488

UPDATE: Maybe augment with other chapters regarding the Dossier?

Classic GOP trick of ‘selective declassification.’

“Steele’s lawyers have advised him not to speak publicly about the controversy, and, because he is a former intelligence officer, much of his life must remain secret. His accusers know this, and, as Senator Whitehouse explained, “they are using selective declassification as a tactic—they use declassified information to tell their side, and then the rebuttal is classified.” Both the criminal referral and Nunes’s report used secret evidence to malign Steele while providing no means for his defenders to respond without breaching national-security secrets. But interviews with Steele’s friends, colleagues, and business associates tell a very different story about how a British citizen became enmeshed in one of America’s most consequential political battles.

Significant parts of the Steele dossier confirmed:

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/report-steele-apos-dossier-trump-161900961.html

“Eighteen months after the dossier’s publication, Steele has impassioned detractors on both the left and the right. On the left, Stephen Cohen, a Russia scholar and Nation contributor, has denied the existence of any collusion between Trump and Russia, and has accused Steele of being part of a powerful “fourth branch of government,” comprising intelligence agencies whose anti-Russia and anti-Trump biases have run amok. On the right, the Washington Examiner’s Byron York has championed Grassley and Graham’s criminal referral, arguing that Steele has a “credibility issue,” because he purportedly lied to the F.B.I. about talking to the press. But did Steele lie? The Justice Department has not filed charges against him. The most serious accusation these critics make is that the F.B.I. tricked the fisa Court into granting a warrant to spy on Trump associates on the basis of false and politically motivated opposition research. If true, this would be a major abuse of power.”

Well false and politically motivated opposition research was the basis for the FBI’s Clinton Foundation investigation but laws that protect the accused don’t apply to Hillary Clinton according to the Trump co-conspirators on the Right, the Bernie Bros on the Left-HA Goodman is now telling Bernie voters to vote for Trump; what does Stephen Cohen think of that?-and (not so) smart set of MSMers in the Church of the Savvy.

But in a sense I think this is overstated: most informants are self interested in some way. To prove that a particular source was partisan is not enough to impeach their information. You have to look at their information on its own terms-is it accurate? matters more than ‘What are their biases?’ As well as having other sources.

But the Bureau didn’t trick the court—it openly disclosed that Steele’s funding was political. Moreover, Steele’s dossier was only part of what the FISA warrant rested on. According to the Democrats’ Intelligence Committee report, the Justice Department obtained information “that corroborated Steele’s reporting” through “multiple independent sources.”

New in this fantastic Chris Steele profile: Steele wrote another memo in November 2016 that said the Kremlin had intervened to block Trump’s initial choice for Secretary of State, Mitt Romney. https://t.co/Jtdj72CjJi pic.twitter.com/NWWkJGr5DJ

— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) March 5, 2018

It’s as if all criminal roads lead to Donald Trump:

“Steele might have been expected to move on once his investigation of the bidding was concluded. But he had discovered that the corruption at fifa was global, and he felt that it should be addressed. The only organization that could handle an investigation of such scope, he felt, was the F.B.I. In 2011, Steele contacted an American agent he’d met who headed the Bureau’s division for serious crimes in Eurasia. Steele introduced him to his sources, who proved essential to the ensuing investigation. In 2015, the Justice Department indicted fourteen people in connection with a hundred and fifty million dollars in bribes and kickbacks. One of them was Chuck Blazer, a top fifa official who had embezzled a fortune from the organization and became an informant for the F.B.I. Blazer had an eighteen-thousand-dollar-per-month apartment in Trump Tower, a few floors down from Trump’s residence.”

Nobody had alleged that Trump knew of any fifa crimes, but Steele soon came across Trump Tower again. Several years ago, the F.B.I. hired Steele to help crack an international gambling and money-laundering ring purportedly run by a suspected Russian organized-crime figure named Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. The syndicate was based in an apartment in Trump Tower. Eventually, federal officials indicted more than thirty co-conspirators for financial crimes. Tokhtakhounov, though, eluded arrest, becoming a fugitive. Interpol issued a “red notice” calling for his arrest. But, in the fall of 2013, he showed up at the Miss Universe contest in Moscow—and sat near the pageant’s owner, Donald Trump.”

“It was as if all criminal roads led to Trump Tower,” Steele told friends.

Killing irony:

By working with law-enforcement authorities on investigations, Steele has kept a foot in his former life. Some critics have questioned the propriety of this. Lindsey Graham recently argued, in the Washington Post, “You can be an F.B.I. informant. You can be a political operative. But you can’t be both, particularly at the same time.”

Reallly? Someone forgot to tell the rogue anti Clinton agents at the FBI that who managed to be both FBI agents and  anti Clinton political operatives.

“Burrows said that on several occasions Orbis had warned authorities about major security threats. Three years ago, a trusted Middle Eastern source told Orbis that a group of isis militants were using the flow of refugees from Syria to infiltrate Europe. Orbis shared the information with associates who relayed the intelligence to German security officials. Several months later, when a concert hall in Paris, the Bataclan, was attacked by terrorists, Burrows and Steele felt remorse at not having notified French authorities as well. When Steele took his suspicions about Trump to the F.B.I. in the summer of 2016, it was in keeping with Orbis protocol, rather than a politically driven aberration.”

I just worry that he’s been thrown onto defense, into somehow proving the negative that he’s NOT a PARTISAN that is really besides the point-is this good work and can it stand up under scrutiny? That’s what should matter not wether he is partisan or nonpartisan-otherwise it’s as if you can’t ever investigate Trump unless you don’t oppose him in anyway-which clearly didn’t hold in Emailgate.

No doubt, the GOP has benefitted from much of the public not understanding the nature of intelligence work

Steele spoke to Mueller in September, 2017

“In the spring of 2017, after eight weeks in hiding, Steele gave a brief statement to the media, announcing his intention of getting back to work. On the advice of his lawyers, he hasn’t spoken publicly since. But Steele talked at length with Mueller’s investigators in September. It isn’t known what they discussed, but, given the seriousness with which Steele views the subject, those who know him suspect that he shared many of his sources, and much else, with the Mueller team.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/12/christopher-steele-the-man-behind-the-trump-dossier

Whatever Steele told Mueller didn’t make it into the report-at Mueller’s July 24 hearing he got a question from a GOPer on the Steele Dossier and its part in the FISA warrant into Christopher Steele-Mueller said he wasn’t able to speak to it. 

Appalling if true:

One subject that Steele is believed to have discussed with Mueller’s investigators is a memo that he wrote in late November, 2016, after his contract with Fusion had ended. This memo, which did not surface publicly with the others, is shorter than the rest, and is based on one source, described as “a senior Russian official.” The official said that he was merely relaying talk circulating in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but what he’d heard was astonishing: people were saying that the Kremlin had intervened to block Trump’s initial choice for Secretary of State, Mitt Romney. (During Romney’s run for the White House in 2012, he was notably hawkish on Russia, calling it the single greatest threat to the U.S.) The memo said that the Kremlin, through unspecified channels, had asked Trump to appoint someone who would be prepared to lift Ukraine-related sanctions, and who would coöperate on security issues of interest to Russia, such as the conflict in Syria. If what the source heard was true, then a foreign power was exercising pivotal influence over U.S. foreign policy—and an incoming President.”

Should this be in the title? That the Kremlin Vetoed Mitt Romney as Secretary of State.

Rex Tillerson was a gift:

“As fantastical as the memo sounds, subsequent events could be said to support it. In a humiliating public spectacle, Trump dangled the post before Romney until early December, then rejected him. There are plenty of domestic political reasons that Trump may have turned against Romney. Trump loyalists, for instance, noted Romney’s public opposition to Trump during the campaign. Roger Stone, the longtime Trump aide, has suggested that Trump was vengefully tormenting Romney, and had never seriously considered him. (Romney declined to comment. The White House said that he was never a first choice for the role and declined to comment about any communications that the Trump team may have had with Russia on the subject.) In any case, on December 13, 2016, Trump gave Rex Tillerson, the C.E.O. of ExxonMobil, the job. The choice was a surprise to most, and a happy one in Moscow, because Tillerson’s business ties with the Kremlin were long-standing and warm. (In 2011, he brokered a historic partnership between ExxonMobil and Rosnet.) After the election, Congress imposed additional sanctions on Russia, in retaliation for its interference, but Trump and Tillerson have resisted enacting them.”

Yet another interesting ‘coincidence’-the Dossier claims that Page was offered a 19% stake in Rosnet in exchange for Trump changing the GOP platform on the Ukraine-again the change was made and there was an entity that received a 19.5% stake in Rosnet after the election-Carter Page ‘just happened to be’ at Rosnet’s corporate headquarters the same day.

And lo and behold, Tillerson is doing nothing with the money given his agency to prevent Russian interference in 2018:

“Monday brought the news that President Trump’s State Department has been granted $120 million to fight Russian election meddling – which intelligence officials are supremely confident will continue during the 2018 midterms – and the agency has used exactly none of it. With last week’s revelation that Trump has not given NSA Director Mike Rogers “day-to-day” authorization to fight Russian cyber attacks, it’s further evidence the Trump administration is reluctant to counter Russia. Viewed in the light that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to benefit Trump, and that members of Trump’s campaign are under investigation for possibly colluding in that effort, the number of coincidences really start to pile up”

UPDATE: Despite Tillerson’s close, personal history with Putin-the order of friendship, etc-and Tillerson’s presiding over the systematic dismantling of Hillary Clinton’s State Department-she had done so much to bring back morale after the disastrous Bush-Cheney years-he and Trump had a bad falling out over Tillerson’s unwillingness to ignore the fact that Trump’s an f-ing moron. Tillerson’s publicly recorded insult of ‘President Trump’-accurate though it is-made him a marked man.

State is now run by the Waterboarding Guy Trump previously had as the CIA Director-Mike Pompeo. He’s a total and utter Trump flunky. While all the other Directors of the various intel agencies revealed  Trump’s efforts to get them to push back publicly  Pompeo while at the CIA was notably silent.

If you think that’s because Trump never asked Pompeo-as opposed to Comey, Mike Rogers, and Dan Coats-to push back-in other words the one true Trump loyalist-we have some find Trump U diplomas for you.

Pompeo comes from the tradition of the Bush WH that basically saw State as an unnecessary appendage to Defense, et. al.

It’s been clear for since the CIA that he’s more loyal to ‘the President’ than the facts. 

His role at State seems to largely be about cleaning up after Trump. 

FN: I wrote this before his central role in Ukrainian Extortion-the sequel to Russian Collusion-came to light.

Jennifer Rubin wrote this over a year ago. We have since seen clear evidence of coordination between Roger Stone, Wikileaks, and the Trump campaign-Wikileaks was Russia’s cutout.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2018/02/26/mueller-could-demonstrate-the-accuracy-of-some-aspects-of-the-steele-dossier/?utm_term=.dbbff9501550

It is in this context that Robert S. Mueller III’s plea deal with Rick Gates, Paul Manafort’s right-hand man, becomes so important. Steele alleges in one of the dossier memos (likely dating from July 2016) that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation … managed on the TRUMP side by the Republican candidate’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort.” We have yet to see evidence corroborating this allegation. Gates, however, could be precisely the person one would need to determine whether Manafort was actually the orchestrator of collusion.”

FN: Gates did indeed later confirm it-see Chapter A for more.

We also now know about Manafort’s infamous dinner with the Russian intel operative, Konstantin Kilimnik-where they discussed:

1. Russian sanctions

2. Wikileaks and the DNC email hacks

3. Manafort handed Kilimnik-who is one of the Russian nationals Mueller has criminally indicted-75 pages of poling data.

4. August 2 also ‘just happens’ to be the day Jerome Corsi got back to Roger Stone with the subject of Assange’s next email dump-Podesta-and the time, October.

Let we forget, Manafort was also at the Trump Tower meeting with the Russians on June 9, 2016 along with Donald Jr. and Jared Kushner.

All of which is consistent with Steele’s contention that “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” was “managed on the TRUMP side by the Republican candidate’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort.”

Or as Rubin puts it, “Manafort was actually the orchestrator of collusion.”

The big picture is”

“Lost in the hubbub over the origins of Christopher Steele’s dossier and its role in obtaining a FISA warrant to monitor suspect spy Carter Page is the degree to which many of its allegations have proved to be entirely correct. Revelations subsequent to the dossier allow us to recognize just how accurate Steele’s assessment, largely completed before the 2016 election, really was.”

A number of things have been proven correct-nothing has yet to be disproven. When Mueller’s report comes out-assuming we ever see it- maybe more of it will be confirmed.

UPDATE: There may be two parts of the Mueller report-the criminal aspect and the intelligence. The Intelligence aspect will go to Congress-and presumably the Democrats will present that to the public. If not then the question of why we elected them will become relevant.

But what difference does it make anyway as the Democrats don’t intend to to impeachment no matter what it shows? After all, it’s up to Mitch McConnell…

To say only impeach with Mitch means you won’t impeach no matter what.

UPDATE 2: I wrote the above at a time of frustration, of course. Thankfully impeachment is now happening-Dems are set to vote on articles today-though I agree with those who argue they’ve been too narrow and, especially, too quick. 

In this regard see also Ryan Cooper and Amanda Marcotte. 

P.S. Clearly the Dossier has become a major lightning board due to the GOP’s targeting in their counternarrative.

As noted in other chapters I no longer would claim nothing in the Dossier has been disproven-I’ve come around to EmptyWheel’s persuasive argument that at least the claim about Michael Cohen going to Prague and being the point person on collusion is likely Russian disinformation-the substance of Prague was the idea Cohen was the point person on collusion but it’s pretty clear now this is false-he was the point person on the Moscow Project and hush money payments but not collusion; the point person on collusion was clearly Manafort; the point person on conspiracy was actually the late Peter Smith.

OTOH what the Dossier claimed regarding Carter Page and Rosnet still looks pretty good. To be sure there is a whole current furor over the IG report that claims aspects of the FISA process in continuing to monitor Carter Page were problematic.

This however, doesn’t touch on the accuracy or inaccuracy of the Dossier simply the process that was used to continue to monitor Page.
The IG report, of course, knocks down the entire GOP narrative that the origins of the Russian investigation were illegitimate-it wasn’t predicated on the Dossier in any case. When Steele first went to the FBI the investigation had already opened. However the report does assert that the process used to continue to monitor Steele were problematic.