The Beginning Of Wisdom

When I was first starting out in foreign counterintelligence--FCI, as we called--back in 1982, one of the first things I was told was: The begining of wisdom is distrust of The Agency, meaning, the CIA. The wisdom wasn't presented in quite that form. It was more along the lines of: Don't believe anything they tell you; they always lie. It was good advice then and it's good advice now.

The hot narrative this morning is this one via Undercover Huber:

NEW: The FISA warrant applications on Carter Page directly relied on information sourced to Vyacheslav Trubnikov, former head of Russia's SVR foreign intelligence agency and "good friend" of FBI CHS Stefan Halper. 

Note: This is still redacted in the FISA applications. 

—Trubnikov's allegation used in the FISA is of a "dossier [on Clinton] [that] had been compiled by the RIS over many years, dating back to the 1990’s".

—Truvnikov [sic] is described in a footnote, as a "Sub Source" of Steele.

Recap: Steele already told Kathleen Kavalec at the State Dept. in Oct 2016 both that Trubnikov was a "source" of his dossier, and that he was also "involved" in the Collusion conspiracy with Trump and "kompromat". 

A conspiracy that didn't exist of course...  

So yeah, the FBI/DOJ were using unverified information from a "former" Russian head of the new KGB in order to spy on an American citizen [Carter Page], who was actually a CIA asset. Great work everyone!

Caveat: Until these sections of the FISA are fully declassified, you can't confirm this for yourself 100%, so bear that in mind, but I spent a lot of time working this out. Will share more when possible. 

/ENDS 

You have to read this very carefully. There are a lot of folks out there saying the usual thing: Aha! The FBI was fooled by Russian disinformation! The Russians were feeding disinformation to the FBI by [specify your favored theory].


That's not exactly what UCH is saying (although his wording is somewhat ambiguous at points). He's actually only saying that some "information" in the Carter Page FISA application--that the Russians had a dossier on Hillary [they do have a professional intel service, right?]--was "sourced to Vyacheslav Trubnikov, former head of Russia's SVR foreign intelligence agency." Note that he's careful to add that the "collusion  conspiracy" involving Trump and Trubnikov was "[a] conspiracy that didn't exist of course."

"Sourced to", as in: Someone said that Trubnikov said. And we know who that "someone" most likely was: Stefan Halper. A long time CIA asset who appears to have been more or less on loan to the FBI for the limited purpose of smearing Carter Page and Michael Flynn.

The wildly improbable story that a guy like Trubnikov--a professional intelligence official who had operated at the top levels of the Russian government for years--would share with a relatively random Russian emigre or with a creepy guy like Halper the story that "the Kremlin had been feeding information to Donald Trump's campaign for an extended period of time" via someone like Carter Page--well, that might seem plausible to naive FISA court judges, but would the FBI really have bought that?

Only if they'd forgotten the lesson I learned back in 1982.

We don't actually know how this story came to Steele to be forwarded to the FBI. Did it really come as scuttlebutt from subsource to subsource of Steele (most of them not personally known to Steele, as the FBI acknowledges in the FISA application)--all part of Steele's phantasmagorical "network"? From our remove almost any story will do. Here's one. John Brennan made the story up, attributing it to Trubnikov to provide verisimilitude and authority, and then had Halper feed it to Steele. Or maybe UK intel people, in collusion with Brennan, fed the story to Steele. Or maybe Brennan fed it directly to Nellie Ohr at Fusion GPS, who attributed it to Steele and his "network"--Nellie the author, Chris the frontman to US government officials and compliant "journalists."

Any number of theories might fit the facts as we know them, but all you need to do is read the "probable cause" section of the Carter Page FISA application to realize the incredibly whill-o-the-wisp nature of it all. Nothing is solid. It's all one supposition balancing on top of another in a precarious structure based on non-sequiturs. That's most likely what Stu Evans at the DoJ's Office of Intelligence was seeing.

One way or another, however, I think this was a conspiracy that was directed from the top down by the highest levels of US, UK, and Aussie intelligence--with little or no direct Russian involvement, certainly not at an official level. Brennan, I believe, was the evil genius--which explains Durham's focus on Brennan and on the ICA, which was really the after the fact defense of what had happened as well as the license to continue the failed effort to prevent the Trump presidency and transform that effort into a coup attempt--the Mueller Witchhunt.

We see Brennan inserting CIA operatives into key areas of the Russia Hoax--CIA contractor Nellie Ohr to the Clinton oppo research camp at Fusion GPS, CIA/MI6 assets like Halper and Mifsud loaned to the FBI. The MI6 asset Chris Steele attached to the Clinton/CIA shop at Fusion GPS as well as the FBI. It's all starting to unravel. We also see Brennan in close contact with Senate Dems--Harry Reid. And Steele was keeping the UK up to speed on events in DC--how else to explain the likes of con man Chris Steele meeting personally with muckety mucks like "Sir" Richard Dearlove and "Sir" Charles Farr?

All roads lead to Langley. Except those that lead even higher up.