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….