575

The Brits warned us about Russia’s interference. But then so did a number of our allies.

 

Some of the best intelligence on Russia’s interference in our election came from the Dutch, the Australians-it was, Alexander Downs, Australia’s top diplomat who informed the US about Papadopoulos which led to the start of the FBI’s Russia probe in July, 2016-and certainly the Brits-starting, of course, with Christopher Steele. We were warned though we didn’t do enough to respond during the election-both the FBI and Obama himself  should have done better.

 

Some of the best reporting has also come from Britain where Paul Wood first reported on the Steele dossier. Recently Wood had yet another scoop-that Cambridge Analytica had Clinton’s emails a month before Wikileaks leaked them as noted in chapter A.

FN: Regarding Steele’s Dossier I have since come around to EmptyWheel’s argument that there is a decent amount of disinformation-ie deliberate misinformation-in it. This doesn’t reflect on Steele’s veracity simply that the Russians knew what he was up to and were able to inject the disinformation.

Now Daily Beast has some new reporting on just how much the British intelligence agency GCHQ-the British equivalent of our NSA-was picking up on Russia’s activities in our election. As noted above, overall, we did not respond effectively to Russia’s brazen attack on our election in real time. This was the story too in the reaction to what GCHQ was discovering.

“Hannigan’s job was to bring GCHQ into the 21st century, the century of cyber conflict. Past heads of GCHQ barely communicated with the public, but on his first day on the job Hannigan took a direct shot at Silicon Valley firms in a column in the Financial Times. “However much they may dislike it,” he wrote, “they have become the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals,” and must learn how to cooperate with the intelligence agencies of the Western democracies. Yet once he settled into the job, he found a player who worried him more than Facebook and Google: Vladimir Putin.”

“Hannigan thought Putin was causing a “disproportionate amount of mayhem in cyberspace.” His staff of thousands of code breakers, signal-intelligence officers, and cyber defenders had soon learned to place the raw evidence of that mayhem atop the pile of intelligence they brought him each day, culled from their own piles of intercepted computer messages and phone calls.

“On this particular day, around Easter in 2016, a series of messages plucked out of the Russian networks stood out.”

“In the inartful terminology of the digital world, it was mostly “metadata,” Hannigan’s staff told him. To Hannigan’s frustration, he could not see its actual content. But it was clear that the traffic was controlled by one of Russia’s premier intelligence agencies, the GRU, the aggressive military intelligence unit whose activities GCHQ tried to monitor around the clock.”

So the level of Russian activity jumped out at him. What also stood out is where the messages appeared to have originated:

“What struck Hannigan, though, was where the messages appeared to have originated: the computer servers of the Democratic National Committee.”

This would turn out to be a truly historic intercept.

“When Hannigan sorted through the message traffic, pausing to examine what would turn out to be a historic intelligence intercept, he was deep inside “The Doughnut,” the Brits’ affectionate name for the bizarre, round Cheltenham headquarters of GCHQ. From the air, the building actually looked more like a spaceship, as if aliens had decided to drop in on the quaint pubs of the Cotswolds: Stow-on-the-Wold and Bourton-on-the-Water, the Shakespearean-era villages just down the road. The Doughnut’s design was very Silicon Valley; once inside the secure zone, everyone worked in the open, cross-pollinating ideas.”

“Cheltenham, on the edge of the Cotswolds, is a place of splendid isolation, and with his family remaining in London, Hannigan had plenty of time to dig deep on the Russia intercepts. The one containing DNC data was a particular mystery.”

“It didn’t tell us much,” he recalled. “It told us there was an intrusion, and something had been taken out of the committee. But I had no way of knowing what.”

Right away, though, Hannigan saw the big picture, the 30,000 foot historical view: the break into the DNC made this Watergate 2.0.

“As Hannigan looked at the intercepted Russian communications from the DNC, it was his sense of history that made them stand out. He was only seven years old when the Watergate scandal broke, barely aware of the headlines from across the Atlantic. But he had become enough of a student of history and politics at university to immediately grasp the import of what the Russians seemed to be doing. “The DNC meant something to me,” he said. “And it was an odd target.”

“It was unclear what they were looking for. The DNC wasn’t a place to get military secrets, or even much policy. It was essentially a place to redistribute cash to campaigns. The goal was a mystery.”

This was also an ongoing mystery of the first Watergate-why exactly did they break into the Watergate? Even to this day it’s not entirely clear but the most likely answer is oppo dirt-both on the Democrats-Larry O’Brien in particular-and anything they had on Nixon-so offensive and defensive. Nixon worried O’Brien had the goods on him and wanted to both steal anything he had as well as find anything that might be incriminating about him.

In the case of Watergate 2.0 the motivation is much more straightforward-the emails so they could weaponize them against Hillary Clinton.

“Hannigan thought his American counterparts needed to see these intercepts, and fast. He looked at them once more and asked his staff to be sure to flag them for the National Security Agency. This shouldn’t get lost in the daily pile, he told them. This was sensitive stuff, and his American counterpart, Admiral Rogers, and his colleagues at the NSA, needed to know about it.”

A few weeks later, Hannigan recalled, he received an acknowledgment “from someone senior” on Rogers’s NSA staff. They appreciated the heads-up.

It was the last he heard from them about it.

UPDATE: Here’s something else the Democrats should find out-and one of those hungry, enterprising ambitious reporters who want to chase leads that the MSM is ignoring can investigate. Both the Dems and any such enterprising investigative reporters should ask Rogers about.

Steele himself would become very frustrated by the lack of response. He basically gave up on the FBI after Comey-who had stated on October 1 that it was too close to the election to discuss Russia’s interference-revealed that the FBI was maybe reopening the email probe-and maybe not but that he made this vague public statement so the public would be properly misinformed? informed…

Suffice it to say that overall, our nation dropped the ball in the run up to the election. As for Britain, despite the great work of GCHQ, Steele, etc, there is a belief that Britain knows a lot more about Trump and Russia than they’re telling us.

“When the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu visited London in 1978, the British government did some serious sucking up. Ceausescu was an egomaniac and possibly crazy. When he went hunting outside Bucharest, his body-guards shot game with machine guns so he could be photographed at the end of the day with a shoulder-high pile of dead animals. He was also said to be a germophobe, sterilising his hand with pure alcohol if it touched a door handle. The French president telephoned the Queen to warn her that when the Ceausescus came to the Élysée, lamps, vases, ashtrays and bathroom taps went missing from their rooms. But Ceausescu got a state visit to Britain, with a knighthood (later revoked) and a stay in Buckingham Palace.”

“Western governments are now trying to appease another germophobe with a reputation for narcissistic excess. The US is not Romania, the stories about Donald J. Trump focus on his cheating at golf, not hunting, and if the great developer removes any bathroom taps, it will be to replace them with something gold-plated. Even so, America’s allies worry that President Trump will get out of bed one morning and do something crazy: abolish Nato, declare war on Canada, give Alaska back to the Russians.”

 

“So how might Britain be sucking up to Trump? A Labour MP, Ben Bradshaw, thinks that the government has not always done all it can to assist the Mueller inquiry into whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia. Bradshaw was the minister in charge of the Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, and has doggedly pursued allegations about Russian meddling in other people’s elections. ‘I’m told that Mueller’s team were over here late last year and they weren’t happy with the level of cooperation they were getting,’ he said. Another source, with links to the ‘intelligence community’, said this was continuing, even after the Skripal poisoning.”

“These claims — of a decision to go slow with Mueller, driven by expediency — have not been confirmed, but if true, the government may have miscalculated. Britain is trying to get a free-trade deal with the US as we leave the EU. And Theresa May was the first world leader through the door of the Oval Office to see the new president. But whatever promises she wrung from Trump will depend on a follow–through and focus he has not shown. This is a president who could not get his own healthcare bill past a Republican Congress.”

Of course, just like our American government, the British government is quite divided. May and her fellow Brexiters in the Conservative party no doubt feel some affinity for so-called ‘President’ Trump-even though Trump has not been so friendly towards May herself. There are parts of the UK government that are very concerned about Trump but there are some supporters in May’s own party. And, of course, we now know Britain had its own Russian interference in the Brexit vote. 

FN: Of course, Boris Johnson is even more Trump friendly. Actually a number of allies pulled back from helping Mueller including the Ukraine under the mistaken idea that Trump would show loyalty to them if they showed loyalty to them. Meanwhile we have Coverup AG Barr browbeating Italy’s intel community to get info from Mifsud who supposedly will help them prove some point or other that will be claimed to prove Russian Collusion didn’t happen-spoiler alert it did as has now become so blindingly obvious even the NYT now gets it.

UPDATE: John Schindler on the eytomlogy of the Russia investigation as originating with signals intelligence both with the NSA and its parallels in the nations of many of our allies-the Brits, French, Germans, the Dutch.

Call it the revenge of Andy McCabe:

Feds claim vaguely to know a lot about President Donald Trump’s secret Kremlin ties. What’s behind the spy mystery here? How much does the FBI know and how does it know it? At last, we have more than hints.

Ignominiously firing Andrew McCabe, the FBI’s deputy director, on January 29, 2018, just 26 hours shy of his retirement, was one of Donald Trump’s more consequential missteps. Kicking the career G-Man out of the Bureau a day short of his pension guaranteed that McCabe would seek payback, and he has gotten it mightily.

 

McCabe’s memoir, out this month, has shot to the top of bestseller lists, thanks in part to President Trump’s public berating of the author. As is his custom, Trump’s hysterical tweets about the book have significantly boosted sales. Most recently, Trump’s insult that McCabe is a “poor man’s J. Edgar Hoover” got the reply, “I don’t even know what that means.” Really, none of us do at this point.

Trump seems unhinged by all the publicity McCabe’s been getting on his book tour, while the former FBI bigwig’s comments can’t sit well at the White House. McCabe has made clear that the Bureau investigated the president’s Kremlin connections because Trump so frequently parroted Russian propaganda in the Oval Office. In slightly more guarded language, McCabe stated, “I think it’s possible” when asked point-blank if President Trump might be an asset of Russian intelligence.

How exactly top counterintelligence officials in our nation’s capital came to the shocking conclusion that Donald Trump really might be working for the Kremlin is the big question lurking at the heart of the entire Department of Justice investigation into the current administration. Answering that will reveal the core secrets of this presidency and perhaps change American politics forever.”

This touches on the obsession of Trump and the GOP co-conspirators with the idea that there was a spy in the Trump campaign-though it wasn’t a spy; ‘spy’ is a political designation, Halper was an informant not a spy.

FN: I find this rather disconcerting and quite problematic:’

In some ways, though, it doesn’t matter if Trump is wrong about the Halper situation. The very perception that he was spied on is reshaping American politics in some very troubling ways.

On Monday, Trump dragged Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats to the White House to discuss his fury over l’affaire Halper. Trump seems to have convinced them to give in to a modified version of Nunes’s demands. On Thursday, Wray, Coates, and another Justice Department official briefed a select group of lawmakers — including Nunes — on Halper’s activities.”

Rosenstein has also tasked the DOJ’s inspector general with looking into whether anyone attempted to inappropriately “infiltrate or surveil” Trump’s team back in 2016.

This all suggests that these factually overblown claims are politically quite potent.

The FBI and Department of Justice are suffering a serious erosion of credibility among Republicans; many of the party’s leaders and most of its voters seem to buy president’s line that the entire Russia investigation is a “witch hunt.” The allegation that they spied on Trump is explosive, and they need to be sensitive to how they’d be perceived if they simply dismissed the president out of hand.

I really disagree with this-it’s exactly what happened in the 2016 election, Comey-McCabe and Friends were never willing to simply dismiss the Fake News and gaslighting of Trump and the GOP co-conspirators out of hand which enabled them to get traction-and ultimately steal the election. The real lesson of 2016 that still remains to be learned, apparently, is you need to know when to dismiss bad faith disinformation and lies out of hand-of course, this has been a lesson the MSM has also been exceedingly slow to learn.

The result, then, is that Trump now has a tool for leveraging influence over the Justice Department — one he’s already deployed effectively. The angry tweets and dubbing a non-scandal “Spygate” may seem absurd, but it serves to raise the stakes of the controversy and further discredit any FBI efforts to investigate him.

Trump himself appears to recognized this dynamic, inventing the term “spygate” deliberately to focus the public’s attention. The Associated Press reported on Thursday that “Trump told one ally this week that he wanted ‘to brand’ the informant a ‘spy,’ believing the more nefarious term would resonate more in the media and with the public.”

On this, Trump has a point: A ginned-up controversy is about as politically useful to him as a real scandal would be.

Yes exactly-it is just as useful as you dignify it just as you would dignify a real scandal-if simply making the allegation is enough then of course a ginned up scandal will be as politically useful as a real one.

Schindler goes on to argue that the government knew what it knew about Trump not over a ‘spy’-a la Stephan Halper, much less Cater Page or Downer; who’s not a spy or even an informant but rather the top diplomat in Australia–but rather signals intelligence.

Like so much of what’s been publicly revealed about CROSSFIRE HURRICANE, it involves Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who back in 2016 were the FBI’s counterintelligence boss and a Bureau attorney, respectively, who were also secret lovers. They exchanged a lot of indiscreet text messages about Trump during the presidential campaign, some of which had no business being in unclassified messages. For their indiscretions, Strzok and Page were run out of the FBI in disgrace, becoming something of an obsession for Team Trump, including the president himself.

Now The Daily Caller has reported what Strzok and Page told Congress last year, in closed testimony, about what was going on with CROSSFIRE HURRICANE back in mid-2016. To make a long spy story short, the lovers were concerned that mounting a serious, sustained counterintelligence investigation into Trump’s ties to Moscow ran the risk of exposing a longtime Bureau intelligence source of great value.

As Page told Congress on July 13, 2018, “If [Trump] is not going to be president, then we don’t need to burn longstanding sources and risk sort of the loss of future investigative outlets, not in this case, but in other Russia-related matters.” Two weeks later, Strzok told Congress that a notorious text exchange with his mistress about a mysterious FBI “insurance policy” actually referred to this shadowy “very sensitive source” who, The Daily Caller noted, “had provided evidence of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.”

On July 12, 2018, Strzok touched on this sensitive source in his public Congressional testimony:

What we had before us was an allegation that something significant, that members of the Trump campaign may have been working in cooperation with the Russians. Some people were saying, ‘hey look, this sensitive source of information that’s so sensitive, so vulnerable, we shouldn’t put it in danger,’ because sometimes if you go out and do aggressive investigation, if it’s a drug snitch or an intelligence source, you can cause significant harm.

Who, then, was this super-sensitive source providing the FBI with evidence of possible collusion between candidate Trump and the Kremlin? Three individuals are known to have provided information to CROSSFIRE HURRICANE: Alexander Downer, Australia’s high commissioner (i.e., ambassador to Britain), retired British spy Christopher Steele (complier of the notorious dossier about Trump and the Russians), and Stefan Halper, an academic and supposed intelligence source for the FBI and CIA.

To be blunt, none of these men is a plausible fit for the “very sensitive source” whom Strzok referenced. Downer and Halper are mere casual sources, no more than access agents, while Steele’s relationship to CROSSFIRE HURRICANE was already exposed long before Strzok and Page testified before Congress.

The clear implication of what The Daily Caller uncovered is that the FBI had a highly important intelligence source in or near the Trump campaign. In other words, the Bureau had a mole. Protecting that source was deemed more important in the summer of 2016 than stopping the Trump campaign, which the FBI knew or at least strongly suspected was in bed with Vladimir Putin.

Who could be that important to the Bureau? Logic and counterintelligence experience dictate that such a source had to be very close to Donald Trump. The mole’s identity has not been revealed and probably won’t be anytime soon, leaving major questions unanswered about how the FBI knew what it knew back in 2016—all of which is surely known to Team Mueller now.

But what if the mole wasn’t a person? The FBI has long protected super-secret technical intelligence programs, above all signals intelligence, by masquerading their information as coming from (non-existent) human sources. Were Strzok and Page obliquely referring to top-secret-plus SIGINT regarding Trump’s clandestine ties to Moscow?

That would fit with what this column previously reported about the president’s Kremlin ties. As I told you last May, “The counterintelligence investigation of Donald Trump was kicked off by not one, not two, but multiple SIGINT reports which set off alarm bells inside our Intelligence Community,” explaining that the initial information came from foreign intelligence partners. I added:

NSA understood quite a bit about Trump’s connections to Moscow, and by mid-2016, it had increased its efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery regarding the candidate’s Russian ties. In response to urgent FBI requests for more information, NSA rose to the occasion, and by the time that Donald Trump officially accepted the Republican nomination in mid-July 2016, ‘We knew we had a Russian agent on our hands,’ as a senior NSA official put it to me recently.

That seems to be the same intelligence which Strzok and Page referred to in coded language, for classification reasons. The Trump White House now is no doubt searching frantically for an FBI mole in their ranks who may not exist. Excellent technical intelligence was always the underpinning of CROSSFIRE HURRICANE, as the FBI has been careful to conceal in order to protect top-secret intelligence sources and methods. The full spy story here, just as with the last major league joint NSA-FBI counterintelligence coup against Moscow, will take decades to be fully revealed to the public.

 

 

FN.: Regarding the Dutch they have very strong evidence-arguably absolute evidence that Russia was behind the hacks. 

 

 

License

October 28, 2016: a Day That Will Live in Infamy Copyright © by . All Rights Reserved.

Share This Book