Tag Archives: Steele dossier

The Steele Dossier and the End of Shame In American Politics, by Jonathan Turley

Adam Schiff is pond scum and it appears not to bother him that he’s pond scum. From Jonathan Turley at jonathanturley.com:

The famous philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal once declared that “the only shame is to have none.” The problem with shame is that it requires a sense of guilt over one’s actions. In the age of rage, there appear fewer and fewer actions that are beyond the pale for politics. Take Adam Schiff and the Steele dossier. While even the Washington Post has admitted that it got the Russian collusion story wrong in light of the findings of Special Counsel John Durham, House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is still insisting that he was absolutely right to promote the discredited Steele dossier. Schiff’s interview on NBC’s Meet the Press may be the final proof of the death of shame in American politics.

Schiff was one of the greatest promoters of the Steele dossier despite access to briefings casting doubt about Steele and the underlying claims. However, Schiff recently has attempted to defend himself by claiming that Steele was a respected former spy and that he was lied to by a Russian source.

Schiff told host Chuck Todd:

“I don’t regret saying that we should investigate claims of someone who, frankly, was a well-respected British intelligence officer. And we couldn’t have known, of course, years ago that we would learn years later that someone who is a primary source lied to him. [Igor] Danchenko lied to Christopher Steele and then lied to the FBI. He should be prosecuted. He is being prosecuted. And I’ll tell you this, if he’s convicted, he should not be pardoned the way Donald Trump pardoned people who lied to FBI agents, like Roger Stone and Mike Flynn. There ought to be the same standard in terms of prosecuting the liars. But I don’t think there ought to be any pardon, no matter which way the lies cut.”

Schiff’s spin is enough to cause permanent vertigo.

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Durham Indicts Danchenko, by Peter Van Buren

Are we ever going to get an investigation of the Clinton campaign’s collusion with Russia? From Peter Van Buren at theamericanconservative.com:

The unravelling of the Steele dossier shows the only campaign that colluded with Russia was Hillary Clinton’s.

ALEXANDRIA, VA – NOVEMBER 10: Russian analyst Igor Danchenko is pursued by journalists as he departs the Albert V. Bryan U.S. Courthouse after being arraigned on November 10, 2021 in Alexandria, Virginia. Danchenko has been charged with five counts of making false statements to the FBI regarding the sources of the information he gave the British firm that created the so-called “Steele Dossier,” which alleged potential ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

It was Hillary all along. The indictment by Special Counsel John Durham of Igor Danchenko for lying to the FBI proves conclusively the Steele dossier was wholly untrue. There was no Russiagate except for the one created out of lies. The only campaign that colluded with Russia was Clinton’s.

Clinton paid for the dossier to be created and Clinton people supplied the fodder. Steele, working with journalists, pushed the dossier into the hands of the FBI to try to derail the Trump campaign. When that failed, the dossier was used to attack the elected president of the United States.

Let’s start with a quick review of what Durham has uncovered about the most destructive political assassination since Kennedy.

Christopher Steele, paid by the Clinton campaign (after Clinton’s denial, it took a year for congressional investigators to uncover that the dossier was commissioned by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, working for the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, paid through the Perkins Coie law firm), seems to have done no investigative work. Instead, his reputation as a former British intelligence officer was purchased to validate a dossier of lies and then traffic them to the FBI and journalists.

Durham’s investigation confirms one of Steele’s key “sources” is the now-arrested Danchenko, a Russian emigre living in the United States. Steele was introduced to the Russian by Fiona Hill, then of the Brookings Institution. Hill would go on to play a key role in the Ukraine impeachment scam. Danchenko completely made up most of what he told Steele about Trump-Russian collusion.

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The biggest loser of the Durham indictments: James Comey’s FBI, by John Solomon

Russiagate demonstrated blatant corruption by the FBI. From John Solomon at justthenews.com:

Special Counsel John Durham’s latest criminal case is as much an indictment of James Comey’s FBI as it is of the primary source of the Steele dossier, whom Durham accuses of repeatedly lying to agents.

The Steele dossier was the central evidence used by the FBI to win four consecutive FISA warrants targeting Trump’s campaign — and in 39 pages of painstaking detail the indictment lays out just how flawed and fake central elements of the dossier were.

Those FISA warrants allowed the bureau to spy on former Trump adviser Carter Page and his many contacts in Trump world for nearly a year.

Igor Danchenko, Steele’s primary source for the dossier, contrived an entire source for key allegations in the dossier and relied on a longtime Hillary Clinton-supporting public relations executive for other intelligence without telling the FBI, the indictment charges. That PR executive had extensive ties to Russian government officials, even as he provided Danchenko information that landed in the dossier.

For some reason, Comey’s FBI couldn’t detect these serious flaws even though a group of civil lawyers was able to locate several Russians suspected of being Danchenko’s sub-sources, interviewing each of them and securing declarations that the information attributed to them in the dossier was wrong or contrived.

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The FBI and special counsel’s horrible, terrible, miserable week, by Kevin R. Brock

The walls are closing in on the coup plotters behind Russiagate, the Michael Flynn affair, and the FISA court warrant misrepresentations. From Kevin R. Block at thehill.com:

The FBI and special counsel's horrible, terrible, miserable week
© Greg Nash

Albert Einstein had his theory of relativity validated by the atomic bomb. Like it or not, Donald Trump’s widely ridiculed “witch hunt” theory was bolstered by a couple more explosive revelations released last week that once again prove paranoia doesn’t mean they’re not actually out to get you.

The first blast revealed that the FBI investigated the primary source of the Steele dossier years ago for being a Russian spy. Amazingly, we’re just learning this now. The second detonation comes from an FBI agent deeply embedded in the Crossfire Hurricane and special counsel investigations who lambasted the exercise as an effort to “get Trump” rather than follow actual evidence.

Let’s start with the spy-crafted dossier. If it wasn’t clear before, it’s now nearly inescapable that those at the top of the FBI were not “never Trumpers,” they were “sever Trumpers.” The more their actions come into corroborated focus, the more apparent was their desire to decapitate the new administration.

The front office’s Stop Trump tone was set early on by former agent Peter Strzok’s infamous text to former FBI counsel Lisa Page on Aug. 15, 2016 — “I’m afraid we can’t take that risk” — regarding Trump’s chances of being elected president.

Meet the Steele Dossier’s ‘Primary Subsource’: Fabulist Russian From Democrat Think Tank Whose Boozy Past the FBI Ignored, by Paul Sperry

If the man Christopher Steele relied on as a source for his dossier had come under even cursory scrutiny, his material would have been rejected and the whole Russiagate investigation would have been have been shut down. From Paul Sperry at realclearinvestigations.com:

The mysterious “Primary Subsource” that Christopher Steele has long hidden behind to defend his discredited Trump-Russia dossier is a former Brookings Institution analyst — Igor “Iggy” Danchenko, a Russian national whose past includes criminal convictions and other personal baggage ignored by the FBI in vetting him and the information he fed to Steele, according to congressional sources and records obtained by RealClearInvestigations. Agents continued to use the dossier as grounds to investigate President Trump and put his advisers under counter-espionage surveillance.

The 42-year-old Danchenko, who was hired by Steele in 2016 to deploy a network of sources to dig up dirt on Trump and Russia for the Hillary Clinton campaign, was arrested, jailed and convicted years earlier on multiple public drunkenness and disorderly conduct charges in the Washington area and ordered to undergo substance-abuse and mental-health counseling, according to criminal records.

Fiona Hill: She worked at the Brookings Institution with dossier “Primary Subsource” Igor “Iggy” Danchenko (top photo), and testified against President Trump last year during impeachment hearings.
In an odd twist, a 2013 federal case against Danchenko was prosecuted by then-U.S Attorney Rod Rosenstein, who ended up signing one of the FBI’s dossier-based wiretap warrants as deputy attorney general in 2017.

 

Why the Obama intelligence assessment on Russia collusion is under investigation, by John Solomon

There was a criminal conspiracy to depose the president, and it’s now clear who the conspirators were. The main unanswered question is whether or not any of them will see the inside of a courtroom or a prison. From John Solomon at justthenews.com:

John Durham, the special prosecutor, is examining the Intelligence Community Assessment as evidence that conflicts with one of its key conclusions keeps mounting.

recently declassified annex to the Obama administration’s intelligence report on Russian election interference took great pains to make clear it did not use Christopher Steele’s deeply flawed dossier to make any assessments about Moscow’s intentions.

The Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) found Steele’s evidence “highly politically sensitive” and minimally corroborated and thus not worthy of including in its analysis of Russian election interference, the annex stated.

“We have only limited corroboration of the source reporting in this case and did not use it to reach the analytic conclusions of the CIA/FBI/NSA assessment,” the memo added.

In retrospect, the exclusion of the Steele dossier in assessing Russian intentions may have been a consequential mistake, since evidence emerged just two weeks after the assessment was made public in early January 2017 that directly conflicted with one of the ICA’s key conclusions.

The outgoing Obama administration’s intelligence community leaders — FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, NSA Director Mike Rogers and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper — declared on July 5, 2017 that Moscow was specifically trying to help Donald Trump win the 2016 election and to defeat Hillary Clinton.

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‘Corroboration Zero’: An Inspector General’s Report Reveals the Steele Dossier Was Always a Joke, by Matt Taibbi

One of the few honest liberal journalists out there says the Horowitz report confirms that Russiagate was always a fraud. From Matt Taibbi at rollingstone.com:

The report throws water on one “deep state” conspiracy theory of the Russia investigation, but validates complaints about “fake news”

Former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey

Former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The Guardian headline reads: “DOJ Internal watchdog report clears FBI of illegal surveillance of Trump adviser.”

If the report released Monday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz constitutes a “clearing” of the FBI, never clear me of anything. Holy God, what a clown show the Trump-Russia investigation was.

Like the much-ballyhooed report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Horowitz report is a Rorschach test, in which partisans will find what they want to find.

Much of the press is concentrating on Horowitz’s conclusion that there was no evidence of “political bias or improper motivation” in the FBI’s probe of Donald Trump’s Russia contacts, an investigation Horowitz says the bureau had “authorized purpose” to conduct.

Horowitz uses phrases like “serious performance failures,” describing his 416-page catalogue of errors and manipulations as incompetence rather than corruption. This throws water on the notion that the Trump investigation was a vast frame-up.

The Russian collusion hoax meets unbelievable end, by Rep. Devin Nunes

It’s time to put the shoe on the other foot. From Representative Devin Nunes at washingtonexaminer.com:

As the Russia collusion hoax hurtles toward its demise, it’s important to consider how this destructive information operation rampaged through vital American institutions for more than two years, and what can be done to stop such a damaging episode from recurring.

While the hoax was fueled by a wide array of false accusations, misleading leaks of ostensibly classified information, and bad-faith investigative actions by government officials, one vital element was indispensable to the overall operation: the Steele dossier.

Funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democrat National Committee, which hid their payments from disclosure by funneling them through the law firm Perkins Coie, the dossier was a collection of false and often absurd accusations of collusion between Trump associates and Russian officials. These allegations, which relied heavily on Russian sources cultivated by Christopher Steele, were spoon-fed to Trump opponents in the U.S. government, including officials in law enforcement and intelligence.

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Hunting for Golem, by James Howard Kunstler

The long knives are out for Trump, but he may have a few long knives of his own. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

As another president once remarked in a different context — LBJ speaking to a hanger full of grunts in Vietnam — “go on out there, boys, and nail that coonskin to the wall!” That was around the time the war was looking like a lost cause, with 1000 soldiers a month coming home in a box and even the Rotarians of Keokuk, Iowa, starting to doubt the official story of what exactly we thought we were doing over there. It was also, arguably, around the time America stopped being, ahem, “great” and commenced the long, nauseating slide into idiocracy and collapse.

The news media has taken LBJ’s place in today’s Wile E. Coyote phase of our history, cheerleading the congressional hunt for the glittering golden scalp of You-Know-Who in the White House. They got all revved up on Friday in a New York Times front-page salvo with the headline: F.B.I. Opened Inquiry Into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia. The purpose of this blast was to establish the high and grave seriousness of Robert Mueller’s Russia Collusion investigation, because otherwise the yarn has completely shed its credibility. Note: it was around paragraph nine in the story that the team of three Times reporters inserted the sentence that said, “No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials.” The idea, you see, was to simply drag the teetering narrative back onstage to titillate the paper’s Creative Classnik readership who desperately want to nail that Golden Golem of Greatness to the wall, scalp, paunch, tiny hands, and all.

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Judge Forces Fusion GPS To Disclose Murky Details Behind Steele Dossier, by Tyler Durden

It will be interesting to see what Fusion GPS principals have to say about the Steele dossier in a deposition, under oath. Their disclosures, judging by how hard they’ve fought to keep quiet, will come none too willingly. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Opposition research firm Fusion GPS was dealt a major blow on Tuesday when the a federal judge in a lawsuit against BuzzFeed ordered them to answer a wide-ranging series of questions on the infamous Steele dossier, reports the Daily Caller‘s Chuck Ross.

U.S. District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro issued the decision Tuesday in a defamation lawsuit a Russian tech executive filed against BuzzFeed News, which published the dossier on Jan. 10, 2017.

The trial is scheduled to begin in Miami in November.

Ungaro ruled that attorneys for the executive, Aleksej Gubarev, can ask Fusion GPS representatives in a deposition about the firm’s dossier clients, its efforts to verify the dossier, its decision to hire dossier author Christopher Steele and its interactions with government officials and media outlets, including BuzzFeed. –Daily Caller

“This ruling gave us everything that we had hoped for,” Evan Fray-Witzer, a lawyer for Gubarev, told The Daily Caller News Foundation – adding “After a year of trying everything they could think of to avoid being deposed, Fusion is finally going to have to sit down and answer our questions.”

Aleksej Gubarev, owner of global tech firm XBT Holding – which owns Dallas-based Webzilla, is suing BuzzFeed for defamation, claiming they failed to properly investigate the dossier’s allegations before publishing the 35-page document – which include the claim that Gubarev was “recruited under duress” by Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB.

To continue reading: Judge Forces Fusion GPS To Disclose Murky Details Behind Steele Dossier