Feds claim vaguely to know a lot about President Donald Trump’s secret Kremlin ties. What’s behind the spy mystery here? How much does the FBI know and how does it know it? At last, we have more than hints.
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It’s no secret that senior FBI officials knew that something was amiss with candidate Trump and his foreign linkages back in 2016. That summer, the Bureau opened a tightly compartmented counterintelligence investigation into possible Russian espionage connections to Team Trump. Memorably termed CROSSFIRE HURRICANE, that inquiry opened the door to the Special Counsel investigation headed by Robert S. Mueller, III, still in progress today. What exactly the FBI’s initial investigation uncovered remains shrouded behind classification, but we’ve now gotten a big hint about what was really happening that fateful summer.
Like so much of what’s been publicly revealed about CROSSFIRE HURRICANE, it involves Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who back in 2016 were the FBI’s counterintelligence boss and a Bureau attorney, respectively, who were also secret lovers. They exchanged a lot of indiscreet text messages about Trump during the presidential campaign, some of which had no business being in unclassified messages. For their indiscretions, Strzok and Page were run out of the FBI in disgrace, becoming something of an obsession for Team Trump, including the president himself.
Now The Daily Caller has reported what Strzok and Page told Congress last year, in closed testimony, about what was going on with CROSSFIRE HURRICANE back in mid-2016. To make a long spy story short, the lovers were concerned that mounting a serious, sustained counterintelligence investigation into Trump’s ties to Moscow ran the risk of exposing a longtime Bureau intelligence source of great value.
As Page told Congress on July 13, 2018, “If [Trump] is not going to be president, then we don’t need to burn longstanding sources and risk sort of the loss of future investigative outlets, not in this case, but in other Russia-related matters.” Two weeks later, Strzok told Congress that a notorious text exchange with his mistress about a mysterious FBI “insurance policy” actually referred to this shadowy “very sensitive source” who, The Daily Caller noted, “had provided evidence of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.”
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But what if the mole wasn’t a person? The FBI has long protected super-secret technical intelligence programs, above all signals intelligence, by masquerading their information as coming from (non-existent) human sources. Were Strzok and Page obliquely referring to top-secret-plus SIGINT regarding Trump’s clandestine ties to Moscow?
That would fit with what this column previously reported about the president’s Kremlin ties. As I told you last May, “The counterintelligence investigation of Donald Trump was kicked off by not one, not two, but multiple SIGINT reports which set off alarm bells inside our Intelligence Community,” explaining that the initial information came from foreign intelligence partners. I added:
NSA understood quite a bit about Trump’s connections to Moscow, and by mid-2016, it had increased its efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery regarding the candidate’s Russian ties. In response to urgent FBI requests for more information, NSA rose to the occasion, and by the time that Donald Trump officially accepted the Republican nomination in mid-July 2016, ‘We knew we had a Russian agent on our hands,’ as a senior NSA official put it to me recently.
That seems to be the same intelligence which Strzok and Page referred to in coded language, for classification reasons. The Trump White House now is no doubt searching frantically for an FBI mole in their ranks who may not exist. Excellent technical intelligence was always the underpinning of CROSSFIRE HURRICANE, as the FBI has been careful to conceal in order to protect top-secret intelligence sources and methods. The full spy story here, just as with the last major league joint NSA-FBI counterintelligence coup against Moscow, will take decades to be fully revealed to the public.
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"In other words, the Bureau had a mole. Protecting that source was deemed more important in the summer of 2016 than stopping the Trump campaign, which the FBI knew or at least strongly suspected was in bed with Vladimir Putin."https://t.co/r6EAnvOi5w
— John Schindler (@20committee) February 25, 2019
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