The Tape-Recorded Conversation in April 2016

On January 12, 2017 -- about a week before the inauguration of Donald Trump -- the BBC published an article titled Trump 'compromising' claims: How and why did we get here?, written by Paul Wood.

This BBC publication occurred six days after the publication -- on January 6 -- of the US Government's Background to Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections. It seems that the BBC article was based on information that was not included in that Background but that was provided secretly to Wood, who described his sources as follows:

This news was given to me by several sources and corroborated by someone I will identify only as a senior member of the US intelligence community. He would never volunteer anything - giving up classified information would be illegal - but he would confirm or deny what I had heard from other sources.

"I'm going to write a story that says…" I would say. "I don't have a problem with that," he would reply, if my information was accurate. He confirmed the sequence of events below.

In my blog article here, I am focusing on the first event in that sequence:

Last April [2016], the CIA director [John Brennan] was shown intelligence that worried him. It was - allegedly - a tape recording of a conversation about money from the Kremlin going into the US presidential campaign.

It was passed to the US by an intelligence agency of one of the Baltic States.

Subsequently, the CIA organized a six-agency joint counter-intelligence taskforce, and then in June 2016 the US Justice Department submitted a FISA application that targeted two Russian banks.  

To place those events into a broader sequence of events, Christopher Steele delivered his first Dossier reports to the FBI's Michael Gaeta in Rome on July 5, 2016, and those reports were not delivered to FBI Headquarters until September 19, 2016.

In other words, the delivery of the tape-recording to the CIA Director happened much earlier and more consequently than the first delivery of any Dossier report. Well before Gaeta received the first Dossier reports on July 5, 2016, the joint counterintelligence taskforce already had been organized and then, in June 2016, a FISA application had been submitted to a FISA judge.

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Perhaps the tape-recording indeed was "passed to the US by an intelligence agency of one of the Baltic states". Or perhaps the BBC reporter Paul Wood was deceived on that point so that the actual source of the tape-recording would remain secret.

I speculate that the actual source of the tape-recording was CIA Director Brennan's spy in Russia's Presidential Administration, Oleg Smolenkov. Smolenkov was spying for Brennan in that Presidential Administration until about June 2017, when Brennan's CIA arranged for him to defect to the USA. 

(I speculate that the defection was done in that June largely because Robert Mueller's investigation of the alleged Russia-Trump collusion had been initiated in mid-May 2016.)

Sure, Brennan would pay serious attention if Estonian Intelligence gave him a tape-recording of some people talking about "money from the Kremlin going to the US presidential campaign".

However, if Brennan would pay much, much more attention if his precious spy Smolenkov gave him a tape-recording of Presidential Administration officials discussing such transfers of money. Such a tape-recording might cause Brennan to organize a joint taskforce.

Keep in mind that Brennan received the tape-recording in April and organized the task force in June 2016. The tape-recording raised suspicions about Russia's Alfa Bank.

Not until July 2016 did Christopher Steele provide his first Dossier reports to his FBI case officer Michael Gaeta.

The US Intelligence Community's suspicions about Alfa Bank began much earlier than any suspicions raised by Steele's Dossier reports.