James Comey

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Obama’s Acting Homeland Security Inspector General and his subordinate were indicted on 16 counts of theft and fraud, the Justice Department announced on Friday.

www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-acting-inspector-general-us-department-homeland-security-indicted-theft-government

The indictment charges Charles K. Edwards, 59, of Sandy Spring, Maryland, and Murali Yamazula Venkata, 54, of Aldie, Virginia, with conspiracy to commit theft of government property and to defraud the United States, theft of government property, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft. The indictment also charges Venkata with destruction of records.”

The charges allege that in addition to stealing government software and databases, Venkata helped Edwards by reconfiguring his laptop so that he could upload the stolen software.

“The indictment further alleges that, in addition to stealing DHS-OIG’s software and the sensitive government databases, Venkata and others also assisted Edwards by reconfiguring his laptop so that he could properly upload the stolen software and databases, provided troubleshooting support whenever Edwards required it, and helped him build a testing server at his residence with the stolen software and databases,” the Department of Justice said in a press release announcing the indictments. “As further part of the alleged scheme, Edwards retained software developers in India for the purpose of developing his commercial alternative of DHS-OIG’s software.”

Although Edwards left the DHS in 2013, according to the indictment he leveraged his relationship with Venkata to carry out the scheme which began in October of 2014 and continued to April of 2017.

Not a smidgen of corruption, though. Just ask Barry Obama.

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Former British spy and author of the junk Trump-Russia dossier, Christopher Steele, defended his unconfirmed trash report on candidate Donald Trump. The former British spy inflicted upon America the Russia scam that derailed the Trump administration for three years.


Steele, who spoke at Oxford University today, says he will not cooperate with William Barr and John Durham. There is currently a criminal referral on Steele for lying to congressional investigaters.

dailycaller.com/2020/03/06/christopher-steele-oxford-dossier/

“I stand by the integrity of our work, our sources and what we did,” Steele said at the Oxford Student Union.

Steele’s glowing self-assessment is in stark contrast to the findings of the special counsel’s investigation and a Justice Department inspector general’s report on the FBI’s surveillance of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

The FBI relied heavily on Steele’s information to obtain four warrants to wiretap Page. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) blasted the FBI in the wake of the inspector general’s report, accusing the bureau of submitting false and misleading information related to Page, Steele, and the dossier.

The report found that the FBI was unable to corroborate Steele’s allegations regarding Page or other Trump associates. It also said that Steele’s only direct source for information disputed much of what was in the dossier.

The Steele source’s interviews with the FBI in early 2017 “raised doubts about the reliability of Steele’s descriptions of information in his election reports,” according to the report.

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Rep. Jerry Nadler called on a federal appeals court to reexamine their decision not to force former Trump attorney Don McGahn to testify before his committee.

www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/house-democrats-request-full-appeals-court-to-rehear-mcgahn-case

The Democratic-led committee asked on Friday for the full court to rehear the case.

“The Committee’s petition argues that the panel’s ruling misread binding precedent and — if allowed to stand — would severely undermine the House’s ability to perform its constitutional functions as a check on the Executive Branch,” Chairman Jerry Nadler said in a statement.

“Two of the three judges on the panel strongly suggested that they would reject President Trump’s claim of ‘absolute immunity’ if they were able to reach the merits of the case. The full Court should promptly rehear this case and make clear, once and for all, that White House aides cannot ignore subpoenas from Congress,” the New York Democrat added.

The panel sought to obtain testimony from McGahn in April relating to special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, but the White House blocked him from complying with the subpoena.

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justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/fbis-russia-collusion-case-fell-apart-first-month-trump-presidency

FBI’s Russia collusion case fell apart in first month of Trump presidency, memos show
Flynn collusion ruled out, Steele dossier debunked in January 2017, more than two years before Mueller announced it.

The piecemeal release of FBI files in the Russia collusion investigation has masked an essential fact: James Comey’s G-men had substantially debunked the theory that Donald Trump’s campaign conspired with Moscow by the time the 45th president was settling into the Oval Office, according to declassified memos, court filings and interviews.

And that means a nascent presidency and an entire nation were put through two more years of lacerating debate over an issue that was mostly resolved in January 2017 inside the bureau’s own evidence files. The proof is now sitting in plain view.

In rapid fire sequence in January 2017, U.S. officials:

received multiple warnings about the credibility of informant Christopher Steele and his dossier;
affirmed key targets of the FBI counterintelligence investigation made exculpatory statements denying collusion to undercover sources;
concluded retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, Trump's first national security adviser, was not engaged in collusion with the Russians.
The latter revelation has mostly escaped much notice, contained in a single sentence in a once-sealed court motion filed by Flynn defense attorney Sidney Powell that requested what is known as Brady material, or evidence of innocence.

That motion dated Sept. 11, 2019 requested access to “an internal DOJ document dated January 30, 2017, in which the FBI exonerated Mr. Flynn of being ‘an agent of Russia.’”

URL to Embed



Flynn's motion is confirmed by a 2018 letter obtained by Just the News between Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office and defense lawyers. It shows the DOJ exoneration memo was written after Flynn had been interviewed by FBI agents in January 2017 and after the government learned the former Defense Intelligence Agency chief had kept his old agency briefed on his contacts with Russia, something that weighed heavily against the notion he was aiding Moscow.

"According to an internal DOJ memo dated January 30, 2017, after the Jan. 24 interview, the FBI advised that based on the interview the FBI did not believe Flynn was acting as an agent of Russia," Mueller's team wrote in the letter.

U.S. District Judge Emmett Sullivan so far has concluded that the exoneration of Flynn on the Russia collusion charge wasn’t relevant to his conviction since he pled guilty to a different crime, making a false statement to the FBI.





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But for the American public, such a revelation is momentous.

Less than two weeks into Trump’s presidency the FBI had concluded his national security adviser had not been working as an agent of Russia. While that was the view of federal law enforcement, the false storyline of Flynn as a Russian stooge was broadcasted across the nation, with leaks of his conversations with a Russian ambassador and other tales, for many more months.

In an interview with Just the News and its John Solomon Reports podcast, Powell confirmed she was provided by letter three sentences from the DOJ memo but has been unable to get the full document.

"It’s just horrible,” Powell said. "They gave us a little three lines summary of it and the letter and told us it existed but have refused to give us the actual document, which I know means there's a lot of other information in it that would be helpful to us.”

URL to Embed

Powell also confirmed that Mueller was fully aware of a letter sent in early January 2017 to Flynn from Britain’s national security adviser raising concerns about Steele’s credibility.

The British government “hand-delivered” a letter to Flynn’s team that “totally disavowed any credibility of Christopher Steele, and would have completely destroyed the Russia collusion narrative,” Powell said.

Flynn himself has no memory of receiving the communique, but people around him at the time do and confirmed the existence of the document, Powell explained. Flynn was questioned about it during his debriefings by Mueller’s team, she added.

“I was told that a copy of the document would have been given to [then-National Security Adviser] Susan Rice as well,” she added. "So the Obama administration knew full well that the entire Russia collusion mess was a farce.”

Instead of responding to the British government’s warning by abandoning the Russia collusion narrative and sparing her client the years-long ordeal of being targeted for investigation, top U.S. intelligence officials hid the communication, Powell said.

Her account confirms information that Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) provided for a May 2019 article for The Hill.

Other significant red flags also emerged in January 2017 that the Russia collusion theory used by the FBI to open a Trump campaign-focused probe in July 2016 was simply wrong. So too was the evidence the FBI submitted to secure an October 2016 FISA warrant targeting Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

According to information made public by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the FBI interviewed Steele’s primary sub-source around Jan. 7, 2017. That source disavowed much of the Russia collusion evidence attributed to him in the dossier, a fact the bureau hid from the court.

A recent order by FISC Chief Judge James Boasberg lays bare how devastating the revelation from Steele’s source was to the entire Russia collusion theory.

“Steele obtained this information from a primary sub-source, who had, in tum, obtained the information from his/her own source network,” the judge wrote. “The FBI did not, however, advise DOJ or the Court of inconsistencies between sections of Steele's reporting that had been used in the applications and statements Steele's primary sub-source had made to the FBI about the accuracy of information attributed to 'Person 1,' who the FBI assessed had been the source of the information in Reports 95 and 102. The government also did not disclose that Steele himself had undercut the reliability of Person 1, telling the FBI that Person 1 was a 'boaster' and an 'egoist' and 'may engage in some embellishment.'"

An FBI spreadsheet similarly found that nearly all of Steele’s information in the dossier was either false, could not be proved, or amounted to Internet-based rumor, making it mostly worthless as actionable intelligence.

Further eroding by January 2017 the FBI’s "mosaic" (former FBI Director James Comey's term) of evidence cited for suspicions of collusion, the bureau had collected exculpatory statements in fall 2016 in which two central targets of the investigation — former Trump advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos — told undercover informants they were not colluding with Russia.

Boasberg’s ruling also slammed the FBI for hiding these statements from his court, saying they substantially undercut the FBI's predicate for the investigation, including the now-disproven allegation that Page had altered the RNC platform at the 2016 nominating convention to help Putin.

“The government also omitted Page's statements to a confidential human source that he intentionally had 'stayed clear' of efforts to change the Republican platform, as well as evidence tending to show that two other Trump campaign officials were responsible for the change,” the judge wrote. “Both pieces of information were inconsistent with the government's suggestion that, at the behest of the Russian government, Page may have facilitated a change to the Republican platform regarding Russia 's annexation of part of Ukraine.”

The Horowitz report confirms the court's finding in much greater detail.

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Flynn was cleared of being a Russian agent in January 2017. That same month Steele’s dossier was both discredited by the British government and repudiated by his own confidential sources. And the FBI had evidence its two main Trump targets were innocent. All as President Trump was starting his first two weeks in office.

Congressional investigators are now looking at whether Comey's approach to Trump at a Feb. 14, 2017 dinner at the White House may have been part of an effort to pivot away from the bogus Russia collusion investigation and lay a predicate for a new investigation focused on possible obstruction of justice. Those same investigators also are inquiring as to why Mueller's final report did not more clearly spell out how the FBI's collusion case fell apart in January 2017.

Wherever that congressional inquiry lands, there is now clear and convincing evidence that the country, the president and the courts were kept in the dark about an historic turnaround in the evidence in January 2017, even as defendants were being pressured to plead guilty to crimes unrelated to the collusion allegation. Time will tell whether those who kept this secret for two more years will be held to account.

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Billed by Democrats as “THE NEXT OBAMA”, former Democrat nominee for Governor in the state of Florida made the news on Friday. Andrew Gillum was named in a police report that involved baggies of crystal meth and two other men in Miami Beach hotel room last night.

The police report first published online by Candace Owens, is extremely concerning.

Gillum, who came close to beating former Congressman Ron DeSantis in 2018 for governor, was apparently involved in quite the party. Paramedics were called to the room before police arrived to treat another man who was allegedly overdosing from what was described as crystal meth.

According to one of the men involved in the “party”, he entered the hotel room to find Andrew Gillum and the other man under the influence of an “unknown” substance. Gillum then collapsed on the bed in a prone position before entering the bathroom to vomit. When police were taking statements from the men, Gillum was so drunk that he was unable to speak coherently. He was allowed to return to another hotel room without being arrested, according to The Capitolist.

thecapitolist.com/developing-andrew-gillum-involved-in-possible-drug-related-incident-in-miami-beach/

Here are copies from the report:

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More like the next Bill Clinton

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Hmmm, why do they not want this to go to trial?

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This will be fun to follow:

www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/03/24/lawsuit-accuses-burr-of-securities-fraud-over-coronavirus-stock-dump/

A newly filed lawsuit in federal court alleges Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) may have committed securities fraud by selling upwards of $1.72 million in stock before the coronavirus pandemic reached its height in February.

Politico reported on Tuesday a shareholder of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts is suing the senator in federal court, alleging Burr used inside information available to him as a member of congress to avoid widespread losses on the stock.




“Senator Burr owed a duty to Congress, the United States government, and citizens … not to use material nonpublic information that he learned by virtue of his duties as a United States Senator in connection with the sale or purchase of any security,” the lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, reads.

The lawsuit comes as Burr is facing calls to resign amid revelations he unloaded thousands of dollars worth of stock—less than a week before the stock market sharply dropped because of the coronavirus pandemic. The senator’s timely sell-off netted between $628,000 and $1.72 million.

Most of the shares were in hospitality companies, like Wyndham Hotels and Hilton, that took an especially hard hit as coronavirus travel restrictions went into place.

More troubling is that the transactions, 33 in total, came as the Intelligence Committee, which Burr chairs, was receiving daily briefings on the pandemic. Given that fact, when news of the sell-off broke, speculation began to stir that the senator had acted on inside information to protect his assets.

If true, Burr could potentially be found in violation of the STOCK Act, which prohibits the use of non-public information for private profit by lawmakers.

Burr has strenuously denied any wrongdoing. In a statement issued last week, the senator admitted while the selloff was motivated by the coronavirus, he did not act on information privileged only to members of congress.

“I relied solely on public news reports to guide my decision regarding the sale of stocks on February 13,” Burr said, urging the Senate Ethics Committee to launch an investigation into the sale.

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www.politico.com/news/2020/03/23/richard-burr-lawsuit-coronavirus-145564

Shareholder suit accuses Sen. Richard Burr of securities fraud
The lawsuit alleges Burr had confidential information about the effects of coronavirus when he sold up to $1.7 million in stocks.

Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) is being sued after selling shares in a hotel company while possessing confidential information about the potential impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

Alan Jacobson, a shareholder in Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, sued Burr in federal court on Monday, alleging that the senator used private information to motivate a mass liquidation of his assets. It is illegal for senators to use nonpublic information in conducting securities exchanges.

Advertisement


Burr came under fire after OpenSecrets and ProPublica reported last week that he had sold between $628,000 and $1.72 million worth of his stock holdings in mid-February — while he was still publicly reassuring the country that the United States was amply prepared for the growing coronavirus outbreak. Among the shares he sold were an up to $150,000 stake in Wyndham, whose stock suffered a market-value cut of more than two-thirds since mid-February.


Burr was also in the hot seat after NPR reported that he had warned wealthy members of an exclusive social club about the major disruptions to the nation’s economic and daily life that would come from the growing outbreak. As chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Burr is privy to much of the nation’s classified information on threats to national security.

The coronavirus pandemic has devastated the travel industry, from cruises to airlines to hotels. Wyndham was no exception — the company’s stock sold at $59.96 on Feb. 19 but has dropped precipitously, to $25.03 on Monday.

“Senator Burr owed a duty to Congress, the United States government, and citizens of the United States, including Plaintiff, not to use material nonpublic information that he learned by virtue of his duties as a United States Senator in connection with the sale or purchase of any security,” said Jacobson’s lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

“Had Plaintiff and the market known of the material nonpublic information in Senator Burr’s possession regarding COVID-19, and on which Senator Burr traded, Wyndham’s stock price on February 13, 2020 would have been substantially lower,” the suit continued. “Senator Burr and his wife sold up to $150,000 of Wyndham stock on that date, and therefore he and his wife pocketed up to $150,000 in illegal insider trading proceeds at Plaintiff’s expense.”

Jacobson argued he had suffered harm because he kept his shares while they were trading at artificially inflated prices due to the lack of public knowledge on the coming economic devastation from coronavirus.

Burr asked the Senate Ethics Committee on Friday to review his stock sales and maintained that he “relied solely on public news reports to guide my decision regarding the sale of stocks.” He denied using information that was not public regarding the coronavirus outbreak. Burr is planning to retire at the end of 2022

His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday night about the lawsuit.

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www.dailywire.com/news/breaking-feds-investigating-lawmakers-stock-transactions-prior-to-market-crash-report-says

BREAKING: Feds Investigating Lawmakers’ Stock Transactions Prior To Market Crash, Report Says

Federal law enforcement officials are reportedly investigating a series of stock market transactions that were made by U.S. lawmakers prior to the stock market tanking as a result of the coronavirus rapidly spreading throughout the U.S.


“The inquiry, which is still in its early stages and being done in coordination with the Securities and Exchange Commission, has so far included outreach from the FBI to at least one lawmaker, Sen. Richard Burr, seeking information about the trades, according to one of the sources,” CNN reported. “Public scrutiny of the lawmakers’ market activity has centered on whether members of Congress sought to profit from the information they obtained in non-public briefings about the virus epidemic.”

CNN added that there is “no indication that any of the sales, including Burr’s, broke any laws or ran afoul of Senate rules.”

Other senators who have come under scrutiny include Sens. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Jim Inhofe (R-OK).

“Congress passed the Stock Act in 2012, which made it illegal for lawmakers to use inside information for financial benefit,” CNN added. “Under insider trading laws, prosecutors would need to prove the lawmakers traded based on material non-public information they received in violation of a duty to keep it confidential.”


Burr said in a statement two weeks ago that he welcomed an investigation into his stock market transactions.

“I relied solely on public news reports to guide my decision regarding the sale of stocks on February 13,” Burr said in a statement. “Specifically, I closely followed CNBC’s daily health and science reporting out of its Asia bureaus at the time.”

Burr continued, “Understanding the assumption many could make in hindsight however, I spoke this morning with the chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee and asked him to open a complete review of the matter with full transparency.”

Loeffler appeared in numerous television interviews after speculation over her stock trades where she said that she does not manage her portfolio.

Loeffler told Fox Business host Neil Cavuto on March 24, “I don’t do trades, Neil. I’m not involved in my portfolio. My husband is not involved. Our portfolio is managed by third parties. The actions are blind to me until they put it in front of me at the end of the reporting period. And I will just tell you, in that portfolio, it’s absolutely false that we sold millions. Actually, it was a more bullish bet. We ended up owning companies like Delta, like Goldman Sachs, like Prudential, companies that have been hard-hit and ended up losing money. No one has reported that and it doesn’t, you know, it has nothing to do with knowledge I had or didn’t have because I had no involvement in these trades.”

CNN noted that Feinstein did not sell any stock herself, but her husband reportedly sold millions in stocks.

Inhofe said that he had no involvement in the investment decisions that were made in his portfolio.

When the news broke about the senator’s stock trades it spurred wide spread calls for them to resign or for the government to launch an investigation.

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Say it's not so....

www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/04/02/audit-fbi-may-have-obtained-fisa-warrants-using-inaccurate-nonexistent-supporting-docs/

Audit: FBI May Have Obtained FISA Warrants Using Inaccurate, Nonexistent Supporting Docs

The internal watchdog at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) this week suggested that the FBI may have obtained approval for secret surveillance using inaccurate or even nonexistent documentation to support factual assertions made to judges when seeking a warrant.

Michael Horowitz, the DOJ inspector general (IG), noted in an audit made public on Tuesday that the FBI failed to produce the documents it allegedly used to back claims in four of the 29 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications it reviewed.


FBI agents either lost the supporting documents for the four FISA applications, or they did not know “if they ever existed,” the office of the inspector general (OIG) found.

The IG office also said it “identified apparent errors or inadequately supported facts in all of the [remaining] 25 applications.”

On average, Horowitz found 20 errors in each of the applications “with a high of approximately 65 issues in one application and less than 5 issues in another application,” the audit noted.

Horowitz’s recent findings come after his office found “at least 17 significant errors and omissions” in the Carter Page FISA application that enabled the Russian collusion hoax investigation into Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, known as operation “Crossfire Hurricane.”

In the new FISA audit, the IG reviewed “a judgmentally selected sample of 29 applications” submitted by eight FBI field offices between October 2014 and September 2019 to assess whether the agency complied with its Woods Procedures.

The Woods Procedures refers to the FBI’s process used to review the factual accuracy of the FISA applications.

Horowitz declared that his office does not have confidence that the FBI has executed the accuracy review process in compliance with an internal policy aimed at ensuring the applications are “scrupulously accurate.”

“We believe that a deficiency in the FBI’s efforts to support the factual statements in FISA applications through its Woods Procedures undermines the FBI’s ability to achieve its ‘scrupulously accurate’ standard for FISA applications,” the IG audit proclaimed.

In other words, at least some of the applications the FBI has submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court could be inaccurate.

The IG noted in a report made public on Monday:

Our lack of confidence that the Woods Procedures are working as intended stems primarily from the fact that: (1) we could not review original Woods Files for 4 of the 29 selected FISA applications because the FBI has not been able to locate them and, in 3 of these instances, did not know if they ever existed; (2) our testing of FISA applications to the associated Woods Files identified apparent errors or inadequately supported facts in all of the 25 applications we reviewed, and interviews to date with available agents or supervisors in field offices generally have confirmed the issues we identified; (3) existing FBI and [DOJ’s] NSD [National Security Division] oversight mechanisms have also identified deficiencies in documentary support and application accuracy that are similar to those that we have observed to date; and (4) FBI and NSD officials we interviewed indicated to us that there were no efforts by the FBI to use existing FBI and NSD oversight mechanisms to perform comprehensive, strategic assessments of the efficacy of the Woods Procedures or FISA accuracy, to include identifying the need for enhancements to training and improvements in the process, or increased accountability measures.

In its latest audit, the DOJ IG did not speculate whether or not the potential errors in the applications were material or whether they influenced the judge’s decision to approve the warrants.

Horowitz included a response the FBI issued to a draft version of the new audit in which the agency asserted that reforms issued by the director, Christopher Wray, should address the widespread problems with the Woods Procedures.

“We believe that the process errors identified in the OIG’s preliminary findings will be addressed by Director Wray’s previously ordered corrective actions,” Paul Abbate, the associate deputy director at the FBI, wrote.

The FBI is examining its “accuracy subfiles” for all FISA applications submitted since 2015 and is taking “remedial steps” when possible, he added.

President Donald Trump’s supporters argue that Democrats weaponized the secret surveillance tool against his 2016 campaign.

“But the findings also bolster arguments by critics of that claim who have suggested that errors in the Page application were likelier attributable to systemic sloppiness than sinister intentions,” Politico reported.

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US Attorney General Bill Barr told Fox News host Laura Ingraham there was ‘no basis’ for the FBI’s ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ investigation into then-candidate Donald Trump.

Recall, FBI counter-intel chief Peter Strzok opened a CI investigation into Trump’s campaign in July of 2016 dubbed ‘Crossfire Hurricane,’ based on bogus claims his camp was working with the Russians.

Barr said what happened to Trump was one of the greatest travesties in American history.

Even more alarming was the pattern of events after the campaign to sabotage Trump’s presidency.


“I think what happened to him [Trump] was one of the greatest travesties in American history, and without any basis they started this investigation of his campaign, and even more concerning, actually is what happened after the campaign, a whole pattern of events while he was president to sabotage the presidency,” said Barr.

WATCH:

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AG Bill Barr: Well I think a report, may be and probably will be a by-product of his activity. But his primary focus isn’t to prepare a report. He is looking to bring to justice people who were engaged in abuses if he can show that they were criminal violations. So that’s what the focus is on. And as you know being a lawyer, you, yourself, buidling these cases especially the sprawling case we have between us that went on for two or three years, it takes some time. It takes some time to build a case. So he’s diligently pursuing it. My own view is that the evidence shows that we’re not dealing with just mistakes and sloppiness. There’s something far more troubling here. And we’re going to get to the bottom of it.

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Here we go, again............................

www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/04/10/adam-schiff-submits-bill-to-create-commission-reviewing-trumps-coronavirus-response/

Adam Schiff Submits Bill to Create Commission Reviewing Trump’s Coronavirus Response

House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) unveiled a bill on Friday to create a commission to review the Trump administration’s response to the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.

In a statement, Schiff compared the commission’s aim to the one established to study the September 11, 2001, terror attacks and the United States’ subsequent military response.

“After Pearl Harbor, September 11, and other momentous events in American history, independent, bipartisan commissions have been established to provide a complete accounting of what happened, what we did right and wrong, and what we can do to better protect the country in the future,” said Schiff. “It is clear that a comprehensive and authoritative review will be required, not as a political exercise to cast blame, but to learn from our mistakes to prevent history from tragically repeating itself.”

Schiff said the commission would be comprised of five Democrats and five Republicans, who are presently out of government, and be appointed by President Trump and Congress.



The development comes after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) announced a new select committee to oversee how the Trump administration manages the $2 trillion relief aid to combat the outbreak.

The bipartisan Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis will be chaired by House Majority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina, she said.

Comparing the new panel to one chaired by then-Sen. Harry Truman during World War II to oversee war spending, Pelosi said the new oversight panel will similarly prevent “waste, fraud and abuse” in a time of national emergency.

“What made sense then makes even more sense now,” she said, adding that its bi-partisan members will “protect against price-gouging, profiteering and political favoritism.”

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CBS News reporter Catherine Herridge obtained an April 2 letter responding to Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley over four key footnotes in IG Horowitz’s report.

“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” — Catherine Herridge said.

Herridge: READ FULL footnote 302 Steele dossier sub-source “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)

Enter Bruce Ohr (who STILL has a job at the DOJ):

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This seems to be uber important, but I highly doubt the MSM will cover it.

dailycaller.com/2020/04/10/fbi-russian-disinformation-steele-dossier-trump/

FBI Received Evidence Of Russian Disinformation In Steele Dossier

The FBI received information that Russian disinformation might have been fed to Christopher Steele, whose dossier played a “central” role in the bureau’s investigation of the Trump campaign.
The bombshell disclosures are in newly unredacted footnotes contained in the Justice Department inspector general’s report on the FBI’s surveillance of the Trump campaign.
An FBI unit had concerns as far back as 2015 about Steele’s relationships with Russian oligarchs, one footnote stated.
The FBI was provided assessments that Steele’s claims about Michael Cohen and a trip that Donald Trump made to Moscow in 2013 were products of Russian disinformation, another footnote said.

The FBI received evidence that Russian disinformation polluted the infamous Steele dossier, according to information declassified Friday from the Justice Department inspector general’s report of the FBI’s surveillance of the Trump campaign.

FBI officials also had concerns as far back as 2015 of dossier author Christopher Steele’s relationship to Russian oligarchs, but those were never shared with the FBI team that led the Trump investigation.


Despite those red flags, the FBI continued relying on Steele’s information in applications to obtain surveillance warrants against Carter Page, the former Trump campaign aide.

The bombshell disclosures were made Friday in response to repeated requests from Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson to disclose four redacted footnotes in the IG report.

“It’s ironic that the Russian collusion narrative was fatally flawed because of Russian disinformation,” the two Republicans said in a statement. “These footnotes confirm that there was a direct Russian disinformation campaign in 2016, and there were ties between Russian intelligence and a presidential campaign – the Clinton campaign, not Trump’s.” (RELATED: Mystery Footnotes From FISA Report Set For Declassification)

The senators said they expect a “fuller declassification” of the footnotes over the next few days. CBS News published portions of the unredacted footnotes Friday afternoon.



Steele, a former MI6 officer, was hired in 2016 by the Clinton campaign and DNC to investigate Donald Trump’s possible ties to Russia. He shared the information with the FBI, which used it to obtain wiretap authorization against Page.

The FBI received assessments in 2017 that Russia’s intelligence service, RIS, pushed disinformation to Steele regarding former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and a 2013 trip that Trump made to Moscow, according to one footnote.

Cohen visited Prague in August 2016 to meet with Kremlin insiders to pay off Russian hackers, Steele said in the dossier.

The Russian government was blackmailing Trump with video footage of him with prostitutes in Moscow in 2013, Steele also noted. (RELATED: Investigate The Dossier As Russian Disinformation, Intel Experts Say)


An unknown entity — its identity is still redacted — assessed 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 U.S. foreign relations,” the footnote stated.



Partially declassified footnote 350 from the Justice Department inspector general’s report on FISA abuse (via Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office)

The footnote refers to a piece of information given to the FBI in 2017 “outlining an inaccuracy in a limited subset of Steele’s reporting about the activities of Michael Cohen.”

One footnote refers to information that a Russian operative had infiltrated Steele’s network of informants.

“An individual with reported connections to Trump and Russia who claimed that the public reporting about the details of Trump’s [redacted] activities in Moscow during a trip in 2013 are false, and that they were the product of RIS ‘infiltrating a source into the network’ of a [redacted] who compiled a dossier of information on Trump’s activities,” one footnote reads.

One FBI unit had concerns about Steele’s contacts with Russian oligarchs, but those did not make their way to the FBI Crossfire Hurricane team.

“Steele’s frequent contacts with Russian oligarchs in 2015 had raised concerns in the FBI Transnational Organized Crime Intelligence Unit,” one footnote stated.

Steele had previously worked for Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some lawmakers have openly asked whether Deripaska somehow fed inaccurate information to Steele.

The footnotes indicated that the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team, which led the Trump probe, received information about the potential Russian disinformation campaign.

“We identified reporting the Crossfire Hurricane team received from [redacted] indicating the potential for Russian disinformation influencing Steele’s election reporting,” one footnote stated.

Investigators received information in early October 2016 that a purported sub-source for the dossier was “rumored” to be a Russian intelligence agent, according to another footnote.

“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. The document described reporting [redacted] that Person 1 ‘was rumored to be a former KGB/SVR officer.'”

FBI investigators told the IG they would have wanted to know earlier about the information regarding Steele, the footnotes stated.

An FBI intelligence analyst and supervisory agent told the IG that they did not recall reviewing Steele’s internal FBI source filings which document “frequent contacts with representatives for multiple Russian oligarchs in 2015.”

The Crossfire Hurricane team did not review Steele’s source file until Nov. 18, 2016, nearly a month after the FBI obtained its first surveillance warrant against Steele.

The supervisory special agent who oversaw the Crossfire Hurricane investigation told the IG that he was unaware of those concerns, but said he would have found the information useful “and would have wanted to know about it while supervising the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”

“For years, the public was fed a healthy diet of leaks, innuendo and false information to imply that President Trump and his campaign were part of a Russian conspiracy to spread disinformation,” said Grassley and Johnson. “The FBI’s blind pursuit of the investigation, despite exculpatory and contradictory information, only legitimized the narrative.”

Lawmakers and other government officials have speculated for years that Russian disinformation was fed to Steele. That theory has gained traction in the three years since BuzzFeed News published Steele’s report.

Fiona Hill, who served as a top Russia expert in the Trump White House, testified on Oct. 14, 2019, at the Trump impeachment hearings that she believed that Steele published Russian disinformation.

Steele relied on a primary source who collected information from a network of sub-sources in Russia and the West. He produced 17 memos as part of the investigation, and met multiple times with the FBI as part of its investigation into a possible conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Steele’s primary source also told FBI agents in January 2017 that Steele mischaracterized information that ended up in the dossier.

[soonernvolved]

www.dailywire.com/news/bombshell-fbi-allegedly-had-evidence-that-anti-trump-dossier-contained-russian-intel-disinformation-declassified-footnotes-show

BOMBSHELL: FBI Had Evidence That Anti-Trump Dossier Could Contain Russian Intel Disinformation, Declassified Footnotes Show

The FBI team investigating President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign allegedly received evidence that information contained in the infamous anti-Trump dossier, created by ex-British spy Christopher Steele, contained Russian disinformation that was part of a campaign launched by Russia’s intelligence service.


Fox News’ Gregg Re reported:

One of the footnotes, which was previously redacted in its entirety, read: “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.” That subset referred to the activities of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, whom Steele’s dossier claimed had traveled to Prague to meet with Russian agents. Special Counsel Robert Mueller was unable to substantiate that claim, and Cohen has denied it.

The footnote goes on to state that a 2017 report “contained information … that the public reporting about the details of Trump’s [REDACTED] activities in Moscow during a trip in 2013 were false, and that they were the product of RIS ‘infiltra[ing] a source into the network’ of a [REDACTED] who compiled a dossier of information on Trump’s activities.”

CBS News’ Catherine Herridge highlighted another footnote that was declassified, which stated: “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. The document described reporting [REDACTED] that Person 1 ‘was rumored to be a former KGB/SVR officer.’ In addition, in late December 2016, Department Attorney Bruce Ohr told SSA 1 that he had met with Glenn Simpson and that Simpson had assessed that Person 1 was a RIS officer who was central in connecting Trump to Russia.”

The disclosures were made in response to Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) repeatedly demanding that the redacted footnotes from the Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report be made public.


The two Senators highlighted how disgraced former FBI Director James Comey’s FBI did not included the information in its FISA applications to surveil the Trump campaign.

Grassley and Johnson said in a joint statement, “For years, the public was fed a healthy diet of leaks, innuendo and false information to imply that President Trump and his campaign were part of a Russian conspiracy to spread disinformation. The FBI’s blind pursuit of the investigation, despite exculpatory and contradictory information, only legitimized the narrative. The mounting evidence undercutting this narrative should have stopped the investigation early in its tracks. Instead, it took several years and millions in taxpayer dollars to conclude that the allegations were baseless.”

“Had FBI leadership heeded the numerous warnings of Russian disinformation, paid attention to the glaring contradictions in the pool of evidence and followed long-standing procedures to ensure accuracy, everyone would have been better off,” the statement continued. “Carter Page’s civil liberties wouldn’t have been shredded, taxpayer dollars wouldn’t have been wasted, the country wouldn’t be as divided and the FBI’s reputation wouldn’t be in shambles.”

“It’s ironic that the Russian collusion narrative was fatally flawed because of Russian disinformation,” the senators concluded. “These footnotes confirm that there was a direct Russian disinformation campaign in 2016, and there were ties between Russian intelligence and a presidential campaign – the Clinton campaign, not Trump’s.”

[soonernvolved]

dailycaller.com/2020/04/11/steele-dossier-disinformation/

ANALYSIS: The FBI Knew The Steele Dossier Contained Russian Disinformation Three Years Ago — Somehow It Never Leaked

At some point in 2017, the precise month is not clear, the FBI obtained evidence that Russian operatives fed disinformation to former British spy Christopher Steele.

That stunning revelation came on Friday, and not through a leak, as did so many of the anti-Trump and pro-Steele stories that have come out since the dossier was published in January 2017.


Instead, the disclosure was the product of an intense GOP-led fact-finding campaign to force U.S. intelligence officials to declassify information that the FBI had on Steele and his notorious dossier.

Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, the two Republicans who jogged loose the new information, noted the disparity in the type of information that has leaked out of the Trump-Russia investigation in the three-plus years since it began.

“For years, the public was fed a healthy diet of leaks, innuendo and false information to imply that President Trump and his campaign were part of a Russian conspiracy to spread disinformation,” they said in a statement upon the release of three footnotes from the Justice Department inspector general’s (IG) report on the FBI’s surveillance of the Trump campaign.

The previously-classified footnotes said that an organization not identified in the IG report provided the FBI evidence that Russian operatives fed disinformation that wound up in the dossier.



The disclosure is another stunning blow to the reputation of the FBI, which made Steele’s dossier a “central and essential” component of its surveillance warrants against Carter Page.

The disinformation involved two of Steele’s most explosive claims: that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen visited Prague in August 2016 to meet with Kremlin operatives, and that the Kremlin was blackmailing Donald Trump with footage of him with prostitutes in Moscow in 2013. (RELATED: FBI Received Evidence Of Russian Disinformation In Steele Dossier)

An FBI unit was also concerned about Steele’s ties to Russian oligarchs. Steele has worked in the past for Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum magnate close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.



Footnote 350 from the Justice Department inspector general’s report of the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign.

It is impossible to know what would have happened to the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign, and the special counsel’s investigation that followed, had the information contained in the footnotes been widely known three years ago. The footnotes do not say exactly when in 2017 the FBI obtained the information. The special counsel was appointed on May 17, 2017.


But as Grassley and Johnson noted, government officials in various agencies and in Congress appear to have leaked information out intended to lend credence to the dossier, and its core theory that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.

Outlets like CNN published stories that vaguely suggested that the FBI had verified parts of the dossier. The network reported on Feb. 10, 2017 that the FBI had “corroborated some” of Steele’s information, but didn’t provide additional details.

One of the most historically significant leaks of the era was one that appeared in The Washington Post on April 11, 2017.

The newspaper reported that the FBI and Justice Department had obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants to surveil Page, a former Trump campaign aide. The interpretation at the time was that the infallible FBI would not have sought a FISA warrant without strong suspicion that Page was a Russian agent.

The FISA court granting the warrant was also seen at the time as an endorsement of the theory. And when CNN reported on April 18, 2017 that the FBI used the Steele dossier to obtain FISA orders, the network cited anonymous government officials who said that the FBI would have corroborated information from Steele before using it to justify spying on Page.

“Officials familiar with the process say even if the application to monitor Page included information from the dossier, it would only be after the FBI had corroborated the information through its own investigation. The officials would not say what or how much was corroborated,” reads the CNN story.

Pundits on CNN and MSNBC insisted that the FBI would have validated every factual statement from Steele before using it to obtain FISA orders.

But that was all wrong.

The IG report said that the FBI was unable to verify any of Steele’s main Trump-related allegations. The report also said that Steele’s main source said the ex-spy embellished or misrepresented key claims in the dossier. Steele himself told FBI agents on Oct. 3, 2016, three weeks before the first Page FISA order was granted, that he viewed a sub-source used in the dossier as an “embellisher” and “boaster.”

Fittingly, the dossier itself became public through a series of leaks.

BuzzFeed News published it on Jan. 10, 2017 just after CNN reported that then-FBI Director James Comey briefed then-President-elect Trump four days earlier about the salacious sex allegation in the dossier. BuzzFeed had obtained the dossier from a close associate of Sen. John McCain, who had in turn obtained it from Steele.

Peter Strzok, who served at the time as deputy chief of FBI counterintelligence, noted in internal FBI correspondence that investigators could use the leak of the dossier to their benefit.

“We’re discussing whether, now that this is out, we use it as a pretext to go interview some people,” Strzok texted then-FBI lawyer Lisa Page on the day BuzzFeed published the dossier.

The document immediately placed a cloud of suspicion over Trump and his associates, including Carter Page, Cohen and anyone else in Trump’s orbit.

Steele’s information and reputation were bolstered over the course of 2017 through a series of leaks and glowing profiles intended to portray him as a sober intelligence operative widely respected by his peers.

Comey and other former U.S. officials also never disparaged the dossier. Instead, Comey has put out innuendo suggesting that Steele’s steamy allegations about Trump could be accurate. Comey said in a CNN interview on May 9, 2019 that he did not know whether Steele’s sex claim about Trump was true, while leaving open the possibility that it was.

Comey has claimed in the years since his May 9, 2017 firing, that he briefed Trump on the dossier to make him aware of information that was floating around Washington, D.C., and that he expected it to be leaked to the media.

Among the unknowns is whether the FBI received the evidence that the dossier was disinformation while Comey was still with the bureau, or after he left.

The FBI did pick up evidence while Comey was still FBI chief that the dossier had significant problems. In January 2017, just days after BuzzFeed published the dossier, FBI agents met with the Steele source who disputed many of the allegations in the dossier.

That nugget of information was first revealed through a leak of sorts to The New York Times but not until April 2019 — after Special Counsel Robert Mueller had ended his investigation.

[soonernvolved]

Wonder why the media is so silent on this?

thefederalist.com/2020/04/13/new-info-doj-fbi-knew-trump-surveillance-was-based-on-russian-disinformation/

Declassified Info: DOJ, FBI Knew Trump Surveillance Was Based On Russian Disinformation
These facts establish the FBI used Russia’s meddling with the 2016 election as a pretext to investigate Donald Trump and the special counsel’s office was complicit in this ploy.
Margot Cleveland
By Margot Cleveland
APRIL 13, 2020
On Friday, the Department of Justice released newly declassified information from an inspector general report on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuse, revealing for the first time that the FBI had received information indicating the Christopher Steele dossier contained Russian disinformation. The newly unredacted portions of the IG’s report also confirmed there was no “network of sources” backing up Steele’s reporting.

While both revelations provide further fodder for attacking the Carter Page surveillance proceedings, the significance is much greater: These facts establish the FBI used Russia’s meddling with the 2016 election as a pretext to investigate Donald Trump and the special counsel’s office was complicit in this ploy.


More than two months ago, Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson dispatched a letter to William Barr requesting the attorney general declassify information and unredact information contained in four footnotes in Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s 478-page report on FISA abuse. In their letter, the senators noted that they “[were] deeply concerned about certain information that remains classified.”

They added, “certain sections of the public version of the report are misleading because they are contradicted by relevant and probative classified information redacted in four footnotes.” Further, according to the Republican senators, “this classified information is significant not only because it contradicts key statements in a section of the report, but also because it provides insight essential for an accurate evaluation of the entire investigation.”

Three of These Footnotes Have been Released
Based on Attorney General William Barr’s finding that it is in the “public interest” to declassify the information, three of the four footnotes were released on Friday with “minimal redactions to protect national security interests.”

The fourth footnote, identified as footnote 342, “presents unique and significant concerns,” a letter accompanying the declassified footnotes explained, because it “refers to information received by a member of the Crossfire Hurricane team regarding possible previous attempts by a foreign government to penetrate and research a company or individuals associated with Christopher Steele.” While the Department of Justice left that footnote redacted in full, it noted that “a further declassification or summary substitution” may later be made.


The three Barr declassified were footnotes 302, 347, and 350. Footnote 302 concerned “Person 1,” who is widely reported to be Sergei Millian. Here is an excerpt of the relevant text of the IG report and a comparison of the footnote redactions:




From the additional information disclosed, footnote 302 now reveals that “Crossfire Hurricane team members and supervisors in early October 2016” had circulated a document stating that “Person 1 had historical contact with persons and entities suspected of being linked to [the Russian Intelligence Service] RIS.” “Person 1 ‘was rumored to be a former KGB/SVR officer,’” according to the document. Steele’s business partner, Glenn Simpson, had also “assessed that Person 1 was a RIS officer.”

These new details take on an oversized significance when read together with the information contained in footnote 350. Here is an excerpt of that relevant text, and a comparison of the footnote redactions:




As can be seen from a comparison of the footnotes, the original redaction created the impression that the details hidden in footnote 350 concerned Steele’s connection to various Russian oligarchs. But the declassification now reveals that the focus was on Russian disinformation.

Russian Disinformation Influenced FISA Warrant Basis
Specifically, the IG discovered that the Crossfire Hurricane team had received reporting “indicating the potential for Russian disinformation influencing Steele’s election reporting.” And in 2017, the Crossfire Hurricane team received a report highlighting Steele’s inaccurate reporting concerning activities of Michael Cohen.

The Crossfire Hurricane team was told that portion of Steele’s reporting was assessed to be “part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations.” A follow-up report, also from 2017, asserted that “public reporting about the details of Trump’s [redacted] activities in Moscow during a trip in 2013 were false, and that they were the product of RIS ‘infiltrat[ing] a source into the network’ of a [redacted] who compiled a dossier of information on Trump’s activities.”


The remaining redactions in footnote 350 leave unanswered the identity of the source of intel that informed the FBI of Russia’s purported disinformation campaign and the claimed RIS infiltration into the source of networks. But read together, footnotes 302 and 350 reveal that both members and supervisors of the Crossfire Hurricane team knew in early October of the possibility that the Steele dossier was Russian disinformation. Yet they continued to use the dossier as a basis to investigate the Trump campaign and failed to disclose those details to the FISA court.

The Inspector General Lied to Americans
Then, in 2017, after Americans had elected Trump president, the investigation continued, even though the Crossfire Hurricane team received multiple additional reports that Russia was engaged in a disinformation campaign. The IG report, however, hid those facts from the country, and instead portrayed the possibility of disinformation as merely a general risk—not one based on evidence and facts.

“We found that the FBI was aware of the potential for disinformation in the Steele election reporting and, in part to address that issue, made some effort to assess that possibility,” Horowitz’s report read. Horowitz added that “Steele told us that Russian intelligence is ‘sophisticated’ and relies on disinformation. He said it can involve ‘planted information,’ which he described as ‘controlled information,’ and that often the information is true but with ‘bits missing and changed.’” The IG then concluded that, “Steele told us that he had no evidence that his reporting was ‘polluted’ with Russian disinformation.”

But the declassified details show it was much more than a “potential for disinformation” of which the FBI was aware—it had received multiple reports that Steele’s reporting included Russia disinformation. The IG report obscured that reality, and in fact conveyed the impression that Russia disinformation was not in play, which is exactly why Grassley and Johnson sought declassification of the footnotes.

So Many More Questions Need Answering
With this information now public, questions abound: Did Russia actually feed Steele disinformation? Which Crossfire Hurricane team members and supervisors knew of the reports of Russia disinformation? Why did they ignore that potential?

Most significantly, why did Special Counsel Robert Mueller fail to investigate whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election by feeding Steele disinformation to launch an investigation into the Trump campaign?

Mueller spent more than two years and more than $30 million supposedly investigating Russia interference in the 2016 election, and not once in his 448-page opus did the special counsel mention an investigation into whether Russia interfered with the U.S. presidential election by feeding dossier author Steele disinformation. Logic alone should have prompted Mueller to investigate the possibility that Russia interfered in the 2016 election by feeding Steele disinformation because there were only two possibilities in play: Steele lied to the FBI about his sources or intel, or both; or Russia fed Steele disinformation.

But now we know that Mueller’s team had reports and evidence of a Russian disinformation campaign and ignored the question of whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election by feeding Steele fake intel, prompting an FBI investigation into the Trump presidential campaign. If it wasn’t clear before, it should be clear now: Mueller was either incompetent or a political hack—or both.

Lying to the Court to Obtain a Surveillance Order
While the revelations concerning a potential Russia disinformation campaign prove the most significant from the Friday release, the declassification in the third footnote adds another damning detail, both to the FISA process and to Horowitz’s report. As seen below, Horowitz reported that “s noted in the first FISA application, Steele relied on a primary sub-source (Primary Sub-source) for information, and this Primary Sub-source used a network of sub-sources to gather the information that was relayed to Steele; Steele himself was not the originating source of any of the factual information in his reporting.”

But the declassified footnote contradicts the IG’s conclusion that “the Primary Sub-source used a network of sub-sources to gather the information that was relayed to Steele.” “When interviewed by the FBI,” the report reads, “the Primary Sub-source stated that he/she did not view his/her contacts as a network of sources,” but individuals “with whom he/she had conversations about current events and government relations.”




That Steele’s primary sub-source did not have a “network of sources” establishes two points. First, it hammers home the amount of deception used to obtain a FISA surveillance order on Carter Page. When the government presented its first application to the FISA court, the court’s legal advisor queried the National Security Division’s Office of Intelligence on the basis for Steele’s intel. How was it that Steele had a network of sub-sources, the FISA representative asked?

In response, the government told the FISA court that Steele had a network of sources in place based on his former work as British intelligence agent. But, as I explained previously, that was a misrepresentation because, as the IG report revealed in footnote 214, Steele had said that his “source network did not involve sources from his time as a [redacted] and was developed entirely in the period after he retired from government service.” (The redacted language undoubtedly referred to Steele’s work for MI6.)

But now we know that not only did the government misrepresent Steele’s “source network,” it misrepresented the existence of a primary sub-source “source network.”

This revelation has a second and broader implication than further evidence of FISA abuse: The complete lack of a “source network” undermines the entire basis for the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and the special counsel probe.

While team members and supervisors knew early that there was no source network, that Russian disinformation was potentially in play, and that there was no Russia collusion, rather than drop the investigation into candidate, and then president, Trump, they continued for more than two years to undermine the Trump administration. And as Friday’s declassification shows, the depth of the deception and the plot to take down the duly elected president is still not fully known.

Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. Cleveland served nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk to a federal appellate judge and is a former full-time faculty member and adjunct instructor at the college of business at the University of Notre Dame. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

[soonernvolved]

dailycaller.com/2020/04/15/steele-dossier-russian-disinformation-trump/

FISA Bombshell: Russian Intelligence Knew Christopher Steele Was Investigating Trump During 2016 Campaign

Two Russian intelligence operatives were aware as early as July 2016 that former British spy Christopher Steele was investigating Donald Trump, according to newly declassified information in footnotes from a Justice Department report on FBI surveillance of the Trump campaign.

Footnotes from that report also said a member of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team investigating the Trump campaign received evidence in January 2017 that Russian intelligence might have targeted and collected information on Steele’s firm, Orbis Business Intelligence.


The footnotes, released by Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson on Wednesday, provide further indications that Russian operatives fed disinformation to Steele that ended up in his infamous anti-Trump dossier.

The FBI relied on Steele’s salacious report to obtain authorization to wiretap Carter Page, a former Trump campaign aide.

A Justice Department inspector general’s report laid out a series of “significant”errors and omissions that the FBI made in its applications to spy on Page. Many of those errors involved failures to disclose evidence that undercut Steele’s allegations of a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The footnotes declassified on Wednesday say that in late January 2017, an investigator on the Crossfire Hurricane team received information that Russian intelligence “may have targeted Orbis” and researched the company.



Another footnote says that a June 2017 report from the U.S. intelligence community “indicated that two persons affiliated with RIS were aware of Steele’s election investigation in early July 2016.”

Steele, a former MI6 officer, began investigating the Trump campaign on behalf of the DNC and Clinton campaign in June 2016. He was hired directly by Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm based in Washington, D.C.

It was not previously known that Russian intelligence operatives knew of Steele’s investigation at the time it took place. But as it has become more clear in recent years that Steele’s dossier contained inaccuracies, speculation has built among lawmakers and former intelligence officials that the ex-spy was duped by Russian disinformation.

Orbis, Steele’s firm, declined the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment this week.


Steele, who is based in London, relied on a lone source for information that ended up in the dossier. The source allegedly collected information from a network of sub-sources. But one of the most significant revelations in the IG report, released on Dec. 9, was that Steele’s primary source disputed how information in the dossier was characterized. The source, who has not been identified, said that Steele misrepresented or embellished allegations in the dossier.

Carter Page, former foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign, speaks to the media after testifying before the House Intelligence Committee on November 2, 2017 in Washington, DC. The committee is conducting an investigation into Russia's tampering in the 2016 election. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
Carter Page, former foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign, speaks to the media after testifying before the House Intelligence Committee on November 2, 2017 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

CBS News first reported the footnotes. The Daily Caller News Foundation confirmed their accuracy with sources familiar with the declassification process.

Additional information released on Wednesday shows exactly when in 2017 the FBI received evidence that Russian intelligence operatives fed Steele with disinformation.

The FBI obtained information on Jan. 12, 2017, two days after BuzzFeed News published the dossier, Steele’s allegation that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen visited Prague in August 2016 was likely the product of Russian disinformation.

The FBI received evidence on Feb. 27, 2017 that Russians may have fed disinformation to Steele regarding his most explosive claim: that Donald Trump used hookers during a 2013 trip to Moscow. (RELATED: The FBI Knew The Steele Dossier Contained Russian Disinformation Three Years Ago — And Somehow That Never Leaked)

The footnotes declassified on Wednesday say that the FBI’s Transnational Organized Crime Intelligence Unit sought a validation review of Steele as an FBI source in 2015 because of his links to five Russian oligarchs.

The footnote says that the FBI unit found that five Russian oligarchs who sought meetings with the FBI that year had intermediaries who contacted Steele.

“The report noted that Steele’s contact with 5 Russian oligarchs in a short period of time was unusual and recommended that a validation review be completed on Steele because of this activity,” the footnote says.

Another footnote of the IG report said that the FBI received information in early June 2017 about “personal and business ties between” Steele’s primary source of information for the dossier and sub-source. The sub-source, who has not been identified, also had contacts with “an individual in the Russian Presidential Administration in June/July 2016.”

The “sub-subsource” also voiced “strong support” for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, one footnote says.

The lead supervisory intelligence analyst on the FBI investigation told the IG’s office he did not know as of June 2017 that Steele’s source network “had been penetrated or compromised.”

[soonernvolved]

thefederalist.com/2020/04/15/newly-declassified-papadopoulos-transcript-exposes-crossfire-hurricane-corruption/

Newly Declassified Papadopoulos Transcript Exposes Crossfire Hurricane Corruption
A newly declassified transcript calls into question the entire Crossfire Hurricane investigation: Why was it started, and why did it continue?
Margot ClevelandBy Margot Cleveland
APRIL 15, 2020
Attorney General William Barr said last week that “the evidence shows that we’re not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness” in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Rather, “there is something far more troubling here.”

“Without any basis,” Barr added in his sit-down interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, “they started this investigation of [Trump’s] campaign, and even more concerning actually is what happened after the campaign, a whole pattern of events while he was president to sabotage his presidency — or at least have the effect of sabotaging the presidency.”


While Barr did not elaborate on the evidence he’s seen, a declassified transcript made public earlier in the week of a wired conversation between former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos and a Crossfire Hurricane confidential human source (CHS), when read in tandem with Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuse, substantiates Barr’s view that it wasn’t “just mistakes.”

When the transcript of the CHS’s secretly recorded conversation with Papadopoulos was released last week, the media highlighted his adamant denial of any Trump-campaign involvement into the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s emails. The coverage also focused on Papadopoulos’s denials being withheld from the FISA court.

But we already knew that: The IG’s report identified the failure to inform the FISA court of Papadopoulos’s denials as two of the 17 “significant inaccuracies and omissions.” Specifically, the IG report noted the initial FISA application “[o]mitted Papadopoulos’s consensually monitored statements to an FBI CHS in September 2016 denying that anyone associated with the Trump campaign was collaborating with Russia or with outside groups like Wikileaks in the release of emails.”

The report explained that error was repeated in the three subsequent FISA renewal applications, adding that those applications also “[o]mitted Papadopoulos’s statements to an FBI CHS in late October 2016 denying that the Trump campaign was involved in the circumstances of the DNC email hack.”

Crossfire Hurricane Team Ignores Papadopoulos’ Words

The declassified transcript, however, does much more than hammer home the FISA abuse. It reveals a stark difference between Papadopoulos’s September 2016 denial of involvement in the DNC email hack and his denial a month later.

The Sept. 15, 2016, wired conversation was between Papadopoulos and Stefan Halper, whom the IG report identified as “Source 2.” That meeting occurred over “pre-dinner drinks,” and Halper was tasked with asking “Papadopoulos direct questions about whether the Trump campaign benefitted from, or anyone in the Trump campaign had knowledge of, Russian assistance or the Wikileaks release of information that was damaging to the Clinton campaign.”

According to the IG report, “[W]hen Source 2 initially asked about Wikileaks, Papadopoulos commented that with respect to [Julian] Assange ‘no one knows what he’s going to release’ and that he could release information on Trump as a ‘ploy to basically dismantle … [or] undercut the … next President of the United States regardless of who it’s going to be.’ Papadopoulos also stated that ‘no one has proven that the Russians actually did the hacking.’’’

Halper later asked “Papadopoulos directly whether help ‘from a third party like Wikileaks for example or some other third party like the Russians, could be incredibly helpful’ in securing a campaign victory.” The IG report summarized Papadopoulos’s response:

Well as a campaign, of course, we don’t advocate for this type of activity because at the end of the day it’s, ah, illegal. First and foremost it compromises the US national security and third it sets a very bad precedence [sic]. … So the campaign does not advocate for this, does not support what is happening. The indirect consequences are out of our hands. … [F]or example, our campaign is not … engag[ing] or reaching out to wiki leaks or to the whoever it is to tell them please work with us, collaborate because we don’t, no one does that. … Unless there’s something going on that I don’t know which I don’t because I don’t think anybody would risk their, their life, ah, potentially going to prison over doing something like that. Um … because at the end of the day, you know, it’s an illegal, it’s an illegal activity. Espionage is, ah, treason. This is a form of treason. … I mean that’s why, you know, it became a very big issue when Mr. Trump said, ‘Russia if you’re listening’ … Do you remember? … And you know we had to retract it because, of course, he didn’t mean for them to actively engage in espionage but the media then took and ran with it.


Halper raised the issue again, and Papadopoulos replied: “To run a shop like that … of course it’s illegal. No one’s looking to … obviously get into trouble like that and, you know, as far as I understand that’s, no one’s collaborating, there’s been no collusion and it’s going to remain that way. But the media, of course, wants to take a statement that Trump made, an off-the-cuff statement, about [how] Russia helped find the 30,000 emails and use that as a tool to advance their [story] … that Trump is … a stooge and if he’s elected he’ll permit the Russians to have carte blanche throughout Eastern Europe and the Middle East while the Americans sit back and twiddle their thumbs. And that’s not correct.”

While Papadopoulos’s September 2016 denials to Halper were strident and unequivocal, the IG report made clear that the Crossfire Hurricane team found them unconvincing. Case Agent 1, publicly known to be Joe Pientka, told the IG that “he and the team discounted Papadopoulos’s denials for several reasons.”

The IG report noted that Pientka said, “[T]he Crossfire Hurricane team’s assessment was that Papadopoulos’s denial to the CHS was a rehearsed response.” His “response to the direct questions seemed weird,” Pientka said, “because it ‘seemed rehearsed and almost rote.’” Papadopoulos “went from a free-flowing conversation with [Halper] to almost a canned response,” Pientka claimed.

The IG report further noted that “Case Agent 1 emailed SSA 1 and others to report that Papadopoulos ‘gave … a canned answer, which he was probably prepped to say when asked.’” According to the report, Pientka said that “it remained a topic of conversation on the Crossfire Hurricane team for days afterward whether Papadopoulos had ‘been coached by a legal team to deny’ any involvement because of the ‘noticeable change’ in ‘the tenor of the conversation.’”


Another agent likewise told the IG that “his main observation was that when Papadopoulos was pushed for answers, he seemed to have a ‘prepared statement. It sounded like a lawyer wrote it.’” When the Office of General Counsel’s Deputy General Counsel Trisha Anderson later learned of Papadopoulos’s responses while working on a letter to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, she said Papadopoulos’s statements to Halper sounded “self-serving” and “like a lawyered statement.”

Papadopoulos Spoke Freely with Source 3
These excerpts make clear that the Crossfire Hurricane team uniformly viewed Papadopoulos’s denials to Halper as contrived. In contrast, the IG report makes no mention whatsoever of Crossfire Hurricane team members viewing Papadopoulos’s denials to Source 3 on Oct. 31, 2016, as being similarly suspect. None.

This is where the declassified transcript of Papadopoulos’s conversation proves essential. From the IG report, his conversations with Halper and Source 3 seemed very similar. But the recently declassified transcript reveals a much different relationship between Papadopoulos and Source 3 — and a much different conversation.

Papadopoulos spoke with Source 3 for more than four hours during lunch and at a casino. Papadopoulos shared with Source 3 everything from his views on millennials — they were lazy — to his disdain for condoms. The conversation was friendly and uninhibited. In the midst of these off-the-cuff and cordial exchanges, Papadopoulos chatted with Source 3 about politics, the DNC hack, and Russia.

When Source 3 asked Papadopoulos whether he thought “Russia’s playing a big game in this election,” Papadopoulos said, “That’s all bullsh-t,” adding, “No one knows who’s hacking [the DNC]. … Could be the Chinese, could be the Iranians, it could be some Bernie … supporters.” Papadopoulos said the arguments about Russians are “all … conspiracy theories,” and he knew “‘for a fact’ that no one from the Trump campaign had anything to do with releasing emails from the DNC, because Papadopoulos said he had ‘been working with them for the last nine months. … And all of this stuff has been happening, what, the last four months?’”

Significantly, Papadopoulos told Source 3 that Halper had asked him the same questions and “he believed [Halper] was going to go and tell the CIA or something if I’d have told him something else. I assume that’s why he was asking. And I told him, absolutely not. … t’s illegal, you know, to do that.”

That Papadopoulos told Source 3 he thought Halper was working for the CIA seems a pretty good indication he didn’t have the same qualms about Source 3. Papadopoulos’s insulting commentary on congressmen — “Do you know how many Members of Congress I’ve met that know jack … about anything? Except what their advisors tell them? … They can barely put a sentence together. … I’m talking about Members of Congress dude” — and his braggadocio about making himself a “brand” and monetizing his connections also suggest he had no idea Source 3 was wired.

Something Doesn’t Add Up
So why didn’t the Crossfire Hurricane team members consider the possibility that Papadopoulos’s denials to Source 3 were legitimate? Arguably, the team had a solid basis for discounting his denials to Halper, but the transcript of Papadopoulos’s conversation with Source 3 reveals those same justifications don’t hold. This point goes well beyond FISA abuse and calls into question the entire Crossfire Hurricane investigation: Why was it started, and why did it continue?

And why didn’t the IG report discuss how the Crossfire Hurricane team viewed Papadopoulos’s denials to Source 3? After extensively discussing the reaction of team members to Papadopoulos’s denials to Halper, the IG report is virtually silent on the impact of his continued denials.

The report merely notes that Pientka “received a document with these Papadopoulos statements included in it a few days after the October 2016 meeting,” and that Pientka told the IG that “he was familiar with this CHS meeting at the time and probably reviewed the summary of the interview containing these statements.” Yet when asked why he had not shared the statements with the Office of Intelligence or included it in the FISA renewal applications, Pientka said he “did not recall” but “the information would not have been purposely withheld … but it may have been accidentally omitted.”

The more significant query is why didn’t these denials give the Crossfire Hurricane team pause before it continued its investigation into Donald Trump? Barr is right: this doesn’t smell like a mere mistake.

Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. Cleveland served nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk to a federal appellate judge and is a former full-time faculty member and adjunct instructor at the college of business at the University of Notre Dame. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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In June of 2017, a US report indicated that individuals associated with Russian intel knew about the dossier research.

Also in June 2017, then-DAG Rod Rosenstein signed the 4th FISA renewal after he appointed Robert Mueller as Special Counsel to investigate “Trump-Russia.”

So US intel agencies and the FBI both knew the dossier was Russian disinformation yet they allowed Mueller to rove around for 2 years unchecked probing Trump and harassing/arresting his associates for non-crimes.

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According to the latest declassified footnotes two Russian intel officers used as sources for the junk Steele dossier and the at least one source voiced strong support for Hillary Clinton.

So how many officials in the Obama administration knew they were using a fraudulent document based on pro-Hillary Russian sources to spy on Donald Trump?

Trump wasn’t colluding with Russian officials — Obama and Hillary were.

Rep. Devin Nunes had this to say tonight: I hope that there better be people who are charged with lying and obstructing a Congressional investigation because we should have been given this information. One more important point. Remember the ICA that I called Obama’s dossier. Remember that they put that together in late 2016 after the election. What did it say? It said that oh the Russians were trying to help Trump. In that report, in the annex they put in, what? That Christopher Steele paid for dirt Steele dossier. Now if that is all the information we have from all of our intelligence assets where was the information that we now learned from the Horowitz report? Why was that not in the ICA?



Barack Obama spied on candidate Trump and his family, sent spies in to set up his campaign and then later smeared Donald Trump before he went into office.

Author Lee Smith wrote about this in his book “The Plot Against the President.” An excerpt from the book was published at The Federalist.

thefederalist.com/2019/10/28/how-the-obama-administration-set-in-motion-democrats-coup-against-trump/

Obama’s biggest move against Trump was to order CIA director John Brennan to conduct a full review of all intelligence relating to Russia and the 2016 elections. He requested it on December 6 and wanted it ready by the time he left office on January 20. But the sitting president already knew what the intelligence community assessment (ICA) was going to say, because Brennan had told him months before.

Brennan’s handpicked team of CIA, FBI, and NSA analysts had started analyzing Russian election interference in late July. In August, Brennan had briefed Harry Reid on the dossier and may have briefed Obama on it, too. Earlier in August, Brennan sent a “bombshell” report to Obama’s desk.

When Brennan reassembled his select team in December, it was to have them reproduce their August findings: Putin, according to Brennan, was boosting the GOP candidate. And that’s why only three days after Obama ordered the assessment in December, the Washington Post could already reveal what the intelligence community had found.

“The CIA,” reported the December 9 edition of the Post, “has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system.”

The story was the first of many apparently sourced to leaks of classified information that were given to the Post team of Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima, and Greg Miller. The reporters’ sources weren’t whistle-blowers shedding light on government corruption— rather, they were senior US officials abusing government resources to prosecute a campaign against the newly elected commander in chief. The article was the earliest public evidence that the coup was under way. The floodgates were open, as the IC pushed more stories through the press to delegitimize the president-elect.

A Wave of Leak-Sourced Stories All Saying the Same Thing

The same day, a New York Times article by David E. Sanger and Scott Shane echoed the Post’s piece. According to senior administration officials, “American intelligence agencies have concluded with ‘high confidence’ that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump.”

A December 14 NBC News story by William M. Arkin, Ken Dilanian, and Cynthia McFadden reported that “Russian President Vladimir Putin became personally involved in the covert Russian campaign to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, senior U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.”

The ICA that Obama ordered gave political operatives, the press, and his intelligence chiefs a second shot at Trump.

The more we know the worse Obama looks.
Heads need to roll.

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On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee released key material related to the Obama FISA Abuse Scandal.

In addition to the transcripts, the Committee released other material related to the Committee’s investigation into Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) actions leading up to and during the Crossfire Hurricane operation, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant process.

Today, the Committee released three categories of material.

Declassified DOJ materials related to the Crossfire Hurricane operation.
Timeline of correspondence sent or received by Chairman Graham and Committee activity regarding the FISA abuse investigation.
Corrective actions taken by DOJ and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as a result of the FISA abuse investigation.
TRENDING: FINALLY: Trump Lays Out Three-Phase Plan To Reopen Economy

In response to Graham’s letters on March 7, August 29, and December 19, 2019 urging Attorney General Barr to declassify as much material as possible relating to the abuse of the FISA process targeting the Trump campaign, DOJ has produced the following documents:

Confidential human source transcripts related to the Crossfire Hurricane operation
Transcript of George Papadopoulos and FBI Confidential Human Source (declassified March 13, 2020) (document)
Transcript of George Papadopoulos and FBI Confidential Human Source (declassified April 1, 2020) (document)
FISA Warrant Application for Carter Page and Three Subsequent Renewals
FISA Warrant Application for Carter Page (document)
FISA Warrant Application for Carter Page, Renewal One (document)
FISA Warrant Application for Carter Page, Renewal Two (document)
FISA Warrant Application for Carter Page, Renewal Three (document)
A July 2018 letter from DOJ to the FISA court alerting the court to some of the significant errors and omissions in the Carter Page FISA applications (letter)
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Here is the transcript of George Papadopoulos and the confidential human resource who was sent to spy on the young Trump Campaign official.

www.scribd.com/document/456786393/2020-3-13-FISA-Senate-Transcript-of-George-Papadopoulos-and-FBI-Confidential-Human-Source-Declassified-March-13-2020

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Things are getting interesting now,

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www.dailywire.com/news/fbi-had-information-suggesting-christopher-steele-wasnt-reliable-but-withheld-it-while-relying-on-his-dossier

FBI Had Information Suggesting Christopher Steele Wasn’t Reliable But Withheld It While Relying On His Dossier

The FBI was aware of issues with ex-British spy Christopher Steele’s work but kept the information out of an important documents after agreeing to do so in order to learn about Steele’s credibility.

In other words, to assess Steele’s credibility, the FBI agreed not to include its assessment of Steele’s credibility in a document maintained by the FBI regarding Steele as a confidential source.



The Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross reported that Bill Priestap, former FBI chief of counterintelligence, “told Justice Department investigators he agreed not to disclose information he learned about Christopher Steele as a precondition for a meeting with British government officials regarding the former MI6 officer, according to recently declassified information.”

Priestap and Peter Strzok, the infamous ex-FBI agent who had an affair and talked about an “insurance policy” against then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016, met with officials in the United Kingdom in 2016 to look into Steele’s credibility. Steel compiled the infamous “Steel Dossier” that was used to claim Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton and to obtain FISA warrants against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

More from Ross:

Priestap and Strzok received mixed reviews about Steele from his former colleagues, according to a Justice Department inspector general’s report on the FBI’s probe.

Some vouched for Steele’s honesty and integrity, but several others questioned his judgement and “lack of self-awareness.” Some colleagues described Steele as “smart,” and a “person of integrity,” their notes said.

“f he reported it, he believed it,” one contact said.

But their notes also reflected negative reviews on Steele. He “[d]emonstrates lack of self-awareness, poor judgment,” was “underpinned by poor judgment,” and “[r]eporting in good faith, but not clear what he would have done to validate,” one source said.
Ross reported that Priestap and Strzok went to assess Steele’s credibility weeks after the FBI already used his dossier to obtain the surveillance warrants against Page. Priestap and Strzok shared the information they learned about Steele with the people already investigating Trump on Steele’s trumped up claims, but the information was not included in Steele’s “Delta File,” which is kept on the FBI’s confidential sources.

“Because the information was not in Steele’s file, it was not used to assess Steele’s validity as an FBI source for the Trump investigation. The FBI also did not share the information in three additional applications for FISA orders against Page,” Ross explained.

When Priestap was asked why the negative information was kept out of Steele’s file, he told the Inspector General’s office that he “may have made a commitment” to MI6 – Steele’s former employer – “not to document the former employer’s views on Steele as a condition for obtaining the information.”

As The Daily Wire reported in March 2019, Steele’s former MI6 boss, Sir John Scarlett, refused to answer a reporter’s question about what it was like to work with Steele. Scarlett also called the information in Steele’s dossier “overrated.”

“I looked at it and I thought these are commercial intelligence reports; I don’t know about the sources — they might be right, they might be wrong and they’ll probably be overrated and they’ve been overrated,” Scarlett said at the time.

It is unclear whether Scarlett is the source of the negative information about Steele included in the FBI report.

The Steele Dossier was already decimated by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General, who found that the FBI knew in early 2017 that Steele was fed Russian disinformation and included it in the dossier. Still, the FBI used it against Trump.

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dailycaller.com/2020/04/17/christopher-steele-bill-priestap-dossier-mi6/

FBI Official Withheld Negative Information About Christopher Steele Because Of Agreement With Brits

Bill Priestap, the FBI’s former chief of counterintelligence, told Justice Department investigators he agreed not to disclose information he learned about Christopher Steele as a precondition for a meeting with British government officials regarding the former MI6 officer, according to recently declassified information.

Priestap and his deputy, Peter Strzok, traveled to the United Kingdom in November and December 2016 to assess the reliability of Steele, a former MI6 officer whose dossier the FBI used for its investigation into the Trump campaign.


Priestap and Strzok received mixed reviews about Steele from his former colleagues, according to a Justice Department inspector general’s report on the FBI’s probe.

Some vouched for Steele’s honesty and integrity, but several others questioned his judgement and “lack of self-awareness.” Some colleagues described Steele as “smart,” and a “person of integrity,” their notes said. (RELATED: FBI Received Evidence Of Russian Disinformation In Steele Dossier)

“f he reported it, he believed it,” one contact said.

But their notes also reflected negative reviews on Steele. He “[d]emonstrates lack of self-awareness, poor judgment,” was “underpinned by poor judgment,” and “[r]eporting in good faith, but not clear what he would have done to validate,” one source said.



Priestap and Strzok embarked on the fact-finding mission weeks after the FBI had already used Steele’s anti-Trump dossier to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) order against Carter Page.

They shared those assessments with the FBI team conducting the Trump probe, but did not include the information in Steele’s so-called Delta file, which the FBI maintains for its confidential sources.

Because the information was not in Steele’s file, it was not used to assess Steele’s validity as an FBI source for the Trump investigation. The FBI also did not share the information in three additional applications for FISA orders against Page.

Priestap was asked during an interview with the IG why the negative Steele information was not included in his file, or disclosed to the FISA Court.


He said that he “may have made a commitment” to Steele’s former employer, “not to document the former employer’s views on Steele as a condition for obtaining the information” on the retired spy.



The IG report provides a damning assessment of Steele’s dossier.

Released on Dec. 9, 2019, the report said Steele’s primary source for the dossier disputed many of the characterizations in the salacious document.

According to footnotes from the report released April 10, the FBI received evidence in early 2017 that Russian intelligence operatives might have fed disinformation to Steele that ended up in the dossier.

Footnotes declassified this week said the U.S. intelligence community produced a report in June 2017 that said two Russian intelligence operatives knew in early July 2016 that Steele was investigating Trump. The Kremlin’s awareness of Steele’s activities might have made him a vulnerable target for a possible disinformation campaign.

Priestap, who retired from the FBI in 2018, did not respond to an email seeking comment.

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theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/04/17/declassified-doj-letter-to-fisa-court-highlights-severe-institutional-corruption-doj-blames-fbi-for-spygate/

Declassified DOJ Letter to FISA Court Highlights Severe Institutional Corruption – DOJ Blames FBI For Spygate…
Posted on April 17, 2020 by sundance

Amid a series of documents released by the Senate Judiciary Committee [SEE HERE] there is a rather alarming letter from the DOJ to the FISA Court in July 2018 that points toward an institutional cover-up.

Before getting to the substance of the letter, it’s important to put the release in context. After the FISA Court reviewed the DOJ inspector general report, the FISC ordered the DOJ-NSD to declassify and release documents related to the Carter Page FISA application.

In the cover letter for this specific release to the Senate Judiciary and Senate Intelligence committees, the DOJ cites the January 7, 2020, FISA court order:



Keep in mind that prior to this release only the FISA court had seen this letter from the DOJ-National Security Division (DOJ-NSD). As we walk through the alarming content of this letter I think you’ll identify the motive behind the FISC order to release it.

First, the letter in question was sent by the DOJ-NSD to the FISA Court on July 12, 2018. It is critical to keep the date of the letter in mind as we review the content.



Aside from the date the important part of the first page is the motive for sending it. The DOJ is telling the court in July 2018: based on what they know the FISA application still contains “sufficient predication for the Court to have found probable cause” to approve the application. The DOJ is defending the Carter Page FISA application as still valid.

However, it is within the justification of the application that alarm bells are found. On page six the letter identifies the primary participants behind the FISA redactions:



As you can see: Christopher Steele is noted as “Source #1”. Glenn Simpson of Fusion-GPS is noted as “identified U.S. person” or “business associate”; and Perkins Coie is the “U.S-based law firm.”

Now things get very interesting.

On page #8 when discussing Christopher Steele’s sub-source, the DOJ notes the FBI found him to be truthful and cooperative.



This is an incredibly misleading statement to the FISA court because what the letter doesn’t say is that 18-months earlier the sub-source, also known in the IG report as the “primary sub-source”, informed the FBI that the material attributed to him in the dossier was essentially junk.

Let’s look at how the IG report frames the primary sub-source, and specifically notice the FBI contact and questioning took place in January 2017 (we now know that date to be January 12, 2017):




Those interviews with Steele’s primary sub-source took place in January, March and May of 2017; and clearly the sub-source debunked the content of the dossier itself.

Those interviews were 18-months, 16-months and 14-months ahead of the July 2018 DOJ letter to the FISC. The DOJ-NSD says the sub-source was “truthful and cooperative” but the DOJ doesn’t tell the court the content of the truthfulness and cooperation. Why?

Keep in mind this letter to the court was written by AAG John Demers in July 2018. Jeff Sessions was Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein was Deputy AG; Christopher Wray was FBI Director, David Bowditch is Deputy, and Dana Boente is FBI chief-legal-counsel.

Why would the DOJ-NSD not be forthcoming with the FISA court about the primary sub-source? This level of disingenuous withholding of information speaks to an institutional motive.

By July 2018 the DOJ clearly knew the dossier was full of fabrications, yet they withheld that information from the court and said the predicate was still valid. Why?

It doesn’t take a deep-weeds-walker to identify the DOJ motive.

In July 2018 Robert Mueller’s investigation was at its apex.

This letter justifying the application and claiming the current information would still be a valid predicate therein, speaks to the 2018 DOJ needing to retain the validity of the FISA warrant…. My research suspicion is that the DOJ needed to protect evidence Mueller had already extracted from the fraudulent FISA authority. That’s the motive.

In July 2018 if the DOJ-NSD had admitted the FISA application and all renewals were fatally flawed Robert Mueller would have needed to withdraw any evidence gathered as a result of its exploitation. The DOJ in 2018 was protecting Mueller’s poisoned fruit.

If the DOJ had been honest with the court, there’s a strong possibility some, perhaps much, of Mueller evidence gathering would have been invalidated… and cases were pending. The solution: mislead the court and claim the predication was still valid.

This is not simply a hunch, because that motive also speaks to why the FISC would order the current DOJ to release the letter.

Remember, in December the FISC received the IG Horowitz report; and they would have immediately noted the disparity between what IG Horowitz outlined about the FBI investigating Steele’s sub-source, as contrast against what the DOJ told them in July 2018.

The DOJ letter is a transparent misrepresentation when compared to the information in the Horowitz report. Hence, the court orders the DOJ to release the July letter so that everyone, including congressional oversight and the public can see the misrepresentation.

The court was misled; now everyone can see it.

The content of that DOJ-NSD letter, and the subsequent disparity, points to an institutional cover-up; and as a consequence the FISC also ordered the DOJ to begin an immediate sequestration effort to find all the evidence from the fraudulent FISA application. The proverbial fruit from the poisonous tree…. And yes, that is ongoing.

Moving on…

Two more big misstatements within the July letter appear on page #9. The first is the DOJ claiming that only after the application was filed did they become aware of Christopher Steele working for Fusion-GPS and knowing his intent was to create opposition research for the Hillary Clinton campaign. See the top of the page.

According to the DOJ-NSD claim the number four ranking official in the DOJ, Bruce Ohr, never told them he was acting as a conduit for Christopher Steele to the FBI. While that claim is hard to believe, in essence what the DOJ-NSD is saying in that paragraph is that the FBI hoodwinked the DOJ-NSD by not telling them where the information for the FISA application was coming from. The DOJ, via John Demers, is blaming the FBI.



The second statement, equally as incredulous, is at the bottom of page nine where the DOJ claims they had no idea Bruce Ohr was talking to the FBI throughout the entire time any of the FISA applications were being submitted. October 2016 through June 2017.

In essence the claim there is that Bruce Ohr was working with the FBI and never told anyone in the DOJ throughout 2016 and all the way past June 29th of 2017. That denial seems rather unlikely; however, once again the DOJ-NSD is putting the FBI in the crosshairs and claiming they knew nothing about the information pipeline.

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Bruce Ohr, whose wife was working for Fusion-GPS and assisting Christopher Steele with information, was interviewed by the FBI over a dozen times as he communicated with Steele and fed his information to the FBI. Yet the DOJ claims they knew nothing about it.

Again, just keep in mind this claim by the DOJ-NSD is being made in July 2018, six months after Bruce Ohr was demoted twice (December 2017 and January 2018). If what the DOJ is saying is true, well, the FBI was completely off-the-rails and rogue.

Neither option speaks well about the integrity of either institution; and quite frankly I don’t buy the DOJ-NSD spin. Why? The reason is simple, the DOJ is claiming in the letter the predication was still valid… if the DOJ-NSD genuinely didn’t know about the FBI manipulation, they would be informing the court in 2018 the DOJ no longer supported the FISA application due to new information. They did not do that. Instead, in July 2018, they specifically told the court the predicate was valid, yet the DOJ-NSD knew it was not.

The last point about the July 2018 letter is perhaps the most jarring. Again, keep in mind when it was written Chris Wray is FBI Director, David Bowditch is Deputy and Dana Boente is FBI chief legal counsel.

Their own FBI reports, by three different INSD and IG investigations; had turned up seriously alarming evidence going back to the early 2017 time-frame; the results of which ultimately led to the DC FBI office losing all of their top officials; and knowing the letter itself was full of misleading and false information about FBI knowledge in/around Christopher Steele; this particular sentence is alarming:



“The FBI has reviewed this letter and confirmed its factual accuracy?”
Really?

As we have just shared, the July 2018 letter itself is filled with factual inaccuracies, misstatements and intentional omissions. So who exactly did the “reviewing”?

This declassification release raises more questions than any other in recent memory. Perhaps AG Bill Barr will now start asking some rather hard questions to FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Here’s the Full Letter. I strongly suggest everyone read the 14-pages slowly. If you know the background, this letter is infuriating…

www.judiciary.senate.gov/download/2018-doj-letter-to-fisc

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www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/04/larry-c-johnson-senate-judiciary-document-dump-exposes-extensive-fbi-doj-corruption/

Larry C. Johnson: Senate Judiciary Document Dump Exposes Extensive FBI and DOJ Corruption

If you are exhausted from the drumbeat of doom and gloom surrounding the Corona virus pandemic, here is a welcome diversion–corruption and malfeasance by the FBI and the Department of Justice. The Senate Judiciary Committee dumped several critical documents Thursday night relevant to the Deep State plot to portray Donald Trump and his team as agents of Putin’s Russia. Jim Hoft was first out of the box posting the links to the damning documents (see here). You can click on the links in Jim’s article and read the original documents for your self.

The Conservative Treehouse also provided an excellent piece focusing on the cover letter sent to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court trying to explain why the errors in the FISA applications were not important errors. That was a big lie. The letter was signed by AAG John Demers in July 2018, when Jeff Sessions was Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein was Deputy AG; Christopher Wray was FBI Director, David Bowditch was the Deputy, and Dana Boente was FBI chief-legal-counsel. This letter was a lame effort at trying to cover the FBI’s crooked ass.

There are many fascinating and damning revelations in these documents. They confirm what I have written in the past about the FBI role in the attempted coup against Donald Trump. This July 12, 2018 letter to Judge Rosemary Collyer tries to put lipstick on the pig of FBI misdeeds and pretend that the FBI’s FISA applications were the equivalent of the gorgeous Marilyn Monroe in her heyday. Instead, the FBI misdeeds are exposed as a fat, ugly crone.

Demers’ letter continued to insist that four FISA applications to spy on Carter Page were properly predicated. That is balderdash.

Let me take you on a detailed journey through the first FISA application seeking permission to spy on Carter Page. Congressional Democrats falsely insisted that Steele’s lies and misinformation played little role. You can see from the following how wrong that assertion is:

pp. 2-3 Statements of “fact” about Russia as a threat, including a blacked out section attributed to a foreign government.

pp. 4-5 FBI tries to explain why they thought Carter was a bad guy.

p. 5 Uses statements of proven liar James Clapper as “evidence” of Russian bad intentions.

p. 6 Repeats the U.S. Government propaganda about Wikileaks (they’re bad because Julian Assange published information very embarrassing to the United States).

pp. 7-8 More historical (and semi-hysterical) boiler plate describing the evil intentions of Russia.

pp. 8-10 FBI states its “BELIEFS” about the nefarious intention of Carter Page and others linked to the Trump campaign.

pp. 10-15 FBI draws on open source information and previous interviews with Carter Page to paint in the darkest terms Page’s business contacts with Russians that Page voluntarily disclosed.

pp. 15-22 Now the dirt from Steele starts to flow. Steele and his sub-source are cited frequently in establishing the so-called “facts” of Page’s contacts with Russia.

pp. 22-26 The FBI plays the clever trick of citing journalist reports as further evidence to support the allegations against Page without disclosing that those reports were based on leaks from Steele. The FBI does acknowledge having multiple contacts with Page who denied these reports as scurrilous lies.

pp. 27-28 FBI admits it used a Confidential Human Source to try to bait Page but came up empty. That damn Carter Page kept telling the truth about not working with the Russians.

pp. 29-31 These are blacked out.

pp. 32-33 The FBI conclusion, which they use to justify spying on an innocent American.

As you can see, the majority of the so-called “evidence” presented to get permission to spy on Page came from Christopher Steele’s dossier, which was commissioned and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

If you take time to read the first FISA application you will learn the following supposed “facts” that are in fact evidence of the FBI deliberately deceiving the FISC:

1. Christopher Steele had been an FBI informant since 2013.

(U) Source1 (Steele) is a (former member of Britain’s MI6) and has been an FBI source since in or about October 2013. Source #l’s reporting has been corroborated and used in criminal proceedings and the FBI assesses Source #1 to be reliable. Source 1 has been compensated approximately $95,000 by the FBI and the FBI is unaware of any derogatory information pertaining to Source 1. (See page 15)

But the FBI failed to include the actual facts about Steele’s misconduct, which led the FBI to terminate him around the same time they were affirming to Judge Collyer that he was a solid guy. Steele was spreading the dossier lies to the American media with the knowledge and consent of Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS “fame.” Most normal, sensible people understand that getting fired for lying to the FBI qualifies as “derogatory information.”

2. The FBI received so-called intelligence from Christopher Steele starting in June of 2016–one month before they launched Operation Crossfire Hurricane.

Source 1 (Steele) reported the information contained herein to the FBI over the course of several meetings with the FBI from in or about June 2016 through August 2016. (See page 17)

What could Christopher Steele tell the FBI in June of 2016 and why would the FBI even entertain getting political dirt from a biased source eager to trash the candidacy of Donald Trump? The only report Steele had in June (dated 20 June 2016) made the following claims:

Russia cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump since at least 2011.
Trump has declined various real estate deals in Russia but he and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin on his political rivals.
FSB has compromising intel on Trump that they can use to blackmail him (e.g., coprophilia).
A dossier of compromising material on Hillary Clinton is being held by the Kremlin but has not been distributed.
Steele’s FBI handler was required by practice and regulations of the FBI to write up a report (i.e. a 302) recounting what Christopher Steele told him. Where is that report and who at FBI headquarters read it?

3. The FBI claimed that Carter Page was an intelligence asset of the Russian Government.

This application targets Carter Page. The FBI believes Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian Government for a number or years and currently is acting as an unregistered agent of the Russian Government to undermine and influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election in violation of U.S. criminal law. (See page 4)

Here again the FBI chose to lie by failing to disclose that Carter Page had been working for the CIA from 2008 thru 2013. He was telling the CIA about his Russian contacts in order to help protect America.

Inspector General Horowitz called out this deceit in his December 2019 report:

Toward that end, on September 28, 2016, the 01 Attorney emailed Case Agent 1 a draft of the FISA application, copying other members of the Crossfire Hurricane team. In a comment in the draft application, the 01 Attorney asked “do we know if there is any truth to Page’s claim that he has provided information to [another U.S. government agency]-was he considered a source/asset/whatever?” In response to the 01 Attorney’s question, on September 29, Case Agent 1 inserted the following comment in the draft:

“He did meet with [the other U.S. government agency], however, it’s dated and I would argue it was/is outside scope, I don’t think we need it in. It was years ago, when he was in Moscow. If you want to keep it, I can get the language from the [August 17 Memorandum] we were provided [by the other U.S. government agency].”294

Based upon this response, the 01 Attorney did not include information about Page’s prior relationship with the other agency in the FISA application.

4. The FBI was investigating many members of the Trump campaign for allegedly helping Russia to interfere in the 2016 Presidential election.

The FBI is investigating several individuals associated with Candidate #1’s campaign, including Papadopoulos and Page, to determine the extent to which such individuals are engaged in unlawful activities in support of Russia’s efforts to undermine and influence the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. The FBI believes that Page is coordinating election influence efforts with the Russian Government.

We now know there was no real evidence to justify the investigation of Carter Page, George Papadopoulus, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and General Michael Flynn. This was not just a mistake by overly enthusiastic FBI gum shoes. It was an attempted coup.

Apologists for the FBI cannot argue that the “mistakes” in the first FISA application were just human error because those mistakes were compounded in the subsequent three FISA applications. Most damning is the failure to disclose in the second, third and fourth applications that the Russian sub-source for Steele’s outlandish claims disavowed his reporting during interviews with the FBI in January 2017, March 2017 and May 2017. Pay close attention to what Horowitz found:

In support of the fourth element concerning Carter Page’s alleged coordination with the Russian government on 2016 U.S. presidential election activities, the drafts of the application-and later the read copy and final application-relied entirely on information from Steele that Steele said was provided to him by his Primary Sub-source. Specifically, the following aspects of Steele’s Reports 80, 94, 95, and 102 were used to support the application:
• Compromising information about Hillary Clinton had been compiled for many years, was controlled by the Kremlin, and the Kremlin had been feeding information to the Trump campaign for an extended period of time (Report 80);
• During his July 2016 trip to Moscow, Carter Page attended a secret meeting with Igor Sechin, Chairman of Rosneft and close associate of Putin, to discuss future cooperation and the lifting of Ukraine-related sanctions against Russia; and a secret meeting with Igor Divyekin, another highly placed Russian official, to discuss sharing compromising information about Clinton with the Trump campaign (Report 94);
• Page was an intermediary between Russia and the Trump campaign’s then manager (Manafort) in a “well-developed conspiracy” of cooperation, which led, with at least Page’s knowledge and agreement, to Russia’s disclosure of hacked DNC emails to Wikileaks in exchange for the Trump campaign’s agreement to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue (Report 95);267 and
• Russia released the DNC emails to Wikileaks in an attempt to swing voters to Trump, an objective conceived and promoted by Carter Page and others (Report 102).

What is particularly galling is that the FBI peddled Steele’s crap to the U.S. Intelligence Community:

The FBI disseminated the Steele election reporting to the U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) and sought to have it included in the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) relating to Russian interference with the U.S. elections, in large part because the FBI believed the information in Steele’s reports to be credible, although the FBI made clear to the USIC that the information in the reports had not been fully corroborated. (See page 172 of Horowitz’s December 2019 report).

Horowitz reported that the FBI met with Steele’s sub-source three times in 2017 and discovered he had no solid intelligence. He was fabricating:

The FBI conducted interviews of the Primary Sub-source in January, March, and May 2017 that raised significant questions about the reliability of the Steele election reporting. In particular, the FBI’s interview with Steele’s Primary Sub- source in January 2017, shortly after the FBI filed the Carter Page FISA Renewal Application No. 1 and months prior to Renewal Application No. 2, raised doubts about the reliability of Steele’s descriptions of information in his election reports.

During the FBI’s January interview, at which Case Agent 1, the Supervisory Intel Analyst, and representatives of NSD were present, the Primary Sub-source told the FBI that he/she had not seen Steele’s reports until they became public that month, and that he/she made statements indicating that Steele misstated or exaggerated the Primary Sub-source’s statements in multiple sections of the reporting.

For example, the Primary Sub-source told the FBI that, while Report 80 stated that Trump’s alleged sexual activities at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Moscow had been “confirmed” by a senior, western staff member at the hotel, the Primary Sub-source explained that he/she reported to Steele that Trump’s alleged unorthodox sexual activity at the Ritz Carlton hotel was “rumor and speculation” and that he/she had
not been able to confirm the story.

The Horowitz audit presented in December 2019 makes it very clear that this was not mere administrative sloppiness by the FBI:

We found that members of the Crossfire Hurricane team failed to meet the basic obligation to ensure that the Carter Page FISA applications were “scrupulously accurate.” We identified significant inaccuracies and omissions in each of the four applications-7 in the first FISA application and a total of 17 by the final renewal application. (see page 413)

In the preparation of the FISA applications to surveil Carter Page, the Crossfire Hurricane team failed to comply with FBI policies, and in so doing fell short of what is rightfully expected from a premier law enforcement agency entrusted with such an intrusive surveillance tool. In light of the significant concerns identified with the Carter Page FISA applications and the other issues described in this report, the OIG today initiated an audit that will further examine the FBI’s compliance with the Woods Procedures in FISA applications that target U.S. persons in both counterintelligence and counterterrorism investigations. (see page 414)

Call me a naive dreamer, but I still believe that those responsible for these crimes against Trump will be indicted and face trial. I pray for the sake of our nation that I am not proven wrong.