Vincent J. Curtis
31 Dec 2017
The Trump-hating Fake News media are letting themselves be used as the conduit of a disinformation story that comes straight from the Mueller
investigation. The pressure is on the
FBI and the Mueller team because of the belief that the FBI investigation into
the Trump campaign and the issuance of FISA warrants to wiretap Trump campaign
aides were based upon the discredited Steele Dossier – the one financed by the
Hillary campaign and created by former British spy Christopher Steele
The story planted in the New
York Times headlined, “How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide,
Drinks, and Talk of Political Dirt” written by Sharon LaFraniere, Mark Mazzetti,
and Matt Apuzzo, offers a theory of origin alternative to the Steele Dossier
theory.
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has
been pressing the FBI to release details of the FISA warrants were obtained to
wiretap, among others, Carter Page and Paul Manafort. The FBI and the DoJ have not been forthcoming
with the information, and the Committee Chairman Devin Nunes is preparing to
issue contempt of Congress citations against leading members of the FBI if they
fail to deliver the requested information by January 3, 2018. Nunes wants to have answered the question of
whether the FISA warrants were obtained using the Steele Dossier (paid for by
Hillary) as the basis of evidence. The
purpose of the Times story planted by
the Mueller team is to deflect attention from the Steele Dossier theory by
offering the Democrats an alternative theory to push.
That the source of this story is the Mueller team comes from
the details it contains – details that can only have come from it and from one
of the scalps it has gathered - George Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos was convicted in July, 2017, of
lying to the FBI, and this fact was revealed in September. He is said to be a “cooperating witness,”
which means details that only Papadopoulos could know and that appear in the Times story could only have come from
the Mueller team.
How do we know that this leak from the Mueller team is
intended to deflect attention from the Steele Dossier? For the denser among us, the story says so
explicitly in several places, starting at the beginning of the fourth
paragraph, “The hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign
may have had inside information about it were
driving factors that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into
Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s
associates conspired.” As I type
those words, it occurs to me that Peter Strzok could be a source, since only he
among the Mueller team would be in a position to say authoritatively what were
the driving factors the led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016. Further on, the story says, “It was not, as Mr. Trump and other
politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a
rival campaign. Instead it was firsthand
information from one of American’s closest intelligence allies.” (That’s right, Dorothy, pay no attention to
the man behind the curtain…)
And later on it says, “A team of F.B.I. agents traveled to
Europe to interview Mr. Steele in early October, 2016. Mr. Steele had shown some of his findings to
an F.B.I. agents in Rome three months earlier, but that information was not part of the justification to start an
counterintelligence inquiry, American officials said.” (Left unsaid was if the FBI agents upon
meeting Steele asked him how he got his information and why he was
undertaking such an enterprise as gathering a dossier on Donald Trump. Such a question would have led to the answer
that he was being paid to do so by Fusion GPS, and thus the unravelling of the
Hillary campaign laundering effort.)
These are the lines in the story that show that the Mueller
team is the source of the Times
story, since they say authoritatively things that only Papadopoulos would know –
and he is a “cooperating witness.”
-
But when [Joseph Mifsud] found out that [Papadopoulos]
was a Trump campaign advisor, he latched
onto him, according to court records and emails obtained by The New York
Times. Their joint goal was to arrange a meeting between Mr. Trump and
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Moscow, or between their respective
parties.
-
Mr. Papadopoulos
was trusted enough to edit the outline of Mr. Trump’s first major foreign
policy speech on April 27. (edit an
outline of a speech? A sign of
trust? These a Papadopoulos’s recollections
and opinion of himself.)
-
Senior agents did not discuss [the opening of the
investigation into the Trump campaign] at the daily morning briefing, a
classified setting where officials normally speak freely about highly sensitive
opeations. (Who but a few of the
principles would know this? Comey,
Strzok, McCabe, Lisa Page, and that might be it.)
-
A trip to Moscow by another advisor, Carter Page, also
raised concerns at the F.B.I. (Again,
who would know that it was Carter Page’s trip to Moscow that “also raised
concerns” but the few mentioned above?)
-
F.B.I. agents debated how aggressively to investigate
the campaign’s Russia ties, according to current and former officials familiar
with the debate. (Again, Comey, McCabe,
and Strzok.)
-
Even if the odds against a Trump presidency were long,
these agents argued, it was prudent to take every precaution. (again, Strzok and his paramour Lisa Page
said these very things in McCabe’s office, according to Strzok’s own
emails. But why would it be ‘prudent?’ If Trump were elected, he’d be president and
none of this would matter unless they had
in mind the overturning of that result somehow.)
-
Mr. Trump’s improbable victory raised Mr. Papadopoulos’s hopes that he might ascend to a top White
House job.
-
Mr. Millian (to Papadopoulos) bragged of his ties to
Mr. Trump. (who would characterize it as
‘bragging’ except the person to whom the bragging was directed, i.e. to
Papadopoulos.)
-
Mr. Millian proposed that he and Mr. Papadopoulos form
an energy related business that would be financed by Russian billionaires “who
are not under sanctions” and would “open all doors for us” at “any level all
the way to the top.” (Unless Papadopoulos
was wearing a wire, who but Papadopoulos would recall such a conversation? And
if was in an email, that particular would have to come from the Mueller
investigation.)
-
Nothing came of his proposal, partly because Mr. Papadopoulos was hoping
that Michael T. Flynn, then Mr. Trump’s pick to be national security advisor,
might give him the energy portfolio at the National Security Council. Who but Mr. Papadopoulos would know what was
in his own mind, unless he told it to the Mueller investigators?)
These many references to what was in Papadopoulos’s mind and
details of intimate conversations with people that the Mueller investigators cannot
reach point to Papadopoulos as the originator of the information. The Times has two possible sources to this
information since they did not interview Papadopoulos himself: secret court
pleadings or leaks from the Mueller team.
And the Mueller team would have to be the source of the court
documents. Hence the Mueller team
provided this story to the Times. But who
could it be? It would have to be someone
knowledgeable going back to July 2016.
The insider information of the FBI thinking and activities
could be known only by a very few at the top of the FBI at the time: James
Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page, all of whom together amount
to four and can be described as current and former officials familiar with…
since only Comey of the four is a “former” official, and Comey is known to have
leaked to the Times before.
The purpose of the story is quite obviously to provide an
alternative theory as to how the FBI obtained a FISA warrant against Carter
Page that doesn’t include presenting the Steele Dossier to the court as
evidence.
In part II, I will go through in greater detail contradictions
in the story that demonstrate this story is a smokescreen put out by the
Mueller investigation.
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