Russiagate is bijna voorbij, maar Special Counsel Mueller zit er nog steeds. Ook diens einde in die rol lijkt echter zeer nabij. Als onderstaande hem gewaar wordt, zie ik hem nog wel eens snel vertrekken.

De lijn van het grote verhaal heb ik afgelopen vrijdag weliswaar afgesloten, maar er is nog veel dat opheldering behoeft en dan volgt er uiteindelijk nog de strafrechtelijke afwikkeling. Russiagate blijft nog wel even gaande, en als de vooruitzichten niet bedriegen zal het nog een hele tijd duren eer de MSM er belangstelling voor krijgen. Ze hebben nogal wat uit te leggen, en we zien uit naar de manier waarop dat gebeuren gaat.

In het Huis van Afgevaardigden maakt men op dit moment onder anderen ruzie met het Witte Huis over de vraag in hoeverre Special Counsel Mueller een rapport moet uitbrengen en aan wie. En of dit openbaar dient te worden gemaakt.

Veel interessanter wordt met welke argumenten het Mueller-onderzoek zal worden beëindigd. Er is nieuw bewijs voor een al wat ouder verhaal opgedoken (om alles bij te houden heb je je werk voor je) waarover ik vorig jaar al rapporteerde: de betrokkenheid van MI6 en andere Europese diensten, ook bekend als Spygate. Via ZeroHedge nu daarover meer:

We return, now, to this issue and specifically the research of Chris Blackburn, to place the final nail in the coffin of the Trump-Russia collusion charade. Blackburn’s insights are incredible not only because they return us to the earliest reporting on the role of British intelligence figures in manufacturing the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, but because they also implicate members of Mueller’s investigation. What we are left with is an indication of collusion between factions of the US and UK intelligence community in fabricating evidence of Trump-Russia collusion: a scandal that would have rocked the legacy press to its core, if Western establishment-backed media had a spine.

Na een uitgebreide verantwoording wie auteur Chris Blackburn is en zijn credentials, volgt de eerste dreun:

Counter Terrorism, Not Counter Intelligence, Sparked RussiaProbe

In an article published by The Telegraph last November, the paper acknowledged the following:

“It forces the spotlight on whether the UK played a role in the FBI’s investigation launched before the 2016 presidential election into Trump campaign ties to the Kremlin… Mr. Trump’s allies and former advisers are raising questions about the UK’s role in the start of the probe, given many of the key figures and meetings were located in Britain… One former top White House adviser to Mr. Trump made similar insinuations, telling this newspaper: “You know the Brits are up to their neck.” The source added on the Page wiretap application: “I think that stuff is going to implicate MI5 and MI6 in a bunch of activities they don’t want to be implicated in, along with FBI, counter-terrorism and the CIA.” [Emphasis Added]

Heel kort samengevat: Russiagate werd geconstrueerd nadat president Trump de verkiezingen van 8 november 2016 won om diens presidentschap te vernietigen. In essentie zijn de vaste lezers hiervan op de hoogte, maar het nogmaals benadrukken is noodzakelijk om iedereen er te doordringen van wat hier is gebeurd.

“The Telegraph story on Trump Russia acknowledges that activities involving counter-terrorism are at the heart of the scandal…not counter-intelligence. If the [London Centre for International Law Practice] was British state, not private, some Commonwealth countries (hiermee worden bedoeld Australië en Nieuw-Zeeland, red VoL) are going to be seriously pissed off.”

(..) They quote anonymous officials who believe that their intelligence agencies used counter-terrorism personnel to kick start the investigation/scandal.” [Emphasis Added]

(..) Counter-intelligence cases have been known to stretch for decades- often relying on nothing more than paranoia and suspicion to fuel investigations.

(..) Cybersecurity has become the third major discipline in intelligence. The London Center of International Law Practice, the mysterious intelligence company that employed both Papadopoulos and Mifsud, had also been working in that area.”

Papadopoulos was de eerste Trump-medewerker waar het Mueller-team indertijd bovenop dook. Blackburn zegt daarover onder meer:

“It shows that there is a high probability that intelligence was deliberately abused to make Papadopoulos’ activities look like they were something else. As counter-terrorism and counterintelligence are close in tactics and methods, it would seem that they were used because they share the same skill sets – covert evidence gathering and deception. It’s basically sleight of hand.

En via deze kwestie komt het Mueller-team ineens in beeld:

Mueller’s Team And Joseph Mifsud
Zainab Ahmad, a member of Mueller’s legal team, is the former Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York. As pointed out by Blackburn, Ahmad attended a Global Center on Cooperative Security event in 2017. In recent days, Blackburn wrote via Twitter:

“Zainab Ahmad is a major player in the Russiagate scandal at the DOJ. Does she work for SC Mueller? She was at a GCCS event in May 2017. Arvinder Sambei, a co-director of the [London Centre of International Law Practice], worked with Joseph Mifsud, [George Papadopoulos] and [Simona Mangiante]. She’s a GCCS consultant.”

Blackburn told this author:

“Zainab Ahmad was one of the first DOJ prosecutors to have seen the Steele dossier. In May 2017, she attended a counter-terrorism conference in New York with the Global Center on Cooperative Security (GCCS), an organization which Joseph Mifsud, the alleged Russian spy, had been working within London and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.”

Mevrouw Ahmad is de spil waaromheen zich nu plotseling een heel nieuw perspectief begint te formeren, concludeert Blackburn:

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Global Center on Cooperative Security is connected to various elements that popped up in the Papadopoulos case. The fact that a prosecutor on Mueller’s team was at Global Center before Mueller was appointed as special counsel is also troubling.”

En er komt steeds meer samen:

Days ago, The Hill reported on Congressional testimony by Bruce Ohr, revealing that when served as a DOJ official, he warned FBI and DOJ figures that the Steele dossier was problematic and linked to the Clintons. Critically, The Hill writes:

“Those he briefed included Andrew Weissmann, then the head of DOJ’s fraud section; Bruce Swartz, longtime head of DOJ’s international operations, and Zainab Ahmad, an accomplished terrorism prosecutor who, at the time, was assigned to work with Lynch (Minister van  Justitie onder Obama, red VoL) as a senior counselor. Ahmad and Weissmann would go on to work for Mueller, the special prosecutor overseeing the Russia probe.” [Emphasis Added]

Ahmad was dus al bij een crucuiale bijeenkomst aanwezig eer het Mueller-team werd geformeerd. Ook aan de Britse kant komen zaken samen:

Last year, Blackburn noted the connection between Mifsud and Arvinder Sambei, writing: “LCILP director and FBI counsel, works with Mike Smith at the Global Center. They ran joint counter-terrorism conferences and training with Mifsud’s London Academy. Sambei then brought Mifsud over to the [London Centre of International Law Practice]. [Global Center works with Aussies, UK and US State too.”

Sambei has been described elsewhere as a “Former practising barrister, Senior Crown Prosecutor with the Crown Prosecution Service of England & Wales, and Legal Adviser at the Permanent Joint Headquarters (PJHQ), Ministry of Defence.” [British spelling has been retained]

Want ook Sambei is blijkt een Missing Link:

That Sambei has been so thoroughly linked to organizations where Mifsud was a central figure is yet another cause of suspicion regarding allegations that Joseph Mifsud was a shadowy, unknown Russian agent until the summer of 2016. She is also a direct link between Robert Mueller and Mifsud.

Blackburn wrote via Twitter: “Arvinder Sambei helped to organize LCILP’s counter-terrorism and corruption events. She used her contacts in the US to bring in Middle Eastern government officials that were seen to be vulnerable to graft. Lisa Osofsky, former FBI Deputy General Counsel, was working with her.”

En Sambei kende Robert Mueller al van een eerdere complexe zaak:

“Mifsud and Papadopoulos’s co-director Arvinder Sambei was also the former FBI British counsel working 9/11 cases for Robert Mueller.

Waar het ook ietwart vreemd wordt is de behandeling door de Britten en met wie ze hun informatie deelden: CIA-directeur John Brennan, de man van wie gefluisterd wordt dat hij het mastermimnd achter Russiagate is.

Disobedient Media previously reported that Robert Hannigan, then head of British spy agency GCHQ, flew to Washington DC to share ‘director-to-director’ level intelligence with then-CIA Chief John Brennan in the summer of 2016. This writer noted that “The Guardian reported Hannigan’s announcement that he would step down from his leadership position with the agency just three days after the inauguration of President Trump, on 23 January 2017. Jane Mayer, in her profile of Christopher Steele published in the New Yorker, also noted that Hannigan had flown to Washington D.C. to personally brief the then-CIA Director John Brennan on alleged communications between the Trump campaign and Moscow. What is so curious about this briefing “deemed so sensitive it was handled at director-level” is why Hannigan was talking director-to-director to the CIA and not Mike Rogers at the NSA, GCHQ’s Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partner.”

Het interview met Blackburn licht nog een tipje van een andere sluier op:

“Former Congressman Trey Gowdy, who has seen most of the information gathered by Congress from the intelligence community concerning the Russia investigation, said that if President Trump were to declassify files and present the truth to the American public, it would “embarrass John Brennan.” I think that is pretty concrete for me, but it’s not definitive. I know the polarization and spin in Washington has become perverse, but that statement is pretty specific for me. If Brennan is involved, it is most probably through Papadopoulos who sparked off the ‘official’ investigation at the FBI. He also made sure the Steele dossier was spread through the US government.”

Al hetgeen ons leidt naar de volgende conclusie:

At minimum, we can surmise that Mifsud was not a Russian agent, but was an asset of Western intelligence agencies. We are left with the impression that the Mifsud saga served as a ploy, whether he participated knowingly or not. It seems reasonable to conclude that the gambit was initially developed with participation of John Brennan and UK intelligence. Following this, Mueller inherited and developed the Mifsud narrative thread into the collusion soap opera we know today.

Mueller zou – als dit verhaal een correcte reconstructie is – in een gespreid bedje zijn gelegd, met weinig andere mogelijkheden dan het pad te volgen dat voor hem was uitgestippeld. Dat is 1. Wellicht nog erger is punt 2, het risico dat hiermee werd genomen:

Ultimately, we are faced with the reality that British and US interests worked together to fabricate a collusion scandal to subvert a US Presidency, and in doing so, intentionally raised tensions between the West and a nuclear-armed power.

Want dat de verhoudinge tussen USA en Rusland zijn gezakr naar een punt waarop een oorlog soms maar een druk op de knop weg lijkt te zijn. Dat die verhoudingen zo ver onder nul zijn gezakt dat de situatie gevaarlijk is wordt eigenlijk nauwelijks nog betwijfeld.

Enfin, Ludlum en zijn Bourne-Conspiracy zijn er niks bij. Behalve wellicht een inspiratie?

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