Saturday, August 10, 2019

Real Characters Episode 19 Fresh blood investigating the investigators


                A member of the Department of Justice (DOJ) has just been assigned to help with the investigation into the Trump collusion investigation.  Inspector General Harrowitz, Jeff Durham and Attorney General Bill Barr all believe they need help because the more they dig, the more questions they have.  This causes them to have more and more things to look into.  A fresh set of eyes is often good in complex cases.  For simplicity purposes, we will call the fresh set of eyes, John Smith.  He is looking at a transcript of an FBI interview with Bruce Ohr, who at the time of the Russian collusion investigation was the fourth highest ranking official in the DOJ.  These interviews are known as ‘302’s.’  As John looks at his inbox, he sees an e-mail creep up from an address he doesn’t know.  There is no attachment, it simply says, ‘Look up Wall Street Journal April 17, 2007 piece, “How Lobbyists help Ex-Soviets Woo Washington.’  Like any sane person, John is very suspicious of the e-mail since he doesn’t know the source.  He deletes the e-mail then logs into the Wall Street Journal account that the DOJ has.  He searches for the article and reads it.  What he finds is striking. 

                Bill Barr has given one of his new employees, John Smith, a couple days to go through the Ohr 302’s and he calls him up to see what he finds.  John says, “Well, it appears that Nellie Ohr, Bruce Ohr’s wife wrote a dossier about Paul Manafort.”

                “You think it aided in the indictment of Manafort by Mueller?’

                “I do, but the issue is, I don’t think it’s true.”

                “You think Steele used Nellie Ohr as a source for his information.”

                “Actually, I think it’s the opposite”

                “What do you mean?”

                “I think Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS wrote the Dossier and asked Steele to put his name on it to give it credibility since he was respected by the FBI due to his work with the FIFA case.”

                “How can you say that based on information you found about Nellie Ohr?”

                “Nellie Ohr works for Fusion GPS.  Glenn Simpson, who owns Fusion GPS, wrote an article in 2007 when he was with the Wall Street Journal.  In it, he paints the same picture that the dossier does.  The dossier and the article seemed to be written in the same voice.”

                “That’s tough to prove”

                “I agree, I’m just letting you know my thoughts.”

                “It is actually something we thought too.  We just wanted to see if people came to it independently.”John was a little annoyed by this but he knew it was the nature of the beast.  “Anything that’s prosecutorial in the 302’s?” Barr added.

                “Yes, Ohr told the FBI that he thought Steele’s motivations weren’t counter-intelligence related by politically motivated.  That means when the FBI swore to a FISA court that they had no derogatory information, they lied.  This is derogatory information.”

                “Good work, keep going.  We do believe that’s going to be the easiest thing to indict the signers of the FISA on.  The more evidence, the better.  We already have the Kavalec memos and this.  It seems the FBI is going to have trouble denying that they had a lot of derogatory information about Steele.”

                “Yea, I’ll keep going through it.”

                John reads through the 302 again.  He made a point to go back to something he saw earlier.  He focuses on an excerpt where Ohr speaks about laundering money through the NRA to Trump.  It mentions that a Russian oligarch tied to organized crime named Turshin was the benefactor.  Sitting back, John reviews all the indictments and accusations made by Mueller, Weissman, Brennan, McCabe and others and can’t find anything having to do with the NRA.  He goes back to the 302 trying to find another clue on how he may back into this.  John notices that they talk about a lawyer for the NRA that was very upset when she found out about this after the election.  He decides to look her up.  Using his access to the classified information he has, he knows that the publicly redacted name of the lawyer is Clea Mitchell.  He searches her and tries to find her commenting on her frustration with the money laundering.  What he finds is that Ohr was wrong.  Mitchell consistently and repeatedly denies that it ever happened.  Her only frustration is with the accusation that is completely baseless.  This narrative explains why there were no indictments.  He makes a mental note to take everything he reads in the Ohr 302 with a grain of salt.

                The next day Jeff Durham calls John.  John tells him all the problems he has with the 302’s.  Durham seems unfazed by the information.  He says he’ll look into it.  Durham pivots and states, “Good job with the 302’s, there’s a new angle I’d like you to look into.”

                “Alright”

                “I want you to look at the connection between George Soros and the State department”

                “The billionaire Hungarian liberal?”

                “Yes”

                “Anything specific?”

                “It seems that former Soviet block countries keep coming up.  Soros has been hanging around Georgia, Ukraine and that area a lot.  I’m not sure it’s all on the up and up.  It could be nothing but with Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Paul Manafort hanging out in that area, something seems fishy.”

                John saves all his work on the Ohr 302’s and starts looking at George Soros.  Since it seems that everything with this case happens between 2014 and 2016, that’s the time period John focuses on.  His big break comes in a simple attendance log at the state department.  He asks himself the questions, ‘what is a billionaire businessman during meeting with Victoria Nuland of the State Department repeatedly in such a short time frame?’  John steps back and decides that it could be that he’s donating to the campaign or funding some sort of event or fund raiser.  He takes a deep breath when he finds the name of the foundation.  Soros is heading a foundation called the ‘Civil Society.’  John feels he’s wasting his time but he searches what the Civil Society Foundation does and discovers that it is to fight corruption in Ukraine after they decided to break from Russia.  Suddenly, John is no longer relaxed.  He looks at the dates and focuses on when the meetings stopped.  He types in Ukraine, State Department and the date that the meetings stop.  The thing that pops up on his screen that garners the most attention is that the DOJ targeted a Ukrainian named Dimitrio Firtash.  Firtash has sanctions on him and is indicted by the United States Department of Justice.  John stops reading and asks himself why the name ‘Dimitrio Firtash’ seems familiar.  After pondering it for a while, he decides to open his 302 file.  He reads through it and can’t find anything about Firtash. 

He goes to the cafeteria and makes himself a coffee. He comes back to his desk and takes a deep breath. The slight break was good for him.  As he looks up, he sees on the wall the Wall Street Journal article and lines stemming from it since the information is all over the Trump collusion investigation, mainly the Steele dossier.  He picks up the article and reads it.  Sure enough, he finds that Dimitrio Firtash was a Ukrainian working with lobbyist to try to influence America.  This information unnerves him.  On one hand, he wonders if Firtash is a Russian meddler in the elections and the DOJ was right in indicting him to stop him from meddling in our elections but on the other hand, he wonders if Soros is the one influencing government policy.  He decides that both scenarios are just as likely.  He sees if there’s any connection between Soros and Firtash.  Sure enough, they were on opposing sides in Ukraine.  Firtash was on the side of Russian influence over Ukraine and Soros was on the independent Ukraine side.  He scolds himself because this is pretty loose.  It’s very circumstantial evidence that Soros did economic battle with a man in Ukraine to try to make the vacuum caused by Ukraine’s new independence from Russia an entrepreneurial activity.  When there’s an opportunity for money, people flock and compete.  That’s the capitalist way.  That doesn’t mean something is nefarious about it.  He dismisses it.

As John looks back at the meetings between Soros and the State Department, he notices that Soros gave Ukraine $ 1 Billion right after Firtash was indicted.  John smiled and exclaimed, “Well, capitalistic competition is good but bribing a state department official to take out your rivals definitely would be considered ‘nefarious’”

John looks up at his board and stares at the article.  He shakes his head and blurts out, “Who would have thought a simple Wall Street Journal article written 12 years ago would describe everything that happens for three years.”

Seeing that the visitors to the state department had proven fruitful in revealing some sketchy activity, John went back to it.  There was another common visitor to the State department.  Christopher Steele met with Victoria Nuland, Anthony Weiner and others on several occasions.  John is puzzled by this because he knows Steele is an FBI informant.  What is he doing hanging out with the state department so much?  He investigates further and finds that things Steele told the State department refute what’s in the dossier.  Not only that, things he says he doesn’t know are in the dossier that he supposedly wrote.  This makes John think more and more than Steele didn’t write the dossier.  John remembers reading about former FBI lawyer Lisa Page who seemed to surprise to learn that Steele was also a CIA asset.  At this point Jeff Durham calls and John answers.  “How’s it coming?”

John tells Durham what he found out and says that he’s hit a wall about why Steele is meeting with the State department so much.  John replies, “Check the fourth FISA”

“Okay, for what?”

“Just cross reference dates see if it matches up with anything.”

                The conversation ends.  While reading the fourth FISA, he sees a sentence that says ‘we no longer considered the source (Steele) suitable for use and terminated his employment.’  John reads it several times to make sure he read it right.  He starts furiously combing through FBI records and finds when Steele was fired.  He then looks at the meetings with Nuland and Weiner at the State Department.  What he finds is that Steele started meeting with them right after he got fired from the FBI.  John tells himself that the obvious answer is he was looking for a back door into the FBI but he thinks of alternate explanations.  He thinks that it could simply be what normally happens to terminated people; they bounce back and get picked up by someone else.  John scratches this idea because Steele is put on the same case that he was fired for due to shady tactics.  John can’t think of any other explanation.  He grins excitedly.  This case is getting juicier by the second.

 

                Elsewhere in government, Bob Mueller is in court.  He is the prosecutor and the defendants are Russia social media trolls.  Mueller presents his case to the judge that the defendants are linked to the Russian government.  When he is done, the judge reprimands him for wasting the court’s time.  The judge declares that he has done nothing to show any evidence that the defendants have any ties to the Russian government.  The verdict is that Mueller is not allowed to ever prejudice a jury in public or as part of another court case by making that claim. 

                Mueller is shell shocked by the ruling.  He knows that new Attorney General Bill Barr is investigating the origin of his probe.  In addition to this, Jeff Durham has been hired for the same reason.  He thinks about all the times he made the claim that the pro-Trump social media campaigns by the Russians were linked to the Russian government.  Not being able to say that now will make him look like a liar when he had stated it previously.  He meets with his advisors and they all tell him to get ahead of the story and give a press conference saying that they have no connections.  Mueller asks, “What if someone asks me about the previous times I said it?  It was kind of a major focus of my investigation.”

                “We can’t control the questions so just declare that you’re not taking any”

                The day after the court hearing, Mueller gives a press conference saying that there was no evidence the Russian trolls were linked to the Russian government.  He ends by resigning from the DOJ and asks to be left alone and leaves without answering any questions.  Unfortunately for Mueller, it wasn’t going to be that easy.  He is quickly interviewed by GOP judiciary members.  They ask him straight up if he gave that press conference in reaction to the judge’s ruling and Mueller denies it.  Later, Barr and Durham’s team will add this to evidence that Mueller perjured himself. It’s interesting that a man who was so adept at not answering questions and referring to reports and dodging still managed to perjure himself on the select few questions he did answer.

                About two months later, Mueller isn’t going to get his wish to just fade into oblivion and not be bothered again.  He is dragged onto Capitol Hill by the Democrats to testify about his report.  He spends six hours looking confused and non-credible and it was an absolute disaster that millions in America saw.  Nobody learned anything but the American public no longer could believe that Mueller was a credible source.  He seemed to not have known his own report as various congressmen had to correct him several times by citing the report.  Mueller basically said if the report says it, he agrees.  He is back in his home now hoping that given how badly his performance went, nobody, Republican or Democrat will want to interview him again.  He’s done with this whole investigation and just wants to be left alone.  He did his job by putting a lot of heat on Trump to distract him and tarnish his presidency.  He knew from the onset that there was no collusion.  He watches MSNBC and people are talking about how Trump uses subliminal messages to rally the White Supremacists to action.  The commentator is insinuating that Trump is leading an uprising of white people to violently attack minorities.  Mueller rolls his eyes and shouts at the TV sarcastically, “How can you accuse Trump of being subtle?  There isn’t a subtle or subliminal bone in his body.  Everything is confrontational and in your face.”

                “He turns off the TV as it has annoyed him how everyone is so obsessed with hating Trump.  Although Mueller hates him as well, he’s getting a little sick of hating him.  Deep down, he admires that with all the shots that he’s taken, the man is not only still standing but thriving.  The economy is doing well and there is a whole movement of blacks and Hispanics leaving the Democratic Party.  The black move, nicknamed ‘blexit’ is spearheaded by a woman that didn’t even vote for Trump, Candace Owens.  Mueller goes through all the battles Trump has had and is looking for a loss.  The biggest fight he had is the one he’s doing the worst in.  The border wall is not being built expeditiously or even in a manner that his base wants.  Mueller takes solace that Trump is winning all the time but this one is still a toss up.  The recent Supreme Court decision that he can use military treasury money for it is definitely a big battle he won but the war is still up for grabs.  He starts looking into China to see if the trade war is winning.  The trade war with Mexico, Canada and Europe all were victorious but China is a much more worthy adversary than they are.  What he finds is that many US companies are scheduled to leave China in a couple months and go to other countries.  Most of them are going to Mexico or Vietnam.  This is exactly what Trump wants.  As American companies leave China, China can no longer steal their intellectual property and they will suffer a lot more than the United States will.  Mueller concedes that so far, Trump is winning this one.  Looks like the border wall is the only one he can take solace in because it’s the closest thing President Trump has come to a loss.  The spending bill also is looking good as a loss for Trump but that battle has barely begun.  Time will tell. All Mueller hopes for is that he can watch from the sidelines.  He’s done being in the fight.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of hungry people like Barr, Durham and John Smith that are retaliating against him and his cohorts. 

 

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