Posted originally on CTH on March 6, 2025 | Sundance
The original information from an FBI whistleblower first surfaced in 2022. Essentially the information was that the DNC contracted law firm of Perkins Coie had an FBI workstation in their DC office since 2012.
The Perkins Coie workstation (collocated by the FBI) has access to the NSA database on all Americans, including political figures. The Democrats contracted with Perkins Coie for “political research.”
It doesn’t take a lot of thinking to realize what this set up was all about; Perkins Coie could do opposition research on any candidate and feed that information to the DNC for use in their campaigning.
This means both Marc Elias (DNC lawyer) and Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann could exploit the NSA database to conduct searches of all cell phone, computer, email, text message, social media, electronic communication and all private data/communication belonging to Americans; this would include geolocation.
The arrangement was in place since 2012. Democrats have held access to fully intrusive electronic surveillance of their political opposition, or anyone else – anywhere, for over a decade. The ramifications of this joint collaborative activity are vast. President Trump just shut it down:
Pay attention to Section 2, paragraph b.
[…] Sec. 2. Security Clearance Review. (a) The Attorney General, the Director of National Intelligence, and all other relevant heads of executive departments and agencies (agencies) shall immediately take steps consistent with applicable law to suspend any active security clearances held by individuals at Perkins Coie, pending a review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest.
(b) The Office of Management and Budget shall identify all Government goods, property, material, and services, including Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, provided for the benefit of Perkins Coie. The heads of all agencies providing such material or services shall, to the extent permitted by law, expeditiously cease such provision. (LINK)
There is a common misconception about why the FBI and intelligence apparatus began investigating the political campaign of Donald Trump.
In this refresher outline I hope to provide some deep source material that will provide context to the revelation of the FBI-Perkins Coie relationship against numerous historic reference points that reconcile with the revelation of their workstation access.
During the timeframe of December 2015 through April 2016 the NSA database was being exploited by contractors within the intelligence community, specifically within the FBI, doing unauthorized searches.
On March 9, 2016, oversight personnel doing a review of FBI system access were alerted to thousands of unauthorized FBI search queries of specific U.S. persons within the NSA database.
NSA Director Mike Rogers was made aware.
Subsequently NSA Director Rogers initiated a full compliance review of the system to identify who was doing the searches; & what searches were being conducted.
On April 18, 2016, following the preliminary audit results, Director Rogers shut down all FBI contractor access to the database after he learned FISA-702 “about”(17) and “to/from”(16) search queries were being done without authorization.
Thus begins the first discovery of a much bigger background story.
When you compile the timeline with the people involved; and the specific wording of the resulting review, which was then delivered to the FISA court; and overlay the activity that was taking place in the 2016 political primary; what we discover is a process where the metadata collected by the NSA was being searched for political opposition research and surveillance.
Tens-of-thousands of unauthorized and unlawful searches were identified by the FISA court as likely extending much further than the compliance review period: “while the government reports it is unable to provide a reliable estimate of the non compliant queries since 2012, there is no apparent reason to believe the November 2015 [to] April 2016 period coincided with an unusually high error rate”.
In short, during the Obama administration access to the NSA database was continually used to conduct surveillance. This is the critical point that leads to understanding the origin of “Spygate”, as it unfolded in the Spring and Summer of 2016.
It was the discovery of the database exploitation and the removal of access as a surveillance tool that seemed to create the initial problem for the FBI political unit in Washington, DC. Here’s how we can tell.
In December 2015 there were 17 GOP candidates, all needing opposition research.
However, when Donald Trump won New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina the field was significantly whittled. Trump, Cruz, Rubio, Kasich and Carson remained.
On Super Tuesday, March 2, 2016, Donald Trump won seven states (VT, AR, VA, GA, AL, TN, MA) it was then clear that Trump was the GOP frontrunner with momentum to become the presumptive nominee.
On March 5th, 2016, DonaldTrump won Kentucky and Louisiana; and on March 8th Trump won Michigan, Mississippi and Hawaii.
The next day, March 9, 2016, is when NSA security alerts warned internal oversight personnel that something sketchy was going on. This timing is not coincidental.
As FISA Judge Rosemary Collyer later wrote in her report, “many of these non-compliant queries involved the use of the same identifiers over different date ranges.” Put another way: attributes belonging to a specific individual(s) were being targeted and queried, unlawfully. Given what was later discovered, it seems obvious the primary search targets, over multiple date ranges, were political candidates, specifically Donald Trump.
There were tens-of-thousands of unauthorized search queries; and as Judge Collyer stated in her report, there is no reason to believe the 85% non compliant rate was any different from the abuse of the NSA database going back to 2012, the same year the FBI collocated a workspace within Perkins Coie.
As you will see below the NSA database was how political surveillance was being conducted during Obama’s second term in office. However, when the system was flagged, and when NSA Director Mike Rogers shut down “FBI contractor” access to the system, the system users needed to develop another way to get access.
Mike Rogers shuts down access on April 18, 2016. On April 19, 2016, Fusion-GPS founder Glenn Simpson’s wife, Mary Jacoby visits the White House. Immediately thereafter, the DNC and Clinton campaign contract Fusion GPS… who then hire Christopher Steele.
Knowing it was federal “contractors”, outside government with FBI access to the system doing the unauthorized searches, the question becomes: who were the contractors?
The possibilities are quite vast. Essentially anyone the FBI or intelligence apparatus was using could have participated. Crowdstrike was a known FBI contractor; they were also contracted by the DNC. Shawn Henry was the former head of the FBI office in DC and later become part of Crowdstrike’s leadership team, a rather dubious contractor for the government and a politically connected data security and forensic company.
FBI Director James Comey’s special friend Daniel Richman was an unpaid FBI “special employee” with security access to the database. Nellie Ohr began working for Fusion-GPS on the Trump project in November 2015 and she was a previous open-source CIA contractor; and now that we know the FBI and Perkins Coie were in a collaborative relationship, we can also presume they were FBI contractors with similar clearances and access.
Remember the Sharyl Attkisson computer intrusions? It’s all part of this same network; Attkisson even named former FBI Supervisory Special Agent Shawn Henry as a defendant in her ongoing lawsuit.
All of the aforementioned names, and so many more, held a political agenda in 2016.
It seems likely if the NSA flags were never triggered then the contracted FBI system users would have continued exploiting the NSA database for political opposition research; which would then be funneled to the Clinton team. However, once the unauthorized flags were triggered, the system users (including those inside the FBI and sister agency the CIA) would need to find another back-door to continue… Again, the timing becomes transparent.
Immediately after NSA flags were raised March 9, 2016, the same FBI and CIA intelligence agencies began using confidential human sources (CHS’s) to run into the Trump campaign. By activating intelligence assets like Joseph Mifsud and Stefan Halper the IC (CIA, FBI) and system users had now created an authorized way to continue the same political surveillance operations.
When Donald Trump hired Paul Manafort on March 28, 2016, it was a perfect scenario for those doing the surveillance. Manafort was a known entity to the FBI and was previously under investigation. Paul Manafort’s entry into the Trump orbit was perfect for Glenn Simpson to sell his prior research on Manafort as a Trump-Russia collusion script two weeks later.
The shift from “unauthorized exploitation of the NSA database” to legally authorized exploitation of the NSA database was now in place. This was how they continued the political surveillance. This is the confluence of events that originated “spygate”, or what officially blossomed into the FBI investigation known as “Crossfire Hurricane” on July 31.
If the NSA flags were never raised; and if Director Rogers had never initiated the compliance audit; and if the FBI political contractors were never blocked from access to the database; they would never have needed to create a legal back-door, a justification to retain the surveillance. The political operatives/contractors would have just continued the targeted metadata exploitation.
Once they created the FBI surveillance door, Fusion-GPS was then needed to get the FBI known commodity of Chris Steele activated as a pipeline. Into that pipeline all system users pushed opposition research. However, one mistake from the database extraction, likely during an “about” query, shows up as a New Yorker named Michael Cohen in Prague.
That misinterpreted data from a FISA-702 “about query” is then piped to Steele and turns up inside the dossier; it was the wrong Michael Cohen. It wasn’t Trump’s lawyer; it was an art dealer from New York City with the same name; the same “identifier”.
Unfortunately, the FBI cannot be reformed.
The FBI needs to be closed, disassembled and a new smaller federal investigative agency opened in its place.
Centinel2012 