For those TDS sufferers whose news services have BURIED this whole story -- Steele has been backtracking on the dossier since he was hauled into court for libel in the UK by one of the Russians mentioned... He NEVER gathered the Russian Intel himself, he sent a peon to go get dirt from the GRU/FSB in Moscow....
Faced with libel lawsuit, dossier drafter Christopher Steele hedges on linking Trump to Russia
By Rowan Scarborough - The Washington Times - Wednesday, December 20, 2017
Christopher Steele, the former British spy who fueled an ongoing investigation into President Trump’s administration, was a lot more confident of his charges when he wrote his now-notorious 2016 dossier than he is today in defending it in a libel lawsuit.
While Mr. Steele stated matter-of-factly in his dossier that collusion between Mr. Trump and the Russian government took place, he called it only “possible” months later in court filings. While he confidently referred to “trusted” sources inside the Kremlin, in court he referred to the dossier’s “limited intelligence.”
Now that Mr. Steele must defend those charges in a London courtroom, his confidence level has shifted down several notches.
In court filings this year, Mr. Steele doesn’t sound as confident as his dossier.
He answered questions through his attorney in a libel complaint brought by a Russian entrepreneur, Aleksej Gubarev. Mr. Steele has accused Mr. Gubarev of being pressured by Russian’s FSB intelligence service to take part in hacking against the Democratic Party.
In one answer, Mr. Steele refers to the intelligence he gathered as “limited.” On the charge of collusion by Mr. Trump and his campaign advisers, he now says there was only “possible coordination.”
In another indication that Mr. Steele was no longer wholeheartedly vouching for his own findings, he said he told journalists that they may not quote his research. He “understood that the information provided might be used for the purpose of further research, but would not be published or attributed,” he said through his attorney.
Mr. Steele also acknowledged that his final December memo, the only one that dealt with Mr. Gubarev, contained information he never vetted. He added, “Such intelligence was not actively sought; it was merely received.” The unverified “raw intelligence” included Mr. Cohen reported trip to Prague.
https://nypost.com/2018/01/22/it-lo...the-dossier-let-a-putin-pawn-do-all-the-work/
Virtually all of the credibility of the so-called Steele dossier — and the Trump-Russia collusion narrative and investigations it spawned — hinges on Christopher Steele’s vaunted reputation as a former British intelligence agent who spied on Moscow and still maintains a network of sources inside the Kremlin.
But now we are finding out from newly released transcripts that he never even set foot inside Russia to compile his dossier, and that he relied instead on an ex-journalist-turned-p.r. consultant to do much of his investigating there. In fact, this non-intelligence figure may be his main “Russian source” of information.
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-South Carolina) asked Steele’s Clinton-paid handler Glenn Simpson, during the House Intelligence Committee’s Nov. 14 closed-door hearing, if Steele had gone “to Russia as part of this project,” to which Simpson replied, “No, sir.” Steele, at the time he compiled the dossier, hadn’t been back to Russia in 17 years.
So, Gowdy pressed, “How was he able to accumulate information in Russia if he didn’t go?” Simpson claimed that Steele ran a “network of subsources or subcontractors” who traveled around Russia and gathered information for him.
But it turns out the primary subcontractor worked not for Steele but for Simpson at Washington-based Fusion GPS, and he contributed key material for the investigation of Trump underwritten by the Clinton campaign. His name is Edward Baumgartner, a British national who speaks fluent Russian and runs a p.r. shop out of London (and who spent 2016 tweeting his forceful opposition to Trump’s candidacy).
While Baumgartner was working on the dossier, he was also working for Simpson on another case to smear an anti-Putin whistleblower in an effort to help Putin-tied company Prevezon defend itself against US charges of money laundering.
During that contract, which ran through October 2016, Baumgartner worked closely in Moscow with the Russian lawyer who lobbied Donald Trump Jr. at a now-infamous Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 to help lift US sanctions on Russia. Her talking points were written by Simpson, who also dealt directly with the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya.
During the case, Simpson and Baumgartner also met with her partner, former Russian military intelligence officer Rinat Akhmetshin.
Asked by intel panel staff if he verified Steele’s “sources in Russia” or corroborated their information, Simpson said he’s never been to Russia himself and couldn’t “evaluate the credibility of someone on the other side of the [Atlantic].” Nor could he confirm that Steele actually spoke directly with any of his Russian sources.
So in other words, Steele mainly lent his credentials and credibility to the "hit people" at Fusion GPS that hated Trump and actually "compiled" the pile of dog shit that is the "Steele Dossier"... And then helped market it and try to sell it to the media and US Intel by using complicit journalists to accept "circular reporting" on the dossier that was actually SOURCED by Steele. But the fake news folks never ACKNOWLEDGED their source for "verifying" the dossier was Steele himself..
You rabid partisans know-nothings are WAY behind on this.. Because the shit you consume for news, has totally black-out the details of the biggest political scandal of your lifetime... To protect your fragile tiny brains and feelwings...
