508

Again-history repeats itself first as tragedy-Nixon-and then as farce-Trump. After Trump fired Comey Roger Stone declared that somewhere Dick Nixon is smiling.

He’s probably been smiling a lot the last two three years. There are so many similarities it’s easy to lose count. Both Watergate and Watergate 2.0 were centered around breaking into the DNC-though as the cyber version Watergate 2.0 has been much more effective than the original kinetic version.

While there is a G. Gordon Liddy 2.0-Paul Manafort, a Rose Woods 2.0-Hope Hicks-and a Howard Hunt 2.0-Michael Flynn-Stone himself is the common thread: he was there-and had a material part in the first Watergate and this one. He avoided jail despite his part in delivering the Canucks letter that arguably won the election for Nixon; at least based on Nixon’s premise that Ed Muskie was the Democrat most likely to beat him. But Stone-unlike Don Segretti who wrote the Canucks letter-Stone escaped prison due to his young years-he was only 19 at the time.

Again, it’s tough to list all the parallels between Watergate 2.0 and the first one in one sit in but just like Nixon had a counternarrative-‘the real crime is LBJ spied on me’ Trump has insisted ‘Obama spied on me.’

 

 

 

Trump first made this baseless claim on-where else?-Twitter in March, 2017. Ever since it’s been the ambition of Devin Nunes and friends to prove the ‘President’ right.  That was the background to Devin Nunes bizarro world ‘unmasking’ conspiracy theories that he raced to the Russia House to meet with Trump aides to prove by scouring raw intelligence intercepts.

FN: This original baseless claim that Obama spied on him has grown into an unwieldy counternarrative that the actual interference and collusion was Ukraine and the Democrats-an idea that originated with Putin himself-but then Trump did say I believe Putin-Chapter A-that got us into the current Ukraine if you’re listening fiasco.

End FN.

So Susan Rice unmasked Trump campaign aides conspiring with the Russians was one version of proving the fake President’s fake news to be true. Then there was the GOP obsession with Carter Page’s FISA warrant, that even considering Page’s rap sheet the granting of the warrant was somehow evil. But defending a clear Russian stooge like Page became the hill they wanted to die on. 

FN: This has been the GOP modus operandi in concocting fake scandals for years where they take a simple fact and repeat it and repeat it until just citing this fact is supposed to imply something nefarious-they’re doing the same thing now with Biden-there is no wrongdoing by Biden or his son but they just repeat the fact that Hunter Biden had a cushy job with a dodgy Ukraine company as being enough-when we have so much on the nepotism train regarding Trump and his kids and yet the GOP co-conspirators see nothing to be concerned about.

Indeed their goal is to Benghazi Joe Biden-as Chris Matthews pointed out the other night it, it was never clear exactly what Hillary’s alleged sin was in Benghazi in the first place.

End FN.

Suffice it to say there was plenty reason to watch Page-and it would have been a scandal if they hadn’t done so. The big-one of the big lies, as the GOP is using so many lies-is that Carter Page only became a person of interest to intel community due to the dossier. In fact he had been someone the feds were watching starting in 2013 when the Russians targeted him for recruitment. 

“Carter Page boasted about his Russia contacts 2 months after the FBI warned him the Kremlin was trying to recruit him as an agent.”

“Carter Page, the former adviser to President Donald Trump’s campaign who is at the center of the memo controversy, boasted about his Russia contacts in a 2013 letter to an academic journal, TIME reported on Saturday.”

“Over the past half year, I have had the privilege to serve as an informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin in preparation for their Presidency of the G-20 Summit next month, where energy issues will be a prominent point on the agenda,” Page said in the letter, dated August 25, 2013.

An informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin. 

“Page became a central figure in the news amid the memo saga last week. Among other things, the document, which House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes spearheaded, claims that the FBI and the Department of Justice bypassed protocol to improperly surveil Page leading up to the 2016 election.”

“In particular, it alleges that the DOJ relied primarily on what it characterized as insufficient and unreliable information in the so-called Steele dossier to support their application for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant targeting Page. The Steele dossier, compiled by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, is an explosive collection of memos that outlines improper ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.”

The Nunes Memo was a bust. It debunked its own central thesis-that the Steele dossier was the First Cause of the Russia investigation when it admitted on the last page that in fact, Papadopoulos’ boasts about the incriminating emails Joseph Mifsud told him the Russians had on Clinton to Alexander Downer, Australia’s top diplomat was what triggered the start of the counterintelligence probe of Russian interference and the Trump campaign. As we note in chapter-find Ch Mike-the way to getting Papadopoulos to tell you the truth is to ply him with liquor a la Jason  Wilson.

As noted above, the Steele dossier wasn’t the First Cause of the focus on Carter Page in any case-he’d been suspect going back to 2013-just like Paul Manafort was a suspect before serving on the Trump campaign. It’s interesting how Trump isn’t held responsible for all the shady people in senior positions on his own campaign-if the cleaning lady at Clinton campaign headquarters got into trouble the GOP would demand impeachment and the media would say we should at least have hearings. But with Trump the simple association isn’t enough for the press to connect the dots. In any case there’s a lot more than mere associations to deal with here-that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

After the Nunes Memo went bust, a new counternarrative was developed this one around an FBI informant named Stephan Halper that the Trump loyalists insisted on calling a spy. The ‘formal’ name of this new unified field theory counternarrative for Trump apologists is Spygate. 

“President Donald Trump claims to have uncovered one of the biggest spying scandals in American history — and that the FBI, not Russia, is the culprit.

“His allegation centers on a retired university professor in Britain named Stefan Halper. Halper, an American who taught for years at Cambridge University in the UK, has been outed in the press as a secret FBI “informant” who met with several Trump campaign advisers in mid-2016 at the bureau’s behest. The goal of these meetings was allegedly to assess whether there were any real links between the Trump campaign and Russia, enough to fuel a wider investigation.”

Trump and Republicans say that Halper was a spy planted in the Trump campaign by the Obama administration “for political purposes” — in other words, to hurt Trump’s electoral chances. The president has dubbed this “SPYGATE,” calling it a “scandal the likes of which this country may never have seen before!”

The reality is much less exciting.

“Based on what has been publicly reported, legal experts say that Halper’s work was most likely part of a legitimate counterintelligence operation targeted at Russia’s election interference campaign and not any kind of political attack on Trump. Barbara McQuade, a former US district attorney, told Vox that the notion that the FBI was fishing for some kind of dirt on Trump is “baseless.”

FN: Of course what has a strong basis is that many at the FBI were interested in political dirt about Hillary Clinton-they opened an investigation based on the flimsy predication of Clinton Cash for cripes sake.

“The scandal here isn’t that Trump was “spied on.” It’s that the FBI’s legitimate investigation into Russia is becoming a cudgel for the president to attack the Justice Department publicly and undermine its independence.”

FN: A legitimate investigation that if anything the FBI slowwalked in a way they surely wouldn’t have if the subject were Hillary Clinton.

Yes and he’s used it to enable him and his GOP allies to demand information about his own investigation in real time-what is obstruction of justice if not that?

There are some pretty interesting aspects regarding Spygate. It’s kind of a Unified Theory of the Deep State and it brings together not only the conspiracy theories around Carter Page but also George Papadopoulos-who’s drunken revelations about the Russians having damaging emails about Clinton are the proximate cause of the start of the Russia investigation.

Because Stephan Halper spoke to both Carter Page and George Papadopoulos and Sam Clovis, the senior Trump aide who just happened to be the one who hired both Page and Papadopoulos. Regarding Page and Papadopoulos it’s notable that these were two of the five names Trump gave when asked about his foreign policy team in March, 2016.

While both Page and Papadopoulous have been dismissed as being marginal figures they were 40% of Trump’s original foreign policy team-names that passed his own lips.

Meanwhile Joseph Schmitz has himself been a figure of considerable interest. We learned earlier this year that he approached the FBI, and other government agencies, about material a client of his had found off the dark web that Schmitz believed may have been Clinton’s  33,000  deleted emails. 

This led Seth Abramson to postulate that Schmitz’s client was actually Peter Smith who had been searching the dark web for these very same deleted emails.

What we now do know for a fact is that Michael Flynn actually met with Schmidt prior to going on his Moscow trip. So three of the five names Trump gave the Washington Post on March 21, 2016 were: Carter Page long suspected of being some sort unwitting/witting agent of the Russians, Papadopoulos, whose drunken boasts about the Russians having incriminating emails on Clinton led to the FBI opening  the Russia investigation; and who met his wife though their mutual acquaintance of: Joseph Mifsud aka the  Russian Professor, and Joseph Schmidt who sought out the FBI with what he thought may have been Clinton’s 33,000 emails he found on the dark web.

Then there was Carter Page’s shockingly anti American speech he gave in Moscow in July, 2016.

This and not the Steele dossier was the immediate proximate cause of the FISA warrant on him.

At the time the names on Trump’s foreign policy list puzzled GOP foreign policy experts. 

“Two of the five people Trump cited Monday have private-sector backgrounds. One of them, George Papadopoulos, is a 2009 college graduate and an international energy lawyer. Papadopoulos had previously advised Ben Carson’s presidential campaign. According to his LinkedIn page, he was a researcher at the conservative Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., before joining the London Center of International Law Practice, which describes itself as dedicated to “peace and development through international law and dispute resolution.”

“Papadopoulos’ LinkedIn page also boasts about his role at the 2012 meeting in Geneva of Model U.N., the student role-playing exercise on international diplomacy. It adds that he has “had experience lobbying foreign policy resolutions on Capitol Hill by means of coherent and concise arguments.”

“Another private-sector Trump adviser is Carter Page, a former investment banker and global energy consultant who graduated from the Naval Academy, according to his online biography. In discursive online blog postings about foreign policy that invoke the likes of Kanye West, Oprah Winfrey and Rhonda Byrne’s self-help bestseller “The Secret,” Page has blamed the U.S. for “misguided and provocative actions” toward Russia — notable in light of Trump’s friendly words for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Page, who has worked for Merrill Lynch in Moscow, has accused the State Department’s top official for Ukraine and Russia, Victoria Nuland, of “fomenting” the 2014 revolution that overthrew Ukraine’s government. That charge is often lodged by pro-Kremlin media outlets but is strongly disputed by the Obama administration.”

“Page has also compared the Obama administration’s official 2015 national security strategy document to an 1850 document on how to manage slaves.”

Again, this was before we knew anything about Russiagate-we as in American civilians, the British, Dutch and Aussies already had some inclination of what was happening. The FBI and DNC between them through a comedy of errors had failed to take the threat seriously until it was too late to prevent it.

But Papadopoulous and Carter Page are who the GOP has decided to rally around-both of them spoke to Stephan Halper. Halper also spoke to Sam Clovis, the senior Trump aide with the dubious distinction of having hired both of them-though Abramson argues persuasively Michael Flynn was the real brains behind these hires-as well as hiring Manafort-though clearly Roger Stone was  also highly instrumental in hiring Manafort.

One thing I’ll note about Manafort is that he was the 30 year partner of Roger Stone-Trump himself knew Manafort very well despite the way he tries to make it sound. This isn’t meant to say Flynn wasn’t instrumental in  Manafort joining the team but it seems clear that Roger Stone would have been another major Trump influencer pushing Manafort-to do away with archenemy Corey Lewandowski.

But it’s certainly plausible that both Flynn and Stone were each pushing for Manafort for their own reasons . In any case, per Abramson’s theory of the case, Michael Flynn is largely responsible for the clear pro Russian tilt of the Trump campaign since early in 2016 at least-beyond Trump’s own clear worship of Putin.

In any case, the three Trump campaign operatives we know for a fact who were contacted by Stephan Halper are: Papadopoulos and Page, of course, and-Sam Clovis who hired both of them. 

“Sam Clovis, a former national co-chairman of the Trump campaign, is one of three Trump figures known to have been contacted by FBI informant Stefan Halper during the 2016 presidential campaign. Clovis received an email, out of the blue, from Halper, whom he did not know, on August 29, 2016 — after Halper had been in touch with Carter Page and just before he contacted George Papadopoulos.”

“Page and Papadopoulos were peripheral, sometime volunteer Trump foreign policy advisers, but they are key figures in the investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to rig the 2016 election. Clovis, who is not suspected of any wrongdoing, has testified and been interviewed for a total of 19 hours, by his own count, before special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators, before Mueller’s grand jury, and before the House and Senate intelligence committees.”

“During all that testifying, Clovis never knew about Halper’s connection to the FBI. Only recently, from news reports, has Clovis learned about Halper’s true role. And that has prompted Clovis to re-play his brief and seemingly inconsequential encounter with Halper in light of a wealth of new information.”

UPDATE: Put this elsewhere

Did Mike Flynn Gamble and Lose on Bill Barr and Michael Horowitz?

“Halper’s note to Clovis — they worked out logistics and met at Clovis’ hotel, the Doubletree Inn in Crystal City, Virginia, a couple of days later — was premised on his approach to Page. And it seemed of a piece with Halper’s approach, the very next day, to Papadopoulos. But the actual content of their meeting has left Clovis wondering what Halper was up to.”

“He wasn’t wondering at the time — Clovis thought the meeting was so inconsequential that he did not report it up the chain at the Trump campaign, as he would have done if he had met someone who might be important to the campaign or who might be seeking a job. Only now, after reports that Halper was an informant for the FBI, has Clovis mentally gone back over their meeting in an attempt to figure things out.”

“Halper mentioned only briefly, and in passing, that he had met with Page, Clovis recalled when we discussed the meeting recently. Instead, Halper stressed his academic research, mostly about China and trade.”

“It was about China,” Clovis said. “It had nothing to do with emails. No mention of Russia. No mention of Hillary Clinton. No mention of her campaign. Only a mention in passing that he had met with Carter Page. Other than that, it was a discussion of his research and what he thought about China.”

“It was like two guys sitting in the faculty lounge talking,” Clovis continued. “It was so innocuous I never reported it back to headquarters. It did not raise any antennas or red flags or something we needed to be on guard against.”

“I asked if Halper volunteered to work for the campaign, or asked to be part of it. “No, not at all,” Clovis said. But: “He said he was willing to share the research if it would be useful to our foreign policy effort.”

That soft offer to help was apparently consistent with what Halper did earlier with Page. It is always hard to discern the exact meaning of Page’s statements, but Page has tweeted a line from an email he says he sent to the campaign on July 16, 2016, regarding Halper. Halper — Page referred to him as the professor — “offered a range of possibilities regarding how he and the University might be able to help,” Page wrote.

“Halper’s behavior with Papadopoulos appears to have been quite different. Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller has reported that, “Sources familiar with Papadopoulos’s version of their meetings said Halper randomly asked Papadopoulos whether he knew about Democratic National Committee emails that had been hacked and leaked by Russians.”

Ross continued: “Papadopoulos strongly denied the allegation, sources familiar with his version of the exchange have told TheDCNF. Halper grew agitated and pressed Papadopoulos on the topic. Papadopoulos believes that Halper was recording him during some of their interactions, sources said.”

That account could not be more different from Clovis’s experience with Halper. So much so that Clovis believes Halper had very specific purposes in approaching the Trump figures he approached.

“This is just my speculation — I have no knowledge,” Clovis told me. “I think [Halper] was using his meeting with me to give him bona fides to talk to George Papadopoulos. He used Carter Page to get to me and he used me to get to George. George was the target. I think George was the target all along.”

Clovis’s theory is that Halper was trying to link Papadopoulos and the 30,000-plus emails that Hillary Clinton unilaterally deleted from her private email system. Halper was hoping “that somebody would bite in the campaign … his goal was to drag George into this to say the Trump campaign tried to get access to those emails from Russia.”

If that is what Halper was trying to do — and again, that is simply Clovis’ theory — then it didn’t work. “Nobody was biting,” Clovis told me. “As far as I know, no one in the campaign lifted a finger to get to the 30,000 emails. I don’t think it was in their interest. Anytime anybody approached me about oppo, I deleted it. Oppo research against Hillary Clinton? We had plenty of material. It’s not like it’s not a target-rich environment.”

Nobody in the campaign lifted a finger to get the 30,000 emails? What about Joseph Schmitz? What about Cambridge Analytica and the Mercers? What about Trump himself-Russia if you’re listening?  

To be sure, it’s easy for this to get pretty confusing. Clovis there is talking about the 33,000 Clinton emails but it’s still not clear that these were the ‘incriminating emails’ Mifsud told Papadopoulos about-that Papadopoulos told both Australia’s top diplomat and Greece’s Defense Minister. 

While he has publicly been maintaining the-fiction?-that he didn’t tell anyone on the Trump campaign about the emails, as we saw in chapter-find Ch Mike-Jason Wilson, a patron he spoke to at a Chicago bar in late March, 2018 states he told Jeff Sessions about it-and Sessions was very high on the idea.

Then there’s all Roger Stone’s efforts to get his hands on incriminating emails on Clinton. So this doesn’t pass the laugh test. As for Papadopoulos’ characterization of Halper’s behavior there is very little I would believe simply based on the word of Papadopoulos who is a proven liar and perjurer-as we saw in chapter x-find the ch later Mike-he has lately taken to claiming that Mifusd is a British agent which is pretty ironic as this is what Mifsud’s lawyer, Stephen Roh says about him.

In any case this is the Unified Theory for a counternarrative to Russia collusion for Trump apologists: the best they can do is clasp hands with Carter Page, Papadopoulos, and Sam Clovis-the Trump senior aide who hired them.

UPDATE: I wrote this on October 14, 2018 and it’s amazing how much news there’s been in the over four months since-though that’s par for the Trump years. There’s been very little recent Carter Page news and in that vacuum the Trump co-conspirators and loyalists have proclaimed this proves Carter Page was falsely accused as part of the Deep State conspiracy against ‘President Trump’:

Mueller has a big problem if Carter Page isn’t a diabolical spy

Going in, the FBI’s very best evidence in the whole Trump-Russia collusion theory was, supposedly, against a U.S. citizen they wiretapped over and over again — month after month — under both the Obama and Trump administrations.

But businessman Carter Page has yet to be charged with a crime.

The implications are potentially dire.

Is Page an active Russian spy, being allowed to run loose and undermine our civilization for reasons unknown?

Or was the FBI’s judgment so poor that its top agents targeted an innocent man, violating his civil rights in the most intrusive way, stubbornly refusing to back off when the evidence wasn’t there?”

Or were the FBI agents so incompetent — and Page so clever — that he spied right under their noses, but they were unable to find a shred of evidence while monitoring his communications and movements day in and day out?

Or was the FBI improperly using Page as their best shot at a secret window into a political campaign and a president they opposed?”

As all Trump apologists do writer Sharyl Attikson  starts with a clear falsehood-that Carter Page was ‘the best evidence of Trump-Russia collusion’ in fact there is a great deal of evidence-true much of it is circumstantial but then, most evidence is circumstantial and put together it’s a very powerful case.

Carter Page is always treated as the progenitor of Russian collusion-coordination-conspiracy by the GOP co-conspirators but this is false-the First Cause as it were of the counterintelligence investigation was actually Papadopoulos’s drunken revelations to Australia’s top diplomat of what Mifsud told him about the incriminating emails on Clinton.

Nor is it true that if Page isn’t linked to Russia coordination then it’s debunked. There is already such a high level of evidence that one false lead wouldn’t have the ability to debunk the big picture. But then she commits the common fallacy-in the MSM though she’s less MSM than Trump apologist-that because we haven’t heard any news on him recently and we haven’t heard he’s been charged with a crime this proves they have nothing on him. This commits the canard that Mueller has shown us everything he has-in truth what we’ve seen from him so far is likely a drop in the bucket. With all the redactions in his sentencing memos how can it be presumed that we already know everything he has-if so, then the fight over making the Mueller report public would be redundant.

 

Just to refresh our memories as it has been a while since we’ve heard anything about Carter Page the Steele dossier alleged that when he spoke in the Russian Economic School in Moscow, he was offered a 19% stake in the Russian state gas company by Igor Sechin if he convinced Trump to change the GOP platform on Russia’s intervention in the Ukraine.

As noted elsewhere, a number of items in the dossier have been corroborated and none of it has been debunked-obviously plenty remains neither corroborated or debunked-like even now regarding if Cohen ‘went to Prague’-or another former Soviet satellite in Summer of 2016.

 

But regarding Carter Page and Rosnet note that:

1. The GOP platform on Ukraine was weakened and according to Jeff Gordon-who just happened to be Jeff Sessions’ deputy; Sessions just happened to be who Carter Page reported to-Donald Trump himself directed Gordon to change it. 

2. In the December after the election, a 19.5% stake in Rosnet was sold-to an anonymous buyer. However, Page’s finger prints were not hard to find:

The Steele Dossier says Carter Page was one of the Trump aides used as an intermediary in the bribery of Trump. Where was Carter Page on the day Flynn and Cohen met with the Rosneft buyer (December 12, 2016)? Moscow. Was he meeting with Rosneft people? Yes.

11/ How do we know Page met Rosneft officials the day before, day of, or day after the Rosneft sale? Because he said so on video. Was Page working for Trump on that date? He says no, but Trump’s campaign habitually fired people then kept working with them.

It’s important to remember the different lanes of Russian coordination-there’s the quid, the pro, and the quo. Election interference-hacked emails, social media fake news, hacking election systems-this was the quid. The quo is what Russia gets-sanction relief and more generally the ability to dictate US foreign policy-and Trump has done what Putin wanted regarding Crimea, regarding Syria, regarding NATO, regarding as it turns out North Korea.

FN: To say nothing of Ukraine which was the subject of the initial RNC platform change and which figures centrally in the current impeachment hearings. But it must be remembered who actually benefitted from Trump denying Ukraine the military aid-until it became a public political scandal-and Trump to this day still hasn’t met with Zelensky: Russia. Indeed the counter GOP co-conspirator narrative that the ‘real collusion’ was Ukraine and the Democrats is itself a Russian intel talking point-which Fiona Hill called them out for with such devastating effect.

End of FN.

Carter Page’s fee for getting the GOP platform changed is the quo. It’s important to differentiate these different lanes of Russian coordination and conspiracy-as every new bit of news is met by the disinformation campaign of Trump and his GOP conspirators-there’s nothing wrong with buying an oil company that’s got nothing to do with collusion, etc.

We’ll see what Mueller has to say about Page in his report but it’s clear that the dossier seems pretty solid regarding him-the platform was purchased and the stake in Rosnet was sold and while it wasn’t nominally to Page he-in yet another ‘pure coincidence’-was  visiting with Rosnet the day the sale went through.

Malcom Nance is right-coincidences sure do take a lot of planning.

FN: In Chapter A I did come to agree with EmptyWheel that the whole Dossier storyline about Cohen-that essentially he was the point person on Russian Hacker Collusion-Coordination-Conspiracy is probably  Russian disinformation-the point person has clearly since emerged as Manafort-though regarding Conspiracy it was the late GOP operative Peter Smith working with Michael Flynn.

OTOH what the Dossier said about Page holds up fairly well.

UPDATE 2.0: John Schindler for more on Spygate

UPDATE:

UPDATE: With the IG report that the Trump GOP co-conspirator narrative that the FBI infiltrated the Trump campaign with spies blowing up, Michael Flynn may be SOL with his late gambit to stop cooperating with Mueller this last year to embrace the Fake News of the Trump Deplorables.

Did Mike Flynn Gamble and Lose on Bill Barr and Michael Horowitz?

 

 

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