The Steele Dossier

[_Gray Ghost]

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/05/16/report-comey-told-staff-in-2016-that-john-brennan-insisted-on-pushing-pee-dossier-in-intel-assessment/

Why should anyone care what a white supremacist site has to say on the matter?

[_ajax18]

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/05/16/report-comey-told-staff-in-2016-that-john-brennan-insisted-on-pushing-pee-dossier-in-intel-assessment/

Why should anyone care what a white supremacist site has to say on the matter?

It's not really about anything I had to say on the matter. It was a question about what EAllusion and Kevin Graham have said on the matter.

Who contends that the FISA warrant was not based on the Steele Dossier?

Don't know about mattresses and Golden Showers. But the infamous English dossier was used by the FBI to get a FISA warrant on Carter Page.

I wonder if The CCC still believes his previous statement.

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=45827&p=1050225&hilit=dossier#p1050225

[_subgenius]

Subs,

You were upset that the gov spent $60M to discover Bill got a blowie in the White House?

- Doc

yep, waste of time.

[_Brackite]

I wonder if The CCC still believes his previous statement.

I think that he passed away.

[_Some Schmo]

I wonder if The CCC still believes his previous statement.

I think that he passed away.

I've wondered about that. Saddens me.

[_ajax18]

I think that he passed away.

I hope he's in a better place. At least he got religion right even if his politics were off the mark.

[_Kevin Graham]

It's not really about anything I had to say on the matter. It was a question about what EAllusion and Kevin Graham have said on the matter.

Who contends that the FISA warrant was not based on the Steele Dossier?

Only the idiots on FOX News and the White Supremacist sites you peruse daily are saying the FISA was based strictly on the Dossier.

Also on Fox News, Rep. Matt Gaetz claimed that “even [former FBI Deputy Director] Andrew McCabe indicated that in the absence of the dossier, the Papadopoulos meeting would not have been enough to continue the investigation.”

Gaetz is referring to the February 2018 Republican memo, which claimed that McCabe had testified in December “that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.” But that has been disputed, including by McCabe.

Democrats said at the time that the memo’s description of McCabe’s closed-door testimony was incorrect. In an interview with CNN, McCabe said his testimony had been “selectively quoted” and “mischaracterized” in the GOP memo.

“We started the investigations without the dossier. We were proceeding with the investigations before we ever received that information,” McCabe told CNN. “Was the dossier material important to the [FISA] package? Of course, it was. As was every fact included in that package. Was it the majority of what was in the package? Absolutely not.”

So get your head out of your ass. The dossier was produced by someone the FBI has a history with for producing reliable intelligence. It wasn't some baseless hit job. Like EA said, it was raw intelligence. Some of it was probably false and some was true. Very little has been indisputably been proven false. There is nothing to exonerate Trump on the pee tape or Russia having compromising information on him. Anyone with common sense should admit that expert KGB operatives are going to get compromising information on any wealthy American visiting there.

[_Kevin Graham]

The so-called dossier formed only a smart part of the evidence used to meet the legal burden of establishing "probable cause" that Page was an agent of Russia.

The released documents contain dozens of pages that are entirely blacked out. People who have read them, including Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, say they contain secret evidence establishing ties between Page and Russians — evidence that goes beyond what was included in the dossier compiled by Christopher Steele. Frank Figliuzzi, the former FBI counterintelligence chief who is now an NBC News contributor, says that likely includes reporting from human sources and intercepted communications. Page, it should be said, denies that he was an agent of Russia and has not been charged with a crime.

National security experts who have reviewed the document say that even the parts that aren't blacked out contain more than enough information to provide a judge reason to rule that the FBI had probable cause to believe that Page was an agent of Russia.

Probable cause is much lower than the reasonable doubt the standard required to convict someone of a crime. "It's the probability of a possibility," said William Banks, director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism at Syracuse University College of Law. Page had already appeared on the FBI's radar as a target of Russian intelligence recruitment in a separate spy case. He has acknowledged that he traveled to Moscow and met with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign. It would have been malpractice for the FBI, confronted with allegations that Page was helping the Russians, not to investigate, Figliuzzi says.

Four different judges, all appointed by Republican presidents, signed off on electronic surveillance of Carter Page.

And that's the end of a long process that involves multiple layers of review within the FBI and the Justice Department, current and former officials say. Anyone trying to put one over on the FISA court would be risking his or her career.

It was not improper — and perfectly normal — for the FBI to disclose information from the Steele dossier as part of the warrant application.

Andrew McCarthy, a former prosecutor and Trump backer, has argued that the dossier amounted to unverified hearsay, and that the FBI misrepresented that it had verified the information. But Figliuzzi and other former officials say the use of hearsay is common in warrant applications, because the FBI wants to tell the judge as much as possible about what is known about the target. No judge, however, would grant a surveillance warrant based entirely on hearsay, Figliuzzi said.

The FBI disclosed to the court that Steele was paid by people seeking to discredit Trump. But the FBI viewed Steele as credible.

"They dealt with the Steele stuff in an extensive footnote with bolded language," Banks said. The note didn't disclose that the dossier was paid for by Democrats because the document didn't use any names or identities. It called Trump "Candidate 1" even after he was elected president. But the note did say that the dossier appeared to be funded by people seeking to discredit Trump.

In addition, Steele was seen not as a partisan operative, but as a credible source, according to the warrant. The document doesn't say this, but Steele had helped the FBI for years, including providing crucial information in the U.S. investigation of corruption in international soccer.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-cour ... nt-n893666

[_Gunnar]

I wonder if The CCC still believes his previous statement.

I think that he passed away.

I would be saddened but not surprised if The CCC passed away. It was clear from his own statements that he was in rather poor health.

[_Gunnar]

I think that he passed away.

I hope he's in a better place. At least he got religion right even if his politics were off the mark.

On the contrary, his politics were what he was least off the mark about.