As the special counsel probe into still-unsupported allegations of Russian “collusion” with the Trump campaign enters its second year, this might be a good time to take a look at where we are with that. One problem, however: there’s suddenly so much news connected with the investigation that it’s hard to know where to begin without hopping on board the Information Overload Express.
The investigation appears to be imploding, but the mainstream press is trying very hard to avoid covering this. One story that just ran in the Washington Post (also picked up by AP) included input from, I think, five reporters but was written so narrowly that it essentially just contrasted the calmness and seriousness of the so-highly-organized Mueller team with the frenzied, chaotic reaction of Trump blah blah blah. Most of the budding Woodward-and-Bernsteins don’t seem all that interested in ferreting out the truth about Obama’s DOJ and FBI.
In contrast, there’s been fabulous reporting and analysis from out-of-the-mainstream journalists. Over the past year, we’ve learned that we have a much bigger problem than election interference by Russia –- we have election interference by our own intelligence community. In just in the last few days, we’ve addressed several breaking stories, including the most outrageous revelation of all (so far): that the FBI relied on a confidential “human source” (mole) within the Trump campaign and kept that information from Congress and the FISA court.
The counterintelligence investigation launched by the FBI was fraught with conflicts of interest and outrageous political bias from the very start, and we’re only now learning just how dark its origins may have been. The Russian “dossier” on Trump prepared by the highly imaginative British ex-spy Christopher Steele and paid for by Hillary and the DNC was used by FBI agents in applications to the FISA court for warrants to spy on such peripheral figures as Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, and they didn’t bother to inform the FISA court of the dossier’s political roots. When that information became public, the story changed; it was no longer the dossier that was so important, but a report that George Papadopoulos had bragged drunkenly in a London bar about the Russians having thousands of Hillary’s emails.
The idea of the Russians or anyone else on Earth or even the galaxy having thousands of Hillary’s emails should come as no surprise, as she “carelessly” conducted all her State Department business through a nonsecure personal email server, something most officials would face jail time for. But we’ve just learned something startling about the Papadopoulos story: it was a set-up. A few “handlers,” including Peter Stsrzok working on background, got him to London, fed him information about Hillary’s emails being hacked by the Kremlin, and you know the rest. Thanks to Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller News Foundation, we even know the name of the operative who set up the London trip: Stefan Halper.
The FBI probe was formally opened on July 31, 2016, three months before the election, when CIA Director John Brennan sent an email to FBI Director James Comey. We know this thanks to the persistence of House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes, who finally threatened top DOJ officials with impeachment if they didn’t give him the unredacted document. They finally gave him access to a version that was still modestly redacted, hiding the identify of the source of the “raw intelligence” that Brennan had passed along to Comey.
Clarice Feldman at AMERICAN THINKER makes the case that this source is Stefan Halper. If you want to “go deep” on the details of how the FBI investigation was engineered –- and make no mistake, it WAS engineered –- and learn more about Halper’s background and his role in the whole shameful business, this piece by Thomas Lifson (with all its internal links) is a must-read…
There’s more breaking special counsel news even now, about a stunning conflict of interest involving Mueller himself and a RUSSIAN OLIGARCH (irony of ironies) named Oleg Deripaska, who spend $25 million of his own money and worked with the FBI to try to help them free one of their agents, Robert Levinson, being held in Iran. (He’s still there, incidentally. This is an outrageous story in itself, which we’ll take on as more details emerge. It involves Hillary Clinton acting as Secretary of State, and she does not come off well.) Two months before the election, and before the FISA application was made, three FBI agents came to see him at his home in New York to tell him they suspected Trump’s campaign was colluding with Russia to win the election, and they brought up Paul Manafort (with whom Deripaska had had a legal dispute), presumably in the hope that Deripaska would want to implicate Manafort in the collusion narrative. According to reporter John Solomon, Deripaska laughed and said, “You are trying to create something out of nothing.” Their reaction was along the lines of, “Let’s stay in touch. Keep an open mind.”
Solomon is highly confident of his sources for this story, saying that both Deripaska and his lawyer have gone on record. Deripaska has even offered to come testify before Congress, without immunity. Gee, I’ll bet the FISA court judges would have appreciated knowing about all this. And surely Paul Manafort would have liked to have it as well, to push back at the charges made against him. At least now he’s got it.
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