An Update Re Steele - Papadopoulos.

Svetlana Lokhova has a new thread that's basically talking about the same things Margot Cleveland and others have been doing by examining the FISA report footnotes. To make it easy to read I'll paste it in in text format. Lokhova is talking about the person identified in Horowitz's report as "Person 1" who I, like commenter Yancey Ward, understand to be Sergei Millian, a Russian emigre in the UK.

This is the meat of the issue. If you actually spent time to look into what happened I think you would be appalled. Remember they say ok we are not going to talk to the Campaign. We are going to send people in, wire them up and have them talk to the individuals. That happened. That happened in August, September and October and it all came back exculpatory. People said don’t know what you are talking about. It is exculpatory not only as to the relationship with the Russians but as to the specific facts.  

And they never did anything about that, they just pressed ahead but they never informed the court. They were told they didn’t have probable cause to get a warrant so they took the Steele Dossier which they had done nothing to verify and they used that to get the warrant. Collapse everything. They withheld from the court all the exculpatory information and they withheld from the court information about the lack of reliability of Steele.  

The real interesting thing here, and to me the major takeaway actually, is after the election, because in January Steele was dealing with one person, he only talked to one person, that is what we call the primary sub source, that person who had the so-called network of sub-sources. When they finally got around to talking to him, he said I don’t know what Steele is talking about I didn’t tell him this stuff or it was mostly barroom talk and rumour. I made it clear to him that this was my own suppositions or theories.” 

And at that point it was clear that the dossier was a sham. But what happens, what happens at that point. They don’t tell the court. They continue to get FISA warrants based on that dossier. And more damming [sic] they actually filed a statement with the court saying we talked to the sub-source and found him credible and co-operative and that they put in into bolster. When actually what he was being truthful about was that the dossier was garbage.

This is a good little summary to read after wading through the footnote material. Note that Lokhova is saying what others have said--by January, 2017, AT THE LATEST, the FBI knew that the entire Steele "dossier" was BS, but they kept investigating, getting FISA renewals, trying to frame Flynn, etc.

Now you see why Grassley and Johnson were so exercised about Horowitz misleading the public, and why Barr and Durham publicly disputed Horowitz's claims about the FBI having adequate predication.

And all this therefore leads to Rosenstein, Comey, McCabe, and Team Mueller.

FBI Unredacts Most of Kathleen Kavalec's Notes Re Steele

That was quick!

Two and a half years unclassified, then 11 days as Classified, and now back to being almost totally unclassified. It appears that Bill Barr was not amused by the Chris Wray FBI's adventures in retroactive classification and redaction of Kathleen Kavalec's notes and write up regarding her discussions with Chris Steele, the Brit ex spook and fabulist. Kavalec originally left her notes and an email based on them Unclassified--that was two and a half years ago. The FBI did their retroactive number on the material just over a week ago, but after a furor in the media has ... rethought things.

CTH, in a longer blog tonight, includes the fact that the FBI has apparently reconsidered its redactions of Kathleen Kavalec's typed up notes regarding her meeting on October 11, 2016, with Chris Steele Tatyana Duran. The handwritten notes are clearly for the most part a precis of material in Steele's famous "dossier." However, there are differences, as can be seen from the typed up--and now mostly unredacted--material. Notably, in Kavalec's notes we find Paul Manafort presented as playing the role of courier between Trump and "the Russians," rather than Carter Page being the courier between Manafort and the Russians on Trump's behalf. Another unique feature is that Manafort is also said to communicate secretly with the Kremlin via the Alfa Bank using Tor software and a "hidden server" managed by Alfa Bank. Page is also said to be involved, but in some unspecified way, although he is said to have met twice (rather than just once) with Igor Sechin of Rosneft--and with no apparent reference to his commencement address in Moscow.

These discrepancies in the various versions of Steele's "dossier" material raise the interesting question of how the FBI decided which version of Steele's stories to use in its FISA application. The most readily available version of the Steele dossier features Manafort as the principal behind the Trump outreach to the Russians, but Carter Page serves as the courier between Manafort and the Russians. The appeal of this version--as opposed to Manafort doing the communications on his own, is that it supports the narrative that the FBI used to open an "enterprise counterintelligence investigation"--Crossfire Hurricane.