The CIA Bull in Glenn Simpson's China Shop
by John Helmer - Dances with Bears
January 22, 2018
The corollary rule for defending lawyers is – if the answer to your question will incriminate your client, don’t ask it, and hope the prosecutor fails to do his job.
Glenn Simpson, a former employee of the Wall Street Journal, is currently on trial in the US for having fabricated a dossier of allegations of Russian misconduct (bribes, sex, blackmail, hacking) involving President Donald Trump and circulating them to the press; the objective was to damage Trump’s candidacy before the November 2016 election.
Simpson was called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on August 22, 2017; then the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on November 8 and again on November 14, 2017. So far, Simpson’s veracity and business conduct face nothing more than the court of public opinion. He has not yet been charged with criminal or civil offences. That will happen if the evidence materializes that Simpson has been lying.
Simpson’s collaborator in the dossier and his business partner, Christopher Steele, is facing trial in the London High Court, charged with libels he and Simpson published in their dossier. Together, they are material witnesses in two federal US court trials for defamation, one in Miami and one in New York. If they perjure themselves giving evidence in those cases, they are likely to face criminal indictments. If they tell the truth, they are likely to face fresh defamation proceedings; perhaps a civil racketeering suit for fraud; maybe a false statement prosecution under the US criminal code.
One question for them is as obvious as its answer. Who do an American ex-journalist on US national security and an ex-British intelligence agent go to for sources on Russian undercover operations outside Russia in general, the US in particular? Answer — first, their friends and contacts from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); second, their friends and contacts from the Secret Intelligence Service or MI6, as the UK counterpart is known.
Why then did the twenty-two congressmen, the members of the House Intelligence Committee who subpoenaed Simpson for interview, fail to pursue what information he and Steele received either directly from the CIA or indirectly through British intelligence?
The answer no-one in the US wants to say aloud is the possibility that it was the CIA which provided Simpson and Steele with names and source materials for their dossier, creating the evidence of a Russian plot against the US election, and generating evidence of Russian operations. If that is what happened, then Simpson and Steele were participants in a false-flag CIA operation in US politics.
This isn’t idle speculation. It has been under investigation at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) since Simpson and Steele decided in mid-2016 to go to the FBI to request an investigation, and then told American press to get the FBI to confirm it was investigating. At the fresh request this month from the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the FBI is still investigating.
Simpson’s appearance at the House Intelligence Committee was the sequel to his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee; for that story, read this.
Simpson’s three lawyers from the Washington, DC, firm of Cunningham
Levy Muse, who appeared with him at the Senate and House committee
hearings. (L-R) Robert Muse; Joshua Levy, and Rachel Clattenburg.
The firm’s other name partner, Bryan Cunningham, was a CIA officer specializing in cyber operations.
The transcripts of the House Intelligence Committee were released last Thursday. Simpson’s first appearance was on November 8, and can be read in full here.
Simpson’s lawyers did all the talking; Simpson said nothing, pleading the US Constitution’s Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself.
Although his lawyers repeatedly claimed during the earlier Senate Committee hearing that Simpson was testifying voluntarily, the House Committee recorded that Simpson was compelled to testify. “Our record today,” the November 8 transcript begins,
“will reflect that you have been compelled to appear today pursuant to a subpoena issued on October 4th, 2017.”
Simpson then told the Committee through his lawyers that he would plead the Fifth Amendment and not answer any questions. The first transcript is a record of debate between Republican and Democratic members of the Committee.
This resulted in an agreement for Simpson to testify under the subpoena but on terms his lawyers said would limit the scope of the questions which he would agree to answer.
Steele, according to the November 8 transcript, was also summoned to testify. A British citizen with home in Berkshire and office in London, he refused and the Committee recorded his “non-cooperation and non-testimony.”
Republicans outnumber Democrats on the House Committee, 13 to 9. Just 5 Republican members were at Simpson’s November 14 appearance; 7 Democrats. The Republican committee chairman, Devin Nunes, was absent. Release of Simpson’s transcript was an initiative of the Democrats. In a statement by their leader on the committee, Adam Schiff, the Democrats claimed last week “thus far, Committee Republicans have refused to look into this key area and we hope the release of this transcript will reinforce the importance of these critical questions to our investigation.”
Read the November 14 testimony here.
Members of the House Intelligence Committee on the podium at an
open hearing in November 2017. From left to right: Adam Schiff (D),
Michael Conaway (R), and Thomas Rooney (R).
Search the 165 pages of the transcript for the CIA, and you will find many references to the letters, C, I and A – specialize, social, commercial, especially, association, financial and politician. There were 44 mentions of the Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI); 4 mentions of “British Intelligence” – the spy agency to which Steele belonged ten years ago – one mention each of the Israeli Mossad, the Chinese and Indian intelligence services.
According to Simpson, “foreign intelligence services hacking American political operations is not that unusual, actually, and there’s a lot of foreign intelligence services that play in American elections.” He mentioned the Chinese and the Indians, not the Israelis. The Mossad, Simpson did tell the Committee, was his source for his belief that Russian intelligence has been operating through the Jewish Orthodox Chabad movement, and the Russian Orthodox Church. “The Orthodox church is also an arm of the Russian State now… the Mossad guys used to tell me about how the Russians were laundering money through the Orthodox church in Israel, and that it was intelligence operations.”
There are just two references in the Committee transcript to the CIA. One was a passing remark to imply the Russians cannot “break[ing] into the CIA, [so instead] you are breaking into, you know, places where, you know, an open society leaves open.”
The second was a bombshell. It dropped during questioning by Congressman Thomas Rooney (right), a 3-term Republican representative from Florida with a career as an army lawyer. Rooney asked Simpson:“Do you or anyone else independently verify or corroborate any information in the dossier?”
Simpson replied by saying, “Yes. Well, numerous things in the dossier have been verified. You know, I don’t have access to the intelligence or law enforcement information that I see made reference to, but, you know, things like, you know, the Russian Government has been investigating Hillary Clinton and has a lot of information about her.”
Then Simpson contradicted himself, disclosing what he had just denied. “When the original memos came in saying that the Kremlin was mounting a specific operation to get Donald Trump elected President, that was not what the Intelligence Community was saying. The Intelligence Community was saying they are just seeking to disrupt our election and our political process, and that this is sort of kind of just a generally nihilistic, you know, trouble-making operation. And, you know, Chris turned out to be right, it was specifically designed to elect Donald Trump President.”
How did Simpson know with such confidence what the “Intelligence Community” was “saying”, and who were Simpson’s and Steele’s sources in the “Intelligence Community”? Rooney failed to inquire. Instead, he and Simpson exchanged question and answer regarding the approach Simpson and Steele made to the FBI when they delivered their dossier. In the details of that, Simpson repeated what he had already told the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Rooney then asked what contact had been made with the CIA or “any other intelligence officials”. Simpson claimed he didn’t understand the question at first, then he stumbled.
115-IG00-20180118-SD002.pdf -- page 61.
What Simpson was concealing in the two pauses, reported in the transcript as hyphens, Rooney did not realize. Simpson was implying that no-one from Fusion GPS, his consulting company, had been in contact with the CIA, nor him personally. But Simpson left open that Steele had been in contact with the CIA. Rooney followed with a question about “anyone”, but that was so imprecise, Simpson recovered his confidence to say “No”. That was a cover-up – and the House Intelligence Committee let it drop noiselessly.
Intelligence community sources and colleagues who know Simpson and Steele say Simpson was notorious at the Wall Street Journal for coming up with conspiracy theories for which the evidence was missing or unreliable. He told the Committee that disbelief on the part of his editors and management had been one of his reasons for leaving the newspaper. “One of the reasons why I left the Wall Street Journal was because I wanted to write more stories about Russian influence in Washington, D.C., on both the Democrats and the Republicans… eventually the Journal lost interest in that subject. And I was frustrated…that was where I left my journalism career.”
Left: Glenn Simpson reporter for the Wall Street Journal in 1996,
promoting his book, Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistence of Corruption
in American Politics. Right: Simpson in Washington in August 2017.
When Simpson was asked “do you – did you find anything to — that you verified as false in the dossier, since or during?” Simpson replied: “I have not seen anything – “. Note the hypthen, the stenographer’s signal that Simpson was pausing.
“[Question]. So everything in that dossier, as far as you’re concerned, is true or could be true?”
“MR. SIMPSON: I didn’t say that. What I said was it was credible at the time it came in. We were able to corroborate various things that supported its credibility.”
Sources in London are divided on the question of where Steele’s sources came from – CIA, MI6, or elsewhere. What has been clear for the year in which the dossier’s contents have been in public circulation is that the sources the dossier referred to as “Russian” were not. For details of the sourcing. The subsequent identification of the Maltese source Joseph Mifsud, and the Greek-American George Papadopoulos, corroborates their lack of direct Russian sources. Instead, the sources identified in the dossier were either Americans, Americans of Russian ethnic origin, or Russians with no direct knowledge repeating hearsay three or four times removed from source.
So were the allegations of the dossier manufactured by a CIA disinformation unit, and fed back to the US through the British agent, Steele? Or were they a Simpson conspiracy theory of the type that failed to pass veracity testing when Simpson was at the Wall Street Journal? The House Intelligence Committee failed to inquire.
One independent clue is what financial and other links Simpson and Steele and their consulting firms, Fusion GPS and Orbis Business Intelligence, have had with US Government agencies other than the FBI, and what US Government contracts they were paid for, before the Republican and Democratic Party organizations commissioned the anti-Trump job?
The House Committee has subpoenaed business records from Fusion, but Simpson’s lawyers say they will refuse to hand them over. The financial records of Steele’s firm are openly accessible through the UK government company registry, Companies House. Click to read here.
Because the Trump dossier work ran from the second half of 2015 to November 2016, the financial reports of Orbis for the financial years ending March 31, 2016, and March 31, 2017, are the primary sources. For FY 2016 and FY 2017, open this link to read.
The papers reveal that Orbis was a small firm with no more than 7 employees. Steele’s business partner and co-shareholder, Christopher Burrows, is another former MI6 spy. They had been hoping for MI6 support of their private business, but it failed to materialize, says an London intelligence source.
“Chris Burrows is another from the same background. They all hope to be Hakluyt [a leading commercial intelligence operation in London] but didn’t get the nod on departure.”
(L) Christopher Steele; (R) Christopher Burrows.
They do not report the Orbis income. Instead, for 2016 the company filings indicate £155,171 in cash at the bank, and income of £245,017 owed by clients and contractors. Offsetting that figure, Orbis owed £317,848 – to whom and for what purposes is not reported. The unaudited accounts show Orbis’s profit jumped from £121,046 in 2015 to £199,223 in 2016, and £441,089 in 2017.
The financial data are complicated by the operation by Steele and Burrows of a second company, Orbis Business Intelligence International, a subsidiary they created in 2010, a year after the parent company was formed. Follow its affairs here.
According to British press reports, Orbis and Steele were paid £200,000 for the dossier. Simpson told the House Intelligence Committee the sum was much less — $160,000 (about £114,000). Simpson’s firm, he also testified, was being paid at a rate of about $50,000 per month for a total of about $320,000. If the British sources are more accurate than Simpson’s testimony, Steele’s takings from the dossier represented roughly half the profit on the Orbis balance-sheet.
British sources also report that a US Government agency paid for Orbis to work on evidence and allegations of corruption at the world soccer federation, Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). Indictments in this case were issued by the US Department of Justice in May 2015, and the following December. What role the two-partner British consultancy played in the complex investigations by teams from the Justice Department, the FBI and also the Internal Revenue Service is unclear. That Steele, Burrows and Orbis depended on US government sources for their financial well-being appears to be certain.
Another reported version of the FIFA contract is that Steele, Burrows and Orbis were hired by the British Football Association to collect materials on FIFA corruption, and provide them to the FBI and other US investigators, and then to the press. The scheme’s objective was reportedly to advance the British bidding for the World Cup in 2018 or 2022 by discrediting the rival bids from Russia and Qatar. Click to read. Were MI6 and CIA sources mobilized by Orbis to feed the FBI with evidence the US investigators were unable to turn up, or was Orbis the conduit through which disinformation targeting Russia was fed to make it appear more credible to the FBI, and to the media?
US Congressional investigators have so far failed to notice the similarities between the FIFA and the Trump dossier operations. Early this month two Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee announced that they have called for a Justice Department and FBI investigation of Steele for providing false information to the FBI. The provision of the US code making lying a federal crime requires the falsehoods occur “within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States.” Simpson has testified that when Steele briefed the FBI on the dossier, he did so at meetings in Rome, Italy.
Now then, Part I and this sequel of the Simpson-Steele story having been read and thoroughly mulled over, what can the meaning be?
In the short run, this case was a black job assigned by Republican Party candidates for president, then the Democratic National Committee, for the purpose of discrediting Trump in favour of Hillary Clinton. It failed on Election Day in 2016; the Democrats are still trying.
In the long run, the case is a measurement of the life, or the half-life, of truth. Giuseppe di Lampedusa wrote once that nowhere has truth so short a life as in Sicily. On his clock, that was five minutes. He didn’t know the United States, or shall we say the stretch from Washington through New York to the North End of Boston. There, truth has an even shorter life. Scarcely a second.
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