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May 11, 2018

Just Who Is Our Enemy Here?

Filed under: Probable Cause — Tags: , , , — Bill @ 12:05 pm

COSI-TopSecret-If you haven’t yet read Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel’s column posted on May 10, 2018, please take the time to read it.  It was entitled About That FBI ‘Source’.

Strassel asserts that Rosenstein and the US Department of Justice are stonewalling the House Intelligence Committee’s most recent subpoena because, “… the FBI secretly had a person on the payroll who used his or her non-FBI credentials to interact in some capacity with the Trump campaign.”

Strassel’s column implies that the FBI inserted  a highly-placed human intelligence source or recruited one already inside the Trump campaign before the 2016 election.  She also says, “… we know Mr. Nunes’s request deals with a ‘top secret intelligence source’ of the FBI and CIA, who is a U.S. citizen and who was involved in the Russia collusion probe.” [emphasis mine]  In other words, she suggests the FBI was running an intelligence collection operation inside the Trump campaign.

Assuming Strassel and her competitors at the Washington Post have the straight scoop, it raises a few  questions.

  • Was the Trump Campaign the only presidential campaign targeted or were other presidential candidate campaigns targeted as well?  If so, which ones?
  • Who made the final decision to allow the FBI to run a collection operation inside the Trump campaign?  Who had the authority to okay ‘a top secret intelligence source of the FBI and CIA’ to collect information about or exert influence on a candidate or nominee for President of the United States?
  • Was the ‘top secret intelligence source’ a human being or technical device(s) or combination of both?
  • Who or what was the actual target of the collection operation?  If it was only for collection, what were the essential elements of information sought?
  • Was the ‘top secret intelligence source’ of the FBI and CIA an information collector or was s/he an agent of influence (or both)?
  • Who was the human source’s handler/case officer?  To whom did the ‘top secret intelligence source’ report?
  • When?
    • When was this operation first proposed and by whom?
    • When was the operation finally approved?
    • When did the operation launch?
    • When will Congress subpoena the Case Officer’s contact reports and source?
    • If the operation began and continued after Trump had officially become the Republican nominee and was therefore receiving national security briefings, when was the Secret Service notified of this operation as it should have been?
    • When did this operation end (assuming it has!)?
    • When was candidate/nominee/President Trump first notified of this operation and by whom?
  • Was the collection operation limited to personal observations and recollections of the ‘top secret intelligence source’ or was the ‘top secret intelligence source’ allowed or directed to spot, assess, and recruit other human sources within the Trump campaign?

The actions of Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein to resist the HPSCI’s subpoenas only adds to the plausibility of the Washington Post’s and Wall Street Journal’s articles.  President Trump can if he chooses declassify everything DoJ and the CIA have on this matter.  Whether he should or not must be based on legitimate national security considerations, not political expedience or advantage.

2 Comments

  1. Given that literally everyone in the swamp had no doubt that HRC would be elected, I am sure that they all felt they were not touchable. Hopefully those ferreting out this information have adopted the Andrew Jackson strategy of waiting until they see the whites of their eyes before they pull the trigger. I recall Nunes saying on Fox that he had seen far more troublesome information. I have to admire his commitment to his obligation of maintaining the information’s confidentiality. Perhaps he is waiting for the long awaited, overdue, Inspector General’s report? However, on the other hand, there comes a time that a person needs to say damn the torpedoes, open the drain, and let the swamp drain.

    Comment by Tributary — May 12, 2018 @ 11:30 am

  2. Tributary,

    Because of the certainty of an HRC landslide victory on November 8, 2016, there were a lot of actions being taken that would not have been taken without that absolute certainty. Some of them might even have been legal.

    I really want to know when a lot of the FBI/CIA involvement in the 2016 election began, what that involvement was, and who approved what and when.

    It sounds to me as if the ‘top secret intelligence source’ of the FBI and CIA was first a CIA source whom it handed off to the FBI when the source, supposedly a US citizen, returned to the US. If the source was more than just a source for the CIA overseas, if the source was regularly collecting on behalf of the CIA, then identifying the source could end up getting his/her in-country associates disappeared and rapidly decomposed.

    As my third bullet point suggests, I’m still not completely convinced the ‘top secret intelligence source’ was exclusively human.

    So evidently the FB-One and the Department of Lynch Mob Justice can’t find a single prosecutable violation among the haystack composed of prosecutable violations in the Clinton campaign, but they’re ready, willing, and eager to have a human (or technical) source inside the Trump campaign. I wonder how many false affidavits they had to swear in front of federal judges to make that happen.

    I hope the IG’s report answers more questions than it creates. I won’t hold my breath.

    Comment by Bill — May 12, 2018 @ 1:07 pm

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