FBI, DOJ Knew Clintons Funded Anti-Trump Russia Dossier, Hid It from FISA Court
The blockbuster memo just released by the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee makes it abundantly clear that the FBI was staffed and led by pro-Clinton/anti-Trump zealots who would stop at nothing to keep him from office or remove him once he was there.
They’re still at it.
The Nunes/GOP memo shows that the top leadership of the FBI and the Justice Department knew that the dossier prepared by Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS was paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee — but hid its partisan origin from the FISA court.
In other words, our top FBI and Justice Department officials omitted key information from the FISA Court warrant application in order to convince them to let them spy on Trump transition and campaign officials — American citizens. Would the Court have looked at the warrant in the same way if they knew it was commissioned by the Democrat nominee for president to discredit her opponent?
The FISA court is really on a par with the Supreme Court in that its decisions cannot be appealed. Its standard of proof for issuance of a FISA warrant is extremely high. Concealing that the dossier was funded by a partisan group is a major mistake and perhaps indictable.
Former Deputy Director McCabe told the House Intelligence Committee that the FISA warrant to spy on Carter Page would never have been issued were it not for the dossier.
But the FBI knew that the dossier was never verified. The memo also states that the FBI’s counter-intelligence attempted to verify the sources in the dossier and found that it was only “minimally corroborated.”
Defenders of the Justice Department say that the dossier was not the sole source used before the FISA Court but that news stories added to its credibility. But the Nunes memo makes the point that the corroborating news story they cite was a Yahoo! News story published on Sept. 23, 2016, by Michael Isikoff that was based entirely on Isikoff’s interview with Steele himself.
So, the use of the article to bolster the dossier is an exercise in “circular reporting.”
During his research on the dossier, Steele’s expenses were paid by the FBI, even as his consultant fee was paid by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. His credibility was based on the FBI’s vouching for him. But, as the memo reveals, he was actually fired by the FBI — “suspended and terminated” — for leaking the dossier to Mother Jones and for concealing his meeting with Yahoo reporter Isikoff and other news media and then lying about it.
Steele pretended that he quit his partnership with the FBI because he was angry at its failure to pursue his findings aggressively. Now it turns out that this was not true. He was fired because he lied to them and because he revealed his confidential association with the FBI to the media.
Steele and Simpson repeated this lie. Steele told various media outlets the tall tale and Simpson testified before Congress that Steele had ended his relationship with the FBI after he read a New York Times story indicating that the agency did not seek a link between Trump and the Russians.
This degree of co-ordination among the media, Steele, Fusion GPS, the DOJ, FBI and the Clintons was laid out and predicted in our book “Rogue Spooks: The Intelligence War on Donald Trump.”
It is becoming increasingly apparent that Christopher Steele was not the main author of the dossier — Cody Shearer was.
Steele admits that Shearer provided him with material.
Shearer, who the Clintons had called upon time and again to discredit women and others who testified against Bill Clinton, was the key black ops guy in Hillary’s orbit. He and Clinton rony Sidney Blumenthal sent a horde of spook memos about Libya to Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state. Now, facing the biggest challenge of her life — discrediting Donald Trump — she may have turned to her old familiar pattern and brought in Shearer.
For his part Shearer could have made up most of the fictitious meetings and encounters breathlessly reported in the final Dossier.
But Shearer had a terrible reputation and was widely seen as unreliable — and somewhat wacky. So the Clintons needed a front man to be seen as the dossier’s author. They relied on Christopher Steele because of his credentials as an ex-operative of MI-6 and his access to the FBI.
Then, when Steele — desperate to get out the phony charge of Trump-Russia collusion — leaked to the media — first to Yahoo’s Michael Issikoff and then to Mother Jones — the FBI “suspended and terminated” him.
To fill the gap left by Steele’s termination by the FBI, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., got the dossier and, through Andrew McCabe, arranged for a meeting to give the dossier to FBI Director James Comey. (McCabe is, of course, a Clintonista who’s wife’s state Senate campaign in Virginia was funded by the Clinton machine). From Comey, the dossier went to President Barack Obama and thence to the media, accomplishing the Clintons’ mission, albeit too late to swing the election.
So was the dossier created to give the FBI ammunition to use against Trump?
Dick Morris is a former adviser to President Bill Clinton as well as a political author, pollster and consultant. His most recent book, “Rogue Spooks,” was written with his wife, Eileen McGann.
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