It's official: The dossier was malarkey
By: Byron York
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The new report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz is an absolutely damning indictment of the Steele dossier.
The dossier, compiled by the former British spy Christopher Steele during the 2016 campaign, was a collection of damaging and unfounded rumors about candidate Donald Trump. It was paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign and overseen by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS. It was never verified, and some of it was laughably far-fetched from the very beginning.
Still, the dossier's tales were taken seriously by officials in the highest ranks of the FBI — then-director James Comey and top deputy Andrew McCabe. In January 2017, Comey briefed President-elect Trump on the dossier's most sensational allegations. The briefing provided a hook for some news organizations to tell the public of the dossier's existence, and then, days later, publish the entire document.
The reporting did terrible damage to a new president as he took office. And now, the Horowitz report definitively shows that it was all garbage.
The report makes clear the dossier never had even a shred of credibility. Steele had no firsthand knowledge of anything in the document. He got all his information secondhand or thirdhand from sources who themselves heard things secondhand or thirdhand.
When the FBI managed to track down one of Steele's main sources, the source was amazed that Steele took the information so seriously. It was "word of mouth and hearsay," the source said, "conversation ... with friends over beers." The source said he takes what his own sources tell him "with a grain of salt," and that it was, in the end, "just talk."
Nevertheless, Steele, along with his Democratic sponsors and the highest levels of U.S. law enforcement, used those conversations with friends over beers to throw American politics into chaos and do irreparable harm to a newly elected president.
Look at three of the dossier's most incendiary charges:
1) The "well-developed conspiracy" between Trump and Russia. The dossier claimed that Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort used low-level foreign policy adviser Carter Page as an intermediary to the Russians in a plot to weaken Clinton. But when the FBI interviewed Steele's "sub-source" — that is, a person in Russia who gathered gossip from others and passed it on to Steele — agents heard an account that was "not consistent with and, in fact, contradicted the allegations of a 'well-developed conspiracy.'" In a secretly recorded conversation with an informant, Page said he "literally never met" or "said one word to" Manafort and complained that Manafort never responded to Page's emails. And then, according to the report, Steele himself told the FBI that his source was a "boaster" who "may engage in some embellishment." Nevertheless, Steele passed on the "well-developed conspiracy" allegation — the foundation of the entire Trump-Russia collusion fabrication — and the FBI, for a while, believed it.
2) The Carter Page bribe. The dossier reported that during a July 2016 trip to Moscow, Page met with Igor Sechin, head of the Russian energy giant Rosneft and a close associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Sechin, the dossier said, offered Page a huge bribe, in the form of a multibillion-dollar brokerage interest, to persuade Trump, should he become president, to end U.S. sanctions. The FBI talked to Steele's subsource, who said he got information from another source via text message, and the texts never said anything about a brokerage offer to Page. "We reviewed the texts," the inspector general report says, "and did not find any discussion of a bribe, whether as an interest in Rosneft itself or a 'brokerage.'" Somewhere along the line, the Page "bribe" was created out of whole cloth. Beyond being false, it was, of course, enormously harmful to Page's reputation.
3) The pee tape. The most sensational and salacious part of the dossier was the allegation that businessman Trump watched prostitutes perform a kinky sex act in a Moscow hotel room in 2013 while Russian spy cameras recorded the whole thing. It didn't happen. The report says the subsource involved in that story told the FBI he warned Steele the story was "rumor and speculation," which the subsource had not been able to substantiate. It had not been "confirmed" by a Western staff member at the hotel, as Steele claimed. And then this: The subsource told the FBI "that some of the information, such as allegations about Trump's sexual activities, were statements he heard made in 'jest.'" It was all a joke.
Nevertheless, the nation's top intelligence chiefs were so excited by the sex story that they decided Comey should give that briefing to Trump in January 2017. Then, news of the briefing leaked, which led to the leak of the entire dossier, which raised the Trump-Russia affair to a new and higher level.
And of course, it was not known at the time, but the FBI used the dossier to persuade a court to authorize a wiretap of Page.
Those were just the two most shameful episodes in the shameful history of the dossier. Now that the Horowitz report has shown it all to be bunk, it's hard to say what should happen now. Certainly, those responsible for creating, validating, and spreading the lies — Steele, Comey, Fusion GPS, and others — should suffer disgrace. But for those hurt in the affair, reputations cannot be easily restored. The disruption to the nation's public life cannot be measured. And the damage cannot be undone.
Byron York
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Another thing the Horowitz Report has done is to finally confirm that the Steele Dossier was complete Bull Shit. For most of us, we knew that for a long, long time.
Amen to that!
Notwithstanding this news, are the Democrats not taking the impeachment even further? Burying themselves 6 feet under isn't deep enough? Will the American electorate be so obtuse that they won't permit themselves to see it?
The mindset of the progressive liberal left only allows for them to drag this out to the bloody end so long as it fits their particular narrow minded hate filled natrative.
In a sane world, this would be the end of the Putin-Trump nonsense. But then again, its been clear since the very beginning years ago that the claim that Trump conspired with Putin to steal the 2016 election was fanciful garbage, at least to those of us capable of thinking critically. One of the first "bombshells" the Washington Post ran with back in 2016, soon after the election, when the hysteria was just beginning was their story that Kushner and the Russian ambassador were looking to set up a back channel for communications. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to understand that if the Trump was looking to set up a back channel AFTER the election with Russia, then one didn't exist BEFORE the election, which would have been necessary for any collusion to take place.. Yet, that "bombshell" was pimped by the MSM as an excuse to start the Trump-Russia colluded to steal the election false narrative, despite it actually disproving that any collusion existed.
And it's continued for years. With every indictment Mueller handed down, it became even more obvious to any one who read the indictments and could think logically that no conspiracy existed. Yet the progressives clung to fantastical claims of "secret evidence" and blatantly misrepresented the nature of the indictments and the actual contained there in as "proof" of a conspiracy that existed only in their fevered minds. Even now, months after Mueller demonstrated there was no conspiracy or coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign, Putin's useful idiots still pedal their conspiracy narratives like loons 9/11 truthers or those who claim FDR orchestrated Pearl Harbor. Their irrational hatred of Trump is so strong, and their need for him to be guilty is so correspondingly desperate, that they are immune to facts and even reality itself. They hate Trump, therefore he is guilty of something, or everything.
In a sane world, the Mueller report paired with yesterday's IG report would end the lies about Trump conspiring with Putin. Certainly, for the rational among us they have. The Steele dossier has now been comprehensively and publicly exposed as a fraud, Mueller and a team of Democratic attorneys found no evidence of any coordination between Russian and Trump despite their desperate efforts to do so leaving not a single rational basis for persisting with the debunked slurs about Trump and Russia. Yet we know, even now, the shameless left wing moon bats will keep spreading lies, immune to facts and reality.
Final thoughts:
I seeded this to counter the few progressives still trying to defend the Steele Dossier as credible. It never was. The FBI knew it yet used it to get FISA warrants.
When necessary I will re-open this seed.