The Steele dossier is the backbone of the so called Russian collusion investigation against President Trump.

If the dossier can be significantly disproven, that would be a body blow to the initial FBI investigation under Comey, and the subsequent investigation under Mueller.

The dossier is 35 pages long. There are 17 separate reports by Christopher Steele that make up the dossier.

So it might be good to take the dossier, report by report, list the key things in each report, and parse this thing into bite size pieces that we can all understand.

The dossier has very negative things reported on President Trump and the campaign. I think almost everything in the dossier is false. So para and the admins may not want false information such as this discussed here on the forum. I hope they allow the thread to progress though, because the dossier can’t be effectively attacked and disproven without addressing it head on.




Report 1 (pages 1-3) dated 20 June 2016

Russian regime has been cultivating Trump for 5 years

Trump and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence on his Democratic and other political rivals. The Kremlin has been feeding Trump intelligence on H Clinton for several years. The Kremlin has offered Trump lucrative real estate deals in Russia, but Trump has not taken up any of these.

Trump is susceptible to blackmail because of recorded sex tapes. In 2013, Trump hired Russian prostitutes to pee in a hotel bed that the Obamas had once used. (Moscow Ritz Carlton presidential suite). There was additional blackmail material from Trump “unorthodox behavior”.

A dossier has been collected on Hillary Clinton (mainly bugged conversations) where she had said things which contradicted her current position. Russia has not shared the Clinton dossier w Trump. None of this Clinton material involved “unorthodox behavior”. The Clinton dossier was controlled by Dmitriy Peskov.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Steele came up w this first report in about 3 weeks. Very strange that it was so easy. Glenn Simpson of Fusion had been working for Washington Free Beacon for about 8 months during the Republican primary and none of this appeared to come up.

Former CIA Director John Brennan has said he did not know what was in the dossier until December 2016. “And it did not play any role whatsoever in the intelligence community assessments that was done that was presented to then President Obama and then President-elect Trump.” “there were things in that dossier that made me wonder whether or not they were, in fact, accurate and true.”

The Report: “The Kremlin has been feeding Trump intelligence on H Clinton for years.” But later it says the Russian dossier on Clinton was not shared with Donald Trump.

Note how the Russian information on Clinton is just things where she contradicted herself. Steele paints the Clinton dirt as rather mild.

One aspect to keep in mind: for each dated report, is there anything there that could not have been completely fabricated by Russian experts such as Glenn Simpson, Nellie Ohr, and Christopher Steele ?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: sdy,

My reaction to the dossier, when I finally saw it, was it was mostly 3rd rate gossip, not evidence of anything, certainly not proof of anything.

I wondered if it wasn’t dreamed up by the same short bald headed swarthy men in Santa Monica who come up with network sitcoms and other fiction garbage.

Glenn Simpson testified that his specialty was doing detailed open source searches for information.

I suspect that he and his team did that, and picked up on things such as Carter Page being named by Donald Trump as an advisor (Mar 2016 WaPo article)

Then they could have mixed some truth w a bunch of references to Russians and Russian organizations to "build" the dossier. I haven't found anything in the dossier that is clearly factual and was not known before the date of the report.

"3rd rate gossip, not evidence of anything, certainly not proof of anything"

I agree. I was stunned the first time I read the dossier because it was so flimsy. But the FBI ran w it.

**********

OT There have been several reports that the FBI interviewed Carter Page in Mar 2016. In fact, Adam Schiff said that in his rebuttal to the Nunes memo.

I think that date is wrong. The one reference that in detail mentioned the FBI interview w Page, gave the date as Mar 2017 (not 2016).

Perhaps someone wrote it as Mar 2016 in a story and a lot of others copied it.

I thought I read that the FBI was investigating the Russia ties before it was provided the Dossier. Not true?

Not clear exactly when things started.

Steele briefed the first report to the FBI on 5 July 2016.

Then Wikileaks dumped the DNC emails starting 22 July 2016.

The Australian diplomat told the FBI about Papadopoulos' comments about emails sometime in July 2016.

I think July 2016 was when the FBI started an investigation into the Trump campaign colluding w the Russians.

Now the FBI was worried about Russia hacking the DNC much much earlier. Back in 2014 or 2015. But the collusion part came later

quote:

Originally posted by sdy:
Not clear exactly when things started.

Steele briefed the first report to the FBI on 5 July 2016.

Then Wikileaks dumped the DNC emails starting 22 July 2016.


The Australian diplomat told the FBI about Papadopoulos' comments about emails sometime in July 2016.

I think July 2016 was when the FBI started an investigation into the Trump campaign colluding w the Russians.

Now the FBI was worried about Russia hacking the DNC much much earlier. Back in 2014 or 2015. But the collusion part came later

*July
*August
*September
*November
*December
*January
*February
*March
*April
*May
*June
*July
*August
*September
*November
*December
*January
*February
*March

Man that's a lot of months, you'd think they'd find some of all this collusion going on by now, wouldn't you?

quote:

Originally posted by sdy:
Not clear exactly when things started.

Steele briefed the first report to the FBI on 5 July 2016.

Then Wikileaks dumped the DNC emails starting 22 July 2016.

The Australian diplomat told the FBI about Papadopoulos' comments about emails sometime in July 2016.

I think July 2016 was when the FBI started an investigation into the Trump campaign colluding w the Russians.

Now the FBI was worried about Russia hacking the DNC much much earlier. Back in 2014 or 2015. But the collusion part came later

Wasn’t there a FISA Court warrant application in July that was turned down? That was before they had the dossier to prop it up, I figure.

I have never been clear on the early FISA warrant that was supposedly turned down.

Even if it was July 2016 though, Steele briefed FBI on 5 July 2016 (according to Glenn Simpson congressional testimony and Steele statements in the London lawsuit)

The lawsuit situation is a bit messy too.

A Russian software company is suing Steele in London and Buzzfeed in the US.

Lawyer Cohen is suing Steele for 100 mil.

Carter Page is suing for false story on him.

And 3 other Russians are suing Steele.

Steele and Simpson never wanted the dossier to be completely public. They tried to give pieces, always verbally, to the media.

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:
My reaction to the dossier, when I finally saw it, was it was mostly 3rd rate gossip, not evidence of anything, certainly not proof of anything.

I wondered if it wasn’t dreamed up by the same short bald headed swarthy men in Santa Monica who come up with network sitcoms and other fiction garbage.

I am thinking the Weekly World News could have done a better job for a lot less than $12 million.

How about this, from a year ago, Andrew McCarthy:

quote:

President Trump’s early Saturday morning tweeting has exploded to the forefront an uncovered scandal I’ve been talking about since early January (including in this weekend’s column): The fact that the Obama Justice Department and the FBI investigated associates of Donald Trump, and likely Trump himself, in the heat of the presidential campaign.

To summarize, reporting indicates that, prior to June 2016, the Obama Justice Department and FBI considered a criminal investigation of Trump associates, and perhaps Trump himself, based on concerns about connections to Russian financial institutions. Preliminary poking around indicated that there was nothing criminal involved. Rather than shut the case down, though, the Obama Justice Department converted it into a national-security investigation under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA allows the government, if it gets court permission, to conduct electronic surveillance (which could include wiretapping, monitoring of e-mail, and the like) against those it alleges are “agents of a foreign power.” FISA applications and the evidence garnered from them are classified – i.e., we would not know about any of this unless someone had leaked classified information to the media, a felony.

In June, the Obama Justice Department submitted an application that apparently “named” Trump in addition to some of his associates. As I have stressed, it is unclear whether “named” in this context indicates that Trump himself was cited as a person the Justice Department was alleging was a Russian agent whom it wanted to surveil. It could instead mean that Trump’s name was merely mentioned in an application that sought to conduct surveillance on other alleged Russian agents. President Trump’s tweets on Saturday claimed that “President Obama . . . tapp[ed] my phones[,]” which makes it more likely that Trump was targeted for surveillance, rather than merely mentioned in the application.

In any event, the FISA court reportedly turned down the Obama Justice Department’s request, which is notable: The FISA court is notoriously solicitous of government requests to conduct national-security surveillance (although, as I’ve noted over the years, the claim by many that it is a rubber-stamp is overblown).

Not taking no for an answer, the Obama Justice Department evidently returned to the FISA court in October 2016, the critical final weeks of the presidential campaign. This time, the Justice Department submitted a narrowly tailored application that did not mention Trump. The court apparently granted it, authorizing surveillance of some Trump associates. It is unknown whether that surveillance is still underway, but the New York Times has identified – again, based on illegal leaks of classified information – at least three of its targets: Paul Manafort (the former Trump campaign chairman who was ousted in August), and two others whose connection to the Trump campaign was loose at best, Manafort’s former political-consulting business partner Roger Stone, and investor Carter Page. The Times report (from mid-January) includes a lot of heavy breathing about potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia; but it ultimately concedes that the government’s FISA investigation may have nothing to do with Trump, the campaign, or alleged Russian efforts to interfere in the U.S. election by hacking e-mail accounts.

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:
How about this, from a year ago, Andrew McCarthy:

President Trump’s early Saturday morning tweeting has exploded to the forefront an uncovered scandal...

I hope that justice is done. Sadly, if it is, the people who watch/read CNN,MSNBC, ABC, CBS, WP, NYT, etc will never know it.



.

At the risk of adjusting a tin foil hat a little bit, let’s think about a June 2016 FISA warrant

On 18 April 2016, NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers stops the FBI contractors from having any further access to raw FISA data

WH visitor logs show a Mary B Jacoby visiting the WH on 19 April 2016 for an East Wing Tour

A Mary B Jacoby is married to Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS. They were married in Little Rock, Arkansas.

The Clinton campaign (thru Perkins Coie law firm) hired Fusion GPS in April 2016 to do opposition research on Donald Trump.

Bruce Ohr's wife Nellie was hired by Fusion GPS about May 2016.

Christopher Steele is hired by Fusion late May/early June 2016.

and then we have a FISA warrant attempt in June 2016.

Maybe someday we can connect the appropriate dots.

A reminder that the dossier pages are numbered 1-35, but the individual reports in those pages are sometimes not in exact time sequence.

These notes are high level summaries of the actual dossier reports. To get the full picture, one would need to read the full dossier.

Report 2 (pages 4-6) dated 26 July 2015 (this was an error, it was 2016)

Russia has extensive program of cyber operations. External targets include foreign governments and corporations (esp banks).

FSB (Federal Security Service) uses coercion and blackmail to recruit the most capable cyber operatives. FSB was approaching US citizens of Russian (Jewish) origin on business trips to Russia. FSB offered seed money to a US citizen of Russian ethnicity for a new IT company; in exchange, FSB would use the product to plant a Trojan virus.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The above is a very short version of report #2. Note there is no specific mention of any Trump administration personnel.

This report seems to be an introductory set up for later reports about Russian hacking.

adding:
Steele is providing these reports to the FBI.

Wikileaks starts dumping DNC emails on 22 July 2016.

Then Steele puts out a 26 July 2016 report on how Russia has an extensive program of offensive cyber operations. Perhaps just a coincidence.

quote:

Even if it was July 2016 though, Steele briefed FBI on 5 July 2016 (according to Glenn Simpson congressional testimony and Steele statements in the London lawsuit)

Isn't that the same day Jim Comey gave his famous press briefing on national TV to "exonerate" Hillary?

Gentlemen,

I take grave exception to, and outright reject the use of the phrase "Steele dossier."

The word "dossier" imparts a significant element of legitimacy to Mr. Steele's thirty-odd pages of bullshit, innuendo, and lies. A legitimacy unsupported by the facts.

A legitimacy attributable to a government's effort to compile information critical to their sovereignty. That is a dossier. Mr. Steele's work is not a "dossier" in this sense of the word.

We know Mr. Steele planted stories in the media to add a whiff of legitimacy to his pile of steaming bovine excrement. That one act shows, beyond any dispute, that Mr. Steele knew his information was bogus, bullshit, lies, wrong, etcetera, but the lure of millions of dollars in consulting fees was too strong. So he flogged it wherever he could make a dollar (or Bitcoin, Euro, Kuggerand, Pound Sterling, setcetera) off it.

So long as Mr. Steele's magnum opus, with sub-arrangements by the DOJ, the DNC, Hilary Clinton and her campaign (Thank You, O God, for having Mr. Trump defeat her!), has the slightest sense of legitimacy, it will continued to by a source of parasitic drag on President Trump.

I propose a new term: Steele's shit salad.

yes same day.

However, the recent New Yorker article says Steele briefed the FBI on 5 July 2016 in his London office. (don't know how reliable that is)

On the baited hook is some ‘stinkbait’ right near the muddy bottom. It’s a fishing expedition. The original ‘target’ of the FISA is Carter Page, they don’t even care about him any more.

The idea is to trip up Trump or his close associates with ‘process crimes’. This is all the swamp fighting back.

Next is Report #3

Report 3 (pages 7-8) undated

Extensive conspiracy between Trump campaign and Kremlin. Involving Russian diplomatic staff in US. Managed on the Trump side by Paul Manafort who was using Carter Page and others as intermediaries. Putin hated and feared Hillary Clinton.

Trump associate admits Kremlin behind DNC emails on Wikileaks as means of maintaining plausible deniability. Russia behind leak of DNC emails through Wikileaks. The operation had full knowledge and support of Trump and senior campaign members. In return Trump agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue.

Trump team using moles in DNC and hackers in the US, as well as outside in Russia. Three elements were used against Clinton. First, there were agents in the Democratic Party. Second, there were offensive cyber operators in the US. Third, state sponsored cyber operatives in Russia.

Republican campaign team was happy to have Russia as media bogeyman to mask more extensive corrupt business ties to China.

Trump had explored real estate deals in St Petersburg and Moscow, but had to settle for extensive sexual services from local prostitutes rather than business success.


xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

In this one, Steele claims that Manafort was leading the "conspiracy" with the Kremlin.

Manafort joined the Trump campaign in March 2016. He would have been a prime person for Glenn Simpson to exploit. Simpson thru his Russian research, knew Manafort was involved in shady deals with government officials in Ukraine.

NYT article of 14 Aug 2016:

"Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau. Investigators assert that the disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials."

The Associated Press reported 18 Aug 2016 that Manafort's firm had lobbied in the United States on behalf of the ruling Ukrainian political party even though Manafort did not disclose his work as a foreign agent, as mandated by federal law.

Donald Trump accepted Manafort's resignation from the campaign on 19 Aug 2016.

So report #3 would be before Manafort was fired by Trump.

This report also claims to directly link the Trump campaign to the Kremlin / DNC emails / Wikileaks.

Were any Trump team moles ever identified in the DNC ?

Were any extensive corrupt business ties to China identified?

Note that the dossier says several times that Donald Trump did not actually take any of the "lucrative real estate deals in Russia" offered by the Kremlin.

And there is the comment that Putin feared H Clinton.

All this was eventually fed to the FBI and select media sources.

This is so mind numbingly stupid. So, Putin, former KGB enforcer who invades countries...is afraid of HRC?

The same HRC who he can hack or buy at will? The one who gave him 20% of our Uranium?

On the other side, first Trump was offered lucrative RE deals and turned them down. Then, it says he "had to settle" for prostitutes. So, he was offered lucrative deals but doesn't know enough about RE to make them work and had to settle?

I hope this report from Sarah Carter is appropriate here.

~~~~~~~

The House Select Committee on Intelligence is now investigating former Secretary of State John F. Kerry’s possible role into the unverified dossier paid for by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton Campaign, this reporter has learned. The dossier, assembled by a former British spy, laid the foundation for the FBI’s investigation into alleged collusion between President Trump and Russia and was the essential piece of evidence used by the FBI to get a warrant to spy on a former volunteer for the Trump campaign.

For more than a month, the committee has been in its second phase of investigations focused on former Obama State Department officials and their role in either transmitting information or using information provided by a former British spy and investigator Christopher Steele. Steele was hired by embattled research firm Fusion GPS, also under several congressional and Senate investigations.

But it was in February when questions surfaced regarding Kerry’s possible involvement or knowledge of the dossier.


Jonathan Winer, a long-time colleague of Kerry and who served as the former envoy for Libya during his tenure at the Department, wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post on Feb. 8, defending his relationship with Steele and his role in the infamous dossier.


Winer attempted to pre-empt questions that the committee would ask regarding his role by admitting in his article that he was a long-time friend of Steele. He also established his close working relationship with Kerry saying, “in 2013, I returned to the State Department at the request of Secretary of State John F. Kerry, whom I had previously served as Senate counsel.”

But information uncovered by the Senate Judiciary Committee and revealed in its criminal referral of Steele to the Department of Justice that several Clinton allies were also connected to the State Department and the dossier. Sidney Blumenthal, a close confidant of Hillary Clinton, and Cody Shearer, a former journalist who went on to work for the Clintons, appeared to be feeding Steele information.

Winer said in his op-ed that “in late September, I spoke with an old friend, Sidney Blumenthal, whom I met 30 years ago when I was investigating the Iran-contra affair for then-Sen. Kerry and Blumenthal was a reporter at The Post. At the time, Russian hacking was at the front and center in the 2016 presidential campaign. The emails of Blumenthal, who had a long association with Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been hacked in 2013 through a Russian server.

While talking about that hacking, Blumenthal and I discussed Steele’s reports. He showed me notes gathered by a journalist I did not know, Cody Shearer, that alleged the Russians had compromising information on Trump of a sexual and financial nature.”

Also in September, 2016 Steele briefed Winer on the dossier at a Washington Hotel, according to an expose recently published in The New Yorker. Winer prepared his summary and shared it with former Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland and Jon Finer, who was then chief of staff Kerry. Kerry was then briefed by Finer several days later, according to the report.

In February, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-CA, sent a dozen letters, containing ten questions, to former high-ranking Obama administration officials demanding full disclosure of their knowledge of the unverified dossier. Committee officials are in the process of determining how many senior officials within the Obama administration, like Kerry, were aware of the dossier.

At the time, the committee did not disclose what officials received the letters, so it is not clear if Kerry was among them. Last week, however, reports surfaced that former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former FBI Director James Comey were among those Obama officials to receive a questionnaire.

On Monday, Nunes told Fox News that some of the former administration officials responded, others asked for extensions, and several have failed to respond. He also noted that another dozen letters will be sent to more former Obama officials in the upcoming weeks as the investigation expands. The letter contained ten questions but one is of specific importance, say congressional investigators and that is if President Obama was aware of the contents of the dossier prior to Jan. 5, 2017. Also, the committee is investigating whether or not any senior officials leaked the contents of the dossier to reporters or media, as reported earlier.

Nunes said Clapper, Comey and Brennan did respond to the committee’s letter.

“There are a few people though that are not responding – they seem to have gone dark,” Nunes told Martha McCallum. “However, if they don’t respond here shortly they will be getting subpoenaed to appear before Congress to be treated with a deposition.”



But Winer’s op-ed and statements made by Nuland to the media regarding her role in the dossier have raised more questions than answers among congressional investigators. Winer, who also worked as the special envoy to Libya, noted in his op-ed that he contacted Nuland about Steele’s reports while he was at the State Department.

In one instance, Winer states that “over the years, Steele and I had discussed many matters relating to Russia. He asked me whether the State Department would like copies of new information as he developed it.”

Winer also said that he and Steele “met and became friends” in 2009 and both were interested in Russia and the collection of “business intelligence.” Winer also admitted sharing Steele’s work with the State Department’s Russia desk. “Over the next two years, I shared more than 100 of Steele’s reports with the Russia experts at the State Department, who continued to find them useful.”

Similar to Winer, Nuland has come forward to select media outlets regarding her relationship with Steele and the dossier. She told CBS’s Face the Nation, “[Steele] passed two to four pages of short points of what he was finding, and our immediate reaction to that was, ‘This is not in our purview. This needs to go to the FBI if there is any concern here that one candidate or the election as a whole might be influenced by the Russian Federation. That’s something for the FBI to investigate.”

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