New details of how a Russian hacker, a Republican operative and a cabal in the FBI worked to expose Anthony Weiner’s sexting scandal to hurt Hillary Clinton’s election chances.
The use of compromising sex secrets to ruin politicians’ careers is as old as the profession itself. Be it Alexander Hamilton’s affair, Thomas Jefferson’s love child with a slave, the Monica Lewinsky scandal or the careers of Gary Hart, Elliot Spitzer, or Anthony Weiner, U.S. history is littered with political ambitions ruined by sexual exploits.
Sex scandals are common in Russia, too. But under the supervision of Vladimir Putin, the dark art now has its own moniker, “kompromat.” Putin infamously climbed the ranks of the Kremlin by leaking secretly filmed tapes of a prosecutor cavorting with two prostitutes. The prosecutor was investigating corruption by then-President Boris Yeltsin. As a reward, Yeltsin elevated Putin to Prime Minister.
Russia’s “kompromat” arsenal is a new weapon in the digital age. Recently, the Kremlin has taken to hacking opposition activists’ computers and planting “child porn” on their hard drives, as happened to Vladimir Bukovsky, a Soviet dissident in England. Once imbedded on Bukovsky’s computer, a tip to the police resulted in a raid and an arrest. Bukovsky was later cleared after it was established a third-party had hacked his home network and “planted” the evidence. The implication was Russian intelligence was the culprit.
In 2016, Russia exported her “kompromat” tactic to the U.S. when the Kremlin invaded the American democracy. The key exhibit is the claim in the Steele Dossier of a caught-on-tape sexual impropriety by Donald Trump, allegedly with prostitutes at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton. The Russian attacks on U.S. democracy included hacks on the DNC, state voters rolls, electronic voting machine vendors and malware distribution which allowed access to the personal computers and drives of prominent Americans.
In one such act, Russian hacker Yevgeniy Nikulin, 29, hacked Formspring, the platform former Congressman Anthony Weiner used for sexting. Nikulin was arrested in a restaurant in Prague on the fifth of October and is the subject of dueling extradition requests by the U.S. and Russia.
Anthony Weiner was ‘honey trapped’ into sexting an ‘underage’ girl, allowing the FBI to access his laptop.
Honey trapping is the term investigators use for seducing someone into a sexual relationship so that incriminating evidence can be used against the target for blackmail. A honey trap is also often set for the purpose incriminating someone in a broader conspiracy.
In September of last year, the Daily Mail published an explosive story about disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, who is married to Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s top-aide at the time. It detailed Weiner’s months-long online relationship with a 15-year-old girl. Weiner would later take a plea bargain for transfer of “obscene material to a minor”. But, more importantly, the criminal charge opened the door to an FBI investigation of Weiner’s laptop on which they “discovered” confidential emails from Secretary Clinton.
The facts of the crime Weiner committed were, however, a lie. The official story was that the girl was a pro-Clinton 15-year-old but according to an investigation by whowhatwhy.org, she was a Trump supporter.
She told Inside Edition in September, “I knew that Hillary Clinton would be running for president in the year 2016 and I wanted to see if Anthony was still up to the same antics.”
The teen told Inside Edition it was her, not Weiner, who initiated the conversation. The teen’s father also has a long rap sheet including assault and strangulation. This conspiracy was first detailed in an exclusive report on Louise Mensch’s blog Patribotics.
The teen who sexted with Weiner also sought advice from GOP cyber provocateur Chuck Johnson. Johnson is connected to Trump funder Peter Thiel and reportedly speaks to mercenary Erik Prince “once a week,” according to whowhatwhy. He also met with Wikileaks’ Julian Assange and other known Russian assets but is refusing to provide the Senate intelligence Committee because of “journalistic privilege”.
It was Chuck Johnson who got the story published in the Daily Mail.
“It did seem kind of strange that a 15-year old would have this level of, yeah, wherewithal, so I will say I somewhat suspected that there was something else going on at the time,” Johnson told whowhatwhy. “But it was sort of like in the fog of war, you know, in the fog of the election, and so when I flipped it to [Daily Mail reporter Alana Goodman], you know, Alana was convinced that the girl was legit, everything was legit. I told her ‘I think you should look a little harder at this because it’s kind of a big deal. Weiner had been catfished before,” Johnson said.
This is how the Clinton emails were discovered on Anthony Weiner’s computer through a honey trap involving a teen who lied about her age and who used well-known Republican agitator Chuck Johnson to publicise the story. Johnson would later tweet “The role I played in helping to put Anthony Weiner behind bars will ring out for a long time”.
The FBI New York Field Office actively worked to undermine the Clinton campaign, with Trump associates.
As Election Day neared, and Trump slumped in the polls, his daughter-in-law Lara Trump appeared on Fox and Friends on October 25 and promised an “October surprise” was coming. The next day Rudy Giuliani told Fox News “I think he’s [Trump] got a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days. I mean, I’m talking about some pretty big surprises.” Later, mercenary Erik Prince boasted on Breitbart Radio the NYPD and the FBI had forced FBI Director Jim Comey to release the emails or they would “go public” with their revelations.
Eleven days before the 2016 election, then-FBI Director Jim Comey publicly revealed the discovery of the Clinton emails on Weiner’s laptop. It was a bombshell which altered the course of the election. Comey could never clearly articulate how Clinton’s emails got onto the laptop, telling a congressional hearing in May, “somehow, her emails were being forwarded to Anthony Weiner, including classified information by her assistant, Huma Abedin.” Comey later added, Huma sent the emails to him “to print out for her so she could then deliver them to the Secretary of State.”
Abedin’s lawyers said they had no idea how the emails got on there.
The actual e-mails found on Weiner’s laptop were nothing new but the course of events and the myriad connections to Republican operatives clearly lends credence to the notion the Bureau played a significant role in the 2016 election. “The FBI is Trumpland,” an FBI agent told The Guardian in November. “Clinton is the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel,” and “the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.”
Last week, we reported that former MI6 agent Christopher Steele had become aware of this “cabal” within the FBI New York office (known to have close ties to Giuliani). Steele was frustrated his repeated attempts to alert the FBI about the discoveries his investigation had unearthed had fallen on deaf ears. Steele penned a letter to the FBI on July 23 with proof Russia and the Trump Campaign had cut a deal to drop Russian sanctions in exchange for help in the elections, but this, too, was ignored.
“The New York office, in particular, appeared to be on a crusade against Ms. Clinton. Some of its agents had a long working relationship with Giuliani, by then a member of the Trump campaign, since his days as public prosecutor and then Mayor of the city,” The Independent wrote after interviewing Steele.
Rudy Giuliani & Donald Trump’s ties date back to the 80’s. They both have close ties to current and former FBI agents.
Giuliani met Trump in the late 80’s, when Trump was the co-chair of Giuliani’s first fundraiser. It was around this time that Giuliani made an alleged case of money-laundering against Trump disappear without even giving it a case number. “That meant that New Jersey gaming authorities would never know it existed,” biographer Wayne Barrett said in the NY Daily News.
During the campaign, Giuliani worked as the head of “cybersecurity” for Greenberg Taurig, a law firm representing Trump, Jared Kushner and ex-Fox News boss Roger Ailes. The former mayor still works as Trump’s cyber-czar on issues such as “hacking, intrusions, disruptions, manipulations, theft of data and identities, and securing information technology infrastructure,” according to a Trump transition statement.
Giuliani’s tentacles also reach deep into the Kremlin, having provided “image consulting” to Russian oligarchs, according to the New York Times. His clients included Transneft, a company targeted by U.S.-sanctions. In March of this year, Giuliani also joined the defense of accused Iranian money launderer Reza Zarreb who has ties to Turkish dictator Recep Erdogan, a close ally of Vladimir Putin.
Rudy served as a U.S. attorney for 17 years and maintained his ties to the FBI after leaving office. The former head of the FBI New York office Jim Kallstrom works for Giuliani’s security firm, and both he and Rudy are in touch with agents there. Giuliani’s former law firm acts as general counsel to FBI Agents Association (FBIAA), which represents 13,000 former and current agents and was started in the New York office. Kallstrom told Fox News in September “I think we’re going to see a lot more of the facts come out in the course of the next few months. That’s my prediction.”
Trump has his own ties to Kallstrom. In fact he attended a fundraiser for Kallstrom’s charity in lieu of campaigning in Iowa on GOP primary election day. Previously, Trump donated $230,000 to Kallstrom’s foundation.
In light of all of these new revelations, The FBI is conducting forensic analysis on Anthony Weiner’s laptop which may become key evidence in a case involving Russian intelligence and agents within the FBI’s New York field office, in a massive criminal conspiracy to swing the election towards Donald Trump.
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