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NEW REVELATIONS ABOUT FBI TARGETING TRUMP. With the 2020 election less than six weeks away, we are learning more — at long last — about the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign in the 2016 election. The new information appears to be coming mostly from U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation of the investigation, and it is making its way to the public through Attorney General Bill Barr’s commitment to declassify documents from the FBI’s probe of Trump campaign figures, and also through the court fighting over the Justice Department’s move to drop criminal charges against former Trump aide Michael Flynn.
There’s a lot to see, but just for the moment focus on the Steele dossier. We already knew the FBI’s embrace of the sensational and bogus dossier by a former British spy was a shameful episode in the bureau’s history. Now we know even more with the revelation that a key source for the dossier had connections to Russian intelligence — increasing the possibility that the dossier was at least in part a Russian disinformation document.
Remember, in 2016, the FBI embraced the dossier, which was compiled by the fanatically anti-Trump ex-spy Christopher Steele. Even though Steele’s Trump targeting was being funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign, the FBI still proposed to hire Steele to do anti-Trump research for the bureau in the final days of the 2016 campaign. That alone is one of the most jaw-dropping elements of the entire story. (The deal to hire Steele fell through when he could not resist talking to the press about his work.)
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Then remember that top FBI officials, from James Comey down, wanted to include information from the dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment, which was the classified report on Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. And then remember that on January 6, 2017, Comey briefed President-elect Trump himself on the most salacious of the dossier’s allegations — that in a Moscow hotel room in 2013, Trump watched prostitutes perform a kinky sex act while Russian spy cameras videotaped the whole thing.
Then remember that it was all BS, and the FBI either knew or should have known that it was BS. And now, consider the new evidence, which concerns a person known as the “primary sub-source” for the dossier. Steele himself did not dig up a lot of the “evidence” in the dossier. He got most of it from the primary sub-source. “Steele was not the originating source of any of the factual information in his reporting,” Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz found. “Steele instead relied on a primary sub-source for information, who used his/her network of sub-sources.”
Now, Attorney General Barr has declassified information showing that the primary sub-source was once the subject of an FBI counter-intelligence investigation and was suspected of being a Russian spy. He had connections and contacts with Russian intelligence agents in the U.S. and was suspected of trying to recruit two employees at a Democratic think tank in Washington. The FBI began the process of getting a wiretap on him — this was back in the 2009-2011 period — but stopped when he left the country.
And that was the person who was supplying Christopher Steele with his bogus anti-Trump gossip. And one more thing. It turns out the FBI knew in December 2016 about the primary sub-source’s past. And yet they still went ahead with pushing to get Steele’s information into the Intelligence Community Assessment and to brief the president-elect — and the President Obama, too — on Steele’s material.
There is much, much more in the new revelations — about the Flynn investigation and the entire “Crossfire Hurricane” probe. But just the news about the FBI’s handling of the Steele dossier is enough to stun even the most jaded observers of the bureau’s actions in the Trump-Russia affair.
