Nevertheless, the question lingers about what motivated the FBI to investigate connections between the Trump campaign and Moscow—for the Bureau, a highly sensitive matter given its proximity to partisan politics. For months, the White House, including President Trump himself, insisted that a private dossier complied by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, was the real origin of the inquiry. That is simply not true. Trumpian suspicion has also fallen on a drunken conversation in June 2016 between George Papadopoulos, a campaign adviser, and the Australian ambassador to London. The FBI did indeed get wind of that boozy chat and was troubled by Papadopoulos’ claim that Moscow had dirt on Hillary Clinton from her hacked emails—but that shocking assertion wasn’t actually news to the Bureau.
Determining when “Spygate” started has become a parlor game among Trump’s increasingly panicky fanbase, not to mention a welcome distraction from the truth, which asserts that there was a political “witch hunt” (to use the presidentially preferred term) led by the Obama White House, using the FBI as its proxy, to attack the Trump campaign. Its most polished telling comes from Andrew McCarthy, who mendaciously explained that the Department of Justice needs to reveal the evidence that got the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of candidate Trump going. Since McCarthy is a former DoJ prosecutor who worked national security cases, he knows that his former employer isn’t going to reveal such highly classified information. Here we have yet another Trumpian shell game-cum-deception.
Given his background, McCarthy is surely aware that a high percentage of counterintelligence inquiries begin with signals intelligence (SIGINT), in other words an electronic intercept (or several) which sparks FBI interest. Wanting to know more, Bureau agents start digging—doing research, thumbing through intelligence reports, asking judges for wiretaps, dispatching informants to get information—in other words, all the things which the FBI actually did in 2016, as it tried to understand why so many Trump associates were so chummy and chatty with Kremlin officials. It bears noting that the most successful counterintelligence operation in American history worked just like this, with bombshell SIGINT reports leading to close collaboration between the National Security Agency and the FBI to slowly, carefully unmask Kremlin spies in the United States.
I know something about how that plays out in practice, since I worked for NSA both as a civilian analyst and as a military officer, and I was technical director of NSA’s biggest operational division. I also worked extensively in counterintelligence, including collaboration with the FBI in cases just like what unfolded, in secret, in 2016 around candidate Trump. Therefore, I speak of the intersection of SIGINT and counterintelligence from the vantage point of what my friend Tom Nichols might call an expert.
Let me put my cards on the table: 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. This has been publicly known, in a general way, for some time. A little over a year ago, the Guardian reported, based on multiple intelligence sources, that the lead was taken by Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ – Britain’s NSA), which “first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious ‘interactions’ between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK intelligence said. This intelligence was passed to the U.S. as part of a routine exchange of information.”
NSA isn’t just the world’s most powerful intelligence agency, it’s the hub of the whole Western spy system. In late 2015, based on GCHQ reports, the word went out to NSA’s close friends and partners to be on the lookout for any intercepts touching on Russian efforts to infiltrate the Trump campaign. They found plenty. As the Guardian explained, in the first half of 2016, as Trump’s presidential bid gained unexpected steam, Australia, Germany, Estonia, and Poland all had SIGINT hits that indicated a troubling relationship between Trump and Moscow. So, too, did the French and the Dutch—the latter being an especially savvy SIGINT partner of NSA’s.
As the Guardian tactfully phrased the matter, “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 U.S.” In other words, Western intelligence agencies that were eavesdropping on the Kremlin and its spies—not Trump or any of his retinue—heard numerous conversations about Trump and his secret Russian connections. As I’ve told you previously, senior Kremlin officials got very chatty about Trump beginning in late 2014, on the heels of his infamous Moscow trip, and NSA knew about this.
In truth, 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.
http://observer.com/2018/05/what-did-the-fbi-do-in-2016-about-russian-connections-to-donald-trump/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
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