The other secrets inside Grenell’s satchel are the key to the biggest political scandal in US history
That satchel that Acting DNI Ric Grenell personally delivered to the Department of Justice on May 7, 2020 was far too big for just a list of the 39 Obama administration officials, including his chief of staff and ambassador to Italy. Those higher ups have been exposed as requesting the unmasking of General Flynn. But there must have been a lot more inside, and that material was voluminous to require a briefcase-sized container, and that is the key to exposing the real extent of the spy operation that President Obama carried out on his political enemies, and the unmasking of General Michael Fynn is just the tip of the iceberg.
That is the basic message of this long and fascinating post by retired naval officer J.E. Dyer at Liberty Unyielding. I urge those who take a keen interest in the subject to read the whole thing, for it is full of technical points and complexities, but I will offer my own perspective on the thesis advanced by Ms. Dyer, who tweets under the name OptimisticCon. The post was sent to me by a counterintelligence professional who noted that it reinforced the point I made yesterday:
The unmasking of the unmaskers of General Flynn's telephone call is the camel's nose under the tent of the Obama administration's conspiracy to sabotage the incoming Trump administration, using the vast resources of the federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies using Deep State operatives within them.”
The key message is that for years the Obama administration was mining the incomparable database of the National Security Agency (NSA), which captured virtually all electronic communications – emails, text messages, everything – launched into the ether. The potential for abuse is breathtaking. Everything that political enemies said to each other, except in private in-person conversations or in snail mail letters, could have been spied upon. And now it looks like staggering numbers of intercepts were monitored. Dyer makes that case:
The clues are minimal, but if you know how to read them, you know that the investigators at DOJ and in the intel community have gone right where they needed to go, and they’ve hit the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
What will blow the whole thing wide open is simply this: laying bare the nexus of the operation at the National Security Council staff.
Not among the principals; i.e., the “big officials,” like Susan Rice, James Clapper, or John Brennan. (snip)
No, the pot of gold is among the worker bees (including “czar” appointees). The people who actually sat at computers and used them, to do things the principals could authorize, but didn’t keyboard-jockey themselves, because NSC principals aren’t your keyboard jockeys.
I wrote about this back in August 2017, and a number of times since. Rather than remake the whole case, I’ll give you the links (e.g., here, here, here) to understand it if you haven’t been following along, and merely set forth the key points in this article.
Understanding the scope of the Obamagate enterprise is best done through insight into how it ran through the NSC staff. Who on the staff was involved? And what recorded actions did they take?
Those are the two questions whose answers will form the Rosetta Stone for Obamagate. Remember, Obamagate is the name that clarifies this key point: the enterprise went all the way into the Oval Office. Spygate and Russiagate don’t do that for us. They finger actions involving subordinates performing in their lanes; they don’t clarify the full scope of the administration-wide operation. (snip)
A number of the actors on the NSC staff are probably people whose names few of us know.
As the earlier posts Ms. Dyer links to indicate, this mass mining of the NSA database has been going on a long time, and has been alluded to already, though largely ignored.
…we have known for years now that this was happening. The ODNI reported it in 2017, in response to the FISA court review – prompted by NSA’s Admiral Mike Rogers and his community report of October 2016 – which directed the intelligence community to police this problem up.
One more time, here is the telltale graphic from the ODNI confessional report in 2017:
The graphic shows how the number of so-called “non-contents,” upstream queries under FISA Section 702 exploded between 2012 and 2016. These are the queries that enabled desk jockeys at the federal agencies and the NSC staff to view USPI – without having to record a formal unmasking request. (Again, please see my earlier articles for what makes that possible.)
This is the skulduggery [sic] we’re looking for. It wasn’t tracking entries in a formal logbook that revealed it. It had to be computer forensics: tracing the actions of account users, as logged by the computer systems.
It’s called insulation. The principals who directed the spying never on their own logged requests for unmasking, at least until the very end of the Obama administration, when 39 names urgently needed access to the means to discredit and get rid of Flynn, who alone among the incoming Trump crew, had the knowledge of the intelligence community to blow up the conspiracy and reform the gargantuan spy apparatus. They were protecting the much larger spy operation that lasted for years under Obama.
Adam Housely of Fox News has inside sources who are feeding him similar insight on what lies ahead:
Ooooooh brother. Massive surveillance...that’s what’s been found. “MASSIVE” is the way it was sent to me.
— Adam Housley (@adamhousley) May 12, 2020
As I’m told the list Grenell brought over is much larger than anything involving Flynn. “The exact tasking flow is hard to discern because the stuff was flying everywhere.”
— Adam Housley (@adamhousley) May 12, 2020
The keyboard operatives working for the bigshots were not in the West Wing:
The NSC staff isn’t the only physical place it was done. The notorious dust-up at the FBI’s Washington Field Office in March 2016 is a strong data point indicating that the FBI was involved in it, with contractors – people who weren’t government employees – being able to view USPI material. The unauthorized viewing by contractors was a major issue, exposed to the public in Judge Rosemary Collyer’s orders after the FISA court review was released in 2017.
There are other opinions on this, but I believe there is a strong argument that there were two agencies involved in that particular case: the FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). The exposed contractors were very likely to be individuals from the same company who worked government contracts that that company held with both agencies.
The company is the one John Brennan was president of from 2005 to 2009: The Analysis Corporation. A major reason this hypothesis resonates is that the TAC contract with both agencies is for database maintenance and analysis. (The contracts are still active. They were very long ones, obtained in 2008 and 2009, running into hundreds of millions of dollars.)
The other major reason is that in 2012, Brennan set up the close collaboration of the FBI and NCTC on precisely the data we’re concerned about – USPI – when he was Obama’s counterterrorism czar.
This is mind-boggling. Huge sums of money spent on contractors in a company John Brennan ran. Did or does he have a financial stake in that outfit? Was he profiting from domestic spying?
Dyer uses the interesting term “syndicate enterprise.”
But, again, the NSC staff as the nexus for Obamagate is the key to divining the architecture of what was essentially a syndicate enterprise. The NSC staff has desks and computers manned by most of the major agencies of the U.S. government. A CIA representative working there is “CIA,” in every meaningful sense, but is available for activities that can only be performed from the physical location of the White House complex. The same is true for the DOJ, FBI, State, Treasury, and so forth. Then there are the employees of the Executive Office of the President itself, the core of the NSC staff.
Shades of RICO, which may offer a robust and far-reaching prosecutorial tool for Durham and any other federal prosecutor taking on elements of this vast enterprise. Dyer believes that a ton of investigative work already has gone into this, and that it has been painstaking:
The sheer number of persons said to be on Grenell’s list informs us that the “black book” of this enterprise has been pried out and assembled, computer keystroke by computer keystroke.
This is far more important than seeing the names of senior officials we already knew were unmasking authorities, attached to their unmasking requests.
This is leverage. This is insight. It goes well beyond the Michael Flynn case. This expanded list is how you figure out what the enterprise was and who was in it. So the fact that Grenell delivered it publicly is in itself significant. It means the investigators are very close to being ready for a big “reveal.” [emphasis in original]
“Leverage” means that the keyboard functionaries can be squeezed to testify against the principals . And we can guess who is doing that squeezing:
We can assume the Ric Grenell ODNI has been cooperating on this matter with the DOJ – in particular, with John Durham – since Grenell stepped in as Acting in February 2020. That’s a key reason I am confident Durham is already on the move, and fresh revelations are coming very soon.
But here’s the catch: because Durham is meticulous and not leaking, we won’t hear about this until the ”big reveal.” And we don’t want to do anything to harm those plea bargain negotiations by getting specifics out into the public view. I am among the many conservatives frustrated by the “all talk, no action” status quo.
But: John Durham is no Lindsey Graham or Trey Gowdy. He has no interest in talking a good game; he wants indictments and convictions.
And so do I.
Patience, my friends. The information and reasoning supplied by J.E. Dyer is the most heartening news of the day.
Photo credit: YouTube screengrab (cropped)
Hat tip: Mark Wauck