12/16/2023 0 Comments Fake dossier![]() ![]() That has been the extent of my contact with the FBI or any other government agency regarding this issue,” the senator said in a statement on Wednesday morning. “Upon examination of the contents, and unable to make a judgment about their accuracy, I delivered the information to the Director of the FBI. However, on 9 December, McCain arranged a one-on-one meeting with Comey, with no aides present, and handed them over. McCain said he was reluctant to get involved, lest it be perceived as payback for insulting remarks Trump had made about him during his rambunctious campaign. The emissary flew back within 24 hours and showed McCain the documents, saying it was hard to impossible to verify them without a proper investigation. Having found each other, the retired counter-intelligence officer drove the emissary to his house, where they discussed the documents and their background. (The Guardian has agreed not to specify the city or country where the meeting took place.) The meeting had a certain cold war tradecraft to it, as he was told to look for a man with a copy of the Financial Times. ![]() The emissary hastily arranged a transatlantic flight and met the source at the airport as arranged. McCain decided the implications were sufficiently alarming to dispatch a trusted emissary, a former US official, to meet the source and find out more. Senator John McCain, a hawkish Republican, was there and was introduced to a former senior western diplomat who had seen the documents, knew their source and thought him highly reliable. On 18 November, the annual Halifax International Security Forum opened in the Canadian city, bringing together serving and former security and foreign policy officials from around the world. In mid-November, the documents took another route into Washington that ultimately led to them being mentioned in the joint intelligence report on Russian interference that was delivered to President Obama and President-elect Trump. The threat of leaks from New York about Clinton emails had reportedly pushed Comey into making his October surprise announcement. The FBI counter-intelligence division, headquartered in Washington, is extremely secretive, much more so than the New York field office, which had strong links to former prosecutor and mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was by then working for Trump. The silence was not altogether surprising. The FBI however continued to refuse to comment on the issue, despite reports that it had requested and perhaps acquired a warrant for further investigation from the Foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court. On a trip to New York in October, he was persuaded to tell his story to David Corn, the Washington editor of Mother Jones, who first reported the existence of the material on 31 October. The former intelligence official grew concerned that there was a cover-up in progress. The FBI’s director, James Comey, threw the election into a spin 11 days before the vote by announcing his investigators were examining newly discovered material. ![]() The bureau seemed obsessed instead with classified material that flowed through a private email server set up by Clinton’s aides. It is believed he also passed a copy to his own country’s intelligence service, but it felt constrained in what action it could take and left it up to the Americans to do their own investigation and draw their own conclusions.Īs summer turned to autumn, the investigator was asked for more information by the FBI but heard nothing back about any investigation. He delivered a set to former colleagues in the FBI, whose counter-intelligence division would be the appropriate body to investigate. If the allegations were real, their implications were overwhelming. He delivered his reports, but the gravity of their contents weighed on him. Opposition research is frequently financed by wealthy individuals who have donated all they can and are looking for other ways to help.īy July, the counter-intelligence contractor had collected a significant amount of material based on Russian sources who he had grown to trust over the years – not just in Moscow, but also among oligarchs living in the west. This was not necessarily the Hillary Clinton campaign or the Democratic National Committee. The original client had dropped out, but the firm that had hired him had found a new, Democratic client. ![]() By the time the contractor had started his research, however, the Republican primary was over. ![]()
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