From the first moment I read the version of the Steele Dossier posted by BuzzFeed in January 2017, assuming the dossier is what it purports to be, I thought that it was the product of Russian disinformation. You’d have to be a fool not to see it. How could CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and all the rest who worked with it somehow overlook that? Steele’s Russian sources are dubious on the face of the dossier. Brennan and Comey had their own uses for Russian disinformation.
That is the question I raised when the Attorney General declassified and partially unredacted most of three Horowitz report footnotes on the Carter Page FISA warrant applications last week. I embedded a copy of the Attorney General’s letter and accompanying document in “Steele’s Russian disinformation.”
Now John Solomon adds to the picture based on newly declassified notes (embedded below) in the Just the News report “FBI repeatedly warned Steele dossier fed by Russian misinformation, Clinton supporter.” Below is a hot take via Catherine Herridge and Undercover Huber.
— Undercover Huber (@JohnWHuber) April 15, 2020
The newly declassified footnotes have been released at the urging of Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson. They jointly issued a statement quoted by Solomon: “As we can see from these now-declassified footnotes in the IG’s report, Russian intelligence was aware of the dossier before the FBI even began its investigation and the FBI had reports in hand that their central piece of evidence was most likely tainted with Russian disinformation.”
To put it slightly differently, James Comey’s FBI appears to have colluded with Vladimir Putin and his stooges via the Clinton presidential campaign, Glenn Simpson/Fusion GPS, and Christopher Steele. Or did Comey et al. think Christopher Steele picked up the phone and had a heart-to-heart with the past and present Russian officials who supposedly gave him the good stuff?
Attorney General Barr put it this way last week: “My own view is that the evidence shows that we’re not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness. There is something far more troubling here, and we’re going to get to the bottom of it….I think what happened to him was one of the greatest travesties in American history. Without any basis they started this investigation of his campaign, and even more concerning, actually is what happened after the campaign, a whole pattern of events while he was president. So I — to sabotage the presidency, and I think that – or at least have the effect of sabotaging the presidency.”
04-15-20 ODNI Declassified … by Scott Johnson on Scribd
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