The Wall Street Journal: Abolish the FBI

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‘Heads Should Roll’

How The FBI Copied Parts Of The Debunked Steele
Dossier Directly Into Its Spy Requests

https://www.realclearwire.com/articles/2022/12/20/how_the_fbi_copied_parts_of_the_debunked_steele_dossier_directly_into_its_spy_requests_870182.html

The FBI relied more extensively on Christopher Steele’s debunked
dossier in their Russiagate investigation than has been revealed,
inserting key parts from it into their applications for warrants to
spy on the 2016 Trump campaign.

Agents did this without telling the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court that the precise wording was plucked directly from a political
rumor sheet paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign or providing judges
with any independent corroboration of the explosive allegations.

But the notion that mere “snippets” of the reporting by paid Clinton
subcontractor Christopher Steele showed up in FISA applications, as
CNN has described it, no longer holds up to scrutiny.

A close examination of all four of the FISA warrants reveals that the
FBI lifted dozens of key phrases – as well as practically some entire
sentences – from the dossier and pasted them verbatim into their sworn
affidavits. It did so repeatedly without citing its sources or using
typical hedging language such as “allegedly” or “purportedly” to
indicate that the claims were unverified.

As a result, the FBI lent its voice of authority to many of the
unsourced – and now debunked – accusations in the dossier.

For example, it avowed under oath in all four warrant applications
that “the FBI has learned” that onetime Trump campaign adviser Carter
Page had secretly met with sanctioned Kremlin officials in Moscow. But
those allegations came from Steele’s D.C.-based collector Igor
Danchenko, who admitted to the FBI in a January 2017 interview his
input was just “hearsay” gathered from “conversation with friends over
beer.”

It is not clear whether the bureau decided to pay Steele in connection
with the dossier so that it could represent the material as
originating from one of its own confidential sources. At one point it
reportedly offered him $1 million if he could verify key claims (he
could not).

Meanwhile, the FBI repeatedly portrayed improbable third-hand rumors
as sound “intelligence,” despite taking them directly from paid
political opposition research operatives. Suggesting independent
verification, the bureau repeatedly assured the FISA court it
“assesses” the truth of damning claims.

In some cases, the FBI mixed partial information from one dossier
report with partial information from another report to draw broader
conclusions. It then used these as a foundation to claim evidence of a
grand election “conspiracy” between the Trump campaign and Russia,
with Page acting as an “intermediary.” Such a conspiracy was what
counterintelligence agents needed to convince the FISA court that
their main target Page was a Kremlin agent who posed a national
security threat, and that deploying the government’s most intrusive
investigative method – electronic surveillance – was necessary to
investigate him.

In short, the FBI fabricated conclusions from fabrications and turned
them into sworn representations before the powerful Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Veteran FBI investigators who have worked counterintelligence cases
and sworn out wiretap warrants say the agents who ran the Russiagate
investigation, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, violated the fundamental
principle requiring them to independently verify evidence they present
to the court.

“Their actions – lying and misrepresentations on warrants and
affidavits – are antithetical to every instruction at FBI training at
Quantico and in the field,” said 27-year FBI veteran Michael Biasello.
“Any FBI Academy trainee and agent in the field is aware that search
warrants, affidavits and any accompanying documents and information
contained therein requiring federal judicial approval is to be vetted
and verified to create a pristine document. Their accuracy is vital.”

The FBI declined comment.

The bureau’s reliance on the dossier – a series of 17 reports compiled
by Steele for Fusion GPS, the Washington-based opposition research
firm employed the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National
Committee – has been brought into sharp relief by the work of Special
Counsel John Durham.

His team investigated for possible criminal misconduct the Russiagate
probe that hobbled the Trump presidency. It zeroed in on the FBI’s
handling of the dossier both before and after the agency began using
it to gain FISA court approval to wiretap Page in 2016 and 2017.
Investigators questioned several FBI witnesses about their
interactions with Steele and Danchenko, some of whom Durham said were
not forthcoming about their involvement, and obtained related
documents. Danchenko, who provided an estimated 80% of the dossier’s
content, was indicted last year for lying about the sources of his
information, though he was acquitted in October by a D.C.-area jury.

Like CNN, the New York Times has tried to minimize the agency's
reliance on the dossier. In a recent article on Durham’s inquiry, the
Times maintained that the FBI only used “some” claims from the dossier
in applying for court permission to wiretap Page.

In fact, the FBI used several claims – and those claims happened to
constitute the most critical “evidence" in the wiretap applications.
Even former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe has admitted that if not
for the Steele dossier, no surveillance warrant would have been sought
for Page.

All told, the FBI used four dossier reports – Report 80, Report 94,
Report 95 and Report 102 – in all four of its FISA wiretap warrants
targeting Page in 2016 and 2017. And three of the reports were based
on a fictitious source.

A side-by-side comparison of the texts of the FBI’s original Oct. 21,
2016, warrant affidavit and the dossier reports reveals several areas
of significant overlap, similarities that have not been previously
reported. The FBI effectively plagiarized Steele, the London-based
author of the reports, lifting whole phrases and sentences without
bracketing off his words in quotation marks.

For instance, Steele wrote the following in Report 102, based on a
conversation Danchenko falsely claimed to have had with a Trump
“associate” (document images here):

    TRUMP’s associate reported that the aim of leaking the DNC e-mails
to WikiLeaks during the Democratic Convention had been to swing
supporters of Bernie SANDERS away from Hillary CLINTON and across to
TRUMP. ... This objective had been conceived and promoted, inter alia,
by TRUMP’s foreign policy adviser Carter PAGE who had discussed it
directly with the ethnic Russian associate.

For comparison, here is what the FBI stated in all of its wiretap
applications, using virtually the same language, except referring to
the Russia-born Trump associate as “Sub-Source E":

    Sub-Source E reported that the above-described leak of the DNC
e-mails to WikiLeaks had been done, at least in part, as an attempt to
swing supporters of an identified individual who had been running
against [Clinton] for their political party’s nomination, away from
[Clinton] and to [Trump]. Sub-Source E reported that this objective
had been conceived and promoted by, among other things, Page, who had
discussed the objective directly with Sub-Source E.”

Sub-Source E was later revealed to be an American real estate man and
Trump booster named Sergei Millian. Despite the implication, Millian
was not an FBI source. Instead, he allegedly provided a stream of
bombshell claims to Danchenko, who then fed them to Steele.

But Danchenko never actually spoke with Millian, as Durham’s
investigators discovered from phone and email records and other
evidence. Danchenko invented his source, which means he also made up
the allegation that Page masterminded the DNC email leak, a claim the
FBI vouchsafed to the FISA court to attain the Page wiretap.

Now turn to Steele Report 95, which was based on the same fictitious source.

The claim that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to steal the
2016 election hangs on the “conspiracy of cooperation" allegation put
forth in this report. It is the linchpin to Russiagate. Pull it and
the whole case falls apart. Until the FBI in the summer of 2016
received Report 95 and its explosive claim of a “well-developed
conspiracy of co-operation” between the Trump campaign and Russian
government, it struggled to establish probable cause to spy on Page.
Report 95 is what pushed its application over the line. Here’s what
Steele wrote (document images here):

    Speaking in confidence to a compatriot in late July 2016, Source
E, an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican US presidential
candidate Donald Trump, admitted that there was a well-developed
conspiracy of co-operation between them and the Russian leadership.
This was managed on the TRUMP side by the Republican candidate’s
campaign manager, Paul MANAFORT, who was using foreign policy advisor,
Carter PAGE, and others as intermediaries. …Inter alia, Source E,
acknowledged that the Russian regime had been behind the recent leak
of embarrassing e-mail messages, emanating from the Democratic
National Committee (DNC), to the WikiLeaks platform. The reason for
using WikiLeaks was “plausible deniability” and the operation had been
conducted with the full knowledge and support of TRUMP and senior
members of his campaign team. In return the TRUMP team had agreed to
sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue and to
raise US/NATO defence [sic] commitments in the Baltics and Eastern
Europe to deflect attention away from Ukraine, a priority for PUTIN
who needed to cauterise the subject.

With this key dossier report in hand, the FBI, in turn, fatuously
repeated the allegations, changing words here and there, but writing
virtually the same thing in its warrant applications, while
attributing the accusations directly (and falsely) to Millian instead
of the dossier. The relevant text is found on page 20 of the
affidavit, for comparison:

    According to information provided by Sub-Source E [redacted
section describing Millian], there was ‘a well-developed conspiracy of
co-operation between them [assessed to be individuals involved in
Candidate #1’s (Trump’s) campaign] and the Russian leadership.'
Sub-Source E reported that the conspiracy was being managed by
[Trump’s] then campaign manager, who was using, among others, foreign
policy advisor Carter Page as an intermediary. Sub-Source E further
reported that that the Russian regime had been behind the ...
disclosure of DNC e-mail messages to WikiLeaks. Sub-Source E reported
that WikiLeaks was used to create 'plausible deniability,' and that
the operation had been conducted with the full knowledge and support
of [Trump’s] team, which the FBI assesses includes at least Page. In
return, according to Sub-Source E, [Trump’s] team, which the FBI
assesses includes at least Page, agreed to sideline Russian
intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue and to raise U.S./NATO
defense commitments in the Baltics and Eastern Europe to deflect
attention away from Ukraine.

In its copy-and-paste, the FBI made sure to change Steele’s spelling
of the word defense from the British style –“defence” – to the
American style.

In Report 95, Steele also claimed that the hack-and-dump conspiracy
was run out of the Russian consulate in Miami. Except it doesn’t
exist. Moscow maintains no such diplomatic branch in Miami. This was a
clear red flag regarding the reliability of Steele’s information. But
the FBI still used it as no less than the cornerstone of its probable
cause.

On page 10 of the FISA warrant application, the FBI reiterated that
Page “has been identified by source reporting as an intermediary with
Russian leadership in a ‘well-developed conspiracy of co-operation’ to
influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

Again, the agency made no reference to the Clinton-commissioned
dossier – just to “source reporting,” which was nothing more than
Danchenko’s imagination. His invented source Millian never provided
any of the information for Report 95 – or for the rest of the dossier.

In its wiretap request, the FBI even cribbed from the dossier’s
infamous pee-tape memo – Report 80 – which was also attributed to the
fake source (Millian).

In addition to falsely claiming that Moscow held a blackmail sex video
of Trump cavorting with urinating hookers at the Ritz-Carlton, Moscow,
Report 80 alleged that the Kremlin had “kompromat” on Hillary Clinton
and was feeding it to Trump – and that it had been “very helpful” to
his campaign. The compromising information on Clinton, which the
report ironically referred to as a “dossier,” was said to be
“controlled exclusively by chief Kremlin spokesman Dmitriy Peskov, who
was responsible for compiling/handling it on the explicit instructions
of [Russian President] PUTIN himself.”

The FBI found this to be valuable “intelligence” and included it in
all its FISA applications. Adopting the same language of Report 80
(document images here), it told the FISA court that “this dossier [on
Clinton] was, by the direct instructions of Russian President Putin,
controlled exclusively by Senior Kremlin Spokesman Dmitriy Peskov.” It
added, further parroting Report 80, that the information had been
“very helpful” to Trump.

Then the FBI went one step further than anything Steele reported.
“Accordingly,” the bureau’s FISA application  said on page 19, "the
FBI assesses that [Kremlin official Igor] Divyekin received direction
by the Russian  Government to disclose the nature and existence of
the dossier [on Clinton] to Page.”

Divyekin is not named in Report 80. It appears instead that the FBI
got his name from another Steele memo, Report 94, and then injected
him into the narrative. Report 94 was also a treasure trove of
misinformation. It claimed that the Kremlin spokesman had held “secret
meetings” with Page, along with U.S.-sanctioned Russian official Igor
Sechin, during a trip Page made to Moscow in July 2016.

The bureau then made this reporting its own in a FISA application,
telling the court, “The FBI has learned that Page met with at least
two Russian officials during this trip,” even though it had no
independent knowledge of such a meeting. While Page did travel to
Moscow at the time to give a speech at a college where President Obama
also once spoke, the secret meetings were another tall tale. Page told
agents he didn’t even know who Divyekin was. But that didn’t stop the
FBI from inserting the false rumors into its spy warrants (document
images here).

Report 94 claimed that during the alleged meetings, Page and Sechin
raised “issues of future bilateral US-Russia energy co-operation and
associated lifting of western sanctions against Russia over Ukraine.”
The FBI repeated the allegation on page 17 of its original warrant
affidavit using the same wording with no attribution to the dossier:
“Page and Sechin discussed future bilateral energy cooperation and the
prospects for an associated move to lift Ukraine-related Western
sanctions against Russia.” Report 94 claimed that “Page had reacted
positively” to the talks, and the FBI regurgitated the same line in
its application that “Page had reacted positively to the discussions.”

Also, the report claimed that Divyekin and Page talked about releasing
the alleged anti-Clinton “kompromat” to the Trump campaign. This was a
convenient piece of “evidence” for the FBI, which was looking to tie
in reporting it received separately from an Australian diplomat that
another Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, had “received
some kind of suggestion from Russia that Russia could assist with the
anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be
damaging to [Clinton],” according to page 9 of the FISA application.

Though it noted this overseas tip was “unclear,” the application said
the “FBI believes that election influence efforts are being
coordinated between the RIS [Russian Intelligence Service] and Page,
and possibly others.”

This appears to be why the FBI drew the conclusion that Divyekin had
“received direction by the Russian Government” to share the Clinton
dirt with Page, a stretch even for the dossier, which never said
Divyekin was operating on orders from the Russian government. But the
FBI needed Russian intelligence to be involved to sell the espionage
“conspiracy.”

The imagination of Crossfire Hurricane agents was running full
throttle, but then they made an even bigger leap. At the top of page
20 of their first FISA request, they stated: “The FBI assesses the
information funneled by the Russians to Page may be part of Russia’s
intent to influence the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.”


This put a nice bow on the grand conspiracy for the FISA court, which
is that Russia helped Trump steal the  election.

The way the FBI framed it for FISA judges, it was an urgent matter of
national security to let agents monitor Page  and also collect any
past communications he had with Trump campaign officials – to stop the
theft of the White House by the Kremlin.

As the Crossfire case bled into the inquiry directed by Special
Counsel Robert S. Mueller, it became more and more obvious the FBI had
given its imprimatur to a wide range of false allegations in its FISA
applications.

By autumn 2017, investigators understood full well that the dossier
allegations were fabricated by Danchenko. The FBI finally let the
Trump-related wiretaps expire in late September that year. To this
day, Page has never been charged with a crime.
‘Heads Should Roll’

In each of their four sworn FISA affidavits, which were signed by
then-FBI Director James Comey and his deputy McCabe, FBI agents told
the FISA court that Danchenko was “truthful and cooperative,” when
they knew otherwise. Instead of going back to the court and correcting
the record, as required by law (which risked acknowledging the fraud)
they fished for more dirt, more unsubstantiated rumors about Trump,
from the same unscrupulous sources. They continued to meet with Steele
and Danchenko throughout 2017.

Former FBI investigators say it’s clear their colleagues weren’t
played by their sources, but rather played along with them.

“The bureau was not misled. The bureau received false information
,knew it to be false, and still represented it as true for the purpose
of the affidavits,” Biasello said. "That is a blatant criminal act.”

He noted that in a December 2019 opinion, then-FISA Court Presiding
Judge Rosemary Collyer reprimanded the FBI, while warning that other
FISA warrants may be equally tainted and based on fraudulent
information.

“The frequency with which representations made by FBI personnel turned
out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their
possession, and [the frequency] with which they withheld information
detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information
contained in other FBI applications is reliable,” wrote Collyer, who
signed the initial warrant targeting Page.

“In view of her comments, heads should roll,” Biasello said.