Despite the FBI and DOJ officials refusing to answer the question publicly, everyone suspected the sketchy Steele Dossier was what corrupt FBI and DOJ officials used to get the October 2016 FISA warrant against Trump. It was the only scenario that made sense.
Even with the publicly available circumstantial evidence and the hundreds of different ways congressional investigators asked the question, no-one would definitively confirmed the Christopher Steele Trump ‘Russian Dossier’ was the underlying evidence for the 2016 FISA application to gain electronic surveillance of presidential candidate Donald Trump and his team. UNTIL NOW.
Trump Critic Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) just confirmed on Fox News Channel Tucker Carson that the Steele Dossier was used obtain a warrant that authorized the wiretap and surveillance of Trumps campaign officials. Guest host Brian Kilmead understood what he was hearing was serious, but didn’t quite catch the specific seriousness of it. Watch, exchange on dossier begins at 4:10:
“I’m very disturbed by what the Department of Justice did with this dossier and we need a special councel to look in to that. Because that’s not in Mueller’s charter. What I saw and what I’ve gathered in the last couple of days, bothers me a lot and I would like somebody outside DOJ to look into how this dossier was handled – and what they did with it.”
This is huge news. After all, this a “dossier” that former FBI director James Comey dismissed as “salacious and unverified” in Senate testimony just six months ago.
When a court is asked for a warrant, the government is obligated to provide the judge with a basis to believe the information submitted is credible — by vouching that the source has been reliable in the past, by corroborating the information offered, or both. If Comey pronounced the dossier information unverified in June 2017, it had to have been unverified ten months earlier. That’s when the FBI and Justice Department obtained a FISA warrant for Carter Page, who had been loosely described as a Trump campaign adviser.
Why is this important?
- The Steele dossier was a Clinton campaign product. If used by the FBI and the Obama Justice Department to obtain a FISA warrant, that would mean law-enforcement agencies controlled by a Democratic president fed the FISA court political campaign material produced by the Democratic candidate whom the president had endorsed to succeed him. The objective could have only been to spy on the opposition Republican campaign.
- In June of this year, former FBI director James Comey testified that the dossier was “salacious and unverified.” While still director, Comey had described the dossier the same way when he briefed President-elect Trump on it in January 2017. If the dossier was still unverified as late as mid 2017, its allegations could not possibly have been verified months earlier, in the late summer or early autumn of 2016, when it appears that the FBI and DOJ used them in an application to the FISA court.
It is abundantly clear that, at a high level, the DOJ and FBI were in the tank for Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration colluded with the Clinton campaign to use the Steele dossier as a vehicle for court-authorized monitoring of the Trump campaign — and to fuel a pre-election media narrative.
I agree with Senator Graham, a special councel is necessary to get to the bottom of this. Using the intelligence community to spy on the opposition party during a presidential election cannot be established as the new norm.
