Fire up the subpoenas
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https://public.substack.com/p/cia-had-foreign-allies-spy-on-trump
Last year, John Durham, a special prosecutor for the Department of Justice (DOJ), concluded that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) should never have opened its investigation of alleged collusion by then-presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and Russia in late July of 2016.
Now, multiple credible sources tell Public and Racket that the United States Intelligence Community (IC), including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), illegally mobilized foreign intelligence agencies to target Trump advisors long before the summer of 2016.
The new information fills many gaps in our understanding of the Russia collusion hoax and is supported by testimony already in the public record.
Until now, the official story has been that the FBI’s investigation began after Australian intelligence officials told US officials that a Trump aide had boasted to an Australian diplomat that Russia had damning material about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
In truth, the US IC asked the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance to surveil Trump’s associates and share the intelligence they acquired with US agencies, say sources close to a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HSPCI) investigation. The Five Eyes nations are the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
After Public and Racket had been told that President Barack Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan, had identified 26 Trump associates for the Five Eyes to target, a source confirmed that the IC had “identified [them] as people to ‘bump,’ or make contact with or manipulate. They were targets of our own IC and law enforcement — targets for collection and misinformation.”
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Taibbi and Shellenberger are going to livestream their discoveries tonight.
https://www.racket.news/p/livestream-tonight-630-pm-et-explaining
Without giving away the whole story, this first installment relies on a never-released classified report to describe a broad political espionage campaign that reportedly involved at least 26 Trump aides and associates. I strongly urge anyone interested in the topic to check out the article, titled “CIA Had Foreign Allies Spy On Trump Team, Triggering Russia Collusion Hoax, Sources Say” on Public.
However, this is a very complicated story with a lot of moving parts, and as material comes out today and tomorrow I wanted to create a livestream so that I could walk readers through what we actually have in this story.
I'm going to be otherwise occupied, but it might be worth taking a look.
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CNN acknowledged that the FBI was looking for a "binder" in the Mar-a-Lago search for classified documents. And...no one can find it.
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/politics/missing-russia-intelligence-trump-dg/
A binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went missing at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, raising alarms among intelligence officials that some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies could be exposed, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
Its disappearance, which has not been previously reported, was so concerning that intelligence officials briefed Senate Intelligence Committee leaders last year about the missing materials and the government’s efforts to retrieve them, the sources said.
But the story doesn't say who was interfering.
CNN and its intelligence sources meant “exposure” in a bad way. Sources have told Public and Racket, however, that the secrets officials worry might be “exposed” are ones that would implicate them in widespread abuses of intelligence authority dating back to the 2015-2016 election season.
“I would call [the binder] Trump’s insurance policy,” said someone knowledgeable about the case. “He was very concerned about having it and taking it with him because it was the road map” of Russiagate.
Transgressions range from Justice Department surveillance of domestic political targets without probable cause to the improper unmasking of a pre-election conversation between a Trump official and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to WMD-style manipulation of intelligence for public reports on alleged Russian “influence activities.”
The CNN report claimed intelligence officials were concerned about the disclosure of “sources and methods that informed the U.S. government’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election.”
They should be concerned. The story of how a team “hand-picked” by CIA Director John Brennan relied on “cooked intelligence” to craft that January 6th, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment is the subject of tomorrow’s story, the last in this three-part series.
Corruption, not tradecraft, is what officials are desperate to keep secret.
The ”missing binder” story has several variants. Sources offer differing answers on the question of whether anything of consequence is missing. They give mixed accounts of Trump’s frantic last efforts to declassify Russia-related material.
But nearly everyone Public and Racket spoke to agreed that the tale obscured a broader and more important story.
Dating back to the release of the so-called “Nunes memo” in 2018 exposing the corruption of the FISA application process, senior intelligence officials, including Trump’s CIA Director, Gina Haspel, have repeatedly blocked attempts to declassify information about the Trump-Russia investigation.
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Alexander Smirnov, an informant with the FBI since 2010, allegedly made false claims to the bureau in 2020 about the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paying the president and his son Hunter Biden $5 million each. The claim has been central to House Republicans’ corruption allegations against Joe Biden.
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And what does that have to do with this thread?
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Former FBI source Alexander Smirnov has struck a plea agreement with the office of special counsel David Weiss, agreeing to plead guilty on several counts.
The document notes that Smirnov is agreeing to plead guilty to "Count Two of the indictment in United States v. Alexander Smirnov … which charges defendant with causing the creation of a false and fictitious record in a federal investigation … " and agreeing to plead guilty to charges of tax evasion.
Smirnov is accused of providing false information to the FBI.
He signed off on a statement of facts in support of the plea agreement, which echoes allegations that had been made against him in an indictment.
Smirnov allegedly "provided false derogatory information to the FBI about Public Official 1, an elected official in the Obama-Biden Administration who left office in January 2017, and Businessperson 1, the son of Public Official 1, in 2020, after Public Official 1 became a candidate for President of the United States of America."
The allegation apparently refers to President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, though the two are not specifically identified by name.
