If I were writing a fictional account of the effort to prove there was “collusion” between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russians, and the subsequent quest to drive him out of office, I would include a lot of material on how the intelligence services of the United States and Great Britain worked together.
This is not just a good plot, it’s increasingly obvious that it actually happened. As The Washington Examiner reported the other day,
Sir Kim Darroch, the long-time senior British diplomat who had served as their representative in Washington, D.C., since January 2016, “is said to have vouched for the credibility of Christopher Steele, the author of an explosive dossier of claims about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, in conversation with at least one US official” according to a new article by the Sunday Telegraph, which has reviewed the documents.
The British newspaper reported: “Asked whether Mr. Steele, a former MI6 officer, was ‘legit’, Sir Kim replied: ‘Absolutely.’”
That’s the same British ambassador who had lambasted the Trump administration, telling his superiors in London that “We don’t really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept.” And Ambassador Darroch fed classified information to local journalists, as the Examiner‘s Tom Rogan reported:
According to one current and one former U.S. government official speaking on the condition of anonymity, Darroch repeatedly leaked classified U.S. intelligence information, including highly classified information, to a journalist for a U.S.-based media outlet. The sources are confirmed by the reaction my related inquiries have received from other government officials.
Indeed, the Brits, via MI6, had been an integral part of the scheme all along, from its origins in the trans-Atlantic Intelligence Community’s operation against Michael Flynn. It’s hard to tell if Stefan Halper was working for the CIA, the FBI or MI6 when he hosted General Flynn at Cambridge University, but in my fictional account he’d be in cahoots with all of them.
It was an international scheme all along, with collusion involving high officials in the Italian intelligence services, who used a little-known Roman university to provide academic legitimacy to their activities. Steele, as usual, seems to have been involved, as well as the FBI’s man in the Italian capital, along with one of the two parties that currently make up the Italian government.
With all this collusion, the Russians were predictably involved. We know they provided a mass of false “information” that made its way into the Steele dossier, that in turn became the key document that served to obtain a warrant to spy on Flynn first, and then a group of Trump associates, from Page to Manafort. In my tale, the Russians expected and wanted Hillary to win the 2016 election (why would they prefer Trump?), and, having failed in both their prophecy and their collusion with the Western intelligence agencies, continued their anti-Trump efforts.
A lot of this may sound too far out to take seriously, even in a fictional account. But so far as I can tell, it tracks with the known facts. The big surprise is the suggestion of collusion between Western and Russian intelligence services. You probably thought they always fought each other, didn’t you? Well, in this case it’s a bit more complicated. Just think of the enormous sums of money sloshing around, and who stands to get it. It isn’t coming from Trump. It comes from the Dark State and the Russians, and they have been against Trump ever since he came down the escalator.
It’s a hell of a story.
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