Anyone finds out about a FISA Court that mostly a judge has to see a solid body of lots of stuff to issue a wiretap order. Then the FBI found out enough more to get three more warrant extensions.
Week 14: The Trump Dossier Resurfaces
The link notices that the Republicans paid for the dossier first. ...
Fake News Lie. The Republicans had nothing to do with Steele and the Dossier.
After Trump won, the Obama administration panicked.
With two months between the election and the inauguration, the panicked emotions led to frenzied actions. National Security Adviser Susan Rice unmasked dozens of redacted names of Americans in intelligence reports dealing with the Trump transition team. While she violated no law, the practice of unmasking Americans incidentally picked up in U.S. government eavesdropping is extraordinarily rare for senior officials, particularly when those Americans are preparing the presidential transition of the party out of power.
The White House instructed the U.S. intelligence community to push raw intelligence to as wide an audience as possible inside the government and Congress, making it much easier to leak, the Fake News
New York Times reported on March 1, 2017.
Details about Flynn’s private phone calls with the Russian ambassador to the United States, the kind of information that is almost never made public, were leaked to Fake News
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. Obama’s deputy attorney general, Sally Yates, opened a new investigation against Flynn for violating the Logan Act, a 1799 law that bars private citizens from conducting foreign policy. Flynn was weeks away from becoming national-security adviser, so he was hardly an ordinary private citizen. In any case, the Logan Act has never been successfully prosecuted and is likely unconstitutional.
Obama also instructed the U.S. intelligence community to assemble both a public and classified assessment of the Russian interference in the 2016 election, to be completed before he left office. The assessment proved important for two reasons. First, it’s what prompted Nunes to begin investigating the investigators. As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, he received a classified briefing around Thanksgiving about Russian interference, according to journalist Lee Smith’s book,
The Plot Against the President. Nunes said he was not told of any assessment at the time that Russians had actively wanted Trump to win, only that the goal of the Russia operation had been to sow chaos and undermine faith in democratic institutions.
The intelligence-community assessment also set the stage for the public disclosure of the Steele dossier. It came down to a familiar Washington trope: The Corrupt FBI and the CIA had an argument. At the Corrupt FBI, Comey and McCabe believed Steele and pushed to include the dossier’s findings in the classified assessment. But the CIA’s top analyst balked. Horowitz writes that he considered Steele’s dossier to be “Internet rumor.” The compromise: The Steele allegations were included in a separate appendix.
When the assessment was finally completed in January, the leaders of the intelligence community—Comey, CIA director John Brennan, Crapper, and National Security Agency chief Mike Rogers—briefed Obama and Trump on its findings. When it came to the Steele appendix, Comey briefed Trump alone. Comey recounted his version of that conversation in handwritten notes he took after the meeting—notes he leaked to the Fake News
New York Times after Trump fired him a few months later. The article based on Comey’s leak was a key element in the campaign to name Robert Mueller as an independent counsel, which is what it was intended to do.
Comey’s insistence on including the Dossier in an official assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election was peculiar. The Corrupt FBI had already received a lot of evidence that Steele had gotten it wrong. Page had told an informant in August that he had never met Manafort. Steele himself told Corrupt FBI agents that one of his main sources was prone to embellishment. The Corrupt bureau had been unable to verify it. The Corrupt FBI had learned that Page had informed the CIA about his contacts with Russian intelligence officers before.
Horowitz does not say whether Comey or his deputy, Andrew McCabe, were aware of this exculpatory information when they pushed to include the Steele dossier in the assessment.
McCabe handpicked the three teams of agents that rotated in and out of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. That investigation was not being run out of a field office. It was deliberately run out of Corrupt FBI headquarters. It’s all but impossible that McCabe, who was regularly briefed on the status of the investigation, was unaware that Steele’s information wasn’t checking out.
Comey’s briefing sent Trump into a rage. Trump already had people in his circle such as Flynn and Nunes who were advising him to be wary of Obama’s intelligence-community leaders. After Comey’s dossier briefing, with tales of golden showers and collusion, Trump’s distrust became contempt.
Nonetheless, he asked Comey if the Corrupt FBI could investigate the urination tape in order to clear him. Comey recounts that he counseled Trump against this by saying it was not something the FBI normally did. It wasn’t? At that very moment, his own Corrupt FBI was trying to verify that exact story. And as Horowitz says, agents would interview an important subsource for Steele who said there was no corroboration for the pee-tape story.
Before the Trump briefing, many journalists knew the details but believed that the Steele dossier was just a jumble of unverified allegations. Now journalists came to learn that the U.S. intelligence community believed that the dossier was important enough that both Trump and Obama needed to know about it. The dossier was no longer a bunch of dirt peddled by Democrats. It was now something the U.S. government had included in a briefing for both Trump and Obama. It was news.
Fake News CNN got the scoop about the briefings and ran with it on January 10, 2017. The network reported the story with some caution and didn’t provide many details about what the dossier actually said. After CNN’s story, the cat was out of the bag. The first outlet to publish Steele’s dossier in its entirety was Buzzfeed, a few hours later. At the time, the online news site made sure to say that the claims were unverified and in some cases appeared to get basic names of places and institutions wrong. But Buzzfeed reasoned that if the dossier was important enough for the intelligence community to brief the outgoing and incoming presidents, its readers deserved to read it.
After Buzzfeed published the story, the anti-Trump resistance went wild. Rachel Madcow began devoting much of her Fake New MSNBC program to speculation about whether the Russians could blackmail the incoming president. The Center for American Progress opened a website called the Moscow Project, which featured a photo of Page in the section that reproduced the dossier. Grifters posing as counterintelligence experts launched podcasts and Twitter feeds.
Behind the panic was a glaring irony. In its application for the FISA warrant against Page, the Corrupt FBI used Isikoff’s Yahoo story as verification of Steele’s reporting. Horowitz reports that the first draft of the warrant acknowledged that Isikoff likely obtained his information from Steele. But the final version did not.
The Corrupt FBI has said the Isikoff story was included because it included Page’s denials. That beggars belief. What the Corrupt FBI did, quite simply, was use a piece of reporting on Steele’s findings and falsely claim that it independently confirmed Steele’s findings, when it knew that Isikoff’s story had done no such thing.
Which means that the cloud over Trump’s presidency was the product of Fake News journalists and Corrupt G-men using themselves to confirm a falsehood.
The FBI Scandal - Commentary
