He accepted the help in the 2016 election, the help of stolen goods by the Russians, the help of stolen private emails of a political opponent in an election, he accepted the help of an enemy nation who got those hacked emails by using their Russian Military intelligence, to illegally hack the DNC in order to obtain them.
Now, IF YOU THINK that hiring a US firm to investigate Trump, what is called opposition research, is the gosh darn same....
THEN THERE IS NO HOPE FOR YOU, or your traitorous, sorry, ass!
the end.
There is no evidence to support your claims, but, there is a great deal of evidence that Obama illegally spied on the Trump campaign.
There is ZERO evidence that Obama illegally spied on the Trump Campaign. There is your made up CONSPIRACY that they did, but ZERO evidence has been acquired to prove such... at least so far...
They submitted claims to FISC as "verified" that were not.
They concealed from FISC that the unverified claims were oppo research purchased by Hillary.
They repeated vouched for Steele's integrity even after they fired him for lying.
They presented news accounts as "corroboration" of Steele's information even though he was the source for both.
They told these lies and concealed this information because had they told the whole truth, they spying warrants would not have been granted.
When you lie to get spying authority, the spying is illegal. Is this really lost on you?
The dossier part that was submitted to the court Judge was NOT submitted as verified information..
Each application was stamped VERIFIED
... the Judge was told that it was opposition research acquired that the opponent Candidate paid for...
They concealed that it was purchased by the Hillary Campaign.
...No one told the Judge it was verified information, unless it was verified information...
Oh yes they did. Even though when Steele was under oath and his balls were on the line, he testified that his claims were UNVERIFIED.
The Steele Dossier and the ‘Verified Application’ That Wasn’t
Former officials are fighting over who deserves blame.
Here’s what you need to know: In rushing out their assessment of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, Obama-administration officials chose not to include the risible Steele-dossier allegations that they had put in their “
VERIFIED APPLICATION” for warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) because . . . wait for it . . . the allegations weren’t verified.
And now, the officials are squabbling over who pushed the dossier. Why? Because the dossier — a Clinton-campaign opposition-research screed, based on anonymous Russian sources peddling farcical hearsay, compiled by a well-paid foreign operative (former British spy Christopher Steele) — is crumbling by the day.
It was long ago acknowledged that dossier information was “
salacious and unverified,” to quote congressional testimony by former FBI director James Comey.
If dossier claims were still unverified when Comey testified to Congress in mid 2017 (and thereafter), then those claims could not have been verified when the Obama Justice Department and FBI submitted it to the FISC as a “VERIFIED APPLICATION” in October 2016. It also had to have been unverified on January 6, 2017, when the Obama administration chose to include a sliver of the dossier in the briefing of President-elect Trump —
the day after intelligence chiefs met with President Obama in the Oval Office and discussed what Russia information should be shared with the incoming Trump team.
Then-director Comey conceded that there was no meaningful corroboration of the dossier. Despite that, the FBI and Justice Department included it in the “VERIFIED APPLICATION”.
Moreover, FBI and Justice Department procedures require that information be vetted for factual accuracy
before it is submitted to the FISC. The rules of the FISC require the Justice Department to
notify the court promptly if misstatements or inaccuracies have been discovered. Far from alerting the FISC that information in what it boldly labeled the “VERIFIED APPLICATION” was actually
unverified, the Justice Department and the FBI
kept reaffirming the dossier allegations to the court — in January, April, and June of 2017.
A dispute between the camps of Comey and Obama CIA director John Brennan broke out into the open — a dispute over which of them tried to force the dossier findings into the aforementioned
intelligence-community assessment (ICA). This is a remarkable rift given that the dossier allegations in fact
were not included in the ICA (though, again, the infamous “pee tape” claim was included in the briefing of then-president-elect Trump).
But, be of good cheer, all of this will be sorted out now that Attorney General Bill Barr has appointed John Durham, the excellent U.S. attorney for Connecticut, to investigate the investigation.
For now, though, the telling thing is that no one wants to be associated with the dossier. Even if former director Comey is right that it was Brennan, not he, who was trying to slide the dossier into the ICA, Comey’s FBI still used it in the FISC. Plus, Comey himself did agree to brief Trump on it, though in a very incomplete way — alerting the president-elect to the lurid story about prostitutes in a Moscow hotel, but studiously omitting the tiny detail about how the FBI had used the “salacious and unverified” dossier in the FISC to contend that Trump’s campaign was in a conspiracy with Russia to undermine the election.
The urge to run from the dossier is understandable. In Washington, about ten days before the FISC authorized spying on Page, Steele was
interviewed by the State Department official Kathleen Kavalec, who took notes that were passed along to the FBI. With very little effort (probably two minutes on Google), Kavalec was able to figure out that one of Steele’s major allegations was a complete invention.
Steele claimed that the Trump-Russia conspiracy involved exploitation of the
Russian consulate in Miami to transfer money and information.
But there is no Russian consulate in Miami. As the Twitter investigative wiz
Undercover Huber details, Steele’s source for this allegation (unidentified Source E) is also the source for the pee-tape story, as well as the foundational allegation that Donald Trump and the Kremlin were in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation.”
None of these allegations has ever been verified, and the Mueller report rejects the claim of a Trump-Russia conspiracy.
In the “
VERIFIED APPLICATION” that the Obama Justice Department and the FBI submitted, the FISC was led to believe Steele was reliable and that there was no known “derogatory information pertaining to” him — no mention was made of the known errors in his dossier reporting.
The first VERIFIED APPLICATION included a laborious footnote (
here, pages 15 to 16) vaguely “speculating” that Steele “likely” had a political motivation to discredit Trump’s campaign; the FBI and Justice Department concealed from the court that, far from speculation, they had certain knowledge — from Steele himself — that he was passionately opposed to Trump’s election, and they further failed to disclose that the dossier allegations had been sponsored by the campaign of the opposition candidate (Hillary Clinton).
Moreover, the court was told that the FBI did not believe Steele was the “direct” source of dossier information leaked to the media. Yet it not only seemed highly likely Steele was a direct media source; Steele had told Kavalec that he was managing relationships with media outlets, some of which “have” his information (he mentioned “NYT and WP” — the
New York Times and the
Washington Post).
No mention of Steele’s State Department interview was made to the court. In fact, the court was informed that the only government agency to which Steele had provided information was the FBI (
here, page 23). The State Department interview was likely withheld from FISC because revealing this damage to Steele’s credibility would doom the “VERIFIED APPLICATION.”
Steele identified two of his sources for Kavalec: Russia’s former spy chief Vyacheslav Trubnikov and top Kremlin adviser Vladislav Surkov. Trubnikov has intriguing ties to
Stefan Halper, whom the FBI used as a confidential informant to approach Trump campaign figures Page, George Papadopoulos, and Sam Clovis.
Steele himself did private-eye work for Oleg Deripaska, the aluminum oligarch known to be a close Putin confidant. Steele was also pushing his U.S. government contacts — such as Justice Department official Bruce Ohr — to accommodate Deripaska’s desire to travel to the U.S. The idea was that Deripaska could be a valuable informant. Evidently, the FBI lost interest when Deripaska told agents that Steele’s Trump-Russia conspiracy theory was preposterous.
Steele Dossier: The ‘Verified Application’ That Wasn’t | National Review
Not to worry, Barr and Durham are digging all the way to the bottom of this mess on behalf of the American People.
