Smoking Gun: Steele Dossier, Russia Collusion, the Investigation IS the Cover-Up.

Hot off the presses at Real Clear Investigations is this utterly damning report that clears away any remaining camouflage or supposed support for the Steele Dossier. This is game, set, and match, provided the reporting holds up. So when Gen. Michael Flynn tweeted that this is a Big Deal, I took note and clicked the link.

The top analyst [FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten], assigned to the FBI’s Russia “collusion” case, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, admitted under oath that neither he nor his team of half a dozen intelligence analysts could confirm any of the allegations in the [Steele] dossier — including ones the FBI nonetheless included in several warrant applications as evidence to establish legal grounds to electronically monitor a former Trump adviser for almost a year.

This guy was supposed to provide validation of at least something in the dossier for it to be presented as evidence for warrants -- that's his job -- so that the FBI could begin its domestic spying on the Trump campaign. Without any corroboration, the FBI should never have presented a request to a judge, because there was nothing to stand on.

This doesn't mean that the FBI was responsible for proving Russian collusion to investigate it, which would be silly. Instead, the FBI has a duty to have at least some basis for wire-tapping a Presidential campaign. An analogy is the way that prosecutors/investigators don't get warrants signed for hunches -- they must present evidence, and that evidence had better stand up to scrutiny. Therefore, the duty is on the prosecuting/investigating side to validate the evidence before they include it in a request for a warrant. No evidence, no warrant!

Former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who personally signed and approved the final application, has testified that without the dossier, the warrants could not have been obtained. -- Ibid.

Notably, the campaign thus spied upon was the party not in power, that is, the party not currently giving orders to executive branch bodies such as the DoJ and the FBI. Perhaps I am wrong and this is not the strong case it appears to be, but Gen. Flynn seems to think this is sufficient to tweet-shout at newly-installed House Speaker Johnson, "Do Something!!!"

After years of digging, Auten conceded that the only material in the dossier that he could verify was information that was already publicly available, such as names, entities, and positions held by persons mentioned in the document. -- Ibid.

When stated this way, it sounds like it might be something, but this is literally nothing. That's the information off of people's office doors. Here's how the nothing just keeps rolling:

[Auten and his team] could not corroborate any of the allegations of Trump-Russia “collusion" in the dossier, and actually debunked many of them — including the rumor, oft-repeated by the media, that Trump attorney Michael Cohen flew to Prague in the summer of 2016 to secretly huddle with Kremlin agents over an alleged Trump-Russia plot to hack the election. They determined that Cohen had never even been to the Czech Republic. -- Ibid.

Oh yeah, there's more. A lot more. Read the whole thing. Gen Flynn did, and he's mad as Hell:

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