Oh what a tangled web is weaved…. Apparently, the FBI used the Jeb Bush/DNC Commissioned opposition research dossier on candidate Trump as evidence to the FISA court to gain a warrant for surveillance. Things just got more interesting.
If this report via CNN is factual in its baseline accuracy, methinks the motive for the stuttering obfuscation of FBI Director James Comey just gained some sunlight.
Washington (CNN) – The FBI last year used a dossier of allegations of Russian ties to Donald Trump’s campaign as part of the justification to win approval to secretly monitor a Trump associate, according to US officials briefed on the investigation.
The dossier has also been cited by FBI Director James Comey in some of his briefings to members of Congress in recent weeks, as one of the sources of information the bureau has used to bolster its investigation, according to US officials briefed on the probe.
This includes approval from the secret court that oversees the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to monitor the communications of Carter Page, two of the officials said. Last year, Page was identified by the Trump campaign as an adviser on national security. (read more)
Remember the comments from Chairman Devin Nunes when he shared: Mike Rogers (NSA) was very willing to provide the intelligence committee with evidence; however, James Comey (FBI) was not forthcoming with the requests made by the committee.
Why would FBI Director James Comey be vested in keeping information withheld from the oversight committee? Ah, now it’s time to bring back the public hearings.
Reminder:
FBI Director James Comey unmasked as a Deep State Black Hat Operative.
Representative Elise M. Stefanik is a young, freshman republican congresswoman from the Albany New York area. And using a probative questioning timeline, she single-handily pulled the mask from FBI Director James Comey, yet no-one seemed to notice.
Obviously Ms. Stefanik has not been in the swamp long enough to lose her common sense.
In the segment of the questioning below Rep. Stefanik begins by asking director Comey what are the typical protocols, broad standards and procedures for notifying the Director of National Intelligence, the White House and senior congressional leadership (aka the intelligence Gang of Eight), when the FBI has opened a counter-intelligence investigation.
The parseltongue response from Comey is a generalized reply (with uncomfortable body language) that notification of counter-intel investigations are discussed with the White House, and other pertinent officials, on a calendar basis, ie. “quarterly”.
With the statement that such counter-intel notifications happen “generally quarterly”, and against the backdrop that Comey stated in July of 2016 a counter-intel investigation began, Stefanik asks:
…”when did you notify the White House, the DNI and congressional leadership”?
BOOM! Watch an extremely uncomfortable Director James Comey outright LIE… by claiming there was no active DNI -which is entirely false- James Clapper was Obama’s DNI.
Watch it again.
Watch that first 3:00 minutes again. Ending with:
…”Because of the sensitivity of the matter” ~ James Comey
Director Comey intentionally obfuscates knowledge of the question from Rep Stefanik; using parseltongue verbiage to get himself away from the sunlit timeline.
The counter-intel investigation, by his own admission, began in July 2016. Congress was not notified until March 2017. That’s an eight month period – Obviously obfuscating the quarterly claim moments earlier.
The uncomfortable aspect to this line of inquiry is Comey’s transparent knowledge of the politicized Office of the DNI James Clapper by President Obama. Clapper was used rather extensively by the Obama Administration as an intelligence shield, a firewall or useful idiot, on several occasions.
Anyone who followed the Obama White House intel policy outcomes will have a lengthy frame of reference for DNI Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan as the two primary political operatives. Brennan admitted investigating, and spying on, the Senate Intelligence Committee as they held oversight responsibility for the CIA itself.
The first and second questions from Stefanik were clear. Comey’s understanding of the questions was clear. However, Comey directly evaded truthful response to the second question. When you watch the video, you can see Comey quickly connecting the dots on where this inquiry was going.
There is only one reasonable explanation for FBI Director James Comey to be launching a counter-intel investigation in July 2016, notifying the White House and Clapper, and keeping it under wraps from congress. Comey was a participant in the intelligence gathering for political purposes – wittingly, or unwittingly.
As a direct consequence of this mid-thought-stream Comey obfuscation, it is now clear -at least to me- that Director Comey was using his office as a facilitating conduit for the political purposes of the Obama White House.
Unfortunately, a slightly nervous Stefanik, never forced Comey to go back to the non-answered question and respond by saying:
No, Mr. Comey, there WAS a DNI in place in 2016, please answer the question of when did you notify him (Clapper) and the White House?
….. then it would get a little ugly:
Why did you notify Clapper and the White House but delay congressional notification?
With all the banter about these hearings, and against this slight moment of clarity of purpose, it bears repeating:
There is only ONE KNOWN Factual and CRIMINAL activity currently identified: the unmasking and leaking of Mike Flynn’s name to the media.
FBI Director Comey states his organization is “investigating”. Fair enough, however – not a single congresscritter asked HIM if he is the source of the unmasking or leaks.
How can a congressional committee conduct an investigation if they don’t know if the primary witness, the lead investigator, is the source of the leaks?
Wouldn’t the very first step, the actual basis of the foundation for the investigation itself, be to ensure the person conducting the investigation did not participate in the illegality of the conduct being investigated?
Think.
Avoid the shiny things.
Why wouldn’t congress ask this simple question?
Admiral Mike Rogers answers that approximately 10-20 people within his NSA organization had the potential to unmask and/or leak to the media. Fair enough.
Wouldn’t the first question as follow-up be to ask Admiral Mike Rogers if he is one of those numbered possibilities?
Wouldn’t the second follow-up question, in an authentic inquiry, be to ask Mike Rogers: if he is one of the possibilities with access to that information, then was he actually the person who unmasked or leaked?
If Mike Rogers and James Comey admit they are in charge of two of the possible source organizations for leak activity (expressly known illegal behavior)… then what affirmative confidence has either person expressed to congress to ensure the inquiring body that they personally were not the originating source?
And why didn’t congress ask them?
Think.
There is NO PEA in this shell game of distraction.
Why didn’t congress ask them?
Occam’s Razor – Because the question(s), the brutally obvious question(s), then lead to the follow-up: If the only criminal activity is the sourcing of the leak, and the two people giving testimony are potential suspects in that criminal activity, then: A) How can we trust their testimony, and B) Why are we even having this hearing”? (with two people who are suspects in an ongoing investigation)…
The answers reveal the current intention of the intelligence committee is not to actually investigate, but rather to give the outward illusion of investigation.
If they were not merely giving an illusion…. Congress would be pointing out that FBI Director James Comey has a direct and specific conflict of interest that is so glaringly obvious it’s unfathomable no-one see it.
Director Comey, and to a lesser extent Rogers, would have been in direct contact with the prior administration individuals, and entities acting on their behalf, who were politicizing the information being gathered and lying about (ie. leaking to the media) the content therein.
“Because of the sensitivity of the matter” ~ James Comey
Didn’t Comey further claim in this hearing that lying about the content of (or even the existence of) a counter-intelligence investigation was not itself a criminal act? Hello?
That said, James Comey has an expressed interest in claiming an ongoing investigation exists (even if it doesn’t) just to ensure the prior administration contact and behavior was shielded behind the wall of “an ongoing investigation”. Comey says: “Because of the sensitivity of the matter”.. Where “the matter” is the politicized and entirely false information from the White House.
FBI Director James Comey has singularity of knowledge and has cleverly placed himself in a position where there is no “oversight” of his claims.
…”Because of the sensitivity of the matter” ~ James Comey
See how that works?
At one point in his political life Comey may have been a White Hat, but there’s no doubt his behavior is exactly what a black hat operative would be doing to shield his connection to the black hat activity of the prior administration.
Summary: Hillary Clinton political operatives manufactured the illusion of a computer connection between Russian entities (financial banks) and the Trump campaign/organization. Those manufactured points of evidence were then passed along to White House entities who used the political intel community (Clapper to Comey) to open an investigation of nothingness – to nowhere. The mere existence of that investigation was then used as the originating point for a series of media intel leaks (the narrative) intended to cloud and damage the Trump campaign/organization. FBI Director James Comey, as head of one of the investigative agencies, became part of that political apparatus. Now, usefulness exhausted and with the media engaged, it’s CYA time all around for the originating entities.
“Because of the sensitivity of the matter” ~ James Comey
“I was urging my former colleagues, and, and frankly speaking the people on the Hill [Democrat politicians], it was more actually aimed at telling the Hill people, get as much information as you can – get as much intelligence as you can – before President Obama leaves the administration.”
“Because I had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with the senior [Obama] people who left; so it would be hidden away in the bureaucracy, um, that the Trump folks – if they found out HOW we knew what we knew about their, the Trump staff, dealing with Russians – that they would try to compromise those sources and methods; meaning we no longer have access to that intelligence.”
“So I became very worried because not enough was coming out into the open and I knew that there was more. We have very good intelligence on Russia; so then I had talked to some of my former colleagues and I knew that they were also trying to help get information to the Hill.”
Susan Rice has already earned her fourth pinocchio!
Of course there was no physical wiretap at Trump Towers! They are far more advanced in spying than old listening devices.
Here is an up to date report on the spying at Trump Towers!
ANALYSIS CONFIRMS BRITISH ROLE IN TRUMP BEING SPIED ON
The British Guardian posted a report on April 13 claiming that its sources now admit that the British spy agency GCHQ was digitally wiretapping Trump associates going back to late 2015. This was presumably when the December 2015 Moscow meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn took place.
This runs contrary to the blanket nature of the denial insinuated in GCHQ’s carefully crafted statement of March 17 claiming it was all “nonsense” and “utterly ridiculous” that they conducted surveillance of “then president-elect” Donald Trump (emphasis added). The surveillance went back a year before he became “president-elect.”
President Trump’s claim of being “wire tapped” has been vindicated. Indeed, the surveillance is far more extensive than even he suspected at the time.
Based on the new disclosures, we can safely conclude that the world’s most advanced and extensive system of computerized espionage was indeed used against him and people he worked with, for political purposes, with the knowledge and approval of top Obama officials such as CIA Director John Brennan (one major name implicated by the Guardian).
Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano, who said GCHQ was involved in wiretapping Trump, has also been vindicated. Fox News owes Napolitano an apology for yanking him off the air for a week for making that “controversial” and now-verified assertion.
Trump was right
President Trump stressed the pervasive “extent” of this Obama political “wiretapping” to Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business in an Oval Office interview on April 11 (aired April 12). “Me and so many other people” surveilled, Trump said. He explained again that he had picked up the “wire tapped” terminology straight from the headline of the New York Times (of Jan. 20) as he has explained before (on March 15; see AIM report).
Get “Trump’s War: His Battle for America” by talk radio icon Michael Savage, from the WND Superstore.
Now we’re learning that GCHQ did wiretap Trump for a year before the election. “Trump” is, of course, shorthand for Trump associates and possibly Trump himself directly, depending on context. But GCHQ is trying to put a positive spin on what it admits would be illegal spying on U.S. citizens if done by U.S. agencies.
The Guardian’s sources claim a heroic role for the British GCHQ as a courageous “whistleblower” in warning U.S. agencies to “Watch out” about Trump and Russia – but carefully avoiding mention of the U.S.’s NSA, which must be protected at all costs as part of the NSA-GCHQ spy-on-each-other’s-citizens “wiretap shell game.” (See AIM Special Report of March 18.)
These sources virtually admit the mutual “wiretap shell game” by inadvertently mentioning the Trump-Russia data was originally passed on to the U.S. by GCHQ as part of a “routine exchange” of intelligence. The use of this term, “exchange,” suggests what we had previously reported – the shell-game “exchange” between the NSA and GCHQ where they can spy on each other’s citizens and deny it all.
British wiretapping
Past British prime ministers have been implicated in various scandals involving wiretaps. Some have involved the “Echelon” global surveillance system set up by the NSA with its counterparts in the other “Five Eyes” nations – U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Any one of these countries is able to circumvent domestic laws against spying on their own citizens by asking another Echelon member country to do it for them. This is precisely the “wiretap shell game” used by the Obama administration to have British GCHQ spy on Trump, as outlined by Judge Napolitano and his sources.
To avoid unraveling the longstanding Five Eyes spying “wiretap shell game,” the GCHQ had to pretend they “routinely” came across this Trump-Russia wiretap data “by chance,” unprompted by requests from U.S. agencies (such as the NSA or CIA) or by Obama officials, working outside normal NSA chain of command on Signals Intelligence or SIGINT (as Judge Napolitano reported on March 14).
So the heroic British GCHQ comes to the rescue with conveniently accidental (our word) captures of wiretap communications between Trump people and sinister-sounding “Russian intelligence agents,” with the wiretaps sent here to help out the U.S. agencies. We are supposed to believe the U.S. agencies and the Obama White House just passively received this bombshell wiretap data from GCHQ, no questions asked, for over a year from late 2015 to early 2017. (The Guardian has no end date for the surveillance, such as the Nov. 8 election, and indicates continued surveillance into the Trump transition, with the FBI “throwing more resources” into the investigation then.)
Did Obama officials ever say, “Wait! Stop sending us this material, it may be illegal!” It does not appear so. Hence, the questions that have to be asked by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees are:
Were there requests for more wiretap data on Trump and his team? Were there requests for more complete transcripts, or even voice recordings?
This “alerting” of the U.S. on Trump-Russia communications was needed, according to the Guardian and its U.S. and U.K. intelligence sources, because the U.S. agencies were “asleep” or “untrained,” or were legally prohibited from “examining the private communications of American citizens without warrants.” But to the GCHQ, America is a “foreign” nation and evidently they think they are free to spy on Americans “without warrants.”
Obama’s CIA and the anti-Trump task force
Previous reporting has said that an interagency task force of six U.S. intelligence agencies was set up to investigate the alleged Trump-connected names supposedly discovered in “incidental collection” of digital wiretap surveillance of Russian communications. The six agencies are said to consist of the CIA, NSA, FBI, the Justice Department’s National Security Division, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Treasury Department financial crimes unit.
Until now, no one has known who in the Obama administration set up the task force, who directs it, what its operating directives state, what its activities have entailed, and who it is really accountable to.
But the Guardian is now reporting that it was CIA Director John Brennan who initiated, in about August 2016, what clearly seems to be an illegal domestic investigation of the Trump political campaign, which would be prohibited by the CIA charter.
Reportedly “Brennan used [British] GCHQ information and intelligence from other partners to launch a major interagency investigation.” The infamous fake “Trump dossier” is apparently dragged in too.
Brennan then proceeded to give highly classified “urgent” briefings to individual members of the congressional “Gang of Eight.” Beginning on about Aug. 25, with then-Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., on that date, CIA chief Brennan claimed that the Russian email hackings of the Democratic National Committee were designed to help Trump win the election, according to the New York Times. These partisan briefings represent the politicization of the CIA under Obama, and are of dubious legality.
In September 2016, this anti-Trump intelligence task force changed the previous “incidental” collection to outright direct targeting of Trump people so that their communications with Russia were “actively monitored,” not merely retrieved retroactively in digital archives with names having to be laboriously “unmasked.” (See also New York Times Jan.19/20, Feb. 14.)
Unmasking is unnecessary if one starts with the specific names of Trump personnel first, and then flags them for future surveillance, going forward in time. In that case, the “actively monitored” and flagged Trump names automatically trigger alerts in the NSA-GCHQ computers whenever the names turn up. These wiretap reports would then have been submitted to Obama officials at the level of national security adviser Susan Rice and CIA director Brennan, and perhaps to Obama himself.
Interestingly, the Guardian’s sources carefully try to avoid implicating or involving the NSA in GCHQ’s allegedly unprompted reporting on intercepted wiretap data on Trump associates. It’s the “shell game” again with the NSA and GCHQ covering for each other.
British GCHQ director implicated
Instead, the Guardian’s anonymous intelligence sources say that then-director of GCHQ Robert Hannigan passed on a top secret “director level” report on Trump-Russia in “summer 2016” to CIA Director John Brennan, rather than to the NSA. However, if GCHQ was using NSA’s digital wiretap facilities to “routinely” spy on Trump people, then the NSA would be implicated by the very arrangement used.
As we predicted at AIM, the unexpected sudden resignation of GCHQ director Hannigan, announced on Jan. 23, makes him the potential villain and scapegoat. Hannigan stayed on his job until his replacement took office on April 7.
In an unprecedented BBC interview on April 5, Hannigan fired a parting shot at the Judge Napolitano and White House reports of his GCHQ’s spying on Trump. Hannigan snidely dismissed the reports, saying: “We get crazy conspiracy theories thrown at us every day. We ignore most of them. On this occasion, it was so crazy that we felt we should say so, and we have said it’s a ridiculous suggestion.”
The Guardian’s report refutes Hannigan, barely a week after he left office, possibly with official connivance or approval. But why is Hannigan getting thrown under the bus so soon? Is it fear of the impending findings of U.S. congressional and official investigations exposing GCHQ?
Such reports in the British press on highly sensitive intelligence matters surely must have been quietly cleared by the British government as a first fallback position on GCHQ spying on Trump. Otherwise, the Guardian would be in deep trouble under the U.K.’s Official Secrets Act and its D-Notice procedure to suppress or censor news stories on secret intelligence matters.
Finally, the British also seem to be trying to spread the blame around to a laundry list of other countries allegedly passing on intelligence about Trump-Russia contacts – Germany, Estonia, Poland, Australia, the Dutch and the French DGSE.
Still, no “smoking gun” has ever been found in any of this wiretap material, for it would already have been leaked like Lt. Gen. Flynn’s fairly benign conversations with the Russian ambassador that got him fired.
Despite the sensational news from the Washington Post that the FBI obtained a FISA warrant to wiretap ex-Trump adviser Carter Page, which may even still be in effect, his “Russian contacts” also seem to be completely ordinary and routine. Page is so confident of his innocence that he has been going on various television news programs to talk openly about his work on Russia, supplying Russian contacts with some of his New York University classroom materials.
To be sure, a certain large percentage of these kinds of business meetings with Russians will turn out to be with undercover Russian intelligence officers – unbeknownst to the Western business and academic people meeting them. The media portray them as suspicious. But this kind of Russian spy game has always been going on since the Cold War and is nothing new.
The FISA warrant, rather than proving any malfeasance by Carter Page – again no “smoking gun” – only adds to the evidence that what President Trump said from the start was true: that Trump and his associates were under electronic surveillance.
Unasked questions
What do the wiretaps on Trump actually say? The media don’t want to know if the NSA-GCHQ wiretaps actually exonerate President Trump.
One of the advantages of the adversarial system in the courts is that advocates on the opposing side ideally get a fair chance – unlike the one-sided media with journalists who, at the rate of more than 90 percent, contributed to the Hillary Clinton campaign. (See this Columbia Journalism Review study of election records.)
Questions not asked of Rice or other sources by the media include whether she or other Obama officials “flagged” the unmasked Trump team names for future NSA (or British GCHQ) automatic unmasking and delivery of transcripts and summary reports.
Did the Obama people regularize the “unmasking” so that routinely a new retroactive search was automatically ordered with automatic unmaskings? That would be another way to turn “incidental collection” into an effectively ongoing wiretap order. Did President Obama or Rice or others request actual sound recordings of Trump and others to review?
Did the Obama team “unmask” other presidential candidates and associates besides Trump, such as Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who visited Moscow in December 2015 and dined with Putin? Fox is reporting that congressional investigators are now looking into whether other presidential candidates and members of Congress were surveilled, too. In 2014, CIA director Brennan was caught red-handed lying to the Senate about the CIA’s criminal hacking of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s computer system.
We are told that many, if not most, of these wiretaps and unmaskings of Trump people were not even wiretaps about Russia or “incidental collection” on legitimate foreign intelligence subjects, though they may have begun that way.
The evidence now indicates that the information was procured for partisan political purposes – to spy on the Trump opposition to Hillary Clinton using the full weight of the U.S. government’s NSA spying apparatus (or NSA facilities used by British GCHQ).
Pompeo must clean out the CIA
Trump CIA Director Mike Pompeo is in a position to get to the bottom of this scandal. Yet, on April 13, 2017, in his first public speech as director, he seemed to indicate that the evidence being developed in connection with the CIA’s role in the illegal surveillance of President Trump was going to be ignored or brushed aside. It was a forceful, even strident, defense of the agency.
“I inherited an agency that has a real appreciation for the law and for the Constitution,” he claimed. “Despite fictional depictions meant to sell books or box-office tickets, we are not an untethered or rogue agency. So yes, while we have some truly awesome capabilities at our disposal, our officers do not operate in areas or against targets that are rightfully and legally off-limits to us.”
The evidence suggests the opposite. The CIA under Obama’s CIA Director Brennan was involved in illegal surveillance, using those “truly awesome capabilities,” against political targets that should have been off-limits.
One of those targets was the president who appointed Pompeo as CIA director.
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