Dossier Spy Christopher Steele Accused of Deceiving the FBI

According to a Senate document released to the public on Tuesday, Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley has levied serious charges against former British spy (and author of the Trump/Russia dossier) Christopher Steele.

As part of a criminal referral that the committee has sent to the Justice Department, Grassley included information that indicates that not only did Steele freely speak to the mainstream media while working with the Bureau, he also misled officials about the nature of that communication. This, in turn, led the FBI to mistakenly use a Yahoo News article as corroboration for the dossier when presenting their application for a warrant to the FISA court. They did this because Steele had denied being the source for that story.

That, as we now know, was a lie.

Whether the FBI knew or not at the time that it was a lie will have to be investigated, but it is a near-certainty that the FISA court believed that the Yahoo News article was a separate piece of reporting. The FBI presented it that way, both to bolster the “Oh, he would never blab to the press” reputation of their source, Steele, and to provide his dossier with extra credibility. So whether the FBI officials believed Steele or deceived the court intentionally, we’ll have to leave that question for another day. But the answer won’t change the fact that the warrant was issued under invalid circumstances. Therefore, the U.S. government, under Obama, illegally spied on an American citizen.

You can bet that Mr. Carter Page’s lawyers are warming up their lawsuit-writing hands as we speak.

More importantly to the rest of us, it is increasingly obvious that the entire Russia investigation was precipitated by and continued because of this dossier – a dossier that is losing credibility by the second. It started off with next-to-none, sank lower when we learned that it began its life as a piece of Clinton-purchased political propaganda, and then lost all of it last week when we found out that people like Clinton-bestie Sidney Blumenthal was the one handing Steele these rumors in the first place. And to realize that the FBI has been chasing this wild goose for the better part of two years? It defies the imagination.

Now the question is: How much longer is Robert Mueller and the various Congressional committees going to continue foisting this farce on the American people? When it someone – be it the president or someone in the Justice Department or Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell – going to say, “Enough is enough”? If you can’t prove this case in the amount of time you’ve had…if you can’t even MAKE a case in this amount of time…then you don’t HAVE a case. Let’s close it up, move on, and start investigating the people responsible for creating this mess: Hillary Clinton, Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele, and the rest of them.