FBI Spied on Page Using Clinton-Paid Dossier, Records Show

Documents show what conservatives and supporters of President Donald Trump have long suspected and even known — that the Steele Dossier, funded by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, was the primary reason the FBI received its FISA court approval to spy on Carter Page.

The dossier, as political watchers are aware, has been largely debunked.

FBI got parts of Dossier from top DOJ official Bruce Ohr.

Ohr‘s wife Nellie worked for Fusion.

Fusion was paid by Clinton.

The Dossier was never validated and was the key to getting the FISA warrant to spy on Trump campaign.

Rod Rosenstein signed the final FISA renewal.

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) July 24, 2018

You’d think even the left would have to admit how politicized the FBI has become. But of course, the left has dug in deeper to support its intelligence minions.

The Deep State is indeed alive and well.

From the Epoch Times:

Newly declassified documents released on July 21 substantiate long-held suspicions that a group of top Obama administration officials used an unverified opposition research dossier, funded by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC), to obtain a warrant to spy on former Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page, yet failed to inform the court about who funded the dossier.

Then-FBI Director James Comey and then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates signed off on the initial warrant application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), according to the trove of documents released by the Justice Department. Despite telling the Senate intelligence committee that he knew in January last year that the dossier was “salacious and unverified,” Comey signed off on two renewal warrant applications. The 400 pages of the secret court documents span the initial warrant application and three renewals, none of which disclose to the judge that the evidence presented was paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC.

The FBI renewed the initial warrant to surveil Page three times, with Comey and Yates signing the initial renewals, followed by approvals by then-Acting Attorney General Dana Boente, then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Despite a year of surveillance, no charges were ever brought against Page. The release of the documents also suggests that Page is unlikely to be the subject of any investigation.

In the nearly 40-year history of the FISC prior to July 21, the Justice Department never released warrant applications to the public. The raw-document revelation is the first major piece of evidence backing claims that the Trump campaign was subjected to politicized surveillance.

The FISC documents are notably thin on evidence, with claims from the Clinton-funded dossier making up the core of the claims against Page. Christopher Steele, a former British spy, used second-hand sources to compile the dossier, the documents show. Steele was hired by Fusion GPS at the behest of Perkins Coie, a law firm working for Clinton and the DNC.

The Obama officials topped off the claims from Steele’s dossier with nearly eight pages of claims gathered from media articles. Each of the media reports used a negative angle on the Trump campaign.

In one instance, the FBI officials cite “speculation in U.S. media” as proof that the Russian government is behind the hack of the DNC’s servers.

In another instance, the warrant describes an article which speculates that Trump would not give weapons to Ukraine if he were elected president. Last year, Trump approved the sale of Javelin tank-busting missiles to Ukraine.

In a third instance, the officials cite an article reporting that Page is under investigation. The officials name a “Western intelligence source” as one of the sources in the article, but, knowingly or not, fail to disclose that the source for the article was Steele.

In intelligence circles, using such evidence is called circular reporting: an act of citing the same evidence through multiple sources to create an appearance of corroboration. In another instance of this tactic, the warrant application cites a letter from Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada) to then FBI-Director James Comey. Reid obtained the allegations in the letter from then-CIA Director John Brennan, who in turn learned of the claims from the Clinton-funded dossier.

The FISA documents also reveal, for the first time, that the FBI paid Steele for his services. It was known that the bureau planned to pay Steele $50,000, but cut ties with him because Steele started speaking to the media in violation of the FBI’s source policies. The new documents confirm that Steele received the money despite breaking the rules.

Steele hired “sub-sources” to conduct the research for his dossier, the documents show. But instead of verifying the credibility of those sources, the FBI officials used the claims in the dossier based on the assessment that Steele was a reliable source. The assistant director of counterintelligence division at the FBI, Bill Priestap, admitted under oath in Congress that verification of the Clinton-funded dossier was in its infancy during the first FISA application, according to a memo (pdf) by the House intelligence committee.

President Donald Trump suggested on July 22 that the FISA documents substantiate allegations that the Trump campaign was the target of politicized spying to benefit his opponent in the 2016 election.

“Looking more & more like the Trump Campaign for President was illegally being spied upon (surveillance) for the political gain of Crooked Hillary Clinton and the DNC,” Trump wrote on Twitter on July 22. “Republicans must get tough now. An illegal Scam!”

The FISA documents show how spying on Page could open the door to spying on the entire Trump campaign. In the initial application, the FBI officials state that “these same authorities may also incidentally require other foreign intelligence information, as defined by the Act.”

The admission suggests that the FBI team received approval to collect surveillance on individuals connected to Page. For example, if the FBI surveilled Page electronically, which is almost certain given a nearly five-page, fully redacted list of “specific authorities requested,” the agents could pull from the National Security Agency’s communications database using the “two-hop” rule.

Under the rule, a surveillance warrant extends to the communications of all people who contact the target, in this case, Page. Furthermore, via the second “hop,” the communications of everyone who contacted the people who contacted Page could also be obtained by the FBI, a web that could easily spread to the entire Trump campaign.

Trump indicated he is aware of the possibility as part of another Twitter message on July 22 quoting Fox News anchor Pete Hegseth.

“Carter Page was just the foot to surveil the Trump campaign,” Trump wrote.

Page vehemently denied the allegations in the documents during an appearance on CNN on July 22.

“This is so ridiculous, it’s just beyond words,” Page told “State of the Union.”

“I’ve never been an agent of a foreign power by any stretch of the imagination. It’s really spin.”

Eleven congressmen accused Comey, McCabe, Yates, and Boente of depriving Page of his rights and of investigative misconduct in a criminal referral sent on April 18 to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Trump fired Yates for insubordination last January and removed Comey last May for usurping the attorney general, among other missteps. Sessions fired McCabe for authorizing a self-serving leak to the media and lying about it to investigators. Boente is now the FBI’s general counsel.

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Suresh

5 years ago

Clinton mafia still active after Trump takeover as they kill another witness to email investigation http://tinyurl.com/y8p9cv5l

They know their hold overs in FBI / DOJ /NSC will help them out !

Unless they are totally purged including Left/Liberal judges to keep out their bias …its uphill task to prosecute them.

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Covadonga

5 years ago

And Justice official Bruce Ohr’s wife Nellie Ohr was a Communist sympathizer, the daughter of a Leftist writer and a Leftist scientist.

And then-CIA chief John Brennan, who started the CIA electronic surveillance program against the Trump campaign at CIA headquarters in Langley, had voted for Communist Party USA candidate Gus Hall in the 1976 presidential election, preferring him to Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter.

And Christopher Steele, the former head of the Russian desk of the British spy agency MI6, was known as a Leftist in college at Cambridge.

And Fusion GPS’s 3rd Russian expert, after Steele and Nellie Ohr, was Edward Baumgartner, another Leftist, who majored in Russian history at Vassar when Nellie Ohr was a professor of Russian history there.

Other than this bunch of Bolsheviks, who’ve known each other for decades and all have ties to the Soviet Union and its agents in the West, do the Democrats have anybody else to accuse Mr. Trump of “Russian collusion”?

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Drew the Infidel

5 years ago

My prediction is that the Mueller witch hunt has more than a nodding acquaintance with this same bogus dossier and that General Flynn and Paul Manafort will have a new day an outcome in court.

Mueller can’t do anything right. He was the FBI Director who missed the signals on 9/11, Ft. Hood, and the Boston Marathon bombing. His successor, James Comey, missed on Orlando an San Bernardino.

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William Wilhelm

5 years ago

Just think, without those pesky court documents from the freedom of information lawsuits filed by judicial, we might never know how corrupted the Obama administration was. Support judicial watch financially if you want the truth. They just keep going much like the Energizer bunny.

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