President Trump and his band of merry men have been busy this week undermining America’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Nothing new with that; Trump castigated them during his campaign last year, as he did our military leadership.
But, now he’s RESPONSIBLE for these agencies. One can only imagine what the thousands of F.B.I. employees feel about their Boss, and how hard they must want to work to Make America Great Again.
(Or, conversely, how hard they might want to work for Special Counsel Mueller.)
Somehow, the whole Russia-gate “witch hunt” (as the President has called it) has seemingly boiled down to two guys: Mr. Christopher Steele and Mr. Carter Page. Or, at least that’s what President Trump, Congressman Nunes, and the GOP would have us all believe.
One theory, if one could call it such, is that this guy (Page) was inappropriately surveilled by the U.S. government…because he was a foreign policy campaign advisor to Donald Trump…and that would be, well…unfair and maybe illegal. Therefore, goes the argument, the whole Russia-gate collusion investigation is tainted and…who knows what other machinations are going on over in the F.B.I. to bring down our beloved President.
“It’s shameful”, said Mr. Trump today.
Actually, what is shameful is the threadbare allegations that Congressman Nunes has put together and Trump has publicly released (against the advice of the FBI and CIA), conveniently omitting relevant information that would put the entire Carter Page story into perspective.
But, it’s got the Fox News talking heads drooling.
For one, Mr. Carter Page was on America’s intelligence radar screen three years before Donald Trump ran for President. He was an American energy consultant who worked on transactions involving Gazprom and other leading energy companies. Gazprom is owned by the Russian government; i.e. the CEO is Vladimir Putin, the Prez’ BFF.
While Carter Page was doing a lot of work in Moscow, the Russian intelligence service attempted to recruit him. U.S. intelligence agencies found out and apparently assumed that Mr. Page’s loyalties might be up for grabs.
Shortly thereafter (2014) a FISA warrant was issued authorizing surveillance of Mr. Page’s electronic communications. FISA is shorthand for U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. A warrant to eavesdrop must be recommended by several top U.S. agencies and then must be approved by a special court. The FISA warrant request was approved, all the way up the line, implying that something about Carter Page smelled fishy to our intelligence folks.
This FISA surveillance was approved two years before Donald Trump announced his run for President, so politics had nothing to do with the FISA warrant.
Donald Trump brought politics into the Carter Page story when he engaged Mr. Page as a foreign policy advisor for the 2016 Presidential campaign.
The F.B.I. opened an investigation into Carter Page when he became part of the Trump campaign because of Page’s suspicious contacts with a nation under U.S. economic and political sanctions. This would be standard operating procedure; it’s what our counterintelligence agencies do.
When news of the investigation surfaced, Mr. Page stepped down from the Trump campaign.
At about the same time, ex-General Michael Flynn, who had been Trump’s chief foreign policy advisor during the campaign, came under scrutiny for HIS dealings with the Russians.
(Nominated by Trump to be National Security Advisor, Flynn was found to have lied about his Russian contacts on behalf of the President-elect, was dropped like a hot potato by Mr. Trump, and plead guilty to lying to the F.B.I. He’s now “singing” to the Special Counsel.)
The damage was done, however, because of Page’s and Flynn’s involvement in the campaign, and because of then-candidate Trump’s conciliatory and often laudatory comments about Russia and its leader, Vladimir Putin. The whole mess smelled like week-old haddock. As does the Nunes memo.
Not surprisingly, President Trump now denies that Carter Page was an “advisor” during the campaign. (He also denies Global Warming and Evolution; if he could fire them, he would.)
Footnote: The FISA warrant regarding Carter Page has been repeatedly renewed since 2014, indicating that something about the guy is disconcerting, national security-wise. By the way, the four top-echelon FBI guys who have supported the issuance of the FISA warrant are all Republicans. Evidently, they are actually Republicans who care about national security, a sub-species of the GOP which seems to be in short supply lately.
Interestingly, Special Counsel Robert Mueller is also a Republican, was appointed to lead the investigation by Republicans, and is a former FBI Director who was appointed to a ten-year term by President George W. Bush, also a Republican. The F.B.I., it’s leader at the time, James Comey, the C.I.A., and Robert Mueller, who was retired at the time, we’re all great Republican patriots…until they started looking into Carter Page. Then, they became bad guys.
The other hot-button issue for Trump and the GOP relating to the Russia-gate investigation is the so-called “Steele Dossier”. It contains inflammatory allegations about Mr. Trump and his team, and is pointed at by the GOP as Democratic “dirty tricks” and, therefore, not credible or suitable in this matter.
Some background is necessary…
Christopher Steele is a retired MI6 intelligence officer. MI6 is the British equivalent of our C.I.A. Mr.Steele was head of the “Russia desk” at MI6 when he retired after 22 years of service, meaning he was their expert on Russian intelligence matters. He was obviously held in high esteem to warrant this position. After his retirement, in 2009, Steele formed a private intelligence agency called Orbis Business Intelligence, Inc., providing information to whomever was willing to pay the freight.
The “dossier” was part of opposition research on Donald Trump; in other words, other candidates wanted to find dirt on this political upstart. The research (by research firm Fusion GPS) was initially funded in 2015 during the Republican primary campaign by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website primarily funded by Republican donor Paul Singer. Mr. Trump was not a popular candidate among conservative Republicans at the time, so it is altogether normal that Republican opponents would try to dig up some dirt on him.
When Donald Trump became the presumptive GOP nominee, The Free Beacon stopped funding the research.
The research was then picked up and funded by (surprise!) the Democratic National Committee, who was looking to dig up dirt on it’s new opponent, Donald Trump. As part of the new project, Fusion GPS hired Orbis (Christopher Steele) to look into Mr. Trump’s dealings with Russia. According to Fusion GPS, Steele was not told that the DNC was the customer paying for the research.
Eventually, Steele uncovered a variety of troubling (to him) connections between the Russian government and Donald Trump. He found them to serious enough that he shared his findings with the F.B.I. Of course, the F.B.I. was already alerted to suspicious goings on between Trump operative Carter Page and the Russians, and Steele’s research probably sent shivers down the Agency’s spine.
At just about the time that the 2016 Presidential election was concluding, Steele, on his own initiative because he didn’t feel the F.B.I. was moving on his allegations, released most of his “dossier” (16 memos, 33 pages) to the press, unleashing a…shitstorm, to put it mildly.
No one but Donald Trump (and, probably, Special Counsel Robert Mueller) knows whether the allegations contained in the dossier are factual, partly-factual, or non-factual supposition. President Trump has, of course, labeled the entire Steele Dossier as “fake”. On the other hand, Mr. Steele is a well-regarded expert on slimy goings on in Russia, and Mueller is well aware of this.
So, President Trump and the GOP are very unhappy that the Steele Dossier exists, and is apparently being used (to some degree) by the Special Counsel’s investigative team. Since the research project was funded (eventually) by the Democrats, there is an effort by Trump and Associates to brand Steele’s work as fundamentally flawed, contaminated, and totally partisan B.S.
But, then, we have to remember who started this game…a conservative Republican patriot who wanted to examine the mysterious candidate Trump in fine detail. If the research had panned out early enough, it could have derailed the Trump candidacy and resulted in a different GOP opponent for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Now, that’s a disgusting thought!
But, really, who can blame anyone for looking into Donald Trump. He’s a master of hiding what he does, who’s working for him, how much money he makes, how much taxes he pays, etc. His nature is that he incites investigations by his slimy business dealings and the company he keeps. If he were a bit more transparent, and normal, there may not be so much mystery and suspicion regarding the guy.
It seems obvious to most people that, due to the numerous attempts by Trump and his accomplices to obstruct inquiries into his mysterious dealings, there’s got to be a substantial amount of dirt under the proverbial carpet. It feels…Nixonian.
Update: Yesterday, Republican Congressman Trey Gowdy, the Benghazi-obsessed attack dog who spent the past two years distracting Americans from the Trump catastrophe, admitted that Congressman Nunes inflammatory memo “does not in any way discredit the (Mueller) investigation”. Wow! But, we already knew that…as does everyone else in Washington D.C.
Now that Republican Gowdy has announced that he will not seek re-election, it appears that he has grown a set of testicles.
I suspect that more GOP Congressmen (the one’s up for re-election) will similarly start to back peddle on their support of President Trump as the November, 2018 mid-term election nears.
The man will likely be radioactive by then.
By the way, the stock market (Dow Jones Average) dropped like a stone this past week…including the biggest one-day decline in history. President Trump, who was trumpeting the performance of “his” market virtually every other day, has been pretty silent this week.
