Tornado Alley (PROG)

[mr40]

There remains much that is not known about the Trump dossier but two things are fact. The donor who asked for the dossier refused to pay for it because there were no sources or verification.
Second, several items were quickly proven to be false.

The PDF file of the 30-page typewritten report alleges that high Kremlin officials colluded with Trump, offered him multi-billion dollar bribes, and accumulated compromising evidence of Trump’s sexual escapades in Russia.

The U.S. intelligence community purportedly has examined the allegations but have not confirmed any of them. We can wait till hell freezes over. The material is not verifiable. It reports information from anonymous “trusted compatriots,” “knowledgeable sources,” “former intelligence officers,” and “ministry of foreign affairs officials.”

The Orbis report spins the tale of Putin insiders, spurred on by Putin himself, engaging in a five-year courtship of Donald Trump in which they offer him lucrative real estate deals that he rejects but leaves himself open to blackmail as a result of sexual escapades with prostitutes in St. Petersburg and Moscow (the famous “golden shower” incident). Despite his reluctance to enter into lucrative business deals, Trump “and his inner circle have accepted regular intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals,” according to the Orbis report.

In 2011, when the Russian courtship purportedly begins, Trump was a TV personality and beauty pageant impresario. Neither in the U.S. or Russia would anyone of authority anticipate that Trump would one day become the presidential candidate of a major U.S. political party, making him the target of Russian intelligence.

The Orbis report claims, that as the election neared (July 2016), Igor Sechin, Putin’s right-hand man and CEO of Rosneft (Russia’s national oil company) offered Trump a deal that defies belief. I quote:

“Speaking to a trusted compatriot in mid-October 2015, a close associate of Rosneft President and PUTIN ally Igor SECHIN elaborated on the reported secret meeting between the latter and Carter PAGE, of US Republican presidential candidate's foreign policy team, in Moscow in July 2016. The secret had been confirmed to him/her by a senior member of staff, in addition to the Rosneft President himself…Sechin’s associate said that the Rosneft President was so keen to lift personal and corporate Western sanctions imposed on the company, that he offered PAGE associates the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatized) stake in Rosneft in return PAGE had expressed interest and confirmed that were TRUMP elected US president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted.”

This story is utter nonsense, not worthy of a wacky conspiracy theory of an alien invasion.

To offer Trump either the entirety of, or a brokerage commission on, the market value of 19.5% of Rosneft shares—even a 6 percent commission on $12 billion worth of Rosneft shares would amount to an astonishing $720 million—would deplete the cash that Putin desperately needed for military spending and budget deficits, all in return for a promise to lift sanctions if—and what a big “if”—Trump were elected. Rosneft, as a public company, would have to conceal that the U.S. president was a party to this major transaction. This remarkable secret-of-secrets seems to be bandied about to an Orbis “trusted compatriot," a senior member of Sechin’s staff, and disclosed by Sechin himself. I guess there are a lot of loose lips in Rosneft offices.

The huge bribe for (perhaps) lifting the sanctions makes Nikita Khrushchev’s hare-brained schemes—for which he was fired—look eminently reasonable.

One of the few verifiable facts in the Orbis report is the key role played by Trump’s “personal lawyer” Michael Cohen. Cohen purportedly took over the negotiation of the Sechin deal, and, when the Kremlin got cold feet over its hacking campaign, it turned to Cohen to cover up the operation, meet with the Kremlin’s Presidential Administration, and make illicit payments to shut up and move the hackers to Bulgaria. A key meeting was held in Prague in August of 2016 with Cohen accompanied by three colleagues. The meetings took place in the offices of a Russian quasi-state organization, Rossotrudnichestvo.

Cohen has denied any such meetings with the Kremlin Presidential administration and claims never to have visited Prague. According to the Orbis report, Cohen engaged in potential criminal activities, such as illicit payoffs to hackers and the buying of their silence. I doubt that he will let such accusations pass.

Cohen produced his Passport showing he had never been in Prague. He also produced receipts showing he was in fact in California in August of 2016 with his son, checking out colleges!

The Orbis report was written, in my opinion, not by an ex British intelligence officer but by a Russian trained in the KGB tradition.

It is full of names, dates, meetings, quarrels, and events that are hearsay (one an overheard conversation). It is a collection of “this important person” said this to “another important person.” There is no record; no informant is identified by name or by more than a generic title. The report appears to fail the veracity test in the one instance of a purported meeting in which names, dates, and location are provided. Some of the stories are so bizarre (the Rosneft bribe) that they fail the laugh test.

We have reached a sad state of affairs where an anonymous report, full of bizarre statements, captures the attention of the world media because it casts a shadow over the legitimacy of a President-elect, who has not even taken the oath of office. For example, the Trump dossier is tonight’s lead item on German state television and on BBC. False news has become America’s international export to the world media.

THIS FAKE DOSSIER POS DID A LOT OF DAMAGE TO TRUMP AND WHOEVER ORDERED FUSION GPS TO PRODUCE IT SHOULD BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2017/01/13/the-trump-dossier-is-false-news-and-heres-why/#47db5ee06867