The Senate Judiciary Committee released newly declassified documents on Friday that “significantly undercut” the “reliability” of the Steele dossier — the basis for the phony investigation Democrats relied upon to launch the debunked Russian collusion conspiracy — according to Chairman Lindsey Graham.
The first document is a summary of a three-day interview with ex-British spy Christopher Steele’s primary sub-source. The source, according to the committee, told the FBI in 2017 that the information Steele provided in the dossier was “unsubstantiated and unreliable.”
Steele’s source told the FBI multiple times that he “disagreed with and was surprised by” the way Steele conveyed his intel in the dossier.
Despite this, the FBI, led at the time by Director James Comey, pursued the Russiagate hoax anyways.
The document also reveals that Steele’s primary source on election reporting was not a current or former Russian official, but a non-Russian-based contract employee who worked for Steele’s firm. That means Steele’s primary source was giving him “second- and third-hand information at best.”
The source told the FBI that he “did not recall” where some of the information Steele had attributed to him came from, and accused Steele of “re-characterizing” some of the information to make it seem more credible and “less attenuated” than it really was, according to the committee. And in some cases, Steele flat-out lied and “implied direct access to information where the access to information was indirect.”
The second declassified document obtained by the committee contains type-written notes by former FBI special agent Peter Strzok, in which Strzok disagrees with certain assertions made in a New York Times article about the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia.
In the notes, Strzok admits that “recent interviews and investigation … reveal Steele may not be in a position to judge the reliability of his sub-source network.”
Strzok also wrote that “the FBI may have been using foreign intelligence gathering techniques to impermissibly unmask and analyze existing and future intelligence collection regarding U.S. persons associated with the Trump campaign,” referring to former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
Graham, R-SC, said he was “very pleased” with the results of his committee’s investigation.
“What have we learned from the release of these two documents by the Department of Justice? Number one, it is clear to me that the memo regarding the FBI interview of the primary sub-source in January 2017 should have required the system to stop and reevaluate the case against Mr. Page,” Graham said in a statement.
“Most importantly after this interview of the sub-source and the subsequent memo detailing the contents of the interview, it was a miscarriage of justice for the FBI and the Department of Justice to continue to seek a FISA warrant against Carter Page in April and June of 2017.”
Moreover, Strzok’s comments “are devastating in that they are an admission that there was no reliable evidence that anyone from the Trump campaign was working with Russian intelligence agencies in any form,” Graham continued.
“These documents, which I have long sought, tell a damning story for anyone who’s interested in trying to find the truth behind the corrupt nature of the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign in 2016 and beyond,” he concluded.
