Some might have speculated this was the case long before independent journalists covered it. Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag, and Matt Taibbi dropped this latest development in the Russian collusion saga: the CIA plotted with the intelligence services of foreign allies to illegally monitor at least two dozen Trump associates before the FBI’s official counterintelligence probe in the summer of 2016.
The established narrative was that the FBI brass took the Steele Dossier as gospel despite knowing it was a Clinton-funded opposition research project that led to the Crossfire Hurricane operation and related surveillance of Trump campaign officials. Disgraced counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok signed off on the probe, which Special Counsel Robert Mueller later took over. Shellenberger, Gutentag, and Taibbi added this latest development, which exposes a new layer of the Russian collusion hoax.
We knew the FISA warrants against Carter Page were illegally obtained, with FBI officials doctoring evidence, but that was just one piece of the puzzle. While that surveillance operation was illegal, the rest of the investigation was more or less viewed as a politically driven wild goose chase aimed to damage the Trump presidency. As it turns out, the whole operation was illegal, according to sources who reached out to these three reporters. It was plotted before the FBI’s probe, which has been viewed as the starting point for this collusion circus, and our allies' services, the “Five Eyes,” helped manufacture probably the greatest political hit jobs of all time. It lends further credence to the belief that there is a deep state and they're working to thwart the will of the voters:
Last year, John Durham, a special prosecutor for the Department of Justice (DOJ), concluded that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) should never have opened its investigation of alleged collusion by then-presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and Russia in late July of 2016.
Now, multiple credible sources tell Public and Racket that the United States Intelligence Community (IC), including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), illegally mobilized foreign intelligence agencies to target Trump advisors long before the summer of 2016.
[…]
Until now, the official story has been that the FBI’s investigation began after Australian intelligence officials told US officials that a Trump aide had boasted to an Australian diplomat that Russia had damning material about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
In truth, the US IC asked the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance to surveil Trump’s associates and share the intelligence they acquired with US agencies, say sources close to a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HSPCI) investigation. The Five Eyes nations are the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
After Public and Racket had been told that President Barack Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan, had identified 26 Trump associates for the Five Eyes to target, a source confirmed that the IC had “identified [them] as people to ‘bump,’ or make contact with or manipulate. They were targets of our own IC and law enforcement — targets for collection and misinformation.”
[…]
“They were making contacts and bumping Trump people going back to March 2016,” a source close to the investigation said. “They were sending people around the UK, Australia, Italy — the Mossad in Italy. The MI6 was working at an intelligence school they had set up.”
The IC, a source said, considered the 26 Trump campaign people identified to “bump” or “reverse target,” or manipulate through confidential human sources (CHSs), to be easy marks because of their relative inexperience.
Doing so was illegal, both because US law prohibits such intelligence gathering unless authorized by a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant and because the weaponization of the IC for political purposes constitutes election interference.
[…]
The FBI has already admitted that it should not have sought FISA warrants to wiretap Carter Page, a Trump foreign policy advisor. FBI had included in its FISA warrant application for Page noncredible intelligence from a confidential human source (CHS) named Christopher Steele, a former British spy.
A source told Public and Racket that IC officials had targeted Page because they viewed him as inexperienced. “You look at some of the people who were there,” the person said. “They weren’t sophisticated or experienced at disinformation or at [dealing with] IC people planting ideas or befriending you.”
In 2018, HPSCI released a 243-page clearing Trump of allegations that he and his team colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election. House Republicans had made a deal with the CIA to place their documents inside a safe within the CIA’s vault.
Today, the trio will dive more into the information that was illicitly obtained that the intelligence community doesn’t want us to see. Shellenberger and Taibbi were the pair that also combed through the ‘Twitter Files,’ another multi-part investigative journalism project that exposed the social media company’s working partnership with the FBI to influence public opinion, among many other creepy anti-democratic things, pre-Elon Musk.