‘Until yesterday’s release, it was hard to 100% disprove Schiff’s memo just from the FISA itself…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., was caught in another blatant lie after recently declassified footnotes from an inspector general’s probe showed that language from an FBI surveillance application was ripped almost verbatim from the debunked Steele Dossier.
Until yesterday’s release, it was hard to 100% disprove Schiff’s memo just from the FISA itself. You could rely on the 2019 IG report, but Schiff can claim he didn’t know the IG’s findings when he wrote his memo
Not true: Schiff knew he was lying at time, in Jan 2018
— Undercover Huber (@JohnWHuber) April 17, 2020
Despite having access to the unredacted version of the documents in question, Schiff deceptively stated in a 2018 memo that the FBI had “narrowly” relied on the Steele Dossier in its warrant applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Predictably, left-wing media shills like Vox claimed Schiff’s memo, a rebuttal to one by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., had shredded the case for FBI misconduct outlined by House Republican leaders.
But the disclosures last week by the Justice Department proved that Schiff—then the ranking minority member on the House Intelligence Committee—would have been able to spot the close similarities in the language, according to investigative journalist John W. Huber.
This “specific sub section” of the FISA starts at p.15 (Section III,B)
This is where the FISA first *appears* to mention Steele, and rely on his dossier reporting about Page’s alleged meetings in Moscow with Igor Sechin and others – or the “narrow use”, according to Schiff pic.twitter.com/4wrrn2pbUm
— Undercover Huber (@JohnWHuber) April 17, 2020
The unredacted footnotes also showed partisan FBI investigators, led by then-counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap and agent Peter Strzok, were aware that former British spy Christopher Steele was deeply involved in a Russian disinformation campaign to smear President Donald Trump.
Moreover, the agents knew that Steele—whose opposition-research was commissioned by top Democrats including the Hillary Clinton campaign—had overtly lied about being the source behind a Yahoo News article smearing the president in September 2016, according to American Greatness.
Although Steele had been dismissed as an FBI intelligence source for shopping his so-called research to left-wing media, the bureau continued to receive his dispatches via the Fusion GPS firm using backdoor channels.
The FBI then relied heavily—if not exclusively—on the information provided by Steele in four different FISA requests to spy on the Trump campaign.
Schiff—who led the impeachment probe and prosecution against Trump over an unrelated Ukraine affair—was also complicit in the FBI cover-up and, thus, in the Russian disinformation campaign.
He and many other Democrats used the false accusations against Trump for fundraising and campaigning during the 2018 midterm elections, which allowed Democrats to reclaim the House majority and elevated Schiff into the Intel Committee chairmanship.
However, his position as steward of some of the country’s most sensitive secrets has not kept Schiff from overtly partisan maneuvers, often including lies that have been readily and objectively exposed.
Among several bold misstatements during his Ukraine investigation, Schiff offered a dramatic reading of the transcript outlining a call between Trump and Ukraine leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy that falsely seemed to suggest a Mafia-style shakedown.
Schiff has also capitalized on the secrecy of the committee’s work by using selective leaks and—it seems—selective omissions to provide a misleading narrative.
During the impeachment hearings, he was able to weaponize the whistleblower process, for instance, to prevent information that undermined his case from being publicly disclosed.
Schiff repeatedly denied knowledge of the so-called whistleblower’s identity—presumed to be former CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella—despite having previously acknowledged that his office had communicated with the whistleblower.
In fact, evidence suggests that Schiff likely helped to instigate the whistleblower complaint, working closely with Ciaramella and former Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson to ensure that the process was airtight.
Prior to the Ukraine impeachment effort, Schiff also had claimed he had irrefutable “evidence in plain sight” of Trump’s collusion with Russia that would result in the president’s impeachment and possible prosecution.
But as with the recent FISA revelations, his claim was disproved in due time when the Mueller Report presented no such evidence.
What is now clear: Schiff was, indeed, gazing at evidence in plain sight that involved Russian collusion and election interference. But he, not Trump, was the beneficiary of it.