It's kind of amazing that DOJ/FBI can walk into a secret court ex parte and present hearsay such as a news clipping from Yahoo! News and thereby obtain a warrant to spy on Americans.
I guess the court must have a very high opinion of the credibility of Yahoo! News. Are there other secret warrants based on, say, TMZ or Perez Hilton?
Possibly that would be "of Michael Issikoff," but wouldn't that be the guy with the false representation of a Koran being flushed down a toilet that caused an "ever-so-slightly-unbalanced response?"
An allegation has been made that Issikoff was further paid money through Fusion GPS to do an article on Steele's work.
It has played soothingly to Democrat ears that the dossier was really "oppo research" as if it truly derived from one or more well-meaning people (e.g., Steele, Nellie Ohr) that were looking up previously published tidbits of likely-factual information.
That's not what Steele's representations were about the dossier. It was actually much "thinner gruel." In interviews in his native England, Steele said the dossier was a work of fiction, intended to fuel a whisper campaign.
That monstrosity was never derived from truths, however salacious! It was cut from whole cloth as a harmonized script for the lips of people with more reputation than moral scruples to chat up grist for a rumor-mill, known in advance not to have any basis in fact. Such a whisper campaign parlays and converts reputations of the rumor-instigators for smears against people they already don't like.
McLame's whistling for a gopher to bring a copy to US shores was a labor of (his kind of) love to smear Trump. That the FBI would attempt to pass it off as anything more solid than a whisper campaign shows their mistake right off the bat.
The payment of money and FISC representations seem to show someone's or some group's impetus to concretize that, taking it entirely outside the realm of its provenance, even well before Fusion GPS received DNC or Clinton Foundation money. Steele's original charge (now, by whom would that have come?) was apparently not to write a report on researched facts, but rather something to be used as back-slapping, watering-hole exaggerations or in obvious parody.
The verification process that is still incomplete and so well avoided to have been reported should have told FBI handlers and us how devoid of substance it truly is.