Originally published Feb 5, 2018

After 19 months of continual investigation in which the FBI/DOJ have bent and likely broken the law with abandon, not a shred of evidence has emerged validating the central proposition that Trump associates either assisted or promised to reward interference by the Russian government favoring Trump in the last election. For those who have made the effort to carefully examine the facts at hand, this should not be the least bit surprising, as there is no credible public evidence that Russia did interfere in this regard — and there is HARD evidence — which the MSM studiously ignores — that the Deep State purveyors of this hoax (that’s right, it wasn’t just an innocent mistake or paranoid fantasy, it was a consciously constructed HOAX) are DEAD WRONG on key aspects of their “assessments”.

So it should be truly fascinating to dissect the ways that FBI/DOJ investigators have justified and conducted their 19-month journey to nowhere — while our MSM breathlessly reported each twist and turn with unceasing gullibility.

The recent House FISA memo states what has long been suspected — the Christopher Steele “Dossier” was the central basis of the FISA application that was filed to enable spying on Trump campaign associate Carter Page. As corroborating evidence, the application included a Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff based on tips provided by — Christopher Steele; the FISA application did not explain that the dossier and the Isikoff “corroborating” article stemmed from the same dubious source. And it hardly seems likely that the application fully clarified that the dossier had been funded by the Clinton campaign, and at the time had received only the most minimal vetting for accuracy by the FBI. (We know of course that Comey himself subsequently testified to Congress that the dossier was “unverified and salacious”.)

Nonetheless, the FISA judge in the Carter Page case had reason to believe that the reporting in the Steele dossier and the Isikoff article was largely true, since the FBI operates under a mandate known as the Woods Procedures which requires rigorous vetting of facts presented in FISA applications. As recently noted by Sheryl Attkisson:

“Woods Procedures were named for Michael Woods, the FBI official who drafted the rules as head of the Office of General Counsel’s National Security Law Unit. They were instituted in April 2001 to “ensure accuracy with regard to … the facts supporting probable cause” after recurring instances, presumably inadvertent, in which the FBI had presented inaccurate information to the FISA court.”

The FBI’s complex, multi-layered review is designed for the very purpose of preventing unverified information from ever reaching the court. It starts with the FBI field offices.

According to former FBI agent Asha Rangappa, who wrote of the process last year in JustSecurity.org, the completed FISA application requires approval through the FBI chain of command “including a Supervisor, the Chief Division Counsel (the highest lawyer within that FBI field office), and finally, the Special Agent in Charge of the field office, before making its way to FBI Headquarters to get approval by (at least) the Unit-level Supervisor there.”

At FBI headquarters, an “action memorandum” is prepared with additional facts culled by analytical personnel assigned to espionage allegations involving certain foreign powers.

Next, it goes to the Justice Department “where attorneys from the National Security Division comb through the application to verify all the assertions made in it,” wrote Rangappa. “DOJ verifies the accuracy of every fact stated in the application. If anything looks unsubstantiated, the application is sent back to the FBI to provide additional evidentiary support — this game of bureaucratic chutes and ladders continues until DOJ is satisfied that the facts in the FISA application can both be corroborated and meet the legal standards for the court. After getting sign-off from a senior DOJ official (finally!).”

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/372233-nunes-memo-raises-question-d...

Now for a show of hands — how many of you think that the Woods Procedures were employed to validate the FISA application targeting Carter Page? And — for those whose hands are still down — how many of you think that the flouting of these procedures was just an innocent oversight?

The Democrats on the House committee, after voting unanimously to block the release of the Republican-drafted House FISA memo to the full House and then to the public, and fraudulently claiming that the release of said memo would reveal secret FBI sources and methods, are now reciting in unison that the House memo was “cherry-picked”, and that their own counter-memo will validate this. Let’s hope that, after redactions that are deemed appropriate, we can soon hear the Democrats’ side of the story. They dispute the central assertion of the House memo that Andrew McCabe had testified in closed committee sessions that no FISA warrant would have been granted if the Steele dossier had not been included in the application. Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee are standing by their assertion, and note that McCabe’s testimony was recorded and can thus be objectively verified. Let’s see where this goes.

One can assume that the Democrats’ memo will stress the fact that the FISA application included additional evidence not detailed in the Republican memo. We do know that, according to the FBI, Russian spies attempted to recruit Page as an info source following a Page visit to Russia in 2013. However, the fact that no indictment was forthcoming suggests that Page did not rise to the bait. And the fact that Page is still walking around free and unindicted suggests that, whatever this additional evidence is, it must be of little substance.

The Democrats will note the fact that the Page FISA application included info on George Papadopoulos, a low-level but self-important Trump campaign aide. As we know, the story here is: An Aussie diplomat claims that a drunken Papadopoulos told him that a Maltese professor in London told him that he had heard that the Russian government had some Hillary Clinton emails (a speculation which a number of former US intelligence officials had floated themselves, in light of the ready hackability of Hillary’s private server). Even if the Russians do have Hillary’s emails, how would this in any way incriminate Papadopoulos in a plot to hack Hillary? Of course, the MSM have tried to pump this story up by falsely conflating the Hillary emails that the Maltese professor was referring to with the DNC and Podesta emails subsequently released by Wikileaks. Nonetheless, even under this (mis)interpretation, where is the culpability of Papadopoulos here? Do tempests in a teapot get any more inane than this? And what is the possible relevance of this to Carter Page?

(The real significance of what is known about Papadopoulos’ role in the Trump campaign is that he made repeated efforts to put Trump higher-ups in contact with Russian officials during the campaign — and those higher-ups repeatedly and wisely spurned these suggestions. This can be construed as evidence that the Trump campaign had no intention of “colluding” with the Russian government on electoral matters.)

The Democrats will also likely state that the FISA judge was given some nebulous hint that some of Steele’s work was funded by political interests. But the Republicans maintain that the role of the DNC and Hillary’s campaign in funding Steele was not explicitly laid out in the application, even though top FBI/DOJ officials were aware of this fact.

However, even if the application were weighted down with compelling evidence that Page was a Russian spy, and had explicitly noted the role of the Clinton campaign in the provenance of the Steele dossier, this would not alter the fact that, by prominent inclusion of the unvetted dossier and Isikoff article in the application, FBI/DOJ officials had overtly violated the Woods Procedures and thereby in effect defrauded the FISA court — which is a felony. All who signed off on this application, and/or the subsequent applications to renew the FISA warrant on Page, may face indictment — and that includes Comey, McCabe, Yates, and Rosenstein. Perhaps some of those signing off on the renewals just assumed that the original application had been properly vetted, and hence have somewhat lesser culpability — but nonetheless, their endorsement was improper.

It will be interesting to learn what use was made of the FISA warrant against Page in the subsequent investigation of Trump associates. When people are surveilled under such a warrant, the people whom they contact are subject to surveillance as well — which means that multiple members of the Trump campaign may have been caught up in a web of illicitly justified snooping. Did info obtained from such snooping contribute to the investigations of Trump associates who were subsequently indicted or plead guilty during the Mueller probe (for perjury during interviews that amounted to entrapment, or for money laundering crimes unrelated to Russia or the Trump campaign)? Could these cases now be imperiled by the “fruit of the poisoned tree” mandate? Is that why Mueller recently postponed a sentencing hearing for Gen. Flynn?

Moreover, there is reason to suspect that the flim-flam involved in the Page FISA application was only a small part of the legally dubious measures which the Obama administration employed in a desperate effort to dig up dirt on Trump and his associates prior to and after the election. Indeed, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee are telling reporters that they are planning to release much further pertinent evidence in this regard. If will be of particular interest to learn what role British intelligence (GCHQ) played in surveillance of Trump associates.

Reports that appeared in the NYT and Guardian early last year indicated that GCHQ agents, since 2015, had been monitoring contacts between Trump associates and “likely or known Russian intelligence agents”. In subsequent congressional testimony, Comey threw cold water on these assertions, noting that the Russians in question in fact were not intelligence agents.

But, according to some media reports, anonymous sources within our intelligence community have revealed that the Obama administration throughout 2016 had employed the GCHQ as a back-door source for warrantless spying on Trump associates. Whereas it was illegal for the Obama administration to spy on these individuals directly without a warrant, there was nothing illegal about GCHQ doing so. The GCHQ has agents operating out of NSA headquarters in Ft. Meade, and they have full access to the omnivorous worldwide surveillance being conducted by the NSA. In effect, GCHQ agents could monitor Trump associates, and then pass their findings across the table to their American counterparts. Did this in fact happen? We need to find out.

A remarkable article appearing in True Pundit in September of last year, allegedly based on inside sources in US intelligence, makes the following assertions casting a most interesting light on the very strange meeting between Trump Jr. and Russian attorney Veselnitskaya:

Here is what we now know, per intelligence gleaned from federal law enforcement sources with insider knowledge of what amounts to a plot by U.S. intelligence agencies to secure back door and illegal wiretaps of President Trump’s associates:

· Six U.S. agencies created a stealth task force, spearhead by CIA’s Brennan, to run domestic surveillance on Trump associates and possibly Trump himself.

· To feign ignorance and to seemingly operate within U.S. laws, the agencies freelanced the wiretapping of Trump associates to the British spy agency GCHQ.

· The decision to insert GCHQ as a back door to eavesdrop was sparked by the denial of two FISA Court warrant applications filed by the FBI to seek wiretaps of Trump associates.

· GCHQ did not work from London or the UK. In fact the spy agency worked from NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, MD with direct NSA supervision and guidance to conduct sweeping surveillance on Trump associates.

· The illegal wiretaps were initiated months before the controversial Trump dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.

· The Justice Department and FBI set up the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner with controversial Russian officials to make Trump’s associates appear compromised.

· Following the Trump Tower sit down, GCHQ began digitally wiretapping Manafort, Trump Jr., and Kushner.

· After the concocted meeting by the Deep State, the British spy agency could officially justify wiretapping Trump associates as an intelligence front for NSA because the Russian lawyer at the meeting Natalia Veselnitskaya was considered an international security risk and prior to the June sit down was not even allowed entry into the United States or the UK, federal sources said.

· By using GCHQ, the NSA and its intelligence partners had carved out a loophole to wiretap Trump without a warrant. While it is illegal for U.S. agencies to monitor phones and emails of U.S. citizens inside the United States absent a warrant, it is not illegal for British intelligence to do so. Even if the GCHQ was tapping Trump on U.S. soil at Fort Meade.

· The wiretaps, secured through illicit scheming, have been used by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 election, even though the evidence is considered “poisoned fruit.”

Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who spearheaded the Trump Tower meeting with the Trump campaign trio, was previously barred from entering the United Sates due to her alleged connections to the Russian FSB (the modern replacement of the cold-war-era KGB).

Yet mere days before the June meeting, Veselnitskaya was granted a rare visa to enter the United States from Preet Bharara, the then U.S. Attorney for the southern district of New York. Bharara could not be reached for comment and did not respond the a Twitter inquiry on the Russian’s visa by True Pundit.

https://truepundit.com/exclusive-six-u-s-agencies-conspired-to-illegally...

Whether any or all of this — based on anonymous “inside sources” — is actually true, remains to be verified. The reason why I find this account so compelling is that it suddenly make perfect sense of the bizarre Trump Jr-Veselnitskaya affair. Why did Rob Goldstone — a Fusion GPS associate — lure Trump Jr. to a meeting with a Russian “person of interest” with a bogus promise of dirt on Hillary? Why did the DOJ grant a special rare visa to Veselnitskaya just days before her planned meeting with Trump Jr.? Everything falls into place if the True Pundit account is true- the meeting was a set-up by the DOJ to give GCHQ a legal excuse to surveil the Trump associates attending that meeting; the proceeds of that spying could then be “passed across the table” to US intelligence.

I can’t claim to have Nostradamus-like insight into what actually transpired in these matters- all I can do is plead that the truth be allowed to come out, so that the American people can see what our public servants in the FBI/DOJ have been doing in our name.

What is clear is that, inasmuch as it is impossible to collude in non-existent interference, the entire evidentiary basis of the 19-month investigation of such “collusion” is corrupt at its core. The American people deserve to know how this investigation has been fomented and conducted.

As to the claim that Mueller is investigating Russian interference in our election, that contention is rendered laughable by one simple fact: Mueller has never attempted to interview Julian Assange. Caitlin Johnstone and others have highlighted this point, and they are entirely correct.

Here’s my take on the entire situation: The Obama DOJ and FBI decided that they would not enforce the actual meaning of the Espionage Act, allowing Hillary and her associates to skate after top-secret info was passed through her private server, quite possibly imperiling the lives of US intelligence assets. Once the DOJ had made it clear to the FBI that Hillary would only be indicted if she had intentionally passed secrets to foreign rivals, it is not the least bit peculiar that Comey drafted a memo of exoneration weeks or months before Hillary and her associates were interviewed; not even Hillary’s most fervent critics suspected that she was functioning as a spy. Of course, everyone with at least half a brain suspects that the motivation of Hillary’s private server (remember when Comey comically told Congress that he thought her motive was “convenience”?) was to conceal evidence of pay-for-play — that donors to the Clinton Foundation were given special access to, and likely in some instances, favorable rulings from, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Three FBI field offices had commenced investigations into pay-for-play allegations; Andrew McCarthy has detailed how the DOJ and Andrew McCabe effectively eviscerated these ongoing investigations by denying them the most basic tools required for their success- including access to the Hillary emails then in possession of the FBI. And when 33 thousand “private” Hillary emails were bleach-bitted out of existence while under subpoena — emails which almost surely contained evidence pertinent to a pay-for-play investigation — the DOJ/FBI just chose to look the other way. Nor should we omit the fact that grants of immunity were handed out like candy — even though no indictments were forthcoming.

After the DOJ/FBI had committed obstruction of justice on Hillary’s behalf to clear her path to the Presidency, they immediately commenced the unwarranted (literally and figuratively!) investigation of the Trump campaign for “Russian collusion” that we have been discussing here. An essential concomitant to this investigation was the claim that operatives acting on behalf of the Russian government, in an effort to tank Hillary’s campaign, had hacked the DNC and Podesta servers and provided their booty to Wikileaks for subsequent public release. This narrative began with the DNC hire Crowdstrike and the shadowy Guccifer 2.0 persona, whom cyberanalysts have concluded was a DNC affiliate posing as a Russian hacker. The claim by our intelligence agencies (or rather the couple of dozen agents handpicked by the Russophobes Brennan and Clapper) that Guccifer 2.0 is a Russian source for the Wikileaks releases is demonstrably, objectively false — which is why our sycophantic MSM have studiously ignored this story. They also have failed to note that whoever concocted Guccifer 2.0 would have had a clear motive to eliminate Seth Rich; several lines of evidence suggest that this Bernie-backing DNC employee had leaked to Wikileaks the DNC emails which they subsequently released. In particular, Sy Hersh has cited a source inside the FBI (whom Hersh claims to be highly credible) who claims to have seen an FBI analysis of Seth’s computer which confirms that Seth was a Wikileaks source. When will efforts be made to either find this memo, or debunk this claim?

Since the underlying motivation of Deep State interests has been to foment a McCarthyite hatred of all things Russians, so that we will continue to funnel vast resources to our massive military-industrial complex, while many of our genuine needs go unmet — and since Democrats pushing the “Trump’s in bed with Putin” line have motivation to make Russia appear as menacing as possible — the “Russia interfered” narrative has been embellished with one hyped (though rapidly debunked) story after another, the most risible of which is the notion that the Internet Research Agency and Russian bots have swayed American social discourse in a meaningful and nefarious manner. The current iteration of this claim is that Russians have been attempting to “sow discord” and “destroy faith in our democracy”, since the original contention that these efforts had been intended to support Trump’s election could not be sustained by any rational analysis of the evidence. These considerations are now fueling McCarthyite efforts to censor social media in ways that protect the lies and fantasies pushed by the Deep State and their MSM sycophants from the critiques that they deserve.

Meanwhile, in one of the greatest acts of betrayal in American history, our MSM have been pushing the “Russia interfered, Trump colluded in this interference” meme with non-stop hysteria, studiously ignoring all the lines of evidence which debunk it — in a reprise of their role in fomenting our catastrophic and illegal involvement in Iraq. And a high proportion of Americans who haven’t had the time or motivation to dig into the underlying evidence have swallowed this scam whole. Although one “bombshell” revelation after another has fallen flat, people have been overwhelmed by the volume of claims that have been made, to the point that they simply assume that “there must be a there there”. Nonetheless, as I commented prior to our criminal invasion of Iraq, “One hundred times zero is still just zero.”

My favorite TV mini-series is still the great BBC production I Claudius. Claudius delivers an unforgettable line that is ever so apt for our present situation: “Let all of the poisons that lurk in the mud, hatch out!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMKSwcZNpd8

Amen! If congressional investigators and other Americans who have a genuine regard for truth and fair play make an earnest effort in the coming year, we are likely to be treated to a carnival of revelations, many of which will strike to the heart of the recent Deep State corruption. Let the truth come out, and let the chips fall where they may.

I’ll conclude with a comment about the Democratic Party. The election of Trump — whom I and most other credible observers consider to be wholly unprepared for the Commander-in-Chief role, and whose faux populism masks a sell-out to the plutocratic interests typically favored by Republicans — meant that the Democratic Party had been dealt a straight flush for the 2018 elections. Bernie Sanders, although not immune to the Russiagate frenzy, has been doing his best to show the American people just how faux Trump’s faux populism is. Yet by playing the Russiagate card to the hilt, the Democrats will find themselves in the crosshairs in the coming year, as the myths of Russiagate are successively debunked. Trump will be revealed as the innocent victim of a vast plot by the Deep State, the Democrats, and their MSM allies to paint him as a Kremlin stooge — and he won’t be subtle in pointing this out. His intermittent attempts to lash out at his persecutors will be revealed, not as an effort to obstruct justice, but an effort to obstruct injustice. These considerations won’t sway the minority of the public who belong to the hard-core anti-Trump resistance — but they will matter to the plurality of American voters who call themselves Independents. Have the Democrats just flushed their straight flush down the toilet? Stay tuned!