Even the CIA Thought the Steele Dossier Was Crap by Larry C Johnson

Well what do you know? John Brennan, the congenital liar and Obama's CIA Chief, actually made the right call when it came to the Steele Dossier. More importantly, we discover that Brennan inadvertently admitted that there was no substance to the Steele Dossier. If he had one shred of supporting evidence, you can be assured he would have been fully on board with the FBI request. But that is not what happened. According to a Senate Intelligence Committee report declassified this week, Brennan pushed back against the FBI's Jimmy Comey and Andy McCabe on the matter of whether to include the allegations reported in the Steele Dossier in the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Interference in the U.S. Presidential Election. Chuck Ross reports that:

Documents declassified on Tuesday detail an intense debate between the CIA and FBI in late 2016 over the handling of information from Christopher Steele, with one CIA official telling the Senate Intelligence Committee that the former British spy’s allegations about Trump-Russia collusion were “very unvetted.”

Despite the CIA’s concerns about Steele’s allegations, the FBI successfully lobbied to include his information in an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election. The bureau also continued using information from Steele to conduct surveillance against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

Investigators have since debunked several of Steele’s allegations.

The newly declassified information is from a Senate Intelligence Committee report released on April 21 that detailed the creation of an ICA released on Jan. 6, 2017.

I disputed the validity of Steele's work way back in January 2017, after BuzzFeed published the dossier. The errors and outlandish claims were so flagrant that even renowned Helen Keller, were she still alive, could see the problems. But I was wrong in believing that the media were capable of honest analysis or following simple logic. As a result, Steele's claims went virtually unchallenged by meme makers for more than two years and the American public was bombarded with the gargantuan lie that Russia's meddling in the 2016 Presidential Election paved the road for Donald Trump's victory. Democrats and media cretins  insisted that Trump is nothing more than Putin's prison bitch.

But cold, hard facts began to emerge that exposed the falsehoods of the Steele document. The biggest blow came courtesy of DOJ Inspector General Horowitz's revelation that the FBI had identified and interviewed Steele's Russian sub-source and learned that he could not corroborate any of the wild, scurrilous claims made by Steele.

Now we have learned the identify to that source--Igor Danchenko. He is a Russian-born analyst living in the United States and was the primary source for Christopher Steele. More importantly, he is directly linked to prominent Democrats closely tied to Hillary Clinton. In particular, Strobe Talbott:

According to information he put online, Danchenko attended high schools in the United States in the 1990s as part of a student exchange program. He graduated from Perm State University in Russia and received a master’s degree from the University of Louisville in 2005.

He worked for five years at the Brookings Institution as a Russia analyst. While there, he wrote a paper with Fiona Hill, who joined the Trump White House in 2017 as its top Russia expert.

Brookings has played a large role in the dossier saga. In 2016, it’s then-president, Strobe Talbott, contacted Steele seeking a copy of the dossier. Hill told Congress last year that Talbott shared a copy of the dossier with her on Jan. 9, 2017, a day before BuzzFeed published the document online.

Christopher Steele's veracity and judgment took another hit in early July when a British Judge ruled he was guilty of libel in his claim that Russia's Alfa bank was part of an elaborate money laundering scheme that enriched Donald Trump.

The latest revelation from the Senate Intelligence Committee makes it clear that l'affaire Steele was an FBI creation. I assumed previously that the CIA also was involved in helping feed and prop up the Steele Dossier. But the Senate Report makes it very clear that the CIA put no stock whatsoever in Steele's claims. Shocking as it may be, the congenital miscreant, John Brennan, actually did the right thing and resisted repeated efforts by the FBI leaders--Jim Comey and Andy McCabe--to insert Steele's findings into the Intelligence Community Assessment on Russia's meddling.

This really puts Jim Comey and Andy McCabe in the trick box. If the CIA had facilitated the Steele Dossier and corroborated its claims, then Comey and McCabe could argue that they were relying on intelligence community findings in their acceptance of the Steele Dossier. That cannot go that route. They are fully exposed.

Comey and McCabe committed a fraud on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by repeatedly submitting an application to spy on Carter Page that affirmed the allegations in the Steele Dossier as truthful. They knew by the end of January 2017 that Steele's claims were unfounded and not corroborated. But instead of fessing up to the FISC Judge, they opted to lie.

This is not to suggest that John Brennan and Jimmy Clapper, the former DNI Chief, are exonerated of illegal conduct. Au contraire. They oversaw a massive intelligence collection operation, which included covert actions designed to ensnare George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone and others and to promote the meme that Trump was a creature of Moscow.

One of the most important takeaways from this week's revelations is the tacit admission that the intelligence community did not have a damn piece of compromising information on Donald Trump. Consider this--we know that John Brennan had access to parts of the Steele dossier in August 2016 and he briefed Democrat Senator Harry Reid on its contents. And there is no doubt that the members of Brennan's Trump Task Force at the CIA was tasked to scour all intelligence for proof that would transform Steele's trash into pure gold. But that did not happen. Instead, come December 2016, even John Brennan had to concede that Christopher Steele's wild claims could nor be corroborated nor verified.  

 

Comments

[Deap]

Brennan did not want the peepee dossier included, because it would expose himself as the dirty cop running the whole transnational Obamagate hit operation on DJTrump. Ya think? I suspect Brennan pushed back with a wink, when he confronted Comey.

[Deap]

Latest wrinkle - push Susan Rice for VP since you can't conduct investigations on a candidate that may "interfere with an election?

Impeachment didn't work, covid delays didn't work, burning cities down didn't work, attacking federal court houses didn't work, police brutality race riots didn't work, sticking it to Barr during the Judiciary hearing didn't work, Russiagate still plods on.

Time to bring in Obama fixer Susan Rice as Biden's VP 'candidate" just to finally put the screws on the Russiagate investigations. Is Rice their insurance policy?

[Fred]

Deap,

Rice isn't going to be the first to be getting investigated and running for office, or being in office, isn't going to protect her. You want to cut out her value as a shield for Barack and Biden then Pardon Obama. He'll enjoy testifying before a grand jury about what went on with nothing but a possible perjury charge to worry about.

[Vegetius]

How does someone like Brennan, a supposed Muslim and admitted supporter of Marxism, get a job mopping the floors at the Department of Labor, much less get hired on by the CIA?

Is the agency that corrupt or simply incompetent?

[johnf]

More on Igor Danchenko, Steele's main source for the dossier:

"The mysterious “Primary Subsource” that Christopher Steele has long hidden behind to defend his discredited Trump-Russia dossier is a former Brookings Institution analyst -- Igor “Iggy” Danchenko, a Russian national whose past includes criminal convictions and other personal baggage ignored by the FBI in vetting him and the information he fed to Steele...

The 42-year-old Danchenko, who was hired by Steele in 2016 to deploy a network of sources to dig up dirt on Trump and Russia for the Hillary Clinton campaign, was arrested, jailed and convicted years earlier on multiple public drunkenness and disorderly conduct charges in the Washington area and ordered to undergo substance-abuse and mental-health counseling, according to criminal records...

A newly declassified FBI summary of the FBI-Danchenko meeting reveals agents learned that key allegations in the dossier, which claimed Trump engaged in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” with the Kremlin against Clinton, were largely inspired by gossip and bar talk among Danchenko and his drinking buddies, most of whom were childhood friends from Russia...

In March 2013 — three years before Danchenko began working on the dossier — federal authorities in Greenbelt, Md., arrested and charged him with several misdemeanors, including “drunk in public, disorderly conduct, and failure to have his [2-year-old] child in a safety seat,” according to a court filing. The U.S. prosecutor for Maryland at the time was Rosenstein, whose name appears in the docket filings."

Danchenko was at the Brookings InStitute and was a protege of Fiona Hill. Strobe Talbot and his brother-in-law Cody Shearer were also involved in the group.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/07/24/meet_steele_dossiers_primary_subsource_fabulist_russian_at_us_think_tank_whose_boozy_past_the_fbi_ignored_124601.html

[Mathias Alexander]

" covert actions designed to ensnare George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone and others and to promote the meme that Trump was a creature of Moscow."
So there are massive covert actions designed to promote memes then.

[English Outsider]

Still this odd lacuna in the investigation.

We've become very familiar with Christopher Steele and his doings, often through statements or justifications in the media put out by Sir Richard Dearlove or by journalists with the same aims as Steele. We hear increasingly more about Mr Steele's actions and contacts at the American end as he worked at circulating and promoting his dossier.

But that's it. No further questions. Mr Steele himself seems to be taken for granted. A senior ex-Intelligence Officer, with continuing close contact with British Intelligence up to a senior level, meddling in American politics? Most normal thing in the world. Nothing out of the way there.

Like hell. The American authorities won't get to the bottom of Russiagate until they stop pretending it was nothing to do with HMG.

[turcopolier]

Mathias Alexander

Yes, in all the major countries.

[turcopolier]

Vegetius

I vote for incompetent.

[Rick Merlotti]

EO,
You are correct about HMG. British Intel and their Anglophile cousins in US Intel ran/are running this coup. But Republicans would rather lazily bash Russia than think critically on the subject. There will be no real justice until this changes.

[johnf]

EO

The Theresa May (and probably the Cameron) governments were obviously involved in the campaign to derail the Trump Campaign and his nascent Presidency. This was probably from promptings by anti-Trump elements within the American intelligence community and Trump's anti-NATO stance.

To keep everything at arms length they employed Steele through his private company Orbis.

You can see the British involvement through PM Theresa May's horrified reaction to Trump's surprise election when, realizing Britain's blunder, with indecent haste she crossed the Atlantic as soon as he was inaugurated and held his hand in the Rose Garden.

Relations between the two countries remained frosty until Boris Johnson turned up. Elements of his nascent foreign policy are (probably) more closely aligned to Trump's.

Steele is now employed by the British Intelligence establishment to smear Johnson as a Russian agent.

[English Outsider]

johnf - if Mrs May was in the loop so was Mr Johnson. He'll have been briefed at the latest when he became PM and should have been briefed earlier.

Thing is, they must have been briefed to some extent. Never mind speculation about what happened earlier. The dossier scandal exploded in late 2016. There was no ignoring it. Any PM would ask "What's one of our people doing getting involved in all this?" and as a matter of course they'd have distanced HMG from the scandal.

They didn't. According to one of the experts here - Mr Habakkuk - they might have been on the point of disavowing Steele at one time. At the least it must have been one of the options discussed. We don't know why that option wasn't taken.

Turn it round the other way. Say some US Intelligence Officer spread scandal about Mr Johnson at the time he became PM. That's not what one friendly power does to another and no matter whether the scandal was true or not the US government would automatically distance itself from the affair. Or they would if they wanted to remain on friendly terms with HMG.

Turn it back round and you'll see that there are two indisputable facts. The scandal was spread by an ex UK Intelligence Officer. HMG did nothing to distance itself. That though the scandal was and remained politically embarrassing to the new President.

Odd as hell, the whole thing.

Trump's got an election coming up. Johnson, though he's got a spanking majority, is not that secure as PM and has got to get the Brexit deal squared away pretty soon. Maybe the thing'll be swept under the carpet until those two things are done.

Maybe it'll be swept under the carpet permanently.