FBI Unredacts Most of Kathleen Kavalec's Notes Re Steele

That was quick!

Two and a half years unclassified, then 11 days as Classified, and now back to being almost totally unclassified. It appears that Bill Barr was not amused by the Chris Wray FBI's adventures in retroactive classification and redaction of Kathleen Kavalec's notes and write up regarding her discussions with Chris Steele, the Brit ex spook and fabulist. Kavalec originally left her notes and an email based on them Unclassified--that was two and a half years ago. The FBI did their retroactive number on the material just over a week ago, but after a furor in the media has ... rethought things.

CTH, in a longer blog tonight, includes the fact that the FBI has apparently reconsidered its redactions of Kathleen Kavalec's typed up notes regarding her meeting on October 11, 2016, with Chris Steele Tatyana Duran. The handwritten notes are clearly for the most part a precis of material in Steele's famous "dossier." However, there are differences, as can be seen from the typed up--and now mostly unredacted--material. Notably, in Kavalec's notes we find Paul Manafort presented as playing the role of courier between Trump and "the Russians," rather than Carter Page being the courier between Manafort and the Russians on Trump's behalf. Another unique feature is that Manafort is also said to communicate secretly with the Kremlin via the Alfa Bank using Tor software and a "hidden server" managed by Alfa Bank. Page is also said to be involved, but in some unspecified way, although he is said to have met twice (rather than just once) with Igor Sechin of Rosneft--and with no apparent reference to his commencement address in Moscow.

These discrepancies in the various versions of Steele's "dossier" material raise the interesting question of how the FBI decided which version of Steele's stories to use in its FISA application. The most readily available version of the Steele dossier features Manafort as the principal behind the Trump outreach to the Russians, but Carter Page serves as the courier between Manafort and the Russians. The appeal of this version--as opposed to Manafort doing the communications on his own, is that it supports the narrative that the FBI used to open an "enterprise counterintelligence investigation"--Crossfire Hurricane.


According to that narrative, a de facto unit or "enterprise" existed within the Trump campaign to handle the Russian contacts. While the narrative of one person--Manafort--being the go between might work to open a Full Investigation on Manafort alone, the "enterprise" narrative involving several persons opened up the possibility of a broader investigation into the Trump organization. Thus, by going with the narrative of Manafort and Page working together, and drawing Papadopoulos and Flynn into the enterprise, an "enterprise" theory could be presented to the FISA court that, by presenting a variety of persons with a variety of supposed Russian contacts as working in concert, might prove more persuasive to a FISA court judge considering the authorization of a FISA on, for practical purposes, a presidential candidate. But, once again, that raises the question whether the selection of material to be used was made simply on the basis of what sounded more plausible and what might justify the broadest FISA coverage. And that approach is, of course, wildly illegal. Not "according to the book."

Also of note is that Sergei Millian--a mysterious figure who is widely assumed to be Sources D and E in Steele's dossier--figures prominently in Kavalec's notes (this is especially apparent in her rough notes, rather than the write up). To say that Millian is a source of very questionable reliability would be an understatement. Nevertheless, Steele provided Kavalec with a narrative that traces Trump's Russian connections back to 2009, but which appears to be based on claims by Millian that have been largely debunked. Again, one assumes that the FBI--in its normal course of business--would have demanded to know the identity of Steele's sources to vet them. If they had take this basic step with regard to as shady a character as Millian, they could hardly have presented Steele (and by implication, his "sources") to the FISA court in good faith as credible.