The FBI Was Desperate for Somebody to Spy On The Steele dossier served up an improbable tale about Carter Page, but it would have to do. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbi-was-desperate-for-somebody-to-spy-on-1518216629?mod=nwsrl_commentary_u_s_&cx_refModule=nwsrl#cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=ctrl&cx_artPos=8
Now we have it ostensibly from then-FBI Director James Comey as well as former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe that there might have been no surveillance of Carter Page without the Steele dossier. If so, that’s probably because the dossier provided the one thing the FBI lacked and was unlikely to find (because it didn’t exist): a reason to believe Mr. Page was important.
In the dossier accumulated by former British spy Christopher Steele, Mr. Page is a player. He meets secretly with Vladimir Putin’s No. 1 capo, Igor Sechin. Dangled in front of him is a gobsmacking bribe—a brokerage fee on the forthcoming privatization of a 19.5% stake in the giant Russian state oil firm Rosneft. All he has to do is arrange the lifting of U.S. sanctions, as if this were in the power of the elfin Mr. Page to deliver.
The story is implausible. Mr. Page has denied it under oath. Nothing has emerged to suggest the FBI confirmed it. Only Luke Harding, a British journalist who has written a book alleging Trump -Russia collusion, finds it inherently self-crediting. Why? Because Mr. Steele’s Russian “mole” apparently correctly anticipated the Rosneft deal that would finally be consummated in the closing hours of 2016. Even the Russian cabinet and Rosneft’s own board, Mr. Harding wrote last week at Politico.com, “only discovered the deal on December 7, hours after Sechin had already recorded his TV meeting with Putin revealing it.”
This nonsense actually points to why somebody might pluck out of the pending Rosneft deal and attach Mr. Page’s name to it. The partial sale, aimed at reducing the Russian government’s stake to 50% plus one share, had actually been conspicuously on the agenda for years. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree in 2014, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov started touting the expected proceeds in 2015, and Mr. Putin formally included them in the state budget in February 2016. CONTINUE AT SITE
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