New Documents Suggest The Steele Dossier Was A Deliberate Setup For Trump

After nearly two years since the Steele dossier was published, it remains the cornerstone of the case for collusion. The dossier model has also given rise to similar operations.

A trove of recently released documents sheds further light on the scope and logistics of the information operation designed to sabotage an American election. Players include the press, political operatives from both parties, and law enforcement and intelligence officials. Their instrument was the Steele dossier, first introduced to the American public two years ago.

A collection of reports compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, the dossier is now engraved in contemporary U.S. history. First marketed as bedrock evidence that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election, the dossier’s legitimacy took a hit after reports showed the Hillary Clinton campaign paid for the work.

The revelation that the dossier was used to secure a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page compromised the integrity of the investigation the FBI had opened on Page and three other Trump associates by the end of July 2016. Nonetheless, that same probe continues today as the special counsel investigation.

“In his testimony, Comey again pushed the fiction that Republicans opposed to Trump first paid for the dossier. Congressional Republicans are right that Comey is trying to muddy the waters—the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee funded Steele’s work. None of it would have been possible had the media not linked arms with spies, cops, and lawyers to relay a story first spun by Clinton operatives. But credit Comey for underscoring, and maybe not accidentally, a larger truth—the operation that sought to defraud the American voter had bipartisan support all along. Court documents released in December show that Steele gave his final report to Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger and House Speaker Paul Ryan’s chief of staff, Jonathan Burks.”

“Around the same time Fusion GPS was hired, longtime Clinton foot-soldier Cody Shearer was also probing for ties between Trump and Russia. He, too, was speaking to media figures, like former CIA official Robert Baer. Shearer wrote two reports (“Donald Trump—Background Notes—The Compromised Candidate,” and “FSB Interview”), which are likely sources for the dossier report on which Comey briefed Trump.

Both Shearer memos detail Trump’s alleged sexual proclivities. One claims there is film of a woman urinating on him. The other Shearer report alleges that there is video of Trump caught in a sexual tryst in the presidential suite of the Moscow Ritz-Carlton in 2013. According to Shearer’s FSB source, this is how the Russians compromised Trump.

These are nearly identical to the core findings that Steele seems to have shared with the State Department and FBI in June and early July. The chronology of the BuzzFeed document indicates no other memos existed at that point. It’s not known whether Steele shared reporting with U.S. authorities that was not included in the BuzzFeed version.”

“Shortly after Steele met with an FBI agent in London the first week of July, the press was briefed on his subsequent reporting. On July 26, a Wall Street Journal reporter texted Carter Page to ask for comment on allegations that he had met with Igor Sechin, a Russian energy executive and Putin ally, to discuss “energy deals and the possibility of the U.S. government lifting sanctions.”

The reporter’s queries match allegations made in a July 19 Steele memo that Page met with Sechin, who was sanctioned by the United States in 2014, during a Moscow trip earlier that month to discuss “future bilateral energy cooperation and prospects for an associated move to lift Ukraine-related Western sanctions on Russia.” These claims were entered in the original FISA application and all three renewals.

The FBI terminated its arrangement with Steele after discovering that he had briefed the press for a Mother Jones article published October 31. The House Intelligence Committee’s FISA memo argued that
Steele should have been fired for his “undisclosed contacts” with press outlets in September, before the FISA application was submitted to the court. But the exchange between Page and the WSJ reporter shows the press was being briefed on what is said to be Steele’s reporting by the end of July. Page wrote on Twitter recently that Fusion GPS fed the journalist this material.

Page has denied that he knows Sechin, the president of Rosneft (Russia’s major petroleum company), or the Kremlin official named in the memo. He responded to the Journal reporter that the “sanctions lifting point” was “ridiculous.””

“According to intelligence officials, the fact that Page was relatively unknown made him an attractive target.

Intelligence sources told The Federalist that Page was likely targeted as a means of accessing the Trump team’s communications.

“It can be tougher to make a FISA case on a prominent, government-connected figure,” said former Army intelligence officer Chris Farrell, now director of investigations at Judicial Watch. “But you can spin a tale about a guy who is on the margins. You can make sweeping generalizations, you don’t have to be too detailed. And they’d use the lack of information on Page to explain that’s precisely why they need the warrant—to learn more about him.”

Intelligence sources told The Federalist that Page was likely targeted as a means of accessing the Trump team’s communications.

“It’s not just that it would be hard to convince a judge to let you target Trump,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “There’s an upside to going after a middle or lower-level figure in an organizational structure.”

According to FISA’s two-jump protocol, the FBI can monitor the communications of those in contact with the target and those in contact with them. Law enforcement would look for a target likely to provide the largest aperture into an organization.

“The fact that Page was a peripheral campaign figure meant he was in contact with more people than someone like Trump, whose contacts were likely pretty limited,” said the same source. “Trump’s the top guy, so his contacts within the team are through a funnel, a handful of aides. Targeting Page would give them broader ability to hop. His first order contacts within the campaign team were probably limited, maybe 15 people—who knows? But that would give lots of access to other people on the second hop, maybe 30 or 40 times that.”

Page is the dossier’s protagonist. It is the dossier’s account of his actions that earned the October 21 warrant. A former prosecutor familiar with the case told The Federalist that when he first read the dossier, he recognized immediately that Page was the central figure: “All the other stuff isn’t that important. The other characters appear to be secondary. Page is the leading actor, the centerpiece of the dossier. He’s the one who is alleged to have committed a crime.””

“The Wall Street Journal reporter appears to have been one of several journalists briefed during the same period on Page’s alleged Russian-related activities. Articles published during July and early August (The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Weekly Standard, Washington Post, and Slate) cite Page’s biography and articles as evidence of Trump’s ties to Russia.

An important target audience was the handful of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges likely to read the application for a warrant on the Trump adviser.

Page’s alleged interactions with Russian officials were represented as part of a larger clandestine network linking the Trump team to the Kremlin.

“By the time it got to the secret court,” said a senior congressional source, “it was supposed to be common knowledge that Page was strangely friendly to Russia.”

Page is first identified in the dossier in an undated memo (Report 095), apparently from the mid-July period, as an intermediary used by Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort to manage the “well-developed conspiracy” between Trump and the Russians.

Among other pieces of evidence cited in the dossier to prove Manafort’s connections to the Kremlin is an August 22 report detailing a “secret” meeting the previous week between Putin and former Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovich, a former Manafort client. In their meeting, according to the dossier, Yanukovich confirmed to Putin that he “authorized the kick-back payments to Manafort, as alleged in western media.”

The memo is likely referring to a New York Times article from the previous week sourced to Ukrainian activists. But the August 15 meeting in Volgograd between Putin and Yanukovich is an invention.

A Russian government website shows Putin was in Volgograd on that date, for a one-day trip. Yanukovich, however, didn’t get to Volgograd until August 18, three days after Putin left. It would have been hard to miss Yanukovich’s arrival, since he pulled into port on a triple-decker yacht.

It appears that Steele or another Fusion employee had mistaken the date in published reports, like this one from Meduza, a Russian opposition publication based in Latvia.

Thus Page’s alleged interactions with Russian officials were represented as part of a larger clandestine network linking the Trump team to the Kremlin. Press coverage of Page’s July trip to Moscow, and his speech there, proved he was somehow engaged in Russia-related affairs—while the dossier purported to unveil the real, nefarious purpose of his trip.”

“Ticking Off the FISA Boxes

The July 19 Steele memo alleging that Page had a “secret meeting” with Sechin checked off an important box for the FISA application process.

“It’s to find out about the target’s clandestine activities on behalf of foreign powers. It doesn’t make sense if it’s a public meeting in Red Square,” said Wauck. “Next you’d want to show that the people he met with clandestinely were part of the criminal activity.”

The memo ties Page’s potentially criminal actions to Trump himself.

However, there is no crime alleged in the July 19 memo. The substance of Page’s supposed meeting is not criminal. Removing sanctions on Russia in exchange for bilateral energy cooperation would be a matter of policy.

The criminal predicate for the FISA warrant is introduced subsequently, in a memo dated almost exactly three months later, October 18. Report 134 is essentially a revision of the July 19 memo. It discusses the same meeting in early July and appears to be described by the same intimate of Sechin’s who reported the meeting to Steele’s intermediary in July. This time, however, Sechin’s “close associate” gives a significantly different account to Steele’s source—he “elaborated on the reported secret [July] meeting.”

According to the October 18 report, instead of offering bilateral energy cooperation in exchange for convincing Trump to relieve sanctions, Sechin tells Page that he will profit personally. According to the memo, Page was offered “the brokerage of up to a 19% (privatised) stake in Rosneft in return.”

That’s bribery. The scheme would have benefited both men, likely removing sanctions on Sechin and making Page a wealthy man. The brokerage fee would have amounted to at least tens of millions of dollars on a percentage worth more than $10 billion.

The Trump adviser, the report continues, “expressed interest and confirmed that were Trump elected US president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted.” The memo ties Page’s potentially criminal actions to Trump himself. According to Steele’s source, Page was “speaking with the Republican candidate’s authority.””

"The Importance of 19 Percent Newly incoming House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff contended back in March 2017 that the fact Rosneft did eventually sell off a 19 percent stake, to Qatar, proves the veracity of the dossier. However, the number would have been easy to find on the internet. By spring 2016 it was widely reported that Russia, hurting from both sanctions and a drop in energy prices, intended to sell off between 19 and 19.5 percent of Rosneft. ‘It suggests that the scenario may have been directed by the FBI.’ Nevertheless, the 19 percent figure may have won the warrant. “Imagine you’re before a judge,” said Wauck, “and you’re making a case that your suspect was involved in a bribery scheme. If you give a real figure, that’s a lot more persuasive than saying he was handed a suitcase full of cash.” While the allegations from the July 19 memo regarding the Page-Sechin meeting are included in all four FISA applications, the dossier’s allegations of Page’s crime are apparent in neither the original nor the three renewals. Either the warrants failed for some reason to include sensational allegations of a potential crime in connection with the clandestine intelligence activities of a FISA target, or the allegations are redacted. Perhaps that was to conceal evidence that Steele’s October 18 memo secured the FISA three days later. The rapid turnaround is not typical, says Judicial Watch’s Farrell. “An act of espionage may not be reportable for years. By its nature, you’re talking about clandestine activity, so you may not find out about it until long after it’s happened. Here the operational activity is identified almost immediately. And then it’s followed by a warrant. It suggests that the scenario may have been directed by the FBI.”\"

This author must’ve been shipwrecked on an island somewhere. Way behind the curve.

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you’re right this is “way behind the curve” to many especially those here on the forum.

however there are millions out there that are glued to MSM version of nightly news before the wheel.

they haven’t got a clue.

there is a whole generation of voters that were not even born before bubba’s blue dress days.

hopefully exposure in more traditional media will help spread the word.

Michael isikoff admission of unsubstantiated BS on hildabeast dossier was pretty big walk back too.

lotta old news to you, is a new revelation to a lotta people everyday.

How is it possible that so many people knew and said nothing? Everyone knows it’s impossible to sustain a real conspiracy that size. People in the know talk and the press makes it public. But they did talk—all the time. But the conversations, implicit confessions, of FBI agents and other U.S. officials were hidden by colleagues who classified their talk, or deleted it, like FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page’s text messages.

The press didn’t report it because the press is part of the operation, the indispensable part. None of it would have been possible, and it certainly wouldn’t have lasted for two years, had the media not linked arms with spies, cops, and lawyers to relay a story first spun by Clinton operatives.

Notice, Dear Reader, first, that this is obviously true, on the one hand, and on the other it makes no sense at all without the implicit assumption that “the press” is a unitary entity. Without, that is, the understanding that there is no ideological competition in journalism. And there isn’t. The First Amendment takes as a starting point the assumption of ideological diversity in journalism - diversity which was obvious up through most of the Nineteenth Century. But something changed that.
IMHO it was the telegraph - the telegraph, and the wire services. And in particular the AP and its membership. The AP “wire” is a continuous virtual meeting of the membership of the AP.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)
It appears that Adam Smith was right. The First Amendment intended to maintain ideological diversity in journalism, by preventing the government from stifling it. Unfortunately that has not proved to be sufficient; it is also necessary to restrain the tendency of journalists to enforce ideological conformity on itself - and thereby control the government via its PR power, bringing us exactly the same result that government control of journalism would.

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