Thread by @JewhadiTM

A MUST READ 👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻

Trump-Russia and Clinton-Libya: A Story of 2 Probes and the FBI: RealClearInvestigations realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/…

Records recently posted online by the FBI indicate that it did little to investigate allegations from private sources connected to Republicans about a scheme in which associates of SOS @HillaryClinton tried to exploit their connection to her to profit from 2011 turmoil in Libya.

The FBI received the documents in June 2016, around the time it launched an exhaustive, three-year investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia based, in part, on info from private sources connected to Dems that in the main would prove to be false – the Steele dossier.

The bureau’s different responses to these documents also came during the same period when FBI Director James B. @Comey controversially cleared Clinton, in his first of two exonerations, of criminal wrongdoing in the bureau’s probe of her unauthorized and insecure email setup.

The documents, quietly released as part of the FBI’s case files for the “Midyear Exam,” code name for the Clinton email investigation, revive a lingering mystery from Clinton’s tenure as SOS:

Why did Sidney Blumenthal, the former journalist and Bill Clinton White House aide, send her a series of detailed memos and reports about Libya beginning in 2011?

The documents offer an answer. They allege that Blumenthal sent the emails as a "quid pro quo" to free up classified State Department financial intelligence to help Libya recover as much as $66 billion spirited offshore by slain strongman Moammar Gadhafi.

Out of that, Blumenthal and associates stood to gain a brokers' cut of perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars.

Blumenthal worked on Libya with Cody Shearer, another longtime Clinton operative. Shearer would later join Blumenthal in passing anti-Trump claims similar to those in the Steele dossier on to the State Department and across the federal government.

The FBI's acquisition of the Libya files made it freshly aware of Blumenthal's possible past motives - including personal financial gain - as he spurred an investigation meant to help defeat Donald Trump and elect Clinton.

In addition, one FBI agent played an especially pivotal role in the bureau’s response to both sets of allegations: @PeteStrzok, who would eventually be fired by the bureau because of his anti-Trump bias.

The heavily redacted files are part of a 428-page FBI document dump posted on FBI.gov in June. The documents are labeled by the FBI as having been received on June 6, 2016 – a month before the first of @Comey’s 2 exonerations of Clinton:..

...and roughly seven weeks before the FBI opened its counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign, relying on the Steele dossier.

vault.fbi.gov/hillary-r.-cli…

(relevant pages: 318-380).

Reporting by ProPublica and Gawker in 2015 established that Blumenthal was working with Shearer and former CIA officer Tyler Drumheller, who died in 2015, as part of what the publications called a “secret spy ring” to funnel information to Clinton.

Over the next few years, Blumenthal sent her intel reports prepared by Drumheller, former chief of the CIA’s clandestine service in Europe who left the agency in 2005. Emails between Blumenthal and Drumheller suggest Shearer may have been in contact with the Libyan authorities.

The group’s interest in Libya came to light after Marcel Lazăr Lehel, the notorious Romanian hacker who goes by the name “Guccifer,” stole Blumenthal’s emails in 2013 and published his correspondence with Clinton online.

The hack also revealed that Clinton was conducting sensitive State Department business on a personal email account, though her email practices didn’t become a high-profile controversy until 2015, during the congressional investigation into the Benghazi attack.

A 2015 New York Times article on the hack reported that “[m]uch of the Libya intelligence that Mr. Blumenthal passed on to Clinton appears to have come from a group of business associates he was advising as they sought to win contracts from the Libyan transitional government.”

Nevertheless, the Times reported that Clinton passed Blumenthal’s memos on to other State Department officials, though a Clinton aide would obscure the source of the information, saying “they had come from an anonymous ‘contact’ of Mrs. Clinton.”

The documents recently released by the FBI purport to spell out the exact nature of business Blumenthal et al were pursuing:

“Our evidence shows that Mr. Blumenthal was involved with a group of intelligence professionals seeking to repatriate asset[s] which were plundered and then exfiltrated by the [Gadhafi] family and hidden in various offshore localities.”

“One of the devices used by [Blumenthal’s] lawyers and advisors was the infamous Panama papers law firm... This program is better known as Rogue National Judgment Recovery Litigation, for which we have much experience, sources, and knowledge generally.”

“However, in order for Mr. Blumenthal and his associates to be successful with this program, they needed high quality FINCEN [Financial Crimes Enforcement Network] intelligence analysts that formerly worked as liaisons with the CIA;...”

”he needed complete access to the Libyan Central Bank to do the financial traces; and most important of all, needed access to the State Department Intelligence Bureau file regarding the Libyan Frozen Assets Fund, which consisted of about $30B in frozen and recovered assets.”

“As an illustration of how profitable this program could be, since the Blumenthal group had a contingency contract with the coalition government [in Libya], if they found just $1B in assets and the contingency fee was 10% of funds recovered...”

” (which is extremely conservative and considerably below industry standards), it would mean the group would earn $100M gross. Assuming expenses of 10% of the gross, which would be extremely generous, the net to the group would be $90M,” according to the docs given to the FBI.

“The only obstacle separating Mr. Blumenthal and the money was the State Department intelligence; and the key to getting it was his longtime patron Mrs. Clinton.”

The private inquiry asserts that the “constant Libya memos” Blumenthal and his associates were passing on to Clinton were meant as “bait to entice the State Department to release the data” and an “official example of quid pro quo.”

The documents published by the FBI claim Blumenthal and his associates were working on the Libya “scheme” as late as December 2015.

The documents assert that they got as far as obtaining a draft agreement for asset recovery with Libya’s coalition government and setting up an “offshore corporate vehicle” – with the help of Mossack Fonseca, the Panama Papers firm.

But the findings of the private investigation state: “what we do not know is whether the team was actually operationalized or if the attendant publicity surrounding [Clinton’s] email server” -which ramped up throughout 2015 -“effectively shut down the Blumenthal team’s efforts.”

“For these reasons, we assess that the true motivation behind Blumenthal’s willingness to move mountains of data about Libya to Clinton was all about the money and to get access to or actually obtain the State Dept intel file...

...notwithstanding that it would be highly illegal for the file to be released to a private citizen.”

To date, these claims are unverified. Still, the FBI’s subdued handling of the matter appears to contrast w/its response to the unconfirmed Steele dossier -also received in mid-2016 – and that Blumenthal & Shearer were deeply involved in the effort to tie Trump to Russia.

The Second ‘Dossier’

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Blumenthal and Shearer were actively preparing opposition research on behalf of Hillary Clinton. Two memos prepared by Shearer claimed, as did the Steele dossier, that Donald Trump had been compromised by the Russians.

One of the people they used to pass on these false allegations to the FBI was Jonathan Winer, then a U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement and former special envoy for Libya.

Winer declined to comment for this article, but in a Washington Post op-ed in February of last year, he explained his meeting with his “old friend” Blumenthal. When the two met in September 2016, Winer had already met with Steele and was familiar with the contents the dossier.

“What struck me was how some of [Shearer’s] material echoed Steele’s but appeared to involve different sources,” Winer wrote.

A memo released by the Senate Judiciary Committee last year appears to reference Steele’s use of the Blumenthal-Shearer Trump dossier to corroborate his own:

"One memorandum by Mr. Steele that was not published by BuzzFeed is dated October 19, 2016.”

“Mr. Steele’s memorandum states that his company ‘received this report from [REDACTED] US State Department,’ that the report was second in a series, and that the report was information that came from a foreign sub-source who ‘is in touch with [REDACTED],

a contact of [REDACTED], a friend of the Clintons, who passed it to [REDACTED].’ It is troubling enough that the Clinton campaign funded Steele’s work, but that Clinton associates were contemporaneously feeding Steele allegations raises additional concerns about his credibility."

It is also significant that Steele provided the FBI with only the second of Shearer’s oppo research reports on Trump. The first identified a Dem funder: Shearer said Glenn Simpson & Peter Fritsch of Fusion GPS had been hired by the DNC to “rack [sic] down Trump compromised story”

Did Steele obtain both Shearer reports? Winer is vague in his Washington Post op-ed on the exact nature of the “notes” Blumenthal passed on to him.

But if Winer provided both reports to Steele, that suggests that Steele would have been aware of who was funding his efforts, and that he withheld that information from the FBI by not sharing the first report.

The FBI’s FISA warrant application to surveil the Trump campaign includes no mention that Steele knew of the dossier's politically motivated funders, the DNC and the Clinton campaign.

Instead, citing the Steele dossier, the application states that Simpson “never advised Source No. 1 [Steele] as to the motivation behind the research into candidate’s #1 [Trump’s] ties to Russia.”

If the FBI had been made aware in mid-2016 that Blumenthal and Shearer might have had financial motives tied to presidential candidate Clinton, Steele’s decision to pass on info obtained by Shearer later that year should have been a red flag about the reliability of Steele’s info

The FBI cited Steele’s dossier in its first application for a FISA warrant to surveil former Trump campaign aide Carter Page in October — months after the bureau received the Libya documents.

In May of this year, Trey Gowdy told Fox News that he had seen Blumenthal’s name on an FBI spreadsheet that attempted to list independent corroboration for specific factual assertions in the Steele dossier.

Apparently referring to Blumenthal’s reputation for pro-Clinton political machinations, the Republican said the operative’s past should have concerned the FBI.

“When the name Sidney Blumenthal is included as part of your corroboration, and when you’re the world’s leading law-enforcement agency, you have a problem,” Gowdy said.

Via @Heminator