Spies and Lies

Vincent J. Curtis

1 June 2018

Facts are fast closing in on the Mueller Investigation, and there is a serious question whether Mueller will get to interrogate Donald Trump before Mueller is overwhelmed with news of the misdeeds of the Obama administration that got his investigation started.

It is useful to keep in mind the timeline of the Russia probe, and specifically the investigation by the Obama administration into the Trump campaign for alleged Russian collusion.

It was on March 14, 2016, that Joseph Mifsud first met George Papadopoulos in Italy.  Mifsud is (or was – he has disappeared) a professor at a British university, along with some other appointments, and has been associated with the British counter-intelligence service, MI6.  George Papadopoulos was then 28 years old.  The two met again in Britain five weeks later, April 26, 2016, and it was then that Mifsud began his counter-intelligence work on Papadopoulos.  Mifsud may have indicated to Papadopoulos that he was associated with the Russian intelligence service, FSB (successor to the notorious KGB) and told Papadopoulos that Russia had Hillary’s missing emails.  In addition to planting this false intelligence lead, Mifsud convinced Papadopoulos to accept the position as head of “London Centre of International Law Practice”, which required no work.  Such a title would, in a newspaper story, give Papadopoulos an elevated stature.

Alexander Downer, Australian High Commissioner to the UK, met with George Papadopoulos on May 10^th, 2016, for a drink.  After getting Papadopoulos drunk, Downer managed to extract from him the intelligence planted by Joseph Mifsud, that the Russians had dirt on Hillary in the form of emails.  The story goes that Downer passed on to Australian intelligence services the fact that this asset of the Trump campaign seemed to know something about the Russians having emails on Hillary; and about two months later, i.e. late June to early July, the Australian intelligence services, in turn, passed this information on to the FBI.  The trouble with this narrative is that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has not seen the “Five Eyes” intelligence report that contains this report.  (Australia belongs to the Five Eyes intelligence group, consisting of the the USA, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand)  In the normal course of business, Nunes would have seen such a report, and the FBI/DOJ have not yet provided Nunes with it.  Hence, the story that it was the Australian report to the FBI that sparked interest in the Trump campaign lacks the essential element: an actual spark.

The even curiouser thing about the Hillary emails origination story is that it was not until July 22^nd, 2016, three days before the start of the Democratic National Convention that would nominate Hillary Clinton for president, that WikiLeaks published emails of the DNC.  These were the emails that proved that the DNC had been in the tank for Hillary from the very beginning and had worked to defeat Bernie Sanders.  These were the emails that caused Debby Wasserman-Schultz to quit as Chair of the DNC on the eve of the convention.

The alleged hacker of these was one Guccifer 2.0, and it is alleged that he worked in concert with a group called Fancy Bear, who, in turn, are said to be associated with the Russian government.  It is important to note that these DNC emails are not the 33,000 missing Hillary emails that everybody had heard about, the ones that Papadopoulos had been led to believe were in Russian hands.  The DNC emails are a completely different set.  Though it might be easy to confuse the two, it is important to the timeline that WikiLeaks did not release the DNC emails until late July.

It was about June 20, a month before the WikiLeaks surprise, that former MI6 operative Christopher Steele contacted the FBI with the first report that eventually would constitute the “Steele dossier”.  This first report by Steele preceded Carter Page’s trip to Moscow and his attendance at the Cambridge conference whose other guests included MI6/FBI asset Stefan Halper, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and Steele himself.  It was this first Steele report that really got the interest of the FBI.

What is clear from this timeline is that CIA director John Brennan had been running agents-provocateurs at peripheral figures of the Trump campaign well before there was any real cause for suspicion of Russian involvement.  By April, 2016, once it became clear that Trump was going to win the Republican nomination, the campaign orchestrated by Brennan began.  The purpose of running agents at these foreign-policy figures was to get them to say something foolish that could be used to discredit Donald Trump.  That’s why Papadopoulos had an impressive sounding job title pressed upon him.  By keeping from the FBI exactly what he was doing, Brennan was able to create an echo chamber in which, to an uninformed FBI, Trump people seemed to be saying things that implicated them with Russian interests somehow.

Christopher Steele, ultimately an agent of Hillary Clinton, reported to his boss Glen Simpson of Fusion GPS that the FBI had told him that they had one or more informants, or human intelligence sources, in the Trump campaign.  It is not clear if this person or people were planted or not, but the hotly debated question is what this person or people should be called.  Trump insists the FBI was spying on his campaign, while others prefer “informant.”

Since the FBI were running a counter-intelligence investigation and not a criminal investigation, the correct term of art is “spy.”  If the CIA had an informant or human intelligence source implanted in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin would have that person executed as a spy.  It is in criminal investigations – which is not what the FBI was doing against Carter Page and the Trump campaign from July, 2016, to the summer of 2017 – that the term “informant” is applicable.  The Mueller investigation is likewise a counter-intelligence investigation – to find out what the Russians did in the 2016 campaign, and hence, as it applies to Mueller, “spy” is the appropriate term.

The spy may have been looking for Russians or for colluders with Russians within the Trump campaign, or that person may simply have been reporting on the goings on of the Trump campaign itself.  We do not know.  We do know that the FBI did not inform Trump that his campaign may have been penetrated by Russian spies and that they were running protective operations.  Likewise, the FBI failed to inform the congressional Gang of 8 of their concerns and that they were taking counter-measures within the Trump campaign to find out what was going on.  We do know that as late as September, 2016, Stefan Halper contacted Trump campaign co-chair Sam Clovis requesting contact information for George Papadopoulos, and that Halper later offered his services to the Trump administration.

The FBI originally told congress that the official counter-intelligence investigation into the Trump campaign began on July 31^st, 2016.  That may be so, except that James Comey had briefed Attorney-General Loretta Lynch on Page and Papadopoulos back in March, 2016, and then the principals committee of the National Security Council on the pair in April.  Brennan was then already running MI6 agents at Page and Papadopoulos, and the FBI were debriefing Christopher Steele in June, well before anybody knew that WikiLeaks was going to publish the (authentic) DNC emails.

Earlier this week, congressman Trey Gowdy came in for considerable criticism for saying that Americans would have wanted the FBI to do what they did concerning the Trump campaign.  We do not know what frightening thing was alleged to have occurred in the Trump campaign that justified in Gowdy’s mind the infiltration of the FBI into the Trump campaign, but it had to have had something to do with Russian interference in the election.  The questions go unanswered: why was something similar not done to Hillary’s campaign?  WikiLeaks got hold of John Podesta’s emails and then started publishing them on October 1^st, providing a daily drumbeat of scandal to the Hillary campaign.  Why weren’t the FBI trying to protect Hillary’s campaign from Russian penetration?

The purpose of John Brennan’s and the FBI’s work on the Trump campaign was to find a way to discredit Trump and assure Hillary’s election.  The smear of Russian help for Trump started early, and only got louder after Trump gained his spectacular win in November.  At that point, the smear of Russian collusion and the “investigation” therein to (of which the Mueller investigation is merely a continuation) turned into an effort to discredit the legitimacy of President Trump and to cripple his presidency.

Before leaving office, the Obama administration discussed how much, if any, of what they had done in respect of Trump’s campaign should be revealed to the incoming president - who upon taking office has the right to be informed on everything.  This discussion involved not only Susan Rice but also Sally Yates, acting Attorney-General.  This was the meeting for which Rice planted a 12:15 pm January 20^th, 2017 note-to-self saying that Obama emphasized that things should be “done by the book.”  Thus we have the spectacle of senior permanent officials demonstrating loyalty not to the constitution, or to the office of the president (and to whomever happens to be the office-holder at that moment), but to a man: Barack Obama, and to the cause he stands for – progressivism.

The swamp runs deep in Washington, D.C., and this meeting of Obama officials proves that no one can count on the loyalty of the permanent Washington bureaucracy to the constitution, to the rule of law, to republican principles, or to the right of the American people to make their own decisions knowing full well that they to live with the consequences.  Spies and lies are perfectly acceptable - if you can get away with it.

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