CIA Larry Johnson: Will Donald Trump punish the UK for its meddling in two US Presidential elections?

Larry C. Johnson is a former CIA officer and intelligence analyst, and former planner and advisor at the US State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism. As an independent contractor, he has provided training for the US Military’s Special Operations community for 24 years.

Larry Johnson writes in his recent post – “Will Donald Trump Punish the UK for its Meddling in Two US Presidential Elections?”:

“If the Brits are laboring under the fantasy that they enjoy a special relationship with the United States, it is time for my British cousins to wake up. My thesis is simple: Donald Trump and Kash Patel know that British intelligence officers and assets played a key and enthusiastic role in trying to destroy Donald Trump’s campaign for President in 2016 and are likely to hold the UK accountable.

In my judgment, Russiagate was a comprehensive, complex intelligence operation that involved the UK, the Australians and the Israelis. Then, four years later, we have Keir Starmer taking a swing at Trump by sending Labour volunteers to the United States in the fall of 2024 to campaign for Kamala Harris. That foreign meddling exceeds anything the Russians are alleged to have done in 2016.

In short, I believe that Donald Trump has not forgotten how these foreign intelligence agencies tried to destroy them and does not likely place a high value on seeking further collaboration with them in the future. I am reposting two articles from my archive that addressed the question of how foreign intelligence operative were used to attack Donald Trump and his campaign.

Let me take you back to an article I wrote in May 2019:

“Do not focus on July 2016 as the so-called start of the counter intelligence investigation of Donald Trump. That is a lie. We know that the FBI had signed up Christopher Steele as a Confidential Human Source (aka CHS) by February of 2016. It is incumbent on Attorney General Barr to examine the contact reports filed by Steele’s FBI handler (those reports are known as FD-1023s). He also, as I have noted in a previous post, needs to look at the FD-1023s for Felix Sater and Henry Greenberg. But these will only tell a small part of the story. There is a massive intelligence side to this story.

The CIA, with the knowledge of the Director of National Intelligence, worked with British counterparts starting in the summer of 2015 to collect intelligence on Republican and at least one Democrat candidate. John Brennan was probably hoping that his proactive steps to help the Hillary Clinton campaign would ensure him taking over as DNI in the new Clinton Administration. Regardless of motives, the CIA enlisted the British intelligence community to start gathering intelligence on most major Republican candidates and on Bernie Sanders. This initial phase of intelligence gathering goes beyond opposition research.

The information being gathered identified the key personnel in each campaign and identified the people outside the United States receiving their calls, texts and emails. This information was turned into intelligence reports that then were passed back to the United States intel community as “liaison reporting.” This was not put into normal classified channels. This intelligence was put into a SAP, i.e. a Special Access Program.

This initial phase of intelligence collection produced a great volume of intelligence that allowed analysts to identify key personnel and the people they were communicating with overseas.

We also know that Felix Sater, a longtime business associate of Donald Trump and an FBI informant since December 1998 (he was signed up by Andrew Weismann), initiated the proposal to do a Trump Tower in Moscow.

In the late summer of 2015, the Trump Organization received a new inquiry about pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow. Sater’s communication were intercepted by western intelligence agencies – GCHQ and NSA. I do not know which agency put it into an intel report, but it was put into the system.

The Sater FD-1023 will tell us whether or not Sater did this at the direction of the FBI or acted on his own initiative. The key point is that the “bait” to do something with the Russians came from a registered FBI informant.

By December of 2015, the Hillary Campaign decided to use the Russian angle on Donald Trump. Thanks to Wikileaks we have Campaign Manager John Podesta’s email exchange in December 2015 with Democratic operative Brent Budowsky:

“That’s good, sooner it’s clarified the better, and the stronger the better,” Budowski replies, later adding: “Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin, but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria.”

The program to slaughter Donald Trump using Russia as the hatchet was already underway.

This was more the opposition research. This was the weaponization of law enforcement and intelligence assets to attack political opponents. Hillary had covered the opposition research angle in London by hiring a firm comprised of former MI6 assets – Hakluyt: there was a second, even more powerful and mysterious opposition research and intelligence firm lurking about with significant political and financial links to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign for president against Donald Trump.

Meet London-based Hakluyt & Co., founded by three former British intelligence operatives in 1995 to provide the kind of otherwise inaccessible research for which select governments and Fortune 500 corporations pay huge sums...

Hakluyt is described by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s Henry Williams as “one of the more secretive firms within the corporate investigations world” and as “a retirement home for ex-MI6 [British foreign intelligence] officers, but it now also recruits from the worlds of management consultancy and banking… ”

Downer, a long-time Aussie chum of Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been on Hakluyt’s advisory board since 2008. Officially, he had to resign his Hakluyt role in 2014, but his informal connections continued uninterrupted, the News Corp. Australian Network reported in a January 2016 exclusive:

But it can be revealed Mr. Downer has still been attending client conferences and gatherings of the group, including a client cocktail soirée at the Orangery at Kensington Palace a few months ago.

His attendance at that event is understood to have come days after he also attended a two-day country retreat at the invitation of the group, which has been involved in a number of corporate spy scandals in recent times.

Much remains to be uncovered in this plot. But this much is certain – there is an extensive documentary record, including TOP SECRET intelligence reports (SIGINT and HUMINT) and emails and phone calls that will show there was a concerted covert action operation mounted against Donald Trump and his campaign. Those documents will tell the story.”

…These articles, written almost five years ago, only scratch the surface of British perfidy. I suspect there are some very nervous blokes in MI6, waiting to see what Trump and Kash Patel might do. This is not about seeking revenge. This is about accountability. I do not know if the memory of British meddling played any role in the tough message delivered by JD Vance to the Munich Security Counsel, but I think it is highly likely that Donald Trump does not trust the Brits… and with good reason, Larry Johnson concludes.

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