Steele’s Other Clinton Link A Senate letter says the dossier writer got info from a Clinton ‘friend.’
https://www.wsj.com/articles/steeles-other-clinton-link-1517876663
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley on Monday released an unclassified version of his recent letter to the Justice Department urging a criminal investigation into Christopher Steele, and it raises more questions about the credibility of the dossier that Mr. Steele generated in 2016.
The unclassified version is heavily redacted, consisting of 14 readable paragraphs. It nonetheless provides new details about the FBI’s application to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order against former Trump official Carter Page in October 2016, a request that relied on the Steele dossier. The referral letter says Mr. Steele may have lied to the FBI and that the FBI provided false information to a FISA judge.
The FBI fired Mr. Steele after the ex-British spy talked about his interaction with the bureau and his dossier for an Oct. 30, 2016 Mother Jones article. Yet the referral notes that in subsequent sworn court filings in Britain, Mr. Steele said he also briefed reporters in “late summer/autumn 2016,” including the New York Times, Washington Post and Yahoo News. Fusion GPS chief Glenn Simpson, who hired Mr. Steele and was retained by the Hillary Clinton campaign, has confirmed these briefings.
Yet according to the Grassley referral, this conflicts with “classified documents reviewed by” his committee. In other words, the FBI’s application for surveillance, filed October 21, 2016, led the court to believe that Mr. Steele wasn’t talking to the press and working a political angle. Such an admission might have derailed the surveillance order.
Democrats insist that the FISA court knew the dossier was the work of a partisan campaign. But the House intelligence memo makes clear the application didn’t refer to the Clinton campaign or the Democratic Party, and our sources tell us it also didn’t use the words “political party.” The court was told that the document was politically motivated—which is not the same as a competing presidential campaign.
The Grassley referral adds that associates of the Clinton campaign fed Mr. Steele information apart from the dossier. One section of the Steele dossier was not made public by the Buzzfeed website in 2017, and the Grassley memo says that in that section Mr. Steele acknowledges that “his company ‘received this report from [redacted] US State Department,’ that the report was the second in a series, and that the report was information that came from a foreign sub-source who ‘is in touch with [redacted], a contact of [redacted], a friend of the Clintons. ”
Between Mr. Steele’s media outreach and his connection with Clinton associates, the dossier was hardly a secret. As the referral notes, “the more people who contemporaneously knew that Mr. Steele was compiling his dossier, the more likely it was vulnerable to manipulation.” And the more likely the Russians knew about it too.
Mr. Grassley wants the FBI to declassify his entire referral letter, and either the bureau or the White House should do so. The House GOP memo betrayed no sources and methods, and now the GOP is moving to release a Democratic memo. All Americans should get the complete FISA-Steele story.
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