Thread by @SethAbramson

(THREAD) Macmillan just published a PROOF OF CONSPIRACY excerpt—link below—on pre-election Trump-Israeli collusion. I'll now build on it with a related story about Ben Carson that almost no one knows. I hope you'll RETWEET, as this'll surprise many.

More: read.macmillan.com/lp/proof-of-co…

1/ On November 8, 2015—exactly one year before the 2016 presidential election—two GOP primary candidates were *running away with* the primary. They were tied with one another at 24%, and no other Republican was anywhere *close*. Those two Republicans: Donald Trump and Ben Carson.

2/ Most people forget that for almost *all* of fall 2015, there were only two GOP presidential primary candidates who looked viable: Trump and Carson. What the two men had in common—above all else—was that they were political neophytes with absolutely no *clue* on foreign policy.

3/ The other thing they had in common was that the religious right had reason to think either would be a good pick for evangelicals: Carson because of his beliefs, Trump because he was clearly willing to say or do anything for a vote. Both were considered very strong on *Israel*.

4/ Carson, not Trump, was the preferred pick for evangelicals, of course, as he actually had beliefs. Moreover, in fall 2015—while Michael Flynn was secretly working on a multinational nuclear deal involving Israel to enrich himself—Carson actually looked like a potential winner.

5/ Flynn's proposed "grand bargain" would see the U.S. working with Russia to bring nuclear power, and later nuclear weapons, to Sunni Arab nations opposed—like Israel—to Iranian influence in the region. It was an audacious plan—and ultimately one that was/is disloyal to America.

6/ The plan was so audacious—and so contrary to US interests and global security—that *only* a complete political neophyte would go for it. It'd help if such a pol were particularly susceptible to backchannel entreaties from Israelis and *radically* pro-Israel U.S. conservatives.

7/ So imagine Flynn's excitement in 2015 when—having pitched his plan in Israel and Egypt (June) and Saudi Arabia (October) he saw that the two men leading the GOP field were those most likely to adopt his pre-election "grand bargain." Fortunately for Flynn? He was advising both.

8/ It was no coincidence Flynn, a radical, was advising Trump and Carson most robustly in fall 2015, along with—intermittently—a couple other pols. No serious mainstream candidate wanted anything to do with him—he needed a political blank slate to trust him. Carson and Trump did.

9/ There's reason to believe pro-Israel advocates in the US and Israel are the reason Trump and Carson trusted Flynn when almost no one else did. Trump was connected to Netanyahu via Netanyahu's good friend Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law. Carson had even more interesting ties.

10/ You want to know which two presidential campaigns George Papadopoulos—who was, by his own admission, hours from being indicted by Bob Mueller as an *Israeli* agent—wanted to work for in 2015? That's right—Trump and Carson. Trump turned him down, so he went to work for Carson.

11/ Besides Flynn and Papadopoulos, Carson had two other Israel-linked figures in his corner in fall '15—the period during which Israel appears to have signed on to Flynn's "grand bargain" following a Red Sea meeting of Sunni Arab leaders on the subject—who'd later be with Trump.

12/ The first was a man named George Birnbaum, who'd been Netanyahu's chief of staff for years, was *still* a political adviser to the Israeli prime minister, and was considered responsible (with another man, the late Arthur Finkelstein) for Netanyahu's *entire political career*.

13/ Birnbaum was GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson's chief adviser on Israel issues, but also in Carson's corner was an Israeli "business intelligence expert"—Israel-speak for a former Israeli soldier who now spies for persons/corps instead of governments—named *Joel Zamel*.

14/ Joel Zamel was—and would remain through Election Day—in a mutual admiration society with Carson national security adviser Michael Flynn. Zamel wanted Flynn to work with/for him. Zamel also was friends with Carson adviser Birnbaum. How well Papadopoulos knew Flynn is unclear.

15/ So Carson, the evangelical pro-Israel GOP contender willing to do what Flynn advised on national security, which happened to be what Israel wanted to see—a "grand bargain" that required ending sanctions on Russia and giving Saudi Arabia nuclear tech—had a *big* "Israel team."

16/ Israeli business intelligence companies operate with a lot of Israeli government oversight—so they can't afford to piss off the prime minister's office. Things get particularly sensitive when they're involved in a U.S. presidential campaign, as it's easy to cross legal lines.

17/ So it's telling—in terms of determining who Netanyahu was backing in late 2015—that Carson not only had the aide of Zamel's Israeli firm, Psy-Group, but also another Israeli business intel firm, Inspiration. Zamel and Inspiration appeared to be working together to aid Carson.

18/ What were Zamel and Inspiration doing for GOP co-frontrunner Carson in November 2015? Well—walking a *narrow-as-hell legal line*, for one. It's illegal for a foreign firm to offer financial or in-kind assistance to a U.S. campaign; that can only happen through U.S. employees.

19/ Israeli firms Psy-Group and Inspiration had few if any US employees, so any "social marketing" aid they were giving Carson—Israeli-business-intel-talk for digital domestic-disinformation schemes and covert intelligence-gathering activities—was necessarily of dubious legality.

20/ Remember, Mueller was on the verge of charging Papadopoulos—who, did I mention, was in regular secret contact with Eli Groner, an aide to Netanyahu, throughout 2015?—with being an Israeli agent, so it's not hard to say what Mueller was worried about here (and the FBI is now).

21/ When Mueller was asked about Papadopoulos' ties to Israel by Congress, he replied, under oath, that that was outside the scope of his investigation—meaning that the information we know he had on it went, with all the rest of the counterintel evidence he gathered, to the FBI.

22/ We know from major-media reporting that the non-Russia counterintelligence evidence Mueller gathered and sent to the FBI had to do with attempts to influence the 2016 election by *nations other than Russia*—so it's not hard to see what would've concerned Mueller about Carson.

23/ When Carson dropped out of the GOP primaries on March 4, 2016, he was in a bind. Since November 2015 he'd tanked so hard that no one was predicting a political future for him. He could go on the Fox News circuit—become an analyst—but had always wanted an *executive* position.

24/ I'm not faulting Carson for this; he'd been a hospital executive previously, and it was certainly reasonable for him to be seeking some sort of executive position in politics going forward rather than a position as an analyst (which didn't play to his strengths, in any case).

25/ So what did Carson do as soon as he dropped out?

Why, he went to see Donald Trump in Trump Tower, of course.

26/ Here are the *only* things we know for sure about Carson's meeting with Trump at Trump Tower sometime between March 4 and March 11, 2016:

(1) The meeting led to Carson endorsing Trump on March 11;

(2) Carson recommended that Trump immediately begin working with Inspiration.

27/ That's odd, isn't it? I mean, certainly Carson national security adviser Flynn had defected to Trump's permanent team just 5 weeks before Carson dropped out, and possible Israeli agent Papadopoulos joined Trump's team (mirabile dictu) almost the same day Carson dropped out...

28/ ...but why was it so urgent for Carson to come to Trump bearing gifts (as it were) in early March 2016, and why was his chief gift an Israeli business intelligence firm? In any case, within weeks Carson adviser Birnbaum was connecting with Trump deputy campaign manager Gates.

29/ The connect wasn't immediate—Carson endorsed Trump on March 11, and it appears his adviser Birnbaum for some reason (PROOF OF CONSPIRACY reveals why) had to wait until Manafort and Gates were aboard Trump's team to make contact—but it was pretty quick: just a matter of weeks.

30/ When Birnbaum gets to Gates, what does he say? Gates—he says—you've got to meet Joel Zamel.

Carson may have *recommended* Inspiration—but Inspiration and Psy-Group were clearly a package. Inspiration has since conceded it worked with another Israeli intel firm it won't name.

31/ Inspiration will only say the firm *wasn't* Israeli operation Black Cube. And it emphasized—*though no one had asked this*—that the Israeli firm it worked with *wasn't*, er, *British* firm Cambridge Analytica. PROOF OF CONSPIRACY reveals why it said so—and why it wasn't true.

32/ Birnbaum ends up being the Trump campaign's connection to Zamel, whose Psy-Group—by *Zamel's own admission to federal witness George Nader*—secretly ran a domestic psy-ops campaign for Trump in the last 90 days of the general election: a campaign that would have been illegal.

33/ Flynn and Papadopoulos end up secretly negotiating sanctions relief for Russia—a necessary precursor to the "grand bargain" Israel wants—with Kremlin agents. Carson's "Israel team" thus jumps over to another pro-Israel national security neophyte, Trump, and helps him *win*.

34/ Carson gets nominated to be HUD secretary despite *no* expertise in the area whatsoever—a continuation of Trump's penchant for not just giving ambassadorships as political favors to unqualified persons linked to him but even (breaking with long tradition) *cabinet* positions.

35/ Incidentally, in the weeks—about 3—between March 11, 2016 and Carson adviser Birnbaum connecting with new Trump adviser Rick Gates, Zamel crafted "redundancies" in the outreach by contacting Newt Gingrich (a member of Psy-Group's board) and asking for help getting to Kushner.

36/ So can you *imagine* how interested I was in *this* breaking news, involving Russia, Carson and Gingrich—three words folks might otherwise have thought had no connection whatsoever to one another? (Note: Vickery's is a still-developing story, clearly.)

https://twitter.com/VickerySec/status/1158455886509035520

37/ If nothing else, I hope this thread—which gives you a *glimpse* of just *one* of the 50+ narratives that interweave in PROOF OF CONSPIRACY—will underscore that the counterintelligence investigation into Trump's ties to Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Egypt is *vast*.

38/ What we know now only *scratches the surface*, which is why Mueller was at pains—in his Report *and* before Congress—to underscore that any and all counterintelligence information (essentially, info on collusion that touched on *other* nations besides Russia) went to the FBI.

39/ We need to see the FBI's counterintelligence report. At a minimum, everyone in Congress does. How else will they realize they need to have a long, serious, under-oath, on-the-record, *televised* conversation with Trump's oh-so-unlikely HUD secretary, Ben Carson? And Birnbaum?

40/ There's a *reason* @KirkusReviews says of PROOF OF CONSPIRACY that its "deft tracing of the undeclared international shuttling back and forth between interested parties of former Trump aide Flynn will make readers wonder why he's not locked inside a maximum security prison."

@KirkusReviews PS/ @KirkusReviews also calls PROOF OF CONSPIRACY a "richly documented indictment of power and corruption that bears urgent discussion in the coming electoral cycle." I hope this thread helps explain why I think it's urgent, too.

You can preorder it here: amazon.com/dp/1250256712?…

@KirkusReviews HARD DATA/ In the GOP primary polling-average graphic below, Donald Trump is in light blue and Ben Carson is in red. (Source: RealClearPolitics, among much else a political poll aggregation website.)

@KirkusReviews PS2/ Given the graphic I just tweeted, this keeps me up at night: Carson's campaign collapsed within days of a Red Sea meeting Zamel's friend Nader convened in fall 2015. At the meeting, Sunni Arab despots decided which GOP pol would advance the "grand bargain." They chose Trump.

@KirkusReviews PS3/ *Immediately* after they—Saudi Arabia's MBS, UAE's MBZ, and Egypt's el-Sisi—chose Donald Trump over their next-most-obvious-and-malleable option, political neophyte Ben Carson, here's what happened to the two candidates (Trump in light blue, Carson in red).

It's terrifying.