John Solomon: FBI Knew Dossier Was Bogus, Used It Anyway
I know--that doesn't sound like bombshell news. However, John Solomon is reporting this based on source information and a "spreadsheet like" document that the FBI produced in their effort to verify information in Christopher Steele's "dossier". In his latest reporting, FBI's spreadsheet puts a stake through the heart of Steele's dossier , Solomon states that there is evidence not only that the FBI was warned by State Department official Kathleen Kavalec of the unreliability of Steele's work product, but that Steele himself warned the FBI as early as July and again in October of 2016. That confirms that the original FISA application was knowingly based on unreliable information, presented to the FISA court as reliable. In an interview with Sean Hannity , Solomon confirmed that this was done in the hope that dirt would be uncovered on Trump that would retroactively justify the FBI investigation. It was an attempted coup.
Over the succeeding months the FBI continued its attempts to verify Steele's work product, seeking to find substance to support the Russia Hoax collusion narrative. Every allegation was examined and the results were assembled in what Solomon describes as "a spreadsheet-like document":
Multiple sources familiar with the FBI spreadsheet tell me the vast majority of Steele’s claims were deemed to be wrong, or could not be corroborated even with the most awesome tools available to the U.S. intelligence community. One source estimated the spreadsheet found upward of 90 percent of the dossier’s claims to be either wrong, nonverifiable or open-source intelligence found with a Google search.
In other words, it was mostly useless.
“The spreadsheet was a sea of blanks, meaning most claims couldn’t be corroborated, and those things that were found in classified intelligence suggested Steele’s intelligence was partly or totally inaccurate on several claims,” one source told me.
In their efforts to confirm some part of the "dossier," the FBI pressed Steele to identify his Russian source. An agent interviewed that source in early 2017. The conclusion that the FBI came to was that--giving Steele the benefit of the doubt--the Russian had "misled" Steele:
For example, U.S. intelligence found no evidence that Carter Page, during a trip to Moscow in July 2016, secretly met with two associates of Vladimir Putin — Rosneft oil executive Igor Sechin and senior government official Igor Divyekin — as part of the effort to collude with the Trump campaign, as Steele reported.
...
The inaccuracy of Steele’s intelligence on Page is at the heart of the inspector general investigation specifically because the FBI represented to the FISA court that the intelligence on Page was verified and strong enough to support the FISA warrant. It was, in the end, not verified.
And yet the FBI used this bogus "information" in the follow FISA extension requests, signed by Sally Yates, Dana Boente (currently the top lawyer at the FBI, for Chris Wray), and Rod Rosenstein. The FISA product was used by Team Mueller throughout their inquisition.
Solomon's sources also confirmed what we have pointed out, that the "dossier" was an evolving narrative that developed and changed as circumstances changed. For example, when Carter Page left the Trump campaign a new conduit for "collusion" had to be found. So Steele came up with the Michael Cohen-in-Prague tale. That, you may recall, came after Steele met with DoJ lawyers, including Andrew Weissmann :
Another knockdown of the dossier occurred when U.S. intelligence determined former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was not in Prague in the summer of 2016 when Steele claimed he was meeting with Russians to coordinate a hijacking of the election, the sources said.
Steele’s theory about who in the Trump campaign might be conspiring with Russia kept evolving from Page to Cohen to former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. None of those theories checked out in the end, as the Mueller report showed.
Weissmann needs to be grilled about his involvement in the FISA.
In the interview with Hannity, Solomon discusses Andrew McCabe's admission in testimony that without the "dossier" there would have been no FISA. However, there's another point that we've been making over the months. Without the "dossier" there would have been no Crossfire Hurricane to begin with. Yes, Crossfire Hurricane was the sine qua non for the Carter Page FISA. But it was also the the sine qua non for the Mueller inquisition, which Rod Rosenstein confirmed to be basically no more than an extension of Crossfire Hurricane.
As we've always known, the whole thing was a hoax, from start to finish.
Oh, and Solomon is supposed to have another big story out later this week. I can't wait! Maybe this is what Devin Nunes was talking about when he said the Mueller testimony might never happen.
ADDENDUM: In response to commenter dfp21, yes, from remarks Solomon drops it's clear that his source(s) is familiar with the results of the OIG investigation--including the results of the very recent interviews of Kathleen Kavalec and Chris Steele.