The Trump-Russian collusion story is one big pile of manure. That actually was never in doubt but each day it appears more and more likely that the “dirty dossier” is a part of a larger conspiracy to stop Trump.
So we’re clear- The Washington Free Beacon engaged Fusion GPS to do opposition research on Trump. That’s it. They had nothing to do with the dossier.
Chuck Ross has provided us with a timeline:
Oct. 2015: It was reported late Friday that the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website funded by GOP mega-donor Paul Singer, hired Fusion GPS to investigate Trump. Free Beacon’s editor said Friday that the research was standard opposition research and that it was not tied to the dossier work that would follow several months later. It is not clear what, if anything, Singer knew about Free Beacon’s hiring of Fusion. The hedge fund manager was Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s biggest backer.
Here is Matthew Continetti’s statement about this:
Since its launch in February of 2012, the Washington Free Beacon has retained third party firms to conduct research on many individuals and institutions of interest to us and our readers. In that capacity, during the 2016 election cycle we retained Fusion GPS to provide research on multiple candidates in the Republican presidential primary, just as we retained other firms to assist in our research into Hillary Clinton. All of the work that Fusion GPS provided to the Free Beacon was based on public sources, and none of the work product that the Free Beacon received appears in the Steele dossier. The Free Beacon had no knowledge of or connection to the Steele dossier, did not pay for the dossier, and never had contact with, knowledge of, or provided payment for any work performed by Christopher Steele. Nor did we have any knowledge of the relationship between Fusion GPS and the Democratic National Committee, Perkins Coie, and the Clinton campaign.
Then after Jeb Bush dropped out Fusion GPS approached the Clinton campaign:
March: Fusion GPS approached Perkins Coie, the law firm for the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee. Perkins Coie general counsel revealed this week that Fusion offered to continue Trump opposition research it had started while working for a Republican candidate.
April: Perkins Coie, using money from the Clinton campaign and DNC, hires Fusion GPS. Marc Elias, a Perkins Coie partner and general counsel for both the campaign and DNC, would serve as the bagman.
That month, Federal Election Commission records show that the Clinton campaign paid Perkins Coie a total of $150,000 for legal services. The DNC paid the firm around $107,000. It is unclear how much of that went to Fusion GPS. Both the campaign and DNC would pay Perkins Coie hundreds of thousands more dollars throughout the campaign.
In May of 2016 The Free Beacon severed ties with Fusion GPS.
There was no dossier at this time. Then..
June: Fusion GPS hires former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and his London-based firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia. Steele discloses this in court filings earlier this year as part of a lawsuit he faces over the dossier. Steele said he worked for Fusion GPS from June through November.
June 20: Steele writes first memo of the dossier. It alleges that Trump used prostitutes during a visit to Moscow in 2013 and that the Kremlin was blackmailing him with the evidence. The memo also alleges that the Trump campaign was engaged in a well-orchestrated collusion campaign with Russian operatives.
Steele put the dossier together. The information in the dossier was fed to Steele by “Russian officials”:
Mr. Steele makes clear that his unproven charges came almost exclusively from sources linked to the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin. He identified his sources as “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure,” a former “top level Russian intelligence officer active inside the Kremlin,” a “senior Kremlin official” and a “senior Russian government official.”
If the Russians were seeking to help Trump get elected, why the hell would they feed Steele information damaging to Trump? Does anyone in his or her right mind think Putin was unaware of this?
It was about this time that a FISA warrant was sought to spy on Trump:
We know that that effort began some time in the late Spring or early Summer of 2016 because an application was made to the FISC in June/July. That application mentioned Trump by name–and was rejected. Why FISA? Because a Title III “wiretap” would have required an actual investigation based on a violation of a real US criminal law and a quite high and specific standard in the application for a court order.
That application was made by the FBI.
It was refused, but the obama administration was desperate to spy on Trump. Thus, the dossier:
But in the anti-Trump conspiracy that’s exactly what was needed: FISA coverage, “wiretaps.” There was no time to do the painstaking research on Trump and his associates–they needed FISA and they needed it NOW. They’d already been turned down at least once. The NSA info was essentially useless, because what they really wanted was to get conversations between Trump and his associates here in the US–all USPERs–not international conversations (those were either lacking or harmless). Yes, NSA probably scoops up internal US communications of USPERs, too, but to use it without a FI and without a FISA order would be illegal. Therefore, the “dossier.”
The dossier was the vehicle for obama to spy on Trump, but he couldn’t do it directly. Trump’s personal communications would be picked up as “incidental collection.”
The only available information about the scale of incidental collection under Section 702 comes from raw intelligence obtained by the Washington Post as part of the materials revealed by Ed Snowden. The Washington Post surveyed those materials and found that 90% of communications collected under Section 702 “were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.” Remember, under current law, any of the communications incidentally collected under Section 702 can be used by federal agencies like the FBI in investigations or prosecutions.
…
A “dossier” that could provide that sort of “reason to believe” would justify a FI and then FISA coverage. And therefore access to Trump campaign related communications (the extent would be dependent on the nature of the FISA order, who were the USPERs listed as targets–Page for sure, Flynn maybe, etc.). NB: Although they were claiming Trump collusion with Russia, what they were really targeting was campaign communications. By claiming that key people were foreign agents they could collect ALL their domestic communications with anybody.
You’ll want to read the whole thing. With the dossier in hand, a second FISA application was approved:
September: The FBI obtained a surveillance warrant from a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Carter Page. The application for the warrant reportedly cited the dossier as evidence.
That means all of Page’s communications, all his emails, everything. All approved on the basis of Kremlin propaganda.
Then the obama administration went berserk unmasking the Trump campaign:
An Obama official made “hundreds of unmasking requests” during the final year of the previous administration, according to a letter from a top Republican who raised new concerns that officials sought the identities of Trump associates in intelligence reports for “improper purposes.”
“Unmasking” refers to the formal request to identify Americans in an intelligence document.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., has questioned whether Obama officials improperly sought the names of Trump transition members in this way – and, in the letter obtained by Fox News, Nunes provided new details about what his investigators have found.
“[T]his Committee has learned that one official, whose position has no apparent intelligence-related function, made hundreds of unmasking requests during the final year of the Obama Administration,” he wrote to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats.
Only one request, Nunes wrote, “offered a justification that was not boilerplate and articulated why” the identity was needed for official duties.
Three of the nation’s intelligence agencies received subpoenas in May explicitly naming three top Obama administration officials: Former CIA director John Brennan, former national security adviser Susan Rice, and former U.N. ambassador Samantha Power.
Nunes’ letter appears to make reference to Power as the official who made “hundreds” of requests.
The DNC and the Clinton campaign (and maybe the obama administration) hired Fusion GPS to collect dirt on Trump. Fusion then hired Steele, who obtained all sorts of salacious disinformation from high level Kremlin officials to assemble the dirty dossier, which was then used to obtain FISA approval to spy on Trump and his associates and eventually try to take him down. If the Russians wanted to help trump, why not pass on propaganda damaging to Hillary? It’s far more likely that Bill Clinton would be cavorting with hookers in Moscow (or in Putin’s home) than it is Trump.
It is the democrats who colluded and still are colluding with the Russians. They are using Russian propaganda to smear Trump and the obama administration might have been party to this since April of 2016.
Paul Manafort is going to take a hit for something having nothing to do with the 2016 election from someone who seems to have ignored the money laundering and bribery schemes in 2010.
This whole thing stinks of conspiracy.
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Except for liberals being foolish.
The very leak that charges were filed this week is illegal, they have no respect for law not any of them.
Will be interesting as Manafort dealt with the Podestas in the Ukraine so they very well knew who to zero in on.
Well… no. But would anyone in their right mind want Hillary as President? This isn’t a demographic that does a lot of thinking.
It stinks of socialism, which is the way they do things. The ends justifies the means and using criminal means and lies as a means is no problem for socialists. And some of the leftists have come forth and stated had they known the Democrats were working hand in hand with Fusion and the Russians, they would have done more to help. Is further explanation necessary?
I wonder at what point the left will realize they should have let sleeping weasels lie?
The liberal Demac-RATS in their little black book of dirty tricks up to their usial dastardly deeds and as Patton once said POLITICIANS ARE THE LOWESTS FROM OR LIFE ON EARTH LIBERAL DEMACRATS ARE THE LOWESTS FORM OF POLITICIAN
Clapper says the Russians succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in eroding confidence in the democratic process in America. Probably true, but they could not have done it without the willing aid of the Democrats.
A whole lot of nuttin..
basically it has nothing to do with the election, the items put up are from prior to 2014…
and nothing is actually conntected to trump other than working with them, and the public expecting people commiting crimes to tell others they do before being hired..
so its a story full of sound and fury, signifying nothing…
It stinks of socialism, which is the way they do things. The ends justifies the means and using criminal means and lies as a means is no problem for socialists.
Let me quote waht i learned from my latvian family about attitudes of the soviets: “Cheating is just a more efficient way to win”
@Artfldgr:
Exactly. Here’s what I think they are hoping for: they will put enough threats and punishment upon Manafort, Gates and Papadopoulos to scare someone into signing a confession of witnessing some collusion. Like with other politically motivated high-profile cases the left has brought, the conviction is not the goal but drawing out the trial and using the indictments and charges as political weapons.
I just saw the movie “The Confession” about Soviet trials of “traitors” in the Czech government and the similarities are striking.
The dossier is pretty much irrelevant to Mueller’s expanding criminal investigation.
Manafort and Gates have been indicted for their alleged involvement in Russian money laundering schemes. The indictment states that this criminal activity continued at least through 2016. Manafort was Trump’s campaign manager until August 19, 2016. So, if the charges are established in court, you’ve got Trump’s campaign manager doing the bidding of Russian criminal interests while holding that position.
This does not look so good. Hence the frantic efforts to distract with accusations against his political enemies, the media, and investigators. The level of danger for the nation will rapidly escalate if the investigation begins to close in on the administration itself, because there’s no better distraction than war.
@Greg: Did you read the indictment or have that horse puck shoveled into your head by Madcow?
He hid money he earned from a pro Kremlin party in the Ukraine from taxation, then lived off it bought homes ect without claiming it as income.
At the same time the Kremlin was donating to Hillarys foundation and Bill was making speeches she was posing with reset buttons.
Hillary is still using the money donated to fly around pushing her book of tears in her beer.
There is still zero evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia in the 2016 election. But we have Manafort committing shady lobby practices with a firm headed by Hillary’s campaign chair.
https://thepoliticalinsider.com/tony-podesta-steps-down/?
@kitt, #9:
Did you read it?
That would be a direct reference to the Russian money that he laundered. $18 million or so, according to the indictment. Who do you think was funding the “pro-Kremlin party in the Ukraine” that you mention? Manafort was working to further Russian interests, not the interests of Ukraine. Ukraine was the place where those Russian interests were being furthered.
People seem to be willfully missing the obvious.
@Greg:
The dossier is irrelevant to everything because it does not contain any facts. However, the FBI’s wire tapping and investigating was based on what the dossier, completely un-verified and without merit, accused.
Doesn’t have anything to do Trump. If you remember (though it is inconvenient), as soon as Trump learned Manafort had Ukrainian and Russian connections, he let him go. The same goes for Papadopoulos, who was on the team to provide connections with the Greek government and who kept offering to arrange meetings with Russian officials; these were rejected by the Trump campaign and Papadopoulos was dropped. In reality, a clear look at the behavior of the Trump campaign and Trump leaves little room for such partisan and politically motivated accusations. But, sore losing is a tough way to live life, I guess.
Hillary’s connections with the Russians and her numerous conflicts of interest have been well known for a long time… long before it was thought accusing Trump of collusion might further the liberal agenda. The point of all that is, why keep wasting time when there is not basis for the accusations against Trump and no evidence of collusion can be found when it is clear that Hillary lied before Congress, profited from selling uranium to Russia and really DID collude with the Russians to try and affect the election and she is not being pursued? The answer, of course, is clear and obvious; the DOJ has been infected with liberals and weaponized and the corrupt liberal media is supporting a vendetta against Trump.
When Trump learned people were not what they presented themselves as, he got rid of them. Not only is there no evidence of Trump’s collusion, but it appears Trump made every effort to keep his staff and campaign clean and honest. Hillary, on the other hand….
@Greg: He is an attorney, and was paid for services rendered, just like the baby rapist Hillary got off.
The money was not taxed he tried to live off unreported income, oh Hillary didnt report those donations either damn.
No collusion at all with Trumps Campaign.
Manafort lived a luxurious lifestyle on Russian money with fancy clothes ect so did Hillary, and her daughter who gets a paycheck from the foundation.
They are not going to be able to distract from Uranium one or the dirty Doss. that was used to spy on the opposing party during an election.
Mueller is in it up to his ears in the Uranium One cover-up. With an un-gagged witness to testify I think we need a special prosecutor.
@kitt: If Trump fires Mueller impeachment proceedings will begin almost immediately—at 33% he’s less popular than Nixon and majority of country will be glad to be rid of him.
Problem of course—Far Right Pence marginally better.
@rich wheeler: Why would he fire Mueller?
Hillary Clinton Freed Child Rapist is another of the right’s fabricated smear stories.
Don’t you people ever truth check anything? (A purely rhetorical question, of course.)
@kitt: Indeed. Trump is being cleared by this indictment. Why the hell would he interrupt? As the saying goes, when the enemy is destroying themselves, get out of the way and don’t interfere.
@rich wheeler: Does it hurt when your fantasies crumble?
@kitt: Why indeed? Many on the right, including FA’ERS, believe his goal is to bring down DT. Don’t you?
Bill Have you now flip flopped on Mueller? You like the job he’s doing. lol Don’t let your head spin off–You won’t like his next indictments too much–he’s getting closer and closer and DT doesn’t like it
@rich wheeler:
Again, the fantasies have taken over your mind. Mueller is hunting the Loch Ness Monster… something that doesn’t exist but in the imagination of some. What he has revealed is what most of us (those who subscribe to reality rather than hate-driven false accusations); Trump did not collude with the Russians. The bonus is confirming also what we residents of reality-world have known: that Hillary had been involved with coordinating with the Russians on schemes that fattened up her coffers and aided her campaign.
If Mueller were to deserve accolades, he would have selected a more balanced investigation team instead of the liberal team of revenge-seekers he has. Just as Obama and Hillary’s $13 million could not find any real dirt on Trump, so Mueller’s team, as much as they want to, have not been able to find anything to pin on Trump.
The left is totally dependent on lies. Trump colluded, Tillerson threatened to resign, Tillerson called Trump a moron, the White House is in chaos… no facts to hang your conspiracies and hopes on, only lies. This investigation was born of and driven by lies.
Oh, any you never answered my question, did you?
@Bill… Deplorable Me: You’re so long winded you can’t see an answer right in front of you.
Repubs are ready to can Mueller if they don’t like his findings. They’ll say he can’t be impartial. They’re scared.
Greg-Trumpeteers don’t really care about the truth. Fortunately 2/3 of Americans know this. They remain a mere vocal minority. Appears Bill has taken RT’s place as FA’S long winded leader–getting paid by the word no doubt.
Prosecutors normally drop the big shoe first, if this is that shoe make hay if you can, the next indictments might be for material tags removed from pillows.
If there were any illegal activities done by Trumps campaign let it out in the open these charges have nothing to do with Trump so should get a big yawn from the MSM, or maybe a tear rolling down the cheek.
Of course he was set on a mission to “get Trump” So what he has given it his best shot couldnt find Boris or Natasha in the gold lined closet too bad so sad.
@Greg: http://freebeacon.com/politics/the-hillary-tapes/
@rich wheeler:
Oh, I KNOW the answer. I am trying to see if you are man enough to admit it. So far, not very hopeful.
This is much like the left trumpeting that Bush blamed Iraq for 9/11 but was proven wrong. NO ONE ever blamed Iraq for 9/11 and, though it is pointed out that Mueller has conflicts of interest all over the place and should resign, no one is talking about firing him. But, when fantasies is all you have, I guess you have to be allowed your fantasies.
Ha… first, the pot calling the kettle black, then the confirmation.
Why is Tony Podesta suddenly on the lam? Because of all the Trump collusion?
Prosecutors may be seeking info on Flynn-Turkey ties from witness: report
Nov. 27 – Michael Flynn’s lawyer meets with members of special counsel’s team, raising specter of plea deal
@Greg: Michael Flynn’s problems appear to be Michael Flynn’s, not Trump’s.
@Bill… Deplorable Me, #24:
They’re working up the chain. Or, more accurately, up along several chains, that will all join together at some point. The person at that point of intersection will be either Trump or somebody else—but Trump doesn’t strike me as the sort who allows other people to call the shots and run his show.
December 1 – Michael Flynn Pleads Guilty to Lying to the F.B.I. and Will Cooperate With Russia Inquiry
@Greg: It was Trumps son-in-law and when were they to begin setting up diplomatic relations? How did this affect the Election, after the recounts were completed? What law was broken? Dont let them set you up for another nothing burger feast.
@kitt, #26:
Clearly something was going on long before Election Day.
APRIL 6, 2017 – C.I.A. Had Evidence of Russian Effort to Help Trump Earlier Than Believed
We’d probably all do well to remember that most details of the investigation haven’t been made public. The various leaks have only provided a sketchy outline.
@Greg: OMG Greg you are citing the NYTimes, when will you quit being a wank?
Cant you find anything less reliable like SNOPES or Politifactless?
Just sayin’ dont let them build you all up for a nothing burger feast.
BTW I think your clue to the next DNC pick is a long shot, he seems too good to be true not Marxist enough for their tastes.
You might just have to sit for the next 7 years and hate what is going on in the gov like conservatives did,
WOW did you ear about toiletseatgate a special exclusive scoop by NBC?
The New York Times is still a real newspaper that actually engages in traditional investigative journalism and concise, principled reporting. They sometimes err, but they’re still guided by journalistic principles, and still recognize their responsibilities in a democratic society.
When will you figure out that repeatedly characterizing all competing views and information sources as categorically false and as something that must be totally ignored is a propaganda and brainwashing technique?
You might want to review the classic Cult Warning Signs. The checklist applies as much to politics as to religion.
Breaking news. It’s definite! THE RATS ARE BEING THROWN OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE!
@Greg:
Since when? they buried the holocaust during WW2
Its a ultra liberal propaganda rag.
Not questioning sources especially when caught lying numerous times is called brainwashed.
Just put in your search engine” NYT caught lying again.”
If they cant lie they bury it deep in the Sunday edition.
You have been rejecting conservative sources all along.
#30 So you are saying the Obamas lived happily with various vermin infestations and maintenance issues that were causing further damage to the historic building? Looks like Trump arrived just in time to save the White House.
@Greg: #30 Yet ANOTHER mess Obama left, huh?
They probably followed Donald in the door as part of his entourage.
@Greg: More likely part of the 5th column Obama left behind to disrupt and cause chaos. No doubt Michelle’s big ass broke the toilet seat.
@Greg: #33 from your link” Hundreds of requests were received over the two years.” Ewwwww what kind of people live like that, an infested house gross!