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I’ve got a new suspicion, based on some recent revelations, that Steele may not be the true author/compiler of the information in his dossier and that he did not get the information from his “Russian spy network”.

I suggest the possibility that the information came from political partisans, and that he was paid to write it up to look like “intelligence” and put his name on it because of his relationship with the FBI and history in the MI-6, to give the information an air of credulity and a pretext for the FBI to “trust” it and use it to justify its spying on Trump.

Why do I say this? Consider the following points:

1) Jonathan Wise, a State Dept deputy, wrote an Op-Ed in the WaPo saying that he received a ‘dossier’ containing similar allegations in the Steele memos, from longtime Clinton confidant Sydney Blumenthal. As we also know from the Clinton server investigation releases, Blumenthal was acting in part as an independent intelligence gatherer for Hillary outside the intel apparatus.

This raises some questions - did Blumenthal get the Steele memos before Steele ever wrote them? Or, could it be that people associated with the Clinton team wrote them first, couldn’t get any traction with them, and then decided to hire Steele to fix them up and put his name on them and get it to the FBI?

2) Steele met with Kathleen Kavalec, also a State Dept deputy. Kavalec wrote a memo to the FBI about this meeting in which she writes that Steele said he was working for “an institution that had been hacked” that was “eager to see the information get to the public before the election”.

3) At least two pieces of information in the dossier was old and previously looked into. First, the allegation that Trump had computers connected to a Russian bank was reported to the FBI by the DNC months before Steele wrote his dossier. The FBI investigated the DNC claim and found it to be nothing. But this shows that the allegation existed and was used by partisans before the dossier was written. Second, Trump’s private attorney Cohen testified before Congress that this “rumor of a pee tape” had been floating around for years, but that nobody believed it to be true and Cohen did not ever locate anyone who saw it, was never approached by anyone or tried to buy it/suppress it, and nobody tried to blackmail Trump with it.

These facts suggest that at least parts of dossier was not intelligence, but instead a collection of smears, innuendos and old rumors which were compiled by an ‘expert’ who was paid handsomely to look like some sort of intelligence gathering operation.