Opinion Editorial
When the Department of Justice Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz released his bombshell report last December, it explained in exhaustive detail how former FBI Director James Comey’s agency had perpetrated a massive fraud on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. They did this in order to obtain a legal warrant to spy on the Trump presidential campaign, and then upon the incoming administration itself after President Trump and his appointees assumed their official offices. The mainstream media did it’s best to downplay what Horowitz found.
What Horowitz did with his explosive FISA Abuse Report, was establish the legitimate basis for what became US Attorney John Durham’s RussiaGate Hoax investigation.
Without Horowitz first releasing that report, we simply would not understand a lot of what Durham has been doing. Even though a lot of people do not accept this, it is nonetheless true:
The basis for Horowitz’s FISA investigation was established by...none other than the Mueller Special Counsel.
Yes. Really.
Mueller's investigation established at its long-anticipated conclusion that there never was any sufficient evidence to charge Trump or any of his campaign people with election collusion or being Russian agents.
Mueller’s Team Killed the RussiaGate Hoax Stone Cold Dead
If there had been sufficient evidence to launch the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign, and then to continue that spying operation on the Trump administration after it had assumed office, it is quite clear that Mueller and his merry band of bloodthirsty prosecutors would have found it.
They did not do so.
And precisely because of Mueller's **extensive and exhaustive** investigation turning up no actual evidence of Donald Trump or any of his associates being Russian agents or colluding with the Russian government during the 2016 election, this caused a very compelling question to be raised at the highest levels of the Department of Justice:
"If there never was evidence that Trump and his people were Russian agents colluding with Putin during the election, then how did the RussiaGate Hoax happen, who launched it, and why was it sustained long enough for a fraudulent FISA surveillance warrant to not only be granted but renewed three times?”
This is exactly what Horowitz was sent in to find out. It is what his FISA Abuse report was all about.
During the course of the OIG investigation, Horowitz finds and **exhaustively documents** that not only did the FBI’s supposedly crack Crossfire Hurricane team never have any real evidence for this surveillance warrant, but they were also actively suppressing and hiding exculpatory evidence from the FISA Court to ensure they got the warrant approved and renewed.
Fake News Busted on Two Years’ Worth Of Lies
The Inspector General also conclusively proved that the FBI had relied almost completely on Christopher Steele’s fake dossier to keep their warrant hoax moving forward.
He proved this despite almost two years of mainstream media coverage that we now know was based on false leaks. Those fake leaks supposedly came from “people familiar with the matter” either inside the Mueller Special Counsel’s office or close to it, sources that stridently insisted to gullible reporters the FBI had relied little, if at all, on the Steele Dossier to get the Carter Page warrant.
That wasn’t the only thing the legacy media got wrong about this scandal. The mainstream media regaled the public for many months with lurid stories and think pieces about Trump associates purportedly ‘flipping’ on him and singing to Mueller about all the Russian collusion, handing over mountains of evidence.
After Attorney General William Barr publicly revealed in May of 2019 that he had tapped Durham to investigate the RussiaGate hoax, we had to wait just over a year for the first indictment.
And that first deal, given to former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, **points right at** the heart of the fraud: it points to the fact many of those involved in this hoax knew Carter Page wasn't a Russian agent.
They were aware Carter Page was a CIA source keeping that intelligence agency appraised of his contacts with suspected and known Russian spies from 2008 to 2013.
The CIA had alerted the FBI to this fact in August of 2016, two months before the bureau submitted the warrant to the FISA Court claiming he was a Russian agent working with the Putin government.
So to sum up just how much of a farce this was, the FBI was taking the exact same contacts with Russians that Carter Page was sharing with the CIA to claim to the FISA Court he was a Russian agent and a traitor to his country who was trying to help a foreign government interfere in the 2016 Presidential election.
The Steele Dossier’s Focus on Carter Page
In Steele’s dossier, it is claimed that during a visit to Moscow in July of 2016, a trip he took outside of his capacity as a member of the Trump campaign, Page met with a high-ranking Russian government official who offered him a massive bribe. Page vehemently insists to this day he has never met or spoken with Igor Sechin.
And we now know that Steele’s main source for these absurd allegations, (that Page was offered a huge bribe amounting to billions of dollars involving a 19% stake in the Russian oil company Rosneft) came from bar chitchat with a low-level research assistant at the Brookings Institute named Igor Danchenko.
At least, that’s where Steele claims he got it from. At this point, I don’t think anything Steele says can be trusted. It’s also becoming clear that even the FBI itself didn’t put much stock in Steele’s dossier since they only used it as a last resort.
The Steele Dossier Was ‘Plan B’
Documents declassified in just the past several months have revealed how the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team **wasted the entire Summer** of 2016 on a strategy of having informants secretly record Trump campaign advisors Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, while attempting to goad them into saying something that could provide the basis for a spy warrant.
It appears to me that the FBI team started with Papadopoulos, first by using a classic entrapment scheme using Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud as an OCONUS LURE.
OCONUS means “Outside the Continental United States”. An intelligence asset is sent undercover to make contact with an American citizen who is suspected of being a foreign agent. The lure then tries to bait the suspected foreign agent into doing something illegal. If the suspected person is innocent, they either will not respond or report the overture to the authorities.
After others carefully arranged for the low-level Trump campaign advisor to meet Mifsud, he approached Papadopoulos in London to make a fake offer of Russian help to the Trump campaign in the 2016 election.
The FBI then dispatched both Cambridge Professor, Stefan Halper and Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer to record Papadopoulos repeating the Misfud offer. But Papadopoulos frustrated the plan by never making a clear incriminating statement.
In fact, Downer was so clumsily obvious in the leading questions he was baiting Papadopoulos with, that Papadopoulos has loudly insisted for two years now that he reported Downer to the FBI, which is exactly what an innocent person would do if such an approach was made.
At one point while Halper was trying to lead Papadopoulos into saying something incriminating, asking if he'd accept help from the Putin government to aid the Trump campaign in the election, the young Trump campaign advisor angrily blurted out "THAT WOULD BE TREASON!"
That is a clear exculpatory statement. And it rendered the recording useless in obtaining a surveillance warrant.
Which is why the FBI hid it and every other exculpatory statement made by Papadopoulos and Page from the FISA Court.
It’s been noticed by some SpyGate researchers and investigative reporters that it seemed strange after focusing so much attention on Papadopoulos, sending an OCONUS lure at him, and recording him several times over a few months, that in late September the FBI suddenly shifts its gears and focuses on Carter Page, seeming to do so once they decided to make use of the Steele dossier as the basis for their surveillance warrant.
This is because while Carter Page shows up several times in the Steele dossier, George Papadopoulos does not.
The original plan was never to resort to using a paid political operative of the Hillary Clinton campaign selling often non-verifiable hearsay to the agency as a confidential human source [CHS, or informant]. This only happened after the surreptitious recording strategy failed.
All those involved knew the claims advanced by Steele in his dossier would not stand up to any real scrutiny, and indeed, they haven’t.
And so here we are now, after the first Durham indictment dropped, waiting to see who goes next as this massive and ever-growing scandal continues to build.
Twitter: @drawandstrike
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