
DOJ Was Explicitly Warned That Steele Dossier Was Politically Biased
The Hill’s John Solomon has been one of the unsung journalists digging past the media’s feeding trough and into the gleaming truth of the FBI’s malpractice during the 2016 election. This week, Solomon dropped another bombshell that will go utterly ignored by the Democrat-run media.
Solomon’s sources inside the Department of Justice insist that not only did the FBI and the DOJ rely heavily on the Steele dossier when securing their FISA warrant against Trump campaign associate Carter Page, but they knew all along that they were dealing with a piece of politically-biased opposition research. Research that was bought and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.
From The Hill:
When the annals of mistakes and abuses in the FBI’s Russia investigation are finally written, Bruce Ohr almost certainly will be the No. 1 witness, according to my sources.
The then-No. 4 Department of Justice (DOJ) official briefed both senior FBI and DOJ officials in summer 2016 about Christopher Steele’s Russia dossier, explicitly cautioning that the British intelligence operative’s work was opposition research connected to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and might be biased.
Ohr’s briefings, in July and August 2016, included the deputy director of the FBI, a top lawyer for then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and a Justice official who later would become the top deputy to special counsel Robert Mueller.
At the time, Ohr was the associate attorney general. Yet his warnings about political bias were pointedly omitted weeks later from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant that the FBI obtained from a federal court, granting it permission to spy on whether the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia to hijack the 2016 presidential election.
Late last year, former FBI Director James Comey assured Congress that he had no knowledge at the time that the Steele dossier was a product of the Clinton campaign. In fact, he went as far as to tell lawmakers that he wouldn’t have cared where it originated in any case. Which is the kind of ridiculous thing you say when you’re waiting for evidence to emerge that you DID actually know about its origins all along.
Now we know that Comey was either lying or hopelessly ignorant about his own top investigation. We also know that when the FBI and the DOJ sought the warrant against Page, they did not omit details of the dossier’s provenance due to ignorance; Ohr told them exactly what it was and exactly where it came from. No, they downplayed and omitted these details because they knew their warrant application would be rejected otherwise.
The final chapter in the FBI/DOJ’s 2016 (and ongoing) misconduct has yet to be written. But even from what we know already, this is surely one of the gravest episodes of political bias to ever infect our nation’s law enforcement agencies. We must not rest until these people are brought to justice.