The Fabricated "Predicate" to Spy on the Trump Campaign by Larry C Johnson

While Inspector General Michael Horowitz did a pretty fair job of documenting the crimes of the FBI in getting the green light from a Federal Judge to spy on Carter Page as an ostensible agent of the Russians, he utterly failed to investigate the cornerstone (aka the "predicate") for launching this whole sordid affair. That predicate?  George Papadopoulos, an obscure foreign policy advisor to the Trump Campaign, reportedly told  Australia's High Commissioner to the UK (and Clinton crony), Alexander Downer, that the Russian Government had dirt on Hillary Clinton. But Papadopoulos was simply passing on gossip he heard from Joseph Mifsud, an intelligence agent tied to British secret services, not the Russians.

In a competent world of law enforcement and intelligence officials, this kind of hearsay (I heard it through the grapevine) would not pass the laugh test. But not in the partisan world of the FBI. The FBI leadership, according to Inspector General Horowitz, unanimously agreed that the unsubstantiated hearsay justified launching a full scale counterintelligence investigation and spying on the Trump campaign. Michael Horowitz reports that:

. . . the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane on July 31, 2016, just days after its receipt of information from a Friendly Foreign Government (FFG) reporting that, in May 2016, during a meeting with the FFG, then Trump campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos "suggested the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist this process with the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to Mrs. Clinton (and President Obama)."

McCabe said the FBI viewed the FFG (aka Downer) information in the context of Russian attempts to interfere with the 2016 U.S. elections in the years and months prior, as well as the FBI's ongoing investigation into the DNC hack by a Russian Intelligence Service (RIS). He also said that when the FBI received the FFG information it was a "tipping point" in terms of opening a counterintelligence investigation regarding Russia's attempts to influence and interfere with the 2016 U.S. elections because not only was there information that Russia was targeting U.S. political institutions, but now the FBI had received an allegation from a trusted partner that there had been some sort of contact between the Russians and the Trump campaign.

Here is Mueller's account of how the investigation started:

In late April 2016, Papadopoulos was told by London-based professor Joseph Mifsud, immediately after Mifsud 's return from a trip to Moscow, that the Russian government had obtained "dirt" on candidate Clinton in the form of thousands of emails.

It is critical to take note that George Papadopoulos did not solicit Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton. That offer came from Joseph Mifsud. Inspector General Horowitz makes little mention of Mifsud beyond noting that he lied to the FBI about his conversation with Papadopoulos. That incuriosity is troubling and inexcusable if one is serious about understanding the predicate for spying on the Trump campaign. Michael Horowitz took a pass.

Robert Mueller identifies Mifsud in the report as someone with close ties to Russia. Good old guilt by association without one shred of proof. Mueller's report describes Mifsud as:

. . . a Maltese national who worked as a professor at the London Academy of Diplomacy in London, England.  Although Mifsud worked out of London and was also affiliated with LCILP, the encounter in Rome was the first time that Papadopoulos met him. Mifsud maintained various Russian contacts while living in London, as described further below.

Joseph Mifsud was not and is not an agent of Russia. He was working for western intelligence. If you want to get the full picture of Mifsud's ties to British intelligence, the CIA and the FBI, I encourage you to read, The Death of Russiagate?, Mueller team tied to Mifsud network, a tangled web. This article provides actual evidence about the intelligence pedigree of Joseph Mifsud. Robert Mueller, by contrast, provides not one single piece of actual evidence. Mueller and his team of clown lawyers relied on innuendo and guilt by association. And Horowitz just ignores Mifsud, pretending he is irrelevant to the "predication."

The next critical event in the predication chain, according to both Mueller and Horowitz, was Papadopoulos speaking with Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer. Mueller reports:

One week later, on May 6, 2016, Papadopoulos suggested to a representative of a foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information that would be damaging to candidate Clinton.

The name of Alexander Downer does not appear in Mueller or Horowitz report. 

Why did "FFG" aka Alexander Downer, who reportedly heard about the Russian dirt on Hillary from the lips of a tipsy George Papadopoulos in early May, wait more than two months to tell the United States about it? Downer claims it was Wikileaks publication of the emails that was the last straw. However, it was not a secret of state on June 14, 2016 when Ellen Nakashima of The Washington Post reported Crowdstrike, a private cyber security firm hired by the DNC, "discovered" that the Russians had hacked the DNC. Why did Downer not react to that news? And why did the FBI treat the supposed attack by Russia with such an incurious approach? They did not set up a task force. They did not subpoena the server nor press the NSA for corroborating evidence that would have exposed a Russian plot.

Instead, Comey's FBI was content to passively receive information provided by Crowdstrike rather than get access themselves. No answer to these questions is provided by either Michael Horowitz or Robert Mueller.

A careful reading of the Horowitz report reveals that Downer told his hearsay to Gina Haspel, the current Director of the CIA who was the CIA's Chief of Station in London at the time.

On July 26, 2016, 4 days after Wikileaks publicly released hacked emails from the DNC, the FFG official spoke with a U.S. government (USG) official in the European city about an "urgent matter" that required an in-person meeting. At the meeting, the FFG official informed the USG official of the meeting with Papadopoulos. . . .

On Jul 27 2016 the USG official called the FBI's Legal Attache (Legat) and in the European city to her office and provided them [BLACKED OUT MATERIAL] The Legat told us he was not provided any other
information about the meetings between the FFG and Papadopoulos.

Notwithstanding Horowitz's narrow, legalistic finding that the actual "predicate" to start spying on the Trump campaign was because of what Alexander Downer said about George Papadopoulos, the testimony of Andrew McCabe makes it clear that the an alleged Russian role in the DNC hack also weighed heavily in favor of spying on Trump. It is essential to note that the FBI had no independent proof or evidence that Russia was in anyway responsible for the missing DNC emails. The FBI based their conclusion entirely on the unsubstantiated claim by Crowdstrike that "the Russians" had hacked the DNC. It is worth recalling that FBI Director Jim Comey testified in the Spring of 2017, under oath, that the FBI never gained access to the DNC server and that the FBI relied on information provided by Crowdstrike.

With the Horowitz report in the public sphere we can now compare his account of the Papadopoulos affair with that present by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller. You will see that the story is nonsense. It also is a contrived set up. Alexander Downer's decision to report his "concern" to the CIA's Gina Haspel was the fruit of a covert action carried out by U.S. and foreign intelligence services working in tandem to go after Trump. The so-called "predicate" for the FBI was a deliberate, carefully crafted fabrication.

It started with the deliberate targeting of George Papadopolous by Joseph Mifsud, an intelligence operative working for the Brits and the CIA, not the Russians. Mifsud was planting evidence by telling Papadopoulos that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. The intent of this lure was to entice Papadopoulos to carry this offer back to the Trump campaign (which he did). But the Trump campaign did not bite. 

Despite the Trump campaign's refusal to take the Russian bait, having Alexander Downer report the rumor started by Mifsud as a "fact" of the intent of the Trump campaign to collude with the Russians became the raison d'être for getting The FBI. It is no mere coincidence that Gina Haspel, who was serving as the CIA Chief of Station in London at the Time, turned to The FBI to do its thing. 

What is shocking about the Horowitz conclusion justifying the predicate for spying on Donald Trump and his team is that neither Horowitz nor any other senior official at The FBI when these events unfolded was troubled by accepting as fact a third hand report that Russia had dirt on Hillary. What kind of dirt? No one among The FBI leadership asked that question according to Horowitz. The claim of "dirt" was accepted at face value. 

Having a foreign stooge like Alexander Downer carry the intel community's dirty water to the FBI provided a legalistic cover that the Bureau leadership could and did cite as a proper "legal" foundation for spying on the Trump campaign. The could safely claim that they did not know nothing about no spying while claiming to be just following the law. Welcome to the Washington Swamp's version of Kabuki theater. Sadly, Inspector General Horowitz played along with this charade.

Attorney General Bill Barr and U.S. Prosecutor John Durham have put the Washington Swamp on notice that the Horowitz fiction about The FBI predicate will not survive. Durham has collected evidence and testimony from the intelligence community side of the house, as well as overseas, that will expose the FBI, at a minimum, as unwitting dupes out-smarted by duplicitous intelligence operatives. The more likely scenario is that key FBI officials will be indicted for participating in an elaborate scheme that is nothing short of sedition. It is worth noting that it was the FBI's Comey and McCabe who were insisting that the discredited Steele Dossier be included in the equally suspect January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment. That does not sound like a couple of rubes being dragged around by their nose to do something they otherwise would not. A more appropriate term is "conspirator."

 

 

 

 

Jul 13, 2018 - “Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump

Comments

[Jack]

Yes. What is routine practice? It would appear from the Steven Hatfill, Richard Jewell and Sen. Ted Stevens cases and the many more that haven’t been publicized, that it is routine practice for the DOJ/FBI to falsify evidence, misrepresent evidence and hide exculpatory evidence. Does it matter what the motives were? What the biases were? The fact is law enforcement mislead a rubber stamp court to gain deeply intrusive surveillance authority on a presidential campaign and manipulated an election in cahoots with many elements in the media. The only question is should they get away one more time and if the answer is yes, what will they do next? If we claim we are a constitutional republic then at what level of egregiousness does the hammer come down? And more broadly why should the citizenry follow the law when law enforcement routinely distorts it?

[English Outsider]

TTG - from the American end I'd imagine the "salacious material" was only a small part of it all. But it was the part that registered most with the public then. In today's world, where what can be got to register with the public is often what matters, it was I believe a significant part. If Mr Johnson does not object to me taking up yet more space on this thread, might I explain why?

I don't at all believe that "Golden Showers" story but even were it true it'd make no odds.

Ignore the FBI and other activity before the election.  As far as I know none of that was known to the public at the time.  Look at what happened after the election and imagine the position had been reversed.  Imagine a CIA operative surfacing in London putting out such stories publicly just after our new Prime Minister had been elected.

The US diplomats would have immediately disavowed him.  All know "ex" doesn't mean a lot when it comes to CIA operatives and the US government would not have wanted to be associated with such a damaging attack on a new British Prime Minister.

They'd certainly have been associated with that attack if they had not only failed to disavow.  Imagine they had given the CIA operative a safe house and that later it had come out that that CIA operative had retained close links with the CIA.  If it also came out that the operative had consulted with an ex-CIA Director before he released the story.  And if the US media had continued to insist on the veracity of the story, again without any disavowal from the US government.

That could only be seen as a direct attack, supported by the US government, against the new UK administration.

Of course the position was reversed.  I remember how odd it seemed at the time, that Steele had put such material out and that no attempt was made at the London end to minimise the damage.  It's one thing helping with some bad publicity against a Presidential candidate who was in any case unlikely to be elected.  Quite a different matter continuing with the attack once he'd become President.

There was all the talk about foreign influence on that US election.  Russian or Israeli, if I remember correctly.  But no mention that it was an ex-MI6 operative who attempted to damage Trump before the election and who, with no check from his ex-employer, continued with that attempt long after.

That failure on the part of HMG to disavow Steele was the smoking gun at the start of the publicly known beginning of the Steele affair and it has remained the smoking gun since.  There will be no Horowitz put in at the UK end to meticulously assemble the facts behind what happened, but the publicly known facts speak for themselves.  HMG allowed and to an extent supported an attack on an elected US President.

Just HMG, or was there some conscious help at the American end?  Presumably that's what Mr Durham will be looking into next.

.

Scottish independence? Best of luck to them, if they go for it. As an Englishman, and for sentimental reasons, I'd rather we stayed together. Whatever they do Mrs Sturgeon can expect a most disapproving letter from me if there's a tariff on Single Malts.

[Factotum]

Who was the secretive Special Agent A unnamed in the Horowitz report as the human train wreck of errors within the FBI?

Speculation abounds: "FBI Agent Joseph Pientka was never interviewed by the joint House judiciary and oversight committees (Goodlatte and Gowdy). The reason, as explained by Meadows, was simple; Pientka was on Weissmann and Mueller’s special counsel team. Congress was not allowed to interfere in the Mueller probe. In hindsight this looks like Weissmann, Mueller & Rosenstein strategically using the investigation as a shield from sunlight." (ConTreeHouse)

[blue peacock]

Was it consensual unprotected? That was taking a huge risk on both sides as Hunter Biden is finding out with his baby mama in Arkansas.

[blue peacock]

Col. Lang

Do you think Barr will explore what Obama knew and when? He seems to me to be a card carrying member of the Swamp.

[blue peacock]

TTG

Do you think, even if it is par for the course, that it is all good for the DOJ & FBI to play fast and loose with evidence and character assassination through their media buddies and even frame innocent Americans?

[blue peacock]

"And more broadly why should the citizenry follow the law when law enforcement routinely distorts it?"

Good question, Jack.

I suppose they have the ability to inflict state sanctioned violence. Lock you up. Make you go broke. Harass you and your friends and family. And have the media paint you as a villain. Make you lose your employment prospects.

The reality is we live in an uneven system. One set of rules for law enforcement and all the big shots at the apex. Another set of rules for us schmucks.

[Fred]

TTG,

And how would that ever be found out as no comparison to GRU command and control servers have been made, other than "according to figures in the lawsuit against the Russia.." - as reported by the Daily Beast on July 16th 2018. Even Are Technica reports from July 2018 don't make that claim.

[The Twisted Genius]

Fred, I don’t think the indictment of the GRU 12 makes any mention of CrowdStrike’s work with the DNC beyond a brief mention of “Company 1’s” effort to mitigate the intrusion. With what the NSA gathered, there was no need to rely on CrowdStrike’s images or to mention any congruities/incongruities between NSA and CrowdStrike captured data.

As an example, the NSA (or some other government agency) monitored GRU activities on a leased server in Arizona configured as their attack point called the AMS panel communicating with the DCCC network in April and May 2016. On 19 April they monitored the GRU configuring another overseas server to serve as a relay between the DNC network and the AMS panel. This the GRU called the middle server. The next day the GRU hackers directed the X-Agent malware on the DCCC network to connect with this middle server rather than directly to the AMS panel. On 22 April the NSA observed the GRU compress gigabytes of data on the DCCC network and then move that data to another leased server in Illinois.

The indictment is full of those kinds of details. Those details are the result of real time monitoring and imaging of those GRU controlled servers. I could damn near guarantee that an FBI or DOJ techie would catch any incongruity between what the NSA captured on the GRU controlled servers with CrowdStrike’s images of the DNC/DCCC servers. I can also damned near guarantee that the techies would have done such a comparison. I’ve seen them do so whenever the attack server data is captured which is not always the case. Often the attack server is never identified. Perhaps a normal FBI agent or DOJ lawyer would miss it, but a techie, no way. I’ve seen them catch the smallest incongruities in mountains of data.

[The Twisted Genius]

Blue peacock, I'm with Horowitz on the FBI's sloppiness and overzealous diddling of evidence. He's investigating other FISA applications to see just how deep these problems are. He recommends legislative corrective action to the abuse of LE investigative powers. He even identified potentials for abuse in current legislation and DOJ regulations that should be addressed. Good. Do it.

[Factotum]

You follow the law for your own benefit; regardless.

[English Outsider]

Note - TTG - that's very much the bare bones of how it appeared to us in the general public when the Steele affair first became public. As said, there's not going to be a UK Horowitz examining what happened in the background at the UK end. However, while your were engaged in the house renovation David Habakkuk has been looking closely at that background. His conclusions, and the information on which he bases his conclusions, aren't all in one place but the pre-penultimate comment here -

https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/12/benchmarks-to-look-for-in-the-horowitz-report-on-fisa-by-larry-c-johnson.html#comment-6a00d8341c72e153ef0240a4f3cd5a200b

- shows that there were a lot of moving parts that we in the UK public weren't aware of and aren't aware of now.

Again, this is very much your field and not mine at all, but the whole together does suggest hat Steele was not a lone rogue operative but was part of a somewhat wider UK effort.

[Factotum]

St Comey, now in deep rehab states on Sunday news circuit: I was wrong. Carter Page was right.

[Factotum]

Redstate weighs in:

.... "So, if you want to understand how a Third World kleptocracy with the GDP of New York State ran circles around the United States during the Obama administration, you now have your answer.

The CIA employs highly partisan idiots, lots of them, and apparently has an extraordinarily effective affirmative action program for them to ensure they get promoted to positions of responsibility....."

[turcopolier]

factotum

"I was let down and betrayed by my subordinates."

[Factotum]

Back to Samatha Powers "hundreds" of last minute Obama administration FISA unmasking requests. So far this loose end has not been mentioned, let along tied up in any of the current FISA abuse reports.

Could Samantha Powers, or an Obama agent using her name, have been applying one of Barry Soetoro's favorite tactics? Cloward-Pivens: overwhlem the system with so many legal requests that it breaks down and cannot function with any degree of diligence?

Swamp FISA with court unrelated requests so it does not pay careful attention to the one FISA request you really want. The timing of the FISA court Carter Page requests and the "hundreds" of Samantha Power's FISA court requests may be interesting to track.

Why am I still smelling Ben Rhodes fingerprints somewhere in this ongoing Obama scandal saga?

[Factotum]

Collectively, how much were US taxpayers spending on these "subordinates" who betrayed their country; yet willingly picked up their US taxpayer funded paychecks year after year.

We need the equivalent of 'Transparent California" - a seachable data base for all government employees in the state of California, breaking down their full compensation packages. It has been a blinding dose of cruel sunshine for California tax payers. And exposes why the deep state has such a vested interest in its own perpetuity. Cash, lots and lots of cash.

[David Habakkuk]

‘English Outsider’ and all,

In – somewhat belated – response to the responses to earlier comments of mine by ‘EO’, ‘BP’, ‘Elmo Zoneball.’

As far as I can judge at the moment, the Horowitz report shows every sign of being a classic ‘limited hangout’, which will greatly assist the efforts of a group of seditious conspirators to portray themselves as not much worse than panic-stricken bunglers.

Unfortunately, people seem to be falling for this, in droves.

The basic truth of the situation was well set out by Devin Nunes back in July, when he commented:

“These are all a bunch of dirty cops and I’ll tell you, some of them better go to jail, or we’re going to go down in a spiral in this country because you will not have a Republican that will trust the FBI or the Department of Justice for generations to come.”

(https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/07/14/nunes_without_jail_for_dirty_cops_people_wont_trust_doj_or_fbi_for_generations.html .)

As has become progressively clearer, however, we have all along been dealing not just with ‘dirty cops’, but with equally grimy people from the intelligence and foreign affairs bureaucracies, on both sides of the Atlantic, and – crucially – journalists whose preponderant concern is to keep in with their – supposed – ‘reliable sources.’

In this situation, a government investigation could only be credible, if it proceeded on the basis that ‘evidence’ from FBI people about what the supposed ‘Primary Sub-Source’ of the memoranda published by ‘BuzzFeed’ told them, and what the supposed conduit for the material himself claimed, needed alike to be treated with scepticism.

This is all the more so, given that Christopher Steele’s response to the report specifically disputes the account supposed to have been given by the ‘Primary Sub-Source’ to the FBI, in addition claiming that ‘Orbis was not given an opportunity to respond to those materials’, and that his, or her, ‘debriefings by Orbis were meticulously documented and recorded.’

(See https://hannity.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Steele-Statement.pdf .)

What justification can Horowitz give, other than nationalistic prejudice, for believing one set of liars rather than another, when common sense suggests he should at least have contemplated the possibility that the one point on which they agree – that the ‘Primary Sub-Source’ actually existed – is simply a part of the original concatenation of lies neither can afford to disavow?

One comes back, here, to a number of issues which were raised by the ‘Nunes memo’ back in February 2018 – among other things, by its description of Steele as a ‘longtime FBI source’.

On these, I commented in a SST post shortly afterwards, which was entitled ‘Habakkuk on “longtime” sources: Steele, Shvets, Levinson, Litvinenko and the “Billion Dollar Don.”’

(See https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2018/02/habakkuk-on-longtime-sources.html .)

This, and the exchanges of comments it provoked, need to be read in conjunction with my January 2016 response here to Sir Robert Owen’s cover-up of Steele’s cover-up relating to how the late Alexander Litvinenko died and lived, which was entitled ‘David Habakkuk on Sir Robert Owens’ Inquiry.’ (At the time, of course, the ‘Wizard’ was still hidden behind the ‘curtain.’)

(See https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2016/01/david-hakkuk-on-sir-robert-owens-inquiry.html .)

As it happens, I have two apologies to make.

My discussions, I think, demonstrate two things which are rather relevant to assessing the claims, and counter-claims, about the ‘Principal Sub-Source’ and many other matters.

It is clear that corrupting judicial investigations, fabricating evidence, and turning journalists into ‘stenographers’ for what the Soviets called the ‘organs’ is part of Steele’s ‘modus operandi’.

It is, however, equally clear that he has done this, all along, in close collaboration with people from your side of the Atlantic.

Accordingly, I should have been more alert to the sheer scale of the mendacity of these people.

For instance, rereading the ‘302s’ that Bruce Ohr dictated to Joseph Pientka, against the background of what we now know about those which the latter and Peter Strzok produced following their interview with Lieutenant-General Flynn, including the swapping of notes by the pair, I see I should have grasped that a ‘dual strategy’ was being pursued.

(See https://themarketswork.com/2018/08/18/the-bruce-ohr-302s/ .)

So, on the one hand, Pientka and Strzok, clearly in conjunction with many others, were ‘doubling down’ on the conspiracy against Trump, by using ever more discreditable methods to ‘frame’ Flynn – who seems increasingly to have provided an awful warning about the dangers of assuming that any of these people have an ounce left of honour or integrity (if they ever had any.)

At the same time, however, Pientka and Ohr were colluding in leaving an ‘evidence trail’, to support what was increasingly emerging as the ‘insurance policy’ on both sides of the Atlantic: if the conspiracy came unstuck, make Steele the ‘patsy.’

And then, take the following paragraph in the Nunes memo:

‘Steele was suspended and then terminated as an FBI source for what the FBI defines as the most serious of violations – an unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI in an October 30, 2016, Mother Jones article by David Corn. Steele should have been terminated for his previous undisclosed contacts with Yahoo and other outlets in September – before the Page application was submitted to the FISC in October – but Steele improperly concealed from and lied to the FBI about those contacts.’

Again, it now looks as though many of us simply did not grasp the depth of deliquency with which we were dealing.

One part of Steele’s response which I think may actually be true is his assertion that ‘The FBI Never asked Steele Not to Disclose Information to the Media.’

Where it gets really interesting however is that, in supporting his assertion, he denies that he had ever been a ‘Confidential Human Source’ for the FBI.

According to his account, in 2013 ‘the FBI decided that it wanted to engage Christopher Steele to conduct investigations on its behalf.’ And this, his lawyers tell us, was at a time when ‘the FBI at that time had no history of contracting out work to private investigatory firms.’

As a result of this, supposedly, while Orbis successfully insisted that the only possible relationship was contractual, ‘FBI agents, for internal FBI purposes, decided to call Christopher Steele a CHS.’

So, it looks as though the account we were fed may have been simply another part of the ‘insurance policy’, designed to disguise the extent to which those who disseminated it were co-conspirators, in the dissemination of the ‘dossier’ material and almost certainly its production.

If meanwhile anyone thinks that the – apparently unprecedented – engagement of Steele in 2013 was really simply because the FBI had been impressed by what they had seen of his reports, there is a very fine bridge near me in Hammersmith I am quite prepared to sell you, for a reasonable fee (without of course letting you know it has been found unsuitable for traffic.)

More material than I was aware of when I wrote my response to the Nunes memo has since appeared on the background – which brings me to my second apology.

I had simply taken it for granted that Steele and his confederates had been totally successful in corrupting the investigation of Litvinenko’s death by Counter Terrorism Command (SO15.)

The close involvement of senior members of that organisation with figures involved in the conspiracy on your side does appear to have been made even more apparent with the publication by Heidi Blake of a book-length version of the ‘investigation’ she and her ‘BuzzFeed’ colleagues published in June 2017 under the title ‘From Russia With Blood.’

This deals with fourteen murders in London, where, supposedly, U.S. intelligence people knew that the Russian security services were ‘prime suspects’, but which the British would not investigate properly because they wanted to suck up to Putin (LOL.)

(For an extract, see https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/heidiblake/putin-global-assassination-campaign-berezovsky-london .)

As it happens, however, my cynicism about SO15 caused me to miss the masterly way in which some of its members cleverly subverted the Litvinenko cover-up.

One of the major problems Steele and his confederates faced in organising this resulted from the fact that the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in Grosvenor Square was only fixed on as the ‘scene of the crime’ after it became impossible to disguise the scale of the polonium contamination there.

This was a full fortnight after Litvinenko’s death, and more than five weeks after – supposedly – he realised that Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun had tried to kill him there.

The change made it necessary to insist that Litvinenko had not visited the offices of his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky, and left contamination on the photocopier there, until after the Pine Bar meeting.

If you go the archived inquiry website, and open the report, you can find the timeline which seems to support this on pages 279-80.

(See https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090320/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/">https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090320/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/ .)

If, however, you cross over to the ‘Evidence’ page, and put ‘INQ018243’ into the ‘Find’ facility on your browser, you can open the ‘Maps showing movements of Alexander Litvinenko on 1 November 2006.’

One of the first things I noticed, when I belatedly did this, was that while it certainly has Litvinenko using the photocopier in Berezovsky’s at 5.00 pm, on the strength of a statement by one of Berezovsky’s cronies, it also includes an earlier visit, timed at 1.40pm, on the strength of a statement by a security guard at the offices, Stephen Brown.

It seems absolutely clear that Steele and Owen’s team, and also Berezovsky and his cronies, colluded in suppressing this critical evidence.

Looking further at the maps, however, it is clear that enormous wit and ingenuity has been deployed in what is sometimes called ‘esoteric writing’ – where one pretends to conform to what one is supposed to believe, but actually makes covertly clear that it is false. I take my hat off to the detectives who constructed it.

Among other things, some of the oblique clues they included strongly reinforce my long-standing suspicion: that another key thing which Steele and his confederates had to cover up was that on the morning of the day he was supposedly poisoned, Litvinenko was given a lift in Akhmed Zakayev’s Mercedes to Berezovsky’s office.

Read against this background, the lies which Ms. Blake is busily disseminating actually point to a key truth: that key roots of ‘Russiagate’ go back to the ‘devil’s pact’ which key figures in London, and Washington, made those who became the ‘semibankirshchina’ of the Russian ‘Nineties.

This led to false claims about murders, which in the end led to real murders. And generally – as in Berezovsky’s own case – the ‘prime suspects’ are emphatically not the Russian security services and Vladimir Putin.

[blue peacock]

David

We can certain that there will be a whitewash. Not much different than your Iraq WMD investigation that exonerated Blair and his cronies.

Bill Barr has been a long term Swamp player. He and Durham will do what Comey did with Hillary - extreme carelessness that does not rise to the level of criminality. And follow up with burying everything which the equally complicit media will be happy to do as they are in it to their eyeballs.

It is fascinating when you read the comments on the pro-Trump site, Conservative Treehouse, which has been at the forefront of investigating the Russia Collusion hoax and done a phenomenal job. The excuses that are made for Trump not taking the one action he could, which is to declassify all the documents & communications. Devin Nunes who has been vindicated, begged Trump to declassify the FISA applications and other communications. That would have put to rest 2 years ago that the FISA was based on the Steele dossier. Trump did not. All he did was tweet - "witch hunt" incessantly.

It should be obvious to even the most die-hard Trump supporter, that Trump could have opened this wide open by a single action, completely in his sole authority, which is to declassify. He did not. Why?

[prawnik]

"If it does not bother you to learn that the FBI repeatedly and deliberately deceived the FISA court into granting it permission to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign, then it is virtually certain that you are either someone with no principles, someone who cares only about partisan advantage and nothing about basic civil liberties and the rule of law, or both. There is simply no way for anyone of good faith to read this IG Report and reach any conclusion other than that this is yet another instance of the FBI abusing its power in severe ways to subvert and undermine U.S. democracy. If you don’t care about that, what do you care about?

But the revelations of the IG Report are not merely a massive FBI scandal. They are also a massive media scandal, because they reveal that so much of what the U.S. media has authoritatively claimed about all of these matters for more than two years is completely false."

https://theintercept.com/2019/12/12/the-inspector-generals-report-on-2016-fb-i-spying-reveals-a-scandal-of-historic-magnitude-not-only-for-the-fbi-but-also-the-u-s-media/?fbclid=IwAR1I64d2cUM6hu5axIppCeWcHG5mwITc7pk4ke3OWKouoPGyZH2KuPIzkXo

Note that Glenn Greenwald is not exactly a Team R cheerleader or Trump cultist.

[Factotum]

"They" are going after Nunes now.

Big news story this morning speculating about who is funding Nunes string of defensive law suits trying to protect his reputation - article claims it must be from laundered funds, illegal reporting campaign contributions, misused funds, etc, ete and debunking the possibility his recent spate of defensive lawsuits were taken for free on contingency.

A total media hit piece against Nunes in the press today. "They" do not sleep. Except with the devils.

[Factotum]

Pientka is speculated to be the prime unnamed bungler or inside agent. When will he get exposed by name? Why is his name referred to only by code right now.

[CG]

Oh, well:

Rain was spreading like a fresh bruise across the London sky as the unmarked car rolled up Whitehall toward Big Ben. The Scotland Yard protection officer scanned the road with a well-trained eye, clocking potential hazards as the car passed the spiked iron gates of Downing Street, and swung right on Parliament Square. ...

how comes investigative reporting sounds so much like fiction nowadays?

[Jack]

Well, Larry, the honey badger got taken by Judge Sullivan.

[English Outsider]

Mr Habakkuk - "As far as I can judge at the moment, the Horowitz report shows every sign of being a classic ‘limited hangout’, which will greatly assist the efforts of a group of seditious conspirators to portray themselves as not much worse than panic-stricken bunglers."

I see what you mean.  A "limited hangout" is required because there's a danger that in lifting one corner of the conspiracy they lift all.  Get to the bottom of the Steele affair and the general public will start looking more sceptically at Litvinenko, Skripal - then possibly on to any number of events where we've most of us in the general public bought the official line and most of us in the general public are still happy with that official line.

Can't be allowed to happen.  And won't.  On the other hand there are some  powerful American politicians who are indignant at the conspiracy to damage Trump and who need to see the fact that there was a conspiracy publicly and indisputably acknowledged by a court or by an official investigator.

So the problem they have is how to lift one corner to vindicate Trump without having to lift many others and thus allowing other scandals coming to light.  We might be seeing this attempted limitation of the investigation in Senator Sasse's suggestion -  "Maybe I’m wrong, but I think the collusion was between the DNC and the FBI..."  (28.58 of that part of the (as yet incomplete) transcript) -

https://www.rev.com/blog/inspector-general-report-hearing-transcript-michael-horowitz-testifies-on-fbis-findings

That would meet the need for an exposure of what happened at the American end without needing to go further.  Or perhaps the even more limited possible scenario that Mr Johnson sets out above - "that will expose the FBI, at a minimum, as unwitting dupes out-smarted by duplicitous intelligence operatives."

That can easily become, as reported by the BBC (above) -

"Democrats said the report undercuts Mr Trump's repeated claims that he was the victim of a "witch hunt".

"It was never a witch hunt, Democratic Senator Mark Warner said on Twitter.  "It was the men and women of federal law enforcement doing their jobs.""

That is the "limited hangout" that you fear, and with your encyclopaedic knowledge of all the moving parts and how they relate to each other you can see how that could occur.  But it does seem to me, at the other end of that scale of knowledge admittedly, that the Horowitz report, as expanded at the hearing, could also open the way for a more comprehensive account of the conspiracy.