Well, well, well, looks like the infamous Trump Tower Russia meeting with Don Jr. was a setup, put together by Hillary and Obama operatives from his DOJ.
That’s the details exposed in a new report, that further links Clinton and Obama to the very start of the phony Russia probe.
From Real Clear Investigations
The June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between high-ranking members of the Republican presidential campaign staff and a Russian lawyer with Kremlin ties remains the cornerstone of claims that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election.
A growing body of evidence, however, indicates that the meeting may have been a setup — part of a broad effort to tarnish the Trump campaign involving Hillary Clinton operatives employed by Kremlin-linked figures and Department of Justice officials. This view, that the real collusion may have taken place among those who arranged the meeting rather than the Trump officials who agreed to attend it, is supported by two disparate lines of evidence pulled together for the first time here: newly released records and a pattern of efforts to connect the Trump campaign to Russia.
The first line of evidence includes emails, texts, and memos recently turned over to Congress by the Department of Justice. They show how closely senior Justice Department officials and the Federal Bureau of Investigation worked with employees of Fusion GPS, a Washington-based research firm reportedly paid $1 million by Clinton operatives to dig up dirt on the Trump campaign.
They reveal that then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, the fourth-highest-ranking official at DOJ, coordinated before, during and after the election with Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, who did work for the Clinton campaign and Russians; and former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, who was employed by Simpson.
Those emails, which disclose the topics of discussions but not their details, revolve around two business executives: Donald Trump and Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate close to President Vladimir Putin. Steele was particularly interested in resolving issues concerning Deripaska’s U.S. visa, which was revoked in 2006 because of his suspected ties to organized crime. In another sign of the overlapping strands of this story, when Special Counsel Robert Mueller was running the FBI in 2009, the bureau had asked Deripaska to contribute millions of dollars to help locate former FBI agent Robert Levinson, captured in Iran in 2007 while working for the CIA. Levinson remains missing.
The Ohr-Steele-Simpson correspondence appears to include references to the former British spy’s work for Fusion GPS on Trump’s ties to Russia. Months before the election, Steele wrote Ohr to say that he would be back in Washington soon “on business of mutual interest.”
The cozy relationship was bolstered by the fact that the wife of the senior DOJ official, Nellie Ohr, was employed by Fusion GPS.
After Steele was dismissed by the FBI for speaking to the press for an October 31, 2016 report, Bruce Ohr took over the work of relaying Fusion GPS’ opposition research on the Trump campaign directly to the FBI.
The culmination of their combined efforts, the 35-page dossier of unverified Trump/Russia connections, was used by the FBI to secure a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. The Department of Justice did not respond to RealClearInvestigations’ requests for comment, nor did Glenn Simpson’s lawyer, Joshua Levy.
The second line of evidence reframing the Trump Tower meeting — after the Ohr-Steele-Simpson correspondence – was first reported in June by RealClearInvestigations. It shows that, starting in March 2016, FBI confidential sources and other figures associated with Western intelligence services and the Clinton campaign approached the Trump team promising damaging information on Clinton. The Trump Tower meeting appears to have been the most successful of these approaches, since it was the one instance where the Trump campaign signaled it was willing to receive incriminating information on its opponent.
These two strands of evidence – the DOJ’s collaboration with Clinton-paid researchers and efforts to connect the Trump campaign to Russia – came together in midtown Manhattan on June 9, 2016 at Trump Tower.
At the center of it all was Fusion GPS, which had two clients whose interests were served by the Trump Tower meeting: the Russians and the Clinton campaign.
Even though no evidence has emerged from the meeting of any dark conspiracy, appearances were evidently enough. In sworn Senate testimony last year, Simpson claimed the meeting corroborated one of the key claims made in the reports filed by Fusion GPS contractor Steele: “Trump and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.”
Nonetheless, Simpson also testified that he had no knowledge of the meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and others until it was reported a year later. There is reason to doubt that account.
In fact, the Russian lawyer at the center of the meeting, Natalia Veselnitskaya, was his client.
She has publicly stated that she used talking points developed by Simpson for the Russian government in that discussion. Kremlin officials also posted the allegations on the Prosecutor General’s website, and shared them with visiting U.S. congressional delegations.
In addition, Simpson has testified that he had dinner with Veselnitskaya the night before the meeting and the night after.
Accompanying Veselnitskaya to the meeting was Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, who had served in the Soviet Union’s military counterintelligence service. His role remains unclear, but evidence suggests he may have been the source Simpson was alluding to in December 2016 when Ohr recorded that Simpson told him, “Much of the collection about the Trump campaign ties to Russia comes from a former Russian intelligence officer (? not entirely clear) who lives in the U.S.”
Veselnitskaya hired Simpson in spring 2014 for work that lasted, according to Simpson’s Senate testimony, until “mid to late 2016.”
Fusion GPS assisted Veselnitskaya — representing Pyotr Katsyv and his son Denis, both Kremlin-tied businessmen — in her campaign to repeal U.S. legislation sanctioning Russian officials under the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which was named for Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian corruption whistleblower who died in police custody. Simpson, sources told RealClearInvestigations, was tasked with running a smear campaign against the driving force behind those sanctions, Chicago-born financier William Browder, who had employed Magnitsky.
Read more here.
Via TruthFeed
