Don's Tuesday Column

      THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   5/14/2019

                          Plots, machinations may be treasonous

Blockbuster revelations came last week from reporter John Solomon, “FBI’s Steele story falls apart: False intel and media contacts were flagged before FISA.” Legal authority Andrew C. McCarthy wrote: “The FBI’s Trump-Russia Investigation Was Formally Opened on False Pretenses.” “The State Department and an Australian diplomat grossly exaggerated Papadopoulos’s claims—which were probably false anyway,” alludes to the use of “human assets” (“spies” in common parlance) to set up a Trump associate as a conduit for dirt on Hillary Clinton from Russia.

News cycles and headlines dwell on, slow down or speed up depending on their relative importance, mostly decided by editors and media bigwigs in the New York/Washington DC media corridor. They keep one eye on the ratings, weather-related disasters and major crime events, but pursue repetitive follow-up coverage of politically charged controversy.

Conversely, stories deemed inconvenient to favored entities disappear. “Think of reporters and editors as Democrat operatives with bylines,” “Covering the important stories, with a pillow, until they die” and “Protecting people from news that reflects badly on Democrats.”

The Solomon story is simply the latest investigative piece that—if people had been paying attention to the thin gruel supporting “Trump/Russia collusion”—made the “no collusion/no obstruction” findings of Mueller, Barr and Rosenstein obvious. The 2-year saga has transitioned from “mountain” to “molehill,” inducing glazed eyes and shrugged shoulders for most people.

The real major scandal has now come to the fore with AG Barr’s casual admission that “spying did occur” and his allusion to the involvement of multiple agencies. It could see numerous formerly powerful DOJ, FBI, CIA and even news people subject to fines or jail time. Time and truth will tell.

Barr rightly pronounced that the relevant issue was whether there were legitimate reasons to launch the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court warrant in October 2016 (and renewals) against Carter Page. That inevitably focuses on the so-called “Steele Dossier,” commissioned by Hillary Clinton’s people through the DNC; Democrat and Obama campaign money paid for Steele to assemble what became obviously unverified—even unverifiable—anecdotes from Russian sources.

Those “salacious and unverified” stories (as James Comey told Trump in January, 2017) were or were not the primary, even the sole, evidence presented to the FISA judge to secure a surveillance warrant. First, the FBI agent(s) affirm, with signatures, that such evidence is reliable, verified and truthful—a given, necessary predicate for “spying” on and invading the privacy of an American citizen. This is a very big deal, as Barr indicated.

What fired FBI head James Comey is now proclaiming—in softball, friendly interviews and a townhall forum—is that there is no such thing as “spying,” rather the official “investigative techniques and procedures” used to “surveil,” AKA spy, on a suspect. I provided the brief Webster’s definition, “To observe secretly,” which should end the dispute, current FBI head Christopher Wray’s deflection aside. Comey was not asked how suspect Page was surveilled in Britain, when the FBI only works in the USA.

Solomon writes: “The FBI’s sworn story to a federal court about its asset, Christopher Steele, is fraying faster than a $5 souvenir T-shirt bought at a tourist trap. Newly unearthed memos show a high-ranking government official, who met with Steele in October 2016, determined some of the Donald Trump dirt that Steele was simultaneously digging up for the FBI and for Hillary Clinton’s campaign was inaccurate, and likely leaked to the media.

“The concerns were flagged in a typed memo and in handwritten notes taken by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec on Oct. 11, 2016. Her observations were recorded exactly 10 days before the FBI used Steele and his infamous dossier to justify securing a FISA warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and the campaign’s contacts with Russia in search of a now debunked collusion theory.”

Kavalec’s notes contained quite the bombshell: Steele told her that the Russians had constructed a “technical/human operation run out of Moscow targeting the election” that recruited emigres in the USA to “do hacking and recruiting…Payments to those recruited are made out of the Russian Consulate in Miami.” A bracketed comment: “It is important to note that there is no Russian consulate in Miami.”

Steele was a fraud that admitted to Kavalec that his research was “political and facing an Election Day deadline.” An election hit job that morphed into a predicate for a coup d’état. Subpoenas, warrants and Mueller took the place of tanks and troops.

Since her memos were placed in the hands of the FBI days before the first FISA warrant, it proves that there was foreknowledge, or at least prior suspicions, brought to the attention of whoever signed off on the “reliability” of Steele, who was repeatedly paid, but fired due to his media contacts.

From McCarthy’s piece (look up by title): “Chicanery was the force behind the formal opening of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. There was a false premise, namely: The Trump campaign must have known that Russia possessed emails related to Hillary Clinton. From there, through either intentional deception or incompetence, the foreign ministries of Australia and the United States erected a fraudulent story tying the Trump campaign’s purported knowledge to the publication of hacked DNC emails.”

Stipulate that (nearly) all’s fair in love, war and politics. Campaign skullduggery, mud-throwing and dirt-digging before an election can be seen as equal opportunity tactics; falsehoods can be uncovered (hopefully) in time to be exposed; crimes, and vote fraud can be prosecuted, perhaps corrected post-election.

However, what happened in the now-failed attempt to reverse the legitimate election of President Trump through FBI and CIA plots and machinations, fits with other shameless attempts to deprive Trump of his office. Unfettered investigations alone will determine if such attempts amounted to treason, but I suspect that the spirit, if not the letter, of the law will prove it did.