Exonerated

by Dan Bongino

  Meanwhile, investigations into scandals surrounding his administration were stagnant, stalled, or swept under the rug. And the central figure in a boatload of those scandals, Hillary Clinton, appeared to be Teflon-coated. Not only did she avoid any penalties for her mishandling of the Benghazi terror attacks, for abusing national security laws regarding the use of a private email server, and for trading political access and favors for money for herself and the Clinton Foundation, but she seemed to think she would waltz into the White House.

  The idea that Clinton might lose, that the prevailing power structure that had been in place for eight years might shift, that those in leadership positions might be called into account, and that the lords of the swamp might be evicted was a frightening one. New administrations have the right to clean house. But a Trump win wouldn’t just threaten job security for a couple of generational insiders and their next of kin; it would upend the entire broken system. As we’ve seen, some Republicans were calling for Obama’s intelligence guru James Clapper to face charges for lying to Congress. For Comey, who had botched the Clinton investigation, his career and reputation were at stake—some critics wanted his head for giving Clinton’s email abuses a pass, while Democrats wanted him tarred and feathered for reopening the email investigation eleven days before the presidential election. And plenty of other appointees, we now know, could have been called onto the carpet for violating privacy norms and for out-and-out lying to the American people.

  At some point, Obama administration officials got very nervous and began ramping up the pressure on the Trump campaign team. “I have seen intelligence reports that clearly show that the president-elect and his team were, I guess, at least monitored,” House intelligence chairman Devin Nunes revealed.1

  And who was doing the monitoring and spilling the beans about it? Just before Trump took over the White House, the offices of both National Security Advisor Susan Rice and United Nations ambassador Samantha Power made requests to unmask (that is, to reveal) the identities of Trump team members—American citizens—who were under surveillance, according to numerous reports. “Power was believed to have made ‘hundreds’ of unmasking requests to identify individuals named in classified intelligence community reports related to Trump and his presidential transition team,” reports the Free Beacon.2

  As for Rice, she is rumored to have provided media with allegations regarding Michael Flynn, her replacement to head the National Security Council (NSC). Of course, when PBS anchor Judy Woodruff asked Rice if she knew anything about individuals on the Trump team’s having their identities disclosed, Obama’s right-hand woman on national security said, “I know nothing about this. I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that count today.”

  If you buy that story, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you at a discount.

  According to CNN, multiple sources relayed that Rice “privately told House investigators that she unmasked the identities of senior Trump officials to understand why the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates was in New York late last year.”3

  As both James Comey and former NSA head Mike Rogers testified before the House Intelligence Committee on March 20, 2017, there are only twenty people in the federal government with the authority to approve unmasking requests regarding names that surface in NSA data collection—and all those requests at the time would have been vetted by Rogers, a longtime cyberwar expert appointed to his position by President Obama in 2014.

  So the politicization and vilification of the Trump team were in full effect during the transition. But those things had been going on for a full year in subtler, more secretive forms. James Clapper and John Brennan had been stirring the pot, too. But what stoked them into action? New evidence has now surfaced establishing other events that made conditions ripe to launch the plan to take down Donald Trump.

  So let’s go back in time, back to before Mueller became special counsel, before anyone had heard the names George Papadopoulos, Christopher Steele, and Glenn Simpson.

  THE SPIES THAT BLIND

  On April 23, 2012, Eric Holder, the U.S. attorney general of the United States, submitted a motion to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The seventy-page request sought to expand the FBI’s ability to receive information from foreign intelligence services about U.S. citizens who were subject to FISA warrants, or whose names had surfaced during the course of a FISA warrant investigation.4

  By definition, the motion also sought to allow the FBI to share information about U.S. citizens with foreign partners. Without sharing some identifying information—a name, a profession, a photo—the FBI had no way to obtain information about specific subjects from the foreign governments whose help they were seeking.

  So the Obama administration didn’t mince words. The motion proposed that “the following underlined text will be inserted into the first sentence: ‘The FBI may disseminate FISA-acquired information concerning United States persons, which reasonably appears to be foreign intelligence information, is necessary to understand foreign intelligence information or assess its importance, or is evidence of a crime being disseminated for a law enforcement purpose, to foreign governments as follows…’”5

  The wording was broad and fuzzy.

  “‘Reasonably necessary to understand foreign intelligence or assess its importance?’ That’s pretty vague,” Republican Texas congressman Louie Gohmert told the Daily Caller in April 2019. “There’s nothing they could obtain on American citizens that John Brennan or James Clapper couldn’t say ‘it helped me understand other intelligence.’”6

  The motion passed. It became part of FISA law.

  Back in 2012, Obama’s legal eagles obviously weren’t planning to spy specifically on Donald Trump or anyone in his presidential campaign—he hadn’t even declared his candidacy. But the move, couched in language about combating international and domestic terrorism threats, established a precedent for spies to exchange information. It greased the wheels for the hostile operation that would unfold as Trump’s rise to power became more of a threat.

  The motion also established that the FBI’s tentacles extend beyond American borders. The bureau works with foreign intelligence organizations as a matter of course. And this new language would prove vital to manufacturing Russiagate.

  POISONED SOURCES

  The 2012 FISA rules update also suggests the extent to which intelligence collection had become one big game of unvetted show and tell. Obviously, in the age of Islamic terrorism and murderous organizations like ISIS and Al Qaeda urging rogue attacks on the West, we want intelligence agencies to share information about bad actors. But who, exactly, is identifying bad actors and who, exactly, is verifying the information about “persons of interest”? It can be a slippery slope.

  In terms of the Trump campaign, the slope was about as slippery as a sheet of ice greased with melted butter. How allegations surfaced against the Trump campaign is still mystifying, but the story has all the markings of a thirsty Obama administration and an all-too-eager-to-comply Russian disinformation bartender.

  We know a good deal about Glenn Simpson and his plug-and-play template.

  We know that George Papadopoulos was approached by Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud in Italy back on March 12, 2016. About six weeks later, on April 26, Mifsud allegedly told Papadopoulos about “thousands of emails” that he had.7

  We know that Australian high commissioner Alexander Downer, a proud pal of Bill Clinton’s, claims that Papadopoulos told him the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton—something Papadopoulos denies ever doing.8

  And we know that Downer’s recounting of that alleged incident is what the FBI claims ignited the Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence operation, which launched on July 31, 2016.

  A number of questions, however, have developed over this last point. Downer has been clear that Papadopoulos never mentioned emails during their conversation—and y
et, somehow, according to the New York Times’ initial report, the FBI learned that Mifsud had mentioned emails to Papadopoulos. So if FBI agents knew this as noted in their FISA warrant, who told them?

  There are several possibilities. In Papadopoulos’s book, he admits to telling Greek foreign minister Nikolaos Kotzias about the emails.9 Was that meeting under surveillance? Or did Kotzias, who has close ties to Moscow, share the info with the U.S.? Another possible source of the email story, of course, is Mifsud himself and his handlers.

  But we still don’t know conclusively whom Mifsud was working for (although all signs point strongly to Mifsud’s being a Western intelligence asset), who fed him the hacking information, or if that tale was just another of the many fabrications he spun for Papadopoulos. It seems unlikely that Mifsud was a Russian asset, given that Papadopoulos has repeatedly said Mifsud succeeded in introducing him only to two alleged Russians of little consequence, and that one of them was a young woman whom Mifsud introduced as Putin’s niece—even though Putin doesn’t have a niece. So whom was the mysterious Mifsud working for, and what was his end game? Because if Mifsud was not a Russian intelligence asset, as the Russian collusion hoaxsters insist, then we are likely looking at an entrapment scheme marshaled by intelligence agencies supposedly friendly to U.S. interests. That’s right: a setup.

  The FBI actually asked Papadopoulos for Mifsud’s contact information during an interview. The agency also reportedly interviewed Mifsud when he came to a State Department-sponsored conference.10 Suspiciously, FISA warrant applications made after the FBI’s February 2017 interview with Mifsud do not seem to have been updated with what, if anything, that interview revealed. This is strange considering that Mifsud’s alleged proclamations to Papadopoulos about the Russians’ having information about emails are what, according to the shady FBI explanation, kick-started the FBI’s investigation into the Trump team.

  It is hard not to look at all this circumstantial evidence and wonder if our British pals were either duped or actively trying to fool U.S. intelligence. The very first whispers of Trump’s being entwined with Russia, not coincidentally, emanated from London. The Guardian reports that in late 2015, Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the nation’s eavesdropping agency, was listening in on Moscow targets when these “known Kremlin operatives” were picked up talking to people associated with Trump. The precise details revealed during these alleged recorded exchanges have not been made public. But the intelligence was sent to U.S. agencies.11

  As for more curious British connections, Downer, one of the most senior foreign diplomats in London, and ex-MI6 director Richard Dearlove (who, ironically, vouched for Steele’s Russian-intelligence-gathering abilities to the media) both sat on the board of directors of Hakluyt & Co., one of the world’s leading private intelligence groups, based in the U.K. George Papadopoulos had been working in England at the London Centre of International Law Practice when he was steered to meet Mifsud in Rome by, according to Papadopoulos, Arvinder Sambei, whom he refers to as “the legal counsel for the FBI in the U.K. who just happens to be a director at this organization.”12 It should be noted that Sambei challenged this description of events in an interview with T. A. Frank in the Washington Post, in which she said she was “completely taken aback” because she claims she met Papadopoulos only once.13 In addition, she is a former senior prosecutor at the Crown Prosecution Service, where, she claims, she worked with the FBI but was never employed as counsel. Mifsud had worked in London previously and eventually joined the same firm, the London Centre of International Law Practice, where Papadopoulos worked. That Papadopoulos and Mifsud, two incidental characters almost entirely off the radar in terms of notoriety, became the crux of the biggest political espionage scandal in modern history would be inconceivable except for two things.

  First, Papadopoulos was the ideal target, according to anyone familiar with Black Ops 101. He was young, ambitious, and inexperienced—a vulnerable combination to exploit for masters of spycraft—and he had access to the Trump campaign.

  Second, Mifsud had a dirty past, reportedly spiked with at least two money scandals and one now-defunct school, the London Academy of Diplomacy.14 So he might easily be enticed to spin the young American target.

  It seems beyond obvious that somebody with a grudge against the Trump team decided to use these two guys to effectively plant a virus inside the Trump campaign that could grow into Russian collusion charges.

  Fortunately for Papadopoulos, he didn’t bite.

  Unfortunately for Papadopoulos, the FBI did.

  Meanwhile, on December 28, 2015, Peter Strzok, chief of the FBI’s counterespionage section, sent a text to his FBI coworker and girlfriend, Lisa Page, a member of the FBI’s general counsel office. Strzok asked if she had “all our oconus lures approved?”15 OCONUS is an acronym most frequently used by the military to mean “outside the continental United States.” In other words, Strzok was asking about foreign spies or overseas informants. No smoking-gun texts have surfaced that reveal which agents Strzok was referring to or what their missions were. But the exchange by two senior FBI employees who were later found to harbor disturbing anti-Trump biases that got them bounced off the Mueller investigative team and its timing—just after the GCHQ informed the U.S. of noise about Trump and Russia—remain incredibly suspicious.

  According to the unofficial narrative of mainstream media, the GCHQ reports didn’t send off immediate shock waves. U.S. intelligence agencies regarded the communiqués with caution, apparently, because they can’t—legally, anyway—examine private communications of U.S. citizens without a warrant. But there are ways around this. They are called intelligence summaries. The foreign intelligence agents simply outline the content of their intercepts. Were Strzok’s lures related to that GCHQ report? File that with the known unknowns. But about six months later, the GCHQ was so worried about perceived inaction by U.S. intelligence that the British agency’s then-head, Robert Hannigan, flew to the U.S. to meet John Brennan and deliver his ominous Trump-related news personally.16

  Add Christopher Steele’s approaching an FBI agent in Rome, also during the summer of 2016, and the international intelligence agency chatter—German, French, and Dutch spies also reportedly chimed in—was coming from all directions. All of it cast a mountain of aspersions on Trump and the campaign.

  Was any of it verified?

  Not a single word.

  Why let facts get in the way of an investigation into the one man who could burn the wretched swamp to the ground?

  By late summer of 2016, as Trump and Hillary Clinton were going into the homestretch as their respective party nominees, that chatter—about Russian meddling, about Russian kompromat, and about Trump associates in contact with Kremlin operatives—had landed in the ears of Brennan, Clapper, and Comey. Three of America’s top intelligence figures, all Obama loyalists, had been saturated with unconfirmed reports of alleged misdeeds by Trump team members. While we know that Glenn Simpson and Christopher Steele had targeted the FBI and Comey, the facts around the foreign-fed “intelligence” given to Brennan and then presumably shared with Clapper remain murky. We don’t know what the CIA director was told. But the explosive notes of the October 11, 2016, meeting between the U.S. State Department’s Kathleen Kavalec and Steele, which surfaced in May 2019, provide some clues. Steele met with Kavalec before the FBI swore to the information in the FISA warrant application just a few weeks later—and, during a discussion of his “sources,” dropped the names of Russian disinformation specialists Trubnikov and Surkov. Since Steele was trying to convince Kavalec that his reports were legitimate, it seems highly likely that these were his sources.

  Interestingly, Trubnikov was an associate of Stefan Halper, the U.S. spy who probed the Trump team through his contacts with Papadopoulos and Carter Page, at the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar. Halper actually taught classes with Trubnikov at the University of Cambridge in the
U.K. Halper was also close with Richard Dearlove, the former U.K. spy chief. Both Dearlove and Halper suspiciously resigned from the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar shortly after the upset 2016 election victory of Donald Trump, stating, unbelievably, that the victory was due to “unacceptable Russian influence.” Whose influence? Trubnikov’s?

  Dearlove and Halper were also at the July 2016 event at—guess where?—Cambridge, to which Halper had invited the target of the October 2016 FISA warrant, Trump team member Carter Page.

  The CIA, headed by political opportunist John Brennan, would assuredly have been aware of contacts between a well-known U.S. human intelligence asset such as Halper, on foreign soil and in a foreign country, and associates of the Republican nominee for the U.S. presidency. It appears likely that Brennan was running a rogue intelligence-gathering operation, which would explain GOP congressman Devin Nunes’s assertion that no “official” intelligence was used to open the investigation into Trump. A good source of “unofficial” intelligence would’ve been Trubnikov, Halper, and Dearlove’s troika, which used conduit Christopher Steele to circumvent traditional intelligence channels and to pipeline the unverified, salacious allegations directly to John Brennan. The CIA chief could then pass them off to ethically compromised politicians, such as Harry Reid, who would then push them to the FBI. Voilà! Then the FBI could say that the information they, along with the DNC and Hillary Clinton, were paying for from Steele was verified! Although, again, it was just being repeated, not verified.