The Russia Hoax: It's Still About The Predication

Aaron Maté has a really good article at Real Clear Investigations today. I urge everyone who wants a good overview of the predication issue that’s central to the Russia Hoax to review the article:

Durham vs. Horowitz: Tension Over Truth and Consequences Grips the FBI's Trump-Russia Reckoning

That said, a few caveats. We need to tread cautiously here.

The title may give the impression that Durham and Horowitz are duking it out behind the scenes. That’s not necessarily the case, and Maté doesn’t actually say that in the article. Yes, Maté does remind us that Durham very pointedly and publicly disagreed with IG Horowitz’s statement that Crossfire Hurricane (CH)—the FBI’s codename for their Get Trump op—was “launched in good faith”. To be exact:

Though highly critical of the bureau's use of Christopher Steele's reports, Horowitz concluded that they “played no role in the Crossfire Hurricane opening," which he said had met the department's “low threshold” for opening an investigation.

I think it’s safe to say that Durham was angry at Horowitz’s unwarranted statement—unwarranted because, due to significant limits on OIG’s investigative powers:

But Durham has made plain his dissent. In response to Horowitz's report, the special counsel announced that his office had "advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened." Durham stressed that, unlike Horowitz, his "investigation is not limited to developing information from within component parts of the Justice Department" and has instead obtained "information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S."

Was Horowitz’s statement an attempted preemptive strike against Durham? Quite possibly. But that’s probably in the past now—Horowitz did what he did and likely can do no more to thwart Durham.

Now, a refresher—about that supposedly “low threshold” for the FBI to open an investigation. A “low threshold” is one of those things that’s relative to the circumstances—a defined threshold may be easy to meet in one type of investigation, but rather difficult in a different type of investigation. It’s also necessary to remember that the FBI has various sorts of “investigations”, each with different “thresholds”, which is to say, each with different “predication” requirements and different types of investigative techniques that are authorized.

CH was opened as a Full Investigation (FI), and a FI requires the most specific level of predication. Why didn’t the FBI take the safer route of opening a lower level of investigation, say, a Preliminary Investigation (PI)? As it happens, the FBI is only able to obtain a FISA warrant on an USPER or an organization of USPERs if it has an open FI. So, think: Donald J. Trump, or the Trump For President campaign organization, or an “entity in fact,” such as Carter Page and Paul Manafort running an espionage operation on Trump’s behalf from within the campaign. You may think—and the FBI will doubtless maintain—that they didn’t open CH with a FISA already in mind, but the reality is that from the moment of opening CH the FBI was pointing at obtaining a FISA that would ensnare Trump in one way or another.

What are the predication requirements for opening a FI? Those are set out in the Attorney General Guidelines (this citation is to an earlier version, but the essence will be equivalent)—I’ve bolded the portions that appear to be most pertinent based on the FBI’s FISA applications: 

FBI Headquarters or a field office may initiate a full investigation if there are specific and articulable facts that give reason to believe that …

a. An individual is or may be an international terrorist or an agent of a foreign power.

b. A group or organization is or may be a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power,

c.

d. An individual, group, or organization is or may be engaging, or has or may have engaged, in activities constituting a threat to the national security (or related preparatory or support activities) for or on behalf of a foreign power.

e. A crime involved in or related to a threat to the national security has or may have occurred, is or may be occurring, or will or may occur.

f. An individual, group, or organization is, or may be, the target of a recruitment or infiltration effort by an international terrorist, foreign power, or agent of a foreign power under circumstances related to a threat to the national security. 

g. An individual, group, organization, entity, information, property, or activity is, or may be, a target of international terrorism, espionage, foreign computer intrusion, or other threat to the national security.

Note two things:

1. The FBI must provide “specific and articulable facts that give reason to believe” that the basis for the investigation is or may be actual fact.

2. There must be an actual crime, under US law, involved in this.

Please note that the unsupported statements of a foreign national named Chris don’t, of themselves, qualify as “specific and articulable facts”. They require some sort of confirmation or corroboration before they can be classified as “facts”. The same goes for the unsupported statements of an Aussie “diplomat”. So maybe, in the circumstances, that “low threshold” isn’t really so low at all—not when you have to actually show that your predication is based on “facts”. That’s the kind of threshold you could easily trip over. And there was ample reason to doubt whether much of anything Steele had to say was factual.

Maté digs in to Horowitz’s claim that the FBI didn’t rely on Steele’s “dossier” to open CH, and his summary is worth quoting in full—bearing in mind the requirement for predication based on “specific and articulable facts”:

A considerable paper trail points to Steele’s political opposition research playing a greater role in the probe than the FBI has acknowledged:

• Numerous officials received Steele's allegations – some meeting with the ex-British intelligence officer himself – and discussed sending them up the FBI chain weeks before July 31, 2016, the Horowitz-endorsed date when the bureau claims it opened the Russia-Trump “collusion” investigation. ...

• The FBI’s own records belie its claims that it decided to launch the Russia probe not because of the dossier, but instead on a vague tip recounting a London barroom conversation with a low-level Trump campaign volunteer, George Papadopoulos. Australian diplomat Alexander Downer’s tip, recorded in bureau records, was that Papadopoulos had merely "suggested" that Russia had made an unspecified "suggestion" of Russian help – a thin basis upon which to investigate an entire presidential campaign.

• Upon officially opening Crossfire Hurricane on July 31, FBI officials immediately took investigative steps that mirrored the claims in the Steele dossier even though they were supposedly unaware of it. In August, the FBI team opened probes of Trump campaign figures Carter Page, Michael Flynn, and Paul Manafort – all of whom are mentioned in the dossier – based on predicates that are just as flimsy as the Downer-Papadopoulos pretext.

• The FBI’s claim that Steele played no role in sparking the Trump-Russia probe is further called into question by top bureau officials’ previous false claims about the investigation, including Steele's role. They not only lied to the public and Congress, but to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Note that third point. Basically immediately after the CH opening—supposedly based on the Downer claims re Papadopoulos—the FBI appears to have been totally focused on obtaining a FISA on Carter Page. No one has ever suggested that there were any big investigative developments within the first two weeks or so of CH that would explain such a shift of focus. All of the above are indications that the FBI is hiding its predication.

Maté also returns to an aspect of the Russia Hoax that has always seemed important to me, but has received relatively little attention: the specific role of Michael Gaeta. What fascinates me about Gaeta’s involvement is that it may point to high level conspiring against Trump at a relatively early date—just one indicator of what could well be a much bigger story.

Gaeta was working in the FBI’s Rome legat office in July, 2016, and had previously, when assigned to the NYO (in the same field with Andy McCabe) also worked with Steele as an informant. That fact of past contacts does not explain why only Gaeta would do as a contact with Steele. It’s commonplace for FBI informants to be “handed off” to new agent handlers as agent assignments change. It’s true that there can be exceptions in particularly sensitive cases, when the informant may be endangered and may only trust one person, but that was not the case here. Steele was an established contact and a former intel officer himself. Why didn’t Gaeta tell Steele to get in touch with the FBI’s London legat office? As befits the “special relationship” between the US and the UK, the London legat office is probably the most important legat office the FBI operates.

The way Gaeta tells it in his Congressional testimony, as quoted by Maté, is that 

Steele, Gaeta recalled in congressional testimony, informed him that “I have some really interesting information you need to see … immediately.” Gaeta jumped at the chance: “I said, all right, I will be up there tomorrow,” and immediately caught a flight to London.

Excuse me, that’s not how the FBI works. The FBI works strictly through the chain of command, and Gaeta wasn’t even the top guy in the Rome legat office. He couldn’t possibly have “immediately caught a flight to London.” He would have had to clear that through multiple people above him to explain why he should be operating outside his assigned territory. My guess is that he would have had to clear the trip through his FBI boss in Rome and probably also the Ambassador, and also obtain the permission from similar officials in London as well as at a high level at FBIHQ. The dead giveaway for all this is that, ultimately, permission for this op came from Victoria Nuland—at that time the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. That’s a very high level of clearance, isn’t it? “Immediately caught a flight to London” my *ss.

Does all that sound like someone, or maybe a couple someones, at FBIHQ decided that only Gaeta could be trusted to handle this? It does to me, too, and the names Andy McCabe (who was well acquainted with Gaeta) and Jim Comey come to mind as possibilities. Not the only possibilities, but …

Be all that as it may be, all of this happened over the 4th of July weekend in 2016, weeks before the CH opening. Gaeta testified that he was told that his reporting would likely be circulating at a “high level” at FBIHQ “within a matter of days.” And yet the FBI wants the world to believe that this had no influence on the opening of CH as a FI on a presidential campaign as the focus of what amounted to an espionage operation for the benefit of Russia. Please. The use of the Papadopoulos story, with its threadbare excuse for predication, comes across as a red herring that—very obviously—was never intended to come to public attention.

Maté continues with extended discussion of Steele, Danchenko, and the whole Papadopoulos situation. It’s all good. He concludes with several paragraphs under the subheading:

Durham's Dissent Could Become a Political Flashpoint

What he’s talking about, of course, is Durham’s public disagreement with IG Horowitz’s claim that the Steele “dossier” didn’t play a role in the CH opening. Maté is cautious here, but it seems to me that the only way that “Durham’s Dissent” becomes a political flashpoint is if the issue of predication leads to the revelation that CH was opened at the behest of US politicians at a higher level than Jim Comey.

FBI Director is an important and powerful position in DC, but it’s still not top of the heap—not in the sense that Jim Comey could authorize what amounted to an investigation of a presidential candidate without consulting at much higher levels. You can disagree with me, but if I had been FBI Director I know I sure wouldn’t have done that. Moreover, you can think whatever you want about Jim Comey as a person, but don’t think that as a prosecutor he’s an idiot. He would certainly have understood—in a flash—what the supposed “predication” for CH was actually worth. To take that kind of risk, Comey would—again, my opinion—have looked to cover his backside before stepping off the cliff.

There is simply no doubt that the Deep State was totally committed to stopping Trump from winning the election. So, with all that in mind, Maté writes:

Despite uncovering FBI deceptions, Horowitz acknowledged that he was relying largely on the word of the officials he was investigating. …

As his dissenting statement made clear, Durham is not limited to one department nor to its employees' voluntary testimony.

Durham's grand juries have already yielded indictments of two Clinton campaign-tied operatives for deceptive attempts to influence the FBI's Trump-Russia probe. That Horowitz has already uncovered so many inconsistencies in the FBI's account – and that Durham has gone out of his way to question the FBI predication that Horowitz accepted – suggests that the Steele dossier and the Alfa Bank "secret hotline" story are far from the only fraudulent Trump-Russia activity in Durham's sights.

If Durham does unearth additional evidence that the FBI did not launch the Trump-Russia probe in the way that it claims, then that would be yet another devastating revelation for a bureau that has already been caught relying on Clinton-funded disinformation and lying about it. Given how hard the FBI and Democratic Party allies have fought to shield this conduct from scrutiny, Durham's probe could become a major political flashpoint as his probe reaches its final months and hones in on its final targets.

So, as I’ve been maintaining since 2018, predication is key. CH is not the kind of investigation that the FBI can just say, Woops, our bad, but no harm, no foul. That’s not remotely how the ending will be if Durham gets anywhere near the bottom of the predication issue.

Perhaps all Maté is suggesting is that it was Steele—not Papadopoulos—who provided the predication to open CH. But, if that were the case, how would that come “a major political flashpoint”? Answer: It wouldn’t. Now, on the other hand, if the actual predication turned out to be some exchange between Comey/McCabe and Hillary Clinton, or word from the Obama White House, then Yes, that could become “a major political flashpoint.”

Interesting times ahead. I hope.