John Solomon, writing for the opinion section of the Hill, says the Russia collusion investigation began in London by the spring of 2016. It did not begin in Moscow during the summer of the 2016 election.
His piece aligns somewhat with information provided by Kimberly Strassel at the Wall Street Journal and Sara A. Carter.
Foreign figures on London contacted Trump campaign advisers and provided the FBI with hearsay allegations of Trump-Russia collusion, bureau documents and interviews of government insiders reveal, Solomon writes. These contacts in spring 2016 — some from trusted intelligence sources, others from Hillary Clinton supporters — occurred well before FBI headquarters authorized an official counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016, he continued.
The new timeline makes one wonder: Did the FBI follow its rules governing informants?
Mueller’s own FBI governing rules forbad the FBI from directing a human source to target an American until a formally predicated investigative file is opened. He established the rules when he was in charge of the FBI.
That isn’t what happened insofar as we know.
Retired FBI assistant director for intelligence Kevin Brock told John Solomon: “These types of investigations aren’t normally run by assistant directors and deputy directors at headquarters,” he told me. “All that happens normally in a field office, but that isn’t the case here and so it becomes a red flag. Congress would have legitimate oversight interests in the conditions and timing of the targeting of a confidential human source against a U.S. person.”
There was tremendous political pressure as we know from agents Strzok-Page texts:
“We’re not going to withstand the pressure soon,” FBI lawyer Lisa Page texted fellow agent Peter Strzok on Aug. 3, 2016, days after Strzok opened the official probe and returned from a trip to London. At the time, they were dealing with simultaneous challenges: the wrap-up of the Hillary Clinton email scandal and the start of the Russia-Trump probe.
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They expressed fear of political meddling:
“This is MUCH more tasty for one of those DOJ aholes to leak,” Strzok wrote as the two FBI colleagues — then having an affair, the bureau later told Congress — debated how long they could delay a CIA-FBI meeting so as to “not play into the agency’s BS game.”
They said the White House was handling it — spying on the opposition:
They voiced alarm when an FBI colleague — “Liz” — suggested the Obama White House was about to hijack the investigation. “Went well, best we could have expected,” Strzok texted Page after an Aug. 5, 2016, meeting. “Other than Liz quote ‘the White House is running this.’ ” Page then texted to assure Strzok of a paper trail showing the FBI in charge: “We got emails that say otherwise.”
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