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Synopsis: It's becoming increasingly clear that the entire Trump/Russia accusation was cooked up inside the White House as a way to smear Trump before his election. Subsequently, it has served as the infamous "insurance policy" that FBI Don Juan counter-intelligence guy Peter Strzok was put in charge of in order to save America should Trump be elected. But the Steele dossier is inherently such a weak hand to play, it's hard to believe that professionals would place so much dependence on it - but they have. I think that's what's on the minds of a lot of moderate Democrats who...

Obama appointee and former CIA director John Brennan is the target of a perjury investigation by the House Intelligence Committee. Chairman Devin Nunes is turning his attention to the role the CIA played in promoting the Steele dossier. Brennan said under oath that he didn't know who commissioned the dossier and that it was not used to conclude that Russia had meddled in the 2016 presidential campaign. Brennan also swore that he did not know who commissioned the anti-Trump research document, even though senior national security and counterintelligence officials at the Justice Department and FBI knew the previous year that...

We have been fed an endless diet of Trump-Russia collusion by the media. It is based on the dossier compiled by one Christopher Steele. The more we learn about it, the more curious it becomes. The dossier was the basis for the FBI to secure a warrant to spy on Carter Page. That in itself is very curious. Page has been on the FBI radar since at least 2014. Page is thought to have helped the FBI snare Russian spies in 2013 back then although he denies it. You'd think that the FBi would be able to determine if Page was...

President Trump's tweet today indicates that he may release the Democratic memo, but only once the authors of the document make the suggested changes. Trump alleges that the Democrats "would have blamed the White House for lack of transparency" had he decided to release a redacted memo.

President Trump's former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski on Saturday accused Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee of purposefully putting sensitive information in their memo, forcing Trump to block its release. “What you’ve seen here is another partisan issue, which is the Democrats specifically put information in this memo that they knew the White House could not sign off on because of national security reasons,” Lewandowski said on "Fox & Friends." “What the White House is asking the Democrats to do is go back and remove the information from the memorandum that would allow the White House to release all the...

Letter at link. President Trump is not ready to approve the release of a Democratic memo meant to rebut a controversial document released by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee last week, the White House announced. White House counsel Don McGahn announced the decision in a letter to House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) on Friday. "Although the President is inclined to declassify the February 5th Memorandum, because the Memorandum contains numerous properly classified and especially sensitive passages, he is unable to do so at this time," McGahn wrote.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday blocked the release of a classified memo written by House of Representatives Democrats that rebutted a Republican document made public last week which alleged anti-Trump bias in the FBI’s Russia probe.

ANALYSIS/OPINION: One of the more disconcerting revelations from the long-anticipated FISA memo released by the House Intelligence Committee Friday was that the FBI had barely begun a verification process of the Russian dossier when they used it to justify a FISA surveillance warrant on Carter Page. Meanwhile the media refused to publish the dossier allegations because they could not be verified. In short: The media had higher standards than the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The dossier, a compilation of political opposition research compiled at the behest of the Hillary Clinton for President campaign, was peddled to multiple media outlets in...

"""Democratic Sen. Mark Warner texted with Russian oligarch lobbyist in effort to contact dossier author Christopher Steele""" EXCLUSIVE – Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee who has been leading a congressional investigation into President Trump's alleged ties to Russia, had extensive contact last year with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch who was offering Warner access to former British spy and dossier author Christopher Steele, according to text messages obtained exclusively by Fox News.

A Wall Street Journal editorial is demanding "radical transparency" on the Mueller investigation not only from the FBI and Congress, but also from other news outlets. Several days ago, Senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham released a less redacted version of their criminal referral letter to the Justice Department concerning Christopher Steele -- the former British spy and author of the infamous dossier alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. The letter from the two senators clarifies the recently released House Intelligence Committee's memo describing FISA surveillance abuse by the FBI, and provides even more evidence that the Clinton...

Republican Rep. Jim Jordan accused key Clinton allies of helping craft a second anti-Trump dossier and accused them of “rigging the game,” Tuesday on “Fox & Friends.” Jordan was asked about a possible second dossier and said Clinton operatives Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer had paid Christopher Steele to do opposition research, but then told Steele which specific details to include.

The Clinton fingerprints on the Clinton-Steele dossier are getting greasier with every new revelation. Not that this is much of a revelation by now. It's just a confirmation of what most people already knew. Behind the manufactured scandal of the Clinton-Steele dossier were too familiar names from Clintonworld, Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer.,,, The State Department had been Hillary's playpen for years. And she had staffed it with her own loyalists. Hillary Clinton had even wanted to bring in Sidney Blumenthal, but Rahm Emanuel had allegedly put his foot down. And it now appears that the State Department conveyed material...

A criminal referral from top Senate investigators confirms explosive charges in last week’s House Intelligence Committee memo regarding abuse of surveillance authorities at the FBI and Department of Justice. It also reveals a host of problems arising from the bureau’s cooperation with foreign investigator Christopher Steele, who was working on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The eight-page memo from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Crime and Terrorism Subcommittee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) includes underlying evidence to support the claims.“It appears the FBI relied on admittedly uncorroborated information, funded by and obtained for Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign,...

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes said the FBI should have opened a counterintelligence investigation of Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016. On "Hannity," Nunes discussed Republicans' controversial memo alleging surveillance abuses by the FBI, explaining the "clear link to Russia" which led to a FISA warrant to surveil Carter Page. He said the Clinton campaign hired a law firm, which hired Fusion GPS, which then hired "foreign agent" Christoper Steele to dig up dirt via Russians on Donald Trump. The resulting dossier was then used to obtain the surveillance warrant. "It seems like the counterintelligence investigation should have been opened...

On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, former British MI-6 Intelligence Officer Christopher Steele is going to extremes to avoiding answering questions from the United States Congress, while at the same time avoiding being videotaped and deposed in a multi-million dollar libel case brought against Buzzfeed. The media outlet published the unverified Trump dossier just over a year ago, setting off an international firestorm. Steele was a no-show Monday for a long-requested deposition in London, Fox News has learned. The news comes as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., have announced a criminal referral...

The House Intelligence Committee memo about 2016 surveillance abuses, released Friday, lays out grave evidence that the FBI wasn’t fully forthcoming with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as it sought an order to wiretap former Trump adviser Carter Page. It’s possible the FBI’s lack of candor was even worse than the memo describes. Democrats are disputing the memo on lots of grounds, but they’ve said little about the FBI’s failure to inform the court that the bureau had itself decided one of its main sources, dossier author Christopher Steele, was unreliable. Mr. Steele in October 2016 gave Mother Jones an...

Now we know why the FBI tried so hard to block release of the House Intelligence Committee memo. And why Democrats and the media want to change the subject to Republican motivations. The four-page memo released Friday reports disturbing facts about how the FBI and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court appear to have been used to influence the 2016 election and its aftermath.The White House declassified the memo Friday, and you don’t have to be a civil libertarian to be shocked by the details. The memo confirms that the FBI and Justice Department on Oct. 21, 2016 obtained a FISA...

Former CIA Director John Brennan had harsh words for House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes on Sunday morning, calling the controversial four-page “FISA memo” created by Nunes’ staffers “exceptionally partisan” and that Nunes has “abused the office” by refusing to allow Democrats on his committee to make their own rebuttal document public. “That Devin Nunes and Republicans denied the ability of the minority, the Democratic members of that committee, to put out its report is just appalling. I think it, it really underscores just how partisan Mr. Nunes has been. He has abused the office of the chairmanship of HPSCI. And...

Democrats, media, and the aggregate DOJ/FBI intelligence community are finally seeing accountability. With the HPSCI memo now in the rear-view mirror, and the content in the bloodstream of the U.S. electorate, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley is next. Toward the end of December, the FBI provided the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, with FBI investigative documents (likely FD-302’s) from their contacts with Christopher Steele. According to most reasonable timing we can discover Steele met with FBI officials sometime around October 1st, 2016. From the U.K. lawsuit against Christopher Steele (pdf here), Steele admits to having shopped the Clinton-Steele dossier to...

In a new podcast, Yahoo News Chief Investigative Correspondent Michael Isikoff gives details of a key passage in the controversial Republican memo alleging surveillance abuses by the FBI and the Department of Justice — a passage in which Isikoff himself, to his surprise, played a leading role. The memo, which was released Friday after it was declassified by the White House, says a September 2016 article by Isikoff was “cited extensively” in an FBI application for a surveillance warrant against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Isikoff was the first to report that Page was under federal investigation over a...