THE BRITISH ROLE IN THE COUP AGAINST THE PRESIDENT IS NOW EXPOSED.
BY BARBARA BOYD
Aim4Truth.org
Understanding the ferocity of the attacks on Donald Trump and our Constitution may seem to be a head scratcher. Is it really just due to Barack Obama and Hillary partisans at the top levels of the Justice Department, conspiring with a bunch of know-nothing, hotheaded, politically correct millennials and sour Deep State apparatchiks in the news media—the meme favored by Fox News?
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If so, why isn’t the President being more effectively defended? Is the Deep State simply the permanent American administrative bureaucracy which lives on, relentlessly, like a slime mold, in the swamps of Washington, D.C., regardless of who the voters elect? Or, has the whole of Washington, D.C., along with most of New York City, Massachusetts, and California, simply gone stark raving mad through an invasion of alien space creatures eating away at their brains? By space bugs which have been “weaponized,” no doubt, by Vladimir Putin, who, if you read the media, weaponizes everything in some secret Siberian laboratory, including, drumroll please, “jokes.”
Fortunately, two recent excretions from the British Isles, one of them stolen, the other, self-revealing, allow us to sketch something nearer to the real picture. On November 23, 2018, someone started publishing purloined documents from the British military’s Integrity Initiative, an international network of politicians, journalists, academics, foundations, and military officers engaged in a very dirty black propaganda campaign funded by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, NATO, Facebook, and such intelligence quangos as the Smith Richardson Foundation here in the United States, all while posing as a Scottish charity.
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Then, on December 18, the House of Lords released a report on the imperatives of current British policy, imperatives for which the Integrity Initiative’s information warriors and a host of similar outfits, have been tasked to engineer popular support. The Integrity Initiative claims it focuses on Russian hybrid disinformation warfare, a form of irregular warfare they claim Russia is conducting.
Its own purloined internal papers, however, expose the Initiative, rather than Putin, as the master propagandists, targeting and smearing those considered “subversives,” like British Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, other anti-war figures, and Donald Trump. The liberated documents show that Sir Andrew Wood and Pablo Miller, Sergei Skripal’s MI6 handler, who are both players in Christopher Steele’s Orbis Business Intelligence, also have significant relationships to the Initiative.
Skripal and his daughter were poisoned in Salisbury, England, in one of 2018’s more infamous intelligence hoaxes targeting Russia. Steele, of course, wrote the very dirty and obviously fake dossier on Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin which has sustained the Russiagate scandal for almost two years in the United States, throwing this country into a McCarthyite hysteria in which former defenders of the Constitution now demonstrate on behalf of the FBI and CIA and demand that a Special Prosecutor become, effectively, a fourth branch of our government.
This Report has three parts. First, we examine what the House of Lords declared as the imperatives of present British strategic policy. We then examine the Integrity Initiative’s propaganda operations in support of these imperatives and their genesis in the renewed British regime change and war drive against Russia which followed the 2014 Ukraine coup. We then put the manufactured Russiagate hoax in the United States, in the appropriate strategic context, demonstrating how a completely obvious intelligence fraud, the dirty dossier about Trump attributed to MI6 agent Christopher Steele, could dominate political discussion in the United States for more than two years, creating popular insanity about Russia and China and paralyzing our government.
Hopefully, you will conclude after reading this Report, that this is the year in which we can and must end the decadent, desperate, and failing Anglo-Dutch Liberal Empire. There are four countries which have the combined economic, scientific, and cultural potential to do this, even in the face of the systemic financial collapse of the huge bubble the City of London and Wall Street have now built anew. These nations are the United States, Russia, China, and India. If these Four Powers come together to create a new fixed exchange rate monetary system and devote their credit and the energies of their populations to full-scale development of the world, to fundamental breakthroughs in science, and to the great human adventure of space exploration and habitation, then they can create a new Renaissance. The Lords fully understand this challenge. In their report, they target exactly these four nations as their primary foreign policy concern.
With respect to Russia, they plan to continue their policies for containment, economic isolation, and political destabilization. They have plans for intellectually corrupting India and China, integrating these nations more fully into their globalist institutions and schemes. In the United States, they have one immediate goal: ending the “disruption” caused by Donald Trump by removing him, one way or the other.
THE BRITISH LORDS’ FIRST PRIORITY: NO SECOND TERM FOR DONALD TRUMP
The British House of Lords report with accompanying papers and appendices, is entitled, “UK Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order.” The discussion which follows is drawn from the report itself, its accompanying papers and appendices, and other recent statements of the key participants in shaping the report’s conclusions. In the report itself, the Lords huff that Donald Trump has completely imperiled the globalist “postwar rules based international order” as well as the “special relationship” between the United States and Britain.
They say this while, at the same time, reveling in their success in infiltrating and controlling the United States following World War II.
The covert defense and intelligence relationships flowing from the special relationship are sufficient, they argue, to survive one term of Trump. But, not two. Otherwise, they are terrified by the activation of the “people” in the Brexit vote in Britain and in the 2016 election in the United States.
THEY CITE THE FREE ABILITY OF INDIVIDUALS TO ACCESS INFORMATION AS THE CENTRAL THREAT TO THEIR ABILITY TO RULE.
To answer this, they intend to create censorship and propaganda regimes which would make George Orwell’s fictional Ministry of Truth in his novel, 1984, seem like child’s play. Those with longer memories will recall that John McCain and others responded to Trump’s election with bellicose incitements to invoke NATO’s Article 5, claiming that alleged Russian election meddling in the 2016 presidential election was an act of war and that Trump was out to destroy the very same “post war, rules based international order.”
John Brennan subsequently reported that the British, and their NATO satraps, like Estonia, began feeding him leads about Trump–Russia collusion in late 2015 because they feared Trump would destroy the special relationship. MI6’s Christopher Steele followed that up by telling his Justice Department collaborator Bruce Ohr, that he was absolutely desperate to prevent Trump’s election and would do just about anything on behalf of that mission.
And then, after the election, the Senate Intelligence Committee kicked off its absurd investigation of Russian electoral dirty tricks which, it was claimed, elected Donald Trump. In their first public hearing, a parade of British experts or Americans, like Roy Godson, who, nonetheless, salute the flag of Empire, enthralled very stupid Senators with tales about super potent Russian “active measures” capable of inducing underclass Americans into voting for Trump based on racist Facebook memes, or cartoons which made fun of Hillary Clinton.
Anyone with a modicum of intelligence viewing this stupid spectacle had to feel deep embarrassment on behalf of the United States. To put things in perspective here, it’s useful to review, briefly, the history of this “rules based international order,” referred to over and over again in the House of Lords report. Promulgated by the Truman Presidency and Winston Churchill at the end of World War II, this “Order” preserved colonialism, albeit in modern institutionalized forms of debt slavery and deliberate genocidal underdevelopment for the bulk of the world’s population. This was against the intent of the American President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and much of the American population at the time.
The IMF and World Bank, Bretton Woods institutions which Franklin Roosevelt wanted to use for world-wide economic development and to end British colonialism, became the overlords, instead, of an imperial financial system which enforced Malthusian population control and underdevelopment while securing vital mineral and other natural resources for the realm. This primary “alliance” also built a series of military bases throughout the world, “to project” imperial power, in their words, based upon British colonial policing and geopolitical stratagems.
For a period of time, following the War, the U.S. and other advanced sector nations enjoyed economic prosperity. This is the period to which President Trump refers as the era of American “greatness.” It was the result of then-extant and new capital-intensive investments in U.S. infrastructure building, in new plant and equipment, and building out further the machine tool capacities that had dominated the war mobilization. It included great technological, scientific, and technological horizon programs, such as Kennedy’s Moon mission.
But such programs, reflecting the American system of political economy of Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, all but ended by 1967, when London undertook its final offensive to once again control the world’s financial flows. The British chose the moment in which the U.S. was suffering from the financial and cultural impacts of the genocidal Vietnam War, to make their moves. On August 15, 1971, after a series of preliminary steps, they succeeded in taking down the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate currency system.
With the collapse of Bretton Woods, floating exchange rates, currency wars, and speculative financial gambling became the way of the world. Proposals for large-scale development were scrapped as too costly or financially unpredictable. The advanced sector’s economies were systematically deindustrialized and financialized with former industrial areas of whole countries turned into wastelands. Jobs were outsourced world-wide in pursuit of the cheapest labor possible. Food cartels replaced the agro-industrial units called family farms, and the U.S. rail grid was largely abandoned and consolidated, driving populations into urban areas and the coasts for mere sustenance.
In place of productive jobs and a national mission, such as President Kennedy’s space program, the majority of citizens in the United States were offered the gig and service economy, drugs, pornography, sports, and Hollywood entertainment to fill their time on earth. The new religion of “environmentalism” and its sub cult, anthropogenic climate change, were used to justify wholesale genocide through underdevelopment of the world, meeting the demands of Prince Philip and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands to reduce human population down to one to two billion people. “Science” became the land of statistics and information technologies, rather than the “science” which was the actual font of American greatness—the big ideas, bold experiments, and the constant discovery and creativity which characterized the harnessing of nuclear power and space travel to the Moon.
INSTEAD, THE CITY OF LONDON, THE PRIVATE ENTITY AGAINST WHICH AMERICA FOUGHT A REVOLUTION, BECAME, ONCE AGAIN, THE CENTER OF ALL WORLD FINANCE.
Its mantras, “free trade, free enterprise, and limited government,” were endlessly mouthed by anyone who wanted to become rich or famous. Much of the success of this infiltration can be traced to British recognition of the simple fact that how individuals think about the world and whether their surrounding culture encourages or destroys human creativity, constitute the most important battlegrounds of strategic warfare and grand strategy.
The contrary assertion, that they are beasts, incapable of knowing any universal truth, is the central tenet of British liberalism. It is no accident that the House of Lords report lists British universities as a critical “soft power” resource and puts expansion of Marshall scholarships on the same level of importance as relations with major foreign states. The “Order” was freshly updated following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, by George H.W. Bush and Margaret Thatcher, with France’s François Mitterrand playing a supporting role. The former Soviet Union was looted, devastating both its economy and the life span of its population, with major hauls of loot diverted to British offshore banks. Now, regional genocidal wars and regime change coups were run against any governments not agreeing to the terms of the “New World Order.”
Britain, as is its tradition, contributed some troops, but mostly dictated strategy and targets, while allowing use of its world-wide bases for this effort. The American military bore the brunt of battle. The Balkans, the Middle East, and large parts of Africa were set on fire. Millions of people died. American fighters came home both mentally and physically devastated. Thousands of war refugees flooded Europe. President Trump has called those supporting this Order, “the globalists.” Lyndon LaRouche more precisely locates their disease as the “Anglo-Dutch liberal system” or the New British Empire. Their stink thoroughly permeates major institutions of government in the United States on both sides of the aisle.
In the House of Lords Report, they brag about this. They cite their “dense and complex set of relationships across many parts of policy, society, and economic and individual life.” The special relationship, they say, is like an “iceberg” in which most activity takes place out of public view. That “iceberg,” centered in defense and intelligence relationships below the surface, they brag, has so far been able to subvert the declared agenda of the duly elected American President, Donald Trump. According to the delusional and paranoid “narrative” presented in the House of Lords report, the world-wide economic collapse resulting from their austerity and bailout policies in 2008, absolutely did not cause the revolt of their population in the June 2016 vote to leave the European Union.
The collapse simply increased “economic anxieties” among the commoners. The problem, the Lords say, is people’s access to information, boosted by instant connectivity on an unprecedented scale and speed. Governments are responding to short-term demands of their citizens, who have been empowered by their access to information and opinion. This is the imperial line first promulgated by Samuel Huntington, author of the genocidal tract “Clash of Civilizations” and inventor of the term “Davos man” to celebrate globalization. In his 1975 Crisis of Democracy Report for the Trilateral Commission, Huntington proclaimed that democracies only work when large swaths of the population are apathetic, citing the empowerment of African-Americans by the civil rights movement as a clear and present danger to political stability.
The Lords pontificate that, due to the disturbingly overbroad access to information, many in the “base,” or population, have come to believe in “conspiracy theories” rather than the official accounts of government actions. This meme is widespread now in the trans-Atlantic elites and has been a frequent line used by Barack Obama.
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Conspiracy theorists, according to them, include those who say the Government’s explanation of 9/11 does not cut it, that the U.S. intervention in Syria and Libya openly supported terrorists, that the Ukraine coup, run by the British and the U.S. State Department, had a major neo-Nazi component, that Russia is not genetically predisposed to evil (both Sir Richard Dearlove and James Clapper have claimed Russians have evil in their genes), and other truths about very real Anglo-American genocides and foreign conspiracies. These offensive truths, which the Lords and Obama label “conspiracy theories,” have been readily accessible until now in the free-for-all of cyberspace, outside the control of major corporate media.
The 2016 U.S. election and the Brexit vote represented wholesale political activation by the people the elites disdain, Trump’s forgotten men and women, using, ironically, the technology invented for social control purposes by Facebook and Twitter as major organizing tools. These were actual exercises of democracy. The Lords and the antics of their Integrity Initiative make it clear that they intend now to kill this activation. Censorship and counter propaganda or “cognitive infiltration,” as Barack Obama’s friend Cass Sunstein dubbed the required action, are now being massively deployed in the U.S., Britain, and throughout Europe. Actual experimental studies of the impact of propaganda conducted throughout the years demonstrate that it works when populations have no alternatives to look at, and are reacting constantly to the media bombardment of the 24-hour news cycle.
It fails almost immediately when people are introduced to an alternative, such as the publicity surrounding the rapid economic development China is now producing throughout the world, or are presented with the sudden and shocking realization that China is now exploring the far side of the Moon, specifically with the idea of using the Moon’s helium-3 to create fusion power. The wonderful thing about human nature is that the imagination and desire for new frontiers and adventures, if provoked, can and will destroy years of tedious work in planning and implementing any fixed social control system, and that, as if in an instant.
PRESENT IMPERIAL POLICY
The Lords began reviewing British Foreign policy in January of 2018, ahead of the anticipated withdrawal of Britain from the European Union in 2019 as the result of Brexit. Delegations were sent to the United States to speak with members of Congress, think tanks, and government officials, convening an open discussion at the Atlantic Council, the flagship British think tank in the United States. Participants in that discussion at the Atlantic Council, funded by the British government and NATO, included a representative from the Center for New American Security (a German Marshall Fund knockoff currently run by Victoria Nuland, the case officer for the Ukraine coup and major actor in the British inspired coup against Trump), an analyst from the Financial Systemic Analysis and Resilience Center (an information and surveillance collaboration between the eight largest banks and the U.S. Cyber Command), Franklin Kramer of the Center for Naval Analysis and the Atlantic Council, along with several other Atlantic Council toadies.
Clinton Secretary of State and National Endowment for Democracy honcho Madeline Albright also played a significant role. The primary concern of the Lords is the “disrupter,” U.S. President Donald Trump. According to them, they found that the Special Relationship was intact and revered in the U.S. intelligence and defense establishments and especially on both sides of the aisle in Congress. They conclude that the relationship is strong enough to withstand whatever the President does within a one-term Presidency.
But, if the President succeeds in getting a second term, all bets are off.
Sir Richard Dearlove, whose Henry Jackson Society played a leading role in formulating the House of Lords report, has gone even further in more recent statements. Dearlove, the former head of MI6 and mentor to Christopher Steele, is telling confidants that nothing Donald Trump does need be taken too seriously since Trump will only be a one-term President.
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The Lords cite Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Change agreement, the Iran nuclear deal, and the UN Human Rights Council, as well as his actions in the Middle East, his attacks on NATO, his support of the nation state and corresponding attacks on globalist institutions, and the imposition of trade tariffs as major beefs. But, they claim, Trump has been unable to fully implement anything he wants to do as the result of his own Cabinet and the Congress. As a result, Trump has been and dragged “kicking and screaming” to “behave better,” backing away from key stances and supporting British policies. But, the Lords emphasize, their networks have to now fully mobilize those who agree with them to contain Trump both in the United States and internationally.
The next changed circumstance for British foreign policy is the “rise of China.” The Lords readily acknowledge that China’s economy is rapidly outpacing the productivity of any economy in the West and that the Belt and Road infrastructure initiative is the largest such project ever undertaken by mankind. True to British form, they have publicly embraced China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and they participate in the China launched Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. But they do this in order to bend these initiatives to their financial and geopolitical advantage. About this, they are explicit: We welcome the UK’s engagement with new international institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. The UK should use its membership to shape the lending terms and governance of these bodies. They harp on: The UK should be a vocal champion of reform to international institutions. It should support reforms both to make these institutions more efficient, and to give a greater voice to emerging powers—particularly China and India—to build their support for the rules-based international order.
In the meantime, of course, British oriented and supported institutions in the U.S., like the Hudson Institute, persistently incite the Trump Administration and the Congress about the inevitability of near-term war with China. They aim to completely destroy the vast potentials of U.S.–China collaboration, embodied now in Trump’s relationship to President Xi Jinping, which would, ineluctably, leave the British elites sucking history’s dust. It is no accident that Michael Pillsbury, Vice President Pence’s hawk on China, is a fully accredited fellow of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the font of all British imperial policy, and that the Smith-Richardson Foundation heavily funds both the Integrity Initiative and the Hudson Institute.
According to the Henry Jackson Society, in their submission to the House of Lords, the British should confront “revisionist” tendencies in the United States, Russia, and China, by several modifications of focus. Post-Brexit, Britain must preserve its role as the strategic hegemon in NATO, preventing Germany, France, or Russia from becoming a major power on the Eurasian continent. This geopolitical dictum about Eurasia, created by Halford Mackinder and Nicholas John Spykman and cited as such in the Jackson Society submission, has been imperial strategy for some centuries now and resulted in two world wars. Second, the Jackson Society says, Britain must retain its primacy in the Middle East, the cockpit for War which Britain has dominated ever since the Sykes-Picot agreement. With respect to Russia, the Lords and the Jackson Society recommend continuing to attack its alleged “malign” activities (such as the Salisbury Skripal poisoning discussed below) while maintaining limited areas of potential cooperation.
Russia is uniformly described as a failing economic power, which can be contained so long as NATO is strengthened to British specifications, Russia itself is strategically marginalized and financially isolated, and the portrait of Putin as the world’s bogeyman (created for regime change purposes), is fully embraced by Western populations. Finally, the Lords recommend that Britain revitalize its relationship with India, creating a keystone role for that nation in the Commonwealth, which is the British entity through which the Queen presides over one-third of the world’s population. The Lords now want to highlight and build their security relationship to India, in addition to current commercial and trade relationships. They note, in passing, the historical strategic tensions between China and India, tensions which they obviously intend to exploit.
THE INTEGRITY INITIATIVE’S FOREIGN AGENTS OF INFLUENCE INVADE THE UNITED STATES
On November 23, 2018, a group calling itself “Anonymous” posted actual documents from the Integrity Initiative, a rapid-response black-propaganda information-warfare operation targeting Russia, China, Western Europe, and the United States. Since that initial posting, there have been three other document dumps concerning the Initiative, the last on January 4. These documents reveal the “boots on the ground” so to speak, for the cyberspace and black propaganda policies otherwise alluded to in the sanitized diplospeak of the December 18, 2018 House of Lords report which we covered in Part I of this series.
The Initiative is run under the Institute for Statecraft, a British NGO which receives 95% of its funding from the British government, NATO, and the U.S. State Department. It is housed in London, right next to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in the very rich and chic building which, according to the Grayzone’s Mohamed Elmaazi, once housed the Knights Templar and was the London home of William Astor. This is despite its registration as a charity in Scotland with an address corresponding to a dilapidated and abandoned building.
Its funding was recently supplemented by Facebook. It is seeking U.S. tax exemption for a spinoff NGO here, to be funded by the Smith-Richardson Foundation, with the plan to target major cities in the United States outside of Washington, DC or the coasts. In all probability, the plan is to concentrate in the presidential battleground states for the 2020 elections, to prevent a second Trump term. The first document released by Anonymous brags that the Integrity Initiative managed to derail the nomination of Pedro Baños to head Spain’s Homeland Security Department based on a 2-hour smear campaign claiming he was too soft on Moscow.
The Initiative operates on the basis of “clusters” or contact groups of journalists, military and foreign office personnel, academics, and lobbyists within almost every European country, the United States, and Canada, and is now looking to expand to the Middle East. These people get alerts, often through the medium of Initiative “contacts” in British Embassies, to take action when the British Foreign Office perceives a need. A look at the “clusters” for the United States and Britain reveal them to be dominated by individuals from the Atlantic Council, the rabidly anti-Russian and anti-Chinese Jamestown Foundation, the Center for European Policy Analysis, and similar National Endowment for Democracy spinoffs.
The Atlantic Council is the home of the Digital Research Lab which housed Dmitri Alperovitch, the guy who also leads CrowdStrike, the company which manufactured the fake story about Russian hacking of the DNC and John Podesta. It also houses Ben Nimmo, who also shills for the Integrity Initiative and has written many of the provably fake claims about Putin’s purported monster cyber capabilities. The Digital Research Lab was recently hired by Facebook to police and censor users.
The U.S. cluster includes Evelyn Farkas, who formerly had the Russia and Eurasia desk at the Defense Department under Obama and famously mouthed off on an episode of Morning Joe, about the Obama Administration’s unmasking and leaks of classified information to Congress in order to derail the Trump presidency.
The UK cluster includes Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post, Ed Lucas of the Center for European Policy Analysis, Bill Browder and Vadim Kleiner from Browder’s operations, and, not surprisingly, Sir Andrew Wood, of Orbis Business Intelligence, the firm founded by Christopher Steele. All of these people have been up to their necks in the operations against Trump. At the center of the Institute’s very military operations, is the use of propaganda directed simultaneously at both the government and the general population.
Institute personnel lobby governments on behalf of war party policies against Russia and China, for example, in their disguise as private parties, while the Institute itself is being paid, as a think tank, by the very same governments. At the same time, the Institute’s media contacts echo the entirely concocted government “debate” to the general population. This circular churning of the media sphere is what Obama’s former security advisor Ben Rhodes called creating a public opinion “echo chamber.” Rhodes cut his national security chops by helping with production of the fraud known as the 9/11 Commission Report. This methodology, fulling implemented in the British propaganda and regime change operation against Putin, which began with the Litvinenko poisoning in 2006 and dramatically escalated in 2014, has created an astounding and deranged war fever against Putin in Britain and throughout Europe.
The Integrity Institute is led by Christopher Donnelly, a very well placed British military intelligence officer with an impressive career in NATO, the Ministry of Defence, and in military destabilization operations.
Donnelly is obsessed with and paranoid about Russia. He laments that Britain and NATO are not equipped for war with Russia and proposes to change that by hyping the Russia threat both to governments and populations. Like an ever more deranged Doctor Strangelove, Donnelly’s prescriptions for responding to “the annexation” of Crimea in 2014 included mining Sevastopol harbor, attacking Russian satellites, and destroying Russian fighter jets—all of such actions being, of course, acts of war. Donnelly argues, that the British government needs a long term “vision” that will inspire people to fight a war, something which most sane people, of course, given the existence of nuclear weapons, are more than a little hesitant about.
The Institute papers feature a discussion between Donnelly and General Sir Richard Barrons in October of 2016 which finds Donnelly wishing for some shocking horrendous event that will wake people up to the Russian threat. The purloined documents posted by Anonymous show that Initiative personnel have targeted British Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in a huge smear campaign as well as the Scottish Nationalist Party and other domestic opponents of the powers that be in Britain. They also show that Simon Bracey-Lane, a young Institute fellow, infiltrated the Bernie Sanders campaign in Iowa in 2016, gathering information which in all probability was reported back to the Clinton campaign.
The Institute also claimed that Green Party candidate Jill Stein was a Russian pawn, a claim echoed by Hillary Clinton. In the United States, according to Max Blumenthal’s terrific reporting, the Institute aims to create a new generation of “information warriors.” It has hired John Rendon, known as the “man who sold the Iraq War,” to train its “perception management” specialists. Rendon handled the publicity for Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, along with other Washington, DC public relations firms.
Buzzfeed, which infamously published the Christopher Steele dirty dossier on Donald Trump, is listed as a friendly media source. An itinerary for Integrity Initiative head Christopher Donnelly’s visit to the United States noted that Sebastian Gorka, Steve Bannon’s buddy who served with him at the White House, was scheduled for a breakfast meeting with Donnelly. Gorka’s wife, Katherine, who works for Homeland Security, is listed as an Institute contact. And Sebastian Gorka openly supports Vitézi Rend, a Hungarian order of fascist pedigree. Donnelly was shepherded around Washington, DC by Anne Bader, a former Vice-President of the Atlantic Council whose own intelligence pedigree is completely British. He visited the Center for Naval Analysis, a key contributor to the Lords Report, and the John McCain Institute’s Executive Director Kurt Volker, a rabid neo-con who serves as US Special Representative to Ukraine. He also spent a lot of time at the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, where Todd Leventhal doubles as an employee while also serving with the Institute.
At its first U.S. event in Seattle, Washington, the Institute spokesman Simon Bracey-Lane, the same guy who infiltrated the Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2016, read remarks from Christopher Donnelly noting that the West was no longer in a ‘peace time, rules based environment. . . the conclusion is that we have to look for people who suit a wartime environment rather than peacetime. Blumenthal reports that active recruitment in the United States of such warriors is targeted on the altright formations in the circles of Bannon and Gorka, and young Trump supporters more generally, who entertain a positive view of Putin and Russia, as well as the general public.
Blumenthal asks the very germane question, how come these people don’t have to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act? The Institute has recently opened major operations targeting Germany, seeking to smear and defame existing German networks urging peace with Russia while attempting to build the same war fever they have created in Washington and London. According to Sputnik’s Kit Klarenberg, the Institute’s lead agent for Germany is Harold Elletson, who was exposed by the Observer as an MI6 agent in 1996. Klarenberg writes: One can spot a ‘cultivated’ Russlandversteher [russia-sympathizer], Elletson suggests, when they make statements in accordance with one the Kremlin’s 21 alleged ‘key messages.’
These include:
- Germany and Russia had a ‘special relationship’ and should return to it;
- Russia has legitimate interests and the West should respect them;
- the West deceived Russia over NATO expansion;
- ‘Wikileaks’ and Snowden show the West has not been open in its dealings with Germany;
- the Georgian crisis was the result of Georgian aggression; Russia has a legitimate claim to Crimea;
- the Ukrainian revolution was actually a coup d’état;
- sanctions against Russia are counter-productive and will damage the German economy;
- the Syrian crisis cannot be solved without Russian support, which has been instrumental in stopping the spread of ISIS.
In essence, any German who’s remotely critical of NATO, the West, or prevailing Western global political narratives, or indeed government policy anywhere in the world negatively impacting Russia in any way — or who simply doesn’t view Russia as invariably villainous — is a stooge of Putin.
The Institute’s now-public documents include a proposal by the French company Lexfo which seeks funding for an offensive online influence campaign and includes a proposal for “counter-activism” through “negative PR, legal actions, ethical hack back, etc.” It states that it can launch hundreds of news pieces a day and offers to “edit” Wikipedia articles. Lexfo’s proposal is of a piece with the recent scandal enveloping the cyberwarriors at New Knowledge, a U.S. corporation run by former Obama staffers, who were caught openly meddling in Alabama candidate Roy Moore’s campaign for the U.S. Senate.
New Knowledge had been endorsed as certifiable experts on Russian disinformation activities in the 2016 U.S. election by none other than the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee. The Intelligence Committee released a Report authored by New Knowledge and “experts” at the Oxford University Computational Propaganda Research Project about Russian propaganda techniques on December 17, 2018. On December 19, 2018, however, the New York Times published internal New Knowledge documents about actual election interference, not by Russia, but by New Knowledge.
According to Dan Cohen’s definitive account at the Grayzone Project, among the tactics used was manufacturing “a link between Roy Moore’s campaign and the Kremlin by claiming thousands of Roy Moore’s twitter followers were Russian bots.” The Internal Report cited by the New York Times contained the admission, We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet. New Knowledge ran a Facebook page boosting an obscure write-in candidate, Mac Watson, to draw votes away from Moore while using social media to amplify sexual assault allegations directed at Moore. Local media were deployed extensively to cover the alleged Russia/Roy Moore linkage and national coverage was provided by the Russiagate conspirators at Mother Jones magazine.
According to Cohen’s account, the Alabama disinformation campaign, received at least $100,000 from Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, although Hoffman has said he gave $750,000 to Mickey Dickerson’s American Engagement Technologies. AET paid for the Alabama false flag campaign. Dickerson was a founder of the United States Digital Service, a signature Barack Obama initiative. The entire episode is now under investigation by the Alabama Attorney General.
One of the New Knowledge “experts” is Jonathon Morgan, once a special advisor to the Obama White House and State Department and a contractor for DARPA.
After the 2016 election, he was a favored media source for the Obama–Clinton trope that Hillary Clinton’s loss was the product of Russian disinformation. As cited by Cohen, Morgan told television viewers in Austin, Texas, that feelings of discontent were telltale signs that they had been duped by Russian disinformation… If it makes you feel too angry or really provokes that type of almost tribal response, then it may be designed to manipulate you… People should be concerned about things that encourage them to change their behavior.
His partner in the actual disinformation operations conducted by New Knowledge is Ryan Fox, who spent 15 years at the NSA and was also a computer analyst for the military’s Joint Special Operations Command. Since receiving $11 million in funding from Silicon Valley’s GGV capital, New Knowledge is positioning itself as a major player in Anglo-American propaganda psyops. Morgan helped develop the Hamilton 68 dashboard, a completely phony tool for spotting Russian propaganda, which is funded by the U.S. German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, the Victoria Nuland outfit which testified for the House of Lords report.
The tranche of documents released by Anonymous on January 4 include a contract with Harod Associates to monitor social media and media response internationally to the Sergei Skripal poisoning and the British government response. The Institute labeled this and related activity, “Operation Iris.” A previous Anonymous release of Institute documents included the name of Christopher Steele’s business associate and Sergei Skripal’s MI6 handler, Pablo Miller, on the general contact list of Integrity Initiative head Christopher Donnelly. Anonymous originally claimed that this list is from a meeting concerning the White Helmets, a major terrorist-promoting and intelligence-funded “aid” organization critical to the fake narrative that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against Syrian civilians.
Former Ambassador Craig Murray, however, reasons that the Donnelly general contact list suggests much deeper involvement in the Sergei Skripal poisoning hoax. Murray notes that the list includes the political handler of Porton Down, the UK’s chemical weapon facility, Skripal’s MI6 handler, the BBC, and representatives of the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office, and the U.S. Embassy. In this release, Anonymous provides documents concerning Operation Iris and a timeline confirming Murray’s hypothesis. As revealed in the January 4 dump, the Institute’s media campaign about the Skripal poisoning was designed to create popular demand for even harsher actions against Russia by the British government while planting articles all over the world blaming Putin for the Skripal poisoning. “Journalists” paid by the Institute published multiple articles in the British press supporting the “Putin did it, and it should be War” line promulgated by Operation Iris. The Initiative characterized the official British response as “weak.”
Anonymous notes, in its January 4 release, that the Institute is also deeply entangled in the White Helmets operation. Many analysts following this story have also asked the obvious questions about Skripal, Miller, and Christopher Steele. Was Skripal, the MI6 former Russian spy, somehow involved in Steele’s full spectrum information warfare campaign against Donald Trump?
Did he get Novichoked because he was threatening to spill the beans about how the whole fake dossier was cooked up? Or, was he targeted, as some have suggested, to create a narrative whereby Christopher Steele had actual Russian sources whose bravery in reporting to him resulted in Putin killing them, a phony narrative widely circulated by Steele’s publicists after his Trump dossier had been thoroughly and appropriate debunked?
Such an event would hardly be new in the annals of British intelligence. The blogger Moon of Alabama, points out that Ben Nimmo appears to be double-billing the Atlantic Council’s Digital Research Lab and the Institute for his various raves about the Russian threat. Nimmo is the author of the stunningly preposterous claim that Putin has weaponized jokes. He also authored a 2017 Guardian piece claiming that Russia influenced the Brexit decision through Facebook Ads with Guardian reporter Carole Cadwalladr. Both appear to have been paid by the Initiative for their nonsense, even after Facebook revealed that Russia-linked accounts had spent a total of 97 cents on Brexit ads.
These absurd claims, of course, parallel those of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee about how a few thousand dollars in Russian-linked Facebook ads, most of which occurred after the election and had little to say about Trump or Clinton, and a full quarter of which were seen by no one, swung the American election for Trump. Aaron Maté has thoroughly debunked the Robert Mueller/Senate Intelligence Committee nonsense. Another Integrity Initiative “expert,” Mark Galeotti, invented a whole Russian military doctrine of hybrid cyber warfare out of thin air in 2013, attributing it to a paper written that year by Russian General Valery Gerasimov. After years as an article of faith, requiring expenditure of untold millions of defense dollars to defend against it, Galeotti himself finally retracted his invention in March of 2018, following an earlier shredding of his claims by the U.S. Army Military Review.
The now-exposed Integrity Initiative is only a small part of the massive British-spawned hybrid warfare apparatus targeting Russia, China, and dissident voices in target populations. This apparatus was put into action following the Ukraine coup in 2014 and the initial popular rumblings in Britain itself about Brexit. As Hillary Clinton herself observed, the British and the U.S. utterly failed to sell their coup in Ukraine as a triumph of democracy. Clinton attributed this to superior Russian social media and disinformation regimes. Reality would say, however, that the employment of NeoNazis as the coup’s mercenaries by the British and their American friends, led by John McCain and Victoria Nuland, had a major impact on the applause meter. It is not incidental that one Christopher Steele served as a prominent adviser to Nuland and the Obama Administration concerning this coup, delivering over one hundred missives to the State Department concerning its operations.
In 2008, the Obama Administration, faced with managing the financial collapse and the revolt of the American population, proposed to attack “conspiracy theories,” namely anything interrupting their preferred depiction to the American population of reality. Samantha Power’s husband, Cass Sunstein, memorialized these discussions in January, 2008 Harvard and University of Chicago law school publications. He largely focused on debunking what he called fake conspiracy theories about 9/11. Citing the arch British agent, and godfather of George Soros, Sir Karl Popper, Sunstein advocated direct government intervention in internet chat rooms in the form of “cognitive infiltration,” suggesting that the resulting cognitive dissonance would render any political danger from conspiracy theories politically impotent. Sunstein proposed that private individuals fed with government information systematically intervene in internet conspiracy forums.
The recent fake narratives produced by QAnon and targeting Trump supporters just before the Midterms, in the form of video game, Pokemantype clues about the coup, such as the fake claim that Robert Mueller is really on Trump’s side, are a vivid example of such “cognitive infiltration.”
In 2009, Obama and the British engaged NATO to set up a mechanism to control opinion in the trans-Atlantic community, the NATO Centre for Strategic Com- munications. This project, however, largely sat dormant until 2014 when the Institute for Modern Russia, a think tank run by deported Russian oligarch, crook, and British stooge, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, published a paper asserting that Russia was deploying a vast propaganda network that was inundating the West with “conspiracy theories” in order to create general confusion. The aforementioned and debunked Integrity Institute expert Mark Galeotti is cited in the paper as its primary source of inspiration.
In November 2014, the British military created the 77th Brigade, implementing a strategy of disrupting internet sites devoted to exposing facts about 9/11 and the war against Syria. Subsequently, in 2015, Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post and the Center for European Policy Analysis created a unit called the Information Warfare Initiative which prominently featured Edward Lucas, who is the former editor of the London Economist and a general spook. The Center for European Analysis is a National Endowment for Democracy spinoff and was directed, at the time, by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Madeline Albright. The Information Warfare Initiative focused its attacks on the Russian media outlets, RT and Sputnik. At about the same time, in 2015, the Brits were setting up the Integrity Initiative as the central project of the Institute for Statecraft.
Russiagate in the United States, kicked into manic gear by the electoral victory of Donald Trump, was used to justify a massive expansion of these operations, kicking them off with a lurid article in the November 24, 2016 Washington Postdrawing on the supposed “research” of a shadowy outfit calling itself PropOrNot. The article claimed that 200 websites were pawns of the Russian government. This included just about every site in the United States opposing the Bush/Obama foreign adventures. The PropOrNot organization involves Polygraph (a government-funded Voice of America outlet), the Interpreter (the Institute for Modern Russia’s magazine), the Center for European Policy Analysis, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Research Lab. The entire effort is now subject to massive funding based on Barack Obama’s 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
Although Trump appears to have been successful in initially blocking full implementation of Obama’s plans, Secretary of State Pompeo has now fully funded the State Department’s Global Engagement Center as stipulated in the 2016 NDAA. The Integrity Initiative claims that it is now fully engaged with State’s GEC. Todd Leventhal is a duel staffer at State and the Integrity Initiative. In the United States, the Integrity Initiative is also working with the Center for Naval Analysis and the Center for European Analysis. It has also worked extensively with the State Department/Ukrainian intelligence collaboration known as StopFake. It is working with far-right groups in Ukraine and the Baltics and mapping a full-scale attack on the Russian Orthodox Church, according to the documents posted by Anonymous.
With the funding spigots now completely open, every think tank inhabiting the U.S. security complex is sprouting “disinformation” and cyber war entities, surpassing even the billions of dollars poured into the same black holes for the War on Terror. The same is true in Britain. It is possible to specify at least 60 organizations now dedicated to information psyops against the population of the United States. Max Blumenthal, in his first takedown of the Integrity Initiative, compares it to Operation Mockingbird, the collaboration of intelligence agencies, compromised politicians, and the national news media which employed over 400 American journalists in the service of the CIA during the Cold War. In a fiery parting shot at just this type of apparatus, award winning journalist William Arkin has resigned from NBC News and MSNBC. Arkin, the author of one of the last great exposes of the national security state, Top Secret America, blasted NBC as a total captive of that very security state.
A BRITISH INTELLIGENCE FRAUD CREATES THE COUP AGAINST DONALD TRUMP
Put now in the larger context of British information warfare and regime change operations directed at Russia and independent thinkers in the United States, Britain, and Western Europe—operations which were put on steroids as of 2014 (operations which we covered in Part II of this Report)—what are we to make of the Christopher Steele dossier on Donald Trump and its use to impact the 2016 elections and the Trump Presidency? As we shall show, the dossier itself is flat out, totally, and utterly false, a stinking hideous fraud. Christopher Steele himself, in subsequent testimony, has described it as “unverified raw intelligence” and will not vouch for its accuracy.
Even its most fervent champions, such as Yahoo’s Michael Isikoff, who met personally with Steele in September of 2016, now doubt the document, which provided the central legends of Russiagate.
And, as former House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes has repeatedly emphasized, the operations against the Trump Campaign, using the dossier as its investigative backbone, were not run through traditional U.S. channels.
Rather, they were run through the traditional channels of British influence in the United States: the CIA and the State Department. All of these operations were coordinated from the Obama White House. Donald Trump was always the target of an extraordinary and illegal FBI investigation, despite the earlier pretense of a counterintelligence operation directed at Trump campaign volunteers and advisors.
The President became an explicit target when he fired James Comey, according to the blaring headline of the January 12, 2018 New York Times. At that point, the New York Times reports, top levels of the FBI decided they had to go after the President of the United States as a covert Russian agent, accusing him, under the circumstances, of treason, since they viewed Russia as the ultimate foreign enemy of the United States. In this crazed atmosphere, having all the earmarks of a coup, an American putsch in legal garb, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein talked about wearing a wire to set the President up, while others talked about invoking the 25th Amendment.
After the election, Tom Steyer, George Soros, and other Silicon Valley billionaires provided some $70 million in an attempt to put meat on Steele’s fact-free work product. A big part of this exercise is to create enough atmospherics and smoke to prevent the public from concluding that those who believe this crap are stark raving mad and belong in mental institutions rather than having any say in our government. That is also a large part of the function assigned to Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Belief that the dossier is true requires the assumption that Christopher Steele had some 32 sources inside the Russian government. What they allegedly told him is specific enough in time and content to identify them.
You have to further assume that the British government, therefore, was willing to roll up this entire network, since the intention was for the dossier’s wild claims to be published as widely as possible. By all accounts, Britain and the United States together do not have 32 highly placed sources inside the Russian government, nor would they ever make them public in this way or with this very sloppy tradecraft. In fact, they would not engage in such covert intelligence operational malpractice for even one valued source. Upon closer examination, it is clear that the dossier uses aspects of readily available public information, such as the sale of 19% of the energy company Rosneft (the alleged bribe offered to Carter Page for lifting sanctions), to concoct a fictional narrative of high crimes and misdemeanors.
There were no “highly placed” Russian sources. The info war campaign which spread, internationally, the legend that Donald Trump was a Manchurian candidate, involved a small group of individuals in the U.S.—journalists and government officials working or in some way associated with the firm Fusion GPS, British steered networks in the State Department, Obama’s DNI, CIA and FBI chiefs, and the Obama White House. These people had all known each other for years, if not decades, and were skilled in information warfare.
In Britain, it involved the intelligence circles of Sir Richard Dearlove, centered in the Henry Jackson Society, Steele’s Orbis Business Intelligence, and the firm Hakluyt, billed as the favored “retirement home” for MI6 spies. The dossier was given credence only because it was backed by very powerful people who insisted that this obvious British hoax must be taken with absolute dead seriousness. Not taking it seriously or speaking out about its obvious flakiness was a career ender in the national security state.
THESE PEOPLE HAD ONE STRATEGIC GOAL IN MIND: TO DESTROY TRUMP, THE AMERICAN DISRUPTER, OR, AT THE VERY LEAST, TO UNDERMINE HIS RATIONAL DESIRE, EXPRESSED THROUGHOUT HIS PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN, FOR BETTER AND SANE RELATIONS WITH RUSSIA.
A much larger group of partisan officials and journalists were willing to leave their brains and morals behind in an all or nothing effort to defeat, neuter, or remove Donald Trump, even if it resulted in a deranged and mounting national hysteria about Russia, a hysteria which now champions war against both Russia and China. As we said at the outset, the British operation had two goals. Though they continue to rage and wield their knifes, they have yet to succeed in removing Donald Trump.
But, as the House of Lords and Richard Dearlove emphasize, this remains a central British strategic goal. In the meantime, a large section of our population and most in Congress, are nuts about Putin and Russia, blocking every effort the President has undertaken to improve relations. According to the Lords, this is facilitated by Trump’s own cabinet and a fawning, Anglophilic Congress. So, with respect to that second goal, creating a McCarthyite war fever infecting official Washington and a large portion of the population of the United States, the British and their toadies can say, “mission accomplished.” At least for now.
THE RICHARD DEARLOVE NETWORK OF NETWORKS AND THE BRITISH PUSH
The Steele Dossier and the Integrity Institute involve the same British intelligence networks revolving around Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6. Dr. Victor Madeira, one of the key staffers at the Integrity Institute used to work directly for Dearlove and Sir Christopher Andrew at the Cambridge Intelligence Forum. In 2014, then DIA chief Michael Flynn was invited to visit that forum and chatted about Russian intelligence history with a Russian graduate student and historian there. Christopher Steele was at the same event.
So was Stefan Halper, the close friend of Dearlove who subsequently worked with the CIA and British intelligence in entrapment operations targeting Trump volunteers George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, and Sam Clovis. In 2014, Halper and others claimed that Flynn was compromised by a Russian historian and spread their absolutely false bilge throughout the trans-Atlantic intelligence community in an effort which many believe led to Flynn’s firing by Barack Obama. Flynn’s real sin was his confrontation of the Obama Administration and the British for using terrorists to fight the Assad regime in Syria, highlighting their other alliances with Islamic terrorist groups, and for insisting that Russia could be a valuable ally in the war on terror and on other fronts.
Andrew Wood (the former UK Ambassador to Russia, a friend of Dearlove, and an advisor to Christopher Steele’s Orbis Business Intelligence Company) is listed as a Specialist Team Member of the Integrity Institute. Drew Foxall of the Henry Jackson Society, where Dearlove is the leading light, is listed as a member of the “inner core” of the Institute. Both the Integrity Initiative and Christopher Steele traffic in intelligence lies targeted at Russia, and both employ the media echo chamber to legitimize these lies through media retainers and witting government accomplices.
Among the specializations which have been, at one point or another, listed as special skills of Steele’s Orbis Business Intelligence are, “creating public opinion groundswells,” and “delivering targeted political campaigns.” Richard Dearlove is an old hand at such operations. While leading MI6, Dearlove infamously vouched for the doctored dossier which said that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, collaborating with the CIA’s George Tenet on one of the most deadly intelligence lies in the last century. Christopher Steele has a similar, albeit less developed pedigree. He was the MI6 case officer for Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian defector who worked for the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, and took up residence in Britain. Litvinenko was murdered, using polonium poison, in 2006. Berezovsky, after making millions of dollars looting Russia, fled to London and went to war against Putin on behalf of MI6. It is not a stretch to opine that Steele also ran Berezovsky’s operations.
Prior to his murder, Litvinenko was characterized as Berezovsky’s “bomb thrower” against Putin. Steele instantly blamed Litvinenko’s murder on Putin and obviously had a role in the orchestrated and notorious death bed statements by Litvinenko which did the same. The death bed statement was drafted by another Berezovsky associate, Alex Goldfarb, a former George Soros employee. It was further massaged by Bell, Pottinger, the disgraced British public relations firm famous for such contracts as its $540 million effort for the CIA making fake al-Qaeda propaganda films for the war in Iraq. The British government didn’t bite, and instead indicted a sole Russian for the crime, not the Russian state. In the wake of the Ukraine coup, the Litvinenko case was revived for propaganda purposes. The new British review lasted two years, ending in January 2016 and charging that Russia and Putin were “probably” responsible for the murder.
The report used the word “probably” 35 times with respect to its major findings. Litvinenko’s father blames organized crime associates of Berezovsky for the murder. Berezovsky himself was suicided in 2013. Dearlove mentored Steele in Orbis’s operations and specifically worked with him on the Trump dossier operation, vouching for and hyping Steele’s claims throughout the Five Eyes intelligence community. Dearlove is also associated with Hakluyt. Hakluyt is named after Richard Hakluyt, the geographer and retainer of the British East India Company known for his work promoting the colonization of America by the British. Stefan Halper, the MI6/CIA asset deployed to entrap Trump campaign volunteers George Papadopoulos and Carter Page in London, is an advisor to Hakluyt and a long-time professional colleague of Steele. Alexander Downer, the High Commissioner of Australia to the United Kingdom, was on Hakluyt’s Board and played a significant role in the operations against Papadopoulos which the FBI incredibly claimed as the investigative predicate for their investigation of Trump.
Luke Harding, who wrote the book Collusion to legitimize Steele’s dossier, has served for a very long time as Steele’s publicist and scribe while conducting similar trysts with other major British intelligence figures. Harding has worked with both Hakluyt and Orbis. Similarly, Pablo Miller, the MI6 handler of Sergei Skripal, has worked with Steele since their days in MI6 and also worked with Hakluyt.
Finally, the mysterious Maltese professor, Joseph Mifsud, whose job was to flip Papadopoulos, by giving him a job in London and then offering the Trump Campaign access to Putin’s inner circle, runs in the very same intelligence networks. Claire Smith, the member of the Joint UK intelligence committee famously photographed and working with Mifsud, reportedly worked with Christopher Steele in Afghanistan. Luke Harding has just finally been exposed. He wrote a completely fabricated story in the London Guardian on November 27, 2018, saying that Paul Manafort met with Julian Assange of Wikileaks several times in London, presumably concerning the Wikileaks publication of emails liberated from Clinton Campaign Manager John Podesta, and the Democratic National Committee in 2016. Harding’s story was widely debunked as a complete fabrication.
THE NARRATIVE BLAMING RUSSIA HACKERS FOR LIBERATING TRUTHFUL DOCUMENTS FROM THE DNC AND PODESTA AND PROVIDING THEM TO WIKILEAKS, IS, OF COURSE, THE FOUNDATIONAL FAKE STORY CONCERNING TRUMP-RUSSIA COLLUSION.
OPERATION TRUMP/PUTIN COMMENCES
We now know that the chronologies presented about the Steele dossier operation in various official reports are off by many months, missing the early collaboration. Judicial Watch has unearthed documents using the FOIA which show that Steele was being paid as an FBI source as of February 2016. Steele told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer that in April 2016, the month that his U.S. employer, Fusion GPS, was hired by Clinton and the DNC to produce dirt on Trump, he had just “finished a special investigation called Project Charlemagne,” for a “private client.”
Mayer writes: “It involved a survey of Russian interference in the politics of four members of the European Union—France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Germany—along with Turkey, a candidate for membership. The report chronicles persistent, aggressive political interference by the Kremlin: social-media warfare aimed at inflaming fear and prejudice, and ‘opaque financial support’ given to favored politicians… The Kremlin’s long-term aim, the report concludes, was to boost extremist groups and politicians at the expense of Europe’s liberal democracies. The more immediate goal was to ‘destroy’ the E.U., in order to end the punishing economic sanctions that the E.U. and the U.S. had imposed on Russia after its 2014 political and military interference in Ukraine.”
This is the same type of bilge which was being ground out by the Institute for Statecraft and the Integrity Initiative prior to the Brexit vote in Britain in June of 2016. In late 2015, by his own account, John Brennan’s British friends began flooding him with reports of Trump/Russia financial and intelligence flows aimed at helping Trump’s election. The first source of such information was, allegedly, Estonia, a player in NATO’s StratCom information warfare initiative. According to Brennan and others, the Brits persistently demanded investigations of Trump in order to save the “special relationship.”
In the March-April time frame, Brennan convened a task force, an act of very questionable legality, at CIA headquarters to “investigate” this garbage. At the same time, Fusion GPS/Christopher Steele were being hired by the Clinton Campaign and the DNC. Entrapment operations targeting Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, and other tangential Trump campaign figures were initiated. In the case of Page and Papadopoulos, these operations were mostly done on British soil. There were repeated offers of “dirt on Hillary Clinton from Russia,” “Hillary Clinton’s missing emails,” and for meetings with Putin or other Russian officials. These offers were dutifully conveyed back to the Trump Campaign, creating the documentary email chain necessary to justify further investigation.
Paul Manafort, who served as Trump’s campaign chairman for a few months in 2016, was intensely investigated at the same time, for corruption surrounding his activities in Ukraine on behalf of deposed President Yanukovych. These investigations were led by Alexandra Chalupa at the DNC and supported by official Ukrainian intelligence sources as well as the heavily British penetrated Free Russia network of NGOs.
Michael Isikoff of Yahoo served as Chalupa’s publicist. In April, the initial Trump/Russia collusion stories began to appear in the press. Thanks to Lee Smith’s excellent re-examination of the Steele dossier chronology at The Federalist, we know that the echo chamber of Trump-Russia stories (New York Magazine, Slate, and two in Politico) began right after the DNC and Clinton hired Fusion GPS. During late 2015 through May 2016, according to the timeline provided to Robert Mueller by CrowdStrike and the DNC, and swallowed whole by him, Russian military intelligence, the GRU, was hacking files from the DNC and various Clinton operatives, including Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta.
In June of 2016, the Guccifer 2.0 persona appeared on the web sharing emails he alleged he had hacked from the Clinton Campaign and the DNC and referring people to the DC Leaks website and Wikileaks for the documents. We have previously documented that this was the great Russian hack that wasn’t. Creation of the fabricated persona, Guccifer 2.0, was accompanied by a media campaign typified by a phony New York Times story which appeared on June 12, 2016. It claimed that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange had told Britain’s ITV that he had the emails and hoped that they would harm Clinton’s campaign and that he planned to release them in conjunction with the Democratic Party Convention.
Assange made no such statement about harm to Clinton or timing in the ITV interview. On July 25, Anne Applebaum, she of the Integrity Initiative and the Center for European Policy Analysis, weighed in wearing her Washington Post“journalist” hat. She scolded people for being too interested in the content of the emails (namely Clinton campaign operatives openly conspiring to sabotage Bernie Sanders’ campaign and Clinton herself fawning all over Wall Street executives for big bucks). Applebaum instructed her readers to divert their gaze from such glaring true facts and to focus, instead, on the claim that it was the evil Ruskies who obtained this information. She cataloged her claims of Russian electoral interference in Eastern Europe in support of this argument.
The same day, Thomas Rid, one of the Dearlove network’s very own “security experts” weighed in from King’s College, Oxford, saying the evil Ruskies had crossed a “red line.” Steele’s dossier, also of course, immediately attributed responsibility for the DNC email publications to a conspiracy between the Russians and the Trump campaign in memos he produced and circulated at the same time. The Trump Tower entrapment operation also occurred in June 2016. It involved an elaborate operation in which the State Department issued an extremely unusual business visa to Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. Employees of Fusion GPS were directly involved in the meeting.
The State Department’s chief Russia intelligence “expert” Robert Otto tracked the entire process, working with Kyle Parker (the Congressional author of the Magnitsky Act), and, reportedly, Michael Weiss of the Henry Jackson Society, the Institute for Modern Russia, and the Daily Beast. The Trump Campaign was baited with alleged dirt about Clinton from Russian state sources in the email chain setting up the meeting. The meeting itself, however, was a bust. As a result, it was only made public amidst Russiagate investigations in 2017.
During the first week of July, Christopher Steele officially met with his FBI “handler” Michael Gaeta in London. The meeting was brokered by Victoria Nuland at the State Department.
Jonathan Winer, Steele’s longtime friend and John Kerry’s go-to aide at the State Department, was also on top of Steele’s memos and briefings, including Putin’s alleged compromise of Trump based on sexual entrapment. Winer is the inventor of the idea of the Magnitsky Act sanctions that have done much to completely poison US–Russian relations. Shortly after Steele met with Gaeta, a Wall Street Journal reporter texted Carter Page asking whether he had met with Igor Sechin, a Russian energy executive and Putin ally, to discuss “energy deals and the possibility of the U.S. government lifting sanctions.” This is straight out of Steele’s July 19 memo.
NBC’s discredited national security reporter, Brian Ross, interviewed Sergei Millian, having been directed to him by Fusion GPS’ Glenn Simpson as the source of Steele’s most salacious sexual allegations concerning Trump. By the end of July, the FBI had officially opened its unprecedented Cross-Fire Hurricane counter-intelligence investigation of the Trump Campaign. It focused on four targets: Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and George Papadopoulos. This investigation had obviously already been going on informally for months before.
Remember, John Brenna’s CIA task force, the State Department, and British intelligence had all been highly active for months. Reportedly, the FBI liaison to Brennan’s task force was Peter Strzok. But despite everything which had gone on before the FBI opened its official investigation, Strzok told his mistress, FBI attorney Lisa Page, that there was “still no there, there” concerning Trump and Russia.
Yet, the first stage of the British operation had succeeded.
There was now an open FBI investigation, with the preposterous Steele dossier providing the actual investigative backbone.
The FBI investigation provided a “news hook” and credibility for further stories pumping Steele’s wild and unsubstantiated claims. To understand the reach of this propaganda operation in the U.S., it is important to understand Steele’s American employer, FusionGPS. Bruce Ohr, the now demoted third man in the U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Division hierarchy, is married to Nellie Ohr, who worked for Fusion. Both Ohrs had a longstanding relationship with Christopher Steele and Glenn Simpson based on investigations of Russian organized crime dating back decades. Lisa Page, Andrew McCabe’s lawyer at the FBI and Peter Strzok’s mistress, had previously worked for Bruce Ohr for five years. Neil King, Jr., who works for Fusion, is married to Shailagh Murray, who was Barack Obama’s senior policy adviser at the White House, having previously worked for years for Vice-President Biden. Otherwise most of Fusion’s staff is composed of former reporters for major national newspapers who know how to feed tips and hot stories to their former friends or those they hire to put bylines on the propaganda ordered up by their clients.
A major client for Fusion’s products has always been law enforcement. It is a major drop point for feeding and amplifying stories planted by the intelligence community out to its network of journalists. It has had a “professional relationship” with Christopher Steele’s Orbis Business Intelligence in Britain since 2010, and perhaps other entities associated with Sir Richard Dearlove.
NO SUMMER VACATION IN CAMPAIGN SEASON
In late August 2016, John Brennan briefed the Gang of Eight—the Speaker and Minority leaders of the House and Senate, and the heads of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees—about Steele’s reports, deliberately interrupting their summer vacations and Washington’s traditional dead month, with urgent calls on secure telephone lines. According to Brennan’s testimony to Congress, he did this with the explicit approval of President Obama. Brennan, of course, never did anything in this operation without discussing it with Obama. It was obvious that Brennan’s briefing would leak, and it did.
On August 27, Senator Harry Reid published a letter he wrote to FBI Director Comey noting that the FBI was investigating allegations of Trump/Russia collusion, featuring Steele’s allegations about Carter Page among others, and demanding that the FBI tell the American people about their investigation. Reid says that Brennan blessed this letter. Evidence available to the Republican-led House of Representatives committees investigating Russiagate indicates that top officials at the FBI were also aware that the Reid letter was orchestrated.
In all probability, it had two purposes: to convince saner FBI and DOJ officials to drink the British Kool-Aid, while, at the same time, circulating the “Trump is a Manchurian candidate” meme to the public in order to directly impact the upcoming November election.
In September, Steele himself briefed reporters from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo News, Mother Jones, CNN, and the New Yorker. Nonetheless, no one immediately saluted this unsubstantiated crap except for Yahoo News’ Michael Isikoff, Glenn Simpson’s long-time friend, who was already enmeshed in the Manafort “investigation.” In September, Steele met personally with Jonathan Winer, providing with a detailed briefing and copies of his memos. Winer, in turn, gave Steele copies of memos written by Clinton operative and dirty trickster Cody Shearer designed to corroborate Steele’s crazy claims about Trump’s sexual conduct.
On September 23, Michael Isikoff published what he called a bombshell story about Carter Page and the Russians, which went on to recite, verbatim, Steele’s allegations about Carter Page. Isikoff attributed this to “a well-placed Western intelligence source.” The Clinton campaign jumped all over Isikoff’s story, spinning its own opposition research as a government investigation into Donald Trump.
Jennifer Palmieri, the campaign’s communications director, took to television the next day to tout the Isikoff story and cite “U.S. intelligence officials” concerns about Trump and Russia only six weeks prior to the election. The FBI used Isikoff’s article as corroborative of Christopher Steele’s claims about Page in a FISA application for a surveillance warrant targeting Page. It never informed the Court that Isikoff’s article was not corroborative of Steele; it was Steele himself speaking to Isikoff. It never informed the court that Steele had been hired to produce this crap by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Also, in October 2016, Steele visited the State Department conducting a full-scale briefing for officials and a select group of journalists there. He provided handouts to the audience. In October, David Corn published another iteration of the “Trump is Putin’s puppet” meme in Mother Jones. Now, however, the obvious tack Steele was taking of using the FBI to buttress his propaganda campaign became too much for even some in the FBI. He was fired, but continued his relationship with top levels of the FBI by continuing to brief then Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, who, in turn, continued to brief the FBI.
The FISA warrant turned Page into a walking microphone into Trump campaign circles. FISA warrants allow agencies to surveil not only an immediate target, but anyone the target contacts and anyone those people then contact—so-called “two-hop” surveillance. It is pretty obvious that this counterintelligence investigation was also employing surveillance under Executive Order 12333, which is far more pervasive than that allowed by FISA. The FBI had had Page on its radar for years, based on his cooperation in a previous espionage investigation in which he was the Russian target and based upon his continuing loud defense of the Russian state. They had interviewed him again in March, prior to his association with the Trump campaign. Since he has never been charged with anything, it is likely the FBI and Steele considered Page a useful tool, based on his prior involvements, around which to build the fake Trump/Russia collusion charges.
TRUMP GETS ELECTED: NOW IT’S WAR
In the run-up to Trump’s inauguration, the White House, Christopher Steele, the Clinton Campaign and the State Department/National Endowment for Democracy networks which had been part of the initial round of Russiagate, kicked into high gear. We know that Samantha Power, Cass Sunstein’s wife, went into a mad round of unmasking classified intercepts of Trump transition activities at the White House for purposes of attacking the incoming President.
We know that Obama signed new regulations, allowing for widespread distribution of classified intelligence intercepts throughout the government, knowing that it would result in massive and untraceable leaks. This mass distribution included intercepts made under E.O. 12333 and may very well be the source of many of the transcripts now being used by Robert Mueller’s team to trap and elicit pleas from those they have indicted.
We know that the Clinton campaign and Fusion GPS went into a full mobilization on the Trump/Russia collusion story hoping to sway the electoral college vote against Trump and portray Trump’s victory as the result of Russia tampering with votes. We know from remarks by the Integrity Initiative’s Evelyn Farkas on Morning Joe, that Farkas and others were dumping their accumulated manure on Trump and Russia, including info war “weaponization” of classified intercepts, into Congress. They claimed that their criminal abuse of classified information was justified, according to Farkas, in order to prevent a “coverup” by the incoming Trump Administration.
At the same time, Christopher Steele and Richard Dearlove were mapping their next moves. At the Halifax Security Forum in mid-November, Senator John McCain ran into Sir Andrew Wood. Some say McCain ran into Dearlove himself a few days earlier. Wood briefed McCain on Steele’s work, and McCain immediately dispatched his aide, David Kramer to London to meet with Steele and obtain the dossier. There is, however, substantial reason to view this widely publicized account of McCain and Kramer’s involvement as highly incomplete. Robert Otto, the State Department’s chief Russia intelligence guy had his email accounts leaked in 2017 as the result of a claimed hack by someone using the name “Johnnie Walker.” The posted hacked emails don’t just show Otto’s involvement in the Trump Tower meeting. They also show extensive correspondence with David Kramer, Andrew Wood, and a host of Chatham House, and British and Australian intelligence operatives about Trump and Russia as the operation against Trump evolved throughout 2016. Kramer was then leading McCain’s Institute for International Leadership. He is a former member of the infamous and disgraced Project for a New American Century, the chief propaganda group for war in the Middle East. He is also a long-time State Department/National Endowment for Democracy cold warrior who violently hates both Trump and Russia.
According to the court record in the Gubarev v. BuzzFeed lawsuit in the Southern District of Florida, on November 30, Kramer was tasked by McCain to provide the FBI and CIA with the dossier, after Kramer met with Steele in London and obtained the dossier, subsequently, from Glenn Simpson. In the next few days Kramer met with Victoria Nuland and Celeste Wallander, the Senior Director for Russian Affairs at Obama’s National Security Council. Both of them said that they were all in concerning Steele’s work and had been, and that the dossier was to be taken very, very seriously. In the meantime, on December 6, Christopher Steele wrote his final report, providing it to David Kramer, an unnamed senior British intelligence official, Celeste Wallander, Representative Adam Kinzinger (RIll) and House Speaker Paul Ryan’s Chief of Staff, John Burks. Then on December 29, David Kramer leaked the entirety of the dodgy dossier to BuzzFeed reporter Ken Bensinger.
On January 5, 2017, the Obama Administration put forth its phony “assessment” that Russia had intervened in the American election to defeat Hillary Clinton and elect Donald Trump. A two-page classified summary of the Steele dossier was attached to that piece of nonsense and was used to reach the conclusions in this “Intelligence Community Assessment.” James Comey briefed Donald Trump on the contents of the dossier at a meeting at Trump Tower on January 6, 2017, confronting the President-elect with claims of sexual compromise by the Russians in what Comey actually referred to as his “J. Edgar Hoover” moment.
Comey never told the President that his campaign had been, in fact, the target of this filthy operation. Based on leaks from James Clapper, CNN published reports about the dossier and compromise of the incoming President of the United States on January 10, followed by BuzzFeed’s publication of the entire Steele dossier the next day.
As a result, the incoming President of the United States was successfully portrayed to the American public and the world, as a sexually compromised and blackmailed puppet of Vladimir Putin.
In his Congressional testimony, James Comey makes clear that he followed that up by staging a series of encounters with Trump, planned by what he called a “murder board” of his close circle at the upper levels of the FBI, each of them designed to entrap the President. He recorded each of these encounters in “contemporaneous” memoranda, which for evidentiary purposes, have an advantage over wiretaps. Such memos are considered to be high grade evidence. And, they are much easier to manipulate than wires. According to Comey, these classified and unclassified pieces of fiction were leaked to the press, after Comey was fired, to provide the justification for Robert Mueller’s appointment as Special Prosecutor.
A FINAL NOTE ON STEELE’S FAKERY
Lee Smith in his January 2 Federalist article, contends, with documentary evidence, that much of the dossier is simply drawn from public source postings, some of which are foreign language publications, with embellishments by Steele to change actual events into nefarious crimes. In other words, there are no real Russian sources. Others have made a similar comment about the dossier’s most salacious and incendiary allegation, that Trump cavorted with prostitutes in Moscow who urinated on the bed in which the Obamas had slept. This seems to be simply a rejiggered revival of 2009 British propaganda stories about former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi spending the night with a prostitute in a hotel room in Rome and “defiling” a bed in which Putin had slept. No one ever said that the British are original. The fact that anyone bought this junk, ever, is a testament to how very, very stupid and decadent many have become.