For the past two weeks all eyes have been on the House Intelligence Committee's FISA abuse memo, first when they committee voted to allow all House members to see it, despite all Democrats on the committee voting against the measure, then the #ReleaseTheMemo campaign which resulted in another vote to allow all Americans to see it, until finally it was released.
Under the radar, amidst the chaos surrounding the House memo, the Senate Judiciary Committee quietly battled with the Justice Department to get their criminal referral details against Christopher Steele released to the public. The final eight-page declassified document is heavily redacted with the majority of whole pages blacked out in some cases, but what can be seen, shows far more damning information than what was contained in the House memo.
While the House memo did show a number of disturbing fact patterns, specifically that the unverified, Kremlin sourced Steele dossier, which was funded by the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign, was used to obtain a FISA warrant to surveil the Trump campaign, telling the court there was a political bias, but not informing the court who funded the dossier, what the Senate document shows, even with the redactions, is there was a second Steele dossier created, where foreign sources fed information to a Hillary and Bill Clinton associate, who then fed that information to Obama State Department official, who then handed it over to Christopher Steele.
Furthermore, one of the things not redacted in the criminal referral memo is that in late September 2016, Steele claims that at the behest of Fusion GPS, who was paid by the Clinton campaign and the DNC, Steele was shopping this information obtained by Clinton allies, from foreign sub-sources, given to Steele by Obama State Department officials, to the New York Times, Washington Post, Yahoo News, The New Yorker and CNN.
Via Page 4-5 of the Senate Judiciary Committee's declassified criminal referral against Steele, states the following:
(U) In Steele's sworn court filings in litigation in London, he admitted that he "gave off the record briefings to a small number of journalists about the pre-election memoranda [i.e., the dossier] in late summer/autumn 2016." In another sworn filing in that case, Mr. Steele further stated that journalists from "the New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo News, the New Yorker, and CNN" were "briefed at the end of September 2016 by [Steele] and Fusion at Fusion's instruction." The filing further states that Mr. Steele subsequently participated in further meetings at Fusion's instruction with Fusion and the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Yahoo News, which took place mid-October 2016. According to these court filings "[t]he briefings involved the disclosure of limited intelligence regarding indications of Russian interference in the U.S. election process and the possible coordination of members of Trump's campaign team and Russian government officials." In his interview with the Committee, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS confirmed this account by Mr. Steele and his company as filed in British court."
It is not surprising to those of us that have been paying attention that it was Clinton political activists that created the whole Russia collusion narrative, as we can see articles about Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta accusing the Trump campaign of working in cohoots with Russia from October 2016, just as the Clinton allies were passing information to the Obama State Department official, who was then passing it on to Steele for his dossier, which the FBI and DOJ officials then used to obtain their FISA warrants against Carter Page.
The entire, heavily redacted Senate Memo is below:
Remember from the House intelligence Committee memo, (embedded at the bottom of an ANP article here), on Page 5, it stated that in September 2016, "Steele admitted to Ohr his feelings against then-candidate Trump when Steele said he 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.' This clear evidence of Steele's bias was recorded by Ohr at the time and subsequently in the official FBI files-but not reflected in any of the Page FISA applications."
Via the House memo:
In other words, while liberals and the media are making a big deal about the fact that the FISA application did mention "opposition" funding for the Steele dossier, they did not mention it was the Clinton campaign and the DNC specifically that funded it, nor did they tell the FISA judge that the man that created the dossier had an extreme bias against Donald Trump, which they knew and had noted in their files, nor that it was Clinton political activists that passed information from foreign sub-sources to an Obama State Department, which gave it to Steele.
In Cincinnati, President Trump addressed the new information from the memos, saying "Oh, but did we catch them in the act or what? You know what I’m talking about. Oh, did we catch them in the act? They are very embarrassed.They never thought they’d get caught. We caught them. We caught them. It’s so much fun. We’re like the great sleuth."
In the words of Mark Levin "Hillary Clinton paid for a warrant. That's the easiest way we can put it. Hillary Clinton colluded with the Russians. But it appears the FBI at the senior-most levels colluded with the Russians too. Whether it was witting or unwitting it doesn't matter. That's a fact." He continued on to say "The American people have been subjected to a massive propaganda and misinformation campaign by the Clinton campaign, by the Obama administration."
This writer agrees, to a point. His benefit of the doubt to the senior-most level members of the FBI, in my opinion, is much too generous, since the information contained within the House memo, and the recently released, redacted Senate Judiciary Committee's criminal referral against Christopher Steele, was available to the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies, before it was even handed over to the Senate or House oversight committees.
I contend they knew the Russia collusion narrative was a hoax, and given the clear bias shown in the texts between FBI agent Peter Strzok, who played key roles in both the Hillary Clinton private server/email investigation and the initiation of the Russia probe, and his lover, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, they simply didn't care if they were "colluding" with Russia and the Clinton campaign to manufacture a Russian collusion propaganda campaign. I further contend that they, and other senior members of the FBI and DOJ under Obama, were willing to do anything, commit any crime, doctor any evidence, and lie to the FISA court to overturn the 2016 presidential election and destroy President Trump.
The way the House Intelligence Committee timed their memo release, in a manner where it sucked up all the oxygen in the room, or to more accurately phrase it, forced Democratic politicians to push out all their hot air, where it then dominated all the headlines, leaving this Senate memo to come out without fanfare, no push back and no time or room to pre-emptively spin the information, was the ultimate bait and switch.
