by Dan Bongino
For most of the bigwigs at the FBI and Department of Justice, the British spy’s résumé made him an unimpeachable delivery system for unsubstantiated data to be fed to Washington law enforcement and drive a paranoid collusion narrative that would wound and possibly kill the Trump campaign. I say “most of,” because evidence now reveals that some members of the DOJ had “continued concerns” about the FISA warrant application, specifically about a confidential source cited in the document.
Once again, this information comes to us via the texts of Lisa Page, the FBI lawyer eventually dismissed from the Mueller special counsel team. In one message, she appears confident that the bureau can explain away any suggestion of bias—presumably the fact that Christopher Steele, who was employed by Glenn Simpson, who was employed by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, might not be the most even-handed source. She also notes that Stuart Evans, then the DOJ’s National Security Division deputy assistant attorney general, had repeatedly taken issue with the application:
“OI [Office of Intelligence] now has a robust explanation re any possible bias of the CHS [confidential human source] in the package,” Page wrote to Andrew McCabe on October 12, 2016. “Don’t know what the holdup is now, other than Stu’s continued concerns.”17
There was also at least one other person who raised flags to FBI investigators about the veracity and slant of Steele’s information and the possible bias of Christopher Steele himself: Bruce Ohr, the DOJ’s deputy attorney general, whose own wife worked for Glenn Simpson.
We now know that while she was employed by Simpson, Nellie Ohr fed her husband and other DOJ prosecutors anti-Trump reports during the 2016 campaign. Hidden in 339 pages of Bruce Ohr’s communications that were released by the DOJ were “Hi Honey” emails from Nellie to her husband that shared her research tracking corruption in Russia and Ukraine.
“Ohr sent reams of open-source intelligence to her husband, Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, and on some occasions to at least three DOJ prosecutors: Lisa Holtyn, Ivana Nizich and Joseph Wheatley,” as John Solomon reported for The Hill, noting that she sent “intelligence affecting Russian figures she told Congress she had tried to connect to Trump or Manafort.”18
“Hi Honey, if you ever get a moment you might find the penultimate article interesting—especially the summary in the final paragraph,” Nellie Ohr emailed her husband on July 6, 2016, in one typical communication. The article and paragraph she flagged suggested that Trump was a Putin stooge: “If Putin wanted to concoct the ideal candidate to service his purposes, his laboratory creation would look like Donald Trump.”19
The Fusion GPS researcher bolded that last sentence apparently for emphasis.
Ohr’s emails represent another way that Brennan, Clapper, and the FBI could have seen so-called intelligence that helped stoke the collusion narrative without relying on the dossier. Did Nellie Ohr’s tips get forwarded around D.C.? It seems entirely possible and entirely probable, given the Never Trump movement that was growing in the swamp.
Bruce Ohr testified on Tuesday, August 28, 2018, before the House Judiciary Committee that he had repeatedly warned FBI investigators—and Mueller’s investigative bulldog Andrew Weissmann, who was at the DOJ at the time—that Christopher Steele had been “desperate that Trump not be elected.” Ohr drew this conclusion after Steele reached out to him and arranged for them to meet on July 30, 2016, at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. The meeting was also attended by Ohr’s wife, Nellie.20
One day after that meeting, Bruce Ohr contacted members of the FBI and cautioned them when it came to evaluating Steele’s reports. “I provided information to the FBI when I thought Christopher Steele was, as I said, desperate that Trump not be elected.”
Ohr testified that he reached out to his bureau connections “[i]n case there might be any kind of bias or anything like that.” He said he warned the FBI about the quality of the intel: “I don’t know how reliable it is. You’re going to have to check it out and be aware.”
The transcript reveals that Ohr also told FBI agents that his wife and Steele were both working for Fusion GPS—and spelled out connections between the research group and Clinton. Here’s a critical exchange between then South Carolina representative Trey Gowdy and Ohr:
Mr. Gowdy. So you specifically told the Bureau that the information you were passing on came from someone who was employed by the DNC, albeit in a somewhat triangulated way?
Mr. Ohr. I don’t believe I used—I didn’t know they were employed by the DNC, but I certainly said, yes, that—that they were working for—you know, they were somehow working associated with the Clinton campaign. And I also told the FBI that my wife worked for Fusion GPS or was a contractor for GPS, Fusion GPS.21
“I certainly told the FBI that Fusion GPS was working with—doing opposition research on Donald Trump,” Ohr told congressional investigators, adding that he warned the FBI that Steele had expressed bias during their conversations. “I provided information to the FBI when I thought Christopher Steele was, as I said, desperate that Trump not be elected. So, yes, of course I provided that to the FBI.
“These guys were hired by somebody relating to—who’s related to the Clinton campaign,” Ohr said, admonishing the FBI to “be aware.”
Until Simpson and Steele come clean on their working methods and sources—were sources incentivized to come up with explosive allegations?—the raw intelligence they provided should be regarded as illegitimate. Seriously, it belongs in an intel decontamination lab. Did Simpson feed Steele sources and quotes? And if so, did Steele vet what he was given or just take everything as gospel from his boss? These would be natural questions for any investigation.
But because of Steele’s reputation and his previous experience working on a headline-grabbing international soccer scandal with the FBI, bureau investigators and the FISA court bought the raw intel as legit—or at least worthy of evaluation.
Even if it was unfounded paranoia- and perversion-fueled gossip, it wound up being taken seriously. Seriously enough that it formed the bedrock of the most corrupt counterintelligence investigation in U.S. history.
Steele was hired before the initial FISA rejection. So he was ready to go in his hour of need. The first Steele memo was dated June 20, 2016.”22 As noted earlier, it was numbered 080, which suggests there were other memos—presumably a 079, a 078, or maybe even a 001 memo. But let’s not get sidetracked by missing memos. The fact is that 080 is a big opening shot.
Here’s what it claims:
Russia had been “cultivating and supporting” Trump for “at least 5 years.”
The Trump operation was directed by Putin, whose ultimate goal was to sow disunity in the U.S. and within the Transatlantic Alliance.
The Kremlin had been feeding Trump damaging intel on “democratic rivals.”
The Kremlin had offered Trump “various lucrative real estate development and business deals in Russia…. However, so far, for reasons unknown, Trump had not taken any of these.”
Russia had a file of kompromat on Hillary Clinton that was controlled by Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
A trove of compromising material—sexual in nature—had been obtained by Russia to blackmail Trump.23
Two hundred ninety days elapsed between the start of operation Crossfire Hurricane and the start of the Mueller investigation. Then 674 days passed before Mueller submitted his report. In those 964 days, guess how many of the claims in the dossier’s first memo were proven beyond a reasonable doubt?
None. Zero. Zip. Nada.
Look, I’m willing to concede that portions of #2 above have some basis in reality. Trump’s own advisors believe Russia tried to interfere in the election. This is what Russia and other foreign governments do. And there is no doubt that Russia and Russian agents conducted social media-influencing campaigns. So I get it. There is substantial evidence that the
Kremlin played dirty, and Putin doesn’t like being subservient to the West, which Russia relies on for cash and imports. But the cybercharges were broad and lacked any original detail. Remember, more than one month before WikiLeaks published the hacked DNC emails, WikiLeaks mastermind Julian Assange told the world he had damaging material! “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton,” he said to British television network ITV on June 12, 2016—eight days before the first dossier memo. “We have emails pending publication.”24
In other words, I could have written similar Russian cyberinterference memos at home on my couch and been as factually correct as the dossier. Or, to put it another way, when it came to dossier memo 080, there was, as Trump-hater Strzok once worried, “no big there there.”
The third charge in the dossier, of feeding “damaging intel,” is also unsubstantiated. The only identified approach to the Trump campaign with damaging intel came at the Trump Tower meeting, from Natalia Veselnitskaya, a woman working with Fusion GPS who delivered nothing of any consequence. The “intel,” if you can even call it that, was about her objections to the Magnitsky Act and had nothing to do with Hillary Clinton’s emails or anyone else’s.
As for the alleged real estate deals, this is absurd. Trump didn’t take any deals, per the memo. So what is the problem? I’m sure some people now believe that lawyer Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony stating he been working on a deal for a Trump Tower in Moscow during the campaign somehow corroborates this charge. He even said he was pushing the deal as late as June 2016. Still, consider the source. Cohen’s testimony itself is dubious because he was facing a long stint in the big house. Furthermore, as Trump himself has noted, he was a businessman engaged in an uncertain campaign. He was conducting business internationally, as he had for decades. Finally, there was no deal. True to his word, Trump made no deal.
As for the January 2016 email Cohen wrote that was “addressed” to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov asking for help on the Trump Tower Moscow project, the charge is ridiculous. Sure, Cohen wrote the email, but it was a shot in the dark—he didn’t have Peskov’s email address! Here’s how the Trump-hating New York Times described it: “But Mr. Cohen did not appear to have Mr. Peskov’s direct email, and instead wrote to a general inbox for press inquiries.”25 So why was this even an issue? It was just another bogus, hyped-up storyline. And when it came time to press charges against Cohen, Mueller left out clarifying information to make it seem like this real estate deal was much higher-level and more suspicious than it was.
At any rate, it is possible that Mueller and the Collusion Chorus consider Cohen’s email as evidence vindicating the real estate allegations in the Steele dossier. If that’s the case, that just supports the idea that Mueller was using the dossier as a justification for endlessly investigating Trump as well as to salvage the broken reputations of the DOJ and FBI for relying on Steele’s information. If Mueller could show something, anything, in the dossier and if Steele’s information had a sliver of truth, then he could vindicate the FBI and DOJ.
Let’s go on to the second memo in the dossier, 086, dated July 26, 2016. This focuses largely on Russia’s cyberinfluencing, espionage, and hacking. Again, of all the dossier dishing, this has proved to be the most compelling. But let’s consider the historical context of this memo. On July 22, 2016, WikiLeaks published a huge trove of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee. It was a stunning, damning, embarrassing dump. Four days later, Christopher Steele reported that one month earlier, he had been told that Russia prioritizes “state-sponsored” attacks against Western governments. Anyone think the timing and subject matter here might be suspect? It seems clear that Steele provided intelligence to suggest that Russia might be behind the recent hacking.
And guess what? The next memo laid out in the dossier, 095, doesn’t have a date on it but it confirms that Russia was behind the DNC hack. Here are two notable allegations:
“An ethnic Russian close associate of Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump” said there was a “conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and Russian leadership, and that it was “managed” by Paul Manafort, Carter Page, “and others.”
The same source said the Russian regime was behind the email hacking of the DNC and that the Trump team had been aware of the operation. “In return the Trump team had agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine” as a campaign and NATO issue.26
The reason the above dossier tidbits are so interesting and horrifying is that we now know the identity of Source E, who not only made these charges but also provided salacious charges about Trump and prostitutes. Sergei Millian was the apparently unwitting man listed as Sources D and E, according to the Wall Street Journal, who spilled his tales to an associate, who then passed them on to Steele.27 The dossier calls him “an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump.” Based on everything we know about Millian—who did not respond to the paper’s asking him if he was a source for the dossier—the description of him as a “close associate” of Trump is laughable. Did Millian, who apparently exchanged emails with Michael Cohen, try to pump up his own reputation when talking to Steele’s source? Or did Steele’s source pump up Millian’s connection to Trump? Or did Steele?
All these unanswered questions and so much uncertainty show how suspect raw intelligence—especially Steele’s raw intelligence—can be.
Seriously, the only thing that has been 100 percent verified in the entire Steele dossier is the claim that Carter Page did, in fact, travel to Russia, which isn’t novel and certainly is not a crime. I’ve traveled to Russia twice; is there a dossier on me, too? Maybe a FISA warrant?
How did investigators separate the fact from the fantasy?
It appears that until they had the FISA warrant in hand, they didn’t want to.
A BOMBSHELL IN THE FOOTNOTES
Here is the thing about the FBI’s Russiagate FISA warrant applications: the details about Steele subtly change over time. And they reveal that Steele reported his “raw intelligence”—that is, lies—directly to the FBI.
Look at what the FBI wrote on pages fifteen and sixteen of the FISA warrant application of October 2016. Keep in mind that “Source #1” is clearly Christopher Steele, “U.S. person” is clearly Glenn Simpson, “U.S.-based law firm” is clearly Perkins Coie, and “Candidate #1” is clearly Donald Trump:
Source #1[redacted] and has been an FBI source since [redacted]. Source #1’s reporting has been corroborated and used in criminal proceedings and the FBI assesses Source #1 to be reliable. Source #1 has been compensated [redacted] by the FBI [emphasis mine] and the FBI is unaware of any derogatory information pertaining to Source #1.
Source #1, who now owns a foreign business/financial intelligence firm, was approached by an identified U.S. person, who indicated to Source #1 that a U.S.-based law firm had hired the identified U.S. person to conduct research regarding Candidate #1’s ties to Russia [emphasis mine] (the identified U.S. person and Source #1 have a long-standing business relationship). The identified U.S. person hired Source #1 to conduct this research. The identified U.S. person never advised the motivation behind the research into Candidate #1’s ties to Russia. The FBI speculates that the identified U.S. person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s campaign.
Source #1 tasked his sub-source(s) to collect the requisite information. After Source #1 received information from the sub-source(s), described herein, Source #1 provided the information to the identified U.S. person who had hired Source #1 and to the FBI [emphasis mine]. [Redacted]
Notwithstanding Source #1’s reason for conducting the research into Candidate #1’s ties to Russia, based on Source #1’s previous reporting history with the FBI, whereby Source #1 provided reliable information to the FBI, the FBI believes Source #1’s reporting herein to be credible.28
&nbs
p; The key takeaways here, which I bolded above, are that the FBI never stated that the DNC and the Clinton campaign were paying Simpson and Steele via Perkins Coie; that the FBI was paying Steele for the information used in the application; and—this is the killer revelation—that the information he provided the FBI was the same information that was in the dossier he compiled for Simpson’s Fusion GPS and their clients Clinton and the DNC.
This is right there in black and white: Steele was filing two sets of documents. One was the dossier—which was fed to the media (and presumably the DNC and the Clinton campaign). The other set of reports went to the FBI. They may have been the same exact reports for all we know. But to maintain plausible deniability and promote the myth that there was some separate “other” intelligence source that Clapper, Brennan, and the FBI had seen, the Steele reports to the FBI were never referred to as “the dossier.” FBI agents didn’t mention that particular document because Steele was funneling them separate reports—of the same dirt!
Eight pages later, the application discusses journalist Michael Isikoff’s September 23, 2016, story titled “U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin.”29
In the article, Isikoff reports that Carter Page is being investigated to determine if he opened up “communications with senior Russian officials” to discuss “the possible lifting of economic sanctions if the Republican nominee becomes president.” The story cites multiple sources, but the October FISA warrant application, as I’m about to show, tries to clear Steele of driving the September 23rd “news” article. Somehow, though, the application authors failed to note that Isikoff is friends30 with Glenn Simpson, the “business associate” in this application footnote. Here:
As discussed above, Source #1 was hired by a business associate to conduct research into Candidate #1’s ties to Russia. Source #1 provided the results of his research to the business associate, and the FBI assesses that the business associate likely provided this information to the law firm that hired the business associate in the first place. Source #1 told the FBI that he/she only provided this information to the business associate and the FBI. [redacted]
