Horowitz Unearthed More Steele Conspiracy Tales

IG Michael Horowitz's FISA report continues to be scrutinized and mined for relevant new facts that shed light on the origins and development of the Russia Hoax. Today at the Washington Examiner Rowan Scarborough lays out new facts that demonstrate that the Russia Hoax was rooted in cynically contrived conspiracy theories emanating from the Clinton camp.

In Trump conspiracy theories beyond the Steele dossier were passed to FBI Scarborogh documents from the FISA report that Christopher Steele provided the FBI with at least three additional anti-Trump conspiracy stories, all of which were as untrue as those contained in his "dossier" memos. We can leave to another time the whole question of who actually wrote these materials and simply note that Steele spread them.

Scarborough provides a usefull account of Steele's connections to the Hillary campaign through Fusion GPS, his meetings with reporters and with FBI officials, as well as his provision of materials to political figures such as John McCain. IG Horowitz put together a timeline for Steele's activities and, in doing so, discovered that there was more to Steele's involvement in the election than merely the dossier. Here are the three new items presented in the FISA report.

Carter Page's Supposed Russian handler

Mr. Steele provided the FBI in Rome the name of a Russian intelligence officer whom he said may be the handler for Mr. Page, a name that Mr. Steele also told Mr. Ohr. 

"The FBI in Rome" means, of course, Andy McCabe's friend and collaborator Michael Gaeta.

If true, this would bolster Mr. Steele’s reporting that Mr. Page, while on a trip to Moscow in July 2016, met with two Kremlin insiders and discussed taking bribes in exchange for relief from U.S. economic sanctions should Mr. Trump become president. 

But that supposed meeting was never substantiated and neither was the Steele supposition that Mr. Page had a Russian handler.

The FBI told the IG that “Steele’s allegations about the Russian national were investigated, but no information was uncovered to substantiate the allegations.”

Of course this business of the FBI supposedly attempting to verify Steele's tales is almost certainly an after the fact, self serving CYA subterfuge. The truth was well known--Carter Page had for years been a trusted source for both the FBI and the CIA.

Putin's Supposed Intervention In Trump's Secretary of state Appointment

Recall that Bruce Ohr received a thumb drive from Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson. Ohr later testified that he delived the thumb drive to the FBI, but the full contents have never been disclosed. Ohr himself claims not to have known what the contents were.

The Horowitz report said the drive contained more Steele dossier memos.

There was also a document the Crossfire Hurricane team had never seen, the IG said.

That document, the report said, “recounted that a senior official in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs had reported that a rumor was circulating that President-elect Trump’s delay in appointing a new Secretary of State was the result of an ‘intervention’ by Putin and the Kremlin, and that they had requested Trump appoint a ‘Russia-friendly’ figure who was prepared to lift sanctions against Russia.”

Yeah, right. Not verified.

Azeri cash

The third allegation was that Trump had received illegal campaign cash from an Azerbaijani family with whom Trump had worked during the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, in Moscow.

This information came to Mr. Steele not from his prime source inside the Kremlin but from two longtime Hillary Clinton operatives and liberal former journalists, Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer. 

... 

The chain of custody went this way: Mr. Shearer collected his anti-Trump data from a Turkish businessman and a source inside Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). Mr. Shearer gave the report to Mr. Blumenthal, who had a friend at the State Department. 

That friend was Jonathan Winer, a former adviser to Secretary of State John Kerry. Mr. Winer gave the Shearer dossier to Mr. Steele who in turn passed it on to the FBI. 

... 

“Trump’s compromise by the FSB, and the Kremlin’s funding of the Trump campaign by way of the Azerbaijani family,” is the way the IG report described the Shearer accusation. 

... 

Like the dossier, the Azerbaijani angle remains unverified. There is no hint of such payments in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report and his team’s two years’ worth of FBI investigating any links between Mr. Trump, his allies and Russia.

Scarborough has more details on all this. The bottom line appears to be that Steele's role was probably to led some sort of "intel" cred to these tales and to purvey them far and wide, with the hope that a media buzz would be created. There was an effort to make it look like the information was coming from multiple sources, but the probability is that there was actually one main source for it all: Fusion GPS. After all, they got paid the most.