With text messages between US Justice Department (DOJ)
conspirators Peter Strzok and his adulterous main squeeze Lisa Page now
revealing that then-President Barack Obama “wants to know everything we’re
doing,” it now appears that the 2016 plot to subvert the rule of law and
corrupt the US organs of state security for
political purposes reached the very pinnacle of power. To call the United
States today a “banana republic” increasingly may be seen as a gratuitous
insult to the friendly spider-infested nations to
our south.
Still, don’t
expect to see Barry Hussein Saetoro doing
the perp walk anytime soon or even being deported back to Kenya. Don’t expect
to see orange prison suits on
Strzok, Page, former FBI Director James Comey, former Associate Deputy Attorney
General Bruce Ohr, former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and others
implicated in putting a political thumb on the scales to, first, get Hillary Clinton elected,
and then, when that failed, to neuter Donald Trump’s presidency with a phony
Russiagate probe. Officials’ getting “former-ed” is one thing, their getting
prosecuted quite another. (Just imagine if a GOP administration had similarly
skewed the supposedly non-political law enforcement and intelligence services
for partisan reasons. We’d have Watergate on steroids. The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN would be calling
for hanging, drawing, and quartering.)
Indeed, it’s
not even clear the Russiagate investigation itself will be impacted. After all,
the narrative may have flipped on one variable –
from Trump campaign collusion to Democratic and FBI collusion – but the constant remains the
same: Russia. Trump’s defenders are as insistent as his detractors
that the real culprit
is Russia! Russia! Russia!
Sean Hannity of Fox News has
been particularly hyperventilative that the entire Steele Dossier lying at the
black heart of the mess consists of “phony, fake-news Russian propaganda” and
“Russian intelligence lies” from British MI6 (supposedly “former”)
spymaster Christopher Steele’s “Russian sources.” Even level-headed
observers like Paul Sperry and Patrick Buchanan characterize the file as a “Kremlin-aided smear job”
and “Russian dirt [that] Steele was
spoon-fed by old comrades in the Kremlin’s security apparatus.”
Christopher Steele is not Russian
But what do
we really know about Steele’s claimed sources? Not much.
Sure, maybe
Vladimir Putin personally whispered every word of the dossier into Steele’s
ear. Or maybe Steele invented his supposed sources from whole cloth: your
clients are paying for sleaze, you give them sleaze. Or anything in between:
maybe Steele consulted some imaginative Russian cranks with only a marginal,
and most likely adversarial, relationship to the Russian authorities, whose
“inside knowledge” Steele padded to justify his fee. (Steele claims he didn’t
pay his “sources” – assuming they exist at all – but that’s no more worthy of
credit than anything else he says.)
As analyzed
by Russia expert Stephen F. Cohen:
‘Where, then,
… did Steele get his information? According to Steele and his many
stenographers – which include his American employers, Democratic Party
Russiagaters, the mainstream media, and even progressive publications – it came
from his “deep connections in Russia,” specifically from retired and
current Russian intelligence officials in or near the Kremlin. From
the moment the dossier began to be leaked to the American media, this seemed
highly implausible (as reporters who took his bait should have known) for
several reasons:
- ‘Steele has
not returned to Russia after leaving his post there in the early 1990s. Since
then, the main Russian intelligence agency, the FSB, has undergone many
personnel and other changes, especially after 2000, and especially in or near
Putin’s Kremlin. Did Steele really have such “connections” so many years later?
[JGJ: Is it
credible that the head of MI6’s Russian branch is on a first-name basis with
top Kremlin insiders? Turn the identities around and ask whether the chiefs of
the US section of Russian or Chinese intelligence are on intimate speaking
terms with the US president’s top advisers or with the leadership of the CIA or
FBI. Hardly.]
- ‘Even if he
did, would these purported Russian insiders really have collaborated with this
“former” British intelligence agent under what is so widely said to be the
ever-vigilant eye of the ruthless “former KGB agent” Vladimir Putin, thereby
risking their positions, income, perhaps freedom, as well as the well-being of
their families?
- ‘Originally
it was said that his Russian sources were highly paid by Steele. Arguably, this
might have warranted the risk. But subsequently Steele’s employer and head of
Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, wrote in The New York Times that
“Steele’s sources in Russia…were not paid.” If the Putin Kremlin’s purpose was
to put Trump in the White House, why then would these “Kremlin-connected”
sources have contributed to Steele’s anti-Trump project without financial or
political gain – only with considerable risk?
- ‘There is
the also the telling matter of factual mistakes in the dossier that Kremlin
“insiders” were unlikely to have made, but this is the subject for a separate
analysis.
‘And indeed
we now know that Steele had at least three other “sources” for the dossier,
ones not previously mentioned by him or his employer. There was the information
from foreign intelligence agencies provided by Brennan to Steele or to the FBI,
which we also now know was collaborating with Steele. There was … a“second Trump-Russia dossier” prepared by people personally close to
Hillary Clinton and who shared their “findings” with Steele.
And most intriguingly, there was the “research” provided by Nellie Ohr, wife of
a top Department of Justice official, Bruce Ohr, who, according to the
Republican memo, “was employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of
opposition research on Trump. Ohr later provided the FBI with all of his wife’s
opposition research.” Most likely, it found its way into Steele’s dossier.
(Mrs. Ohr was a trained Russian Studies scholar with a PhD from Stanford and a
onetime assistant professor at Vassar, and thus, it must have seemed, an ideal
collaborator for Steele.)’
The reference
to “people personally close to Hillary Clinton and who shared their ‘findings’
with Steele” dovetails with another intriguing suggestion from former Clinton
insider Dick Morris, who knows the modus
operandi of the Clinton lie generator better than anyone else.
On the Fox News “Ingraham
Angle” show, Morris suggested to host Laura Ingraham that the bulk of the dossier was invented by veteran political
dirty tricksters and Clinton-machine hatchet men Max Blumenthal and Cody
Shearer, who then engaged “former” spook Steele, because of the
Brit’s known relationship with the FBI, as their conduit to give their garbage
credibility. (Never underestimate the residual “colonial” mentality of Yanks to
find any sort of gibberish convincing if delivered with a British accent, as
confirmed by the ubiquity of posh Brit voices in
American advertising.)
Andrew Wood is not Russian
But Steele
isn’t the only limey link to #Dossiergate. In late 2016, after Trump’s election
victory, Andrew Wood, a former British
ambassador to Russia, told US Senator John McCain about the
existence of compromising material on Donald Trump, according to Wood’s account to BBC4. Wood
then set up a meeting between Steele and David Kramer, an associate of
McCain’s. It’s unclear whether McCain already knew about the dossier at that
point or whether Wood alerted the Senator to its existence.
For what it
is worth – not much – Wood states that McCain had obtained the documents
from the Senator’s own sources. “I told him I was aware of what was
in the report but I had not read it myself, that it might be true, it might be
untrue. I had no means of judging really,” and that he served only to inform
McCain about the dossier contents: “My mission was essentially to be a
go-between and a messenger, to
tell the Senator and assistants that such a dossier existed,”
Wood told Fox News. Wood elsewhere relates that McCain
was “visibly shocked” at his description and
expressed interest in reading the full report. That doesn’t sound as though
McCain had already obtained the dossier from his “own sources” but, rather,
that Wood was the instigator.
So which is
it? Did McCain already know about the dossier, and if so how did it “happen” to
get raised with a British diplomat? Conversely, was the initiative from Woods
to induce the Senator – known to be a strong Trump critic as well as for his
hostility to Russia – to pass the dossier on in Washington? Keep in mind that the
dossier had already been used to secure a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
(FISA) warrant to monitor Carter Page, a peripheral asteroid in the Trump
orbit, and that Trump had already been elected. By this time the conspiracy’s
purpose had shifted from preventing Trump’s victory to tying down his incoming
administration, especially with respect to blocking any opening to Moscow as
Trump said he intended to do. What better way to set the cat among the pigeons
than for a supposedly totally non-political British diplomat (certainly no
intelligence officer, he!) to quietly peddle the material from Steele (whom
Wood called a “very competent professional operator … I do not think he would make things
up.”) to the right man in Washington?
GCHQ is not Russian
Finally,
while it’s clear the dossier served to get a FISA warrant for American services
to spy on the Trump campaign and later the transition team, US agencies’ might
not have been the only eyes and ears monitoring them. Amid all the hubbub over
Michael Wolff’s slash-and-burn Fire
and Fury, little mention (other than a heated denial on the floor
of the House of Commons, from
the notoriously truth-challenged former prime minister Tony Blair,
and from the relevant British agency
itself!) has been made of the suggestion that the UK’s Government Communications
Headquarters (GCHQ) – Britain’s version of the NSA – was spying
on Trump and providing their sister agencies in the US with additional data.
Keep in mind the carefully worded deflection last
year from James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence
(DNI), that “there was no wiretap against Trump Tower during the campaign
conducted by any part of the national intelligence community... including the
FBI,” thus begging the question of whether Trump was spied on not by a US
“national” agency but by one of the Anglosphere “Five Eyes” agencies –
most likely GCHQ – which then passed the information back to their American
colleagues. With Steele’s and Wood’s involvement, and given the virtual control
of America’s manifestly corrupted agencies of their counterparts in satellite
countries like the United Kingdom, involvement by GCHQ and perhaps other
“friendly” foreign agencies cannot be dismissed out of hand.
Madame Prime Minister is not Russian
To be sure,
in 2016 the majority opinion in Russia was that Donald Trump’s election would
be preferable to Hillary Clinton’s for the simple reason that the former openly
advocated better relations with Moscow while the latter was a notorious
warmonger. But there was also a strong minority view,
especially among more pro-Western elements of the Russian establishment, that
Hillary – “the devil you know” –
was preferable to rolling the dice on an unpredictable and unknown quantity.
Plus, Hillary was delightfully corrupt,
with the Clinton Foundation an open
invitation for many foreign powers to buy influence.
There was no
ambiguity in the position of the British government, however. In 2016 Prime
Minister Theresa May, like her German counterpart,
made little effort to hide her disdain for the “just plain wrong”
Trump and her preference for Hillary Clinton,
whom she expected to win (as did most other observers). Why should
anyone be surprised that her MI6 and GCHQ minions would share the same views
and perhaps acted on them to provide some helping “hands across the water”
to their US counterparts whose anti-constitutional conspiracy now stands
exposed?
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/02/09/is-steele-dossier-full-russian-dirt-or-british.html
