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

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