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Senate Transcript - Democrats’ Dossier Team
Was Hired By The Kremlin’s Sanctions-Busting
Russian Lawyer PRIOR To Her Luring Trump Advisers
Part 2


By Yoichi Shimatsu
 Senate Judicial Transcript - Part 2
Part 1 Here
1-15-18

 
 It sometimes happens during hunting season that the quarry suddenly pops its head out of hole, like a whack-a-mole, then finds itself stunned at spotting your red jacket. The alarmed badger or a quick-witted fox ducks back down pronto to dodge the shot, and the hunter's lucky not to blow your own foot off with the shotgun. Investigative journalists have similar unexpected jolts, as happened Sunday afternoon when I was about to pen the first line of this essay which was supposed to start with an ode to women’s softball.
 
 Distracted by that false alarm over an ICBM homing in for a second Pearl Harbor attack, I noticed another intriguing news item: “Moby says CIA agents asked him to spread the word about Trump and Russia”. There you have it in a nutshell, the thesis that I’ve been pursuing for more than a year that the dossier was part of a CIA-White House operation.
 
 Moby is the nickname of a DJ, Richard Melville Hall, who has an online following of millions of ravers and pogo punks in mosh-pits around the world, the same sort of young and restless rebels who flocked to Soros-funded protests against the Trump inauguration.
 
 “They said, like, look you have more of a social media following than any of us do, so can you please post some of these things, just in a way, sort of to put it out there?”
 
 Say, bro’, those friends of yours are violating congressional rules on the strict separation of foreign intelligence and domestic affairs. Like, psst . . . we got a job for you to do at a book depository in Dallas. That’s sort of, uh illegal, Moby, especially if you get caught or let it slip like you just did, because now a DA can squeeze the identities of those CIA agents out of you with a court order. Squeeze, like, you’re toothpaste, dude.
 
 The white DJ, who is distantly related to Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, said that back in January 2017: “Active and former CIA agents were truly concerned about Trump’s collusion with Russia. This is the Manchurian Candidate.”  
 
 Those CIA creeps truly got imagination, since Trump never set foot inside a brainwashing camp in North Korea. Hey, come to think of it, wasn’t it the CIA that created Manchurian Candidates, like inside Ewen Cameron’s psychiatric ward? Jason Bourne, MK-ULTRA. Thanks for the tip-off about your CIA pals creeping around like succubi in short skirts in a dark disco.
 
 After expressing these harsh warnings, I should apologize to you, great white whale of vegan animal-rights, for that comparison to a wide-eyed badger. To tell the truth I never liked killing animals, not after doing the dirty work at a testing lab and sending thousands of pathetic chickens to be plucked and boiled at a Campbell’s Soup factory.
 
 Hunting was just an excuse to walk around inside private forestland, and the only gunshots fired were to scare off a few noisy crows disturbing the peace and quiet. Those were just a nature walk in the woods without harming a single feather on a quail, Moby, so don’t go reporting me as a gun-toting terrorist to your CIA handlers. Relax, have a carrot.
 
 Now that they know you squawked, next time you see them just smile and nod while they palm off their Afghan heroin to the drugged-out teens and zonked bankers on the dance floor. Since you’ve spilled the beans, you’d better pray the Agency boys don’t do another Bataclan or an Orlando Pulse like at one of your performances.
 
 Clintons as partners of the Kremlin
 
 The most striking aspect of the Senate Judiciary inquiry of witness Glenn Simpson, boss of the Fusion GPS front-man who supposedly produced and distributed the Trump-Russia Dosser, is how Sen. Dianne Fienstein’s legal counsel inexplicably avoided any significant disclosures from him. With every opportunity to further discredit the Trump team, the Democratic counsel Heather Sawyer eschewed serious probing of Simpson over Russiagate and relented whenever he shied away from answering. If this had been a court trial of a serial killer, he would have been home for dinner with all night to reload.
 
 Her turn to interview the witness followed a superb display of incisive questioning from Grassley legal staffer Patrick Davis, who got Simpson to disclose his paid work against the 2012 Magnitsky Act trade sanctions for Russian lawyer Natalia Veselitskaya, prior to and after her notorious meeting at Trump Tower with Don Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner.
 
 Despite the fact that a Senate inquiry lacks powers of prosecution, Davis and his team sweated out Simpson to admit that he acted as a bloodhound, tactician and publicist for Kremlin-linked interests against the Magnitsky Act sanctions and its top proponent William Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital, the employer of auditor Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Moscow prison.
 
 Displaying passive-aggressive, even sadistic pleasure in catching up with his prey, Simpson boasted about how he tracked down Browder to an unannounced appearance at the Aspen Institute and had two of his employees serve him subpoenas, only to watch Browder toss the papers on the parking lot and drive away in fury. (p.40-43) The emotional confrontation with Browder revealed a streak of fanaticism in Simpson’s pursuit of a termination to sanctions on Russia. This is especially disturbing when considering that his ethically challenged client Prevezon owner Denis Katsyv had to pay $5.9 million in fines to the U.S. Treasury in May 2017 for money-laundering funds gained through tax evasion in Russia.
 
 Catch and Release
 
 As compared with his hot-blooded description of confronting Browder, whose major transgression was not to meekly accept the official account that Magnitsky died of illness in prison while this corpse showed bruises possibly from beatings (a mystery to be examined in Part 3 of this series), Simpson spoke like a robotized zombie in response to Sawyer’s inane questions.
 
 With all of the alleged Trump-Russia connection left to the Democrat side of the aisle, Sawyer wasted five pages of drivel before finally arriving at Felix Sater, an immigrant Russian Jew involved in ho-hum crime-as-usual in the East Coast construction business. (p.68-70) Sater served as construction supervisor for Trump Soho (The Dominick) and Trump building sites in Phoenix, Fort Lauderdale and London. In a grown-up world, does anyone think that construction is a playing field for angels? Just consider the building career of Eddie DeBartolo, former manager and owner of the 49ers busted for gambling.
 
 Granted, in January 2017 (when the dossier was released to John McCain) Sater discussed his proposal with Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen to end sanctions on Russia in exchange for Moscow pulling out armed militias from Ukraine and accepting a lease for Crimea, a most sensible diplomatic solution that Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed offhand with “We cannot lease from ourselves.” (This slap, as will be discussed further on, illustrates how the Putin team never really welcomed Trump’s ascendancy to the White House but had quietly backed the “professional” Hillary Clinton and her Democrat insiders all along.)


 Nothing (Privilege)

 Next, Sawyer focused on the dates of the Fusion GPS contract with Veselnitskaya/Prevezpon and the other research job for the Democratic Party, as to which Simpson suffered instant memory loss, hemming and hawing. When asked about the Trump research for the second client, he answered: “What I can tell you about that client: Nothing. (privilege)”

 The mainstream media had by then already published that the Hillary campaign and Democratic National Committee had hired Fusion GPS. (DNC chair Donna Brazile last year, however, said the DNC had been starved of funds by the Clintons and did not disburse funds for opposition research. What gives?)
 
 Why was Simpson so adamant not to name the source of the funding for opposition research? (p.75) Fusion GPS had been hired in a shell game of sponsors via Seattle law firm Perkins Coie on behalf of the Hillary campaign and the DNC.

 The original source of the $700,000 in funding for Fusion GPS came from OBAMA FOR AMERICA aka Organizing For Action, the then sitting president’s campaign organization and soon-to-be grassroots “resistance” network, founded by David Plouffe and Mitch Stewart. President Obama transferred the funds out of the OFA warchest of $40 million to Perkins Coie in April 2016, following Trump’s pull-away primary victories in the March 1 Super-Tuesday contests.
 
 When Sawyer inquired about the starting date of that opposition research, his reply was “the beginning of 2016”, which he then changed to “the first half of 2016.” (p.74) Perkins Coie transferred the first tranche of the Obama funding in April right away to Fusion GPS, but too late to stop Trump’s march toward the golden number of 1,237 pledged delegates attained in late May to clinch the nomination.
 
 When asked by Sawyer if he worked for two clients at the same time, Simpson assured her of the complete absence of information sharing (guaranteed by his integrity and nothing more). Here again, more deception from a pathological liar as shown in the June 9 meeting at Trump Tower, arranged by Rob Goldstone, the London music producer who set up that meeting based on his entertainment business with Azerbaizani singer Emin Agaralov, whose father owns the Crocus Stadium where Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe Contest Moscow was staged.
 
 Goldstone knew hardly anything about Veselnitskaya, calling her “the Russian government lawyer flying over from London.”. Actually, she was already in New York and had dinner with Simpson on the night before and after the Trump Tower meeting, and met him that same morning in court, which casts doubt on his feigned claim of knowing nothing about the meeting. (see Part 1) Here, in case of Goldman, as in the case of Christopher Steele, is the CIA circus of local hires from retired British spookdom. (I wonder if Moby knows Goldstone.)
 
 Feinstein’s counsel Heather Sawyer failed to follow up on his obvious evasions, and let him off the hook.
 
 OK, now here’s the lead that was to be a tribute to women’s softball, preempted by Moby the Whale. Pitching for the Blue Donkeys, Heather Sesamestrasse steps up to the mound, winds up generating a tornado of blinding dust, and then releases an underhanded toss, a blazin mush ball toward batter “Homer” Simpson of the D.C. Con-fusion who watches it roll to a halt on the turf past his toes. In the tension of a record 3 hours at bat, Simpson has set a new world record, walking all the bases to the puzzlement of the referee who called a time-out to study the rule book. Con-fusion won the game 1-0, and Barack Obama just texted Homer, the home run hero,  with a message of congratulation. A sour Don Trump tweeted: “That was the cheating-est game I’ve ever seen in that sh--hole stadium!”
 
 
 So why did Sawyer choke at the Senate Judicial hearing? Because her boss Dianne Feinstein had to avoid, at any cost, public acknowledgment of  Obama’s patronage via Fusion GPS of Kremlin-linked lawyer Natalia Veselitskaya, who was lobbying to cease sanctions on Russia, and the Hillary Clinton campaign. The top Democrats stood to earn billions in profits for Wall Street by reopening trade with Russia. The Kremlin and the Democratic leadership were working in tandem for the sunset of the Magnitsky Act under a media blackout to avoid censure from the Jewish community.
 
 Trump as Fall-Guy
 
 The 2015-16 primaries conveniently churned up the wild-card Donald Trump, an outsider renowned for iconoclastic positions in defiance of the bipartisan consensus, as for example, verbal support for Putin’s tough stance on Syria. Trump was the perfect public figure to lambaste the trade sanctions imposed by the 2012 Magnitsky Act, the rationale for the notorious June 9, 2016, meeting between the Russian lawyer and the Trump advisers at Trump Tower.
 
 Trump had already assumed the role of devil’s advocate against foreign policy overstretch, but he was certain to be no great loss to either The Swamp or the Kremlin as a scapegoat for sanctions-busting after his anticipated defeat in the nomination or surely the presidential elections.

 Quite unwittingly, Trump rose to the bait from Putin advisers Ivanov, Peskov and Sechin as passed on to Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and his contacts Manafort and Kushner. In hindsight, it’s clear that President Obama and leading candidate Hillary Clinton made no strident policy challenge against Trump’s enthusiastic support for Putin. The media uproar after the Veselitskaya meeting at the Tower was not meant to deter Trump from cooperating with the Russians but to just play along with the master plan. Manafort was ousted from the campaign for knowing too much about Russian and also his potential leaks to Russians unfriendly to Putin’s circle.
 
 To enlist the Trump campaign against Magnitsky (or at least the appearance of so doing), Natalia Veselnitskaya arranged the meeting in Trump Tower with Don Jr., Manafort and Kushner. Donald Jr. was especially confused by her promised offer of “opposition research” that never materialized and was taken aback on her proposal to focus solely on the Magnitsky issue. The trio had that uncomfortable feeling of being played but not knowing toward what purpose.
 
 Little did the Trump campaign trio realize then that Veselnitskaya was the lawyer for Prevezon Holdings, the company researched for money laundering by Sergei Magnitsky at the time of his arrest and death in prison. Nor could the three advisers know that she had hired Fusion GPS to run her lobbying strategy and media publicity.

 The funding from Obama For America and the coordination with Veselnitskay involved in the Trump Tower ambush shows that the Putin Kremlin and the Obama White House were in it together to exploit outsider candidate Trump to assail the Magnitsky sanctions, and then dump him but only after his tweets convincingly swayed the electorate that sanctions on Russia are counterproductive for the American economic revival. Meanwhile, the CIA provided the 24-hour monitoring of Trump and his potential Russian contacts, which was later used in the forgery known as the Trump-Russia Dossier.
 
 The media hue and cry against Trump for alleged Kremlin contacts was a Clinton-Kremlin diversionary ploy to fixate the attention of wealthy Jewish donors, while keeping them in the dark about the coming Democrat betrayal on Magnitsky following Hillary’s much-anticipated electoral victory. For the Democrats, the billions of dollars from trade with Russia befitting the likes of Jamie Dimon of Morgan Stanley and Lloyd Blankenfeld of Goldman Sachs could fill their campaign coffers for decades.
 
 To advance the Russian aim of lifting sanctions, Russian Ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak quietly met with and kept in contact with high-level Clinton Democrats, including Sen. Feinstein, Sen. Claire McCaskill and House warhorse Nancy Pelosi.
 
 A big problem for the secret Kremlin-Democrat axis was the lack of tangible connections implicating Trump in Russia, need to oust him in a worst-case scenario or least to keep control over his team. The Trump Organization owned no signature landmarks in Russia, indeed no real estate holdings at all in that vast country, no stock shares in Russian companies, and no bank accounts. The slim pickings that the CIA and its Russian counterparts had to work with was the 2013 Miss Universe Contest in Moscow’s Crocus Hall, thus the invention of the absurd scenario called Pee-gate, a very clumsy start to the dossier. This explains why Goldstone was roped into arrange the plot at Trump Tower.
 
 Agency on the Lookout

 “Dossier” is a particularly apt way to describe the Obama-funded project to collect dirt on Trump. The timeline of events suggest the dossier was originally intended to be just that, a compilation random notes from the CIA surveillance on Trump and his associates. Most of the claims in that collection of 16 reports given to Sen. John McCain were never mentioned during the campaign, being unverifiable and low-grade fluff.
 
 The random snippets were mostly based on unsubstantiated rumors, with many taken out of context or falsely attributed to Kremlin advisers, Russian businessmen and even the nation’s largest mafia. This low-grade scuttlebutt was monitored, more importantly, to ensure that Putin wasn’t preparing to double-cross the sanctions-expiry agreement promised by overwhelming electoral favorite Hillary Clinton.

 During the summer campaign season, the Russia monitoring effort was led by senior CIA translator and analyst Nellie Hauke Ohr at the cyber-lab called Open Source Works (OSW) at Langley headquarters. She also scanned counterintelligence reports at the DOJ executive office of her husband Bruce Genesoke Ohr. A methodical professional, even her home was used for more traditional signals intercepts, listening to Russian chatter and Moscow news channels over her ham radio. This extraordinary tolerance of free movement between government intel agencies would not have been possible without approval from the Executive Office, and her salary and expenses were covered by the Obama For America (OFA) grant to Fusion GPS. Obviously, Nellie Ohr did not work as a solitary monitor but supervised a staff of CIA employees.
 
 Her dedicated effort picked up those tidbits of gossip, nearly all grossly inaccurate or inane banter, as typical of Russian patter. Those scraps of gossip could not have been her main assignment, which had to be instead discerning whether the other side, the Putin circle, might be preparing to trash Hillary and aid the Donald. Putin stayed on course, realizing that Trump was too divisive to bring about an end to sanctions with the consent of liberal Jews.
 
 The supposed author of the dossier, retired British MI-6 officer Christopher Steele was paid more than $160,000 by Fusion GPS, a vast sum for so little effort. (The comments about TNK-BP oil tycoons are his, but other British contacts in Russia are not prominent.) He flew to Rome in June to meet the station chief and Bruce Ohr. His research/surveillance assignment would be as “as second pair of eyes” to keep watch for any signs of a Putin betrayal of Hillary.

 If the Kremlin were to expose the Clinton campaign as its partner, only a short few hours would be available to black out communications and send a counter-threat from the CIA. MI-6 would be the first to detect a betrayal, although Steele was paid mainly to be an actor, to pretend that he and not the CIA drafted the notes on Trump. As a foreigner without a lot of known business assets, he is safer from a lawsuit by Trump and his team for libel or other type of revenge for character assassination.
 
 On the Russian side of the ledger, there was less concern in Moscow over a fall-through of the sanctions-killing agreement so long as Hillary stayed on course to the White House. The Clintons were readily managed by the Kremlin from Bill Clinton’s participation in the Soviet-sponsored 1969 World Youth Festival in Moscow during his Fulbright Fellowship at Oxford to his huge speaking fee related to the 2013 Uranium One deal with Rosatom. The Clintons were bought and stayed sold-out, as shown in their four decades of loyalty to their Arkansas patrons at Stephens inc.

 The Fix is Blown
 
 The unexpected upset in November was a morale-crushing embarrassment for Hillary and the Democrat elite, and a dilemma for Putin. The fix was blown. Suddenly, the repeal of the Magnitsky Act sanctions, with its promises of billions for Wall Street, were nixed by the feud between Trump’s pro-Russian populist base and the liberal Jewish establishment. Hillary might have been able to cajole her Jewish constituents to accept the rescinding of Magnitsky, but Trump had zero chance of gaining Jewish cooperation after his statements adulating Putin and his support base in the alt-right. The best-laid plans of men and feminists went awry in a triumph for chaos.
 
 Hillary’s defeat left the Trump-Russia dossier project in limbo. Five weeks passed before the hastily compiled dossier was passed to John McCain. Since only a couple of weeks at most were needed to amend or update the drafts of notes into its present form of 16 sloppy reports, meaning that earlier two weeks must have been spent in intense debate inside the CIA and Oval Office on whether the dossier had any value for the new priority of mounting progressive “resistance” against the Trump administration. Without Hillary’s greed to compel him, Obama dropped any intentions of altering Magnitsky and went for Trump’s throat.
 
 The hastiness of patching together the rough document indicates an ad hoc team, probably Nellie Ohr and Mary Jacoby, cut-and-pasted the dossier report at Bruce Ohr’s DOJ rooms and after hours at work stations in Jacoby’s Main Justice blog office. Another indicator of the Kremlin's busted deal with the Democrats is how the Putin-Trump “relationship” went sour so quickly.

 After tears and sobbing, Hillary Clinton pulled herself together as the woman scorned. Her hell hath no fury rage must’ve been the trigger to release what’s come down to us as the “Trump-Russia Dossier”, which is nearly as confused and irrational as Hillary’s mental disarray over losing.
 
 Let there be no regrets or glee. She worked hard to lose since long before the campaign. Trump kept the faith despite the many disappointments over others' failings, and Putin’s best-laid plans ended up up in a pile of ashes that he just walked away from. In politics there is always tomorrow. As for the past, the dossier will be remembered as one of the biggest forgeries in political history, a transparent hoax and by now a farce.
 
 Up to the Supreme Court

 
 The precedent set by Barack Obama and the Clintons, with the aid of CIA and DOJ/FBI, the consent of top-ranking Democrats, and cooperation from the corporate-controlled news media, to depose a fairly elected president set a dangerous precedent for the future of democracy in the United States. Unable to accept the electorate’s decision, the political insiders resorted to deceptive propaganda, street protests and even assassination threats, the sum of which is a “color revolution” in the USA, all based in that catalog of lies called the Russia Dossier.
 
 In defense of the Constitution, prosecutors must act on their mandate to bring this case of election tampering and treasonous conspiracy to the Supreme Court. Only the sternest high court ruling and severe punitive sentences can prevent another cabal from considering a similar deceptive strategy, based on the dossier model, to impose a tyrannical regime to destroy the nation’s heritage of democratic governance.
 
 Before closing the book on this open-and-shut case of treason as partly disclosed in the Senate Judiciary transcript, this series will next look at the intriguing minor themes from the hearing, soon to be presented in Part 3 and last.