Michael Gaeta and FBI Counterintelligence -- Part 3

Part 1, Part 2

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The Horowitz report makes the impression that Rome-based FBI official Michael Gaeta received only one Dossier report (#80) from Christopher Steele in London on July 5, 2016 (page 95). However, Steele himself testified to a British judge that Gaeta, accompanied by one or more other FBI officials, received more than one report (paragraph 51(1); emphasis added):

On 5 July 2016, Mr Steele and Mr Burrows [Steele's business partner] met FBI officials at Orbis’ offices in London. Mr Steele provided the FBI with the reports which Orbis [i.e. Steele] had prepared by that point.

The Horowitz report indicates further that Gaeta received the second Dossier report (#94), attached to an -e-mail, on July 19, 2016 (page 98).

The Horowitz does not explain the numbering gap -- Report 81 through Report 93. The only Dossier report that is numbered in that gap and that is available to the public is Report 86, which is dated July 26, 2015 (fifteen).

Report 80 says that the Russian regime had been cultivating Donald Trump -- in order to encourage splits and divisions in the western alliance -- for five years, since 2011. However, none of the publicly available Dossier reports provide information about that cultivation during those five years. Therefore, I speculate that such information was provided in Reports 81-93, which Steele had written before 2016. That is why Report 86 is a report that Steele had written in the year 2015.

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In this series of blog articles, I speculate that Gaeta worked directly for the FBI's Counterintelligence Division. One or more officials from that Division accompanied Gaeta to his meeting with Steele on July 5, 2016, and received copies of all the Dossier reports that Gaeta himself received that day.

Gaeta's position working for the Legal Attaché (Legat) in the USA's Rome Embassy was a cover. When Gaeta returned to Rome from his London meeting, he deceived the Legat about the number of Dossier reports that he had received and about his effort to send Dossier reports to the FBI Counterintelligence Division, which itself already had received Steele's reports at the London meeting.

When FBI Inspector General Horowitz and his IG team investigated this matter, Gaeta and  other FBI officials told nonsensical stories about a months-long delay in delivering the Dossier reports to the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane team. Steele began delivering Dossier reports to Gaeta on July 5, 2016, but no such reports were delivered to the Crossfire Hurricane team at FBI Headquarters until September 19, 2016 -- and even at that late, only six reports were delivered.

Of course, whenever Gaeta received Dossier reports from Steele, Gaeta sent them immediately to the FBI's Counterintelligence Division. Furthermore, at least one Division official accompanied Gaeta to the London meeting on July 5 and received the first batch of Dossier reports directly from Steele.

 I expect that John Durham will indict several FBI officials for deceiving the IG investigation about the delivery of Dossier reports to FBI Headquarters.

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The Horowitz report provides (page 81) the following organizational chart of relevant FBI officials. Click on the image to enlarge it.

Click on the image to enlarge it

I think that Gaeta sent all the Dossier reports immediately to Assistant Director Bill Priestap, who concealed most of them from his subordinates. Even Priestap's immediate subordinate Peter Strzok was kept ignorant of much information.

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Only a few of the Dossier reports that the Counterintelligence Division received have become available to the public. Those reports that have become available were given by Steele to people outside of the FBI, and those particular reports were collected by the Buzzfeed organization, which made them available. The FBI itself never has made any Dossier reports available to the public.

Although Gaeta fired Steele at the end of October 2016, the FBI surely received all the Dossier reports that Steele wrote after he was fired. Nelly Ohr -- an employee of Fusion GSI, which paid Steele to write the Dossier -- gave all the Dossier reports to her husband Bruce Ohr -- a top official in the US Justice Department -- who gave them all to the FBI.

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The publicly available Dossier reports range in number from Report 80 to 166. This range indicates that FBI's Counterintelligence Division obtained at least 87 Dossier reports. That total number would be even higher if some Dossier reports are numbered before 80 or after 166.

Of the 87 or more Dossier reports, only the following 16 have become available to the public:

1) Report 80, dated June 20, 2016

2) Report 86, dated July 26, 2015 (twenty-fifteen)

3) Report 94, dated July 19, 2016

4) Report 95, undated, but apparently written in late-July 2016

5) Report 97, dated July 30, 2016

6) Report 100, dated August 5, 2016

7) Report 101, dated August 10, 2016

8) Report 102, dated August 10, 2016

9) Report 105, dated August 22, 2016

10) Report 111, dated September 14, 2016

11) Report 112, dated September 14, 2016

12) Report 113, dated September 14, 2016

13) Report 130, dated October 12, 2016

14) Report 134, dated October 18, 2016

14) Report 135, dated October 19, 2016

15) Report 136, dated October 20, 2016

16) Report 166, dated December 13, 2016

There are three major gaps in the above numbers:

1) Reports 81 through 93 (only #86, written in 2015, is available)

2) Reports 114 through 129

3) Reports 137 through 165

I think that the first gap (81-93) comprises reports that Steele wrote before 2016 and that support his assertion that the Russian regime began cultivating Trump in 2011.

I think that the second gap (114-129) comprises mostly other reports that Steele wrote before 2016 and that he deemed to be useful to the FBI following his meeting with FBI officials in Rome on October 3.

I think that the third gap (137-165) comprises mostly reports that Steel wrote after he was fired by Gaeta at the end of October 2016.

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Only a small number of the 87 or more Dossier reports are based on information that Steele received from his so-called primary subsource, Igor Danchenko.

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The essence of Steele's pre-2016 reports is provided by the book Russian Roulette: The Inside Stroy of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, written by Michael Isikoff and David Corn and published in 2018.

Book Cover of Russian Roulette

Isikoff met Steele in September 2016, at a meeting that was arranged by Glenn Simpson, the owner of the Fusion GPS company, which had hired Steele to write the Dossier. Isikoff, writing about himself in the third person, describes the meeting (page 232-233):

It was the first time Isikoff met Steele, and the journalist [Isikoff] was impressed by his [Steele's] credentials. Steele explained who he was -- a former MI6 spy who had served in Moscow. Wearing a starched white shirt, he was grave and all business. He was not there for small talk.

Emphasizing that he believed what he had discovered was truly disturbing, Steel laid out his story about Carter Page and his trip to Moscow. ....

Steele wouldn't say anything about his sources. That was strictly confidential. After all, this was Russia -- where sources could be shot or poisoned for talking about such matters.

[....]

There were strict ground rules for this meeting. It was on background. That meant Steele could not be quoted by name or referred to as an ex-MI6 officer. He was to be described as a Western "intelligence source" -- which was true, since he had been a steady source of intelligence for the FBI. ....

When he [Isikoff] got back to the office, Isikoff called Jonathan Winer at the State Department; he [Isikoff] had known Winer for years. Simpson had told him Winer could vouch for Steele.

Although Isikoff does not say so in his book, Steele did two activities for his paying clients:

1) collected derogatory information

2) distributed the derogatory information.

Steele himself did not always do the second activity. Rather, Steele used associates like Winer to distribute much of the information. For example, Steele himself did not give any Dossier reports to Isikoff. Rather, Steele would tell a journalist to go meet with Winer, who then would "vouch" for Steele. Then Winer provided to that journalist Dossier reports -- or perhaps summaries of the reports.

The book Russian Roulette indicates that, for years, Steele had been giving intelligence reports to Winer with the intention that Winer would distribute them (page 144):

In the spring of 2015, Steele, retained by a private business client, was producing reports on the Ukrainian crisis. He thought they might be of interest to Washington and reached out to Jonathan Winer, a senior official at Foggy Bottom [the US State Department] ....

Winer notified [State Department official] Victoria Nuland that he had a source with good contacts in Russia and Ukraine. Would she be interested? Yes, she said, and after reviewing a few of Steele's reports, she told Wine to "keep them coming". But Nuland, concerned that the material could be intercepted by Russian hackers, asked Winer to place them into a secure State Department classified computer system before forwarding them to her.

Between May 214 and February 2015, Steele sent Nuland 120 Orbis [Steele] reports about political and diplomatic developments in Russia and Ukraine.

Journalist Eric Felten tells how Steele continued to distribute his intelligence reports through Winer in 2016:

As Winer tells it, he and Steele were old pals. They “met and became friends” in 2009, when both were in the business of selling “business intelligence,” much of it involving Russia. Winer went back to work at State in 2013, after his old Capitol Hill boss, John Kerry, had become secretary of State.

But he didn’t lose track of his friend Steele — not at all. He shared, and shared, and shared Steele’s corporate intelligence work with the State Department’s Russia desk. “Over the next two years, I shared more than 100 of Steele’s reports with the Russia experts at the State Department, who continued to find them useful.” ....

Come the summer of 2016, Steele’s prime client was the campaign of Hillary Clinton, by way of the hired-guns at Fusion GPS, for whom he was assembling a grab bag of Trump tales from some sort of Russian sources. Come the fall Steele was spreading dossier info to various news organizations, the FBI, and the State Department. “In September 2016, Steele and I [Winer] met in Washington and discussed the information now known as the ‘dossier.’” ....

“I was allowed to review, but not to keep, a copy of these reports to enable me to alert the State Department,” Winer writes. “I prepared a two-page summary and shared it with Nuland.” ... To hear Winer tell it, when he gave her his memo, Nuland was all for the State Department doing something about it: She “indicated that, like me, she felt that the secretary of State needed to be made aware of this material.”

When Steele told Isikoff to contact Winer right after the Steele-Isikoff meeting, Steele surely expected Winer to begin supplying Dossier reports and summaries to Isikoff. Therefore, Isikoff has become well informed about the Dossier -- including about reports that have not become available to the public.

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Isikoff's co-author Corn tells about how he too has become well informed about the Dossier. Corn too tells about himself (pages 268 - 271) in the third person.

That weekend [October 29-30, 2016], Corn checked in with Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS. He [Corn] had known Simpson for years -- as a colleague, a social acquaintance, and an occasional source -- and he [Corn] wsa award that Simpson was doing opposition research on Trump, including his links to Russia. He asked if Simpson had any last-minute leads that warranted independent investigation.

Let's meet today, Simpson told him. ...

Corn and Simpson met at a Le Pain Quotidien [restaurant] in Dupont Circle [in Washington DC]. "I got some crazy shit," Simpson told the reporter [Corn]. He then recounted the story of Steele and his memos. ...

"Let me see the memos," Corn said.

Later that day, Corn was at Simpson's office, reading through all the Steele reports. ....

Corn arranged to speak via Skype with Steele, who was in London. .... After speaking with Steele, Corn ... contacted Jonathan Winer to ask him about Steele. ....

Thus, both co-authors -- Isikoff and Steele -- became well informed about the Dossier -- including about Dossier reports that never have become available to the public.

Therefore, their book Russian Roulette provides insights into Dossier reports that Steele provided to the FBI's Counterintelligence Division but that never have become available to the public.

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Continued in Part 4