Michael Gaeta and FBI Counterintelligence -- Part 4

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

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According to the Horowitz report, Michael Gaeta, an FBI official stationed at the USA's Rome Embassy, began receiving Christopher Steele's Dossier reports (Report #80) on July 5, 2016, but did not manage to deliver any of them to the FBI Headquarters in Washington DC until September 19, 2016. Gaeta sat on the Dossier reports in Rome until July 28, when he sent them to the FBI's New York Field Office. In that office, the reports were kept within the Chief Division Counsel, where nothing was done with them. Finally, on September 19, Gaeta e-mailed six Dossier reports to Joe Pientka (Supervisory Special Agent 1), who managed the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigation.

Steele testified to a British judge that he gave several Dossier reports to several FBI officials in his London office on July 5, 2016 (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.

In this series of blog articles, I speculate that Gaeta was working secretly and directly for Bill Priestap, the Director of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division.

Click on the image to enlarge it.

I think that Priestap accompanied Gaeta to the meeting with Steele in London on July 5, 2016, and that Priestap received all the Dossier reports that Gaeta received. On instructions from Priestap, Gaeta then pretended that he was unable for many weeks to send any Dossier reports to FBI Headquarters.

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According to the book Russian Roulette, written by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Dossier Report #80 was being discussed within the FBI's Counterintelligence Division within the week of the meeting in Steele's London office, which had taken place on Tuesday, July 5 (pages 159 - 160).

When the first Steele memo [Report #80] arrived in FBI headquarters that same week [July 3-9, 2016], it got the attention of the Bureau's counterintelligence division.

The officials there knew about Steel's track record providing reports that were helpful in the FIFA soccer corruption investigation. They also knew from the outset that Steele had an agenda and that he was likely working for the Democrats. But this was not a deal breaker, according to one senior official who reviewed Steele's report at the time. FBI agents were used to receiving intelligence from informants with agendas and grudges. ....

"It was a concerning document," recalled the senior official. "Of course, we took it seriously."

Although Dossier Report #80, does not mention Carter Page, the Counterintelligence Division's senior official told Isikoff and Corn that the Counterintelligence Division immediately focused on Page's presence in Moscow on Friday and Saturday, July 7 and 8 (pages 160 - 163):

Within days [of the arrival of Steele's information in the Counterintelligence Division], a rambling and boring lecture in Moscow ratcheted up the Bureau's concerns.  ....

On July 7, Page appeared onstage in an auditorium of the New Economic School in Moscow to deliver a talk on U.S. -Russian economic relations. ....

Russian officials could be forgiven for believing that Page was bearing a message from Trump. After all, Trump had repeatedly spoken about improving relations with Russia and getting along with Putin.

And Page was known as something of a Putin fan. In a 2014 blog post, after Obama had added Igor Sechin, the chairman of Rosneft, the state-owned oil company, and a close Putin ally, to the sanctions list, Page had declared, "Sechin has done more to advance U.S. Russian relations than any individual in or out of government from either side of the Atlantic over the past decade." ...

Now, before the two hundred or so college students who had gathered in the auditorium at the school, Page, reading off his laptop in a painful monotone, described U.S.-Russian economic interactions.  ....

At least one influential Russian openly embraced Page's appearance in Moscow. Alexander Dugin, a Kremlin-connected political scientist known as the "mad philosopher" -- who had urged Russians to "kill, kill, kill" Ukrainians -- promoted Page's lecture. A big fan of Trump and a hard-core ultranationalist, Dugin had produced a series of videos hailing the Republican candidate. Now he praised Page for promoting "an alternative for the U,.S.," and on Tsargrad, a TV station he founded, he broadcast Page's lecture live.

While in Moscow, Page declined to tell a Reuters reporter whether he would be meeting with anyone from the Russian government. ....

Page's speech may have been a snooze. But his time in Moscow caught the attention of the FBI. ... His trip to Moscow in July 2016 rang a bell within the Bureau, raising concerns about whether one of Trump's foreign policy advisers was being manipulated by the Kremlin.

It seems that the Counterintelligence Division's senior official informed Isikoff and Corn that the Division was collecting information about Page's Moscow visit while the visit was happening. A Reuters reporter was tasked to ask Page whether he would be meeting anyone from the Russian government. The live broadcast of Page's speech was recorded by a US Counterintelligence official based in the US Embassy in Moscow.

According to the Horowitz report (page 59), the FBI did not initiate a counter-intelligence investigation of Page until August 10, 2016 -- more than a month after his Moscow speech on July 7 "ratcheted up the Bureau's concerns".

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Keep in mind the following facts:

* Steele testified to a British judge that on July 6, 2016, he "met FBI officials ... in London [and] provided ... the reports".

* Within that same week, Dossier Report #80 arrived in the FBI Counterintelligence Division, where it "was a concerning document".

* Steele wrote Report #80 on June 20, 2016, and wrote Report #94 on July 19, 2016.

* The only Dossier report that is numbered within that interval and that is publicly available is Report #86, which Steele had written on July 26, 2015 (fifteen).

Based on those facts, I speculate Steele had written reports 81-93 before 2016. In Steele's London office on July 5, 2016, Steele gave to Gaeta and Priestap one report (#80) that he had written on June 20, and also 13 reports (81-93) he had written before 2016.

When Priestap returned to FBI Headquarters, he provided only Report #80 to his his Counterintelligence subordinates and kept the other 13 reports secret from his subordinates. Furthermore, Priestap instructed Gaeta to keep the 13 old reports secret and to pretend that it was practically impossible to send any Dossier reports from Rome to FBI Headquarters.

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The 13 old reports, which Priestap and Gaeta kept extraordinarily secret, included information that Steele had written about Page before 2016. For example, Steele had copied statements from Page's blog in 2014.

Priestap feared that his possession of Steele's old reports might cause trouble for Priestap himself.

Report #80 remarked that the Russian regime had been cultivating Trump for five years. From that remark, we can deduce that Steele's reports 81-93 included information about Trump and his associates and activities since mid-2011.

However, Steele later would remark in Report #97, which he wrote on July 30, 2016, that "an intelligence exchange had been running" between the Trump team and the Kremlin for at least eight years. Therefore, between June 20 (Report #80) and July 30 (Report #97), Steele indicated that he found new information about Trump's activities that had happened during the three-year period from mid-2008 to mid-2011.

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Continued in Part 5