Extracts from a subsource

Kim Strassel has tweeted out the Wall Street Journal editorial “The FBI’s dossier deceit.” It bears the hallmarks of her excellent work on the Russia hoax.

The editorial is based on the declassification via the Senate Judiciary Committee of the FBI’s interviews over three days in January 2017 with the primary source for the infamous Steele dossier. Strassel reminds us: “The bureau used the dossier’s accusations as the basis for four warrants to surveil Trump aide Carter Page during the 2016 campaign and early months of the Trump Presidency.” Long story short: “The 57 pages of notes from the source interviews make clear that the FBI knew the dossier was junk as early as January 2017.”

Strassel elaborates:

Former British spy Christopher Steele, whose dirt-digging was financed by the Hillary Clinton campaign, based nearly all of his dossier allegations on information from one unidentified “primary subsource.” The FBI didn’t corroborate the Steele dossier’s claims prior to its first application to surveil Mr. Page in October 2016, and it didn’t get around to interviewing the source until nearly four months later.

When agents finally got around to it, the source made clear that there was no factual basis to the dossier’s claims. The source noted he had mainly provided business intelligence to Mr. Steele, so he was “uncomfortable” when Mr. Steele in March 2016 asked him to investigate Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, and later Donald Trump. The source said his friends and contacts were “too far removed” from these matters, but that he “felt like he had to report something back to Steele.”

The source’s attorney insists the source didn’t have a “network” so much as a “social circle.” The source didn’t take notes, and he couldn’t remember which information came from whom. He acknowledged that he even passed along information derived from a telephone call from an anonymous “Russian male” who “never identified himself.”

The source said he warned Mr. Steele that his info was “rumor and speculation.” The FBI interviewer writes: “Steele pushed [the source] to try and either follow-up with people or corroborate the reporting but [the source] wasn’t able to do so.”

Why, it’s almost enough to make us think that the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign was based on a patently ludicrous pretext. More via Twitter below, including Peter Strzok’s astute assessment of a New York Times story peddling the hoax — the biggest scandal in American political history by far.

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