The Trump Dossier Timeline, A Democrat Disaster Looming by Publius Tacitus

When the entire episode about the creation of the Trump dossier (by former Brit spy, Christopher Steele) and its dissemination (by Steele and the Democrat hired contractor, FUSION GPS,) to the FBI and the press, is fully exposed, the American people will be confronted with the stark dilemma of how to deal with the fact that there was a failed domestic coup attempted by members of the U.S. intel and law enforcement community. The facts will show that the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the CIA and the FBI conspired and meddled in the 2016 Presidential election. They lied to a Federal judge about the origins of the dossier and used those lies to get permission to spy on Trump and members of his campaign staff.

Here are the facts as we know them now. (Please note, these facts are sourced and are not my opinion).

1. Fusion GPS approached Perkins Coie (a Seattle based law firm) and sought an engagement to continue research it had started on Donald Trump. Perkins Coie retained Fusion GPS on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC in April 2016. (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4116755-PerkinsCoie-Fusion-PrivelegeLetter-102417.html). 
2. The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee funded the research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin. (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4116755-PerkinsCoie-Fusion-PrivelegeLetter-102417.html, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/clinton-campaign-dnc-paid-for-research-that-led-to-russia-dossier/2017/10/24/226fabf0-b8e4-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html?utm_term=.14d16b270afd).
3. Christopher Steele (Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd) was hired by Fusion GPS in May or June of 2016 (Glen Simpson testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee 0n 22 August 2017, p. 77)
4. The first report of the Dossier was dated 20 June 2017 and made the following allegations:
   1. Russian regime had been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years.
   2. TRUMP declined various business deals offered him in Russia but accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.
   3. Russian intelligence officer claims FSB has material to blackmail TRUMP.
   4. The Russians had a dossier on Clinton but "nothing embarrassing."
5. Christopher Steele tells Glen Simpson that he wants to take the info in the 20 June report to the FBI (this conversation occurred late June/early July  according to Glen Simpson testimony before Senate Judiciary Committee, p. 161, 165
6. July 2016, Christopher Steele meets with FBI (name of contact unknown) and passes on content from the 20 June memo.
7. Third report, dated 19 July 2016, claims that TRUMP advisor Carter PAGE held secret meetings in Moscow with SECHIN and senior Kremlin Internal Affairs official, DIVYEKIN. (See dossier).
   1. But U.S. officials have since received intelligence reports that during that same three-day trip, Page met with Igor Sechin, a longtime Putin associate and former Russian deputy prime minister who is now the executive chairman of Rosneft, Russian’s leading oil company, a well-placed Western intelligence source tells Yahoo News.
8. 15 August 2016 FBI Agent Strzok’s text about the meeting in McCabe’s office is dated August 15, 2016. . . According to Agent Strzok, with Election Day less than three months away, Page, the bureau lawyer, weighed in on Trump’s bid: “There’s no way he gets elected.”
9. According to David Corn, Christopher Steele was sending all of his subsequent reports to the FBI:
   1. The response to the information from the FBI, he recalled, was “shock and horror.” After a few weeks, the bureau asked him for information on his sources and their reliability and on how he had obtained his reports. He was also asked to continue to send copies of his subsequent reports to the bureau. These reports were not written, he noted, as finished work products; they were updates on what he was learning from his various sources.
10. 27 August 2016. Senate and House leaders briefed by "intelligence community" on the contents of the Steele memos--A letter from Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, dated 27 August 2017 states:
    1. "I have recently become concerned that the threat of the Russian government tampering in our presidential election is more extensive than widely known and may include the intent to falsify official election results. The evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump's presidential campaign continues to mount. . ."
    2. Michael Isikoff referenced those briefings: "The activities of Trump adviser Carter Page, who has extensive business interests in Russia, have been discussed with senior members of Congress during recent briefings about suspected efforts by Moscow to influence the presidential election, the sources said. After one of those briefings, Senate minority leader Harry Reid wrote FBI Director James Comey, citing reports of meetings between a Trump adviser (a reference to Page) and “high ranking sanctioned individuals” in Moscow over the summer as evidence of “significant and disturbing ties” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin that needed to be investigated by the bureau."
11. September 2016. FBI used the Steele memos as part of the basis for requesting a FISA warrant according to reports by the NY Times and the Washington Post:
    1. We do not know exactly when the FISA warrant was granted, but the New York Times and the Washington Post have reported, citing U.S. government sources, that this occurred in September 2016 (see here, here, and here).
       
       
       1. After Mr. Page, 45 — a Navy veteran and businessman who had lived in Moscow for three years — stepped down (26 September 2016) from the Trump campaign in September, the F.B.I. obtained a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing the authorities to monitor his communications on the suspicion that he was a Russian agent.

       2. The Justice Department obtained a secret court-approved wiretap last summer on Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign, based on evidence that he was operating as a Russian agent, a government official said Wednesday. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued the warrant, the official said, after investigators determined that Mr. Page was no longer part of the Trump campaign, which began distancing itself from him in early August.

       3. The FBI and the Justice Department obtained the warrant targeting Carter Page’s communications after convincing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power, in this case Russia, according to the officials.
       4. Loretta Lynch, Attorney General under President Obama, approved the FISA application. (Note--federal law requires that the attorney general approve every application to the FISA court.)
12. End of September--Steele revealed in a London court filing earlier this year that he was directed by Fusion GPS to brief reporters at outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Yahoo! News and Mother Jones about his Trump findings.
13. End of September--Steele informs Simpson (i.e. Fusion GPS) that the FBI wants to meet him in Rome. (Senate Judiciary Committee 0n 22 August 2017, p. 171)
     
14. 8 November 2016, Senator John McCain, accompanied by David Kramer (a Senior Director at Senator McCain's Institute for International Leadership), met in London with an Associate of Orbis, former British Ambassador Sir Andrew Wood, to arrange a subsequent meeting with Christopher Steele in order to read the now infamous Steele Dossier. 
15. David Kramer and Christopher Steele met in Surrey on 28 November 2016, where Kramer was briefed on the contents of the memos.
16. Once Senator McCain and David Kramer returned to the United States, arrangements were made for Fusion GPS to provide Senator McCain hard copies of the memoranda.
17. 13 December 2016, Christopher Steele prepares, on his own, the 17th report in the dossier and sends it to Senator McCain via David Kramer.
18. 6 January 2017--FBI Director Comey briefs Trump on the Steele dossier, which Comey describes as "salacious and UNVERIFIED.":
    1. The IC leadership thought it important, for a variety of reasons, to alert the incoming President to the existence of this material, even though it was salacious and unverified. Among those reasons were: (1) we knew the media was about to publicly report the material and we believed the IC should not keep knowledge of the material and its imminent release from the President-Elect; and (2) to the extent there was some effort to compromise an incoming President, we could blunt any such effort with a defensive briefing. (Comey's statement before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 8 June 2017)

 One of the more interesting developments in the dossier case came as a result of depositions and testimony in the defamation case that Aleksej Gubarev filed against Christoper Steele in the United Kingdom last year. When pressed to defend the authenticity and accuracy of the dossier and the allegations against President Trump, Christopher Steele became a British version of Michael Jackson and moon-walked backwards. Andy McCarthy describes the situation beautifully:

Describing his reports in the Mother Jones interview, Steele asserted, “This was something of huge significance, way above party politics.” Things changed, though, when Steele was sued for libel after the dossier was published in early 2017. Suddenly, when he was in a forum where it was clear to him that making exaggerated or false claims could cost him dearly, he decided his allegations were not of such “huge significance” after all . . . .According to Steele’s courtroom version, the dossier is merely a compilation of bits of “raw intelligence” that were “unverified” and that he passed along because they “warranted further investigation” — i.e., not because he could vouch for their truthfulness.  (kudos to Rowan Scarborough who initially broke the story).

 There are some very interesting unanswered questions. Here are some that I believe are most relevant:

1. Why does a former MI-6 officer reach out on his own to the FBI when the normal point of contact would be the CIA?
2. Who did Steele contact at the FBI?
3. Who at the FBI asked Steele to travel to Rome in October 2016? [Note--this request is quite odd given the fact that the FBI has a very large presence in London and, if the purpose was simply to inform the FBI about possible nefarious Russian activity, could have easily walked over to the US Embassy at Grosvenor Square rather than travel to Rome.]

The failure of the FBI and the CIA to disclose to members of Congress and the President that the information they briefed from the dossier had been paid for by the Clinton campaign is much more than gross negligence and incompetence. It is prima facie evidence of collusion and meddling in a U.S. domestic election. Only the culprits weren't the Russians. As Pogo once said, "we have met the enemy and he is us." 

Comments

[blue peacock]

J

I am not suggesting that at all.

What I am suggesting however is that partisan elements at the highest levels of US law enforcement and the IC obtained some factual information from querying the bulk collected data. (For example, that Trump's businesses had some dealings with Russian entities and he visited Russia well before he became a presidential candidate, albeit for legitimate business purposes. Qualitatively different than Slick Willy getting paid for a speech in Russia.) This was made available to certain subcontractors and others maybe including Fusion GPS. They then stitched together the dossier that includes some factual information, other known information and pure fabrication in constructing the dossier, to buttress the Russia collusion narrative.

Remember that Nellie Ohr had a role to play in this and she would be quite familiar due to her association with CIA and along with her husband, DOJ Deputy Bruce Ohr, on how to construct such a dossier to be used in part to trigger a formal CI investigation and to support the narrative. Glenn Simpson due to his background as a journalist and WSJ reporter would know how to launder "stories" to build a narrative. And of course the Clinton campaign and elements in the White House had a role to play to further fan the flames of the narrative to discredit Trump as the Manchurian Candidate during the election. There were many cogs in the wheel to build and get in motion the narrative. The dossier is one element in this. The attempts to get the Trump campaign linked with shady people in Russia, like the meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya is another element. The connections with the corporate media to create hysteria is another element.

That is why I suggest to focus on the genesis, the period of February/March 2016 when the FISA violations took place.

[Jack]

blue peacock,

Ray McGovern in his article on Consortium News makes a similar contention. Russiagate had very little to do with Russia and everything to do with preventing Trump from taking and holding the office of POTUS.

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/01/11/the-fbi-hand-behind-russia-gate/

[mariner]

'I doubt he actually understood the significance of the conversation'

Total rot. Downer steered Australia into a potential mess in Timor, and steered us out again with the last minute help of Bill Clinton. It was not guaranteed and required diplomatic skill. I doubt Trump would have done the same for us. Like all politicians Downer tells lies, covers up his failures and ensures others get the blame in the miniscule chance they become public.

[mariner]

What intelligence coup. It was obtained overtly. It was information Papadopoulos wanted Downer to know.

'Thus implying that George is less bright, or was a great deal drunker'

No. Implicit in what I wrote is that Papadopoulos may be a man of weak character.

[J]

The Steele document was definitely one element as you say, and certainly acted to catalyse further processes. My point was that the document appears to be such a rushed amateurish concoction that it risked discrediting the intended narrative as well as those through whose hands it passed. Those points would however be moot without media comment, as indeed was the case.
I suggest that the author's expectation was that more credible evidence would become visible during later investigations and render the Steele document irrelevant. Hence, a gamble.

[J]

The separation of Timor was instigated by the US, not by Howard or Downer. Habibie could not determine the outcome or the timing, and Downer was well down in the chain.
I think we both agree that Downer is not bright. Consider the converse point of view - that he Did understand the significance. If he had, Turnbull would have forcefully used the information to curry favour with the White House, and that did not happen.

[J]

I was referring to that fact that some people see Downer as a bit of a hero in this. Neither of them can claim many points for this event, unless of course George used Our Man In London as a well lubricated conduit.

[mariner]

'The separation of Timor was instigated by the US'

Totally wrong. The Pentagon resisted it to the last, and even after the results of the referendum had been announced continued to predict a failed State.

'I think we both agree that Downer is not bright.'

We do not. Nor do politicians have to be in the first eleven. We elect them to make deals between competing interests not to invent rockets.

[J]

A bit off the subject now, but the US was concerned an ongoing East Timor controversy could destabilise the new post-Suharto post-Asian financial crisis government, which was still in the experimental stage. Ted Kennedy also carried much weight.

Clinton resisted the use of US ground troops in any peacekeeping force before or after the ballot, but threatened Habibie, Wiranto and the rest of TNI with plenty of consequences if they refused to hold the ballot, which is why Habibie offered independence and Wiranto so easily abandoned his position that TNI owned East Timor. Clinton also expected Australia to lead any peacekeeping force, which Howard/Downer initially wanted nothing to do with, so we were dragged in too. Eventually all parties ceased threatening each other and mythology was made.

No more about Downer, please !

[mariner]

Wrong again J. US and Aust interests diverged which is why Jenkins, liason to the Pentagon, was instructed not to share certain intelligence. It's in the public domain what happened next.

Lobbying by the Jewish left played an important part changing Clinton's approach.

Downer and DFAT originally wanted a Noumea Accord model, a 15-20 year transition period before any vote, during which time the parties could find common ground or postpone a vote indefinitely should Indonesia's democratic transition be successful.

Habibie is totally responsible for what happened. He and ICMI wanted to get rid of E.Timor.

In 1945 the Islamic alternative to a secular State, the Piagam [Charter] Jakarta was blocked by Christian Eastern Indonesia. Habibie and ICMI wanted a greater political role for Islam and felt compelled to first weaken and rearrange their enemies in the East. E.Timor was a threat to their strategic goal, they threw it to the international community while they proceeded with the main game. The two Christian power centres in North Sulawesi and Maluku were split to weaken them and, increase Muslim votes in the centre. This is what the jihads in Poso and Maluku were all about. Gorontalo was taken from Manado and Ternate from Ambon, forming new Provinces. With ethnic cleansing, Christians were to concentrated in enclaves in half of Ambon and in Minahasa Manado. Christians in Ternate were forced to flee to North Sulawesi [where sadly they remain] or convert. Manadonese Christians saw what was done in Maluku and formed their own Christian militias in defence. The new province of West Sulawesi was also created.

In East Timor there were few indigenous Muslims, 5000 in Daisua Same and the east. They were given special, and early, treatment. Sent to Makassar where they were organised by Agus Andi Dwikarna the Jundullah leader and AQ man. They were then sent for resettlement to the new neighbouring Province in formation. Agus Dwi was a confidant of Kalla, the current Vice President. Dwikarna liased with Osama's pointman Al Farouk. Dwikarna was arrested in the Phillips and jailed, causing a split between his followers and Kalla. Obviously a worried man, Kalla was leaned on to arrange an end to the jihads in Poso and Ambon. Al Farouk was kidnapped and sent for a spot of speech therapy in Bagram. Credit goes to GW Bush for ending those two wars, and to the Australian who escorted a group of US visitors around Poso. Downer and his department couldn't be interested in this, Timor successfully diverted international focus. Some E.Timorese Christians were also held hostage by Dwikarna at his Mosque in Jalan Racing and the story of how they escaped is yet to be told.

E.Timorese militia had an incriminating recording of Habibie giving a speech. They camped outside the Habibie Centre threatening to embarrass him if he didn't pay up. He did, and some of the proceeds were used to fund their guerrilla operations against Interfet and PKF.

Though the US didn't put boots on the ground USN sent a carrier that steamed between Dili and Oecussi to intimidate.

Downer and DFAT misread Habibie badly, Saint Bill of Little Rock hauled us out of the mess. The Pentagon didn't want an Independent E.Timor but did what their civilian boss told them, albeit whining like bagpipes with bronchitis and predicting a failed State.

The true history of US Australian relations during this period may one day dribble out, but not before the parties whose reputations stand to be harmed write their official history.

[J]

Hi mariner, I was trying to keep it brief but I think now we are getting a bit away from commander's intent :) If we see a comment on ET lets start again.
Regards J.

[Keith Harbaugh]

Might be worth giving clickable links to several very worthwhile posts from "sundance" at The Conservative Tree House
"sundance" has an awesome ability to connect dots.
Like, e.g., the Trump Transition Team announcing they were moving all transition activity to Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey
the day after DIRNSA Rogers visited him,
possibly revealing to Trump the extent to which he was being surveilled.
Just a coincidence?!?!?!
(This is pointed out in the first link below.)

"How The FBI and DOJ Intelligence Units Were Weaponized Around Congressional Oversight…", 2018-01-08

"The DOJ and FBI Worked With Fusion GPS on “Operation Trump”…", 2018-01-11

"#FusionCollusion – Congress Takes 3-Prong Approach To Surround Corrupt Intelligence and Justice Officials…", 2018-01-14

"#FusionCollusion – Thirty Questions and One Answer: “Because Laura Ingraham Wouldn’t Shut Up”…", 2018-01-17

Do you care to comment on your opinion of "sundance" and all this reporting, PT?
Much of it looks impressive, and plausible, to me,
although I have my doubts about his theory that the Steele dossier
originated within U.S. intelligence, then was laundered through Steele.
THAT sounds pretty extreme to me.
But who knows?

[Boronx]

The Steele dossier has been verified on several points, including the Russian Govt. passing information on Trump's political opponents to his campaign, and the laundering of hacked data through Wikileaks.

"This was something of huge significance, way above party politics." and "It's raw intelligence." are not mutually exclusive ideas. Steele has never claimed that the dossier was anything other than raw intelligence before or after any libel trial.

You have not presented any evidence that any of the intelligence was fabricated by Steele, or that his employers asked him to fabricate any intelligence, or that the FBI acted improperly by discretely following up on it.

Prima facie, Steele seems to have engaged in normal oppo research, and decided to elevate his readership when he came to believe his findings showed a serious threat to to the Western alliance. There is zero evidence made public, and certainly none presented by you, that suggests otherwise.

Strzok should have been more professional in his texting, but the only crime I've seen that he's committed is saying mean things about one of the targets of his investigation in private communication with another FBI employee. Republicans are trying to blow that into a scandal. Are they going to scour the archives for any disparaging comments any agents have made about people suspected of committing major crimes?