The Mueller thing
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FBI knew, in February 2017, before the special counsel was appointed that the Steele dossier was bogus. The whole thing was a house of cards, and now, after more than three years, we're seeing the cards face up.
A top F.B.I. agent recognized by February 2017 that a now notorious dossier of claims about purported Trump-Russia ties had credibility problems, but the Justice Department continued to rely on it as part of its basis to renew permission to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser, documents released on Friday showed.
The documents included an F.B.I. memo recounting a three-day interview in January 2017 with a person who served as a primary source for Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who compiled the dossier for a research firm paid by Democrats. They also included an F.B.I. agent’s notes disputing aspects of a New York Times article the next month.
The agent, Peter Strzok, had not participated in the interview of Mr. Steele’s source, in which the source had suggested that the dossier misstated or exaggerated certain information that the source had gathered from a network of contacts in Russia and relayed to Mr. Steele. But Mr. Strzok appeared to be aware of aspects of it.
In his annotations about two weeks later, Mr. Strzok questioned the reliability of the dossier.
Reacting to a line in the newspaper article that senior F.B.I. officials believed that Mr. Steele had a credible track record, Mr. Strzok wrote in the margins: “Recent interviews and investigation, however, reveal Steele may not be in a position to judge the reliability of his subsource network.”
OK New York Times, that's some interesting reporting good on ya.
And then you did this:
The documents were released on Friday by Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. A close ally to President Trump, Mr. Graham has been using his position to try to discredit the Russia inquiry in an election year.
In a statement announcing the release of the documents, Mr. Graham called the F.B.I.’s investigation into the Trump campaign “corrupt.” An accompanying news release from his office said that “the document demonstrates that Peter Strzok and others in F.B.I. leadership positions must have been aware of the issues with the Steele dossier that the F.B.I.’s interview with Steele’s ‘primary subsource’ revealed.”
Wasn't there a story yesterday about how the NYT got EVERYTHING wrong about the "Russian collusion" story?
