Thanks to the Trump administration’s continued efforts to declassify documents related to the bogus Obama-era investigation and surveillance of the president’s 2016 campaign, we’re learning just how far the politicized FBI and Justice Department went to target a political rival.
According to The Daily Caller, just-revealed documents show that rogue FBI agents left out key details about former British spy Christopher Steele and his garbage ‘dossier’ from a noteworthy Intelligence Community Assessment provided to the incoming Trump administration regarding alleged high-powered Russian election interference.
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The two-page document, which was declassified by newly appointed Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe “describes Steele’s allegations about possible links between the Trump campaign and Russian government,” the Daily Caller reported. “It says that an FBI source — Steele — had provided information thought to be credible regarding Russia’s goals in meddling in the election.”
However:
…[T]he document, which was attached as an annex to a Jan. 7, 2017, Intelligence Community Assessment, failed to disclose information that the FBI had regarding Steele that likely would have raised questions about his motives for investigating the Trump campaign, as well as the validity of his allegations.
According to a recent Justice Department inspector general’s report, Steele informed his FBI handlers on Oct. 3, 2016, that a principle sub-source for the dossier was a “boaster” and “egoist.”
Unreliable, in other words.
In addition, some of Steele’s former colleagues had informed FBI counterintelligence agents in December 2016 that the ex-British spy at times demonstrated poor judgment, the IG’s report noted.
In addition, the intelligence assessment does not reveal that the FBI had severed its ties with Steele on Nov. 1, 2016, following his unauthorized contact with the media. What’s also left out is that the media ultimately acquired the information in Steele’s dossier from the former spy himself.
The Daily Caller notes further:
The retired spy met with numerous journalists in the weeks and months leading up to the 2016 election. He was the primary source for a Yahoo! News article published Sept. 23, 2016, and a Mother Jones story published on Oct. 31, 2016.
While the annex stated that Steele produced the dossier on behalf of a private client, it does not identify the client as the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign.
Perkins Coie, the law firm for the DNC and Team Clinton, hired opposition research firm Fusion GPS to investigate Donald Trump in April 2016. Fusion GPS in turn hired Steele.
The annex leaves out all of that information.
Rather, it says an FBI source volunteered “highly politically sensitive information” during the summer of 2016 about “Russian influence efforts aimed at the U.S. presidential election.:
“We have only limited corroboration of the source’s reporting in this case and did not use it to reach the analytic conclusions of the CIA/FBI/NSA assessment,” reads the annex.
The newly declassified annex notes that “some of the FBI source’s reporting is consistent with the judgments in this assessment.”
And let’s recall that the CIA didn’t want the bogus dossier included in the ICA being provided to the incoming Trump administration, according to the IG’s report.
Then why was it? Because then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe argued it was “credible.”
