Vincent J. Curtis
25 May 2018
Let me begin with a couple of stipulations:
1)
The Muller investigation is merely the continuation of
the effort to smear Donald Trump with “Russian Collusion” that begin as early
as March, 2016.
2)
If the American people choose to elect the Manchurian
Candidate as President of the United States, it is not the place of the
intelligence agencies to try to change the public’s mind, or to overturn by
some means the decision made in accordance with the processes of the United
States constitution.
Let me continue with the story of how the heads of the Obama
intelligence agencies enabled CNN to publicize the so-called Steele dossier in
early January, 2017. All the news
agencies were aware of the Steele dossier before the election. Responsibly, none of them reported on it
because they could not independently verify any of its contents. But early in 2017, anti-Trump CNN were
itching to publicize it. They needed a
news “hook” in order to justify reporting on the dossier. Organized by John Brennan, the hook was
created by having FBI Director James Comey “brief” Trump on some of its
contents after a larger briefing on intelligence matters by CIA Director John
Brennan, DNI James Clapper, and Comey.
The briefing by Comey was not full, for it only consisted of
the “golden showers” allegation, and did not include the fact that the dossier
was bought and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. After the briefing, Comey nodded to Clapper
who nodded to CNN, who ran the story that “Trump had been briefed” on the
dossier, which included the following spectacular allegations. Etc.
That’s how the heads of Obama’s intelligence agencies, working together,
enabled Trump to be smeared with the Steele dossier. And since Trump took pains to ensure that no
one – not even his long time confidential secretary - knew that he was going to
get an intelligence briefing from CIA, DNI, and FBI that day, Trump knew that
at least one of them had leaked to
CNN. Within weeks, James Clapper got
hired by CNN to be a contributor.
The monitoring of Donald Trump by the Obama administration
began in March, 2016. The foreign policy
establishment of the Republican party had shunned Trump publicly, and the
Washington Post editorial board asked
Trump in a March 21st interview from whom he was getting foreign
policy advice? Trump provided them with
a list, which included the names Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. Page was known to the FBI as someone who had
helped the FBI entrap a Russian spy several years earlier. Page, however, was known to be a pro-Russia
sympathizer, and Comey and Andrew McCabe immediately briefed Attorney-General
Loretta Lynch on the pair. Not long
afterwards, Comey briefed the principals committee of the National Security
Council, which consists of the president, the Secretaries of State, Defense,
Treasury, Homeland Security, the A-G, Director of CIA, Whitehouse Chief of
Staff, the UN Ambassador, the National Security Advisor, and others. Out of this, somehow, CIA Director John
Brennan appointed himself the head of a Trump destabilization task force.
Through CIA contacts with Britain’s MI6, arrangements were
made for Page and Papadopoulos to be engaged with agents-provocateurs, in hopes
that they would say or do something that might discredit the Trump campaign.
Professor Joseph Mifsud was a professor at the University of
Stirling, Scotland, (among other postings) and is connected to Britain’s
MI6. It so happened that Mifsud met with
young George Papadopoulos in Italy on March 14, 2016. In April, Mifsud met with Papadopoulos again
and had him accept a posting as head of the “London Centre of International Law
Practice,” which required no work.
Mifsud planted with Papadopoulos the idea that the Russians had copies
of Hillary Clinton’s emails. Thus we see
young Papadopoulos being set up with an exalted title and the alleged
intelligence that the Russians had Hillary`s emails.
On May 10, 2016, Papadopoulos accepted an invitation to meet
with Alexander Downer, a senior Australian diplomat, and the man responsible
for having the Australian government donate $25 million to the Clinton
Foundation. It happens that Mr. Downer
knows quite a few former MI6 types through his association with an advisory
board to Hakluyt. After getting Mr.
Papadopoulos drunk in a London bar, Downer got him to spit up the
“intelligence” about Russia having Hillary’s emails. Dutifully, Downer passed on to Australian
intelligence agencies that this Trump campaign advisor seemed to have inside
information on Russian dirt on Hillary.
Next to be worked on was Carter Page. Page was invited to attend a conference at
Cambridge University – yes, in the UK- called “2016’s Race to Change the
World.” At the conference besides Page,
were Christopher Steele (of dossier fame, formerly of MI6 and FBI informant),
Stefan Halper a man with deep connects to both CIA and MI6, and Madeleine
Albright, former Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, and a strong Hillary
supporter. Page reported that Albright
was pushing him to get into the public debates, though he repeatedly
declined. He was also provoked and
stroked by Halper at the conference. Had
Page said something foolish, pro-Russian, or ambiguous publicly at the
conference, what he said could be reported in the media as a foolish-sounding statement
of an important Trump advisor – in the presence of Albright and all the other
intelligence big-shots who peopled the conference.
It was from this conference that Carter Page flew to Moscow
to attend the famous conference at which he actually spoke. Oddly, what Page said at that conference has
not been widely reported since it served no useful purpose to the smear-Trump
campaign, but his attendance at that conference provided a hook for Christopher
Steele to explain all the Russian contacts in his dossier. It was the Steele dossier, and Page’s
well-known trip to the Moscow conference, that provided the hook for the FISA
warrant on Page, and with it a back-door access to the inner workings of the
Trump campaign.
Meanwhile, the release on WikiLeaks of the DNC emails that
showed the DNC to be in the tank for Hillary seemed close enough to Russia’s
emails of Hillary’s that Australian intelligence got around to informing the
FBI of George Papadopoulos. In order to
divert attention from the contents of the DNC emails, Hillary and the DNC would
immediately divert attention to alleged Russian hacking – of the type Trump
allegedly invited Russia to do. (Anyone
who listens to Trump joke about Russia’s possession of Hillary’s missing emails
would understand what Trump was laughing at the NSA, and the FBI.) The FBI did not ask, and the DNC did not
offer, their server for forensic analysis by the FBI to determine whether, in
fact, the server was hacked by Russia or not.
Russian hacking was again said to be the source of the
WikiLeaks dump of campaign chair John Podesta’s emails that proved critically
embarrassing to Hillary’s campaign. It
was further alleged, utterly without evidence, that this Russian hacking was
for the benefit of Donald Trump.
Allegation piled on allegation that Trump and Russia were in cahoots to
defeat Hillary. Trump’s cause was not
helped by the fact that he wanted better diplomatic relations with Russia, and
eschewed rising to Democrat bait and criticizing Vladimir Putin at their
behest.
The campaign marched on to its surprising climax on November
8, 2016, when Trump defeated Hillary for president. During the campaign, National Security
Advisor Susan Rice and UN Ambassador Samantha Power were furiously unmasking
NSA intercepts in the hopes of finding the Russian collusion or something
otherwise embarrassing they had been led to believe existed.
After Trump won, the Obama administration and the intelligence
agencies continued intense surveillance of the incoming Trump administration.in
the hopes of finding something incriminating.
This couldn’t be done directly, and so every one in contact with the
Trump team, such as Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, was wiretapped. It was this surveillance that led to the
downfall of Lt-Gen Michael Flynn on account of his misremembering the details
of a conversation he had had with Kislyak, the contents of which had been
feloniously leaked to the Washington Post. Flynn was harassed at this time by Obama
holdover Sally Yates who hoped to ensnare Flynn in some violation of the Logan
Act.
Obama created a diplomatic incident with Russia with less
than four weeks to go in his administration.
He did so without consulting Trump on the arrogant ground that “there’s
only one president at a time.” Flynn was
left to manage this crisis on behalf of the Trump team, and he asked Kislyak
for Russia not to over-react to Obama’s provocation. Trump would be president soon and would
review the matter. Russia complied, and
Obama’s cherished incident fizzled.
Yates was going to take revenge on Flynn for that.
Soon after taking office Trump complained that he had been
wiretapped by the Obama administration.
Everybody, including those in the intelligence community, laughed at the
allegation, and said that it was further proof of Trump’s unfitness for
office. (Nobody’s laughing
nowadays.) Followers of Fox News may
recall that about this time Fox’s senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano
was suspended by Fox for saying that it was possible for the Obama
administration to surveil Trump indirectly since Britain’s communications
intelligence agency GCHQ had direct access to the NSA database. GCHQ could do the analysis of the NSA
intercepts and pass on its findings to the administration without a paper trail
in America. GCHQ strongly denied such an
arrangement and demanded an apology.
Nevertheless, Robert Hannigan, the head of GCHQ, passed
material on to – not Admiral
Mike Rogers, his opposite number – but to John Brennan in
the summer of 2016. (Brennan also briefed
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in July, 2016, on the contents of the Steele dossier, and Reid
demanded an investigation.) Hannigan
retired as head of GCHQ three days after Trump’s inauguration, and Napolitano
was restored as a Fox News contributor less than two weeks after being
suspended.
All the surveillance of Trump and his campaign turned up
nothing, and all James Comey had to go on was the Steele dossier. Perhaps the echo chamber effect told on him,
for he desperately wanted to believe that at least some of the dossier was true. He continued to insinuate in public that
Trump was a suspect in a counter-intelligence investigation – never mind the
decision of the American people to make him president– though privately he said that Trump was not a
suspect. Trump, who was too busy
campaigning to notice, gave Comey the okay to investigate his “satellites” who
might have done something wrong when he was busy with other things. He did ask Comey to go easy on Flynn, as
Flynn was a loyal man who was only doing what Trump wanted him to do. What is noteworthy is that the Obama
administration declined to give Trump or his campaign a “heads-up” briefing
that the Russians may be trying to infiltrate his campaign.
When it became clear to Trump that Comey was deliberately
trying to undermine his administration by continuing this false Russian
narrative, he fired him. That didn’t
help, as Rod Rosenstein hired Comey’s great and good friend Robert Mueller to
continue the Russia investigation as a special council, and with an apparently
unlimited and secret mandate. Mueller is
the swamp creature par excellence, and
his loyalty isn’t to the truth but to the ideal that the target must be
destroyed. That the target represents
everything official Washington hates is all the more reason for his destroying
this target.
So far, the Mueller investigation has turned up
nothing. It has obtained guilty pleas
for lying to the FBI from George Papadopoulos, Lt-Gen Flynn, and several
indictments against Paul Manafort for events that took place in 2006. However, he has found nothing showing
coordination between Russian state actors and the Trump campaign that would
contribute to the embarrassment of Hillary Clinton. The only Russian connection in evidence is
the collection from Russian sources of third-hand hearsay – disinformation –
that comprise the Steele dossier. The Hillary
campaign paid for the preparation of the Steele dossier, and Clinton acolytes
Sid Blumenthal and Cory Shearer have some role in either the preparation of the
Steele dossier, or of a second dossier.
The upshot is that Mueller hasn’t found anything and won’t
until he starts to look at the fingerprints on the Steele dossier and how it
came to pass that a FISA warrant was obtained against Carter Page.
Based on the questions that Mueller would like to ask Trump,
Muller is focussing his destruction efforts on obstruction of justice – that being
Trump’s asking Comey to go easy on Flynn, and the firing of Comey itself. Never mind the unimpeachable arguments that
Trump has about his powers under Article II of the constitution, Rod Rosenstein
provided Trump with justification for firing Comey and, besides the obvious multiple
and overlapping conflicts of interests here, Rosenstein’s document is all one
needs to establish reasonable doubt, Mr. Special Prosecutor. None
of this seems to matter to Mueller, who is bent on destroying the target. (Never mind the obstruction of justice
inherent in Barack Obama’s declaration of Hillary’s innocence of crime in
March, 2016!)
Now that the effort to enmesh the Trump campaign in some
nefarious effort by Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton is becoming known, the
fact that the Mueller investigation is merely another growth of the same
poisoned tree may begin to overtake his investigation. So long as one ignores all the stuff that
passed before Mueller was appointed, his investigation seems defensible. But once one sees that his investigation is
merely a continuation of the previous efforts to destroy first the Trump
campaign and then the Trump presidency, the justification for continuing starts
to become more pro-forma - of letting the guy finish his job.
By the time Mueller finds the courage to demand that Trump
appear before a grand jury to answer for some crime that Mueller has invented
out of thin air (c.f “Fraud against the United States”) popular opinion may
turn irreversibly against this last gasp of the Obama administration and the
Hillary campaign. If Mueller is
embarrassed in court, as by not being ready to bring the case against certain
Russian companies, or to have parts of the Manafort case invalidated by an overly
broad mandate or unconstitutional appointment, his investigation may be forced
to come to an inconclusive close.
The Muller investigation is the illegitimate continuation of
a campaign ruse perpetrated by the Hillary campaign and aided and abetted by
the Obama administration. Members of the
National Security Council, John Brennan, and James Comey acting somewhat in
concert, but not with complete knowledge of what each other was up to, created
a hall of mirrors, an echo chamber, in which they convinced themselves of Trump’s
guilt of something, and never mind the choice of the American people, his presidency
must be brought down. The Democratic
party and never-Trumpers in the Republican party had interests in thwarting the
will of the people, and their contempt for the constitution and for their thirst
to hold on to power, they permitted this attempt on the Trump presidency to
continue.
Hopefully soon it will end, and the perpetrators of this
fraud on the American electorate will face the justice they richly deserve.
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