October 29, 2017
Implausible Deniability
By
Clarice Feldman
The aftermath of the 2016 election has revealed
the criminality of the Democrats, the perfidy of the Deep State, the corruption of the press, and the bought and paid for motives of the scribblers in the conservative pundit class. And Trump won despite all that. In many ways it reminds me of a Soviet operation called The Trust. If you missed
Reilly -- Ace of Spies, Edward Jay Epstein describes how the Soviets created a fake anti-Soviet group called The Trust and used it to nab dissidents plotting to overthrow the regime.
Fusion GPSā dossier was a replay of a classic Soviet disinformation campaign.
"The Trust was not an anti-Soviet organization, it only imitated one." In reality, he continued, the Trust was a creature of the Soviet secret police. Its purpose was not to overthrow Communism, but to manipulate real anti-communist organizations into misleading the West.
In much the same way, I believe, Russian agents working for
the Clintons and
the DNC through Fusion GPS and its hireling Christopher Steele provided fake information in a dossier which the FBI (headed by
James Comey) and the Department of Justice (headed by
Loretta Lynch )
used to craft an affidavit to obtain a FISA warrant authorizing electronic surveillance on people connected, however tangentially, to the Trump campaign. This, after previous such warrants had -- and this is unusual --
been turned down by the FISA court. Then-president Obama allowed the surveilled communications to be widely circulated throughout the government, so that the names of the targets caught up in the surveillance and their communications were thus widely available for leaking, and were leaked.
As Byron York noted in a series of tweets, here were some of the dossierās sources:
1/6 -- Looking at dossier itself, sure seems Kremlin-linked Russians were participating in anti-Trump effortā¦
2/6 -- For example, dossier Source A is described as 'senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure.'
3/6 -- Dossier Source B is described as 'former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin.'
4/6 -- Dossier Source C is 'senior Russian financial official.'
The Trust was funded by ƩmigrƩs who believed it was legit. And the Russian anti-Trump phony dossier was, we now know, funded by the Clinton campaign and the DNC, which would have us believe that their lawyer Marc Elias, who received over $9 million for unspecified work, did this without their consent or knowledge.
(Fusion GPS
was also funded during the nomination period -- and before Fusion GPS and Steele were poking around Russia, by
Washington Free Beacon, something that it -- like Elias -- admitted shortly before a likely court ruling that Fusionās bank account information had to be provided to congressional investigators.)
In any event, their work with Fusion GPS ended with the nomination of Trump. They had nothing to do with the hiring of Fusion GPS and the creation and distribution of the dossier.
The
Washington Free Beacon is a right-of-center publication, and certainly has done some fine work in the past,
but its links to the anti-Trump crowd of the right is unmistakable. The publication is largely funded by hedge fund billionaire
Paul Singer, who strongly supports gay rights and open borders. Among its original board members were
Bill Kristol, and both the present editors, Michael Goldfarb (formerly deputy communications director for John McCain) and Matthew Continetti (Kristolās son-in-law) both worked for the
Weekly Standard while Kristol was its editor. Kristol, as you may recall, worked hard to promote others to run against Trump for the nomination. Singer financially supported Marco Rubio for the nomination. His aide, Dan Senor, was a senior advisor to vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan and reportedly retains strong ties to him.
I seriously doubt that any candidate Paul Singer would prefer could ever have won the general election.
Singer strongly opposed both Ted Cruz and Trump.
The dossier was a means for the
Russians at no cost the them to provide
the Democrats with disinformation to be used against
Trump.
Mollie Hemingway at
The Federalist does the most thorough job of clearing the air on the dossier
Space and copyright limitations keep me from quoting more of it, but here are the
ten things about the dossier Hemingway thinks you should know:
ā1) Russian officials were sources of key claims in dossierā
ā2) No, the Russian dossier was not initially funded by Republicansā
ā3) The dossier is chock full of discredited informationā
ā4) The dossier was used as a basis for wiretaps on American citizensā
5) The FBI also paid for the dossier
...
When Trump asked about the FBI payment, many political journalists feigned shock and outrage that he would make such a claim.
They should not have. Their outlets had already reported that the FBI had tried to pay for the dossier and had, in fact, reimbursed expenses for the dossier. We do not know if those expenses include the payments to the Russian officials for salacious stories on Republican nominee for president Trump.
6) Dossier publisher Fusion GPS works with shady outfitsā
7) Fusion GPSā ties to media are problematic
The principals at Fusion GPS are well-connected to mainstream media reporters. They are former journalists themselves, and know how to package stories and provide information to push narratives. They are, in fact, close friends with some of the top reporters who have covered the Russia-Trump collusion story.
Fusion GPS has placed stories with friendly reporters while fighting congressional investigatorsā attempts to find out the groupās sources of funding. Fusion GPS leaders have taken the Fifth and fought subpoenas for information about the groupās involvement with Russia.
8) Jim Comey personally briefed Trump on the dossier, shortly before CNN reported it
What really got the ball rolling on last yearās Russia-Trump conspiracy theory, then, was not the dossier itself but the briefing of it by Obama intelligence chiefs to President-elect Trump in January. Former FBI head
Jim Comey admitted under oath that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper asked him to personally brief President Trump about this dossier. The fact of that meeting was quickly leaked to CNN.
Given the dossierās many problems, was the entire purpose of the meeting to produce the leak that the meeting happened?
9) Mueller investigation spurred by dossier and illegal leaks from intelligence operatives about Trump.
We know from previous reporting that the dossier of Russia-supplied information or disinformation was used by the FBI to secure a warrant to spy on an American citizen advising an opposing political partyās presidential campaign.
We know that this dossier was funded at least in part by the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and the FBI. The firm that produced the report was itself funded by
Russians.
10) The Steele dossier was a Clinton/DNC-funded operation supported by the FBI and influenced heavily by Russian operatives in the Kremlin The Clinton campaign, the DNC, and the FBI all worked wittingly or unwittingly with Russians to affect the results of the 2016 election. Far from just meeting with a Russian and not getting dirt on a political opponent, these groups wittingly or unwittingly paid Russian operatives for disinformation to harm Trump during the 2016 election and beyond.
Worse, these efforts perverted our justice system by forcing the attorney general to recuse himself for the crime of having served as a surrogate on the Trump campaign, spawning a massive, sprawling, limitless probe over Russia.