More on Christopher Steele
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https://dailycaller.com/2020/04/27/christopher-steele-dossier-alfa-bank-perkins-coie/
A lawyer representing the DNC and Clinton campaign provided Christopher Steele with information in 2016 regarding an alleged secret communications channel between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank, the former spy told a British court last month.
That now-debunked tip, from Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann, set off a chain of events that led to Steele publishing a Sept. 14, 2016 memo accusing the founders of the bank, Alfa Bank, of having “illicit” ties to Vladimir Putin, according to a court transcript obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
A week after Steele wrote that memo, he had another meeting with Sussmann’s colleague, Marc Elias, according to the transcript.
Steele disclosed the previously unreported meetings with Sussmann and Elias during testimony in a defamation lawsuit filed against him by the Alfa Bank founders, the transcript shows.
Steele’s testimony about Sussmann and Elias provides insight into how deeply involved the two lawyers were in the Trump investigation, and suggests they helped shape Steele’s investigation into possible Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Perkins Coie, Sussmann and Elias did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
So, the Clinton campaigns lawyers, and the DNC lawyers paid Fusion GPS, who then fed false information (about Alfa) to Steele, who put it into the dossier.
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I think one of the nuances that gets lost in the dossier conversation is that a dossier - by its nature - is not synthesized intelligence.
It's a raw intelligence. Meaning is a collection of records, both true and false.
An intelligence report and analysis will take raw intelligence and apply judgement to it.
It's useful to think of it like a witness statement. Could be true or false.
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@xenon said in More on Christopher Steele:
I think one of the nuances that gets lost in the dossier conversation is that a dossier - by its nature - is not synthesized intelligence.
It's a raw intelligence. Meaning is a collection of records, both true and false.
An intelligence report and analysis will take raw intelligence and apply judgement to it.
It's useful to think of it like a witness statement. Could be true or false.
Good point. Apparently the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee has been denied the opportunity to the synthesizers.
https://dailycaller.com/2020/06/07/lindsey-graham-fbi-dossier-source/
Graham has sought interviews with the FBI case agent and supervisory intelligence analyst to discuss their interview in January 2017 with the primary source for Christopher Steele, the former British spy who investigated the Trump campaign for Democrats.
Steele’s source disputed many of the allegations attributed to him in the dossier, which the FBI used to obtain surveillance warrants against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. The FBI and Justice Department failed to disclose those red flags in applications to federal judges for authority to surveil Page.
“I made a request to interview the case agent and the intel analyst…and they’re denying me the ability to do that,” Graham said in an interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.”
“I’m going to keep working the system,” Graham said.
Graham, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, did not say whether the FBI or the Justice Department have blocked his request to interview the FBI employees.
Graham is considering a subpoena for 53 current and former government officials as part of a sweeping review of the investigation of the Trump campaign’s possible ties to the Russian government.
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The FBI knew IN JULY of 2016 of cooperation between the Clinton campaign and Steele:
But one passage and two footnotes in Horowitz’s report that have largely escaped public attention suggest the FBI agent who first interviewed Steele about his anti-Trump research in London on July 5, 2016 was aware immediately of a connection to Clinton and that a separate office of the FBI passed along information from an informant by Aug. 2, 2016 that Simpson’s Fusion GPS was connected to the DNC.
And the FBI didn't tell the courts.
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Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
The so-called Annex A of the official Russian election interference Intelligence Community Assessment was declassified this week by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, providing the most definitive proof to date that the U.S. intelligence in December 2016 as President Obama was leaving office was wary of a dossier that was essential to the FBI probe into now-disproven Trump-Russia collusion.
“An FBI source, using both identified and unidentified sub sources, volunteered highly politically sensitive information from the summer to the fall of 2016 on Russian influence efforts aimed at the US presidential election. We have only limited corroboration of the source reporting in this case and did not use it to reach the analytic conclusions of the CIA/FBI/NSA assessment," the appendix stated.
The intelligence community assessment also warned that Steele appeared to have leaked his information to the media just before Trump was elected Nov. 8, 2016.
“The source’s reporting appears to have been acquired by multiple western press organizations starting in October,” the annex stated.
The annex confirms Republicans’ long-held suspicions that the intelligence community saw the Steele dossier as suspect even as the FBI portrayed its allegations as verified to a FISA court starting in October 2016.
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K said in More on Christopher Steele:
@Jolly said in More on Christopher Steele:
Somebody needs to go to jail.
Perhaps the FBI agent who altered emails?
Would be a nice start.
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K said in More on Christopher Steele:
A fun twitter thread that documents how the media, with the help of Clapper et al pushed the Steele dossier over and over.
Now that it's been discredited, and the fact that the FBI knew it was bogus from the start are being memory-holed.
Well, that's how it works anyway, and always has worked that way: post the incriminating stuff on page 1 when you want the reaction, follow-up on page 12 when it's revealed there was actually no story.
This kind of stuff has been going on since forever. But thankfully with the interwebs, it's easier to spot and call out.
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Remember when everyone laughed when Trump said "they're spying on me?"
The Washington press corps seems engaged in a collective demonstration of the legal concept of willful blindness, or deliberately ignoring facts, following the release of yet another declassified document that directly refutes past statements about the Russia collusion investigation. The document shows the FBI used a security briefing of then candidate Donald Trump and top aides to gather possible evidence for Crossfire Hurricane, its code name for the Russia investigation.
What is astonishing is that the media has refused to see what should be one of the biggest stories in decades. The Obama administration targeted the campaign of the opposing party based on false evidence. The media endlessly covered former Obama administration officials ridiculing suggestions of spying on the Trump campaign or of improper conduct in the Russia investigation. When Attorney General William Barr told the Senate last year that he believed spying did occur, he was lambasted in the media, including by James Comey and others involved in that investigation. The mocking “wow” response of the fired FBI director received extensive coverage.
The new document shows that, in the summer of 2016, FBI agent Joe Pientka briefed Trump campaign advisers Michael Flynn and Chris Christie on national security issues, a standard practice ahead of the election. It included a discussion of Russia interfering in the election. But this was different. The document detailing the questions asked by Trump and his aides and their reactions was filed a few days after the meeting under Crossfire Hurricane and Crossfire Razor, the FBI investigation of Flynn. The two FBI officials listed who approved the report are Kevin Clinesmith and Peter Strzok.
Clinesmith is the former FBI lawyer responsible for the FISA surveillance conducted on members of the Trump campaign. Clinesmith opposed Trump and sent an email after the election declaring “viva the resistance.” He is reportedly under review for possible criminal charges for altering a FISA court filing. The FBI had used Trump adviser Carter Page as a basis for the original FISA application, due to his contacts with Russians. Soon after that surveillance was approved, however, federal officials discredited the collusion allegations and noted that Page was a CIA asset. Clinesmith had allegedly changed the information to state that Page was not working for the CIA.
Strzok is the FBI agent whose violation of FBI rules led Justice Department officials to refer him for possible criminal charges. Strzok did not hide his intense loathing of Trump and famously referenced an “insurance policy” if Trump were to win the election. After FBI officials concluded there was no evidence of any crime by Flynn at the end of 2016, Strzok prevented the closing of the investigation as FBI officials searched for any crime that might be used to charge the incoming national security adviser.
Documents also show Comey briefed President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden on the investigation shortly before the inauguration of Trump. When Comey admitted the communications between Flynn and Russian officials appeared legitimate, Biden reportedly suggested using the Logan Act, widely viewed as unconstitutional and never used to successfully convict a single person, as an alternative charge against Flynn. The memo of that meeting contradicts claims that Biden he did not know about the Flynn investigation. Let us detail some proven but mostly unseen facts.
First, the Russia collusion allegations were based in significant part on the dossier funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The Clinton campaign repeatedly denied paying for the dossier until long after the election, when it was confronted with irrefutable evidence that the money had been buried among legal expenditures. New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman wrote, “Folks involved in funding this lied about it and with sanctimony for a year.”
Second, FBI agents warned that dossier author Christopher Steele may have been used by Russian intelligence to plant false information to disrupt the election. His source for the most serious allegations claims that Steele misrepresented what he had said and that it was little more than rumors recast by Steele as reliable intelligence.
Third, the Obama administration was told that the basis for the FISA application was highly dubious and likely false. Yet it continued the investigation as someone leaked its existence to the media. Another declassified document shows that, after the New York Times ran a leaked story on the investigation, even Strzok balked at the account as misleading and inaccurate. His early 2017 memo affirmed that there was no evidence of any individuals in contact with Russians. This information came as the collusion stories were turning into a frenzy that would last years.
Fourth, the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller and inspectors general found no evidence of collusion or knowing contact between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. What inspectors general did find were false statements or possible criminal conduct by Comey and others. While unable to say that it was the reason for their decisions, they also found extensive statements of animus against Trump and his campaign by the very FBI officials directing the investigation. Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has recently testified he never would have approved renewal of the FISA surveillance and encouraged further investigation into such bias.
Finally, Obama and Biden were aware of the investigation, as were the administration officials who publicly ridiculed Trump when he said there was spying on his campaign. Others, like House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, declared they had evidence of collusion but never produced it. Countless reporters, columnists, and analysts have continued to deride, as writer Max Boot said it, the spinning of “absurd conspiracy theories” about how the FBI “supposedly spied on the Trump campaign.”
Willful blindness has its advantages. The media eagerly covered the original leak and the false narrative of collusion, despite mounting evidence that it was false. They filled hours of cable news coverage and pages of print on a collusion story discredited by the FBI. Virtually none of these journalists or experts have acknowledged that the collusion leaks were proven false, let alone pursue the troubling implications of national security powers being used to target the political opponents of an administration. But then, in Washington, success often depends not on what you see but what you can unsee.
