Welcome to the Real Russia Scandal
By DAVID HARSANYI
April 16, 2020 4:30 PM
The FBI was warned that the Steele Dossier might contain Russian disinformation.
Here’s what we know:
The Obama administration opened an investigation into the Republican Party’s presidential campaign during a highly contested election predominantly using dubious evidence that was paid for by the Democratic Party — and that likely included Russian disinformation.
Catherine Herridge at CBS News, who has done notably excellent work on an issue few in the legacy media want to cover, reports
that newly declassified footnotes show that the FBI relied on the DNC’s Steele dossier to secure warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, even though agents were warned multiple times that Russians had likely corrupted the evidence.
Herridge offers numerous instances, but here are just a couple:
Footnote 350 reads in part, “The (redacted) stated that it did not have high confidence in this subset of Steele’s reporting and assessed that the referenced subset was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate US foreign relations.”
Footnote 302 is related to the FBI’s efforts to verify information contained in the Steele dossier.
“According to a document circulated among Crossfire Hurricane team members and supervisors in early October 2016, Person 1 had historical contact with persons and entities suspected of being linked to RIS (Russian Intel).”
According to CBS,
the FBI also warned that one Russian source for the Steele dossier also voiced “strong support” for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
Will any reporter with access to the DNC ask someone over there whether the organization had been advised that aspects of their opposition research contained Kremlin falsehoods? And if so, did they know this before they handed it to CNN or BuzzFeed et al., which breathlessly regurgitated the information as reporting?
Will someone with access ask former high-ranking Justice Department officials such as James Comey whether they were aware that the warrants obtained for eavesdropping on a presidential campaign were partisan documents contaminated with information from a foreign intelligence agency?
It should be reiterated that the FISA applications sought by the FBI were almost “entirely” predicated on the fabulist Steele dossier, according to Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Further, the agents also left out contradictory, exculpatory evidence when kicking off the spying against Carter Page.
And Horowitz recently reported that, from October 2014 to September 2019, virtually every application for a FISA warrant featured “significant inaccuracies and omissions” and “fraudulent” evidence.
After Trump won the election in 2016, Obama holdovers and opponents of the president in new administration began leaking misleading snippets of the Trump–Russia investigation to a largely pliant media, which used to it fuel partisan hysteria that dominated American media coverage for three years.
All of this then sparked an open-ended independent Robert Mueller investigation that, though it failed to come back with a single indictment against anyone for criminal conspiracy with Russia during the 2016 campaign, succeeded in overwhelming our news coverage and convincing many gullible voters that the Russians had stolen the election.
Seems like there’s a huge and important story to tell here
Trump & Russia & DNC’s Steele Dossier -- Welcome to the Real Russia Scandal | National Review
