Posted on 11/14/2017 6:36:21 AM PST by Hojczyk
In her Wall Street Journal column “Lifting the Steele curtain” this past Friday Kim Strassel called the dossier “one of the dirtiest tricks in U.S. political history.” At the heart of her column she focused on the shrewdly evil introduction of the dossier during the campaign. Analyze this:
“Details from the dossier were not reported before Election Day,” ran a recent CNN story. Hillary Clinton herself stressed the point in a recent “Daily Show” appearance. The dossier, she said, is “part of what happens in a campaign where you get information that may or may not be useful and you try to make sure anything you put out in the public arena is accurate. So this thing didn’t come out until after the election, and it’s still being evaluated.”
This is utterly untrue. In British court documents Mr. Steele has acknowledged he briefed U.S. reporters about the dossier in September 2016. Those briefed included journalists from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo News and others. Mr. Steele, by his own admission (in an interview with Mother Jones), also gave his dossier in July 2016 to the FBI.
Among the dossier’s contents were allegations that in early July 2016 Carter Page, sometimes described as a foreign-policy adviser to Candidate Trump, held a “secret” meeting with two high-ranking Russians connected to President Vladimir Putin. It even claimed these Russians offered to give Mr. Page a 19% share in Russia’s state oil company in return for a future President Trump lifting U.S. sanctions. This dossier allegation is ludicrous on its face. Mr. Page was at most a minor figure in the campaign and has testified under oath that he never met the two men in question or had such a conversation.
(Excerpt) Read more at powerlineblog.com ...
Yet the press ran with it. On Sept. 23, 2016, Yahoo News’s Michael Isikoff published a bombshell story under the headline: “U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin.” Mr. Isikoff said “U.S. officials” had “received intelligence” about Mr. Page and Russians, and then went on to recite verbatim all the unfounded dossier allegations. He attributed all this to a “well-placed Western intelligence source,” making it sound as if this info had come from someone in government rather than from an ex-spy-for-hire.
The Clinton campaign jumped all over it, spinning its own oppo research as a government investigation into Mr. Trump. Jennifer Palmieri, the campaign’s communications director, the next day took to television to tout the Isikoff story and cite “U.S. intelligence officials” in the same breath as Mr. Page. Other Clinton surrogates fanned out on TV and Twitter to spread the allegations.
The Isikoff piece publicly launched the Trump-Russia collusion narrative…
Kim also raised the question whether FISA warrants on figures around the Trump campaign were procured in part on basis of the dossier. She concluded that “it is fair to ask if the entire Trump-Russia narrative—which has played a central role in our political discourse for a year, and is now resulting in a special counsel issuing unrelated indictments—is based on nothing more than a political smear document.” She asked: “Is there any reason to believe the FBI was probing a Trump-Russia angle before the dossier? Is there any collusion allegation that doesn’t come in some form from the dossier?”
Mr. Isikoff (A name that sound Russian) was played like a cheap fiddle. I wonder why he hasn’t divulged the identity of the “U.S. officials” and their “well-placed Western intelligence source,” who suckered him so completely.
The dirty trick on Roy Moore is fast out-pacing the dossier dirty trick.
As far as I have seen, there is no evidence that Steele presented this to journalists prior to the election ... merely his claim.
Consider a different scenario: this dossier was never meant to see the light of day because it would have been shredded in five minutes, as indeed was the case.
The purpose of the dossier, and the meeting between Donald Trump Jr. which we now find out was a set-up arranged by Fusion GPS, was to give the FBI enough supposed evidence for a FISA warrant to bug Trump and his associates. No one expected they would find “evidence” of collusion with Russia. What they expected to find was lots of nefarious dealings, but it turns out, much to their disappointment that with Trump, what you see is pretty much what you get.
Step 2: Hillary is elected, and the dossier is never found out to be the fake basis of the wiretaps that uncovered the unrelated dirt that won her the election.
But then she isn’t elected, and all of the above is going to come out, so they then need to spin the story about collusion in the press, to cover their own butts.
In that scenario, we have Watergate on steroids, with the press playing Nixon’s praetorian guard.
Wasn’t Isikoff the one who spiked the story on Monica Lewinsky, well before Drudge ran with it?
Isikoff had the story but Newsweek spiked it.
“She asked: “Is there any reason to believe the FBI was probing a Trump-Russia angle before the dossier? Is there any collusion allegation that doesn’t come in some form from the dossier?”
Seems to me that the DoJ/FBI/Swamp leadership were coordinating with and advising the Clintons on the creation of the dossier from its inception. I can see people saying, “We can’t get FISA warrants without something to base it on. You guys need to feed us some sort of dossier. Christopher Steele would be good for that.”
_
Yep.
Very well said. Thank you.
Beautiful....excellent destruction. I agree completely.
Oops....make that excellent “deconstruction”.......although you did some great destruction to the dossier invention.
Ol' "Spikey" only spikes stories that are damaging to his Democrat Party handlers...
Jennifer "Kellyanne Broke Me" Palmieri, or Jennifer "Kellyanne Beat Me Like A Rented Mule" Palmieri...
Fixed it! :)
His nickname is forever "Spikey"...
Why does anyone even listen to Hillary after she was caught lying about the dossier. She said that allegations of her involvement were bologna. Now she freely admits paying for the bologna, ordering the bologna and eating the bologna.
Actually there is evidence...
On October 31, 2016, a week before the election, Mother Jones reported that a former intelligence officer, whom they did not name, had produced a report based on Russian sources and turned it over to the FBI.
Other news reports were referencing information in the hands of the fbi...
To the larger point, the actual dossier was not meant to see the light of day. It was meant to serve as probable cause for a FISA warrant and to plant negative collusion news in the media.
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