February 25, 2019
NO WAY OUT:
Who--or What--Was the FBI's Mole at the Heart of the Trump Campaign? (John R. Schindler, 02/25/19, NY Observer)
On July 12, 2018, Strzok touched on this sensitive source in his public Congressional testimony:What we had before us was an allegation that something significant, that members of the Trump campaign may have been working in cooperation with the Russians. Some people were saying, 'hey look, this sensitive source of information that's so sensitive, so vulnerable, we shouldn't put it in danger,' because sometimes if you go out and do aggressive investigation, if it's a drug snitch or an intelligence source, you can cause significant harm.Who, then, was this super-sensitive source providing the FBI with evidence of possible collusion between candidate Trump and the Kremlin? Three individuals are known to have provided information to CROSSFIRE HURRICANE: Alexander Downer, Australia's high commissioner (i.e., ambassador to Britain), retired British spy Christopher Steele (complier of the notorious dossier about Trump and the Russians), and Stefan Halper, an academic and supposed intelligence source for the FBI and CIA.To be blunt, none of these men is a plausible fit for the "very sensitive source" whom Strzok referenced. [...]But what if the mole wasn't a person? The FBI has long protected super-secret technical intelligence programs, above all signals intelligence, by masquerading their information as coming from (non-existent) human sources. Were Strzok and Page obliquely referring to top-secret-plus SIGINT regarding Trump's clandestine ties to Moscow?That would fit with what this column previously reported about the president's Kremlin ties. As I told you last May, "The counterintelligence investigation of Donald Trump was kicked off by not one, not two, but multiple SIGINT reports which set off alarm bells inside our Intelligence Community," explaining that the initial information came from foreign intelligence partners. I added:NSA understood quite a bit about Trump's connections to Moscow, and by mid-2016, it had increased its efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery regarding the candidate's Russian ties. In response to urgent FBI requests for more information, NSA rose to the occasion, and by the time that Donald Trump officially accepted the Republican nomination in mid-July 2016, 'We knew we had a Russian agent on our hands,' as a senior NSA official put it to me recently.That seems to be the same intelligence which Strzok and Page referred to in coded language, for classification reasons. The Trump White House now is no doubt searching frantically for an FBI mole in their ranks who may not exist. Excellent technical intelligence was always the underpinning of CROSSFIRE HURRICANE, as the FBI has been careful to conceal in order to protect top-secret intelligence sources and methods. The full spy story here, just as with the last major league joint NSA-FBI counterintelligence coup against Moscow, will take decades to be fully revealed to the public.
Posted by Orrin Judd at February 25, 2019 4:52 PM
