Allow me to share right away that if you haven’t followed the entire fourteen months of discussion surrounding The Big Ugly, this is not a discussion thread you will enjoy.

This is more digestible by those who have a comprehensive understanding of the 2016 back-story behind the DOJ and FBI surveillance program of Candidate Donald Trump, then President Trump, and the FISA-701(16)(17) issues therein.

On this subject, as with a few in the past, CTH has presented intricacies beyond the current story.

Oddly, when this happens, and specifically because of our prior crowd-sourcing track record, we pick up ‘nodes’, operational insiders who are curious about how we construct and predict seemingly invisible action.

That said, this entire Justice Department surveillance operation did not start with candidate Donald Trump. It has been going on, albeit with slightly different methods, for many years. The past 20 +/- years have seen an exponential growth of the electronic use of U.S. Justice Department political surveillance.

Hundreds of federal and state officials are monitored, and the reason therein is not as riddled with complexity as we might think. The motives are not deep, they’re shallow. Ultimately, it is all about money. If an entity can know, in advance, what actions are going to be taken by State and Federal officials, an entity can make massive amounts of money. Think about government contract bids submitted electronically as one example.

There are billions of billions to be made with the right information. As such, there are millions of millions to be spent on obtaining that information. Everything is up for sale.

Hardware and infrastructure is not installed by government; it is installed by contractors who work for government. Hardware is not manufactured by government, it is manufactured by contractors. Which is more valuable: the door key into your home or the pass-code for the security system?

The metadata collection Ed Snowden discussed was the tip of the iceberg. Snowden was inside the system, he discussed how information was gathered. Snowden never discussed who actually controls the weaponization of the information from the outside. Who pays?

Who pays for access to systems? Who pays the DOJ and FBI officials for access? Who pays for the information. Ultimately, who controls that information. It is all connected.

A reasonable guess would be eight-out-of-ten federal politicians are paid by entities outside government for access to existing systems and hardware. Just because the system is intelligence, and might have national security ramifications, doesn’t change the process.

The Awan Brothers should be a solid reference point. Watch:

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Just like lobbyists paying politicians to write legislation beneficial to those paying for services, so too are foreign and domestic entities paying for access to federal and state information. This has been happening so frequently the actual scale of the problem is larger than any capacity of the system to self-correct internally.

Almost every entity within the current political system is dependent on retention of a pay-for-information network that has been built-out over the past 15+/- years. The scope of the growth in selling political information began escalating with Bill Clinton, by the first-year of President Obama’s second-term the growth was exponential.

Look at the number of people occupying K-Street offices in Washington DC.

Consider the sheer growth volume of lobbying expenditures:

See the scale of growth?

♦ Selling Information – There are massive metadata files on all key public officials. The higher the official is in the influence chain, the move valuable their data-file. Within their file EVERYTHING about them is available for purchase. What they do, what they purchase, who they call, where they are, who they lunch with, who paid, what they ate, where they travel, what they are working on, etc. everything is available.

If an entity has a financial stake based on engagement with one or more of those officials, it is entirely possible to purchase the file (whole or in part). This is the type of data, the type of business model, that Glenn Simpson, Bean LLC, aka ‘Fusion-GPS’ engage with.

Every keystroke the targeted official enters, in business or profession, is available for purchase; so too is the same information available on every one of their colleagues and family members; and that purchase can extend to their friends and their friends families.

The Awan Brothers were simply brokers for this type of information.

It is a massive business. The annual federal budget is $4,000,000,000,000.00 +/-

Four trillion is four thousand billions.

It is specifically because of the financial opportunity within this business model the United States Justice Department has been corrupted. Institutionally corrupted, top-to-bottom.

It is almost beyond the scope of us to understand is how incredibly difficult this is to fix.

What Chairman Devin Nunes, Chairman Bob Goodlatte, Chairman Chuck Grassley and Inspector General Michael Horowitz are trying to do is no less than an institutional purge to the entire U.S. Justice Department, while simultaneously keeping it running.

Beyond what those reformers are attempting we have the U.S. State Department – same problem, same scale, same issues. Secretary Rex Tillerson is only beginning to scrape the surface of the problem.

Imagine how much more challenging it would be if the corrupt institution currently being confronted by Nunes, Goodlatte, Grassley and Horowitz was spread over the entire planet?

Think about it?

That’s currently Secretary Tillerson’s challenge to manage and control…..

…. we haven’t even begun to fathom that yet.