A British judge has helped unravel the origin of the Russia Collusion Hoax by proving the FBI knew the notorious Steele Dossier, which the agency used to apply for permission to spy on the Trump presidential campaign, was a political hit job ordered up by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
The finding is significant, reporter John Solomon wrote of the judge’s remarks, because it validates Attorney General Bill Barr’s allegations that the FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court in seeking approval of the surveillance.
Misleading the court was a crime, but the judge’s lengthy ruling in a defamation judgement against Steele invites a question: Did Hillary Clinton commit the misdeed of which she accused Trump, i.e., soliciting foreign interference to win the election.
The “Ultimate Client”
The judge ruled that Steele smeared two Russian businessmen with the dossier, but “buried in Justice Mark Warby’s ruling were several new pieces of evidence that answer long lingering questions about just what the FBI knew, and when it knew it,” Solomon wrote. “Warby’s lengthy ruling unearthed a gem of new evidence to answer the question: Steele kept his own notes of what he told FBI agents the first time he met them on July 5, 2016 in London to discuss his anti-Trump Russia research.”
Warby revealed that the “ultimate client” for Steele’s dossier was the Democratic Party, and beyond that, the Clinton campaign, Solomon wrote, a distinction without a difference as American election-year politics goes.
{modulepos inner_text_ad}
And the FBI knew it was receiving politically tainted “intelligence.”
Mr Steele understood that the intelligence he gathered would be used to advise the Ultimate Client on the prospect of legal proceedings and, if necessary, deployed in such proceedings to challenge the eventual outcome of the Presidential Election….
Mr Steele’s evidence is that he now believes the Ultimate Client was the Democratic National Committee. [Steele’s attorney] submits that the Ultimate Client was the Clinton election campaign, “Hillary for America”. This is in line with the FBI Note of 5 July 2016, which records Mr Steele telling the FBI that … “the ultimate client were (sic) the leadership of the Clinton presidential campaign”. The FBI Note also indicates that Mr Steele had been told by that stage that Mrs Clinton herself was aware of what Orbis had been commissioned to do.
That “Ultimate Client” hired the Perkins Coie law firm to engage the Fusion GPS private intelligence outfit, which in turn hired Steele to compile the dossier, to help “ensure Hillary Clinton’s election as President,” the judge wrote. “Mr Steele knew this much from early June 2016, at least.”
“It would be naïve and unreal to suppose that the Ultimate Client, when instructing Perkins Coie, did not have political aims,” the judge wrote. “The role and position of the Ultimate Client, the relationship in which that client stood to Mr Trump, and the nature of the instructions, make it obvious that they did.”
As well, Solomon observed, citing the court document, top State Department officials were involved in the Steele Dossier smear campaign, and Steele confessed that “he did little to verify information he got from sources and gave to the FBI unfiltered and unvetted. In fact, the court dissected just one of the many memos that made up Steele’s dossier and found five factually inaccurate, unverified statements.”
The judge also wrote that Steele “enthusiastically” briefed journalists on his work.
As Solomon summarized Warby’s ruling, “Steele admitted to the FBI his ultimate client was Clinton. He admitted he was leaking to the news media. He admitted he didn’t do much to verify his raw allegations. And he admitted he was working political figures in the Clinton sphere to get his allegations into circulation.”
The Justice Department’s Inspector General found 17 errors or omissions in the application in the FBI’s FISA application to spy on Trump campaign official Carter Page.
As Barr concluded, “In the rush to obtain and maintain FISA surveillance of Trump campaign associates, FBI officials misled the FISA court, omitted critical exculpatory facts from their filings, and suppressed or ignored information negating the reliability of their principal source.”
The question now is whether anyone in the FBI or State Department, or Clinton or her campaign torpedoes, will be prosecuted.
Photo: AP Images
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
