Mr. Garfinkle of Garfinkle’s New Method
Hebrew School in Milwaukee used to frequently echo King Solomon’s admonition;
“There’s nothing new under the sun.” I was reminded of that this week when the
rapidly unfolding “scandal” of Trump’s purported dealings with Russia hit the
news. It has more than a few similarities with the Dan Rather faked-up story of
GW Bush’s National Guard service where an anonymous, never-found source
supposedly gave Bill Burkett a demonstrably fake report and Dan Rather ran
with it. This time a Bush (Jeb) is involved but as an instigator of the story,
not a victim. John McCain acts as the intermediary passing the junk on to the
Intelligence Community, which makes sure it is published.
If you’re confused about it, let me put it
in the context of the most reliable information I’ve been able to put together,
noting that I think the story is likely to become even more clear over the
next few days. As you will see, the dossier is so ridiculous, if anyone in the
Intelligence Community fell for it, he’s too stupid to allow in place, and if
no one did but they still played a role in publicizing it, everyone involved
needs to be fired
A. Digging Up Dirt on Opponents
In September of 2015 someone -- now
revealed as a Jeb Bush Super PAC donor -- paid Fusion GPS, a Washington,
D.C. outfit, to compile a dossier of dirt on Donald Trump. Fusion engaged
Christopher Steele, a former MI-6 agent in London, to do the job. While early
accounts of the story refer to him as a “respected source”, he has a history
of dumpster
diving for Democrats.
Kimberley Strassel at the Wall
Street Journal has been reporting on his work for some time and
explains why he keeps getting hired: “to gin up the ugliest, most scurrilous
claims, and then trust the click-hungry media to disseminate them. No matter
how false the allegations, the subject of the attack is required to respond,
wasting precious time and losing credibility.”
She warns this will be the left’s game:
But it says
something about the brass-knuckle approach of the left that it would go so far
as to write a dossier suggesting that Mr. Trump is a Manchurian candidate --
and then to foist that report into the hands of intelligence officials.
[snip]
So the left
will increasingly rely on campaigns of delegitimization designed to force
opponents onto a back foot, push them off task, or even bully them out of the
public arena. In the absence of a winning policy argument, this is, in their
minds, the best they’ve got. Republicans had better be ready for it.
At about the time Trump won the
nomination, funds from the Bush donors were cut off. Whether this was because
the report was so shoddy or the effort so unavailing isn’t clear. At that point
supporters of Hillary Clinton became involved in financing the search.
Steele hadn’t been in Russia for decades
and as a former British spy could not have done the work himself. So, as the
account in the New
York Times continues, “he hired native Russian speakers to
call informants inside Russia and made surreptitious contact with his own
connections in the country as well.”
Beginning in June and until December
Steele delivered his findings -- a series of short memos -- to GPS. Although
post-election no one was paying, Steele continued on this muckraking operation,
The memos suggested that the Russians were
trying to influence Trump and stated that one of Trump’s lawyers, Michael
Cohen, had met with a Russian official in Prague. (A claim Cohen has credibly
rebutted.)
Word of the dossier made it to the FBI via
Senator John McCain, a man with an apparently insatiable desire to betray. McCain, who heard about the dossier
from a former diplomatic colleague of Tony Blair (Sir Andrew Wood), dispatched
someone (apparently former State Department official David J. Kramer) to London
to pick it up, then
handed it off to the FBI.
From sources as yet unknown, news of the
Steele report made it to journalists who investigated and finding no verification
after investigating refused to print it.
The FBI, tried to get permission to tap
into a server in the Trump Tower, which was denied, then in a
strangely odd act tried twice to get a warrant from FISA to tap into it.
Whether this was in response to the dossier, I do not know. Andrew
McCarthy writes in National Review Online:
To summarize,
it appears there were no grounds for a criminal investigation of banking
violations against Trump. Presumably based on the fact that the bank or banks
at issue were Russian, the Justice Department and the FBI decided to continue
investigating on national-security grounds. A FISA application in which Trump
was “named” was rejected by the FISA court as overbroad, notwithstanding that
the FISA court usually looks kindly on government surveillance requests. A
second, more narrow application, apparently not naming Trump, may have been
granted five months later; the best the media can say about it, however, is
that the server on which the application centers is “possibly” related to the
Trump campaign’s “alleged” links to two Russian banks -- under circumstances in
which the FBI has previously found no “nefarious purpose” in some (undescribed)
connection between Trump Tower and at least one Russian bank (whose connection
to Putin’s regime is not described). That is tissue-thin indeed. It’s a good example
of why investigations properly proceed in secret and are not publicly announced
unless and until the government is ready to put its money where its mouth is by
charging someone. It’s a good example of why FISA surveillance is done in
secret and its results are virtually never publicized -- the problem is not
just the possibility of tipping off the hostile foreign power; there is also
the potential of tainting U.S. persons who may have done nothing wrong. While
it’s too early to say for sure, it may also be an example of what I thought
would never actually happen: the government pretextually using its
national-security authority to continue a criminal investigation after
determining it lacked evidence of crimes.
The second thrust of the Steele
“investigative” report suggested Trump had engaged in some scatological conduct
while in Russia, hiring prostitutes to urinate on the bed the Obamas had used
there.
These claims were not only unverifiable,
they were ludicrous as well, as was the Intelligence Community’s justification
for giving them one second’s worth of credence.
As Iowahawk tweeted: “Unconfirmed Denial
of Unsourced Blockbuster Allegations Raises Questions, According To Insiders
Who Requested Anonymity.”
At American Digest, Gerard
Vanderleun explains
precisely why:
1) An
international business man who has spent decades in the rough and tumble world
of real estate development and skyscraper construction and may be presumed to
have some sophistication when it comes to wheeling and dealing with governments
of all sorts throughout the world travels to
2) Moscow.
Not Moscow, Idaho, but Moscow in Russia. That would be Moscow the capital of
one of the most paranoid and intrusive governments in the world (Both now and
for the 19th and 20th centuries). It is a society and a government with a long
history of...
3) Secret
police and the clandestine surveillance of its own citizens and visitors to the
extent that the US was digging bugs out of the walls of its own embassy in
Moscow for decades. When he gets to Moscow he stays at...
4) The Moscow
Ritz-Carlton in the “Presidential Suite.” Since such accommodations are
typically only taken by the filthy rich and/or representatives of foreign
governments such as, say, presidents. And then this sophisticated and
reasonably intelligent billionaire real estate developer...
5) Assumes
that such a suite in such a capitol city of such a government has no
surveillance equipment at all installed in its rooms, bathrooms, closets, and
-- most importantly -- bedrooms. He then asks the hotel staff to show him...
6) The bed in
which Barack Obama and his wife slept in when they were in this same
“Presidential Suite.” Upon being shown the bed our businessman then...
7) Contacts
two high-dollar Russian hookers (who would never, ever, have anything to do
with the KGB or other intelligence organs of Russia) and instructs them to....
Wait for it....
8) Urinate on
said bed in order to give said businessman some odd sort of thrill and...
9) Said
businessman remains utterly positive no agency of the Russian state is running
cameras and microphones from every possible angle in the master bedroom in a
“Presidential Suite” in a top hotel in the capital of Russia and...
10) The two
damp hookers will never, ever, reveal a word about their golden shower in the
Ritz Carleton’s “Presidential Suite.”
While I know
that millions of morons are nodding like the drinking bird over the glass in
their deep and abiding belief in this overflowing crock, I still find it hard
to believe that there are smart people out there that really are this stupid.
But of course they are not that stupid, not the smart ones. Instead they know
this is a crock and yet they find they must drink from it lest their
#NeverTrump fantasy world dissolve.
Sad. Their
repetitive manic desperation now has foam flecking their lips and jowls as they
dive down deep, and not for the last time, into this fuming septic tank of
their own political sewage. Without even a snorkel. If they ever get out of the
tank they will need a long, long golden shower
B. The Intelligence Community Peddles the
Dirt (then feigns dismay that it makes its way into the press).
Among the morons apparently “drinking this
up” besides John McCain were high officials in the Intelligence Community,
which passed the rumors on to the president and key congressional staff,
although -- despite conflicting reports about this -- apparently never shared
it with president-elect Trump. Director of National Intelligence James
Clapper claimed
to have been “dismayed” that this leaked out after having passed it
on. He claimed as well that the Intelligence Community “hadn’t made any
judgment on whether the claims within the document were reliable”
As my online friend Cecil Turner
observes: “Former U.S. intelligence officials described the inclusion of
the summary -- drawn from 'opposition research' done by a political research
firm -- as highly unusual.
"Assuming, of course, that it is. The
problem with this sort of thing is that it's on the borderline between unknown
and unknowable. Every character involved is either anonymous or has a name that
sounds pseudonymous, and the sources are professional liars.
"Roll eyes, wait for actual evidence.
The fact that it leaked strongly suggests there is none.”
CNN, however, lapped it up, informed its
readers of the existence of scandalous reports on Trump, and BuzzFeed, a
clickbait site owned in part by NBC, then published the dossier, a portion of
which, it seems, was provided by infonerd bulletin board 4 Chan.
Asked why it had published an account of
this nonsense which other news agencies had refused to print because it was
completely unverifiable, CNN blamed BuzzFeed, noting it had not released the
details, presumably on the assumption that readers whose curiosity had been
piqued by the news wouldn’t want details.
Steele has gone to ground ostensibly
because he fears Russian reprisals, but I think it’s because he wants to avoid
answering questions about what are obviously fabrications to satisfy political
interests who paid for this shoddy product.
Kassam asked
if Bolton had ever heard of the man revealed as the creator of the dossier,
former British MI6 officer Christopher Steele. “Could it be the case that
somebody has just paid this guy to write these things, so this leak came out?”
Kassam asked.
“Well,
actually, that thought occurred to me because it’s so bad. I haven’t found
anybody, including friends who are experienced in both diplomacy and military
and intelligence affairs, who haven’t just laughed at most of it,” Bolton
replied.
“It’s filled with
anonymous sources, single-source information and whatnot. If I were a corporate
customer, and I wanted, in effect, a private investigator -- I think that’s
what this firm basically is -- and I got something back like this, I would
refuse to pay. You or I could sit down at a computer right now and type out
these 35 pages, just let our imaginations run wild, and if somebody would pay
for it, I suppose it’s nice work if you can get it,” he said.
c. Is it Just IC Incompetence or is the
Deep State Deliberately Undermining Faith in Trump and Aiding a Russian
Disinformation Campaign?
Glenn Greenwald (hardly a Trump fan) thinks
it’s more, and on examination of the Intelligence Community’s
handling of this tripe, it’s hard to disagree with him. He points out the
unprecedented support for Hillary Clinton in this “deep state,” and takes issue
with their advancing the Steele memos
...the Deep
State unleashed its tawdriest and most aggressive assault yet on Trump: vesting
credibility in and then causing the public disclosure of a completely unvetted
and unverified document, compiled by a paid, anonymous operative while he was
working for both GOP and Democratic opponents of Trump, accusing
Trump of a wide range of crimes, corrupt acts, and salacious private conduct.
The reaction to all of this illustrates that while the Trump presidency poses
grave dangers, so, too, do those who are increasingly unhinged in their
flailing, slapdash, and destructive attempts to undermine it.
[snip]
Once CNN
strongly hinted at these allegations, it left it to the public imagination to
conjure up the dirt Russia allegedly had to blackmail and control Trump.
By publishing these accusations, BuzzFeed ended that speculation. More
importantly, it allowed everyone to see how dubious this document is,
one the CIA and CNN had elevated into some sort of grave national security
threat.
ALMOST
IMMEDIATELY AFTER it
was published, the farcical nature of the “dossier” manifested. Not only
was its author anonymous, but he was paid by Democrats (and, before that, by
Trump’s GOP adversaries) to dig up dirt on Trump. Worse, he himself cited no
evidence of any kind but instead relied on a string of other anonymous people
in Russia he claims told him these things. Worse still, the document was filled
with amateur errors.
David Goldman, who did support Trump, was
more succinct: “Warning the intelligence communities about salacious and
politically motivated leaks: the president-elect threatened to drag their
shenanigans into the daylight. No one has ever done that to the spooks before.
I'm lovin' it.”
In any event, McCain's much-touted
hearings on Russian interference with the election should prove to be a million
laughs. He obviously believed this nonsense was credible enough to seek
it out and pass it on, so I hardly imagine he’s in a position to make credible
calls on what the hearings involving these now discredited documents reveal or
on the wisdom and good faith of the officials involved in leaking
them.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/01/the_trump_dossier_puts_the_deep_state_in_deep_doodoo.html#ixzz4VqbBKorQ
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