concerning emails being “dirt”
on Hillary, (b) bother to inform the FBI of this apparent connection
between the Trump campaign and Russia; and (c) why the FBI would act on it.
The story, to bolster its case of non-Steele dossier reasons
for seeking FISA warrants, includes the statement that “John O. Brennan, who
retired this year after four years as C.I.A. director, told Congress in May
that he had been concerned about multiple contacts between Russian officials and
Trump advisors. Russia, he said, tried
to ‘suborn’ members of the Trump campaign.”
In light of this story, Brennan manifestly lied to Congress. There were no Russian officials in the picture until after the election. Papadopoulos’s
alleged Russian contact was Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor “at a now
defunct London academy who had valuable contacts with the Russian Ministry of
Foreign Affairs.” Mifsud was not a “Russian
official.” The CIA did not uncover
Papadopoulos’s conversation with Australian Alexander Downer. The one Trump link with Russia the CIA could
possibly know about was Carter Page, and they had no intelligence on Page’s one
trip to Moscow in July, 2016.
From what we now know and from what is in this Times story, there were no contacts at all between “Russian officials” and Trump ‘advisors’. There were none for the CIA to discover -
assuming that they could have discovered them if there were! The Australians passed their alleged intelligence
to the FBI, not to the CIA. Brennan had
no evaluation of the Steele Dossier even though he knew its contents. Brennan simply lied to Congress to cast a
shadow over the legitimacy of the Trump presidency.
The Times story alleges that in late April, 2016, at a
London hotel, Mifsud told Papadopoulos that he had just learned from high-level
Russian officials in Moscow that the Russians had “dirt” on Mrs. Clinton in the
form of “thousands of emails” (There is
no evidence that Papadopoulos discussed this information with the Trump
campaign.) If you think you have heard
this line before, you have. Having “dirt”
on Hillary was the basis of a meeting on June 9, 2016, between Don Trump, Jr.
Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner and one Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian
lawyer who used that very bait in order to lobby for the repeal of the
Magnitsky Act. That meeting went
nowhere.
An attack on the Magnitsky Act also seems to be behind the
proposal by a Mr. Millian to Papadopoulos, made after the election, that they
form an energy business that would be financed by Russian billionaires who are not under sanctions and open all
doors for us at any level all the way to the top. In other words, if there is a case to be made
of Russians trying to contact the Trump campaign, it seems that its purpose was
to undermine the Magnitsky Act rather than to influence the outcome of the
election.
But this leads to a further point: These low level contacts, and even that
dramatic effort by Natalia Veselnitskaya, demonstrate that high-level contacts
and coordination by high Russian authorities were not taking place. If
they were taking place, these low level contacts would have been unnecessary,
and the effort to undermine the Magnitsky Act would follow in train from the
election of Donald Trump. So, no need or
worry to fuss at lower levels about Magnitsky – unless these people were not
from the Russian government at all, but were simply agents of those private
Russians who were affected by the Act.
Far from providing an alternative theory as to the use of
the Steele Dossier (paid for by the Hillary campaign) to obtain FISA warrants, the
story helps Trump because the Times story makes no sense unless there was no
collusion between responsible members of the Trump campaign and “Russia.” The
story is all about one young guy in London allegedly knowing something
surprising and the effort by the FBI to uncover what, if anything, was going on
with Trump. But the story would have us
believe that the FBI didn’t wiretap or get close the guy who knew something,
but wiretapped other people such as Trump’s campaign manager instead. And that the FISA court went along with their reasoning.
Now, why would Comey wiretap Manafort unless
he was guided by the Steele Dossier, which the FBI had learned about directly
from Steele himself, and not from hearsay supplied by the Australian
government? Makes no sense otherwise,
unless he had a hate on for Manafort.
Even granting that James Comey believed that Russia was
trying to influence the Trump campaign, the abyss he would be staring into
should Trump win is that his investigation would undermine the legitimacy of the
incoming president – something he shied away from when it came to indicting
Hillary Clinton. The prudent course
would have been to do nothing and wait and see.
Collusion with Russia is not a crime – as has been said repeatedly
before, and Comey would lack a statutory basis for an investigation. Perhaps the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover
whispered in his ear.
The contradictions in the Times story simply undermine the
alternative hypothesis that an intelligence tip from the Australian government
prompted the FBI to obtain FISA warrants against Carter Page and Paul Manafort
- but not against George Papadopoulos.
The low level contacts with people remotely connected to the Trump
campaign establish that there were no
high level contacts between Trump and the Putin regime – which is all that
matters, at all. All low level contacts
were concerned with overturning the Magnitsky Act, not with coordinating Russian
government involvement with the Trump campaign.
The Times story was planted by the Mueller team to distract
attention from theory that the Steele Dossier (paid for by Hillary) was used to
obtain FISA warrants against Trump campaign officials. This convenient story is intended to offer
Democrats a talking point to counter that claim, and ease the pressure now on
certain officials in the FBI and the Mueller team. Andrew McCabe did not reference the Australian tip
in his testimony before Congress, wouldn’t talk about the Steele Dossier
forming the basis, and said nothing about another alternative. The problem with the Papadopoulos story is
that it is such thin gruel for a FISA court to issue warrants to wiretap
Americans, especially Americans other than Papadopoulos himself.
We can’t know what was going on in the minds of Andrew
McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and James Comey when they sought FISA
warrants, but the application will determine for sure on what basis the
warrants were sought.
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