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

Michael Gaeta and FBI Counterintelligence -- Part 3

Part 1, Part 2

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The Horowitz report makes the impression that Rome-based FBI official Michael Gaeta received only one Dossier report (#80) from Christopher Steele in London on July 5, 2016 (page 95). However, Steele himself testified to a British judge that Gaeta, accompanied by one or more other FBI officials, received more than one report (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.

The Horowitz report indicates further that Gaeta received the second Dossier report (#94), attached to an -e-mail, on July 19, 2016 (page 98).

The Horowitz does not explain the numbering gap -- Report 81 through Report 93. The only Dossier report that is numbered in that gap and that is available to the public is Report 86, which is dated July 26, 2015 (fifteen).

Report 80 says that the Russian regime had been cultivating Donald Trump -- in order to encourage splits and divisions in the western alliance -- for five years, since 2011. However, none of the publicly available Dossier reports provide information about that cultivation during those five years. Therefore, I speculate that such information was provided in Reports 81-93, which Steele had written before 2016. That is why Report 86 is a report that Steele had written in the year 2015.

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In this series of blog articles, I speculate that Gaeta worked directly for the FBI's Counterintelligence Division. One or more officials from that Division accompanied Gaeta to his meeting with Steele on July 5, 2016, and received copies of all the Dossier reports that Gaeta himself received that day.

Gaeta's position working for the Legal Attaché (Legat) in the USA's Rome Embassy was a cover. When Gaeta returned to Rome from his London meeting, he deceived the Legat about the number of Dossier reports that he had received and about his effort to send Dossier reports to the FBI Counterintelligence Division, which itself already had received Steele's reports at the London meeting.

When FBI Inspector General Horowitz and his IG team investigated this matter, Gaeta and  other FBI officials told nonsensical stories about a months-long delay in delivering the Dossier reports to the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane team. Steele began delivering Dossier reports to Gaeta on July 5, 2016, but no such reports were delivered to the Crossfire Hurricane team at FBI Headquarters until September 19, 2016 -- and even at that late, only six reports were delivered.

Of course, whenever Gaeta received Dossier reports from Steele, Gaeta sent them immediately to the FBI's Counterintelligence Division. Furthermore, at least one Division official accompanied Gaeta to the London meeting on July 5 and received the first batch of Dossier reports directly from Steele.

 I expect that John Durham will indict several FBI officials for deceiving the IG investigation about the delivery of Dossier reports to FBI Headquarters.

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The Horowitz report provides (page 81) the following organizational chart of relevant FBI officials. Click on the image to enlarge it.

Click on the image to enlarge it

I think that Gaeta sent all the Dossier reports immediately to Assistant Director Bill Priestap, who concealed most of them from his subordinates. Even Priestap's immediate subordinate Peter Strzok was kept ignorant of much information.

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Only a few of the Dossier reports that the Counterintelligence Division received have become available to the public. Those reports that have become available were given by Steele to people outside of the FBI, and those particular reports were collected by the Buzzfeed organization, which made them available. The FBI itself never has made any Dossier reports available to the public.

Although Gaeta fired Steele at the end of October 2016, the FBI surely received all the Dossier reports that Steele wrote after he was fired. Nelly Ohr -- an employee of Fusion GSI, which paid Steele to write the Dossier -- gave all the Dossier reports to her husband Bruce Ohr -- a top official in the US Justice Department -- who gave them all to the FBI.

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The publicly available Dossier reports range in number from Report 80 to 166. This range indicates that FBI's Counterintelligence Division obtained at least 87 Dossier reports. That total number would be even higher if some Dossier reports are numbered before 80 or after 166.

Of the 87 or more Dossier reports, only the following 16 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

There are three major gaps in the above numbers:

1) Reports 81 through 93 (only #86, written in 2015, is available)

2) Reports 114 through 129

3) Reports 137 through 165

I think that the first gap (81-93) comprises reports that Steele wrote before 2016 and that support his assertion that the Russian regime began cultivating Trump in 2011.

I think that the second gap (114-129) comprises mostly other reports that Steele wrote before 2016 and that he deemed to be useful to the FBI following his meeting with FBI officials in Rome on October 3.

I think that the third gap (137-165) comprises mostly reports that Steel wrote after he was fired by Gaeta at the end of October 2016.

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Only a small number of the 87 or more Dossier reports are based on information that Steele received from his so-called primary subsource, Igor Danchenko.

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The essence of Steele's pre-2016 reports is provided by the book Russian Roulette: The Inside Stroy of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, written by Michael Isikoff and David Corn and published in 2018.

Book Cover of Russian Roulette

Isikoff met Steele in September 2016, at a meeting that was arranged by Glenn Simpson, the owner of the Fusion GPS company, which had hired Steele to write the Dossier. Isikoff, writing about himself in the third person, describes the meeting (page 232-233):

It was the first time Isikoff met Steele, and the journalist [Isikoff] was impressed by his [Steele's] credentials. Steele explained who he was -- a former MI6 spy who had served in Moscow. Wearing a starched white shirt, he was grave and all business. He was not there for small talk.

Emphasizing that he believed what he had discovered was truly disturbing, Steel laid out his story about Carter Page and his trip to Moscow. ....

Steele wouldn't say anything about his sources. That was strictly confidential. After all, this was Russia -- where sources could be shot or poisoned for talking about such matters.

[....]

There were strict ground rules for this meeting. It was on background. That meant Steele could not be quoted by name or referred to as an ex-MI6 officer. He was to be described as a Western "intelligence source" -- which was true, since he had been a steady source of intelligence for the FBI. ....

When he [Isikoff] got back to the office, Isikoff called Jonathan Winer at the State Department; he [Isikoff] had known Winer for years. Simpson had told him Winer could vouch for Steele.

Although Isikoff does not say so in his book, Steele did two activities for his paying clients:

1) collected derogatory information

2) distributed the derogatory information.

Steele himself did not always do the second activity. Rather, Steele used associates like Winer to distribute much of the information. For example, Steele himself did not give any Dossier reports to Isikoff. Rather, Steele would tell a journalist to go meet with Winer, who then would "vouch" for Steele. Then Winer provided to that journalist Dossier reports -- or perhaps summaries of the reports.

The book Russian Roulette indicates that, for years, Steele had been giving intelligence reports to Winer with the intention that Winer would distribute them (page 144):

In the spring of 2015, Steele, retained by a private business client, was producing reports on the Ukrainian crisis. He thought they might be of interest to Washington and reached out to Jonathan Winer, a senior official at Foggy Bottom [the US State Department] ....

Winer notified [State Department official] Victoria Nuland that he had a source with good contacts in Russia and Ukraine. Would she be interested? Yes, she said, and after reviewing a few of Steele's reports, she told Wine to "keep them coming". But Nuland, concerned that the material could be intercepted by Russian hackers, asked Winer to place them into a secure State Department classified computer system before forwarding them to her.

Between May 214 and February 2015, Steele sent Nuland 120 Orbis [Steele] reports about political and diplomatic developments in Russia and Ukraine.

Journalist Eric Felten tells how Steele continued to distribute his intelligence reports through Winer in 2016:

As Winer tells it, he and Steele were old pals. They “met and became friends” in 2009, when both were in the business of selling “business intelligence,” much of it involving Russia. Winer went back to work at State in 2013, after his old Capitol Hill boss, John Kerry, had become secretary of State.

But he didn’t lose track of his friend Steele — not at all. He shared, and shared, and shared Steele’s corporate intelligence work with the State Department’s Russia desk. “Over the next two years, I shared more than 100 of Steele’s reports with the Russia experts at the State Department, who continued to find them useful.” ....

Come the summer of 2016, Steele’s prime client was the campaign of Hillary Clinton, by way of the hired-guns at Fusion GPS, for whom he was assembling a grab bag of Trump tales from some sort of Russian sources. Come the fall Steele was spreading dossier info to various news organizations, the FBI, and the State Department. “In September 2016, Steele and I [Winer] met in Washington and discussed the information now known as the ‘dossier.’” ....

“I was allowed to review, but not to keep, a copy of these reports to enable me to alert the State Department,” Winer writes. “I prepared a two-page summary and shared it with Nuland.” ... To hear Winer tell it, when he gave her his memo, Nuland was all for the State Department doing something about it: She “indicated that, like me, she felt that the secretary of State needed to be made aware of this material.”

When Steele told Isikoff to contact Winer right after the Steele-Isikoff meeting, Steele surely expected Winer to begin supplying Dossier reports and summaries to Isikoff. Therefore, Isikoff has become well informed about the Dossier -- including about reports that have not become available to the public.

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Isikoff's co-author Corn tells about how he too has become well informed about the Dossier. Corn too tells about himself (pages 268 - 271) in the third person.

That weekend [October 29-30, 2016], Corn checked in with Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS. He [Corn] had known Simpson for years -- as a colleague, a social acquaintance, and an occasional source -- and he [Corn] wsa award that Simpson was doing opposition research on Trump, including his links to Russia. He asked if Simpson had any last-minute leads that warranted independent investigation.

Let's meet today, Simpson told him. ...

Corn and Simpson met at a Le Pain Quotidien [restaurant] in Dupont Circle [in Washington DC]. "I got some crazy shit," Simpson told the reporter [Corn]. He then recounted the story of Steele and his memos. ...

"Let me see the memos," Corn said.

Later that day, Corn was at Simpson's office, reading through all the Steele reports. ....

Corn arranged to speak via Skype with Steele, who was in London. .... After speaking with Steele, Corn ... contacted Jonathan Winer to ask him about Steele. ....

Thus, both co-authors -- Isikoff and Steele -- became well informed about the Dossier -- including about Dossier reports that never have become available to the public.

Therefore, their book Russian Roulette provides insights into Dossier reports that Steele provided to the FBI's Counterintelligence Division but that never have become available to the public.

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Continued in Part 4

Michael Gaeta and FBI Counterintelligence -- Part 2

Part 1

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On October 3, 2016, Michael Gaeta hosted a meeting in Rome in order to introduce himself and Christopher Steele to several members of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane team. Gaeta had served as the FBI's Handling Agent for Steele since 2011 and would continue to do so.

In 2016, Gaeta and Steele were focused on counter-intelligence collections. Although Gaeta officially was working an assistant to the FBI's Legal Attaché (Legat) in Rome, I think that job was a cover.  Actually, Gaeta was working directly for the FBI's Counterintelligence Division.

Three Crossfire Hurricane team members attended the Rome meeting (Horowitz, page 108):

1) an Acting Section Chief from FBI's Counterintelligence Division ("Acting Section Chief 1")

2) "Case Agent 2"

3) "Supervisory Intel Analyst"

I think those three Crossfire Hurricane team members were the officials marked in the below diagram (Horowitz, page 81).

Click on the image to enlarge it.

I think also that those three team members did not know that Gaeta worked directly for the Counterintelligence Division. Only higher officials in the Division knew -- such as Peter Strzok or Bill Priestap.

The three team members at the Rome meeting thought that Steele had provided only six reports to the FBI. In fact, however, Steele already had provided at least 34 reports during the year 2016.

One major purpose of the Rome meeting was to discuss with Steele whether he might eventually quit the private company Fusion GPS in order to write counter-intelligence reports exclusively for the FBI.

This switch would be complicated.

Steele would have to identify his relevant sources to the FBI.

Steele would have to sever his contract with Fusion GPS.

The FBI would have to pay Steele more money.

Steele would have to obey the FBI's rules.

These issues were discussed but not decided at the Rome meeting.

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I group Steele's Dossier reports as follows:

Reports 80 to 93
On July 5, 2016, Steele gave Gaeta 14 reports. Report 80 was the Dossier's introduction, which said that Russian Intelligence had been cultivating Donald Trump for five years -- since mid-2011. Reports 81-93 were old reports, which Steele had written during the years 2011-2015, telling about that cultivation.

Gaeta immediately sent all 14 reports to the FBI's Counterintelligence Division. However, Gaeta concocted a false story to deceive the Rome Legat. Gaeta pretended that he had received only Report 80 and pretended further that the routing of this one report was delayed for many weeks because of uncertainties and misunderstandings.

Report 80 was delivered to the Crossfire Hurricane team on September 19 and is publicly available now. Reports 81-93 have been concealed by FBI Counterintelligence to the present.

According to a judgment of a British court, Steele himself has testified that he gave Gaeta more than one Dossier report on July 5 (paragraph 51(1)).

Reports 94 to 99
These reports were written in the last half of July 2016 and helped to justify the establishment of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation on July 31, 2016.

Reports 94 and 95 were delivered to the Crossfire Hurricane team on September 19.  Reports 96, 98 and 99 have been concealed by FBI Counterintelligence to the present. Report 97 was concealed for a while because it indicated that Steele was collecting information from inside Donald Trump's campaign staff, but Report 97 has become available to the public.

Reports 100 to 113
These reports were written after the establishment of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation (after July 31) and before the Rome meeting (before October 3).

Reports 100, 101, 102 and 105 were delivered to the Crossfire Hurricane team on September 19. Reports 104 and 106 to 113 have been concealed by FBI Counterintelligence to the present.

According to a judgment of a British court, Steele himself has said that sometime in August he gave Gaeta all the remaining Dossier reports that he had written by that August date. (paragraph 51(2)).

According to that same judgment, Steele himself has said that he gave Report 112 (dated September 14) to Gaeta "within a few days" after September 14. (paragraph 51(4)).

Reports 114 to 129
These are old reports that Steele wrote before the year 2016. Based on the discussions at the Rome meeting, Steele thought these old reports might be valuable for the investigation. In the days following the Rome meeting, Steele gave these old reports to Gaeta, who sent them promptly (no later than October 12) to FBI Counterintelligence, which has concealed them to the present.

Reports 130 to 166
These reports were written from October 12 to December 13, 2016. Some (at least through Report 135) were written before Gaeta fired Steele at the end of October, and the rest were written after Gaeta fired Steele.

The only reports that were written before the firing and that are available to the public are Report 130 (October 12), Report 134 (October 18) and Report 135 (October 15). The rest of the reports written before the firing have been concealed by FBI Counterintelligence to the present.

The only report that was written after the firing and that is available to the public is Report 166 (December 13). It's likely that, despite the firing, Steele delivered all these reports to Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, who delivered them to FBI Counterintelligence, which has concealed them to the present.

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Reports that have become publicly available did so because they were given by Steele to people outside of the FBI.

There is no reason to think that the Dossier reports assembled by Buzzfeed are all the Dossier reports that the FBI received.

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By October 3, Steele had written the following Dossier reports that are 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

In mid-September, a decision was made that some Dossier reports should be delivered belatedly to the Crossfire Hurricane team at FBI Headquarters. Specifically, six Dossier reports -- 80, 94, 95, 100, 101, and 102 -- were delivered on September 19 (Horowitz page 100).

The Horowitz report specifies (pages 103-104, footnote 231) that Steele did not furnish several reports to the FBI before the October 3 Rome meeting: 97, 105, 112 and 113. The Horowitz report explains:

.... the FBI was unaware at the time that Steele had not made available to the FBI all of the reports he prepared as of mid-September concerning Russia. .... These and other reports were provided to the FBI in November and December 2016 by a journalist, Senator John McCain, and Ohr. When we [Horowitz's inspectors] asked Steele why he failed to provide all of his then-existing reports to the FBI, he could not provide us with an explanation and said that he should have given them to the FBI at the time.

Of course -- in my opinion -- Steele actually had given those four reports to Gaeta before the Rome meeting, and Gaeta had sent them directly to the Counterintelligence Division at FBI Headquarters. When Steele was asked by Horowitz's inspectors about missing reports, Steele "could not provide us with an explanation". Steele was surprised by the question -- and that is why he could not provide an explanation -- because he had provided all those reports to Gaeta promptly after he had written them.

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The Horowitz does not explain Dossier Reports 96, 98, 99 and 111.

Those four reports are not listed in the six reports -- 80, 94, 95, 100, 101, and 102 -- that were delivered to the Crossfire Headquarters team on September 19.

Those four reports are not listed in the four reports -- 97, 105, 112 and 113 -- that the Horowitz inspectors asked Steele about.

When the Horowitz inspectors wrote about their asking Steele "why he failed to provide all of his then-existing reports to the FBI", why are Reports 96, 98, 99 and 111 missing from that account?

No information about Reports 96, 98 and 99 is available to the public.

Report 111 is based on information from "a senior official of the Russian Presidential Administration (PA)". This particular report was particularly troublesome for the CIA, which indeed collected information secretly from such a PA official -- Yuri Ushakov, whose assistant Oleg Smolenkov secretly was reporting Ushakov's remarks to the CIA. I wrote about this arrangement in an earlier blog article titled The CIA's Concerns About Steele's Dossier.

I speculate that the CIA asked Horowitz to avoid discussion of Steele's Report 111. Horowitz claims absurdly that Steele never provided Report 111 to the FBI, which obtained that report only after the November 2016 Presidential election, belatedly from a magazine reporter (page 175).

I speculate that Dossier Reports 96, 98 and 99 likewise were based on the PA official and therefore could not -- at the CIA's request -- be mentioned by Horowitz.

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Continued in Part 3

Michael Gaeta and FBI Counterintelligence -- Part 1

On July 5, 2016, Michael Gaeta flew from Rome, where he was an FBI official at the USA's Embassy, to London in order to meet with Christopher Steele. A short time after the meeting, on that same day, Gaeta flew back to Rome. According to the Horowitz report, Gaeta brought back one Dossier report -- Report 80 -- that he had obtained from Steele in London. A couple weeks later, on July 19, Steele sent another report -- Report 94 -- to Gaeta in Rome.

Here is a list of all the known Dossier reports that Steele wrote before September 19, 2016 (the date when the Crossfire Hurricane team officially received its first Dossier reports).

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

Here is a list of 13 numbers between 80 and 94:

81

82

83

84

85

86 -- refers to a report that Steele wrote in 2015

87

88

89

90

91

92

93

I speculate that the 15 reports numbered 80 through 94 were structured as follows:

Report 80

Steele wrote this report (dated June 20, 2016) to introduce his Dossier, which will tell about Russian Intelligence operations that previously had happened during 2011-2015 and that now were continuing in 2016.

Reports 81 - 93

Steele previously had written these reports (dated 2011 through 2015) while he had been collecting information Russian Intelligence operations as they were happening during 2011-2015.

Report 94

Steele wrote this report (dated July 19, 2016) to tell about current Russian Intelligence operations as they are happening during 2016.

I speculate further that on July 5, 2016, Gaeta obtained 14 reports (not just one report) from Steele. Specifically, Gaeta obtained Reports 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 8,5, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92 and 93. When Gaeta returned to Rome, he informed his supervisor, the FBI's Legal Attaché (Legat) that his London source had given him one report. Gaeta showed the Legat Report 80, and Gaeta did the paperwork recording that he had received one new report.

Then, on July 19, 2016, Gaeta received Report 94 from Steele. Accordingly, Gaeta informed his supervisor, the Rome Legat, that he had received a second new report from his London source. Again, Gaeta did the paperwork recording that he had received a second new report.

As far as the Legat knew and as far as the paperwork recorded, Gaeta had received two new reports from Steele. In fact, though Gaeta had received 15 reports -- two of which Steele had written during June-July 2016, and 13 of which Steele had written during 2011-2015.

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Steele introduced his entire Dossier in his Report 80, which begins with this Summary (emphasis added)

Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance.

So far TRUMP has declined various sweetener real estate business deals offered him in Russia in order to further Kremlin's cultivation of him. However he and his inner circle have accepted regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.

Former top Russian intelligence officer claims FSB [Russian's Federal Security Service] has compromised TRUMP through his activities in Moscow sufficiently to be able to blackmail him. According to several knowledgeable sources, his conduct in Moscow has included perverted sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB.

A dossier of compromising material on Hillary CLINTON has been collated by the Russian Intelligence Services over many years and mainly comprises bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls rather than any embarrassing conduct. The dossier is controlled by Kremlin spokesman, PESKOV, directly on PUTIN's orders. However it has not been distributed abroad, including to TRUMP. Russian intentions for its deployment still unclear.

Based on this Summary of the Steele Dossier, I speculate that Steele had written Reports 81-93 during the previous five years -- mid 2011 to mid-2016 -- and that Reports 81-93 provided information about the following Russian Intelligence activities during 2011-2015:

Offers of real-estate business deals to Trump

Collection of compromising information about Trump's activities in Moscow

Bugging of Hillary Clinton's conversations in Russia

Interception of Hillary Clinton's phone calls

One such report that Steele wrote during 2011-2015 has become available to the public. This is Report 86, which Steele had written on July 26, 2015 (fifteen). Report 86 tells how Russian Intelligence steals information from other countries' computers. Report 86 does not mention Trump or refer to Trump. Report 86 eventually was delivered to the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane Team on September 19, 2016.

As Steele implicitly promised to do in his Dossier's introductory Report 80, Steele indeed did provide to Gaeta much information about Russian Intelligence activities targeting Trump and Clinton. However, all that information was in Reports 81-93, which Gaeta did not show to the Rome Legat and which Gaeta did not record in his paperwork.

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Gaeta was routinely insubordinate to his supervisor, the Rome Legat. Based on the Horowitz report, I think that:

* Gaeta showed only two of his 15 Dossier reports to the Legat.

* Gaeta misinformed the Legat that sending the reports to Gaeta's former colleague at the New York Field Office (NYFO) was proper.

* Gaeta misled the Legat into thinking that Gaeta would send the reports officially to the Counterintelligence Division at FBI Headquarters.

In general, I think that Gaeta was not really working for the Legat. Gaeta's official subordination to the Legat was merely a cover. Gaeta actually was working for FBI Counterintelligence and was concealing that actual work from the Legat.

In fact, Gaeta did send immediately to FBI Counterintelligence all the Dossier reports that he received during July 2016. However, Gaeta also concocted a false story that he had to wait many weeks for advice and instructions about what he should do with the few Dossier reports that he supposedly received. In accordance with this false story, the reports very slowly were sent to the NYFO's Chief Division Counsel, which hid the reports without any administrative records of their arrivals and filing.

======

Continued in Part 2

The Role of the FBI's Chief Division Counsel in Hiding Dossier Reports

In a previous blog article titled The Temporary Disappearance of Dossier Report 97, I explained the omission of two Dossier reports -- #97 and #105 -- from the first batch of Christopher Steele's Dossier reports that were delivered to the Crossfire Hurricane Team. That first batch was delivered on September 19, 2016. By that date, Steele had completed the following reports:

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

According to the Horowitz report, the first time when FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigative team received any of those Dossier reports was on September 19, 2016. On that occasion, the team received six Dossier reports -- 80, 94, 95, 100, 101, and 102 (Horowitz page 100).

In other words, the following six completed reports were not included in that delivery:

2) Report 86, dated July 26, 2015 (twenty-fifteen)

5) Report 97, dated July 30, 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

Although my previous blog article was titled The Temporary Disappearance of Dossier Report 97, the article addressed the non-inclusion of two reports -- #97 and #105. My article concluded that those two Dossier reports were not included for the following reason:

Those two reports indicated that Steele was obtaining information from sources who knew about happenings inside Trump's election-campaign staff. In particular,

* Steele wrote that his source for Report 97 was "a Russian émigré figure close to the Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump's campaign team".

* Steele wrote that one of his sources for Report 105 was "an American political figure associated with Donald TRUMP and his campaign" who knew why Trump had removed Paul Manafort as his campaign manager on August 17.

.... those two reports eventually might cause accusations that the US Intelligence Community was spying on Trump's campaign staff.

I cannot imagine any other explanation. (I welcome suggestions.)

========

Because of someone's decision, the Crossfire Hurricane team did not receive Report 97, which included the following passage:

.... the émigré confirmed that an intelligence exchange had been running between them [the TRUMP team and the Kremlin] for at least 8 years. .... TRUMP and his associates duly had obtained and supplied the Kremlin with ... information [about leading Russian oligarchs and their families].

As far as 'kompromat' ... on TRUMP were concerned, although there was plenty of this, he [the émigré] understood the Kremlin had given its word that it [kompromat] would not be deployed against the Republican presidential candidate given how helpful and co-operative his team had been over several years, and particularly of late.

Because of someone's decision, the Crossfire Hurricane likewise did not receive Report 105, which included the following passage:

... a recent meeting between President PUTIN and ex-President YANUKOVYCH of Ukraine .... had been held in secret on 15 August near Volgograd .... revelations about [Trump's former campaign manager] MANAFORT and Ukraine had featured prominently on the agenda.

YANUKOVYCH had confided in PUTIN that he did authorize and order substantial kick-back payments to MANAFORT ... ...

Obviously, both reports would have been important for the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.

Who made that decision -- shortly before September 19, 2016 -- to not deliver those two Dossier reports to the Crossfire Hurricane team?

=====

To analyze that question -- who made that decision? -- let us consider the physical locations of those two Dossier reports when the decision was made. Before September 19, both those reports were located in only two known locations within the FBI:

1) Gaeta's FBI office in the the USA's Rome Embassy

2) The office of the Chief Division Counsel (CDC) of the FBI's New York Field Office (NYFO)

In this blog article, I will focus on the second location. I begin with the Horowitz report's Executive Summary (page v), which states (emphasis added):

... Steele directly provided more than a dozen of his reports to the FBI between July and October 2016, and several others to the FBI through [Bruce] Ohr and other third parties. The Crossfire Hurricane team received the first six election reports [i.e. Steele Dossier reports] on September 19, 2016 -- more than two months after Steele first gave his handling agent two of the six reports. We describe the reasons it took two months for the reports to reach the team in Chapter Four.

Chapter Four's relevant section is titled "Steele Informs Handling Agent 1 in July 2016 about his Election" (pages 95 - 98). The expression "Handling Agent 1" refers to Gaeta. I myself summarize that section as follows.

=======

On July 5, 2016, Gaeta flew from Rome to London, where he obtained the Dossier's Report 80 from Steele. On that same day, Gaeta flew back to Rome. During the following days, Gaeta discussed Report 80 with his own supervisor, the FBI's Legal Attaché ("Legat") at the Embassy.

Normally, Gaeta and the Legat would request guidance from the FBI's International Operations Division (IOD), which manages the FBI's Legats. However, Gaeta persuaded the Rome Legat that Gaeta would obtain guidance instead from an FBI colleague at the FBI's NYFO. Gaeta previously had worked at the NYFO and knew that this particular colleague would give better guidance than the IOD would give. Gaeta explained to the Rome Legat that his (Gaeta's) "goal was to put the information directly in the hands of people who needed to see it."

The Horowitz report calls Gaeta's NYFO colleague "ASAC 1" (ASAC = Assistant Special Agent in Charge). This colleague's name is unknown to the public.

On about July 12, Steele phoned Gaeta and asked whether he wanted more such reports. Gaeta answered: "Not yet. I'm still dealing with this. I'll get back to you." Therefore it seems that by July 12 Gaeta still had not obtained the Rome Legat's permission to go around the IOD in routing Report 80. It seems further that Gaeta and the Rome Legat eventually agreed to a compromise in which Gaeta could consult with his NYFO colleague but nevertheless would send Report 80 to the FBI's Counterintelligence Division. Despite this agreement, however, Gaeta did not send Report 80 there. The Horowitz alludes to that failed agreement as follows (page 97):

The Legat told us that he recalled Handling Agent 1 's [Gaeta's] proposal to contact NYFO, which he concurred with, but that his expectation was that Handling Agent 1 [Gaeta] would provide Steele's reporting to the Counterintelligence Division (CD) at FBI Headquarters within a matter of days.

The Legat stated that he recalled inquiring about the handling of the reporting when Handling Agent 1 [Gaeta] obtained another report from Steele, Report 94 ... on July 19, 2016 ...

The Legat said that during this time, "I just assumed [Gaeta] was handling it. .. [and] had sent it off [to the FBI's Counterintelligence Division]."

As mentioned above, on about July 12, Steele asked Gaeta whether Gaeta wanted more Dossier reports, and Gaeta told Steele to wait. On the next day, July 13, however, Gaeta did obtain the Rome Legat's permission to send Report 80 to his NYFO colleague. The Horowitz report describes that development as follows (pages 97; emphasis added):

[On July 13] Handling Agent 1 [Gaeta] contacted an Assistant Special Agent in Charge (ASAC 1) in NYFO ... [and] described the "gist" of the situation to ASAC 1, who responded that he would assess what to do and contact Handling Agent 1 [Gaeta] later.

ASAC 1 told us that the information ... [was] "definitely of interest to the Counterintelligence folks."

ASAC 1 said that after hearing from Handling Agent 1 [Gaeta], he spoke with his Special Agent in Charge (SAC 1) the same day [July 13].

The Horowitz report does not identify explicitly "the Counterintelligence folks", but does indicate subtly that these "folks" were stationed in the NYFO, not in FBI Headquarters.

So, Gaeta (in Rome) described Report 80's "gist" to ASAC 1 (in New York), who in turn described that "gist" to "the Counterintelligence folks", who said they were definitely interested in seeing Report 80 itself. However, the Horowitz report indicates that Gaeta kept Report 80 in his Rome office and did not send it to the NYFO for more than two weeks after those conversations on July 13.

On July 19, Steele e-mailed to Gaeta a second Dossier report -- Report 94. As Gaeta was doing already with Report 80, he likewise kept Report 94 in his Rome office and did not send it to anybody at that time.

======

While Gaeta was keeping those two Dossier reports in his Rome office, a decision was made by some unknown persons that the Dossier reports would be delivered ultimately to the NYFO's Associate Division Counsel (ADC), who worked for the NYFO's Chief Division Counsel (CDC). In essence, the Dossier reports would be kept and controlled by the NYFO's CDC office.

In accordance with that decision, on July 28 Gaeta sent the two Dossier reports to the NYFO's ASAC 1, who on August 5 delivered the two reports to the NYFO's ADC. Although ASAC 1's supervisor and ADC's supervisor were generally informed about the situation, the two reports did not pass through the two supervisors. Rather, Gaeta e-mailed the two Dossier reports directly to ASAC 1, who e-mailed them directly to the ADC. I assume that ASAC 1 was supposed to delete his own copy after sending it to the ADC.

The Horowitz report (page 99) provides the following details (emphasis added):

The ADC ... was assigned the responsibility of reading Steele's reports and determining whether they were pertinent to any crimes involving public corruption. ....

.... the reports would be placed in a sub-file in NYFO and thereby "walled off" from agents in NYFO, and ... the Assistant Director in Charge of NYFO and the "Executive Assistant Director (EAD) level" at FBI Headquarters were aware of the reports' existence. ...

So, the NYFO's ADC read the Dossier's Report 80 and Report 94 to determine whether they were pertinent to any crimes involving public corruption. The Horowitz does not say what the NYFO's ADC determined about that matter. However, the Horowitz report does mention "public corruption" in another passage (page 72; emphasis added).

[FBI Director] Comey also told us [Horowitz's investigators] that the FBI generally tried to keep [Justice] Department leadership informed about all significant activities to include important public corruption or espionage cases concerning Russian efforts to interfere with the 2016 U.S. elections.

[FBI Deputy Director Andrew] McCabe told us that he did not recall briefing Crossfire Hurricane to [the Justice Department's Deputy Attorney General Sally] Yates; however, his contemporaneous notes of a regularly scheduled meeting with the DAG on August 10 reflect that Yates was briefed on the FFG information [Australian diplomat Alexander Downer's conversation with Trump's foreign-policy advisor George Papadopoulos] at that time.

It seems to me that the NYFO's CDC received and studied the Dossier reports to determine whether the reports should be briefed to the Justice Department of Justice. Two issues were relevant:

1) Public corruption

2) Russian espionage efforts to interfere in the US election.

If the Dossier reports pertained to either issue, then the FBI was obligated to brief the Justice Department. However, the FBI did not brief the Justice Department's Deputy Attorney General Yates about the Dossier on August 10. Rather, the FBI brief Yates only about about Downer's conversation with Papadopoulos -- not about the Dossier.

The ADC surely found that neither report did pertain to his own focus -- to public corruption, to the corruption of government officials in the USA. In that regard, the subsequent decision that Yates did not have to be briefed about the Dossier on August 10 was reasonable.

Surely, however, both reports did pertain to the issue of Russian espionage efforts to interfere in the US election. However, the two Dossier reports were not briefed to Yates. Furthermore, the reports were not even forwarded to the Crossfire Hurricane team.

I think -- reading between the lines of the Horowitz report -- that "the Counterintelligence folks" in the NYFO should have studied the Dossier reports, found that they did pertain to the Russian espionage efforts and therefore recommended that the reports be briefed to the Justice Department. However, the Horowitz report does not say whether those folks thus did study, find and recommend. About that, the Horowitz did not inform the public.

The Horowitz report stated that after the Dossier reports were delivered to the NYFO on July 28, a decision was made that the Dossier reports would be placed in a walled-off subfile in the NYFO. When were the reports actually placed into such a sub-file? The Dossier report says (pages 99-100)

On September 2, 2016, Handling Agent 1 [Gaeta], who had been waiting for NYFO to inform him where to forward Steele's reports, sent the following email to the ADC and counterintelligence supervisor: "Do we have a name yet? The stuff is burning a hole."

The ADC responded the same day explaining that SSA 1 [Supervisory Special Agent 1 = Joe Pientka] had created an electronic sub-file for Handling Agent 1 [Gaeta] in the Crossfire Hurricane case and that he should forward the Steele reports to it. However, SSA 1 [Pientka] told us that there was a problem with his attempt to send an email to Handling Agent 1 [Gaeta] in early September. SSA 1 said he did not recognize the problem until September 13 and emailed Handling Agent 1 [Gaeta] that day with the case information necessary to upload the reports

So, it seems that perhaps the Dossier sub-file was created at the NYFO belatedly on September 2 and that Gaeta was provided the necessary uploading details on September 13. Even with those uploading details, however, Gaeta was not able to upload anything from his Rome office directly into the NYFO's walled-off sub-file. Therefore, on September 19, Gaeta simply e-mailed all his available Dossier reports -- Reports 80, 94, 95, 100, 101 and 102) to Pientka, who uploaded the reports into the sub-file.

Then, it seems, the Crossfire Hurricane team at FBI Headquarters became able to access those DOssier reports in the NYFO sub-file for the first time.

=======

The above was my summary of the relevant section of the Horowitz report's Chapter 4.

Another source of information about the routing of the Dossier reports is Gaeta's interview by the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence of the US House of Representatives. That interview adds the following details:

ASAC 1 was "the ASAC of Public Corruption" (page 28).

After Gaeta queried ASAC 1 on July 13, ASAC 1 did not re-contact Gaeta until July 28 (pages 30-31).

Gaeta e-mailed the Dossier reports to ASAC 1 on that same July 28

On about Friday, July 29, or Saturday, July 30, ASAC 1 told Gaeta to send the Dossier reports directly to the NYFO's CDC.

By Monday, August 1, the NYFO's Special Agent in Charge and Assistant Director in Charge had seen the Dossier reports at the NYFO. Also by August 1, "the EAD level" at FBI Headquarters "is aware of the reports" (page 31). (This "EAD level" seems to be FBI Executive Assistant Director Michael Steinbach. Search for the words EAD and Steinbach in the Horowitz report.)

In about the middle of August, Gaeta communicated with the NYFO's CDC "and another ASAC in the counterintel program in New York", and the latter two advised Gaeta that "there is a unit in Headquarters that needs to see this, some type of investigative unit that's there that you need to send this to" (page 32). (This "unit in headquarters" must be the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane team.)

Gaeta immediately asked those two NYFO officials for the name of a person in that "unit in Headquarters", but Gaeta did not receive a name until three or four weeks had passed (page 32). That name was Bill Priestap (page 33).

Gaeta e-mailed all his Dossier reports to Priestap in "the second or early third week in September" (page 34).

About a week later, Gaeta e-mailed Priestap and asked about the Dossier reports' intelligence value (pages 35-36).

On about September 23 or 24, Priestap e-mailed Gaeta that "the information that - in the dossier corroborated information that they received [REDACTED] that actually predicated all this investigation" (page 36).

Priestap told Gaeta that one or more "Five Eyes" countries "were involved in the investigation and also had seen the reporting from Steele". In particular Australia was involved and had seen the reporting (page 36).

======

An unidentified person at the Gaeta interview asked why the NYFO CDC did not send the Dossier reports directly to FBI Headquarters. In other words, why was Gaeta tasked repeatedly  to e-mail Dossier reports from Rome when the NYFO CDC already had all the reports from Gaeta? Nobody at the interview could explain this mystery (pages 38-39).

My explanation of that mystery is that the Dossier reports were given to the NYFO CDC to conceal the fact that Gaeta had sent the reports from his Rome office to anyone else in the FBI. I speculate that the NYFO CDC did not have to register its receipt and possession of the Dossier reports.

The NYFO CDC thus provided a potential plausible denial that any FBI official except Gaeta ever had even seen any of the Dossier reports. Eventually such a plausible denial became unnecessary, because the FBI officially embraced the Dossier reports. Even then, however, the NYFO CDC maintained a fiction that the NYFO CDC never had possessed the Dossier reports. That is why the NYFO CDC itself did not send the Dossier reports to FBI Headquarters.

The Horowitz report maintains that fiction, that plausible denial. The Horowitz report pretends that the Crossfire Hurricane team did not receive any Dossier reports until September 19, even though Priestap must have received Dossier reports long before that date.

The routing of the Dossier reports from Gaeta's Rome office to the Crossfire Hurricane team was deliberately delayed. Part of that delay was the receipt and keeping of the Dossier reports at the NYFO CDC, without normal documentation of that receipt and keeping.

The FBI did not want the public to ever learn the role that the Dossier really played in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation from the very beginning of that investigation.

The Change of the Cabal's Attitude Toward Steele

This article follows up my previous article The Temporary Disappearance of Dossier Report 97. There, I speculated that FBI official Michael Gaeta, stationed in Rome, delayed forwarding to the FBI in the USA the Dossier reports that he received from Christopher Steele. Gaeta was the FBI handling agent of Steele and is called "Handling Agent 1" in the Horowitz report. Steele was aware that Gaeta was his FBI handling agent and therefore gave Gaeta his Dossier reports with the expectation that Gaeta would forward them to the FBI in the USA promptly.

However, Gaeta kept the Dossier reports in Rome. Here are three examples:

* Gaeta received Steele's Report 80 on July 5 and sent it to the FBI's New York Field Office (NYFO) on about July 28, 2016 -- a delay of 23 days.

* Gaeta received Steele's Report 94 on about July 19 and sent it to the NYFO on about July 28 -- a delay of nine days.

* Gaeta received Steele's Report 97 in mid- or late-August, but it still did not arrive at the Crossfire Hurricane team even as late as September 19 -- a delay of more than one month.

Furthermore, Gaeta did not send the Dossier Reports 80 and 94 directly to FBI Headquarters, even though Gaeta's supervisor, the FBI's Legat in Rome, thought that Gaeta would do so. Rather, Gaeta sent those two reports only to the NYFO, on about July 28, and then the NYFO office held those two reports until about September 19, when the NYFO sent them to the Crossfire Hurricane team.

The Horowitz report does not explain what Gaeta ever did with Report 97. Apparently, Gaeta never did forward it to the FBI in the USA, and it eventually, much later, reached the Crossfire Hurricane team by some other route that did not involve Gaeta.

In my previous article, I speculated that Gaeta had received secret instructions from very high ranking officials -- I called them "the cabal" -- to delay Steele's reports and to send them secretly to the cabal, which would approve or disapprove Gaeta's forwarding the reports to the FBI in the USA.

I speculated further that the cabal disapproved Gaeta's forwarding of Report 97, because Steele's supposed source for that particular report seemed to be obtaining information from inside Donald Trump's campaign staff. The cabal feared that this report might eventually create an impression that the US Intelligence Community was spying on Trump's campaign staff.

========

Keep in mind that Steele did not know that Gaeta was delaying and even blocking Steele's reports. Steele assumed that Gaeta forwarded them promptly.

In mid-August, Justice Department official Bruce Ohr apparently became puzzled about Gaeta's handling of Steele's reports. Bruce Ohr's wife, Nellie Ohr, worked for Steele's boss, Glenn Simpson.

According to the Horowitz report, Gaeta in Rome heard from Bruce Ohr "out of the blue". Ohr asked whether Gaeta had even seen any of Steele's reports. Ohr apparently had heard from his wife and from Simpson that Steele had provided two reports to Gaeta by mid-July, but neither report had reached FBI Headquarters by mid-August.

Also in mid- or late-August, Gaeta told Steele to send him more reports. On about July 12, Gaeta had told Steele not to send him any more reports until told to do so. Now that Gaeta did tell Steele to send more reports, Steele must have sent Report 97, which Steele had written on July 30. Although Gaeta must have received Report 97 by the end of August, he never forwarded it to the FBI in the USA.

==========

Report 105 was written by Steele on August 22, but it was not included in the Dossier reports that were delivered  belatedly to the Crossfire Hurricane team on September 19. The date August 22 might be considered to be mid-or late-August. We do not know whether Report 105 was written before or after Ohr contacted Gaeta "out of the blue" or before or after Gaeta asked Steele for more reports. It seems to me that Gaeta must have received Report 105 before the end of August but that he never forwarded it to the FBI in the USA.

Report 105 -- like Report 97 -- purported to be based on a Steele informant who obtained information from inside Trump's campaign staff. I speculate that Gaeta secretly sent those two reports to the cabal, which subsequently told Gaeta to keep them in Rome rather than forward them to the FBI in the USA.

==========

If my speculation is correct -- if the cabal indeed told Gaeta to block some of Steele's Dossier reports -- then the cabal was concerned during June, July and at least the first half of August 2016 that the Dossier might cause trouble in the future. For example, the reports that indicated that Steele was obtaining information from inside Trump's campaign staff might eventually cause accusations that the US Intelligence Community was spying on Trump's campaign staff.

 The Horowitz report says in Footnote 8 (on page 17) that Steele "reported the information herein to the FBI over the course of several meetings with the FBI from in or about June 2016 through August 2016". In other words, Steele did not meet with Gaeta or provide Dossier information to Gaeta in September 2016. Steele wrote three Dossier reports -- 111, 112 and 113 -- that are dated September 14, 2016, but did not provide them to his FBI handling agent Gaeta during September.

Did Gaeta avoid contact with Steele during September? If so, did Gaeta do so because of instructions from the cabal?

==========

I think that a change in the cabal's attitude toward Steele occurred in mid-September 2016. That change was marked by the NYFO's delivery of its six Dossier reports ts -- 80, 94, 95, 100, 101, and 102 -- to the Crossfire Hurricane team on September 19. By that date, Steele had written 12 Dossier reports, but the NYFO apparently had received only those six from Gaeta.

Gaeta must have received also Reports 97 and 105 from Steele but continued to keep those two in Rome. Gaeta had not received Reports 111, 112 and 113 -- all written on September 14 -- because Gaeta was (I think) avoiding Steele during the entire month of September.

Because the Crossfire Hurricane team did receive six reports on September 19, some team members met with and questioned Steele in a European city (London or Rome) in early October. The logistics of that meeting were organized by Gaeta, according to the Horowitz report (Page 108).

Surely Steele mentioned to the Crossfire Hurricane team members at that meeting in early October that he had written 12 reports -- not merely the six that the team had received on September 19. By the time of this early-October meeting, the cabal accepted the inevitability that the Crossfire Hurricane team eventually would obtain all the Dossier reports.

=========

As I asserted above, the cabal changed its attitude toward Steele in mid-September.

Before mid-September, the cabal was focused on dealing with a future October Surprise that might cause the defeat of Hillary Clinton on Election Day, November 8. If embarrassing e-mails of Clinton were released a few days before Election Day, then during those intervening days top officials of the US Intelligence Community would assure the public that the e-mails had been stolen AND ALTERED by Russian Intelligence. This assurance would have to convince the public only for those few days. After the election, the e-mails could turn out to be unaltered.

The cabal's initial preparation for an October Surprise might be helped by the Dossier reports -- or the preparation might be troubled. If top Intelligence officials would be trying to assure the public that Russian Intelligence was to blame for the October Surprise, then allegations that, for example, Trump had been filmed watching prostitutes urinate on a hotel bed might detract from the attempted gravity of the assertions.

The cabal did not need Steele. The cabal had the CrowdStrike findings and Downer's report about Papadopoulos. That evidence would suffice to convince the public that Russian Intelligence had stolen the e-mails in order to affect the US election.

In the cabal's perspective before mid-September, Steele was mostly an unreliable, uncontrolled trouble-maker. That is why the cabal told Gaeta to get its permission before forwarding Steele's reports to the FBI in the USA and why Gaeta was told to block some reports and eventually to avoid Steele.

=======

In mid-August, however, the cabal's attitude toward Steele began to shift. On August 15, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page indicated in their text messages that discussions had begun about perhaps preparing "an insurance policy" for the possibility that Trump won the election. If Trump won by just a small margin in the Electoral College, then perhaps a sufficient number of Electoral College voters might be convinced that Trump had won only because he had colluded with Russian Intelligence to affect the election.

Suppose that Trump won by, say, just a dozen Electoral College votes. If so, then the top officials of the US Intelligence Community -- such as James Clapper, John Brennan and James Comey -- might declare that all of the USA's 17 Intelligence agencies agreed that Trump had won by colluding with Russian Intelligence. In such circumstances, at least a dozen Electoral College voters might change their votes, enabling Clinton to win when the Electoral College actually voted on December 19.

In relation to the cabal's new "insurance policy", Steele's Dossier might turn out to be useful. The discussions within the cabal began on about August 15 and culminated shortly before September 19, when the NYFO was instructed to delivery its six Dossier reports belatedly to the Crossfire Hurricane team in FBI Headquarters. That delivery led to the meeting between team members and Steele in early October and to the team's belated acquisition of all the Dossier reports written by the time of that meeting.

Anyway, the cabal no longer could block Dossier reports by means of Gaeta, because Steele and Simpson were distributing Dossier reports around Gaeta.

=======

During the rest of October, the cabal prepared for an October Surprise and also for a Trump victory with just a small margin of Electoral College votes.

As it turned out, however, Trump won without an October Surprise and won with an Electoral College margin that was too large to change. Therefore, the cabal began to sabotage Trump's presidency, a process that would last for years.

The Temporary Disappearance of Dossier Report 97

FBI Headquarters established its Crossfire Hurricane investigation on July 31, 2016.

Christopher Steele's first 12 Dossier reports were dated 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

According to the Horowitz report, the first time when FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigative team received any of those Dossier reports was on September 19, 2016. On that occasion, the team received six Dossier reports -- 80, 94, 95, 100, 101, and 102 (Horowitz page 100).

==========

When the six Dossier reports were delivered to the Crossfire Hurricane team on September 19, the following six reports had been completed but were not included in that delivery:

2) Report 86, dated July 26, 2015 (twenty-fifteen)

5) Report 97, dated July 30, 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

Report 86 had been written five weeks after June 16, 2015, the date when Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President. but Report 86 had not mentioned Trump or the election. Rather, Report 86 asserted that "Russia" has a state-sponsored apparatus that conducts offensive cyber operations against foreign governments and big corporations, especially banks. Report 86 did not include any specific details that would significantly interest the Crossfire Hurricane team.

Report 97 certainly would have interested the Crossfire Hurricane team. Report 97 claimed to be based on the knowledge of "a Russian émigré figure close to the Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump's campaign team". Report 97 included the following passages:

The émigré said there was a high level of anxiety within the TRUMP team as a result of various accusations levelled against them. ....

the émigré associate of TRUMP opined that the Kremlin wanted the situation to calm, but for 'plausible deniability' to be maintained concerning its extensive pro-TRUMP and anti-CLINTON operations ....

.... the émigré confirmed that an intelligence exchange had been running between them [the TRUMP team and the Kremlin] for at least 8 years. .... TRUMP and his associartes duly had obtained and supplied the Kremlin with ... information [about leading Russian oligarchs and their families].

As far as 'kompromat' ... on TRUMP were concerned, although there was plenty of this, he [the émigré] understood the Kremlin had given its work that it would not be deployed against the Republican presidential candidate given how helpful and co-operative his team had been over several years, and particularly of late.

Why was this Report 97, written on July 30, not delivered to the Crossfire Hurricane team on September 19, 2016? In comparison, Reports 100, 101 and 102 were written later, in August, and they were delivered.

=======

Before I speculate about the puzzling absence of Report 97 from that delivery, I will tell how those first six reports -- 80, 94, 95, 100, 101, and 102 -- traveled from Steele to Crossfire Hurricane.

At the beginning of July 2016. Steele phoned from London to Michael Gaeta, his FBI handling agent, stationed in Rome. (The Horowitz report calls Gaeta "Handling Agent 1"). In response to Steele's phone call, Gaeta flew from Rome to London on July 5, obtained Report 80 from Steele and returned to Rome on that same day (Horowitz page 95).

After Gaeta returned to Rome with Report 80, he proceeded to misplace the report into oblivion. Gaeta informed his supervisor, the FBI's Rome Legat, about the report and advised the Legat that the report should be sent to the FBI's New York Field Office (NYFO). Steele's reasoning was that he himself previously had worked at the NYFO and therefore knew that his former colleagues there would "put the information directly in the hands of the people who need to see it". The Rome Legat accepted Gaeta's advice and agreed that the report should be sent to the NYFO (Horowitz page 97).

Horowitz's Footnote 222 (page 97) remarks:

Handling Agent 1 [Gaeta] said that he did not contact the International Operations Division (IOD) at FBI Headquarters, which supports the Legats, about the reporting.

The Horowitz report does not clarify whether the Rome Legat thought erroneously that Gaeta indeed would inform also the IOD about Report 80. The Legat told the Horowitz team that he thought that Report 80 would be sent to the FBI's Counterintelligence Division (Horowitz page 97).

However, according to the Horowitz report, Gaeta did not send Report 80 from Rome to any recipient anywhere until the last days of July 2016. Gaeta held Report 80 in Rome.

On July 13, Steele phoned Gaeta again and asked whether Gaeta wanted more Dossier reports. Gaeta responded that Steele should not send any more reports yet, because "I'm still dealing with this." Gaeta added that he would contact Steele when he did want more reports.

On that same July 13, Gaeta contacted an Assistant Special Agent in Charge (ASAC) of the NYFO and described the gist of Report 80. Gaeta did not, however, send Report 80 to the NYFO promptly.

Despite Gaeta's instructions to wait until re-contacted, Steele sent Report 94 to Gaeta on July 19. Gaeta informed the Rome Legat about this second report. The Legat apparently thought that Gaeta would send this report too to a proper FBI office.

Now Gaeta possessed Report 80 and Report 94. He had briefed his supervisor, the Legat in Rome, about both reports and had given the Legat the impression that he was sending both reports promptly to FBI offices in the USA. However, Gaeta did not actually send them until about July 28. On that date, the two reports were received belatedly by the NYFO ASAC. The Horowitz remarks that the NYFO ASAC does not know why "nothing happened with the reports [80 and 94] between July 13 ... and July 28" (Horowitz page 97, footnote 224).

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In "mid-August" [exact date unknown], Gaeta re-contacted Steele and asked for more Dossier reports (Horowitz page 97). The Horowitz report does not specify whether Steele subsequently sent any reports to Steele or which reports he sent. Surely, however, Steele sent Report 97 -- which was written on July 30 -- to Gaeta when Graeta requested more Dossier reports in mid- or late-August 2016.

The Horowitz report (pages 99-100) tells about another event that happened in mid- or late-August 2016:

... Handling Agent 1 [Gaeta] also told us that, in mid to late August, he heard from [Bruce] Ohr "out of the blue," who inquired whether Handling Agent 1 [Gaeta] had seen Steele's reports. According to Handling Agent 1 [Gaeta], Ohr contacted him to confirm that the FBI was aware of the reports and was "handling" them.

Handling Agent 1 [Gaeta] ... advised Ohr that news of the reports had reached the "EAD [Executive Assistant Director] level" at FBI Headquarters and that executive management at NYFO was aware of the reports and trying to determine where to forward them. Ohr stated that he recalled Handing Agent 1 [Gaeta] telling him this, but that at some later date Ohr said he became concerned that the right people at FBI Headquarters did not know about the reporting.

In mid- or late-August 2016, two "out of the blue" events occurred.

1) Gaeta -- who had told Steele on July 13 not to send him any more reports until told to do so -- now told Steele to send more reports.

2) Ohr contacted Gaeta, who still was in Rome, to inquire whether Gaeta had seen Steele's reports.

I think that these two "out of the blue" events were related. Steele informed his boss, Glenn Simpson, that he had completed five new reports -- Reports 95, 97, 100, 101 and 102. That news was communicated by Simpson to Ohr -- via Bruce Ohr's wife, Nellie Ohr, who worked for Simpson. The news was communicated also to Gaeta, and then Bruce Ohr followed up by asking Streele whether he had received those five new reports.

The next Dossier report -- Report 105 -- was written on August 22. Perhaps that report was written after the two "out of the blue" events that occurred in mid- or late-August. However, I will revisit Report 105 later in this blog article.

The Horowitz report (pages 99-100) tells a dubious story about the various delays that delayed until September 19 the reports' delivery to the Crossfire Hurricane team at FBI Headquarters.

On August 25, 2016, according to Supervisory Special Agent 1 (SSA 1) [Joe Pientka] who was assigned to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, during a briefing for then Deputy Director Andrew McCabe on the investigation, McCabe asked SSA 1 [Pientka] to contact NYFO about information that potentially could assist the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.[footnote 225] SSA 1 said he reached out to counterintelligence agents and analysts in NYFO within approximately 24 hours following the meeting. Instant messages show that on September 1, SSA 1 [Pientka] spoke with a NYFO counterintelligence supervisor, and that the counterintelligence supervisor was attempting to set up a call between SSA 1 and the ADC.

On September 2, 2016, Handling Agent 1 [Gaeta], who had been waiting for NYFO to inform hm where to forward Steele's reports, sent the following email to the ADC and counterintelligence supervisor: "Do we have a name yet? The stuff is burning a hole." The ADC responded the same day explaining that SSA 1 had created an electronic sub-file for Handling Agent 1 [Gaeta] in the Crossfire Hurricane case and that he should forward the Steele reports to it. However, SSA 1 told us that there was a problem with his attempt to send an email to Handling Agent 1 in early September. SSA 1 [Pientka] said he did not recognize the problem until September 13 and email Handling Agent 1 [Gaeta] that day with the case information necessary to upload the reports.

On September 19, 2016, the Crossfire Hurricane team received the Steele reporting for the first time when Handling Agent 1 [Gaeta] emailed SSA 1 six reports for SSA 1 to upload himself to the sub-file: Reports 80 and 94 and four additional reports (Rep;orts 95, 100, 101, and 102 that Handling Agent 1 had since received from Steele.

The Dossier reports that were delivered to the Crossfire Hurricane team on September 19 were Reports 80, 94, 95, 100, 101, and 102 -- only six of the 12 Dossier reports that were written before September 19.

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In my blog article here, I now am addressing two of the reports -- Report 97 and Report 105 -- that were not delivered on September 19.

Those two reports indicated that Steele was obtaining information from sources who knew about happenings inside Trump's election-campaign staff. In particular,

* Steele wrote that his source for Report 97 was "a Russian émigré figure close to the Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump's campaign team".

* Steele wrote that one of his sources for Report 105 was "an American political figure associated with Donald TRUMP and his campaign" who knew why Trump had removed Paul Manafort as his campaign manager on August 17.

I speculate that Michael Gaeta in Rome acted as a secret gate in the Dossier reports' path from Steele in London to FBI offices in the USA. When Gaeta received Steele's reports, he stopped their progress while the reports were studied and discussed by a cabal at the top of the US Intelligence Community.

The cabal was higher than Bruce Ohr, who was puzzled about the reports' mysterious inertia in Gaeta's office in Rome. In fact, Gaeta was sending Steele's reports to the cabal and was blocking the reports' progress until the cabal told Gaeta to send the reports forward to FBI offices in the USA.

The cabal told Gaeta to keep holding Reports 97 and 105 because those two reports eventually might cause accusations that the US Intelligence Community was spying on Trump's campaign staff.

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In September 2016, the cabal still was focused on preparing for the possibility of an October Surprise, in which many of Hillary Clinton's e-mails might be released to the public a few days before the election, hwich would take place on November 8. The cabal was preparing to argue that Russian Intelligence had stolen AND ALTERED Clinton's e-mails in order to embarrass and discredit her.

Much of what Steele was writing in his Dossier was extraneous and problematic for the cabal's preparations to deal with such an October Surprise.

In particular, the cabal did not like Steele's claims that he was using secret agents to collect information from inside Trump's campaign staff. Because of that concern, the cabal tried to keep Dossier Reports 97 and 105 out of circulation -- even from delivery to the Crossfire Hurricane team -- as long as possible.