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Steele Dossier Intrigue
In August 2007, it all seemed so easy. Barack Obama announced on the campaign trail that, if elected president, he would banish backroom intrigue with an unprecedented commitment to transparency. By 2016, that promise had been abandoned, as the Obama administration erected barriers to public access to information that surpassed those of previous administrations. That veil of secrecy has been only partially lifted in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible Russian involvement in the 2016 election allegedly in collaboration with the Trump campaign.
On this score, I agree with the Hoover Institution’s Paul Gregory, who has extensively studied Russian propaganda tactics, that the Russians knew that they could not influence the outcome of the election with a few well-timed tweets. But they understood that a disinformation campaign could raise the specter of collusion with either party, which would then weaken the presidency no matter which candidate won. So far, this strategy has worked brilliantly. We now know that the Democratic National Committee, through the research firm Fusion GPS, financed the efforts of British spy Christopher Steele to dredge up dirt, contained in his famous dossier, on a supposedly deep Trump-Russia connection in the run-up to the 2016 election. Opposition research is part of the grand American political tradition, and this tidbit from the opening line of Steele’s dossier was an intended bombshell: “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance.”
We also now know from the publication of the Republican memo earlier this month, as well as from the subsequent Grassley-Graham letter, that some information that was contained in that explosive dossier made its way into the hands of the FBI—which, according to the Grassley-Graham letter, “relied heavily” upon it in its applications to the Foreign Intelligence Court to continue the surveillance of Carter Page, a low-level Trump campaign volunteer, who had some previous contacts with the Russians. Exactly how the dossier was used in the application—and whether the dossier was quoted—is not clear. The initial FBI investigation to monitor Page went as far back as 2013. The previous applications signed either by James Comey or Deputy Director Andrew McCabe have prompted no criticism. However, to get a fourth FISA warrant, as the FBI did in October 2016 on the heels of the election, the bureau had to show with fresh information that there was probable cause to believe that Page was both acting on behalf of some foreign nation—i.e. Russia—and engaged in some form of criminal activity. The FBI relied on the Steele dossier in an effort to close the gaps in its probable cause case.
But this raises some questions. First, why did the FBI think it was necessary to include any portion of Steele’s opposition research in its affidavit? If the information from the previous investigations sufficed, why include what was clearly a flawed and biased document? If the dossier were essential, then it should have been vetted, especially because the FBI knew that the information from the Steele dossier was obtained from the Democratic National Committee. And yet, it concealed that fact in its FISA application. The FBI, it seems, also knew when it submitted its application to the FISA court that Steele had talked to the media and was a principal source for the well-known story Michael Isikoff published on Yahoo in September 2016—which the FBI deceptively cited in its warrant against Page, even though it knew that none other than Steele himself had supplied the information for that supposedly independent source of corroboration.
The standard Democratic defense of this—that the matter was non-controversial because Page had previously been under surveillance even before the Steele dossier surfaced—will not do. Quite the opposite: FISA warrants are limited to 90-day periods to make sure that the FBI is kept on a short leash. The most obvious explanation for the inclusion of material from the Steele dossier was that the FBI had run dry on its earlier investigations, and now needed to pump new life into its inquiry in order to renew the warrant, for which this memo would be the answer. Even if the FBI had obtained reliable information from Steele, then a public servant, in an earlier probe—of the scandal-ridden world soccer association FIFA—the contents of the Steele dossier were so erratic, disjointed, and undocumented that Paul Gregory pronounced it a “fake” on its face because its content was obviously fabricated.
On this point, it does not matter if, as the Washington Post’s left-leaning columnist Greg Sargent insists, that the FBI had other information that tended to support its application, including material “gathered earlier by the FBI about former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos.” There is no reason to believe that any information collected in that venture was relevant to an inquiry into Carter Page, absent any claim of a connection between the two men. And worse still, the best that the Mueller probe could come up with against Papadopoulos—a fringe figure in the Trump campaign— was a guilty plea on October 5, 2017, for lying to the FBI. But that plea does nothing to establish that any contacts Papadopoulos had with the Russians made their way back into the Trump camp. Nothing less, though, would be required to make a substantive charge against him—let alone charges sufficient to bolster the warrant issued against Page. One of the many things that we definitely do not know is whether the substantive investigations of Papadopoulos and Page are continuing. But the longer these investigations go on in secrecy, the weaker the argument grows that the FBI had sufficient independent information in October 2016 to obtain a warrant against Page from the FISA court.
To be sure, the FISA application that relied on the Steele dossier did say that some political sources were involved in the case, without naming the Clinton campaign. Unfortunately, that partial disclosure only makes matters worse. A half-truth in a setting that requires full disclosure is deliberately deceptive and akin to a complete lie. It is no feather in the cap of the FISA court that it took a passive view of this application, given the elusive reference to its political origins. Its response might have been quite different if the Clinton connection had been made explicit. The Clinton campaign was known to be a strong top-down operation; so the FISA court could have asked the simple question of whether Hillary Clinton or those close to her either knew of or authorized Steele to collect that information. It could also have asked what her role was, as an Obama administration official, in all of the high-level decisions that followed, including its submission to the FBI and its subsequent publication. But we know nothing about how the Clinton campaign and DNC operated during the entire investigation.
In addition, it is also fair to ask how much President Obama or key officials in the White House knew of the decisions that the FBI made with respect to its warrant application. There is now information that FBI lawyer Lisa Page revealed to Peter Strzok, the FBI’s deputy head of counter-intelligence, that President Obama “wanted to know everything we’re doing.” Unfortunately, “everything” is a capacious word that could include activities undertaken to secure a political advantage for Clinton. The story becomes even more troublesome if we consider that Comey likely knew that both Page and Strzok, like Steele, were strong anti-Trump partisans. That raises the question of whether and how Comey or Obama should have double-checked the claims raised by Page and Strzok to see that they did not stray beyond their national security mission.
What happens next? President Trump did not do a public service when he refused to allow the publication of the Democratic response to the earlier Republican memo on the ground that further redaction was needed to prevent the leakage of classified information—which looks like the same lame excuse that the Democrats and the FBI offered against the publication of both the House memo and the Grassley-Graham letter. There is absolutely nothing in the material thus far published that refers to either sources or methods of intelligence that could compromise the operation of the system. It is most unlikely that the Democratic response contains anything highly sensitive, given that the House Committee voted unanimously to release it.
The public needs the information. Right now, we have tolerably good information on the use of the Steele dossier to obtain the October 2016 warrant to continue surveillance of Carter Page. But there is a huge gap concerning who in the Obama administration and Clinton campaign knew what allegations in the Steele dossier were true (or not) at the time they acted. The most likely assumption is that nearly everyone involved in the investigation understood the gaps, inaccuracies, and falsehoods inherent in Steele’s document. The burden thus rests on the DNC, Clinton, Obama, and Comey to establish their ignorance. The trail of information leading back to the Trump White House has grown cold. In contrast, the trail to the entire Democratic establishment looks uncomfortably hot.
© 2018 by the Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University
Published in Law, Politics
Phony FISA warrants designed to weaponize a foreign intelligence agency against an ongoing Presidential Campaign and then continuing the attack in an attempt to destroy a sitting American President. Makes the break-in at the Watergate look like an Easter Egg Hunt by the Cub Scouts.
Regards,
Jim
Obama, H. Clinton and all their minions are liars.
I like this part:
“To be sure, the FISA application that relied on the Steele dossier did say that some political sources were involved in the case, without naming the Clinton campaign. Unfortunately, that partial disclosure only makes matters worse. A half-truth in a setting that requires full disclosure is deliberately deceptive and akin to a complete lie.”
And, my question is, what is the Judge’s responsibilities here? Why wouldn’t he push back on the footnote. Did he/she even note it? My suspicion is, for the most part, they simply make sure they paperwork is filled out correctly rather than challenge the contents. While I do also suspect some judges are more demanding than others. I suspect most are glorified rubber stamps. And, there’s pressure to be a rubber stamp. You don’t want to be the judge that says no and then a bomb goes off.
Mr. Comey has been playing fast and loose in his sworn testimony before Congress. The Daily Caller has correctly called out his deception in conveniently not disclosing to Congress that he met with Obama, Rice, Sally Yates, VP Biden – after Trump was elected on January 5, 2017 about the Russian election meddling issue and seemed to be willing to withhold information from the President-elect if Obama deemed it necessary to do so. Comey testified under oath that he only met with Obama twice, and the meeting noted above is not one of them. Where is the criminal referral on Comey? For leaking FBI documents to the press…for misleading a FISC tribunal…for lying to Congress? Has Mueller granted him immunity from prosecution? Have his statements to Mueller been reviewed for further misleading or false allegations? Will they ever be?
I would say the “promise” was abandoned well before his election victory. Maybe the thing to say is, “That promise was revealed to have been abandoned by 2016, and well into 2017.”
Still, a great post as always . . .
Personally, I find that Andrew McCarthy at NRO, Byron York at The Washington Examiner, and Lee Smith at Tablet Magazine, along with occasional input from Sara A. Carter, collectively serve as the most reliable and insightful resources about this whole scandal.
I’m unsure what to make of blogger “Sundance” at the Conservative Tree House site — while sometimes compelling, Sundance’s posts invariably spur me to wonder:
a) sourced from where/whom?;
b) much of the time, is Sundance essentially overthinking things, and — at the fringes of the most apocalyptic of the suppositions and connections offered up in his/her posts — succumbing to seeing shadows and stratagems (both good and bad) where none really exist?;
and
c) I realize that the McCarthy/York/Smith (/Carter) bar for willingness to cite reports along the lines conveyed by Sundance/CTH is quite high (actual journalistic integrity will do that to people), and I realize that — notwithstanding this implied standard — sometimes blogs deemed a bit (or a lot) “out there” occasionally turn out to be hawking assertions and sources that, eventually, turn out to be substantially on the money in this saga, so how can any reader reconcile the two (the high bar and the daring-assertion blog posts)?
I know I may have to resign myself to the simple response “No way to figure any of this out with any certainty” across the board (vis-a-vis “a,” “b,” and “c”) — but I’m also hoping that someone here on Ricochet is possessed of the perspicacity, the experience, and dare I say the confident humility to suggest a plausibly worthwhile route through the fog.
It was already abandoned by the time ObamaCare was voted on in March, 2010.
And most people in Washington DC “knew” that Hillary would win. This fact increases the desire of the judge to act as the rubber stamp.
In major areas of the country, the DNC controls the outcomes of the ballot counting. For instance, witness the activist group in San Diego who was able to secure attorneys to work pro bono on their case that the June 2016 San Diego primary of HRC vs Sanders was rigged. In this one case, the court did not demand that Sanders make himself apart of the case. It went on to be heard, and the final court ruling was that the DNC had flipped votes from Sanders to HRC, giving her the victory. There are at least 12 to 16 other voting districts in the nation that wanted the results of the Primary subjected to a court case, but with judges ruling that Sanders must participate, or there would be no “standing” the cases were not heard in court. (Mr Sanders, despite all his glorious proclamations of being progressive, has never helped voting activists regarding the Primary.)
We all know that had HRC won, a great many things would have been swept under the national carpet. Among the most important of those items is the fact that the Obama Crime family and the Clinton Crime family spied on a Presidential candidate. That one item of itself should send shivers down the spines of everyone in America who cares about our being a free nation.
In America, we really need to go back to paper ballots. (And not as is the casein Calif., paper ballots that are then no longer counted by electronic machinery.)
Obamacare was 100% lies to wipe out employer-based insurance and to force single-payer. Along the way to that it is a regressively financed redistribution scheme on the productive middle class via insurance premiums, fat deductibles etc.
Nunes suggested on Sunday that the Democrats purposefully injected sources and methods in their memo, knowing that it would be held up for redactions, and giving them grounds for complaining about a hold-up.
I do not think such tactics are beneath them. I suspect Nunes is correct.
There is not a single person in the Obama admin that has a shred of honor, decency, or ethics. All roads lead to Barry and the Wormtongues surrounding him.
What is the purpose of the Democrats’ response memo? They have not answered anything truthfully up to this point – in fact, all of the investigations, IRS, Benghazi, Uranium One, Hillary’s staff, computers, and on and on have been a large revolving door of lies and deceit – when any of those involved were asked to answer questions before Congress, they all pleated the 5th – Our country’s politics are starting to resemble socialistic strongholds in Eastern Europe and elsewhere – they’re actually making those look tame.
Sowing confusion among the voters.
This places too much faith in the promise in the first place. The Left and Democrats (but I repeat) use whatever-it-takes means to reach their utopian ends. “Transparency” is a buzzword — a sales pitch. It means about as much as “scandal-free.”
I think the good professor is projecting his own decency on people totally undeserving of such good faith.
A new piece of information has been brought to light by Lee Smith of Tablet Magazine.
The new information is Smith’s speculation based on his journalistic investigation that the entire Trump/Russia collusion narrative appears to have been put into play by the CIA’s John Brennan.
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/255020/how-cia-director-john-brennan-targeted-james-comey
Lee Smith also appears on today’s Michael in the Morning podcast with Michael Graham.
As if this debacle were not complex enough already…
If the Democrats really had information in their memo that cast doubt on the Republican version, they would have gone to great lengths to make sure there was no classified information in it that would give Trump an excuse to block its release,
If the memo contains classified information that would prevent its release, then the Democrats are either idiots, or they put it there to force Trump to block it, thereby preventing the public from seeing that it was a charade.
Frankly, the latter sounds more likely. This is a classic political trick: you make headlines by claiming you have explosive evidence that contradicts your opponent, then you shuck and jive and scheme to never release it. You are counting on the original accusation to be remembered, and for your loyal internet fanboys to trot out the existance of the ‘damning evidence’ constantly as a rebuttal to the other side, and hope that eventually everyone just forgets that you never had any information in the first place.
For a good example of this tactic, see Harry Reid’s accusation about Romney’s income taxes. He claimed to have evidence, refused to release it, and then long after the election proudly admitted that he just lied about it. He was so confident that there would be no price to pay that he felt free to brag about it in public.
Unfortunately, I think this game can only be played by Democrats, since they are the only ones with a lap dog media that won’t look too closely behind the curtain, and who can be counted on to splash the allegations on the front page, but bury subsequent corrections on page sixteen in small print.
Let’s not forget that Harry Reid pulled the same thing in relation to the dossier, claiming that the FBI had explosive evidence of the Trump campaign colluding with Russia, and demanded that the public had a right to know!
It was political theater, but the press dutifully ran with it, helping bolster the fake collusion story.
In 2013 Page was enrolled as an undercover employee of the FBI and he was described as such in Federal court documents filed in March 2016.
That is a rather strange and I believe counterfactual statement. The Washington Post has reported that the initial FISA warrant was obtained in October 2016:
Andrew McCarthy referred to the issue as follows in National Review:
And, apparently, three subsequent renewals of that warrant following the 90 day period covered by such a warrant were obtained, which would carry the monitoring forward into October 2017.
I don’t – am unqualified to – question Professor Epstein’s knowledge of the law but to the extent that his analysis depends on the time frame for the warrants, I respectfully suggest that he revisit the issue.
No, Drew. That is the Russians’ purpose. The Democrats could never have the same purpose as the Russians.
Unless they do.
Yeah, because nobody has ever faked a paper ballot. Ask Norm Coleman.
No, that’s not the reason.
This wasn’t true when the FISA court denied the first attempt to target the Trump campaign in July 2016.
(emphasis added to show my objection).