The High Price the Clinton Campaign Paid for the Steele "PeePee" Dossier

    Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.

    After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

But, for those who read it, the Steele Dossier is really trash intelligence, little more than outtakes from some old NSA surveillance mixed with Moscow hotel employee gossip from years ago.  None of it is admissable in a court of law.   How much of it is simply fabrication, and how much hear-say ,and how much is actually wiretaps of efforts to set up Trump & Associates is really unknowable at this point.  But, we do know that CIA Director Brennan, Susan Rice and some friends in the NSC and State Dept seized the opportunity after the election to use classified intercepts as a means to gather and illegally release opposition research on the Trump campaign.

The Dossier is part of that politicization of intelligence.   This and the leaks that followed the election  are political payback by the spooks, plain and simple, but that may end up with as high a cost to the Democrats as it will to Trump.

Fusion GPS and Steele were minor characters who had a relatively brief role and actually came in near the end of this saga.  They served as cut-outs to introduce classified intelligence debris into the election.  What became the Steele “Pee Pee Dossier” was handed to Harry Reid in July who scattered it around Washington during the months leading up to the election.   In the end, that failed to have the desired effect of discrediting Trump and getting Hillary elected.

By feeding into the spreading sick feeling that Washington — both parties, the FBI, the intelligence services, all of it — is utterly corrupt, the Dossier may have actually helped Trump get elected.

Indeed, all the above had a hand in creating and spreading the PeePee Papers.  From the same WaPo article:

    Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the company in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Before that agreement, Fusion GPS’s research into Trump was funded by an unknown Republican client during the GOP primary.

    The Clinton campaign and the DNC, through the law firm, continued to fund Fusion GPS’s research through the end of October 2016, days before Election Day.

The back-story behind the dossier* is just as sordid.  It’s pages are largely based on wiretaps of Carter Page, an agent provocateur who has been wearing an FBI wire since 2014, who was inserted into the Trump campaign to lure Paul Manafort into various schemes to compromise him in absurd plots.  These succeeded in painting him as a Russian stooge.  Manafort is the real target of Agency ire after he mucked up CIA and State Dept. regime change operations in Ukraine, a “Color Revolution” project that did not succeed as intended,  resulting in a bloody civil war and stalemate in that now divided country.   The operation was not a triumph on any U.S. Intelligence Officer’s resume.

Beyond Manafort, the dossier may have had only limited further damage to its intended targets.  None of the material gathered through wiretaps of Page is remotely admissible or even credible.  The Russian SVR intelligence service knew exactly what Page was doing after he managed to slip bugs into materials he fed several SVR operatives working at the UN.   Page was the easily identifiable “Male-1” witness in the 2015 trial of one of the SVR agents, an incident that served as a pretext to shut down and expel most of the Russian intelligence presence at the UN.   Russian intelligence knew who Page was, what he was doing, and the SVR subsequently fed him the materials during his visits to Russia and in Trump Tower nothing more than what they wanted the CIA to hear.

But, to the SVR, the “Russia, Russia, Russia” saga has been tremendous success at little cost to itself.  The episode has disrupted American politics and paralyzed the governing process in America for more than a year.   It is a classic PsyOp**, a disinformation program and political spoiling  operation,  resulting in destabilization that has worked only because of the predictable political opportunism of the DNC Democrats and its allies in the American intelligence community and a scandal-obsessed corporate media.

Meanwhile, Former FBI Director Mueller, no stranger to stage managing the damage of politically charged intelligence scandals (he was Deputy U.S. Attorney during the Iran-Contra prosecutions), has used this as an opportunity for a fishing expedition that rivals anything written by Herman Melville.   As a CNN print article, which can contain occasional semi-precious gems, observed in August about where a year of investigation has taken us and is going:  http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/03/politics/mueller-investigation-russia-trump-one-year-financial-ties/in
dex.html

    The possible financial ties between Trump and Russia were part of the concerns for US intelligence and law enforcement officials from the beginning, according to one current law enforcement official and one former US intelligence official.

    Over the decades, the Trump real estate business and its financial dealings have come under scrutiny by the FBI and the Justice Department multiple times.

    In some cases, the FBI was pursuing others who did business with the Trump organization, including alleged mobsters who controlled key contractors used by many real estate developers in New York during the 1980s. The flow of Russian money in real estate — and concerns that some buyers were making the purchases to illegally launder money — had also drawn some attention by US authorities to the Trump business.

This operation may well end up destroying public confidence in both American political parties as well as the Trump Administration, exposing the utter corruption of the mobbed-up New York mercantile class as it has already taken down the credibility of U.S. intelligence, the FBI, and the Justice system in the process.   Altogether, an utter triumph for the SVR.

________________

*This earlier article goes into the details about Carter Page’s history of wearing a wire for the FBI and court testimony against the SVR.  It will become clear why the Russians were fully aware that he’s an agent provocateur and that the SVR was feeding him disinformation that ended up in the Steele Memo.

Carter Page Backstory – JPR 6.22.17