The Brits Tried to Warn the FBI that the Steele Dossier Was Trash, They Kept Using It Anyway

There’s been an avalanche of Steele dossier news the past couple of months. Most of it has centered around the final destruction of any credibly that dumpster fire of a document ever had.

Recently, we learned that the FBI knew the chief source for Russian collusion in the dossier was a liar. We also found out they decided to use the dossier as the main source of the initial Page FISA warrant anyway, despite having knowledge it wasn’t credible.

Another thing that’s become clear is how wrapped up in this the U.K. was. I wrote on their attempts to rehabilitate the dossier a little over a week ago in what looked like a coordinate attempt to get out in front of the coming bad press.

A new revelation has the Brits playing a different role later in the saga though, namely that they tried to warn the FBI the Steele dossier was nonsense after Trump got elected.

Multiple witnesses have told Congress that, a week before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, Britain’s top national security official sent a private communique to the incoming administration, addressing his country’s participation in the counterintelligence probe into the now-debunked Trump-Russia election collusion.

Most significantly, then-British national security adviser Sir Mark Lyall Grant claimed in the memo, hand-delivered to incoming U.S. national security adviser Mike Flynn’s team, that the British government lacked confidence in the credibility of former MI6 spy Christopher Steele’s Russia collusion evidence, according to congressional investigators who interviewed witnesses familiar with the memo.

The existence of the memo doesn’t appear to be in question. Not only did someone form the U.K. say it was sent, but two U.S. officials who handled it also testified under oath about it.

Congressional investigators have interviewed two U.S. officials who handled the memo, confirmed with the British government that a communique was sent and alerted the Department of Justice (DOJ) to the information. One witness confirmed to Congress that he was interviewed by special counselRobert Mueller about the memo.

It’s important to note that all this happened after Trump was elected.

Perhaps the U.K. realized that they might pay a price for what’d they had done and wanted to smooth things over with the new administration? However one wants to take their motivation, what’s more relevant is how the FBI handled the information.

At this point, the FBI had already garnered two warrants against Carter Page on the basis of the dossier. They had been warned via multiple streams of information that Steele’s work was crap and they kept using it anyway. Even after Trump got elected and the Brits tried to warn the U.S. of it’s lack of credibility, the FBI still used it two more times to garner more FISA warrants.

Not only that, but the Steele dossier and the entire “Russian collusion” narrative it falsely painted, was the very basis for Trump being targeted in the Russia investigation.

In other words, in the midst of the only source of evidence against Trump on the matter collapsing, Comey’s FBI kept pushing it anyway. Then when he was fired, the DOJ still appointed Robert Mueller, knowing all along they had no actual evidence Trump had done anything wrong.

There were so many red flags blaring “STOP” to the runway Trump-Russia investigation that it’s hard to keep count at this point. From the very beginning, to after Trump was elected, there was zero reason for it to continue as anything but a counter-intel operation focused on Russia itself.

Yet, for reasons that only make sense through a political sense, the FBI and DOJ leadership (at the time) kept moving forward ever faster, trying desperately to find something, anything on the incoming President. You only do that if you are motivated by malice. Even if one wants to speculate the the genesis of the investigation is pure, there’s noway by Jan. of 2017 that the FBI didn’t know Steele’s work was trash because they had been informed of that fact several times from different sources (including the State Dept.).

The stones keep getting turned over and more and more misconduct is getting exposed. I’m a cynic on government accountability, so I have no illusions the people that did this will be punished. Regardless, we are going to keep reporting on this stuff because it’s too important not to.

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