UPDATE BELOW
NEWSBUSTERS notes this about the Steele Dossier:
- While CNN previously insisted that the FISA warrant against Page did not use the infamous and debunked Steele dossier, in a Senate hearing on Wednesday, IG Michael Horowitz confirmed that the warrant was “entirely” reliant on it. The report also showed that FBI investigators knew the dossier was bogus and presented it to the FISA court as a reliable source of information.
They link to this excellent article by THE FEDERALIST:
In an astonishing admission, the Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz conceded to lawmakers Wednesday that the FBI’s FISA applications used to continue surveillance on the 2016 Trump campaign were based entirely on sources for the widely discredited Steele Dossier funded by the Democrats.
“The FISA applications relied entirely on information from the Steele… from the primary sub-source’s reporting to support the allegation that Page was coordinating with the Russian government on 2016 U.S. presidential election activities. However, the FBI did not share this information from department lawyers, and it was therefore omitted from the last two renewal applications,” Horowitz said.
The Democrat-funded Steele Dossier was basis for the grand Russian conspiracy theory peddled by deep-state government officials and the media that lead to a two-and-a-half year special counsel investigation with unlimited resources that ultimately vindicated the president.
The Horowitz report illustrates how the primary sub-source’s information fed to the Steele Dossier undercut the dossier’s own claims….
BTW, for 2-years I was told that the Steele Dossier was only PART of the warrants. NOPE. I was right, others woefully wrong.
Some Additional Stuff
In an article noted by POWERLINE, Tucker Carlson notes how the media is partially responsible for the “cover-up” of facts regarding the spying on an American citizen – via JEWISH WORLD REVIEW:
Thanks to the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report, we now know for certain what has been, for those paying attention, fairly obvious. The Steele dossier played a central role in the genesis of the Russia hoax and was used to justify extensive spying on former naval officer and Annapolis graduate Carter Page.
The top two leaders of the FBI were closely involved in this fiasco. Other powerful people knew what was happening and lied to cover it up. That all was confirmed by the IG report. The report was a disaster for the credibility of top leaders in Barack Obama’s FBI, and it’s also a big problem for the American news media.
For example, in early 2018, Washington Post intelligence and national security correspondent Shane Harris lectured Kim Strassel of The Wall Street Journal about how little she knows about the story.
“Yes,” he wrote, “I am telling you the dossier was not used as the basis for a FISA warrant on Carter Page.” That’s false. And yet, Harris hasn’t apologized or even acknowledged his incompetence.
Or take NBC News’s so-called intelligence correspondent Ken Dilanian. In the summer of 2018, he smugly tweeted, “Trump is wrong about Carter Page, the dossier and the FISA warrant.” But it looks like Trump was right, and he was wrong.
CNN Newsroom anchor and chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto did admit the Steele dossier might have been used for the warrant. But don’t be impressed. He lectured readers that “the FBI would corroborate information in the dossier on its own before using such intel to justify the FISA warrant.” Of course, that didn’t happen. In fact, the FBI hid information showing the dossier was false. Did Sciutto issue a correction? Of course not. But it does seem a little unfair to focus on Jim Sciutto. He was merely following the lead of almost everyone else at CNN, all of whom were frantically trying to convince us that the dossier was irrelevant:
Evan Perez, CNN senior justice correspondent: “You know, a lot of people will focus on the dossier, a lot of people will focus on a FISA, of Carter Page, and they’ll say they were spying on a campaign. But at the beginning, this is all about what Russia was doing.”
Shimon Prokupecz, CNN crime & justice correspondent: “Now Republicans were trying to claim that the dossier was key to getting the FISA, the surveillance warrant for Carter Page. But the Democrats memo clearly shows it wasn’t key.”
James Clapper, CNN national security analyst: “Even the earlier version of the redacted FISA authorization to me had enough information in it to indicate that the dossier was certainly not used as the primary source.”
Everything you just read turned out to be wrong. Has CNN retracted the comments or apologized? That’s a rhetorical question. Apologies require introspection and integrity. At CNN, they’re doubling down. CNN’s Don Lemon explained that, by definition, everything CNN reported was true….
Back in September of 2017, the EMPTY WHEEL was already noting John Sipher’s defense of the dossier as indefensible: “John Sipher’s Garbage Post Arguing the Steele Dossier Isn’t Garbage” And my post documenting the hard work of MYRDDRAAL showing that almost nothing was confirmed as true or fitting reality is here: “Past CIA Head of Russia Clueless“
CHUCK ROSS add to the media blame by noting that a Washington Post reporter is going back and doing a series on how the Steele Dossier was proffered as fact. In this latest article, Rachel Maddow is under the microscope: “WaPo Columnist Rips Rachel Maddow For Hyping Steele Dossier“
…According to the IG report, the FBI was unable to corroborate any of Steele’s allegations of collusion involving the Trump campaign. Steele’s primary source for the dossier also disputed key allegations in the document. Steele told FBI agents in October 2016 that one of the main sub-sources for the dossier was a “boaster” and “embellisher,” the report further stated.
Wemple laid out a timeline of Maddow’s coverage of the dossier, noting that she tended to hype developments that cut in favor of Steele’s reporting, while ignoring information that undermined the ex-spy.
“When small bits of news arose in favor of the dossier, the franchise MSNBC host pumped air into them,” wrote Wemple. “At least some of her many fans surely came away from her broadcasts thinking the dossier was a serious piece of investigative research, not the flimflam, quick-twitch game of telephone outlined in the Horowitz report.”
“She seemed to be rooting for the document,” he noted.
According to Wemple, Maddow touted reports from other news outlets that claimed parts of the dossier were corroborated. On May 3, 2017, she said on her show that “more and more” aspects of the dossier had been “independently corroborated.”
On Oct. 5, 2017, she said that “a lot” of the claims in the dossier were “dead to rights.” On April 16, 2018, she hyped a story published by McClatchy that the special counsel’s team had received evidence backing up the dossier’s allegation that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen visited Prague in August 2016 to meet Kremlin operatives. The IG report said that the allegation was “not true.”
Maddow appeared so convinced of the dossier’s accuracy that she aired an hour-long special report on Dec. 8, 2017 hyping Steele’s reporting.
[….]
Maddow has only mentioned the Steele dossier once on her show since the release of the IG report. But instead of discussing the report’s critique of Steele, Maddow asserted that the IG debunked a GOP theory that the dossier was the spark for the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign.
“She was there for the bunkings, absent for the debunkings — a pattern of misleading and dishonest asymmetry,” says Wemple.
And where is the full-court-press in discussing how Adam Schiff has been shown to be woefully wrong at best, and a liar at worst (THE LID):
….Schiff ‘s also lied when he claimed the Justice Department was truthful with the FISA court about “Steele’s prior relationship with the FBI.”
Page 364 of Horowitz report says the “source characterization statement asserting that Steele’s prior reporting had been “corroborated and used in criminal proceedings,” which overstated the significance of Steele’s past reporting and was not approved by Steele’s FBI handling agent, as required by the Woods Procedures”
[….]
Schiff claimed the FBI conducted a “rigorous process” to vet Steele’s allegations, and the Page FISA application explained the FBI’s reasonable basis for finding Steele credible. But Horowitz disagreed on Page 383 and 384 of his report.
We determined that prior to and during the pendency of the FISAs the FBI was unable to corroborate any of the specific substantive allegations against Carter
Page contained in the election reporting and relied on in the FISA applications, and was only able to confirm the accuracy of a limited number of circumstantial facts,\ most of which were in the public domain, such as the dates that Page traveled to Russia, the timing of events, and the occupational positions of individuals referenced in the reports.
In addition to the lack of corroboration, we found that the FBI’s interviews of Steele, the Primary Sub-source, and a second sub-source, and other investigative activity revealed potentially serious problems with Steele’s description of information in his election reports.
None of this was told to the court.
The Steele report also contended that the Russians had evidence that while staying at the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow Trump hired a hooker to give him a “golden shower,” ignoring the fact that the POTUS is something of a germaphobe and would never do that with a stranger. Page 188 of the Horowitz report explains the FBI knew the source who told Steele about the supposed incident was joking:
The Primary Sub-source explained that his/ her information came from “word of mouth and hearsay;” “conversation that [he/she] had with friends over beers; ” and that some of the information, such as allegations about Trump’s sexual activities, were statements he/she heard made in “jest.”
The Primary Sub-source also told WFO Agent 1 that he/she believed that the other sub-sources exaggerated their access to information and the relevance of that information to his/her requests. The Primary Sub-source told WFO Agent 1 that he/she “takes what [sub-sources] tell [him/ her] with ‘a grain of salt.”
[….]
The Horowitz report proves that Adam Schiff, the man who is leading the effort to impeach President Trump, lied to America about the FISA report….
All this is a travesty to truth.