Posted originally on the conservative tree house on June 1, 2022 | Sundance

Last night Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) made an explosive announcement as an outcome of a whistleblower providing information to him and Jim Jordan about the FBI having a collaborative relationship with the Clinton/DNC law firm Perkins Coie.  {Go Deep} Specifically, the explosive element surrounds the FBI having a workspace within the DNC law firm that would have given Democrats an open portal into FBI databases for use in opposition research.

Secondarily, Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann being in charge of this working arrangement within Perkins Coie for the past year, since the departure of Marc Elias, becomes a far greater issue. The potential ramifications of this joint collaborative activity are vast.

The FBI can 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.  If the FBI was operating within Perkins Coie since 2012, then the democrats have held access to fully intrusive electronic surveillance of their political opposition, or anyone else – anywhere, for a decade.

Mainstream conservative defenders of the DOJ and FBI institutions, as a result of their prior tenure inside those same agencies, have long denied the Dept of Justice and FBI are corrupt political entities.  The revelation of the FBI and Perkins Coie working collaboratively to exploit this data portal is something that people like Margot Cleveland, Andrew McCarthy, Johnathan Turley and many others need to deny in order to retain the premise of institutional credibility.

However, the FBI and DNC law firm working collaboratively on issues of joint importance goes far beyond the ‘image of impropriety or conflicted interest‘ and extends to the actual corruption within the foundational institutions of government.  Transparently, if these reports are accurate all of the inexplicable dynamics within the “two tiers of justice” suddenly reconcile.  The FBI and Perkins Coie having the ability to conduct electronic surveillance of any target is a thermonuclear level of sunlight, that reconciles years of visible issues.

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 new revelation.

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 names 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”.

A DEEP DIVE – How Did It Work?

Start by reviewing the established record from the 99-page FISC opinion rendered by Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer on April 26, 2017. Review the details within the FISC opinion.

I would strongly urge everyone to read the FISC report (full pdf below) because Judge Collyer outlines how the DOJ, which includes the FBI, had an “institutional lack of candor” in responses to the FISA court. In essence, the Obama administration was continually lying to the FISA court about their activity, and the rate of fourth amendment violations for illegal searches and seizures of U.S. persons’ private information for multiple years.

Unfortunately, due to intelligence terminology Judge Collyer’s brief and ruling is not an easy read for anyone unfamiliar with the FISA processes. That complexity also helps the media avoid discussing it; and as a result most Americans have no idea the scale and scope of the Obama-era surveillance issues. So we’ll try to break down the language.

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For the sake of brevity and common understanding CTH will highlight the most pertinent segments showing just how systemic and troublesome the unlawful electronic surveillance was.

Early in 2016 NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers was alerted of a significant uptick in FISA-702(17) “About” queries using the FBI/NSA database that holds all metadata records on every form of electronic communication.

The NSA compliance officer alerted Admiral Mike Rogers who then initiated a full compliance audit on/around March 9th, 2016, for the period of November 1st, 2015, through May 1st, 2016.

While the audit was ongoing, due to the severity of the results that were identified, Admiral Mike Rogers stopped anyone from using the 702(17) “about query” option, and went to the extraordinary step of blocking all FBI contractor access to the database on April 18, 2016 (keep these dates in mind).

Here are some significant segments:

The key takeaway from these first paragraphs is how the search query results were exported from the NSA database to users who were not authorized to see the material. The FBI contractors were conducting searches and then removing, or ‘exporting’, the results. Later on, the FBI said all of the exported material was deleted.

Searching the highly classified NSA database is essentially a function of filling out search boxes to identify the user-initiated search parameter and get a return on the search result.

♦ FISA-702(16) is a search of the system returning a U.S. person (“702”); and the “16” is a check box to initiate a search based on “To and From“. Example, if you put in a date and a phone number and check “option 16” as the search parameter the user will get the returns on everything “To and From” that identified phone number for the specific date. Calls, texts, contacts etc. Including results for the inbound and outbound contacts.

♦ FISA-702(17) is a search of the system returning a U.S. person (702); and the “17” is a check box to initiate a search based on everything “About” the search qualifier. Example, if you put a date and a phone number and check “option 17” as the search parameter the user will get the returns of everything about that phone. Calls, texts, contacts, geolocation (or gps results), account information, user, service provider etc. As a result, 702(17) can actually be used to locate where the phone (and user) was located on a specific date or sequentially over a specific period of time which is simply a matter of changing the date parameters.

And that’s just from a phone number.

Search an ip address “about” and read all data into that server; put in an email address and gain everything about that account. Or use the electronic address of a GPS enabled vehicle (about) and you can withdraw more electronic data and monitor in real time. Search a credit card number and get everything about the account including what was purchased, where, when, etc. Search a bank account number, get everything about transactions and electronic records etc. Just about anything and everything can be electronically searched; everything has an electronic ‘identifier’.

The search parameter is only limited by the originating field filled out. Names, places, numbers, addresses, etc. By using the “About” parameter there may be thousands or millions of returns. Imagine if you put “@realdonaldtrump” into the search parameter? You could extract all following accounts who interacted on Twitter, or Facebook etc. The search result is only limited by the operators’ imagination and the scale of the electronic connectivity.

As you can see below, on March 9th, 2016, internal auditors noted the FBI was sharing “raw FISA information, including but not limited to Section 702-acquired information”.   Who were they sharing it with?  Perkins Coie?

In plain English the raw search returns were being shared with unknown entities without any attempt to “minimize” or redact the results. The person(s) attached to the search results were named and obvious. There was no effort to hide their identity or protect their 4th amendment rights of privacy; and database access was from the FBI network:

But what’s the scale here? This is where the story really lies.

Read this next excerpt carefully.

The operators were searching “U.S Persons”. The review of November 1, 2015, to May 1, 2016, showed “eighty-five percent of those queries” were unlawful or “non compliant”.

85% !! “representing [redacted number]”.

We can tell from the space of the redaction the number of searches were between 10,000 and 99,999 [six digits]. If we take the middle number of 50,000 – a non compliant rate of 85 percent means 42,500 unlawful searches out of 50,000.

The [six digit] amount (more than 10,000, less than 99,999), and 85% error rate, was captured in a six month period, November 2015 to April 2016.  The timeframe of highest interest in the republican presidential primary.

Also notice this very important quote: “many of these non-compliant queries involved the use of the same identifiers over different date ranges.” This tells us the system users were searching the same phone number, email address, electronic identifier, repeatedly over different dates.  Put another way, specific person(s) were being tracked/monitored.

Additionally, notice the last quote: “while the government reports it is unable to provide a reliable estimate of” these non lawful searches “since 2012, there is no apparent reason to believe the November 2015 [to] April 2016 coincided with an unusually high error rate”.

That means the 85% unlawful FISA-702(16)(17) database abuse has likely been happening since 2012.

2012 is an important date in this database abuse because a network of specific interests is assembled that also shows up in 2016/2017:

• Who was 2012 FBI Director? Robert Mueller, who was selected by the FBI group to become special prosecutor in 2017.
• Who was Mueller’ chief-of-staff? Aaron Zebley, who became one of the lead lawyers on the Mueller special counsel.
• Who was 2012 CIA Director? John Brennan (remember the ouster of Gen Petraeus)
• Who was ODNI? James Clapper.
• Remember, the NSA is inside the Pentagon (Defense Dept) command structure. Who was Defense Secretary? Ash Carter

Who wanted NSA Director Mike Rogers fired in 2016? Brennan, Clapper and Carter.

And finally, who wrote and signed-off-on the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment and then lied about the use of the Steele Dossier? The same John Brennan, and James Clapper along with James Comey.

Tens of thousands of searches over four years (since 2012), and 85% of them are illegal. The results were extracted for?…. (I believe this is all political opposition use; and I’ll explain why momentarily.)

OK, that’s the stunning scale; but who was involved?

Private contractors with access to “raw FISA information that went well beyond what was necessary to respond to FBI’s requests“.

So, someone using the justification of FBI “requests”, was exploiting their access to the FBI portal; and they were searching for material “well beyond” the justification of “FBI requests” the used.  Doesn’t this exactly sound like someone in Perkins Coie using their FBI portal access?

And as noted, the contractor access was finally halted on April 18th, 2016.

[Coincidentally (or likely not), the wife of Fusion-GPS founder Glenn Simpson, Mary Jacoby, goes to the White House the very next day on April 19th, 2016.]

None of this is conspiracy theory.

All of this is laid out inside this 99-page opinion from FISC Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer who also noted that none of this FISA abuse was accidental in a footnote on page 87: “deliberate decisionmaking“:

This specific footnote, if declassified, could be a key. Note the phrase: “([redacted] access to FBI systems was the subject of an interagency memorandum of understanding entered into [redacted])”, this sentence has the potential to expose an internal decision; withheld from congress and the FISA court by the Obama administration; that outlines a process for access and distribution of surveillance data.

Note: “no notice of this practice was given to the FISC until 2016“, that is important.

Summary: The FISA court identified and quantified tens-of-thousands of search queries of the NSA/FBI database using the FISA-702(16)(17) system. The database was repeatedly used by persons with FBI contractor access who unlawfully searched and extracted the raw results without redacting the information and shared it with an unknown number of entities.

The outlined process certainly points toward a political spying and surveillance operation; and we are not the only one to think that’s what this system is being used for.

Back in 2017 when House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes was working to reauthorize the FISA legislation, Nunes wrote a letter to ODNI Dan Coats about this specific issue:

SIDEBAR: To solve the issue, well, actually attempt to ensure it never happened again, NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers eventually took away the “About” query option permanently in 2017. NSA Director Rogers said the abuse was so inherent there was no way to stop it except to remove the process completely. [SEE HERE] Additionally, the NSA database operates as a function of the Pentagon, so the Trump administration went one step further. On his last day as NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers -together with ODNI Dan Coats- put U.S. cyber-command, the database steward, fully into the U.S. military as a full combatant command. [SEE HERE] Unfortunately it didn’t work as shown by the 2018 FISC opinion rendered by FISC Judge James Boasberg [SEE HERE]

There is little doubt the NSA database system was used by Obama-era FBI officials and political allies, from 2012 through April 2016, as a way to spy on their political opposition.

Quite simply, there is no other intellectually honest explanation for the scale and volume of database abuse that was taking place; and keep in mind these searches were all ruled to be unlawful. Searches for repeated persons over a period time that were not authorized.

When we reconcile what was taking place and who was involved, then the actions of the exact same principle participants take on a jaw-dropping amount of clarity.

All of the action taken by CIA Director Brennan, FBI Director Comey, ODNI Clapper and Defense Secretary Ashton Carter make sense. Including their effort to get NSA Director Mike Rogers fired.

Everything that comes after March 9, 2016, had a dual purpose: (1) done to cover up the weaponization of the FISA database. [Explained Here] Spygate, Russia-Gate, the Steele Dossier, and even the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (drawn from the dossier and signed by the above) were needed to create a cover-story and protect themselves from discovery of this four year weaponization, political surveillance and unlawful spying. Even the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel makes sense; he was FBI Director when this began. And (2) they needed to keep the surveillance going.

The beginning decision to use FISA(702) as a domestic surveillance and political spy mechanism appears to have started in/around 2012. Perhaps sometime shortly before the 2012 presidential election and before John Brennan left the White House and moved to CIA. However, there was an earlier version of data assembly that preceded this effort.

Political spying 1.0 was actually the weaponization of the IRS. This is where the term “Secret Research Project” originated as a description from the Obama team. It involved the U.S. Department of Justice under Eric Holder and the FBI under Robert Mueller. It never made sense why Eric Holder requested over 1 million tax records via CD ROM, until overlaying the timeline of the FISA abuse:

The IRS sent the FBI “21 disks constituting a 1.1 million page database of information from 501(c)(4) tax exempt organizations, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” The transaction occurred in October 2010 (link)

Why disks? Why send a stack of DISKS to the DOJ and FBI when there’s a pre-existing financial crimes unit within the IRS. All of the evidence within this sketchy operation came directly to the surface in early spring 2012.

The IRS scandal was never really about the IRS, it was always about the DOJ asking the IRS for the database of information. That is why it was transparently a conflict when the same DOJ was tasked with investigating the DOJ/IRS scandal. Additionally, Obama sent his chief-of-staff Jack Lew to become Treasury Secretary; effectively placing an ally to oversee/cover-up any issues. As Treasury Secretary Lew did just that.

Lesson Learned – It would appear the Obama administration learned a lesson from attempting to gather a large opposition research database operation inside a functioning organization large enough to have some good people that might blow the whistle.

The timeline reflects a few months after realizing the “Secret Research Project” was now worthless (June 2012), they focused more deliberately on a smaller network within the intelligence apparatus and began weaponizing the FBI/NSA database. If our hunch is correct, that is what will be visible in footnote #69:

How this all comes together. 

Fusion GPS was not hired in April 2016 to research Donald Trump. As shown in the evidence provided by the FISC, the FBI contractors were already doing surveillance and spy operations. The Clinton campaign already knew everything about the Trump campaign, as they were monitoring everything by exploiting their FBI relationship and the Perkins Coie location for portal access to the database.

However, after the NSA alerts in/around March 9th, 2016, and particularly after the April 18th shutdown of contractor access, the Clinton Team and FBI needed Fusion GPS to create a legal albeit ex post facto justification for the pre-existing surveillance and spy operations. Fusion GPS gave them that justification in the Steele Dossier.

That’s why the FBI small group, which later transitioned into the Mueller team, were so strongly committed to and defending the formation of the Steele Dossier and its dubious content.  The Steele Dossier was used in lieu of the ‘Woods File’, underpinning the justification for the Carter Page Title-1 surveillance warrant.

The Steele Dossier, an outcome of the Fusion contract, contains two purposes: (1) the cover-story and justification for the pre-existing FBI surveillance operation (protect Obama and Clinton); and (2) facilitate the FBI counterintelligence operation against the Trump campaign (assist Clinton and Perkins Coie).

An insurance policy would be needed.

The Steele Dossier becomes the investigative virus the FBI wanted inside the system. To get the virus into official status, they used the FISA application as the delivery method and injected it into a Title-1 search warrant against Carter Page. The FBI already knew Carter Page (he worked for the CIA); essentially Carter Page was irrelevant, what they needed was the FISA warrant and the Dossier in the system {Go Deep}.

The Obama FBI needed Fusion GPS to give them a plausible justification for already existing political surveillance and spy operations. Fusion-GPS gave them that justification and evidence for a FISA warrant with the Steele Dossier.

Ultimately that’s why the Steele Dossier was so important; without it, the FBI would not have the tool that Mueller needed to continue the investigation of President Trump.  In essence by renewing the FISA application in 2017, despite them knowing the underlying dossier was junk, the FBI was keeping the surveillance gateway open for Team Mueller to exploit later on.

Additionally, without the Steele Dossier the DOJ and FBI are naked with their surveillance (FISA-702) abuse as outlined by John Ratcliffe.

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In this video NSA Director Mike Rogers explains how he was notified of what was happening and what he did after the notification. WATCH:

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Knowing there is a very strong probability Perkins Coie and the FBI were working together on this, makes everything else make sense.

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