People have caught on; it was bound to happen. Back in August 2017 Asst. Attorney General Rod Rosenstein created a special joint task-force within the FBI and DOJ to track down intelligence leakers. The investigative unit was requested by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats.

No-one was really paying much attention to it, until recently people started realizing the false media stories were too structured. The stories were fake, but the leaks were real.

Someone was seeding congress with carefully constructed false information and then watching to see where that false information surfaced. This is exactly how you track down leakers. We previously referenced it as “Black Hat Hunting“.

A few false stories leading the news might be accidental, but the Donald Trump Jr. email date leak, a CNN story, was so specific and so carefully crafted, it became the fake news leak that evidenced a clear strategy going on behind the scenes. CTH has been discussing the likelihood for several weeks, now there’s a bunch of people who have caught on:

(Front Mag) […] The investigation itself is real enough. In August, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats announced the formation of a counterintelligence unit inside the FBI that was going to get to the bottom of national-security leaks. They were looking not just at the intelligence community but also Congress. Which is where the biggest of last week’s botched CNN stories gets even more interesting. The email that CNN reported was part of the investigative evidence shared with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Republican Devin Nunes, with ranking Democratic member Adam Schiff. So a member of the committee or staffer is the likely source of the CNN leak—and it probably was not a Republican. If the mistaken date was on a document that was leaked to CNN and was part of a government sting operation—which sought to identify the leaker by altering a date on a document, and providing that document to only one member of the oversight committee—then whoever leaked that document has now been outed, and is facing some real trouble.

Of course, you can argue that Trump’s appointees to the DOJ and DNI are playing a dirty game against the elected officials and honorable civil servants who are just trying to get to the bottom of Trump’s collusion with Russia. On this reading, the GOP is just providing cover for a treasonous president. But the unending string of false stories being fed to a pliant media points in a different direction. As anyone who’s ever watched a police procedural knows, when the facts keep changing, someone isn’t telling the truth. The reason that Russiagate reporting keeps choking on its errors is because the narrative itself is founded on a big untruth—the Steele dossier. (read more)

Because the wrong information within the CNN leak was so conspicuously specific, and because the details were confirmed by two additional media outlets, a bunch of people realized such a fake news story could not possibly have happened organically. All three media outlets: CNN, CBS and ABC had to be using the same congressional leak source.

Ed Henry discussed the most likely culprit last night:

(Click to enlarge this statement from DJT-Jr attorney)

Indeed, it’s not just Donald Trump Jr. who suspected the culprit. Almost every intellectually honest person who has looked at this, comes to the conclusion the most likely source of the leak was Intelligence Committee Minority Chairman Adam Schiff.

If you accept the original seeds were planted to discover leakers, you then have to assume Schiff was a target of this joint task force. That likelihood also passes the common sense test.

Appearing on Fox News, political pundit Dan Bongino also noted the likelihood:

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♦Two “independent sources” both looked at an email, and both came away from reading that email with the wrong date? How is that possible?

It has been CTH contention for several weeks that a counterintelligence sting operation has been going on within the IC community. False trails of information, seeded by ‘White Hat’ investigators, intended to be captured by ‘Black Hat’ leakers – and delivered to their usurping allies in media. The stories are fake, the leaks are real.

The back-story on this endeavor includes an almost complete, years-long, Dept of Justice Office Inspector General investigation that no-one was paying attention to until recently. And don’t forget the ongoing FBI investigation into the Awan Brothers, vis-a-vis quantifying the potential intelligence compromise therein, plays into this.

That said, it would not be the IG carrying out a counterintelligence sting operation to identify leakers. In actuality, no official IC agency would be empowered to place fake news in front of congress. Setting traps for congress is generally bad form, and for matters of trust – really bad politics. That reality, amid those who follow DC politics, is the central point to dismiss such the “Black Hat Hunting” theory.

However, few people were paying attention four months ago when Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told us they were going to do exactly that:

04:30 …”The FBI has created a new counterintelligence unit to manage these [leak] cases”… 08:17 …”these National Security breaches do not just originate from within the Intelligence Community. They come from a wide range of sources within the government, including the Congress.”…

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Two days later, Sunday August 6th, 2017, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein reiterated he was going to follow through on the investigative demand of AG Sessions and DNI Coats and again referenced a “new counterintelligence division within the FBI”.

00:50 …“we’re responding appropriately. We’re going to devote more resources, re-evaluate our procedures and make sure we investigate every one of those leaks in an appropriate way.”… 1:07 “We have seen a surge in referrals (of leaks). We’ve seen an increase in the number of leaks. And we’re going to respond appropriately and try to establish an effective deterrent. Criminal prosecution isn’t the only way to prevent leaks but it’s an important part of the solution.”… 1:43 “That significant increase has necessitated an increase in resources. And so we have re-prioritized our cases within the National Security Division, we’re providing appropriate supervision at a high level, we’ve created a new unit within the FBI to focus on those leaks, and we’re going to devote whatever resources are necessary to get them under control.”…

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If you consider the years-long IG investigation is coming to a conclusion, and you understand there’s a new FBI/DOJ unit focused on finding ‘leaks’; and there have been several high-profile ‘mistakes’ based on leaks recently: Brian Ross on Flynn, Bloomberg/Reuters on Duetsche Bank (Trump records), CNN on DJT-Jr/WikiLeaks, etc.

Well, the leaks are real, the news is fake.

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Suspicious Cat remains, suspicious.