The FBI suspected it was fake - all along
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FBI offered Christopher Steele $1 million to prove dossier claims
Shortly before the 2016 election, the FBI offered retired British spy Christopher Steele “up to $1 million” to prove the explosive allegations in his dossier about Donald Trump, a senior FBI analyst testified Tuesday.
The cash offer was made during an October 2016 meeting between Steele and several top FBI officials who were trying to corroborate Steele’s claims that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia to win the election.
FBI supervisory analyst Brian Auten testified that Steele never got the money because he could not “prove the allegations.”
Auten also said Steele refused to provide the names of any of his sources during that meeting, and that Steele didn’t give the FBI anything during that meeting that corroborated the claims in his explosive dossier.
Auten was testifying at the criminal trial of Igor Danchenko, a primary source for Steele’s dossier, who is being prosecuted by special counsel John Durham. Danchenko has pleaded not guilty to lying to the FBI.
CNN previously reported that the FBI reimbursed some expenses for Steele, who had been an FBI informant.
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What say you, Jon? Ax?
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If it was met with proper skepticism, there would have been no FISA warrant....
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@Jolly said in The FBI suspected it was fake - all along:
f it was met with proper skepticism, there would have been no FISA warrant....
James Comey’s FBI had even more reason not to believe the Steele dossier.
James Freeman
Oct. 12, 2022 3:51 pm ET
Only about six years too late, CNN and the Washington Post are reporting reasons to disbelieve the bogus Russia collusion story used by Democrats to attack candidate and then President Donald Trump. For anyone who thought that James Comey’s FBI could not have been any more irresponsible in peddling the false claims included in the infamous Steele dossier, the latest revelations are bound to trigger a reassessment.
Shortly before the 2016 election, the FBI offered retired British spy Christopher Steele “up to $1 million” to prove the explosive allegations in his dossier about Donald Trump, a senior FBI analyst testified Tuesday.
The cash offer was made during an overseas October 2016 meeting between Steele and several top FBI officials who were trying to corroborate Steele’s claims that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia to win the election.
FBI supervisory analyst Brian Auten testified that Steele never got the money because he could not “prove the allegations.” ...Auten was testifying at the criminal trial of Igor Danchenko, a primary source for Steele’s dossier, who is being prosecuted by special counsel John Durham. Danchenko has pleaded not guilty to five counts of lying to the FBI about his sourcing for some information that ended up in the dossier. His trial kicked off Tuesday at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia.
Not even a million dollars dangled in front of a questionable source could pry corroborating evidence out of him—yet FBI officials still insisted on promoting his story? Remember, a million dollars went a lot further in 2016 than in the Biden era.Also remember that the FBI went a lot further than just promoting the false story within the intelligence community—disgraceful as that was. The bureau also used the bogus dossier to mislead a federal court into approving the use of government surveillance powers against a U.S. citizen participating in politics. Salvador Rizzo of the Washington Post has more:
Under questioning from Durham, Auten said multiple times that the FBI sought to corroborate a report of a “well-developed conspiracy” between Trump and Russia at the height of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign — an allegation taken from the Steele reports — but was unable to do so.
The FBI used the unconfirmed report, Auten testified, to seek court approval of a secret surveillance warrant to monitor Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser, and then successfully got that warrant reauthorized on three occasions, based in part on the same, uncorroborated claim.
“Was this an important piece of information that was included in the [warrant] application?” Durham asked.
“Yes, it was,” Auten said.
“And it was uncorroborated?” Durham asked.
“Yes,” Auten replied, adding later that the passage in question from the Steele dossier “was carried over into subsequent applications.”
The fact that even a million dollars hadn’t been able to shake any verification out of Mr. Steele in 2016 makes the 2017 actions of the FBI’s then director James Comey even more appalling. In January this column noted that in early 2017 Mr. Comey was promoting the collusion story even though the CIA viewed it as mere “Internet rumor.”As the dossier story was raging in the press, Mr. Comey mounted an unsuccessful effort to stop Director of National Intelligence James Clapper from publicly acknowledging that U.S. intelligence agencies had not deemed the dossier reliable and were not relying upon its claims.
According to the Obama-appointed Justice Department inspector general who reported on the government abuses in this case in 2019, Mr. Comey’s Jan. 11, 2017 email to Mr. Clapper included the following:
I just had a chance to review the proposed talking points on this for today. Perhaps it is a nit, but I worry that it may not be best to say “The IC has not made any judgment that the information in the document is reliable.” I say that because we HAVE concluded that the source [Steele] is reliable and has a track record with us of reporting reliable information; we have some visibility into his source network, some of which we have determined to be sub-sources in a position to report on such things; and much of what he reports in the current document is consistent with and corroborative of other reporting...
In January this column asked:
In the long history of Beltway bureaucratic maneuvering, has a government memo ever included so much inaccuracy in so few words? Mr. Steele had already been fired by the FBI as a confidential source, and his story was falling apart.
This week’s court testimony shows that the conduct of the FBI was even worse than previously reported.But one thing hasn’t changed. There’s still no real accountability for the FBI officials who abused their power and poisoned our politics.
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This popped up in my feed - a blast from the past.
How an FBI Team in Rome Gave Steele Highly Guarded Secrets
The report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz details how a team of FBI agents in early October 2016 shared with Steele extensive classified materials, just weeks before the bureau cut off ties with him for leaking his own research to the media. The secrets included foreign intelligence information still considered so sensitive that the IG’s report refers to it even now only as coming from a “Friendly Foreign Government.” In fact, this is a reference to Australia. That country’s ambassador to Britain sent the United States a tip about loose talk by junior Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos. The FBI has described that as the predicate for its Trump-Russia investigation.
The IG report also discloses that FBI agents knew Steele worked for Glenn Simpson, whose opposition research firm Fusion GPS was paying Steele to dig up dirt on Trump for the Clinton campaign, and that Steele informed the FBI that the “candidate” – Clinton herself – knew about Steele’s work. Steele did not keep to himself the classified material he had learned from the FBI. Shortly after the Rome meeting, Steele briefed Simpson on what the FBI had disclosed to him.
The FBI’s disclosures to Steele -- described on pages 114-115 and in footnote 513, and supported on pages 386-390 and footnotes 252 and 513, deep in Horowitz’s report – were violations of laws governing the handling of classified material, according to the Inspector General and experts in national security law who spoke with RealClearInvestigations.
Oh, according to the IG, the FBI broke the law.
