FBI Unlawfully Passed Classified Intel to Steele
It’s like a playground game of telephone, only big players used each other to confirm bogus intel.
Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence officer hired by Hillary Clinton and the DNC through GPS Fusion to dig make up dirt on Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, is back in the news, along with Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the FBI. And the circular corruption just gets crazier.
“A month before the 2016 presidential election, the FBI met Christopher Steele in Rome and apparently unlawfully shared with the foreign opposition researcher some of the bureau’s most closely held secrets, according to unpublicized disclosures in the recent Justice Department Inspector General report on abuses of federal surveillance powers.” So begins the latest revelation of deep-state corruption, courtesy of Eric Felten and RealClearInvestigations.
Felten continues, “Much of the public reporting regarding this meeting has focused on the information Steele shared with the FBI — and the many reasons agents should have doubted its credibility. But largely neglected has been the opposite side of the equation — what the FBI told Steele. The Inspector General reports that the bureau revealed to him much of the highly classified information that it had gathered regarding alleged Trump-Russia links.” That included information on Trump campaign staffers Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn — information known only by a select few FBI officials.
“The FBI had every reason to expect Steele to share information with Glenn Simpson, whose client was the Clinton campaign,” Felten adds. And, indeed, “Shortly after the Rome meeting, Steele briefed Simpson on what the FBI had disclosed to him.”
Oh, and the FBI paid Steele $15,000 to attend the three-hour meeting.
Remember, it was Steele who leaked his dossier to Yahoo News’s Michael Isikoff. While the FBI soon cut ties with Steele for that leak, it still used the dossier to obtain surveillance warrants against Page. Clinton likewise used Isikoff’s report to hit Trump on the campaign trail.
It’s like a playground game of telephone, only these are big players using each other to confirm bogus intelligence against a candidate for president. Clinton hired Steele, who made up dirt on Trump. Steele leaked it to the press, where Clinton could pick it up and use it. Steele also gave it to the FBI, which used it to surveil Trump’s campaign. The FBI gave Steele classified information regarding the investigations prompted by his dossier — and paid him to receive it.
This sordid tale is easily, in our view, the biggest corrupt endeavor in the history of presidential campaigns. And we continue learning more as time goes on.
