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Despite fevered GOP whining, from the start the FBI has always helped and protected Trump [1]

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Date: 2022-08-16

The wide-ranging investigation into Donald Trump's business activities and ties to Russia began with a protocol-breaking interview with Alexander Downer.

The former Foreign Minister and then High Commissioner to the United Kingdom spoke to the FBI in the first few days of the investigation , the New York Times reports. Downer was granted permission from Canberra to break diplomatic protocol to be interviewed by agents in London in August 2016. Downer spoke with the FBI about a conversation he had at a London wine bar with Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos that May. Papadopoulos purportedly told Downer that Russia had accessed thousands of embarrassing emails sent by Hillary Clinton. When those emails started being released by Wikileaks, Australian officials contacted their American counterparts, triggering the FBI investigation initially named Crossfire Hurricane.

Papadopoulos was told about the Hillary/DNC emails in April about the same time it was discovered by the DNC. His conversation with Downer in the wine bar happened in May. The first entry in the Steele Dossier wasn’t even written until June 20th, four days after Downer talked to the FBI, and the first time anyone in the government even saw a copy, which was Deputy AG Bruce Ohr, wasn’t until July 5th about two weeks later. There’s no way they could have started an investigation based on the Steele Dossier two weeks before they ever saw a copy of it.

Still, there is almost no chance that George didn't tell the rest of the campaign about the Clinton hack, his entire whole job was to report on the success of his communications with Russians, but all copies of that email have "magically disappeared."

A summary outlining the guilty plea of former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos says an unnamed “professor" with ties to the Russian government told him around April 26, 2016, that he had learned that Russia had “dirt” on Clinton, including the emails. That was just weeks after Russian government hackers gained access to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's emails in March 2016 and nearly two months before the Democratic National Committee successfully expelled the hackers from its computer system, where they had been since the previous year, according to Crowdstrike, the cybersecurity firm the party hired to investigate the hack. [...] The summary contains no indication that Papadopoulos passed the information about the emails on to the campaign, but the document says he continued to message the senior policy adviser and a “high-ranking campaign official” about his contacts with the Russians until at least August 2016. It was during that period that another meeting was held between Trump campaign officials and a Kremlin-affiliated lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, at Trump Tower in New York. That meeting, on June 9, 2016, was attended by then Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Trump's son Donald Jr.

However, there is evidence that Papadopoulos did tell the campaign about the Russian email hack, even though the campaign apparently went through an effort to hide this fact, because he admitted in a nightclub that Jeff Sessions had told him to “find out everything about the emails.”

On Thursday at a Chicago nightclub, Papadopoulos had some drinks and, in a conversation with a new acquaintance, allegedly made new and explosive claims about Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Papadopoulos, according to this new acquaintance, said that Sessions was well aware of the contact between Papadopoulos and Joseph Mifsud, an academic from Malta with high-level connections in Russia. Papadopoulos’ indictment revealed that Mifsud had told Papadopoulos that the Russians had “‘dirt’ on then-candidate Hillary Clinton in the form of ‘thousands of emails.'” Jason Wilson, a computer engineer who lives in Chicago, told ThinkProgress that Papadopoulos said during their conversation that “Sessions encouraged me” to find out anything he could about the hacked Hillary Clinton emails that Mifsud had mentioned.

Strangely, it appears that he never told Mueller about this. But then again, he is a convicted liar.

There is still, besides the fact that Crossfire Hurricane was already in progress, the argument that members of the Clinton campaign wanted to secretly “plant” the Steele Dossier and other bogus claims with the FBI in order to start a false investigation of Trump. The problem with that idea besides the fact that FBI rules over elections would have prevented them from publicizing such an investigation until well after November — and we know this because they didn’t publicize Crossfire Hurricane until almost a year after it started — is that people in Perkins Coie who paid Fusion GPS for oppo research on Trump didn’t even know that they had sub-hired Steele to gather information about Russia and Trump. Also, Fusion never even shared what Steele found with Perkins or the Clinton Campaign, instead they took it straight to the FBI — so exactly how could they “plant” something they didn't even know about?

Contrary to the conspiracy theories that the right later spread, Simpson and Fritsch write that they never met or spoke with Clinton. “As far as Fusion knew, Clinton herself had no idea who they were. To this day, no one in the company has ever met or spoken to her,” the book reads. As I reported, although Steele went to the F.B.I. with his findings out of a sense of duty and, by the late summer of 2016, knew that the F.B.I. was seriously investigating Trump’s Russian ties, the communication channels were so siloed that the Clinton campaign was unaware of these facts. Far from conspiring in a plot, the Clinton team had no hard evidence that the F.B.I. was investigating its opponent, even as its own opposition researcher was feeding dirt to the F.B.I. As one top Clinton campaign official told me when I wrote about Steele, “If I’d known the F.B.I. was investigating Trump, I would have been shouting it from the rooftops!”

Special Counsel John Durham has been chasing this particularly snipe by filing charges for lying to the FBI against Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussman claiming that he failed to tell the FBI that his complaint that a Russian Bank Server was strangely pinging a pair of Trump and Devos servers was really a “planted story” from Perkins. It didn’t occur to Durham that Sussman didn’t mention Perkins because they had nothing to do with it and that the allegation was true, even if weird. Consequently that case went the way you would expect for your basic cock and bull conspiracy theory — it crashed and burned.

During a two-week trial in federal court in Washington, Durham’s prosecutors argued that Sussmann was acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign and an internet executive when he took two thumb drives of data and white papers on the purported link to FBI General Counsel James Baker about six weeks before the 2016 presidential election. Sussmann’s defense said the case was flawed on a variety of grounds, including that prosecutors could not prove with certainty exactly what the cybersecurity lawyer and former federal prosecutor said to Baker. Sussmann’s attorneys also stressed that there was no evidence the Clinton campaign authorized Sussmann to go to the FBI, although he and researchers working for Clinton appeared to have spent an extensive amount of time dealing with the server allegations and were actively encouraging The New York Times to write about the issue in the closing weeks of the presidential race. [...] In a brief statement outside the courthouse shortly after the verdict, Sussmann thanked his lawyers and said he views the not guilty verdict as a vindication. “I told the truth to the FBI and the jury clearly recognized that with their unanimous verdict today,” Sussmann told reporters. “Despite being falsely accused, I believe that justice ultimately prevailed in my case.” Sussmann’s defense team declined to address the crowd of reporters and cameras at the court, but issued a written statement blasting the prosecution. “Michael Sussmann should never have been charged in the first place. This is a case of extraordinary prosecutorial overreach. And we believe that today’s verdict sends an unmistakable message to anyone who cares to listen: politics is no substitute for evidence, and politics has no place in our system of justice,” Berkowitz and Bosworth wrote.

So the argument that the Clinton campaign tried to falsely plant allegations that Trump was linked with Russia — which he really was in several different ways — failed. Totally. It’s a nothing burger. It flatly didn’t happen.

The only legitimate complaint - and prosecution - of anyone in the FBI was for the guy who had a typo in an email saying Carter Page hadn't been a CIA informant, when in fact he had.

The Justice Department inspector general last month criticized the FBI for a series of failures in its applications to the FISA court, including making statements that left an "inaccurate impression" and withholding potentially exculpatory information. The report also accused a low-level FBI lawyer of doctoring a document used to build the agency's application for FISA surveillance on Page. The lawyer is now under criminal investigation, and has since resigned from the FBI.

The key point of the reason Page was an informant is that years before Russian spies had tried to recruit him as an asset

Russian intelligence agents working in New York City met with Carter Page, a one-time foreign-policy adviser to President Donald Trump, and attempted to recruit the business consultant as a spy in 2013. While the effort was ultimately unsuccessful as the FBI broke up the spy ring in 2015, the meetings between Page and the Russian intelligence officers constitute one of the most substantive ties to date between a member of the Trump camp and Russian intelligence. Those meetings will likely add to the urgency of the multiple ongoing investigations of the administration’s ties to Moscow and the campaign’s possible coordination with Russian intelligence to tip the election in Trump’s favor. [...] In 2013, though, Russian intelligence took a dim view of Page. In the 2015 complaint that details an FBI investigation into a three-man Russian spy ring, the foreign agents describe their attempt to recruit Page, describing him as an ambitious climber eager to make money in Russia’s energy sector. “He got hooked on Gazprom,” Victor Podobnyy, an officer of the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, told his boss, Igor Sporyshev. “It’s obvious that he wants to earn lots of money.”

Page did work with the FBI and CIA on that case - but he also told the spies he was in contact with the FBI so nearly all of them fled the country and only one of them was arrested and prosecuted. So I'm not really sure his being an informant proves he was exactly loyal to the CIA and FBI since he largely blew their case up by blabbing. What all of this shows however, is that the FBI had damn good reason to surveil Page as potentially being a target for Russian recruitment, because — regardless of Christopher Steele and his dossier — it had already happened before.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/16/2116860/-Despite-fevered-GOP-whining-from-the-start-the-FBI-has-always-helped-and-protected-Trump

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