The New York Times is out today with a lengthy story about how the Trump-Russia investigation began. According to the Times, it was the result of a tip from Australian intelligence to US intelligence agencies about a drunken comment made by George Papadopoulos to and Australian diplomat in London. The story raises more questions than it answers including many about the accuracy of the report. Nevertheless, it offers a new reason for the genesis of the Trump-Russia investigation other than the totally discredited Trump dossier ginned up at the expense of Hillary Clinton and the DNC. It also tries to take FBI agent Peter Strzok off the hook for using that dossier to get a FISA warrant to surveil some in the Trump campaign. One must wonder, however, why it is just now, after all this time, that the Times suddenly learns of all this confidential information.
Let's unpack this a bit.
First of all, the Times reports that in a drunken conversation in a London bar, George Papadopoulos told a high ranking Australian diplomat 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'.” This conversation took place a few weeks before anyone even knew that the DNC had been hacked. Were these the emails taken from the DNC computers? Were they emails taken from Hillary's private unsecured email server which was very much public knowledge at that point? Was the entire conversation just Papadopoulos trying to make himself seem important? The Times never says, although they imply that it must be that the emails were the ones taken from the DNC.
Well, how can we determine which emails were being discussed? One thing we can do is to look at the communications between Papadopoulos and the Trump campaign. The Times says that those communications were had by email since Papadopoulos was in London most of the time. The Times says, however, that the emails have been reviewed and they say essentially nothing that could indicate the Papadopoulos passed this knowledge of emails on to the Trump campaign. How can that be? Papadopoulos was a young man who was trying very hard to create some position for himself. Is it conceivable that a high-level Russian source told him (of all people) that the Russians had all these DNC emails and that Papadopoulos would not immediately tell the Trump campaign in the loudest possible way? Nope. Papadopoulos would want to claim credit for bringing this news to the campaign, and that can't be done if no one in the campaign knows about the story.
That leaves the two possibilities mentioned above: first, Papadopoulos may just have been making the whole story up to try to look important for the Australian diplomat. It surely seems like the sort of thing that Papadopoulos would do. Second, it is also possible that Papadopoulos was actually told by a Russian that the Putin government had Hillary's missing 30,000 emails. I doubt this too, since Papadopoulos made no attempt to alert the Trump campaign to this news.
There's also one further possibility: none of what the Times reports is true. It is just Fake News. It would be easy for an FBI source (like McCabe) to leak this story in an effort to throw the hounds off his own trail. By blaming Australia which will and has already refused to comment, McCabe can claim to be innocent of basing the entire bogus investigation on the Trump dossier.
There are some indicators which point to McCabe as the source of this story. First, the Times tells us that once the investigation of the Trump campaign- Russia story began, it was so secret that the FBI leadership did not even discuss it at the daily classified briefings. According to the Times, the FBI
opened an investigation that became one of its most closely guarded secrets. Senior agents did not discuss it at the daily morning briefing, a classified setting where officials normally speak freely about highly sensitive operations.
Think about that. If senior agents did not know about the investigation, who did know? That would be just the senior leadership of the FBI, namely director Comey and assistant director McCabe. They would be the only ones who could tell the Times that information of this sort was kept from other senior agents; after all, they were the only ones who knew.
The Times never tells us its source for this story, but McCabe seems to be the clear choice here.
So we have one final conundrum to face when it comes to this new story from the Times. Why is it that this was all kept secret for more than a year as every other conceivable fact leaked out of the FBI. Are we really to believe that the genesis of the Trump-Russia investigation was totally different from that reported by the media for about 10,000 times and that nothing of the truth leaked out? I don't think so. After all, why didn't the Papadopoulos story get included in the indictment of Mr. Papadopoulos? Normally, a story this important would have made its way into the indictment, but it didn't.
And there's also the missing link: why didn't Papadopoulos tell the Trump campaign if he had gotten such explosive news from a "high Russian source"?
My conclusion from all of this is that we are dealing here with Fake News. I don't know that the Times made it up, but the story is so unlikely that I assume someone fed Fake News to the Times who has now chosen to run with it so as to try to rescue the Mueller investigation.
Let's unpack this a bit.
First of all, the Times reports that in a drunken conversation in a London bar, George Papadopoulos told a high ranking Australian diplomat 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'.” This conversation took place a few weeks before anyone even knew that the DNC had been hacked. Were these the emails taken from the DNC computers? Were they emails taken from Hillary's private unsecured email server which was very much public knowledge at that point? Was the entire conversation just Papadopoulos trying to make himself seem important? The Times never says, although they imply that it must be that the emails were the ones taken from the DNC.
Well, how can we determine which emails were being discussed? One thing we can do is to look at the communications between Papadopoulos and the Trump campaign. The Times says that those communications were had by email since Papadopoulos was in London most of the time. The Times says, however, that the emails have been reviewed and they say essentially nothing that could indicate the Papadopoulos passed this knowledge of emails on to the Trump campaign. How can that be? Papadopoulos was a young man who was trying very hard to create some position for himself. Is it conceivable that a high-level Russian source told him (of all people) that the Russians had all these DNC emails and that Papadopoulos would not immediately tell the Trump campaign in the loudest possible way? Nope. Papadopoulos would want to claim credit for bringing this news to the campaign, and that can't be done if no one in the campaign knows about the story.
That leaves the two possibilities mentioned above: first, Papadopoulos may just have been making the whole story up to try to look important for the Australian diplomat. It surely seems like the sort of thing that Papadopoulos would do. Second, it is also possible that Papadopoulos was actually told by a Russian that the Putin government had Hillary's missing 30,000 emails. I doubt this too, since Papadopoulos made no attempt to alert the Trump campaign to this news.
There's also one further possibility: none of what the Times reports is true. It is just Fake News. It would be easy for an FBI source (like McCabe) to leak this story in an effort to throw the hounds off his own trail. By blaming Australia which will and has already refused to comment, McCabe can claim to be innocent of basing the entire bogus investigation on the Trump dossier.
There are some indicators which point to McCabe as the source of this story. First, the Times tells us that once the investigation of the Trump campaign- Russia story began, it was so secret that the FBI leadership did not even discuss it at the daily classified briefings. According to the Times, the FBI
opened an investigation that became one of its most closely guarded secrets. Senior agents did not discuss it at the daily morning briefing, a classified setting where officials normally speak freely about highly sensitive operations.
Think about that. If senior agents did not know about the investigation, who did know? That would be just the senior leadership of the FBI, namely director Comey and assistant director McCabe. They would be the only ones who could tell the Times that information of this sort was kept from other senior agents; after all, they were the only ones who knew.
The Times never tells us its source for this story, but McCabe seems to be the clear choice here.
So we have one final conundrum to face when it comes to this new story from the Times. Why is it that this was all kept secret for more than a year as every other conceivable fact leaked out of the FBI. Are we really to believe that the genesis of the Trump-Russia investigation was totally different from that reported by the media for about 10,000 times and that nothing of the truth leaked out? I don't think so. After all, why didn't the Papadopoulos story get included in the indictment of Mr. Papadopoulos? Normally, a story this important would have made its way into the indictment, but it didn't.
And there's also the missing link: why didn't Papadopoulos tell the Trump campaign if he had gotten such explosive news from a "high Russian source"?
My conclusion from all of this is that we are dealing here with Fake News. I don't know that the Times made it up, but the story is so unlikely that I assume someone fed Fake News to the Times who has now chosen to run with it so as to try to rescue the Mueller investigation.
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