Bleeding Edge

SpyGate

This book details the evidence and the reasons behind the recently failed Coup D’Etat against the American Democracy.
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“This is the most important existential threat that our country has faced since the inception of this Republic” —Dr Churchill
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This Book was written by Dr Pano Churchill
Copyright 2018
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Chapter Thirteen
The timeline of the Coup D’Etat against our Democracy

Robert Mueller must now justify his faith in the Coup D’Etat set up, as it stands against the very foundation of our legal system, by putting up or shutting down.

Because recently, we learned more about the back-and-forth between President Trump’s legal team and Special Counsel Robert Mueller this past weekend. The New York Times published a long letter from Trump’s team to Mueller arguing that he should drop his request to interview the president.

The lengthy letter makes many factual and legal assertions, some of which are highly debatable. Yet, assuming that it accurately reflects the nature and scope of Mueller’s investigation, its two bottom-line claims have merit: The special counsel does not have a viable criminal case against the president, nor has he justified the extraordinary measure of seeking the president’s testimony.

The letter suggests that the special counsel’s inquiry into Trump’s conduct is focused on obstruction. Mueller was appointed on May 17, 2017, amid the uproar over two events: Trump’s May 9 firing of Comey, and Comey’s subsequent leak of a memo-to-self (published by the New York Times on May 16), which claimed that Trump had pressured him to drop any investigation of former national-security adviser Michael Flynn. The letter implies that these two events remain the gravamen of the special counsel’s obstruction probe.

If that is so, there is no obstruction case.

Only illegal acts to influence an investigation can predicate a criminal charge of obstruction against a president. Investigation and prosecution are executive functions in our system. FBI investigations are conducted under the president’s power; unlike ordinary citizens, the chief executive has the authority to influence, impede, and even shut down investigations.

Consequently, a prosecutor may not charge obstruction based on the president’s exercise of his constitutional prerogatives. The president’s authority to remove executive officials, such as the FBI director, and to exercise prosecutorial discretion — an executive power — by weighing in on the merits of an investigation are incontestable. Put aside that the president disputes claims that he leaned on Comey to drop the Flynn investigation and dismissed Comey over the Russia investigation; his lawyers are right that such actions cannot form the basis for an obstruction indictment.

Trump’s lawyers may go too far in arguing that, as a matter of law, presidential actions cannot constitute obstruction because that would amount to a claim that the Constitution’s “chief law enforcement officer” could “obstruct himself.” Trump’s lawyers root this argument in “the President’s actions here” — i.e., they appear to be referring to the legal actions Trump actually took, not to hypothetical lawless acts.

The president, in any event, is not above the law. Theoretically, if a president attempted to impede an investigation by illegal acts, that could predicate an obstruction charge. For example, Presidents Nixon and Clinton were properly investigated on obstruction allegations based on witness tampering and subornation of perjury. But those presidents were subjected to impeachment proceedings, the remedy our system contemplates for egregious executive misconduct.

Congress has the authority to impeach and remove a president based on abuses of executive power and based even on constitutionally permissible actions — e.g., a pardon issued to silence a witness. Mueller is not Congress, nor does he work for Congress. He is a prosecutor, whose burden is to prove statutory crimes. He is, moreover, a subordinate executive official; if the president’s actions are constitutionally legitimate, it is not his place to question whether they are tainted by untoward motives.

The president’s attorneys are also correct in asserting that no federal prosecutor should seek a president’s testimony, much less attempt to compel it by grand-jury subpoena, absent a demonstration “with specificity” that the information sought is “important” to proving a serious crime, and that it “is not practically available from another source.” (The lawyers here quote the D.C. Circuit Court’s 1997 Espy decision.) It is doubtful that Mueller can establish either condition.

Unless there is a smoking gun against the president that is lurking unseen even in the private jousting between Trump’s team and Mueller, the special prosecutor should be wrapping up the obstruction aspect of his probe.

Even if one believes Trump botched the firing of Comey, and even if one is skeptical of Trump’s claim that the firing was unrelated to the Russia investigation (we suspect it had much to do with Comey’s refusal to state publicly his private assurances that Trump was not suspected of wrongdoing), Trump’s removal of Comey was still legitimate, and, as we have opined, justified. Moreover, even if one believes (as we do) that presidents should refrain from involvement in ongoing investigations, especially involving political allies such as Flynn, the president’s authority to assert himself is clear — indeed, Trump could legitimately have ordered the Flynn investigation to be dropped, or pardoned Flynn.

And as a practical matter, there was no obstruction. Comey’s removal did not impede the Russia investigation in the slightest. Regarding the Flynn probe specifically, Comey never reported to the Justice Department that he had been obstructed, and Flynn was ultimately prosecuted and convicted.

Regardless, Mueller can’t legitimately claim that the information he wants from Trump is unavailable from any other source. He has collected voluminous documentary evidence and extensively questioned other participants in Comey’s termination and Flynn’s investigation. The prosecutor does not need the president’s testimony to prove what happened. Nor does he need it to establish Trump’s state of mind. Unless Trump committed an illegal act, his intentions are irrelevant; and even if they were arguably relevant, it is commonplace for prosecutors to prove mens rea without testimony from the subjects under investigation.

In short, unless there is a smoking gun against the president that is lurking unseen even in the private jousting between Trump’s team and Mueller, the special prosecutor should be wrapping up the obstruction aspect of his probe rather than extending it via a court fight over the president’s testimony.

Over the past month, a number of articles have made reference to the timeline surrounding the Obama administration’s counterintelligence operation into President Donald Trump’s campaign‘s alleged ties to Russia.

Investigations conducted by Congressional and Senate committees are entering the second year and what has been pieced together by investigators – battling for documents every step of the way – challenges the information the FBI and former senior Obama administration have revealed about the investigation.

Their evidence is at odds with the DOJ/FBI timeline leaked to various news outlets indicating the investigation began in late summer of 2016. These discrepancies make it all the more important that the DOJ and FBI turn over documents to the Congressional oversight committees who are investigating what looks like an abuse and weaponization of the tools used by U.S. federal law enforcement and the intelligence community.

In a December 2017 article, numerous intelligence officials and whistleblowers, said that what happened in the Trump campaign is a microcosm of ongoing abuse of the intelligence apparatus, and explain why the American public has a right to know what happened.

But the FBI’s Russia/Trump investigation has become more of a Pandora’s box and the revelations lead to multiple unanswered questions on the part of all the players involved.

What was the evidence that allowed the Obama administration to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign?

We still don’t have an answer, but we’re closer than ever to unraveling what happened and why. If the FBI was truly concerned that Russians were trying to influence the campaign, why didn’t the Bureau give a defensive briefing to alert the campaign about these concerns? What role did the offices of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA and NSA have in the investigation?

Unfortunately, the FBI and DOJ have stonewalled the American public’s right-to-know, along with congressional oversight efforts, and so many questions are left unanswered. What we do know is that a bulk of the information regarding advisors with the Trump campaign was gathered in England. We also know that Great Britain’s intelligence apparatus, along with other allied nations intelligence networks, were also gathering communications and data on officials of the Trump campaign while overseas.

How much information shared with the U.S. authorities and what was the nature of intelligence sharing?

Here is what the timeline, based on leaks in the press, and information obtained by lawmakers, reveals, and why it is so important that the President and Congress do everything in their power to find out what happened and wrap up this investigation.

Here is the timeline of the events that brought us this far, and are all seemingly manufactured to bring down a President, starting from the late 2015, (contrary to the FBI’s leaked and fake timeline), when according to several former and current western intelligence sources who spoke for this report, the investigations into President Donald Trump and his campaign began. This date is of course, very much earlier, than what had been reported by DoJ, and for that matter, the investigation did not even begin in the United States, but rather across the Atlantic Ocean, in Great Britain.

Intelligence community counterparts in Great Britain, specifically GCHQ, which is similar to America’s NSA, had already begun looking into what they alleged was contact between Russians and some members of the Trump campaign and played “an early, prominent role” according to these sources. But whether that information was requested by the U.S. FBI, or CIA, as assistance to an investigation here, or whether the British began the investigation on their own is still not clear. Yet all sources speak of an FBI/CIA joint request triggering that part of the Trump investigation, and that points straight to Obama, his White House, Valerie Jarett, Sally Yates, Comey, and Loretta Lynch.

The Guardian had reported assuredly, that the British Intelligence sources shared their signals intelligence on people connected to the Trump campaign, with the United States DoJ and branches of the Security apparatus. However, The Guardian also reports that Germany, Poland, and Estonia also shared communications related to members of the Trump campaign with the United States. Great Britain, which is part of what is called the “Five-Eyes” alliance includes the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand and the countries often shared signals intelligence, and raw communications, between targets, they were tracking, spying on, following, or even investigating.

Therefore, if what we are being told is true, then there are some pivotal questions that need to be asked. Moreover, for now, but most importantly for the future of our Co-operation with Allies and with other Security Agencies worldwide and with domestic agencies and institutions — we must ask these questions:

1) Who amongst those inside the U.S. and British intelligence agencies were aware that members of the Trump campaign had their communications intercepted by British intelligence, purportedly investigating the Russians?

2) Who received the product of such intelligence?

3) Was it the U.S. who asked the British to assist in a counterintelligence investigation?

4) Did the British do this on their own as claimed in The Guardian?

5) If this did occur, how directly involved were CIA Director John Brennan, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and FBI Director James Comey in the information being shared by our allies?

6) How often had American political communications, unknown to the public, been intercepted by foreign governments for political purposes?

7) Were these Allies notified that they were involved in an American Election Campaign directly or indirectly, and what cause (similar to the FISA Court documentation) they were given for the requested effort?

8) If members of an administration collect information from allies based on overseas communications between political opposition, especially in times of national elections, what happens to that intelligence?

9) How is it safeguarded from abuse and who or what agency has the oversight authority to ensure it is a legitimate counterintelligence investigation?

10) Since Congressional oversight is always after-the-fact and lawmakers have been hampered by roadblocks set up by the DOJ, FBI and former senior officials of the Obama administration, who either have withheld documentation, evaded answering questions or lied — how can we overcome the obvious & implausible deniability of the “spying” effort by our Security apparatus run amok against the Trump campaign because a gangsterized DoJ and a weaponized FBI and the other security agencies were directed by a sunsetting White House to go against a political opponent who seemed to be winning the Presidential race?

11) If what the British and western intelligence officials are saying is true, then the investigation into the Trump campaign began much earlier than the FBI’s claims at the end of July 2016. More importantly, our allies may have been collecting more communications than we’re aware of, on Trump campaign officials and volunteers. What we do know is that National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn; Carter Page, a short time foreign policy volunteer for the campaign; Paul Manafort, a short-term campaign chair and George Papadopoulos, a young short-term foreign policy advisor were all caught up in the spying dragnet. So how do we get the whole intelligence product of our allies now, in order to examine the requests that brought this thing about?

12) How can we become assured that we have fixed all the targets of the Security Agencies and have established clear limitations on them, so that they do not become an Unconstitutional State into themselves, like a modern day Gestapo, a Stasi, or a KGB, acting with impunity and without limitations within our Country and across the World, in direct contravention with our Democratic Constitutional Republic?

December 10, 2015: Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who was the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, goes to Moscow to give a speech at an event held by Russia Television, a Russian government-funded news agency known as RT. Flynn was paid $45,000 through his speaker’s bureau which arranged for him to speak at the event. Jill Stein, who was the Green Party’s presidential candidate, was also seated at the same table as Flynn, along with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Early March 2016: George Papadopoulos was working in London at the London Centre of International Law Practice. It was during this time in early March that he learns that he will serve as a volunteer foreign policy advisor on the Trump campaign, according to court records. He had only been with this organization for a short period of time.

Early March 2016: Fusion GPS approached the law firm of Perkins Coie which represents the Hillary for America Campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Fusion GPS presents the firm with a proposal to continue its opposition research on then-candidate Donald Trump, which they had begun in 2015 under contract with the Paul Singer-connected Washington Free Beacon.

March 10, 2016: An onslaught of malicious phishing email messages targeting people from the Hillary Clinton campaign were sent around. John Podesta – who responded to the phishing bait – allowed the hackers to gain entry into the campaigns most confidential emails, per reports.

March 11, 2016: A Russian spy, Evgeny Buryakov, who posed as a banker in New York City, pleaded guilty to espionage-related charges. Court documents revealed Russia’s SVR, foreign intelligence service, was involved. Allegedly Carter Page, a graduate of the Naval Academy, who was outed as “Male 1” in media reports was approached by the Russians in 2013. The FBI then approached Page about his contact with the Russians. For the most part Page’s involvement in the FBI’s case remains a mystery. Questions still loom as to whether or not Page assisted the FBI in bringing charges against the Russian spies and the extent of his role, according to analysts.

March 14, 2016: Professor Joseph Mifsud, allegedly in hiding now, was an honorary director with the London Academy of Diplomacy and was also with the London Centre of International Law Practice. Mifsud shows the direct interest in Papadopoulos and arranges a meeting. Mifsud, originally from Malta, was connected to both the British foreign secretary along with Western intelligence agencies, including the CIA, according to various reports and work history. Papadopoulos had gone to Rome as part of a visiting delegation from the London Center. In an article, Lee Smith with Real Clear Politics outlines Mifsud’s history and calls into question his direct ties with Russia, instead suggesting the professor’s ties appear to be stronger to western intelligence agencies and possibly Bill and Hillary Clinton. Smith refers to an interview Mifsud gave to the Italian newspaper La Republica, shortly before he went into hiding saying: “The only foundation I am a member of, is the Clinton Foundation.”

March 21, 2016: Then-candidate Trump, who was under criticism for not having a foreign policy team in place, does an hour-long interview with the Washington Post, where he reveals a number of advisors selected for the campaign’s foreign policy team. Two of the people on the list are Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, who were brought on board by Sam Clovis.

From The Washington Post: Trump began the hour-long meeting by pulling out a list of some of his foreign policy advisers.”Walid Phares, who you probably know. PhD, adviser to the House of Representatives. He’s a counterterrorism expert,” Trump said (during his interview with the Washington Post). “Carter Page, PhD. George Papadopoulos. He’s an oil and energy consultant. Excellent guy. The honorable Joe Schmitz, [was] inspector general at the Department of Defense. General Keith Kellogg. And I have quite a few more. But that’s a group of some of the people that we are dealing with. We have many other people in different aspects of what we do. But that’s a pretty representative group.”

March 2016 (Date not specified): Shortly after Trump announces his foreign policy team, FBI Director James Comey, along with Deputy Director Andrew McCabe go to brief Attorney General Loretta Lynch about Carter Page. Why? Because Page had already been on the FBI’s radar during a 2013 investigation into Russian spies working in New York City. According to the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia report, Lynch told lawmakers, “one of the possibilities the three of us discussed was whether or not to provide what is called a defensive briefing to the campaign, wherein there would be a meeting with a senior person with the campaign to alert them to the fact that…there may be efforts to compromise someone in their campaign.” The FBI, however, did not provide that briefing.

The report also noted “Page previously lived and worked in Russia and maintained contact with known Russian intelligence officers, including (redacted) who was described in a 2015 court filing as an SVR officer posted to the Russian Mission to the United Nations. Page previously worked with the FBI in the prosecution of (redacted) and other Russian intelligence officials.”

Late Spring (no specified date given by Obama Officials): After speaking to Lynch, Comey briefs the National Security Council Principals about Page, according to the Russia Report (page 54). Those interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee, however, did not specify the date of the meeting to lawmakers, only recalling it was in late spring. Still, despite concerns, the FBI did not provide a defensive briefing to the Trump campaign about Page or raise any awareness about Russia’s interference. The Washington Examiner’s Byron York, describes: “ … the principals committee includes some of the highest-ranking officials in the government, including the secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense, and Homeland Security, the attorney general, the head of the CIA, the White House chief of staff, U.N. ambassador, and more.”

Former CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power who unmasked over 300 people at the end of her tenure. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who among other senior officials was fully briefed on the matter.

Here are a few more vital questions that are still left unanswered.

1) What did Obama order people to do?

2) What did Valerie Jarrett order people to do?

3) What did Hillary Clinton order people to do?

4) What did James Comey order people to do?

5) What did John Brennan order people to do?

6) What did James Clapper order people to do?

7) What did Loretta Lynch order people to do?

8) What did Sally Yates order people to do?

9) What did the fired Head of CGHQ of Great Britain order people to do?

10) What did any government official directing the spying effort on the Trump campaign, order people to do?

11) What did the other friendly governments spying on behalf of the FBI order people to do?

12) What did the branches of the FBI operating through our American embassy, order people to do?

Answering those questions to our satisfaction, should be the only way for us to believe that the FBI should not be dismembered as a “Too Big To Fail” organization.

Because we need to see and understand the established lines of command, and the downwards communications, in order for us all, to be able to convincingly believe that this method of Spying against a Political Opponent, was not an act of a Coup D’Etat against our Country.

Waiting for those answers for a while now.

Yet I am not holding my breath… for quick answers any time soon.

But I am still hopeful that the local KGB, Gestapo, and Stasi — all rolled into one and masquerading as the domestic police force named the FBI, is going to answer my Questions.

Am still waiting as if that’s possible…

March 29, 2016: Paul Manafort and his partner, Richard Gates, join the Trump campaign. Like Page, both men were also on the FBI’s radar. Manafort and Gates worked as political consultants for Ukrainian politicians backed by the Kremlin.
April 2016: Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer Marc E. Elias, with the law firm Perkins Coie, goes back to Fusion GPS to retain the research firm for an investigation into Trump’s campaign and alleged ties to Russia, according to a letter. Perkins Coie was also representing the DNC in addition to the Hillary Clinton Campaign. According to Luke Harding, The Guardian former British spy Christopher Steele begins working for Fusion GPS co-founder and friend Glen Simpson in April. Steele was no stranger to Washington D.C. circles. He had a long time relationship with the FBI and was connected to officials in the State Department, many of whom were closely connected to Hillary and Bill Clinton. According to the Washington Post article, which first reported who paid the research firm, “Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the company in

April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC”: Harding interviewed Steele for his report in The Guardian, which stated that he began working for Fusion in April but other articles and Congressional testimony suggest Fusion GPS hired Steele in June. These dates are confusing but important. If Steele turned in his first part of the dossier in June, there is a reason to believe he was working much earlier for Fusion GPS.

April 26, 2016: Papadopoulos has a meeting with Professor Joseph Mifsud in London. According to court documents, Papadopoulos tells the FBI that Mifsud told him about a recent trip to Moscow. Mifsud allegedly said that while he was in Moscow he met with “high-level Russian government officials” that claimed to have information on Hillary Clinton.

May 4, 2016: Papadopoulus gives an interview to The Times, in London, where he garners attention for lashing out at Prime Minister David Cameron saying, the PM should apologize for calling Trump “divisive, stupid and wrong.” This interview gets the attention of the Australian Diplomat Alexander Downer, who is upset by Papadopoulos’ remarks regarding Cameron and arranges to meet with him. The meeting was scheduled for May 10, 2016, according to reports and interviews with Downer.

May 10, 2016: Papadopoulos agrees to meet Downer at London’s Kensington Wine Room. According to Downer, they only had one drink and he was meeting to respond to Papadopoulos’s interview with The Times. It was then that Papadopoulos referred to the information Mifsud had relayed to him about Moscow having information on Clinton. Downer, in an interview with The Australian news magazine, said articles referring to a heavy night of drinking were false. He said that “by the way, nothing [Papadopoulos] said in that conversation indicated Trump himself had been conspiring with the Russians to collect information on Hillary Clinton. It was just that this guy, Papadopoulos, clearly knew that the Russians did have material on Hillary Clinton — but whether Trump knew or not?” Downer also indicated that “Papadopoulos didn’t say Trump knew or that Trump was in any way involved in this. He said it was about Russians and Hillary Clinton; it wasn’t about Trump.” In fact, he noted that Papadopoulos “didn’t say dirt; he said material that could be damaging to Hillary Clinton. No, he said it would be damaging. He didn’t say what it was.

It was the conversation during this meeting, according to a story in the New York Times in December 2017, that would open the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation “Crossfire Hurricane,” which was to probe any coordination between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

According to Chuck Ross with the Daily Caller Papadopoulos believed Mifsud was referring to the 30,000-plus emails Hillary Clinton had deleted from her server. Andrew McCarthy in National Review noted that this scenario makes more sense because “it was those emails that Donald Trump harped on throughout the campaign and that were in the news when Mifsud spoke with Papadopoulos in April 2016. While there are grounds for concern that Clinton’s emails were hacked, there is no proof that it happened; Clinton’s 30,000 emails are not the hacked DNC emails on which the “collusion” narrative is based.”

June 20, 2016: Former British spy Christopher Steele turns over the first part of his work on the dossier to Fusion GPS, according to The Guardian.

July 2016: According to the book Russian Roulette, Victoria Nuland, with the State Department, who knows Steele, gets a summary of the dossier through Jonathan Winer, also the State Department. According to the book, she gave permission for an FBI agent in London to meet with Steele.

July 5, 2016: Steele met with FBI Agent Michael Gaeta in London at Steele’s home. At that point, Steele gave Gaeta a copy of the dossier he has put together.

July 7, 2016: Carter Page makes a trip to Moscow for a speaking engagement on

July 7, but not as an official member of the Trump campaign.

July 11-12, 2016: Just days after leaving Moscow, Carter Page attends an event at the University of Cambridge called 2016’s Race to Change the World: How the U.S. Presidential Campaign Can Reshape Global Politics and Foreign Policy. Page received the invitation to attend the event at the end of May. Page told this reporter that this is when he first met Stephan Halper, an emeritus professor of the university. Halper’s contact with Page suggests he was already an informant being used by the FBI in their counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign. Interestingly, Page was not invited to speak at the event but event organizers paid for his trip to attend. It is now widely circulated in reports that Stephan Halper was the informant used by the FBI to keep tabs on the Trump campaign. If this is true, who inside the FBI or DOJ authorized him to do so and why?

July 19 – December 13, 2016: There would be 16 more memos put together by Steele and his final December memo would be given to Rep. John McCain through a representative, as reported by The Guardian.

May 16, 2018: The New York Times and The Washington Post, citing anonymous sources, revealed the name of the FBI’s investigation into alleged Russian influence in the Trump campaign. In the articles, which reference the operation Crossfire Hurricane, sources stated that Halper didn’t reach out to Trump campaign officials until July 31st. This, however, is clearly not the case as Carter Page began speaking with Halper in mid-July during his trip at the London conference.

Halper, who has close ties with the CIA and MI-6, is now at the center of the controversy surrounding the FBI’s investigation and whether or not he was used as an informant by the FBI to gather information. But this wasn’t Halper’s first rodeo. The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald’s article reveals that Halper was also utilized by the CIA during President Ronald Reagan’s campaign against former President Jimmy Carter.

July 16, 2016: Carter Page revealed on his Twitter account that Halper was already in touch with him earlier than stated by the FBI and DOJ. In fact, on July 16, Page sent an email to a senior Trump campaign official about Halper, indicating Halper’s desire to help the campaign.

July 22, 2016: WikiLeaks releases the DNC emails connected to the campaign that FBI officials believe were hacked when John Podesta clicked on the malicious email sent to him in March, as reported by The Washington Post.

July 2016 (date not specified): Australian diplomat Alexander Downer reports his conversation with Papadopoulos to the FBI.

July 25, 2016: FBI confirms it’s investigating the Democratic National Committee hack, as reported by Politico.

July 31, 2016: According to the New York Times and the Washington Post the FBI opens its investigation now known as Crossfire Hurricane into the Trump campaign and alleged ties to Russia. Sources close to the current investigations being conducted in Congress and the Senate have told this reporter that based on all the evidence it appears the counterintelligence investigation began much earlier, possibly as early as March.

August 2, 2016: Two FBI agents that had been dispatched to London, send a summary of their report and interview with Downer to headquarters. Embattled FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok, was one of the agents to interview Downer in what is considered highly unusual because Downer was a diplomat, as reported.

August 29, 2016: Stephan Halper sends an email to Sam Clovis, who was the former national co-chairman of the Trump campaign. It was Clovis who brought Page and Papadopoulos onto the Trump campaign as foreign policy advisors. As stated by The Washington Examiner’s Byron York in his interview with Clovis, he met with Halper several days later in Virginia. Clovis, who is not suspected of any wrongdoing, recounts to York that Halper did not divulge that he knew Page and seemed very interested in Papadopoulos.

Clovis tells York: “This is just my speculation — I have no knowledge,” Clovis told me. “I think [Halper] was using his meeting with me to give him bona fides to talk to George Papadopoulos. He used Carter Page to get to me and he used me to get to George. George was the target. I think George was the target all along.”

Clovis’s theory is that Halper was trying to link Papadopoulos and the 30,000-plus emails that Hillary Clinton unilaterally deleted from her private email system. Halper was hoping “that somebody would bite in the campaign … his goal was to drag George into this to say the Trump campaign tried to get access to those emails from Russia.”

September 23, 2016: Yahoo News Michael Iskoff publishes an article saying U.S. Intelligence officials are investigating Carter Page and his connections to Russia. The story, which was used as part of the evidence to gain a warrant to spy on Page, also relied on the same information Christopher Steele provided the FBI in his unverified dossier. According to the House Intelligence Committee investigation, the FISA application on Page was actually “derived from information leaked by Steele himself to Yahoo News.”

October 1, 2016: The Washington Post’s David Ignatius reported in his January 16, column that Christopher Steele met with an FBI agent In Rome. Ignatius writes: “That encounter took place around Oct. 1 (2016) in Rome with Steele’s old FBI contact. At this meeting, the FBI official asked Steele if he had ever heard of Papadopoulos, according to an official familiar with the meeting. Steele hadn’t.” According to congressional officials and reports, Steele was offered $50,000 by the FBI, but was never paid for it, after it was discovered that he had been leaking to new outlets, distributing his dossier to mass media, and speaking to various reporters about the salacious dossier, in violation of the contract he had signed as a spy, or as an informant, for the FBI.

It is worth noting that the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a criminal referral on Steele on January 4, 2018, which stated this: “The FBI relied on admittedly uncorroborated information, funded by and obtained for Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign, in order to conduct surveillance of an associate of the opposing presidential candidate. It did so based on Mr. Steele’s personal credibility and presumably having faith in his process of obtaining the information.”

This is the direct act of the Senate requesting prosecution of Mr Steele, author of the salacious dossier, because there is substantial evidence suggesting that Mr. Steele materially misled the FBI about key aspects of his dossier efforts, which of course bears great & negative onus on his credibility…

October 31, 2016: FBI is granted Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Application warrant on Carter Page. There were three more FISA warrants on Page, each renewed every 90 days by law and ending in September 2017. As I previously reported, DOJ Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein signed off on the final FISA application on Page and that application would have contained all the evidence gathered from previous investigations. According to the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia report the bulk of the FISA warrant relied heavily on Christopher Steele’s unverified dossier.

The questions here are the following three:

1) Why didn’t the FBI get a warrant to spy on Papadopoulos if the bureau was so concerned about the connections he alleged to Mifsud?

2) Did they try to get a warrant but failed to show enough evidence and justifiable proof of collusion for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court FISA, in order to adequately convince the judge to grant their request for surveillance of an American citizen?

3) When can we see the FISA court applications of the FBI, CIA, and NSA?

November 3, 2016: Despite multiple offers to “help” the Trump campaign, the erudite spy, Mr Stefan Halper publicly stated that “Madame President, Not-So-Crooked Hillary Clinton, would be the better candidate.” This was reported by the Russian news.

November 8, 2016: Election Day.

November 9, 2016: President Trump becomes the 45th president of the United States after the vote is tallied.

November 10, 2016: Former President Obama, who fired Flynn based on multiple disagreements over the administration’s policy in the Middle East and Islamic State crisis, warns President Trump about Flynn.

November 18, 2016: Flynn is named by Trump as Incoming National Security Advisor.

December 22, 2016: Flynn has a phone conversation with the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Dec. 28, 2016: Executive order 13757 is signed by Obama announcing sanctions against Russia for interfering in the 2016 election. Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak contacts Flynn, according to Flynn’s plea agreement.

December 29, 2016: Flynn calls a senior member of the Presidential Transition Team to discuss what if anything he should discuss with Kislyak. Flynn is on vacation with his family. He then calls the Russian Ambassador and has multiple short phone conversations with Kislyak. Flynn calls back the senior Presidential Transition Team official, in Mar-a-Lago, to let them know what he had discussed with Kislyak, according to the plea agreement.

January 5, 2017: Then-National Security Advisor Susan Rice, President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates have a meeting at the White House about Russian interference in the election.

January 6, 2017: Director of National Intelligence James Clapper asks then FBI Director James Comey to brief then President-Elect Donald Trump on the contents of the dossier after their national security briefing with the President-elect at Trump Tower, according to Comey’s memos and as reported.

January 10, 2017: CNN’s Jake Tapper, publishes the first report about the intelligence chief’s briefing on Steele’s dossier, citing senior officials with knowledge. The House Intelligence Committee Russia report found that Clapper was not truthful and had multiple conflicting statements regarding his communications with CNN reporters about the contents of the dossier and the briefing given to then President-elect Trump. Clapper is suspected of leaking the information to CNN on the dossier Comey testified was unverified and salacious, as reported. Comey noted in his memos that news agencies had the Steele dossier for some time but they were unwilling to publish the unverified dossier unless they had a “news hook.”

January 10, 2017: Shortly after CNN’s report, Buzzfeed publishes the Steele dossier.

January 12, 2017: The Washington Post columnist David Ignatius publishes a column leaking the highly classified contents of Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak. Senior Obama government officials tell Ignatius that Flynn discussed the sanctions – including the expulsion from the U.S. of 35 Russian diplomats- with the Russian Ambassador. In the article, they try to accuse the incoming National Security Advisor of violating the Logan Act, an obscure law that forbids U.S. citizens from negotiating with nations in a dispute with the United States.

January 15, 2017: Vice President-Elect Mike Pence tells CBS’s Face the Nation that he spoke to Flynn and there was no discussion of sanctions, according to the transcripts.

January 20, 2017: Inauguration Day. But that wasn’t all that took place, on her last day as National Security Advisor Susan Rice sent out the last email on her official White House account. In it she recounts the Jan. 5 meeting she had with Obama, Biden, Yates and Comey. The email was discovered by the Senate Judiciary Committee and in a letter they sent, to Rice. The Chairman Charles Grassley and Sen. Lindsey Graham questioned Rice, asking why she would send such a memo to herself. She stressed repeatedly in the email that Obama wanted any investigation into Trump to be done “by the book,” as reported.

“The President stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book,” wrote Rice. “From a national security perspective, however, President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming [Trump] team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.”

January 24, 2017: FBI Special Agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka interview Flynn at the White House about his conversation with Kislyak. Flynn is not aware that the agents were coming to the White House to conduct an official interview as the FBI had been conducting security briefings with the new transition team that week. The agents did not believe Flynn lied about his phone conversations with Kislyak. Comey also told lawmakers the agents did not believe Flynn lied, as reported and according to the House Intelligence Committee Russia report.

January 26, 2017: Acting Attorney General Sally Yates goes to the White House to notify the administration that Flynn is not telling the truth and could be blackmailed by the Russians (which on its face is extreme since there was no evidence that Flynn had been lying).

February 13, 2017: Flynn is fired by the White House for apparently misleading Vice President Pence about his conversation with Russia.

Yours,

Dr Churchill

PS:

This is what President Donald J Trump had to say about this matter recently:
“I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!”
(10:37 AM – May 20, 2018)

James Clapper, President Obama’s director of national intelligence, gained a reputation among liberals as a liar for covering up the existence of secret data-collection programs.

Since becoming a private citizen, he has claimed that President Trump is a Russian “asset” and that Vladimir Putin is his “case officer,” then when pressed said he was speaking “figuratively.”

His latest assertion, in a book and mass media interviews, clownish Mr James Clapper has said that Mr. Putin elected Mr. Trump. Of course, this is based on non-reasoning, because that statement effectively puts all the defenders of the U.S. democracy in a position of having to prove a negative.

Incredibly James Clapper went on to say on PBS this whooper: “It just exceeds logic and credulity that they didn’t affect the election.”

Mr. Clapper not only exaggerates Russia’s efforts, but he crucially overlooks the fact that it’s the net effect that matters. Allegations and insinuations of Russian meddling clearly cost Mr. Trump some sizeable number of votes. Hillary Clinton made good use of this mallet, as would be clearer now if she had also made good use of her other assets to contest those states where the election would actually be decided.

Mr. Clapper misleads you (and possibly himself) by appealing to the hindsight fallacy: Because Mr. Trump’s victory was unexpected, Russia must have caused it.

But why does he want you to believe, that he believes that, witch he can’t possibly know?

There’s been much talk about origins. Let’s understand how all this really began. James Comey knew it was unrealistic that Mrs. Clinton would be prosecuted for email mishandling but also knew it was the Obama Justice Department’s decision to make, own and defend. Why did he insert himself?

The first answer is that he expected Mrs. Clinton to win—and likely believed it was necessary that she win. Secondly he had a pretext for violating the normal and proper protocol for criminal investigations. He did so by turning it into a counterintelligence matter, seizing on a Democratic email supposedly in Russian hands that dubiously referred to a compromising conversation of Attorney General Loretta Lynch regarding the Hillary investigation.

Put aside whether this information really necessitated his intervention. (It didn’t. This is the great non sequitur of the Comey story.) Now adopted, Russia became the rationale for actions that should trouble Americans simply on account of their foolishness.

Think about it: The FBI’s original intervention in the Hillary matter was premised on apparent false information from the Russians. Its actions against the Trump campaign flowed from an implausible, unsupported document attributed to Russian sources and paid for by Mr. Trump’s political opponents.

In surveilling Carter Page, the FBI had every reason to know it was surveilling an inconsequential non-spy, and did so based on a warrant that falsely characterized a Yahoo news article. Its suspicions of George Papadopoulos were based on drunken gossip about Hillary’s emails when the whole world was gossiping about Hillary’s emails.

The FBI’s most consequential intervention of all, its last-minute reopening of the Clinton investigation, arose from “new” evidence that turned out to be a nothingburger.

There is a term for how all this looks in retrospect: colossally stupid. Democrats now have a strong if unprovable case that Mr. Comey changed the election outcome. Mr. Trump has a strong case his presidency has been hobbled by unwarranted accusations. Americans harbor new and serious doubts about the integrity of the FBI.

As an extra kick in the head, its partners in so much idiocy, and perhaps the real fomenters of it, in the Obama intelligence agencies have so far gotten a pass.

If a private informant was enlisted to feel out the Russian connections of a couple of Trump nonentities, this was at least a sensitive and discreet approach to a legitimate question when so many FBI actions were neither.

It was after the election, with the outpouring of criminal leaks and planted disinformation (see Clapper), that a Rubicon was crossed. Consider just one anomaly: Any “intelligence community” worth the name would get to the bottom of foreigner Christopher Steele’s singular intervention in a U.S. presidential election, based as it was on the anonymous whisperings of Russian intelligence officials. Not ours. Our intelligence community is highly motivated not to know these answers because any finding that discredited the Steele dossier would also discredit the FBI’s actions in the 2016 campaign.

It practically goes without saying that all involved now have a stake in keeping the focus on the louche Mr. Trump and threatening him with investigations no matter how far afield from Russia collusion.

You can be a nonfan of Mr. Trump; you can believe he’s peddling a conspiracy theory about FBI and CIA actions during the campaign. But every president has a duty to fight to protect himself and his power. And notice that his conspiracy theory is but the mirror image of the conspiracy theory that his political, institutional, and media enemies have been prosecuting against him since Election Day 2016.