Cliff Notes: Steele Dossier played NO role in opening the Carter Page investigation. They began their investigation prior to even receiving it. The DOJ did in fact inform the court of the origin of the Steele Dossier. They accuse Nunes of deliberately misrepresenting the underlying FISA Warrant intelligence. Four different judge's approved FISA warrants including judge's appointed by Bush and Reagan. Multiple DOJ officials also approved the applications prior to the court even seeing them including Trump appointees Rosenstein and Boente. They actually started listening to Page after he left Trump campaign so the idea they were watching him to spy on Trump is absurd. Page has a long history with Russia going back to 2004 and was being actively investigated once before already in 2013. The FBI had even interviewed him in 2016 again prior to receiving the Steele Dossier. The Steele dossier was referenced in the application as corroboration of certain things, and not to independently demonstrate. A bunch of blacked out additional evidence with a bit in the middle noting Page lied to the HIC in his testimony in 2017 about meeting with Russian officials. It included the footnote that discusses the Steele dossier source which SPECIFICALLY STATES ..."The FBI speculates the the unidentified U.S. Person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1's campaign." Candidate 1 is Trump. Steele is Source #1. DOJ timely informed the court when the FBI fired Steele and why. The attacks on Bruce Ohr for knowing Steele/and his wife working for Fusion GPS are 100% baseless. He was not involved in the FISA process and disclosed his relationships in November 2016.
Steele's sources reported that Page met separately while in Russia with Igor Sechin, a close associate of Vladimir Putin and executive chairman of Rosneft, Russia's state-owned oil company, and Igor Divyekin, a senior Kremlin official. Sechin allegedly discussed the prospect of future U.S.-Russia energy cooperation and "an associated move to lift Ukraine-related western sanctions against Russia." Divyekin allegedly disclosed to Page that the Kremlin possessed compromising information on Clinton ("kompromat") and noted "the possibility of its being released to Candidate #1's campaign". [Note: "Candidate #1" refers to candidate Trump.] This closely tracks what other Russian contacts were informing another Trump foreign policy advisor, George Papadopolous.
DOJ was transparent with Court about Steele's sourcing: The Committee Majority, which had earlier accused Obama Administration officials of improper "unmasking", faults DOJ for not revealing the names of specific U.S. persons and entities in the FISA application and subsequent renewals. In fact, DOJ appropriately upheld its longstanding practice of protecting U.S. citizen information by purposely not "unmasking" U.S. person and entity names, unless they were themselves the subject of a counterintelligence investigation. DOJ instead used generic identifiers that provided the Court with more than sufficient information to understand the political context of Steele's research. In an extensive explanation to the Court, DOJ discloses that Steele: "was approached by an identified U.S. Person, who indicated to Source #1[Steele] that a U.S.-based law firm had hired the identified U.S. Person to conduct research regarding Candidate #1's ties to Russia. (The identified U.S. Person and Source #1 have a long-standing business relationship.) The identified U.S. person hired Source #1 to conduct this research. The identified U.S. Person never advised Source #1 as to the motivation behind the research into Candidate #1's ties to Russia. The FBI speculates that the identified U.S. Person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1's campaign"
FISA was not used to spy on Trump or his campaign. As the Trump campaign and Page have acknowledged, Page ended his formal affiliation with the campaign months before DOJ applied for a warrant. DOJ, moreover, submitted the initial application less than three weeks before the election, even though the FBI's investigation had been ongoing since the end of July 2016. The Court approved surveillance of Page allowed FBI to collect valuable intelligence. The FISA renewals demonstrate that the FBI collected important investigative information and leads by conducting Court-approved surveillance. For instance, ███████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████. DOJ also documented evidence that Page ████████████████████████████████████████████, anticipated ███████████████████████████████████ and repeatedly contacted █████████████████████████████ in an effort to present himself as ██████████████████████. ███████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████. Page's efforts to ██████████████████████████████████████████████████ also contradict his sworn testimony to our committee.
Their memo pretty clearly supports every single charge in the Reps memo, and their feeble attempts at constituent-'splaning clearly show they consider Americans to be morons with no reasoning powers or reading comprehension skills. Liddle Shifty just shot himself in the foot again.
@ maris61 The old adage that you can lead a horse to water but you can't make the horse drink seems very appropriate. You can give a person an article to read, but you can't make them comprehend. News flash, your boy Trump has lots of flaws that should concern you.
