Again: The Important Takeaway From Schrage's Revelations

Margot Cleveland comes down on my side this morning at The Federalist. The tantalizing takeaway in what Steven Schrage has had to say thus far about the Cambridge meeting of Stefan Halper with Carter Page actually has to do with the role of British intelligence operatives in the Russia Hoax. Or, technically, former British intelligence operatives.

Recall that I wrote yesterday:

Finally, regarding the MI6 connection, while Dearlove and Steele are "retired," that doesn't mean that Dearlove might not have served as a high level--but deniable--connection among Five Eyes intel agencies. Note, for example, the way in which Dearlove's presence seemingly energized and directed Halper, in Schrage's telling of the events. That appears to be the truly main point that Shrage is trying to make--the influence of Richard Dearlove on what transpired and developed into the Russia Hoax. And we know that Christopher Steele consulted with Dearlove on this, as well.

What I was briefly referring to in the red highlighted sentence was a WaPo profile of Christopher Steele that contained this, to me, significant passage (below)--which I quoted in Let's Talk About Michael Gaeta. After presenting what appeared to me to be anomalies in the early July, 2016, mission of FBI agent Michael Gaeta, traveling from Rome to London--with the approval of Victoria Nuland--to meet with Steele, I continue:


Following Steele's July 5 meeting with Gaeta ...

"Later that month, Steele reached out to a State Department contact in Washington, according to Nuland, who said officials decided his allegations were best left to the FBI. 

In late July, Steele told friends he was rattled when WikiLeaks released thousands of internal Democratic National Committee emails on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, material that U.S. law enforcement officials said was hacked by Russia. Then Trump — who had repeatedly praised Putin on the campaign trail — publicly called on Russia to hack and release a cache of missing Clinton emails. [This is, of course, a false characterization of what Trump said.] 

Steele, who had researched Russian attempts to interfere in European elections for another client, began to fear that the Americans were not taking the Kremlin’s efforts seriously enough, associates said. 

In the early fall, he and Burrows [Chris Burrows, another "former" MI6 operative, and Steele's partner at Orbis Business Intelligence] turned to Dearlove, their former MI6 boss, for advice. Sitting in winged chairs at the Garrick Club, one of London’s most venerable private establishments, under oil paintings of famed British playwrights, the two men shared their worries about what was happening in the United States. They asked for his guidance about how to handle their obligations to their client and the public, Dearlove recalled. [God, is that priceless or what? Sitting in winged chairs under oil paintings of famed playwrights discussing their obligations to the public--I mean to say! How much more high minded does it get? You'd almost think Steele was volunteering his services to Fusion GPS!]

Dearlove said their situation reminded him of a predicament he had faced years earlier, when he was chief of station for British intelligence in Washington and alerted U.S. authorities to British information that a vice presidential hopeful had once been in communication with the Kremlin. 

He said he advised Steele and Burrows to work discreetly with a top British government official to pass along information to the FBI." [So Steele had multiple masters: the FBI, the British government, his client--even, God help them, the public! It seems terribly promiscuous, but one assumes that that came naturally to Steele.]

Anecdotally, it has been reported that Dearlove continues to travel and interact with former high level colleagues in the globalist Deep State.

So Margot Cleveland writes along the same lines:

If Schrage’s version is accurate, Halper purposefully connected to Page and then sold that connection to the FBI to spy on him. Also, under the scenario Schrage presents, Halper did so at Dearlove’s behest. But why? What was Dearlove’s interest? 

Here, Schrage’s article is a must-read synopsis of what he calls “the Cambridge Four,” which in addition to Dearlove and Halper includes Dearlove’s former MI6 underling, Christopher Steele, and the official MI5 historian turned Cambridge academic Christopher Andrew. Together, the four have fingers in several different strands of Spygate, from the spying on Page, to the invention of an affair between Flynn and the Russian-born, Cambridge Ph.D. student Svetlana Lokhova, to, of course, the Steele dossier. 

Steele, we know was paid by the Clinton campaign. But what induced Dearlove, Halper, and Andrew to join in the endeavor? Was it money? Or did intelligence agencies seek out their assistance? If so, which intelligence community? While questioning Dearlove, Steele, or Andrew may prove impossible, Halper is a U.S. citizen. So why hasn’t he been hauled before Congress to explain himself?

So, what could be more natural than that Bill Barr and John Durham--following in the footsteps, as it were, of Michael Horowitz--should travel to London to talk to people there. Who all did they talk with? Wouldn't we like to know! But it doesn't take much reflection to realize that the seeming connection of the British intelligence community in the Russia Hoax with the US Intelligence Community (FBI and CIA for our purposes) is a very big story, and one that has been widely ignored.