A nugget in BuzzFeed’s article by Anthony Cormier and Jason Leopold suggests to me that a likely source for explosive intel in the Steele dossier from Source E (Felix Sater) was a GRU intelligence officer that Sater has known since the 1990s, when he was living and working in Moscow.
[Originally published on Twitter July 1, 2018]
(THREAD) This Felix Sater quote is from an interview published on 15 Nov 2016 in a Russian paper. The interview is apparently in Russian. (Sater was born in Moscow and speaks Russian.) I’ve used Google to get it into English. @grantstern @funder
1/ This is not surprising, but is worth noting given the overwhelming evidence that Felix Sater was Source E of the Steele dossier. While Sater was not an adviser or campaign operative, he certainly was in close touch with the campaign.
2/ One of the outstanding questions in RussiaGate is how the allegations contained in the early Steele memos (like the explosive #095) got to Steele.
3/ In my first long thread on Sater, I proposed that Steele got his intel from an FBI informant who had once been close to the anti-Clinton, pro-Trump faction in the NYPD and SDNY FBI (Trumplandia), but later turned on them.
4/ When it appeared from Glenn Simpson’s Congressional testimony and other sources that the FBI did not have an informant inside or close to the campaign (notoriously, Trump has alleged there was, and called him or her a “spy”),
5/ I suggested instead that Steele’s informant was a member of the Russian-Jewish expatriate community in NYC who was close to Sater.
6/ (Steele now works in the field of *business* intelligence, with a special interest in Russian oligarchs, and would undoubtedly have had contacts in that community.)
7/ We recently learned that Sater had a contact in 2015 during the negotiations over the Trump Tower Moscow hotel project who was a former Russian military intel officer (GRU), and who Sater had known since the late 1990s when he had lived in Moscow,
8/ so there is yet another possibility: that Sater spoke to this former GRU officer (or to another similar source), who then relayed the intel to Steele, making one of Sater’s longtime Russian contacts one of Steele’s Russian sources.
9/ One reason for thinking that this idea (that Sater’s contact was a Steele source) should be taken seriously is that we know that US intel does not want this contact of Sater’s to be named, claiming (plausibly enough) that he would be killed if his identity became known.
10/ It is quite likely that Sater’s GRU contact was willing to play both sides of the street — helping first the Kremlin, then the FBI and British intel — whenever that serves his purpose —
11/ (just as Sater does, according to a lifelong friend who lived with Sater in Moscow and wrote a fascinating book about him (The Scorpion and the Frog), the importance of which for getting insight into Sater has not been sufficiently appreciated.)
12/ To get financing for the project in Moscow, Sater needed Russian financing, and he has claimed that he did in fact secure it from VTB Bank. The legal problem was that Sater as a US citizen was barred from negotiating with VTB because it had been placed under US sanctions.
13/ Sater has defended the negotiations for the financing on the grounds that he did not do the *actual negotiating*: it was all done in an arm’s length transaction by the Russian national, his old GRU contact.
14/ One very interesting possibility, then, is that there was a quid pro quo between Sater and his GRU contact: Sater provided inside info on the Trump campaign to the contact
15/ (which would undoubtedly have been very useful for him as a Kremlin agent), in return for his help in getting Sater the financing.
16/ This is just the sort of matter that would be of great interest to Mueller.In fact, there is good reason to believe that Mueller has ALREADY nailed it down,
17/ because it is certain now that Sater is and has been for some time a cooperating informant in the Mueller probe.
