EDITORIAL

Prosecutors Zero In on
British-Obama-Clinton Networks
Behind Anti-Trump Coup

by Harley Schlanger

[Print version of this editorial]

May 17—Though President Donald Trump has declared that the “Collusion Delusion” is dead—killed off by the report released on March 22 by Special Counsel Robert Mueller that exonerates him of charges that he “colluded” with Russian President Putin to rig the 2016 election—rabid anti-Trumpers continue their desperate search for phantom leads, in multiple Congressional committees and in the Fake News rooms of major media across the U.S. and in western Europe.

Their flailing has become all the more hysterical in the last weeks, as a veritable tsunami of new leads is emerging. Unfortunately for the anti-Trampers, these leads are providing new evidence of the criminal actions of those who launched the Russiagate coup attempt, and in particular, and evidence of the significance of the role of British intelligence operative, Christopher Steele. Leading the investigation is U.S. Attorney General William Barr, who this week appointed a new prosecutor to investigate the origins of the anti-Trump, anti-Putin regime-change coup, which was designed to prevent Trump’s election, then to contain him, or remove him from office, after he won the 2016 election.

The central feature of the new investigations is the homing in on the role of the “dodgy dossier” fabricated by former British spy Christopher Steele, which was used by the FBI to obtain surveillance warrants issued by the super-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court. Although Steele, who had been a top Russia hand in MI6, has been doing his best to disappear, his dossier, and its use in shaping the anti-Trump narrative, has now been forced into the open. From the beginning, investigators from the LaRouche movement have pointed to the Steele dossier and its backers from the highest levels of British intelligence, including both MI6 and GCHQ, as key to grasp who was behind the attacks on Donald Trump, and why.

Barr Takes the Point

In a Senate hearing on April 10, Attorney General Barr described the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign—which was officially launched in July 2016, but had origins as early as 2015—as “spying on a political campaign.” When outraged Democrats on the committee demanded that he clarify the statement, he repeated, “I think spying did occur.” Current FBI Director Christopher Wray, in full damage-control mode, tried to push back. To say there was spying, he said, that’s “a loaded word. . . . That’s not the term I would use.”

But several reports released since have shown that is exactly what the FBI and its allies were doing. The two such reports most damaging for the nexus of British operatives and their U.S. allies in the Obama intelligence leadership and the Clinton campaign are a New York Times report and an article by John Solomon in The Hill.

On May 2, the Times reported that the FBI had deployed an “informant” to a meeting in London in September 2016 with Trump campaign official George Papadopoulos. The informant, a “Ms. Azure Turk” flirted with Papadopoulos, while pumping him for information on what he knew about ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. She was working with Stefan Halper, who has been identified as a shared asset of British intelligence and the CIA. Halper’s role in targeting Papadopoulos was coordinated by the FBI. While the New York Times may have run the story to pre-empt a fuller investigation—as the paper has been a leader from the beginning in the witch hunt against the President—the story is in conformity with the bigger picture emerging, which is what prompted Barr’s charge that “spying” is a key feature of Russiagate.

On May 9, The Hill published John Solomon’s report under the title, “FBI’s Steele Story Falls Apart.” Solomon reports on a memo written by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec detailing a meeting she had with Steele on Oct. 11, 2016. In her memo, she wrote that Steele’s account was unreliable, and had a political purpose, to defeat then candidate Donald Trump, and that Steele was desperate to get it out before the election. She sent her memo directly to an FBI official, Stephen Laycock, who forwarded it immediately to the team headed by Peter Strzok that was allegedly examining whether Trump was acting in “collusion” with Russian subversion of the U.S. election.

What Solomon reveals is that—in spite of Kavalec’s memo confirming similar concerns about Steele’s lack of veracity and his political agenda, voiced by senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr in August 2016—the FBI used the Steele dossier as the lead document in its application to the FISA Court for a warrant to surveil minor Trump operative Carter Page. That warrant was then used as an opening for broader surveillance of the Trump campaign. In their filing, ten days after Kavalec’s meeting with Steele and eight days after the delivery of her memo, the FBI nevertheless vouched for Steele as credible and reliable, and his report as verifiable. The FBI did not mention that it had been paid for by the campaign of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Solomon’s report on the Kavalec memo did not go unnoticed by President Trump, who has begun targeting the British role in the attacks against him. On May 8, he tweeted, “The British Spy, Christopher Steele, tries so hard to get this (the Fake Dossier) out before Election Day. Why?”

Like Classic FBI Sting Operations

These two major revelations are backed up by commentary on the use of “informants” by the FBI in targeting Trump and his campaign, from such sources as former CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson and former U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., Joseph E. diGenova.

In addition to identifying Halper, another exposed asset shared by the Brits and U.S. intelligence was Joseph Mifsud, who planted the story with Papadopoulos of “Russian hacking” of the emails of the Clinton campaign, John Podesta, and the Democratic National Committee. These shared assets acted in the manner of classic FBI sting and entrapment operations.

On May 13, Attorney General Barr appointed a U.S. Attorney from Connecticut, John Durham, to investigate who was behind the launching of Russiagate. Durham, who will have subpoena power and can bring witnesses before a grand jury, has already been investigating leaks to the media by former FBI General Counsel James Baker. His investigation, with full support from Barr, means there are now three official investigations underway into the actions of the coup plotters.

A report is expected soon from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who is investigating charges of FBI abuse of the FISA process, as well as its handling of the probe into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. Horowitz previously was responsible for the release of the thousands of text messages between Peter Strzok, the leading FBI official on both the Clinton email case and the initial Russiagate investigation, and FBI attorney Lisa Page. The texts demonstrated the high degree of hostility among leading FBI officials toward Trump, as the two proposed using the FBI’s Russiagate investigation as an “insurance policy,” to get rid of Trump if he were elected.

The third investigation is that of a U.S. Attorney from Utah, John Huber, who is looking into FISA Court abuses in the applications for warrants to conduct surveillance of Trump campaign operatives.

In addition, there is a Senate investigation underway, under the direction of Sen. Lindsey Graham, with full backing from Senators Ron Johnson and Charles Grassley. While Graham said they will defer to Durham’s investigation for the moment, he added that they are prepared to proceed with their own independent probe.

The Spies Are in Trouble

Reactions from some of the perpetrators behind Russiagate show they know they are in deep trouble. John Brennan, who was the director of the CIA from 2013 to 2017, lied in an interview about the use of the Steele dossier in the FISA filing, saying “it went through a rigorous due process within the Justice Department and the FBI.” The Kavalec memo proves that Brennan has again been caught in a blatant lie. When the former Director of the FBI, James Comey, tried to defend himself from charges that he violated the law and FBI/DOJ protocol, saying that Brennan played the major role in pushing the Steele dossier for the FISA Court application, the former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, joined his co-plotter Brennan in pointing their fingers at Comey, saying he alone pushed it.

Comey was the subject of an op-ed by Kevin Brock, the former Assistant Director of Intelligence for the FBI, who wrote in The Hill on May 7 that, with the investigations underway, “Comey’s mishandling of the FBI and legal processes likely will be fully exposed.”

On May 10, attorneys for Roger Stone filed now-critical motions which challenge the fake story at the heart of Russiagate, that the Russians hacked the DNC and gave the documents to WikiLeaks. The filing includes an affidavit from former NSA Technical Adviser William Binney, who says he’s prepared to testify on his forensic evaluations which show that there was no external hack.

This news service has reported from the outset that the cause of the attacks on Trump and Putin was the fear gripping British imperial networks that the two would move to overturn their geopolitical design of maintaining a confrontational relationship between the United States and Russia. The most recent revelations of the anti-Trump, anti-Putin campaign run by the British-Obama “spy” ring confirm that defense of this geopolitical design—which has produced endless wars, regime-change coups, huge military/defense budgets, and deadly austerity against the real economy of the vast majority of the people—is the actual origin of Russiagate.