Rogue spooks, p.9
Rogue Spooks, page 9
That’s a lot of money! Was his PAC going to pay it? We don’t know if Brock—or his PAC—ever paid anyone. But his offer raises a serious question: Would either of the offered payments violate campaign finance laws?
Here’s another question: Did he or his organizations have anything to do with funding the Steele project? We don’t know who put up the money. Disclosure is not required so we only know that it was “donors” or “supporters” of Hillary Clinton.
Brock is currently recovering from a heart attack and is temporarily sidelined from politics.
As for the lurid sexual claims, the deplorable accusations simply cannot be proven. But reward or not, the tape never surfaced, and Source D (whom the dossier also identifies as Source E) disavowed all negative statements about Trump that were attributed to him. In addition, Trump indicated his full awareness of the likelihood that the Russians might try to lure him and his associates into a compromising sexual situation that could be filmed or taped for use as future blackmail,46 a practice called “honeypot.”47
No one has ever called Trump stupid.
The Dossier Actually Backs Off Its Own Claims About Carter Page
The dossier assigns a secondary role to an American investment banker, Carter Page, saying that he met with senior Russian officials as an emissary of the Trump campaign.
Page, unlike Cohen, really did go to Russia, but he’d been doing that—on private business—for twenty-six years. The dossier claims that he “discussed quid-pro-quo deals relating to sanctions, business opportunities and Russia’s interference in the election.”48
Page did visit Russia in July 2016, when he delivered a commencement speech at the New Economic School in Moscow that was critical of U.S. policy. At the time, Trump advisor Hope Hicks issued a statement clarifying that Page was in Moscow “in a private capacity and was not representing the campaign.”49 CNN reports that the “trip drew the attention of the FBI and raised concerns about Page’s contacts with suspected Russian operatives.”50 The FBI used his trip to Russia as the basis for seeking—and getting—a warrant from the FISA court for surveillance of Page.51
We don’t know what Page talked about in Russia. For what it’s worth, dossier report 2016/134, dated October 18, 2016, says that “Page . . . confirmed [at a meeting with a close associate of Putin] if Trump elected president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted.”52
Then, the dossier retreats, saying that Page “had not stated . . . explicitly [that Trump would lift sanctions but] he had clearly implied that in terms of his comments on Trump’s intention to lift Russian sanctions if elected president, he was speaking with the Republican candidate’s authority.”53
The problem with the dossier’s account of Page’s role is not one of mistaken identity this time. They had the right Carter Page. But there is no evidence of any close relationship between Page and President Trump.
They have never even met, even though Page twice asked for an appointment. Page was a volunteer member of a large committee of foreign affairs specialists who were said to be advising Trump. He only saw Trump at rallies, along with thousands of other people.
And, in December 2016, Trump’s lawyer Donald McGahn ordered Page to stop holding himself out as an “advisor” to Trump:
“You were merely one of the many people named to a foreign policy advisory committee in March of 2016—a committee that met one time,” he lectured Page. “You never met Mr. Trump, nor did you ever ‘advise’ Mr. Trump about anything. You are thus not an ‘advisor’ to Mr. Trump in any sense of the word.”54
Sounds like the rogue “advisor” met the rogue spooks.
The dossier’s last entry about Page is in the December 13, 2016, report that Steele has already admitted was unverified and needed further investigation, so it can probably be ignored. Once again, the dossier summons the ghost of Michael Cohen to establish Page’s role in the supposed Trump-Kremlin liaison:
We reported earlier that the involvement of political operative Paul MANAFORT and Carter PAGE in the secret Trump-Kremlin liaison had been exposed in the media in the runup to Prague and that damage limitation of these also was discussed by COHEN with this Kremlin representative.55
Since we know Prague never happened, then those discussions about “damage limitation” with the “Kremlin representative” never happened, either.56
As for Manafort—his work as a consultant in Ukraine from 2004 to 2014 to former president Viktor Yanukovych was years before he joined the Trump campaign, where he worked from March until August 2016. Whatever his work entailed in Ukraine, it had nothing to do with Donald Trump. Manafort and Trump were casual acquaintances and were never friends, confidants, or business partners.
The dossier claims that Manafort was Trump’s personal representative in the conspiracy with the Kremlin before he left the Trump campaign and that Michael Cohen took his place, but it describes nothing at all about what Manafort did in that supposed role.
We know that everything it says about Michael Cohen isn’t true. The only other claims about Manafort relate to well-published details associated with his work in Ukraine. No new information, except that his name comes up when Steele reports on a confidential meeting between Putin and Yanukovych near Volgograd on August 15, 2016.
During the “secret” meeting, Yanukovych allegedly confided in Putin that he had authorized “substantial kick-back payments to MANAFORT,” but assured Putin there was “no documentary trail left behind that could provide clear evidence.”57
Let’s look carefully at this one. At that point, Yanukovych was a fugitive. He was forced to flee the Ukraine on February 22, 2014, after the parliament voted unanimously to remove him from office, citing human rights abuses and other crimes. Since then, he has been in exile.58
Government officials eventually found logs that precisely detail his involvement with over $2 billion in bribes—a stunning $1.4 million for each day he was in office.59 Many bribes were to government officials and many went to election commissioners to make sure that he would remain in office. Prosecutors are still investigating this.
In November 2016, Yanukovych was indicted for high treason, and his trial on the matter began in early May 2016. He refused to return to Ukraine and is being tried in absentia.60
But all he talked about with Putin was a supposed bribe he paid to Manafort. That’s odd, isn’t it?
And who else sat in on—and reported—this secret meeting in which Yanukovych incriminated himself while he was under investigation for massive corruption? The source is described as a “well-placed Russian figure.”61 What does that mean? If no one else was there, did Putin report this to someone himself? And whoever he might have trusted then passed it on to the British spies? That’s doubtful, too. And, if someone else were there, would Yanukovych really describe his criminal activity in front of other people? That’s doubtful, too.
And if Putin did repeat his conversation with the Ukrainian to an associate, did that person really tell the rogue spooks about it? And is this person still alive? That’s really far-fetched.
The Dossier’s Iffy Sources
Let’s cut to the chase. The sources in the dossier were about as reliable as its intel—which is to say they were unreliable. And we don’t know if Steele corroborated anything that was given to him, regardless of how outlandish it was.
In fact, had he sought corroboration about a Trump-Kremlin collusion, he would not have found any, because the intel itself about that was not true—it was totally false. No amount of examination or review could change that.
Here’s the cast of characters who supposedly provided the source material to Steele:
Source A, a senior foreign ministry figure
Source B, a top-level former intelligence agent
Source C, a senior Russian financial officer still active in the Kremlin
Source D, a close associate of Trump’s who had organized Trump’s recent trips to Moscow
Source E, hotel employee
Source F, woman, an ethnic employee of the hotel
Source G, Kremlin official
an ethnic Russian associate of Donald Trump
two “well-placed and established sources”
another Kremlin insider
Even when we try to look through their cloak-and-dagger descriptions to imagine the real people behind them, none of these vaguely described characters seem terribly authentic or threatening.
There is no context to them, no credible indication of past experience, no analyses of their possible motives or truthfulness. In fact, we now know that many of them simply don’t exist, and their supposed juicy intelligence tidbits were easily proven to be nothing but fake news.
What we also know now is that Steele has no relationship with them. He could not simply call them and discuss the information they offered. They were faceless, their information coming to him in unsolicited reports.
But here’s the gnawing question: Why would anyone close to Putin ever speak to Steele or any of his paid sources? (If there actually were any, which is a BIG “if.”)
Are we to believe that there are actually people who are so intimate with Putin that they know his important thoughts and beliefs who would dare to share them with a British ex-spy or his surrogate? It’s pretty unlikely. And, if they were tempted, they would surely know that the consequences, if they were caught, would be severe and could even lead to death. So the likelihood of a Putin confidant providing this kind of information is not very high.
We have already debunked many of these sources connected to the fake Cohen meeting in Prague that underlies so much of the story about Donald Trump. So we know that the sources are dubious, at best.
So where did the unsolicited “raw intel” come from? He didn’t disclose that, so we don’t know. Steele merely offered that he received the unsolicited intel and passed it on.
Some intelligence professionals say they were concerned about the sources for the dossier even before Steele admitted that many of the claims were unverified. John Sipher, a CIA agent for thirty-four years, attributed “the uproar over Steele’s dossier to the fact that ‘no one truly knows his sources.’ ”62
That’s certainly true.
Steele seems to have acted like a post office drop. “Unsolicited” raw intelligence just landed in his lap, thrown in over the transom.
Even though he said it needed further investigation, did he do anything at all to probe the allegations? Did he do any independent investigation? What exactly was Steele paid for?
We know, for example, that the claims about the alleged hacker Gubarev were never investigated. Gubarev was never contacted by anyone about the hacker claim.63
Who was it that sent Steele the unsolicited intelligence?
What made the credibility of his distant sources even more problematic is that, in many cases, he may have had to pay them for the information they offered. That was suggested in Howard Blum’s article in Vanity Fair about the dossier and Steele. But even that might not be true.64
Former acting CIA director Michael Morell, who publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton, criticized Steele’s use of sources “who were paid intermediaries who in turn paid sources for the information he used in the report. . . . And that kind of worries me a little bit because if you’re paying somebody, particularly former FSB officers, they are going to tell you truth and innuendo and rumor, and they’re going to call you up and say, ‘Hey, let’s have another meeting, I have more information for you,’ because they want to get paid some more.”65
In spook worlds, payment always raises questions about how honest informants are and how trustworthy their information is.
John le Carré, the well-known British author of spy thrillers, including The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, spent twenty years as a spy for MI6. Not long ago, he warned of the dangers of relying on paid sources.
There’s huge money in the secret world now, too—money for fabricators who put together brilliant pieces of intelligence. We saw that with the forged documents suggesting Saddam Hussein tried to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger. Somebody was paid a fortune for that nonsense. Huge money is now being paid out to informants, a lot of it for hokum.66
Morell also raised concerns about the dossier, noting that the fact that the information came from second- and thirdhand parties and was not directly conveyed to Steele raised “red flags.”67
“Unless you know the sources,” Morell said, “and unless you know how a particular source acquired a particular piece of information, you can’t judge the information—you just can’t.”68
Morell told NBC categorically that “he had seen no evidence that Trump associates cooperated with Russians.” On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians, he said, “there is smoke, but there is no fire, at all.”
Those were strong words from a well-known Clinton ally who might have been considered for CIA director had Hillary Clinton won.
Morell was not alone in his skepticism about Steele’s sources. Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, questioned how a small private company like Steele’s Orbis Business Intelligence, with limited resources, could possibly manage a large number of highly connected sources and consistently get unique information that eluded government intelligence sources with endless resources and billions in budgets:
A private western company is able to run a state level intelligence operation in Russia for years, continually interviewing senior security sources and people personally close to Putin, without being caught by the Russian security services. . . . They can continually pump Putin’s friends for information and get it, . . . which the CIA/NSA/GCHQ/MI6 did not have, despite their specific tasking and enormous technical, staff and financial resources amounting between them to over 150,000 staff and the availability of hundreds of billions of dollars to do nothing but this.69
We, too, wonder how they were able to pull this off.
The Independent (UK) reported on a “business intelligence consultant” (same title as Steele) with experience similar to Steele’s in Russian matters who questioned the genuineness of the Steele dossier: “with its extremely highly placed sources and lurid details, [the dossier] was simply ‘too good to be true.’ . . . It would have meant that whoever was writing the report was far better than any British or CIA agent since the Russian revolution.”70
Then there is the fact that Steele, who lived in Russia for three years but left in 1992, did not travel to Russia to investigate Trump’s activities. The Russians knew of his history and he had spoken out about their brutal poisoning of the oligarch Litvinenko. Without the diplomatic cover that he had when working in the British Embassy in Moscow, he would not have “diplomatic immunity” if he were arrested. So, he could not have personally interviewed the main sources for the dossier. It had to be second- and thirdhand. He could not look those giving him information in the eye, question them, and evaluate their honesty and motives, as spies are trained to do.
Other criticisms of the dossier were more blunt. Respected investigative reporter Bob Woodward of Watergate fame—who has written extensively about the CIA—described Steele’s dossier as, simply, “garbage.”71
And another twenty-year veteran of MI6, former spy Frederick Forsyth, who is also a famous author of spy thrillers, including The Day of the Jackal, called the dossier “dubious.” Speaking to the BBC, Forsyth said he found “no evidence of workable evidence, no tapes, no intercepts . . . and without that, there is nothing but allegations.”72
Another government official, who was familiar with his work, noted that Steele was not always impervious to disinformation: “Sometimes he would get spun by somebody. [But] it was always 80% there.”73
But the most devastating dismissal of Steele’s dossier and sources came from an odd source, General James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence. Remember, he stated, “some of the sources that Mr. Steele drew on, the second- and third-order assets, we could not validate or corroborate.”74
Those ex-spies are certainly coming in from the cold.
Contradictions Within the Dossier
In addition to the outright lies in the dossier, the document actually contradicts its own talking points in many cases. For example, while claiming, on the one hand, that the Russians have been cultivating Trump for many years, the memos also clearly describe Trump’s lack of interest in any of the bribes that were offered.
Again, here’s what the dossier says:
Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance.75
But see its contradictory words:
So far Trump has declined various sweetener real estate business deals offered him in Russia in order to further the Kremlin’s cultivation of him.76
And more:
The Kremlin’s cultivation operation on Trump had also comprised offering him various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia, especially in relation to the ongoing 2018 World Cup Soccer tournament. However, so far, for reasons unknown, TRUMP had not taken up any of these.77
So apparently the cultivation was a one-way street, with Donald Trump nowhere on the block.
Misspellings in the Dossier
There were some clues that Steele may not have written all of the reports himself. There are glaring misspellings of the names of supposedly key actors in his narrative. As a Cambridge graduate, Steele would be expected to have a somewhat more polished writing style and at least know how to spell.
