In a 20-month search for evidence of collusion between Donald Trump's campaign and Russia, none that is compelling has emerged.
Former FBI director James Comey told Congress he found none. The U.S. intelligence community has given a similar assessment, though it did prove convincingly that Moscow meddled in the 2016 election through cyber warfare. And, so far, special counsel Robert Mueller has not offered any collusion evidence, though his work continues.
But, for the first time, I can say there is evidence of collusion between Russians and Americans - specifically, the sort that is at the heart of counterintelligence work.
Before we review that evidence, let's define collusion. The Collins Dictionary says its original British meaning was "secret or illegal cooperation, especially between countries or organizations." Using that definition, collusion can be secret but good, if the outcome is well intended. Or, it can be bad, if it is meant to defraud, deceive or create illegality.
Now for the evidence, as presented to me by several sources, American and foreign:
In September 2015, senior Department of Justice (DOJ) official Bruce Ohr and some FBI agents met in New York with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, to seek the Russian billionaire's help on organized crime investigations. The meeting was facilitated - though not attended - by British intelligence operative Christopher Steele.
In 2012, Steele's private firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, was hired as a subcontractor by a law firm working for Deripaska, who then headed Russia's largest aluminum company. Steele's firm was asked to do research to help the law firm defend a lawsuit filed against Deripaska by a business rival.
By 2015, Steele's work had left him friendly with one of Deripaska's lawyers, according to my sources. And when Ohr, then the associate deputy attorney general and a longtime acquaintance of Steele, sought help getting to meet Deripaska, Steele obliged.
Deripaska, who frequently has appeared alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin at high-profile meetings, never really dealt with Steele but he followed his lawyer's recommendations and met with Ohr, my sources say.
By that time, Deripaska already had proven himself helpful to the FBI. As I've written previously, based on numerous U.S. sources, he cooperated with the bureau from 2009 to 2011 and spent more than $25 million of his own money on an FBI-supervised operation to try to rescue retired FBI agent Robert Levinson, who was captured in Iran while working as a CIA contractor.
U.S. officials and Levinson's family told me that Deripaska's efforts came close to securing Levinson's freedom before the State Department scuttled a deal. The former agent never has been heard from again.
The 2015 meeting between Ohr, the FBI and Deripaska is captured cryptically in some of Ohr's handwritten notes, recently turned over to Congress.
People familiar with the meeting said U.S. officials posed some investigative theories about suspected Russian organized crime and cyber espionage activity, theories that Deripaska indicated he did not believe were accurate.
The sources stressed that the 2015 meeting had nothing to do with any allegation about Russian meddling in the upcoming 2016 election but, rather, was an "outreach" about other types of suspected activity overseas that concerned U.S. officials.
A year later, Deripaska would get another visit from his FBI friends in New York. But this time the questions were about possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Specifically, the agents told Deripaska they believed Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was secretly coordinating the election with Moscow.
Steele had planted that theory with the FBI. By that time the former MI-6 agent was working for the American opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which had been hired by Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to find Russian dirt on Trump. Steele's theories, of course, are contained in the so-called Steele dossier provided to the FBI.
Ohr had his own connection to Fusion, which was paying his wife, Nellie, to work on the anti-Trump research project, according to congressional testimony.
Deripaska once had a business relationship with Manafort but it ended in lawsuits. Despite that acrimony, Deripaska told the agents in that September 2016 meeting that he believed the theory of Manafort was colluding with Russia to help Trump win the election was preposterous.
Deripaska - like the many foreign business figures to whom U.S. intelligence has turned for help over the decades - is not without controversy or need. The U.S. State Department tried to keep him from getting a U.S. visa between 2006 and 2009 because they believed he had unspecified connections to criminal elements in Russia as he consolidated power in the aluminum industry. Deripaska has denied those allegations and claims FBI agents told him in 2009 that the State Department file blocking his entry to the country was merely a pretext.
Whatever the case, it is irrefutable that after he began helping the FBI, Deripaska regained entry to the United States. And he visited numerous times between 2009 and 2017, visa entry records show.
We now know that, on multiple occasions during those visits, the DOJ and FBI secretly collaborated with Deripaska in the hope of getting help, first regarding Levinson, then on Ohr's matters, and finally on the Manafort case. U.S. officials told me they assumed Deripaska let Putin's team know he was helping the U.S. government, and that his motive for helping was to keep visiting America.
Today, Deripaska is banned anew from the United States, one of several Russians sanctioned in April by the Trump administration as a way to punish Putin for 2016 election meddling. But he wants to be clear about a few things, according to a statement provided by his team. First, he did collude with Americans in the form of voluntarily assisting and meeting with the FBI, the DOJ and people such as Ohr between 2009 and 2016.
He also wants Americans to know he did not cooperate or assist with Steele's dossier, and he tried to dispel the FBI notion that Russia and the Trump campaign colluded during the 2016 election.
"The latest reckless media chatter proposes that I had some unspecified involvement in the so-called dossier. Like most of the absurd fantasies and smears that ricochet across the internet, it is utterly false. I had absolutely nothing to do with this project, and I never had any knowledge of it until it was reported in the media and I certainly wasn't involved in any activity related to it," Deripaska said in a statement provided to me by his team.
Americans can form their own conclusions about the veracity of those claims. But they now have a pretty convincing case of collusion between U.S. officials and Russians, one that isn't necessarily all that harmful to the American interest.
And the tale of Ohr, Steele, Deripaska, the FBI and the DOJ is a cogent reminder that people looking for black-and-white answers on Russia are more likely to find lots of gray - the favorite color of the murky counterintelligence world.
Pathetic this is the hill these two choose do die on
"Robert Mueller has not offered any collusion evidence,
though his work continues."no
Trash got off by paying $25M for Trash University fraud, false advertising crime.
Mueller, NY state are going to call his bluff, and he's got ty cards.
I think the best out for USA now is for Trash to fall over dead from heart attack or totally incapacitated by massive stroke. That his only chance of shutting Mueller down. Trash's cult wouldn't, but probably would, blame Mueller.
What hill would that be djohn?
Ohr
Two ty Russian bots. Maybe less than that because bots can at least generate a theory
What hill would that be djohn?
Devin Nunes conspiracy hill
What is the Devin Nunes conspiracy hill djohn?
Serious question?
Are you trolling these guys for 1200 pages?
That seems to be the only logical explanation - you cannot seriously believe any of what you have thrown up against the wall hoping something would stick. Would you?
I think your trolling is brilliant!
dodgerjohn dodging questions again
The hill that never gets anything right
Why did you randomly bring up Devin Nunes out of the blue?The hill that never gets anything right
And what difference would that have made?
Remember your theory is that the judge and everyone having anything to do with the warrant is in on it.
If it doesn’t concern you stop acting concerned.
Thinking you’re in any way threatening
I find it amusing that you ask so many questions about things you say don’t matter. For a guy who now claims he never thought there was Trump/Russia collusion you sure do spend a lot of time in here arguing with those who share the same viewpoint.
Dem collusion doesn’t concern Dems.
Not my fault you espoused every alt right conspiracy that ever appeared on a blog or website or Twitter.Thinking you’re in any way threatening
I find it amusing that you ask so many questions about things you say don’t matter. For a guy who now claims he never thought there was Trump/Russia collusion you sure do spend a lot of time in here arguing with those who share the same viewpoint.
Don't project. You're the gullible here.
lol
No collusion. Just illusion and delusion.
What do you Trash fellators have to say about this Repug leak/theft of Nat Sec data?
C.I.A. Officer-Turned-Candidate Says PAC Obtained Her Security Application
A former C.I.A. officer running for Congress accused a super PAC aligned with Speaker Paul D. Ryan on Tuesday of improperly obtaining her entire federal security clearance application —
a highly sensitive do ent containing extensive personal information —
and then using it for political purposes.
Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic candidate challenging Representative Dave Brat of Virginia, sent a cease-and-desist letter to Corry Bliss, the executive director of the Congressional Leadership Fund, which has raised more than $100 million to help Republicans in the midterm elections.
She demanded that the super PAC destroy all copies of the form and agree to not use the information in any fashion.
“I write as a former civil servant and as an American, in shock and anger, that you have tried to exploit my service to our country by exposing my most personal information in the name of politics,” she wrote.
he do ent was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request filed with the United States Postal Service by America Rising, a separate Republican-aligned research firm.
“C.L.F. follows the letter of the law in examining any candidate’s background and Ms. Spanberger was no different,”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/28/us/politics/cia-officer-house-election-super-pac.html
Security applications, forms, etc are available for the asking?
"examining any candidate's background", excluding, of course, the health and tax records of illegit so-called Pres Trash.
So we can make FOIA request for Trash's health and tax records?
Rachel Maddow Ties Trump And The GOP To Russian Organized Crime
Maddow said:
It has a Russian organized crime element to it.
And now the president mulls pardoning Paul Manafort.
As the president openly mulls firing the attorney general of the United States in the midst of the Manafort prosecution as a way to make the Russia investigation all go away,
today, Republicans in Congress spent the entire day going after that justice department official I’ve been talking about.
That specific official who started with the El Feo case and
the drug gangs in the Bronx.
Who rose to become the head of organized crime and racketeering at the justice department.
Who became the Justice Department’s expert on Russian organized crime.
The guy who indicted the head of the Russian mafia.
The guy who became the Justice Department’s lead counsel for transnational organized crime and international affairs.
The guy who had been part of the team banned Paul Manafort’s patron and business partner, Oleg Deripaska from doing business with the United States on his alleged ties to organized crime in Russia.
That justice department official. That guy. Is named Bruce Ohr.
And he is the object of conspiracy theories and condemnation on right-wing media on a 24-hour loop.
And today, pro trump Republican members of Congress summoned Bruce Ohr to testify behind closed doors before two Republican-led committees and
then they immediately went out to the cameras to talk to report betters
how Bruce Ohr was a liar and
to accuse him of being the rot at the heart of the Mueller investigation and
the Russia scandal more broadly.
The “New York Times” this weekend profiled his long history in leading American law enforcement efforts against Russian organized crime.
There is a Russian organized crime element to the Russia scandal.
Today House Republicans literally came back early from summer vacation to spend the day trying to destroy Bruce Ohr.
And today they are trying the take out one of America’s top experts on organized crime.
And I don’t know exactly what these targeted attacks by the White House and Congressional Republicans will ultimately do to the capabilities of the justice department and the FBI
when it comes to fighting things like Russian intelligence operations in the United States and
Russian organized crime and Russian money laundering through American real estate.
But you can imagine how satisfying a day like today must have been for Semion Mogilevich.
You can imagine how delightful that was for the Russian mafia.
You can imagine how nice a day it must have been when viewed from the perspective of the Kremlin.
Russian Organized Crime Is In The Shadows Of The Trump Scandal
A group of American criminals who couldn’t get banks in the United States to loan them money,
including the current president, somehow were able to get funds from Russia.
Congressional Republicans have been making trips to Russia, and
now they are targeting US Russian organized crime fighters
It could all be a big coincidence that Congressional Republicans have been blazing a trail to Moscow, and
now they are targeting US experts and Russian organized crime fighters.
https://www.politicususa.com/2018/08...iticus+USA+%29
Collusion with the Russians by the Dems.
Final answer?
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