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Wednesday, January 8, 2020

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Briefly Noted: Stefan Halper Update

There are a number of blogs out this morning that build of information gleaned from the OIG FISA report to shed interesting new light on the activities of two key intel operatives: Chris Steele and Stefan Halper. What the new information strongly suggests is that there was close coordination between the John Brennan's CIA and the Clinton campaign, using Fusion GPS, the Clinton's oppo research firm that was secretly funded through a DNC connected law firm. Some of this general thrust of new revelations can be seen in Mike Sylwester's article yesterday, Steele's Reports About Putin's Presidential Administration.

Margot Cleveland at The Federalist focuses on Stefan Halper's interaction with Carter Page: Exclusive Carter Page Interview Raises New Questions About ‘Inaccuracy-Laden’ IG Report. Here's what I see as the essence of what Cleveland is saying:

According to the IG report, after the launch of Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI tasked Halper as a confidential human source to target Page, George Papadopoulos, and another unnamed, high-ranking Trump campaign official, widely known to be Sam Clovis. 
Halper’s handling agent told the IG it was “serendipitous” that Source 2 — the moniker used for the unnamed Halper — “had contacts with three of their four subjects, including Carter Page.” They “couldn’t believe [their] luck,” the handling agent noted, upon learning that Halper knew Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort, and had crossed paths with Page just weeks before. 
After asking Halper about Papadopoulos, whom “he had never heard of,” the case agent told the Office of the Inspector General that Halper “asked whether the team had any interest in an individual named Carter Page.”

Cleveland is rightly skeptical about the serendipitous nature of all this, and asks the obvious questions:

Did Halper hope to be tasked by the FBI with targeting Page? 
Had Halper been tasked by another agency already? 
And did Halper exaggerate the content of his conversation with Page to make Page appear instrumental in the Trump campaign. If so, for what purpose?

Given that we know that Halper was being lavishly funded through a CIA front (Office of Net Assessment), I think the bolded middle alternative is the fundamental question. The CIA had tasked Halper to gather intel on Carter Page--or maybe manufacture intel would be a better way of putting it. Ask yourselves: If Carter Page was a trusted operative of the CIA--which he was; the CIA said so in an email to Kevin Clinesmith at the FBI--then why would they be tasking another source to spy on him? Did it have something to do with Page's position in the Trump campaign? Barr/Durham will surely want to know all about that, and especially whether the CIA tasking came as a result of communication with the Clinton campaign--or possibly even the Obama administration.

Those issues are what Cleveland addresses in the third set of questions. My guess is that what she may have in mind is that the reason for exaggerating Page's importance in the Trump campaign could be connected to the need for a FISA targeting (for practical purposes) the Trump campaign. If so, the question of coordination on this issue at a very high level--especially between Brennan and Comey--arises.

There appear to be any number of avenues of inquiry opening up for Barr/Durham.

UPDATE: Commenter Anonymous (Tom S.) has weighed in on the issue of whether, as Margot Cleveland and I have suggested, Carter Page was being targeted from an early date by the CIA through Stefan Halper. The point being that, when the FBI came calling on Halper, the fact that Halper was already acquainted with Page was not simply the result of random schmoozing in diplomatic/foreign policy circles. Anonymous notes [I've corrected a few misspellings]:

The Cambridge meet was set up by Steven Schrage who was listed as a doctoral student of Halper's. He was also DoS and CIA. He was on Romney's Election staff 2008. Steven Schrage sent out the invitations. Carter Page became close with Schrage and Halper. Schrage also introduced a former CIA operator to Romney named Cofer Black. Black served on Burisma's Board in Ukraine at same time frame as Biden. IMO Schrage, Black, Halper and Romney are CIA assets. They set up the meeting offshore.

This all seemed very familiar to me, but some searching on this blog failed to turn up as much as I expected to find. For example, I could find no references to Schrage, yet the name was very familiar to me. Then I recalled that I'd written in glowing terms several times about Mark Steyn's superb account of this very same Cambridge meeting. I linked Steyn's account in Brennan's Task Force--The Heart Of The Russia Hoax, writing:

On July 7 and 8, 2016, Carter Page gave a presentation on “The Future of the World Economy” in Moscow, and the next day, gives the commencement address for the New Economic School at the World Trade Center. (Does this sound strangely like some sort of setup to you, too? I mean, with all due respect, who wanted to hear Page's views on the World Economy?)
On his return trip, Carter Page stopped at Cambridge on July 11 and 12, 2016, to attend a two-day conference called "2016's Race to Change the World", and who do you think were also in attendance? Stefan Halper and Chris Steele. As Mark Steyn amusingly remarks, "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," but then Page was rubbing elbows with the likes of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and a select group of certified Deep State denizens. And Steele and Halper.

Steyn's article--and very much worth rereading--dates to May 22, 2018: Tinker, Tailor, Clapper, Carter, Downer, Halper, Spy. So let me do something I should have done back then--provide an extended quote from Steyn:

... 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". ... 
... 
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 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." 
... 
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.

And Steyn is just warming up at that point. He moves on from there to Mifsud and Downer and Papadopoulos. To my mind it's the single most brilliant bit of writing on the whole Russia Hoax I can recall off hand.


34 comments:

  1. There is a reason for Obama's mike drop, Brennan's declaration with a gleem in his eyes, and Hillary's and media's jaw dropping on election night.

    The fix was in.

    However, enough people in government, Admiral Rogers for example, and the American people had other desires.

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  2. TexasDude, please explain how Obama's mike drop (Apr. 2016?), and Brennan's declaration (on DJT's "treason"?) fits in with the fix being in.

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    1. I am asserting that a counter intelligence operation on a opposition political party candidate did not just involve mid level FBI or DoJ, or even high level actors, but the President himself either by actual direction and/or approval of actions started by lower level government.

      Sorry, Obama does not get an out.

      Things at this level of sophistication do work without.

      Admiral Rogers found and an OIG found out that Maxine Waters was correct in 2012 that Obama built or was building a database on everyone. That database was abused extensively.

      Remember, Obama's self declared wingman, AG Holder, was given stacks of IRS data on DVD.

      It's the totality of the evidence and it all points to President Obama abusing his powers and authority.

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    2. The scope of it all is almost beyond imagining. Especially when you realize that Big Data is all-in with the Dems.

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  3. When a potential CHS gratuitously asks the FBI if they have any interest in "XYZ," when "XYZ" is one of the targets of their investigation, and knows two more of the four targets, it's sure sign something very ABNORMAL is going on. It's like winning three out of four lottery ticket Jackpots in a row.

    Or, as Smiley points out in "Tinker, Tailor...": "Topicality is always suspect."

    When something this unusual happens, a competent analyst's first question ought to be whether random chance can explain the fortuitous connections of the CHS to the targets, or if it is better explained by the CHS being something far more than he appears to be.

    Such a source should be treated as suspect until proven otherwise, under the auspices of the adage that things that seem to be "too good to be true" usual are.

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    1. Heh! I always luv a TTSS reference.

      "a competent analyst's first question"

      Which kinda begs the question: Were these guys INcompetent analysts, or were they just dishonest?

      Sadly, either or both alternatives seem to work.

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    2. The answer to your question: "Were these guys INcompetent analysts, or were they just dishonest?"


      ... is: "Yes."

      More specifically, this is how bias influences decisions and an investigation, even without any explicit appeal or invocation of the bias: the analyst just goes along with shit they would not normally ever go along with, because they become convinced that "Orange man bad" and thus, must be guilty; ergo, everything must be done to prevent his ascent to the WH.

      Many of them are probably not even aware they are operating this way, and it explains why the IG didn't find overt DIRECT evidence of bias influencing the investigation.

      Add a few subtle hints from the Management team, and no overt documented bias is needed to guide things to their logical conclusion. Everyone knew DOJ was NEVER going to charge Hillary with violating 18 793 f) even though the evidence showed she was guilty as Hell; similarly, everybody on the 7th floor knew they had to stop Trump, because "Orange man bad." They, the CH investigation, and the FISA warrants that let them effectively spy on the Trump campaign, were the "insurance policy."

      Mueller SC and the "obstruction charges" were Plan "B" -- kluged together in haste after Trump defied the prognosticators and won the election. Now they had to cover their tracks, something they assumed they would never need to do as long as Hillary won.

      To their eternal horror and regret, the insurance policy failed.

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  4. I'm not surprised that Halper, on his own initiative, made some effort to get to know Page and Papadopoulos, both of whom were foreign-policy advisors to Trump.

    This seems like something that Halper would do even if the FBI had not tasked him to do so. He was a networker in the foreign-policy business.

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    1. That's a point, Mike. Something not mentioned in the article is that Loretta Lynch confirmed that the FBI was all over the Carter Page angle as soon as Page was announced as an adviser to the campaign. That was in March, 2016, and Lynch attended a meeting with Comey at which this was discussed. It appears that as soon as Page joined the campaign the FBI closed his asset file and started thinking of him as a target of some sort. Since he was also a CIA asset, you have to wonder about coordination in this at a high level--maybe the CIA COS in London giving Halper a heads up when Page was gonna travel to the UK.

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  5. the Cambridge meet was set up by Steven Schrage who was listed as a doctoral student of Halper's. He was also DoS and CIA. He was on Romney's Election staff 2008. Steven Schrage sent out the invitations. Carter Page became close with schrage and Halper. Schrage also intrduced a former cia operator to Romney named Coffer Black. Black served on Buresmas Board in Ukraine at same time frame as Biden. IMO Schrage, Black, Halper and Romney are CIA assets. They set up the meeting offshore.

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    1. That's right--thanks for remembering that. I'll need to add that. This was clearly not aimless schmoozing.

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    2. There are no coincidences in politics.

      Something that cannot get lost in the legalese gobbledy-goop of fraud charges etc. is the explicit and willful use of the espionage apparatus/techniques that these "agents of persons/organizations unknown" (I do not believe they were just running the ball on their own recognizance) used to attack the lawful government of the United States no differently than if by the agents of a foreign power. These things were entrusted to them by the American People. That that trust was utterly betrayed must be indisputable to the average citizen. I think it imperative that no matter the punishment/penalties awarded the American people must leave the courtroom with the impression that it wasn't severe or far reaching enough; otherwise our busy little bureaucratic beavers will just go right back to trying to flood the meadow. Not that they won't anyway, it being the nature of the beast, but perhaps if they get an occasional glimpse of one of their "heroes" being worn about town as a hat they might at least reduce the pace of gnawing at the trunk of the Republic.

      by-the-by this just popped up: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/rod-rosenstein-lands-job-with-corporate-law-firm-in-dc-reports

      That this weasel is apparently not going to be nailed to the barn door is most disheartening.
      Tom S.

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    3. Tom, I'm working on a major update, spurred by your previous comment. There's so much out there that it was one of those forgot-almost-as-much-as-I-used-to-know things. And it will play very much into your no-coincidences-in-politics comment.

      Re Rosenstein, yes, I saw that. His punishment may end up being forced to testify publicly against all his fellow plotters in the clear light of day. He also plays a role in the update.

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    4. @Tom S

      "That this weasel is apparently not going to be nailed to the barn door is most disheartening."

      Tom, why do you think Rod is out of the woods...because he found a job in Christopher Wray's old law firm?

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    5. Reading Margot Cleveland today, you have to wonder--what did Chris Wray know and when did he know it?

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    6. "IMO Schrage, Black, Halper and Romney are CIA assets."

      Romney? Hmmm.

      Stranger things have happened in this extraordinary affair.

      Romney's behavior since Trump was elected has been bizarre.

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  6. Steve McIntyre is on the same track:


    Stephen McIntyre
    ‏ @ClimateAudit
    2h2 hours ago

    Stephen McIntyre Retweeted Svetlana Lokhova

    a dig-here: when was the planning for this conference initiated and by whom? who funded? Unlike most academic conferences which are organized in advance and advertised, it appears suddenly and almost unannounced. Invites to Page AND Stephen Miller on Jun 7 from Schrage.

    Stephen McIntyre added,
    Svetlana Lokhova
    @RealSLokhova
    In a talk Halper gave just four days before meeting Page, he stated: “if the media focuses on Clinton, she will lose, whereas if they continue to focus on Trump, he will lose.” New Details About Meeting FBI Source Suggest Carter Page Was Set Up https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/09/new-details-about-meeting-fbi-source-suggest-carter-page-was-set-up/ …
    1 reply 15 retweets 36 likes

    Stephen McIntyre
    ‏ @ClimateAudit

    2/ another dig-here. Albright, an important person, is recruited for this seemingly hastily put together conference. Albright is strong Atlantic Council. Her firm is linked to some puzzling persons e.g. Rinat Akmetshin who was at Trump Tower meet. His wife is Ukrainian activist
    7:32 AM - 9 Jan 2020

    https://twitter.com/ClimateAudit/status/1215295379748597768


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    1. Very nice, EZ. There's so much out there--it's Deep State, Establishment with a vengeance. The extent of the forces arrayed against Trump is really quite stunning. They started early and continued after the election.

      The reason that I've included material re Albright in other posts is because I was so impressed by this Steyn article as giving a real insight into the upper levels of this conspiracy.

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  7. Regarding Steyn's observations about the topics/agenda of the hastily conceived conference in London; the topics remind me of the quote on the plaque of the statue of the "Faber College" founder from "Animal House":

    "Knowledge is good."

    The whole thing reeks of bait to attract Foreign policy advisors from the Trump Campaign looking to burnish their creds and make what they think might be valuable contacts for use both before and after the election. It was the Foreign Policy equivalent of a honeytrap, to lure in guys like Carter Page, where people who were surveilling Trump campaign people could get "up close and personal,", and, because of the overseas location, Foreign intelligence agencies could intercept phone calls, texts, and emails, and share with their counterparts (Brennan?)in the US -- something that could not legally be done in the US without a warrant issued by a judge.

    All too convenient for people who were desperate to spy on the Trump campaign, and leak menacing smear rumors to the media about "shady collusion with Putin."

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    1. A wonderful Steynism from another article:

      No man anywhere has ever been less in need of a "golden shower" than Donald J Trump. He is surrounded on all sides by powerful forces leaking on him incessantly.

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  8. All you need is a few people in high legal places looking out and covering for you, as Roscoe Davis shows in this thread on the Awan case - Chris Gowan, Steven Wasserman, Jesse Liu, John Carlin, Judge Chutkin, Atkinson, and more, and of course the usual cast - Pelosi, Schiff, Comey, Clinton...

    https://twitter.com/RoscoeBDavis1/status/1214923202025185280

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    1. It's all--Russia Hoax, Awan, Clinton Foundation, IRS, FISA/NSA--just mind boggling.

      Delete
  9. For those interested in digging a little deeper into the "2016's Race to Change the World" conference at Cambridge, here are a few additional dots to connect:

    Conference website: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/26818

    Madeleine Albright/Vin Weber/Steven Schrage video: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/gallery/video/campaigns-on-the-world-stage-madeleine-albright-and-vin-weber

    Who is Vin Weber? Quite an interesting guy. Connections to Manafort, Gates, Albright, Bush, Romney, Rumsfeld and Cheney. A vocal Republican Never Trumper.

    From Wikipedia:

    In 1980, at the age of 28, [Weber] was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives…

    Weber chose not to run for reelection in 1992 and retired from Congress following the House banking scandal, in which he was implicated for writing 125 bad checks worth nearly $48,000….


    Weber was … one of the signers of the PNAC Letter sent to US President Bill Clinton on January 26, 1998, advocating "the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power", along with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and 29 other Republicans.
    Weber opened and managed the Washington, D.C. branch of lobbying firm Clark & Weinstock.

    In 2006, …Freddie Mac paid Weber $360,297 to lobby on its behalf to fend off meaningful regulation in the lead-up to the subprime mortgage crisis. Weber also lobbied for Gazprom, Russia's state-owned natural gas company. In 2011 Clark & Weinstock merged with Mercury, and Weber became a partner in the combined firm.

    Weber [served] as a top advisor on Dole for President in 1996, the Bush reelection campaign in 2004, and Romney for President in 2008. Weber is chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy, a private, nonprofit organization designed to strengthen democratic institutions around the world through nongovernmental efforts. …

    Weber is a board member of … ITT Educational Services, Department 56, and the Aspen Institute. He also serves on the board of The Council on Foreign Relations and co-chaired the Independent Task Force on U.S. Policy toward Reform in the Arab World with former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. …

    Weber was one of the Republicans who turned against the surprise Donald Trump candidacy, telling CNBC on August 3, 2016, "I can't imagine I'd remain a Republican if he becomes president."

    [In August 2016], the Associated Press reported that Mercury Public Affairs LLC., which Weber heads, had received $1.02 million from Paul Manafort's European Centre for a Modern Ukraine to lobby Congress to support pro-Russia Viktor Yanukovich during the Autumn 2012 Ukrainian elections and to block the release from prison of Yanukovich's rival, Julia Tymoshenko. For his lobbying Congress on behalf of pro-Russia entities, Weber received at least $700,000.

    Established in 2012, the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine had been supported by Yanukovich's pro-Russia Party of Regions and continued to pay Mercury for lobbying until February 2014, when Yanukovich fled Ukraine for Russia after the Maidan revolution.

    From 2012 until February 2014 and directed by Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, Weber, who was the principal for Mercury's Ukraine-related lobbying portfolio beginning in 2012, acted as an unregistered agent of a foreign government and foreign political party, a felony offense under [FARA], with a penalty of up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. On April 28, 2017, Mercury retroactively filed with FARA within the Justice Department that it had been hired by the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine. Mercury had filed its lobbying efforts with Congress under the Lobbying Disclosure Act. Files between Mercury and the Manafort and Gates firms connected to Yanukovich and his Party of Regions were subpoenaed by the Mueller investigation.

    In July 2018, New York prosecutors were referred by Mueller to investigate any wrongdoing by Weber and [Mercury]. The Department of Justice dropped the probe of Weber and [Mercury] in September 2019.


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    1. So, other than that, a pretty good guy?

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    2. Haha.

      You are right, Mark, the mind boggles.

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    3. One of the reasons I cut-and-pasted Weber's lengthy bio was to suggest that there were numerous players in this conspiracy who have yet to be exposed. Weber is one, another who comes to mind is former Rep Mike Rogers (R-MI) who was on and then off the Trump transition team.

      My working assumption now is that Pierre Delecto was also one of them and that his interview for the Secy of State job was another Brennan gem.

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    4. The role of the GOPe in seeking to thwart and even depose Trump--who was involved, what were their roles, motives, etc.--is too little reported and understood.

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  10. I've just begun following this blog in the past month or two. Does it warrant mention that Halper was employed/paid lucratively long before the Russia hoax via a company owned by a close Harvard buddy of Chelsea Clinton under contract to ONA? That came to light from a real whistleblower and was promptly buried. Iirc, the Washington Examiner covered it in the most detail.

    It's sticking out to me in that it would seem that perhaps the entire 8 yr Obama "legacy" was supposed to be 'fixing' government so that electoral outcomes always went the way of the cabal, rather than to the will of voters. What hubris!

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    1. I totally agree with your conclusion, and there's no assurance at all at this point that Trump will be able to undo what the Dems spent 8 years putting in place. You can see from the number of subversives still in place--Atkinson and others.

      Re ONA and etc., cf.

      https://meaninginhistory.blogspot.com/2019/12/of-whistleblowers-and-office-of-net.html

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  11. 'Breath-taking' seems spot on. Hope it's not so massive as to be dismissed as too-big-to-be-true.

    I pray that what Barr-Durham deliver is air-tight.

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  12. Mark, thanks for pointing us back to this January 8, 2020 post of yours and the link to Mark Steyn, both of which are well worth re-reading. While we now know much of the contours of the Conspiracy, the scope of it is, yes, 'mind-boggling'. And 'breath-taking' (as Neill says) is a good descriptor too.

    It reminds me that Schrage is undoubtedly more involved in whatever Brennan and Halper were up to than he admitted to Maria Bartiromo yesterday or has written in the paper Matt Taibbi posted. So, yes, his re-surfacing (and the timing of it) will soon raise many more questions than he answered yesterday.

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    1. For example, could Schrage, whose mentor/faculty advisor was Stefan Halper, really have been unaware of Halper's extracurricular activities?

      Could Schrage really have not realized (until much later) that Halper was deeply connected to the IC after (inter alia) what he heard on the Jan 10 phone call with Halper?

      Schrage doesn't add up.

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