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Monday, August 10, 2020

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.

13 comments:

  1. Cleveland always brings clarity. In this article she explains how Halper was able to say:


    In a January 10, 2017, conversation with Halper that Schrage recorded, Halper told him, “I don’t think Flynn’s going to be around long.” Halper then detailed the Machiavellian maneuvers likely to come: “The way these things work,” Halper said, was that “opponents. . . . so-called enemies” of Flynn would be “looking for ways of exerting pressure.” Flynn would be “squeezed pretty hard,” Halper suggested, and then Flynn’s “reaction to that is to blow up and get angry. He’s really f-cked. I don’t know where he goes from there. But that is his reaction. That’s why he’s so unsuitable.”

    When Halper made these predictions, Flynn’s telephone calls with the Russian ambassador were not yet publicly known. Two days later, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius reported those calls after receiving a leak of classified information from a still unknown source, and set in motion the scenario that led to Flynn’s firing.


    Questions have been raised about how Halper, far removed and not apt to be in the insider loop, could come up with such a detailed prediction. Cleveland points to reporter David Ignatius and explains why.

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  2. good article/post! they talk about 'Steele and Burrows working discreetly pass information along' to the FBI, but it seems in totality, that they were simply recycling the information that FBI or other Brookings, etc. folks gave them from USA, to give it the 'foreign intelligence' allure. It doesn't seem that any independent or original material came from these folks, but it's part of the cover story that the bogus 'gossip' was 'foreign intelligence,' or, as typically phrased in a maliciously compliant fashion, "from foreign intelligence sources."

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    1. Yes, I believe it was essentially a laundering operation, for deniability.

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  3. Two other events dovetail with this nicely:

    1. the hand delivered letter from the head of British Intelligence to Flynn and other high ranking officials in US government in January 2016, reportedly disowning anything that Steele had provided US government,

    and

    2. The sudden unexpected and near contemporaneous resignation of the head of GCHQ in Britain, the signals intelligence agency roughly comparable to our NSA, announced on 23 January 2016.

    Taken together with the Shrage revelations, it paints a picture of the British Intelligence meddling in the US election, using Steele and others as a cut-outs, most likely to insulate themselves if Trump won. One guess is GCHQ was involved, induced to share intercepts of people in the Trump campaign and related targets, without proper national security justification.

    Once Trump won and was about to be inaugurated, British Intel had no choice but to go to damage control mode, and disown Steele's material via the hand delivered letter, and, I speculate, Hannigan resigned from GCHQ as a sacrifice to perhaps placate the cousins in the incoming administration in Washington, for coloring outside the lines.

    Hannigan's resignation letter stated it was for "personal reasons" -- but within a month or so, before Hannigan stepped down, rumors floated in the British press that the real reason was because it had been discovered that Hannigan had privately expressed support for a repeat offender priest-pedophile, which is a whale of a good cover story for resigning because he authorized sharing of signals intel on a US presidential campaign whose candidate had just taken office as POTUS.

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    1. Wiki: According to the Guardian, his [Hannigan's] resignation was sudden and prompted speculation that it might be related to "British concerns over shared intelligence with the US in the wake of Donald Trump becoming president."
      https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jan/23/gchq-chief-robert-hannigan-quits
      FWIW.

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  4. DiGenova on WMAL:

    Thinks Shrage is not an "evil-doer" -- name doesn't come up in Russia Collusion Hoax documents, other than organizing the Cambridge Conference at which Carter Page meets Stephan Halper and Dearlove, so he discounts theory that Shrage knowingly worked with conspirators.
    Thinks Shrage conclusion about Durham not interviewing Halper/Dearlove is speculation; says Shrage has no idea who Durham has or hasn't interviewed. Thinks Durham tried or succeeded in interviewing Halper and Dearlove (or they refused) during one or more trips to London.

    Expects Sullivan to be disqualified after tomorrow's Flynn en banc hearing.

    Says SSCI scandal will get much bigger and uglier.

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  5. Don't forget how Boris Johnson (as Foreign Secretary ) , PM Theresa May and media outlets made ad hominem comments about candidate Trump..."mentally ill and deranged" ...The Economist said Trump was a bigger danger to the world than ISIS. BBC was even more vile. Also, don't forget Mr. Mifsud. He had a nifty little sinecure at Stirling University here in Scotland ...paid for by Westminster via Holyrood (Scottish gov).....the students there said they never saw him and he never taught a class.The UK connection is deep.

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  6. If I'm reading this right, from your earlier post "Let's talk about Michael Gaeta," but quoting from the WaPo.

    This storyline feels concocted for an audience of true believers:

    -->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.<--

    Presumably, that is "early fall" 2016. So what was Steele doing being approved by the FBI in February 2016 as a "source"??

    If Steele and Burrows actually did meet with Dearlove at the Garrick Club, surely Steele was briefing Dearlove on Steele/Orbis/FusionGPS activities. Steele didn't need the wisdom of Dearlove's experience regarding the history of the British intelligence services and US politics--Steele was already neck-deep in US election politics as a hired private foreign snoop.

    It's fascinating looking back at the older reporting, that while dubious on first reading, becomes preposterous in the light of evidence that has unfolded. The WaPo and the NYT are factories of fake news.

    They report fiction in defense of a partisan narrative that falls apart with the passage of time. How can anyone read them without bursting into laughter?? Their integrity and truthfulness is in deficit.

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  7. "While questioning Dearlove, Steele, or Andrew may prove impossible"

    But what of their solemn "obligations to ... the public"? I say, old boy, let us retire to the Garrick lest we further confound Mr. Le Carrè's endeavors to put his finishing touches on our quandary.

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  8. FWIW:

    >> Paul Sperry
    @paulsperry_
    BREAKING: In his forthcoming book, Carter Page says he will reveal a different version of events from the one that Halper protege Steven Schrage is telling now <<

    >> https://twitter.com/paulsperry_/status/1293274299302916098 <<

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