by Dan Bongino
This is a chapter with a lot of moving parts. But those moving parts are crucial to explain how what I call Plan B emerged, what Plan B actually was, and why, ultimately, it was as flimsy as the paper the Steele dossier was printed on. But to avoid any confusion, let me summarize the plan right up front: while Christopher Steele was assembling his dossier for Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS, he was also sending that same “intelligence” to the FBI. Footnotes in the FISA warrant applications provide the smoking gun on this. He was, as you will see, double-dipping—working for both the FBI and Glenn Simpson at the same time.
Initially, I believed that the Steele dossier was the FISA warrant application and the FISA warrant application was the Steele dossier. But I’ve now found evidence that indicates that, for reasons I’ll get to in a second, Steele sent other reports to the FBI detailing the same claims as in the dossier. These reports fueled the FISA warrant applications, while the dossier fueled public outrage and served to destabilize Team Trump. Together, the Steele FBI reports and the Steele dossier became the inseparable damaging duo that was used to drive Russiagate forward and cast a paralyzing shadow on the Trump campaign and administration. Without the Steele dossier, there was no way to get the damaging allegations into the media and demand an investigation. Without the Steele reports to the FBI, there was no way to get a warrant approved. No warrant, no investigation. No investigation, no Mueller special counsel. No Mueller special counsel, no fabricated allegations of obstruction against the president.
The reason I’m making a distinction between the Steele dossier and the reports Steele sent to the FBI is that the FBI reports—which have never been seen by the public but are alluded to in multiple FISA warrant applications—are critical to providing cover for so many of the bad actors in this story. John Brennan repeatedly insisted that he first saw the dossier in December 2016, and Comey has repeatedly claimed ignorance regarding its provenance. This is possible. The dossier was only one aspect of Steele’s anti-Trump intel campaign. By reporting to the FBI, verbally or otherwise, Steele was providing a method of plausible deniability for when officials would be asked if they had seen the dossier, which was paid for by the Clinton Campaign and the DNC. If this theory is correct—and the FISA warrant application says the FBI received reports from Steele, then Brennan didn’t have to see the actual dossier because he could see the reports or summaries of the reports that Steele was providing to his intelligence connections through unofficial channels, while the FBI could also receive “reports” from Steele separate from the physical dossier.
Indeed, Peter Strzok, as head of FBI counterintelligence, reportedly briefed Brennan, so it is not a stretch to assume that he shared Steele’s reports, which were not, technically, the dossier.1 As for the FBI investigators, they could cop to the same story—“We never laid eyes on the dossier”—because they didn’t need the dossier when they were getting the same information directly from Steele.
I lay out the proof of all this in subsequent pages. But here is the overarching takeaway: the Steele reports to the FBI—which mirrored the dossier—formed the basis of the FISA warrant application, and the FISA warrant application was based on the Steele reports to the FBI, which completely echo the dossier.
And all three of these things—the dossier, the Steele reports to the FBI, and the FISA warrant application—became the road map to the Mueller investigation. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
FUEL FOR A FIRE
According to official FBI lore, the formal investigation into Trump-Russia collusion kicked off July 31, 2016, with operation Crossfire Hurricane, the Strzok-led counterintelligence investigation. It was initiated, according to the FBI timeline, in response to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer’s report claiming that George Papadopoulos had told him the Russians had some kind of damaging information on Hillary Clinton—something the former Trump advisor has consistently denied ever doing.
Somehow, when the New York Times published the first report of the Downer meeting on December 30, 2017, a huge piece of misinformation, attributed to “court documents,” was slipped into the story: “In late April, at a London hotel, Mr. Mifsud told Mr. Papadopoulos that he had just learned from high-level Russian officials in Moscow that the Russians had ‘dirt’ on Mrs. Clinton in the form of ‘thousands of emails,’ according to court documents.”
Two paragraphs later, the article reports: “Not long after, however, he opened up to Mr. Downer, the Australian diplomat, about his contacts with the Russians.”2
In one article using anonymous sources and unspecified court documents—quite possibly the FISA warrant application regarding Carter Page, which mentions Papadopoulos on page eight and has a redacted footnote next to his name—two completely separate events are linked. But the fact is, Papadopoulos says he never specified that the Russians had Clinton’s emails and, if anything, he was goaded into discussing Russia by Downer, who has now gone on record confirming Papadopoulos’s assertion that emails were never mentioned. But the two events, presented without an ounce of skepticism in the article and evidently linked in court documents, became conflated.
So the source of the Times’s story seems to have known about the Mifsud meeting and the Downer meeting and merged the two events. Perhaps all this is in the Carter Page FISA warrant application—which I have reason to believe the Times reporters had seen. But if it isn’t, find the person who spoon-fed this bombshell bogus storyline to “the Gray Lady” to establish an “official” investigation narrative, and you likely have identified one of the chief deep state architects of Russiagate.
A key figure in this inquiry is Bill Priestap, the assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, who supervised Strzok. Thanks to one of Strzok’s texts, we now know that on or around May 9, 2016—about two weeks after Papadopoulos’s April 26 meeting with Mifsud and just days after Papadopoulos’s May 1 meeting with Downer—Priestap traveled to London (amazing how many times London surfaces in Russiagate, isn’t it?). In a May 4, 2016, text to Lisa Page, Strzok wonders about Priestap’s ability to read a memo “before he gets back from London next week.” Then on May 9, Strzok sent a text wondering who would get a briefing “with Bill out.”3
What was the point of the London trip? According to testimony Priestap gave to Congress in a closed-door meeting on June 5, 2018, he “went to meet with a foreign partner, a foreign government partner.” Priestap refused to specify whom this foreign partner was or whether his trip had anything to do with the Trump-Russia investigation.4
It seems more than likely that a senior FBI counterintelligence director would go to London to meet members of British intelligence, doesn’t it?
Remember: Papadopoulos, the young Trump advisor, was popping up everywhere. The Washington Post had written about him. The Israeli press had covered him. And he was the victim of a sensationalized front-page news hit by the Times of London on May 4. Moreover, Papadopoulos lived in London for months in 2016. He worked for a nebulous law institute whose staff included a British woman who had worked, on occasion, with the FBI—which, according to Papadopoulos, tried to ensure that Mifsud would meet him in Rome.
Still, the whole manufactured storyline regarding Papadopoulos—who North Carolina congressman Mark Meadows said was “the whole reason we have this Russian collusion investigation going on”5 was problematic in terms of taking down Trump and his team.
That’s because Papadopoulos never mentioned the Clinton-email angle to Downer and wisely never repeated Mifsud’s “Russia has Clinton’s emails” claims to anyone on the campaign team. And those two facts really put the kibosh on any plan to plant or prove a collusion storyline. In other words, two key parts of the Russiagate fantasy, as far as roping in Papadopoulos is concerned, cannot be proven because they never happened.
And that means the investigation into Papadopoulos was destined to fail as far as hurting or tainting Trump. As we know from his book, Papadopoulos was
threatened with FARA charges unless he pleaded to the much lesser charge of lying to the FBI, which he did.6 So the Mueller investigation basically wound up going from sixty to zero with Papadopoulos.
If Papadopoulos was going to be a bust, FBI agents needed to broaden the scope of the investigation and ensnarl other members of the Trump team. To do that, they needed a FISA warrant.
Why was a FISA warrant needed?
According to Section 702 of the FISA, U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies can spy on any and every non-U.S. citizen if an investigation hinges on “national security.” If, however, American communications are swept up during an investigation, that information is supposed to be “minimized” and remain unseen, in compliance with Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure regarding U.S. citizens. This means that any surveillance of an American suspected of working as or with a foreign agent requires a warrant.7
Since Trump’s campaign was populated, obviously, by Americans, any probe investigating so-called collusion with Russia required a FISA warrant.
THE FICTION OF FUSION
Enter the plug-and-play work of Glenn Simpson, Fusion GPS, Christopher Steele, and ultimately the Steele dossier, which served at least four functions for the deep state operatives in the Obama administration.
First, it became a compendium—a virtual scandal-a-day diary—of allegations and fantasies about Trump and his campaign that could be weaponized.
Second, it provided a way to “legitimize” the previous reports from foreign intelligence agencies that could not be used against U.S. citizens. Steele, who had been a paid operative for the FBI, was a known and therefore credible source, which was a requirement of the Woods verification procedures that were part of FISA application protocol.
Third, it turns out Steele wasn’t just a former informant for the FBI. The footnotes in the FISA warrant application reveal he was actively working with the FBI while he was collecting information for the dossier.8
Fourth, and most important, it provided Steele with the allegations he would relay to the FBI. Not only did this allow the bureau to build a road map to obtain the FISA warrant by citing Steele as a reliable source, but Steele’s information also provided a road map for the entire Mueller investigation as well.
The Steele dossier mentions very few members of the Trump campaign, and almost all of them—Papadopoulos, Flynn, Manafort, Stone—have been indicted. Ironically, Carter Page, the man the FISA warrant focused on, has had his name dragged through the mud but has never been charged with anything. It’s also ironic that all the charges for Papadopoulos, Flynn, and Manafort have nothing to do with the dossier or Russiagate. The indictments, just to be crystal clear, involve lying to the FBI, FARA law issues, money laundering, and tax evasion.
Timing in love, real estate, and war is always important. The same goes for politics and prosecutions. Now that the optics of a collusion storyline had been planted—thanks to the presence of Paul Manafort, to Trump’s stump-speech quotes about Russia, to Carter Page’s ties to Russia, and to unspecified reports from foreign agents—the FBI thought it had the goods for the usually rubber-stamping FISA court.
In the summer, the FBI applied to the FISA court for a warrant “to monitor four members of the Trump team suspected of irregular contacts with Russian officials,” according to the Guardian.9
A FISA warrant on any member of the campaign would allow open-season surveillance on the entire Trump team because the warrant allows the invocation of the “two-hop” rule. That is, any Americans the suspect talks to can be investigated, and their contacts listened to as well.
But the initial FISA request was denied. The Guardian reported that the application was turned down and that the FISA court asked the “FBI counter-intelligence investigators to narrow its focus.”10
Evidently, the court found the application too broad, which is somewhat shocking because FISA applications in the age of post-9/11 terror have a rubber-stamp reputation—very few are rejected. One published report found that the court has rejected eleven applications and approved 33,942 since its creation.11 The rejection meant the bureau needed to bolster its application. It needed to make the case that spying on Carter Page and the Trump campaign was a serious national security issue. It needed to document widespread, sinister events. But how?
The bureau needed more intel, and fast. The election was now four months away. And if Trump had defied the predictions of political insiders to win the Republican nomination, who was to say he wouldn’t do the same thing against a problematic candidate like Hillary Clinton? Time was of the essence.
Glenn Simpson had already hired Nellie Ohr. He had already met with Bruce Ohr. He had even reached out to Christopher Steele, the FBI-approved informant and former spymaster. And he had nabbed a $2 million payday from the legal team working for the DNC and the Clinton campaign.
There was just one problem. One of the FBI’s intel-collection sources—and possibly one of Glenn Simpson’s sources—had dried up.
AN ILLEGAL COLLECTION AGENCY
That source was likely the enormous database of digital communications maintained by the NSA. Using the powers granted in FISA’s Section 702, the NSA conducts massive data sweeps of internet communications on a regular basis. There are two primary methods: upstream surveillance, which, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, involves collecting communications as they travel through internet backbone carriers—that is, the system’s largest top-tier data routes and connectors—and downstream surveillance, also called PRISM, which gathers communications from companies like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo!12
Law enforcement and intel agencies with clearance can query these databases, requesting communications that are from or to foreign intelligence targets. These search parameters—or “selectors”—can include specific email addresses or phone numbers but can be much broader. If the search is conducted under the guise of a “vital national security” issue, results containing data from Americans can be opened and all “upstream” connections explored.
As long as the people making the queries strictly abide by constitutional provisions and there are supervisors prepared to conduct due diligence to ensure the searches are not being abused, this kind of surveillance makes sense, especially in a post-9/11 world. But there must be checks and balances. You want to investigate an American citizen and conduct surveillance? Get. A. Warrant.
That is the law of the land.
We now know, however, that this wasn’t always the case. Contractors working on behalf of government organizations were also querying the NSA database. According to an April 26, 2017, FISA Memorandum Opinion and Order, numerous queries were being conducted by the intelligence community as well as by or on behalf of contractors and individuals without proper authorization. These searches revealed information about U.S. citizens and were not clearly related to national security. Therefore, making these queries and viewing the result sets should have required FISA court approval.13
Furthermore, according to the FISA Court order,
“[o]n March 9, 2016, DOJ oversight personnel conducting a minimization review at the FBI’s [redacted] learned that the FBI had disclosed raw FISA information, including but not limited to Section 702-acquired information….[redacted] is part of the [redacted] and ‘is largely staffed by private contractors’…. certain [redacted] contractors had access to raw FISA information on FBI storage systems” that “went well beyond what was necessary to respond to the FBI’s requests…. The FBI discontinued the above-described access to raw FISA information as of April 18, 2016.”14
According to the memorandum, the consultants were used to “provide technical or linguistic assistance to the FBI.” But there are a couple of interesting things about these revelations. First, the timing: in March 2016, just as George Papadopoulos was joining the campaign team, the DOJ discovered potential violations. Then it took fi
ve more weeks for the query capability to be shut down. Second, the idea that these illegal queries were in conjunction with translators and tech experts raises questions, too. Who were those translators? And did any of them have connections to the people and companies paid to gather dirt on the Trump team?
Whatever the answer, the fact remains that the FBI was playing fast and loose with FISA data related to American citizens. But as of April 26, the rules of the game—no spying on Americans—were now being enforced and tracked. In fact, some noncompliance reports reached NSA director Mike Rogers, and he was clearly not comfortable with what he was hearing and reading, because he ordered a full audit on Section 702 compliance in mid-June 2016.15
So between operation Crossfire Hurricane’s falling apart as the Papadopoulos “lead” evaporated and a clampdown on collecting info on Team Trump in normal intelligence sweeps (the phone calls, the emails, the text contacts), investigating collusion concerns was not going to be a walk in the park. And using intel that had been illegally gathered was never going to make it in court, either. The FBI needed sanitized intelligence.
AN INTEL CLEARINGHOUSE
Luckily for the bureau—and unluckily for Trump and America—Glenn Simpson’s team appears to have figured out a way to launder specious secondhand and thirdhand allegations into alarming “raw intelligence.”
What is “raw intelligence”? It’s one of the building blocks of spycraft. The FBI, on its own website, says: “Simply defined, intelligence is information relevant to decision-making.”16 Raw intelligence, then, is data that has not been analyzed and evaluated.
By hiring Christopher Steele, a former MI6 Russian expert, Simpson effectively figured out a way to create a kind of magical quote machine to pump out shocking, scandalous data—essentially damning rumors that sounded like they could maybe, somehow, in some alternate universe be true. Remember that Simpson’s wife actually bragged about this on Facebook, posting that her husband was the one who had driven the dossier. And that may be true. But Simpson needed Steele, or someone with Steele’s reputation, as a Russian intel expert.