As we now shift from the “witch hunt” against Trump to ‘investigating the investigators’ who spied on him – remember this; Donald Trump was supposed to lose the 2016 election by almost all accounts. And had Hillary won, as expected, none of this would have seen the light of day.
We wouldn’t know that a hyper-partisan FBI had spied on the Trump campaign, as Attorney General William Barr put it during his April 10 Congressional testimony.
We wouldn’t know that a Clinton-linked operative, Joseph Mifsud, seeded Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos with the rumor that Russia had ‘Dirt’ on Hillary Clinton – which would later be coaxed out of Papadopoulos by a Clinton-linked Australian ambassador, Alexander Downer, and that this apparent ‘setup’ would be the genesis of the FBI’s “operation crossfire hurricane” operation against the Trump campaign.
We wouldn’t know about the role of Fusion GPS – the opposition research firm hired by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to commission the Steele dossier. Fusion is also linked to the infamous Trump Tower meeting, and hired Nellie Ohr – the CIA-linked wife of the DOJ’s then-#4 employee, Bruce Ohr. Nellie fed her husband Bruce intelligence she had gathered against Trump while working for Fusion, according to transcripts of her closed-door Congressional testimony.
And if not for reporting by the Daily Caller‘s Chuck Ross and others, we wouldn’t know that the FBI sent a longtime spook, Stefan Halper, to infiltrate and spy on the Trump campaign – after the Obama DOJ paid him over $400,000 right before the 2016 US election (out of more than $1 million he received while Obama was president).
According to the New York Times, the tables are turning, starting with the Steele Dossier.
Now the dossier — financed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, and compiled by the former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele — is likely to face new, possibly harsh scrutiny from multiple inquiries. –NYT
While Congressional Republicans have vowed to investigate, the DOJ’s Inspector General is considering whether the FBI improperly relied on the dossier when they used it to apply for a surveillance warrant on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. The IG also wants to know about Steele’s sources and whether the FBI disclosed any doubts as to the veracity of the dossier.
Attorney General Barr, meanwhile, said he will review the FBI’s conduct in the Russia investigation after saying the agency spied on the Trump campaign.
Doubts over the dossier
The FBI’s scramble to vet the dossier’s claims are well known. According to an April, 2017 NYT report, the FBI agreed to pay Steele $50,000 for “solid corroboration” of his claims. Steele was apparently unable to produce satisfactory evidence – and was ultimately not paid for his efforts:
Mr. Steele met his F.B.I. contact in Rome in early October, bringing a stack of new intelligence reports. One, dated Sept. 14, said that Mr. Putin was facing “fallout” over his apparent involvement in the D.N.C. hack and was receiving “conflicting advice” on what to do.
The agent said that if Mr. Steele could get solid corroboration of his reports, the F.B.I. would pay him $50,000for his efforts, according to two people familiar with the offer. Ultimately, he was not paid. –NYT
Still, the FBI used the dossier to obtain the FISA warrant on Page – while the document itself was heavily shopped around to various media outlets. The late Sen. John McCain provided a copy to Former FBI Director James Comey, who already had a version, and briefed President Trump on the salacious document. Comey’s briefing to Trump was then used by CNN and BuzzFeed to justify reporting on and publishing the dossier following the election.
Let’s not forget that in October, 2016, both Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman John Podesta promoted the conspiracy theory that a secret Russian server was communicating with Trump Tower.
