RUTHFULLY YOURS

My research had previously suggested that the Steele Dossier may have really been the work of Cody Shearer, one of Bill’s plumbers. The Grassley memo doesn’t name Shearer but indicates that the dossier produced by Christopher Steele had been based on work from the Clinton campaign.

Clinton associates were “feeding” allegations to former British spy Christopher Steele at the same time he was compiling the controversial anti-Trump dossier paid for by the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign, according to an unclassified memo from senior Senate Republicans who recently made a criminal referral.

Those Republicans, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., had asked the Justice Department in January to investigate Steele based on evidence they say suggests he lied to the FBI about his contacts with the media (a violation of 18 USC 1001) — or the FBI misrepresented Steele’s statements.

…

The memo from Grassley and Graham, which is now public for the first time, provides new insight into Steele’s circle of contacts during that time. While heavily redacted, the memo states Steele said he received information that came from “a foreign sub-source who ‘is in touch with (redacted), a contact of (redacted), a friend of the Clintons, who passed it to (redacted).”

Everything is still redacted, but that would fit with Sidney Blumenthal’s private intel operation that was emailing classified information to Hillary Clinton. It would fit with his pal Cody Shearer who would have had some of those contacts.

In that memo, Steele stated that he received information from someone at the State Department. The identity of the contact is redacted in the Grassley-Graham letter, as are other portions of the document.

The information originated with “a foreign sub-source” who had been in touch with a friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton. That Clinton associate, whose name is redacted, passed it on to another person.

But let’s take a step back.

When the origins of the Steele dossier were exposed, the media and the rest of the left tried to spin it as a non-partisan work product of opposition research for the Free Beacon and then the Clinton campaign. Steele and Fusion GPS were just doing research. Except the Grassley memo tells us that the Clinton campaign was feeding the dossier at both ends.

That means that the Clinton campaign wasn’t just employing an independent researcher who followed the clues to see where they led, but his work was shaped by the Clinton campaign.

And that means the FISA request might as well have come from the Clinton campaign because the Steele dossier wasn’t material that the latter happened to stumble on to, it was fed to him by the Clinton campaign. Then it was fed into the DOJ and even the State Department, as we learned yesterday, by Clinton associates. It looks like Clinton fingerprints were on this every step of the way.

Victoria Nuland, a Hillary protege, just began her own media tour. And her revelations include a mention of the Steele dossier being funneled through the State Department. Except that it also appears to have originated there.

So the picture that’s forming here is of Clintonworld associates in and out of the State Department setting the process in motion and then running the work product back into the government to produce the investigation. Steele was there to put some meat on the bones of their thesis. And to then launder it back through the media and into the FBI.

Having a former British intel former agent out front made it look non-partisan. But Steele was a patsy for the Clintons. The dossier was always a front for the Clinton campaign.

The Clintons ordered it, shaped it and distributed it. It’s not the Steele dossier, it’s the Clinton dossier.