RussiaGate starts with Carter Page and ends with him, too.
So forget the ballyhooed 448 pages of mostly trivia, non sequitirs, innuendo and regurgitated Deep State agit prop, lies and smears in the Mueller Report. We will get to some of that in Part 2, but today we intend to dwell on the essence of the entire $40 million Mueller inquisition because what it proves stinks to high heaven:
….the investigation DID NOT establish that (Carter) Page coordinated with the Russian government in its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.”
Talking about smoking howitzers. The fraudulently obtained FISA warrants and subsequent wiretaps on Carter Page were at the heart of the Deep State’s audacious meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign in behalf of Hillary Clinton.
In fact, without the electronic surveillance on the headquarters of the Republican candidate for the highest elective office in the land, the whole RussiaGate contretemps would not have amounted to a hill of beans.
Still, the only thing they had on Carter Page in July 2016 was the Steele dossier’s unproven claim that he had gone to Moscow to cut some kind of sinister energy deal with Russia. But we now know definitively that didn’t happen because Page was never even indicted and the Mueller Report makes no effort whatsoever to confirm the false claim in the Steele dossier on which the wire taps were eventually authorized.
The only other thing they had at the time was dubious gossip from Australian diplomat Alexander Downer—a card carrying Clintonista—- regarding his drink with no count George Papadopoulos in a London bar in May 2016. And even that was about the acid-washed 30,000 missing Hillary Clinton emails from her time as Secretary of State (2009-2013), not the DNC emails that Wikileaks published in late July 2016, and which gave rise to the whole Russian meddling brouhaha.
More specifically, the Russian meddling charge came from the Democratic National Committee’s own contractor, Crowdstrike, a virulently anti-Russian operation trying to put itself on the map and drum-up more commercial business.
Yet it was on the basis of this exceedingly thin gruel that the FBI launched a counter-intelligence investigation of the Trump campaign code-named, “Crossfire Hurricane” (July 31, 2016) and moved to obtain the FISA warrants.
What the Mueller report does in eight pages (pp. 95-103) of belabored, footnote-bedecked narrative ending in the above cited conclusion, however, is to confirm what has been self-evident all along. Namely, that Carter Page was a peripheral nobody in the Trump campaign, who presented exactly zero threat to national security.
So here’s the thing that far outweighs the report’s vast tonnage of irrelevancies and tut-tutting about the Donald’s distaste for Team Mueller and its witch-hunt. That is, there was no conceivable basis for mobilizing the intelligence community’s surveillance machinery against Carter Page per se; and if the spooks didn’t like some of the low level Russian company that Page was keeping they simply needed to follow precedent and inform the GOP candidate that he had a potential mole down in the lower ranks of his campaign.
The one thing we are 100% sure of is this: Donald Trump did not have the foggiest idea about who Carter Page was; and that upon being discretely warned by the FBI, Carter Page would have been sent flying out of the windows on the 39th floor of Trump Tower arms, legs, and energy brief case akimbo.
The fact that they didn’t do the obvious, of course, reminds that Robert Mueller was appointed to undertake the wrong investigation!
Had the Donald chosen an Attorney General with a backbone and a brain back in 2017 (say Bill Barr), the investigation would have focused on the partisan corruption at the top of the FBI (we are talking about you McCabe, Strzok, Baker, Lisa Page etc.) and in the wicked cabal around former CIA Director John Brennan.
Indeed, on the crucial matter of Carter Page, the Mueller Report itself virtually proves the wrong investigation has been undertaken. In addition to acknowledging that Carter Page was a D-list volunteer in the Trump campaign, who had been in a room with the Donald only once for a photo op with the campaign’s hastily minted foreign policy advisory committee on March 31, 2016, it also cites chapter and verse on Page’s personal history.
That footnoted recitation, however, most of which has been publicly known all along, shows that there wasn’t the remotest possibility that Carter Page was some kind of Russian agent capable of espionage against the United States.
To the contrary, as we detail below he was actually an innocent small time hustler in the international energy consulting business with an angle on Russian energy matters because he had worked in Moscow( 2003-2007) for Merrill Lynch.
Thereafter he had hung out his own consulting shingle, which mainly resulted in the dissipation of his life’s savings. But the effort had kept Page busy trying to drum up work at international energy conferences and pitching his knowledge of Russian energy matters to practically anyone who might be a meal ticket.
This included during 2013-2015 some Russian agents operating under diplomatic cover in New York who concluded that Page was an “idiot” and that they had wasted their time trying to recruit him. Moreover, the FBI agents who had busted these Russian “diplomats” in 2015 knew the whole story about Page’s complete innocence long before Crossfire Hurricane was opened.
Did McCabe, Strzok & Co at the FBI take note of this history and did they replicate what the Kremlin apparently did in assessing Page’s non-role in the Trump campaign in just a few hours?
We are referring to the nugget on page 100, which references Page’s July 2016 trip to Moscow to give a speech at the New Economic School in Moscow—-a forum that promoted dialogue between Russian businessmen and government officials and invited guests and counterparts from around the world, and which President Obama had actually addressed a few years earlier.
The conference organizers had invited Page upon reading of his appointment to Trump’s phony foreign affairs advisory committee, and upon his arrival in Moscow concluded the Kremlin might well be interested in meeting with him.
But when his conference hosts contacted Russian Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov about introducing Carter Page to Russian policy officials, Peskov responded with a veritable silver bullet:
“I have read about (Page). Specialists say that he is far from being the main one. So I better not initiate a meeting at the Kremlin.”
For crying out loud. Whether it had nefarious purpose or not, on almost a moment’s notice the Kremlin figured out that Page was a nobody and didn’t even want to bother having a meeting with him. Yet the cabal of Never Trumpers at the FBI and in the intelligence community (IC) were so blindly focused on stopping Trump that they didn’t even bother to find out what the Russians already knew.
Instead, they launched what is surely the most perfidious assault on American democracy imaginable, and something far more insidious than the postings of 20-year olds who worked at the St Petersburg troll farm for $4/hour posting social media inanities in English as a third language.
We are talking about the frightful capabilities to snoop and spy on every American citizen possessed by the FBI and it fellow IC agencies, which were brought to bear on the Trump campaign out of nothing more than anti-Trump vitriol.
So doing, they ignored all of the exculpatory facts of the matter, including the central fact that Carter Page had no foreign policy credentials at all. He had actually been an accidental draftee hastily placed on Trump’s advisory committee during March 2016 in a mad scramble to stem the belittlement in the mainstream press that the Donald had incurred when he said he got his foreign policy advice from watching cable TV!
The fact is, the mainstream GOP foreign policy establishment had so completely boycotted the Trump campaign, the latter was forced to fill its advisory committee essentially from the phone book.
That’s how no-counts like 29-year old George Papadopoulos (indicted for allegedly lying to the FBI about the date of an irrelevant meeting) and Carter Page got on the foreign policy advisory committee—a phony campaign operation that held a single meeting, which was essentially a photo op.
And that’s why Page had been able to keep repeating what he said during an ABC interview last year, yet was neither indicted for perjury or even contradicted by the 8-page bill of particulars contained in the Mueller Report:
“I never spoke with him (Trump) any time in my life,” Page said on Good morning America this morning. Stephanopoulos followed up, asking, “no e-mail, no text, nothing like that?”
Surely that’s also the reason why his appointment to the advisory committee back in March 2016 elicited a “who-he?” harrumph from the MSM:
Carter Page was one of the five members of then-candidate Donald Trump’s foreign policy advisory team that he named to The Washington Post editorial board on March 21, 2016. The announcement initially drew attention because Page, who owns (and is the sole employee of) the energy consulting firm Global Energy Capital, was a relative unknown….
Well, of course he was an unknown no count. That’s all Trump’s seat of the pants campaign could recruit for the photo op on short notice.
The truth of the matter is that after his Merrill Lynch gig in Moscow, Page had set out to peddle himself as an international energy expert and the proprietor of a two-bit international energy advisory firm.
In that capacity he bounced around various international energy conferences in New York, London and St Petersburg and undoubtedly attempted to burnish his credentials by touting his contracts in Moscow. At one point he even bragged about serving as an unpaid energy advisor to the Kremlin:
“Over the past half year, I have had the privilege to serve as an informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin in preparation for their Presidency of the G-20 Summit next month, where energy issues will be a prominent point on the agenda,”
C’mon. The man was spinning his resume to land work. That’s why he had signed on, again, as an unpaid adviser to the Trump campaign, and had gotten their approval to attend another international conference in Moscow during July 2016, but on his own dime.
And those facts, too, and especially that he was acting on his own and not as an agent of the Trump campaign during his Moscow trip, are confirmed by the Mueller Report.
In fact, not only did he have no mandate to represent the Trump campaign; he was actually instructed to represent himself in Moscow as a private citizen. And in that modality, it turns out that his alleged “meeting” with Rosneft actually consisted of drinks with an old buddy from his broker days who had become head of investor relations at Rosneft.
Yes, Carter Page did try to puff up his tail-feathers at the time via an email to colleagues on the Trump campaign claiming that he had met Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich and learned that Putin was keen on Trump’s openness to rapprochement with Russia.
Aside from the fact that there would be absolutely nothing illicit about either the meeting or the idea of rapprochement, it turns out that the encounter with Dvorkovich was also accurately described by the Mueller Report: It amounted to a handshake at a cocktail party held during the conference at which they both spoke; and that Page’s insights about the Russian governments view of Trump came from listening to Dvorkovich’s speech in an auditorium attended by about 1,000 others!
Mueller also concedes that several years earlier (2013) Carter Page had apparently been the target of a recruitment effort by the aforementioned Russian intelligence operatives that amounted to bubcus.
And as we said, a national security investigation worthy of the name could have determined in a day or two by simply reading the newspapers about the bust of the Russian diplomats and consulting the FBI closed case on the matter that Carter Page’s unwitting and harmless contacts with Russian government personal during 2012-2015 had been about drumming up energy business, not anything remotely smacking of espionage.
As FBI Special Agent Gregory Monaghan noted in an originally sealed complaint against several alleged Russian spies, Page never took the bait and was even ridiculed by his would be handlers as not one of the sharpest tools in the shed.
In the complaint, Monaghan attested to how Page was the target of efforts by Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) agents Igor Sporyshev and Victor Podobnyy to recruit sources in New York City. According to the documents, Page and Podobnyy first met at an energy symposium in New York in January 2013. At this conference, Podobnyy gave his contact information to Page, who subsequently followed up with the Russian both by email and in-person to talk about energy policy. Page transferred unspecified “documents” to Podobnyy “about the energy business,” but Monaghan did not recommend that any charges be levied against Page. In fact, the section of the document discussing Page never characterizes him as a conscious spy or security risk, instead framing him as a victim of Sporyshev and Podobnyy, who expressly denied that Page knew about their status as intelligence agents.
Agent Monaghan followed this up by also detailing how Page cooperated with FBI officials in telling them about his contact with Podobnyy during their subsequent interview with him. And that was the extent of Carter Page’s alleged clandestine Russia connections: A brief encounter with some sketchy Russian operatives, and on that brief incident the FBI itself gave him a clean bill of health.
So when you cut through all the sinister spin that Deep State operatives and their stenographers in the MSM have long put on the raw facts of the Page Carter case, it was pretty evident all along that the Steele dossier’s tale about Page’s alleged bribery scheme was completely bogus.
And guess what? The Mueller Report agrees and makes no attempt whatsoever to prove one of the key allegations of the Steele dossier.
And that’s the Rubicon. Two years of investigations by some of America’s most vicious legal gunslingers did not come up with a shred of evidence or even hearsay suggesting that Carter Page was a Russian agent, witting or unwitting.
Why? Because there was no basis for suspecting it in the first place. Carter Page was just a convenient mark that enabled the FBI and IC to go rogue against a presidential candidate who for good and substantial reasons did not wish to embrace the Obama Administration’s policy of demonizing Russia and Putin and kindling Cold War 2.0.
In this context, there is nothing more insidious than intervention by the intelligence and law enforcement apparatus of the state in the most important process of American democracy—the election of the President.
Indeed, if a Presidential campaign were ever to be wire-tapped by the FBI at all, it would needs be triggered by the gravest and most compelling evidence of treason at the highest level of the campaign: That is, the probable fact of a Manchurian candidate at the top of the ticket.
By contrast, if the suspicion concerned a mere campaign official or lesser staffer, the appropriate recourse as we suggested above, would be for law enforcement to go to the candidate himself to disclose the compromising information and seek some mutually agreed course of action.
But did the FBI or John Brennan consider for even one single moment going to the Republican presidential candidate with their suspicions about this non-entity?
No, they went to the FISA court instead with a dossier of dubious hearsay and gossip that had been paid for by the Clinton campaign, and for the explicit purpose of getting an order to wiretap the Trump headquarters.
Accordingly, there is no way to describe the Obama Administration’s course of action other than as a monumentally corrupt act of bad faith. That is, a knowing and deliberate abuse of the most sensitive tool in the national security tool kit—a FISA warrant—-for the purpose of undermining the Republican candidate for President.
Needless to say, in the scale of abuse of state power, there is not a cardinal sin which ranks any higher than that.
So that’s the essence of the DOJ “insurance policy” at work: The Deep State and its allies in the Obama administration were desperately looking for dirt with which to crucify the Donald, and thereby insure that the establishment’s anointed candidate would not fail at the polls.
That is to say, that the state’s candidate, not the people’s choice, would win the presidential election.
Indeed, the most chilling thing about the Carter Page FISA application is right at the top of the document. It essentially says that if you talk to any foreign government not approved by Washington about any civilian topic, such as energy policy, you can be accused of being a foreign agent, wire-tapped and charged with a crime:
……The target of this application is Carter W. Page, a U.S. person, and an agent of a foreign power, described in detail below.”
That assertion is just flat-out preposterous, and the Mueller Report proves it. What is actually described in the FISA application and now in the Mueller Report is all about Page’s doings in international energy policy meetings and forums, which is not surprising because that was his academic and business field of endeavor.
By contrast, there is not a single word about real espionage: That is, about the theft or compromise of military secrets, which is the only possible justification for governments to spy on their own citizens. And now we have confirmation of that very truth by the Mueller Report itself.
So let’s cut to the chase. Since Carter Page self-evidently had nothing to do with military secrets, officials of the Obama Administration had no excuse whatsoever for wire-tapping him—even if he had been a paid energy advisor on Vlad Putin’s personal payroll.
By wantonly infringing upon Carter Page’s constitutional right to free speech at home and abroad, therefore, Obama officials committed the gravest possible assault on American democracy: They misused the vast machinery of national security to meddle in a presidential election for partisan advantage—-an heinous action which cuts right to the quick of democracy’s survival in America.
Indeed, the FISA application—slathered in blackout ink as it is—-proves that the real meddlers in the 2016 election are the signers of the application. That is, the very top tier of Obama’s national security team including John Brennan, Susan Rice, James Clapper and the secretaries of Defense and State.
Their downright criminality, in fact, has now also been established by the Mueller Report. That is, after 22 months of the most abusive prosecutorial tactics on record they not find a single thing upon which to indict Carter Page!
If the Carter Page FISA surveillance smacks of a preventative Deep State coup—it was.
Likewise, by any reasonable reading of the evidence Russia was an uncooperative adversary of US foreign policy. But it was not a mortal enemy or existential threat to the homeland by any stretch of the imagination—and therefore one that would justify extra-ordinary intervention in the election process by the national security machinery of the state.
So we must underscore again: Trump’s sin, apparently, was to openly advocate an abandonment of Obama’s rapidly escalating Russian confrontation policy in favor of an attempt at rapprochement with Putin based on the Donald’s brimming confidence in his own prowess at the Art of the Deal.
Undoubtedly, the latter was misplaced. But elections are supposed to be about teeing up policy alternatives for the voters to consider.
So doing, however, it landed the Trump campaign right in the Deep State’s line of fire.
At least now, the Mighty Mueller has decisively cooled those fires despite his best efforts to the contrary.