The House Intelligence Committee voted along party lines on January 29 to publicly release a classified memo detailing that the FBI used the Steele dossier-bought and paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC- to obtain a FISA warrant to surveil former Trump foreign policy advisor Carter Page in the campaign’s early days.Īny dossier-related FISA warrant to surveil Page would have to be based on the bizarre quid pro quo deal described in the dossier, according to which Igor Sechin (CEO of Rosneft and Putin intimate) offered Page, in July of 2016, a commission on the sale of 19% of Rosneft shares-a bribe of more than a half billion dollars. The true story of the Steel dossier appears about ready to break. The Christopher Steele of dossier fame was long past his sleuthing days, but was instead a consultant hustling to give his clients the dirt they wanted. They do not note that Steele’s last tour of duty in Russia was a quarter century earlier. When virtually everything else is not verifiable or simply made up, the failure of the one claim that can be validated should call into question the entire dossier.Īs a last reed of hope, “dossier Believers” argue that the dossier was after all prepared by a master spy-a former MI6 bigwig-whose “trusted compatriots” gathered intelligence from the innermost sanctums of the Kremlin. Even more damaging: one of the key verifiable claims of the dossier (that Trump’s personal lawyer orchestrated payoffs from Prague on specific dates) has been shown to be false. The Steele dossier could not stand up to the most liberal interpretation of rules of evidence. After an extensive investigation, the Washington Post disguised its disappointment with verbal gymnastics: “Although it’s impossible to say that the dossier is entirely inaccurate (there are some glimmers of accurate predictions), it is also impossible to say that it has been broadly validated.”Īs a matter of fact, the dossier is unverifiable, given the anonymous sources and whether the informants are real people or fabrications. Persistent media efforts to validate the Steele dossier have failed. Steele’s informants were therefore either fictitious, or low-level poseurs passing on gossip, OR they were doing the bidding of the Kremlin as part of a classic Russian disinformation campaign. There is no way that Steele’s alleged top-level Kremlin informants would spill the Kremlin’s deepest secrets to lowly Steele hirelings. No source cited in the dossier had been willing to come forward most of the information is hearsay or even hearsay of hearsay. I concluded immediately after the Steele dossier’s publication by BuzzFeed in January of 2017 that it was a fake. Federal courts, like FISA, are also not supposed to be swayed by politics and should have the commonsense to recognize nonsense when they see it. Federal courts should be subject to rules of evidence on hearsay, identification, and authentication, which would seem to nullify the dossier as credible evidence. We can understand if many Trump-haters swallowed the dossier’s tales of improbable business deals and fictitious meetings as related by anonymous informants, but it now appears that the FBI used the dossier to obtain a warrant to surveil a member of Trump’s campaign team from a FISA court judge.
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