Mark Levin: Obama Administration’s Bastardization Of Our Intel Agencies And FBI
Thursday on his syndicated radio program, Mark Levin reviews the facts about reports that the Steele Dossier was used by the Obama administration to gain approval for a FISA court warrant to surveil Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Circa News reporter Sara Carter reported this week that the dossier “certainly played a role in obtaining the warrant” that was used to spy on members of Trump’s campaign.
MARK LEVIN: This is a massive scandal, the likes of which we’ve not seen.
The bastardization of our intelligence agencies and federal law enforcement by a sitting Democrat administration aimed at destroying and defeating a Republican nominee — the opposition party.
And after the election, his transition. This is a big deal. This is the sort of things that happen in s***hole countries.
Representatives of four committees… the House Intel Committee, the Senate Intel Committee, the House Judiciary Committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee have been able to review documents in a secure room at the Justice Dept. according to the Washington Examiner’s Byron York.
They were not allowed to take the documents out of the room or copy them, but they could take notes. They thus know the answer to the was the dossier used to spy question.
The answer to the question is classified, however, as of yesterday morning, no one had yet leaked it. However, late yesterday, according to reporter Sarah Carter, multiple sources told her that the dossier was used along with other evidence to obtain the warrant from the FISA court.
Mark Levin: Obama Administration’s Bastardization Of Our Intel …
Politicizing Steele’s Raw, Unverified ‘Intelligence‘
Why Congress Shouldn’t Expand Intelligence Agencies‘ Power To …
In-Depth–<a href=”http://NBCNews.com” rel=”nofollow”>NBCNews.com</a>–Jan 11, 2018
Writer: I warned you about Obama
Thursday on his syndicated radio program, Mark Levin reviews the facts about reports that the Steele Dossier was used by the Obama administration to gain approval for a FISA court warrant to surveil Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Circa News reporter Sara Carter reported this week that the dossier “certainly played a role in obtaining the warrant” that was used to spy on members of Trump’s campaign.
MARK LEVIN: This is a massive scandal, the likes of which we’ve not seen.
The bastardization of our intelligence agencies and federal law enforcement by a sitting Democrat administration aimed at destroying and defeating a Republican nominee — the opposition party.
And after the election, his transition. This is a big deal. This is the sort of things that happen in s***hole countries.
Representatives of four committees… the House Intel Committee, the Senate Intel Committee, the House Judiciary Committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee have been able to review documents in a secure room at the Justice Dept. according to the Washington Examiner’s Byron York.
They were not allowed to take the documents out of the room or copy them, but they could take notes. They thus know the answer to the was the dossier used to spy question.
The answer to the question is classified, however, as of yesterday morning, no one had yet leaked it. However, late yesterday, according to reporter Sarah Carter, multiple sources told her that the dossier was used along with other evidence to obtain the warrant from the FISA court.
Our old buddy Fox News’s Sean Hannity corroborated the news on his show that night, saying that three separate sources told him the same thing. This dossier, a 35-page hit piece of opposition research was put together by former British spy Christopher Steele for the liberal opposition research group Fusion GPS, which was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democrat National Committee.
According to Carter, the sources suggest there will be more information in the coming weeks regarding systemic FISA abuse.
‘(The dossier) certainly played a role in obtaining the warrant,’ added another senior U.S. official, with knowledge of the dossier. ‘Congress needs to look at the FBI officials who were handling this case and see what, if anything, was verified in the dossier.’
The law enforcement source said the broader question is why did the FBI use a Democrat-paid-for dossier to actually surveil another campaign.
To show you how utterly and thoroughly corrupt the media is, most of the media are ignoring this. Most of the media are ignoring this. This is such a massive scandal, we can not live in a free society when administrations of one party are surveilling candidates of another party, or transitions of another party.
RealClearPolitics |
Mark Levin: Obama Administration’s Bastardization Of Our Intel Agencies And FBI
RealClearPolitics ‘Congress needs to look at the FBI officials who were handling this case and see what, if anything, was verified in the dossier.’ The law enforcement source said the broader question is why did the FBI use a Democrat-paid-for dossier to actually … Nunes charges ‘abuse’ of government surveillance by FBI and Justice officialsFox News Fusion GPS Transcript Says ‘Pee’ Story Prompted Christopher Steele to Contact FBIBreitbart Report: FBI Used Unverified Anti-Trump Dossier to Obtain FISA WarrantPJ Media CNSNews.com all 428 news articles » |
President Donald Trump, concerned that investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections cast doubt over his legitimacy, has consistently dismissed and denigrated such probes. The decision by Dianne Feinstein, as the Senate Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, to unilaterally release the transcript of closed testimony by Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson adds a measure of much-needed transparency in the still-unfolding investigations. A careful—and apolitical–reading of the more than 300 pages sheds light on the work of the political research firm and the credibility of revelations thus far.
The primary impetus for the nine hours of Senate staff questioning of Simpson was the so-called “Steele Dossier,” a series of raw intelligence reports collected by former British MI-6 officer Christopher Steele, many of which paint Trump and his organization in a highly negative light.
Unfortunately, partisan politics are overshadowing the content of the dossier and the veracity of Steele and Simpson. Information in the transcript contributes significantly to the public’s ability to understand Russia’s goals for the election, as well as the level of professionalism not only of Fusion GPS but also of Steele and, indeed, the FBI.
So it is difficult to ascribe anything but political calculation to Republican opposition to making the transcript public. A spokesperson for Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said the release “undermines the integrity of the committee’s oversight work and jeopardizes its ability to secure candid, voluntary testimony.” These complaints do not appear to be serious, given that the committee presumably could subpoena witnesses if it so desired. And in today’s leaky Washington, there is only an even chance that a transcript would remain confidential.
Simpson himself called for release of the transcript in a recent op-ed in The New York Times. Certainly no classified information was discussed, a valid reason often used to conduct closed hearings. Given all of this, Grassley’s opposition to the release of the transcript appears to be first and foremost a political decision, designed to keep Simpson’s comments out of the public eye.
Motivations for the Initial Research
Many believe the Democratic Party hired Fusion GPS to use Steele to get Russian dirt on Trump, and that this was a key goal from the outset. In fact, according to Simpson, his firm started its research on Trump the same way it did when researching anybody else, Republican or Democrat – using public sources.
The research “wasn’t really a Russia-focused investigation for the first half of it,” he told the committee staff. This is important because Simpson noted to the staffers that most of Fusion’s employees were former journalists, and as such, were used to conducting research using publicly available information.
It is also interesting that Simpson’s initial focus was on Trump’s business activities, not just in the U.S. but worldwide. As we will see in a moment, some of the business that caught Fusion’s attention was in Russia and countries of the former Soviet Union.
Simpson indicated that only when public records had been exhausted did he contact Steele, someone he had known for years, in an attempt to obtain additional information, especially in regard to Trump activities in and around Russia. Portions of what Fusion researchers uncovered led them to suspect Russia played a significant role in the Trump story – suspicions that later seemed to be validated by Steele’s work with his Russian sources.
A Long History of Questionable Business Deals
This is a theme that arose several times during Simpson’s questioning. The Fusion CEO indicated that his initial research focused on identifying links between Trump’s business empire and organized crime worldwide. While the research did turn up non-Russian activity (the Italian mob is mentioned, for example though without detail), Fusion began to find more and more Russia-centric organized crime connections.
Felix Sater, whom Simpson describes as having ties to Russian organized crime, was an example. Simpson said that Trump stated under oath at some point – Simpson didn’t specify the context) that he did not know Sater well. Simpson indicated that “this was not true,” and that Trump “continued to associate with [Sater] long after he learned of Felix’s organized crime ties.”
Trump had business dealings all over the world, and trying to track them proved difficult, Simpson said.
“We became interested in his (Trump’s) [Trump’s] overseas business dealings particularly because they were so opaque and seemed to involve … to say the least, colorful characters,” Simpson said.
As Fusion dug further into Trump’s deals in the former Soviet Union –Kazakhstan, Georgia and Azerbaijan, for example – Simpson became concerned.
“What came back was something … very different and obviously more alarming … which outlined a political conspiracy and a much broader set of issues than the ones we went looking for,” Simpson said. “Initially, we didn’t know what to do with this.”
Fusion’s research into the Trump businesses apparently revealed not only ties to Russian organized crime, but also possible darker intentions on the part of the Russian government. Now Fusion found itself unable to use public information, and so Simpson brought in Steele as a contractor to dig deeper, using the human intelligence techniques Steele had learned as an intelligence officer.
Simpson’s Trust of Steele
The Fusion CEO told the Senate staffers that he had known and worked with Steele for “eight or nine years,” and that, in a business where “a lot of people make stuff up and sell baloney,” Steele stood apart. Simpson made the common-sense business argument that good research and reporting, such as what Steele had provided in the past, made it more likely that Fusion and Steele would get additional business in the future.
Steele is “well-respected in his field, and, as I say, everyone I know who’s ever dealt with him thinks he’s quite good,” Simpson said. “That would include people from the U.S. government.”
So convinced was Fusion of Steele’s skills that Simpson believed Steele would be able to sort out what might be Russian disinformation, should one or more of Steele’s sources be under the control of the Russian government. Simpson reasoned that, given Steele’s long career as an intelligence officer focused on Russia, he would be able to identify false information provided by his Russian sources, and either omit them or include disclaimers in his reporting. This would be standard practice for any professional intelligence officer.
Reporting to the FBI … or Not
One of the more fascinating portions of the transcript describes Simpson and Steele wrestling with how to manage the information that began to flow in regarding the Trump organization’s cooperation with the Russian government. It is clear from the transcript that neither man was initially sure what to do with the bombshell information.
According to Simpson, it was Steele who first raised the issue of passing some of his information to the FBI, given Steele’s concerns that the Russians were attempting to influence the U.S. presidential elections. Simpson at first demurred, saying he needed to think about it. But Steele persisted, and when Steele said he had an old friend who was an FBI officer serving in Rome who could be used as a conduit, Simpson posed no objection to sharing the reporting with him.
“Let’s be clear,” Simpson also told the staffers, “this was not considered by me to be part of the work that we were doing … To me this was, like, you know, you’re driving in to work and you see something happen and you call 911.”
The transcripts reveal Simpson to be a convincing character, one whose firm had been hired over the years to do opposition research on both Republican and Democratic candidates. Fusion GPS’s modus operandi regarding such research seems consistent with Simpson’s journalistic roots and the skills he honed while working as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal.
On several occasions, Simpson highlighted the need to remain professionally and politically neutral when doing his job, not just because of the ethics of his work, but also because he (and his contractor Steele) understood that being an honest broker in his line of work would mean more clients would hire him in the future.
A question that isn’t answered in the hearing is what Steele told Simpson about who his Russian sources were, and how he obtained information from them. On multiple occasions, Simpson declined to answer questions about the sources in order to protect them; at one point, Simpson’s lawyer, Joshua Levy, pushed back at staffers’ questions on this by saying that one person in Russia had already died as a result of the release of the dossier.
Simpson was clearly focused on the reliability of Steele’s sources. But in the end, he put his trust in Steele’s expertise running Russian agents when he was an intelligence officer.
Much of the information discussed in the Simpson transcripts was already known. But in stark contrast to Trump and, apparently, Republicans on the committee, Simpson and Steele were so troubled by the information they collected that they decided to approach the FBI.
“I mean, for both of us, it was citizenship,” said Simpson. Perhaps citizenship is a concept worth remembering in the future when dealing with questions of Trump and Russia.
When John McCain checked into Walter Reed Medical Center in December as he continued his battle against cancer, Russian trolls seized the moment to spread a conspiracy theory that the veteran Republican senator was using his health as a pretense to dodge a rising “scandal” concerning the so-called Trump-Russia dossier. Far-right stories attacking McCain – a frequent critic of President Trump – were among the top 10 shared by Kremlin-backed Twitter accounts in the days after McCain was hospitalized, as well as later in the month after he returned to Arizona, according to recent analysis by the cybersecurity project Hamilton 68.
While the vast majority of the attacks from the 600 Twitter accounts tracked in real time by the Hamilton 68 dashboard are aimed at Democrats, the trolls also turn their sights on Republicans who sometimes stand up to Trump. Repeat targets have included Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. National security adviser H.R. McMaster has also been a target. But no Republican has faced more persistent wrath from the Russian-linked accounts than McCain, says Bret Schafer, an analyst for the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a group of national-security experts behind the dashboard working to expose Kremlin meddling in US politics. And those attacks on McCain have intensified in recent weeks.
“In the other cases, it’s usually one day of concentrated activity going after them, any time one of those figures would come out against Trump,” Schafer says. “McCain has been a much more consistent target.”
Schafer says that the trolls tend to spread disinformation from far-right American sites rather than content from explicitly Russian ones. “GatewayPundit.com and TruePundit.com—sites to the right of Breitbart—those are our frequent flyers,” he says. “The Russians are latching onto hyperpartisan content.”
In September, McCain drew the trolls’ fire when he came out against the Graham-Grassley overhaul of the Affordable Care Act; the day after his statement against the bill, six of the top 10 trending topics on the dashboard reflected content attacking the senator. In December, the shared content took a more personal turn, aiming at the senator’s health, including a story from True Pundit carrying the headline, “As the Trump Dossier Scandal Grows and Implicates Him, McCain checks into Hospital.” The True Pundit story claimed: “This is not the fist [sic] time McCain has sought medical treatment after his role in recent anti-Trump scandals have heated up.” Another story promoted from the site quoted “Beltway insiders” as saying, “new demands to answer for his role in either underwriting or promoting the Trump phony dossier are stressing the Arizona senator’s fragile health.”
McCain has a long history of hard-line stances on Russia and he was an early advocate for a bipartisan commission to investigate Trump’s Russia connections. In May he called Russian President Vladimir Putin “the premier and most important threat, more so than ISIS.” After special counsel Robert Mueller’s team indicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in October, McCain said, “I told you months ago that this was a centipede and shoes would drop, and I guarantee you more shoes will drop.”
McCain has been out of the spotlight the past few weeks as he’s battled his illness; he missed the end-of-the-year tax-bill vote, but he issued a statement in late December praising the administration’s plan to supply Ukraine with anti-tank weapons to fight Russian separatist forces. McCain’s office hasn’t commented on the recent social-media attacks against the senator, but the Arizona senator has previously criticized Russian disinformation efforts and noted that he was targeted in some of the fake online advertisements purchased by Russian troll accounts—part of a broader social-media operation that sought to exploit racial divisions and attack U.S. foreign policy. “These Kremlin-backed advertisements are just one element of Vladimir Putin’s long-term goal of undermining democracies around the world,” McCain said last fall. “Putin’s Russia has no meaningful allies, so it seeks to sow dissent among us and divide us from each other.”
Another longtime Republican critic of both Russia and Trump was briefly targeted by the Hamilton-monitored Russian troll network in early January. Mitt Romney, a potential candidate to run for Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch’s seat this November, was the talk of the dashboard accounts on Jan. 2, after Hatch announced his retirement, and #neverromney registered as a trending hashtag on Hamilton the next day. But the accounts soon turned their attention to the fallout from Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury book, and Schafer cautioned that it’s too soon to say whether they will take an active interest in the Utah Senate race like they did in the Roy Moore Alabama Senate race. He said analysts look for multiple hashtags and urls on a topic to consider it an ongoing campaign. “It’s something we’re definitely going to be tracking over the next couple of months,” Schafer says. “Time will tell whether it’s a race they take a real interest in, or if Romney is just an occasional target that they drag out to curry favor with the pro-Trump crowd.”
Even back in the 2016 presidential primary season, Russian online smear campaigns were spotted attacking Republicans who opposed Trump, according to former FBI special agent Clint Watts, who told the New York Times that Sen. Marco Rubio, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Lindsey Graham were all targets at the time.
McCain’s and Romney’s support for tough policies on Russia may make them obvious targets for trolls, but the co-directors of the Alliance for Securing Democracy emphasize that the influence campaign transcends party lines. In a recent issue of Democracy Journal, Laura Rosenberger and Jamie Fly wrote: “The Kremlin’s ultimate goal is not necessarily to advance one party over another—though that can be a short-term means to the ultimate end. Moscow’s attack on democracy is not focused solely on elections, but has a broader scope, and a larger target: the norms and institutions that underpin our very democratic system.”
In fact, the most prominent theme recently among the Russian-backed accounts is a growing campaign to discredit the Justice Department and FBI, Schafer says. These attacks increased from around 5% of links shared in September to about 15% of the links in December. The trolls push a “deep state” narrative to undermine the agencies, as well as attack Mueller and his Russia investigation directly. In early December after Mueller’s team indicted former national security adviser Michael Flynn, the network shared stories deriding the “tainted investigation” and claiming “Mueller’s investigation is dead.” “It goes back to the idea that they’re doing this to erode trust in our institutions,” Schafer says.
And in the first week of January, one top-shared story from True Pundit attempted to link a Costa Rican plane crash to former FBI Director James Comey, because the story claimed one of Comey’s former hedge-fund colleagues was killed in the crash. “The article has already kicked off conspiracy theories on sites like Reddit, where ‘citizen investigators’ have begun to piece together ‘coincidences,’” analysts wrote in the Alliance for Securing Democracy’s weekly newsletter. “This is the same formula used in the Seth Rich case, where a wild and unfounded claim was placed online, gained credence through posts and reposts on message boards, and was eventually adopted by more credible news sources.”
Former senior CIA official John Sipher says the FBI is a prime target for Russian influence campaigns because the agency directly threatens Kremlin intelligence operations in the US—and he points out that Trump’s own attacks on federal agencies make the trolls’ job easier. “The Russians know that public support for US security institutions is critical, and that President Trump’s attacks aim directly at that public support.” Within the Republican Party, Trump’s attacks on the agencies – continuing in recent days – have widened divisions between conservative lawmakers who have piled on the criticism of Mueller and others who worry that the party, which has historically aligned itself with law-enforcement agencies, will be damaged by the offensive. “You can’t have a situation where people say, ‘Oh, you can’t trust the F.B.I.,’” New York Rep. Peter King recently told the New York Times. “That creates a spirit of anarchy.”
Left-leaning audiences have been targeted by Russian disinformation efforts, too: Fake “LGBT United” and “Blacktivist” Facebook pages were among the accounts shut down last year when it was revealed they were operated by the Internet Research Agency troll farm in St. Petersburg, Russia. But campaigns aimed at liberal Twitter users don’t often show up in the Hamilton dashboard, which focuses on a coordinated network of accounts that put out 20,000 to 25,000 tweets a day tailored to a far-right, pro-Trump audience, Schafer says. “This is an alt-right audience targeted by the Russians that is being spoon-fed disinformation.”
Schafer says he and his colleagues are exploring how best to capture Kremlin influence campaigns that target a left-leaning audience on Twitter, and they hope to gain a better understanding of those efforts. “The Russian bots and trolls aren’t just pro-Trump,” he says. As long as they’re fomenting division and chaos, “they don’t really care.”
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Tom Nichols, Opinion contributor Published 12:59 p.m. ET Jan. 11, 2018 | Updated 6:41 p.m. ET Jan. 11, 2018
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A new testimony released by the Senate Judiciary Committee reveals some shocking information. Susana Victoria Perez (@susana_vp) has more. Buzz60
Protest poster at anti-Trump rally, New York City, June 3, 2017.(Photo: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez, Getty Images)
The transcript of the Senate intelligence committee’s interview with Fusion GPS director Glenn Simpson is now in the public domain, put there by a frustrated Sen. Dianne Feinstein in the wake of ongoing Republican conspiracy theories about what Simpson did or did not tell the Senate.
Somehow, GOP critics of the Trump-Russia investigation have tried to put a positive spin on these materials, as if Simpson’s answers prove their point that the whole business is a witch hunt.
In fact, there are only two ways to read the Simpson interview: either it says nothing, or it has blown up months of carefully constructed conspiracy theorizing.
More: Where is the GOP outrage as Trump turns America into a banana republic?
More: Trump’s not being defamed. If he was, he wouldn’t need to change the libel laws.
Let’s start by piecing together, as best we can, what various critics of the investigation, including the most vociferous Trump supporters, think is going on.
By now we’re all familiar with the “Steele dossier,” a raw — in every way — report from a British spy who was engaged by an opposition research firm called Fusion GPS. It makes sensational claims about years of Russian operations against President Donald Trump.
If not for Steele’s file, the GOP reasoning goes, the FBI would never have started down the path of investigating Trump, which would never have led to FBI Director James Comey approaching Trump about the file; absent this, Comey would never have been fired, there would be no Mueller probe, and all would be right with the world.
But what about Trump officials meeting with the Russians during the campaign? Indeed, in the telling of at least some Trump defenders, these were the result of orders issued from Clinton’s volcano lair for Fusion to lure Donald Trump Jr. and others into a room with shady Russians for meetings that were unwise — or even “treasonous,” if banished Trump advisor Steve Bannon is to be believed. Somehow, after all this slick tradecraft, Clinton’s people never saw it coming when the Russians betrayed them and hacked the DNC anyway.
Think about the size of the claim here: the Clinton campaign, which was convinced it was going to beat Trump in a landslide, funded an espionage-laden high-wire act with a firm whose clients included some unsavory Russians themselves, in which a highly experienced British spook got suckered by the Democrats into weaponizing some Russian disinformation. (Steele could outplay the Russians, but he couldn’t outplay Robby Mook?)
There are other variations on this theme, but central to all of them was the idea that without Fusion there would be nothing, and that we would know this if only we could know what Simpson said to the Senate investigators. But since the Senate intelligence committee wouldn’t release the transcript, we couldn’t know just how much Simpson had spilled his guts.
So now we know, and none of it supports the rickety Jenga pile of Republican conspiracy theories.
Instead of being the source of the FBI investigations, Simpson claimed that the FBI was already on to the Russians, not least because our Australian allies warned us that the Russians claimed to have dirt on Clinton, which they learned because George Papadopoulos, a Trump advisor, was bragging about it to an Australian diplomat.
Also, according to Simpson, Steele was so horrified by what he was finding that he contacted the FBIinstead of just reporting back to his Clintonian masters. Worse yet, Simpson describes Steele as finding the FBI so in the tank — not for Clinton, but for Trump — that Steele stopped cooperating with them.
Now, it’s possible that Simpson is a cool risk-taker who’s willing to lie to Senate investigators. If that’s the case, then we’ve learned nothing. If Simpson, as critics of his testimony insist, is that untrustworthy, then so be it, but that would mean that we do not know anything more today than we knew a week ago.
More: Special counsel Robert Mueller is bad news for Donald Trump — and Russia
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But if Simpson is telling the truth in only two central contentions — that the FBI investigation predated Steele’s work, and that Steele was concerned about the FBI’s lean to Trump, rather than to Clinton — then his testimony unravels what was already a conspiracy theory of gigantic proportions.
The beauty of conspiracy theories, and the reason people find them irresistible, is that they are impervious to facts. If evidence emerges to support the theory, then the conspiracy is confirmed. If contrary evidence surfaces, it’s not really evidence — or it’s misinformation planted by the masters of the real conspiracy to hide their misdeeds. And if there’s no evidence at all, then the arid silence itself proves that the conspirators hid their tracks perfectly.
Both Republicans and Democrats seem determined to make all three of these logical errors in their war over the Trump presidency. But for now, the strange spinning of the Simpson interview as supporting the tangled Clinton-Fusion-Steele story puts critics of the Trump-Russian investigation in the lead for conspiracy theorizing’s gold medal — or perhaps one made of tin foil.
Tom Nichols, a Russia specialist and professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College, is the author of The Death of Expertise. The views expressed here are solely his own. Follow him on Twitter: @RadioFreeTom.
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