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A senior Barack Obama State Department official gave the green light to an FBI agent in 2016 to meet with dossier writer Christopher Steele, a meeting that touched off a relationship that would fuel the ongoing investigation into possible Donald Trump-Russia election collusion. And, the sensational Steele allegation that led to an FBI wiretap on Trump volunteer Carter Page came from “pillow talk” with the lover of a Kremlin official, a new book says. The disclosure that Victoria Nuland started the process is contained in “Russian Roulette,” a book released Tuesday by Yahoo News report Michael Isikoff and Mother Jones...

FBI told court Christopher Steele unaware of Dem funding, New Yorker reports he knew A lengthy, glowing New Yorker magazine profile on the anti-Trump “dossier” author, Christopher Steele, reported the former MI6 agent knew that his work was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. That claim conflicts with the FBI’s explicit statement in its October 2016 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance application that Steele was unaware of who financed his work for Fusion GPS, the opposition-research company hired by the Democrats’ law firm Perkins Coie, reports investigative reporter Sara Carter. Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe has...

“I know nothing,” isn’t just the motto of Sergeant Schultz. It’s also the Clinton motto. And Christopher Steele, the Brit whom the Clinton campaign hired to find out things for them, also knows nothing. Or at least that’s the theme of the sprawling New Yorker profile of Steele, his dossier and his associates. Steele, Jane Mayer, its authoress, tells us, is a brilliant researcher and we should take his word about all his allegations involving President Trump. Even the ones that aren’t true and don’t make any sense. But he doesn’t know anything.

Former British spy and anti-Trump dossier author Christopher Steele once alleged that Russian agents “within the Democratic Party” were involved in hacking the Democratic National Committee. The New Yorker reports: On July 26, 2016, after WikiLeaks disseminated the D.N.C. e-mails, Steele filed yet another memo, this time claiming that the Kremlin was “behind” the hacking, which was part of a Russian cyber war against Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Many of the details seemed far-fetched: Steele’s sources claimed that the digital attack involved agents “within the Democratic Party structure itself,” as well as Russian émigrés in the U.S. and “associated offensive cyber...

A New Yorker profile of dossier author Christopher Steele provided several new revelations MSNBC host Rachel Maddow touted it as a “staggering piece of reporting” Trump has denied the dossier claim, calling it “disgusting” A new profile of dossier author Christopher Steele provided several new revelations about the creation of the salacious and unverified dossier.

I covered some of the New Yorker's whitewash of Christopher Steele, the man behind the Clinton-Steele dossier, already. Here's how it tries to disassociate Steele from the Shearer memo that he passed along. The issue here is that Steele passed along materials from Cody Shearer, one of Bill Clinton's plumbers, to the FBI confirming his own claims. It raised serious questions among many, including myself, whether Shearer hadn't originated the whole dossier. Now here's the whitewash.

Rep. Devin Nunes says the FBI violated its own rules, and may have skirted federal law, by using a Democratic Party-bought dossier to spy on a Trump campaign volunteer. In a letter, he has asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to “hold accountable” those who oversaw the warrant on Carter Page. The chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence told Mr. Sessions that the FBI’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (DIOG) contains specific instructions on how to apply to a judge for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) wiretap. Mr. Nunes, California Republican, says the FBI clearly violated those...

Shortened title. Full title: DEEP STATE SCANDAL=> Robert Mueller STILL Relying on Hillary-Funded Phony Dossier as “Road Map” For Russia Witch Hunt Special Counsel Robert Mueller is continuing to use a controversial 35-page dossier financed by the Democratic National Committee and the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign as a “road map” for investigative leads, sources familiar with his investigation say. Mueller’s team has also used information gleaned from surveillance court-approved wiretaps on former Trump adviser Carter Page that were secured by citing material in the dossier, the sources say. […] Sources say Mueller’s office also inherited collections from a separate wiretap...

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is continuing to use a controversial 35-page dossier financed by the Democratic National Committee and the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign as a "road map” for investigative leads, sources familiar with his investigation say. Mueller’s team has also used information gleaned from surveillance court-approved wiretaps on former Trump adviser Carter Page that were secured by citing material in the dossier, the sources say. And a detail previously reported last fall – that Mueller’s investigators traveled overseas last year to debrief the dossier’s London-based author, Christopher Steele, a former British spy – takes on a new cast with...

Special counsel Robert Mueller has indicted 13 Russian nationals for allegedly conspiring to sow confusion in the 2016 presidential election. The chance of extraditing any of the accused from Vladimir Putin's Russia is zero. Some of the Russians' Keystone Cops efforts to disrupt the election favored Donald Trump (as well as Bernie Sanders). Yet Mueller's team made it clear that the Russians neither colluded with any U.S. citizens nor had any material effect on the election's outcome. But from here on out, there will be ironies, paradoxes and unintended consequences with just about everything Mueller does. Is it now time...

**SNIP** The first one is that they knew Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous Russia-Trump dossier, was a foreign citizen. According to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s press conference on the indictments, the Russians “used stolen or fictitious American identities, fraudulent bank accounts and false identification documents” to hide their activities. The next potentially criminating thing is that the Clinton campaign “knew, and paid, Steele to influence an election.”

On February 18, 2018, United States attorney general Jeff Sessions stated that the Department of Justice (DOJ) will investigate whether the process used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to obtain warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) regarding allegations involving Russia and the Donald Trump presidential campaign was proper. The most notorious part of this process involved FISA Court surveillance and search warrants on part-time Trump campaign informal adviser Carter Page. The warrants were based on a dossier written by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele.

The way to deconstruct the ‘Trump Operation’ is to focus on the underlying cornerstone, ‘the dossier’. We have continued to point toward this approach as the most direct path to get the underlying scheme exposed and subsequently take down all the corrupt officials. This approach also appears to be the course of investigative action by Nunes, Goodlatte and Grassley. The Clinton-Steele Dossier is now exposed as the foundational document behind a fraudulent FISA surveillance warrant. As such Phase-two includes exposing everyone who is associated with the assembly, use, promotion and distribution of the Clinton-Steele Dossier.

...Steele reached an agreement with the FBI a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him $50,000 to continue his “research,” though the deal is believed to have fallen through after the dossier became public (an intelligence community source tells The American Conservative Steele did in fact operate as a fully paid FBI asset.) Along the way, the FBI also informed Steele of their separate investigation into Trump staffer George Papadopoulos, a violation of security and a possible tainting of Steele’s research going forward. The Nunes memo also showed then-associate deputy attorney general Bruce Ohr back-channeled additional...

On a Monday night (February 12th, 2018) episode of Tucker Carlson a democrat member of the House Intelligence committee said something interesting that almost everyone missed. Appearing on the show to joust with Tucker, HPSCI member Eric Swalwell stated: “the House Intel Committee has not interviewed a single witness in over a month”. [Video Here, quote @03:47] This statement is rather enlightening. A month earlier, January 4th, 2018, an agreement was finally made between House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes and DOJ Asst. Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for complete disclosure of all unreadacted documents.....AND a list of witnesses who Nunes...

BuzzFeed News sued the Democratic National Committee (DNC) Tuesday to force the release of information that the news outlet hopes will help it defend against a lawsuit related to the Steele dossier. BuzzFeed is seeking digital information that could shed light on the cyber attacks against the DNC during the presidential campaign. The news outlet faces three separate lawsuits related to its publication of the dossier, which was written by former British spy Christopher Steele and financed by the Clinton campaign and DNC. The suit against the DNC seeks information that could help defend against a defamation lawsuit filed by...

A release last week of texts showed that Christopher Steele, the former British spy whose memos regarding the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia are referred to as the Steele dossier, reached out to Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democratic member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, through a Russian-linked Washington, D.C., lobbyist named Adam Waldman. Among Waldman’s clients is Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. In a text dated March 16, 2017, Waldman texted Warner, “Chris Steele asked me to call you.” In 2009, Waldman filed papers with the Department of Justice...

Christopher Steele’s unproven dossier is a mix of felony charges against President Trump and his people, as well as supposed gossip inside the Kremlin over computer hacking and personnel firings. For the ongoing special counsel investigation into suspected Trump-Russia election coordination, it is helpful to separate what counts: Dust away the atmospherics — supposed Kremlin intrigue — and focus on the collusion charges brought by the former British spy based on his paid intermediaries and Moscow sources. None is identified. Funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party, these specific dossier charges of secret spy missions and criminality...

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...

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes next plans to investigate the role former CIA Director John Brennan and other Obama intelligence officials played in promoting the salacious and unverified Steele dossier on Donald Trump -- including whether Brennan perjured himself in public testimony about it. In his May 2017 testimony before the intelligence panel, Brennan emphatically denied the dossier factored into the intelligence community’s publicly released conclusion last year that Russia meddled in the 2016 election "to help Trump’s chances of victory.” Brennan also swore that he did not know who commissioned the anti-Trump research document (excerpt here), even though...