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Special Counsel Robert Mueller published his final report on April 18, 2019. On that same date, investigative journalists Peter Stone and Greg Gordon -- who apparently received the report before that date -- published an article titled Mueller report states Cohen was not in Prague. It is silent on whether a Cohen device pinged there. The 280-page Mueller report said essentially nothing about the imaginary meeting in Prague, except to assert that Michael Cohen never has visited Prague.
Instead, the bulk of the Report's text about Cohen was that he had been involved in a project to develop a Trump Hotel in Moscow. In the course of that effort, Cohen had communicated with some Russians, but the project was abandoned during the first half of 2016. It did not even happen that a location for the hotel was found.
Furthermore, the Mueller Report said almost nothing about Christopher Steele's Dossier.
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Stone's and Gordon's April 18, 2019, article included the following passages (emphasis added):
The newly released report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller says Donald Trump’s fixer and personal lawyer was not in the Czech Republic months before the 2016 election.
The redacted report is silent on whether investigators received information placing one of Cohen’s devices in or near Prague, as McClatchy [Stone and Gordon] reported.
The so-called Steele Dossier, a collection of private memos from a former British spy [Christopher Steele] that became one of the triggers for Mueller’s two-year probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 elections, alleged that Michael Cohen was in Prague to meet with Kremlin officials and computer hackers.
McClatchy reported in April 2018 that Mueller’s office had been presented with evidence of Cohen entering the Czech Republic via Germany in late August or early September 2016. Cohen denied the allegation.
In a subsequent story in December 2018, McClatchy [Stone and Gordon] reported that it was a pinging cell signal, picked up by a foreign intelligence agency, that geo-located Cohen’s phone to the Prague area. While a contradiction to the assertions in the dossier, compiled by Christopher Steele, this scenario raised the possibility that Cohen was not there but one of the many phones he used was.
The Mueller report states Cohen was not in Prague: “Cohen had never traveled to Prague and was not concerned about those allegations, which he believed were provably false,” the report says on page 139. ...
The report was silent on the issue of a device linked to Cohen pinging from the Czech Republic, and whether the investigation was ever presented with such evidence. The report confirms the investigation used this type of evidence, noting cell-tower records geo-located another person relevant to the investigation. (The investigation geo-located Erik Prince, former head of security firm Blackwater, at Trump Tower, for example.)
The attorney general’s office and the Mueller team declined to comment following release of the report. Cohen and his representative did not respond to requests for comment.
McClatchy’s December 2018 report about the cell-phone ping came after Cohen’s testimony cited in the Mueller report, which was given on November 20, 2018. It is unclear whether Mueller subsequently pursued this line of investigation, or whether it fell under sensitive intelligence gathering. ....
McClatchy’s [Stone's and Gordon's] December 2018 reporting was based on information from five individuals with foreign intelligence connections, who all requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information shared and concerns about sources and methods. Each obtained their information independently from each other. McClatchy stands by the reporting.
Because parts of the Mueller report were redacted to protect secret grand jury testimony and information coming from intelligence gathering and counter-intelligence operations, it is difficult to independently gauge what Mueller knew about the Prague allegations or how he reached his conclusions.
Congress is expected to call Mueller to testify, and this could shed more light on the investigation.
Mueller did testify to Congress, but there he did not shed any light on the imaginary Prague meeting. Mueller even seemed to be ignorant of the Dossier's very existence.
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Stone's and Gordon's April 18, 2019, article added the detail that the Special Counsel's questioning began on November 20, 2018. Until then, Cohen had been questioned only by the FBI's Southern District of New York. At the time when the Special Counsel began its own questioning, Cohen's sentencing was scheduled for December 12, 2018.
The November 20 interview was Cohen's opportunity to reduce his own sentence by providing to the Special Counsel his secret knowledge of the imaginary Prague meeting and of the imaginary Trump-Putin collusion. However, Cohen did not know any such information to provide, and so his sentence was not reduced on December 12. Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison and a $50,000 fine and was ordered to pay $1.4 million in restitution and to forfeit $500,000.
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Stone's and Gordon's December 2018 article said that it was based on information from four sources. Now this April 2019 article specifies five sources. I speculate that Stone and Gordon read Mueller's final report, were disappointed that the Prague meeting was not elaborated, and so asked a fifth intelligence official whether an East European intelligence agency indeed had detected the cell-tower pings and the Russian-language conversation. In response, that fifth official did confirm what I call "the Double Detection".
Therefore, I believe that the Double Deception indeed did happen. In other words, an East European intelligence agency indeed did detect the cell-tower pings and the Russian-language communication.
These two events -- the pings and the conversation -- were staged by the cabal of Trump-hating Intelligence officials -- current and former officials -- who used their expert knowledge to prepare an October Surprise to help Hillary Clinton to defeat Donald Trump.
This October Surprise -- the false accusation that Michael Cohen had met secretly with Kremlin officials in Prague -- would be revealed to the public in late October and would have to withstand scrutiny only until Election Day, November 8, 2016.
A major problem with this October Surprise was that the cell-tower pings and the Russian-language conversation had been detected on specific days. As it turned out, for those specific days Cohen had a rock-sold alibi that he was in California. This contradiction continued to frustrate Mueller's Special Counsel staff until the final report inevitably had to be published in April 2019. The staff's solution was to ignore the Prague-story hoax except for a two-sentence passage admitting that Cohen never has visited Prague, but explaining absolutely nothing more about that hoax.
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The cabal's -- and therefore Steele's -- initial plan was to portray Carter Page as the key intermediary in the imaginary Trump-Putin collusion. Then the plan was adjusted to portraying the much more important Paul Manafort as the key intermediary.
When, however, Manafort was compelled to resign his position as Trump's campaign manager in mid-August 2016, the cabal -- and Steele -- had to develop false evidence against a new key intermediary. The patsy chosen for this role was Michael Cohen. Soon, in the last week of August, the Double Detection was staged for the East European intelligence agency.
On October 18, about three weeks before Election Day, Steele began to publish Dossier reports about Cohen. A cabal member had arranged for "Kremlin insider" Olga Galkina (living in Cyprus) to begin telling false stories about Cohen to "primary sub-source" Igor Danchenko, who forwarded her false stories to Steele, who began summarizing them in his Dossier. The four Dossier reports about Cohen are dated October 18, 19 and 20 and December 13, 2016.
The three October Dossier reports were not revealed to the public before Election Day, because the cabal felt certain that Clinton would win the election. The Dossier reports were not revealed to the public until early January 2019, during the period between Election Day and Inauguration Day.
Instead of the October Surpise -- including the Prague-meeting hoax -- defeating Trump, the Trump-hating Democrats organized Mueller's Special Counsel investigation. It real purpose was not to explain the imaginary collusion to the public. Rather, its purpose was to lure President Trump into an obstruction-of-justice situation that would enable the Trump-hating memebers of Congress to impeach and remove him from his elected office.
Of course, Mueller's Special Counsel staff figured out that the Double Deception had been staged by a cabal of US Intelligence officials. Of course, that finding could not be told in a report to the public. Therefore, the final report was published without describing and explaining the Prague-meeting hoax -- without saying anything significant about Steele's Dossier.
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Continued in Part 7
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