Commentary
The reality is that the intelligence community, the Obama administration, and the political establishment never expected Trump to win in 2016. And when he did win, the intelligence community was suddenly faced with a very real problem. How do they cover up their actions? Their answer was to set out to destroy Trump’s presidency. Or at least fatally hobble, even cripple, the new Trump administration.
As I wrote in the first part of this article, the timeline of the establishment’s actions in the first few months of 2017 tells the story of an establishment response to the very real threat that the young Trump administration presented to the long-standing, and corrupt, political structure of our nation.
By way of a quick recap, events were set in motion during a Jan. 5, 2017, meeting in President Barack Obama’s office that included FBI Director James Comey, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, Vice President Joe Biden, and Susan Rice. Comey’s first action was to tell Congress on Jan. 10 that he could neither confirm nor deny an investigation into Trump—despite privately telling Trump that he was not under investigation. But it was Jan. 12 that marked some of the most crucial events that would shape things to come.
On that day, Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz announced his initiation of a review of actions taken by the FBI in the leadup to the 2016 presidential election. This announcement was not publicized and only became public knowledge almost a year later. It now appears that his investigation was intended to tie up or prevent any real investigation of the actions taken by the DOJ and the intelligence community for years. Jan. 12 also marked the date of the first renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. And on this same day, Washington Post reporter David Ignatius reported on Trump campaign national security adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn’s calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Although Flynn would later be found to have engaged in nothing improper, Flynn would resign on Feb. 13.
By late January, following the FBI’s two-day interview of Steele’s primary source, Igor Danchenko, the FBI knew that the dossier’s major allegations were fabrications. But rather than shutting down its investigation and withdrawing its FISA warrant on Page—a warrant that had been obtained on the basis of the dossier—the FBI escalated its investigation. Put simply, by Jan. 25, 2017, the FBI knew that the dossier’s major allegations were fabrications. To make matters even worse, sometime in March 2017 the FBI provided Danchenko with Confidential Human Source status, which would successfully keep Danchenko under full protective cover—keeping him away from congressional and public view. We don’t know the date with certainty but I suspect Danchenko was given CHS status in early March.
On Feb. 27, 2017, despite incredible and mounting pressure from the Intelligence Community, Congress, and the media, House Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes publicly stated that he had seen absolutely no evidence of Russia-Trump collusion. Nunes also dismissed concerns that Flynn had violated the obscure, centuries-old, Logan Act as “ridiculous” and said that the House Intelligence Committee would not subpoena Trump’s tax returns. This stance, along with some future and crucial disclosures he would make, placed Nunes on a collision course with the weight of the establishment. So much so, that he would be forced to temporarily remove himself from the Russia investigation, though he continued his efforts behind the scenes.
March 1, 2017, marks another very important date, but one that most people are unaware of. It was on this date that The New York Times inadvertently reported on why the Obama administration suddenly issued a last-minute Jan. 3, 2017, rule change that allowed for intra-agency sharing of globally intercepted personal communications. In a piece titled “Obama Administration Rushed to Preserve Intelligence of Russian Hacking,” it was made clear that the Obama administration was sharing information broadly and at low levels of security classification.
According to the NY Times, “In the Obama administration’s last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election - and about possible contacts between associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump and Russians.”
This new order, originally scheduled for early 2016, allowed for the other intelligence agencies to ask the National Security Agency (NSA) for access to specific surveillance simply by claiming the intercepts contained relevant information that would be useful to a particular mission. Crucially, privacy protection of the underlying raw data was specifically bypassed by the order. On its face, the rule was supposedly put in place in order to reduce the risk that the NSA “will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency,” but in reality, it dramatically expanded government officials’ access to the private information of American citizens.
However, with the Jan. 3, 2017, approval of Section 2.3, and the associated expansion of sharing globally intercepted communications, other intelligence agencies would be able to search “directly through raw repositories of communications intercepted by the N.S.A. and then apply such rules for ‘minimizing’ privacy intrusions.” When the order was signed, many wondered at the timing and questioned why there was a pressing need to rush an order that allowed for significant expansion in the sharing of raw intelligence among agencies during the final days of the Obama administration.
Without going into too much detail, if the language had been implemented in early 2016 as originally scheduled, dissemination of any raw intelligence on or relating to the Trump campaign to officials within the Obama White House would likely have been made more difficult or prohibited. In other words, prior to the signing of Section 2.3, it appears that greater latitude existed for officials in the Obama administration to gain access to information. But once the order was signed into effect, Section 2.3 granted greater latitude to interagency sharing of that information.
On March 2, 2017, during an MSNBC interview with Obama’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Evelyn Farkas, she inadvertently detailed how intelligence on the Trump campaign team was being gathered and disseminated by the Obama administration and intelligence agencies. As she noted: “The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff dealing with Russians, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence.”
Another occurrence that took place on March 1 was reporting by The Washington Post that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had contact twice with the Russian ambassador during the campaign—once at a Heritage Foundation event and once at a meeting in Sessions’s Senate office. The article left out some very important context, but the damage was done. On March 2 Sessions recused himself from the Russia inquiry.
From here, events moved fairly swiftly. On March 3, radio host Mark Levin claimed on his radio show that the Obama administration had obtained FISA warrants on members of the Trump campaign. The following day, President Donald Trump sent his infamous tweet that he had been wiretapped by Obama. These two events appeared to trigger a very real panic at the FBI. Agent Peter Strzok, FBI lawyer Lisa Page and head of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division Bill Priestap all went into FBI headquarters on March 5, 2017, a Sunday. On that same day, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper stated that he knew of no FISA warrant approval for the Trump campaign. Clapper would repeat this claim in September of that year.
The next day, March 6, 2017, leaders of the FBI and DOJ held an emergency meeting that appeared to focus primarily on Trump’s tweet. They were obviously very concerned about how much Trump actually knew. Included in the meeting were several officials from the incoming Trump administration, including acting attorney general Dana Boente, to whom the Obama-era officials told a number of lies regarding the basis for their investigation and the FISA warrant on Page.
The FBI referred to Steele’s dossier as “Crown reporting” suggesting the dossier represented official UK government intelligence. Strzok lied to his DOJ superiors about what triggered Alexander Downer, the Australian ambassador in London to come forward to the FBI. The FBI also lied to the DOJ about the Page FISA warrant, which they claimed was “fruitful,” when in fact it had revealed nothing of note—something that the FBI was perfectly aware of by this time. Finally, the FBI tried to misrepresent and escalate the Alfa Bank allegations by claiming that Trump had sent a solicitation to Alfa Bank. Again, this was completely false. The FBI knew within days of Michael Sussmann, an attorney representing the Democratic National Committee, giving them the Alfa Bank data in 2016 that it was useless and probably fake.
Comey continued to maneuver quickly in order to firmly establish the Russia-Collusion narrative.
Somewhere around March 6, 2017, Comey finally notified the congressional Gang of Eight of the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation. Keep in mind that this investigation formally began on July 31, 2016, which is when the Gang of Eight should have been notified. Then, on March 15, 2017, Comey briefed Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) of the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Carter Page FISA application. Two days later, Comey provided them with a physical copy of the FISA, knowing full well the information would make its way to the media.
A few days later, on March 20, Comey testified to Congress. It was during this testimony that Comey confirmed before the House Intelligence Committee that the FBI was investigating whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia during the election. Under reluctant testimony, Comey admitted that he had notified some members of the Obama White House and Clapper in July 2016, but did not notify Congress—including the Gang of Eight—until sometime in March 2017. Tellingly, Comey noted the DOJ had “been aware of it all along.” But Comey refused to make a simple public statement noting that the FBI was not investigating Trump, despite having told Trump exactly that on three different occasions.
The next day, March 21, 2107, Devin Nunes met with a classified source. The New York Times described the meeting. On March 22, Nunes informed Trump that he believed Trump and his Staff were illegally surveilled and “unmasked,” a process of revealing the names of Americans who appear in gathered foreign intelligence. Nunes “Publicly announced that he’d seen evidence of Trump associates being “incidentally” surveilled by Obama intel officials; and their names being “unmasked” and illegally leaked.
Nunes also demanded that the CIA, FBI, and NSA disclose the nature of the unlawful surveillance he had uncovered. For his efforts, an ethics investigation was launched into Nunes. On April 6, Nunes was forced to recuse himself from the Russia collusion investigation. The next day, April 7, the second Carter Page renewal took place.
Watch the full episode of “Truth Over News” on Thursday, Sept. 29.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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