Russiagate begon met het toestaan van het bespioneren van Amerikaanse burgers op basis van het Steele-dossier. Dat de FBI staande hield dat toen nog als geloofwaardig te zien blijkt onhoudbaar. Dat is groot nieuws.

De basislijn van de FBI-verdediging waarom the Agency gerechtigd was een onderzoek naar de Trump-campagne te starten is deze week ineen gestort. Alsof de Maginot-linie van ontbijtkoek bleek:

Newly unearthed memos show a high-ranking government official who met with Steele in October 2016 determined some of the Donald Trump dirt that Steele was simultaneously digging up for the FBI and for Hillary Clinton’s campaign was inaccurate, and likely leaked to the media.
The concerns were flagged in a typed memo and in handwritten notes taken by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec on Oct. 11, 2016.

En je verwacht het niet, maar deze aantekeningen bleken onvindbaar bij de aanvraag van een ruling van het FISA-court. De tijd om ze kwijt te raken was in ieder geval niet te wijten aan vergeetachtigheid omdat het allemaal zo lang geleden was:

Her observations were recorded exactly 10 days before the FBI used Steele and his infamous dossier to justify securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and the campaign’s contacts with Russia in search of a now debunked collusion theory.

Het tijdspad suggereert dat het gesprek dat Kavalec hield met Steele eerder bedoeld was als rechtvaardiging dan als reëel onderzoek – maar niemand had dat aan Kavalec verteld? Zeker in het licht van wat de FBI die tien dagen later aan het FISA-court meldde staat nu vast dat dit huizenhoog stnkt:

It is important to note that the FBI swore on Oct. 21, 2016, to the FISA judges that Steele’s “reporting has been corroborated and used in criminal proceedings” and the FBI has determined him to be “reliable” and was “unaware of any derogatory information pertaining” to their informant, who simultaneously worked for Fusion GPS, the firm paid by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton campaign to find Russian dirt on Trump.

Zo mogelijk nog vernietigender waren de conclusies die Kavalec noteerde:

That’s a pretty remarkable declaration in Footnote 5 on Page 15 of the FISA application, since Kavalec apparently needed just a single encounter with Steele at State to find one of his key claims about Trump-Russia collusion was blatantly false.
In her typed summary, Kavalec wrote that Steele told her the Russians had constructed a “technical/human operation run out of Moscow targeting the election” that recruited emigres in the United States to “do hacking and recruiting.”

Met als hilarische constatering;

She quoted Steele as saying, “Payments to those recruited are made out of the Russian Consulate in Miami,” according to a copy of her summary memo obtained under open records litigation by the conservative group Citizens United. Kavalec bluntly debunked that assertion in a bracketed comment: “It is important to note that there is no Russian consulate in Miami.”

Maar het was voor de FBI geen arument het FISA-warrant in te trekken. Het tijdspad is zelfs nog stringenter:

Kavalec, two days later and well before the FISA warrant was issued, forwarded her typed summary to other government officials. The State Department has redacted the names and agencies of everyone she alerted. It is unlikely that her concerns failed to reach the FBI.

Ook is zeker dat dit bericht aan de FBI werd verstuurd en door haar werd ontvangen. Rep Mark Meadows (R-N.C.):

“This once again shows officials at the FBI and (Department of Justice) DOJ were well aware the dossier was a lie — from very early on in the process all the way to when they made the conscious decision to include it in a FISA application,” he said. “The fact that Christopher Steele and his partisan research document were treated in any way seriously by our Intelligence Community leaders amounts to malpractice.”

Kavalc deed nog iets meer, maar ook zonder dat was er geen misberstand mogelijk:

She expounded in her typed memo. “The Russians have succeeded in placing an agent inside the DNC,” she quoted Steele as saying.

Steele offered Kavalec other wild information that easily could have been debunked before the FISA application — and eventually was, in many cases, after the media reported the allegations — including that:

• • Trump lawyer Michael Cohen traveled to Prague to meet with Russians;
  • Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort owed the Russians $100 million and was the “go-between” from Russian President Vladimir Putin to Trump;
  • Trump adviser Carter Page met with a senior Russian businessman tied to Putin;
  • The Russians secretly communicated with Trump through a computer system.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, released last month, dispelled all those wild theories while hardly mentioning Steele, except for a passing reference to his dossier being “unverified.” That’s significant, because the FISA request from October 2016 that rested heavily on Steele’s information was marked “verified application” before the FBI submitted it to the court.

En hiermee eindigt de fictie dat de FBI neutraal en onpartijdig haar werk deed.

Steele’s admission of media contacts on Oct. 11, 2016, and the mere existence of his meeting at the State Department likewise violated his confidentiality agreement with the bureau and clearly were discoverable well before the FISA warrant was secured Oct. 21, 2016.
If the State Department and Ohr could figure out that Steele was a partisan, paid by a political client and facing an Election Day deadline to broadcast raw intelligence that in some cases probably was false, the FBI should have done the same before it ever envisioned taking his evidence to a FISA court.

Dit wordt allemaal nog lang en uitgebreid vervolgd, maar deze feiten zijn een hoeksteen van het onderzoek dat nu volgen gaat. Ze leggen onweerspreekbaar vast dat er een complot was om een verkiezingsoverwinnig van Donald Trump maximaal te frusteren door zijn presidentschap te verzieken met onderzoeken naar zijn ntgeriteit – zoals we de afgelopen tweeëneenhalf jaar ook inderdaad hebben zien gebeuren.

Is het denkbaar daty dit werd uitgedokterd door een stelletje rancuneuze FBI-agenten die niet eens volledig tot de top van The Agency behoorden? Hier zit groter wild achter, en het jachtseizoen is nu officieel geopend.

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Voor mensen die nieuw zijn in het scepticisme van het NOS/RTL-verhaal raden we dit stuk aan, dat een en ander in het perspectief van het heden zet.