Michael Gaeta and FBI Counterintelligence -- Part 5

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

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In his Dossier Report #80, which Christopher Steele wrote in June 20, 2016, he 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 2011.

However, in his Report #97, which Steele wrote at the end of July 30, 2016, that "an intelligence exchange had been running" between the Trump team and the Kremlin for at least eight years -- since 2008

Therefore, between June 20 (Report #80) and July 30 (Report #97), Steele indicated that he changed the story's starting point from 2011 to 2008.

The Dossier reports that are publicly available do not provide information about the alleged "cultivation" and "intelligent exchange" that happened in the several years before 2016. Therefore, I speculate that such information was provided in Dossier reports -- for example, reports 81-93 -- that were given to FBI Counterintelligence but have not become available to the public.

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Some insight about such information can be found in the book Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, written by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, who were given special access to the Dossier.

The book describes a "treasure trove of damning material" about Paul Manafort (pages 99 - 100, emphasis added).

.... soon enough, a treasure trove of damning material was uncovered.

Some of the clues were hiding in plain sight. In 2011, Yulia Tymoshenko -- the Ukrainian politician whom [Viktor] Yanukovych had defeated in the 2010 election -- had filed a civil lawsuit in the federal court in New York that accused her political opponents of having operated in a U.S.-based racketeering enterprise. The suit alleged that Manafort had colluded with Dmytro Firtash, a Putin-connected Ukrainian natural gas magnate and a Yanukovych ally, to launder hundreds of millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains from Ukrainian gas interests through a "labyrinth" of companies in Panama, Cyprus, and Europe -- and into real estate ventures in New York City. ....

[In 2008], according to documents filed in the lawsuit by Tymoshenko's lawyers, Manfort had met with Firtash in Kiev to discuss a proposal for the oligarch to invest $100 million in a global real estate fund. As part of the arrangement, Firtash would pay $1.5 million in management fees to a firm owned by Manafort and a real estate executive named Brad Zackson, who had once been a manager for the Trump Organization under Fred Trump, Donald's father.

Since the lawsuit was filed in 2011, Steele became able to study and summarize this "treasure trove of damning material" in that year. Then, when wrote his Dossier Report #80 on June 2016 and attached his 13 old reports (81 - 93) he reviewed the dates of those old reports that he had written, and he reflexively indicated in Report 80 that the story had begun in 2011 -- five years previously.

About five weeks later, as Steele was writing his report #97, he realized that -- although he had begun to write those old reports in mid-2011 -- the information in the "treasure trove" dated back into the year 2008. Therefore, when Steele wrote his Report #97 on July 30, 2016, he changed the "five years" (i.e. 2011) to "eight years" (i.e. 2008).

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In the above passage, Isikoff and Corn point out that Fred Trump (Donald's father) had employed Brad Zackson as a manager for a while. For another while, Zackson was a partner of Paul Manafort in a real-estate business, which at some point in time offered to manage a real-estate fund that was being proposed by Dmytro Firtash, a businessman based in Ukraine. Firtash had a lot of money to invest because he allegedly had laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains from Ukrainian gas interests.

The apparent connection between Dmytro Firtash and Fred Trump is roughly this:

* Firtash obtained lots of ill-gotten gains from Ukrainian gas interests

* Firtash colluded with Paul Manafort

* Firtash considered investing in a proposed real-estate fund

* Firtash considered hiring a real-estate firm to manage that fund

* Paul Manafort was a partner of Brad Zackson in a real-estate firm

* Firtash considered hiring the Manafort-Zackson firm to manage the proposed fund

* Zackson once had worked as a manager in a company owned by Fred Trump.

As far as I have found out, Firtash never invested in the proposed fund, which never hired the Manafort-Zackson firm. None of the talk about investing in the proposed fund and about hiring the firm ever was put into action. However, some such talk was mentioned in papers submitted by Yulia Tymoshenko in New York in 2011.

Tymoshenko had been the Prime Minister of Ukraine through March 4, 2010. She lost that position because she lost the Ukrainian election that had taken place on February 7, 2010. She filed a class-action lawsuit against Firtash in New York on April 26, 2011.

.... According to court papers filed on Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Yulia Tymoshenko, who served as prime minster in 2005 and again from 2007 to 2010, brought suit against businessman Dmytro Firtash and Swiss-based RosUkrEnergo AG (RUE) — a company jointly owned by Russian energy giant Gazprom (GAZP.MM) and Firtash.

Tymoshenko accused the defendants, who include 100 unnamed “John Doe” individuals and companies, of defrauding Ukraine’s citizenry by manipulating an arbitration court ruling, “undermining the rule of law in Ukraine.” ....

The suit, a class action on behalf of the Ukrainian people, was filed in U.S. federal court under the Alien Torts Statute, which accommodates actions in U.S. courts to uphold international law, as well as the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Practices Act (RICO).

It's likely that Steele studied the lawsuit document and all publicly available supporting documents. Further, it's likely that Steele studied the "100 unnamed 'John Doe' individuals" and was able to identify some of them -- for example, Manafort and Zackson. Furthermore, it's likely that Steele wrote reports summarizing his findings.

I doubt that in 2011 Steele was significantly interested in the relationship of Brad Zackson to Fred Trump. I suppose that only in later years did Steele develop his interest in the Trumps.

In any case, I speculate that Steele' Dossier reports 81-93 included a few reports that he had written during 2011-2015, summarizing his findings from the Tymoshenko lawsuit and its "100 unnamed 'John Doe' individuals. Perhaps one of those reports pointed out the relationship between Brad Zackson and Fred Trump.

Perhaps Steele wrote these old reports to give the impression that he had collected the information from his own networks of informants in Russia and Ukraine. In other words, Steele did not reveal in these old reports that he simply collected the information from lawsuit documents filed in New York.

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Continued in Part 6