How Much Pressure Do You Think There Is On Peter Strzok?
John Solomon is using the Kathleen Kavalec story to perpetrate the journalistic version of death by a thousand cuts. In his latest article, State Department's red flag on Steele went to a senior FBI man well before FISA warrant , Solomon documents that the information Kavalec received from Brit fabulist and ex-MI6 spook Chris Steele went straight to the FBI and was then routed to ... Peter Strzok. The FBI is required to apprise the FISA court about any reasons for doubting the reliability of a source. Kavalec's typed up account of her interview with Steele includes the "important to note" fact that Steele claimed that the alleged "Russian network" was being paid out of the "Russian Consulate in Miami"--which, as Kavalec points out, doesn't exist . Would the FISA court have been interested to know that the supposedly reliable Steele, on whom the warrant was totally reliant, was inventing stories about non-existent Russian consulates? Would this suggest that he was inventing other "facts," like the "Russian network"?
Multiple sources confirm to me that the recipient of the State Department email was Special Agent Stephen Laycock , then the FBI’s section chief for Eurasian counterintelligence and now one of the bureau’s top executives as the assistant director for intelligence under Director Christopher Wray.
The email to Laycock from Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec arrived eight days before the FBI swore to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that it had no derogatory information on Steele and used his anti-Trump dossier to secure a secret surveillance warrant to investigate Trump’s possible ties to Moscow.
Officials tell me that Laycock immediately forwarded the information he received about Steele on Oct. 13, 2016, to the FBI team leading the Trump-Russia investigation, headed by then-fellow Special Agent Peter Strzok.
Laycock was the normal point of contact for Kavalec on Eurasian counterintelligence matters, and he simply acted as a conduit to get the information to his colleagues supervising the Russia probe, the officials added.
The officials declined to say what the FBI did with the information about Steele after it reached Strzok’s team, or what the email specifically revealed. A publicly disclosed version of the email has been heavily redacted in the name of national security.
It was Strzok's responsibility to make sure that derogatory information was included in the Carter Page FISA application. I'd say there's an enormous amount of pressure on Strzok to do a deal with John Durham if Strzok has any incriminating information on other officials higher up the ladder. We can start with Andy McCabe and James Comey and continue with John Brennan and James Clapper. Strzok appears to have been the poodle running back and forth between the principals in the Intelligence Community who would have had overall direction over the Russia Hoax.
ADDENDUM: Oh my! Sundance at CTH is all over this. Get a load of this--the FBI's FISA application specifically cites information coming from the State Department in October, 2016, for the proposition that Carter Page is a Russian agent:
Worse yet, in the application itself the FBI said the information proving Carter Page was an agent of a foreign power came from the State Dept:
IMO: Peter Strzok is in a world of hurt.