‘We have only limited corroboration of the source’s reporting in this case and did not use it to reach the analytic conclusions…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) As Justice Department investigators wrap a criminal case that is likely to implicate several key players from the Obama-era intelligence community, two leading GOP senators made public another piece of evidence showing the depths of FBI deception in the Russia-collusion hoax against President Donald Trump.
Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa and Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., who respectively chair the Senate Finance and Homeland Security committees, released a newly declassified document Thursday that revealed the fraudulent maneuvers the FBI used to vouch for the reliability of the Steele Dossier by omitting key issues.
“Despite the apparent absence of any initial corroboration and these mounting concerns, the FBI’s investigation continued seemingly unabated,” said the senators in a press release.
“It’s also unclear what, if any, steps were taken by the Intelligence Community to update their assessment based on the warnings,” they added.
The dossier’s salacious claims—including the accusation that Russians had a tape of prostitutes giving President Donald Trump a “golden shower” in a Moscow hotel room—have since been debunked.
Other recently declassified materials have shown that the corrupt agents overseeing the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged Russia ties were already aware of the credibility issues when they formally initiated the investigation.
Steele, a highly partisan operative who was being paid by Democrats to provide opposition research for the Hillary Clinton campaign, may actually have been involved in a coordinated disinformation campaign organized by the Kremlin.
But the “Annex A” document provided by new Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe sheds light on the FBI’s efforts to corroborate the reports by ex-British spy Christopher Steele with limited success and to fool the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court into thinking they had more evidence than they did.
“We have only limited corroboration of the source’s reporting in this case and did not use it to reach the analytic conclusions of the CIA/FBI/NSA assessment,” the investigators wrote in what would later prove to be a considerable understatement.
The sources Steele used in his reports, with whom the FBI had conducted follow-up interviews, had, in fact, disavowed the claims as hearsay, drunken bar talk, or else completely fabricated.
In that light, the Annex A document included with the warrant application to spy on members of the Trump campaign seems less like an acknowledgment of the research’s limitations than a deliberate attempt to dupe the FISA court.
The document tells only of the investigators’ attempts to corroborate through witness interviews without mentioning the notable revelations, which likely would have been considered exculpatory for Trump advisor Carter Page and others being investigated over their Russian contacts.
The document also neglects to mention the partisan source of Steele’s funding, which was routed from the Democratic National Committee through the Perkins Coie law firm to the Fusion GPS research firm.
Because the FBI had been obligated to cut its own ties with Steele, it then used a backdoor-channel via Fusion employee Nellie Ohr—whose husband, Bruce, happened to be an assistant deputy attorney general—to deliver the research via thumb drive into the hands of Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe.
The material in Annex A had been referenced in earlier intelligence reports on the scandal, although the document itself remained classified.
Even though an inspector general’s report released last December found 17 major abuses in the FBI’s process for seeking the FISA warrants, corrupt FBI officials and others on the Left falsely claimed that Inspector General Michael Horowitz had determined the investigation properly predicated.
But the now unredacted details referenced in the report have dispelled those claims, exposing not only the initial cover-up, but the ongoing lies and deceptions that were used to undermine the Trump presidency and conceal the truth of their conspiracy from the public eye.