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From the moment that the so-called Steele dossier burst onto the public scene, thoughtful observers have wondered what role its “salacious and unverified” accusations played in the opening of the so-called Russia investigation, the counterintelligence inquiry into whether Trump officials “colluded” with Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton. When news emerged that the dossier was the product of Clinton-campaign opposition research — laundered through a law firm — then the question got even more urgent. Was the entire investigation the fruit of the poisonous dossier? Did the FBI perhaps knowingly cooperate with Clinton operatives to launch an investigation with the (potential)...

...It turns out the Senate Judiciary Committee also has a memo on Christopher Steele, the FBI and Russia dossier they are working to declassify. Their memo is set to be released including FBI redactions shortly.... Paul Sperry of the New York Post reported, “BREAKING: The Senate Judiciary Committee also has a memo on Steele, the dossier and the FBI, and is working to get it declassified.” [....] As previously reported, GOP Lawmakers are seeking to make the case that the Mueller investigation and the FBI probe into Trump’s campaign was based on potentially tainted and flawed evidence connected to Hillary...

The Democrats and the media spent a week lying to the American people about the “memo.” The memo was full of "classified information" and releasing” it would expose “our spying methods." By “our,” they didn’t mean American spying methods. They meant Obama’s spying methods. A former White House Ethics Lawyer claimed that the Nunes memo would undermine "national security." On MSNBC, Senator Chris Van Hollen threatened that if the memo is released, the FBI and DOJ “will refuse to share information with the House and Senate Intelligence Committees." Senator Cory Booker howled that releasing the memo was "treasonous" and might...

Legal help to understand this please. Comey testified the dossier was unverified in front on Congress but he signed off of the FISA warrant application as we know now through the Nunes memo. He had to know how the dossier was presented to the FISA court right? Under a false pretenses as legitimate counterintelligence sources right? Did he know Steele’s partisan nature? Bruce Ohr was telling the DOJ about Steele and Comey had to know Is that a crime?

Gotta love the professionally obtuse former DNI James Clapper. As much as he is a stuttering doofus, and therein showcases his political value for the former administration; and to the extent that Clapper has previously stated there was no attempt by the DOJ/FBI to gain a FISA authorized approval for surveillance on any Trump campaign officials: “none that I’m aware of“; …it is always valuable to listen to Clapper because he has a tendency to, well, to let slip stuff that makes the black hats cringe. Cue the audio visual “slippage.” Inside tonight’s interview by Jake Tapper, former DNI James...

The FBI inquiry into alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 US presidential election has been given a second memo that independently set out many of the same allegations made in a dossier by Christopher Steele, the British former spy. The second memo was written by Cody Shearer, a controversial political activist and former journalist who was close to the Clinton White House in the 1990s. Advertisement Unlike Steele, Shearer does not have a background in espionage, and his memo was initially viewed with scepticism, not least because he had shared it with select media organisations before the election. However, the...

Two Republican senators are pressing top Hillary Clinton campaign and DNC officials for details of any contacts they had with Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS employees, and several government officials regarding the infamous Trump dossier. Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham sent letters this week to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, strategist Joel Benenson, and former DNC chairwomen Donna Brazile and Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The letters ask for communications records involving top Obama administration officials as well as several previously undisclosed employees of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that commissioned the dossier. The letters also seek...

Jan 26, 2018 WASHINGTON – As part of their ongoing oversight efforts to ensure that the FBI’s law enforcement activities are free of improper political influence, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) yesterday sent six letters seeking information and documents regarding Christopher Steele’s work on behalf of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary for America. The letters seek information and documents relating to those political organizations’ knowledge of and involvement in Mr. Steele’s work and his reported interactions with the FBI while he was working on behalf of...

The Senate Judiciary Committee is investigating the FBI’s involvement with dossier author Christopher Steele. It is being reported the FBI relied on the phony, Hillary-funded Russia dossier to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on Trump’s campaign during the 2016 presidential election. The batch of letters were sent to former DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, former interim DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile, current DNC chair, Tom Perez, former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and former Clinton campaign chief strategist Joel Benenson. [clip] Dear Mr Podesta [clip] In light of this, by February 8, 2018, please answer the following questions and provide...

What happens when federal agencies accused of possible wrongdoing — also control the alleged evidence against them? What happens when they’re the ones in charge of who inside their agencies — or connected to them — ultimately gets investigated and possibly charged? Those questions are moving to the forefront as the facts play out in the investigations into our intelligence agencies’ surveillance activities. There are two overarching issues. First, there’s the alleged improper use of politically-funded opposition research to justify secret warrants to spy on U.S. citizens for political purposes. Second, if corruption is ultimately identified at high levels in...

Among the few givens in the unfolding drama of alleged Russia-Trump collusion is that former MI6 intelligence officer Christopher Steele wrote the Donald Trump-Russia dossier, alternately known as the "Steele Dossier." This is the notorious document that purports to detail "Republican candidate Donald Trump's activities in Russia and compromising relationship Among the few givens in the unfolding drama of alleged Russia-Trump collusion is that former MI6 intelligence officer Christopher Steele wrote the Donald Trump-Russia dossier, alternately known as the "Steele Dossier." This is the notorious document that purports to detail "Republican candidate Donald Trump's activities in Russia and compromising relationship...

snip: On January 4, Grassley and Sen. Lindsey Graham, chairman of the crime and terrorism subcommittee, sent a criminal referral to the FBI and Justice Department concerning Christopher Steele, the former British spy who authored the Trump dossier. In a cover letter, Grassley and Graham suggested that Steele might have lied to the FBI during his association with the bureau as he compiled the dossier. That's all the cover letter said. The referral itself, which was classified, made the actual case about Steele. Grassley wrote an unclassified version of the referral for public release — finally, the public could understand...

Wow. Massive amounts of confirmation for the ongoing strategy we outlined was underway. [Remember the batting order: Nunes, Grassley, Goodlatte, Horowitz] As expected Senator Chuck Grassley, Chairman of Senate Judiciary Committee, steps to the plate following Devin Nunes. We previously outlined how Senator Chuck Grassley was directly calling the bluff of the FBI when he sent a criminal referral to the justice department for Christopher Steele. Much of the referral itself was redacted and withheld from public view because it was classified. Today, in a move with strong parallels to Chairman Nunes (House Intel Committee Memo), Senator Grassley is asking...

Attorney General Holder heads to Zurich, Switzerland tomorrow to lobby to bring the World Cup to the U.S. in 2022.Justice Dept. says Holder is making the trip to Zurich at the request of Pres. Obama to show US commitment to host World Cup in 2022. Pres. Obama lost U.S. effort in '09 to host 2016 Summer Olympics. WH hopes Holder's mission to Zurich doesn't end up a Swiss miss.Perhaps we'll find out more about the World Cup mission from Holder's cables in the next WikiLeaks document disclosures.

Actually, it’s the Swiss who are probing the 2018 World Cup award to Russia, and the US bid was for the 2022 World Cup that went to Qatar.  Vladimir Putin won’t let those facts get in the way of a good anti-American rant, of course. The Russian strongman publicly questioned why the US would have any interest or jurisdiction over a legal argument that doesn’t involve its own citizens, which also turns out to be … not true: Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the United States of meddling in FIFA’s affairs and hinted that it was part of an...

If the “well-placed” source found by The Sydney Morning Herald is to be believed, it seems former President Bill Clinton went into Hulk mode on a Swiss hotel mirror after hearing Qatar was awarded the 2022 World Cup. The Morning Herald reports : “Bill Clinton looked anything but happy as he strode into the Savoy Baur en Ville hotel in Zurich in December 2010. The receptionists could tell he was irritated, but had no idea just how angry he was. After closing the door to his suite, he reached for an ornament on a table and threw it at a...

As part of their broad effort to distract from the Trump-Russia investigation and undermine its foundation, President Trump’s allies in Congress seek any way to discredit the now famous “dossier” authored by former British spy Christopher Steele, including by tying it or him to the Obama administration. Their latest target for guilt by association is the State Department under John Kerry. The suggestion by Trump allies is that somehow Kerry’s State Department was involved in the compilation or distribution of the dossier, an allegation for which there is zero direct evidence. While it’s true that Steele did have connections to...

The FBI “failed to preserve” five months worth of text messages exchanged between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the two FBI employees who made pro-Clinton and anti-Trump comments while working on the Clinton email and the Russia collusion investigations. The disclosure was made Friday in a letter sent by the Justice Department to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC). “The Department wants to bring to your attention that the FBI’s technical system for retaining text messages sent and received on FBI mobile devices failed to preserve text messages for Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page,” Stephen Boyd, the...

To understand the Four Page House Intelligence Memo at the heart of today’s FISA Abuse stories, it helps to understand why the memo is needed. We wrote about the issue in a March 2017 outline called: “The Nunes Paradox” – SEE HERE As the year-long story has unfolded, there are two central components at the heart of the political corruption and weaponization of the DOJ and FBI: ♦First, corruption within the DOJ and FBI that included their use of unlawful use of FISA-702 exploits; and ♦Second, how that intelligence information was extracted, passed along to those outside government, repackaged, and...

...Baumgartner had been working alongside Simpson as a Russian translator for a New York law firm defending a Russian holding company, Prevezon, in a money-laundering suit filed by the US Justice Department in Manhattan. Owned by Denis Katsyv, a Putin-tied oligarch, Prevezon was sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act. Also defending Prevezon was Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer who Simpson helped lobby Congress to repeal the Magnitsky Act by attacking William Browder, the banker-turned-human-rights-activist who championed it. “He speaks Russian,” Simpson said of Baumgartner, after Senate Judiciary Committee staff asked about “subcontractors” he’d hired. “So he would work with the lawyers...