It’s already bad enough that the FBI appears to have not even attempted to verify the Trump dossier. The document has clear errors in it. Inaccuracies that could easily have been caught with a simple Google search. On top of this, the State Department knew this document was biased political trash. The Clinton campaign and the Democrats, which hired Fusion GPS, who then tapped ex-MI6 spy Christopher Steele to compile the document, funded the effort. Steele told the State Department that the information in his possession had a shelf life. Yeah, it was called the 2016 election. The document is all part of the Russia-Trump collusion circus that dominated the news cycle for two years, peddled by liberal media figures and politicians alike, fanned the flames of the impeachment fire, and ended up punching everyone who dabbled in this myth right in the face. The report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller debunked the document, which was mostly unverified the entire time this collusion nonsense was being disseminated on a near-daily basis. The second layer to all of this is Carter Page, the former foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign.
The Department of Justice inspector general is said to be readying a scorching report on the alleged FISA abuses. It’s expected to be released this summer. At the heart of the Trump-Russia collusion nonsense is Spygate and the FISA warrant secured to monitor Page based off this dossier. First, there’s the allegation that FBI, or the CIA, tried to infiltrate the Trump campaign based on this Russian collusion hysteria. The second part is the FBI citing this dossier as credible evidence to secure a spy warrant on Page. It was renewed three times through 2017. Political opposition research was cited to secure a spy warrant on the rival campaign from the sitting presidential administration of the opposing party during an election year. Yeah, one could argue that’s weaponizing the DOJ to go after your enemies. How much did Obama know? Also, welcome to this circus, State Department.
The officials in the Obama administration knew that this was biased trash days prior to securing the FISA warrant is bad enough. Another odd angle is that this very intelligence community knew Carter Page because he worked with the CIA, the State Department, and the FBI…before he became a Russian traitor or something (via RCP):
"I was asked various questions, not only by State, FBI, etc, but also the CIA," he said. "I had a long-standing relationship with the CIA going back decades essentially, and I was always very transparent, open."
"I had a longstanding relationship with the CIA, going back decades, essentially," Page said. "I was always very transparent, open."
“Deception by omission,” as some have noted while combing through this report? It wouldn’t be the first time. And as Page spoke about Konstantin Kilimnik, let’s circle back to that omission in the report that The Hill’s John Solomon wrote about last week:
In a key finding of the Mueller report, Ukrainian businessman Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, is tied to Russian intelligence.
But hundreds of pages of government documents — which special counsel Robert Mueller possessed since 2018 — describe Kilimnik as a “sensitive” intelligence source for the U.S. State Department who informed on Ukrainian and Russian matters.
Why Mueller’s team omitted that part of the Kilimnik narrative from its report and related court filings is not known. But the revelation of it comes as the accuracy of Mueller’s Russia conclusions face increased scrutiny.
[…]
Kilimnik was not just any run-of-the-mill source, either.
He interacted with the chief political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, sometimes meeting several times a week to provide information on the Ukraine government. He relayed messages back to Ukraine’s leaders and delivered written reports to U.S. officials via emails that stretched on for thousands of words, the memos show.
The FBI knew all of this, well before the Mueller investigation concluded.
Alan Purcell, the chief political officer at the Kiev embassy from 2014 to 2017, told FBI agents that State officials, including senior embassy officials Alexander Kasanof and Eric Schultz, deemed Kilimnik to be such a valuable asset that they kept his name out of cables for fear he would be compromised by leaks to WikiLeaks.
[...]
Three sources with direct knowledge of the inner workings of Mueller’s office confirmed to me that the special prosecutor’s team had all of the FBI interviews with State officials, as well as Kilimnik’s intelligence reports to the U.S. Embassy, well before they portrayed him as a Russian sympathizer tied to Moscow intelligence or charged Kilimnik with participating with Manafort in a scheme to obstruct the Russia investigation.
Kasanof’s and Purcell’s interviews are corroborated by scores of State Department emails I reviewed that contain regular intelligence from Kilimnik on happenings inside the Yanukovych administration, the Crimea conflict and Ukrainian and Russian politics. For example, the memos show Kilimnik provided real-time intelligence on everything from whose star in the administration was rising or falling to efforts at stuffing ballot boxes in Ukrainian elections.
Those emails raise further doubt about the Mueller report’s portrayal of Kilimnik as a Russian agent. They show Kilimnik was allowed to visit the United States twice in 2016 to meet with State officials, a clear sign he wasn’t flagged in visa databases as a foreign intelligence threat.
The emails also show how misleading, by omission, the Mueller report’s public portrayal of Kilimnik turns out to be.
For instance, the report makes a big deal about Kilimnik’s meeting with Manafort in August 2016 at the Trump Tower in New York.
By that time, Manafort had served as Trump’s campaign chairman for several months but was about to resign because of a growing controversy about the millions of dollars Manafort accepted as a foreign lobbyist for Yanukovych’s party.
Specifically, the Mueller report flagged Kilimnik’s delivery of a peace plan to the Trump campaign for settling the two-year-old Crimea conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
“Kilimnik requested the meeting to deliver in person a peace plan for Ukraine that Manafort acknowledged to the Special Counsel’s Office was a ‘backdoor’ way for Russia to control part of eastern Ukraine,” the Mueller report stated.
But State emails showed Kilimnik first delivered a version of his peace plan in May 2016 to the Obama administration during a visit to Washington. Kasanof, his former handler at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, had been promoted to a top policy position at State, and the two met for dinner on May 5, 2016.
[…]
So Kilimnik’s delivery of the peace plan to the Trump campaign in August 2016 was flagged by Mueller as potentially nefarious, but its earlier delivery to the Obama administration wasn’t mentioned. That’s what many in the intelligence world might call “deception by omission.”
It’s no secret that many thought that this Russia investigation was a total hit job. The Federalist’s Sean Davis does not hold back trashing Mueller and company. He wrote two good pieces about how Mueller and his team of Democratic lawyers tried desperately to prove Russian collusion, but couldn’t. And that, in some ways, is a positive. A group of die-hard partisans tried to get the president and couldn’t. It only adds more credibility to our side concerning that this whole circus was a nothingburger. There’s no pivot here. The Left failed. Mueller’s exiting presser only confirmed that this whole investigation was an effort to get rid of the president, tweaking the language on the collusion findings and all but unveiling an “impeach now” banner behind him.
Last Note: One of the key witnesses in the Mueller report has a long history of peddling child porn. So, yeah—a total fiasco.