We now have what looks like the first authoritative confirmation of this in the form of the article in CNN about Carter Page which I discussed previously. Buried deep within the fantastic and rather aimless speculations about Carter Page which make up most of the article, there is this interesting admission
Two months after Page’s trip [to Moscow], the FBI sought and received a warrant from the secret court that oversees the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to monitor Page’s communications.
(bold italics added)
The trip in question was one Carter Page undertook in July 2016 during which he gave a talk to Moscow’s New Economic School. This is how CNN describes that talk
His trip to Russia in July 2016 revived the FBI’s interest, when he delivered a lecture at a graduation ceremony for the New Economic School. The university opened after the fall of the Soviet Union and is ranked as one of the best universities for economics in Russia. Former President Barack Obama gave a speech there during his first official trip to Russia in 2009.
But Page’s lecture sounded different than what would be expected from most Americans. He parroted Kremlin talking points by chastising the West for prolonging “Cold War tendencies.”
“Ironically, Washington and other Western capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change,” he said, adding that US foreign policy toward Russia was “condescending” and “hostile.” Page stressed to the audience that he was there as a private citizen and not a Trump surrogate. But a spokesman for the school told CNN that Page’s ties to Trump helped secure the invitation
In other words Carter Page gave a talk at a university set up in Russia after the USSR collapsed at which President Obama himself once gave a speech. During that talk Carter Page did no more than openly exercise his First Amendment right to make certain comments about US foreign policy. However because certain things he said “sounded different than what would be expected from most Americans” he was placed under surveillance and his communications were monitored.
That this was not an isolated example is confirmed in further reporting by CNN itself, and in an article in the Guardian which appeared on 13th April 2017, which confirms that the communications of people associated with the Trump campaign were ‘picked up’ by various European intelligence agencies and passed on to the intelligence agencies of the US.
The Guardian article is careful to claim that
……that GCHQ was at no point carrying out a targeted operation against Trump or his team or proactively seeking information. The alleged conversations were picked up by chance as part of routine surveillance of Russian intelligence assets. Over several months, different agencies targeting the same people began to see a pattern of connections that were flagged to intelligence officials in the US.
At this point it needs to be said clearly that the distinction between a ‘targeted campaign of surveillance’ and an ‘incidental campaign of surveillance’ that the article is making is a specious one, even if it is technically true, which by the way it probably isn’t.
The important point is that information obtained through surveillance was being passed on during a US election to US intelligence about US citizens who had done nothing illegal or wrong, and about whom information was being collected and used without a court order. Indeed if the claim that there was no ‘targeted surveillance’ of these people is true, then it is in some ways worse, since European intelligence agencies were in that case informing US intelligence about the communications of people who were not even actual intelligence targets.
In truth the claim that there was ‘no targeted campaign of surveillance’ of these people is starting to look increasingly like an alibi to give the intelligence agencies cover for what they were doing, which was otherwise illegal.
That more and more people are starting to suspect the truth of this is shown by this article in The American Spectator. It makes the following point
An article in the Guardian last week provides more confirmation that John Brennan was the American progenitor of political espionage aimed at defeating Donald Trump. One side did collude with foreign powers to tip the election — Hillary’s.
Seeking to retain his position as CIA director under Hillary, Brennan teamed up with British spies and Estonian spies to cripple Trump’s candidacy. He used their phony intelligence as a pretext for a multi-agency investigation into Trump, which led the FBI to probe a computer server connected to Trump Tower and gave cover to Susan Rice, among other Hillary supporters, to spy on Trump and his people.
John Brennan’s CIA operated like a branch office of the Hillary campaign, leaking out mentions of this bogus investigation to the press in the hopes of inflicting maximum political damage on Trump. An official in the intelligence community tells TAS that Brennan’s retinue of political radicals didn’t even bother to hide their activism, decorating offices with “Hillary for president cups” and other campaign paraphernalia.
A supporter of the American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War, Brennan brought into the CIA a raft of subversives and gave them plum positions from which to gather and leak political espionage on Trump. He bastardized standards so that these left-wing activists could burrow in and take career positions. Under the patina of that phony professionalism, they could then present their politicized judgments as “non-partisan.”……
The Guardian story is written in a style designed to flatter its sources (they are cast as high-minded whistleblowers), but the upshot of it is devastating for them, nonetheless, and explains why all the criminal leaks against Trump first originated in the British press. According to the story, Brennan got his anti-Trump tips primarily from British spies but also Estonian spies and others. The story confirms that the seed of the espionage into Trump was planted by Estonia. The BBC’s Paul Wood reported last year that the intelligence agency of an unnamed Baltic State had tipped Brennan off in April 2016 to a conversation purporting to show that the Kremlin was funneling cash into the Trump campaign.
Any other CIA director would have disregarded such a flaky tip, recognizing that Estonia was eager to see Trump lose (its officials had bought into Hillary’s propaganda that Trump was going to pull out of NATO and leave Baltic countries exposed to Putin). But Brennan opportunistically seized on it, as he later that summer seized on the half-baked intelligence of British spy agencies (also full of officials who wanted to see Trump lose).
The Guardian says that British spy head Robert Hannigan “passed material in summer 2016 to the CIA chief, John Brennan.” To ensure that these flaky tips leaked out, Brennan disseminated them on Capitol Hill. In August and September of 2016, he gave briefings to the “Gang of Eight” about them, which then turned up on the front page of the New York Times….
Were the media not so completely in the tank for Obama and Hillary, all of this political mischief would make for a compelling 2016 version of All the President’s Men. Instead, the public gets a steady stream of Orwellian propaganda about the sudden propriety of political espionage. The headline writers at Pravda couldn’t improve on this week’s official lie, tweeted out by the Maggie Habermans: “Susan Rice Did Nothing Wrong, Say Both Dem and Republican House Aides.”
Liberals pompously quote the saying — “the bigger the lie, the more it will be believed” — even as their media enshrine it. Historians will look back on 2016 and marvel at the audacity of its big lie: whispers of an imaginary Trump-Russia collusion that wafted up from the fever swamps of a real collusion between John Brennan and foreign powers seeking Trump’s defeat.
Despite the well-founded pessimism in the last paragraph of this article, my own belief is that sooner or later all this will come out.
As my previous article about Carter Page pointed out, the supporters of Russiagate are finding it more and more difficult to keep the scandal going because of the lack of any factual material behind it.
When the scandal collapses under the weight of its own absurdity – as it eventually will – the President and his followers will have every reason to publicise the truth, and to apportion blame to those responsible. Whether the media or the public will however acknowledge the truth, even when it is spelled out to them, is another matter.
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