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On January 23 2019 14:39 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2019 12:42 xDaunt wrote:I doubt anyone is really surprised that the Clintons are one of the main parties behind the Trump/Russia collusion nonsense: When at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. That’s what Hillary Clinton’s machine did in 2016, eventually getting the FBI to bite on an uncorroborated narrative that Donald Trump and Russia were trying to hijack the presidential election.
Between July and October 2016, Clinton-connected lawyers, emissaries and apologists made more than a half-dozen overtures to U.S. officials, each tapping a political connection to get suspect evidence into FBI counterintelligence agents’ hands, according to internal documents and testimonies I reviewed and interviews I conducted.
In each situation, the overture was uninvited. And as the election drew closer, the point of contact moved higher up the FBI chain.
It was, as one of my own FBI sources called it, a “classic case of information saturation” designed to inject political opposition research into a counterintelligence machinery that should have suspected a political dirty trick was underway.
Ex-FBI general counsel James Baker, one of the more senior bureau executives to be targeted, gave a memorable answer when congressional investigators asked how attorney Michael Sussmann from the Perkins Coie law firm, which represented the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party, came to personally deliver him dirt on Trump.
“You’d have to ask him why he decided to pick me,” Baker said last year in testimony that has not yet been released publicly. The FBI’s top lawyer turned over a calendar notation to Congress, indicating that he met Sussmann on Sept. 19, 2016, less than two months before Election Day.
Sussmann’s firm paid Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS opposition-research firm to hire British intelligence operative Christopher Steele to create the now-infamous dossier suggesting Trump and Moscow colluded during the 2016 election.
By the time Sussmann reached out, Steele’s dossier already was inside the FBI. Sussmann augmented it with cyber evidence that he claimed showed a further connection between the GOP campaign and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some was put on a thumb drive, according to Baker.
Baker’s detailed account illustrates how a political connection — Sussmann and Baker knew each other — was leveraged to get anti-Trump research to FBI leaders.
“[Sussmann] told me he had cyber experts that had obtained some information that they thought they should get into the hands of the FBI,” Baker testified.
“I referred this to investigators, and I believe they made a record of it,” he testified, adding that he believed he reached out to Peter Strzok, the agent in charge of the Russia case, or William Priestap, the head of FBI counterintelligence.
“Please come get this,” he recalled telling his colleagues. Baker acknowledged it was not the normal way for counterintelligence evidence to enter the FBI.
But when the bureau’s top lawyer makes a request, things happen in the rank-and-file.
The overture was neither the first nor the last instance of Clinton-connected Trump dirt reaching the FBI.
The tsunami began when former MI6 agent Steele first approached an FBI supervisor, his handler in an earlier criminal case, in London. That approach remarkably occurred on July 5, 2016, the same day then-FBI Director James Comey announced he would not pursue criminal charges against Clinton for mishandling classified emails on a private server.
If ever there were a day for the Clinton campaign to want to change the public narrative, it was July 5, 2016.
But the bureau apparently did not initially embrace Steele’s research, and no immediate action was taken, according to congressional investigators who have been briefed.
That’s when the escalation began.
During a trip to Washington later that month, Steele reached out to two political contacts with the credentials to influence the FBI.
Then-senior State Department official Jonathan Winer, who worked for then-Secretary John Kerry, wrote that Steele first approached him in the summer with his Trump research and then met again with him in September. Winer consulted his boss, Assistant Secretary for Eurasia Affairs Victoria Nuland, who said she first learned of Steele’s allegations in late July and urged Winer to send it to the FBI.
(If you need further intrigue, Winer worked from 2008 to 2013 for the lobbying and public relations firm APCO Worldwide, the same firm that was a contractor for both the Clinton Global Initiative and Russia’s main nuclear fuel company that won big decisions from the Obama administration.)
When the State Department office that oversees Russian affairs sends something to the FBI, agents take note.
But Steele was hardly done. He reached out to his longtime Justice Department contact, Bruce Ohr, then a deputy to Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. Steele had breakfast July 30, 2016, with Ohr and his wife, Nellie, to discuss the Russia-Trump dirt.
(To thicken the plot, you should know that Nellie Ohr was a Russia expert working at the time for the same Fusion GPS firm that hired Steele and was hired by the Clinton campaign through Sussmann’s Perkins Coie.)
Bruce Ohr immediately took Steele’s dirt on July 31, 2016, to then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
When the deputy attorney general’s office contacts the FBI, things happen. And, soon, Ohr was connected to the agents running the new Russia probe.
Around the same time, Australia’s ambassador to London, Alexander Downer, reached out to U.S. officials. Like so many characters in this narrative, Downer had his own connection to the Clintons: He secured a $25 million donation from Australia’s government to the Clinton Foundation in the early 2000s.
Downer claims WikiLeaks’s release of hacked Clinton emails that month caused him to remember a conversation in May, in a London tavern, with a Trump adviser named George Papadopoulos. So he reported it to the FBI.
The saturation campaign kept building. Sometime in September, Winer and Nuland got another version of Steele-like research suggesting Trump-Russia collusion, this time from known associates of the Clintons: Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer.
Again, it was sent to the FBI.
Sussmann’s contact with Baker at the FBI occurred that same month.
By mid-September — less than a month before Election Day — there likely was agitation inside the Clinton machine: After so many overtures to the FBI, there was no visible sign of an investigation.
Simpson and Steele began briefing reporters with the hope of getting the word out. It is taboo for an FBI source such as Steele to talk to the media about his work. Yet, he took the risk, eventually getting fired for it, according to FBI documents.
Baker, the FBI’s top lawyer, testified to Congress that he was clearly aware Simpson’s team was shopping the media. “My understanding at the time was that Simpson was going around Washington giving this out to a lot of different people and trying to elevate its profile,” Baker told congressional investigators.
Ohr, through his contacts with Steele and Simpson, also knew the media had been contacted. In handwritten notes from late 2016, Ohr quoted Simpson as saying his outreach to reporters was a “Hail Mary attempt” to sway voters.
The next and final overture came from one of Clinton’s top acolytes in Congress.
Then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, having been briefed by then-CIA Director John Brennan on the Russia allegations, sent a letter to the FBI in late October demanding to know if agents were pursuing the evidence. Before long, the letter leaked.
The political pressure from Team Clinton had come from many directions: State, Congress, Justice, a top Democratic lawyer.
Yet, no one in the FBI seemed to tap the brakes, noticing the obvious: Its counterintelligence apparatus was being weaponized with political opposition research from one campaign against its rival.
Leaking. Politically motivated evidence. Ex parte contacts outside the normal FBI evidence-gathering chain.
None of it seemed to raise a red flag.
That is a troubling legacy. Source. For what it's worth, others sources are starting to report on the same narrative. Baker's testimony about Sussman's overtures is reported on here here and Nunes is now openly talking about Clinton involvement. Tonight, in news that is not surprising in the least. How much of recent reporting due to (1) Clinton’s losing their political power (2) the thought that Trump’s administration might do it to the next one (3) future anti-leak investigations by Barr?
I don't think that (1) or (2) matter. With regards to (2) specifically, Trump doesn't have sufficient control of the FBI and DOJ to pull off what was done to him. (3) may be having a bit of an influence on things. It's been widely reported -- and I agree -- that Mueller disavowed the Buzzfeed story because he knew that Barr would likely fire his ass if he didn't. The more likely explanation for why this stuff is coming now is because Trump wants it to start coming out now. Keep in mind that, as the president, he has all of the relevant information at his fingertips. He knows what happened, and he has absolute control over disclosure. Some congressional or senate committee members may be leaking stuff on their own accord, but I think that it is more likely that they'd coordinate with Trump on this.
|
You guys think the FBI and DOJ are still salvageable?
What would that take?
What happens if/when that redemption doesn't happen?
|
On January 23 2019 15:02 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2019 14:39 Danglars wrote:On January 23 2019 12:42 xDaunt wrote:I doubt anyone is really surprised that the Clintons are one of the main parties behind the Trump/Russia collusion nonsense: When at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. That’s what Hillary Clinton’s machine did in 2016, eventually getting the FBI to bite on an uncorroborated narrative that Donald Trump and Russia were trying to hijack the presidential election.
Between July and October 2016, Clinton-connected lawyers, emissaries and apologists made more than a half-dozen overtures to U.S. officials, each tapping a political connection to get suspect evidence into FBI counterintelligence agents’ hands, according to internal documents and testimonies I reviewed and interviews I conducted.
In each situation, the overture was uninvited. And as the election drew closer, the point of contact moved higher up the FBI chain.
It was, as one of my own FBI sources called it, a “classic case of information saturation” designed to inject political opposition research into a counterintelligence machinery that should have suspected a political dirty trick was underway.
Ex-FBI general counsel James Baker, one of the more senior bureau executives to be targeted, gave a memorable answer when congressional investigators asked how attorney Michael Sussmann from the Perkins Coie law firm, which represented the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party, came to personally deliver him dirt on Trump.
“You’d have to ask him why he decided to pick me,” Baker said last year in testimony that has not yet been released publicly. The FBI’s top lawyer turned over a calendar notation to Congress, indicating that he met Sussmann on Sept. 19, 2016, less than two months before Election Day.
Sussmann’s firm paid Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS opposition-research firm to hire British intelligence operative Christopher Steele to create the now-infamous dossier suggesting Trump and Moscow colluded during the 2016 election.
By the time Sussmann reached out, Steele’s dossier already was inside the FBI. Sussmann augmented it with cyber evidence that he claimed showed a further connection between the GOP campaign and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some was put on a thumb drive, according to Baker.
Baker’s detailed account illustrates how a political connection — Sussmann and Baker knew each other — was leveraged to get anti-Trump research to FBI leaders.
“[Sussmann] told me he had cyber experts that had obtained some information that they thought they should get into the hands of the FBI,” Baker testified.
“I referred this to investigators, and I believe they made a record of it,” he testified, adding that he believed he reached out to Peter Strzok, the agent in charge of the Russia case, or William Priestap, the head of FBI counterintelligence.
“Please come get this,” he recalled telling his colleagues. Baker acknowledged it was not the normal way for counterintelligence evidence to enter the FBI.
But when the bureau’s top lawyer makes a request, things happen in the rank-and-file.
The overture was neither the first nor the last instance of Clinton-connected Trump dirt reaching the FBI.
The tsunami began when former MI6 agent Steele first approached an FBI supervisor, his handler in an earlier criminal case, in London. That approach remarkably occurred on July 5, 2016, the same day then-FBI Director James Comey announced he would not pursue criminal charges against Clinton for mishandling classified emails on a private server.
If ever there were a day for the Clinton campaign to want to change the public narrative, it was July 5, 2016.
But the bureau apparently did not initially embrace Steele’s research, and no immediate action was taken, according to congressional investigators who have been briefed.
That’s when the escalation began.
During a trip to Washington later that month, Steele reached out to two political contacts with the credentials to influence the FBI.
Then-senior State Department official Jonathan Winer, who worked for then-Secretary John Kerry, wrote that Steele first approached him in the summer with his Trump research and then met again with him in September. Winer consulted his boss, Assistant Secretary for Eurasia Affairs Victoria Nuland, who said she first learned of Steele’s allegations in late July and urged Winer to send it to the FBI.
(If you need further intrigue, Winer worked from 2008 to 2013 for the lobbying and public relations firm APCO Worldwide, the same firm that was a contractor for both the Clinton Global Initiative and Russia’s main nuclear fuel company that won big decisions from the Obama administration.)
When the State Department office that oversees Russian affairs sends something to the FBI, agents take note.
But Steele was hardly done. He reached out to his longtime Justice Department contact, Bruce Ohr, then a deputy to Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. Steele had breakfast July 30, 2016, with Ohr and his wife, Nellie, to discuss the Russia-Trump dirt.
(To thicken the plot, you should know that Nellie Ohr was a Russia expert working at the time for the same Fusion GPS firm that hired Steele and was hired by the Clinton campaign through Sussmann’s Perkins Coie.)
Bruce Ohr immediately took Steele’s dirt on July 31, 2016, to then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
When the deputy attorney general’s office contacts the FBI, things happen. And, soon, Ohr was connected to the agents running the new Russia probe.
Around the same time, Australia’s ambassador to London, Alexander Downer, reached out to U.S. officials. Like so many characters in this narrative, Downer had his own connection to the Clintons: He secured a $25 million donation from Australia’s government to the Clinton Foundation in the early 2000s.
Downer claims WikiLeaks’s release of hacked Clinton emails that month caused him to remember a conversation in May, in a London tavern, with a Trump adviser named George Papadopoulos. So he reported it to the FBI.
The saturation campaign kept building. Sometime in September, Winer and Nuland got another version of Steele-like research suggesting Trump-Russia collusion, this time from known associates of the Clintons: Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer.
Again, it was sent to the FBI.
Sussmann’s contact with Baker at the FBI occurred that same month.
By mid-September — less than a month before Election Day — there likely was agitation inside the Clinton machine: After so many overtures to the FBI, there was no visible sign of an investigation.
Simpson and Steele began briefing reporters with the hope of getting the word out. It is taboo for an FBI source such as Steele to talk to the media about his work. Yet, he took the risk, eventually getting fired for it, according to FBI documents.
Baker, the FBI’s top lawyer, testified to Congress that he was clearly aware Simpson’s team was shopping the media. “My understanding at the time was that Simpson was going around Washington giving this out to a lot of different people and trying to elevate its profile,” Baker told congressional investigators.
Ohr, through his contacts with Steele and Simpson, also knew the media had been contacted. In handwritten notes from late 2016, Ohr quoted Simpson as saying his outreach to reporters was a “Hail Mary attempt” to sway voters.
The next and final overture came from one of Clinton’s top acolytes in Congress.
Then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, having been briefed by then-CIA Director John Brennan on the Russia allegations, sent a letter to the FBI in late October demanding to know if agents were pursuing the evidence. Before long, the letter leaked.
The political pressure from Team Clinton had come from many directions: State, Congress, Justice, a top Democratic lawyer.
Yet, no one in the FBI seemed to tap the brakes, noticing the obvious: Its counterintelligence apparatus was being weaponized with political opposition research from one campaign against its rival.
Leaking. Politically motivated evidence. Ex parte contacts outside the normal FBI evidence-gathering chain.
None of it seemed to raise a red flag.
That is a troubling legacy. Source. For what it's worth, others sources are starting to report on the same narrative. Baker's testimony about Sussman's overtures is reported on here here and Nunes is now openly talking about Clinton involvement. Tonight, in news that is not surprising in the least. How much of recent reporting due to (1) Clinton’s losing their political power (2) the thought that Trump’s administration might do it to the next one (3) future anti-leak investigations by Barr? I don't think that (1) or (2) matter. With regards to (2) specifically, Trump doesn't have sufficient control of the FBI and DOJ to pull off what was done to him. (3) may be having a bit of an influence on things. It's been widely reported -- and I agree -- that Mueller disavowed the Buzzfeed story because he knew that Barr would likely fire his ass if he didn't. The more likely explanation for why this stuff is coming now is because Trump wants it to start coming out now. Keep in mind that, as the president, he has all of the relevant information at his fingertips. He knows what happened, and he has absolute control over disclosure. Some congressional or senate committee members may be leaking stuff on their own accord, but I think that it is more likely that they'd coordinate with Trump on this.
The fact that Steele reached out to 4 or 5 different people in the US government could just be because he had prior contact with those people and had worked with them before. Recall that Steele did regular work with the FBI prior to the dossier (which demonstrated the general reliability of his Russian sources). Steele's own overtures don't demonstrate a "Clinton machine" effort. Solomon's logical reasoning has been wanting lately.
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On January 23 2019 23:39 Doodsmack wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2019 15:02 xDaunt wrote:On January 23 2019 14:39 Danglars wrote:On January 23 2019 12:42 xDaunt wrote:I doubt anyone is really surprised that the Clintons are one of the main parties behind the Trump/Russia collusion nonsense: When at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. That’s what Hillary Clinton’s machine did in 2016, eventually getting the FBI to bite on an uncorroborated narrative that Donald Trump and Russia were trying to hijack the presidential election.
Between July and October 2016, Clinton-connected lawyers, emissaries and apologists made more than a half-dozen overtures to U.S. officials, each tapping a political connection to get suspect evidence into FBI counterintelligence agents’ hands, according to internal documents and testimonies I reviewed and interviews I conducted.
In each situation, the overture was uninvited. And as the election drew closer, the point of contact moved higher up the FBI chain.
It was, as one of my own FBI sources called it, a “classic case of information saturation” designed to inject political opposition research into a counterintelligence machinery that should have suspected a political dirty trick was underway.
Ex-FBI general counsel James Baker, one of the more senior bureau executives to be targeted, gave a memorable answer when congressional investigators asked how attorney Michael Sussmann from the Perkins Coie law firm, which represented the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party, came to personally deliver him dirt on Trump.
“You’d have to ask him why he decided to pick me,” Baker said last year in testimony that has not yet been released publicly. The FBI’s top lawyer turned over a calendar notation to Congress, indicating that he met Sussmann on Sept. 19, 2016, less than two months before Election Day.
Sussmann’s firm paid Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS opposition-research firm to hire British intelligence operative Christopher Steele to create the now-infamous dossier suggesting Trump and Moscow colluded during the 2016 election.
By the time Sussmann reached out, Steele’s dossier already was inside the FBI. Sussmann augmented it with cyber evidence that he claimed showed a further connection between the GOP campaign and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some was put on a thumb drive, according to Baker.
Baker’s detailed account illustrates how a political connection — Sussmann and Baker knew each other — was leveraged to get anti-Trump research to FBI leaders.
“[Sussmann] told me he had cyber experts that had obtained some information that they thought they should get into the hands of the FBI,” Baker testified.
“I referred this to investigators, and I believe they made a record of it,” he testified, adding that he believed he reached out to Peter Strzok, the agent in charge of the Russia case, or William Priestap, the head of FBI counterintelligence.
“Please come get this,” he recalled telling his colleagues. Baker acknowledged it was not the normal way for counterintelligence evidence to enter the FBI.
But when the bureau’s top lawyer makes a request, things happen in the rank-and-file.
The overture was neither the first nor the last instance of Clinton-connected Trump dirt reaching the FBI.
The tsunami began when former MI6 agent Steele first approached an FBI supervisor, his handler in an earlier criminal case, in London. That approach remarkably occurred on July 5, 2016, the same day then-FBI Director James Comey announced he would not pursue criminal charges against Clinton for mishandling classified emails on a private server.
If ever there were a day for the Clinton campaign to want to change the public narrative, it was July 5, 2016.
But the bureau apparently did not initially embrace Steele’s research, and no immediate action was taken, according to congressional investigators who have been briefed.
That’s when the escalation began.
During a trip to Washington later that month, Steele reached out to two political contacts with the credentials to influence the FBI.
Then-senior State Department official Jonathan Winer, who worked for then-Secretary John Kerry, wrote that Steele first approached him in the summer with his Trump research and then met again with him in September. Winer consulted his boss, Assistant Secretary for Eurasia Affairs Victoria Nuland, who said she first learned of Steele’s allegations in late July and urged Winer to send it to the FBI.
(If you need further intrigue, Winer worked from 2008 to 2013 for the lobbying and public relations firm APCO Worldwide, the same firm that was a contractor for both the Clinton Global Initiative and Russia’s main nuclear fuel company that won big decisions from the Obama administration.)
When the State Department office that oversees Russian affairs sends something to the FBI, agents take note.
But Steele was hardly done. He reached out to his longtime Justice Department contact, Bruce Ohr, then a deputy to Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. Steele had breakfast July 30, 2016, with Ohr and his wife, Nellie, to discuss the Russia-Trump dirt.
(To thicken the plot, you should know that Nellie Ohr was a Russia expert working at the time for the same Fusion GPS firm that hired Steele and was hired by the Clinton campaign through Sussmann’s Perkins Coie.)
Bruce Ohr immediately took Steele’s dirt on July 31, 2016, to then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
When the deputy attorney general’s office contacts the FBI, things happen. And, soon, Ohr was connected to the agents running the new Russia probe.
Around the same time, Australia’s ambassador to London, Alexander Downer, reached out to U.S. officials. Like so many characters in this narrative, Downer had his own connection to the Clintons: He secured a $25 million donation from Australia’s government to the Clinton Foundation in the early 2000s.
Downer claims WikiLeaks’s release of hacked Clinton emails that month caused him to remember a conversation in May, in a London tavern, with a Trump adviser named George Papadopoulos. So he reported it to the FBI.
The saturation campaign kept building. Sometime in September, Winer and Nuland got another version of Steele-like research suggesting Trump-Russia collusion, this time from known associates of the Clintons: Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer.
Again, it was sent to the FBI.
Sussmann’s contact with Baker at the FBI occurred that same month.
By mid-September — less than a month before Election Day — there likely was agitation inside the Clinton machine: After so many overtures to the FBI, there was no visible sign of an investigation.
Simpson and Steele began briefing reporters with the hope of getting the word out. It is taboo for an FBI source such as Steele to talk to the media about his work. Yet, he took the risk, eventually getting fired for it, according to FBI documents.
Baker, the FBI’s top lawyer, testified to Congress that he was clearly aware Simpson’s team was shopping the media. “My understanding at the time was that Simpson was going around Washington giving this out to a lot of different people and trying to elevate its profile,” Baker told congressional investigators.
Ohr, through his contacts with Steele and Simpson, also knew the media had been contacted. In handwritten notes from late 2016, Ohr quoted Simpson as saying his outreach to reporters was a “Hail Mary attempt” to sway voters.
The next and final overture came from one of Clinton’s top acolytes in Congress.
Then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, having been briefed by then-CIA Director John Brennan on the Russia allegations, sent a letter to the FBI in late October demanding to know if agents were pursuing the evidence. Before long, the letter leaked.
The political pressure from Team Clinton had come from many directions: State, Congress, Justice, a top Democratic lawyer.
Yet, no one in the FBI seemed to tap the brakes, noticing the obvious: Its counterintelligence apparatus was being weaponized with political opposition research from one campaign against its rival.
Leaking. Politically motivated evidence. Ex parte contacts outside the normal FBI evidence-gathering chain.
None of it seemed to raise a red flag.
That is a troubling legacy. Source. For what it's worth, others sources are starting to report on the same narrative. Baker's testimony about Sussman's overtures is reported on here here and Nunes is now openly talking about Clinton involvement. Tonight, in news that is not surprising in the least. How much of recent reporting due to (1) Clinton’s losing their political power (2) the thought that Trump’s administration might do it to the next one (3) future anti-leak investigations by Barr? I don't think that (1) or (2) matter. With regards to (2) specifically, Trump doesn't have sufficient control of the FBI and DOJ to pull off what was done to him. (3) may be having a bit of an influence on things. It's been widely reported -- and I agree -- that Mueller disavowed the Buzzfeed story because he knew that Barr would likely fire his ass if he didn't. The more likely explanation for why this stuff is coming now is because Trump wants it to start coming out now. Keep in mind that, as the president, he has all of the relevant information at his fingertips. He knows what happened, and he has absolute control over disclosure. Some congressional or senate committee members may be leaking stuff on their own accord, but I think that it is more likely that they'd coordinate with Trump on this. The fact that Steele reached out to 4 or 5 different people in the US government could just be because he had prior contact with those people and had worked with them before. Recall that Steele did regular work with the FBI prior to the dossier (which demonstrated the general reliability of his Russian sources). Steele's own overtures don't demonstrate a "Clinton machine" effort. Solomon's logical reasoning has been wanting lately.
Good thing the article doesn’t just mention what Steele did.
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On January 23 2019 17:21 GreenHorizons wrote:
You guys think the FBI and DOJ are still salvageable?
What would that take?
What happens if/when that redemption doesn't happen?
If someone doesn't think they're salvageable (I'm guessing you don't, by your tone), what's the plan to fix that?
|
On January 23 2019 23:48 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2019 23:39 Doodsmack wrote:On January 23 2019 15:02 xDaunt wrote:On January 23 2019 14:39 Danglars wrote:On January 23 2019 12:42 xDaunt wrote:I doubt anyone is really surprised that the Clintons are one of the main parties behind the Trump/Russia collusion nonsense: When at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. That’s what Hillary Clinton’s machine did in 2016, eventually getting the FBI to bite on an uncorroborated narrative that Donald Trump and Russia were trying to hijack the presidential election.
Between July and October 2016, Clinton-connected lawyers, emissaries and apologists made more than a half-dozen overtures to U.S. officials, each tapping a political connection to get suspect evidence into FBI counterintelligence agents’ hands, according to internal documents and testimonies I reviewed and interviews I conducted.
In each situation, the overture was uninvited. And as the election drew closer, the point of contact moved higher up the FBI chain.
It was, as one of my own FBI sources called it, a “classic case of information saturation” designed to inject political opposition research into a counterintelligence machinery that should have suspected a political dirty trick was underway.
Ex-FBI general counsel James Baker, one of the more senior bureau executives to be targeted, gave a memorable answer when congressional investigators asked how attorney Michael Sussmann from the Perkins Coie law firm, which represented the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party, came to personally deliver him dirt on Trump.
“You’d have to ask him why he decided to pick me,” Baker said last year in testimony that has not yet been released publicly. The FBI’s top lawyer turned over a calendar notation to Congress, indicating that he met Sussmann on Sept. 19, 2016, less than two months before Election Day.
Sussmann’s firm paid Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS opposition-research firm to hire British intelligence operative Christopher Steele to create the now-infamous dossier suggesting Trump and Moscow colluded during the 2016 election.
By the time Sussmann reached out, Steele’s dossier already was inside the FBI. Sussmann augmented it with cyber evidence that he claimed showed a further connection between the GOP campaign and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some was put on a thumb drive, according to Baker.
Baker’s detailed account illustrates how a political connection — Sussmann and Baker knew each other — was leveraged to get anti-Trump research to FBI leaders.
“[Sussmann] told me he had cyber experts that had obtained some information that they thought they should get into the hands of the FBI,” Baker testified.
“I referred this to investigators, and I believe they made a record of it,” he testified, adding that he believed he reached out to Peter Strzok, the agent in charge of the Russia case, or William Priestap, the head of FBI counterintelligence.
“Please come get this,” he recalled telling his colleagues. Baker acknowledged it was not the normal way for counterintelligence evidence to enter the FBI.
But when the bureau’s top lawyer makes a request, things happen in the rank-and-file.
The overture was neither the first nor the last instance of Clinton-connected Trump dirt reaching the FBI.
The tsunami began when former MI6 agent Steele first approached an FBI supervisor, his handler in an earlier criminal case, in London. That approach remarkably occurred on July 5, 2016, the same day then-FBI Director James Comey announced he would not pursue criminal charges against Clinton for mishandling classified emails on a private server.
If ever there were a day for the Clinton campaign to want to change the public narrative, it was July 5, 2016.
But the bureau apparently did not initially embrace Steele’s research, and no immediate action was taken, according to congressional investigators who have been briefed.
That’s when the escalation began.
During a trip to Washington later that month, Steele reached out to two political contacts with the credentials to influence the FBI.
Then-senior State Department official Jonathan Winer, who worked for then-Secretary John Kerry, wrote that Steele first approached him in the summer with his Trump research and then met again with him in September. Winer consulted his boss, Assistant Secretary for Eurasia Affairs Victoria Nuland, who said she first learned of Steele’s allegations in late July and urged Winer to send it to the FBI.
(If you need further intrigue, Winer worked from 2008 to 2013 for the lobbying and public relations firm APCO Worldwide, the same firm that was a contractor for both the Clinton Global Initiative and Russia’s main nuclear fuel company that won big decisions from the Obama administration.)
When the State Department office that oversees Russian affairs sends something to the FBI, agents take note.
But Steele was hardly done. He reached out to his longtime Justice Department contact, Bruce Ohr, then a deputy to Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. Steele had breakfast July 30, 2016, with Ohr and his wife, Nellie, to discuss the Russia-Trump dirt.
(To thicken the plot, you should know that Nellie Ohr was a Russia expert working at the time for the same Fusion GPS firm that hired Steele and was hired by the Clinton campaign through Sussmann’s Perkins Coie.)
Bruce Ohr immediately took Steele’s dirt on July 31, 2016, to then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
When the deputy attorney general’s office contacts the FBI, things happen. And, soon, Ohr was connected to the agents running the new Russia probe.
Around the same time, Australia’s ambassador to London, Alexander Downer, reached out to U.S. officials. Like so many characters in this narrative, Downer had his own connection to the Clintons: He secured a $25 million donation from Australia’s government to the Clinton Foundation in the early 2000s.
Downer claims WikiLeaks’s release of hacked Clinton emails that month caused him to remember a conversation in May, in a London tavern, with a Trump adviser named George Papadopoulos. So he reported it to the FBI.
The saturation campaign kept building. Sometime in September, Winer and Nuland got another version of Steele-like research suggesting Trump-Russia collusion, this time from known associates of the Clintons: Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer.
Again, it was sent to the FBI.
Sussmann’s contact with Baker at the FBI occurred that same month.
By mid-September — less than a month before Election Day — there likely was agitation inside the Clinton machine: After so many overtures to the FBI, there was no visible sign of an investigation.
Simpson and Steele began briefing reporters with the hope of getting the word out. It is taboo for an FBI source such as Steele to talk to the media about his work. Yet, he took the risk, eventually getting fired for it, according to FBI documents.
Baker, the FBI’s top lawyer, testified to Congress that he was clearly aware Simpson’s team was shopping the media. “My understanding at the time was that Simpson was going around Washington giving this out to a lot of different people and trying to elevate its profile,” Baker told congressional investigators.
Ohr, through his contacts with Steele and Simpson, also knew the media had been contacted. In handwritten notes from late 2016, Ohr quoted Simpson as saying his outreach to reporters was a “Hail Mary attempt” to sway voters.
The next and final overture came from one of Clinton’s top acolytes in Congress.
Then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, having been briefed by then-CIA Director John Brennan on the Russia allegations, sent a letter to the FBI in late October demanding to know if agents were pursuing the evidence. Before long, the letter leaked.
The political pressure from Team Clinton had come from many directions: State, Congress, Justice, a top Democratic lawyer.
Yet, no one in the FBI seemed to tap the brakes, noticing the obvious: Its counterintelligence apparatus was being weaponized with political opposition research from one campaign against its rival.
Leaking. Politically motivated evidence. Ex parte contacts outside the normal FBI evidence-gathering chain.
None of it seemed to raise a red flag.
That is a troubling legacy. Source. For what it's worth, others sources are starting to report on the same narrative. Baker's testimony about Sussman's overtures is reported on here here and Nunes is now openly talking about Clinton involvement. Tonight, in news that is not surprising in the least. How much of recent reporting due to (1) Clinton’s losing their political power (2) the thought that Trump’s administration might do it to the next one (3) future anti-leak investigations by Barr? I don't think that (1) or (2) matter. With regards to (2) specifically, Trump doesn't have sufficient control of the FBI and DOJ to pull off what was done to him. (3) may be having a bit of an influence on things. It's been widely reported -- and I agree -- that Mueller disavowed the Buzzfeed story because he knew that Barr would likely fire his ass if he didn't. The more likely explanation for why this stuff is coming now is because Trump wants it to start coming out now. Keep in mind that, as the president, he has all of the relevant information at his fingertips. He knows what happened, and he has absolute control over disclosure. Some congressional or senate committee members may be leaking stuff on their own accord, but I think that it is more likely that they'd coordinate with Trump on this. The fact that Steele reached out to 4 or 5 different people in the US government could just be because he had prior contact with those people and had worked with them before. Recall that Steele did regular work with the FBI prior to the dossier (which demonstrated the general reliability of his Russian sources). Steele's own overtures don't demonstrate a "Clinton machine" effort. Solomon's logical reasoning has been wanting lately. Good thing the article doesn’t just mention what Steele did.
Out of curiousity, how do you determine that this article is trustworthy, given how quickly you jump to dismiss any articles that suggests things you don't like?
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On January 24 2019 03:51 iamthedave wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2019 23:48 xDaunt wrote:On January 23 2019 23:39 Doodsmack wrote:On January 23 2019 15:02 xDaunt wrote:On January 23 2019 14:39 Danglars wrote:On January 23 2019 12:42 xDaunt wrote:I doubt anyone is really surprised that the Clintons are one of the main parties behind the Trump/Russia collusion nonsense: When at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. That’s what Hillary Clinton’s machine did in 2016, eventually getting the FBI to bite on an uncorroborated narrative that Donald Trump and Russia were trying to hijack the presidential election.
Between July and October 2016, Clinton-connected lawyers, emissaries and apologists made more than a half-dozen overtures to U.S. officials, each tapping a political connection to get suspect evidence into FBI counterintelligence agents’ hands, according to internal documents and testimonies I reviewed and interviews I conducted.
In each situation, the overture was uninvited. And as the election drew closer, the point of contact moved higher up the FBI chain.
It was, as one of my own FBI sources called it, a “classic case of information saturation” designed to inject political opposition research into a counterintelligence machinery that should have suspected a political dirty trick was underway.
Ex-FBI general counsel James Baker, one of the more senior bureau executives to be targeted, gave a memorable answer when congressional investigators asked how attorney Michael Sussmann from the Perkins Coie law firm, which represented the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party, came to personally deliver him dirt on Trump.
“You’d have to ask him why he decided to pick me,” Baker said last year in testimony that has not yet been released publicly. The FBI’s top lawyer turned over a calendar notation to Congress, indicating that he met Sussmann on Sept. 19, 2016, less than two months before Election Day.
Sussmann’s firm paid Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS opposition-research firm to hire British intelligence operative Christopher Steele to create the now-infamous dossier suggesting Trump and Moscow colluded during the 2016 election.
By the time Sussmann reached out, Steele’s dossier already was inside the FBI. Sussmann augmented it with cyber evidence that he claimed showed a further connection between the GOP campaign and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some was put on a thumb drive, according to Baker.
Baker’s detailed account illustrates how a political connection — Sussmann and Baker knew each other — was leveraged to get anti-Trump research to FBI leaders.
“[Sussmann] told me he had cyber experts that had obtained some information that they thought they should get into the hands of the FBI,” Baker testified.
“I referred this to investigators, and I believe they made a record of it,” he testified, adding that he believed he reached out to Peter Strzok, the agent in charge of the Russia case, or William Priestap, the head of FBI counterintelligence.
“Please come get this,” he recalled telling his colleagues. Baker acknowledged it was not the normal way for counterintelligence evidence to enter the FBI.
But when the bureau’s top lawyer makes a request, things happen in the rank-and-file.
The overture was neither the first nor the last instance of Clinton-connected Trump dirt reaching the FBI.
The tsunami began when former MI6 agent Steele first approached an FBI supervisor, his handler in an earlier criminal case, in London. That approach remarkably occurred on July 5, 2016, the same day then-FBI Director James Comey announced he would not pursue criminal charges against Clinton for mishandling classified emails on a private server.
If ever there were a day for the Clinton campaign to want to change the public narrative, it was July 5, 2016.
But the bureau apparently did not initially embrace Steele’s research, and no immediate action was taken, according to congressional investigators who have been briefed.
That’s when the escalation began.
During a trip to Washington later that month, Steele reached out to two political contacts with the credentials to influence the FBI.
Then-senior State Department official Jonathan Winer, who worked for then-Secretary John Kerry, wrote that Steele first approached him in the summer with his Trump research and then met again with him in September. Winer consulted his boss, Assistant Secretary for Eurasia Affairs Victoria Nuland, who said she first learned of Steele’s allegations in late July and urged Winer to send it to the FBI.
(If you need further intrigue, Winer worked from 2008 to 2013 for the lobbying and public relations firm APCO Worldwide, the same firm that was a contractor for both the Clinton Global Initiative and Russia’s main nuclear fuel company that won big decisions from the Obama administration.)
When the State Department office that oversees Russian affairs sends something to the FBI, agents take note.
But Steele was hardly done. He reached out to his longtime Justice Department contact, Bruce Ohr, then a deputy to Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. Steele had breakfast July 30, 2016, with Ohr and his wife, Nellie, to discuss the Russia-Trump dirt.
(To thicken the plot, you should know that Nellie Ohr was a Russia expert working at the time for the same Fusion GPS firm that hired Steele and was hired by the Clinton campaign through Sussmann’s Perkins Coie.)
Bruce Ohr immediately took Steele’s dirt on July 31, 2016, to then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
When the deputy attorney general’s office contacts the FBI, things happen. And, soon, Ohr was connected to the agents running the new Russia probe.
Around the same time, Australia’s ambassador to London, Alexander Downer, reached out to U.S. officials. Like so many characters in this narrative, Downer had his own connection to the Clintons: He secured a $25 million donation from Australia’s government to the Clinton Foundation in the early 2000s.
Downer claims WikiLeaks’s release of hacked Clinton emails that month caused him to remember a conversation in May, in a London tavern, with a Trump adviser named George Papadopoulos. So he reported it to the FBI.
The saturation campaign kept building. Sometime in September, Winer and Nuland got another version of Steele-like research suggesting Trump-Russia collusion, this time from known associates of the Clintons: Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer.
Again, it was sent to the FBI.
Sussmann’s contact with Baker at the FBI occurred that same month.
By mid-September — less than a month before Election Day — there likely was agitation inside the Clinton machine: After so many overtures to the FBI, there was no visible sign of an investigation.
Simpson and Steele began briefing reporters with the hope of getting the word out. It is taboo for an FBI source such as Steele to talk to the media about his work. Yet, he took the risk, eventually getting fired for it, according to FBI documents.
Baker, the FBI’s top lawyer, testified to Congress that he was clearly aware Simpson’s team was shopping the media. “My understanding at the time was that Simpson was going around Washington giving this out to a lot of different people and trying to elevate its profile,” Baker told congressional investigators.
Ohr, through his contacts with Steele and Simpson, also knew the media had been contacted. In handwritten notes from late 2016, Ohr quoted Simpson as saying his outreach to reporters was a “Hail Mary attempt” to sway voters.
The next and final overture came from one of Clinton’s top acolytes in Congress.
Then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, having been briefed by then-CIA Director John Brennan on the Russia allegations, sent a letter to the FBI in late October demanding to know if agents were pursuing the evidence. Before long, the letter leaked.
The political pressure from Team Clinton had come from many directions: State, Congress, Justice, a top Democratic lawyer.
Yet, no one in the FBI seemed to tap the brakes, noticing the obvious: Its counterintelligence apparatus was being weaponized with political opposition research from one campaign against its rival.
Leaking. Politically motivated evidence. Ex parte contacts outside the normal FBI evidence-gathering chain.
None of it seemed to raise a red flag.
That is a troubling legacy. Source. For what it's worth, others sources are starting to report on the same narrative. Baker's testimony about Sussman's overtures is reported on here here and Nunes is now openly talking about Clinton involvement. Tonight, in news that is not surprising in the least. How much of recent reporting due to (1) Clinton’s losing their political power (2) the thought that Trump’s administration might do it to the next one (3) future anti-leak investigations by Barr? I don't think that (1) or (2) matter. With regards to (2) specifically, Trump doesn't have sufficient control of the FBI and DOJ to pull off what was done to him. (3) may be having a bit of an influence on things. It's been widely reported -- and I agree -- that Mueller disavowed the Buzzfeed story because he knew that Barr would likely fire his ass if he didn't. The more likely explanation for why this stuff is coming now is because Trump wants it to start coming out now. Keep in mind that, as the president, he has all of the relevant information at his fingertips. He knows what happened, and he has absolute control over disclosure. Some congressional or senate committee members may be leaking stuff on their own accord, but I think that it is more likely that they'd coordinate with Trump on this. The fact that Steele reached out to 4 or 5 different people in the US government could just be because he had prior contact with those people and had worked with them before. Recall that Steele did regular work with the FBI prior to the dossier (which demonstrated the general reliability of his Russian sources). Steele's own overtures don't demonstrate a "Clinton machine" effort. Solomon's logical reasoning has been wanting lately. Good thing the article doesn’t just mention what Steele did. Out of curiousity, how do you determine that this article is trustworthy, given how quickly you jump to dismiss any articles that suggests things you don't like?
First, Solomon's reporting on this stuff has appeared to be very accurate so far. Second, and like I pointed out, the main thrust of this article was corroborated by two other outlets. And no, I don't dismiss "articles that suggest things I don't like" out of hand as you imply. Take that Buzzfeed article that came up last week as an example. I didn't believe it as soon as I saw it because 1) it was Buzzfeed as opposed to NYT, and 2) the claims were close to preposterous given what we already knew about Cohen's story. Nevertheless, I sat on my criticisms and waited for the seemingly inevitable debunking, which none other than Mueller promptly delivered.
As a relevant aside, and if you may recall, the same allegations of Russia collusion were made against McCain during the 2008 election. In fact, take a look at the names that pop up, they should all be familiar: Manafort, Kislyak, Deripaska, etc. Hell, Glenn Simpson [of Fusion GPS, who hired Steele] even wrote an Op Ed about Russian collusion back in 2007. What are the odds that the same allegations of Russian collusion would be made against Hillary's expected GOP opponent in two separate presidential campaigns, that the same alleged Russian operatives would be involved in the same plot, and that the same opposition research people would be involved in peddling the story each time for the benefit of the same presidential candidate?
To be 100% clear, I'll wait for the real damning evidence to come out (and it apparently is coming given the pace of the leaks) before making any definitive conclusions, but every single person in the US should be asking themselves some very serious questions about what they have been told about this Russia nonsense and why.
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I see xDaunt hasn't changed. I'll check back in 2 years :D
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I love how the US's response to someone they deem unfairly elected is to forgo elections altogether and just support a dictator by way of coup.
But it's totally for human rights and democracy that we're recognizing a completely unelected leader over a "questionably" elected leader.
People in the US just gobble up the media suggesting that backing a right-wing coup is somehow not worse than Russia's interference with the US election.
On January 24 2019 03:40 Howie_Dewitt wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2019 17:21 GreenHorizons wrote:
You guys think the FBI and DOJ are still salvageable?
What would that take?
What happens if/when that redemption doesn't happen? If someone doesn't think they're salvageable (I'm guessing you don't, by your tone), what's the plan to fix that?
Proletariat revolution.
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You have to remember that GH's solution for any bad situation is to make it ten thousand times worse.
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On January 24 2019 06:22 Sermokala wrote:
You have to remember that GH's solution for any bad situation is to make it ten thousand times worse.
Proletarian revolution is not worse, maybe for the bourgeoisie liberals.
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Congratulations to the US for bringing neolibeFREEDOM to Venezuela
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On January 24 2019 06:25 Nebuchad wrote:
Congratulations to the US for bringing neolibeFREEDOM to Venezuela
Interesting today would be a day AOC isn't shining for me but has a new gloss for more centrist neoliberals. I guess she really does want that NY senate seat.
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On January 24 2019 06:25 Nebuchad wrote:
Congratulations to the US for bringing neolibeFREEDOM to Venezuela
Democracy is non negotiable.
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On January 24 2019 06:30 Sermokala wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2019 06:25 Nebuchad wrote:
Congratulations to the US for bringing neolibeFREEDOM to Venezuela Democracy is non negotiable.
Either vote for a leader the US approves of or they will replace them with one they do. The only way to save democracy is to disregard it altogether in the interest of pursuing profits for US corporations.
I mean it is interesting to see just how deep the war pig vein goes so that Trump backing a right-wing coup doesn't even raise the rancor of "the left" party that complains about practically every thing he does.
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On January 24 2019 06:30 Sermokala wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2019 06:25 Nebuchad wrote:
Congratulations to the US for bringing neolibeFREEDOM to Venezuela Democracy is non negotiable.
Venezuela is the perfect example of the limitations of democracy. In that case, a bunch of poorly educated people voted into office socialist goons who proceeded to run their country right into the ground while looting it for their own personal aggrandizement. Without the rule of law as a backstop, democracy is little more than another form of tyranny.
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On January 24 2019 06:30 Sermokala wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2019 06:25 Nebuchad wrote:
Congratulations to the US for bringing neolibeFREEDOM to Venezuela Democracy is non negotiable.
A pretty comical take considering how often we negotiate with authoritarian countries when they accept their role in global capitalism.
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On January 24 2019 06:57 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2019 06:30 Sermokala wrote:On January 24 2019 06:25 Nebuchad wrote:
Congratulations to the US for bringing neolibeFREEDOM to Venezuela Democracy is non negotiable. Venezuela is the perfect example of the limitations of democracy. In that case, a bunch of poorly educated people voted into office socialist goons who proceeded to run their country right into the ground while looting it for their own personal aggrandizement. Without the rule of law as a backstop, democracy is little more than another form of tyranny.
Supporting coups and totalitarian monarchs is tyranny, being tyrannical is one of the few things the US still may lead in.
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On January 24 2019 07:03 Nebuchad wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2019 06:30 Sermokala wrote:On January 24 2019 06:25 Nebuchad wrote:
Congratulations to the US for bringing neolibeFREEDOM to Venezuela Democracy is non negotiable. A pretty comical take considering how often we negotiate with authoritarian countries when they accept their role in global capitalism.
Yeah it was a pretty comical take in Fallout 3 when liberty bot said it.
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On January 24 2019 07:15 Sermokala wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2019 07:03 Nebuchad wrote:On January 24 2019 06:30 Sermokala wrote:On January 24 2019 06:25 Nebuchad wrote:
Congratulations to the US for bringing neolibeFREEDOM to Venezuela Democracy is non negotiable. A pretty comical take considering how often we negotiate with authoritarian countries when they accept their role in global capitalism. Yeah it was a pretty comical take in Fallout 3 when liberty bot said it.
Sorry, I didn't know that meme
GH: what did AOC say?
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EPT
