The Target Dot on the Scanners' Long, Covered Table

This article elaborates my preceding articles, How long did the imaginary burst waterpipe delay the ballot-counting? and The Scanners' Long, Covered Table.

This new articles' analysis uses Poliitikot's YouTube video titled NEW VIDEO EVIDENCE! - Georgia election hearing II part 1.

You can enlarge the below screen-shots by clicking on them.

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If you go to 26:45 on the YouTube video, you will see the situation at 08:21 a.m. on the morning of Election Day, November 3. Watch the upper-right quadrant.

Shaye Moss, the Black woman with blonde braids, pulls a long, black table from the quadrant's lower-left corner and then pushes the table into a special place. She pushes from one end of the table. At the opposite end from Moss is a round, white dot. In the middle of the white dot is a black crosshairs.

Moss pushes the end of her table to the end of another long table. The two tables are placed end-to-end, essentially forming one doubly-long, aligned table. The white dot is only on Moss's table, but the dot can be seen simultaneously in the upper-two quadrants at 27:09 of the video (at 08:22 a.m. on November 3).

The two tables can be seen in a composite image made by Yaacov Apelbaum.

I speculate that the dot was affixed onto the table in order to place the table in optimal view of the camera. The dot was supposed to be above a particular spot on the floor and to be visible at the lower edge of the video's upper-right quadrant. .  

The table was supposed to be the most easily observed object in the entire video. If any questions ever arose about the scanners' unobserved work late on Election Night, then their work could be observed afterwards on the video. The workers would clearly be seen putting their un-scanned ballots under the table at 10:30. Then the workers would be seen taking the ballots back out from under the table at 11 p.m. in order to scan them in the middle of the night. 

Watching the video would debunk suspicions that the workers put any fraudulent ballots into the process. 

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I speculate that the deception included the following key elements:

* Between 6 and 8 a.m., an imaginary flowing-water incident was concocted.

* Shortly before 8:30, the two long tables -- especially the scanners' table -- were placed so that they were prominently visible in the cameras' views.   

* Sometime during the morning or day, the camera was turned off for one minute, while four boxes of fraudulent ballots were placed under the table.

* In the early evening, journalists were told that the morning's flowing-water incident had delayed the vote-counting by at least two hours. 

* At 10 p.m. everyone was told that counting would be suspended from 10:30 p.m. until 8:30 a.m. 

* A few minutes before 10:30, the scanners packed up their un-scanned ballots into four boxes and put the boxes under their table. 

* While everyone else left right after 10:30 p.m., the scanners loitered until 11 p.m.

* At 11 p.m. the scanners went to their table and pulled the four boxes of fraudulent boxes from under the table. 

* The scanners scanned the four boxes of fraudulent boxes until 1 a.m. 

* Shortly before 1 a.m., the scanners were warned that Republican observers were coming back to the room. The scanners quickly put everything away and departed a few minutes before the observers arrived.   

* During the following few days, the scanners gradually scanned all the ballots in the four boxes that remained under the table. 

If the entire video is watched now, the one minute when the four boxes of fraudulent ballots were placed under the table will not be noticed. The video will have to be examined to find the short interruption in the recording.

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Will Brad Raffensperger ever explain the water incident?

The Scanners' Long, Covered Table

This article elaborates my preceding article, How long did the imaginary burst waterpipe delay the ballot-counting?

This new articles' analysis uses Poliitikot's YouTube video titled NEW VIDEO EVIDENCE! - Georgia election hearing II part 1.

You can enlarge the below screen-shots by clicking on them.

=======

If you go to 27:09 on the YouTube video, you will see the situation at 08:22 a.m. on the morning of Election Day, November 3. After the below image of all four quadrants, we will look only at the two upper quadrants.

At the bottom of each of the upper quadrants is a long table covered by a black tablecloth. The table in the right quadrant has a white dot, which can be seen also in the left quadrant. If you orient yourself on that white dot, you will recognize that the two long tables are placed end-to-end.

I think that the workers in the left quadrant open the envelopes and removed the ballots. Those workers use the long table in the left quadrant.

The workers in the right quadrant run the ballots through scanning machines. Those workers use the long table in the right quadrant.

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If you go to 11:39 in the YouTube video, you will see the situation at 11:02 a.m. on November 3.

This situation is not remarkable. I show it only so that you understand the two upper quadrants.

The left quadrant shows workers opening envelopes and removing ballots. Their table holds three trays of ballots.

The right quadrant shows workers running ballots through scanners. Their table holds one tray of ballots.

Trays of Ballots

Now you can forget about this situation at 11:02 a.m. We will jump forward eleven hours. 

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If you watch the YouTube video from 13:30 to 16:00, you will see the situation from 9:56 to 10:25 p.m. on November 3. All the workers have been told to stop at 10:30 and to resume working at 8:30 a.m. Focus on the upper-right quadrant, where the scanning workers put ballot trays into black boxes, which they then begin put under their long table.

Unfortunately, the video then skips to 10:37, so we do not see about 12 minutes, when the boxes are placed underneath the table. 

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Now if you advance the YouTube video to 19:50, you will see the scanning workers begin to remove boxes from under the table at 11:02 p.m.

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I wonder whether the boxes that were placed under the table before 10:30 were the same boxes that were removed from under the table after 11 p.m.

The video's narrator says that she counted four boxes removed from under the table after 11:00 p.m. Many more than four boxes can fit under that table.

I speculate that four boxes of fraudulent ballots were brought into the room and placed under during the table during the day. Then after 11 p.m. those wrong four boxes -- not the correct four boxes -- were removed from under the table and scanned.

I can only speculate, because the entire video is not available to the public.

* I would like to watch the table during the entire day, to confirm that no boxes were placed under the table before 10:30 p.m.

* I would like to watch the table after 10:30 p.m., to confirm that all the boxes were placed and removed at precisely the same locations of the table.

If four boxes of fraudulent ballots were placed under the table sometime before 10:30 p.m., then the correct four boxes remained under the table from 10:30 until 1:00 a.m. What happened to the correct four boxes? I speculate that all the ballots in those four correct eventually were scanned too.

The plan was to work four hours and scan all eight boxes. Since the Republican observers came back at 1 a.m., though, only the four boxes of fraudulent boxes could be scanned that night.

in other words, no ballots were removed from the process, but four boxes of fraudulent boxes were added to the process.

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Continued:

The Target Dot on the Scanners' Long, Covered Table

Will Brad Raffensperger ever explain the water incident?

How long did the imaginary burst waterpipe delay the ballot-counting?

Journalist Ben Brasch tweeted on Election Day, Tuesday, November 3, at 7:06 p.m., that processing of absentee ballots at State Farm Arena in Atlanta, Georgia, was delayed by four hours because a waterpipe had burst in a room.

In contrast, the 11 Alive news company reported that the the processing was delayed by two hours. This report originally was dated November 3 at 8:26 p.m., but the report was updated on Wednesday, November 4 at 10:27 a.m.

If we assume that 11 Alive said two hours consistently in its original and updated articles, then Brasch was told at about 7:06 p.m. that the delay was four hours, but an 11 Alive journalist was told at about 8:26 p.m. that the delay was two hours.

The supposed pipe-burst had happened at about 6 a.m. and had been fixed by 8 a.m. -- roughly 12 hours before the two journalists were told these quite different estimates of the delay-time.

I speculate that the 11 Alive article originally, on Tuesday evening,  said that the delay was four hours. Then the article was updated on Wednesday morning to say that the estimated delay was two hours. (I am sure that someone can find out what the original article said, but I myself do not know how to do it.)

I speculate that the original plan was to count ballots for four hours during the middle of the night -- from 11 p.m. until 3 a.m.. Then. if that late counting ever were questioned, the explanation would be that a burst waterpipe had delayed the counting by four hours. Therefore, some ballot-counters had to work from from 11 p.m. until 3 a.m. The explanation would be supported by the journalists' reports that had been planted on the evening of Tuesday November 3.

As it turned out, however, some Republican observers who had left at 10:30 p.m. on Tuesday had decided to return to the counting location after midnight. At about 1 a.m., they arrived back at the location, where they learned that the vote-counters had departed just a few minutes earlier.

Because the Republican observers arrived at about 1 a.m., the late-night vote counting did not last four hours, after all. Rather, the late-night counting lasted only two hours.

Of course, the Republican observers were watched constantly after they left at 10:30 p.m. As soon as the Republican observers decided to return to the counting location, the late-night counters were warned to get out quickly. 

In order to fix the story that had been planted to the 11 Alive journalist, he was advised on Wednesday morning to update his article by replacing the expression four hours with the expression two hours.

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What does a delay of a few (e.g. two or four) hours mean? For example, the 11 Alive article includes the following two sentences:

Fulton County election officials said they are behind - possibly by about two hours - counting absentee ballots after a pipe burst near a room at State Farm Arena where some of those ballots were being held.

The remaining ballots would be counted by Friday or Saturday [November 6 or 7], though most could be done by Wednesday [November 5].

On Tuesday evening, it is absurd to say that there is a two-hour or four-hour delay in a project that might be finished on Friday or Saturday. The real delay is three or four DAYS -- from Tuesday until Friday or Saturday.

Why say absurdly on Tuesday evening that there is a two-hour or a four-hour delay? The only reason for saying so is to justify an intention to work two hours or four hours in the middle of the night, Tuesday-Wednesday.

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On Thursday, November 5, Frances Watson, the Chief Investigator of the Georgia Secretary of State, signed a so-called Declaration of Frances Watson. Her Declaration includes the following sentences:

On November 3, 2020, the Secretary of State's Office received complaints that staff of the Fulton County Board of Registrations and Elections directed clerks, public observers and media personnel to leave the State Farm Arena location where ballots were being tabulated due to a water leak at the State Farm Arena, but Fulton County staff continued to scan ballots at the State Farm Arena.

The Secretary of State's Office opened an investigation into the incident at the Sate Farm Arena. Our investigation revealed that the incident initially reported as a water leak in the evening on November 3rd was actually a urinal that had overflowed in the morning of November 3rd, and did not affect the counting of votes later in the evening.

Watson addressed her Declaration to a US District Court in a civil action, but several of her statements seem to be false. For example, she writes that her office received the relevant complaints on Election Day, November 3. Those complaints said that public observers were told on November 3 to leave the ballot-counting location due to a water leak. Watson does not identify any such complainants.  

The actual complaint was made on the morning of Wednesday, November 4. Republican observers complained that they had returned to the State Farm Arena location after 1 a.m. on Wednesday, November 4 and had learned that vote-counters had departed just a few minutes earlier. 

The Republican observers did not complain that they had been told to leave due to a water leak. Rather, they complained that they had been told falsely that all the vote-counting was suspended at 10:30 p.m. on Tuesday evening until 8:30 on Wednesday morning. 

Watson misinformed the US District Court about the day when she received the complaint and about the essence of the complaint.

What did Watson want the US District Court to misunderstand?

The US District Court was misled by Watson to think wrongly that the Republican observers returned to the State Farm Arena location before midnight, still on November 3. Then, the Republican observers complained that they had been told to leave at 10:30 because of a water leak. The US District Court was supposed to think that the Republican observers were confused about some water leak.

Watson did not want the US District Court to understand that, in fact, the Republican observers returned to the State Farm Arena location at 1 a.m. on Wednesday, November 4, and then learned that vote-counting had continued until almost 1 a.m. The Republican observers subsequently complained to Watson's Office during office hours on Wednesday morning. Their complaint was about the unobserved vote-counting in the middle of the night.

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In general, Watson's reporting and evaluation of events seem to be deceptive. The US District Court and the public should exercise the utmost skepticism when considering any of her statements. Another dubious statement in her Declaration is this:

Video taken hours before shows the table being brought into the room at 8:22 a.m. Nothing was underneath the table then.

At 10 p.m., with the room full of people, including official monitors and the media, video shows ballots that had already been opened but not counted placed in the boxes, sealed up and stored under the table.

Georgia's Office of the Secretary of State should provide to the US District Court and to the public a video clip of the event at 10 p.m. in order to confirm Watson's dubious Declaration.

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Another Georgia official whose statements are dubious is Ralph Jones, Fulton County's Registration Chief. According to 11 Alive, Jones described the flowing-water problem as follows:

Fulton County Registration chief Ralph Jones said that the pipe burst just after 6 a.m. Tuesday in the room above where they ballots were being kept, and water was draining down to the left side of the room where the ballots were.

In contrast, Watson told the US District Court that the flowing-water problem was a urinal that overflowed. Either Jones's statement was false or Watson's statement was false.

The idea that some flowing water delayed the vote counting for two to four hours is preposterous. 

It's likely that both statements were false. In fact, there was no flowing-water problem at all. I think that both Watson and Jones participated in the creation of a fiction to justify ballot-counting for two to four hours in the middle of the night.

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Continued

The Scanners' Long, Covered Table

The Target Dot on the Scanners' Long, Covered Table

Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran and Joe Biden's 1972 Election Victory

Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran was a high-ranking member of the Bufalino crime family, which  was based in Northeastern Pennsylvania, particularly in Lackawanna County and adjacent Luzerne County, more particularly in the cities Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, and Pittston. 

This area is on the western edge of the Delaware River Watershed. From that area, transportation and economic routes generally go south to Wilmington and Dover, Delaware.

Delaware River Watershed
(click on the image to enlarge it)

Sheeran grew up in the Pennsylvania town of Darby, on the west bank of Delaware River and about 22 miles from Wilmington. In 1955, when he was about 35 years old, Sheeran was working as a truck driver and became associated with Russell Bufalino, who had been involved in the Mafia since the 1920s. 

Frank Sheeran

In 1955, Bufalino introduced Sheeran to Jimmy Hoffa, the leader of the Teamsters Labor Union, which organized primarily truck drivers. 

Russell Bufalino

Hoffa soon began to employ Sheeran informally as an enforcer who threatened and even murdered Hoffa's rivals in the labor-union movement. During his own 83-year-long life, Sheeran murdered more than two dozen people, including Hoffa. Probably most of the murders were done on Bufalinos' orders. 

Frank Sheeran and Jimmy Hoffa

Due largely to Bufalino's and Hoffa's support, Sheeran rose gradually through the ranks of Teamster's Local 107, which was headquartered in Philadelphia but included Wilmington. Eventually, Wilmington got its own Teamsters Local -- Local 326 -- and Sheeran became that Locals' president.  

In 1966, Hoffa appointed Sheeran to head Teamsters Local 326, headquartered in Wilmington. Sheeran has described his Wilmington appointment as follows:

About a year before [March 1967], Jimmy [Hoffa] split [Teamsters Local] 107 into three locals, figuring it would cut down on the violence that way. He gave me the charter for a new local in Wilmington, Delaware, Local 326. I became acting president of Local 326 until an election could be held and I could be voted in by rank and file of that local. 

The first thing Jimmy wanted me to do was go up to Philly and fire these five disruptive organizers that the [Local] 107 president, Mike Hession, was afraid to fire. I drove up I-95 and fired Johnny Sullivan, who was with [Joey] McGreal and was out on his appeal on the [John] Gorey thing. I fired Stevie Bouras, who only got his job because he fired a gun into the ceiling and scared Hession. I fired another guy, but I don't remember his name. .... I fired Big Bobby Marino and Benny Bedachio. ....

After I fired them all, I stayed in Philly awhile to make sure there was no backlash. Then I went back down to Delaware, which is about thirty miles south. I was learning my new position [Acting President of Local 326]. I wanted to justify Jimmy's faith in me by giving me the charter. (Note 1)

In September 1967, an anti-Hoffa faction led by McGreal tried to take care over Local 107. Sheeran organized a violent attack on the anti-Hoffa faction.

I [Sheeran] called [Philadelphia's Mafia boss] Angelo Bruno and borrowed some Italian muscle. I had Joseph "Chickie" Ciancaglini and Rocco Turra and a few others. We had the good muscle. I had men inside the [Teamsters union] hall looking out the windows and men on the street. I had my back to the union hall.  

Two groups were walking toward each other from opposite ends of Spring Garden Street, the McGreal people coming from one direction and the [pro-Hoffa] people loyal to the [Teamsters] local coming from the other direction. 

All of a sudden, shooting broke out. The first shot came from behind me and went whizzing past my head. They say I gave the signal for the shooting to begin. They said I pointed a finger at DeGeorge and someone from my side shot him. ....

I drove down to Newport, Delaware, to hide out in an apartment over a bar until things died own. I called Fitz [Frank Fitzsimmons, the Teamsters President while Hoffa was in prison] and said to him, "One down. Two limping" [one McGreal supporter killed and two wounded], and Fitz panicked and hung up the phone on me. ....

The D.A.'s office put out an arrest warrant on me. They arrested Chickie, a black guy named Johnny West, and Black Pat, a white guy. I stayed in Delaware for a while, but I didn't want a flight charge on me too. So I got Bill Elliot, who had been a big shot on the Wilmington Police Department, to drive me to Philly. .... 

It cost me my union election at Local 326 in Wilmington. I couldn't campaign because I was sitting in jail. I still only lost by a few votes. Finally, the judge let me sign my own bail and I got out. ....

Those charges against me lingered in the system from 1967 to 1972. Finally, they took me to court to pick a jury and begin the trial. .... Before we picked a jury, the judge put me on the stand and asked me how many times the Commonwealth asked for a postponement of the trial, and I told him "sixty-eight". Then the judge asked m how many times I asked for a continuance, and I said "none", and he [the judge] called it a disgrace .... [Note 2]

The judge then dismissed the charges against Sheeran. While Sheeran had been waiting for the trial -- during 1967-1972 -- he worked as a Teamsters "business agent", which meant that he union members' grievances against the trucking companies. Now that the charges against him were dropped in 1972, however, he could campaign again in the next election for the President of Local 326 in Wilmington.

At about the end of 1967, Wilmington's Local 326 already had declared him to be the Local's "Honorary President for Life". In the following years, Sheeran indeed acted as if he actually were the Local's President. 

When I was incarcerated, the local made me Honorary President for Life. They [Wilmington's Teamsters] didn't have to like me, but they did respect me and they respected the job I did for them. 

I got them their own charter through Jimmy. Before that, they were run by Philadelphia. In 1979 I got them a new building that is their headquarters to this day. I took care of them day-to-day on their grievances and the enforcement of their contracts. We had over 3,000 members when I went to jail [in 1967]. .... [Note 3]

On April 7, 1972, Sheeran murdered "Crazy Joe" Gallo, a rival mobster, in a Manhattan restaurant. Sheeran murdered Gallo because Gallo had disrespected Bufalino earlier that evening. 

That was Sheeran's situation in late 1972 when Joe Biden was campaigning for his first time to become Delaware's US Senator. Sheeran tells his own involvement in Biden's election to the US Senate as follows:

Toward the end of 1972, I got a visit .... from a very prominent lawyer I new who was very big in the Democratic Party. He wanted to talk to me about the upcoming 1972 race for the United States Senate.

Earlier in the year, the incumbent, United States Senator Caleb Boggs, had stopped by and asked to allow him to speak to the [Local 326] membership. I told Boggs that he was too much against labor. He denied that he was against labor. He was a Republican, and he said that since the Teamsters were supporting Nixon for re-election [since Nixon had released Hoffa from prison], he ought to be given a shot to speak to the rank and file. ..... I took it to the [Local 326] executive board, and we decided not to invite him. 

When his opponent Joe Biden asked if he could speak to the membership, I took it to the executive board and got their feelings about it, and nobody opposed it, so I said sure. Biden was on the County Council, and he was a Democrat, and the County Council had some very good people on it for labor. 

Joe Biden was a young kid compared to Boggs. He came and gave his spiel, and he turned out to be a very good talker. He gave a really good pro-labor speech to the rank and file at the membership meeting. He took questions from the floor and handled himself like somebody many years older. He said his door would always be open to the Teamsters. 

So, when this prominent lawyer I knew stopped by my office a little before Election Day, I was already in Biden's corner. The lawyer had another guy with him who worked inside the Morning News and the Evening Journal. They were two papers that were put out by the same company. They were basically the same paper, and they were the only daily newspapers in Wilmington. .... At that time ... nearly every newspaper buyer in the state [Delaware] read the Wilmington newspaper. 

The lawyer explained to me that Senator Boggs had put together some ads that were going to run in an advertising insert in the paper every day for the last week before the election. Boggs was claiming that Joe Biden had distorted Boggs's voting record, and the ads were going to show what Biden had said about Boggs, alongside of Boggs's actual voting record ....

The guy who was there who worked on the paper said that he wanted to run an informational picket line, but he didn't have any good people that worked with him in the newspaper he could trust to walk the line. ... 

I told him I would hire some people and put them on the picket line for him. They were people nobody would mess with. 

The idea behind an informational picket line is that you're trying to organize the company, or ou're claiming that the company is unfair and won't sit down and negotiate with the union, opr that the company is putting pressure on the workers not to sign union cards. ....

I told my friend the lawyer and the guy he had with him that they could count on me to get it handled. I always had a lot of respect for that lawyer, and I thought Biden was better for labor anyway. I told him that once we put up the picket line, I would see to it that no truck driver crossed that picket line. The Teamsters would honor the informational picket line of the other [newspaper company's] union ....

The line went up, and the newspapers were printed, but they stayed in the warehouse and they never were delivered. ....

The newspaper company called me up and .... asked me if I had anything to do with the blowing up of a railroad car that had material that was going to be used in the printing of the newspaper -- whether it was paper or ink or some kind of other supplies, I don't know. But no people got hurt in the bombing. I told him we're honoring the picket line, and if he wanted to hire some guards to keep an eye on his railroad cars, he should look in the Yellow pages.

The day after the election, the information picket line came down, and the newspaper went back to normal, and Delaware had a new United States Senator. ...

There have been things written about this incident, and I am always mentioned in them. They say that this maneuver is what got Senator Joe Biden elected. Especially the Republicans say that if those newspaper inserts from the Boggs side got delivered inside the newspapers, it would have made Joe Biden look very bad. The Boggs ads, coming as they almost did that last week, there would have been no time for Biden to repair the damage. 

I have no way of knowing if Joe Biden knew if that picket-line thing was done on purpose on his behalf. If he did know, he never let on to me. (Note 4)  

On Bufalino's orders, Sheeran murdered Hoffa on July 30, 1975. Bufalino ordered the murder because Hoffa, having been released from prison, intended to campaign again for election as the Teamsters President. The FBI soon figured out that Sheeran was the murderer, but never was able to prosecute him for the crime. However, Sheeran eventually was prosecuted on other charges, for which he was imprisoned  from 1980 to 1995. In his final years (he died in December 2003), Sheeran told his life story to Charles Brandt, who published it as a book in 2004. 

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Note 1: Charles Brandt, I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran and Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (Hanover, NH, 2016), pages 188-189.

 Note 2: Ibid, pages 190-192.

Note 3: Ibid, pages 222-223.

Note 4: Ibid, pages 223-225

Michael Gaeta and FBI Counterintelligence -- Part 9

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

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In 2015 and 2016, a company called NGP VAN provided the software that controlled the voter database of the Democrat National Committee (DNC). On the morning of December 16, 2015, NGP VAN launched a modification of that software. 

On that same morning, Josh Uretsky, a member of Sanders' campaign staff, exploited a bug in the modification and thus accessed some database files that belonged to Hillary Clinton's campaign staff. Uretsky instructed three fellow members of Sanders' campaign staff how to exploit the bug. Then those four Sanders staff members accessed and downloaded data from Clinton's database files for about 45 minutes. Within about four hours of the modification's launch, the improper exploitation of the bug was discovered and stopped. 

Josh Uretsky

CNN summarized the exploitation of the bug as follows:

The Sanders team ran multiple searches in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina and about ten March [primary election] states, including Florida and Colorado, after it noticed the error. One of the data sets it accessed was a Clinton spreadsheet that ranked voters' enthusiasm -- a potential opportunity for Sanders' campaign to target voters who were hesitant to support the former secretary of state.

The Guardian reported that the four culprits performed 25 searches and downloaded data during those 45 minutes.

The Sanders campaign staff fired Uretsky on that same day, December 16, and suspended the other three culprits in the following days. 

Uretsky explained that his actions were innocent.

[Uretsky] told CNN ... that he was only trying to "understand how badly the Sanders campaign's data was exposed" and not attempting to take data from the Clinton campaign. 

"We knew there was a security breach in the data, and we were just trying to understand it and what was happening," said Josh Uretsky, reached by phone on Friday morning, a day after the campaign let him go. He added, "To the best of my knowledge, nobody took anything that would have given the (Sanders) campaign any benefit." .... 

The Sanders campaign fired Uretsky over the breach. "That behavior is unacceptable and that staffer was fired immediately," Sanders' spokesman Michael Briggs said Thursday night. 

Uretsky, who is experienced with the NGP-VAN system used by the DNC and has administered it before, said he first noticed the data breach on Wednesday morning [December 16]. 

"We investigated it for a short period of time to see the scope of the Sanders campaign's exposure and then the breach was shut down presumably by the vendor," he said. "We did not gain any material benefit." 

According to the DNC, the Sanders campaign will remain suspended until it provides the DNC with a full explanation of the episode and provides proof that any improperly accessed data has been discarded. 

Uretsky and his team notified people within the Sanders campaign of the breach on Wednesday and the news worked its way up the chain of command. After reporting it to the campaign, Uretsky said he intended to call the DNC to inform officials there. But before he could do that, the DNC called him. 

"They called me fairly quickly after the breach was closed to inform me that there was something weird going on and that portions of the system were shut down," he said. 

Uretsky says he got into the system to create a record to make it clear to anyone with NGP-VAN knowledge that he was "going through stuff that I wasn't supposed to have access to." ... The point: He wanted people with knowledge of the voter files to be able to clearly see that he was testing the depth of the breach. 

"This wasn't the first time we identified a bad breach," he said, confirming to CNN that the Sanders campaign reported another breach to the DNC in October. "We reported it to them. They thanked us for reporting it and they told us the breach had been closed." 

"In retrospect, I got a little panicky because our data was totally exposed, too," Uretsky said of how he handled the latest breach. " We had to have an assessment, and understand of how broad the exposure was and I had to document it so that I could try to calm down and think about what actually happened so that I could figure out how to protect our stuff." 

Uretsky was informed at the end of the day on Thursday that his three-month stint at the campaign was over. The now-former Sanders staffer would not comment on whether other members of his team were involved in testing the breach. 

Despite Uretsky's explanation -- which seems reasonable to outsiders -- the leadership inside Sanders campaign felt compelled to denounce and fire him. Apparently, the leadership knew that Urestsky's explanation was false.  

The above CNN article mentions that Uretsky previously had "administered" the NGP-VAN software for the DNC. While in that position, he might have become friendly with some NGP-VAN software programmers who participated in the development of that application for the DNC.   

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I speculate that a NGP VAN software programmer who supported Sanders had created the bug intentionally and had told his friend Uretsky how to exploit it. The programmer and Uretsky shared a resentment against the DNC for favoring Clinton unfairly over Sanders. The programmer and Uretsky felt justified in using Clinton's database files to help Sanders win elections. 

I speculate further that on the morning of December 16, Uretsky said too much when he instructed three fellow staff members how to exploit the bug. Within four hours, at least one of those three staff members snitched to the campaign staff's leadership, which stopped the four culprits quickly and then  fired Uretsky by the end of the day.

However, the DNC, the Sanders campaign staff, the Clinton campaign staff and NGP-VAN were not able to resolve the incident quietly, amicably and quickly. The DNC blocked the Sanders campaign staff from accessing even that staff's database files, and therefore the Sanders campaign staff initiated a lawsuit against the DNC. Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign staff sanctimoniously denounced the Sanders campaign staff. 

At some point in time, the DNC hired the CrowdStrike computer-security company to investigate the incident. NGP-VAN was reduced to just an auxiliary role in the investigation and had to allow CrowdStrike to examine its computers, personnel and procedures.  

The Uretsky affair became known to the public. The situation aggravated the resentments between Sanders' supporters, on one hand, and the DNC and Clinton's supporters, on the other hand.

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On the following day, December 17, the DNC blocked the Sanders campaign staff from accessing any of the DNC databases -- even the databases that belonged to the Sanders campaign staff. (Page 6)

In response to that blocking, the Sanders campaign staff filed a lawsuit against the DNC on December 18, 2015. The DNC soon removed the block, but the Sanders campaign staff did not terminate its lawsuit. The Sanders campaign staff maintained its lawsuit in place, but did not formally serve the lawsuit on the DNC until March 24, 2016, which was the deadline. If the Sanders staff had waited one day longer, them the lawsuit would have expired.

=======

I speculate:

The Sanders staff's lawsuit was just one part of a larger complaint that the DNC was treating the Sanders campaign unfairly. Even though the DNC removed the block within a few days, the Sanders campaign kept its lawsuit in effect for many months as part of a larger effort to pressure the DNC to treat Sanders fairly.

The Sanders campaign staff waited more than three months to serve the DNC with the lawsuit because the campaign staff wanted to delay the DNC's discovery process. The DNC knew that Uretsky had acted in collusion with an NGP VAN computer programmer, but the DNC did not know many details that the Sanders' campaign staff's leadership knew. The discovery process would enable the DNC to question Sanders' staff members and to study the Sanders' staff's files and correspondence. 

The DNC exercised its discovery rights between March 24, when the DNC was served, and April 29, 2016, when the lawsuit was terminated. DNC shared its discovery findings with CrowdStrike. 

For some Sanders-supporters, the fact that the DNC now was examining and searching the Sanders campaign staff's files aggravated resentments that the DNC was treating Sanders unfairly. In contrast, Clinton's campaign staff was not being examined and searched.   

During the discovery process, the political circumstances were that from March 22 through April 9, 2016, the DNC conducted eight primary elections, and Sanders won seven of the eight elections. Specifically, Sanders won in Idaho, Utah, Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming -- and lost only in Arizona. Sanders' supporters felt that Sanders' campaign might be on the verge of passing Clinton decisively in the primary election race.

Perhaps a Sanders-supporter with the necessary computer skills decided that the time was ripe to discover information inside the Clinton campaign staff.

======= 

On March 19 -- five days before the DNC was served with the lawsuit and thus became able to initiate its discovery within the Sanders campaign staff -- John Podesta received a phishing e-mail. At that time, Podesta was the chairman of Hillary Clinton's campaign staff. Podesta fell for the phish, and consequently his e-mail account was secretly hacked. Months later, In October and November 2016, thousands of e-mails from that account were revealed to the public, embarrassing Clinton and her campaign.

The hacker remains unknown, but Russian Intelligence was blamed by Clinton's supporters -- in particular, by Clinton's supporters in the US Intelligence Community. 

Once the Uretsky affair is fully understood, however, suspicion about the Podesta hacking might be directed more fruitfully toward Sanders-supporting computer experts who were using their skills to defeat Clinton's political goals. Such a suspicion might encompass the murder of Seth Rich on July 10, 2016. 

======

In order to conceal his own identity, a Sanders-supporting computer expert could have used a known Russian computer virus to hack into DNC computers. The CIA had assembled an archive of foreign computer viruses but had lost control of them during the year 2016. Journalist Patrick Lawrence writes:

As WikiLeaks notes, the agency [the CIA] had “lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal” .... There had been a massive leak, to put this point in simple terms. “The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner,” WikiLeaks reported, “one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.” This occurred at some point in 2016.

A hacker does not have to be a Russian Intelligence operative in order to use a computer virus that was developed by Russian Intelligence. If the CIA had included that virus in its "archive of foreign computer viruses" but had "lost control" of that archive, then the virus could be used by anyone with the necessary computer skills. 

======

The Washington Post reported the termination of Sanders' lawsuit against the DNC on April 29, 2016, as follows:

The announcement [to terminate the lawsuit] followed the completion of an outside investigation into the breach that found that four Sanders staffers had looked at unauthorized data related to 11 states over the course of an hour on the night of Dec. 16, according to a DNC summary of the findings. The DNC declined to release the study itself by the firm CrowdStrike. 

In a statement, the Sanders campaign said the investigation confirmed its contention at the time that no one else in the campaign accessed the Clinton “scoring models” or had knowledge of the activity until well after the incident was over. One Sanders staffer was fired in December. .... 

Luis Miranda, the DNC communications director, said that the CrowdStrike analysis "confirmed that the DNC's initial findings, which were the basis of the temporary shutdown in December, were accurate." 

The investigation found that the four Sanders staffers conducted 25 searches on the Clinton data and exported one statistical summary of a search related to voters in New Hampshire. The Sanders campaign said it has not been able to locate that file and no one with the campaign has ever seen it.   

Uretsky was not exonerated. His explanation that he had accessed the Clinton database innocently has not been confirmed. The public was not supposed to ponder the question of how Uretsky was able to and exploit the computer bug on the morning of December 16, 2015, the day when NGP VAN launched its software modification. Rather, the public is supposed to ponder only Russian hackers.

=======

On the late afternoon of Friday, April 29, 2016 -- the very same day when the Sanders campaign staff terminated its lawsuit that had been caused by a Sanders supporter's hack of the DNC's computers -- an unidentified FBI official conducted a conference call with two people:

1) an unidentified DNC staff member who managed the DNC computer system 

2) Michael Sussman, a computer-security expert employed by the Perkins Coie law firm, which provided legal services to the DNC. 

The FBI official discussed with them the FBI's suspicion that Russian Intelligence was hacking into the DNC computer system. 

During the following weekend, April 30-May 1, Sussman called Shawn Henry, a CrowdStrike manager. Sussman arranged with Henry that CrowdStrike would study the alleged Russian Intelligence hack of DNC computers. 

Keep in mind that CrowdStrike had just given the DNC a report of its investigation of the Uretsky affair. The public does not know when CrowdStrike had begun that investigation, but CrowdStrike had given its report to the DNC within a few days of the termination of Sanders' lawsuit on April 29. During that investigation, CrowdStrike must have examined the DNC computers. 

It seems that CrowdStrike did not find any evidence of Russian computer viruses in the DNC's computers during that recent investigation. Now on about May 2, CrowdStrike would begin a new investigation looking for evidence that Russian Intelligence was hacking DNC computers, and this second investigation would find Russian Intelligence computer viruses.

It's no wonder that the CrowdStrike investigation of the Uretsky affair remains secret. When did that investigation begin and end? Did CrowdStrike look for and find any computer viruses? If so, then on what date and what viruses? Such information might provide the public with new perspectives.

=======

The FBI official already had contacted the DNC computer manager in about the third week of April 2016 to request DNC's computer server logs. Sussman had not participated in that conversation, but he had been told about it by the DNC computer manager. Sussman has testified (Page 31):

There are two incidents. In maybe the third week of April [2016], I was told that the FBI was requesting some logs and to get involved and see what that was about. 

And then the very last Friday in April [April 29, 2016] was when I was told that the DNC itself had discovered an intruder in the network and to get on that late-afternoon call on a Friday and to start dealing with it.

Based on that phone conversation with an FBI official on the late afternoon of Friday, April 29, Sussman contacted Shawn Henry, a CrowdStrike official, on Saturday or Sunday, April 30 or May 1, and asked that CrowdStrike examine the DNC computer server (Page 14). 

========

I speculate that the FBI came to suspect by the third week of April that the DNC computer server was being hacked by Russian Intelligence because of reports that had come from Christopher Steele through Gaeta to FBI Counterintelligence.

Steele did not begin writing his Dossier for Fusion GPS until June 2016, but Steele and Gaeta had begun collaborating in 2010. Steele suspected reflexively that Russian Intelligence might be the culprit in any odd political activities in Western politics. Gaeta made Steele a paid source in the fall of (I think) 2015. 

Steele might have read about the Uretsky affair and might have supected reflexively that Russian Intelligence was involved somehow. Then Steele easily could have concocted one of his reports, alleging that Steele had been informed by one of his sources in the Kremlin that Russian Intelligence had learned how Uretesky had hacked into the DNC computer.

Then Steele could have given his concocted report to Gaeta, who gave it to the FBI's Counterintelligence Chief, who believed the report and launched in investigation.

This suspicion that Russian Intelligence was hacking into the DNC computers was rather implausible. After all, Russian Intelligence has finite resources and many, various important concerns. 

Keep in mind that the DNC is not an organization of the US Government. Rather, the DNC is a private, political organization that manages political election campaigns. At that particular time, the DNC's major activity was to manage the primary-election race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. This race was reported and analyzed expertly and comprehensively by the USA's mass media.      

Why would Russian Intelligence expend any manpower or other resources to study DNC files?  The disagreements between Clinton and Sanders were not significantly about Russia. The Democrats had controlled foreign policy since the beginning of 2009, and during that time Clinton had been the Secretary of State. Very probably, Clinton would win the primary elections and then the general election and would become the US President and would continue her own previous policies in relation to Russia.

However, by the third week of April 2016, at least one FBI official became convinced that Russian Intelligence was hacking into DNC computers. This hacking was part of a dastardly plot in the Kremlin to cause Americans to lose faith in their Democracy and therefore to vote against Hillary Clinton. 

And then CrowdStrike did find Russian Intelligence computer viruses on DNC computers -- proving to the FBI's CounterIntelligence chief that Steele indeed did have sources in the Kremlin  

======

Continued in Part 10

Michael Gaeta and FBI Counterintelligence -- Part 8

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

=======

In the year 2011, Glenn Simpson founded the company Fusion GPS, which eventually contracted Christopher Steele to provide intelligence reports. Apparently, Steele numbered the reports sequentially and reached the number 80 on June 20, 2016. From that point forward, the following reports 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

I presume that Steele has continued to provide sequentially numbered reports to Simpson to the present. 

During the 25 weeks of the above list, Steele provided 87 reports -- about 3.5 reports a week. If Steele had provided the previous 79 reports at about the same rate, then he provided report #1 in about mid-January 2016.

However, Steele's production of reports for Simpson before June 26, 2016, might have been sporadic and might have begun in 2015 or even earlier.  

The reports' numbering does not indicate any report's year. For example, report #80 is not numbered as 80-2016 or as 2016-80. Therefore, the sequence seems to have begun whenever Steele provided his first report to Simpson, and the sequence then continues from year to year to the present.   

=======

Although Steele's report #86 is dated July 26, 2015 (fifteen), it obviously was completed in 2016 (sixteen). That report's paragraphs 1, 3 and 6 indicate that the report was written after 2015.

1. Speaking in June 2016, a number of Russian figures with detailed knowledge of national cyber crime, both state-sponsored and otherwise, outlined the current situation in this area. ...

3. In terms of the FSB's recruitment of capable cyber operatives to carry out its, preferably deniable, offensive cyber operations, a Russian IT specialist reported in June 2016 that this was often done using coercion and blackmail. ....  

6. The senior Russian figure cited above also reported that non-state sponsored cyber crime was becoming an increasing problem inside Russia for the government and authorities there. The Central Bank of Russia claimed that in 2015 alone there had been more than 20 attempts at serious cyber embezzlement of money ....

One explanation might be that this report's date is a typo. Steele meant to type July 26, 2015, but mistyped the date as July 26, 2016. However, such date mistakes (writing the previous year instead of the current year) happen in the first few days of a January, not in the last days of a July.  

Another oddity would be that report #86, written on July 26, is numbered before and dated after report #94, written on July 19. No other reports are out of chronological order.

=======

My explanation for the odd date of report #86 is that this report was an update of an earlier report that indeed was dated July 26, 2015 (fifteen). 

The Perkins Coie law firm, acting on behalf of the Democratic National Committee, contracted Simpson in early June 2016 to provide a dossier about Donald Trump's involvement with Russians. Simpson soon subcontracted the project to Steele, who previously had provided 79 reports to Simpson.

Simpson then wrote his first report for this new project and delivered it to Simpson. This report was routinely numbered #80. Although it was the first report that Steele had delivered to Simpson for this particular project, it was the 80th report that Steele ever had delivered to Simpson.

I speculate that Steele then updated some of the previous reports that he had delivered to Simpson. One such report was dated July 26, 2015 (fifteen). Steele basically updated its first, third and sixth paragraphs and then numbered this updated report as #86 -- but he forgot to update the report's date, which thus remained July 26, 2015 (fifteen).

I speculate further that Steele likewise updated several other previous reports and numbered them #81 through #93 -- and they are dated correctly between June 20 and July 19, 2016 (sixteen). It's likely that only #86 has the mistaken previous date.  

Both Steele and Simpson have a set of all the reports, beginning with #1 and continuing at least through #166 -- all the way to the number of the last report that Steele ever wrote for Simpson.  

=======

I speculate that the FBI's Counterintelligence Division also has a complete set, at least through #166. 

On the other hand, the public has only the reports that I listed at the beginning of this blog article here.

The FBI's Counterintelligence Division obtained its set of reports variously from Steele and from Bruce and Nelly Ohr.

The FBI's Counterintelligence Division developed many of its opinions, inquiries, investigations and actions based largely on reports that were written by Steele but that still have not become available to the public. 

Many of those still unavailable reports were originally written long before June 20, 2016. They were originally written in, for example, July 2015 and then were updated, re-numbered and re-dated after June 20, 2016. 

=======

Continued in Part 9

Michael Gaeta and FBI Counterintelligence -- Part 7

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

=======

Christopher Steele's Dossier begins with these three sentences:

Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least five years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance.

So far TRUMP has declined various real estate business deals offered him in Russia in order to further Russia's cultivation with him.

This idea -- that for several years, the Russian regime cultivated Trump in an effort to split the Western alliance -- was not new to Steele in June 2016. Steele had perceived Ukraine's 2010 election to be a political battle that Russia had won against the Western alliance. Russia had supported Viktor Yanukovych, who won that election for the position of Prime Minister, while the Western alliance had favored Yulia Tymoshenko, who was voted out of the office.

In 2011, the year after that election, Tymoshenko had filed a lawsuit in New York against Dmytro Firtash, a rich Ukrainian businessman who had supported Yanukovych. Steele had studied and summarized the documents that the lawsuit had made available. Those documents had convinced Steele that Firtash was stealing money from the Ukrainian natural-gas industry and was using the money to buy real estate in New York. Firtash intended to employ a New York real-estate company that was co-owned by Paul Manafort and Brad Zackson and that seemed to be associated with Fred Trump, the father of Donald Trump.

As Steele had studied Tymoshenko's lawsuit documents in 2011, he wondered why the pro-Russia Firtash was enabling the Trump family to profit from that international political battle in Ukraine. Steele figured that the pro-Russia alliance must be recruiting the Trump family as a new ally. Steele began to develop that idea in 2011. 

========

Steele was introduced to FBI official Michael Gaeta by Justice Department official Bruce Ohr in London in April 2010 (pages 10-11). Gaeta says that at that first meeting, Steele told him about (page 12) ...

... high-level criminal activities about these 'actors' .... very wealthy businessmen, organized crime members, politicians -- a real tight mix between all three of these groups.

During the following couple years (2010-2012?) , Steele and Gaeta met a couple more times in London and once in Washington DC (page 13).

 
In a later year, Gaeta made Steele a paid FBI source in relation to (page 15) ....

... a very large case for us -- the Bureau and Department of Justice -- a very successful matter in our eyes. At that stage in [year redacted], we had three or four cooperating witnesses that we had developed in [redacted] who had already agreed (everything under seal) to cooperate and plead guilty and forfeit significant amounts of money.

So, at that time, the [FBI] thinking was, it's probably right to open him [Steele] as a [paid] source, because we [DOJ/FBI] are to really start to develop this information that he [Steele] has provided.

I suppose that this "very large case" was the 2015 FIFA corruption case and that Gaeta made Steele a paid FBI source in the fall of 2015 (page 14, first full line). In that regard, I point out the following considerations:

Gaeta hired Steele as a paid source after the FBI already had "three or four cooperating witnesses" in its FIFA case.

The FBI never charged any Russians or other former-Soviet-bloc culprits in its FIFA case.

The FBI made Steele a paid source in order to really start to develop this information.

In other words, the FBI made Steele a paid source in order to start a new investigation based on the FIFA investigation, which already was being concluded. I speculate that the new investigation focused on the consideration that the three or four cooperating witnesses in the FIFA case had operated in Trump Tower.

Chuck Blazer looked out the window of his $18,000-a-month Trump Tower apartment, with its view of New York's Central Park. Most tourists on Fifth Avenue below could only dream of his kind of high-rise life. But after years of lavish excess, he was no longer fixated on the trappings of his success. On this day, standing only in an adult diaper as a small team of FBI agents prepared to wire him with a recording device, Blazer just wanted to stay out of prison.

The native New Yorker hardly resembled his image as a statesman of soccer -- an infamous bon vivant who made so much money for the game's international governing body, FIFA, that he was hailed as its virtuoso deal maker. He dined often with sheikhs and heirs at the trendiest restaurants and attended society events with a rotating cast of striking companions. His personal travel blog pictured him with the likes of Bill Clinton and Vladimir Putin and Miss Universe. At 400 pounds, with an unruly white beard and mane, he looked like Santa Claus, talked like a bricklayer and lived like a 1-percenter.

Blazer's big secret, as he looked down on the Manhattan streets, seems so obvious now: He had embezzled his fortune through kickbacks and bribes. And the people who would uncover the scam were with him today, in his apartment, about to dispatch him to take down FIFA.

Gaeta made Steele a paid source in order to investigate the possibility that Donald Trump was involved with Russian organized crime and Russian Intelligence. Perhaps the FIFA investigation served as a cover to justify the beginning of payments to Steele, already in the fall of 2015, for his actual, anti-Trump investigation.

==========

James Comey was particularly interested in a person named Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov (aka Tutakhanov). In the year 2002, Comey had indicted Tokhtakhounov for rigging the figure-skating contest, to benefit Russians, at the Olympic games in Salt Lake City.

In 2013, the year when Comey had become the FBI Director, Tokhtakhounov was indicted again -- this time for operating an international-gambling ring based in Trump Tower in New York City. That FBI investigation was managed by Michael Gaeta, then an official in the FBI's New York Field Office (NYFO).

Perhaps there is a relationship between

1) the appointment of Comey to be the FBI Director, and

2) the investigation of the international-gambling ring in Trump Tower

Perhaps that appointment caused the investigation. Or, perhaps the investigation caused the appointment. In the year 2012, Trump had claimed he had information that Barack Obama's birth certificate was a fraud. That trouble-making claim perhaps motivated the Obama Administration to cause some trouble for Trump.

========

At some point after 2013, Gaeta was transferred from the NYFO to the US Embassy in Rome, Italy. There, Gaeta supposedly worked for the FBI Legal Attaché (Legat), but Gaeta was quite insubordinate to the Legat. In 2016, Gaeta deceived the Legat about what he was doing with Dossier reports. The Legat thought that Gaeta was sending the reports to the FBI Counterintelligence Division.

Gaeta indeed was sending the reports to the Division Chief, but not through official channels. Rather, Gaeta was sending the reports to the Division Chief secretly. Through official channels, Gaeta was sending the reports to the NYFO, where they were kept by the Chief Division Counsel, who did nothing with them.

This bizarre arrangement concealed the fact that Gaeta was sending the Dossier reports directly to Bill Priestap, the Chief of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division. There were no records that Gaeta sent any of Steele's Dossier reports to Priestap -- or that Priestap received them. Instead, there were records that Gaeta sent the reports to the NYFO, where they were received and kept by the Chief Division Counsel (who did nothing with them).

From this arrangement, I speculate that Gaeta's position working for the Legat was a cover for his real position -- working as Priestap's secret agent in Europe. This secret arrangement was known to FBI Director Comey. One of Gaeta's main assignments was to control Steele in Comey's effort to collect information about Trump's activities in Europe and, especially, in East Europe, Russia, and other former Communist countries.

========

Continued in Part 8

Michael Gaeta and FBI Counterintelligence -- Part 6

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

=======

Christopher Steele's Dossier begins with these three sentences:

Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least five years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance.

So far TRUMP has declined various real estate business deals offered him in Russia in order to further Russia's cultivation with him.

However, the publicly available Dossier reports do not provide any information about the various real-estate deals that the Russian regime had offered to Trump in order to cultivate, support and assist Trump during the preceding five or more years.

All of the 16 publicly available Dossier reports are numbered, beginning with #80 and continuing as follows:

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

I speculate that all of Reports 81-93 were written before the year 2016, that all of those older reports were given to the FBI Counterintelligence Division, and that many of them did provide information about the various real estate deals that were offered to Trump in order to cultivate him.

Furthermore, I speculate that Steele wrote or altered those older reports to create a false impression that Steele had collected such information from a vast array of networks of informants inside Russia and its neighboring former-Soviet countries. Furthermore, I speculate that the FBI Counterintelligence Division believed that Steele indeed did manage such an array of networks.

In fact, however, Steele collected his information largely from publicly available documents and from gossips located in the West.

=======

In my previous blog article, Part 5, I speculated that Steele had collected much information from the documents of a lawsuit that Ukrainian politician filed against Ukrainian financier Dmytro Firtash in New York in the year 2011. I speculated that Steele studied those lawsuit documents and then wrote reports that created a false impression that he had collected such information from his vast array of informants in Russia and Ukraine.

The lawsuit documents mentioned over a hundred "John Doe" individuals and companies that allegedly were associated with Firtash's misdeeds. Surely, Steele was able to figure out many of the "John Doe" identities and to name them in his reports. Steele pretended that he had been informed about those named associates by his array of informants in Russia and Ukraine.

For example, I speculate, Steele wrote that Firtash considered hiring a New York real-estate firm to manage a proposed real-estate fund. Although the real-estate firm and its owners were referred to by "John Doe" names in Yulia Tymoshenko's lawsuit documents, Steele figured out that the firm was owned by Paul Manafort and Brad Zackson. Further, Steele learned that Zackson previously had worked as a manager in a real-estate firm owned by Fred Trump, the father of Donald Trump.

Although Steele actually learned or figured out these particular associations by studying Tymoshenko's lawsuit documents and other publicly available information, Steele's reports created a false impression that Steele collected the information from his vast array of informants in Russia and its neighboring countries.

The FBI Counterintelligence Division believed that false impression -- believed that Steele really did control such an array of informants.

=======

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 granted special access to the Dossier.

The book's Chapter 1 begins by describing some events that took place at the Miss Universe contest that Donald Trump presented in Moscow on November 9, 2013. The book points out (page 16) that the contest was attended by a person named Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov.

Other celebs and local notables [who prominently attended Trump's contest in Moscow] ... included ... a curious guest: Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, aka "the Little Taiwanese", one of Russia's most prominent suspected mobsters and a fugitive from U.S. justice. Tokhtakhounov had an odd link to Trump's signature property: Seven months earlier he had been indicted in the United States for protecting a high-stakes illegal gambling operation run out of Trump Tower.

Later in their book (page 143), Isikoff and Corn elaborate about Tokhtakhounov. Their elaboration includes James Comey and also Michael Gaeta, an FBI official who in 2016 was based at the US Embassy in Rome, Italy. (I speculate that the Gaeta's embassy position was a cover for his actual position -- a secret agent for the FBI's Counterintelligence Division chief, Bill Priestap.)

[In the year 2010], he [Steele] rang up an FBI agent named Mike Gaeta, whom he had recently met at a conference in Oxford. Gaeta specialized in Russian organized crime and was then assigned to the New York field office.

I have got some material I'd like to show you, Steele told him. Gaeta was interested, and soon Steele was flying to the United States for meetings with FBI officials in New York and Washington D.C. to share intelligence he had collected about the unsavory connections of various FIFA [Fédération Internationale de Football Association] officials.

He [Steele] gave the FBI intelligence reports that amounted to a dossier on FIFA corruption. One especially damning piece of evidence was a 2005 photograph Steele had uncovered showing Sepp Blatter, the longtime FIFA president, laughing and clinking glasses at a Moscow nightclub with Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, the alleged Russian organized crime boss known as the "Little Taiwanese".

Tokhtakhounov was on the Bureau's "most wanted" list, a fugitive from U.S. justice who had been indicted in 2002 for allegedly scheming to fix the Winter Olympics figure skating competition that year to insure a gold medal for Russia. The indictment was announced by James Comey, then a U.S. Attorney. (Tokhtakhounov would be indicted again in 2013 for allegedly protecting a high-stakes transatlantic gambling ring, which operated in Trump Tower and laundered millions of dollars for Russian oligarchs through shell companies in Cyprus.)

So, in the year 2002, Comey, then a U.S. Attorney, had indicted Tokhtakhounov for fixing international contests that were the objects of international gambling rings. At some point in time, Tokhtakhounov managed an international gambling ring that was based in Trump Tower in New York. In 2010, Gaeta was working at the FBI's New York Field Office, and he brought Steele to the USA to brief FBI officials about corruption in international contests and about international gambling rings. The FBI officials were particularly interested in a photograph that Steele had obtained and that showed Tokhtakhounov dining with a key official of international soccer competitions.

Gaeta purported to have some special access to Tokhtakounov, which enabled Steele even to obtain photographs of Tokhtakhounov dining in Moscow with international-sports officials.

When thinking about the FBI's interest in international contests and international gambling rings, it's important to keep in mind that Donald Trump owned Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City during the years 1984 - 2014 and owned the Miss Universe Organization during the years 1996 - 2015.

Keep in mind also that Comey -- who personally had indicted Tokhtakounov in 2002 -- became the FBI Director in 2013, the year when Tokhtakounov was indicted the second time.

I pose two questions:

1) In what year did Comey himself begin to suspect that Russian Intelligence was cultivating Donald Trump by offering real-estate deals and facilitating his involvement in international gambling rings?

2) Did Comey himself, after he became the FBI Director, arrange for Gaeta to be transferred from the New York Field Office to the Rome Embassy? 

======

Gaeta was interviewed by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in in December 2017.

During that interview, Representative Adam Schiff asked Gaeta to summarize his investigation of Tokhtakounov (spelled Tutakhanov in the House transcript). Gaeta summarized as follows (page 50):

It was an illegal-gambling / money-laundering investigation, where the individual, Tutakhanov, -- also known by the nickname Taiwanchik -- had been indicted by the Southern District [i.e. by Comey] in the early 2002 as the result of a bribery scheme involving one of the figure-skating competitions in the Salt Lake City Olympics. And he [Tutakhanov] was a fugitive out of Southern District.

We learned from other, independent-source [Steele?] information that he [Tutakhanov] had ties to individuals [Trump?] in New York City who were running an illegal gambling operation ... a massive gambling operation done internationally ... being controlled by two individuals who resided in Trump Tower, being controlled ultimately by this individual, Taiwanchik, who was overseas in Russia.

When Schiff asked Gaeta to summarize the money-laundering aspect of his investigation of the Trump Tower operation, Gaeta summarized as follows (page 52, 54, 55):

There was a real-estate aspect to it. .... Funds that came into this operation, that came from overseas, worked its way to the US, where real estate was purchased.

Real estate in the United States is the end goal for a lot of this money that's been generated illegally. You know it's safe; it's in the United States. It's a solid place to put money by these individuals. ...

The money used at the time of the purchase may have been legitimized by washing it or moving it through numerous shell corporations and covering up transfers through loan arrangements. ... They do it in places such as Miami and Vegas and New York.

When asked by Republicans whether Gaeta had found in his investigation that the illegal-gambling and money-laundering activities involved Donald Trump or his family, Gaeta answered that he had not found any such involvement.

======

I speculate that some of Steele's Dossier reports that are not available to the public but that were delivered to FBI Counterintelligence -- especially Reports 81-93 -- discussed Tokhtakhounov, aka Tutakhanov.

======

Continued in Part 7