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FBI’s ‘central evidence’ To Spy On Trump Campaign Was Russian Disinformation, Declassified IG Footnotes Reveal


By Sara Carter -April 10, 2020

Partially declassified footnotes from Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s FBI report reveal that the most ‘central and essential’ evidence to justify surveillance of short term Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page was based on Russian disinformation, according to newly declassified footnotes.


In January, U.S. Sens. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, sent a classified letter questioning the contradiction between the footnotes and what was made public by Horowitz’s team regarding the bureau’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation. The letter was first reported by SaraACarter.com. In January, the senator’s did not disclose what section of the December FISA report contradicts the footnotes in their findings.

The declassification came at the request Grassely and Johnson, whose committees have been dedicated to uncovering the truth regarding the FBI’s malfeasance during the bureau’s probe into President Donald Trump’s campaign and its now debunked theory that campaign officials colluded with Russia. Those footnotes deal directly with the evidence collected by the FBI from former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, whose salacious and debunked dossier was the bulk of information used to seek a warrant from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to spy on Page.

Johnson, who spoke to this reporter Friday said that the American people deserve the whole truth and that revelations in the partially declassified footnotes reveals that some members of the FBI’s top echelon “were total and complete snakes.” Johnson told this reporter Friday that he expects further declassification of the footnotes by early next week.

Johnson, chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs,  credits his committee staffers with the extraordinary find after long hours of combing through every detail of Horowitz’s report. The Senator also published Opinion Editorial on Friday with the Wall Street Journal stating that “Chuck Grassley and I began pressing Attorney General William Barr, and eventually acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, for full declassification of these footnotes. That’s why they’re now public.”

Page, who filed a lawsuit in January against the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and law firm Perkins Coie over the unsubstantiated Steele dossier, questioned Friday why the details have never been disclosed before. The DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign paid the now embattled research firm Fusion GPS to investigate Trump and any ties to Russia. The entities did so through the law firm as a cut-out.


“Why have all these details remained unnecessarily secret for so long? In our dual system of Justice, the Mueller Witch Hunt crew falsely misrepresented my own “historical contact with persons and entities suspected of being linked to RIS, when I was actually serving my country in support of the U.S. Intelligence Community,” Page told this reporter. “The time has finally come for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and related agencies to release the full facts about the Obama-Biden Administration’s election interference campaign against candidate Trump and the illicit coup attempt against our President.”

In the Fall of 2016 the FBI obtained a secret warrant to spy on Page, the warrant was renewed  in April and in June of 2017, “raising questions about when exactly the FBI received and reviewed these new intelligence reports, and what it did with them,” stated a press release from Johnson and Grassley.

Citing the IG report, the FISA court ordered the FBI to explain how it will take corrective action on the FISA process.  A subsequent IG audit of the FBI procedures to ensure accuracy of FISA applications found errors in 29 unrelated applications, prompting the court to order more information from the FBI.

According to Grassley and Johnson the footnotes, “reveal that, beginning early on and continuing throughout the FBI’s Russia investigation, FBI officials learned critical information streams that flowed to the dossier were likely tainted with Russian Intelligence disinformation.”

Despite the evidence showing Moscow’s spy network played a role in spreading deceptive and false information, the FBI none-the-less “aggressively advanced the probe anyway, ignoring internal oversight mechanisms and neglecting to flag the material credibility concerns for a secret court.”Moreover, the FBI officials involved in the probe against Trump continued to use the Russian disinformation to target Trump’s campaign and his administration after discovering it was based on patently false information and lies.


“It would eventually spill over into the years-long special counsel operation, costing taxpayers more than $30 million and increasing partisan divisions – all based on faulty evidence,” said Grassley and Johnson in a statement released Friday. “In the end, the special counsel concluded that the Trump campaign did not collude with Russia.”

The Senator’s added that “had FBI leadership heeded the numerous warnings of Russian disinformation, paid attention to the glaring contradictions in the pool of evidence and followed long-standing procedures to ensure accuracy, everyone would have been better off. Carter Page’s civil liberties wouldn’t have been shredded, taxpayer dollars wouldn’t have been wasted, the country wouldn’t be as divided and the FBI’s reputation wouldn’t be in shambles.”

“It’s ironic that the Russian collusion narrative was fatally flawed because of Russian disinformation,” the Senators stated. “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.”

From Grassley and Johnson’s Press Release Friday 

The IG report detailed how the FBI’s application for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Page relied heavily on an unverified dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele on behalf of Fusion GPS, which was conducting opposition research for the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee.

 • According to Footnote 302, in October 2016, FBI investigators learned that one of Steele’s main sources was linked to the Russian Intelligence Service (RIS), and was rumored to be a former KGB/SVR officer.  However, the FBI neglected to include this information in its application, which the FISA court approved that same month. Two months later, investigators learned that Glenn Simpson, the head of Fusion GPS, told a Justice Department attorney that he assessed the same source “was a RIS officer who was central in connecting Trump to Russia.” In January, the FISA warrant was renewed.
 • Footnote 350 states that, in 2017, the FBI learned that intelligence reports “assessed that the referenced subset [of Steele’s reporting about the activities of Michael Cohen] was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations.”
 • That same footnote (footnote 350) states that a separate report, dated 2017, “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.”
The surveillance warrant against Page was renewed two more times – in April and in June of 2017 – raising questions about when exactly the FBI received and reviewed these new intelligence reports, and what it did with them. Grassley and Johnson expect the footnotes to be further declassified in the coming days.


Citing the IG report, the FISA court ordered the FBI to explain how it will take corrective action on the FISA process.  A subsequent IG audit of the FBI procedures to ensure accuracy of FISA applications found errors in 29 unrelated applications, prompting the court to order more information from the FBI.

The declassified footnotes were contained in an April 2, 2020, letter from the Justice Department responding to Grassley and Johnson’s January 28, 2020, inquiry.

https://saraacarter.com/fbis-central-evidence-to-spy-on-trump-campaign-w...

the FBI probe was a hoax...

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Russia investigation launched and conducted by James Comey’s Federal Bureau of Investigation deserves to rank as one of the agency’s great blunders — at best.

President Trump famously calls the probe a hoax, a label he uses liberally, but in this instance, it may literally be true.

We’ve spent years obsessing about Russian meddling in our politics, and now it turns out that the original FBI investigation into the Trump campaign that morphed into the Mueller probe may have been instigated, in part, by Russian disinformation.

In other words, the Kremlin may have succeeded in getting us to turn even more viciously against ourselves and conduct our politics in an atmosphere characterized by screaming headlines, dark insinuations and endless investigations — all by feeding a few lies to a private eye hired by the Hillary Clinton campaign to dig up dirt on Trump.

And the people who did the most to whip up this hysteria were the same ones who professed to be most alarmed at Russia meddling.

If this was the product of a deliberate Russian intelligence operation, it has to be judged one of the most audaciously clever of all time. The operative who first conceived of it deserves high honors, indeed, is a cinch to become a Hero of the Russian Federation.

A couple of footnotes in the report of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz into the conduct of the FBI investigation, released in December, have just been unredacted. They relate to the so-called Steele dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, who worked indirectly for the Clinton campaign.

One footnote says that the FBI received word of potential “Russian disinformation influencing Steele’s election reporting.” The FBI was told multiples times that information in the dossier was inaccurate. One warning said a subset of bad information was “part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate US foreign relations,” another that falsehoods were the work of Russian intelligence “infiltrat[ing] a source into the network” providing information.

A second unredacted footnote says that the FBI has information that an unnamed Steele source “had historical contact with persons and entities suspected of being linked to” Russian intelligence.

 

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2020/04/13/it-looks-like-putin-conned-the-fbi-into-th...

significant errors and omissions by the FBI...

The Justice Department inspector general’s report, issued December 2019, exposed a series of “significant”errors and omissions the FBI made in its applications to spy on Carter Page, many of which involved failures to disclose evidence undermining Steele’s allegations of a “conspiracy of cooperation” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

Two Russian intelligence operatives knew as early as July 2016 former MI6 spy Christopher Steele was investigating Donald Trump, according to newly-declassified information.

The bombshell information was contained in freshly redacted footnotes from the Justice Department Inspector General’s report on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s surveillance of the Trump campaign, and the organisation’s controversial ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ investigation. Released by Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson 15th April, it’s just the latest indication Steele was hoodwinked by Russian intelligence, and fed disinformation which ended up in his infamous and utterly discredited ‘Trump-Russia’ dossier.

...

​The FBI obtained information 12th January 2017, two days after BuzzFeed published the dossier in full, that Steele’s allegation former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen visited Prague August 2016 was the product of Russian disinformation. On 27th February, the FBI came to understand Russian intelligence had fed the farcical claim Trump used prostitutes during a 2013 trip to Moscow, and been secretly filmed by Russian intelligence, to Steele.

Strikingly, the newly-declassified footnotes also indicate the FBI’s Transnational Organized Crime Intelligence Unit launched a validation review of Steele as an agency source in 2015 because of his links to five wealthy Russian businessmen, and his contact with them “in a short period of time was unusual”.

Another footnote said the Bureau received information early June 2017 about “personal and business ties between” Steele’s primary source of information for the dossier and sub-source - the latter, is said to have had contacts with an individual in the Russian Presidential Administration in June and/or July 2016, and voiced “strong support” for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election campaign, one footnote says.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/military/202004161078984298-steele-russian-intel...

 

It is most likely that Robert Mueller knew all this but went along with the joke as long as possible in order to justify his bread and butter... See also: 

documents for flynn...

steele to pay compensation for his rubbish...

A London judge has ordered former British spy Christopher Steele to pay thousands of pounds in damages for not verifying the claims he included in his scandalous Russian dossier, which alleged Donald Trump’s ties with Moscow.

Steele was taken to court by Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, Russian bankers from Alfa Group, who contested one of the key allegations in the paper – that they were responsible for delivering “large amounts of illicit cash” to President Vladimir Putin in the 1990s.

Justice Mark Warby of the High Court of England and Wales ruled on Wednesday that Steele’s claim against Fridman and Aven was “inaccurate and misleading.”

Steele’s firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, violated British data privacy law as it “failed to take reasonable steps to verify the allegation,” and will now pay £18,000 pounds (around $22,600) in damages to each of the bankers, Warby said.

Fridman said in a statement that he was “delighted” with the outcome of the trial. He has insisted that the dossier’s claims that Alfa Group was somehow a link between the Russian government and the Trump campaign during the 2016 election were absolutely groundless.

“Ever since these odious allegations were first made public in January 2017, my partners and I have been resolute and unwavering in our determination to prove that they are untrue, and through this case, we have finally succeeded in doing so,” Fridman said.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/494197-christopher-steele-russia-dossier-trial/

 

 

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