Paul Roderick Gregory \/\/ Forbes<\/p>\n
The media\u2019s promotion of an unverified dossier against Republican candidate, Donald Trump, failed to cement Hillary Clinton\u2019s expected victory in November. If that were the whole story, the dossier would have faded from public view, the new President Trump would not have spent his first year fighting off charges of treason, and a much bigger story would not be getting ready to break.<\/p>\n
What we did not know on election day was that the Christopher Steele dossier was bought and paid for by the Clinton Campaign and the DNC, that the dossier itself may have been part and parcel of a Kremlin disinformation campaign, and that a FISA (Federal Intelligence Surveillance) court apparently used one of its most bizarre claims to approve the surveillance of a Trump campaign advisor. We also have learned that the Steele dossier was commissioned by an opposition-research firm\u2014Fusion GPS\u2014that had Russia among its main clients.<\/p>\n
In light of these disclosures, investigators must now determine if the leaders of the Democratic Party, not Trump, colluded with the Kremlin to produce what the Russians call \u201cblack PR\u201d against Trump.<\/p>\n
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We can understand if many Trump-haters swallowed the dossier\u2019s tales of improbable business deals and fictitious meetings as related by anonymous informants, but it now appears that the FBI used the dossier to obtain a warrant to surveil a member of Trump\u2019s campaign team from a FISA court judge. Federal courts should be subject to\u00a0rules of evidence<\/a>\u00a0on hearsay, identification, and authentication, which would seem to nullify the dossier as credible evidence. Federal courts, like FISA, are also not supposed to be swayed by politics and should have the commonsense to recognize nonsense when they see it.<\/p>\n I\u00a0concluded<\/a>\u00a0immediately after the Steele dossier\u2019s publication by BuzzFeed in January of 2017 that it was a fake. No source cited in the dossier had been willing to come forward; most of the information is hearsay or even hearsay of hearsay. There is no way that Steele\u2019s alleged top-level Kremlin informants would spill the Kremlin\u2019s deepest secrets to lowly Steele hirelings. Steele\u2019s informants were therefore either fictitious, or low-level poseurs passing on gossip, OR they were doing the bidding of the Kremlin as part of a classic Russian\u00a0disinformation<\/a>\u00a0campaign.<\/p>\n Persistent media efforts to validate the Steele dossier have failed. After an extensive\u00a0investigation<\/a>, the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0disguised its disappointment with verbal gymnastics: \u201cAlthough it\u2019s impossible to say that the dossier is entirely inaccurate (there are some glimmers of accurate predictions), it is also impossible to say that it has been broadly validated.\u201d<\/p>\n As a matter of fact, the dossier is unverifiable, given the anonymous sources and whether the informants are real people or fabrications. The Steele dossier could not stand up to the most liberal interpretation of rules of evidence. Even more damaging: one of the key verifiable claims of the dossier (that Trump\u2019s personal lawyer orchestrated payoffs from Prague on specific dates) has been shown to be false. When virtually everything else is not verifiable or simply made up, the failure of the one claim that can be validated should call into question the entire dossier.<\/p>\n As a last reed of hope, \u201cdossier Believers\u201d argue that the dossier was after all prepared by a master spy\u2014a former MI6 bigwig\u2014whose \u201ctrusted compatriots\u201d gathered intelligence from the innermost sanctums of the Kremlin. They do not note that Steele\u2019s last tour of duty in Russia was a quarter century earlier. The Christopher Steele of dossier fame was long past his sleuthing days, but was instead a consultant hustling to give his clients the dirt they wanted.<\/p>\n The true story of the Steel dossier appears about ready to break. The House Intelligence Committee voted along party lines on January 29 to publicly release a classified memo\u00a0detailing<\/a>\u00a0that the FBI used the Steele dossier\u2014bought and paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC\u2014 to obtain a FISA warrant to surveil former Trump foreign policy advisor Carter Page in the campaign\u2019s early days.<\/p>\n Any dossier-related FISA warrant to surveil Page would have to be based on the bizarre quid pro quo deal described in the dossier, according to which Igor Sechin (CEO of Rosneft and Putin intimate) offered Page, in July of 2016, a commission on the sale of 19% of Rosneft shares\u2014a bribe of more than a half billion dollars. Russia would get, in return, a softening of the Republican platform on Ukraine arms and an understanding that Trump would lift sanctions on Russia if elected.<\/p>\n