Praise for The Plot to Destroy Trump

“The DEEP STATE conspired to take down TRUMP. This book fills in all the details, and names names. All patriots need to read it.”

—Alex Jones, founder, Infowars

“This Dan Brown-style page turner is based on fact, not fiction, and it is a great read.”

—Harold Fickett, CEO and publisher of SCENES

“The attempt to destabilize and destroy President Trump is one of the most disgraceful episodes in modern political history. This is an important book that will help to dispel the myths.”

—Nigel Farage, LBC Radio and Fox News contributor

“The Red November conspiracy details how an unelected deep state sought to depose an elected president. As a political scandal, it doesn’t get bigger than that.”

—Francis Buckley, New York Post

“This book is simply unputdownable!”

—Freddy Gray, The Spectator

“Providing a fact-based counter-narrative to that of the establishment media, Dr. Malloch represents what should be the real American interest in the 2016 election and beyond—that Russia and other nations have an inherent interest in weakening the legitimacy of the President of the United States. The media—alongside Democrats and even former British spies—are actually assisting Kremlin interests.”

—Raheem Kassam, editor, Breitbart

“With his characteristic no-nonsense approach, Ted Malloch certainly makes you wonder why government investigators spent so much time and taxpayers’ money on giving such credence to a clearly politically slanted document. With so much of the deep state against him, it’s a miracle President Trump—the people’s choice—is still in the White House! This book reveals what Trump is up against.”

—Tim Newark, author of Protest Vote and political commentator for the Daily Express, among others

“Courageous! That’s Ted Malloch, who sacrificed elite-style comfort and prestige to be a freedom fighter.”

—Joseph Farah, founder and CEO, WND

“This book connects all the dots in the plot to destroy Trump. It is the most politically explosive book of the year.”

—Caroline Wheeler, Sunday London Times

“To the list of worldly ills—the unethical knaves in big business and the fools in big government—author Theodore Roosevelt Malloch has now added the cowards in “big conspiracy,” who secretly traffic in worldly falsehoods so as to reap the whirlwind of political strife. Why do they do it? Because their thirst for power knows no bottom, and because they hope to gain the political upper hand in the ensuing confusion. No one loses more in the exchange than the ordinary citizen, who knows his world is at least partly run by these manipulative liars, but who cannot quite bring himself to reject the beautiful lies being spun. The Plot to Destroy Trump pulls open the veil behind which these manipulators operate. It is a view of jaded and world-weary malevolence, leavened with the essence of pure self-interest. In so many ways, the liars have the upper hand because they are selling “wishes come true,” and because the truth itself can be hard to hear—e.g., work hard, compete, don’t accept handouts—but the ordinary citizen knows something is deeply crooked about this world. It is a crookedness for which the only remedy is Truth. “Let there be Truth,” says author Malloch—a declaration that every citizen who wishes to live in reality can embrace as their own.”

—K. W. Bickford, Times-Picayune

“In stunning detail, The Plot to Destroy Trump: How the Deep State Fabricated the Russia Dossier to Subvert the President exposes the biggest political scandal of our lifetime. A must-read!”

—Jim Hoft, Gateway Pundit

“This thriller reads like a Tom Clancy novel. It unpacks a conspiracy theory on Red November.”

—Daily Caller

“To patriots, national election results matter. Following Trump’s stunning upset victory in 2016, globalists and deep state allies went into overdrive. Each day, more evidence emerges demonstrating just how many Americans conspired to defy the expressed will of the electorate. The Plot to Destroy Trump is historical fact, yet it reads like a thriller. Ted Malloch brings us a cautionary tale that must be remembered each time we vote, in all free nations, under rule of law.”

—Charles Ortel, Charles on Sunday

Copyright © 2018 by Theodore Roosevelt Malloch

Foreword Copyright © 2018 by Roger Stone

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Brian Peterson

Cover photo: AP images

ISBN: 978-1-5107-4010-5

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-4011-2

Printed in the United States of America

Vox Populi, Vox Dei

Christopher Steele is the head of Orbis Business Intelligence, Ltd., in London, England. He pulls a dossier out of his office vault. Composed of disinformation to compromise presidential candidate Donald J. Trump, it triggers investigations, court warrants, and endless “fake news” stories. Steele himself has to go into protective hiding when the dossier he prepared goes viral and the Russian intelligence service puts him in their sights. The dossier is shared with both British and American Intelligence Services and becomes the basis for wiretaps, surveillance, unmaskings, and indictments. After Special Investigative Counsel Robert Mueller interrogates Steele, his inventions become the trigger in a witch hunt to bring down the US president. Is it a modern Watergate, a devilish trick, or a plot to destroy the president? Follow the path and connect the dots in this Red November conspiracy.

FOREWORD

By Roger Stone

IT HAS BEEN MY PLEASURE TO work for four American presidents and to be involved in ten presidential campaigns. One was a libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson; the others were Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, my great friend and a great patriot, Senator Bob Dole, George Herbert Walker Bush, of which I have some regret, and of course now Donald J. Trump.

I would say that the 2016 election was an election in which all of those things that I thought were absolutely necessary and true about American politics, about micro politics in the age of mass communications, all proved not to be true or at least to be suspended for the time of this most recent election.

Donald Trump was successful and elected president without benefit of sophisticated professional polling, focus groups, message testing, hundreds of millions of dollars, or paid broadcast advertising.

He was the candidate who operated solely and completely on the basis of his instincts, on the basis of his gut.

Trump had no speechwriters. He had no press secretary. He had no prepared talking points for him to read from. He was very much his own man. There was no Karl Rove in front of him and there never has been. I suspect there never will be, certainly not Roger Stone, and most definitely not Steve Bannon.

The fact is that he was massively outspent, while it’s very hard to get precise numbers on the intersection of hard and soft money. A reasonable estimate would be that the forces supporting his opponent, Hillary Clinton, raised on the order of $2 billion dollars, perhaps a bit more. Those supporting Donald Trump, although not Trump himself, spent about $237 million dollars.

Additionally, I would make a case that the traditional old media and the new media were both actively working against his election.

The old media I define as the three US-based television networks, and I label with them the cable networks.

While they certainly gave Trump a disproportionate amount of coverage during the primaries, they did that not to boost Donald Trump. They did it because somebody this freewheeling, somebody this unscripted is “interesting”—and being interesting is the most important thing in politics.

The only thing worse in politics than being wrong is being boring. Donald Trump as a candidate was never boring. And that drove ratings and ratings drove their ability to charge more for their virtual advertising.

I would also argue that in the general election phase of the campaign that coverage turned largely negative, very nasty, indeed.

I would also make a case to you that the new media was rigged against Trump. We see that for example at Google, when the Trump campaign put out a press release it was marked as “Promotion.” When the Hillary Clinton campaign put out a press release it was marked as “Update.”

That is the difference between literally tens of millions of people reading it and others not following it at all. That’s just one example of the bias.

I think it would be a mistake to view the Trump election solely as the rise of an interesting and flamboyant populist candidate.

He was far more than that. He was the total rejection of a two-party duopoly. Although they endeavor to sound different at election time, they are really bringing the country one set of identical policies.

The Republicans and Democrats, the elites of both parties, were working together, the Bushes and the Clintons, whose policies and truths were largely indistinguishable. They brought us endless wars, where our inherent national interests were never clear.

The erosion of our civil liberties, the reading of our emails, the reading of our text messages, the wiring of our phone calls, the collection of metadata on Americans, is in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, borrowing and spending of debt that my grandson’s children will end up paying for, immigration policies that are unfair, that do not reward those who wait their turn and go through the process, that have rendered some of our neighborhoods and streets unsafe.

Our international trade policies where we were promised by both the Bushes and the Clintons were not an economic panacea but instead sucked the jobs out of America as one populist candidate, Ross Perot, once said. Economic policies that brought devastation to the central part of our country, the rust belt, left in desperation. These were the policies of the Republican and Democrats working together.

These are the policies of the political elites; these are the policies of the Bushes and Clintons alike, when they find their way to the White House.

How, for example, could Barack Obama promise us that Guantanamo would be closed, and instead it is still open?

Why could they promise us that the war in Afghanistan would be ended and it is still going on? Why would we march off to war in Iraq where our inherent national interest was never clear? Why do the wars have the combined partisan support of the elites and no one else?

I believe that Donald Trump’s election was a rejection of all of that.

I also, having worked for a number of presidents and spent some time in Washington, realize that when the establishment cannot defeat you, they first try to discredit you. When they cannot do that they try to co-opt you. After that they try to delegitimize you. And failing that they try and depose you.

Yes, I am disappointed that we are still in Afghanistan. Yes, I think sending more troops has been a mistake. Our largest troop deployment to date has been unable to win that war.

Yes, I do not think that Donald Trump can accomplish everything in only one year.

But it is interesting to me that we were told that if he were elected our stock market would collapse and our economy would go into deep recession. Under this president we have now created almost two million new jobs.

The stock market has roared to unprecedented levels. Unemployment has hit longtime lows. African American unemployment, one of the most intractable problems in the country, is at the lowest number, ever.

Yes, I want to see Trump’s plan to rebuild our urban centers realized. He promised us this during the campaign.

He has only been president for one short year. We have multinational corporations who have left, repatriating money back to the United States, coming back to the United States. Companies like Apple, hardly Trump supporters, announcing that they’re repatriating $250 million dollars and they are going to spend another $350 billion dollars in a US-based expansion.

By any stretch of the imagination the president has had a very successful first year.

The reaction to his election is something that is worth looking at closely.

First, there was the argument that the Electoral College should overturn his election. Mr. Podesta, the manager of Hillary Clinton’s losing campaign, a man who spent $2 billion to get his brains beat in, suggested that the Electoral College should be briefed on the Russian collusion.

It would have been a very short briefing.

This is because, so far, the claim of Russian collusion has proved to be a complete delusion.

Yet despite the fact that we have had multi-million dollar tax-payer financed investigations by the House and the Senate, we do not have any evidence of any effective action, of anybody in the Trump campaign or the Trump family or by Trump associates, who successfully coordinated or colluded or conspired with the Russian State. None.

We do know that the handful of aides around Bill Clinton, and the Clintons, made millions of dollars from the oligarchs around Vladimir Putin.

There’s the gas deal, the uranium deal, which you may have heard of, and there is the banking deal to boot.

You see, the president has the intractable opposition of what we call the “Deep State.”

Some people say, Stone, you are a conspiracy theorist. For example you said that maybe Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy or didn’t act alone. Well, perhaps we learned in the documents just released that the government has lied from the beginning about their knowledge of Oswald, where he came from, and his various movements.

I wrote a book about that which is a New York Times bestseller. No, I am not a conspiracy theorist. I am a conspiracy realist. I simply go where the facts take us.

There is no shortage of data to show the second phase of the opposition to Trump. Since the Russian collusion delusion has centrally collapsed, we have seen some of the seeds of this emerge. I suspect you will hear more of it: the president is “crazy.” He is out of his mind and he is not competent.

He needs to be removed.

He is not able to discharge his duties. Well, I have known him almost forty years and he is the same person he has ever been.

Is he eccentric? Most definitely, he is. So was Franklin Roosevelt. So was Theodore Roosevelt. Go back and read what they said about Teddy, an egomaniac, a lightweight, a braggart, one of our greatest presidents. Lincoln was considered to be eccentric too. He slept in bed with a man.

All of our greatest presidents have changed the presidency in their own image.

Trump has a unique style. He is not a cookie-cutter, blown-dry, polling-fueled career politician. He is a force of nature and he is an actual phenomenon. He has his own unique leadership style.

If that style gets you two thousand points in the stock market and two million new jobs, I like it. Most people do.

The seeds of this entire narrative that the president is mentally unbalanced—which I believe to be manifestly untrue based on all the evidence, both anecdotal and personal and now medical—are based on a 25th Amendment strategy being propagated by some leftists that he may need to be removed from elected office.

This too is based on the intractable opposition of the same Deep State. Dwight Eisenhower called them the “Military Industrial Complex.” How can it be that Robert Gates would be a cabinet member and Secretary of Defense for both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, if their policies were so different?

As I said earlier, why is Guantanamo still open? Why do we have the same people in the second and third levels of the intelligence agencies serving the last two or three previous presidents?

It is very simple and I can explain it to you. Hillary Clinton promised these folks an expansion of a proxy war in Syria. I see no winners in Syria, with Assad propping up Hezbollah and Hamas and himself being propped up by the Russians, is certainly no friend of ours or of human rights.

ISIS on the other side is propped up by the Saudis, whose involvement in 9/11 is the subject of legislation on which they do not want to be sued. You have one hundred or more small subsets of terrorist fanatics funded by the Saudis.

I am sorry, this is not worth one drop of American blood or one borrowed American dollar.

We have seen graphically in Libya what happens when you topple a regime with American bomber planes without thinking through the implications.

You can look at the videos of the slave markets in which black Africans are being sold as slaves in Tripoli. They are chilling to say the least.

So the intractable opposition to Trump is based in many cases on his unwillingness to expand the war or make new ones, while cutting bureaucracy and defunding excesses.

Trump was not only the law and order candidate from a rhetorical perspective, he was the only “peace” candidate. Does he have any delusions about the evil of the Russian system?

Does he think Vladimir Putin is a good guy?

Absolutely not. But when the other folks in the world, such as the Russians, have thermonuclear weapons, a guy who wants to work with them is probably a pretty good idea.

The war over Syria is much closer geographically than it would look on a map. It is not a sound idea because our national interests there are not at all clear.

We are witnessing the beginning of the collapse of an illegitimate effort to reverse what the Deep State could not do in the 2016 election.

We now know almost certainly and most certainly we will get more information shortly, as in this book, that the entire claim of Russian collusion and the unconstitutional and illegal surveillance of the Republican candidate for president and his top associates, including yours truly, is based on—a lie.

It is based on a fabrication, a dossier that is not based in truth.

Donald Trump did not meet with prostitutes and did not urinate on a bed in Moscow.

It just didn’t happen.

The documents (you have to give those guys from Fusion GPS credit) sold the same information three times to three different buyers.

First, it was sold to the Republicans funded by hedge fund manager Paul Singer and Marco Rubio, who was running for president

Then he sold it to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.

And then, finally, sadly, and most incredibly, he sold it to the FBI.

It is due to this dubious document that this administration has been questioned; it is the same document which the Obama administration took to the FISA court and asked permission to surveil Trump and his associates. In July of last year they were stunned when initially their first request was flatly rejected.

It is important to understand that under the FISA court rules there need be no probable cause for action. The government doesn’t say we want to spy on someone because we have evidence that he is involved in treason or we believe he is involved with Russia. They could spy on you simply because they want to. In fact, 99 percent of the government requests that go to the FISA court are rubber-stamped and the surveillance is undertaken.

We now know that the highest level officials in the Obama administration went back to the FISA court, to a different judge, never acknowledging to the second judge that the previous judge had turned down their request, because these proceedings are all secret.

They got illegitimate permission to conduct surveillance on the basis of the fake evidence.

What you had was collusion by the highest levels of the Intelligence Community in the United States. They were interested in the expansion of the war in Syria, convinced had they had a choice between Hillary Clinton and, say, Jeb Bush and that that expanded proxy war would have been in the bag.

Desperate to dislodge this president, who they were shocked was elected with to begin with, this is a nothing short of a coup d’état.

The idea, having failed with their Russian argument, then turned to the 25th Amendment.

How does the 25th Amendment work?

You would need a majority of the president’s cabinet and the vice president to agree that the president is no longer mentally capable of discharging his or her duties. Then the president would have the constitutional right to take that to either the highest legal office or to appeal it. That appeal would go to the House of Representatives under control of Speaker Paul Ryan.

Such a strategy may sound far-fetched but it cannot work without the hysteria built up by the folks at, oh I don’t know, how about CNN, that the president is mentally unbalanced.

It is already the next phase of the effort to dislodge this president who threatens their business as usual and the Deep State.

More chilling is an effort to put the toothpaste back the tube.

As I said back in 2016, it was the year in which the mainstream media lost their monopoly stranglehold on political dissemination of political information. The invention of the internet changes things.

It opened the door to the broader alternative media—left, right, and center.

What we now see is an effort to censor those on the internet by Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon. This flies exactly in the face of American tradition.

If you are going to leave the caps square then everyone has to have access to the town square. We should be opposed to any censorship of any voice, right or left. It doesn’t matter if you are the wackiest far-out leftist or whether you are a right-wing nut, you should have a chance to speak and to be heard.

I am one who has been banned for life from Twitter. Is it coincidental then that they shut off the president’s Twitter feed for eleven minutes? Was it coincidental that Julian Assange’s Twitter feed went down? Or that it popped back up?

Was it an accident that somebody spilled Coke on the keyboard and that’s what made Sean Hannity’s Twitter feed disappear?

Are they playing games with us?

These companies have First Amendment responsibilities. They have what many would consider to be antitrust responsibilities.

They also have the other problem, which is that people who want to have a robust dialogue can pick up and go elsewhere. They’ll go to other internet alternatives where you can have a dialogue.

One of the most interesting things that we just went through is the disintermediation of the media.

Almost everything that we have been told about this is wrong. Yes, we had under Barack Obama a near state takeover of government by the Deep State and an attempt to overthrow President Trump before, during, and after he was elected.

Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, they all had to give equal access to everybody. Not the content providers. They can defame you, they can block you, they can ignore you, they can censor you, they can literally erase you from history, and they were unfettered.

True networks require that everyone have an equal voice and the new rules will lend themselves to that. Now we have Mr. Pompeo, the former CIA Director and now presumptive Secretary of State, saying that the Russians are going to interfere with the 2018 elections.

Has anyone been able to produce any evidence whatsoever that they interfered in any meaningful way in the 2016 elections?

I wonder what the basis of this information is?

Some of you may not know that a group is suing me in the District of Columbia courts by the name of Protect Democracy, which is a front group for Barack Obama.

Their allegation against me is that I worked with the Russians to hack the Democratic National Committee’s email and gave the information to WikiLeaks.

Not only is there no evidence of that, none of it is true, they will be hard-pressed to prove it in court if we get that far.

What interests me most is that the president’s lawyers filed a motion in court in essence saying that given The New York Times v. the United States case, the famous Pentagon Papers case, the publication of classified information by a journalist is not a crime.

That’s what journalists do. If you are going to bust Julian Assange, then you have to bust the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and many others who have had enormous scoops by tainting from sources.

It is the role of a free press to share information. It may be inconvenient and it may be embarrassing to the government but it is most definably not illegal.

How can it be that campaigns were being sued? In a courtroom Trump’s lawyers asserted that there is no violation of law, therefore there can be no conspiracy, as you can’t conspire to commit a crime at the same time.

Pompeo and Sessions, the Attorney General, are arguing that Julian Assange be extradited to the United States for a crime of publishing classified information. Now you cannot have it both ways. Assertions that I knew in advance that Julian Assange would publish Hillary Clinton’s emails are false, other than to say that I can read what he said in a dozen interviews. I did re-tweet what he said.

The idea that I interfered in John Podesta’s email is also patently false. I never said that but I did read the Panama Papers.

In January 2016 they outlined his shady business dealings in Eastern Europe, including Russia.

So there is no evidence whatsoever. On the other hand, this lawsuit is a great fundraising device for these folks.

It will lead exactly nowhere. The point to bring it all back to my central point is that censorship is the last step in this effort to discredit and destabilize this president.

I don’t think the 25th Amendment narrative will work. I think in the end censorship will not work because in the end free speech will win out. I don’t think the toothpaste can be put back into the tube. We like our Twitter feeds and our Facebook posts and any other number of up-and-coming social media outlets.

Gone are the days when the three major networks said something that didn’t happen or just did not cover it, as if it just didn’t happen. It is like the proverbial tree falling in the forest. No, I think if we are going to have a robust debate we should be ready and happy to have it

Make no mistake: there was a clear attempt, call it a plot, to take down the duly elected president of the United States. His name is Donald Trump.

Now what are we going to do about it?

INTRODUCTION

THE STORY WE HAVE HERE IS truly stranger than fiction. You can’t make this stuff up; I couldn’t if I tried. What is presented in this book is the truth as I see it, after carefully analyzing countless texts, articles, documents, interviews, and speeches.

This combing through documents to verify their authenticity is a process that today, it seems, has fallen by the wayside. A process that has shifted from the ones who should be doing it, the news media, to the ones who shouldn’t have to, the general public. To be sure, this cultural shift has an unintended consequence: a transfer in autonomy. No longer are the ones supplying the information responsible for fact-checking their sources before releasing them for public consumption. Instead, the responsibility now lies in the hands of the public.

Like most historical trends, this didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow and gradual shift that occurred in tandem with the rise of the internet and other social media platforms that allow news to travel twice around the world before anyone thinks to question its veracity. Yet there is a silver lining to this shift: a newly forged path has been carved out, creating platforms for independent voices to reach a wider, more discerning audience without the constraints of traditional media broadcast.

There’s a quotation often attributed to Mark Twain: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting its shoes on.” Twain’s sentiment continues to ring true today—perhaps even more so now than when it was first written well over a hundred years ago. With countless media outlets, a decline in journalism, and general disregard for the truth—where the measure of success is through ratings and likes and clicks, not accuracy—it’s no wonder that a document like the Trump-Russia dossier, which is undoubtedly fabricated, has cemented its place as a political fork in the road, blurring the once-drawn line in the sand between fact and fiction.

And yet it’s not just the media that bends the truth. These news outlets are often just the last line of defense, a buffer of sorts, between the truth and the public. Sometimes they’re reporting what they were told. To find the truth, we have to go back further and deeper. Like a game of telephone, the farther we go back, the more the message and story is distorted. And yet, if we step away from it all as we try to connect the dots from a distance, we see it’s part of a bigger picture—something more than just media, which is a mere cog in this great machine. This machine, as we’ve come to know it, is what we call the Deep State: a collective group of government agencies and select individuals who hold great power to manipulate, distort, and downright falsify the information that will be released to the media and then to the public, ultimately changing the course of world history.

This Deep State is at the heart of our hunt for Red November: a conspiracy orchestrated by anti-Trump forces that begins with memos written by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele for Fusion GPS, an intelligence firm. From here, the trail opens up, spreading its reach throughout Washington—including the FBI, the DOJ, and the CIA—as these forces work together to fabricate a narrative to delegitimize, subvert, and ultimately depose President Trump. This is Red November.

And yet as this story of Donald Trump’s alleged nefarious connection to Russia continues to unfold—a complicated, tangled web of people and places and meetings and questionable timetables and events—we’re missing one piece to this puzzle: tangible proof of any wrongdoing or collusion between Trump and his Russian adversaries. Despite this, the mainstream media continues to run this story that makes you dizzy just trying wrap your head around it. It’s far too complicated. And it only gets complicated if you’re lying. It’s not complicated if you’re telling the truth.

As so it has become in our world today, the information out there from the left media is both disparate and confusing, each outlet and talking head offering cloudy versions of the story that only further overwhelm consumers. These news outlets force readers and viewers to sift through the information and disseminate what is truth and what is not.

The purpose of this book is to cut through the clutter and to provide you with an alternative to the mainstream media’s foregone conclusion that relies solely on salacious, unverified gossip that will produce higher ratings that translate into high ad revenue. And more, they know that this is what their audience wants to read. They know that their consumers will sop up this gossip and come back for seconds because it fits in nicely with their narrative—reaffirming their political beliefs, not challenging them—further deepening their echo chambers. This is dangerous: it’s an attack on true discourse and open dialogue. If we can’t tolerate alternative opinions that question our own beliefs and ideological stances, then the result is paralysis: the slow and inevitable death of a nation.

This book serves as a challenge to mainstream media and thinking and to the widespread notion that there is some sort of nefarious collusion between President Trump and Russia. My aim is to lay the facts out as clearly as possible for you, the reader, to see the difference between fact and pure fiction.

The story I present to you on the pages that follow is an attempt to peel back the layers, tracing that telephone line back to the source and revealing the real story: a story that was still putting its shoes on while a great big lie was traveling halfway around the world. This story, as Winston Churchill once put it, is a riddle, wrapped up in a mystery, inside an enigma … but perhaps there is a key.

—Theodore Roosevelt Malloch
March 2018

PART I

ORIGIN STORIES: THE MAKING OF RED NOVEMBER JUNE 2016—NOVEMBER 8, 2016

1

STRANGER THAN FICTION

CROSSING VAUXHALL BRIDGE IN LONDON, ON the south bank of the River Thames, stands a modern, monolithic fortified structure: the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service of the United Kingdom. Londoners know it as MI6—short for Ministry of Intelligence, Section 6—where agents work on external and foreign affairs. Surely, any passerby on a Sunday stroll down the river would view MI6—a rather imposing building—as a place where serious business takes place. The agents inside, however, have grown quite fond of the nickname given to their section: “The Circus.”

MI6 gained international fame through novelist Ian Fleming’s James Bond, a fictional character who works as a “Double-O” agent within these very walls—which Fleming simply refers to as “Six.” In Hollywood’s cinematic interpretations of Fleming’s novels like Golden Eye and The World Is Not Enough, MI6 is shown front and center. Again it appears in Skyfall, this time under explosive attack. In Spectre, Bond’s nemesis traps him inside the soon-to-explode building. But in true Fleming fashion, Bond escapes near-certain death with a beautiful girl clutching his arm just moments before the inevitable explosion, leaving his adversary to suffer a painful death inside a crumbling MI6.

And yet, without a sworn enemy, what would Bond be? With every new chapter in the series, Bond is pitted against a new, more sinister evil. And more often than not, that enemy is Russian. Ever since the death of Dr. No, the evil forces behind SPECTRE have been busy exacting revenge on MI6. In From Russia With Love, Sean Connery’s character is face-to-face with none other than Donald “Red” Grant, an aptly named adversary. This archetypal rivalry with Russia is so ingrained in American and British culture—in a real, political sense and on the silver screen—that one questions whether it is art imitating life or the other way around. The very notion of Russia as an enemy is so deeply embedded into the so-called water supply that we view any political interaction with Russian officials as suspect. Is there any truth behind this rivalry with Russia, or is it a false narrative concocted by government officials in attempt to create a bogeyman, so to say—an evil force that opposes everything we stand for?

Though fictional, James Bond has become a permanent fixture in global pop culture, transcending generations while maintaining cultural relevance and adoration in the eyes of men and women alike. His fictional status as the ultimate spy has yet to be matched … that is, until we meet Steele.

2

STEELE, CHRISTOPHER STEELE.

AT THE HEART OF OUR TWISTED labyrinth of a story, we have one man with one mission. His name? Christopher Steele. His mission? Dig up dirt on the Republican candidates for president of the approaching 2016 US presidential election. His mission begins in June of 2016.

Steele and our fictional hero do share a common background: Like Bond, Steele was a former MI6 agent himself, snagging the coveted position right after graduating from elite Cambridge University in 1986, where he was a member of the Fabian Society, a socialist organization that seeks the “betterment of society” by democratic socialist principles. The logo of the group was a tortoise for its predilection of gradual transition to socialism—as opposed to revolution. The globalist society has as its coat of arms a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Even to this day, Steele still considers himself a socialist.

Could our British spy have something against his capitalist American adversaries?

After Cambridge, he began at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) for two years. Then, after in-depth training, Steele underwent diplomatic cover as an agent in Moscow during the closing years of the Cold War. Serving at the UK mission in the Soviet Union with a pseudonym, he was a deep agent whose identity was suppressed. He ran a ring of informants and collected highly confidential and secret information using established but clandestine collection techniques and methods.

Steele’s expertise on Russia remained valued, and he was selected as case officer for that unlucky FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko, whose state-sponsored assassination in 2006 affected him deeply. Steele had many associations down the years with Russia and Soviet defectors and continued with a string of informants in Moscow and the former USSR well past his retirement from active service in MI6.

Over time he mastered the Russian language and culture and became very knowledgeable about how things work—or more accurately, how they don’t—in Moscow. In short, he mastered his craft. As a spy, he was adept at collecting raw information, stringing together disparate sources, and bending people and facts to fit his mission and subject matter—a skill that would be very useful in 2016.

In 1993, he returned to London after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and once the Soviet Union had imploded. Steele then moved to Paris, where he continued his Russian espionage and spy game until 2000, when he was outted. After Paris, he found himself in war-torn Afghanistan working with Special Forces on “kill or capture” missions aimed at Taliban targets. Steele recruited other agents and specialized in training them. From 2004 to 2009 he headed the all-important Russia Desk at the very pinnacle of MI6. In March 2009, Steele, now retired from MI6, founded a private intelligence agency, known as Orbis Business Intelligence, with a fellow MI6 retiree.

So, how then does a retired MI6 British agent find himself on one final assignment to meddle with the outcome of the US election? Who is funding the mission—and for how much? Do they want more than just “dirt,” or is there a grander scheme at play? Could there be something more than just money in it for Steele—a man who pledges his loyalty to socialism? Does he have it out for Donald J. Trump—a living, breathing emblem for everything that represents American capitalism?

With the 2016 US election just months away, Steele begins on his mission—one that will culminate in the release of a thirty-five-page dossier of seventeen memos written from June to December 2016 that will rock the political establishment. Though he’s on a solo mission, surely there are more hands at play here in this orchestrated plot to subvert Trump …

3

THE WATERS RUN DEEP

SOMETIMES ART TRULY DOES IMITATE LIFE. “Deep State” is a fictional television miniseries about a retired MI6 agent called back to do just one more job.

Sound familiar?

In the real world, the Deep State is synonymous with a shadow government—a permanent yet formless administrative state that exists in contrast to the tangible public structures we’ve all come to know.

This Deep State is secretive. It entails a fluid network that includes intelligence agencies like the NSA, FBI, CIA, and Defense Department—agencies that run on secret surveillance, in-the-know intel, and cryptic communication. Agencies that play for high stakes, willing to do anything to make sure they don’t lose it all. This Deep State isn’t your local town council or the Department of Agriculture. In other words, it ain’t your grandpa’s government.

The term has been thrown around in political circles for years, but it quickly reentered our national discourse in early 2016 when Trump talked about a cabal—a secret political faction—that operated in Washington DC of unelected officials—that “swamp” that had to be drained, as he so demanded.

Back in 2014 Eric Snowden, the NSA whistleblower, exposed the reach of government surveillance, saying: “There’s definitely a deep state. Trust me, I’ve been there.”¹

Internet activist and founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange—who has gained international recognition as an advocate for truth—publicly released a trove of classified CIA documents that have been dubbed the “Deep State Files.” Following an arrest in 2010, Assange has lived under political asylum granted by Ecuador since 2012, where, to this day, he currently lives at their embassy in London. Assange, who can’t leave his confined space, rarely speaks to outsiders and has almost no human interaction. Clearly, the stakes for going against this Deep State are high.

Perhaps it is Mike Lofgren, a former congressional aide, who accurately captures the essence of the Deep State, calling it “a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process.”²

Its origins echo the long-standing politico term “military-industrial complex,” first referenced by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address when he discussed its potential risks: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Some believe the military-industrial complex makes up only the private part of the Deep State. However, it also involves leaders in finance and technology who, too, are tied to the Intelligence Community and defense establishment.

In his book The New Freedom, published in 1913, Woodrow Wilson, US president during the First World War, had this to say, “Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”

Make no mistake: the Deep State is the central actor in the Red November plot to destroy the president.

Without it, the whole thing would not exist.

This Deep State works together to help fulfill their collective yet sometime conflicting political agendas in hopes of extending its ever-growing reach. To do so, they orchestrate either for or against a political candidate come November.

1 Garvin, Glenn. “Is the Deep State Real—and is it at war with Donald Trump?” Miami Herald. Feb 2 2018. http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article198038824.html.

2 Longley, Robert. “The ‘Deep State’ Theory explained.” Thoughtco. Jan 31 2018. https://www.thoughtco.com/deep-state-definition-4142030.

4

OLD DIRTY TRICKS

EVERY FOUR YEARS AMERICA PUTS ON a show that is too big to miss. The world watches with bated breath for the outcome. The stakes are as high as the cost to run, clocking in to the tune of around two billion dollars. All parties involved will do anything to win. For political contestants, the means most definitely justify the end. But in order to win, someone has to lose.

After eight years of Democrat, left-leaning Barack Obama, the country faced a monumental decision in 2016: Should they continue in the same direction with a so-called “third term”—electing the establishment and politically connected Hillary Rodham Clinton—or turn 180 degrees and run in an opposite direction?

Clinton’s hands were notoriously dirty and she had been known to rig a situation to her own advantage, not to mention collect cash for the family foundation.

Nothing is “fair” when it comes to the Clintons.

Politics is a blood sport for them. Disappointed about her 2008 loss to the immature and less-than-experienced young community organizer, then-Senator Obama, Clinton was not going to lose this time around.

The Republican primary, on the other hand, was wide open since there was no incumbent. All kinds of candidates thought they were right for the times: senators, governors, pastors, congressmen, a former CEO—you name it. Seventeen candidates competed in all.

And one candidate was even more outrageous: a heavyweight, foul-mouthed, brash New York blue-collar billionaire who wanted to turn the entire system upside down. He was running against bad trade deals, lax immigration, high taxes, and the decline of America, which he saw as “crippled.” His slogan? “Make America Great Again!”

Against this backdrop both sides and certain American foreign friends and adversaries saw an opportunity to influence, perhaps steal, or at least try and win the election.

And like a game of chess, sometimes the best defense is going on the offensive—searching for insurance, so to say, to make sure your opponent loses. We’ve come to know this strategy as opposition research—the political pros simply call it “oppo.” And all candidates partake.

To be sure, this tactic is by no means new. Politicians have built their livelihoods on this type of research in hopes of maintaining secure footing in an ever-shifting political realm. Sun Tzu, the great fifth-century Chinese general, wrote about this in his classic work The Art of War, prescribing his followers to focus their aim on their opponents’ moments of weakness. The English Whigs, echoing Sun Tzu, further perfected the technique, which they called “scandalmongering.” Thomas Paine, the English-born American activist, brought this very idea across the Atlantic to bolster himself and his patron Benjamin Franklin when they published their pro-independence tracts during the American Revolution.

Nearly two hundred years later, in Richard Nixon’s White House, the president systemized the notion and kept files on just about everyone he came across and even had an “enemies list.” Nixon was helped by Roger Stone, then a young operative, who would go on to perfect this bag of so-called “dirty tricks.” Stone used such tricks to bring down then-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer about his perpetual affinity for prostitutes, particularly “Client 9.” Politicians who rely on opposition research use trackers to follow a target. This kind of research utilizes databases of public and private records and speeches that stretch back decades, and of course human intel. But such information doesn’t come cheap.

In fact, an entire industry—replete with data shops, gumshoes, listening devices, and K Street consultancy firms—has sprung up to cash in on this ripe business opportunity. One business in particular, Fusion GPS, has risen to the top and become the go-to for all of Washington’s dirty tricks needs. The company has become the epicenter of this sordid game and the heart of this Red November tale.

5

THE DOSSIER: A FAILSAFE INSURANCE POLICY

THE OPENING LINE OF STEELE’S NOW infamous dossier begins with an explosive claim: the “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting, and assisting Trump for at least five years. The aim, endorsed by Putin, has been to encourage splits and divisions in the western alliance.”

Make no mistake about it: Russia has a clear strategy. After its devastating loss in the Cold War, under Vladimir Putin, Russia has two agendas. The first is to be respected as a proud nation in the eyes of the world and seen as an important European power and as an equivalent superpower. The second item on their agenda is simply the demise of the West.

Moscow wants a complete reversal of the historical undoing that began in 1989 when Eastern and Central Europe peacefully reclaimed freedom and eventually brought down the Soviet empire. As James Kirchick at Politico put it, “Shorn of Marxism-Leninism, the Kremlin today is driven by an ideologically versatile illiberalism willing to work with any political faction amenable to its revisionist aims.”³

Russia wants to reset the Trans-Atlantic Alliance using destabilizing efforts. Like a studied disciple of Sun Tzu’s Art of War, Russia exploits its opponent’s weakness and moments of crisis in a calculated attempt to exacerbate the situation by its malign intentions. Fomenting disintegration, its motives revolve around predatory strategies to divide and conquer its enemies—namely the West, or more accurately: America.

Using aggression and subversion, Russia no longer has to depend on the deployment of the Red Army on its western flank. With the Communist ideology long since out of fashion, Russia continues to meddle with its capitalist enemies by inciting confusion and chaos by any means necessary to achieve this demise of Western governments and societies and to restore their own footing as a political power player.

Russia had perfected the technique called kompromat, whereby you entrap a target and blackmail them using sex, money, or ambition. Ideology was not so important any longer. This was only about raw political power and national interests.

Russia had a reputation for meddling in other countries’ elections going back decades. In Western Europe and elsewhere, they played dirty and did as much as possible to influence regimes and select and depose leaders.

Well, for that matter, so had the US, toppling numerous regimes, bribing officials, and putting up CIA fronts. In the Ukraine alone, the US spent over a billion dollars to get rid of the elected regime of Viktor Yanukovich, a crooked Putin ally.

The question in a new era of social media and cybersecurity was what could and what would Russia do to influence an American electoral decision?

Would Hillary Clinton exploit this long-established rocky relationship between the US and Russia to her advantage? Would she use Steele’s dossier as a failsafe “insurance policy” should she lose the election?

When in doubt, blame Russia. After all, they have a history of meddling in elections.

Russia has, as Winston Churchill described it, long been “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” But as he astutely warned, the key is Russian national interest.

Carrying a dark past and something of a chip on its shoulder, Russia in recent decades was a shadow of its former Soviet self.

Shedding an empire and many of its republics, Russia, while resource-rich, had become an inferior place and hardly a first world economy. Sure, it still had a decrepit nuclear arsenal, and its secret police were to be feared, but not as much as in the Stalinist past or even the Kremlin of Mr. Gorbachev.

Russia was now a materialistic autocratic kleptocracy with ambitions to restore its own greatness, but it lacked the means to do so.

The intent was there but it seemed inept, clumsy, less than efficient and often bumbling, even if it was at times proud, xenophobic, and ardently nationalistic.

The Russians were always good at thumping their own chests.

The Soviet peace dividend never really materialized on either side. Russia opened to crass materialism and allowed an oligopolistic regime of friends to get rich quick and cash in, but it didn’t hold much international clout or sway the way it used to in the “good old Communist days.”

At the UN it had a veto power but little muscle. It had no Warsaw Pact and faced enemies on its every border. It felt surrounded—caged in.

The one thing the Russians continued to do well, besides drinking too much vodka, was espionage …

3 Kirchick, James. “The Road to a Free Europe Goes Through Moscow.” Politico. March 17 2017. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/russias-plot-against-the-west-214925

6

FUSION GPS: PROPAGATING PROPAGANDA

IN OCTOBER 2015, WITH THE 2016 election just over a year away, the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website, hires the American research firm Fusion GPS to conduct opposition research on Donald J. Trump and other Republican presidential candidates.

Why would a Republican-funded website be looking for dirt on their own nominees?

Well, Trump, as we’ve come to know, is no ordinary politician: He’s unpredictable, volatile, and shoots from the hip. Unlike every other politician, he’s anything but boring—he’s a showman. And when a man like Trump throws his red hat into the ring of the biggest show on Earth, he is bound to be the star of the show. And the star of the show is always subject to the most attack. Even his Republican counterparts want dirt on him.

The world of conservative journalism exploded during the Obama years. They attacked everything he did—from his birth certificate, to his health care plan, to his socialist outlook, to his anti-Israel Muslim-favoring foreign policy.

The Washington Free Beacon was launched into this competitive and vituperative political environment in the spring of 2012.

The new rag was dedicated to uncovering the stories that “the powers that be hope will never see the light of day” and producing “in-depth investigative reporting on a wide range of issues, including public policy, government affairs, international security, and media.”⁴

There was nothing they wouldn’t touch—so long as it fit their neocon agenda and attacked Obama. The Free Beacon wanted “No Bama.”

This blatantly neoconservative publication regarded its role as a mobilizer for citizens by publicizing stories that would influence coverage in mainstream media.

They wanted to get attention and didn’t care how they did it.

One thing is certain: the Free Beacon is at the core of the hunt for Red November. Leading up to November, they’ll instigate and thrive on anti-Trump venom, broadcasting their views widely in an attempt to take him down.

One man in particular is the financial backing behind this diatribe: Paul Singer, a huge hedge fund magnate who has also been an activist investor.

Singer is also founder of NML Corporation, a Cayman Islands offshore unit that is tied to his hedge fund. It is based offshore for a reason.

Forbes put Singer’s total wealth at just shy of three billion dollars.

As a very big donor to various Republican candidates, his real philanthropic cause has been LGBTQ rights.

Both Singer and his allies in his firm have for years been the top source of contributions to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He counts among his close friends Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, and the junior Florida senator, Marco Rubio.

Both were also candidates in the 2016 Republican presidential primary.

Singer has been described as one of the “smartest and toughest” money managers in hedge world. He takes no prisoners and doesn’t like to lose.

Some have branded him a “vulture capitalist” because his fund hovers like that named bird over the dead carcasses of roadkill. His model is to buy up sovereign bonds on the cheap and then go after those countries in court and in the press for unpaid debt.

Argentina, Peru, Congo, and other desperate third-world countries have found themselves in his sights.

And he has cashed in. Boy has he cashed in.

Singer originally picked up the bill for Fusion GPS’s research, which was done for the Free Beacon.

Singer is connected all over established Washington and in the halls of power. One of his best pals is the neocon idol, William Kristol.

Kristol himself is editor in chief of the Weekly Standard, a Rupert Murdoch-backed neoconservative weekly, and was the font of all Never Trumpism.

William Kristol’s daughter, Anne, is married to Matthew Continetti, the editor of, what else, the Washington Free Beacon.

Must have been a family affair.

So, Fusion GPS agrees to pay Christopher Steele and his firm a grand total of $168,000 to create the special dossiers on Trump’s alleged ties to Russia.

Fusion GPS was founded in 2011 by Glenn R. Simpson, a former investigative reporter who worked on Capitol Hill for Roll Call and the Wall Street Journal.

Simpson rarely makes appearances or gives interviews, preferring to be clandestine.

He co-authored the book Dirty Little Secrets with the University of Virginia political TV pundit, Larry Sabato. In the book they addressed things like “street money” and voter fraud.

A longtime Democrat, Simpson used to write stories for the Capital Hill rag, Roll Call, where he broke the story on GOPAC, which implicated Newt Gingrich.

He likes to “catch” Republicans. While Simpson claims to be bipartisan, he is nothing of the sort.

Simpson’s firm had been accused of having purported connections with Russia and may have acted as an unregistered foreign agent for Russia. Unsurprisingly, Simpson and his colleagues deny they were ever involved in lobbying or violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

Prior to founding Fusion GPS, Simpson did equally questionable work for a sheik in the UAE who sought to overthrow his uncle. Simpson and company did the same again in support of the leftist Maduro regime in Venezuela. In fact, he does this for questionable business entities quite often. For instance, he did this for Planned Parenthood to discredit its main opponents. And, most interestingly, he did similar research for the nefarious Russian clients on the Magnitsky Act—an American law that blacklists suspected human rights abusers.

For a company whose founder has such a checkered past, it begs the question, is Fusion GPS’s opposition research standard procedure, or is there something more here? Is it misinformation? Disinformation? Sold to the highest bidder, or favoring establishment politics over an upstart like Trump?

Could Steele be operating as a double agent? Could he be receiving money not just from the Americans but also from Russian sources? Is it collusion between Fusion GPS, Orbis Business Intelligence, and other Russian entities?

Whatever it may be, with each passing month in 2016, Fusion GPS continues to gather information on Trump, mostly centered around his business and entertainment activities. On May 3, 2016, Trump is named the presumptive nominee for president, so The Free Beacon stops funding research on him. But just as the Republicans in Washington DC wrap up their opposition research on Trump, across the country in Seattle, the Democrats have been busy conducting their own.

4 The Free Beacon. http://freebeacon.com/about/

7

PERKINS COIE: THE INTERMEDIARY

IN APRIL 2016 THE LAW FIRM Perkins Coie, on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, retains Fusion GPS to complete opposition research on Donald Trump.

Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, and founded in 1912, Perkins Coie LLP is the oldest and largest law firm in the Pacific Northwest. While it serves corporate clients, Perkins Coie is perhaps best known for representing political clients.

The chair of its prestigious Political Law Group is one Marc Elias. His focus is on representing public officials, candidates, parties, Political Action Committees (PACs), and tax-exempt organizations.

As a lawyer, Elias advertises himself as knowledgeable in campaign finance, government ethics, lobbying disclosure, and white-collar criminal defense. Elias is an avowed expert on the Foreign Agents Registration Act and the Lobbying Disclosure Act. He focuses on government gift rules, pay-to-play rules, and advises on voting rights. He has represented numerous clients in political corruption charges.

As general counsel to Hillary Clinton for America, he is responsible for the presidential campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

He did the same for John Kerry in 2004. We would later learn from Michael Isikoff and David Corn’s book titled Russian Roulette, released in March 2018, that Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign hired Fusion GPS to dig up “dirt” on his rival Mitt Romney. According to Isikoff and Corn, the campaign’s payments to Fusion GPS, which were not disclosed to the public, were reported as legal bills to the campaign’s law firm, Perkins Coie.⁵

Elias’s major clients include the Democratic National Committee, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Democratic Governors Association, and dozens and dozens of Democrat US senators, governors, and representatives and their campaigns.

He is in other words, Mr. Democrat.

Following the 2014 election, Elias was appointed by the DNC chair, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Democrat from Florida, to review all key components of the role of the Democratic Party in elections.

In April 2016 Hillary makes Marc Elias the attorney of record for the 2016 presidential campaign. The Clinton campaign and the DNC pay Perkins Coie $5.6 million and $3.6 million, respectively, for their services.

Elias admits he helped to orchestrate funding from the Clinton campaign to the research firm Fusion GPS that paid for the anti-Trump dossier.

All of the dossiers and other material were passed from Steele himself to Fusion GPS, who provided them to Marc Elias at Perkins Coie. They were then given to both the Democratic National Committee and to the Clinton campaign.

Elias was what is called the “go-between.” A bagman. He has long been the Democrats go-to super lawyer and is known as a “fixer” who gets things done.

In late October 2016 Perkins Coie released its client, Fusion GPS, from its client confidentiality obligation.

5 Isikoff, Michael; Corn, David. Russian Roulette. Twelve. 13 Mar 2018.

8

MEET THE OHRS: BRUCE AND NELLIE

AT A PRESS CONFERENCE DURING HIS campaign for presidency, Trump once joked to the crowd that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and he wouldn’t lose any voters. Though in jest, there’s truth behind Trump’s joke, and the Democrats knew this. So, Fusion GPS, working on behalf of the Clinton campaign, knows that to dig up dirt on a man nicknamed “Teflon Don”—to whom no scandal or dirt seems to stick—they’ll need more than just one man on the job. They task FBI agent Bruce Ohr with the impossible …

In June 2016 Bruce Ohr is an Associate Deputy General at the US Department of Justice. His office is just four doors down from that of his boss, Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General and the number two justice officer in America.

Ohr’s career is going along swimmingly: for the past decade or so he has been climbing up the political ladder and accruing power. Digging up dirt on Trump will surely bring him one rung higher to the top of the ladder. And Fusion GPS, hedging their bets, contracts another agent for the job. In a clear case of nepotism and the Deep State at work, Fusion hires Bruce’s wife, Nellie, to conduct oppo on Trump and any connections to Russia and similar matters.

Nellie is a well-known expert in Russian affairs with an extensive network in that country. She holds a degree in history and Russian literature from Radcliffe/Harvard and an MA and PhD in Russian Affairs from Stanford University. Throughout her career, Nellie has published extensively on the subject in peer-reviewed journals and worked for the CIA as an open source analyst. In short, she knows all things Russia-related.

Nellie not only speaks the language but also knows the turf inside out and is an experienced Russia hand. Perhaps more curiously, her PhD thesis, titled “Collective farms and Russian peasant society, 1933-1937: the stabilization of the kolkhoz order,” blurs the “revisionist” line as she attempts to defend the millions killed by Stalin as “excesses,” which, according to Ohr, “sometimes represented desperate measures taken by a government that had little real control over the country.”

Is Nellie a Stalin sympathizer? Seems like Steele, a confirmed socialist since his days in Cambridge, has found the perfect woman to carry out his socialist agenda nearly thirty years in the making. He knows Nellie’s the perfect woman for a crooked mission like this.

And interestingly, only a few months prior, Nellie obtained her ham radio license, which begs the question, why? Could it be to have secure and confidential contact with Christopher Steele?

Could Nellie be more than just an agent conducting research? Could she be a co-author of the Steele files? And more peculiarly, when prompted by the FBI down the line, why does Bruce hide the fact that his wife is involved? Is this a conflict of interest? What else is Bruce hiding?

Over the next few months, Bruce Ohr meets not only with Christopher Steele himself but also with Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS, who hired Steele. Simpson is the operative behind this whole saga. Why exactly does Ohr meet with Steele? And how often?

9

DIGITAL WARS

ANY GOOD POLITICIAN WORTH THEIR WEIGHT in salt knows that you can’t win an election using oppo alone, only by attacking your opponent. You need to also know and understand the very people who are going to vote for you—what makes them tick and what they value in you as a candidate—so you can calibrate your approach to win the votes of those still sitting on the fence. So how do you tip the scale in your favor?

In the early days of presidential campaigning, that meant holding town hall discussions to meet face-to-face with the public to learn what issues matter to them most and how you can be of better service to them. Then, you’d travel across the country and repeat this process—the shaking of countless hands, kissing babies for photo ops, and delivering the same stump speech ad nauseam.

Politicians still do these motions to this very day, but with the rise of the internet, social media, and other advanced forms of technology, politicians have had to adjust their approach to account for these twenty- first-century changes. For instance, in just 140 characters, Trump and his tweets have upended decorum in the political realm and how politicians interact with the public.

So, in June 2016, the Trump campaign hires Cambridge Analytica to take over its “data operations.” What a nebulous term. What exactly does that mean? In short, Trump and his team want to collect data on their supporters as well as their potential voters—those on the fence. Sometimes referred to as data mining or analytics, companies like Google and Amazon rely on this type of technological research all the time. To be sure, all campaigns hire voter analytic firms. And just like every other campaign, Trump did the same when hiring Cambridge Analytica. He likely chose the firm because he was already familiar with some members of their administration, like Steve Bannon, who had been the vice president of their board in prior years.

Any time you search for something online, these companies are collecting valuable “psychographic” data on you. For instance, if you search for a waffle-maker on Amazon, but don’t end up purchasing it, you can be certain that for the next week as you surf the web and check your email you’ll see ads for a waffle-maker. This is undoubtedly a mildly annoying new trend, but there’s no going back at this point. This type of data collection will only continue to become part of our lives.

And to be sure, throughout the campaign season, both sides are using digital technologies to advance their research, but you can be certain that the Democrats, specifically the Clinton campaign, are using it to directly smear and derail the Trump campaign. For example, when Hillary Clinton puts out a press release, Google marks it as “Update.” But whenever the Trump campaign puts out a press release it is marked as “Promotion.”

Coincidence or conspiracy?

If this isn’t a clear instance of obvious media manipulation and bias then I don’t know what is. This right here is the makings of a digital war.

Still, this type of metadata (as it is known) doesn’t have to be as Orwellian as the media wants you to believe. For instance, Netflix uses this type of research on its users to better cater to each individual’s preference, making each user’s movie-watching experience that much better. This type of collection is more in line with what the Trump campaign is looking for when they hire Cambridge Analytica to better understand their supporters.

Sean Illing for Vox explains just what the Trump campaign is using their services for:

The benefit of this kind of data is that it allows data companies like Cambridge Analytica to develop more sophisticated psychological profiles of internet users (more data points means more predictive power). Cambridge Analytica was also able to use this real-time information to determine which messages were resonating where and then shape Trump’s travel schedule around it. So, if there was a spike in clicks on an article about immigration in a county in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, Trump would go there and give an immigration-focused speech.⁶

This type of research is just the twenty-first-century form of traveling around the country, shaking hands, and then adjusting your schedule according to shifts and trends.

A bit of tech savvy, enough funding, personnel, contacts, and data can go a long way. Completely legal and aboveboard, and without need of any assistance from the Russians, an effective digital campaign can be launched. Jared Kushner made sure to maximize all the tools at his disposal. In an interview with Steven Bertoni at Forbes, he explains that he called “some friends from Silicon Valley, some of the best digital marketers in the world, and asked how you scale this stuff, they gave me their subcontractors.”⁷

Before Trump’s nomination, Kushner used Facebook micro-targeting to sell Trump hats to expand the branding and raise more funds, and created policy videos with Trump speaking into the camera, reaching over 74 million viewers. After securing the nomination, Kushner dove into a data-driven approach to unify fundraising, messaging, and targeting.

Kushner tells Bertoni, “We played Moneyball, asking ourselves which states will get the best ROI for the electoral vote. I asked, How can we get Trump’s message to that consumer for the least amount of cost?”⁸ Tapping into the Republican National Committee’s database, and with the help of Cambridge Analytica to map voter preferences, and plotting location density of nearly twenty voter types using a live Google Maps interface to create a customized geo-location tool, Kushner could zero in with precisely tailored TV ads, last-minute rallies, and armies of volunteers to call and knock on doors at exactly the most critical points and times in the campaign.

Illing continues:

These online ads were spread primarily through bots on social media platforms. The ads that got liked, shared, and retweeted the most were reproduced and redistributed based on where they were popular and who they appealed to.⁹

And when you consider how close elections can typically be, even a few thousand votes can tip the scale in your favor. Any modern politician knows that to secure the vote, you need to use all the available resources.

6 Illing, Sean. “Cambridge Analytica, the shady firm that might be a key Trump-Russia link, explained.” Vox. 18 Dec 2017. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/16/15657512/mueller-fbi-cambridge-analytica-trump-russia

7 Bertoni, Steven. “Exclusive Interview: How Jared Kushner Won Trump The White House.” Forbes. 22 November 2016. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2016/11/22/exclusive-interview-how-jared-kushner-won-trump-the-white-house/#38e78cde3af6

8 Ibid.

9 Illing, Sean. “Cambridge Analytica, the shady firm that might be a key Trump-Russia link, explained.” Vox. 18 Dec 2017. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/16/15657512/mueller-fbi-cambridge-analytica-trump-russia

10

SMOKE BUT NO FIRE

WHILE BOTH THE TRUMP AND CLINTON campaigns are delving into data mining, FBI Director James Comey begins his investigation into his suspicions that Trump and his camp are colluding with Russians to tip the election in his favor.

But just who is this Comey character?

Standing six feet eight inches, James Comey towers over his peers and colleagues, using his size to intimidate his opponents and friends alike. A powerful US attorney for the Southern District of New York, he served as the Deputy Attorney General until former President Obama appointed Comey to become the FBI director in 2012.

Comey is no foreigner to the bright lights of the American media. He worked on the prosecution of the infamous Gambino family. Then, he served as counsel on the Senate Whitewater Committee on Bill Clinton’s shady land deals. Comey supported the use of enhanced interrogation techniques for terrorists, including waterboarding, until this position fell out of political fashion. In the political world, Comey has a reputation of being a leaker, using the press as an outlet to broadcast his own opinions. So what was it that pushed Comey to be so adversarial against Trump? Who owns him? Or is it all about oversized ego and to get more face time in the American limelight?

While Comey might have good reason to suspect that there might be some sort of evidence for meddling, by no means is there evidence of collusion. Looks like a lot of smoke but no fire. Again, what we have here is Comey and the American media attempting to connect dots where there is no connection.

Meanwhile, US Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn is working with the Trump campaign as an advisor. Unsurprisingly, Comey hones in on Flynn and his involvement with Cambridge Analytica. Comey wants to know what Flynn is doing with the information collected on voters.

Does Flynn have any real connection to the Russians? Did he pass any information along to them? Or is this just another feeble attempt of Comey and the Deep State in their collective witch hunt against Trump? Just how deep and wide does this state permeate? To better understand just how far back this Red November tale goes, we need to rewind even further to a business deal that took place a few years back. Its importance cannot be understated.

11

THE HUNT FOR RED NOVEMBER

IN 2010, A DEAL IS IN the works to allow Rosatom, the Russian nuclear energy agency, to acquire a controlling stake in Uranium One, a Canadian-based company with mining stakes in the United States. As the company’s name suggests, they mine uranium, the same material used to make nuclear bombs and weapons.

However, for a multinational deal of this size and complexity to go through, there are multiple levels of approval from international players that need to be met—not to mention approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and from the Committee on Foreign Investments in the US (CFIUS), on which the US Secretary of State sits—before it is finalized.

As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton plays an integral role in the success of such a deal. While she isn’t the only member on CFIUS on whom the deal’s approval hinges, Clinton undoubtedly holds plenty of clout and bargaining power to ensure its success. Through her heavy political hand and leverage, the deal goes through, and just like that, 20 percent of US uranium deposits are transferred to this Russian company.

Why then does Hillary Clinton approve this deal to give American uranium to the Russians, and what does she want in return? Could this be about more than just uranium?

Enter Frank Giustra, Canadian businessman, accomplished in finance and mining, and founder of the Hollywood and Vancouver-based film studio Lionsgate.

Formerly the chairman of a merchant-banking firm called Endeavor Finance, he helped build the company that would become Goldcorp Inc., which, having purchased a gold firm during a drop in the price of gold, became the fourth-largest producer of gold in the world. Giustra is currently CEO of Fiore Group of Companies.

In 2004, Giustra put together UrAsia Energy with his contacts in Kazakhstan and with the help of a very prominent US politician—one Bill Clinton.

In 2007, Giustra merged UrAsia with a company called Uranium One, chaired by an old friend, Ian Telfer. Giustra, who had retained stock in the company, sold nearly all of his interests shortly after that.

Several years later, in 2013, Uranium One was sold to a Russian state-owned company. The sale gave the Russians control of uranium deposits around the world, including several mines in the United States. That sale was reviewed by the State Department and other agencies at the time that Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.

Some Republicans have charged that this was a conflict of interest, though aides to Clinton have said she did not personally intervene in the approval process and showed no favoritism toward foundation donors. Did she? Records show otherwise.

Involved in philanthropy, Giustra has chaired his Radcliffe Foundation, giving support to disaster relief, economic development, and homelessness. These activities so captivated Giustra that he contributed $30 million to the Clinton HIV/AIDS initiative and later became a board member of the Clinton Foundation. Well, he became its largest donor, giving well over $100 million in gifts.

Touring seven African countries with former President Clinton aboard his MD-87 private jet, they were able to see the extent of global poverty firsthand.

We know that Giustra bonded with the Clintons and supported them in more than one way. They seemingly used each other. His relationship to them as regards the Uranium One transaction opens many questions and leads many to believe it involved extensive kickbacks, wrongdoing, and collusion.

The question arises—did Giustra and his Russian and Central Asia partners unduly benefit from a US government relationship, and is this in fact a real Russian collusion that Clinton wanted to cover up?

Did she create the Trump-Russia collusion and its dossier as a narrative and as a way to hide her own Russia storyline?

Is Red November a Clinton fiction?

12

PAY-TO-PLAY: THE URANIUM ONE DEAL

OVER THE COURSE OF THREE SEPARATE transactions between 2009 and 2013, the Russian state-owned atomic energy giant and uranium monopoly Rosatom, through its subsidiary, ARMZ Uranium Holding, acquired Uranium One. The purchase of the company by Russian interests is now under investigation by the US Congress.

In 2009, ARMZ took control of 16.6 percent of shares in Uranium One in exchange for a 50 percent interest in the Karatau uranium mining project in southern Kazakhstan, in a joint venture with the country’s national import and export operator of uranium, Kazatomprom. In 2010, Uranium One acquired 50 percent and 49 percent respective interests in southern Kazakhstan-based Akbastau and Zarechnoye uranium mines from ARMZ. In exchange, ARMZ increased its stake in Uranium One to 51 percent.¹⁰

The deal was subject to antitrust and other conditions and was not finalized until the companies received Kazakh regulatory approvals, approval under Canadian investment law, clearance by the US Committee on Foreign Investments, and approvals from both the Toronto and Johannesburg stock exchanges.

In June 2010 the deal was finalized, and ARMZ took complete control of Uranium One in January 2013 by buying all shares it did not already own. Later, Uranium One Inc. became a private company and a wholly owned indirect subsidiary of Rosatom.

There appears to be a quid-pro-quo around the approval of the deal to transfer 20 percent of uranium to the company in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation. The donation of $145 million from those linked to Uranium One and UrAsia came largely from one person: Frank Giustra.

Was this a pay-for-play scheme? Did Hillary Clinton give American uranium to the Russians, and what did she get in return?

As the image of Hillary Clinton appeared across all of social media during the 2016 presidential election the ads asked, “So Hillary, if Russia is such a threat, why did you sell them 20 percent of our uranium? Are you a liar, or a traitor, or both?”

Complicating all these coincidental facts is one more.

In addition to the Clinton Foundation donations, former President William Jefferson Clinton booked a $500,000 speaking fee from a Russian investment bank in June 2010, just before the Uranium One deal was approved.

That fee, Clinton’s highest ever, came from Renaissance Capital, the Russia investment bank tied to the Kremlin. Its analysts talked up the Uranium One deal, assigning it a BUY rating, saying it was the “best play” in all the uranium markets.

We later discover that not all the donations made to the Clinton Foundation were disclosed. There were donations from the Uranium One Chairman, Ian Telfer, a Canadian, from 2009-2012, that were not disclosed to the public. They were actually distributed through a subsidiary of the Clinton Foundation called CGSCI, which did not reveal its donors.

Is this an awkward collusion or just a slight oversight?

The Hill, a Washington newspaper, reported receiving documents and eyewitness testimony “indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the US designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow,”¹¹ although no specifics about who those Russian nuclear officials were or how the money was allegedly routed to the Clinton Foundation were given.

The US House Intelligence and Oversight Committee recently announced the launch of a joint investigation into the circumstances surrounding the Russian purchase of Uranium One. There appears to be considerable Russia meddling not around Trump, but instead around the Clintons and their notoriously corrupt foundation.

10 “CFIUS Investigations Currently Ongoing.” Committee of Foreign Investment in The United States (CFIUS). Investigations. 31 Dec 2017. https://americandigitalnews.com/2017/12/31/committee-foreign-investments-us-investigations/#.WqFSiYJG3OQ

11 Solomon, John; Spann, Alison. “FBI uncovered Russian bribery plot before Obama administration approved controversial nuclear deal with Moscow.” The Hill. 17 Oct 17. http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/355749-fbi-uncovered-russian-bribery-plot-before-obama-administration

13

THE CLINTON FOUNDATION

FOUNDED IN 1997 AS THE WILLIAM J. Clinton Foundation with a focus on raising funds for the future Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, the Clinton Foundation evolved to become a philanthropic empire, having raised more than $2 billion over its lifetime.

As an operating foundation, requiring that it raise money on an ongoing basis to fund its projects, the Clinton Foundation does not give much money to other nonprofits, instead focusing itself on global health and wellness, climate change, economic development, and improving opportunities for girls and women in the US and abroad. Within the foundation is the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), started by and centering around Bill Clinton in 2005, which doesn’t involve itself in funding or managing projects, but rather acting as a go-between to match funders with good causes.

Yes, all good, but transparency issues prevail.

During the 2016 election, Donald Trump called for a special prosecutor to investigation the foundation, charging that Hillary Clinton engaged in criminality for connections between the organization’s donations from rich foreign power brokers and her activities as secretary of state. The establishment of CGI was an attempt to separate the secretary’s official business with world leaders from Bill’s interactions with those same people.

Who were those people, how much did they give, and what did they expect in return?

When the Hillary became secretary of state in 2008, she promised President Obama that the foundation would publish all its donors every year. It didn’t.

Trump’s concerns and calls for an investigation into conflict of interest and pay-for-play allegations are reasonable.

As Hillary campaigned for the presidency, donations to the Clinton Foundation by wealthy donors and foreign governments continued. And as soon as she lost the election, criticism directed toward the foundation was reaffirmed as foreign governments, such as Australia and Norway, began reducing and pulling out of annual donations. A clear sign that influence was predicated on donor access to the Clintons, rather than the foundation’s philanthropic work.

14

CASH FOR TRASH

CHRISTOPHER STEELE, WHO IS NOW RETIRED from MI6 and under far less scrutiny and pressure from government and regulatory superiors to produce informed research and properly documented information, is busy creating a series of documents, which the world would soon come to know as the Trump-Russia Dossier. This dossier is the very core of our tale in the hunt for Red November. Investigative journalist Joe Lauria confirms this:

It’s important to realize that Steele was no longer working for an official intelligence agency, which would have imposed strict standards on his work and possibly disciplined him for injecting false information into the government’s decision-making. Instead, he was working for a political party and a presidential candidate looking for dirt that would hurt their opponent, what the Clintons used to call “cash for trash” when they were targets.¹²

Surely Steele would have taken a far different approach had he been doing legitimate intelligence. Instead, he gives his bosses what he knows they want to hear—the same way the media spins news stories to cater to their viewers. Lauria continues:

Instead Steele was producing a piece of purely political research and had different motivations. The first might well have been money, as he was being paid specifically for this project, not as part of his work on a government salary presumably serving all of society. Secondly, to continue being paid for each subsequent memo that he produced he would have been incentivized to please his clients or at least give them enough so they would come back for more.¹³

Still, questions linger: If Steele is tasked with the mission to uncover dirt on Trump—which would ultimately affect the outcome of the 2016 election and, in a wider sense, the history of the world—why would he agree to this task for only $168,000? On paper, this looks like a large sum, but why would Steele, who is financially secure from his MI6 days, accept such a potentially dangerous mission for such a grossly low price? Is there another motive for Steele? Is this more than just money? Or is it part of a larger plot: a personal attack to destroy Trump?

12 Lauria, Joe. “The Democratic Money Behind Russia-Gate.” Consortium News. 29 Oct 2017. https://consortiumnews.com/2017/10/29/the-democratic-money-behind-russia-gate/

13 Ibid.

15

CLASH OF CULTURES: GLOBALISM VERSUS NATIONALISM

IN ORDER TO BETTER UNDERSTAND THE stakes at play in this election, and the impact it would inevitably have on changing the course of history, let’s zoom out a bit and take a bird’s-eye view of the two ideologies at war here: globalism and nationalism, two polar opposites.

Globalism is Clinton’s core belief: Open borders, diminished sovereignty, multilateralism—anything and everything defined as “worldwide” or global in scope. World government is Clinton’s ultimate end goal.

Nationalism is the antithesis to Clinton’s global government. For Trump, the nation-state is supreme: sovereign borders matter above all. The man plans to build a wall on the Mexico border. Bilateralism is ideal. National and ethnic identities are rooted in tradition. And these institutions of society come first: family, church, and civic duty.

Truth is, globalization has been ebbing while economic and political populism is surging. Globalists no longer provide the accepted set of rules for the political and economic order. Transnational, multilateral, and supranational organizations and their networks, experts, and regulators are everywhere on the defense. Cosmopolitan and globalist values are not ascendant. This is what made Trump’s candidacy viable.

As a matter of fact, national sovereignty has soared back and is growing stronger, week by week and month by month. We saw it most clearly in President Trump’s principled realism, which he called “America First.”

With the battle lines set like never before, each candidate’s ideology was pitted against the other—one set of beliefs against the other that, ultimately, will result in a drastic cultural shift. This was war. 2016 would be a watershed, historic year. The Clinton globalists did not want to lose to the Trump nationalists. They did not want their world or their ambitions for globalism disrupted. Clinton is willing to do anything in her power to stop Trump and his nationalistic views in order to further her global reach.

16

TRUMP TOWER MEETING

MEANWHILE, BACK IN NEW YORK CITY, a meeting is scheduled at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016. Just days prior, Natalia Veselnitskaya, a powerful Russian attorney, reaches out to Donald Trump Jr., ostensibly to discuss the adoption of Russian children by US citizens, halted due to Russian government backlash against the Magnitsky Act.

However, Trump Jr. had also received a tip that she might have some dirt on Clinton. Trump Jr. accepts the meeting likely because he thinks the information could be helpful for his team conducting opposition research on Clinton. Jared Kushner, son-in-law to Trump, will be at the meeting. So will Paul Manafort, the political consultant and chairman of Trump’s primary election campaign.

What else is on Veselnitskaya’s agenda? Does she want the Act to go away? Why would she want to see Donald J. Trump, Jr.? And what exactly is the Magnitsky Act?

In 2009, a Russian tax account, Sergei Magnitsky, died in a Moscow prison after his investigation of fraud involving Russian tax officials. With severe medical conditions, Magnitsky was refused medical treatment while imprisoned and was later beaten to death. Formally known as the “Russia and Moldova Jackson-Vanik Repeal and Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012,” the bill was passed on a bipartisan basis by the US Congress and signed by then President Obama.

The act had one intention: to punish Russian officials responsible for the death of Sergei Magnitsky. The Magnitsky Act prohibits certain entrants into the US from Russia and their use of the US banking system. As a result of its enactment, the Russian government denied the adoption of Russian children and prohibited a list of Americans from entering Russia.

The Los Angeles Times writes, “The adoption ban was part of a tit-for-tat law which also blacklisted US citizens considered by Russia to have violated human rights. The Russian government also instigated a lobby campaign and media effort in the US against the legislation. They sought its repeal in Congress and in the Executive Office.”¹⁴

In December 2016, Congress enlarged the scope of the Magnitsky Act to address human rights abuses on a global scale. The current Global Magnitsky Act (GMA) allows the US government to sanction corrupt government officials implicated in abuses anywhere in the world.

So, based on Veselnitskaya’s original request days prior to the actual meeting, Kushner, Trump Jr., and Manafort assumed that the meeting would be in regard to the adoption policy.

During the meeting Veselnitskaya, who claimed to have damaging information about Clinton and her Foundation, dishes the dirt to the Trump camp.

Trump Jr. says he ultimately finds that the information is useless, so they continue to discuss adoption policy and the Magnitsky Act.

A seemingly ordinary meeting, yes? Or will this meeting become the subject of microscopic scrutiny once Steele finishes and release his dossier?

A few months later, when Trump Jr. learns that the New York Times is planning to publish a series of email exchanges between him and Veselnitskaya, Trump Jr., in true Trump fashion, exposes the Times and publishes them himself on his Twitter account, explaining that the meeting was about opposition research and, ultimately, “such a nothing … a wasted 20 minutes.”

And more curiously, after this meeting, as it would become known, Veselnitskaya meets with Glenn Simpson himself. Why? What exactly was the purpose of that meeting?

14 Loiko, Sergei. “18 Americans barred from Russia in tit-for-tat sanctions.” Los Angeles Times. 13 April 2013. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/13/world/la-fg-wn-18-americans-barred-from-russia-in-titfortat-sanctions-20130413

17

THE PROFESSOR, THE DIPLOMAT, AND THE EAGER BEAVER

GEORGE PAPADOPOULOS IS A FORMER MEMBER of the Trump for President foreign policy panel that met formally only once. While his Italian girlfriend disputes this, he is a nobody.

From Chicago, his Greek family was very involved in local politics. Graduating from DePaul University in 2009, Papadopoulos later received an MSc degree in security studies from University College London.

He directed international energy issues at the London Center of International Law Practice.

Landing an internship that turned into a job at the Hudson Institute, Papadopoulos listed himself as “an oil, gas, and policy consultant.”

He served as an advisor on candidate Ben Carson’s failed presidential bid, and then the policy advisor went on to associate with Trump.

Papadopoulos was called, by one publication, a “little known, little qualified 30-year-old.”

In March 2016, he is approached by Professor Joseph Mifsud in London, who brags about his connections to high-level Russian officials and to Putin’s niece, Olga Polonskaya (which turned out to be false). Papadopoulos is told Russia has “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

Papadopoulos makes repeated requests of the Trump campaign to set up a meeting between the leaders, Putin and Trump. He also suggests various meetings with Russians in Russia.

These never occur, and he is repeatedly told “no” by more senior campaign officials.

As reported in the New York Times, in May 2016, Papadopoulos sits at an upscale bar, the Kensington Wine Rooms, in London, for a drink, and there he meets Australia’s High Commissioner to the UK, Alexander Downer. Maybe it was the wine, but Papadopoulos goes on to reveal that Russia has “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

Downer, the diplomat, tips off the FBI, and thus begins the Bureau’s investigation into, not Hillary Clinton, but into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Papadopolous will go on to be arrested at Dulles International Airport on July 27, 2017, and will plead guilty to making false statements to FBI agents.

18

CARTER PAGE: RUSSIAN PLANT?

A FEW WEEKS FOLLOWING THE TRUMP Tower meeting, in July 2016 Trump selects Carter Page as his foreign policy advisor. Page is founder and managing partner at Global Energy Capital, a New York investment fund that specializes in Russia and Central Asia oil and gas markets.

Page served in the Navy for five years, including a tour as an intelligence officer. With a master’s degree in national security from Georgetown University and an MBA from New York University, Page quickly found work as an investment banker for Merrill Lynch in its New York and London offices and then headed its Moscow office. He later earned his PhD from the University of London.

In 1998, he joined Eurasia Group as a strategy consultant but left after only three months as it was “not a good fit.” The CEO claimed his views were too pro-Russia.

Expressing positive views about Russia, Putin, and energy developments there, Page was labeled as a Russia expert on the RT television network and in various journals where he stated his positive views.

On July 7, 2016, Page travels to Moscow to speak at the New Economic School. At the school he gives a speech that is heavily critical of current US foreign policy. He stays in Russia for three days in total …

Could Page possibly be a plant dropped by the Russians into the Trump campaign? Page has been the subject of a FISA court warrant since 2014 due to his connections to certain Russian officials.

In September, US intelligence officials begin investigating alleged contacts between Page and Russian officials, including Igor Sechin, the “de facto deputy” of Vladimir Putin. In other words, he is Putin’s number two guy. Sechin’s aide is a man named Oleg Erovinkin. He is a former general in the KGB. US intelligence officials suspect that Erovinkin might be in contact with Christopher Steele. If this delicate information were to make its way back to the Kremlin, this could be fatal for the former KGB general …

And once word spreads across media outlets connecting Page with Russia and Putin’s government, Page steps down as Trump’s campaign advisor.

The US intelligence community, however, continues investigating emails and conversations between Page and Russian officials subject to US sanctions.

19

CYBER WARFARE

WHILE THE REDS AND BLUES ARE each busy with their own forms of opposition research, John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s campaign, falls victim to an email phishing scam in March 2016. Podesta turns to expert cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

In 2011, George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch founded CrowdStrike, a private cybersecurity firm. Both Kurtz and Alperovitch have long histories and experience in the cybersecurity field, and in 2015 when CapitalG (formerly Google Capital) backs them, CrowdStrike becomes the go-to team for all digital inquiries of the sensitive sort. So, on May 4, 2016, when Podesta and the Democratic National Committee want to investigate a possible intrusion into their servers, they look to CrowdStrike. The DNC was not unfamiliar with CrowdStrike, having used their services in December 2015 to investigate a security breach involving their party-administered voter file system known as VoteBuilder. After a systems forensic examination, including examining the system used by the Bernie Sanders campaign, CrowdStrike released their findings. Curiously, it was on the same day, April 29, 2016, that the DNC server breach was detected.

Following their hiring, CrowdStrike works surprisingly fast. In fact, on May 5, CrowdStrike’s FalconHost software finds indicators such as malware and operating and behavioral techniques that point to Russians being behind the cyber intrusion. Naturally, the DNC and its figureheads take CrowdStrike’s word and findings as gospel—why wouldn’t they? After all, Kurtz and Alperovitch are the experts, not the DNC. And when the DNC spreads this news to the media outlets, journalists across the board report on what they had been told—like in a game of telephone.

Did any of these journalists read CrowdStrike’s findings? Did they conduct any form of firsthand research?

Instead, these reporters abandon their basic journalist duties and release unverified articles with headline-grabbing titles like this one in Forbes, “CrowdStrike Helped Trace the DNC Hack to Russia: Now Business is Booming.” Once the CrowdStrike word spreads like wildfire throughout the Democratic political arena on this alleged interference, one headline dominates the mainstream media: The Russians Hacked America.

This story has an eerily familiar ring to it, doesn’t it?

Sounds just like what Christopher Steele is busy doing for Fusion GPS: fabricating information that he knows his client wants to hear. This type of dirty work isn’t just murky for those directly involved in this chain of communication exchange; it’s even more dangerous for those at the receiving end of this information: the general public.

In her article for the Baffler, “From Russia, With Panic,” journalist Yasha Levine writes about the potential danger here:

CrowdStrike stuck to its guns, and other cybersecurity firms and experts likewise clamored to confirm its findings: Russia was behind the attack. Most journalists took these security savants at their word, not bothering to investigate or vet their forensic methods or look at the way CrowdStrike arrived at its conclusions. And how could they? They were the experts. If you couldn’t trust CrowdStrike and company, who could you trust?¹⁵

Perhaps it’s naïve to think that the DNC—like many other institutions and pillars of American government—is simply ignorant of the idea that their actions might have negative outward consequences that fall on the public, the very people they are there to serve and protect. Or is it too cynical to think that perhaps this is exactly what the DNC wanted: to hire a firm that they know will produce exactly what they want to hear—the Russians did it—so they can report this unverified information to the public to further their agenda of subverting the presidential campaign of Donald Trump?

While the media feverishly continues running a story it hasn’t corroborated, Trump releases a statement: “We believe it was the DNC that did the ‘hacking’ as a way to distract the many issues facing their deeply flawed candidate and a failed party leader.”¹⁶

Unsurprisingly, the media responds harshly, criticizing Trump and his campaign for being out of touch and way off base—that this supposed inside job is all in Trump’s head.

And, should the word get out that this information was false, will the public point blame at the DNC or even CrowdStrike? Will they call out these institutions out for what they are—liars and manipulators of the truth? Or will this misinformation become buried by the national headlines claiming there is Russian interference, so a great, orchestrated lie becomes spun into truth?

Perhaps in time and once more evidence comes into question about the legitimacy of CrowdStrike’s analysis, the tides of opinion will begin to turn in favor of Trump’s position that this is all a hoax, concocted from within the belly of the beast.

15 Levine, Yasha. “From Russia, With Panic.” The Baffler. March 2017. https://thebaffler.com/salvos/from-russia-with-panic-levine

16 Nelson, Louis. “Trump Accuses DNC of ‘hacking’ its own oppo research on him.” Politico. 15 June 2016. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/donald-trump-opposition-224397

20

THE CROWD MENTALITY

IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOW CROWDSTRIKE’S findings, the Washington Post is the first to publish the results. And on their own website, the CrowdStrike team provides further details in regard to their findings in a post titled “Bears in the Midst.” In the post, Alperovitch attributes the DNC hack to two “distinct and very nefarious ‘Russian espionage’ groups: Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear.”¹⁷ Alperovitch writes that these two groups, known as “advanced persistent threats” or APTs, whose traits were known from past nefarious activities, are some of the most advanced cyber-operators he and his team have yet come across: “In fact, our team considers them some of the best adversaries out of all the numerous nation-state, criminal and hacktivist/terrorist groups we encounter on a daily basis.”¹⁸

He continues: “Their tradecraft is superb, operational security second to none and the extensive usage of ‘living-off-the-land’ techniques enables them to easily bypass many security solutions they encounter.”¹⁹

Why would anyone consider questioning Alperovitch and his team’s findings? He’s the expert, not us—the general public, the layman. A dangerous game of telephone we’re playing here, especially considering how high the stakes are.

The CrowdStrike team then explains how these two groups were allegedly behind a string of recent attacks on American corporations and think tanks. In addition to those attacks, these groups are responsible for the recent penetrations of the unclassified networks of the State Department, the White House, and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to CrowdStrike, Cozy Bear was most likely the FSB, while Fancy Bear was linked to the “GRU, Russia’s premier military intelligence service.”

Pointing out cybersecurity author Jeffrey Carr’s questioning of the credibility of CrowdStrike’s methodology, former Marine Corps intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector and author Scott Ritter writes, “Within elements of the cybercommunity, the credibility of CrowdStrike has been shattered by its involvement in the DNC hack. Its two premier product platforms — Falcon and Overwatch — have been exposed as being fundamentally (and perhaps fatally) flawed. The attributions derived from Falcon are little more than false positives generated by algorithms pre-programmed to deliver an outcome — CrowdStrike was looking for Russia, and therefore found it.”²⁰

Therefore, we must consider, is this complicated, overly detailed explanation—replete with names like Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear—of this email intrusion designed to distract the public from the truth? A story that sounds just convincing enough that no one thinks to question its credibility? Is this yet another prime example of the Deep State at work? Is this a Red November fabrication to subvert the president?

17 Alperovitch, Dmitri. “Bears in the Midst: Intrusion into the Democratic National Committee.” CrowdStrike Blog. 16 June 2016. https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democratic-national-committee/

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

20 Ritter, Scott. “Crowdstrike: Making it up as they go along?” Homefront Rising. 31 Aug 2017. https://medium.com/homefront-rising/dumbstruck-how-crowdstrike-conned-america-on-the-hack-of-the-dnc-ecfa522ff44f

21

FAUX RUSSIAN: A HOAX EMAIL LEAK

THIS STORY TAKES ANOTHER SHARP, INCENDIARY turn after a hacker who calls himself Guccifer 2.0 emerges from the woodwork and takes credit for the DNC hack. He calls CrowdStrike’s investigation a fraud and begins leaking classified documents from the DNC, including the Democratic Party’s 200-page opposition research report on Donald Trump.

On June 15, 2016, the day after the Democrats go public about two bears breaching their computers, Guccifer 2.0 introduces himself to the world with an email and attached documents marked “CONFIDENTIAL” to William Bastone, editor-in-chief of the investigative news site the Smoking Gun: “Hi. This is Guccifer 2.0 and this is me who hacked Democratic National Committee.”²¹

“The main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails (about 100GB of data) I gave to WikiLeaks. They will publish them soon,” Guccifer 2.0 writes in a blog post.²²

Who exactly is this Guccifer 2.0, whose namesake Guccifer happens to be that of a Romanian hacker, arrested in 2014 and sentenced in May 2016 to four and a half years in prison after stealing the emails of famous celebrities. Is it an actual person? Or just a persona—a collective group working under the same name and cause?

Once WikiLeaks manages to get their hands on the entire DNC email archive, they slowly begin releasing it out to the public, coordinating their leak for July 22, 2016—one day before the Democratic National Convention is to begin—to ensure maximum exposure.

What exactly is in these classified emails? Could there be evidence of orchestrated political sabotage or smearing?

Within these leaks are the emails of John Podesta, the head of that campaign, which causes significant embarrassment to Hillary Clinton and the Democrat Party.

The US Intelligence Community says the source of the leaks is, of course, Russia. WikiLeaks, however, denies this accusation, claiming it is not a state source.

What then is WikiLeaks’ role, if any, in the outcome of the election?

Once the media examines the emails of top DNC officials, a trend appears: an orchestrated attack on their own candidates, namely Senator Sanders.

On July 25, the FBI says it will investigate the hack. That same day, in attempt for damage control and to plug the leak, the DNC issues a statement:

“On behalf of everyone at the DNC, we want to offer a deep and sincere apology to Senator Sanders, his supporters, and the entire Democratic Party for the inexcusable remarks made over email.”²³

They then explain how the emails do not reflect the DNC’s “steadfast commitment to neutrality during the nominating process.”

What a sorry excuse for an apology. Even worse, the Democratic public accepts it. Here we have concrete evidence of sabotage against one of their own candidates and in favor of Hillary Clinton.

Joe Lauria poses a stark reminder on the Democrats’ supposed neutral approach to politics: “The two sources that originated the allegations claiming that Russia meddled in the 2016 election—without providing convincing evidence—were both paid for by the Democratic National Committee, and in one instance also by the Clinton Campaign: the Steele dossier and the CrowdStrike analysis of the DNC servers. Think about that for a minute.”

Clearly, the DNC abandons their so-called stance on neutrality. In fact, they are responsible for creating this entire notion of collusion.

Will these leaks change the course of the US election?

Is a foreign government really the culprit? Or is this an inside job?

21 Satter, Raphael. “Inside Story: How the Russians hacked the Democrats’ emails.” Associated Press. 4 Nov 2017. https://www.apnews.com/dea73efc01594839957c3c9a6c962b8a

22 Unknown. “Gufficer 2.0 Hacked the Clinton Foundation.” 4 Oct 2016. https://guccifer2.wordpress.com/2016/10/04/clinton-foundation/C

23 Drabold, Will. “DNC Apologizes to Bernie Sanders and Supporters Over Leaked Emails.” Time. 25 July 2016. http://time.com/4422715/bernie-sanders-dnc-apology-leaked-emails/

22

WILLIAM BINNEY WEIGHS IN

WHILE THIS HE-SAID-SHE-SAID GAME IS UNFOLDING live for the world to see, former NSA technical director William Binney is busy conducting experiments to dismiss this whole Russian hack claim. Binney is the same high-level NSA intelligence official who, following his 2001 retirement from the agency, blew the whistle on the extraordinary extent of NSA surveillance programs.

This time, his experiments show that “the known download speed of one batch of DNC emails could not have occurred over the internet but matched what was possible for a USB-connected thumb drive—an indication that a Democratic insider likely downloaded the emails and thus there was no ‘hack.’”²⁴ Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media mocks Binney, calling him a “conspiracy theorist.”

So if it wasn’t Russia, but a Democratic insider, the question remains: who? And why?

In an interview for Consortium News, investigative journalist Dennis J. Bernstein bluntly asks Binney, “So was this a leak by somebody at the Democratic headquarters?” To which Binney replies, “We don’t know that for sure, either. All we know was that it was a local download. We can likely attribute it to a USB device that was physically passed along.”²⁵

Bernstein then asks, “So if, in fact, the Russians were tapping into DNC headquarters, the NSA would absolutely know about it.”

“Yes, and they would also have the trace routes on where they went specifically, in Russia or anywhere else,” Binney says.

Again, this begs the same question we’ve been searching for this whole time: where is the evidence? If there is some sort of Russian collusion, there should be a tangible form of proof. And yet, here we are, with nothing—no answers, just more questions.

With the world caught up with the drama unfolding on stage, Steele is continuing to create his report behind the drawn curtains.

24 Parry, Robert. “Protecting the Shaky Russia-gate Narrative.” Consortium News. 15 Dec 2017. https://consortiumnews.com/2017/12/15/protecting-the-shaky-russia-gate-narrative/

25 Bernstein, Dennis J. “The Still Missing Evidence of Russiagate” Consortium News. 01 Jan 2018. https://consortiumnews.com/2018/01/01/the-still-missing-evidence-of-russia-gate/?print=print

23

SPY GAMES

MEANWHILE IN CLEVELAND, AT THE REPUBLICAN National Convention, Sergey Kislyak is holding a “diplomacy conference.” Kislyak, a stodgy Russian diplomat, served as Russia’s ambassador to the US from 2008 to 2017. Before that he was Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and Russia’s ambassador to Belgium from 1998 to 2003.

His nine-year tenure in the US established him as the ranking interlocutor on Russian affairs. Many referred to him as a “diplomat’s diplomat.”

In attendance at Kislyak’s conference are J. D. Gordon and Carter Page. Is this coincidence that Page, a suspected Russian plant, is meeting with Kislyak? Or is it something more?

Later during the convention, on July 21, Senator Jeff Sessions, policy advisor on national security matters to Trump’s campaign, Gordon, and Page have a meeting with Kislyak, in which, according to delegate Victor Ashe, “Much of the discussion focused on Russia’s incursion into Ukraine and Georgia.”²⁶ Surely, Jeff Sessions’s attendance at this meeting will lead to intense media scrutiny and criticism.

Kislyak soon finds himself in the American media’s spotlight, taking up plenty of airtime on CNN as a major player behind this so-called Russian interference with the election and the source of DNC’s email leak. US intelligence officials claim he is some sort of Russian spy and spy recruiter.

According to Newsweek, however, “People who have worked closely with Kislyak doubt the ambassador was up to anything more than just doing his job.”²⁷ Kislyak, rightfully so, vehemently refutes this conjecture and denies that there was any sort of interference. John Beyrle, a former US ambassador to Russia, comes to his defense, saying that Kislyak is “a professional diplomat, not a politician. I’m sure he’s surprised to have acquired such notoriety recently. I’m sure he’s probably not enjoying his time in the limelight.”

As an ambassador in Washington, DC, Kislyak did what all ambassadors do—namely, meet with people. He met with both Republican and Democratic senators and congressmen and various businesspeople and policy officials.

Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russia, weighs in on the meeting: “On political involvement, I personally don’t think [Kislyak] crossed any lines.”²⁸ And Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, calls the unwarranted speculation on Kislyak “the low professional standards of the American news media.”²⁹

Will this meeting, like the Trump Tower meeting, be of great focus in Steele’s nebulous dossier?

This meeting with Sergey Kislyak is just another example in the line of many of how the mainstream media warps and distorts a story, spinning it into a web of lies that it knows will cater to its audience’s already set-in-concrete views on Russia. It’s a distortion manipulated by this Deep State in our hunt for Red November.

Maybe Putin had an opinion?

With an 80 percent approval rating in Russia and a seemingly endless elected cycle as putative leader of that country, Putin is a bona fide world leader, even if Russia is not a true superpower. Russia is largely what it is today because of Putin and his nationalistic, hyper-strong relations and of course the natural resource wealth on which its economy (and Putin’s reign and personal wealth) depends.

Whether Russia is in or out of the G7/G8, whether it is sanctioned or not, and whether it is seen as a regional or global power, Putin’s imprint sticks.

And Russia via Putin has been known to endorse and coddle certain political leaders in places like the Middle East, Central Asia (former Republics in the USSR), Central America, Africa, and elsewhere. He likes to take center stage and flex his muscles—literally and figuratively.

In Syria, he backed Assad and put his troops and planes in to keep him in power. In Turkey, he appears to have a new détente with Erdogan and has sold him defensive missiles. Allegedly, he has helped to fund both political parties on the left and on the right, sowing discord and chaos in places like Georgia, Ukraine, and Western Europe. And yes, he has invaded Crimea.

The degree of Russian meddling in past elections is up for debate and the US Congress has multiple committees of senators and representatives “looking into” all that activity or in some cases less than overt activity. The US Intelligence Community has said Russia is a nefarious player with definite ambitions and inordinate power to do harm.

At any rate, what Putin thinks matters. What Putin does has consequences. Who Putin favors can result in support and influence.

In the 2016 US election between Clinton and Trump, undoubtedly Putin saw an opportunity.

Could he get one person elected over the other? No. Could he throw around his weight and affect the election? It seems not, except that he could indirectly pull some strings and show favoritism. Could he steal an election using cyber to control the voting machines? No. Did he control WikiLeaks? No. Did he try and use trolls to effect social media? Probably. Did Russia buy ads on Facebook and the like? It seems so, but at insignificant amounts.

So how precisely did Putin’s opinion play a role in the US election?

Putin himself has called stories of his “meddling” both “nonsense” and “spy hysteria.” He has said that there was no way he could damage the American political system.

But did Russia act to promote Trump over Clinton?

Truthfully, Putin hated Clinton because as Secretary of State she was behind the mass protests in Moscow in 2013.

He believed she had tried to undermine his power and prestige. Putin is known to seek revenge.

Was there a budding “bromance” between Putin and Trump? This may be more theory than fact but Trump has voiced admiring words for Putin as a leader and the favor has been returned. Each has called for improved relations between the two countries, something Clinton did not deem plausible or remotely possible.

Clinton has never concealed her disdain for Putin.

As a senator in 2008, she joked about President George W. Bush’s famous line that he’d gotten a sense of Putin’s “soul,” suggesting that because Putin was a KGB agent, “by definition he doesn’t have a soul.”

Putin was logically and emotionally hostile to Clinton, as he felt personally stung by her words and actions.

He was angry.

She took a hard line and was even a proponent of regime change. That was a threat to him and his very survival.

Does this lead to speculation of payback? It does, but within a limited sense of what could be accomplished.

Certainly, Clinton was unloved by the Kremlin and they were skeptical of any “reset” under her future watch.

Putin therefore, like just about every other world leader, expected Clinton to win the election.

But at minimum the Russians wanted to send her a message that they were a power to be reckoned with.

26 Yglesias, Matthew. “A Timeline of Jeff Sessions and Michael Flynn’s Talk with the Russian Ambassador.” Vox. 3 March 2017. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/3/14792942/sessions-flynn-kislyak-timeline

27 Cooper, Matthew; Matthews, Owen. “Spy or Diplomat? Meet Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, The Most Radioactive Man in Washington.” Newsweek. 22 June 2017. http://www.newsweek.com/2017/06/30/spy-diplomat-sergey-kislyak-russia-ambassador-russia-probe-washington-627982.html

28 Ibid.

29 MacFarquhar, Neil; Baker, Peter. “Sergey Kislyak, Russian Envoy, Cultivated Powerful Network in US” New York Times. 2 March 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/world/europe/sergey-kislyak-russian-ambassador.html

24

JAMES “DIRTY HANDS” BAKER

WITH THE DNC EMAIL LEAK CLOGGING up airtime on the media, the FBI is tasked with figuring out who let their finger off the plug. They tasked one man with the job: James Baker, the FBI’s General Counsel. Baker has a very close friend: James Comey.

The two have a long history together, and in January 2014 Comey tapped Baker to become the FBI’s top lawyer. They had been longtime colleagues at both the DOJ and for a spell at the private Bridgewater Associates.

Could Baker be a pawn working for Comey? Does Comey pick Baker for the job because he knows he’ll say just what Comey wants to hear—the same way Steele knows just what the people funding his mission want to hear?

In the past, Baker has also been involved with a number of serious matters involving the DOJ and its past investigations, like his 2015 handling of the sensitive issues regarding Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. It was Baker and his gang who failed to recommend criminal charges.

Baker had always been involved in FISA warrant requests. He was the FBI “go-to” on FISA. In 2007, Baker appeared on the PBS Frontline episode “Spying on the Home Front,” where the show’s producer, in the Washington Post online, referred to Baker as “Mr. FISA himself.”³⁰

Could Baker be a part of an effort to make sure Trump will never make it into the White House? Is he in the middle of the dump-Trump schemes? Is he a resister? Or worse?

Could he be in collaboration to keep this Russia-gate story alive and to support the candidacy of Hillary Clinton?

Did he have help, an ally—high up? Perhaps it was a certain Andy McCabe?

McCabe joined the FBI in 1996 and became what is known as a “lifer.” He knew nothing else.

He started his long career in New York City with the FBI SWAT field office and moved next to become a special agent at the Eurasia Organized Crime Task Force. Promoted, he managed counterterrorism efforts and the National Security Branch of the entire FBI in Washington DC.

In 2009 McCabe directed the office on high-value detainees. He led the investigation on the Boston Marathon bombing and also the arrest of the Benghazi attackers.

McCabe was a dedicated FBIer and he became very attached to James Comey. Comey appointed him to many lead placements and eventually made him his deputy.

McCabe should have recused himself from the Hillary Clinton investigations and those of the Clinton Foundation because of political conflict of interest, given the fact that Clinton’s Democrat cronies (Terry McAuliffe) had given almost $700,000 dollars in contributions to McCabe’s wife in her campaign for Democratic state senate in Virginia. He didn’t.

30 Young, Rick (Producer). “Spying on the Home Front.” PBS Frontline. 16 May 2017. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/05/03/DI2007050301142.html

25

PARAMOURS: PETER STRZOK & LISA PAGE

WHILE HILLARY IS BUSY HIDING EMAILS, FBI agent Peter Strzok (pronounced “struck”) begins his investigation into her use of private emails. In August 2016, Strzok is in Virginia on FBI business, but he is sending amorous text messages to Lisa Page, a fellow FBI colleague. Page is married, but that doesn’t stop her from falling for Strzok. Most couples in the early honeymoon phases of love talk about each other and their futures, but Strzok and Page, it seems, mostly discussed Trump—or more accurately, they were plotting against him.

Strzok is no ordinary FBI agent. He is Chief of Counterespionage during the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails and server intrusion. He would later become Deputy Assistant Director of the whole FBI counterintelligence office. He is the one who will edit the letter by James Comey reducing the liability of Clinton from extreme and punishable to a slap on the wrist by changing the description of Clinton’s actions as “grossly negligent,” which would be a criminal offense, to “extremely careless.” A draft of the letter is then reviewed and corrected by several people until it reaches its final form. In this final statement, Comey says that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring charges based on available evidence.

One thing remains clear about FBI agent Strzok: he certainly has a way with words …

In one text message, Strzok writes, “Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support…. it’s scary real down here.”³¹ From this message alone, Strzok’s deep-seated contempt for those working-class Trump voters is palpable.

Page responds to her knight in shining armor, writing: “Maybe you’re meant to stay where you are because you’re meant to protect the country from that menace [Trump].”³²

In another text, Strzok warns of the need for an “insurance policy” to thwart Trump on the off chance that his poll numbers closed in on those of Mrs. Clinton, writing, “that there’s no way he [Trump] gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk.” Strzok adds, “It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event that you die before you’re 40.”³³ Is Strzok referencing Steele here, as the insurance policy?

Why then would Strzok and Page, both FBI agents more than familiar with heightened surveillance, be so careless with text messages broadcasting their blatant opposition to Trump? Is this simply having a personal opinion? Or is this something more sinister and calculated?

This is people working together in a calculated plot against Trump. This is the Deep State.

31 Fox News. “Read FBIs Strzok, Page Texts About Trump.” Fox News. 21 January 2018. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/01/21/ex-mueller-aides-texts-revealed-read-them-here.html

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

26

SOURCES AND METHODS

IN ORDER TO BETTER UNDERSTAND HOW intelligence professionals compile their research, it’s important to define a few technical terms to have a clearer sense of the stages involved to produce accurate data and reports. Intelligence and Information Policy for National Security: Key Terms and Concepts by Jan Goldman and Susan Maret defines these as follows:

Sources: Persons, images, signals, documents, databases, and communications media capable of providing intelligence information through collection and analysis programs (e.g., Human Intelligence (HUMINT), Imagery Intelligence (IMINT), Signals Intelligence (SIGINT), Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT), and Measurement and Signature Intelligence (MASINT)).

Methods: Information collection and analysis strategies, tactics, operations, and technologies employed to produce intelligence products. If intelligence sources or methods are disclosed without authorization, their effectiveness may be substantially negated or impaired.

And from the Oxford Handbook of National Security Intelligence, edited by Loch K. Johnson, we learn that “sources and methods,” usually used together, describe the practice of intelligence collection and analysis.

Sources range from information obtained through espionage, satellite imagery, and intercepted communications, to media reports and personal contacts. Methods are the tradecraft—the techniques employed by operations agents and officers to obtain their valuable information. Methodologies can range from sociological and psychological profiling to live and predictive computer-based analytical tools.

Ensuring maintenance of communications while safeguarding sources and methods is also critical, since revealing these, and how information is analyzed, could give adversaries and competitors a means of evaluating a rival’s capabilities and intentions.

Thus, for successful operations and analysis to continue into the future, a cloak of secrecy must be maintained by intelligence agencies.

A compilation based on sound sources and methods is highly valued; one based on anything less is worthless.

There is no source validation and no information on “chain of acquisition” of the material Steele collected. What was his vetting process to cross-check and corroborate sources and information? How can Steele stand by the credibility of his information when there is no validation of his sources and methods?

Not being privy to Steele’s sources and methods, we must then analyze the veracity of his information, which we find not only suspect, but outrageous.

That’s right, it is worthless.

Still, even though technically worthless, it could still be used if foisted off as the “real” thing …

27

DISINFORMATION

USED FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 1939 to describe the actions of Soviet leader Josef Stalin, “disinformation” is defined as follows: “false information deliberately and often covertly spread (as by the planting of rumors) in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth.”³⁴

As a form of deliberate deception, or so-called “black propaganda,” the whole idea originated in Russia’s darkest secret organization—the Soviets used it for everything and in every way possible.

They used it to advertise that the US had invented AIDS, to suggest the US backed apartheid, and to bribe officials. There was nothing they did not try to use it on. Anyone in their net was subject to being blackmailed. From forged documents to fake photos to bogus manuscripts, they employed disinformation with one intention: to spread dangerous and fabricated intelligence.

All of this came to light in the interrogations of numerous Soviet defectors from the late 1960s to the end of the 1980s.

Is the Trump-Russia dossier another package of such disinformation? Did it originate in the Russian FSB? Was it planted there to affect an American election? Did they want to destabilize the West?

What we do know is that Christopher Steele was an expert on the use and effect of disinformation.

Is he a dupe himself or perhaps an agent for such material, for a price?

34 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disinformation

28

THE FINISHED, FILTHY PRODUCT

JUST WEEKS AWAY FROM ELECTION DAY, Christopher Steele finishes his compilation, which is just what it suggests: You take all your sources and combine them into a finished, compiled product. Raw intelligence comes from human, electronic, and satellite sources that need to be fitted into a whole.

This combined effect does not include analysis. That last step is left to the analyst; any actions to be taken or decisions to be made are performed by the end user of the intelligence.

In today’s world, where intelligence and journalism meet, you see a new linkage. The power brokers, whether corporate or political, want not just more data points, or more streams of information. They want sensational, high tone, actionable judgments that they can trust and act on.

Information of this kind is called knowledge.

The funding of this new business model, called “business intelligence,” is critical in the case of the Trump-Russia dossier. It involves spies for hire and a journalistic tendency to go for the jugular. The two are not natural allies. Good intelligence is factual and proven, not invented or headline-grabbing.

Hiring former secret agents and their networks that supposedly know where all the bodies are buried, and who buried some themselves, sounds like a novel idea. With years and years’ worth of assets, all with ears and eyes on the ground, in such distant and nefarious places as Moscow, it just made sense.

When Christopher Steele finishes his peculiar compilation, which as we know is funded in a scheme that made more and more sordid stuff likely, since he paid informants to make it up, he doesn’t know what to do with the product.

That product was, remember, done for Fusion GPS and its clients: the DNC and the Clinton campaign.

These players, however, don’t seem to be using it, and the news cycle is focused elsewhere: Anthony Weiner sexting, John Podesta lying, and WikiLeaks.

What is Steele to do with his valuable if not overly salacious compilation?

Finally, Steele rediscovers an old mate from the FBI who is now stationed in Rome. Steele flies there to meet with him and hands him a copy of his compilation. Will the FBI act quickly on Steele’s dirty compilation, or will they drag their feet? Or will Steele have to find another outlet to get his dossier some attention?

29

THE HAIL MARY FROM MOTHER JONES

JAMES BAKER, THE FBI’S GENERAL COUNSEL, who has now caught wind of Steele’s dossier and read through its salacious details, meets with David Corn, a reporter from ultra liberal magazine Mother Jones, to discuss the contents of Steele’s dossier. Corn gained a mild degree of media attention for his harsh criticism of George W. Bush in his book with the highly original title Lies of George W. Bush, in which Corn claims that Bush had “mugged the truth.”³⁵

Corn had also been involved in the coverage and controversy surrounding leaks to the media of former CIA officer Valerie Plame. Corn loved the limelight. He discovered that going to the edge and then one step farther brought him into the national light.

It was Corn who broke the story of the Mitt Romney “47 percent video”—a story that helped defeat the Republican candidate in 2012.

Frustrated and desperate that no one will publish his unverified dossier, Steele takes his compilation on a plane to New York, where he meets with David Corn—a meeting that is set up by none other than James Baker, who knows that the left-wing scandalmonger Corn will love what he’s about to see: filthy dirt. Naturally, Corn promises to keep it secret.

Clearly, Baker has dirty hands and indeed appears to be a key figure working alongside this Deep State in the Red November plot to destroy Trump.

On October 31, 2016, Corn decides to run with the compilation—it’s just too juicy not to. He calls it his “Hail Mary” pass to stop Trump, and runs a version of the story on the spy and the FBI. The compilation is now out in the open.

Mission accomplished.

35 Corn, David. The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception. Penguin Random House. 2004.

30

THE BRITISH CONNECTION

SIR ANDREW WOOD IS PART OF what they refer to as “the good and great” in Great Britain. He quite looks the part. The former British diplomat had a most distinguished career in foreign relations, culminating as ambassador to Russia and then Moldova before retiring from service.

Born in 1940, in Gibraltar, Wood was properly educated at upper crust Ardingly College and King’s College, Cambridge University. He immediately entered into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office after graduation and was posted to Moscow. Following a number of other postings he was made ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1985 through 1989.

As a Russia expert, he has served on a number of boards, commercial and educational, and advised Prime Minister Tony Blair on Russia on various investments there. Wood was made GCMG, which translates as a high order, after having been knighted earlier. This is the most distinguished British Order of St. Michael and St. George. He is also the Russia advisor to Chatham House, a London think tank on international affairs.

As a highly distinguished man with a reputation and resume to match, how does Sir Andrew Wood fit into this puzzle?

He is an advisor to Orbis Intelligence.

On November 8, 2016, after Christopher Steele has passed his Trump-Russia dossier on to both his own MI6 intelligence service in the UK and to the FBI, Sir Andrew Wood attends the annual International Security Forum in Halifax, Canada, where Senator John McCain is also in attendance. The ambassador confidentially discusses a report that has compromising information about the incoming president. He has McCain’s full attention.

McCain is no fan of Donald Trump. He did not back Trump in either his primary or general campaign. He saw him as a dangerous isolationist, a challenge to the entire Establishment and to his neocon views.

After the meeting, McCain dispatches an associate, David Kramer, former State Department official and current senior fellow at the McCain Institute, to London to meet with Christopher Steele to be briefed on its contents. Kramer is given a partial copy of the dossier and in twenty-four hours, he returns it to Washington, DC—to McCain.

The following day, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS meets with McCain and gives him a full copy of the dossier. Senator McCain doesn’t like what he reads, so he sets up a meeting with FBI Director James Comey, writing in a prepared statement that “Upon examination of the contents, and unable to make a judgment about their accuracy, I delivered the information to the Director of the FBI. That has been the extent of my contact with the FBI or any other government agency regarding this issue.”³⁶

Sure …

36 Greenwood, Max. “McCain gave dossier containing ‘sensitive material’ to FBI.” The Hill. 11 Jan 2017. http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/313716-mccain-gave-dossier-containing-sensitive-information-to-fbi

31

THE TRUMP CARD

AT THIS POINT IN THE RACE toward presidency Clinton is a shoo-in. In all the polls, she’s projected to defeat Trump by a landslide. The question isn’t will she win—it’s by how much.

Her surrogates are legion and there isn’t anybody in the media, save for one or two people at Fox News, who think she isn’t a shoo-in to win.

All the newspapers endorse her. All the pundits kowtow to her. And all the pollsters are predicting her inevitable victory. The odds are 8-to-1 she will win in Las Vegas betting.

With the “woman card” up her sleeve, Clinton is a sure bet.

And in the highly unlikely scenario that Clinton loses to Trump, would she be willing to use Steele’s phony intel to blackmail Trump to the Russians with incriminating evidence? But like a reserve parachute that you hope to never have to pull that cord, it’s nice knowing it’s there.

On the morning of November 8, 2016, with the election already underway and votes coming in, the New York Times posts an article online titled, “Who Will Be President?” The Times, using estimates based on pre-election polls, reports that Hillary Clinton is predicted to be the next president, with a staggering 85 percent chance to win. Trump, according to the Times, only has a 15 percent chance … ³⁷

By 6 p.m., the numbers are in Clinton’s favor.

Around 8 p.m., Trump wins the vote in Michigan—a state that should have been a sure victory for the Clinton campaign. With Michigan falling, the scales begin to tip in Trump’s favor.

Like dominoes falling in succession, each state that should have gone to Clinton goes to Trump instead. The world watches with bated breath, as the once impossible is about to be inevitable. An orchestrated hush falls over the Clinton campaign.

By midnight, it’s still too early to call it, but the numbers continue in Trump’s favor. With each passing minute, Americans remain glued to the television, watching it all unfold live. Others turn in for the night, hoping that if they close their eyes and to go to sleep, maybe when they wake up in the morning the election will somehow miraculously have corrected itself and Hillary Clinton will be the forty-fifth president.

At 2:30 a.m. on November 9, Donald Trump addresses the American public in his victory speech: “I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans.” And as those very words rolled off his tongue, the entire world—or those who were still awake—is in shock. But none more so than Hillary herself.

The offense of blackmail is ensconced in the US legal code by 18 USC. § 873:

“Whoever, under a threat of informing, or as a consideration for not informing, against any violation of any law of the United States, demands or receives any money or other valuable thing, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”

Will Hillary concede gracefully and accept her defeat? Or will she go nuclear: cashing in on her “insurance policy”—Steele’s dossier—in feeble attempt to blackmail and subvert Trump?

37 Katz, Josh. “Who Will Be President?” New York Times. 8 Nov 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential-polls-forecast.html

PART II

ELECTION AFTERMATH: THE FALLOUT NOVEMBER 9, 2016—FEBRUARY 2018

32

HILLARY IN HIDING

IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOW THE election results, Hillary is a hermit—shying away from the media attention she so craved and thrived on for the last six months. Behind drawn curtains of her Westchester mansion, Hillary begins scheming ways to “correct” the outcome—ways to explain her loss to herself and to the American public and to the world. How had she lost? What went wrong? She was a shoo-in, right?

Surely there must be an explanation.

Could it have been the fact that she mistakenly assumed that traditionally blue states like Michigan would continue to blindly vote for her because she is a Democrat? When was the last time she had even gone to Michigan to meet its citizens? Did she even bother visiting these potentially volatile swing states or had she spent too much of her time in states where her vote was unchallenged? Had she been truly bested by Trump, who had actually visited these states and gained the vote?

No, that couldn’t be it. Nor of course, could it be that a large number of people were not happy with the use of the term “deplorable” to describe them. That’s too simple and logical. Surely there must be some other more complicated and nefarious explanation. Not wanting to assume any personal responsibility for her defeat, Clinton looks for a scapegoat.

And who better than Russia—a natural sworn enemy—to point her crooked finger at? Russia, with their long-standing ideological feud with America, is the perfect choice to lay the blame.

“It was them! Those sneaky Russians meddling in our election, toying with our democracy … ” Hillary surely wants to shout aloud from the steps of Capitol Hill for all the televised world to hear. And like their second-place hero, many Americans, too, are left searching for a collective salve to heal their shared wounds.

Joe Lauria, an independent journalist and correspondent for the United Nations for over twenty-five years, captures just how this hive mind mentality spread throughout America like wildfire in the immediate days after the election:

Part of this Russia-gate groupthink stems from the outrage—and even shame—that many Americans feel about Trump’s election. They want to find an explanation that doesn’t lay the blame on the US citizenry or America’s current dysfunctional political/media process. It’s much more reassuring, in a way, to blame some foreign adversary while also discrediting Trump’s legitimacy as the elected president. That leaves open some hope that this election might somehow be negated.³⁸

With the President-elect Trump’s inauguration just around the New Year’s bend, it’s time for Hillary to cash in the check on her insurance policy—her so-called failsafe. It’s time to go nuclear and open the floodgates to Russia. This would be the perfect moment to get Christopher Steele’s dossier in heavy rotation on all of America’s mainstream media to blackmail Trump.

38 Lauria, Joe. “How Russia-gate Rationalizes Censorship.” Consortium News. 4 Dec 2017. https://consortiumnews.com/2017/12/04/how-russia-gate-rationalizes-censorship/

33

HOUSE OF CARDS: THE COLLAPSE OF THE CLINTON FOUNDATION

AS IF THINGS COULDN’T GET ANY worse for poor Hillary, now it seems inevitable that her Clinton Foundation is beginning to topple like a house of cards in a hurricane. And as if the world needed more proof that her previous business transactions like the Uranium One deal were, in fact, pay-to-play schemes, countries like Norway and Australia, who had both donated heavily to the foundation during Hillary’s run for the presidency, have now backed out of their financial agreements since they know that there will be no return on their original investments.

It will be reported later that documents show that the Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, who sat down for a drink with George Papadopolous in London, learning that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary, and whose tip to the FBI prompted the Russia-Trump investigation, previously arranged one of the largest foreign donations to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s charitable efforts. Downer, a Clintonista, signed over $25 million in Australian government funds to the Clinton Foundation to fight AIDS in Southeast Asia.³⁹

All Hillary has to offer now is her disgraced name and reputation. The question now isn’t if, but when the Clinton Foundation will run dry and close up shop.

While the Clinton Foundation continues to reel, the circus-like spectacle that was the 2016 election is also finally winding down, and Washington, DC readies itself for a brief hiatus going into the Christmas season. But over in Russia, a plot for murder is set into motion in our Red November tale.

39 “Russia Scandal: Did Hillary Clinton Run FBI’s Trump Investigation?” Investor’s Business Daily. 7 Mar 2018. https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/russia-scandal-did-hillary-clinton-run-fbis-trump-investigation/

34

THE PECULIAR DEATH OF OLEG EROVINKIN

REMEMBER THE EX-KGB CHIEF, OLEG EROVINKIN, who was suspected of helping Christopher Steele draft his dossier? The same Erovinkin who was the aide to Igor Sechin, former Russian Deputy Prime Minister. The same man who, if word got out that he was commiserating and possibly supplying information to a British spy, his fate would be sealed.

On December 26, 2016, Oleg Erovinkin is found dead in the back of his car in Moscow.

Was Oleg more than just an aide? Turns out he was called Putin’s Treasurer, and for good reason: Oleg knew where all the bodies were buried. He knew all the secrets, and just about every last asset. He was the one who had to account for them.

When his body is found the police say they suspect “foul play.” As Igor Sechin’s right hand man, his death is very suspicious. And, as the possible source for the Trump-Russia dossier, it looks even more suspicious.

And yet Christopher Steele adamantly insists that Erovinkin was not one of his sources. “Not one of ours,” he says to reporters, adding that, “Sometimes people just die.”⁴⁰

Who killed Oleg Erovinkin? What else might have he known?

Could it have been Igor Sechin—Russia’s “second most powerful person”?

Just who is Sechin? Born in 1960 in what was Leningrad, USSR. He is Putin’s foremost ally and started his Putinesque career long ago. He was deputy to Putin already in the late 1980s. Sechin is considered Putin’s literal right-hand man, his most conservative partner and leader of the Kremlin’s Siloviki faction, which consists only of former high-ranking security agents.

Sechin served as Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, serving in Putin’s innermost cabinet, until May 2012, when Putin made him Executive Chairman of Rosneft, the state-owned Russian oil company.

Sechin went on to serve his trusted friend Putin everywhere he went. He became Chief of the Russian presidential administration. When Medvedev came to power he was demoted to Deputy Prime Minister, but even then he protected the interests of Putin. According to open intelligence sources, Sechin had inordinate power. He represented the FSB in all dealings in oil and gas. He was all-powerful. His face was all over deals with BP, Gazprom, with Cuba and offshore drilling, and with Venezuela.

In 2014, Sechin was sanctioned by the US government in response to the unrest in Ukraine. He had a travel ban to the US imposed and his assets were frozen. He has been banned from all business transactions between US citizens and corporations. Sechin has been harmed but retains all his influence and all his considerable power and wealth as the foremost Putin crony.

What does he know about the Trump-Russia dossier and why would such a powerful Putin crony with so much to lose be implicated? Is there another line to follow?

Is it coincidence that soon after Erovinkin’s murder, Christopher Steele goes into hiding?

To this day, Steele has been sighted, but won’t travel or give interviews.

40 Harding, Luke. Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win. Penguin Random House. 2017.

35

DÉJÀ VU: IRAQ AND THE MISSING WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

ONCE WASHINGTON RESUMES ITS GOVERNMENTAL OFFICES following the holiday break, the mainstream media—desperately trying to maintain its previously peaking ratings during the race—needs a new story to capture the attention of the American public. Like a broken record stuck in the same groove, the media focuses solely on new reports emerging about Russian interference in the election. The public wants answers in their whodunit mystery of Clinton’s surprise upset, and the media is more than happy to offer a suspect.

This isn’t anything new—this idea of a foreign enemy either meddling in our American affairs, attacking our freedom and democracy, or posing as a grave threat to the world, even if this sworn enemy is thousands of miles and an ocean away from American soil. Like the yin to our yang, America’s intelligence community and the Deep State work together to establish this often-imaginary bogeyman, so to say, to blame for all of our own problems and shortcomings, to justify our ever-increasing defense budget, as we’ve seen with the 2016 election.

Political analyst Gilbert Doctorow reinforces this very idea:

While the Iraq deception was driven by the neoconservatives in the Bush-Cheney administration, the Russia paranoia was started by the nominally left-of-center administration of Barack Obama in the closing months of his presidency. It has been fanned ever since by liberals and centrists in the Democratic Party and the never-Trump contingent in the Republican Party as well as the mainstream media—with the goal of either removing Trump from office or politically crippling him and his administration, i.e., to reverse the results of the 2016 election or, as some might say, reverse the “mistake” of the 2016 election.⁴¹

And to be sure, this isn’t the first time Russia is our enemy. This is just the beginning of a new Cold War. Before this recycling of animosity toward Russia and pointing our collective finger at Putin, we did the same to Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Dan Kovalik, in his book The Plot to Scapegoat Russia, writes on this very idea:

As with the CIA’s claims about WMDs, the US media has been all too willing to accept and regurgitate the CIA’s claims about Russian hacking and Trump’s alleged conspiracy with Russia to steal the election. A journalist I trust, Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh, who has properly condemned the media for accepting these claims at face value. I join Hersh, if he would allow me to, in asking, where is the evidence for this? Indeed, we may have to continue asking this pointed question, as even a number of Democratic leaders are now warning their base.⁴²

What a seemingly savvy move on behalf of the US intelligence agencies: tell the American public that Saddam and his cronies are hiding weapons of mass destruction that could obliterate and destroy the world with the potential to wipe out the entire human race. And just like that, you have almost unilateral, unconditional support from the American media and public. Kovalik continues:

Thus, as Glenn Greenwald wrote in The Intercept on March 16, 2017, in the face of the Russia conspiracy frenzy, which has now become a “fixation” of the Democratic rank ’n file, “former acting CIA chief Michael Morell … one of Clinton’s most vocal CIA surrogates … appeared at an intelligence community forum to ‘cast doubt’ on ‘allegations that members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.’”⁴³

With a majority of the American public seeking some form of retribution after the devastating loss to Trump, the US intelligence agencies are preparing to discuss the contents of Steele’s dossier being passed around like wildfire in DC.

James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence and the same man behind the phony WMD claims, is selected to serve on the Advisory Board of the Committee to Investigate Russia—a nonpartisan, nonprofit group formed to help “Americans understand and recognize the scope and scale of Russia’s continuing attacks on our democracy.” The rhetoric of Clapper’s advisory board sounds strikingly similar, almost verbatim … is it déjà vu?

41 Doctorow, Gilbert. “Questioning the Russia-gate ‘motive’.” Consortium News. 18 Dec 2017.

42 Kovalik, Dan. The Plot to Scapegoat Russia. Skyhorse Publishing. 16 May 2017.

43 Ibid.

36

GROUPTHINK: THE HIVE MENTALITY OF THE INTEL COMMUNITY

ON JANUARY 6, 2017, JAMES CLAPPER releases the findings from his investigation, the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), assessing Russian activities and intentions in recent US elections [See Appendix A]. There are seventeen American intelligence agencies that work in tandem to supposedly govern and protect our borders and ensure our nation’s security—the same intelligence agencies that make up the Deep State. As lead on the investigation, Clapper handpicks three analysts from three separate departments—FBI, CIA, and NSA—of those seventeen, including James Comey and CIA Director John Brennan, both known anti-Trumpers.

Brennan always seems angry.

He was the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2013 until 2017 under then President Barack Obama, where he briefed Obama daily as his chief counterterrorism advisor. With twenty-five years at “The Agency,” Brennan was what is called “a lifer.” He was part of the Deep State.

His work focused over that long career on the Near East, and he served as CIA station chief to Saudi Arabia. Brennan is a fluent Arabic speaker and, most interestingly, a rumored convert to Islam.

Brennan is a known hothead and is closely tied to the Democrat Party and the Clintons. His rise to power came during their reign and he was a controversial CIA Director to say the least.

Many thought him to be less than objective, if not entirely politicized.

He would later tell Fox News’ Chris Wallace that he doesn’t think President-elect Donald Trump has “a full appreciation of Russian capabilities, Russia’s intentions,” and that Trump’s public displays of contempt for the US intelligence community could undermine national security.

His remarks were made after Trump rejected intelligence agencies’ reports of claims that Russia had compromising information on the president-elect.

Clearly, Brennan is a big fan of the Trump-Russia dossier.

He is behind Red November.

Yasha Levine confirms that this isn’t the first time Clapper has claimed unanimity without disclosing proper evidence for this conclusion:

In a frustratingly vague statement to Congress on the report, then-DNI director James Clapper hinted at deeper and more definitive findings that proved serious and rampant Russian interference in America’s presidential balloting—but insisted that all this underlying proof must remain classified. For observers of the D.C. intelligence scene, Clapper’s performance harkened back to his role in touting definitive proof of the imminent threat of Saddam Hussein’s WMD arsenal in the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq.⁴⁴

After his investigation, Clapper claims that the decision is unanimous across American intelligence agencies that this information is accurate and even describes the leaks as damaging to US national security. How could Clapper then only choose three investigators—three left-leaning analysts to be exact—whom he knew would support his claim and his already-laid plot against Trump? How could he announce that this is a general consensus when fourteen agencies hadn’t even been contacted or read through the dossier itself?

Former CIA officer Ray McGovern explains just how transparently this Deep State operates: “In other words, not only did the full intelligence community not participate in the ICA but only analysts ‘handpicked’ by Obama’s intelligence chiefs conducted the analysis—and as we intelligence veterans know well, if you handpick the analysts, you are handpicking the conclusions.”⁴⁵ Through this supposedly “unanimous” decision, we’re beginning to see just how this Deep State operates and exercises its unilateral reach by a carefully calculated design. In doing so, our basic tenets of democracy are tested and strained.

Trump, rightfully so, goes on the offensive during a press conference on November 11, 2017, aboard Air Force One while speaking to the press on his way to Hanoi, Vietnam, saying, “You hear it’s seventeen agencies. Well it’s three. And one is Brennan … give me a break. They’re political hacks … I mean, you have Brennan, you have Clapper, you have Comey. Comey is proven to be a liar and he’s proven to be a leaker.”⁴⁶

And in some odd, ominous warning three days prior to Clapper’s release of his findings, Senator Chuck Schumer, leader of the Democratic Party, publicly warns President-elect Trump, saying that when you “mess with the intel community they have six ways from Sunday to get back at you.” Why would Schumer suggest such a thing? Is there truth behind this, or is it just an intimidation tactic? What else does Schumer know about the Deep State and their capabilities?

And just who is this John Brennan that Trump calls a political hack?

During Trump’s campaign toward the presidency, John Brennan, the director of the CIA, had gone out of his way to attack Trump, even saying publicly he would refuse to employ waterboarding in some extreme cases. “I can say that as long as I’m director of the CIA, irrespective of what the president says, I’m not going to be the director of a CIA that gives that order. They’ll have to find another director,”⁴⁷ said the preemptively insubordinate Brennan.

Former CIA field operations officer Gene Coyle once said that Brennan was “known as the greatest sycophant in the history of the CIA, and a supporter of Hillary Clinton before the election. I find it hard to put any real credence in anything that man says.”

William Binney has this to say about Clapper’s character and tendency to make sweeping claims on tenuous assumptions:

Mr. Clapper was a key player in facilitating the fraudulent intelligence. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put Mr. Clapper in charge of the analysis of satellite imagery, the best source for pinpointing the locations of weapons of mass destruction—if any. When Pentagon favorites like Iraqi emigre Ahmed Chalabi plied the US intelligence with spurious “evidence” on WMD in Iraq, Mr. Clapper was in a position to suppress the findings of any imagery analyst who might have the temerity to report, for example, that the Iraqi “chemical weapons facility” for which Mr. Chalabi provided the geographic coordinates was nothing of the kind. Mr. Clapper preferred to go by the Rumsfeldian dictum: “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Despite the fact that Clapper and his cronies think their pulling the wool over the public’s eyes, Trump calls him and his crew out, citing yet another clear example of how top officials in Washington, like the director of the CIA, are working in orchestration in a plot to subvert his presidency. What we have here is the same cast of characters who championed the Iraq war are now, with the help of mainstream media, stirring up anti-Russia hysteria.

And with all the hearsay and spreading of misinformation, Scott Shane, a longtime journalist for the New York Times captures the glaring flaw in the dossier’s logic:

What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack … Instead, the message from the agencies amounts to “trust us.”⁴⁸

Finally, someone speaking some truth, and from the New York Times, no less. Had anyone from the media actually read the dossier? Had anyone fact-checked it? Was there any substance to the wild claims? Again what we have here is a blatant disregard for basic journalistic duties being shelved in favor of gossip.

Despite the dossier having been thoroughly challenged as unrealistic and unsubstantiated by real experts like Professor Cohen, one of the premiere Kremlinologists in the whole world, it remains the core of all the proponents of the Russia gate storyline.

Cohen, who has served at the top ranks of the US government and taught Russian history at Princeton, has written a mountain of books and professional articles about Russia. He knows it inside out and upside down—and you can’t fool him. In his February 2018 article “Russiagate or Intelgate?” which he wrote for The Nation, Cohen proposes that the Russia-gate brouhaha would be better termed “Intelgate,” and he’s right; the world should listen to him.

This could be the makings of a new cold war. Russia-gate is, however, without Russia in this case: It is something much darker and more sinister.

The collusion was not between the White House and the Kremlin but between the US Intelligence Community and the Democrats.

Cohen asks pointed questions on this Intel-gate saga: when, and by whom, did this opposition to Trump begin? When did Christopher Steele get his information and who gave it to him? The investigation was not instigated by drunken remarks by George Papadopoulos to some anti-Trump Australian ambassador late at night in a London pub.⁴⁹

No, Cohen refutes. It was John Brennan and the CIA who started the whole thing.

Brennan played a crucial role in promoting Russia gate from the get-go. He briefed members of Congress and President Obama as early as July and August of 2016, using Steele’s dossier. He shared information with James Clapper and FBI Director, James Comey.

Still, the question remains: when did Brennan start his (CIA based) investigation of Trump? Could have been in late 2015? His own testimony demonstrates he, not the FBI, was the godfather of Russia-gate.

It was Brennan who provided information to Christopher Steele—he spoon-fed it to him. Steele did not have deep contacts in Russia since he had not been there for about twenty years. He was badly out of touch.

Steele’s sources are incredible. He doesn’t and won’t name them.

Would Russian insiders really collaborate with an old, former MI6 operative under the eyes of the former KGB chief, Vladimir Putin? Would they risk their positions, incomes, and their lives, for what?⁵⁰

Cohen rightly asks these questions. He also points out all the glaring and telling mistakes in the dossier—mistakes that real, current Kremlin experts do not make.

Christopher Steele’s source is John Brennan and the FBI, who as we now know, was already collaborating with Steele. Nellie Ohr, of Fusion GPS, provided CIA research and also funneled it into the Steele dossier. She was his co-author. Convenient.

If the information did not so much come from Russian sources, where did it come from? Is Russia-gate the product of the US Intel Community, specifically of, John Brennan, the political appointee sitting at the helm of the CIA?

Is this not perilous to democracy? Does it pale to Watergate by comparison? Why was it done?

Loathing Trump is one thing; opposing any connection or better relations with Russia is another. Could there also be ambition at play here, since it was no secret that Brennan badly wanted to become Secretary of State to future President, Hillary Clinton.

Should Brennan not come under the bright light? And, what was Obama’s role in all this? What did he know and when did he know it?

And furthermore, why did the intelligence community wait two months after the election to brief President-elect Trump on the dossier?

Why is James Comey, Brennan’s number two, selected to do the briefing?

By broadcasting their findings into the national spotlight, is Comey’s investigation an attempt to legitimize the dossier? If enough people believe a lie, is it still a lie? Can an untruth suddenly become a truth?

Russia-gate is in reality Intelgate. The Red November plot thickens.

44 Levine, Yasha. “From Russia, With Panic.” The Baffler. March 2017. https://thebaffler.com/salvos/from-russia-with-panic-levine

45 McGovern, Ray. “Mocking Trump Doesn’t Prove Russia’s Guilt.” Consortium News. 13 Nov 2017. https://consortiumnews.com/2017/11/13/mocking-trump-doesnt-prove-russias-guilt/

46 Shelbourne, Molly. “Brennan: Trump called us hacks to delegitimize intelligence report.” The Hill. 12 Nov 2017. http://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/359982-brennan-trump-called-us-hacks-to-delegitimize-intelligence-report

47 Landay, Jonathan. “CIA director says he would resign if ordered to resume waterboarding.” Reuters. 13 July 2016. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cia-waterboarding/cia-director-says-he-would-resign-if-ordered-to-resume-waterboarding-idUSKCN0ZT2T3

48 Shane, Scott. “Russian Intervention in American Election Was No One-Off.” New York Times. 6 Jan 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/us/politics/russian-hacking-election-intelligence.html

49 Cohen, Stephen. “Russiagate or Intelgate?” The Nation. 7 Feb 2018.

50 Ibid.

37

BLIND FAITH

PERHAPS ONE OF THE GREATEST UNTRUTHS that had been spun into gospel was the conclusion reached by George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch from their investigation into the DNC email leak. Remember those reports from CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity intelligence firm who claimed they had definitive proof of Russian intrusion into DNC emails and how the Russians were directly responsible for the hack and, therefore, the outcome of the 2016 election? And how the American public blindly believed what these so-called cyber experts told the DNC?

And how James Clapper claimed to have good reason to believe Saddam had WMDs, but like Geraldo Rivera opening Al Capone’s vault, there were no WMDs? In the same conniving vein, the CrowdStrike team, as it turns out, completely falsified their results to match what their client wanted to hear. It didn’t matter to the DNC what the results were as long as it pointed back to the Russians. And it didn’t matter to Clapper what his analysts would find; to Clapper all that mattered was who was doing the finding—because he knew they supported his foregone conclusion.

Yasha Levine reports on just how quickly this mentality spread following Trump’s victory:

After Donald Trump’s surprise victory in November, these four words reverberated across the nation: The Russians Hacked America. Democratic Party insiders, liberal pundits, economists, members of Congress, spies, Hollywood celebrities, and neocons of every stripe and classification level—all these worthy souls reeled in horror at the horribly compromised new American electoral order. In unison, the centers of responsible opinion concurred that Vladimir Putin carried off a brazen and successful plan to throw the most important election in the most powerful democracy in the world to a candidate of his choosing.⁵¹

This is a dangerous game to play—a game that harkens back to the Orwellian false dogma: 2+2=5. When you already have the answer but the numbers don’t add up, you’re left with but one logical option: change the conclusion. But if you’re willing to play by Orwellian logic, you have another option: change the data to make it match your conclusion. And just like that, no longer does 2+2=4.

Clapper’s and the Deep State’s pre-selected conclusion appealed to a core American psychology, an already-established American dichotomy: a good versus evil, us versus them mentality—and at the center of the evil is one man: Vladimir Putin.

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton, captures this false vilification of Russia and Putin:

This too is unprecedented. No Soviet or post-Soviet leader was ever so wildly, baselessly vilified as Putin has increasingly been for more than a decade—and even more since a few selected members of a few US intelligence agencies claimed in January 2017, without making known any evidence whatsoever, that he personally ordered the “attack on America” in 2016. Demonizing Putin has become so maniacal that leading “opinion-makers” seem to think he is a Communist.⁵²

In a game of Russian roulette played according to Orwellian dogma, the numbers, the data, and the research no longer matter—only the outcome.

With the DNC, the so-called seventeen intelligence agencies (actually three), and the majority of news outlets all agreeing that Christopher Steele’s dossier was the truth—and deemed a threat to America’s national security and democracy (how ironic!)—it didn’t matter to the public where the information came from so long as it confirmed their suspicions. Each headline was the salve that these wounded Americans were so desperately looking for—a topical solution to all their issues with democracy, the very proof that confirmed their already set-in-stone conclusion: the Russians hacked America.

Following Trump’s inauguration, these intelligence agencies work together in calculated orchestration to connect Trump with Russia. But since they know they’ll be unable to find a direct line of collusion between Trump and Russia, they widen their net, beginning with his National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Flynn, as we know, had met with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the US, on December 29, 2016, during Trump’s campaign.

Meanwhile, anti-Russia hysteria is brewing within the Capitol and throughout America, so when pressed by the FBI on January 24, 2017, regarding his contact with Russia, Flynn, perhaps in an attempt to minimize his interaction with Kislyak, downplays what occurred during these meetings and withholds pertinent information. However, once word spreads that Flynn did in fact have contact with the Russians and met with Kislyak, Michael Flynn, under intense pressure and public scrutiny, is forced to resign from his position on February 13.

Donald Trump would later chime in on Flynn’s forced resignation through Twitter, writing, “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!”

And during a press conference, Trump adds, “I feel badly for Gen. Flynn. I feel very badly. He’s led a very strong life, and I feel very badly about it. I will say this. Hillary Clinton lied many times to the FBI and nothing happened to her. Flynn lied, and it destroyed his life, and I think it’s a shame.”⁵³

Trump is spot-on here. While Flynn did perhaps mislead the FBI and the public, it wanes in comparison to the lies told by Hillary Clinton to the FBI.

51 Levine, Yasha. “From Russia, With Panic.” The Baffler. March 2017. https://thebaffler.com/salvos/from-russia-with-panic-levine

52 Cohen, Stephen. “Russia Is Not the ‘No. 1 Threat’—or Even Among the Top 5.” The Nation. 27 Nov 2017. https://www.thenation.com/article/russia-is-not-the-no-1-threat-or-even-among-the-top-5/

53 Wilkie, Christina. “Trump: ‘I feel very badly for General Flynn.’” CNBC. 4 Dec 2017. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/04/trump-i-feel-very-badly-for-general-flynn.html

38

REFUTING THE DOSSIER

WITH CLAPPER CLAIMING HIS INVESTIGATION THOROUGHLY examined, he then turns to the American press and media outlets to spin his untruth into a truth—an announcement that is heard across the world. As a direct result of his unsubstantiated claims, a majority of the American public, who is now clamoring for an explanation to correct the outcome of the election, blindly believes the so-called unanimous decision from Clapper and other intelligence agencies regarding the accuracy of Steele’s dossier. And just like that, Steele’s dossier becomes the Democratic gospel.

For any discerning reader (not any member of the CIA, FBI, or NSA), the Christopher Steele dossier should be read in its entirety and read closely to better understand its gravity. The document, as released by Buzzfeed on January 10, 2017, is available in Appendix B at the end of this book.

Many reporters, in the US and abroad, received the dossier months before its public exposure, but let this hot potato sit as they hadn’t been able to verify its contents.

Also, Alfa, the name of Russia’s largest privately owned commercial bank, mentioned on page 25 of the dossier, was misspelled, not once, not twice, but multiple times. One would think that a professionally compiled dossier by a “credible” source would dot all of its i’s and cross all of its t’s.

The document can be distilled down into six main takeaways, as identified by Matthew Yglesias and Andrew Prokop in their February 2, 2018, Vox article.⁵⁴ Six egregious claims that are entirely unverified, and can be refuted with simple logic.

Claim #1: Trump had an ongoing cooperative relationship with Russian authorities for years.

In his dossier, Steele claims that Russia “had been feeding Trump and his team valuable intelligence on his opponents,” including Clinton, for “several years” before 2016, and that in exchange, Trump’s team fed the Kremlin intelligence on Russian oligarchs and their families.

It is now public knowledge that the Russians had been attempting to “sow discord” in the 2016 election nearly two years prior to the election, in 2014—almost a year before Trump announced his run for candidacy. Using this basic math, Steele’s claim just isn’t logical. It seems that Steele is attempting to draw connections based on Trump’s previous business ties to Russia.

Dan Kovalik touches in on the Steele’s flawed logic, using an example of Obama’s previous relations with Ukraine:

Moreover, even if Trump’s friendliness with Russia may be motivated by his business interests—Obama’s Ukraine policy may have been motivated at least in part by the Ukrainian business interests of Vice-President Biden’s son Hunter … this does not in itself make it wrong.⁵⁵

As Kovalik notes, there is nothing inherently illegal or corrupt with having friendly relations with Russia simply because Trump had previous business interests. Additionally, as any mildly informed civilian knows, international relationships are constantly and continually evolving, as witnessed with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Following this dissolution, US-Russian relations slowly, over time, became less strained, especially during Boris Yeltsin’s tenure as president. During this relaxed period, Trump worked closely with Russian entrepreneurs, further expanding his real estate empire. And now, as we enter a new Cold War, any previous ties or business connections with Russia are viewed unfavorably. Steele knows this, and he knows he is making a terribly loose connection between Russia and Trump. He also knows Clinton will love it and will use it as potential blackmail.

Claim #2: Trump is compromised and vulnerable to Russian blackmail due to sexual escapades.

The most salacious of all the accusations in his dossier, Steele claims that during a trip to the Moscow Ritz-Carlton, Trump hired prostitutes to “perform a ‘golden showers’ [urination] show in front of him,” “defiling” the presidential suite bed in which the Obamas had previously slept. In this wild claim, Steele also implies that Russian intelligence taped this sex act and that it is one of several forms of blackmail the Russians have on Trump.

Though it’s the most egregious and potentially most character-damaging claim, its veracity is simple to refute: if there is an actual tape, where is it? And why not release it? Had Steele ever seen the tape? Surely, if he had, wouldn’t he release it to support his claims with tangible evidence? Clearly, Steele never saw the tape because there is no tape because this never happened at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton.

President-elect Trump himself publicly refuted the story many times and even said at a press conference at Trump Tower on January 11, 2017, the day after Buzzfeed’s story, “ … I am extremely careful … Because in your hotel rooms and no matter where you go, you’re gonna probably have cameras … cameras in the strangest places … that are so small with modern technology, you can’t see them and you won’t know. You better be careful, or you’ll be watching yourself on the nightly television … I’m also very much of a germaphobe, by the way, believe me.”

And yet, the question remains: why would Steele, who is likely working for the Russians, write such slanderous statements? Is it perhaps because it isn’t the Russians blackmailing Trump, but members of the Deep State, the CIA?

Again, Kovalik writes about this likelihood:

More disturbingly, there is in fact good reason to believe that it is not the Russians at all who are blackmailing Trump, but rather, the CIA itself. Thus, from what we have been given to know, it was not the Russians who came to Trump to tell him that they had incriminating evidence on him, as any blackmailer would do. No, it was the CIA—who we know wants to pressure Trump into staying on the path toward confrontation with Russia—that not only went to Trump to tell him about the allegedly incriminating evidence on him, but also went to a number of other government officials and the public to let them know about this “evidence.”⁵⁶

Knowing the lengths and depths the Deep State and CIA are willing to go to subvert Trump, it’s no surprise that they would stoop so low to blackmail him.

Claim #3: An extensive conspiracy of cooperation existed between Trump’s campaign and the Kremlin.

As claimed by Steele, Paul Manafort initially managed the Trump-Russia “conspiracy” with Carter Page as intermediary until Manafort was fired in August 2016.

After Manafort’s firing, Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, played an increasingly large role in managing the so-called “Kremlin relationship.”

Former CIA officer Ray McGovern exposes the glaring flaw in this accusation:

The Russia-gate narrative always hinged on the preposterous notion that Russian President Vladimir Putin foresaw years ago what no American political analyst considered even possible, the political ascendancy of Donald Trump. According to the narrative, the fortune-telling Putin then risked creating even worse tensions with a nuclear-armed America that would—by all odds—have been led by a vengeful President Hillary Clinton.⁵⁷

And furthermore, yes, it’s been established that Paul Manafort has connections to both the Ukraine and Russia. It is no secret that he served as an advisor for Viktor Yanukovych during his run in the Ukraine presidential election of 2010.

It has also been established that Carter Page lived in Moscow while he worked for Merrill Lynch.

Both Manafort and Page are businessmen who have connections to several Eastern European countries, which is to be expected from successful venturers of the sort.

Again, what Steele and the intelligence agencies are attempting to do here is draw lines where there is no larger picture. Furthermore, Carter Page is still the subject of nebulous investigations, and perhaps we’ll never know exactly whom he is working for. One thing remains clear: the FBI was illegally surveilling Page and used the dossier to continue their investigation on Page and then Trump.

Claim #4: Trump’s team had full knowledge of Russian plans to deliver emails to WikiLeaks, offering policy concessions in exchange.

Despite all this media speculation and attention regarding this completely unsubstantiated claim that Trump’s team somehow knew and approved the Russian delivery of emails to WikiLeaks, we know this from several sources that this is false. Even Julian Assange continues to maintain his position that Russia is not the source for the leaks. If Russia is not the source, then why or how would Trump’s team know? Could Assange himself be lying? Doubtful. The man’s sole purpose in life is to expose the truth, all while living in secrecy.

And as previously noted, William Binney, the former NSA analyst turned whistleblower, explained that the leaks were from within due to the known download speed of the downloads, which matched a USB-connected thumb drive and not an outside source using the internet. Binney explains that had there been outside interference, the NSA would easily have been able to recognize it. So, if there was any external interference—which there was not, but for argument’s sake, we’ll pretend there was—why wouldn’t the NSA release such findings? This would be the very proof they need, right? Or did they choose not to share their findings because they know it will be self-incriminating, pointing inward to someone within the Deep State?

Claim #5: Carter Page was heavily involved in the conspiracy.

The dossier says claims that Carter Page had “conceived and promoted” the idea that the DNC emails to WikiLeaks should be leaked during the Democratic convention, “aimed at switching Sanders (protest) voters away from Clinton and over to Trump.”

The hacking began in 2015, when Page was not part of the Trump campaign. How could Page conceive this idea before his involvement with the campaign? It makes no logical sense. How then, for even a second, could the FBI even consider this claim as truth? After all, they were wiretapping and surveilling Page. They would know best.

Claim #6: Michael Cohen was a major player in the conspiracy.

According to the fabricated Christopher Steele Trump-Russia dossier, the claim was repeatedly made that Donald Trump’s corporate lawyer, Michael Cohen, a rough-and-tumble corporate lawyer from New York, had traveled to Prague.

He was allegedly there to meet with Russian agents on interference in the 2016 US elections.

The core allegation is that Cohen traveled to Prague and was allegedly said by Czech intelligence to have met with known Russian agents to elaborate a scheme and funding to interfere on behalf of his boss, Donald J. Trump, to secure the US election. The sourcing suggested it was coming from the Czech BIS.

Not only do they deny it, but also it turns out that Cohen has never been to Prague, or anywhere else in the Czech Republic for that matter. As his passport shows there is no record of his going there. And he has only one passport.

On the day Steele and his bogus sources say he was in Prague, Cohen, it turns out, was actually in Los Angeles with his son, playing baseball during college tryouts. USC and its coaching staff have confirmed this fact.

Now that dossier has, according to Cohen’s sworn Congressional testimony, been “riddled with fabrications” and uses unnamed and unverified sources. It also contains “blatant lies.”

54 Yglesias, Matthew and Prokop, Andrew. “The Steele dossier, explained.” Vox. 02 Feb 2018. https://www.vox.com/2018/1/5/16845704/steele-dossier-russia-trump

55 Kovalik, Dan. The Plot to Scapegoat Russia. Skyhorse Publishing. 2017.

56 Kovalik, Dan. The Plot to Scapegoat Russia. Skyhorse Publishing. 2017

57 McGovern, Ray. “The FBI Hand behind Russia-gate.” Consortium News. https://consortiumnews.com/2018/01/11/the-fbi-hand-behind-russia-gate/

39

THE FAULTINESS OF STEELE’S LOGIC

CLEARLY, AS WE’VE JUST SEEN, IT takes basic logic, using simple chronological timelines, to disprove the claims put forth by Steele in his dossier, which begs the question: how did he arrive at such misinformation?

It turns out Steele himself has not been in Russia for seventeen years and used third-hand, former KGB sources, and paid them to make up good stories. The problem is he never verified any of them either, nor did his employer Fusion GPS and the Democratic National Committee, who funded the opposition research.

Since its release, Steele now claims that some 70 percent of what he reported in the dossier is true. The question is, plainly, which 70 percent?

Since he did not verify the details, does he even know? He never went to Russia to collect the material himself and depended on his old networks of FSB agents in country.

Michael Cohen weighs in on Steele’s methods: “In my opinion, the hired spy didn’t find anything factual, so he threw together a shoddily written and totally fabricated report filled with lies and rumors.”⁵⁸

Cohen’s sentiment leads us to our next question: how, or more accurately why, would the FBI ever approve of such a clearly falsified document—a document that can be disproven with simple logic? Is it perhaps because the FBI was offering payment to Christopher Steele to corroborate his Trump-Russia connection?

On March 6, 2017, Chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary Charles Grassley sends a memo to James Comey with twelve pointed questions on the FBI’s handling, involvement, and contact with Steele and his dossier [See Appendix C].

Grassley is demanding answers, but will Comey have any?

58 Lucas, Ryan. “Senate Calls Trump Attorney In For Open Session After Reports About Closed One.” NPR. 19 Sep 2017. https://www.npr.org/2017/09/19/552041493/trump-confidante-rejects-any-collusion-in-russia-election-interference

40

THE FALSE DOGMA OF THE FBI

SINCE ANY RATIONAL, DISCERNING READER OF Steele’s dossier would immediately recognize its flawed logic, why then does the FBI find it to be accurate? Clearly, the FBI—along with the other Deep State constituents—already had their collective minds made up: Trump must go. It is now known that the FBI used the dossier to bolster its Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant targeting the early Trump campaign advisor Carter Page and others.

Trump threatens this Deep State. This is a mutual understanding. And we saw through Senator Schumer’s ominous warning to Trump about what will happen if he attempts to stand in their way. But, as he’s said so many times throughout his campaign, Trump’s plan is to drain this swamp. Knowing this, the FBI understands that in order to take down a man with this much gumption, they’ll need to dig deep, collecting as much dirt on him as possible, even if it is phony intel, while they steady their aim and place him in their crosshairs.

So, when the contents of the dossier were shared across the intelligence communities and given to both President Obama and his key lieutenants, these bodies knew that they had some potentially heavy arsenal in their hands to work with—they just had to package, manipulate, and execute it carefully. President-elect Trump was also later briefed on them, albeit two months later, which is questionable and disconcerting in its own right.

In an attempt to save face, the CIA comments on their delay to relay the sensitive information to Trump: “Rather, after considerable thought and discussion, DNI Clapper and the heads of the FBI, CIA, and NSA decided that because the dossier was circulating among Members of Congress and the media, it was important to warn the President-elect of its existence.”⁵⁹

And yet, more curiously, the CIA Deputy Robert Morell, who would have become head of the agency had Clinton won the election, says, “On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians here, there is smoke, but there is no fire, at all. There’s no little campfire, there’s no little candle, and there’s no spark. And there’s a lot of people looking for it.”

Morell points out that during an interview on Meet the Press, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that he had seen no evidence of a conspiracy when he left office January 20.

“That’s a pretty strong statement by General Clapper,”⁶⁰ Morell concluded.

Despite this, the story continues to run on no legs, being propped up precariously by the mainstream media, especially CNN, whose attention remains fixated on Steele and his juicy dossier.

And in regard to the dossier itself and any information of the like, Morell pointedly says, “Unless you know the sources, and unless you know how a particular source acquired a particular piece of information, you can’t judge the information—you just can’t.”

Had anyone at CNN read the dossier to verify Steele’s audacious claims? Doubtful.

59 Bertrand, Natasha. “Former intel official: Trump-Russia dossier ‘played no role’ in our analysis of Russian meddling.” Business Insider. 27 Oct 2017. http://www.businessinsider.com/robert-litt-says-dossier-played-no-role-in-intel-community-russia-assessment-2017-10

60 Dilanian, Ken. “Clinton Ally Says Smoke, But No Fire: No Russia-Trump Coll-usion.” NBC News. 16 Mar 2017. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/clinton-ally-says-smoke-no-fire-no-russia-trump-collusion-n734176

41

WIDENING THE NET: PAUL MANAFORT AND RICK GATES

IN ATTEMPT TO RILE UP MORE anti-Russia hysteria and to prove their already drawn conclusion, Special Counsel Robert Mueller widens his investigation in attempt to connect Trump to Russia. Since he knows he can’t reel in the biggest catch, he goes after others caught in his dragnet: Paul Manafort and Rick Gates.

Manafort, the lobbyist and political consultant, served as Trump’s campaign manager from June through August of 2016. Manafort was a lead partner and co-founder of the renowned Washington, DC lobbying firm of Black, Manafort & Stone (BMS). He is tasked with getting Trump the delegates needed to secure the Republican nomination. Manafort had served almost every other Republican presidential campaign in recent memory and was most familiar with the processes and rules to get over the top.

Most of Manafort’s clients were what are called “pariahs.”

He lobbied and worked for Victor Yankovych of Ukraine, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, DRC dictator Mobutu, Angolan guerilla leader Jonas Savimbi, and the Kashmiri Council, which was funded by Pakistan.

Under investigation by numerous federal agencies for his dealings in Ukraine, the FBI counterintelligence probe into Russia’s influence on the 2016 election indicted Manafort.

He surrendered to the FBI on October 30, 2017, and was released from house arrest with a gag order, after the grand jury on thirty-two counts found him a person of interest. His longtime business associate and deputy when Manafort was Trump’s campaign manager, Rick Gates, was also indicted and arrested.

Manafort is charged with laundering money, failure to report foreign bank accounts, being an unregistered agent of a foreign principal or government, false and misleading testimony, and filing false FARA (Foreign Agent Registration Act) statements.

Noticeably missing from the long list of charges is any “collusion” with the Russian government or influencing in any fashion the 2016 election.

Again, what we have here is Mueller attempting to take down peripheral people who come in contact with Trump in an attempt to prove guilt by association. But his logic is deeply flawed and, surely, Mueller will continue on his fool’s errand attempting to find collusion where there is none. Despite this, the media and public eat this story up. But with a taste for this Russian connection, Mueller knows they’ll be asking for seconds in no time. What will he have to offer them?

42

ROD ROSENSTEIN: FRIEND OR FOE?

MUELLER’S INVESTIGATION WAS MADE POSSIBLE BY one man who ultimately greenlit the project and gave Mueller carte blanche: Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General of the United States Department of Justice. He is its Number Two.

Though a relatively unknown figure until recently, he is not unimportant. Rather timid and mild-mannered, Rosenstein does not look authoritative in either appearance or tone. A longtime DOJ employee, Rosenstein was previously US Attorney for the District of Maryland—where he in fact served in the position longer than any of his predecessors. President Trump appointed him as deputy to Attorney General Sessions and the US Senate confirmed him only in April of 2017.

Rosenstein came into the public’s eye quickly after Jeff Sessions recused himself on all Russia matters.

Rosenstein authored the memo which Trump used to dismiss FBI Director James Comey, in which he asserts that the FBI must have “a Director who understands the gravity of the mistakes and pledges never to repeat them.” He ends with an argument against keeping Comey as FBI director, on the grounds that he was given an opportunity to “admit his errors” but that there is no hope that he will “implement the necessary corrective actions.” [See Appendix D]

Most critically, however, Rosenstein was the one who appointed Robert Mueller as Special Counsel to investigate the Trump campaign interaction and possible collusion with Russia during the 2016 election. [See Appendix E]

Rosenstein has come under close scrutiny and is now in the cross- hairs.

Did he cover up malfeasance in the Department? We know he extended the notorious FISA Court warrants used to perform surveillance on the Trump team.

Curiously, in December 2017, Rosenstein testifies before the House Judiciary Committee for an oversight hearing on Capitol Hill. During the testimony, Representative Ron DeSantis asks Rosenstein if the FBI paid for the Russia dossier, to which he replies, “I’m not in a position to answer that question.” DeSantis follows up: “Do you know the answer to the question?” To which Rosenstein replies, “I believe I know the answer, but the Intelligence Committee is the appropriate committee …”

Rosenstein’s dodging during the line of questioning makes us wonder: whose team is he on?

In the same House committee hearing, Rosenstein, a registered Republican, said “Nobody has asked me to take a loyalty pledge, other than the oath of office.”

Called a prosecutor not a persecutor, by a lawyer friend, is Rosenstein a “by the book” kind of lawyer?

He did think that Comey “broke the rules.”

Was he used by Trump or is Trump frustrated by him now that the goods are out on him?

Does he protect his pals in the Deep State because he is really one of them?

43

RETRACING STEELE’S STEPS

WE KNOW THAT THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL Committee and the Clinton campaign—using Fusion GPS and the law firm Perkins Coie to funnel the money—financed the dossier. This money eventually went to Christopher Steele in the UK and his intelligence firm, Orbis Business, which made repeated payments to his Russian sources to dish out material on Trump.

The whole process, as we know, was polluted and involved a pay-to-play scheme wherein the “sources” knowingly made up stories to simply get paid more. The more they made up the more they got paid. And the FBI itself allegedly paid Steele, who they knew well and had paid before as an informant. In his dossier, Steele lists his sources as “A, B, C, D, and E.” So, exactly who are these sources? A tragic incident and revelation would soon add a dark twist to Steele’s organization. On March 4, 2018, former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found slumped on a bench in Salisbury, England —the apparent victims of poisoning by an extremely deadly nerve agent called Novichok. Allegations abound that Skripal was close to an unnamed person at Orbis.⁶¹ Who is this unnamed person, and how close might they have been?

Might Skripal have been a source?

Steele vaguely suggests his sources’ backgrounds, but provides no way to ascertain their complete identities or motivations.

So, how then did the FBI use this skimpy, unverified dossier to request secret court authorization to spy on Americans and Carter Page?

61 Martin, Séamus. “Unlikely that Vladimir Putin behind Skripal poisoning.” The Irish Times. 14 Mar 2018. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/unlikely-that-vladimir-putin-behind-skripal-poisoning-1.3425736)

44

FISA WARRANT

OBTAINING A FISA WARRANT TO SURVEIL or wiretap a person is by no means easy to obtain. An agent needs to go to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) or FISA court, which consists of a tribunal of eleven members, all federal judges, whose actions are carried out in secret. So, in order to obtain a warrant of this nature, it needs to be approved by this community of eleven, which further begs the question, who was working inside this Deep State to convince them to get a FISA warrant on Carter Page based on Steele’s dossier? No rational judge would do this who actually read Steele’s compilation.

FISA is the acronym for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which went into force in 1979.

This federal law provides procedures for the surveillance, both physical and electronic, of foreign intelligence information by foreign powers suspected of espionage or terrorism.

The Act utilizes special courts to request such surveillance warrants.

Growing out of President Nixon’s tendency to spy on his enemies—political and activist groups—the Act was created to bring judicial and congressional oversight over the government’s covert surveillance of foreign entities and individuals in the United States.

The Act is fashioned to allow both secrecy and security.

Understanding how the FISA application runs on secrecy, and the fact that FBI agents like Peter Strzok have a knack for falsifying reports and letters for investigation, is it possible that he worked on the application to insure approval of the warrant? Could his secret lover, Lisa Page, be involved? And what about the Ohrs? Just who was behind all this nefarious activity in the Deep State?

Falsifying documents and warrant approvals is no small infraction, and is reason for great concern for the American public.

45

FISA-GATE

IN HIS TOWNHALL ARTICLE, “WHY FISA-GATE Is Scarier Than Watergate,” Victor Hanson writes, “We are now in the midst of a third great modern scandal. Members of the Obama administration’s Department of Justice sought court approval for the surveillance of Carter Page, allegedly for colluding with Russian interests, and extended the surveillance three times.”⁶²

Hanson then explains how none of these government officials told FISC that their warrant requests were based on Steele’s dossier, which was clearly a “hit piece” on Trump, directly funded by the Clinton campaign. And how these same officials failed to mention the fact that Steele and his dossier had been dismissed by the FBI for obvious lack of credibility as a source. These same officials also failed to mention that DOJ official Bruce Ohr had personally met with Steele and that his wife Nellie was hired by Fusion GPS to work on the dossier.

This pattern of recklessness and blatant disregard for standard government procedure is exactly how this Deep State functions. And to be sure, like many tactics and operations in American government, this isn’t new—it’s simply a heightened version of a Deep State past, a collective group armed with more technological warfare. And with the rise of instant messaging and broadcast, everything is caught on tape, able to be shared with all the world—the same way David Corn broke the Mitt Romney “47 percent” video. Nothing is off limits now. And this dangerous game is played by both sides, internally and externally.

James Baker, the FBI’s General Counsel, leaked the Steele dossier to David Corn, knowing full well that the dossier was pure smut. What we have here are government officials engaging in dirty tricks and politicizing their own agendas in favor of one candidate and against another.

And yet, when a former or even current government employee speaks out against this machine, they’re immediately branded as whistleblowers—disloyal and treasonous citizens who ought to be shamed, not lauded for their courage and outspoken actions. Just look at William Binney, the former NSA analyst of twenty-five years, who spoke out about the breadth and illegality of the NSA’s surveillance of the American public. Or Edward Snowden, who lives in hiding just like Julian Assange. What led to this shift in the way we view whistleblowers?

62 Hanson, Victor Davis. “Why FISA-gate Is Scarier Than Watergate.” TownHall. 8 Feb 2018. https://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2018/02/08/why-fisagate-is-scarier-than-watergate-n2445740

46

THE DECLINE OF THE FOURTH ESTATE

ENSHRINED IN THE FIRST AMENDMENT IS a principle that protects what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said, “Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.” However, depending on the survey, an average of only 35 percent of Americans can name the three branches of government, and only around four in ten can name a right protected by the First Amendment. There should be no surprise then that although “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” our press today is somewhat compromised.

The concept of the Fourth Estate suggests that beyond the checks and balances of those three branches of government, there exists an unhindered sentinel against chaos and tyranny, guarding truth and democracy and keeping watch over those who might abuse power.

Have our media ever been fully unhindered or untethered from influence or manipulation? We’d like to believe so, but reality throughout history has proven otherwise as national priorities and security interests have at times supplanted full media independence. However, the sentinel remained vigilant and tried its best to speak truth to power.

The Radio Act of 1927 established that the Federal Radio Commission and its FCC successor should only issue broadcast licenses when ensured that the public interest is served. In 1949 the FCC expanded the mandate to mean that licensees should include discussions of matters of public importance in their broadcasts and should do so in a fair manner.

TV and radio stations with FCC-issued broadcast licenses were required to devote some of their programming to issues of public importance and allow airing of opposing views on those issues.

Enter the present day and a media atmosphere where the truth is relative and subject to financial interests, power agendas, and manipulation. What happened?

In 1987, under the Clinton administration, the FCC revoked the Fairness Doctrine. With revocation came not only less regulation and more broadcaster freedom, but also more and more opportunities to fix programming to a particular ideological perspective.

Going one step further, the Obama administration opened the door to a genie that might be difficult to contain as opportunities for abuse by future presidents are plenty. Using the 1917 Espionage Act to prosecute more whistleblowers and leakers than all prior administrations combined, the administration was able to go after phone records and emails of a mix of reporters, including James Risen from the New York Times, who faced a jail sentence if he didn’t reveal a government source—he didn’t.

Whistleblowers like Thomas Drake, a senior executive at the National Security Agency, who was prosecuted when he decided to take his allegations to the press after efforts to alert superiors and Congress to what he saw as illegal activities, waste, and mismanagement at the NSA led nowhere.

Upon entering office, Barack Obama took the position that whistleblowing by government employees was an act “of courage and patriotism” that “should be encouraged rather than stifled.” However, by the end of his administration, he brought more leak prosecutions than all previous presidential administrations combined.

Freedom of speech and of the press is taking on a capricious nature.

47

DEEP STATE 2.0

WITH THIS NEW DEEP STATE 2.0, there is a strange cultural shift that occurred almost overnight within the government and in the mentality of many Americans. Steele’s dossier, which we know was false, was released to the public without any verification. Now, as other memos and information are slated to be released, all of a sudden, the FBI and other intelligence agencies, a majority of the media—and of course, liberals—are now opposed to the disclosure of public documents. These governmental bodies and media heads are, as Victor Hanson notes, “siding with those in the government who disingenuously sought surveillance to facilitate the efforts of a political campaign.”

And it is Dennis Bernstein who best points out the paradoxical nature of this shift in ideological stance from the left:

A changing-places moment brought about by Russia-gate is that liberals who are usually more skeptical of US intelligence agencies, especially their evidence-free claims, now question the patriotism of Americans who insist that the intelligence community supply proof to support the dangerous claims about Russian “hacking” of Democratic emails especially when some veteran US government experts say the data would be easily available if the Russians indeed were guilty.⁶³

This shift likely was able to occur because of the Deep State’s calculated agenda to subvert Trump and minimize his character. In doing so, a majority of the public, through the media’s warped projection of Trump, thinks he is this buffoon clowning around the White House, a trigger-happy tweeter with one hand on his phone and the other on his nuclear red button. And his so-called peers, too, are working against him to perpetuate this myth and weaken his character.

When Obama was in office, he expressed a distrust toward the Deep State and yet his administration weaponized the IRS and surveilled the Associated Press communications.

So what accounts for this change in ethos?

Is it because Obama, the progressive constitutional lawyer, didn’t fit this right-wing authoritarian bill attempting to subvert the DOJ and other agencies? Is this why Comey, an Obama appointee, is so unwilling to conduct a proper investigation into Hillary Clinton’s hard drives that she wiped? Or the fact that she paid Steele to produce opposition research on Trump that was unverified?

Does Comey know that Hillary is simply untouchable?

Ultimately, without verification, what is the worth of so-called “intelligence”? Why would the FBI be so interested? Why would they run with it?

Who was running the FBI? Could there be a cabal in the FBI?

63 Bernstein, Dennis. “The Still-Missing Evidence of Russia-Gate.” Consortium News. 01 Jan 2018. https://consortiumnews.com/2018/01/01/the-still-missing-evidence-of-russia-gate/

48

THE STRZOK-PAGE TEXT MESSAGES

ON FEBRUARY 7, 2018, PRESIDENT TRUMP tweets in all caps: “NEW FBI TEXTS ARE BOMBSHELLS!” His tweet refers to the release of Peter Strzok’s messages and correspondences with his lover, fellow FBI agent Lisa Page. The text messages are the tangible proof that Trump had been looking for—evidence that Strzok and Page, two FBI agents, two government officials were working together, as an extension of this Deep State, in a coordinated plot to keep him from winning the presidency. Though Trump had great cause for celebration, one still has to question the motivation of the FBI’s release. Typically, during an ongoing investigation of this sort, there is no reason to make such information public. Trump and his team are elated they did; however, they certainly must be wary of what moves the FBI has planned down the line? Is this some sort of trap? Or a distraction?

And why did the FBI release only 375 of the 10,000 text messages? When can the American public see the remaining 9,625 messages?

Why does the FBI pick and choose who and what they will properly investigate? Is there a method to their madness?

49

THE UNTOUCHABLES: HILLARY CLINTON AND BARACK OBAMA

WITH THE RECENT RELEASE OF THE Strzok-Page text messages, perhaps this helps us better understand why James Comey gives up on his investigation of Hillary Clinton and the 30,000 emails that she had scrubbed from her server. Is it because he knew that they were too big a fish to fry? Is that why he tasked FBI agent Peter Strzok to change the language and rhetoric of his initial draft letter in which Strzok relays his findings on his investigation into Clinton’s use of personal emails?

Remember, Strzok had originally reported that Clinton’s actions were “grossly negligent” and that this alone should warrant an investigation. However, upon receiving Strzok’s report, Comey asks him to adjust the wording to “extremely careless.” Clearly, Comey does this for two reasons: He knows that the political powerhouses like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are untouchable, with enough political clout to destroy and mow down anyone who stands in their path. Therefore, Comey wouldn’t dare risk his reputation and career trying to take down such big fish. So, with his conclusion regarding the potential investigation already set in his mind, Comey tasks Strzok to change the language of his report so Comey can come back to the press and his other investigative bodies claiming that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring charges based on available evidence.

Will Mueller’s investigation on Trump and his alleged nefarious connection to Russia highlight the FBI’s favoritism?

Victor Hanson comments on the paradoxes presented by Mueller’s investigation:

Investigating any possible crimes committed by members of the Clinton campaign or the Obama administration is taboo, given the exalted status of both. But every time Mueller seeks to find incidental wrongdoing by those around Trump, he only makes the case stronger that those involved in the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration should be investigated…If such matters are not treated in an unbiased manner, we are not a nation of equality under the law, but a banana republic masquerading as a democracy.⁶⁴

Hanson is absolutely right. In playing favorites, the FBI threatens the sanctity of our democratic processes.

64 Hanson, Victor Davis. “The Paradoxes of the Mueller Investigation.” Townhall. 22 Feb 2018. https://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2018/02/22/the-paradoxes-of-the-mueller-investigation-n2452240

50

CABAL AT THE FBI

THE FBI, AS WE NOW KNOW, was given the first installment of the dossier as early as July 2016 and got additional chapters as they were developed. That timing suggests a long enough period for the FBI to verify and find the dossier either credible or not.

The FBI is supposed to be a safeguard of good government and the protector of the rule of law. It is the nation’s federal police force, and therefore it should not be tainted, corruptible, or biased. It should be objective, fair, honest, and trustworthy. The public depends on it.

As a result of its politicization, however, the FBI itself has earned a tarnished reputation and has lost much of its former credibility.

The former Director of the FBI, James Comey, whom President Trump would later fire, stuck his foot in his mouth often and exercised so much bad judgment during his tenure in office that he brought down the agency with him.

He was swayed by politics and became a maligned figure in both Republican and Democratic circles. The President early in his tenure decided he “had to go” for poor judgment and because of bias and insubordination. At times, it appeared Comey had put his large figure above the law and had a higher esteem for his own notoriety than for the agency he ran. He most certainly was not the embodiment of “ethical leadership” he claimed.

Comey allowed leaks in his time at the FBI and admitted under oath that he himself leaked. The agency became a literal sieve during his directorship.

It also became a hotbed of utter and complete partisanship.

Indeed, there were many, perhaps a “society,” of anti-Trump FBI agents coordinating against his election and against his very presidency. There also developed a cabal of pro-Clinton FBI agents, like worker bees protecting the queen, who sought to protect her at all costs and manipulated policy and inquiries to benefit her and her campaign.

This group sidelined evidence, frustrated investigations, and contrived to condemn Trump and his advisors while hiding, and perhaps destroying, emails and memos regarding Clinton’s own emails and illegal server. They also destroyed or lost emails and texts of those agents who were working to support her, as evidenced in recently uncovered text messages.

The former Assistant Director of the FBI, James Kallstrom, said in a radio interview with John Catsimatidis that he believed behind the scenes there was a “fifth column conspiracy” in the bureau determined to defeat Trump.

Was there a felony involved? Was this small cabal inside the FBI a devious Deep State? Were they working of their own accord or tied to some higher power? Were they James Comey sycophants?

“This whole thing with Russia is just a farce,” Kallstrom said, adding: “If we find out that that phony [Russian dossier] was brought to the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in the form of an affidavit for a judge’s authority, and if we find out that the people signing that affidavit in the bureau knew that that was phony information, that is indeed a serious felony.”⁶⁵

Yet, in the words of one anonymous agent quoted by the left-wing UK Guardian newspaper, some FBI personnel see Clinton as “the anti-Christ,” and “the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.” The FBI, the agent said, “is Trumpland.”

Which is it? Was the FBI pro-Trump? Or pro-Clinton?

And why is it that it was either?

Was there truly a “secret society” of agents actively working to depose the elected president? This went beyond resistance and it involved proactive measures.

They call that treason.

65 James Kallstrom interviewed on radio by host, John Catsimatidis, on Cat’s Roundtable. 10 Dec 2017. https://omny.fm/shows/cats-interviews/12-10-17-james-kallstrom

51

BRUCE & NELLIE OHR: TAKE 2

AS NEW INFORMATION CONTINUES TO POUR in from the House Intelligence Committee about what exactly the FBI knew, what they claim they didn’t know, and what they intentionally kept hidden from the public, consider these new revelations about FBI agent Nellie Ohr and her husband Bruce Ohr, the FBI agent contracted by Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS. It turns out the Nellie was more than just an extra hand here, another point-of-contact for Fusion. In fact, it seems that she may have had a heavy hand in the creation of the dossier. In a memo released by the House Intelligence Committee, Nellie Ohr was “employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump.” The memo continues to detail how Bruce Ohr “later provided the FBI with all of his wife’s opposition research.” So, what exactly was Nellie’s role? Is she no longer this peripheral figure as we previously assumed? Is she at the heart of our hunt for Red November? Could Nellie have been right in the middle, the one actually completing the research for Steele?

A larger question looms: when and how did the FBI learn that Nellie worked for Fusion GPS? And why did they stall to release this information?

More curiously, new information has been leaked regarding Bruce. As we know, he met with Glenn Simpson before the election, but now it seems he also met with Simpson after the election. Why? Was it to get their story straight after Clinton lost? Or was it to recalibrate their plot to subvert President Trump?

52

MEDIA DISTRACTION

IN THE AFTERMATH OF STEELE’S DOSSIER going viral online around the world and becoming the centerpiece for water-cooler gossip in DC, one has to wonder, could this all be just a distraction from something more serious?

In a news analysis published in the Guardian, Cas Mudde, an associate professor at the University of Georgia, reports on the absurdity of Mueller’s investigation and goes so far to call it all a “farce.” Mudde writes that “the Russia-Trump collusion story might be the talk of the town in Washington, but this is not the case in much of the rest of the country.”⁶⁶ As with most narcissistic politicians in DC, they like to bump their own gums and surround themselves with stories about themselves. But, as Daniel Lazare reports for Consortium News, “Out in flyover country, rather, Americans can’t figure out why the political elite is more concerned with a nonexistent scandal than with things that really count, i.e. de-industrialization, infrastructure decay, the opioid epidemic, and school shootings.”⁶⁷ Lazare is right: in the months following the 2016 election and Trump’s upset, a major rift in America was exposed. All these pundits, polling officials, mainstream media talking heads—and even Hillary Clinton—all thought that what was important to them in DC and other major metropolitan areas was exactly what was important to the rest of the country—as if the minority spoke for the majority of America. And look how wrong they were with all their predictions for who would win the election. Now, look how out of touch they are assuming that the entire American population cares about this Russia-gate story. Sure, there is a large portion of people who do care about it—but they care about it because the media tells them to care about it.

Lazare explains the danger in this type of thinking: “As society disintegrates, the only thing the Democrats have accomplished with all their blathering about Russkis under the bed is to demonstrate just how cut off from the real world they are.”⁶⁸

Again, Lazare hits it right on the head. But who’s to blame? The media, the public, or the intelligence committees? Perhaps it’s a combination of all three.

66 Mudde, Cas. “Democrats beware: the Trump-Russia inquiry isn’t the path to power.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/21/trump-russia-mueller-investigation-democrats

67 Lazare, Daniel. “The Mueller Indictments. The Day the Music Died.” Consortium News. 24 Feb 2018. https://consortiumnews.com/2018/02/24/the-mueller-indictments-the-day-the-music-died/?print=print

68 Ibid.

53

US MEDDLING IN ELECTIONS

PERHAPS THIS DISTRACTION IS TO SHIFT the blame away from ourselves to free ourselves from culpability. It seems the motto within these intelligence communities can be best summed up as “Do as we say, not as we do.”

Did Russia intervene in the US election? Very plausible, and more and more apparent with each passing day that yes indeed, they did. Causing disruption and confusion aligns with their earlier noted agenda to encourage the demise of the West.

Americans are justified in their anger at alleged interference with the very bedrock of their democratic process. However, a mirror is called for. The reflection, not so pretty.

In a 2016 NPR interview with Carnegie Mellon University researcher Doc Levin, Ari Shapiro opens the conversation: “This is hardly the first time a country has tried to influence the outcome of another country’s election. The US has done it, too, by [Doc Levin’s] count, more than 80 times worldwide between 1946 and 2000.”⁶⁹ This is not counting US orchestrated coups as in Iran in 1953 or in Guatemala in 1954. Levin estimates that Russia or the Soviet Union have tried to alter the outcome of elections around thirty-six times between those same years.

Levin and Shapiro go on to discuss whether US promotion of democracy and democratic values conflicts with election intervention. They conclude that it depends on whether the objective is to help the pro-democratic side or the less-than-savory side.

Imperatives such as geopolitical and strategic national interests, for example during the Cold War, factor into the equation. Richard Nixon’s national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, said about Chile in 1970, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

Speaking with the New York Times, Loch K. Johnson, regents professor, author, and editor of the journal Intelligence and National Security, said, “We’ve been doing this kind of thing since the CIA was created in 1947. We’ve used posters, pamphlets, mailers, banners—you name it. We’ve planted false information in foreign newspapers. We’ve used what the British call ‘King George’s cavalry’: suitcases of cash.”⁷⁰

The difference today is that new digital or cyber tools are employed along with the old-school espionage techniques and operations.

69 Doc Levin interviewed on radio by host, Ari Shapiro. “Database Tracks History of US Meddling in Foreign Elections.” All Things Considered, NPR. 22 Dec. 2016. https://www.npr.org/2016/12/22/506625913/database-tracks-history-of-u-s-meddling-in-foreign-elections

70 Shane, Scott. “Russia Isn’t The Only One Meddling in Elections. We Do It, Too.” The New York Times. 17 Feb 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/sunday-review/russia-isnt-the-only-one-meddling-in-elections-we-do-it-too.html

54

PERPETUATING MYTHS AND “FAKE NEWS”

NOT ONLY IS A MAJORITY OF the mainstream media out of touch with what the public cares about, but the journalists themselves are out of touch with what real journalism is. Following Trump’s victory, media outlets across the political spectrum abandoned any semblance of journalistic integrity and engaged in a race to the bottom in an attempt to delegitimize his presidency even before it began.

And could we expect anything less from them? These are the same people who read Christopher Steele’s dossier, likely saw it for what it was—pure trash, political smearing at its worst—and decided to forgo any basic firsthand research to verify its authenticity, accepted it as truth, and then passed this information along to the public, who, rightfully so, assumed it was truth. After all, as we’ve seen with the so-called experts at CrowdStrike, why shouldn’t we believe them? They’re the ones looking at the data, analyzing and interpreting the reports to synthesize for us, the laymen. The public shouldn’t have to discern between fact and fiction, between technical jargon and governmental gobbledygook, or between real news and fake news.

These are the very reasons we have specialized experts like lawyers who can interpret the obfuscated language of the law, which is intentionally designed to prevent the layman from understanding it and simply representing themselves in the court of law. If we could decipher this judiciary code, this so-called legalese, then surely we wouldn’t be subjected to the steep costs of hiring a lawyer for protection.

This same logic applies to government officials and representatives of the media. They are meant to serve as buffers, protectors of our democracy. They are the ones paid to sift through the information and weed out the fake news. Yet, in an ironic twist of fate, the ones who once protected us against fake news are now the ones perpetuating these myths and untruths. Which begs the question: do we even need them anymore?

With social networks becoming embedded into our everyday lives, where news travels not by ink on the page, but in 140 digital characters, political figureheads, the Donald Trumps of the world, can now reach the general public in an instant, cutting out the middleman journalist.

As we’ve seen with Trump’s explosive Twitter account, these journalists have been upended and the efficacy of their practice has been questioned. They’re angry, and rightfully so. Trump has threatened their very existence and the necessity of their profession. But Trump overrides them with the click of the button. This new form of instant-gratification news will likely be the only tool to challenge and correct this decline in journalism.

55

CONGRESSIONAL WITCH HUNT

DURING HIS METEORIC RISE TO THE presidency, Trump became a prime target from all media, receiving unfair, biased treatment from journalists and reporters and members of Congress, but none more disparaging than from the left, particularly the New York Times and CNN, who already had their minds set on him and his plans for presidency. Ray McGovern captures the biased mindset of the mainstream media from the start:

It didn’t even seem to matter when new Russia-gate disclosures conflicted with the original narrative that Putin had somehow set Trump up as a Manchurian candidate. All normal journalistic skepticism was jettisoned. It was as if the Russia-gate advocates started with the conclusion that Trump must go and then made the facts fit into that mold, but anyone who noted the violations of normal investigative procedures was dismissed as a “Trump enabler” or a “Moscow stooge.”⁷¹

It should be clear by now just how dangerous this type of hivemind thinking can be, especially when it begins with the media, the ones who are, by definition, meant to be unbiased and simply present the facts. But long gone are the days of neutrality. This groupthink mentality doesn’t end with the media; it reverberates outward to the American public, creating a further divide among individuals who exist in their own political echo chambers. On both sides we have talking heads simply projecting their opinions, which confirms their viewers’ positions and reaffirms the protection of their echo chambers. And yet, if we step away from it, looking at a distance, we see two wildly different stories. The responsibility is now on the individual to decide what is real and what is fake, or to decide what they want to believe or deny. It’s like a Rorschach test where the patient sees what they want to see. This is a dangerous exercise from the mainstream media that threatens American democracy and further exacerbates this rift between DC and the rest of the country.

71 McGovern, Ray. “The FBI Hand Behind Russia-gate.” Consortium News. 11 Jan 2018. https://consortiumnews.com/2018/01/11/the-fbi-hand-behind-russia-gate/

56

THE EVOLUTION OF FAKE NEWS

SO HOW DID WE REACH THIS point? Where journalism is no longer about presenting fact-checked news, but rather presenting ad hominem attacks on political figures. Surely the media hasn’t always been this slanted, disregarding facts and truth for unverified gossip. For instance, CNN, or what many conservatives jokingly refer to as the “Clinton News Network,” didn’t start out that way.

Founded in 1980 by Ted Turner, the flamboyant entrepreneur with a pencil mustache resting above his upper lip and Jane Fonda clinging to his his arm, CNN originally was a mega-radio station based in sleepy Atlanta, labeled the “Mouth of the South.”

Evolving over time and making the switch to television broadcasting, CNN’s reputation took off during the Gulf War in 1990, through their extensive coverage and reporting from the scene with the live feed of troops in Baghdad.

Quickly, Turner gained raw media power and became the most powerful news outlet on cable television. CNN was on 24/7 worldwide, so you couldn’t escape it. Though it had a reputation for flamboyance and in-your-face journalism, it was anything but phony.

However, during the Bush years, CNN drifted politically to the left as Turner was highly critical of US policy. As his personal politics began going beyond his person, Turner and his ego became increasingly more controversial.

When his parent company, Time Warner, made a deal with AOL, Turner got squeezed out, losing his once-tight control over CNN and its direction.

Over the ensuing years, to recuperate from their losses, CNN commercialized and tried to extend its coverage, shows, and bureaus, but it was soon handicapped and faced new competitors, like Fox News, who had a much more conservative approach. Perhaps to overcompensate for their rival’s conservative views, CNN took an even sharper turn left, to cater to their dwindling viewership.

CNN brought in Jeff Zucker to bend its programming even more to the left and to also compete with MSNBC, a subsidiary of the larger NBC, which was overtly leftist and exclusively Democrat in its outlook, favoring Obama and his entire thrust.

It was therefore inevitable that CNN would be one-sided in the 2016 election.

It had backed Clinton so strongly that claims of bias were abundant. It never took the Trump campaign seriously, instead ridiculing him and his followers on both the nightly news and all their various hosted programs and panel shows.

The panels were particularly biased with a normal four Clintonistas versus one Trump surrogate per show. And panelists themselves were outrageous and not only opinionated but bigoted and often mocking of Trump and his ideas, hair, color, and rallies.

But it wasn’t just CNN attacking Trump. The majority of left-leaning outlets, following in the shadows of CNN, approached their so-called journalism in the same way: as a personal attack. The Huffington Post dragged Trump and his character through the mud. The Washington Post didn’t hold back any personal punches, either. And, of course, the New York Times did the same. But it didn’t stop at just the media outlets. Even search engines like Google and Yahoo were in on the muckraking. We see that for example at Google, when the Trump campaign put out a press release it was marked as “Promotion.” When the Hillary Clinton campaign put out a press release it was marked as “Update.”

An analysis of the mainstream networks and CNN during the 2016 election empirically showed what was self-evident. The bias was extraordinary: 95 percent of mainstream media was pro-Clinton and anti-Trump.

In true Trump fashion, however, he fought back in a comedic way. Armed with his explosive Twitter account, Trump created the “Fake News Awards” and, through tweets, awarded CNN with four out of his eleven awards. To date, undoubtedly, this is CNN’s greatest accomplishment.

Though clearly in jest, there is a grave danger with all this new media and the degradation of journalism, which has evolved into what we now know as Fake News.

Like most trends, this isn’t a new invention; it’s a cyclical crutch that media and government rely on to advance an agenda, to perpetuate propaganda, and spread disinformation. Dating back to ancient times, fake news is just the modern reincarnation of what’s previously been termed “misinformation” or “yellow journalism” to single out a few. Regardless of its nomenclature, this type of news is dangerous. Marc Antony, the Roman general, killed himself because of misinformation.

Though an extreme example, the danger of fake news is its increasingly difficult nature to spot and separate from real news.

Take for instance, the comedic routines featured on Saturday Night Live. SNL is not news, rather an attempt at funny political satire, even if most of it is anti-Trump in nature. Similarly, the Onion is a satirical political newspaper. These two media forms don’t pretend to be true and factual representations of the news. Though they do project an agenda and opinion, it’s easily discernible.

However, shows like Jake Tapper’s State of the Union and Becky Anderson’s Connect the World on CNN are not comedies. They parade, as do other shows like them, as real news. When in fact, they are not. They push their own opinions, and opinions are not facts. They push an agenda. That agenda is a globalist liberal agenda.

It’s a dangerous, slippery slope we’re sliding down, where opinion is being misconstrued as fact and disguised as news. The end result is undoubtedly dire. Yet, is there reason to remain hopeful? Hopeful that somehow we can correct and recalibrate this decline in journalism?

57

SLEEPER AGENTS: RUSSIAN TROLLS

A MAJOR FOCUS OF THE MEDIA’S attention is on the use of Russian trolls that supposedly swung the election in favor of Trump. Had any decent journalist looked into these trolls and how they were operating? Or did they just assume they were negative forces because of the negative connotation associated with the name troll and the fact that it’s the Russians behind them?

One can only imagine that Vladimir Putin is sitting in his office, legs kicked up on his desk, laughing at the television as he watches the media stir up hysteria across America, reporting on how Russian interference influenced the outcome of the election using electronic trolls and bots to skew and spew data online. Some reports even explain how Russians pretending to be Americans were used as plants to rally support for the election. Sounds calculated and nefarious, right? Like some evil plan concocted in a secret Russian lair. Let’s look more closely at just what these trolls and bots were doing to better understand if and how they might have affected the outcome of the 2016 election.

A St. Petersburg based company called the Internet Research Agency (IRA) was sending trolls and bots across the internet and social media platforms for distortion and to generate support for both candidates. For instance, according to Sarah K. Burris for Raw Story, “they used the Facebook group ‘Being Patriotic’ to get Americans to organize small pro-Trump rallies that gave the illusion that Trump had volunteers all over the state.”⁷²

This doesn’t exactly sound illegal, now does it? Seems like the people duped by these trolls should have been more savvy.

The Washington Post reports that these trolls “did not ask the Americans to do or say anything they were not already doing, a sign of how effectively the Russian effort learned to echo Trump’s own campaign themes.”⁷³

Still, despite this instance of Trump-leaning support, Melissa Ryan, a Democratic social media marketing expert who tracks right-wing online activity, confirms this, saying, “The idea wasn’t necessarily to help one political party over another, but to sow as much discord as possible.”⁷⁴

“I was supporting Donald Trump anyway. I didn’t need persuading,” said lawyer Max Christiansen, who had volunteered to host an event from that same “Being Patriotic” Facebook group.⁷⁵

This attack does, however, highlight just how badly social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter were played by these Russian bots and trolls. It also shows that this wasn’t an orchestrated attempt by the Russians to tip the voting scale in Trump’s favor; it was merely an attempt to create chaos and add to the white noise on an already clogged media circuit. And despite social media execs like Mark Zuckerberg claiming that they’ll somehow magically fix this issue and rid their sites of bots and trolls, David Gerzof Richard, a communications professor at Emerson College, explains that “This is the new norm. It’s not going away.”

And despite the media’s tendency to project the use of trolls as just a tactic used by outsiders promoting a right-wing agenda, Paul Blumenthal reports on how the media startup company, Mic, cashed in on exploiting the social justice narrative: “The founders of Mic were trolls in the standard internet sense. They tapped into strong feelings and sentiments they didn’t necessarily share, and thus they reverse-engineered a briefly successful media operation out of the algorithmic preferences of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.”⁷⁶

Blumenthal goes on to explain how the company’s goals were like that of any other modern media startup: “to attract venture capital and advertising dollars.”

Rob Goldman, Facebook’s vice president of advertising, under intense scrutiny from his concerned users, defended his company on Twitter, writing, “The main goal of the Russian propaganda and misinformation effort is to divide America by using our institutions, like free speech and social media, against us. It has stoked fear and hatred amongst Americans. It is working incredibly well. We are quite divided as a nation.”⁷⁷

It’s clear that America is undoubtedly divided. However, as Blumenthal notes, “Americans didn’t need help from Russia to get there. What the Internet Research Agency did was enlist itself in the American culture war being waged across our social media platforms, with the platforms’ complicity if not outright encouragement.”⁷⁸

And considering that the Russians spent a total of $12 million on these trolls versus the nearly $2 billion combined budget of the campaigns, the term “interference” seems to be grossly misrepresented.

Again, what we have here are media platforms promoting agendas from both sides of the political spectrum to increase ad revenue and capital. This is nothing new.

The question now is how this tactic of trolling will affect upcoming elections.

And, knowing how benign these Russian bots and trolls turned out to be, does Mueller have anything to hinge his tenuous investigation on?

72 Burris, Sarah K. “Here’s how the Russian government trained online trolls to infiltrate your favorite social media and websties.” RawStory. 20 Feb 2018. https://www.rawstory.com/2018/02/heres-russian-government-trained-online-trolls-infiltrate-favorite-social-media-groups-websites/

73 Troianovski, Anton; Helderman, Rosalind S.; Nakashima, Ellen; Timberg, Craig. “The 21st-century Russian sleeper agent is a troll with an American accent.” Washington Post. 17 Feb 2018. www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/business/technology/the-21st-century-russian-sleeper-agent-is-a-troll-with-an-american-accent/2018/02/17/d024ead2-1404-11e8-8ea1-c1d91fcec3fe_story.html

74 Anderson, Mae. “Indictment says social media firms got played by Russian agents.” PBS News Hour. 17 Feb 2018. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/indictment-says-social-media-firms-got-played-by-russian-agents

75 Troianovski, Anton; Helderman, Rosalind S.; Nakashima, Ellen; Timberg, Craig. “The 21st-century Russian sleeper agent is a troll with an American accent.” Washington Post. 17 Feb 2018. www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/business/technology/the-21st-century-russian-sleeper-agent-is-a-troll-with-an-american-accent/2018/02/17/d024ead2-1404-11e8-8ea1-c1d91fcec3fe_story.html

76 Blumenthal, Paul. “Russian Trolls Used This One Weird Trick To Infiltrate Our Democracy. You’ll Never Believe Where They Learned It.” HuffPost. 28 Feb 2018. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/russian-trolls-internet-research-agency_us_5a96f8cae4b07dffeb6f3434

77 Kuchler, Hannah. “Facebook says Russia’s main goal is to divide US.” Financial Times. 18 Feb 2018. https://www.ft.com/content/f681fed6-144f-11e8-9376-4a6390addb44

78 Blumenthal, Paul. “Russian Trolls Used This One Weird Trick To Infiltrate Our Democracy. You’ll Never Believe Where They Learned It.” HuffPost. 28 Feb 2018. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/russian-trolls-internet-research-agency_us_5a96f8cae4b07dffeb6f3434

58

THE SECOND DOSSIER

ALL OF A SUDDEN, AT THE height of the Trump-Russia fear factory, appears, out of nowhere, a second dossier.

Yes, another dossier, just like the first.

A hack journalist wrote this memo, Cody Shearer, and it sets out all the same allegations that were in the original Steele document.

The controversial leftist activist is actually no journalist and most certainly not a member of the Intelligence Community.

But he is a Clintonite.

With no background whatsoever in espionage or intelligence, Shearer’s dossier was based on gathered gossip and inventions.

It was shared with the FBI in October 2016, it has been disclosed. They took it seriously. Seriously.

Who shared it with them?

This is too much—Christopher Steele did.

He handed it through an intermediary to the FBI because it corroborated his research on the seditious acts of Trump. Steele liked it because it reflected well on his own curious dossier. It did so because it was a ditto copy of everything he crammed into his false estimate.

Steele has now said that he “could not vouch for this new dossier’s veracity.” But he felt obligated to provide it to authorities as a copy and as an independent source.

Could he vouch for the veracity of his own concoction?

Is it likely that the second dossier came first? By that I mean was this Clinton political trick given to Steele who, using his MI6 hat, then made it to look like an intel product?

It was the same source. Steele himself—and his circle of informants—are the very sources.

The farcical “Golden Shower” in the Trump-Russia fantasy appears verbatim in both documents.

Shearer is a known hatchet man and a longtime part of the Clinton orbit. The DNC and the Clinton campaign both knew about the Shearer document and had a long appreciation for his “circle of private spies.”

The primary actor among them is the longtime Clinton confidant, a controversial figure in his own right, one Sidney Blumenthal.

Was this a desperate act by the left-wing cabal given its entire hubbub about Libya? Was it an attempt at false information to corroborate the original false flag?

Does the complete Shearer dossier even really exist? Or was it the invention of the left-wing British newspaper the Guardian, in order to camouflage and obfuscate matters and to sell books of one of its correspondents?

The National Review, a conservative magazine, even called Mr. Shearer “the strangest character in Hillary’s vast left-wing conspiracy.” It is all rather strange.

Shearer has family connections to the Clintons, it turns out. His brother-in-law, Strobe Talbot, was very tight with Bill Clinton while at Oxford, where Clinton was a Rhodes scholar until he was supposedly quietly removed before completing his time because of a sexual allegation—the rape of a young woman at a town pub.

Talbot later served in a high-level position at Clinton’s Department of State as a FOB (friend of Bill). He then became president of the Democratic-leaning Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. Shearer’s own brother was Clinton’s ambassador to Finland.

Shearer was not an official in the Hillary Clinton for President campaign in 2016. The campaign has said he worked “more indirectly.”

The existence of an additional dossier by Christopher Steele or with his involvement that was not published by Buzzfeed in January 2017 raises new questions.

In a criminal referral it is established that coordination existed between Steele and Clinton aides. People in Clinton’s innermost circles and in the Obama administration were in cahoots with Steele and both used his information and supplied him with raw intelligence. That package was delivered to the US Department of State through a Clinton conveyor. That unseen dossier relies nearly entirely on the original Steele work of art.

Christopher Steele was, it turns out, untruthful to the FBI and shared information and contacts obtained at the FBI with the press. It cost him—the FBI dropped him but continue to use his material.

Why a second dossier? Was one not enough?

Or was it too much?

59

MEMO WARS: A POLITICAL PISSING CONTEST

FOLLOWING THE POLITICAL FALLOUT OF STEELE’S explosive dossier is a he-said-she-said, back-and-forth pissing contest from members of both the Republican and Democratic parties. Meanwhile, the whole world is watching, the media captures and reports all the drama unfolding live, and all the actors on stage directly in the limelight couldn’t care less.

And perhaps the spark that led to this war is a letter written on January 4, 2018 by Charles Grassley and Lindsey Graham, both of the Senate Judiciary Committee, addressed to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray, who replaced Comey after Trump fired him. In the letter, Grassley and Graham demand further answers on the FBI’s approach to Steele’s dossier and whether they used his memo to gain approval for a FISA warrant [See Appendix F].

The incendiary letter lights a political war. Artillery is in the form of paper memos, which are being drafted feverishly by each side in attempt to underscore and undercut their opponent. And to their divided audience, the American public, each memo serves as a Rorschach test—where each side chooses to see what they want to see.

Nunes Memo

In mid-January 2018, Representative Devin Nunes compiles a four-page memo arguing that the FBI had abused its power in the investigation of Trump’s campaign. Nunes writes that investigators used Steele’s dossier as the basis for gaining approval for a FISA warrant to further investigate Trump and other members of his campaign. Nunes’s argument is logical, because as we now know, Steele’s dossier is phony, and in his dossier he claims that the Russians have rather compromising information on Trump. Nunes is right when he claims that the FBI didn’t do its job properly by verifying the accuracy of Steele’s dossier before accepting it as gospel, the truth. Instead, they used it as a means to grant full access to investigate Trump. An investigation which, we are now seeing, was incredibly biased from the very start. Nunes also argues that the dossier, which is clearly falsified, should be of no importance, and that the warrant should never have been approved because of the dossier.

The document isn’t yet made public. Meanwhile, the Democrats are busy compiling their own ten-page memo in rebuttal to Nunes’s memo.

Despite never reading the memo, the Justice Department warns the House Intelligence Committee against releasing the memo, claiming that it would be “extraordinarily reckless” to do so before allowing the FBI to review it first. They worry that it could “risk sources and methods used to collect information.”

How ironic!

The FBI, the very body of investigators who used a completely falsified dossier compiled by Christopher Steele who himself used shoddy sources and methods to collect his information—information that was then used as the basis for the FISA warrant used to investigate Trump—now, all of a sudden, has a moral compass and some semblance of basic investigative duties, is hesitant to release Nunes’s memo.

The answer to the question why is obvious: Nunes’s memo is proof that the FBI recklessly used Steele’s dossier as a way to get a FISA warrant to investigate Trump, more specifically to monitor Carter Page, who reportedly has ties to Russian recruiters. Nunes’s memo is proof of political targeting from the FBI.

By now, we know what happens when you take a stand against the Deep State. This time is no different as the FBI and DOJ attempt to silence Nunes and his memo.

But Republicans and members of the conservative media begin to rally together to declassify the memo, saying that the public has a right to it. After all, Steele’s unverified dossier was released without debate, why should this be any different?

Even Trump himself speaks out to get the memo to be released. He knows that he will finally have the inexorable truth to put an end to this congressional witch hunt in attempt to subvert his presidency.

On February 2, 2018, the memo is released. [See Appendix G]

The Nunes memo clearly elaborates and establishes improper surveillance techniques used by the DOJ and FBI in the Russia investigation. But it does more than that.

We now know that Christopher Steele confirmed to Bruce Ohr, Associate Deputy Attorney General, that he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being President.” This establishes motive and bias and discredits the entire campaign.

And, to get FISA court warrants to target Trump’s team, Nunes’s memo highlights how the FBI used the dossier in a central way. The warrants did not say who paid for the dossier (i.e., the Clinton campaign and the DNC), and the FBI knew such. This amounts to obstruction of justice, withholding or concealment of vital information, and misrepresentation of material information.

Also, this memo details that Bruce Ohr’s wife, Nellie, worked for Fusion GPS, the ones who were contracted to produce the dossier and assist in opposition research on Trump. This information was likewise not included in any warrant. This is a failure to report prejudicial evidence that was knowingly withheld.

The warrant did use as corroboration an article that appeared in Yahoo written by left-wing investigative journalist Michael Isikoff. And his source in that article was Christopher Steele, who met him personally to brief him and others in Washington, DC. In real journalistic circles this is called “circular reporting,” but the DOJ and FBI didn’t work on such premises.

The warrant was actually reapproved numerous (four) times and such requests were signed by James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates, and Rod Rosenstein. All of them knew that the warrants were based on faulty and unverified information. This amounts to lying, falsehood, and conspiracy to subvert the courts and the US government.

McCabe gave evidence to Congress in testimony under oath on December 2017 that a FISA warrant would not have been sought without the dossier and what it purportedly revealed.

But he knew what it revealed was a pile of lies.

So, what can we conclude?

The yearlong probe of Trump is polluted and politicized like no other in American history.

Beyond reasonable doubt the extreme abuses of authority and bad faith were instrumental in using the Deep State to spy on American citizens, thereby circumventing the Fourth Amendment. Weaponizing intelligence collection processes on behalf of a political party and for one political candidate over another during a presidential election is without precedent. It makes Watergate look like a minor crime by comparison.

Who will be held accountable? Who bears ultimate responsibility?

Do we not need a complete rethinking of the entire Russia collusion storyline because it is false? Is a second Special Counsel necessary now?

How can we recover from such abuse of power?

The FISA memo proves disingenuous acts. It is spurious. It is deceptive and blatantly corrupt. It is an utter and outright abomination.

On the days that follow the public release of the Nunes memo, the Democrats, led by US Representative Adam Schiff of California, work feverishly on their own memo in an attempt to refute and delegitimize the Republicans’.

Following the publication of his memo, a new target entered Nunes’s crosshairs: Jonathan Winer.

On February 8, 2018, Jonathan Winer, the former US deputy assistant secretary of state and former Libya special envoy (and an Obama appointee), published an op-ed in the Washington Post titled “Devin Nunes is investigating me. Here’s the truth.” In his article, Winer unapologetically details that he had shared “more than 100 of Steele’s reports with Russia experts at the State Department” over a period of two years.

He then details his connection with Cody Shearer, the Clinton-tied activist/hack journalist, and the reports he had received from him, which were later passed on directly to Steele. Winer writes, “Given that I had not worked with Shearer and knew that he was not a professional intelligence officer…I did not expect them to be shared with anyone in the US government.” However, as we’ve come to learn, Steele did, in fact, share Shearer’s notes with the FBI.

These revelations from Winer himself provide even more insights as to just how closely connected Steele was with top US intelligence officials. And, more importantly, how this unverified information was able to circulate throughout Washington thanks to Winer’s involvement and carelessness.

Even more curious is that Winer acknowledged that he signed disclosure forms from his former firm to represent Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire, known as Putin’s “favorite oligarch.” This raised even more questions: what relationship did Deripaska have with Steele himself? And, considering the oligarch’s close ties to Putin and the fact that he has long since been viewed as pushing Russian national interests, could Deripaska be a source for Steele? Was Steele getting paid by Desipaska at the same time he was being paid by Fusion GPS?

Schiff Memo

In the opening line of his memo, prepared on January 29, 2018, and released to the public on February 24, Representative Adam Schiff reports that “FBI and DOJ officials did not abuse the FISA process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign.” In direct rebuttal to Devin Nunes’s memo, Schiff’s is one clearly crafted and fabricated by Democrats in political attempt to override Nunes and the Republican charge. Like Steele’s dossier, Schiff’s is baseless—as you can see from that first line. [See Appendix H]

On February 25, Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont and chair of the DNC, spoke about the release of Adam Schiff’s memo during an interview on MSNBC, saying, “We wouldn’t have put ours out it they hadn’t put theirs out.” To Dean, this is clearly just a pissing contest, a political back-and-forth waste of time.

One surely must wonder whether these memos are merely political instruments to simply undermine their opponent’s agenda and ego, all while distracting the American public from issues that warrant real attention.

Even President Trump weighed in on this nonsense, calling into Jeanine Pirro’s Fox News show Justice with Judge Jeanine and saying, “We shouldn’t be fighting like that. We should all be on the same team. That includes Adam Schiff. Two sides fight all the time … fighting. We should all come together as a nation.”⁷⁹

On March 12, 2018, the House Committee on Intelligence, led by Representative Mike Conaway from Texas, released his committee’s findings, stating, “We have found no evidence of collusion, coordination, or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians” [See Appendix J for House Committee on Intelligence’s Memo].

President Trump immediately took to Twitter, writing in all caps:

THE HOUSE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE HAS, AFTER A 14 MONTH LONG IN-DEPTH INVESTIGATION, FOUND NO EVIDENCE OF COLLUSION OR COORDINATION BETWEEN THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN AND RUSSIA TO INFLUENCE THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.

At a press conference that same day, Conaway says, “We found no evidence of collusion … we found perhaps some bad judgment…we found no evidence of any collusion of anything people were actually doing other than taking a meeting they shouldn’t have taken or just inadvertently being in the same building.”

Conaway concludes, “Bottom line: Russians did commit active measures against our elections in ’16, and we think they’ll do that in the future. It’s clear they sowed discord in our elections…But we couldn’t establish the same conclusions the CIA did that they specifically wanted to help Trump.”

Undoubtedly, the Democrats, likely Adam Schiff, will respond with their own report in attempt to refute Conaway’s; however, as we’ve seen, there is very little tangible evidence to hinge their collusion argument on.⁸⁰

Mystery Memo

To add yet more intrigue to the memo wars, Jane Mayer writes, in her March 12, 2018 feature profile in The New Yorker about Christopher Steele, that there existed another memo—this one hidden from public view, since it was not included in the release of the now widely known Steele dossier.

What is contained in that memo might be considered an extraordinary bombshell if it were not for the fact that its contents are outrageous and unsubstantiated hearsay upon circulated rumor.

Mayer notes that the memo was written by Steele in late November 2016, after his contract with Fusion GPS had ended, and that it was “based on one source, described as a ‘senior Russian official.’ [and] The official said that he was merely relaying talk circulating in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, [where] people were saying that the Kremlin had intervened to block Trump’s initial choice for Secretary of State, Mitt Romney.”⁸¹

Mayer also reveals that the memo described how, through unspecified channels, the Kremlin “had asked Trump to appoint someone who would be prepared to lift Ukraine-related sanctions, and who would cooperate on security issues of interest to Russia, such as the conflict in Syria.”

I guess his name was Rex Tillerson—slanderous.

79 Trump-Pirro. Justice with Judge Jeanine. 24 Feb 2018. https://archive.org/details/FOXNEWSW_20180225_020000_Justice_With_Judge_Jeanine

80 Winer, Jonathan. “Devin Nunes is investigating me. Here is the truth.” Washington Post. 8 Feb 2018.

81 Mayer, Jane. “Christopher Steele, The Man Behind the Trump Dossier.” The New Yorker. 12 Mar 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/12/christopher-steele-the-man-behind-the-trump-dossier

60

GUILTY BY OSMOSIS

WITH THE MEDIA IN A RABID frenzy claiming that they finally have verifiable proof that not only is Trump’s character more questionable than that had originally thought, but also that he does in fact have shady connections to the Russians, the very people who supposedly helped get him elected.

And, as we know, Steele’s dossier is a work of fiction. So when Robert Mueller is tasked to lead an investigation into the collusion between Trump and the Russians, he is placed on a fool’s errand. How can he find collusion where there is none? And worse, the American media is only focusing on this story, so it runs rampant and causes national hysteria, only furthering the public’s demand for Mueller to find proof. Mueller is, undoubtedly, now under enormous pressure to find collusion.

Let’s get one thing clear about Trump and his connection to Russia. First and foremost, Trump is a businessman. The entire world knows this. He made his fortune as a real estate developer. Back in 2015, Trump planned to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. This isn’t secret information. This is his connection to Russia. Despite the reports from CNN and others, there aren’t some clandestine meetings happening underground in a secret lair, as though Trump and Putin are plotting some nefarious plan like in James Bond movies. Mueller knows this, but he’s also tasked with the impossible: to find evidence of collusion where there is none.

Since there is no direct collusion to Trump, he turns to the smaller fish, the peripherals, in an attempt to prove Trump’s guilt by association or osmosis. But this is a syllogism that doesn’t work.

As Victor Hanson reports, the investigation hinges on a fundamental paradox: “Mueller’s existential problem has been with him from the start. Due to the shenanigans of his discredited friend Comey and a rabid media, he was appointed to investigate crimes that did not exist. But if they did exist, collusion and obstruction were committed by those associated with the Clinton campaign and even members of the Obama administration.”⁸²

With both the media and public in a rabid feeding frenzy, like hungry dogs eyeing a steak on a table too high, Mueller knows he has to offer them something to quell their hunger, but all he has is scraps.

82 Hanson, Victor Davis. “The Paradoxes of the Mueller Investigation.” Townhall. 22 Feb 2018. https://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2018/02/22/the-paradoxes-of-the-mueller-investigation-n2452240

61

LOOSE CONNECTIONS

ON FEBRUARY 16, 2018, MUELLER THROWS his rabid public a bone and indicts thirteen Russian nationals and three Russian companies for allegedly conspiring to create confusion in the 2016 presidential election. So, after nine months of work, Mueller indicts them in a feeble attempt to prove his worth as an investigator and to show that he’s making headway on finding Trump’s collusion with the Russians.

One of those three companies in Mueller’s indictment is the Internet Research Agency, the company often referred to as the “Russian troll farm.” The two others are companies that helped finance their operation. Of the thirteen Russian nationals indicted, twelve of them were employees at the agency, and the other was agency’s financier.

Any discerning viewer would see right past the misguided headlines and right through Mueller’s cellophane ploy. We already know just what the Russians—through bots and trolls and troops on the ground—did to “sow discord” in the election. Americans were doing the same.

What no one seems to be focusing on is the fact that no Trump associates have been specifically charged with any crimes related to the Russian interference. Instead, Mueller is attempting to pin guilt on Trump through his prior associations with former advisors, like Michael Flynn, who had pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI back on January 24, 2017. [See Appendix I for Statement of the Offense]

In similar fashion, Mueller goes after George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, and Rick Gates. Manafort and Gates, both of whom worked for the Ukrainian government for a decade each, are alleged to have “acted as unregistered agents” for the Ukrainians, generating “tens of millions of dollars in income,” which they then “laundered” through “scores of United States and foreign corporations, partnerships, and bank accounts.”⁸³ In short, Manafort and Gates are being charged on their questionable financial histories—nothing related to the Russian interference in the 2016 election. Whereas, in October 2017, Papadopoulos pleads guilty to making false statements to the FBI about contacts he had had relating to his Russia-US relations and the Trump campaign.

Papadopoulos agreed to a plea bargain as part of the Mueller investigation.

Many suspect he was pressed to turn information on other Trump officials. It was alleged that he wore a wire as an FBI informant—but it yielded no goods.

Nothing.

While we can certainly tend to judge a person by the company they keep, we certainly can’t prove one’s guilt through that judgment. Yet, this is the false logic on which Mueller’s investigation rests. But Mueller, just another pawn of the Deep State, runs his investigation according to Orwellian logic, and he already has his conclusion: Trump is guilty. Now, he needs to find an equation that fits his conclusion. But above all, he knows that the media and public, who too have their minds set, won’t question or doubt his process.

In his article for Consortium News, Daniel Lazare reports on the three major failures of Mueller’s indictments:⁸⁴

1. It failed to connect the Internet Research Agency, the alleged St. Petersburg troll factory accused of political meddling, with Vladimir Putin, the all-purpose evildoer who the corporate media say is out to destroy American democracy.

2. It similarly failed to establish a connection with the Trump campaign and indeed went out of its way to describe contacts with the Russians as “unwitting.”

3. It described the meddling itself as even more inept and amateurish than many had expected.

83 Prokop, Andrew. “Robert Mueller just flipped his third fromer Trump aide.” Vox. 23 Feb 2018. https://www.vox.com/2018/2/23/17045226/robert-mueller-flip-rick-gates-russia

84 Lazare, Daniel. “The Mueller Indictments. The Day the Music Died.” Consortium News. 24 Feb 2018. https://consortiumnews.com/2018/02/24/the-mueller-indictments-the-day-the-music-died/?print=print

CONCLUSION

IT SHOLD BE TRANSPARENTLY CLEAR NOW just how this machine, the Deep State, operated in a calculated orchestration to subvert the presidency of Donald Trump. And the lengths and depths the media stooped to intentionally distort this story for ratings—whether through viewership, clicks, likes, or shares—which translated into more ad revenue. And yet, as we’ve seen through this complicated, tangled story—a story that is truly stranger than fiction, because much of it is—the media is just one of the many cogs in this machine that is capable of taking a seedling of information and, through a game of telephone, grow that seed into a great big redwood of a story: Red November.

In the time it takes to fire off 140 characters, a personal opinion can begin trending in the morning—with pundits and reporters across the globe quoting a tweet, using it as a crutch to prop up their story—and by nightfall we’ve spun an opinion, one person’s perspective into a shared, collective stance. And like that, an untruth becomes a truth because the media knows it’s what their audience wants to hear. It’s become a mutual, symbiotic relationship that deepens our cultural and political echo chambers for the worse.

Replete with headlines that are about as subtle as a jackhammer and with advertisements longer than actual news clip, the media—like the hand that feeds the fish—treats us as such. With each flake they drop, we swarm to the surface like piranhas and ask for more. And like moths drawn to the light, the media and government use their headlines and warped stories like torches to keep us distracted, when the real fire, a bigger blaze, is burning in the distance.

This game of telephone used to be a linear line of communication, a one-way conversation from supplier to consumer. Yet, with the rise of social media platforms, that linear line has spread laterally and another cog has been added to this machine: the public. Despite what these talking heads want us to believe, things haven’t gotten worse, the technology is just getting better. Now, the ones who once had the last word in this conversation no longer do.

We saw this with the #MeToo movement, which began out of the disturbing revelations centered around one Hollywood mogul: Harvey Weinstein. News spread quickly because of this heightened technology. Through social media platforms that allow the individual user to control the direction of content and the news, a deeply hidden truth that had intentionally been buried was suddenly exposed.

And yet, as the movement grew, it became bloated once the media stuck its ugly, money-grubbing nose in when the feminist website Babe recklessly published an article with a headline that readied the reader for the worst: “I went out on a date with Aziz Ansari and it turned out to be the worst night of my life.”⁸⁵

Like everyone else in America, we clicked.

Unsurprisingly, the article was a cheap, failed attempt to compare unwanted sexual advances with an all-too-familiar bad date.

And just like that, the movement buckled under its own weight and became too big to support itself. The New York Times reported that the article was “Arguably the worst thing that has happened to the #MeToo movement since it began in October. It transforms what ought to be a movement for women’s empowerment into an emblem for female helplessness.”⁸⁶

No one in their right mind would argue against the bravery of this movement and its importance for sparking social change. Yet it also speaks even louder on behalf of the media’s overt desperation for our attention, so they sensationalize and exploit a seedling of an idea into a redwood that can’t support itself.

This is exactly how Christopher Steele’s dossier, a work of unverified salacious gossip, was able to spread like wildfire through Washington, DC, and with the orchestrated help of members of this Deep State, an untruth became a truth and one headline above them all blared across the nation: Trump was guilty of treason for collaborating with Russians. Yet we’re missing one piece: the proof or even a whisper of truth.

Most recently, both Senator John McCain and David Kramer, the former State Department official who met with Christopher Steele to receive the dossier, pleaded the Fifth when questioned by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to avoid revealing Steele’s sources. Their silence speaks volumes.

And yet, while this story continues to unfold and more layers are added, this whole Trump-Russia story will surely implode on itself as Robert Mueller widens his net and wildly misconstrues the definition of collusion. Through his misguided investigation, along with the media’s blatant disregard for journalism, we see a carefully designed plot that begins with Christopher Steele and runs through the FBI, CIA, and NSA all in an attempt to subvert the Trump presidency.

To be sure, this isn’t the sounding of the alarms. There is a silver lining here with all this misinformation being passed around: the credibility of the mainstream media and of our governmental agencies has been tested. Now, the public is becoming more attuned to the lies, manipulation, and distortion being pitched.

An unintended consequence of the media’s reckless abandonment of their journalist duties is a shift in autonomy: the onus is on us—the consumers of information. We are the ones who are now tasked to sift through the white noise and decide what is worth listening to. We are the ones who are now tasked to listen to wildly different perspectives on the same story. And we already are and will continue to become more savvy. We’ll continue to become more astute listeners and discerners of the truth. We’ll be able to look past the headlines that blare, the six-second soundbites that yell in our faces, and click-bait articles that masquerade as truth.

Yet, as we’ve witnessed in the past, the ones who are smart enough to listen aren’t usually the ones doing the talking. In what has become the age of shouting, perhaps what we need most is a whisper of truth.

85 Way, Katy. “I went out on a date with Aziz Anzari. It turned into the worst night of my life.” Babe. 13 Jan 2018. https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355

86 Weiss, Bari. “Aziz Anzari is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader.” The New York Times. 15 Jan 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/opinion/aziz-ansari-babe-sexual-harassment.html

POSTSCRIPT

ON MARCH 27, 2018, I FLEW on a long international flight into Boston’s Logan International airport. I was to connect to a domestic flight en route to my in-laws’ house, just outside of Cleveland, Ohio for the Easter holidays.

After exiting the plane, I was escorted to a special line for passport control. There, I was formally detained and asked to wait, along with my wife who was traveling with me. They would not say why, and I found it most curious as I am a frequent flier and go back and forth to the US and Europe and elsewhere many times a year. I never had had such treatment.

After about twenty minutes left waiting, we were taken by a TSA official and an FBI agent to a separate hall where they thoroughly checked my suitcase and asked about any electronic devices, phones, or computers I had in my possession.

This all seemed very foreboding and I have never experienced anything like this before, unless you include trips to communist China or in the old world to eastern bloc countries as a diplomat. What’s going on, I thought?

When they found nothing suspicious and would not answer my questions about why they were detaining me, they separated me from my wife and told her to wait in a lounge, without explanation, while I was to be interviewed. That is all they said. Naturally, this left her in a state of total confusion and near panic.

What had I done? Why Ted Malloch?

I was then escorted to another building and into a secure conference room where two young FBI agents introduced themselves to me. They said I was being detained to answer questions regarding the Department of Justice Special Counsel probe and showed me their identification.

They seemed to know everything about me and had my color photograph and personal details and said in intimidating ways that it was a felony to lie to the FBI. I stated that I realized that, and I would readily, in fact gladly, cooperate with them.

I did, however, find it objectionable to treat me the way they had, as I was entering my home country, where I am a citizen and have served at the highest levels of government. They did not need to use such tactics or intimidation. I was a US patriot and would do anything and everything to assist the government and I had no information that I believed was relevant.

They asked for my cell phone and any laptop (I didn’t have a computer on me) and produced a document to seize it and perform forensics on it. I gladly signed permission and asked if at least I could keep my driver’s license and credit cards. They said yes and gave them back to me. One of the agents took the phone into another room and downloaded items but returned to say they would need to keep it and take it to Washington, DC for a full assessment. I asked when I could get it back. They assured me that in a few days they would definitely get it to me one way or another.

The other agent then proceeded for about an hour to interrogate me and involved himself in various disarming chitchat about my career, sterling academic credentials, top-secret code word government clearances in an earlier era, and my being a fan of the championship Philadelphia Eagles. All well and good, I presumed. What did they want? Why me? And why in this underhanded fashion? What had I done?

The questions got more detailed about my involvement in the Trump campaign (which was informal and unpaid); whom I communicated with; who I knew and how well—they had a long list of names.

They seemed to then focus more attention on Roger Stone (whom I have met a grand total of three times and with groups of people); Jerome Corsi, a journalist who edited a memoir I had written some years ago; and about Wikileaks, of which I knew nothing.

Had I ever visited the Ecuadorian embassy in London? they asked.

No, I replied truthfully.

I was unfazed and very dubious about why they thought I knew anything. I couldn’t help but wonder: had they read a copy of my soon-to-be-released book? The timing of this interrogation along with the nearing publication date seems to me to suggest yes: they had read it.

Then they served me with a subpoena, which I noticed had only been issued that very day in Boston to appear before the Mueller grand jury in Washington, DC that very Friday. They said I could telephone the lead attorney on that team and make necessary arrangements.

They shook my hand and had agents take me to my wife, who was very alarmed and in disbelief. They then escorted us to the adjoining terminal to catch our delayed domestic flight.

I called the Special Counsel’s office the next morning and they said it would be better to appear later, which we agreed would be April 13th and they would pay for my travel. I told them I had legal representation and asked that they establish contact.

The Deep State is sending a signal and has no doubt read this book.

What could they want from me, a policy wonk and philosophical defender of Trump? I am not an operative, have no Russia contacts, and—aside from appearing on air and in print often to defend and congratulate our President—have done nothing wrong. What message does this send?

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A

Intelligence Community Assessment into Russian Activities and Intentions in US Elections

Background to “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections”: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution

6 January 2017

Background to “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections”: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution

“Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections” is a declassified version of a highly classified assessment that has been provided to the President and to recipients approved by the President.

• The Intelligence Community rarely can publicly reveal the full extent of its knowledge or the precise bases for its assessments, as the release of such information would reveal sensitive sources or methods and imperil the ability to collect critical foreign intelligence in the future.

• Thus, while the conclusions in the report are all reflected in the classified assessment, the declassified report does not and cannot include the full supporting information, including specific intelligence and sources and methods.

The Analytic Process

The mission of the Intelligence Community is to seek to reduce the uncertainty surrounding foreign activities, capabilities, or leaders’ intentions. This objective is difficult to achieve when seeking to understand complex issues on which foreign actors go to extraordinary lengths to hide or obfuscate their activities.

• On these issues of great importance to US national security, the goal of intelligence analysis is to provide assessments to decisionmakers that are intellectually rigorous, objective, timely, and useful, and that adhere to tradecraft standards.

• The tradecraft standards for analytic products have been refined over the past ten years. These standards include describing sources (including their reliability and access to the information they provide), clearly expressing uncertainty, distinguishing between underlying information and analysts’ judgments and assumptions, exploring alternatives, demonstrating relevance to the customer, using strong and transparent logic, and explaining change or consistency in judgments over time.

• Applying these standards helps ensure that the Intelligence Community provides US policymakers, warfighters, and operators with the best and most accurate insight, warning, and context, as well as potential opportunities to advance US national security.

Intelligence Community analysts integrate information from a wide range of sources, including human sources, technical collection, and open source information, and apply specialized skills and structured analytic tools to draw inferences informed by the data available, relevant past activity, and logic and reasoning to provide insight into what is happening and the prospects for the future.

• A critical part of the analyst’s task is to explain uncertainties associated with major judgments based on the quantity and quality of the source material, information gaps, and the complexity of the issue.

• When Intelligence Community analysts use words such as “we assess” or “we judge,” they are conveying an analytic assessment or judgment.

• Some analytic judgments are based directly on collected information; others rest on previous judgments, which serve as building blocks in rigorous analysis. In either type of judgment, the tradecraft standards outlined above ensure that analysts have an appropriate basis for the judgment. 1

• Intelligence Community judgments often include two important elements: judgments of how likely it is that something has happened or will happen (using terms such as “likely” or “unlikely”) and confidence levels in those judgments (low, moderate, and high) that refer to the evidentiary basis, logic and reasoning, and precedents that underpin the judgments.

Determining Attribution in Cyber Incidents

The nature of cyberspace makes attribution of cyber operations difficult but not impossible. Every kind of cyber operation—malicious or not—leaves a trail. US Intelligence Community analysts use this information, their constantly growing knowledge base of previous events and known malicious actors, and their knowledge of how these malicious actors work and the tools that they use, to attempt to trace these operations back to their source. In every case, they apply the same tradecraft standards described in the Analytic Process above.

• Analysts consider a series of questions to assess how the information compares with existing knowledge and adjust their confidence in their judgments as appropriate to account for any alternative hypotheses and ambiguities.

• An assessment of attribution usually is not a simple statement of who conducted an operation, but rather a series of judgments that describe whether it was an isolated incident, who was the likely perpetrator, that perpetrator’s possible motivations, and whether a foreign government had a role in ordering or leading the operation.

This report is a declassified version of a highly classified assessment; its conclusions are identical to those in the highly classified assessment but this version does not include the full supporting information on key elements of the influence campaign.

Scope and Sourcing

Information available as of 29 December 2016 was used in the preparation of this product.

Scope

This report includes an analytic assessment drafted and coordinated among The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and The National Security Agency (NSA), which draws on intelligence information collected and disseminated by those three agencies. It covers the motivation and scope of Moscow’s intentions regarding US elections and Moscow’s use of cyber tools and media campaigns to influence US public opinion. The assessment focuses on activities aimed at the 2016 US presidential election and draws on our understanding of previous Russian influence operations. When we use the term “we” it refers to an assessment by all three agencies.

• This report is a declassified version of a highly classified assessment. This document’s conclusions are identical to the highly classified assessment, but this document does not include the full supporting information, including specific intelligence on key elements of the influence campaign. Given the redactions, we made minor edits purely for readability and flow.

We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election. The US Intelligence Community is charged with monitoring and assessing the intentions, capabilities, and actions of foreign actors; it does not analyze US political processes or US public opinion.

• New information continues to emerge, providing increased insight into Russian activities.

Sourcing

Many of the key judgments in this assessment rely on a body of reporting from multiple sources that are consistent with our understanding of Russian behavior. Insights into Russian efforts—including specific cyber operations—and Russian views of key US players derive from multiple corroborating sources.

Some of our judgments about Kremlin preferences and intent are drawn from the behavior of Kremlin-loyal political figures, state media, and pro-Kremlin social media actors, all of whom the Kremlin either directly uses to convey messages or who are answerable to the Kremlin. The Russian leadership invests significant resources in both foreign and domestic propaganda and places a premium on transmitting what it views as consistent, self-reinforcing narratives regarding its desires and redlines, whether on Ukraine, Syria, or relations with the United States.

Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections

ICA 2017-01D
6 January 2017

Key Judgments

Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.

We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.

• We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.

• Moscow’s approach evolved over the course of the campaign based on Russia’s understanding of the electoral prospects of the two main candidates. When it appeared to Moscow that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the election, the Russian influence campaign began to focus more on undermining her future presidency.

• Further information has come to light since Election Day that, when combined with Russian behavior since early November 2016, increases our confidence in our assessments of Russian motivations and goals.

Moscow’s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or “trolls.” Russia, like its Soviet predecessor, has a history of conducting covert influence campaigns focused on US presidential elections that have used intelligence officers and agents and press placements to disparage candidates perceived as hostile to the Kremlin.

• Russia’s intelligence services conducted cyber operations against targets associated with the 2016 US presidential election, including targets associated with both major US political parties.

• We assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks.

• Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple US state or local electoral boards. DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.

• Russia’s state-run propaganda machine contributed to the influence campaign by serving as a platform for Kremlin messaging to Russian and international audiences.

We assess Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the US presidential election to future influence efforts worldwide, including against US allies and their election processes.

Contents

Scope and Sourcing

Key Judgments

Contents

CIA/FBI/NSA Assessment: Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election

Putin Ordered Campaign To Influence US Election

Russian Campaign Was Multifaceted

Influence Effort Was Boldest Yet in the US

Election Operation Signals “New Normal” in Russian Influence Efforts

Annexes

A: Russia—Kremlin’s TV Seeks To Influence Politics, Fuel Discontent in US

B: Estimative Language

Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election

Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election

Putin Ordered Campaign To Influence US Election

We assess with high confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election, the consistent goals of which were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. When it appeared to Moscow that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the election, the Russian influence campaign then focused on undermining her expected presidency.

• We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.

• In trying to influence the US election, we assess the Kremlin sought to advance its longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, the promotion of which Putin and other senior Russian leaders view as a threat to Russia and Putin’s regime.

• Putin publicly pointed to the Panama Papers disclosure and the Olympic doping scandal as US-directed efforts to defame Russia, suggesting he sought to use disclosures to discredit the image of the United States and cast it as hypocritical.

• Putin most likely wanted to discredit Secretary Clinton because he has publicly blamed her since 2011 for inciting mass protests against his regime in late 2011 and early 2012, and because he holds a grudge for comments he almost certainly saw as disparaging him.

We assess Putin, his advisers, and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump over Secretary Clinton.

• Beginning in June, Putin’s public comments about the US presidential race avoided directly praising President-elect Trump, probably because Kremlin officials thought that any praise from Putin personally would backfire in the United States. Nonetheless, Putin publicly indicated a preference for President-elect Trump’s stated policy to work with Russia, and pro-Kremlin figures spoke highly about what they saw as his Russia-friendly positions on Syria and Ukraine. Putin publicly contrasted the President-elect’s approach to Russia with Secretary Clinton’s “aggressive rhetoric.”

• Moscow also saw the election of President-elect Trump as a way to achieve an international counterterrorism coalition against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

• Putin has had many positive experiences working with Western political leaders whose business interests made them more disposed to deal with Russia, such as former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

• Putin, Russian officials, and other pro-Kremlin pundits stopped publicly criticizing the US election process as unfair almost immediately after the election because Moscow probably assessed it would be counterproductive to building positive relations.

We assess the influence campaign aspired to help President-elect Trump’s chances of victory when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to the President-elect. When it appeared to Moscow that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the presidency the Russian influence campaign focused more on undercutting Secretary Clinton’s legitimacy and crippling her presidency from its start, including by impugning the fairness of the election.

• Before the election, Russian diplomats had publicly denounced the US electoral process and were prepared to publicly call into question the validity of the results. Pro-Kremlin bloggers had prepared a Twitter campaign, #DemocracyRIP, on election night in anticipation of Secretary Clinton’s victory, judging from their social media activity.

Russian Campaign Was Multifaceted

Moscow’s use of disclosures during the US election was unprecedented, but its influence campaign otherwise followed a longstanding Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or “trolls.”

• We assess that influence campaigns are approved at the highest levels of the Russian Government—particularly those that would be politically sensitive.

• Moscow’s campaign aimed at the US election reflected years of investment in its capabilities, which Moscow has honed in the former Soviet states.

• By their nature, Russian influence campaigns are multifaceted and designed to be deniable because they use a mix of agents of influence, cutouts, front organizations, and false-flag operations. Moscow demonstrated this during the Ukraine crisis in 2014, when Russia deployed forces and advisers to eastern Ukraine and denied it publicly.

The Kremlin’s campaign aimed at the US election featured disclosures of data obtained through Russian cyber operations; intrusions into US state and local electoral boards; and overt propaganda. Russian intelligence collection both informed and enabled the influence campaign.

Cyber Espionage Against US Political Organizations. Russia’s intelligence services conducted cyber operations against targets associated with the 2016 US presidential election, including targets associated with both major US political parties.

We assess Russian intelligence services collected against the US primary campaigns, think tanks, and lobbying groups they viewed as likely to shape future US policies. In July 2015, Russian intelligence gained access to Democratic National Committee (DNC) networks and maintained that access until at least June 2016.

• The General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) probably began cyber operations aimed at the US election by March 2016. We assess that the GRU operations resulted in the compromise of the personal e-mail accounts of Democratic Party officials and political figures. By May, the GRU had exfiltrated large volumes of data from the DNC.

Public Disclosures of Russian-Collected Data. We assess with high confidence that the GRU used the Guccifer 2.0 persona, DCLeaks.com, and WikiLeaks to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets.

• Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be an independent Romanian hacker, made multiple contradictory statements and false claims about his likely Russian identity throughout the election. Press reporting suggests more than one person claiming to be Guccifer 2.0 interacted with journalists.

• Content that we assess was taken from e-mail accounts targeted by the GRU in March 2016 appeared on DCLeaks.com starting in June.

We assess with high confidence that the GRU relayed material it acquired from the DNC and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks. Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because of its self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity. Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries.

• In early September, Putin said publicly it was important the DNC data was exposed to WikiLeaks, calling the search for the source of the leaks a distraction and denying Russian “state-level” involvement.

• The Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet RT (formerly Russia Today) has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks. RT’s editor-in-chief visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in August 2013, where they discussed renewing his broadcast contract with RT, according to Russian and Western media. Russian media subsequently announced that RT had become “the only Russian media company” to partner with WikiLeaks and had received access to “new leaks of secret information.” RT routinely gives Assange sympathetic coverage and provides him a platform to denounce the United States.

These election-related disclosures reflect a pattern of Russian intelligence using hacked information in targeted influence efforts against targets such as Olympic athletes and other foreign governments. Such efforts have included releasing or altering personal data, defacing websites, or releasing e-mails.

• A prominent target since the 2016 Summer Olympics has been the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), with leaks that we assess to have originated with the GRU and that have involved data on US athletes.

Russia collected on some Republican-affiliated targets but did not conduct a comparable disclosure campaign.

Russian Cyber Intrusions Into State and Local Electoral Boards. Russian intelligence accessed elements of multiple state or local electoral boards. Since early 2014, Russian intelligence has researched US electoral processes and related technology and equipment.

• DHS assesses that the types of systems we observed Russian actors targeting or compromising are not involved in vote tallying.

Russian Propaganda Efforts. Russia’s state-run propaganda machine—comprised of its domestic media apparatus, outlets targeting global audiences such as RT and Sputnik, and a network of quasi-government trolls—contributed to the influence campaign by serving as a platform for Kremlin messaging to Russian and international audiences. State-owned Russian media made increasingly favorable comments about President-elect Trump as the 2016 US general and primary election campaigns progressed while consistently offering negative coverage of Secretary Clinton.

• Starting in March 2016, Russian Government– linked actors began openly supporting President-elect Trump’s candidacy in media aimed at English-speaking audiences. RT and Sputnik—another government-funded outlet producing pro-Kremlin radio and online content in a variety of languages for international audiences—consistently cast President-elect Trump as the target of unfair coverage from traditional US media outlets that they claimed were subservient to a corrupt political establishment.

• Russian media hailed President-elect Trump’s victory as a vindication of Putin’s advocacy of global populist movements—the theme of Putin’s annual conference for Western academics in October 2016—and the latest example of Western liberalism’s collapse.

• Putin’s chief propagandist Dmitriy Kiselev used his flagship weekly newsmagazine program this fall to cast President-elect Trump as an outsider victimized by a corrupt political establishment and faulty democratic election process that aimed to prevent his election because of his desire to work with Moscow.

• Pro-Kremlin proxy Vladimir Zhirinovskiy, leader of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, proclaimed just before the election that if President-elect Trump won, Russia would “drink champagne” in anticipation of being able to advance its positions on Syria and Ukraine.

RT’s coverage of Secretary Clinton throughout the US presidential campaign was consistently negative and focused on her leaked e-mails and accused her of corruption, poor physical and mental health, and ties to Islamic extremism. Some Russian officials echoed Russian lines for the influence campaign that Secretary Clinton’s election could lead to a war between the United States and Russia.

• In August, Kremlin-linked political analysts suggested avenging negative Western reports on Putin by airing segments devoted to Secretary Clinton’s alleged health problems.

• On 6 August, RT published an English-language video called “Julian Assange Special: Do WikiLeaks Have the E-mail That’ll Put Clinton in Prison?” and an exclusive interview with Assange entitled “Clinton and ISIS Funded by the Same Money.” RT’s most popular video on Secretary Clinton, “How 100% of the Clintons’ ‘Charity’ Went to…Themselves,” had more than 9 million views on social media platforms. RT’s most popular English language video about the President-elect, called “Trump Will Not Be Permitted To Win,” featured Assange and had 2.2 million views.

• For more on Russia’s past media efforts— including portraying the 2012 US electoral process as undemocratic—please see Annex A: Russia—Kremlin’s TV Seeks To Influence Politics, Fuel Discontent in US.

Russia used trolls as well as RT as part of its influence efforts to denigrate Secretary Clinton. This effort amplified stories on scandals about Secretary Clinton and the role of WikiLeaks in the election campaign.

• The likely financier of the so-called Internet Research Agency of professional trolls located in Saint Petersburg is a close Putin ally with ties to Russian intelligence.

• A journalist who is a leading expert on the Internet Research Agency claimed that some social media accounts that appear to be tied to Russia’s professional trolls—because they previously were devoted to supporting Russian actions in Ukraine—started to advocate for President-elect Trump as early as December 2015.

Influence Effort Was Boldest Yet in the US

Russia’s effort to influence the 2016 US presidential election represented a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations aimed at US elections. We assess the 2016 influence campaign reflected the Kremlin’s recognition of the worldwide effects that mass disclosures of US Government and other private data—such as those conducted by WikiLeaks and others—have achieved in recent years, and their understanding of the value of orchestrating such disclosures to maximize the impact of compromising information.

• During the Cold War, the Soviet Union used intelligence officers, influence agents, forgeries, and press placements to disparage candidates perceived as hostile to the Kremlin, according to a former KGB archivist.

Since the Cold War, Russian intelligence efforts related to US elections have primarily focused on foreign intelligence collection. For decades, Russian and Soviet intelligence services have sought to collect insider information from US political parties that could help Russian leaders understand a new US administration’s plans and priorities.

• The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Directorate S (Illegals) officers arrested in the United States in 2010 reported to Moscow about the 2008 election.

• In the 1970s, the KGB recruited a Democratic Party activist who reported information about then-presidential hopeful Jimmy Carter’s campaign and foreign policy plans, according to a former KGB archivist.

Election Operation Signals “New Normal” in Russian Influence Efforts

We assess Moscow will apply lessons learned from its campaign aimed at the US presidential election to future influence efforts in the United States and worldwide, including against US allies and their election processes. We assess the Russian intelligence services would have seen their election influence campaign as at least a qualified success because of their perceived ability to impact public discussion.

• Putin’s public views of the disclosures suggest the Kremlin and the intelligence services will continue to consider using cyber-enabled disclosure operations because of their belief that these can accomplish Russian goals relatively easily without significant damage to Russian interests.

• Russia has sought to influence elections across Europe.

We assess Russian intelligence services will continue to develop capabilities to provide Putin with options to use against the United States, judging from past practice and current efforts. Immediately after Election Day, we assess Russian intelligence began a spearphishing campaign targeting US Government employees and individuals associated with US think tanks and NGOs in national security, defense, and foreign policy fields. This campaign could provide material for future influence efforts as well as foreign intelligence collection on the incoming administration’s goals and plans.

Annex A

Russia -- Kremlin’s TV Seeks To Influence Politics, Fuel Discontent in US*

RT America TV, a Kremlin-financed channel operated from within the United States, has substantially expanded its repertoire of programming that highlights criticism of alleged US shortcomings in democracy and civil liberties. The rapid expansion of RT’s operations and budget and recent candid statements by RT’s leadership point to the channel’s importance to the Kremlin as a messaging tool and indicate a Kremlin-directed campaign to undermine faith in the US Government and fuel political protest. The Kremlin has committed significant resources to expanding the channel’s reach, particularly its social media footprint. A reliable UK report states that RT recently was the most-watched foreign news channel in the UK. RT America has positioned itself as a domestic US channel and has deliberately sought to obscure any legal ties to the Russian Government.

In the runup to the 2012 US presidential election in November, English-language channel RT America -- created and financed by the Russian Government and part of Russian Government-sponsored RT TV (see textbox 1) -- intensified its usually critical coverage of the United States. The channel portrayed the US electoral process as undemocratic and featured calls by US protesters for the public to rise up and “take this government back.”

Messaging on RT prior to the US presidential election (RT, 3 November)

• RT introduced two new shows -- “Breaking the Set” on 4 September and “Truthseeker” on 2 November -- both overwhelmingly focused on criticism of US and Western governments as well as the promotion of radical discontent.

• From August to November 2012, RT ran numerous reports on alleged US election fraud and voting machine vulnerabilities, contending that US election results cannot be trusted and do not reflect the popular will.

• In an effort to highlight the alleged “lack of democracy” in the United States, RT broadcast, hosted, and advertised third-party candidate debates and ran reporting supportive of the political agenda of these candidates. The RT hosts asserted that the US two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a “sham.”

• RT aired a documentary about the Occupy Wall Street movement on 1, 2, and 4 November. RT framed the movement as a fight against “the ruling class” and described the current US political system as corrupt and dominated by corporations. RT advertising for the documentary featured Occupy movement calls to “take back” the government. The documentary claimed that the US system cannot be changed democratically, but only through “revolution.” After the 6 November US presidential election, RT aired a documentary called “Cultures of Protest,” about active and often violent political resistance (RT, 1-10 November).

RT new show “Truthseeker” (RT, 11 November)

RT Conducts Strategic Messaging for Russian Government

RT’s criticism of the US election was the latest facet of its broader and longer-standing anti-US messaging likely aimed at undermining viewers’ trust in US democratic procedures and undercutting US criticism of Russia’s political system. RT Editor in Chief Margarita Simonyan recently declared that the United States itself lacks democracy and that it has “no moral right to teach the rest of the world” (Kommersant, 6 November).

Simonyan steps over the White House in the introduction from her short-lived domestic show on REN TV (REN TV, 26 December 2011)

• Simonyan has characterized RT’s coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement as “information warfare” that is aimed at promoting popular dissatisfaction with the US Government. RT created a Facebook app to connect Occupy Wall Street protesters via social media. In addition, RT featured its own hosts in Occupy rallies (“Minaev Live,” 10 April; RT, 2, 12 June).

• RT’s reports often characterize the United States as a “surveillance state” and allege widespread infringements of civil liberties, police brutality, and drone use (RT, 24, 28 October, 1-10 November).

• RT has also focused on criticism of the US economic system, US currency policy, alleged Wall Street greed, and the US national debt. Some of RT’s hosts have compared the United States to Imperial Rome and have predicted that government corruption and “corporate greed” will lead to US financial collapse (RT, 31 October, 4 November).

RT broadcasts support for other Russian interests in areas such as foreign and energy policy.

RT anti-fracking reporting (RT, 5 October)

• RT runs anti-fracking programming, highlighting environmental issues and the impacts on public health. This is likely reflective of the Russian Government’s concern about the impact of fracking and US natural gas production on the global energy market and the potential challenges to Gazprom’s profitability (5 October).

• RT is a leading media voice opposing Western intervention in the Syrian conflict and blaming the West for waging “information wars” against the Syrian Government (RT, 10 October-9 November).

• In an earlier example of RT’s messaging in support of the Russian Government, during the Georgia-Russia military conflict the channel accused Georgians of killing civilians and organizing a genocide of the Ossetian people. According to Simonyan, when “the Ministry of Defense was at war with Georgia,” RT was “waging an information war against the entire Western world” (Kommersant, 11 July).

In recent interviews, RT’s leadership has candidly acknowledged its mission to expand its US audience and to expose it to Kremlin messaging. However, the leadership rejected claims that RT interferes in US domestic affairs.

• Simonyan claimed in popular arts magazine Afisha on 3 October: “It is important to have a channel that people get used to, and then, when needed, you show them what you need to show. In some sense, not having our own foreign broadcasting is the same as not having a ministry of defense. When there is no war, it looks like we don’t need it. However, when there is a war, it is critical.”

• According to Simonyan, “the word ‘propaganda’ has a very negative connotation, but indeed, there is not a single international foreign TV channel that is doing something other than promotion of the values of the country that it is broadcasting from.” She added that “when Russia is at war, we are, of course, on Russia’s side” (Afisha, 3 October; Kommersant, 4 July).

• TV-Novosti director Nikolov said on 4 October to the Association of Cable Television that RT builds on worldwide demand for “an alternative view of the entire world.” Simonyan asserted on 3 October in Afisha that RT’s goal is “to make an alternative channel that shares information unavailable elsewhere” in order to “conquer the audience” and expose it to Russian state messaging (Afisha, 3 October; Kommersant, 4 July).

• On 26 May, Simonyan tweeted with irony: “Ambassador McFaul hints that our channel is interference with US domestic affairs. And we, sinful souls, were thinking that it is freedom of speech.”

RT Leadership Closely Tied to, Controlled by Kremlin

RT Editor in Chief Margarita Simonyan has close ties to top Russian Government officials, especially Presidential Administration Deputy Chief of Staff Aleksey Gromov, who reportedly manages political TV coverage in Russia and is one of the founders of RT.

Simonyan shows RT facilities to then Prime Minister Putin. Simonyan was on Putin’s 2012 presidential election campaign staff in Moscow (Rospress, 22 September 2010, Ria Novosti, 25 October 2012).

• Simonyan has claimed that Gromov shielded her from other officials and their requests to air certain reports. Russian media consider Simonyan to be Gromov’s protege (Kommersant, 4 July; Dozhd TV, 11 July).

• Simonyan replaced Gromov on state-owned Channel One’s Board of Directors. Government officials, including Gromov and Putin’s Press Secretary Peskov were involved in creating RT and appointing Simonyan (Afisha, 3 October).

• According to Simonyan, Gromov oversees political coverage on TV, and he has periodic meetings with media managers where he shares classified information and discusses their coverage plans. Some opposition journalists, including Andrey Loshak, claim that he also ordered media attacks on opposition figures (Kommersant, 11 July).

The Kremlin staffs RT and closely supervises RT’s coverage, recruiting people who can convey Russian strategic messaging because of their ideological beliefs.

• The head of RT’s Arabic-language service, Aydar Aganin, was rotated from the diplomatic service to manage RT’s Arabic-language expansion, suggesting a close relationship between RT and Russia’s foreign policy apparatus. RT’s London Bureau is managed by Darya Pushkova, the daughter of Aleksey Pushkov, the current chair of the Duma Russian Foreign Affairs Committee and a former Gorbachev speechwriter (DXB, 26 March 2009; MK.ru, 13 March 2006).

• According to Simonyan, the Russian Government sets rating and viewership requirements for RT and, “since RT receives budget from the state, it must complete tasks given by the state.” According to Nikolov, RT news stories are written and edited “to become news” exclusively in RT’s Moscow office (Dozhd TV, 11 July; AKT, 4 October).

• In her interview with pro-Kremlin journalist Sergey Minaev, Simonyan complimented RT staff in the United States for passionately defending Russian positions on the air and in social media. Simonyan said: “I wish you could see…how these guys, not just on air, but on their own social networks, Twitter, and when giving interviews, how they defend the positions that we stand on!” (“Minaev Live,” 10 April).

RT Focuses on Social Media, Building Audience

RT aggressively advertises its social media accounts and has a significant and fast-growing social media footprint. In line with its efforts to present itself as anti-mainstream and to provide viewers alternative news content, RT is making its social media operations a top priority, both to avoid broadcast TV regulations and to expand its overall audience.

• According to RT management, RT’s website receives at least 500,000 unique viewers every day. Since its inception in 2005, RT videos received more than 800 million views on YouTube (1 million views per day), which is the highest among news outlets (see graphics for comparison with other news channels) (AKT, 4 October).

• According to Simonyan, the TV audience worldwide is losing trust in traditional TV broadcasts and stations, while the popularity of “alternative channels” like RT or Al Jazeera grows. RT markets itself as an “alternative channel” that is available via the Internet everywhere in the world, and it encourages interaction and social networking (Kommersant, 29 September).

• According to Simonyan, RT uses social media to expand the reach of its political reporting and uses well-trained people to monitor public opinion in social media commentaries (Kommersant, 29 September).

• According to Nikolov, RT requires its hosts to have social media accounts, in part because social media allows the distribution of content that would not be allowed on television (Newreporter.org, 11 October).

• Simonyan claimed in her 3 October interview to independent TV channel Dozhd that Occupy Wall Street coverage gave RT a significant audience boost.

The Kremlin spends $190 million a year on the distribution and dissemination of RT programming, focusing on hotels and satellite, terrestrial, and cable broadcasting. The Kremlin is rapidly expanding RT’s availability around the world and giving it a reach comparable to channels such as Al Jazeera English. According to Simonyan, the United Kingdom and the United States are RT’s most successful markets. RT does not, however, publish audience information.

• According to market research company Nielsen, RT had the most rapid growth (40 percent) among all international news channels in the United States over the past year (2012). Its audience in New York tripled and in Washington DC grew by 60% (Kommersant, 4 July).

• RT claims that it is surpassing Al Jazeera in viewership in New York and Washington DC (BARB, 20 November; RT, 21 November).

• RT states on its website that it can reach more than 550 million people worldwide and 85 million people in the United States; however, it does not publicize its actual US audience numbers (RT, 10 December).

Formal Disassociation From Kremlin Facilitates RT US Messaging

RT America formally disassociates itself from the Russian Government by using a Moscow-based autonomous nonprofit organization to finance its US operations. According to RT’s leadership, this structure was set up to avoid the Foreign Agents Registration Act and to facilitate licensing abroad. In addition, RT rebranded itself in 2008 to deemphasize its Russian origin.

• According to Simonyan, RT America differs from other Russian state institutions in terms of ownership, but not in terms of financing. To disassociate RT from the Russian Government, the federal news agency RIA Novosti established a subsidiary autonomous nonprofit organization, TV-Novosti, using the formal independence of this company to establish and finance RT worldwide (Dozhd TV, 11 July).

• Nikolov claimed that RT is an “autonomous noncommercial entity,” which is “well received by foreign regulators” and “simplifies getting a license.” Simonyan said that RT America is not a “foreign agent” according to US law because it uses a US commercial organization for its broadcasts (AKT, 4 October; Dozhd TV, 11 July).

• Simonyan observed that RT’s original Russia-centric news reporting did not generate sufficient audience, so RT switched to covering international and US domestic affairs and removed the words “Russia Today” from the logo “to stop scaring away the audience” (Afisha, 18 October; Kommersant, 4 July).

• RT hires or makes contractual agreements with Westerners with views that fit its agenda and airs them on RT. Simonyan said on the pro-Kremlin show “Minaev Live” on 10 April that RT has enough audience and money to be able to choose its hosts, and it chooses the hosts that “think like us,” “are interested in working in the anti-mainstream,” and defend RT’s beliefs on social media. Some hosts and journalists do not present themselves as associated with RT when interviewing people, and many of them have affiliations to other media and activist organizations in the United States (“Minaev Live,” 10 April).

Annex B

* This annex was originally published on 11 December 2012 by the Open Source Center, now the Open Source Enterprise.

APPENDIX B

Steele Dossier

APPENDIX C

Memo from Grassley to Comey regarding FBI Investigation into Steele

March 6, 2017

VIA ELECTRONIC TRANSMISSION

The Honorable James B. Comey, Jr.

Director

Federal Bureau of Investigation

935 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.

Washington, DC 20535

Dear Director Comey:

On February 28, 2017, the Washington Post reported that the FBI reached an agreement a few weeks before the Presidential election to pay the author of the unsubstantiated dossier alleging a conspiracy between President Trump and the Russians, Christopher Steele, to continue investigating Mr. Trump.¹ The article claimed that the FBI was aware Mr. Steele was creating these memos as part of work for an opposition research firm connected to Hillary Clinton. The idea that the FBI and associates of the Clinton campaign would pay Mr. Steele to investigate the Republican nominee for President in the run-up to the election raises further questions about the FBI’s independence from politics, as well as the Obama administration’s use of law enforcement and intelligence agencies for political ends. It is additionally troubling that the FBI reportedly agreed to such an arrangement given that, in January of 2017, then-Director Clapper issued a statement stating that “the IC has not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable, and we did not rely upon it in any way for our conclusions.” According to the Washington Post, the FBI’s arrangement with Mr. Steele fell through when the media published his dossier and revealed his identity.

The Committee requires additional information to evaluate this situation. Please provide the following information and respond to these questions by March 20, 2017. Please also schedule a briefing by that date by FBI personnel with knowledge of these issues.

  1. All FBI records relating to the agreement with Mr. Steele regarding his investigation of President Trump and his associates, including the agreement itself, all drafts, all internal FBI

Director Comey
March 6, 2017
Page 2 of 3

communications about the agreement, all FBI communications with Mr. Steele about the agreement, all FBI requests for authorization for the agreement, and all records documenting the approval of the agreement.

  2. All records, including 302s, of any FBI meetings or interviews with Mr. Steele.

  3. All FBI policies, procedures, and guidelines applicable when the FBI seeks to fund an investigator associated with a political opposition research firm connected to a political candidate, or with any outside entity.

  4. All FBI records relating to agreements and payments made to Mr. Steele in connection with any other investigations, including the reported agreements relating to his investigation of FIFA.

  5. Were any other government officials outside of the FBI involved in discussing or authorizing the agreement with Mr. Steele, including anyone from the Department of Justice or the Obama White House? If so, please explain who was involved and provide all related records.

  6. How did the FBI first obtain Mr. Steele’s Trump investigation memos? Has the FBI obtained additional memos from this same source that were not published by Buzzfeed? If so, please provide copies.

  7. Has the FBI created, or contributed to the creation of, any documents based on or otherwise referencing these memos or the information in the memos? If so, please provide copies of all such documents and, where necessary, clarify which portions are based on or related to the memos.

  8. Has the FBI verified or corroborated any of the allegations made in the memos? Were any allegations or other information from the memo included in any documents created by the FBI, or which the FBI helped to create, without having been independently verified or corroborated by the FBI beforehand? If so, why?

  9. Has the FBI relied on or otherwise referenced the memos or any information in the memos in seeking a FISA warrant, other search warrant, or any other judicial process? Did the FBI rely on or otherwise reference the memos in relation to any National Security Letters? If so, please include copies of all relevant applications and other documents.

10. Who decided to include the memos in the briefings received by Presidents Obama and Trump? What was the basis for that decision?

11. Did the agreement with Mr. Steele ever enter into force? If so, for how long? If it did not, why not?

12. You have previously stated that you will not comment on pending investigations, including confirming or denying whether they exist. You have also acknowledged that statements about closed investigations are a separate matter, sometimes warranting disclosures or public comment. Given the inflammatory nature of the allegations in Mr. Steele’s dossier, if the FBI is undertaking or has undertaken any investigation of the claims, will you please inform the Committee at the conclusion of any such investigations as to what information the investigations discovered and what conclusions the FBI reached? Simply put, when allegations like these are put into the public domain prior to any FBI assessment of their reliability, then if subsequent FBI investigation of the allegations finds them false, unsupported, or unreliable, the FBI should make those rebuttals public.

I anticipate that your responses to these questions may contain both classified and unclassified information. Please send all unclassified material directly to the Committee. In keeping with the requirements of Executive Order 13526, if any of the responsive documents do contain classified information, please segregate all unclassified material within the classified documents, provide all unclassified information directly to the Committee, and provide a classified addendum to the Office of Senate Security. Although the Committee complies with all laws and regulations governing the handling of classified information, it is not bound, absent its prior agreement, by any handling restrictions or instructions on unclassified information unilaterally asserted by the Executive Branch.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this important matter. If you have any questions, please contact Patrick Davis of my Committee staff at (202) 224-5225.

Sincerely,

Charles E. Grassley

Chairman

Committee on the Judiciary

cc: The Honorable Diane Feinstein

Ranking Member

Senate Committee on the Judiciary

¹ Tom Hamburger and Rosalind Helderman, FBI Once Planned to Pay Former British Spy Who Authored Controversial Trump Dossier, THE WASHINGTON POST (Feb. 28, 2017).

APPENDIX D

Letters from Trump, Sessions, and Rosenstein on firing Comey

THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 9, 2017

Statement from the Press Secretary

Today, President Donald J. Trump informed FBI Director James Comey that he has been terminated and removed from office. President Trump acted based on the clear recommendations of both Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

“The FBI is one of our Nation’s most cherished and respected institutions and today will mark a new beginning for our crown jewel of law enforcement,” said President Trump.

A search for a new permanent FBI Director will begin immediately.

###

APPENDIX E

Appointment of Special Counsel from the Office of the Deputy Attorney General

ORDER NO. 3915-2017

APPOINTMENT OF SPECIAL COUNSEL
TO INVESTIGATE RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE WITH THE
2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION AND RELATED MATTERS

By virtue of the authority vested in me as Acting Attorney General, including 28 U.S.C. §§ 509, 510, and 515, in order to discharge my responsibility to provide supervision and management of the Department of Justice, and to ensure a full and thorough investigation of the Russian govemmenfs efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, I hereby order as follows:

(a) Robert S. Mueller III is appointed t() serve as Specia] Counsel for the United States Department of Justice.

(b) The Special Counsel is authorized to conduct the investigation confinned by then-FBI Director James 8. Corney in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on March 20, 2017, including:

(i) any links and/or coordination bet ween the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump; and

(ii) any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation; and

(iii) any other matters within the scope of 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a).

(c) If the Special Counsel believes it is necessary and appropriate, the Special Counsel is authorized to prosecute federal crimes arising from the investigation of these matters.

(d) Sections 600.4 through 600. l 0 of Title 28 of the Code of Federal Regulations are applicable to the Special Counsel.

APPENDIX F

Memo from Grassley and Graham to Rosenstein and Wray, regarding Steele communication with US media

APPENDIX G

Nunes memo

APPENDIX H

Schiff memo

APPENDIX I

Statement of the Offense, filed against Flynn by the Special Counsel’s office

APPENDIX J

Overview

Following a more than yearlong, bipartisan investigation into Russia active measures targeting the 2016 U.S. election, the House Intelligence Committee has completed a draft report of 150+ pages, with 600+ citations. The draft report addresses, in detail, each of the questions within the agreed parameters of the investigation, as announced in March 2017. It analyzes:

• Russian active measures directed against the 2016 U.S. election and against our European allies;

• The U.S. government response to that attack;

• Links between Russians and the Trump and Clinton campaigns; and

• Purported leaks of classified information.

Initial Findings

The draft report contains 40+ initial findings that describe:

• A pattern of Russian attacks on America’s European allies;

• Russian cyberattacks on U.S. political institutions in 2015-2016 and their use of social media to sow discord;

• A lackluster pre-election response to Russian active measures;

• Concurrence with the Intelligence Community Assessment’s judgments, except with respect to Putin’s supposed preference for candidate Trump;

• We have found no evidence of collusion, coordination, or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians;

• How anti-Trump research made its way from Russian sources to the Clinton campaign; and

• Problematic contacts between senior Intelligence Community officials and the media.

Proposed Recommendations

The draft report includes 25+ proposed recommendations for Congress and the executive branch to improve:

• Election security, including protecting vote tallies;

• Support to European allies;

• The U.S. government response to cyber-attacks;

• Campaign finance transparency; and

• Counterintelligence practices related to political campaigns and unauthorized disclosures.

Conclusion

The draft report will be provided to the Committee minority on March 13 for review and comment. After adoption it will be submitted for a declassification review, and a declassified version will be made public. The report’s completion will signify the closure of one chapter in the Committee’s robust oversight of the threat posed by Moscow—which began well before the investigation and will continue thereafter.

Additional follow-on efforts arising from the investigation include oversight of the unmasking of Americans’ names in intelligence reports, FISA abuse, and other matters.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo credit: Reuters

TED ROOSEVELT MALLOCH, scholar-diplomat-strategist, is also Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Roosevelt Group, a leading strategic management and thought leadership company.

He has served as Research Professor at Yale University, Senior Fellow at Said Business School, Oxford University, and Professor of Leadership and Governance at Henley Business School.

His most recent books concern the nature of virtuous enterprise, the practices of practical wisdom in business, the pursuit of happiness, and the virtues of generosity, prudence, and thrift. His most recent book is entitled Common Sense Business.

He has served on the executive board of the World Economic Forum (Davos); held an ambassadorial level position at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland; worked in the US State Department and Senate Committee on Foreign Relations; worked in capital markets at Salomon Brothers on Wall Street; and sat on a number of corporate, mutual fund, and not-for-profit boards.

Ted earned his PhD in international political economy from the University of Toronto, took his BA from Gordon College, and an MLitt from the University of Aberdeen on a St. Andrews Fellowship.