Who wrote the dossier?

We now know that …

1. Mark Elias (counsel to both the Clinton campaign and to the DNC and a partner at Perkins Coie law firm) hired Fusion GPS to do opposition research on Donald Trump;
2. Fusion GPS was paid 50/50 by the campaign and the DNC for this service; and
3. Fusion GPS produced the so-called Trump-Russia (aka, Steele) dossier that was used by corrupt anti-Trumpers at the DOJ and FBI to try to sabotage Trump’s campaign and then, after he won, to try to take down his presidency.

All along, we’ve been told that a retired British spy, Christopher Steele, compiled the dossier from sources he had in Russia.

We now know that is not true. We also know that the sources cited, though real Russians, were just put in the dossier to lend legitimacy to the contents. They say they had nothing to do with any of it.

So who did write the dossier? And where did the information come from?

According to an article by Lee Smith that was published in Tablet on December 20, 2017, the true authors were Mary Jacoby and Glenn Simpson.

Who commissioned the Trump-Russia dossier?

Photo: John Podesta and Hillary Clinton

In October of 2017, both the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) claimed to be unaware that their law firm, Perkins Coie, was connected to the Trump-Russia dossier.

One of the recently declassified House Intelligence Committee transcripts shows that was not true.

On December 4, 2017, John Podesta, who had been the head of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, testified under oath before the House Intelligence Committee. During the interview, Podesta said:

1. Mark Elias made the decision to hire Fusion GPS. Elias was counsel to both the Clinton campaign and to the DNC. He is a partner at Perkins Coie.
2. The Clinton campaign’s manager, Robby Mook, would have been the one who gave Elias the authority to do so.
3. The Fusion GPS’ bill was split 50/50 between the campaign and the DNC.

This is critical information, because the Trump-Steele dossier was the central and perhaps sole excuse that corrupt individuals in the FBI used to justify their multiple FISA warrants to spy (allegedly) on Carter Page.

In all likelihood, the point of these warrants was to allow Obama’s and Hillary’s people to spy first on the Trump campaign and later on the Trump White House.

Bruce and Nellie Ohr were in it up to their necks

At one time, DOJ attorney Bruce Ohr denied there was a conflict of interest between his Trump-Russia work at the DOJ and his wife Nellie’s Trump-Russia work at Fusion GPS.

But the recently released transcript of FBI agent Michael Gaeta’s testimony before the House Intelligence Committee tells a different story.

Fusion GPS is the opposition research company that produced the now-discredited Trump-Russia dossier that was attributed to Christopher Steele and allegedly based on Russian sources, but which is a total work of fiction that may have been authored by Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson and his wife, Mary Jacoby.

Michael Gaeta, Bruce Ohr, and Christopher Steele were all Russia experts who had known each other since 2010.

• Michael Gaeta was head of the FBI’s Eurasian Organized Crime unit, which specializes in investigating criminal groups from Georgia, Russia, and Ukraine.
• Bruce Ohr has spent most of his career at the DOJ overseeing gang and racketeering-related prosecutions, including Russian organized crime.
• Christopher Steele ran the Russia desk at MI6 headquarters in London between 2006 and 2009. In 2009, he co-founded Orbis Business Intelligence, a London-based private intelligence firm.

ObamaGate: It’s on!

“RussiaGate is now a complete dead letter — but ObamaGate is taking its place. Just how far did the then-president go to cripple his successor?” – New York Post editorial

It’s easy for me to understand why Obama would go to any lengths to destroy the Trump presidency. He was and is a thin-skinned narcissist who never, ever forgets a grudge.

I learned this way back when I first heard this story. On October 21, 2006, New York Times’ Maureen Dowd wrote a column called “Obama’s Project Runway.”

In it she says he logs “a lot of time at the gym” calls him an “intellectually nimble, preternaturally articulate smarty-pants.” Later, she says he “combines the political ability — alien to the Bush administration — to see something from your opponent’s point of view with the cool detachment of a J.F.K.”

But in the third-last paragraph, she mentions that his “ears stick out”, a trait she calls “intriguingly imperfect.”

On Sunday, December 10, 2006, roughly 50 days after the article appeared, then-Senator Barack Obama sought out Dowd after a press conference and “chided her — in a kidding way” for having written that his “ears stick out.”

“I just want to put you on notice,” he reportedly told her. “I was teased relentlessly when I was a kid about my big ears.”

He was a U.S. Senator for crying out loud. One might think he’d have had too much to think about to remember and be bothered about such a stupid thing. One even might think that anyone with such thin skin should not be in politics.

One would be wrong on the first count, but 100% right on the second.

Bits & Bytes

FLYNN: [5:35] – Acting Director of National Intelligence, Richard Grenell, has declassified a list of Obama administration officials who were involved in illegally “unmasking” former national security adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn in his communications with the former Russian ambassador during President Donald Trump’s transition period.

Attorney General William Barr is now in possession of the list, and has the authority to make the document public.