Anti-Trump dossier roils Capitol Hill anew after revelations about bias

Three Senate committee chairmen demanded answers this week about the role played by the Justice and State departments in furthering the goals of Christopher Steele, the former British spy who compiled the discredited anti-Trump dossier that helped launch the special counsel’s investigation.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham fired off inquiries to the Justice Department inspector general and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, while Sens. Charles E. Grassley and Ron Johnson, heads of the Finance and Homeland Security committees, respectively, sent their own letter to Mr. Pompeo and FBI Director Christopher Wray on Thursday.

They were all reacting to news that Mr. Steele had communicated some of his work compiling the anti-Trump document to State Department employees.

Notes from a meeting between Mr. Steele and Kathleen Kavalec, who was then a department official, suggest Mr. Steele was intent on getting his information out in the public before the election, according to The Hill, which obtained the notes through an open-records request.

They also said the State Department notes suggest Mr. Steele had communicated with the press. That, they said, would contradict what the FBI had said when it used his unverified information to help win a secret surveillance warrant against one-time Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

Besides, his focus on the elections suggests a political motive beyond the national security concerns he had proclaimed, the senators suggested.

“This important information further demonstrates the bias of the primary source of material that was the basis for the Carter Page FISA warrant,” Mr. Graham wrote in one of his letters.

Republicans recently have renewed their demands for answers about Mr. Steele and his role in the 2016 election.

I have to wonder if any of the good Senators bothered to include or address the pertinent information John Soloman revealed in his column FBI's Steele story falls apart: False intel and media contacts were flagged before FISA
published @ THE HILL yesterday?

The concerns were flagged in a typed memo and in handwritten notes taken by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec on Oct. 11, 2016.

Her observations were recorded exactly 10 days before the FBI used Steele and his infamous dossier to justify securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and the campaign’s contacts with Russia in search of a now debunked collusion theory.

It is important to note that the FBI swore on Oct. 21, 2016, to the FISA judges that Steele’s “reporting has been corroborated and used in criminal proceedings” and the FBI has determined him to be “reliable” and was “unaware of any derogatory information pertaining” to their informant, who simultaneously worked for Fusion GPS, the firm paid by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton campaign to find Russian dirt on Trump.

That’s a pretty remarkable declaration in Footnote 5 on Page 15 of the FISA application, since Kavalec apparently needed just a single encounter with Steele at State to find one of his key claims about Trump-Russia collusion was blatantly false.

In her typed summary, Kavalec wrote that Steele told her the Russians had constructed a “technical/human operation run out of Moscow targeting the election” that recruited emigres in the United States to “do hacking and recruiting.”

She quoted Steele as saying, “Payments to those recruited are made out of the Russian Consulate in Miami,” according to a copy of her summary memo obtained under open records litigation by the conservative group Citizens United. Kavalec bluntly debunked that assertion in a bracketed comment: “It is important to note that there is no Russian consulate in Miami.”

Kavalec, two days later and well before the FISA warrant was issued, forwarded her typed summary to other government officials.

The State Department has redacted the names and agencies of everyone she alerted. It is unlikely that her concerns failed to reach the FBI.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), a member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee and ranking member of its Subcommittee on Government Operations, told me late Thursday he had confirmed with U.S. officials that Kavalec's memo was forwarded to the FBI in the Oct. 13, 2016, email....

“This once again shows officials at the FBI and (Department of Justice) DOJ were well aware the dossier was a lie — from very early on in the process all the way to when they made the conscious decision to include it in a FISA application,” he said. “The fact that Christopher Steele and his partisan research document were treated in any way seriously by our Intelligence Community leaders amounts to malpractice.”

FBI and DOJ officials did not respond to a request for comment.

But it is almost certain the FBI knew of Steele's contact with State and his partisan motive. That's because former Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland says she instructed her staff to send the information they got from Steele to the bureau immediately and to cease contact with the informer because "this is about U.S. politics, and not the work of — not the business of the State Department, and certainly not the business of a career employee who is subject to the Hatch Act."

ON April 25, 2019, FBI Director WRAY reclassified Kavalec's notes and memos by marking all SECRET, SEALED THEM FOR 25 YEARS!

WHY?

Oh? Got a link? I’d like to share that on the forbidden thread.
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CU In The News
Sara Carter: Citizen’s United: Docs Reveal British Spy’s Motive To Release Dossier Dirt On Trump Before 2016 Election

Posted by Citizens United
05/08/2019

A recently discovered memo written by former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec reveals stunning information that FBI informant and former British spy Christopher Steele planned to release the unverified information in his dossier before Election Day. He also admitted to Kavalec in a meeting that his research was political, according to the memo first obtained by Citizen’s United through a Freedom of Information Act request. Steele was paid by the embattled research firm Fusion GPS through the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

It is the first piece of solid communication that reveals Steele’s true intentions for the dossier. The Hill’s John Solomon first published the report of the memo on Tuesday, saying the memo has been turned over to the Department of Justice by a congressional official. The official is concerned that it is information that has not been seen by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz or other DOJ investigators.

In Kavalec’s written account of her Oct. 11, 2016, meeting with Steele that he “is keen to see this information come to light prior to November 8,” the date of the 2016 election. According to Solomon, Kavalec summarized her meeting with Steele and his coworker Tatyana Duran. Duran worked at Steele’s Orbis Security firm.

Citizen’s United obtained the memos last week ago through open-records litigation, according to David Bossie, head of Citizens United. Bossie, who is also an information Trump advisor, noted that his conservative group Citizen’s United has been a leader on using FOIA litigation to uncover a treasure trove of documents from Hillary Clinton’s emails, to Benghazi and now what appears to be the framing of Trump by a former British intelligence officer.

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