Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 of this series have brought us up to the establishment of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation by the FBI. The starting of the investigation was based on a fraud perpetrated on the FISA Court. It is always important to remember the corrupt nature of the DOJ, FBI, et al. This part will lay out how the NSA database works and how it was used.
Never forget, in connection with Washington DC politics, there has been a fusion of the two parties into a uniParty. PDJT is transforming the GOP into the most diverse political party in history. His leadership threatens the gravy train that elite politicians on both sides of the aisle have been wallowing in for too many years.
To recap, early in 2016, Admiral Mike Rogers was alerted to questionable activity in accessing the NSA database. Rogers initiated a full compliance audit on/around March 9th, 2016, for the period of November 1st, 2015, through May 1st, 2016.
While the audit was ongoing, due to the severity of the preliminary results (85% non-compliant), Admiral Mike Rogers stopped anyone from using the 702(17) “about query” option, and went to the extraordinary step of blocking all FBI contractor access to the database on April 18, 2016.
Let me digress here for a moment and talk about Admiral Rogers. When one is running a criminal enterprise like this, one wants people who are dedicated for one reason or another to the cause or who are useful idiots. Sometimes, regardless of a person’s campaign contributions, political ideology or social media posts, character can cause people to behave in ways not expected by the leaders of such an enterprise.
Admiral Rogers political leanings are unknown. Rogers was appointed NSA Director by President Obama. Clearly, they expected him to be on their team as they moved forward to the 2016 elections. It is not clear whether he favored Trump or Obama. However, what is clear is the he was loyal to his oath as a member of the US military. When Rogers saw activity that was outside the bounds of legality, he acted to protect the country regardless of the potential costs to himself. This led to attempts to have him fired after the election.
How does access to the NSA database work?
From Sundance:
Searching the highly classified NSA database is essentially a function of filling out search boxes to identify the user-initiated search parameter and get a return on the search result.
♦ FISA-702(16) is a search of the system returning a U.S. person (“702”); and the “16” is a check box to initiate a search based on “To and From“. Example, if you put in a date and a phone number and check “option 16” as the search parameter the user will get the returns on everything “To and From” that identified phone number for the specific date. Calls, texts, contacts etc. Including results for the inbound and outbound contacts.
♦ FISA-702(17) is a search of the system returning a U.S. person (702); and the “17” is a check box to initiate a search based on everything “About” the search qualifier. Example, if you put a date and a phone number and check “option 17” as the search parameter the user will get the returns of everything about that phone. Calls, texts, contacts, geolocation (or gps results), account information, user, service provider etc. As a result, 702(17) can actually be used to locate where the phone (and user) was located on a specific date or sequentially over a specific period of time which is simply a matter of changing the date parameters.
The example above is about a phone number. Now think about other electronic data. If an ip address is entered, one would get all the data for that server. How about an email address? One would gain access to everything about that account. Most cars today are GPS-enabled. What would those electronic records show?
Any electronic record can be accessed. This includes credit card and debit card transactions, bank transactions and website urls. And this raw data is not minimized. That is, there are no privacy protections as guaranteed by our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Let’s remember that Americans are supposed to free from such untrammeled incursions into our private lives (4th and 5th Amendments and probably others).
The FISA Court, which is a secret court, is a joke. Essentially the court is a rubber stamp for spying on Americans if the FBI says they need to. And as will become clear shortly, the FBI was not asking for warrants if they felt they did not need to. There is no ability to challenge such a warrant. Power exercised in secrecy will always become corrupt. Snowden and others tried to warn us about this.
Please read this portion of Judge Collyer’s 99-page opinion. Judge Collyer is the FISA Court judge who was notified of the questionable activity.
“Raw FISA information” was shared with whom? This is still an unknown.
From Sundance:
In plain English the raw search returns were being shared with unknown entities without any attempt to “minimize” or redact the results. The person(s) attached to the search results were named and obvious. There was no effort to hide their identity or protect their 4th amendment rights of privacy; and database access was from the FBI network:
The real story here is just how big this effort was. 85% were non-compliant. How many queries (searches) were reviewed from the targeted offices?
The redacted number is five digits. That makes the number somewhere between 10,000 and 99,999. If we take the middle (55,000), a non-compliant rate of 85 percent means 46,750 unlawful searches out of 55,000.
All of this occurred between November 2015 and April 2016, the height of the Republican presidential primaries. The language “many of these non-compliant queries involved the use of the same identifiers over different date ranges” tells us that specific persons were being surveilled.
Who was doing this? Private contractors with access to “raw FISA information that went well beyond what was necessary to respond to FBI’s requests“. So still unknown. However, who had an FBI portal to the NSA database at their work location? Perkins Coie, the DNC law firm.
There is a stunning footnote contained in Judge Collyer’s opinion.
This footnote has not been released in unredacted form as yet. Is it among the items that PDJT indicated he had declassified as indicated in this memo? I certainly believe so.
Please note also this part of that footnote.
([redacted] access to FBI systems was the subject of an interagency memorandum of understanding entered into [redacted])
Thinking the unthinkable.
It seems there was an internal decision within the Obama administration that exists in document form somewhere to violate the privacy rights of Americans, in particular, members of the political opposition. While we have not as yet seen all the unredacted portions of this opinion, it clearly seems that political spying was formalized within a memorandum. Of course, no notice of this memo was given to the FISA Court until 2016.
Sundance noted:
There is little doubt the NSA database system was used by Obama-era FBI officials and political allies, from 2012 through April 2016, as a way to spy on their political opposition.
Quite simply, there is no other intellectually honest explanation for the scale and volume of database abuse that was taking place; and keep in mind these searches were all ruled to be unlawful. Searches for repeated persons over a period time that were not authorized.
Below is a link to the entire 99-page opinion from Judge Mary Collyer. Be forewarned that there are significant redactions. That, along with the stilted technical language, can make this a difficult read.
A side note. Lois Lerner over at the IRS headed up the first attempt by the Obama administration at weaponizing government agencies to spy on political opponents. The IRS scandal that broke in early 2012 was just that. They were attempting to mine information from the tax returns of 501(c) 4 organizations.
From Sundance:
The IRS sent the FBI “21 disks constituting a 1.1 million page database of information from 501(c)(4) tax exempt organizations, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” The transaction occurred in October 2010 (link)
Why disks? Why send a stack of DISKS to the DOJ and FBI when there’s a pre-existing financial crimes unit within the IRS. All of the evidence within this sketchy operation came directly to the surface in early spring 2012.
The scandal caused the Obama administration to look for another way to run opposition research within the power of the government. At the same time, they wished to minimize the number of people who might be aware of the operation. Presto we have the NSA database access. Initially the most common way to initiate a FISA warrant was to notify the court about the need for a warrant to investigate potential FARA violations. Remember, these warrants are secret. There is no way to challenge them.
Washington is full of foreign diplomats. A congressperson meeting with a foreign diplomat for lunch on several occasions could be the trigger needed by the FBI to get a FISA warrant on that person. FARA was the excuse. The result was mining that person’s private life for anything that might be useful to use against them. Keep in mind that FISA warrants are retroactive. The specificity of normal warrants is not present in a FISA warrant. Most people do not understand the gravity of a retroactive warrant. One can look back to when someone was a little kid if that was so desired.
Back to the FBI investigation of PDJT that became known as Crossfire Hurricane.
Did the surveillance of the Trump campaign stop once contractor access to the NSA database was shut off? The short answer is no. The illegal operation had been shut down. Now the issue became how to legitimize the operation.
Sundance reports:
On April 19, 2016, Fusion-GPS founder Glenn Simpson’s wife, Mary Jacoby visits the White House. This is the day after contractor access was shut down. Immediately thereafter, the DNC and Clinton campaign contract Fusion GPS… who then hire Christopher Steele. At the tail end of that enterprise Michael Sussmann (Perkins Coie lawyer) is delivering material to FBI legal counsel James Baker, and DOJ official Bruce Ohr is serving as a secondary conduit of information from Chris Steele to the FBI.
This is the beginnings of the Steele Dossier. The FBI needed “evidence” to obtain a FISA warrant. They needed the FISA warrant to legitimize spying on the Trump campaign. Data was being extracted from the NSA database and fed to Chris Steele through intermediaries. Steele was then mixing this info with other info that he gleaned from contacts in Europe (Russian disinformation?). Keep in mind that Steele was rumored to be former MI6.
Steele was then presenting this “evidence” to the FBI. All of this served two purposes. First, it enabled the continued spying on PDJT. Eventually FISA warrants are obtained. Robert Mueller would have had great difficulty with his investigation without it. Second, it was done to cover up the weaponization of the FISA database. A cover story was needed to protect themselves from discovery of this “four-year weaponization, political surveillance and unlawful spying.”
Even well put together operations occasionally trip over their own feet. Such was the case with the Steele Dossier. The name Michael Cohen would prove to be part of their undoing. As most people will remember, Michael Cohen was once PDJT’s lawyer for some things. How ethical Cohen was during his professional career is certainly a subject of discussion.
Here’s how Cohen’s name endangered the operation. Mining the NSA database using a name will return a lot of hits. To get some idea, just enter your own name into Google and see what comes back. Now looking into the NSA database is way off the scale larger.
The exploitation of the database produced a round trip airline ticket for a Michael Cohen from NYC to Prague. This was fed to Chris Steele and showed up in the dossier. The implication was that this was proof of Trump’s nefarious connection to Russia.
The problem? It was not Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer for some things. It was an art dealer. The Michael Cohen was in California at the same time the other was in Prague. And the proof was ironclad. Of course, this information was quickly buried by the media.
Eventually the Steele Dossier is leaked to the media. Herein was another problem for the conspirators. Hillary Clinton was anxious to have the Russia Collusion story out in the public realm so that she could use it during the campaign. However, the big media houses like the NYTimes and WaPo were afraid to touch the story for fear of lawsuits. They probably knew that it was all made up and did not want to be in the line of fire if it blew up. At long last, at least in Clinton’s eyes, the Huffington Post ran with the story and then the Big Media outlets piled in quoting the Huff Post story. The big media outlets were right about the potential for lawsuits as the Huff Post has been sued.
Let’s remember that the Steele Dossier was not just a campaign smear job. It was a way to legitimize the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Sundance notes:
The Steele Dossier becomes the investigative virus the FBI wanted inside the system. To get the virus into official status, they used the FISA application as the delivery method and injected it into a Title-1 search warrant against Carter Page. The FBI already knew Carter Page (he worked for the CIA); essentially Carter Page was irrelevant, what they needed was the FISA warrant and the Dossier in the system {Go Deep}.
The Obama FBI needed Fusion GPS to give them a plausible justification for already existing political surveillance and spy operations. Fusion-GPS gave them that justification and evidence for a FISA warrant with the Steele Dossier.
Ultimately that’s why the Steele Dossier was so important; without it, the FBI would not have the tool that Mueller needed to continue the investigation of President Trump. In essence by renewing the FISA application in 2017, despite them knowing the underlying dossier was junk, the FBI was keeping the surveillance gateway open for Team Mueller to exploit later on.
Was it junk? Listen to John Ratcliffe:
So, when Comey and Yates, et all, signed off corroborating the FISA warrant on Carter Page, they were corroborating the information contained therein. They were saying the info HAD BEEN VERIFIED. No action has been taken against these people for this gross violation of their oaths and their obligations within our justice system.
Again, and I cannot emphasize this enough, Admiral Mike Rogers’ actions after detecting questionable activity within the NSA database system triggered all of this downstream activity. The problem for the conspirators became this.
From Sundance:
However, the involvement of official government agencies like NSA Admiral Mike Rogers, creates a paper trail. Search query logs, notifications to Mike Rogers, notifications to the FISA Court, notifications to FBI officials of the suspension of contractor access, and subsequent FISA court opinions like the 99-pages from Rosemary Collyer, all of it creates an internal trail of government documents that tell the story.
It’s those documents that become a risk to the people who operate within the system. In this example of government documents, the trail outlines the targeting of Donald Trump and that was what he continued to ask the ODNI, DOJ and FBI to release. (emphasis added)
Frustrated by the lack of action, in March 2022 Donald Trump filed a massive civil lawsuit against the Clinton campaign and everyone involved in this targeting operation. [SEE LAWSUIT HERE] “Acting in concert, the Defendants maliciously conspired to weave a false narrative that their Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, was colluding with a hostile foreign sovereignty,” the president states.
“Under the guise of ‘opposition research,’ ‘data analytics,’ and other political stratagems, the Defendants nefariously sought to sway the public’s trust. They worked together with a single, self-serving purpose: to vilify Donald J. Trump,” says one segment of the lawsuit.
All of the claims within the filing are substantiated by documents outlining the history of the events. I’m not sure any defendant is going to be successful getting themselves out of the target zone on the lawsuit. The suit alleges “racketeering” and a “conspiracy to commit injurious falsehood,” among other claims.
It is likely that the evidence, the declassified documents, are what was targeted by the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago. In legal terms, the FBI was engaging in obstruction of justice.
Recall this statement by Trump during the September 2020 debate with Joe Biden:
”We’ve caught them all. We’ve got it all on tape. We’ve caught them all. And by the way, you gave the idea for the Logan Act against General Flynn. You better take a look at that, because we caught you in a sense, and President Obama was sitting in the office.”
By hook or by crook, they had to get PDJT out of the Oval Office.
Part 6 will focus on the battle to get this material declassified.