Carter Page, The Steele "Dossier", And The FISA Hop Hop

Late last night, commenter Forbes raised the question of the two-hop method under FISA for gaining additional information. The importance of this lies in the Carter Page FISA. Carter Page has stated publicly (summarized here) that, although he stepped down from the Trump campaign in September, 2016, he remained in touch with members of the campaign and, later, of the transition. Among those with whom Page stayed in touch was Steve Bannon, chief strategist and senior counselor to the president:

Over the weekend, Page told The Federalist that after he left the Trump campaign in late September 2016, he continued to communicate with individuals officially connected to the campaign. “Yes, I stayed in touch with them – including during the transition months and after the start of the new administration,” Page said. While Page refused to identify all of the individuals with whom he maintained a relationship in order to protect their privacy, he confirmed that he remained in contact with Steve Bannon. 

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Although the publicly released Page FISA orders redact the surveillance methods authorized and the modes of communication the FBI could target, it is safe to assume that any communication device Page used would be tapped, including cell phones, text, and email. Thus, the FBI would have access to any text and emails Page exchanged with Bannon or other members of the campaign, transition team, or administration, as well as the ability to eavesdrop on any telephone calls. 

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But Page went further, telling The Federalist ... “I can also tell you on the record,” Page said, “that one of the things that the FBI investigators were interested in were my early 2017 text messages with Steve Bannon (irrelevant as they may be).” 

Page refused to expand on the content of his early 2017 text messages with Bannon, but suggested that the subject matter of those texts was unimportant—it was the FBI’s interest in, and probing about, his exchanges with Bannon that proved infinitely more significant. That probing came when the FBI interviewed Page multiple times in March 2017, at a time when James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Peter Strzok remained in charge of the Russia collusion investigation.

The issue Forbes raised regarding "Two Hop" relates to the ability of the government to obtain not only the records of the targeted individual (Page) but also of persons "two hops" distant, in a sort of concentric circle around Page. This would, theoretically, give the government the ability to determine how wide Page's conspiracy to collude with Russia was and who its members were. Since Bannon would undoubtedly be in touch with Trump, presumably Trump would fall within those two concentric circles.

Lots Of Noise Swirling Around Bruce And Nellie Ohr

Sundance at Conservative Tree House (CTH) has been trying to connect dots regarding the activities of Bruce and Nellie Ohr. I have some important reservations regarding his speculations, but the release of the full transcript of Bruce Ohr's House testimony and Judicial Watch's FOIA dump from DoJ opens up avenues of research.

The CTH research, in its most convenient form, can be found be found here, and in its original Twitter form here. I will simply work my way down the thread, which contains 14 tweets.

The core of sundance's speculation is his insistent assertion that Nellie Ohr "had to" be working concurrently for both DoJ NSD (National Security Division) and Fusion-GPS--opposition research for the Clinton campaign. Sundance has made this assertion before, but without hard evidence, and I still don't see the evidence now. In support of the assertion he states:

No-one spends that much time gathering, formatting and distributing that much information for free. She had/has to be a government contracted employee for the DOJ.

To start at the beginning, yes, we know that as of 2010 Nellie was an employee/researcher for Open Source Works--a branch of the CIA. Zerohedge has a nice synopsis of what little can be known about Open Source Works:

MULTI-UPDATES: Michael Cohen In A Nutshell

Mark Penn begins his latest, and typically excellent, article with the following trenchant observation:

After bilking corporations out of millions of dollars for "insight" into his client, failing to pay his taxes, trying to entrap his client, and pleading guilty to lying to Congress, now-disbarred attorney Michael Cohen took his best shots at President Donald Trump, calling him a liar and a cheat. The testimony brought Congress to a new low after years of dead-end investigations of supposed Russia-Trump conspiracies.

It may be worthwhile to briefly review how we got to this point, and what the Cohen angle is really about.

Like just about everything else in the Russia Hoax, and as nearly as anyone can tell, Michael Cohen's travails began with the infamous Steele "dossier." When she wasn't honing her mid-life ham radio hobbyist skills, Nellie Ohr--former CIA analyst and wife of Bruce Ohr, a high DoJ official and (yes) FBI informant--browsed through NSA databases on behalf of Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS, in search of opposition research information regarding anyone associated with Trump. Courtesy of James Comey and the FBI, who made their access to NSA databases freely available to Nellie and Fusion GPS.

In early summer of 2016, as the campaign season was heating up, Nellie discovered that a Michael Cohen had traveled to Prague. Whether or not Nellie really assumed that the world only contained one Michael Cohen who might travel to Prague we cannot say for sure. However, by fall of 2016 the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigation of Trump and his campaign was in need of a refreshed narrative, due to the fact that none of the original subjects were any longer with the Trump campaign. Either assuming for no apparent reason that only one Michael Cohen existed or, more likely, figuring that the coincidence of names was close enough for government work, the FBI and Chris Steele wove a new narrative about Cohen as the go between Trump and his masters in Moscow. And that was crucial to obtaining the first FISA:

UPDATED: Nellie Ohr Partial Transcript Leak

Another week, another partial leak of the transcript of testimony by a Russia Hoax insider before the House Intel Committee. This time it concerns Nellie Ohr, researcher for Glenn Simpson's Fusion GPS and wife of then top DoJ career official Bruce Ohr. Fusion GPS, of course, was the oppo research firm for the Clinton campaign, hired through Hillary's and the DNC's Perkins Coie partner, Marc Elias. The partial leak comes to us this time courtesy of the Daily Caller.

At first glance this leak is similar to that of James Baker's testimony: there doesn't appear to be any bombshells, per se, but it does provide confirmation of the role played by the subject.

The obvious takeaway from Nellie's testimony--to the extent that it was leaked--is that she researched travel of Trump's family as well as any links between Trump and Russian "oligarchs":

UPDATED: Mueller Nukes Buzzfeed--Why?

Conservative blogs are accurately characterizing the Special Counsel office's statement re Buzzfeed's fake news story as "rare." As Tucker Carlson put it, Mueller's office has virtually never commented on anything, but in this statement Mueller's office flatly rejects Buzzfeed's claim that President Trump personally directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress regarding the Trump Moscow deal--which was basically moribund by the time 2016 rolled around. Fox News says it nicely:

The statement is remarkable in that Mueller's team rarely issues statements in response to news stories. But BuzzFeed's story sparked immense interest from Democrats, who called for renewed investigations and even suggested the allegations could be a basis for impeachment proceedings.

For example, Adam Schiff immediately rushed out onto the limb:

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., whose committee is already investigating the president and his ties to Russia, called the allegations in the report “the most serious to date.”

“The allegation that the president of the United States may have suborned perjury before our committee in an effort to curtail the investigation and cover up his business dealings with Russia is among the most serious to date,” Schiff said in a statement. “We will do what’s necessary to find out if it’s true.”

And that was a crowded limb:

UPDATED: Lisa Page, Brennan, And The Dossier--Once Again

There's a fair amount of commenting going on about recent leaks of "information", first by Jeff Carlson in his fact based, extensive commentary on Lisa Page's House testimony, and secondly in the NYT's vaguely sourced narrative about the FBI opening an investigation on Trump (this is not actually news). My view is that Lisa Page's testimony, while certainly interesting, produced no bombshells--no breakthrough factual revelations that truly advance our understanding of the Russia Hoax. What her testimony does offer is a view of interaction between the FBI and DoJ with regard to Trump and a better understanding of who the main players were. Page's testimony also--and for me this its most important aspect--strongly confirm the centrality of the dossier for the entire Russia Hoax. This comes out in her testimony regarding former CIA Director John Brennan's apparent knowledge of the dossier material, which Page appears to find genuinely puzzling. This comes up in an exchange regarding Brennan's briefing of former Senator Harry Reid at the end of August, 2016, in which Brennan mentioned the dossier:

UPDATED: Regarding the Cohen Plea Deal

Lots will be said in the coming days about the Michael Cohen plea deal, in which--against all the evidence--Cohen claims to have committed a crime in coordination with Donald Trump. The plea deal was engineered by a non-trial lawyer: Clinton consigliere Lanny Davis. To understand what's going on here I can do no better than recommend the latest article by another (former) Clinton insider, pollster Mark Penn: Cohen's plea deal is prosecutor's attempt to set up Trump. Here are two excerpt that speak volumes about the Establishment and about the entire Mueller operation:

Contrast what is going on here with the treatment of the millions of dollars paid to a Democratic law firm which, in turn, paid out money to political research firm Fusion GPS and British ex-spy Christopher Steele without listing them on any campaign expenditure form — despite crystal-clear laws and regulations that the ultimate beneficiaries of the funds must be listed. This rule was even tightened recently. There is no question that hiring spies to do oppo research in Russia is a campaign expenditure, and yet, no prosecutorial raids have been sprung on the law firm, Fusion GPS or Steele. Reason: It does not “get” Trump.

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These investigations, essentially based on an opposition-funded dossier, were never anything other than an attempt to push into a corner as many Trump aides and family members as possible and shake them down until they could get close enough to Trump to try to take him down. That’s why so many of his aides, lawyers, and actions in the campaign and in the White House have undergone hour-by-hour scrutiny to find anything that could be colored into a crime, leaving far behind the original Russia-collusion theory as the fake pretext it was. Paying for nondisclosure agreements for perfectly legal activities is not a crime, not a campaign contribution as commonly understood or ruled upon by the FEC — and squeezing guilty pleas out of vulnerable witnesses does not change those facts.

UPDATES:

Some things you just really can't make up. Lanny Davis, the Clinton consigliere leading the latest charge to overturn the election of Donald Trump--the alleged Putin puppet--is himself the registered foreign agent for Dmytro Firtash, a pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarch wanted by the US government. Further, Davis is also saying that 13 of the dossier claims about Michael Cohen are "false" and that Cohen "has never been to Prague in his life." (via Daily Caller)

And Jeff Carlson at themarketswork.com has pulled up an February 17, 2012 article in The Guardian, Obama, Facebook and the Power of Friendship: the 2012 Data Election. The article describes what appears to be an "in kind" campaign contribution from Facebook to the Obama Campaign:

Facebook is also being seen as a source of invaluable data on voters. The re-election team, Obama for America, will be inviting its supporters to log on to the campaign website via Facebook, thus allowing the campaign to access their personal data and add it to the central data store – the largest, most detailed and potentially most powerful in the history of political campaigns. If 2008 was all about social media, 2012 is destined to become the "data election".

As Carlson points out:

At the time, this news was greeted with glowing acclaim over the sophistication of Obama’s digital campaign. Obama’s Election Team apparently had full access to Facebook’s data. Republicans did not.

Yes, that really does look like an "in kind" campaign contribution, unlike the Trump hush money. Would anyone like to guesstimate the value of Facebook's in kind contribution? Or when a prosecutor will be looking into this?