Tipsheet

SPYGATE: If The FBI Missed This Glaring Inaccuracy, Did They Even Attempt To Verify The Trump Dossier?

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  May 22, 2019 4:30 PM

Did the FBI verify the Trump dossier? It’s a question that then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe refused to answer. The dossier is the piece of political opposition research compiled by former MI6 spook Christopher Steele that the Clinton campaign and the Democrats bankrolled. The intention was to find dirt on Trump. It was reportedly used as credible evidence to secure a FISA spy warrant on Carter Page, who briefly served as a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. This FISA warrant was renewed at least three times from 2016 up until 2017. Was it verified? Given these glaring errors in the document itself, probably not. In fact, these errors could easily have been debunked by a simple Google search. First, let's go to why this whole affair—Spygate—just got worse for the FBI/DOJ. Well, there’s a new actor involved now, the State Department, because officials there seem to have known that the Trump dossier was a biased document compiled for political purposes days before the FISA warrant was issued for Page. Steele was quite adamant that the contents of this document had to be known prior to Election Day 2016 in order the race. John Solomon at The Hill has more:

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec’s written account of her Oct. 11, 2016, meeting with FBI informant Christopher Steele shows the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded British intelligence operative admitted that his research was political and facing an Election Day deadline.

And that confession occurred 10 days before the FBI used Steele’s now-discredited dossier to justify securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA warrant to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and the campaign’s ties to Russia.

Steele’s client “is keen to see this information come to light prior to November 8,” the date of the 2016 election, Kavalec wrote in a typed summary of her meeting with Steele and Tatyana Duran, a colleague from Steele’s Orbis Security firm. The memos were unearthed a few days ago through open-records litigation by the conservative group Citizens United.

Okay, so onto the ‘did the FBI do any due diligence with this dossier’ side of the story. WMAL’s Larry O’Connor and the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway shared a lengthy Twitter thread by John W. Huber, which pretty much shows that it’s a safe bet that no verification process was taken at the FBI. Some of the sources in the dossier claim there was a Russian consulate in Miami, which served as a base for hacking operations. At the time, there was no Russian consulate in Miami. It was in Tampa and in the same building as the Commerce Department. This source also said the infamous pee tapes with Trump and escorts existed. They don’t. 

The point is, which this thread makes clear, is that the FBI should’ve known this document’s authenticity was suspect when this source cited areas where Russian interests were being carried out that didn’t exist. Huber aptly noted, “If they're wrong about ‘Miami’ what *else* are they wrong about?”

The DOJ under Attorney General William Barr is already looking into whether this whole circus was an elaborate Russian disinformation campaign. With these findings, it’s not hard to see why. And yet, if this was Russia’s intent, the Democrats keep the campaign going with their endless crusade to prove Russia-Trump collusion that doesn’t exist. It never existed, but it still drives the Left mad that Trump is president and Hillary is not. They need any reason to explain one of the greatest upsets in modern American political history, even if it’s conspiracy theory slop.