The Steele dossier has long plagued President Donald Trump.
Many false allegations and investigations came as a result of the doctored report.
Now, this one declassified document is bad news for Barack Obama and the FBI.
The Steele dossier, written by former British spy Christopher Steele, has been a thorn in Donald Trump’s side ever since it surfaced.
It illustrated a picture where then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump schemed with the Russian government to spy on his competitor, Hillary Clinton’s, campaign.
This elaborate hoax of a story led to years of wasted time and taxpayer money as Trump was investigated without more than someone’s word as proof.
No evidence was ever found of any wrongdoing.
And now, the FBI just issued one statement about the Steele dossier that could change the course of this country forever.
Daily Caller reports:
The FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team investigating the Trump 2016 campaign received multiple indications that former British spy Christopher Steele — one of their key informants in their investigation — was part of an elaborate “Russian disinformation campaign,” according to several newly declassified footnotes from Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on FBI misconduct.
“It’s ironic that the Russian collusion narrative was fatally flawed because of Russian disinformation,” Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., who had pushed for the declassification, said in a statement to Fox News on Friday. “These footnotes confirm that there was a direct Russian disinformation campaign in 2016, and there were ties between Russian intelligence and a presidential campaign – the Clinton campaign, not Trump’s.”
The FBI has found ample evidence that the Steele dossier was part of a Russian scheme against the President, one that could very well be linked to Hillary Clinton.
One of the footnotes, which was previously redacted in its entirety, read: “The [REDACTED] stated that it did not have high confidence in this subset of Steele’s reporting and assessed that the referenced subset was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate US foreign relations.” That subset referred to the activities of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, whom Steele’s dossier claimed had traveled to Prague to meet with Russian agents. Special Counsel Robert Mueller was unable to substantiate that claim, and Cohen has denied it.
The footnote goes on to state that a 2017 report “contained information … that the public reporting about the details of Trump’s [REDACTED] activities in Moscow during a trip in 2013 were false, and that they were the product of RIS ‘infiltra[ing] a source into the network’ of a [REDACTED] who compiled a dossier of information on Trump’s activities.”
Yet more footnotes were released, clearing Trump’s name once and for all.
Many are calling for the Department of Justice to release the fully unredacted footnotes, so that America can see the truth about their President and the attacks against him.
Friday’s partial declassification, which suggested Steele’s sources were part of a Russian interference effort, was immediately highlighted by Trump allies and Republicans, who have long pushed the administration to publicize more details of the FBI’s flawed investigation, even as U.S. Attorney John Durham is pursuing a criminal probe into the conduct of U.S. intelligence agencies.
The FBI heavily relied on Steele’s now-discredited dossier to obtain a surveillance warrant to spy on former Donald Trump aide Carter Page, in which FBI officials asserted that Page was an “agent” of Russia. However, the FBI did not share the information about the Russian disinformation campaign with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) when it moved to obtain the warrant, just as it did not tell the court that another Trump aide had denied collusion during a recorded conversation with an FBI informant.
With the pressure that is on them, we can only hope the DOJ will release the full report.