Hi It's Stupid: The FBI

Via.

Hi, it's Stupid to say the FBI didn't take the Trump-Russia story seriously until Trump fired the FBI director and they finally realized there was enough smoke that they might want to think about looking for the fire.

Nevertheless it's the only takeaway I'm getting from Senator Lindsey Graham (chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee since they took down old Richard Burr with an insider trading allegation) and his release of a couple of peculiar documents from February 2017. I thought he and the comrades wanted us to believe Peter Strzok and Lisa Page mounted a conspiracy to "spy on Trump" and "take him down" back in July 2016 or even earlier, but these releases make it pretty clear that wasn't the case. 

One document is what I think must be the first New York Times story on the investigation (by Schmidt, Mazzetti, and Apuzzo, "Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence"), from 14 February 2017, with contemporary annotations said to be by Strzok himself outright denying the story.

WASHINGTON — Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.

American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.

No, says Strzok, this isn't true at all:

Although we know now, at least, that Kislyak's interactions with Flynn and Sessions (and the redacted person, presumably Jared Kushner, not to mention Carter Page and J.D. Gordon) were indeed repeated, and that Manafort's (and Rick Gates's) "associate", Konstantin Kilimnik, is definitely assessed at least now by the FBI to be associated with Russian intelligence himself, and certainly passed information from Manafort and Gates to where Russian intelligence would get it. And whatever you think of Papadopoulos's main contact, the Maltese Professor Mifsud, George followed up with a Russian foreign affairs ministry officer, Ivan Timofeev.

Strzok also seems to be taking a very limited view of what connection to Russian intelligence might mean, ignoring the overlap between Putin associates, intelligence, and criminality in which intelligence functions are held by Russian, Azaerbaijani, Ukriainian, and other post-Soviet oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska, Araz Agalarov, and Igor Sechin, the former deputy prime minister and current Gazprom executive believed by the FBI to have met in Moscow with Carter Page before they saw it referenced in the Steele dossier. And then there are all the weird feelers received by Donald Jr. (from Aleksandr Torshin), Roger Stone and Michael Caputo (the mysterious Henry Greenberg), J.D. Gordon (Mariia Butina), and Jared Kushner (Sergey Gorkov of Vneshekonombank). Whoever The Times's sources were, they seem to have had a clearer idea of all this stuff than Strzok, at the top of the FBI investigation.

The officials said the intercepted communications were not limited to Trump campaign officials, and included other associates of Mr. Trump. On the Russian side, the contacts also included members of the government outside of the intelligence services, they said. All of the current and former officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the continuing investigation is classified.

The call logs and intercepted communications are part of a larger trove of information that the F.B.I. is sifting through as it investigates the links between Mr. Trump’s associates and the Russian government, as well as the hacking of the D.N.C., according to federal law enforcement officials. As part of its inquiry, the F.B.I. has obtained banking and travel records and conducted interviews, the officials said.

All the stuff referenced in the Times article is real stuff (though I'm not sure Marcy thinks it's important)—reporting on the new documents at The Times and Politico is not making that clear enough—that did show up in the Mueller investigation, and former CIA director John O. Brennan seems to have been able to tell the House Intelligence Committee about it that May, a couple of weeks after Comey's firing—

Brennan said he is "aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign." Brennan said that concerned him, "because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals," and that it raised questions about whether or not the Russians "were able to gain the cooperation of those individuals." Brennan added he didn't know if "collusion existed" between the Russians and those he identified as involved in the Trump campaign.

But Strzok, inside the FBI investigation, doesn't seem to have been able to find out anything about the stuff at all, and denied that it existed. Why not?

The other document is a 302 record dated 9 February 2017 of a three-day FBI interview, 24-26 January (a couple of weeks after BuzzFeed published the dossier with the anonymous Primary Sub-Source of the Steele dossier—the "trusted compatriot" in whom sources A through G confided in the interviews on which Christopher Steele based the series of reports he wrote for Fusion GPS between June and October 2016 and later shopped to the FBI and journalists like David Corn and Michael Isikoff. 

It's mainly focused, I think, on the identification of PSS's own sources, and their possible unreliability; though it's heavily enough redacted that I can make out very little of what it's saying about them—though Emptywheel is a lot of help, her interests are somewhat different from mine.

PSS seems to be a Russian national who spent a lot of time doing graduate study in the US, but also working in UK, and he seems to have a history of working with Steele, notably on the gig for the Football Association that made Steele's reputation and damaged Sechin's—

In 2010, The Football Association (FA), England's domestic football governing body, organised a committee in the hope of hosting the 2018 or 2022 World Cups.^[32] The FA hired Steele's company to investigate FIFA (International Federation of Association Football). In advance of the FBI launching its 2015 FIFA corruption case, members of the FBI's Eurasian Organized Crime Task Force met with Steele in London to discuss allegations of possible corruption in FIFA.^[29][33] Steele's research indicated that Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin had rigged the bidding of the 2018 World Cups by employing bribery.^[8]

(if I'm reading the hint correctly)

—and eventually on the monthly payroll of Steele's company, Orbis.

He worked on the Fusion GPS Trump project before the dossier, when it was still being funded by Republicans, researching Paul Manafort, and then moved to the dossier work proper, looking for "information dealing with the US presidential election, including compromising materials on Donald Trump... and Hillary Clinton" in late June I guess, on the sidelines of a more normal business intelligence investigation, and got his network together, starting from two or three old friends and working outward, gathering their views on what was going on (telling them he was working a "research project or analytical product") and periodically reporting back to Steele in London:

As is now pretty well known, Steele was the source of the FBI's interest in Carter Page, PhD, in at least two different ways: through

• Michael Isikoff's Yahoo piece of 23 September 2016, for which Steele served as a source, which was the first public reporting of the story that Page had met with Igor Sechin and (more importantly) Igor Diveykin, a Russian intelligence official thought to be responsible for overseeing collection of information on the 2016 election; 
• the report of July 2016 in which Steele told the story that Diveykin had offered Page a dossier of "Kompromat" on Hillary Clinton, which didn't make it into Isikoff's story, suggesting Steele didn't tell him about it; 
• and conceivably in a third way (perhaps through CIA director John O. Brennan) from Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who hinted darkly at it in a surprising letter to FBI director Comey going back to 29 August

I have an idea that will probably put me in Crazytown (Marcy would certainly reject it) that

• the FBI was completely indifferent to the Steele dossier on first exposure, as was long reported,  well into October 2016, causing the frustration on Steele's part that led him to talk to the press in the first place, but
• deeply affected by Reid's letter (the source for which was almost certainly Brennan, who might have been using CIA info on Page's movements, not Steele), and
• galvanized into action by the Isikoff article, which they didn't realize used Steele as a source (it's not as if Isikoff would have told them)—

And their failure in the first Carter Page FISA application to admit that Steele was their only source on Page's meetings with Sechin and Diveykin was because they honestly didn't know.

Because—and this is my other takeaway from Lindsey Graham's dump—it's really remarkable that the FBI didn't take anything else from the Steele dossier seriously until after the discovery of the Flynn-Kislyak phone calls; not the material on Michael Cohen and the Trump Tower Moscow project (some of which has apparently turned out to be quite false, some much truer than imagined), not the material on Paul Manafort, not the material on Michael Flynn, not the material on Russian surveillance of immigrant communities in Florida.

The question isn't why did they get excited over the Carter Page allegations, but why didn't they get excited over anything else? Why did they take until February 2016—to even examine the sourcing of the thing? Why, even then, did they only look at the possibilities of discrediting it?

And my hypothesis, that the FBI really didn't want to believe the Trump campaign had any connection to Russian interference until Trump's firing of James Comey forced them to, fits the facts. And Peter Strzok had been a prime mover in refusing to consider it. Lindsey Graham has dragged up the evidence that shows this.