Over the succeeding months the FBI continued its attempts to verify Steele's work product, seeking to find substance to support the Russia Hoax collusion narrative. Every allegation was examined and the results were assembled in what Solomon describes as "a spreadsheet-like document":
Multiple sources familiar with the FBI spreadsheet tell me the vast majority of Steele’s claims were deemed to be wrong, or could not be corroborated even with the most awesome tools available to the U.S. intelligence community. One source estimated the spreadsheet found upward of 90 percent of the dossier’s claims to be either wrong, nonverifiable or open-source intelligence found with a Google search.
In other words, it was mostly useless.
“The spreadsheet was a sea of blanks, meaning most claims couldn’t be corroborated, and those things that were found in classified intelligence suggested Steele’s intelligence was partly or totally inaccurate on several claims,” one source told me.
In their efforts to confirm some part of the "dossier," the FBI pressed Steele to identify his Russian source. An agent interviewed that source in early 2017. The conclusion that the FBI came to was that--giving Steele the benefit of the doubt--the Russian had "misled" Steele:
For example, U.S. intelligence found no evidence that Carter Page, during a trip to Moscow in July 2016, secretly met with two associates of Vladimir Putin — Rosneft oil executive Igor Sechin and senior government official Igor Divyekin — as part of the effort to collude with the Trump campaign, as Steele reported.
...
The inaccuracy of Steele’s intelligence on Page is at the heart of the inspector general investigation specifically because the FBI represented to the FISA court that the intelligence on Page was verified and strong enough to support the FISA warrant. It was, in the end, not verified.
And yet the FBI used this bogus "information" in the follow FISA extension requests, signed by Sally Yates, Dana Boente (currently the top lawyer at the FBI, for Chris Wray), and Rod Rosenstein. The FISA product was used by Team Mueller throughout their inquisition.
Solomon's sources also confirmed what we have pointed out, that the "dossier" was an evolving narrative that developed and changed as circumstances changed. For example, when Carter Page left the Trump campaign a new conduit for "collusion" had to be found. So Steele came up with the Michael Cohen-in-Prague tale. That, you may recall, came after Steele met with DoJ lawyers, including Andrew Weissmann:
Another knockdown of the dossier occurred when U.S. intelligence determined former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was not in Prague in the summer of 2016 when Steele claimed he was meeting with Russians to coordinate a hijacking of the election, the sources said.
Steele’s theory about who in the Trump campaign might be conspiring with Russia kept evolving from Page to Cohen to former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. None of those theories checked out in the end, as the Mueller report showed.
Weissmann needs to be grilled about his involvement in the FISA.
In the interview with Hannity, Solomon discusses Andrew McCabe's admission in testimony that without the "dossier" there would have been no FISA. However, there's another point that we've been making over the months. Without the "dossier" there would have been no Crossfire Hurricane to begin with. Yes, Crossfire Hurricane was the sine qua non for the Carter Page FISA. But it was also the the sine qua non for the Mueller inquisition, which Rod Rosenstein confirmed to be basically no more than an extension of Crossfire Hurricane.
As we've always known, the whole thing was a hoax, from start to finish.
Oh, and Solomon is supposed to have another big story out later this week. I can't wait! Maybe this is what Devin Nunes was talking about when he said the Mueller testimony might never happen.
ADDENDUM: In response to commenter dfp21, yes, from remarks Solomon drops it's clear that his source(s) is familiar with the results of the OIG investigation--including the results of the very recent interviews of Kathleen Kavalec and Chris Steele.
As we move into summer, the air temperature is rising and so is the emotional intensity of the body politic. We are now rapidly bifurcating into two ideological extremes in which the opportunity for violence is both tangible and increasingly probable. As an example, an Antifa activist was recently killed while trying to firebomb a Federal Immigration Detention Facility. This will only worsen as politicians employ inflamed rhetoric against each other.
ReplyDeleteSomething has to give or more people will be harmed as the animosity grows and the two camps square off against each other. This is why Barr cannot afford to delay legal action indefinitely.
The criminality of the Obama Administration has been ongoing for over a decade now. And the attempted coup should have ended with the Mueller report, but clearly the Democrats are hell bent on impeaching Trump anyway. Yes, the breadth and depth of this criminality is staggeringly huge, and a proper investigation and prosecution would typically require many years to implement (under conditions of judicial normalcy), but that option comes at a cost. Look to the recent riots in Paris (Yellow Vest Movement) for a harbinger of our future if we don't start course correcting very soon.
Barr possesses the means to begin indicting some of the malefactors involved in the various forms of criminality (he has literally hundreds of perpetrators to choose from). He needs to demonstrate to the public that the rule of law is being restored. The longer he waits to do so, the more likely that vigilantism will arise in it's absence.
No, the order in which it's done matters. However, from the sound of Solomon we should begin to see tangible results soon.
DeleteFBI determined in Jan/Feb 2017 the Steele dossier was "Google Garbage" and false and unverifiable.
ReplyDeleteI assume this is being leaked as a result of the OIG investigation.
Now it's up to Durham to prosecute the FBI & Obama scum who started or continued the hoax.
How much collateral damage is justified in service to an orderly legal process?
ReplyDeleteThe AG commands thousands of prosecutors and ancillary resources. How is it that restoration of the rule of law is not a top priority?
You don't get it. The point of following an orderly investigation before prosecution is to get to the ENTIRE truth, to identify EACH malefactor, and to determine the ENTIRE role of each player.
DeleteYou don't get it. This the crime of the century. There should be dozens (if not hundreds) of prosecutors and investigative agents working on this night and day. Barr hasn't even marshaled the same level of effort as Mueller did in furtherance of the coup. Not one single malefactor has suffered even minimal legal jeopardy as yet. That is a disgrace. And we still don't know if Durham is another Huber hoax or not. And not one single prosecution has resulted for all the prior IG investigation and reporting. The only firm trackrecord that have is that Eptstein got off, the Awan brothers got off, and most significantly, Hillary got a huge pass on her email server. The bad guys have been winning for over a decade and all we have is a wishful hope that the cavalry make been on the way someday.
ReplyDelete"Barr hasn't even marshaled the same level of effort as Mueller did in furtherance of the coup."
DeleteThat's a really stupid statement. You have no way of knowing what Barr is up to except that he's obviously very much trusted by Trump.
"And we still don't know if Durham is another Huber hoax or not."
And you know that because? What--he hasn't leaked to you?
"Eptstein got off, the Awan brothers got off, and most significantly, Hillary got a huge pass on her email server."
And this has exactly what to do with Barr and Durham?
This is slightly off-topic... I seem to recall, early on regarding the Page FISA application, that it was initially turned down. Then it was reworked, and it went forward with the FISA court. Am I remembering this wrong? Has the contents ever been exposed? Was this motivation for "sexing up" the Steele dossier with additional fictions? I.e. that the initial bogus material wasn't sufficiently substantial for a warrant.
ReplyDeleteOr is my memory faulty...
This is unclear to me as well. My best understanding is that the rejected FISA wasn't on Page but had to do with the Alfa Bank server and the server in Trump Tower. That FISA was later obtained, as well as the Page one.
Delete