Greetings Fellow Citizens,
I was asked last night about my
sources of news. I mentioned a few (The Grayzone, Current Affairs, Consortium News, RealClearPolitics -- a news aggregator which includes a variety of sources
including both Democratic and Republican leaning publications, i.e. Rolling
Stone, The Atlantic, American Greatness, New York Times, TN Star, Fox News,
TAP, The Hill, Foreign Affairs, Defense News, Fortune, Las Vegas Review
Journal, Vox, RCP, Daily Caller, Washington Post, San Diego Union Tribune,
...).
But the issue when talking to
skeptics such as most people I know is that news from little known sources is
not convincing. It's like trying to
convince devout Christians that there are flaws in the Bible. One way of dealing with such situations is to
highlights inconsistencies in the mainstream media outlets. That's one reason why I read the mainstream
media, even though I feel that they often spin the news in favor of the vested
interests. If I can point out that
Russiagate, for example, has been discredited by even the NY Times, then it
carries more weight than if I tell you I get my news from Consortium News.
The
Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, and
his team uncovered a staggeringly dysfunctional and error-ridden process in how
the F.B.I. went about obtaining and renewing court permission under the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to wiretap Carter Page, a former Trump
campaign adviser.
But
the inspector general found major errors, material omissions and unsupported
statements about Mr. Page in the materials that went to the court. F.B.I.
agents cherry-picked the evidence, telling the Justice Department information
that made Mr. Page look suspicious and omitting material that cut the other
way, and the department passed that misleading portrait onto the court.
To
give just three examples:
First,
when agents initially sought permission for the wiretap, F.B.I. officials
scoured information from confidential informants and selectively presented
portions that supported their suspicions that Mr. Page might be a conduit
between Russia and the Trump campaign’s onetime chairman, Paul Manafort.
But
officials did not disclose information that undercut that allegation — such as
the fact that Mr. Page had told an informant in August 2016 that he “never met”
or “said one word” to Mr. Manafort, who had never returned Mr. Page’s emails.
Even if the investigators did not necessarily believe Mr. Page, the court
should have been told what he had said.
Second,
as the initial court order was nearing its expiration and law-enforcement
officials prepared to ask the surveillance court to renew it, the F.B.I. had
uncovered information that cast doubt on some of its original assertions. But
law enforcement officials never reported that new information to the court.
Specifically,
the application included allegations about Mr. Page contained in a dossier
compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent whose
research was funded by Democrats. In January 2017, the F.B.I. interviewed Mr.
Steele’s own primary source, and he contradicted what Mr. Steele had written in
the dossier.
The
source for Mr. Steele may, of course, have been lying. But either way,
officials should have flagged the disconnect for the court. Instead, the F.B.I.
reported that its agents had met with the source to “further corroborate” the
dossier and found him to be “truthful and cooperative,” leaving a misleading
impression in renewal applications.
Finally,
the report stressed Mr. Page’s long history of meeting with Russian
intelligence officials. But he had also said that he had a relationship with
the C.I.A., and it turns out that he had for years told the agency about those
meetings — including one that was cited in the wiretap application as a reason
to be suspicious of him.
Here's a piece I read by former
U.K diplomat Craig Murray. Murray goes
to original source documents (e.g. reports by the Organization for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons - OPCW).
The Terrifying Rise of the Zombie State Narrative. In addition to referencing publicly available
source documents, Murray includes consideration of OPCW whistleblowers who are
not given space in the mainstream media, for the obvious reason that the
whistleblower reports contradict the U.S. / British narrative that Russia and
Assad used chemical weapons at Douma in Syria.
The
ruling Establishment has learnt a profound lesson from the debacle over Iraqi
Weapons of Mass Destruction. The lesson they have learnt is not that it is
wrong to attack and destroy an entire country on the basis of lies. They have
not learnt that lesson despite the fact the western powers are now busily
attacking the Iraqi Shia majority government they themselves installed, for the
crime of being a Shia majority government.
No,
the lesson they have learnt is never to admit they lied, never to admit they
were wrong. They see the ghost-like waxen visage of Tony Blair wandering
around, stinking rich but less popular than an Epstein birthday party, and
realise that being widely recognised as a lying mass murderer is not a good
career choice. They have learnt that the mistake is for the Establishment ever
to admit the lies.
The
Establishment had to do a certain amount of collective self-flagellation over
the non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, over which they
precipitated the death and maiming of millions of people...
These
situations are now avoided by the realisation of the security services that in
future they just have to brazen it out. The simple truth of the matter – and it
is a truth – is this. If the Iraq WMD situation occurred today, and the
security services decided to brazen it out and claim that WMD had indeed been
found, there is not a mainstream media outlet that would contradict them.
The
security services outlet Bellingcat would publish some photos of big missiles
planted in the sand. The Washington Post, Guardian, New York Times, BBC and CNN
would republish and amplify these pictures and copy and paste the official
statements from government spokesmen. Robert Fisk would get to the scene and
interview a few eye witnesses who saw the missiles being planted, and he would
be derided as a senile old has-been. Seymour Hersh and Peter Hitchens would
interview whistleblowers and be shunned by their colleagues and left off the
airwaves. Bloggers like myself would be derided as mad conspiracy theorists or
paid Russian agents if we cast any doubt on the Bellingcat “evidence”.
Wikipedia would ruthlessly expunge any alternative narrative as being from
unreliable sources. The Integrity Initiative, 77th Brigade, GCHQ and their US
equivalents would be pumping out the “Iraqi WMD found” narrative all over
social media. Mad Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council would be banning dissenting
accounts all over the place in his role as Facebook Witchfinder-General.
Does
anybody seriously wish to dispute this is how the absence of Iraqi WMD would be
handled today, 16 years on?
If
you do wish to doubt this could happen, look at the obviously fake narrative of
the Syrian government chemical weapons attacks on Douma. The pictures published
on Bellingcat of improvised chlorine gas missiles were always obviously fake.
Remember this missile was supposed to have smashed through ten inches of solid,
steel rebar reinforced concrete (editor's note: there is a photo on linked
website showing the missles).
As I
reported back in May last year, that the expert engineers sent to investigate
by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) did not buy
into this is hardly surprising.
The
highlights are:
“No
nerve agents had been detected in environmental or bio samples”
“The
experts were conclusive in their statements that there was no correlation
between symptoms and chlorine exposure”
“The
experts were also of the opinion that the victims were highly unlikely to have
gathered in piles at the centre of the respective apartments, at such a short
distance from an escape from any toxic chlorine gas to much cleaner air”.
We see now how the OPCW managed to produce a
report which was the opposite of the truth. Ian Henderson, the OPCW engineer
who had visited the site and concluded that the “cylinder bombs” were fakes,
had suddenly become excluded from the “fact finding mission” when it had been
whittled down to a “core group” – excluding any engineers (and presumably
toxicologists) who would seek to insert inconvenient facts into the report.
That
the consequences of the fake Douma incident were much less far-reaching than
they might have been, is entirely due (and I am sorry if you dislike this but
it is true) to the good sense of Donald Trump. Trump is inclined to
isolationism and the fake “Russiagate” narrative promoted by senior echelons of
his security services had led him to be heavily sceptical of them. He therefore
refused, against the united persuasion of the hawks, to respond to the Douma “attack”
by more than quick and limited missile strikes. I have no doubt that the object
of the false flag was to push the US into a full regime change operation, by
falsifying a demonstration that a declared red line on chemical weapon use had
been crossed.
There
is no doubt that Douma was a false flag. The documentary and whistleblower
evidence from the OPCW is overwhelming and irrefutable. In addition to the two
whistleblowers reported extensively by Wikileaks and the Courage Foundation,
the redoubtable Peter Hitchens has his own whistleblowers inside OPCW who may
well be different persons. It is also great entertainment as well as
enlightening to read Hitchens’ takedown of Bellingcat on the issue...
None
of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the BBC, the Guardian nor CNN – all
of which reported the Douma chemical attack very extensively as a real Syrian
government atrocity, and used it to editorialise for western military
intervention in Syria – none of them has admitted they were wrong. None has
issued any substantive retraction or correction. None has reported in detail
and without bias on the overwhelming evidence of foul play within the OPCW.
Those
sources who do publish the truth – including the few outliers in mainstream
media such as Peter Hitchens and Robert Fisk – continue to be further
marginalised, attacked as at best eccentric and at worse Russian agents.
What
we are seeing is the terrifying rise of the zombie state narrative in Western
culture. It does not matter how definitively we can prove that something is a
lie, the full spectrum dominance of the Establishment in media resources is
such that the lie is impossible to kill off, and the state manages to implant
that lie as the truth in the minds of a sufficient majority of the populace to
ride roughshod over objective truth with great success. It follows in the state
narrative that anybody who challenges the state’s version of truth is
themselves dishonest or mad, and the state manages also to implant that notion
into a sufficient majority of the populace.
These
are truly chilling times.
I (Dan) remember the Douma
incident at the time (April 7, 2018) as being highly suspicious. The Syrian Army was just completing their
defeat of Isis/Al Qaeda in southern Syria.
Everyone knew that the Syrians had won and Isis would be retreating. It certainly seemed to me at the time that
it's highly unlikely that Assad would bring out chemical weapons when the
battle was already won. Much more
likely, the Isis/Al Qaeda rebels were on the brink of defeat and made a
desperate false flag attempt to get the U.S. to intervene.
Ah well, I could be wrong about
all this.
A lot more follow up on our
conversation last night. I don't expect
any of you to read this unless you are interested in knowing why I hold
heretical (for Democrats) views regarding the role of the mainstream media,
Democrats, and the intelligence community with regard to Trump's alleged
collusion with Russia, and related threats to democracy.
To finish with
Stone, the ludicrous vindictiveness of the prosecutors in pushing for a seven
to nine year jail sentence for an offence that was really no more than wasting
investigators’ time with his fanatasies, was rightly called out by Donald
Trump. The notion that Roger Stone threatened witnesses is problematical. Randy
Credico, the only person Stone was convicted of threatening, has written to the
judge asking for Stone not to be jailed and making plain he did not feel
threatened. He had known Stone for years and was used to his blustering talk,
which Randy never took as intended to be a serious threat...
To maintain this
stance in the face of all factual evidence requires great skill and dexterity
from Guardian journalists. Fortunately for the Guardian it does not lack for
fantasist Russophobe fabricators like Luke Harding or for more subtly corrupt
spinners like David Smith, who last week wrote of Stone that “He was the sixth
former Trump aide to be convicted in cases arising from the special counsel
Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016
presidential election.”
The oleaginous
David Smith omitted to note what any half honest human being would consider a
very pertinent fact – that not one of those convictions had anything at all to
do with Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election, being either
entirely unrelated tax and corruption matters turned up while trawling, or as
with Stone being questions of process. Stone’s case is unique in that not only
did his conviction not relate to any Russian interference, it was for promoting
precisely the same ludicrous fantasy that the Guardian is promoting. It was
illegal for Stone to persist in telling his lies on oath; there is no legal bar
to the Guardian promoting the same Trump/Wikileaks/Russia fantasy ad nauseam.
Yet we have the
spectacle of Julian Assange standing before a judge facing extradition to the
United States and up to 175 years in jail for “espionage”, when everything
Wikileaks has ever published has a 100% record for truth and accuracy.
As is his wont, the
president went bonkers on Twitter upon learning of the recommendation, calling
it “horrible and very unfair” and a major “miscarriage of justice” because “the
real crimes are on the other side” — i.e., the Russia-probe investigators — yet
“nothing happens to them.” While the Justice Department was obviously aware
of the president’s tweet, as well as press reporting about the harshness of the
prosecutors’ sentencing recommendation, the DOJ and the White House have had no
communications about the case, according to both the president and a
spokeswoman for the attorney general.
It seems like Trump has a
point. But, no, he shouldn't be tweeting
his opinions as that could be exerting inappropriate pressure on the Attorney
General and others. (I was wrong about
this last night, I believe, and … was right.)
Barr allowed the
Mueller probe to reach its conclusion unmolested. The extent of his alleged
interference was, prior to the release of the report, summarizing its findings
in a way that wasn’t harsh or detailed enough for Trump’s critics.
Finally, he
declined to prosecute former Department of Justice official and frequent Trump
target Andrew McCabe for lying to investigators. If Barr is really Trump’s Roy
Cohn, his personal enforcer masquerading as a top law-enforcement official,
nailing McCabe would have been his Job One.
The Horowitz report
is not some ordinary rebuke, but an epic assault that has left the FBI reeling.
After fawning over the bureau for years, the New York Times tried to salvage a
shred of self-respect by declaring that even though it “painted a bleak
portrait of the FBI as a dysfunctional agency,” all was not lost because the
inspector general uncovered “no evidence that the mistakes were intentional or
undertaken out of political bias.”
This was incorrect.
Horowitz made it clear in his Dec. 11 appearance before the Senate judiciary
committee that while there was “no evidence that the initiation of the
investigation was motivated by political bias,” the question gets “murkier”
when it comes to subsequent FBI actions like withholding or doctoring evidence.
Considering that FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith, the man who allegedly falsified
evidence against Page, is a never-Trumper who once texted “viva le resistance,”
it’s hard to see how bias could not have been a factor.
The inspector
general lists seventeen “significant errors” the bureau made in applying for a
secret surveillance warrant. It failed to inform the court that Page had been a
CIA informant for years and had been found to have been truthful throughout;
that he told an undercover agent that he “literally never met” or “said one
word to” Paul Manafort, his alleged co-conspirator, and that Manafort had never
responded to any of his emails; that a source for ex-MI6 agent Christopher
Steele’s famous “golden showers” dossier was known to be a “boaster” and an “egoist”
who may “engage in some embellishment”; and that professional associates of
Steele said he “[d]emonstrates lack of self-awareness [and] poor judgment” and “pursued
people with political risk but no intelligence value.”
Steele, the man who
turned US politics upside down, was a flake in other words while Page was more
likely on the up and up. Yet the FBI assumed the opposite. Perhaps the most
amazing section in Horowitz’s report concerns a Steele informant who confessed
that reports of Trump’s sexual escapades in the Moscow Ritz Carlton were “just
talk,” conversations he or she “had with friends over beers,” and statements
made in “jest.” Yet the Steele dossier reported them as a real, and a credulous
press lapped them all up. Steele’s supposed high-level Kremlin contacts, the
source added, were individuals “who may have had access” – and, then again, may
not have. Corroboration of Steele’s findings was meanwhile “zero.”
Yet this is the
document that the FBI continued using to pursue Page and Trump and convince the
public that collusion was genuine.
So, who are the
weakest links as Durham’s investigation moves forward? One is surely Kevin
Clinesmith, a lawyer in Comey’s FBI who is highlighted in the Horowitz Report
(pages 186-190). Sen. Lindsey Graham mentioned those pages in his Tuesday press
conference. In them, Horowitz presents evidence that Clinesmith not only
altered official documents, he completely changed their meaning. The altered
documents painted Carter Page as a foreign spy; the originals said there was no
evidence for that. The exculpatory evidence was hidden from the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Courts. The lies helped gain a secret warrant to spy
on Page.
How important was
the Steele dossier to gaining the warrant? The FBI’s own legal counsel said, in
internal documents, “this is essentially a single source FISA” (p. 132). That
source was the Steele dossier. (Remember when Comey and all the Democrats
denied that? There was lots more evidence in the applications, they said. There
wasn’t.) Horowitz underscores the dossier’s significance when he concludes it
was “central and essential” to gaining the surveillance warrant (p. 359).
How did the FBI and
DoJ know the Steele dossier was garbage? Because they couldn’t substantiate any
of its key claims and because they interviewed Steele’s most important source.
This “subsource” told them unambiguously that the scandalous claims in the
dossier were based on his own statements to Steele but that they were
exaggerated and distorted in the dossier. The subsource told the FBI that
Steele’s misleading, unverified claims were simply rumors and “bar talk.”
Again, the FBI had this damning evidence in hand before it renewed the FISA
applications on Carter Page. (It should have had them before the first
application, but it didn’t bother.) Again, it lied to the FISA court.
These are serious
crimes, not only against Carter Page but against the true target of the spying,
Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency -- and ultimately against the American
people. Those who committed the crimes must be held to account.
But as far as I know, none of
the FBI officials involved in surveilling Trump based upon these lies have yet
been prosecuted.
Conservatives take
a decidedly different view. They wonder on social media why a congressman who
floated unproven conspiracies and a false dossier is leading the case against
Mr. Trump, and they ask why the liberal media are so uncritical.
As a backdrop: On
Jan. 10, 2017, BuzzFeed posted the Christopher Steele dossier, which made a
dozen felony charges against Mr. Trump and his allies. A month later, The New
York Times reported that the intelligence community owned a year’s worth of
phone records and intercepts between the Trump campaign and Kremlin
intelligence.
The dossier
allegations and Times story were both false.
The next month, the
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence convened the first major
hearing into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election by computer hacking and
social media warfare. A key question was whether the Trump campaign was a
witting ally.
It was in that
media glare that Mr. Schiff began making a series of conspiracy claims as he
sat on a committee that is supposed to deal in facts. At the witness table were
FBI Director James B. Comey and Navy Adm. Michael S. Rogers, head of the
electronic-listening National Security Agency.
Mr. Schiff
immediately endorsed the 35-page dossier and praised its author, former British
intelligence officer Mr. Steele.
To bolster Mr.
Steele’s credibility, Mr. Schiff said this about Trump campaign adviser Carter
Page and Russian oil giant Rosneft: “Is it a coincidence that the Russian gas
company Rosneft sold a 19% share after former British intelligence officer
Steele was told by Russian sources that Carter Page was offered fees on a deal
of just that size?”
The only
coincidence was that the 19% figure was in the press weeks before Mr. Steele
wrote his memo.
Mr. Schiff also
quoted Mr. Steele on a purported conspiracy between campaign chairman Paul
Manafort and Mr. Page: “According to Steele, it was Manafort who chose Page to
serve as a go-between for the Trump campaign and Russian interests.”
Independent
evidence shows the two never knew or spoke with each other.
Mr. Schiff also
said Mr. Steele was “highly regarded” by U.S. intelligence.
When Mr. Page later
appeared before the committee, Mr. Schiff repeatedly quoted the dossier in
questioning the former aide, forcing him to disprove what Mr. Steele had
written.
Mr. Schiff also
tried to use Mr. Page to prove another dossier allegation: that Trump attorney
Michael Cohen secretly traveled to Prague to visit operatives of Russian
President Vladimir Putin. He asked Mr. Page whether his 2016 trip to Hungary
was linked to Cohen.
By November 2017,
Mr. Schiff was dismissing critics and sticking by Mr. Steele and his dossier.
“So I think this is
a bit of an effort to discredit Christopher Steele, discredit the dossier,
ignore how much of it has been corroborated already and ignore the fact that
the intelligence community is operating from a broad array of sources as a way
of basically calling this all a hoax. And it just doesn’t add up to me,” he
said on CNN...
Mr. Schiff said
several times that he had seen evidence of Trump-Russia collusion to interfere
in the election and it was beyond circumstantial.
He began this
talking point in March 2017.
“I can tell you
that the case is more than that,” he said on MSNBC. “And I can’t go into the
particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now.”
Special counsel
Robert Mueller said in his March 2019 report that he did not find a Trump
election conspiracy. No Trump associate was charged in such a conspiracy...
As the dossier’s
credibility began to fall apart in 2017, Rep. Devin Nunes, California
Republican and then-chairman of the House intelligence committee, began an
attempt to find out who financed Mr. Steele’s work and to answer this question:
Did the FBI use the dossier to obtain a judge’s permission to place a Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act wiretap on Mr. Page?
Mr. Schiff, who
voted to impeach Mr. Trump for not turning over documents, opposed Mr. Nunes on
both fronts.
He fought Mr. Nunes’
bank subpoenas, which forced Democrats to acknowledge in October 2017 that the
Hillary Clinton campaign funded the dossier through opposition research firm
Fusion GPS and co-founder Glenn R. Simpson.
After Mr. Nunes
issued a memo in 2018 disclosing FISA abuses, Mr. Schiff issued a countermemo
that proved off-base on several points.
Mr. Schiff titled
his Jan. 29, 2018, countermemo “Correcting the Record — The Russia
Investigation.”
“FBI and DOJ officials
did not ‘abuse’ the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process, omit
material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign,”
he said.
In fact, Justice
Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz’s Dec. 9 report found that the
FBI did abuse FISA. He found 17 instances in which agents submitted inaccurate
information to the judge or omitted exculpatory statements about Mr. Page.
Mr. Horowitz said
the warrant could not have been submitted without the Democratic Party-financed
dossier. There was no other evidence of a conspiracy.
Mr. Schiff said in
his countermemo: “In subsequent FISA renewals, DOJ provided additional
information obtained through multiple independent sources that corroborated
Steele’s reporting.”
Not true, said Mr.
Horowitz. None of Mr. Steele’s reporting in the warrant was ever corroborated.
In fact, FBI agents acquired evidence from Mr. Steele’s main source, who placed
great doubt in Mr. Steele’s allegations. But the FBI left this evidence out of
subsequent warrant renewals.
Mr. Schiff said in
his countermemo: “The FBI and, subsequently, the Special Counsel’s
investigation into links between the Russian government and Trump campaign
associates has been based on troubling law enforcement and intelligence
information unrelated to the ‘dossier.’”
In fact, there is
no indication in the Mueller or Horowitz reports that agents found evidence —
texts, emails, communication intercepts, informants or whistleblowers — that
provided evidence of a conspiracy outside of the dossier.
Peace, love, and hugs...
