Grassley probes FBI's ties to British spy who investigated Trump

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has opened an inquiry into allegations the FBI worked with the British spy who authored a controversial opposition research dossier on President Trump during the 2016 election. In a Monday letter to FBI Director James Comey, Grassley asked for records pertaining to any agreements the agency may have had with Christopher Steele.[snip]

“The idea that the FBI and associates of the Clinton campaign would pay Mr. Steele to investigate the Republican nominee for President in the run-up to the election raises further questions about the FBI’s independence from politics, as well as the Obama administration’s use of law enforcement and intelligence agencies for political ends,” Grassley wrote. “It is additionally troubling that the FBI reportedly agreed to such an arrangement given that, in January of 2017, then-Director Clapper issued a statement stating that ‘the [intelligence community] has not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable, and we did not rely upon it in any way for our conclusions.’”

Is Steele still on the FBI payroll? And what was his relationship with double-agent Alexander Litvinenko?

http://journal-neo.org/2017/01/14/the-trump-dossier-created-by-spies-r-us/

Journalist Carl Bernstein, a co-author of CNN's report on the dossier, said Wednesday it was obtained by a former British ambassador, who forwarded it to Arizona GOP Sen. John McCain last year. McCain said Wednesday he passed it along to the FBI, which already had a copy.

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Christopher-Steele-dossier-intelligence-British/2017/01/11/id/768110/

Of Steele's character, "“It would have meant that whoever was writing the report was far better than any British or CIA agent since the Russian revolution.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-who-is-christopher-steele-man-behind-the-trump-dossier-perverted-sexual-acts-mi6-agent-a7524191.html

CNN has reported that a two-page synopsis of Mr Steele’s dossier was only presented to Barack Obama and Mr Trump after US intelligence agencies checked the ex-MI6 man’s credentials and found him and his sources “credible enough to include some of the information”. ibid

(but, how could they not find him 'credible'? After all, he got street cred working with the NY FBI:)

Emails seen by Reuters indicate that, in the summer of 2010, members of a New York-based FBI squad assigned to investigate “Eurasian Organised Crime” met Mr Steele in London to discuss allegations of possible corruption in FIFA. ibid

Two important documents were released on March 4 on the extreme danger of war being instigated by the hysterical and absurd demonization of any U.S. contacts with Russian diplomats and officials. One document is by Ambassador Jack Matlock, the Ambassador to Russia from 1987-91, one of America’s leading scholars and diplomats. The other is by Robert Parry, the investigative journalist most famous for his exposure of the Iran-Contra operation and the CIA-Contra cocaine trafficking in the US in the 1980s.

Matlock writes that the current presumption of guilt in the US media and political circles constitutes “the attitude of a police state.” He warns that “Nuclear weapons are an existential threat to our nation,” and that improving relations with Russia must be “praised, not scapegoated.”

Parry details the coming together of three apparently disparate forces: the neocons (McCain et.al.); the liberal democrats (the Obama/Hillary/Soros networks); and the mainstream media, all aimed at preventing Trump’s efforts to improve relations with Russia. Parry warns that these actions
“could push the two countries into a war that could truly be the war to end all wars — along with ending human civilization. But Democrats, liberals and the mainstream news media seem to hate Trump so much they will take that risk.”

What is missing from this analysis — and what is fundamental and crucial to defeating it — is that these are not “strange bedfellows” as they may seem, but rather, they jointly function as the tools of Empire and the City of London.

The British Empire is still very much alive, although it has used the United States as a “dumb giant” over the past 16 years of Bush and Obama presidencies in fighting its colonial wars. The Empire can not survive if its “divide and conquer” division of the world between East and West were to be destroyed. This is precisely what is threatened by President Trump’s publicly announced intention to establish cooperative relations with Russia, as well as with China’s “win-win” approach to developing the entire world through the New Silk Road — the One Belt One Road. In the eyes of the British financial oligarchy and the British Monarchy, this must be stopped, by any means necessary, up to and including thermonuclear war.

The world was on the brink of just such an existential disaster under Obama and his clone Hillary Clinton. Although that immediate danger has been avoided by the electoral defeat of Hillary Clinton, both Matlock and Parry correctly warn that the danger is being restored and aggravated by the new McCarthyite witch hunt against any and all discussions with Russia.

As Lyndon LaRouche said today:
“The British are the media, with the intention to ruin nations. It’s been done before, and is being attempted again. Watch out.”
The role of the British, he said must be highlighted. “We can screw them up by doing that.”

The reality of the total bankruptcy of the western banking system (a major cause of the urgency in the eyes of the Empire to get a war started quickly) was driven home today by the announcement by Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan that the 17 month effort to restore the bankrupt institution to stability had failed. The bank lost another $1.5 billion in 2016, mostly in derivative trading, and they face billions in fines from the U.S. for their crimes during the sub-prime mortgage bubble leading into the 2008 bust. Cryan’s new plan for Germany’s biggest bank includes raising $8.5 billion through a new, discounted stock issuance, and to focus on industrial lending, cutting back on trading and asset management speculation.

This sounds reasonable, but LaRouche noted that they are merely “screwing around,” and they must “settle accounts with reality, not tricks.” In July of 2016, when Deutsche Bank nearly collapsed, LaRouche called for a onetime recapitalization of the bank, but on condition that it return to the tradition of its late Chairman, Alfred Herrhausen, a tradition of banking for industrial and human development, not speculation. Herrhausen was assassinated at the time the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, precisely because of his vision.

But LaRouche’s proposal was not followed. The EU and the German government tried to patch over the $55 trillion derivative holdings at Deutsche Bank with tricks, and are now trying yet another trick. The “reality” LaRouche is referring to is that there is no means to escape the inevitable collapse of the nearly $2 quadrillion in derivative contracts sucking the life out of the productive economies of the trans-Atlantic financial system, other than an FDR-style Glass Steagall reorganization — writing off the worthless speculative bubble and directing new credit into productive activity.

If the world chooses to wait it out, it will create not only a financial crisis beyond anyone’s imagination, but also a global war. Now is the time to act.

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