The CIA spied on Trump associates and Russiagate emerged from that?
Didn’t we sort of already know something of this, or at least suspect it? Is it just that it’s now somewhat more official?:
Fox’s Jesse Watters featured a bombshell story from Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi on his show on Tuesday: that the Obama CIA had foreign allies surveil Trump aides, setting off the Russia collusion hoax.
The official story to this point has been that Australian officials informed U.S. officials that a Trump aide told an Australian diplomat that Russia had damaging information on Hillary Clinton.
“Sources” say this began as far back as March of 2016.
But wasn’t there already suspicion that the Obama administration had tipped Australia off?
Here’s an article from 2019:
Donald Trump has said he wants Australia’s role in setting off the FBI inquiry into links between Russia and his election campaign examined by the US attorney general, William Barr.
It is a potentially explosive development for the historically solid US-Australian alliance and the first time Trump has publicly named Australia while discussing what he calls the “Russia hoax” and “witch hunt”. …
Trump said he had declassified “potentially millions of pages” of intelligence documents related to surveillance activities on his campaign and Barr would be in charge of analysing it.
“So what I’ve done is I’ve declassified everything,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday before leaving on a trip to Japan.
“He can look and I hope he looks at the UK and I hope he looks at Australia and I hope he looks at Ukraine.
“I hope he looks at everything, because there was a hoax that was perpetrated on our country.”
Trump’s former campaign aide George Papadopoulos has claimed that Australia’s former high commissioner to the UK, Alexander Downer, spied on him during a meeting at a London bar in May 2016.
May of 2016 is after March of 2016.
More on the new revelations:
Some of that information about the surveillance and the FBI investigation is in a 10-inch binder, according to this report. Trump ordered that material be declassified prior to leaving office. So, what happened to the binder?
Shellenberger told Watters that they would have a follow-up piece specifically to address questions about the binder and the rumor that the binder may have factored into the raid on Mar-a-Lago. Shellenberger said if the binder contains what they have been told, that’s “extremely serious information.” It’s been speculated by many for a long time that the raid was related to Crossfire Hurricane documents, so if they have something firm on that, that would be hugely significant information to reveal.
Wheels within wheels.
the binder may have factored into the raid on Mar-a-Lago
So what are we to infer from that? It seems unlikely that Trump was actually in possession of the binder (meaning that it was physically at Mar-a-Lago), since obviously if he was, and assuming it really has information that is damning to the CIA and other Deepstate Trump advisaries, and Trump declared it to be declassified anyway, it seems like there’d be no reason for him to not just release the info himself.
Nonapod:
Perhaps it disappeared and they were looking for it?
I certainly don’t know.
J. E. Dyer is a good source today with detailed background of the various surreptitious goings on. Her X page has now many threads going back to yesterday afternoon, linking her past contemporaneous blog writings (LibertyUnyielding) on the whole grinding investigations stories of abuses: https://x.com/OptimisticCon?t=nuH5DkorGhMoAFKX_MVFew&s=09
Here’s one thread among the many so far (timeline): https://twitter.com/OptimisticCon/status/1757665033633566863?t=w-5gme62CuhvgYs7HkGvgA&s=19
Here’s another (coincidence): https://twitter.com/OptimisticCon/status/1757652878930702713?t=GUPp5AdSQqoK0lmB27RGJw&s=19
“the binder may have factored into the raid on Mar-a-Lago”
“So what are we to infer from that? It seems unlikely that Trump was actually in possession of the binder (meaning that it was physically at Mar-a-Lago), since obviously if he was, and assuming it really has information that is damning to the CIA and other Deepstate Trump advisaries, and Trump declared it to be declassified anyway, it seems like there’d be no reason for him to not just release the info himself”
“Perhaps it disappeared and they were looking for it?”
How will we ever know? We really have no idea what the FBI found in their MAL raid. We only know what they say they found, and do know that the picture of supposedly classified documents was staged. The reason that we don’t know what they found is because the FBI refused to allow any Trump attorneys to watch the raid.
Keep in mind though that the entire investigation, from negotiating with the archives (under orders from the FJB WH to cooperate with the FBI) through the subpoena, requests for extension of time and rolling document production, search warrant utilized in the MAL raid, to the indictment, was run by Jay Bratt, the branch chief of the DOJ’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Branch (CECB) and Smith’s Deputy Special Counsel. And the MAL raid appears to have been run by the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division (CD). If these organizations (esp CD) seem familiar – they should be. The CD was where Peter Strzok worked, ultimately as a branch chief. They ran both the Midyear Exam (Crooked Hillary email) and Crossfire Hurricane (Trump Russian Collusion) investigations, interviewed LTG Flynn with their copy of the FISA authorized transcript of his phone conversation with the Russian ambassador in front of them (very likely that the CD was the agency intercepting the phone call), to force him out via a § 1001 perjury trap, and the two organizations collaborated to get the 4 fraudulent FISA warrants on Carter Page approved. No surprise then that the infamous binder almost assuredly contained information and documents incriminating both organizations in perfidy, misfeasance, and malfeasance, as a result of not an IG and Special Counsel investigation. The two organizations behind RussiaGate were the ones running the MAL raid.
After the raid they said they didn’t find what they were looking for. I assumed it is the missing binder that will hang them.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
“…they said they didn’t find what they were looking for…”
And if they DID find it they’d assuredly say they found it?????
I would assume they found it simply because they said they didn’t.
Now they don’t have to PRODUCE it for any reason at all….AND they can continue to persecute Trump for not having turned it over….
Sounds (to my conspiratorial mind) like a pretty decent two-fer…
…unless I’m missing something here.
(It would also mean that I’m not giving the FBI the benefit of the doubt. Me bad…)
Alexander “grandma” Downer.
Could have seen that coming from a mile away.
What a wanker. (To use common parlance)
With “friends” like that…
What should you call employees of the Executive Branch who actively work against the President? As a joke the answer would be “Unemployed”. I wonder if there are criminal charges that can be brought against such people. But I doubt it. I always believed that whatever the different branches did was supposed to be regardless of race, religion or political affiliation. I wonder when that went out the window.
I know exactly when I realized that the press was doing all it could to hurt Trump. It was during his trip to Japan. I was reading my local newspaper and there was a picture of Trump dumping a box of fish food into the Imperial koi pond. At the time I thought WTH? He’s just dumping it in? A little while later I saw a video of the whole thing, Trump mirrored the Emperor movement by movement. I knew the media hated him but this was so petty. I then realized that if the media turned everything Trump did, no matter how small, into a bad thing it would create a model in people’s minds that Trump is the AntiChrist. Thus an answer for me why TDS is so widespread and entrenched.
I think the statement that they didn’t find it was a slip (from frustration). If they found it we would never have known about it.
You know, if the CIA was doing its assigned job, viz., keeping tabs on our FOREIGN adversaries, instead of trying to find dirt on Trump, we might have found out sooner that the Russians have hypersonic space weapons ready to deploy. Might’ve been nice to know that back in 2016 instead of finding out seven years later. On the other hand, I could be equally easily convinced that today’s revelation about the BAD, BAD, VERY BAD RUSSIANS and their BAD, BAD, VERY BAD hypersonic space weapons is another false flag designed to gin up HATRED AGAINST THOSE BAD, BAD, VERY BAD RUSSIANS so we feel better about sending another $95,000,000.00 to the Ukrainian kleptocrats and our own wonderful, wonderful, above any suspicion of malfeasance DEFENSE CONTRACTORS. YAY BIDEN! GO AMERICA! BEAT THOSE DIRTY RUSSKIES!
Other than criminals, only the ideological fanatic can justify lying, stealing, cheating and destroying the innocent. Though perhaps, they’re simply two sides of the same coin.
“There are two races of men in this world, but only these two — the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people.” Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
wait there’s more Barry, alex downer worked for Haklyut, a leading British contractor with strong ties to the Chinese power structure,https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/politics/former-foreign-minister-alexander-downer-argues-attempting-to-contain-china-would-be-a-mistake/news-story/6366b24c646248c4e58e8cc495e7e9eb
it was founded under another name, with the famous spy fitzroy mclean, as one of the original figures, it has a host of big name titans on the board including the ceo of Tata Steel,
https://hakluytandco.com/team/anna-reid/
if there is a marsh equivalent to the swamp,
it fits the nature of outfits like the pro Remainer cabal described by Andrew Marr, a year before Brexit happened,
Steve (lawyer …..) might want to actually pay attention to what the Russian Federation has been up to in Ukraine (not good), Syria, Africa, and with Iran.
Being a Vlad apologist means never having to say you are sorry.
How quaint, Steve discovers All Caps.
Didn’t we sort of already know something of this, or at least suspect it? Is it just that it’s now somewhat more official?
I think it is adding more info. This seems to add that they requested other countries to spy on Trump earlier than known. We knew Obama et al were briefed on Clinton’s dossier effort, and we also knew one or more Trump people were surveilled by foreign agents. I don’t think we knew Brennen requested that, but it isn’t a surprise.
I think it does tie in Obama to this more. That in itself is significant.
Our knowledge of what happened is expanding, which is good.
we can’t even extract our own resources because hiawatha haaland, decides we offend sky dragon, we can’t pump out helium, you needed an mri, use a carving knife, let Algeria and Qatar pump out as much as needed,
that was burismas gig, through a well publicized yearly conference in Monaco, it pitched clean energy to stupid eloi, but it hired super spy cofer black, to muscle resources in eastern africa, hunter was just the guy who got the refreshments they in turn worked for kolomoisky, a former oligarch turned energy minister, who probably met up with cofer when he was working the ambassador at large gig in the caucasus,
I think the key element of the story is that Taibbi and his colleagues have managed to tease out details that have not previously been addressed: For example, that the impetus of the whole Russia gate story, that a diplomat from Australia walked in off the street to alert British Intelligence, is fraud. The scandal was perpetrated from within the Washington DC intelligence community, and it was methodically inflated, illegally, because they were scared of the prospect of Trump, as an amateur politician, gaining the office of the Presidency. And it started as early as 2015, in the heart of the Obama administration. Each step of the scandal was conducted without the required pretexts to trigger institutional approval – but approvals were granted nonetheless. And then it spun up into a persecution campaign once Trump was elected.
Taibbi has said that this is only the first of three stories to be released this week. They are being made public – here is the Rumble link for the story yesterday, it’s about 1:37:00 long but can be sped up to 1.5x with no loss.
https://rumble.com/v4d6ulh-explaining-russiagate-expos.html
Taibbi is a stalwart liberal democrat, and it’s fun seeing his outrage grow as he red-pills himself.
well taibbi’s evolution was curious, the son of an nbc reporter, his formative experience was in the wild west of Post Soviet Russia, with Mark Ames, he saw the shock policies that emisserated the Russian people, that created the Oligarchs and that gave the Siloviki such power, when he came back to the States, he saw post 9/11 America and the subprime crisis through a similar lense, although he though the policies that had created the bubble, were well intentioned,
conversely he saw the Tea PArty as not that way, even though they had tried to reign back the abuses that had caused the crisis, I first was introduced to players likeKhuzaimi, the Deutsch bank player who rotated between that ‘den of scum and villainy’ and the SEC working with Strzoks wife, then onto the US Attorneys alternate for the Southern District, where he persecuted Manafort and Michael Cohen, because Orange man waves a cape in his face, or something
https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1757923702770196800?t=SADxXQWtEUFb0h4DO1xITg&s=19
Second story drops.
Re: Matt Taibbi
miguel cervatntes:
Reading Ames and Taibbi’s “The eXile” was formative for me.
___________________________________
In October 2006, co-editor Jake Rudnitsky summarized The eXile’s editorial policy to The Independent: “We shit on everybody equally.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_eXile
___________________________________
A tradition Taibbi is happy to uphold.
“Trump said he had declassified “potentially millions of pages” of intelligence documents related to surveillance activities on his campaign and Barr would be in charge of analysing it.
“So what I’ve done is I’ve declassified everything,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday before leaving on a trip to Japan.”
Correct me if my math is off, but isn’t 2019 BEFORE the Mar-a-lago raid?
Then what’s with all the later brouhaha about Trump “never declassifying anything because he didn’t use the approved bureaucratic protocol” morphing into “he never even said he declassified everything”?
And if he specifically tasked AG Barr with looking over all those newly-declassified documents, where’s the report??
Yeah, that’s sarc. Barr’s declaration within a couple of weeks of the 2020 election that there was no fraud was an impossible achievement even for the heroic super-agents of the Bureau.
IIRC, all he did was ask the field offices in the suspected states and cities, and all of them claimed “nothing to see here, boss.”
What I hate most about this is how there probably will be no meaningful negative consequences to the perpetrators for this, what I hate second of all is how this does not surprise me. I hate these people.
“Then what’s with all the later brouhaha about Trump “never declassifying anything because he didn’t use the approved bureaucratic protocol” morphing into “he never even said he declassified everything”?”
That was always a BS excuse. The bureaucrats can’t constrain the President in that way. He has plenary declassification authority. If he orders it declassified, it is declassified. It’s not just that they work for him, but that their power devolves from his. Trump signed a formal Executive Order, which, for the bureaucracy, has the force of law.
Article II
Section 1.
“The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America…”
None of the main themes here is really new. Downer was known at least as early as 2016 sometime, and that he had been used to attack Trump. This is why LTG Flynn was taken out by the FBI’s Counterintelligence Branch – he knew too much. How do we know that? First, because the FBI agents involved kept popping up around Peter Strzok, who became a branch chief in that division that fall. But also, that division is the organization that would have had the transcript of the telephone call between Flynn and the Russian ambassador lying around. They are the ones getting the FISA warrants, and the FBI (CD) has likely effectively had a standing wiretap order for the Russian Ambassador’s phone since FISA was enacted. Flynn wasn’t surprised that the agents had the transcript – at one point he said that he expected that they did. Now, by law, the FBI was required to minimize Flynn’s identity, because he was a US Person in the US, but it was obvious from the conversation, who he was. And legally they would have had a hard time getting the transcript into evidence at a trial, since the FBI’s use of it was highly problematic. But the case was never expected to go to trial – instead they threatened Flynn’s son with a criminal FARA prosecution, and that was the deal – Flynn would plead guilty to some bogus charges, and they would leave his son alone. Finally, the FBI’s CD is the organization that works closest with the CIA. It has long been suggested that Peter Strzok was dual hatted with the CIA, and that his father did or had worked there.
And yet, watch as they get away with it all, and Trump goes down.
I agree with what Turtler on February 15, 2024 at 12:50 am said:
I know it’s not popular here, but they win if Trump loses.
I suspect Trump did have the documents and that the regime wanted them back, but the “red binder” detail is maybe a little too specific.
A ten-inch binder, if that what it actually is, would be awkward to manage. But pulling various items out of it, or perhaps all of the pages and boxing them up, could be done. So perhaps the term is short hand for “all this information on this scorching subject. Which somebody has. “Hope he runs out of copy paper, whoever he is, and his scanner breaks down. Quick, get Geek Squad on the line….”