The Other McCain

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The Carter Page FISA Documents: The Steele Dossier, the Leaks, the Witch Hunt

Posted on | July 22, 2018 | Comments Off on The Carter Page FISA Documents: The Steele Dossier, the Leaks, the Witch Hunt

Here are some headlines from September and October 2016:

U.S. intel officials probe ties
between Trump adviser and Kremlin
— Michael Isikoff, Yahoo News, Sept. 23, 2016

Michael Isikoff has the latest tale
of people with questionable ties
to Russia within the Trump campaign
— Washington Post, Sept. 23, Sept. 23, 2016

Donald Trump advisor meetings
with Russian officials being investigated
— New York Daily News, Sept. 23, 2016

U.S. Officials Probe Ties
Between Trump Adviser and Russia
— CNN, Sept. 26, 2016

Who is Carter Page?
— Politico, Oct. 6, 2016

Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees
No Clear Link to Russia
— New York Times, Oct. 31, 2016

All of these articles, published in the closing weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign, were the result of (a) the infamous Steele dossier, created for Fusion GPS under contract with Democrats, and (b) unauthorized leaks from within the FBI and other federal agencies. We know that senior FBI officials were biased against Donald Trump, that the Mueller investigation has made no charges of wrongdoing by Carter Page, and that “Source #1” for getting a FISA warrant for surveillance of Page was the Steele dossier:

Given that most of the application that Barack Obama’s Department of Justice submitted to the FISA court to obtain a surveillance order on Carter Page has been redacted, what we can say about the application is limited. Still, a few things stand out.
First, the FISA application expresses confidence that Page was an agent of the Russian government, and engaged in criminal activity . . .
But Page has never been charged with anything. Accordingly, the least we can say is that Obama’s FBI and DOJ were wrong.
Second, the application’s description of Christopher Steele and the provenance of his dossier was misleading at best . . .
The “identified U.S. person” is Glenn Simpson, the head of Fusion GPS. Source #1 is Christopher Steele. The DOJ’s statement that “the FBI speculates that the identified U.S person [Simpson] was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s [Trump’s] campaign” could only have been an intentional effort to deceive the FISA judge. The FBI was perfectly well aware that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC hired Simpson through their lawyers, and the purpose of doing so was to attack candidate Donald Trump. References to “speculation” about “likely” motives are entirely dishonest.
Third, the application relies to an astonishing degree on anti-Trump news stories published in the Democratic Party press. Does the FBI really get surveillance warrants on the basis of partisan press accounts? Apparently so.

FBI director James Comey and deputy attorney general Sally Yates signed the FISA warrant application, and we should therefore not be surprised that Trump fired both of them. Chuck Ross at the Daily Caller:

The dossier is the first piece of evidence cited in the FISA application section laying out the allegations that Page coordinated with Russian government officials on election-related “influence activities.”
That section cites information from “Source #1” who alleged that during a trip to Moscow in July 2016, Page met secretly with two sanctioned Kremlin insiders, Igor Sechin and Igor Diveykin, as part of a collusion scheme involving the Trump campaign.
The source appears to be Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the dossier.
Steele also alleged in the dossier that Page worked with Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to exchange information with Russian operatives. Page has vehemently denied the dossier’s allegations, and says he has never spoken to Manafort. He also says he has never met Sechin and Diveykin while denying that he is a Russian agent.
FBI officials have told Congress that investigators had not corroborated the dossier’s allegations when it was cited in the FISA applications. But the FISA application shows that the FBI and Justice Department believed Steele to be a “reliable” source. Steele has been compensated for other work by the FBI, and his intelligence has been used in other criminal proceedings, the FISA application says.

The Steele dossier and media leaks were the only basis for this surveillance, so far as we know, and more than a year into Mueller’s investigation, there has been zero evidence of wrongdoing by Page.

All of this indicates that the Obama administration wrongly targeted a U.S. citizen for surveillance, in service to a partisan effort to discredit the Republican presidential candidate, by giving a semblance of official credibility to the Steele dossier that Democrats paid for. Note that the liberal media were willing participants in all this, repeatedly publicizing the federal “probe” of the “Trump adviser” and his Russian “ties.”

This is the real “Russian collusion” scandal — the Deep State colluding with the “fake news” media in an effort to help Hillary Clinton win and, when that failed, working to sabotage Trump’s administration by creating the appearance that his victory was illegitimate.



 

Category: Corruption, Donald Trump, Media Bias, Russia

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