In this
Jewish
World Review post, Mark Steyn relates the obvious to readers:
There was indeed interference in the 2016 election cycle, BUT it was not Donald
Trump colluding with Russians. Rather it was the Dems and their Deep State
comrades in the Obama Administration pulling out ALL efforts to make Trump was
not elected. OR if elected, to undermine President Trump so malignantly, he’d
get impeached or resign.
JRH 5/28/18
**************************
Tinker, Tailor, Clapper, Carter, Downer, Halper, Spy
By Mark Steyn
May 28,2018
As I think most persons paying attention now realize, the
investigation into foreign interference with the 2016 election was created as a
cover for domestic interference with the 2016 election.
It was run at the highest (or deepest) Deep State levels by
the likes of James Clapper and John Brennan, whose frantic and hysterical
Tweets are like no utterances of any CIA director in history. That also
explains one of the puzzling aspects of the last year that I've occasionally
mentioned here and on TV and radio: If you were truly interested in an
"independent" Special Counsel, why would you appoint Robert Mueller?
He's a lifetime insider and the most connected man in Washington - a longtime
FBI Director, and Assistant Attorney-General and acting Deputy Attorney-General
at the Department of Justice.
Exactly. His most obvious defect as an
"independent" counsel is, in fact, his principal value to the likes
of Andrew McCabe and Rod Rosenstein: He knows, personally, almost every one in
the tight little coterie of discredited upper-echelon officials, and he has a
deep institutional loyalty to bodies whose contemporary character he helped
create. In other words, he's the perfect guy to protect those institutions. As
for the nominal subject of his investigation, well, he's indicted a bunch of
no-name Russian internet trolls who'll never set foot in a US courthouse.
That's not even worth the cost of printing the complaint. Rush Limbaugh has
been kind enough to quote, several times, my line that "there are no
Russians in the Russia investigation". Which is true. Yet that doesn't
mean there aren't foreigners. And an inordinate number of them are British
subjects - or, to use today's preferred term, "Commonwealth
citizens". All the action in this case takes place not in Moscow but in
southern England.
Let's start at Cambridge University with a two-day
conference called "
2016's Race to Change the World", held on July
11th and 12th 2016 - or three weeks before the FBI supposedly began its
"counterintelligence" operation against Trump, codenamed
"Crossfire Hurricane". That's from the first line of the Rolling
Stones' "Jumpin' Jack Flash". The song and its key signature figure
in the plot of a ho-hum Cold War thriller of the same name, about a British spy
trying to get info from the Russians to an [sic] heroic American woman.
Yes,
really. Jonathan Pryce played "Jumpin' Jack
Flash" , and I asked him about it when I moderated a panel on acting at St
Catherine's College, Oxford with him and Patti Lupone a few years later.
If you think that's a weird event for an Oxbridge college to
host, it's as nothing to this "Race to Change the World" beano. I do
my share of international junketing, but the bill of fare for this curious
symposium is so bland as to be almost generic - panels titled "Europe and
America", "2016 and the World", "Global Challenges Facing the
Next President". Compared to the laser-like focus of a typical Cambridge
confab ("
A Westphalia for the Middle East?"), it's
almost as if someone were trying to create an event so anodyne and torpid no
one would notice it. All that distinguished these colorless presentations was
the undoubted eminence of the speakers: former US Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright; former UK Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind; and Sir Richard
Dearlove, former C (that's M, for 007 fans) at MI6. The conference appears to
have been put together at a couple of weeks' notice by
Steven
Schrage, former "Co-Chair of the G8's Anti-Crime and Terrorism
Group" and a well-connected man on the counterterrorism cocktail circuit:
Here he is
introducing Mitt Romney to the director of the CIA's
Counterterrorist Center, and here he is spending election night in
the UK
at a party with Scotland Yard elite counterterrorist types.
Make of that what you will - it's a somewhat odd background for the convenor of
an insipid, vanilla, cookie-cutter foreign-policy seminar - but among the small
number of strangely prestigious attendees at Mr Schrage's conference were:
~Carter Page, a
petroleum-industry executive and Trump campaign volunteer;
~Christopher Steele, the former
head of the Russia house at MI6;
~Stefan Halper, a University of
Cambridge professor with dual UK/US citizenship.
Today, Mr Page is better known as the endlessly surveilled
"person of interest" whose eternally renewable FISA warrant was the
FBI's gateway into the Trump campaign; Mr Steele is a sometime FBI asset who, a
week before the Cambridge conference, had approached the G-men with the now
famous "dossier" that provided the pretext for the FISA application;
and Professor Halper turns out to be not some tweedy academic but a man with
deep connections to MI6 and the CIA, on the payroll of something at the
Pentagon called the "Office of Net Assessment", and (one of) the
supposed FBI informant(s) inside the Trump circle.
Carter Page says that in the course of this two-day
conference he met Professor Halper for the first time. But I was struck by this
aside Mr Page made to
Sara Carter:
Madeliene [sic] Albright
was always trying to get me to go into public debates. I told her I was there
just as a listener, just as an attendee.
Hmm. If you'll forgive another Patti Lupone-type digression,
many years ago our mutual pal Ned Sherrin decided to launch, just for a laugh,
a rumor that me and Carol Thatcher (Mrs T's daughter) were having an affair.
Ned told somebody, and somebody told somebody else, and about eight months
later it turned up as an item in Nigel Dempster's highly authoritative Daily
Mail gossip column, along with a rather goofy picture of me and Carol
at a David Frost shindig at the Grosvenor House in Park Lane. And Ned was
stunned - because he assumed the Daily Mail story was true.
Because, by the time it circled back to him, he'd clean forgotten he'd started
the whole business.
Oddly enough, that's exactly how James Comey and Andrew
McCabe and John Brennan work. At the FISA court, the FBI, to bolster their
reliance on the Steele dossier, pointed to newspaper stories appearing to
corroborate aspects of it - even though, as he subsequently testified under
oath at the Old Bailey, those stories were in fact fed to those reporters by
Steele himself. Nevertheless, it works like a charm on gullible FISA judges.
You take one thing and you make it two things. Or even better, you take nothing
and you make it a thing: Here, from
yesterday's letter by Senator Ron Johnson, are
McCabe, Sally Yates and other FBI/DOJ honchos arranging for Comey to brief
Trump on the Steele dossier for the sole purpose of giving CNN a news peg for
leaking details about what's in it.
It's almost as if that's what Madeleine Albright is doing
here, isn't it? It's one thing to invite Carter Page to show up at some tedious
yakfest at Cambridge with Halper sitting in front of him and Chris Steele
sitting behind. But what if you could get Page to stand up and say something?
Then you could find a friendly journo to report it and, instead of just a
nobody on the fringes of the campaign, you'd have a "senior Trump
advisor" sharing his thoughts on the global scene with Madam Albright and
Sir Richard and Sir Malcolm and all the other bigshots, and then you could
use that story three weeks later at the FISA court, to
demonstrate how deep into the heart of the campaign the Russkies had
penetrated.
Instead, Professor Halper has to make do with chit-chatting
to Mr Page over the tea and biscuits, and planting the seeds for a friendly
relationship.
Herewith a note on the academic circuit: emeritus professors
and visiting fellows are popular covers with espionage agencies because there's
minimal work and extensive foreign travel, to international talking shops like
the one above. If you make the mistake of being a multinational businessman and
go to foreign countries to meet with other businessmen, you'll be investigated
up the wazoo. But, if you're a professor and you go to foreign countries to
meet with other professors, the world is your oyster. You also get to meet
young people, who are the easiest to recruit.
Here's another professor, and from another Commonwealth
country: Malta. Joseph Mifsud is (was) a professorial fellow at the University
of Stirling in Scotland, but is (was) based in London as a principal of the
"London Centre of International Law Practice" and a director of the
"London Academy of Diplomacy", both of which sound fancy-schmancy but
are essentially hollow entities operating from the same premises - 8, Lincoln's
Inn Fields, a tony address (next to the London School of Economics and the
Royal College of Surgeons) but the "London Centre/Academy’s” fifth in
three years and at which they and a handful of other endeavors are holed up in
a minimally furnished back room filled by four interns round a trestle table on
fifty quid a week.
Professor Mifsud also has (had) similarly undemanding
academic sinecures at the "Euro-Mediterranean University" in Slovenia
and "Link Campus University" in Italy. At the beginning of March
2016, a young man called George Papadopoulos joined the Trump campaign. On
March 14th, traveling through Italy, he met with Professor Mifsud. They got
together again in Britain, and at some point Papadopoulos became head of the "London
Centre of International Law Practice's” soi-disant "Centre
for International Energy and Natural Resources Law & Security", a post
for which he had no obvious qualifications. Happily, like most other jobs at
the "London Centre", it didn't require work, or showing up at the
"London Centre" or even being in London.
Mifsud is said to have ties to high-ranking figures in
Moscow, but there seems to be more prima facie evidence of ties to high-ranking
figures in London. That's Professor Mifsud above with my old friend Boris
Johnson, Britain's Foreign Secretary, at some Brexit event last October 19th.
On October 31st Joseph Mifsud disappeared and has not been seen since. I know
how he feels: The same thing happened to me twelve days after I lunched with
Boris at The Spectator in early 2006. Is (was) Mifsud an FSB
asset? An MI6 asset? Both? Neither? Well, there's more circumstantial evidence
of Mifsud's ties to British intelligence, including multiple meetings
with, inter alia, Claire Smith of the UK's Joint Intelligence
Committee.
At any rate, back in London on April 26th 2016, Professor
Mifsud told young Papadopoulos that the Russians have all this "dirt"
on Hillary, "thousands of emails". A couple of days later, a friend
of George's at the Israeli Embassy, Christian Cantor, introduced him to Erika
Thompson, who worked for Alexander Downer, Canberra's High Commissioner in the
UK, at Australia House. On May 4th, Papadopoulos was quoted in
The
Times of London denouncing David Cameron for calling Trump "
divisive, stupid and wrong". On May 6th, Ms
Thompson called Papadopoulos to say that Mr Downer wanted to meet him. On May
10th they met for drinks at the Kensington Wine Rooms. Young George claims that
the High Commissioner told him to "leave David Cameron alone". Which
doesn't sound quite right to me.
As longtime readers may recall, I have drunk with Alexander
Downer and that is not something to be undertaken lightly. Somewhere in the
course of the evening a pretty squiffy Papadopoulos lifted his head up from the
bowl of cocktail olives and started blabbing about Russian "dirt" on
Hillary.
Another digression: Mr Downer was Australia's longest
serving foreign minister and, as I used to say in those days, "my favorite
foreign minister". Since then, he has spent many years on the
"advisory board" of Hakluyt, a curiously named body set up by former
MI6 chaps. I'm not saying he spends his nights rappelling down the walls of
presidential palaces (although I would be tickled to be proved wrong), but I
don't think I'm betraying any confidences when I say that, after tea with
Alexander in Adelaide a couple of years back, whence he had just returned from
some meeting with some group or other in Lisbon, I remember musing about that
select circle of people who can jet around the world in the expectation that
doors will open for them and some useful tidbit will drop into their laps. As
for Hakluyt, its website is
here: I do believe it's the coolest thing I've seen
since (another long me-'n'-Carol-type story) I was given Marlon Brando's
business card, which had the words "Marlon" and "Brando" on
it and nothing else.
At any rate Mr Downer relayed the information about young
George to Aussie Intelligence back home. Canberra sat on the info for two
months and then passed it along to the Yanks in late July, just in time for
that FISA application.
And so, as July turned to August, Peter Strzok bade farewell
to his "paramour" Lisa Page and flew to London for a sit-down with
the High Commissioner at Australia House. When Strzok reported back to
Washington, the FBI sicced the omnipresent "professor" Stefan Halper on
George Papadopoulos. So the Trump aide woke up one August morning to an email
from a Cambridge academic he'd never heard of, inviting him on an
all-expenses-paid trip back to Britain to give a speech for $3,000. Once in
London, Halper casually inquired of his new friend, "George, you know
about hacking the emails from Russia, right?"
Right. As Rush
put it, the day before I guest-hosted last week:
He was a nothing. He was a
nobody, which made him a perfect mark. He was a young guy who wanted to go
places... He actually put on his résumé that he had participated in Model UN
in high school.
Just so: Papadopoulos was the perfect mark. And the easiest
way to reel him in is to get him off his home turf. In your own neighborhood,
you have your routine - your usual bars, favorite restaurants; you notice if
something's off. But, flown to London, you have no routine, no old haunts. You
go where you're invited, you're introduced to important people - like
"High Commissioners", woshever the hell thash ish, hic – [Blog
Editor: As an American I think Steyn is expressing a drunken form of “whoever
the hell they is, hiccup] and you want them to think you're important, too,
so you reveal that you know all about the Russian "dirt" on Hillary.
So you got that from the Russians, right? Er, no. I
got it from a Maltese guy in Italy who's a Scottish professor and plugged in to
MI6, and then I told it to an Australian bloke in London who's also plugged in
to MI6 and told me to lay off David Cameron, and then an American guy in
Cambridge who's plugged in to MI6 reminded me about it to see if I'd deny all
knowledge of it, which would be suspicious, wouldn't it..?
As I said, and as Rush likes to quote, there are no Russians
in the Russia investigation. But, like that rumor about me and Carol Thatcher,
you just put these things out there and a few months later they come back to
you, via Canberra and the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing program and suddenly
it's "independently" "corroborated" "evidence"
from a respected ally and you can take it to a FISA judge.
There were two investigations into presidential candidates
during the 2016 election. But, as Andrew McCarthy reminds us, these two
investigations were not the same. The Clinton "matter" was a criminal
investigation - because there was credible evidence that Hillary had committed
criminal acts. The FBI had no such clear-cut goods on Trump. So they had to
find something else:
The scandal is that the FBI,
lacking the incriminating evidence needed to justify opening a criminal
investigation of the Trump campaign, decided to open a counterintelligence
investigation. With the blessing of the Obama White House, they
took the powers that enable our government to spy on foreign adversaries and
used them to spy on Americans — Americans who just happened to be their
political adversaries.
And the advantage of a "counterintelligence
investigation", unlike a criminal investigation, is that everything in it
is "classified". So that even an obvious set-up at a Cambridge confab
or Kensington wine bar is "intelligence" that has to be
"protected" for "national security" reasons. It's a brazen,
audacious scheme, and unlikely to have been loosed without the approval,
however discreetly stated, of the then President. Occam's Razor suggests that
the man running the operation was the CIA's John Brennan through the
"inter-agency taskforce" that met at Langley. But Brennan isn't
that reckless:
Go back to Madeleine Albright urging Carter Page to speak up at a Cambridge
conference; Christopher Steele leaking parts of his dossier to the newspapers;
a staffer at Australia House inviting George Papadopoulos for a drink... The
best way to turn nothing into something is to plant it somewhere far away and
wait for it to
work its way back to you:
Britain's spy agencies played a
crucial role in alerting their counterparts in Washington to contacts between
members of Donald Trump's campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives,
the Guardian has been told.
Golly, you don't say! I wonder who "told" The
Guardian that. A conference here, a speech there, a cocktail round the
corner, and pretty soon you have the simulacrum of
"counterintelligence" concerns from America's closest allies:
According to one account, GCHQ's
then head, Robert Hannigan, passed material in summer 2016 to the CIA chief,
John Brennan. The matter was deemed so sensitive it was handled at
"director level". After an initially slow start, Brennan used GCHQ
information and intelligence from other partners to launch a major inter-agency
investigation.
Er, wait a minute. If it's "so sensitive" it's
being handled "director-to-director", why isn't the head of GCHQ
meeting with his opposite number at NSA? Why's he meeting with Brennan?
Hey, don't get hung up on details. It all went brilliantly -
except for one tiny detail: Hillary managed to do the impossible and lose. On
January 23rd 2017, three days after Trump's inauguration, GCHQ at Cheltenham
Tweeted the sad fate of
Mr So Sensitive:
We're sorry to announce that
Robert Hannigan, our Director since 2014, has decided to step down as head of
GCHQ.
Oh, dear. Well, enjoy your sudden retirement, old boy.
Unfortunately, for Brennan and Comey and McCabe and Strzok and the others on
this side of the Atlantic in the third week of January, it wasn't quite that
simple. Because, instead of protecting Hillary, they were now protecting
themselves - so it was necessary to dig in and double-down on the "Russia
investigation".
Which sounds super-credible except for one small point:
there was never a Russia investigation. As Andrew McCarthy sums it up:
Opening up a counterintelligence investigation against
Russia is not the same thing as opening up a counterintelligence investigation
against the Trump campaign.
Which is what they did - Brennan and Clapper and Comey and
McCabe. They took tools designed to combat America's foreign enemies and used
them against their own citizens and their political opposition. It was an
intentional subversion of the electoral process conducted at the highest level
by agencies with almost unlimited power. And, if they get away with it, they
will do it again, and again and again. That's what Brennan's telling us on
Twitter, and Clapper on "The View":
Yeah? So what? Whatcha gonna do
about it?
Good question.
________________________
Mark Steyn is an
international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading
Canadian human rights activist. His latest book is "The Undocumented
Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned". (Buy it at a 57%
discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 41%
discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)
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