Tag Archives: Fusion GPS

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Bombshell: FBI knew that Steele dossier contained Russian disinformation

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Barack Obama and his corrupt ally in the FBI
Barack Obama and his corrupt ally in the FBI

Previously, I blogged about how the Steele dossier that was used to get permission to spy on the Trump campaign was paid for by Democrats. The latest news is that the Steele dossier contained Russian disinformation. So, instead of Trump colluding with Russians, it was actually the Democrats colluding with Russians to get a fake dossier to allow spying on the Trump campaign.

Here’s the latest from the Daily Caller:

At some point in 2017, the precise month is not clear, the FBI obtained evidence that Russian operatives fed disinformation to former British spy Christopher Steele.

That stunning revelation came on Friday, and not through a leak, as did so many of the anti-Trump and pro-Steele stories that have come out since the dossier was published in January 2017.

Instead, the disclosure was the product of an intense GOP-led fact-finding campaign to force U.S. intelligence officials to declassify information that the FBI had on Steele and his notorious dossier.

Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, the two Republicans who jogged loose the new information, noted the disparity in the type of information that has leaked out of the Trump-Russia investigation in the three-plus years since it began.

“For years, the public was fed a healthy diet of leaks, innuendo and false information to imply that President Trump and his campaign were part of a Russian conspiracy to spread disinformation,” they said in a statement upon the release of three footnotes from the Justice Department inspector general’s (IG) report on the FBI’s surveillance of the Trump campaign.

The previously-classified footnotes said that an organization not identified in the IG report provided the FBI evidence that Russian operatives fed disinformation that wound up in the dossier.

The disclosure is another stunning blow to the reputation of the FBI, which made Steele’s dossier a “central and essential” component of its surveillance warrants against Carter Page.

Actually, the Steele dossier was the ONLY source for the FISA warrant that allowed the Obama administration to spy on the Trump campaign.

Now I want to review who paid for the Steele dossier that contained Russian disinformation.

The far-left Washington Post explains:

The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said.

Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.

After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the company in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Before that agreement, Fusion GPS’s research into Trump was funded by an unknown Republican client during the GOP primary.

The Clinton campaign and the DNC, through the law firm, continued to fund Fusion GPS’s research through the end of October 2016, days before Election Day.

The FBI and DOJ didn’t tell the FISA court about who was funding the Steele dossier when they applied for the warrant. Because if they had, they would have been denied the warrant. No FISA court would approve surveillance of the Republican party if the sole basis for the warrant was uncorroborated opposition research funded by the Democrat party. In order to get the FISA warrant, the request had to be written in such a way that the funding of the Steele dossier was not revealed, and Steele was not declared to be the source of the news articles used as corroborating evidence.

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I have to debate a co-worker on Trump-Russia collusion, here are my notes

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The media spent two years parroting a fake news story paid for by Democrats
The media spent 2 years pushing a fake news story paid for by Democrats

Well, now that the Mueller report is out, I am dealing with a bunch of angry progressives at work. They want to know how why their favorite mainstream media sources got the Trump-Collusion story so wrong. One of them even asked me to go to lunch so that I could explain why the story fell apart. I made some notes in preparation for the lunch, and I’ve written them up below.

So, basically I wanted to get a bunch of articles together that trace the whole narrative from start to finish. Let’s see an outline first.

The Trump-Russia collusion story that was trumpted by the progressive media for the last two years was a joint effort between the Hillary Clinton campaign and high-ranking members of the FBI during the Obama administration.

The goal was to get the government to spy on the Trump campaign, in order neutralize his administration, if he won the 2016 election.

Here’s the left-leaning The Hill, reporting on an important finding from October 2018:

Congressional investigators have confirmed that a top FBI official met with Democratic Party lawyers to talk about allegations of Donald Trump-Russia collusion weeks before the 2016 election, and before the bureau secured a search warrant targeting Trump’s campaign.

Former FBI general counsel James Baker met during the 2016 season with at least one attorney from Perkins Coie, the Democratic National Committee’s private law firm.

That’s the firm used by the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to secretly pay research firm Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence operative, to compile a dossier of uncorroborated raw intelligence alleging Trump and Moscow were colluding to hijack the presidential election.

The article notes that Perkins Coie is the “Democratic National Committee’s private law firm”.

The Federalist reports that the Obama presidential election campaign also paid $972,000 to Perkins Coie in 2016 alone:

Former president Barack Obama’s official campaign organization has directed nearly a million dollars to the same law firm that funneled money to Fusion GPS, the firm behind the infamous Steele dossier. Since April of 2016, Obama For America (OFA) has paid over $972,000 to Perkins Coie, records filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) show.

[…]Federal records show that Hillary Clinton’s official campaign organization, Hillary For America, paid just under $5.1 million to Perkins Coie in 2016. The DNC paid nearly $5.4 million to the law firm in 2016.

[…]The Washington Post reported last week that Perkins Coie, an international law firm, was directed by both the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to retain Fusion GPS in April of 2016 to dig up dirt on then-candidate Donald Trump. Fusion GPS then hired Christopher Steele, a former British spy, to compile a dossier of allegations that Trump and his campaign actively colluded with the Russian government during the 2016 election. Though many of the claims in the dossier have been directly refuted, none of the dossier’s allegations of collusion have been independently verified. Lawyers for Steele admitted in court filings last April that his work was not verified and was never meant to be made public.

In addition, Fox News reports that the FBI paid Christopher Steele ELEVEN TIMES in 2016. So this dossier was funded by Democrats from many different groups. They probably thought that no one would ever find out who was behind it.

But why would the FBI and the FISA court accept the Democrat-funded dossier as a basis to spy on the Democrat’s main political rival? Answer: there were Democrats in the FBI who covered up the source of funding for the Steele dossier, as well as the anti-Trump bias of the dossier’s author.

The Washington Examiner reported on the released text messages from highly-placed anti-Trump Democrat Lisa Page within the FBI in March 2019:

The text messages, between then-Deputy Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe, who was later fired, and former FBI attorney Lisa Page — who was having an affair with FBI agent Peter Strzok — were obtained by Fox News.

They reveal that Stuart Evans, deputy assistant attorney general of DOJ’s National Security Division at the time, had “continued concerns” about the “possible bias” of a source being used in the FISA application but that Lisa Page had a sense of urgency about the FISA application being submitted quickly and was considering ending “the hold up” with “a high-level push.”

“OI [Office of Intelligence] now has a robust explanation re any possible bias of the chs [Confidential Human Source] in the package,” Page texted McCabe on Oct. 12, 2016. “Don’t know what the holdup is now, other than Stu’s continued concerns. Strong operational need to have in place before Monday if at all possible, which means to ct tomorrow. I communication you and boss’s green light to Sty earlier, and just sent an email to Stu asking where things stood. This might take a high-level push. Will keep you posted.”

Page said she would press the issue with Evans by “invoking” McCabe’s name. Further texts show that a meeting would eventually be set up including then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates at the direction of the White House. The FISA application, relaying heavily on Steele’s dossier, would be submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court just days later.

Then-Director of the FBI James Comey ultimately signed off on the application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for approval to surveil Carter Page. It was dated nine days after the Page-McCabe texts: Oct. 21 2016.

The specific funding of Steele’s dossier was never mentioned to the FISA court, either during that first application or during three subsequent FISA renewals. Steele’s anti-Trump fervor and determination to provide his dossier to the media and members of the U.S. government later became well known.

I think there’s enough information in this post to show why the mainstream media ought to have known better than to push a “collusion” narrative on the strength of the Steele dossier and the FBI spying on the Trump campaign. The whole collusion plot was funded lock, stock and barrel by Democrats. The reason why the mainstream media reported on a #FakeNews story for two years was because they wanted to sway voters away from Trump in the 2018 elections. It’s only now that they are trying to step away from it so they can pretend to be unbiased.

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Mueller’s report ends media’s 22-month #FakeNews campaign against Trump’s re-election

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Why do people think that CNN are biased leftist clowns?
Why do people think that CNN are biased leftist clowns?

The 22-month-long investigation of Trump-Russia collusion ended yesterday. By now, everyone has heard that there will be no indictments for the Trump campaign for collusion with the Russians. We don’t have the full content of the final report produced by Mueller, but we do know that there will be no additional indictments.

In this post, I want to recall for everyone who paid for the dossier, how the dossier was used to spy on members of the Trump Campaign, and then list out some of the people who pushed the (false) Trump-Russia collusion allegations the most.

Let’s start with this article from Friday night, by the Daily Caller:

CNN political analyst Gloria Borger admitted that the president is “vindicated” by the conclusion of the probe, but did so in a roundabout way, focusing on the political implications for the president’s past critiques of the Mueller team.

“So if, if as Jeffrey is saying, they get great news, the great news is, first of all, there’s no more indictments. But if suddenly the president has to say those angry Democrats who were working with Bob Mueller were actually just part of a Justice Department doing its job after he has criticized the Justice Department, then he’s now vindicated.”

CNN’s admission is important, because they’ve been caught authoring several false reports about the story:

The network, ever desperate to get the biggest scoop on the Russia probe, falsely claimed as far back as June 2016 that Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci was under investigation for alleged ties to Russia. In December 2017, CNN inaccurately said that Donald Trump Jr. had special access to Democratic documents stolen by WikiLeaks.

OK, very good. CNN certainly deserves credit for reporting on Mueller’s final report accurately, even though it falsifies their Trump-Russia collusion narrative of the past 22 months. But what about the other groups that pushed the false Trump-Russia collusion narrative? BuzzFeed, the Washington Post, the New York Times, MSNBC, etc. And what about the many unhinged Democrat politicians, including Adam Schiff and Ted Lieu. Will they spend the next 22 months undoing the damage they’ve done to the American election process? How else would you see this 22-month charade, except as a deliberate effort by Democrats in the mainstream media to discredit the Republican party before the 2020 elections?

What was the Steele dossier?

So, let’s look at an article from October 2017, published in the radically leftist Washington Post. (One of the sources that pushed the now discredited Trump-Russia dossier the hardest)

It says:

The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said.

Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.

After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the company in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC.

Got that? Democrat Clinton and Democrat DNC hire Democrat law firm. Democrat law firm hires Democrat PR firm Fusion GPS.  Democrat PR firm Fusion GPS hires Christopher Steele, who then produces the Steele dossier. The Steele dossier was then used to obtain the FISA warrant that allowed the FBI to spy on members of the Trump campaign.

Last week, Steele himself admitted that he used unverified blog posts from random users posted on a website called iReport.com – which just allowed anyone to post any article they wanted online with no journalism or fact-checking of any kind.

The Washington Examiner explains:

According to deposition transcripts released this week, Steele said last year he used a 2009 report he found on CNN’s iReport website and said he wasn’t aware that submissions to that site are posted by members of the public and are not checked for accuracy.

A web archive from July 29, 2009 shows that CNN described the site in this manner: “iReport.com is a user-generated site.  That means the stories submitted by users are not edited, fact-checked, or screened before they post.”

Steele just Googled for information and put these unchecked user-generated “stories” into the dossier. And then the dossier was used to get the FBI surveillance warrants.

And Steele knew what he was doing:

When asked about his methodology for searching for this information, Steele described it as “what we could call an open source search,” which he defined as “where you go into the Internet and you access material that is available on the Internet that is of relevance or reference to the issue at hand or the person under consideration.”

Steele said his dossier contained “raw intelligence” that he admitted could contain untrue or even “deliberately false information.”

Remember, the Steele dossier was the basis for the FBI’s FISA surveillance warrants against Trump. And that’s what we have been hearing about from Democrat politicians and their allies in the far-left news media for the last 22 months.

This investigation cost a huge amount of taxpayer dollars. It damaged the credibility of the Trump administration enormously. And it smeared all Republican voters, because we supposedly voted for a crooked corrupt President.

When will Hillary Clinton be investigated?

Previously, I blogged about actual collusion between Hillary Clinton and Russia, regarding the sale of uranium rights. We did not have a 22-month investigation of that. Just think how few low-information Democrat voters know about that scandal. We also did not have a 22-month investigation of Clinton’s  unsecure, private e-mail server that was deliberately designed to evade the government’s legal requirements for record-keeping about government business. But the mainstream media didn’t have a thing to say about either of those investigations. Why should we trust them about anything?