My guess is that the FISA Court was told that the Steele dossier was verified. The congressional leadership was told the same thing, which goes a long way to explaining the conduct of the Republicans on the Hill. The media was told the same thing. Total control of information in secret proceedings with no opportunity for cross-examination and refutation is a powerful thing.
No one in the summer and fall of 2016 and early 2017 contemplated that the senior people in the FBI, DOJ and IC were flat-out lying.
Nobody who voted for Trump thought the allegations were credible, and many many people picked up on the lies, as well as the exact methods used to perpetrate legal/investigatory action against Trump.
Mueller's appointment was, on its face, flawed and dishonest.
-- Total control of information in secret proceedings with no opportunity for cross-examination and refutation is a powerful thing. --
Until you realize that when the conduct is secret, the person pushing it is almost certainly lying.
Just consider how many naked assertions are made, like "FISA is an important tool for the safety of the public." No it's not. It's a secret court. No way is it used for a good purpose. It is used to hide bad conduct.
The government has demonstrated again and again that it cannot be trusted. How often is it caught telling the truth? The government's track record for truth is worse than the press record for truth.
Lindsey Graham brought that exact point up in his press conference yesterday. Everyone who read the Steele Dossier and believed it to be real must have been floored and it was being endorsed by the FBI, DOJ and the intelligence community as being real.
If real, the only conclusion a person could come to is that President Trump was a danger to this country and needed yo be removed from office.
The only person close to President Trump who understood the intelligence system well enough to figure out shat was going on and fight back on this when Trump took office in Jan 2017 was General Flynn.
This is why framing Flynn to get rid of him was central to the coup attempt.
Looks like even Comey was misled by Brennan and the Fusion GPS team early on and Brennan tricked Comey on the level of confirmation of the hoax to suck him in to the plot.
Bruce Orr and others in the know about the Hillary Clinton funded, Fusion GPS engineered Steele dirty trick hoax tried to warn the unknowing that this was really just a faked political dirt operation and not a real intelligence document to keep it from entering the formal FBI/DOJ legal investigation system where it would eventually be exposed.
Orr was not successful as Rosenstein used the Steele Dossier to justify the initiation of the Mueller Investigation witch hunt to set up a soft coup against Trump and things started spinning out of control.
At some point, the plotters crossed the Rubicon and had to go into full on cover up and obstruction to cover for their coup, a process we are now at the end game of .
The damage these people have done to our country and to the entire world is simply staggering