dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Interview With FBI’s Gaeta, Central to Russiagate, Among 53 Transcripts Slated for Release

BY PETR SVAB

September 30, 2018 Updated: October 5, 2018

https://www.theepochtimes.com/interview-with-fbis-gaeta-core-to-russiagate-among-53-transcripts-slated-for-release_2674522.html

While the public has heard the story of many of the interviewees before, one of the transcripts may be the most complete account yet from a key figure in what has come to be known as “Russiagate.” Specifically, his role in allowing the now infamous Steele dossier to become the cornerstone in the FBI obtaining a FISA spy warrant on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, and by extension—under the NSA’s so-called two-hop rule—other members of the Trump campaign. That figure is FBI agent Michael Gaeta.

Gaeta was, and possibly still is, the assistant legal attaché at the United States Embassy in Rome. Until 2014, he headed the FBI Eurasian Organized Crime unit.

It was Gaeta who, reportedly on July 5, 2016, traveled to London to meet with former British spy Christopher Steele, the author of the dossier. The trip was reportedly authorized by Victoria Nuland, then-assistant state secretary for Eurasian affairs.

Steele used unsubstantiated claims from second- and thirdhand sources close to Kremlin to compile the dossier on Russians allegedly conspiring with the Trump campaign to sway the elections.

Steele was paid by opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was paid by law firm Perkins Coie, which was contracted for the job by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

Steele was only authorized by Fusion GPS co-founder Glen Simpson to call Gaeta a few days before the July 5 trip, according to Yahoo News’ Michael Isikoff and Mother Jones’ David Corn.

But that doesn’t square with a report by The Guardian’s Luke Harding, who wrote that Steele flew to Rome in June to brief on the dossier his “FBI contact with whom he had co-operated over Fifa.”

Harding wrote that Steele had previously provided the FBI with information on Russians corrupting the Fifa soccer association in a bid to host the 2018 soccer World Cup.

Steele’s “American contact in Rome” was “the head of the FBI’s Eurasian serious crime division,” Harding wrote. That was, at the time, Gaeta.

Nuland later testified to Congress that she saw “excerpts” from the unfinished dossier in mid-July 2016. She decided the matter should have been handled by the FBI, she said during her appearance on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”

But it wasn’t the dossier that, officially on July 31, 2016, prompted the FBI to launch a counterintelligence investigation of a Russian conspiracy, even though the conspiracy was primarily alleged by the dossier.

All Roads Lead to Rome

As the official story goes, Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos was invited for a talk with then-Australian ambassador Alexander Downer and the two met and drank in London on May 10, 2016. Downer later said he learned from the young aide that Russians had information that was damaging to Clinton.

Downer reported the conversation to Canberra “a day or two after,” as “it seemed quite interesting,” he told The Australian.

When, on July 22, 2016, Wikileaks started to release emails they say were leaked from the DNC, the Australian government communicated to the FBI what Downer learned from Papadopoulos.

Since Crowdstrike, a firm hired by the DNC, provided data that suggested the DNC emails were hacked by Russians, the FBI appears to had made an inference that the Clinton dirt was the DNC emails and that Papadopoulos, therefore, must have had prior knowledge of the alleged Russian hacking. That was enough to launch the probe.

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