quote:

I hope this report from Sarah Carter is appropriate here.

of course it is.

Parts of the story are

a) what does the dossier actually say,
b) who contributed to the dossier, and
c) who actually used it.

We may learn a lot more in the next few months to clear up some of the mystery.

Glenn Simpson testified he did not verify the dossier. Simpson said Steele had a skill to identify misinformation when it was presented. (rather stupid to say something like that) Simpson also said the Russians were good at using misinformation as an intelligence tool.

Steele has said he took his information to the FBI and Intel community so they could verify it.

James Comey told the Senate Intel Committee that the FBI believed the dossier because Steele was a trusted FBI source with a good track record. Comey said the FBI did not do much (if any) verification other than believe Steele. Quite an ugly circle.

Steele didn’t deal directly with the sources. He interacted with a team of paid Russian subcontractors. The subcontractors talked to the Russian sources. Some of the sources talked about things that other people had told them. The subcontractors and sources have not been publicly identified.

So it is quite amazing that Steele had this uncanny ability to detect misinformation when he was multiple times removed from the people who actually claimed to have witnessed the events being reported.

Full dossier here:
https://assets.documentcloud.o...ence-Allegations.pdf


Note that the main Trump campaign players who are discussed in the dossier by name are Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and Michael Cohen.

All 3 of these people had public links to Russia before the dossier was written. Glenn Simpson could have found those links, especially if he had access to the raw FISA
data.

Carter Page gave a speech in Moscow in early July.

Report 4 (pages 9-10) dated 19 July 2016

In July 2016, Carter Page secretly meets in Moscow with Igor Sechin and Divyekin.

Sechin discusses lifting of sanctions against Russia over Ukraine. Page is non-committal.

Diveykin discusses release of the Russian Clinton dossier (dirt). Diveykin hinted the Russians had compromising material on Trump.

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There will be much more detail on these alleged meetings in Report 15.

Steele and Glenn Simpson will brief Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News in Sept 2016. Isikoff writes a 23 July Sep 2016 story about these alleged meetings involving Carter Page.

This will become a huge issue in the false claims by the FBI in the FISA warrant against Carter Page.

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edit: in rereading this post, I see that I used the wrong month for the Isikoff story

This message has been edited. Last edited by: sdy,

Report 5 (pages 11-12) dated 30 July 2016

Kremlin concerned that political fallout from DNC hacking is spiraling out of control. Extreme nervousness among Trump associates from negative media accusations.

Russians keen to cool situation. Russians want to maintain “plausible deniability” to pro-Trump and anti-Clinton operations. Unlikely to be any ratcheting up of offensive plays.

Trump campaign source confirms regular exchange w Kremlin for at least 8 years, including intelligence fed back to Russia on oligarchs’ activity in US.

Russians apparently agreed to not use the compromising material they held on Trump, given how helpful his team had been over several years.

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Report 5 tries to paint a picture of a long term (8 year) relationship.

It also throws out some "rational" on why the Russians didn't use all of the compromising material they supposedly had.

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Report 6 (pages 13-14) dated 5 Aug 2016

Sergei Ivanov angry that the Kremlin team (led by Dmitriy Peskov) went too far in the pro-Trump campaign. Ivanov says the Russian leadership should “sit tight and deny everything”.

Peskov is now “scared shitless” that he would be scape goated by Putin for the Russian interference in the US election

Premier Dmitriy Medvedev says he won’t cover for Peskov in the DNC/Trump operations

************************

Report 7 (pages 15-16) dated 10 Aug 2016

Sergei Ivanov assessed the impact of the Kremlin intervention into the US presidential election. The Russians decided not to leak new material. They would try to remain technically deniable.

Ivanov said the target audience of rumours and misinformation would be the educated youth in America. He thought there was still a chance they would vote for Trump as a protest against the establishment H Clinton.

Ivanov reported that although the Kremlin had underestimated the strength of the US media and liberal reaction to the DNC hacks and Trump’s links to Russia, Putin was generally satisfied.

The Kremlin supported various US political figures, including funding indirectly their recent visits to Moscow. These included a delegation from Lyndon Larouche, Jill Stein of the Green Party, Carter Page, and Michael Flynn.

**************************

These 6 pages of the dossier seem to be filler material to add to the overall theme.

Remember: this all may be fantasy talk w no real basis. Or it may be a mix of truth w fantasy. I doubt very much that is all true.

quote:

Ivanov said the target audience of rumours and misinformation would be the educated youth in America. He thought there was still a chance they would vote for Trump as a protest against the establishment H Clinton.

Hoo, boy. And then they "backed" Lyndon Larouche and Jill Stein.

I don't doubt that they made all kinds of efforts, but it kinda sounds like some Russian dude was just given a big ol' budget and told to have at it.

Report 8 (page 17) dated 10 Aug 2016

An ethic Russian associate of Donald Trump discussed the reaction inside the camp from recent negative publicity to Moscow clandestine involvement in the campaign. Trump’s associate reported that the aim of leaking the DNC emails to Wikileaks was to swing supporters of Bernie Sanders from Clinton to Trump. This objective had been conceived and promoted by Carter Page.

The ethnic Russian associate of Trump said the problem was that campaign had underestimated the negative reaction from liberals and the conservative elite to Russian interference. The new objective was to check the Clinton successful exploitation of Putin as the bogeyman / Russian interference story to tarnish Trump. The Trump campaign was focusing on tapping into support in American television media to achieve this, as they reckoned this resource had been underused by then to date.

Trump’s associate admitted there was anger in the Trump team at Putin going beyond weakening Clinton, to undermine the US government and democratic system.

******************

The dossier says the aim of leaking the DNC emails was "conceived and promoted by Carter Page".

If you have listened to a few Carter Page interviews, you know how ridiculous that statement is.

Then the statement that the Trump campaign would tap into American television because that had been "underused". American media was almost universally ripping the Trump campaign apart.

And then finally the dossier tries to raise the stakes beyond the campaign but to undermining the democratic system.

Keep in mind this is most likely pure bullshit, fabricated by Simpson and Steele, and paid for by Hillary Clinton. They would take this crap and package it as "Western intelligence".

How stupid could the FBI be to run with this material with no verification ?

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Report 9 (page 18-19) dated 20 Oct 2016

Kremlin insider reports that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen secretly met Kremlin officials in August 2016 in a meeting held in Prague, Czech Republic. Purpose of the meeting was to clean up the mess of western media revelations of a) Paul Manafort corrupt relation with Yanukovych regime in Ukraine and b) Carter Page secret meeting in Moscow with senior regime figures in July 2016.

Pro-Putin figure Kosachev involved as “plausibly deniable” facilitator and may have been in meeting with Cohen. Kosachev an important player in the Trump campaign – Kremlin liaison operation.


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Report 9 is out time sequence (it is an October report). This may just be because of the way someone copied the reports and put them into a pdf.

It is ludicrous that the FBI hasn't come out and said the dossier claims about Cohen are not true. Cohen showed his passport had no stamps for travel to Prague, and he had explanations for where he was during the times cited in the dossier.

If the FBI thought Cohen met with the Kremlin like this, why would they let him remain an advisor to the President? Why would there be no indictment of Cohen ?

This would be Mueller's biggest catch if it was true.

But Democrats and many of the media all claim the dossier is completely true.

A source known to me for several decades in Prague whose information has been reliable in the past indicated to me that a Michael Cohen was seen in Prague during that time frame, apparently in town for a bowling tournament.

quote:

apparently in town for a bowling tournament.

well, that could be a problem. because,

occasionally there is an article that is worth quoting in full. This is one of them.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/...sier/article/2011865

A Doozy of a Dossier
8:15 AM, MAR 09, 2018 | By ERIC FELTEN

The so-called “Trump dossier” continues to be the most important—and contested—document in the many probes of Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election.

Since its publication by BuzzFeed on January 10, 2017—bearing the remarkable disclaimer that “ the allegations are unverified, and the report contains errors ”—it has set partisan hearts racing. Democrats have by and large treated it as a collection of solid leads in need of thorough investigation by intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. Senator Dianne Feinstein is typical in claiming that “not a single revelation in the Steele dossier has been refuted.”

Republicans, by contrast, see it as a partisan hit job and wonder what’s become of the FBI and the Justice Department when they start crediting salacious rumors strung together by a Trump opponent.

But thanks to the investigations it has spawned, we know a lot more about the provenance of the dossier than when it was first published, and it bears rereading in light of what we have since learned.

The dossier is a series of memos written from June to December 2016 by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, alleging a Trump/Kremlin conspiracy. Paying for Steele’s work was the opposition research company Fusion GPS; paying Fusion GPS was the law firm Perkins Coie; paying Perkins Coie was the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Given that Steele presents largely uncheckable allegations from anonymous sources, the reliability and credibility of the dossier has rested on the reliability and credibility that has been claimed for Steele himself. According to senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham, during a briefing to senators in March 2017 then-director of the FBI James Comey vouched for Steele’s bona fides. In seeking a warrant from the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to eavesdrop on the communications of one-time Trump campaign aide Carter Page, the FBI had relied on the dossier, Comey told the senators, “because Mr. Steele himself was considered reliable due to his past work with the Bureau.”

At a 2017 House hearing with Comey, Rep. Joaquin Castro began his assessment of the dossier by proclaiming his reliance on “the reputation of the author.” According to the Texas Democrat, the fact that “Christopher Steele is a former accomplished British intelligence officer with a career built on following Russia is important. This is not someone who doesn’t know how to run a source and not someone without contacts.” Ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff has described Steele glowingly as “a former British intelligence officer, who is reportedly held in high regard by U.S. intelligence.”

In all the scuffling over whether Clinton’s funding of the enterprise calls Steele’s credibility into question, little attention has been devoted to a more basic and obvious question posed by the dossier: How could a former spy in the U.K., in a matter of months, squeeze the highest ranks of the Russian government like a sponge and expose one of its most consequential and closely guarded schemes?

Why do we pay CIA agents if a freelancer like Steele so easily runs circles around them?

Adding to the astonishing degree of difficulty of the trick, according to a fawning profile in the New Yorker, Steele hasn’t been to any former Soviet state, let alone Russia itself, since 2009. It’s a matter of personal safety—a contractor for his business-intelligence company warned him in 2012 that an agent of the FSB (the modern iteration of the KGB) had called Steele “an enemy of Mother Russia.” This is supposed to bolster the credibility of the dossier author. But it cuts the other way when it comes to the seeming ease with which Steele hoovered up information. Who in Moscow’s upper echelons is going to spill to “an enemy of Mother Russia”?

But spill, the dossier tells us, they did: The sources Steele describes are high-ranking. Source A is “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure.” Source B is “a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin.” Source C is a “senior Russian financial official.” A “trusted compatriot” of Sources A and B is indiscreet enough to tell Steele that “the Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting US Republican presidential candidate, Donald TRUMP for at least 5 years.” Source B blabbed “that the TRUMP operation was both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir PUTIN.”

Let’s stop for a second and take that in.

On the first page of the dossier, Steele claims to have gotten senior Russian officials and their trusted friends to chit-chat about a secret plan crafted for five years by no less than Putin himself. Given the relative trivialities that can get one beaten to death in a Russian prison, these senior officials would seem to have exhibited an extraordinarily cavalier attitude toward their own health and well-being.

Is it plausible? One skeptic is an American journalist with a decade’s experience working in Moscow. He points out the obvious: It can be dangerous to be a reporter in Russia and difficult to get sources with real information to share it. People asking questions of top officials and their associates don’t go unnoticed in Putin’s surveillance state, whether it’s someone on the phone from England or just a nosy local. “Nobody Steele could have sent or talked to could have done so without it immediately coming to the attention of Russian internal security,” says the journalist.

From the earliest days of the dossier inquiry, Russian security services would have had at least a couple of options: (1) They could have shut Steele down immediately, or (2) they could have taken the opportunity to feed him stories contrived to cause the most chaos and damage to the United States. The journalist says, “Whatever is in the dossier is there because Russia wanted it in the dossier.” Unless, he adds, Steele just made things up and never had any serious Russian sources for the material in the first place .

Before moving on, let’s consider one further curiosity: the famously lurid story that kicks off the dossier, in which Trump is said to have paid prostitutes to pee on his bed at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton. Steele’s associates supposedly didn’t want to include it—too sensational, they thought.

But ever the straight-shooter, according to a “longtime friend” quoted in the New Yorker, Steele thought that “the possibility of a potential American President being subject to blackmail was too important to hide.” But here we have another problem of plausibility: The dossier repeatedly treats “perverted sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB” as the ultimate stuff of kompromat.

Yet if Trump engaged in a multiyear criminal conspiracy with Russia, as the dossier claims, he exposed himself to blackmail by Putin on a scale that would make a library’s worth of pornographic surveillance videos trivial by comparison. And yet when it comes to Trump, our prurient spy friend keeps coming back to kinky sex as the gold-standard of kompromat.

Aside from the difficulty of clearing basic-believability hurdles, the dossier also appears to be padded. COMPANY INTELLIGENCE REPORT 2016/086—the memo following the water-sports piffle—provides “A SYNOPSIS OF RUSSIAN STATE SPONSORED AND OTHER CYBER OFFENSIVE [CRIMINAL] OPERATIONS.” The report is an exercise in recycling.

Though the date built into the title of the memo is 2016, most of the information is boilerplate dated to 2015 and in content and tone appears to have been written for one of Steele’s run-of-the-mill business clients. Not only does it have no information about Trump, the memo doesn’t mention anything about the 2016 election, nor anything about election-meddling of any sort.

Here and there, whoever took the report off the shelf remembered to update it with a bit of data marked 2016, but the giveaway comes at the end of the memo, where Steele always puts a specific date. The memo is dated “26 July 2015.”

There are glaring inconsistencies. Whereas in a June dossier entry, the Trump/Kremlin conspiracy is described as a five-year affair, by July Steele cites a “Source close to TRUMP campaign” that “regular exchange with Kremlin has existed for at least 8 years, including intelligence fed back to Russia on oligarchs’ activities in US.”

Five years—let alone eight—is an extraordinarily long time to maintain an international covert operation. And that’s assuming top-notch, tight-lipped tradecraft.

How does a conspiracy last five days if it’s comprised of Trump and associates on one end and loose-lipped Russians on the other? And what benefits was the Kremlin getting out of the bargain? Is it plausible that an FSB handler eager for info on oligarchs abroad would have recruited Donald Trump, in 2011 or 2008 or any other year, to keep tabs on them?

The one documented act of Russian footsie with Team Trump that we are so far aware of is the meeting Don Jr. took with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in June 2016. Somehow, the dossier missed that outreach (even though Veselnitskaya was also a client of Fusion GPS, the firm directly paying Steele for the dossier).

We know that meeting happened, but it makes no sense in the context of the compromising relationship the dossier purports to have uncovered: If the Kremlin had been “cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least 5 years,” as the dossier summarized, why the sudden need to reach out to Don Jr.?

Time and again the dossier attributes to Trump feats of political trickeration that would be astonishing if performed by a disciplined and experienced organization. Nothing we have learned of the Trump campaign suggests either the discipline or the competence.

Take the memo labeled COMPANY INTELLIGENCE REPORT 2016/095. It alleges not just the quite creditable assertion that the Kremlin is “behind recent appearance of DNC emails on WikiLeaks” but the rather more difficult to credit claim that the Russian hacking relied on an “exchange of information established in both directions”—that is, help from the Republican candidate: “TRUMP’s team using moles within DNC and hackers in the US as well as outside in Russia.”

As impressive as it would be for an independent operator to have even a single high-placed Russian government source, from memo to memo in the dossier the super-secret sources just keep coming. Among them is a “longstanding compatriot friend” of “a Kremlin insider.” And that insider has blockbuster stuff. Such blockbuster stuff that one is left scratching one’s head over why the FBI was wasting its time with a piker like Carter Page.

On October 18, 2016, just three days before the FBI sought a FISA warrant to surveil Page, Steele delivered one of the dossier’s most shocking allegations: “a Kremlin insider with direct access to the leadership,” he wrote, “confirmed that a key role in the secret TRUMP campaign/Kremlin relationship was being played by the Republican candidate’s personal lawyer Michael COHEN.”

Shocking, because unlike Carter Page—a figure distant from Trump in the first place and who by October 2016 had already left the campaign—Cohen couldn’t have been closer to the candidate. Shocking, because the dossier accused Page only of entertaining the possibility of a bribe in exchange for lifting sanctions in the then-unlikely event Trump were to win the White House. Cohen, by contrast, was said to be personally managing the years-long international conspiracy: A “Kremlin insider highlighted the importance of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s lawyer, Michael COHEN, in the ongoing secret liaison relationship between the New York tycoon’s campaign and the Russian leadership,” alleged a dossier memo dated October 19, 2016.

Cohen was said to be tasked with covering up the conspiracy and worse. The memo dated October 20, 2016, tells of Trump’s lawyer going to Prague for “secret meeting/s with Kremlin officials.”

The dossier claimed he went there to arrange payoffs: “The agenda comprised questions on how deniable cash payments were to be made to hackers who had worked in Europe under Kremlin direction against the CLINTON campaign,” one memo specified, “and various contingencies for covering up these operations and Moscow’s secret liaison with the TRUMP team more generally.” The hackers were “paid by both TRUMP’s team and the Kremlin.”

By mid-October, Carter Page was good and washed-up and Steele was reporting that all the action was with Michael Cohen. Nor would it be impossible to imagine Cohen as a bag man—the lawyer, after all, was the one who arranged to pay porn performer Stormy Daniels to keep mum about any affair she may have had years ago with Trump.

And yet days after Steele pegged Cohen as the linchpin to the Kremlin/Trump conspiracy, the FBI relied heavily on the dossier to put in for a FISA warrant to sweep not Cohen’s communications but Page’s. Why?

Perhaps it’s because the dossier memos involving Cohen included readily checkable details. For example, according to the dossier, “COHEN’s wife is of Russian descent and her father a leading property developer in Moscow.” (His wife left Ukraine as a child 40 years ago; her father is not any sort of property developer in Moscow, let alone a “leading” one.) The dossier alleges Cohen skulked to Prague with some associates “either in the last week of August or the first week of September.” (Cohen has paraded his passport to prove he made no such trip.) Cohen has since brought defamation suits against Fusion GPS and BuzzFeed.

It’s quite possible the FBI didn’t seek a FISA warrant on Cohen because they discovered, rather quickly, that the claims against Trump’s lawyer did not square with the available evidence. If so, kudos to the FBI for professionalism. On the other hand, if what was checkable in the dossier so readily proved false, why present Steele’s work to the FISA court as reliable and credible when it came to surveilling Carter Page?

Does the dossier still matter? Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) told the New Yorker last week that “ to impeach Steele’s dossier is to impeach Mueller’s investigation .” Which raises the question: Why is Sen. Whitehouse selling special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation so short?

If Mueller is half the professional he is advertised to be, he will look for provable facts, not the fancies peddled by Steele and his sources, such as they may be. The opposition researchers were paid to collect allegations damaging to team Trump; Mueller is charged with finding the truth. These are fundamentally different undertakings.

The dossier has launched investigations and lawsuits and thousands of arguments since its original publication. Rereading it now, in light of all that has subsequently come to pass, shows that the best summary of its contents is still the one BuzzFeed began with:

The allegations remain unverified, and the report contains errors. And how.

Very good article.

I have my doubts about this Michael Cohen lawyer. Someone sophisticated enough to be entrusted with the delicate tasks of deniable cash payments to European hackers and pretending to be in Santa Monica while really in Prague is not likely dumb enough to rely on a non-disclosure agreement with a female, especially one with questionable morals. It almost seems like felony malpractice per se.

Report 10 (page 20-21) dated 22 Aug 2016

Ex-Ukranian President Yanukovich tells Putin that he authorized kickback payments to Paul Manafort, as alleged in western media. Yanukovich tells Putin there is no documentary trail that could provide clear evidence of this.

Putin remains worried that Yanukovich has fully covered traces of these payments to Manafort.

Close Trump associate explains reason behind Manafort’s recent resignation. While Ukraine revelations played a part, former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski also wanted Manafort out.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


Report 11 (page 22-24) dated 14 Sep 2016

Kremlin orders staff to remain silent in media on allegations of Russian interference in US presidential campaign. Putin orders no discussion in public or private.

Sergei Kislyak (Russian ambassador to US) had been advising on potential negative impact on Russia from the operations. Sergei Ivanov had been advising that the pro-Trump, anti-Clinton operation would be effective with little blowback. Ivanov fired in August 2016 as Head of Administration for giving Putin poor advice on the Russian interference operation

Russians have further “kompromat” on Clinton (emails) and consider release in late September. Presidential spokesman Peskov still leading this

Kremlin objective to shift policy consensus favourably to Russia in US post-Obama regardless of who won the election. It basically comprised of pushing candidate Clinton away from Obama’s policies. The best example was that both candidates opposed TPP and TTIP, which were assesses as detrimental to Russian interests.

Overall, the US election was considered too close to call.

Senior Russian diplomat (Mikhail Kulagin) withdrawn from Washington embassy on account of potential exposure in US presidential election operations

6 more reports to describe.

At this point with September 2016 reports listed, remember that Steele and Simpson briefed a number of media reps in September 2016.

The media briefed included NYT, Wash Post, Yahoo, New Yorker, CNN .

Yahoo (Isikoff) wrote an article that just addressed Carter Page based on the Steele inputs. Isikoff has admitted Steele briefed him for the article.

When the FBI went for the FISA warrant against Carter Page, they said that Steele had not briefed Isikoff, and thus Isikoff's article was an independent corroboration of Steele. (a lie)

A new book is coming out very soon: "Russian Roulette". The authors are Michael Isikoff and David Corn. Steele briefed David Corn (Mother Jones) in October 2016 and Corn published a broader version of the dossier in late October 2016.

I would suspect Isikoff and Corn are not the most objective of reporters.

Adam Schiff said something a few weeks ago that seemed like a bombshell, but no one appeared to pay any attention to it. Schiff said the only part of the dossier that was presented to the FISA court were the parts about Carter Page.

IF the court had been presented the full dossier, it is likely the judge would have wanted some serious verification of the wild claims in the dossier. But if Schiff is right, the court only saw the parts about Page. That was very deceptive by the FBI to make the dossier and Steele look credible.

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Report 12 (page 25-26) dated 14 Sep 2016

Top level Russian government official notes history between Putin and Alpha Group of businesses led by oligarchs Mikhaul Fridman, Petr Aven, and German Khan.

Alpha held “kompromat” on Putin and his corrupt business activities.

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Report 13 (page 27) dated 14 Sep 2016

St Petersburg sources say Trump paid bribes and engaged in sexual activities but key witnesses silenced. Trump participated in sex parties in St Petersburg

A business figure ( Araz Agalarov) would know the details of what Trump did there.

***********************

Simpson could have picked up the Agalarov name to throw into the pot. Aras Agalarov was involved w Donald Trump in the 2013 Miss Universe pageant held in Moscow.

Little bit of truth, lot of fantasy, stir well.

quote:

Originally posted by sdy:
6 more reports to describe.

At this point with September 2016 reports listed, remember that Steele and Simpson briefed a number of media reps in September 2016.

The media briefed included NYT, Wash Post, Yahoo, New Yorker, CNN .

Yahoo (Isikoff) wrote an article that just addressed Carter Page based on the Steele inputs. Isikoff has admitted Steele briefed him for the article.

When the FBI went for the FISA warrant against Carter Page, they said that Steele had not briefed Isikoff, and thus Isikoff's article was an independent corroboration of Steele. (a lie)

A new book is coming out very soon: "Russian Roulette". The authors are Michael Isikoff and David Corn. Steele briefed David Corn (Mother Jones) in October 2016 and Corn published a broader version of the dossier in late October 2016.

I would suspect Isikoff and Corn are not the most objective of reporters.

Adam Schiff said something a few weeks ago that seemed like a bombshell, but no one appeared to pay any attention to it. Schiff said the only part of the dossier that was presented to the FISA court were the parts about Carter Page.

IF the court had been presented the full dossier, it is likely the judge would have wanted some serious verification of the wild claims in the dossier. But if Schiff is right, the court only saw the parts about Page. That was very deceptive by the FBI to make the dossier and Steele look credible.

It’s unclear who has actually laid eyes on the FISA application. The FBI released it to the HPSCI on terms that one each side, plus one staff each side could see it. Nunes reportedly designated Trey Gowdy to review all the materials and they drafted the memo. I don’t recall any clear information on who the God Damned Commies had do the review.

Adam Schiff has said he was the DEM rep who reviewed the detailed classified reports.

Schiff has frequently ridiculed Nunes because Nunes did not personally review the material. Of course we now know that Nunes assigned Trey Gowdy to be the REP reviewer.

In the 24 Jan 2018 ltr from DoJ to Nunes, which warned about releasing the Nunes memo, there was a footnote that said Schiff reviewed for DEMs and Gowdy for REPs.

link to ltr:

https://www.lawfareblog.com/do...ter-nunes-about-memo

quote:

Originally posted by sdy:
Adam Schiff has said he was the DEM rep who reviewed the detailed classified reports.

Schiff has frequently ridiculed Nunes because Nunes did not personally review the material. Of course we now know that Nunes assigned Trey Gowdy to be the REP reviewer.

Yes, but nearly everything I have heard Schiff say has turned out to be wrong.

see my last post above.

added the DoJ ltr reference.

Agree that Schiff is a prolific liar.


here is a video of Schiff saying that only the parts about Page were presented to the court.

Note how Schiff brags that the parts about Michael Cohen were not presented to the court. The FBI had good reason not to. (to deceive the court)

https://www.realclearpolitics....n_to_fisa_court.html

Report 14 (page 28-29) dated 12 Oct 2016

Russian leadership disappointed that leaked emails on Clinton have not had greater impact on campaign.

Russians have injected further anti-Clinton material into compliant western media outlets like Wikileaks. Best material already in public domain.

Putin angry with senior officials who overpromised on Trump both in terms of his chances and being able to contain US backlash over Kremlin interference.

Trump supported by Kremlin because he would shake up international status quo in favor of Russia.

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Report 15 (page 30-31) dated 18 Oct 2016

A close associate of Rosneft President Igor Sechin elaborated on the secret meeting between Sechin and Carter Page on either 7 or 8 July 2016.

Sechin was so keen to get western sanctions lifted that he offered Page/Trump associates up to 19% of Rosneft. Page expressed interest and confirmed that if Trump were elected President, sanctions would be lifted.


Sechin believed that Trump would win the presidency up to 17 Oct 2016, when he assessed this was no longer possible. Sechin put out feelers to other business and political contacts in the US instead


A Kremlin insider confirmed that a key role in the secret Trump campaign / Kremlim relationship was being played by Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen

Sechin’s associate said that although Carter Page had not stated it explicitly to Sechin, he had implied with regard to lifting sanctions, he was speaking with Trump’s authority.

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Rosneft is a major Russian oil company. One of the largest companies in Russia.

Carter Page pointed out that 19% of Rosneft was sold. A December 2016 news story reported that 19% of Rosneft was sold for $ 11 Billion. It was sold to a Swiss company Glencore and Qatar.

Page noted that Glencore had been founded by Marc Rich. (The same Marc Rich pardoned by Bill Clinton in 2000). Rich passed away in 2013 in Switzerland with net worth $ 1 Billion.

Several have noted - all roads lead back to the Clintons

Carter Page was hardly involved in the Trump campaign at all. His name only publicly surfaced because in Mar 2016 Donald Trump was pushed by Wash Post to name some foreign policy people on his team. At that time the Trump team was weak. Very weak.

An indication that Christopher Steele is a fraud can be seen back in report #9. Steele says that Cohen has to clean up the mess from western media revelations of Carter Page's secret meeting in Moscow.

The only story that was out at the time of report #9 was Isikoff's 23 Sep 2016 story about Page. And Steele had planted that story w Isikoff.

So Steele plants a story in the western press, and then later uses it as rational for why Cohen had to clean it up.

BTW, the FBI lied exactly the same way w the Isikoff story to the FISA court.

My daughter in law is a senior Navy officer in Intel, now at the Pentagon. I think, but do not know, that she is mostly involved in collection and assessment of physical information, rainfalls, crops, population movements, food production, etc.

I keep trying to get her to talk to me about humint, human intelligence, the information gathered from human sources, which this dossier seems to be an attempt at. She is closed mouthed, either because she knows and can’t say, or knows and is embarrassed to say, or doesn’t know.

I tend to think it is the middle choice. If this is a fair sample of what our vast humint operation collects and deals in, then we are devoting a lot of resources for not much, and that may explain the appalling failures of intelligence which always are blamed for sudden adverse events, like the embassy seizure in Teran decades ago, 9-11.

Maybe it is that third rate gossip is better than no information at all, or something.

With only 2 reports left to describe, I hope it is evident that the dossier is actually very weak in terms of proving anything at all.

Much of it is extremely suspicious of being flat out fabrication.

What did Christopher Steele have to say about the dossier when he got sued in a London court?

Steele "understood the information provided might be used for the purpose of further research, but it would not be published or attributed."

Steele "understood that the arrangement between Fusion and its client(s) was that the intelligence would not be disclosed."

But Steele himself briefed multiple news media.

The last 2 reports of the dossier:

Report 16 (page 32-33) dated 19 Oct 2016

A Kremlin insider highlighted the importance of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen in the secret relationship between the Trump campaign and the Russian leadership. Manafort had led for the Trump side until he left the campaign in August 2016.

Cohen was now heavily involved in a cover up and damage limitation operation to prevent the full details of Trump’s relationship with Russia being exposed. The immediate issues to contain were further scandals involving Manafort’s role in Russia/Ukraine and to limit damage from the exposure of Carter Page’s secret meetings with Russian leadership figures in July 2016.

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report 16 was the last one before the election. Basically a repeat of previous info.

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Report 17 (page 34-35) dated 13 Dec 2016

Trump representative Michael Cohen accompanied by 3 colleagues traveled to Prague either in last week of August or first week in September 2016. They met with Kremlin representatives. The agenda comprised questions on how deniable cash payments were to be made to hackers in Europe under Kremlin direction against the Clinton campaign and contingencies for covering up these operations

Someone (name blanked out) said that from March to September 2016, a company called XBT/Webzilla had been transmitting viruses, planting bugs, stealing data, and conducting “altering operations” against the Democratic Party leadership. Aleksei Gubarov and Seva Kapsugovich were significant players.

In Prague, Cohen agreed contingency plans for various scenarios to protect the operation, but in particular what was to be done if Clinton won. In that event, cyber and other operators would go effectively to ground to cover their traces.

It was agreed by the two sides in Prague to stand down various “Romanian hackers” and that other hackers should head for Plovdiv, Bulgaria to “lay low”.

The operatives had been paid by both the Trump team and the Kremlin

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so Steele claims that Cohen and 3 colleagues traveled to Prague. Has anyone ever asked Simpson or Steele who the 3 were ?

Amazing that this pile of unverified op research caused so much trouble.

That so-called dossier reads like fiction written by a drunk. Major league Bizarro World.

One of the key dossier claims against Carter Page is in report #15 dated 18 Oct 2016 .

"Sechin was so keen to get western sanctions lifted that he offered Page/Trump associates up to 19% of Rosneft"

Russian state-controlled oil giant Rosneft


Turns out there was a previous public announcement in June 2016 :

"According to Bloomberg, Rosneft is looking to dump as much as 19% off to China and/or India."

from

https://www.forbes.com/sites/k...-deals/#6475191f6eee

This smells like classic misinformation trickery. Find something truthful in the public domain, then twist it to look like something bad for the enemy of clients.