Politics

Steele: Dossier Was Funded By Democrats To Challenge Election

In a surprising admission, the author of the controversial dossier used to secure the secret surveillance on Trump officials admitted that it was paid for by Clinton campaign as a type of insurance to challenge the election.  At the same time, the reporter who helped break the story, Michael Isikoff now says that many of the specific allegations remain unproven and are likely false. 

The Washington Times reported that Steele stated in a declaration in a defamation case that the law firm Perkins Coie wanted to be able to challenge the results of the election based on the dossier.  In an answer to interrogatories, Mr. Steele wrote: “Fusion’s immediate client was law firm Perkins Coie. It engaged Fusion to obtain information necessary for Perkins Coie LLP to provide legal advice on the potential impact of Russian involvement on the legal validity of the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential election. Based on that advice, parties such as the Democratic National Committee and HFACC Inc. (also known as ‘Hillary for America’) could consider steps they would be legally entitled to take to challenge the validity of the outcome of that election.”

Ultimately, the Clinton-funded  dossier was used by the Obama Administration to secure secret surveillance targeting Trump officials. Not only was the use of such a document from an opposing candidate concerning, but many of the allegations have never been proven. Indeed, this week the attorney for Michael Cohen repeated his prior categorical denial that a key trip to Prague never occurred in direct contradiction to Steele’s dossier: “When you actually get into the details of the Steele dossier, the specific allegations, we have not seen the evidence to support them, and, in fact, there’s good grounds to think that some of the more sensational allegations will never be proven and are likely false.”

Carter Page, a former Trump adviser, has never been charged.

The Steele admission only magnifies the concerns over the purpose and the use of this dossier, but has received little media attention.

149 thoughts on “Steele: Dossier Was Funded By Democrats To Challenge Election”

  1. Once again, we are witnessing the storm that comes from the Democrats wanting to challenge an election’s results in court, rather than accepting the binding results as certified by the House of Representatives of the Electoral College’s votes.

    The United States will never be coherent as a nation again if we always allow for court challenges to election outcomes.

    1. The United States will never be coherent as a nation again if we always allow for court challenges to election outcomes.

      I would take that further Kevin and include …court challenges to executive branch policy.

      Turley has been very vocal in his warnings about establishing an uber presidency; at least during the last administration. Democrats were more than willing to cede authority from the Legislative branch to the Executive branch as long as it was a Democrat in the White House. Progressives in both major political parties have no intention of getting that power back. They instead rely on the other monster they created; the activist courts to fight against a perceived enemy president. What is truly tragic is how powerless this makes the citizens. Congress does very little by way of any heavy lifting in their legislative work. Most “law-making” is done through the administrative agencies and when congress objects to this power being used in ways that work against their political interests, then they quickly file an injunction with a friendly court.

  2. Surprise? It’s been common knowledge for well over a year. Except to those like Meuller. Nothing new there except the Now ongoing investigation by the next Senate using the complete findings of the soon to be former Representatives.

  3. JUDGE SHOCKS TRUMP ALLIES

    CAN’T HIDE HIS DISGUST AND DISDAIN FOR MICHAEL FLYNN

    For a full eight minutes, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan read aloud an inventory of Michael Flynn’s lies — describing his “disgust” that President Trump’s national security adviser sought to deceive FBI agents while “on the premises of the White House.”

    Flynn, a retired general who is the highest-ranking Trump aide to plead guilty as part of the special counsel investigation, listened tensely, his face tight, as the judge ticked through his misdeeds.

    This was not how Flynn’s supporters or Trump thought Tuesday’s sentencing hearing would unfold. They had pinned their hopes on Sullivan, an independent-minded jurist with a history of ferreting out prosecutorial misconduct, as the one who would reveal overreach by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and the FBI. Some Flynn allies even speculated the judge might toss out Flynn’s guilty plea and clear his name.

    Instead, the 71-year-old ­veteran jurist used his platform to puncture conspiracy theories that paint Flynn as a victim of deep-state persecution. And he reminded the country of a few simple creeds commonly held in courthouses but increasingly dismissed by the president’s allies: Lying to the FBI is against the law. Breaking the law is bad. People who work in the White House are supposed to be held to a higher standard.

    Sullivan, the longest-serving active federal judge on the U.S. District Court in Washington, was first appointed to the local D.C. Superior Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1984. He was named to the D.C. appeals court by President George H.W. Bush and appointed to the federal bench by President Bill Clinton.

    The product of Houston and Gardner, a storied Washington civil rights law firm, Sullivan is best known for his robust enforcement of the rule that prosecutors must disclose any evidence that could help defendants establish their innocence. Defense attorneys have given him the nickname “Brady,” a reference to the Supreme Court ruling requiring the disclosure of such exculpatory material.

    So Trump’s allies were cheered when Sullivan last week ordered Flynn’s lawyers and Mueller’s team to turn over FBI records detailing agents’ interview with Flynn in January 2017.

    Some Flynn allies, including the president, speculated that the judge was probing possible FBI misconduct.

    On Fox News, Trump ally and former judge Jeanine Pirro predicted Sullivan would throw out Flynn’s conviction. The Wall Street Journal published an editorial alleging that the FBI’s treatment of Flynn “reeks of entrapment” and calling on Sullivan to “question the entire plea deal.”

    On Tuesday, nearly a dozen members of Mueller’s team showed up at the downtown Washington courtroom for the hearing, filling the front bench. Flynn, wearing a blue suit, was flanked by his two attorneys.

    Sullivan quickly indicated that he was offended by Flynn’s suggestion that he was misled by FBI agents. And he said it appeared that the former national security adviser was trying to have it both ways: to take a generous plea deal even as he telegraphed that he might have been entrapped.

    Sullivan said the FBI records — many of which the judge forced to be publicly disclosed in recent days — showed Flynn had repeatedly lied to agents, despite knowing it was a crime to do so.

    “You understand why” I was concerned, the judge told Flynn’s attorney Robert Kelner. “This sounds like a backpedaling on the acceptance of responsibility.”

    Kelner told the judge that he and co-counsel Steven Anthony were trying to show in their filing how Flynn was different from others who have admitted lying to special counsel investigators, noting that agents did not warn him he was under investigation and that he did not have an attorney advising him.

    But Sullivan rejected that argument, saying Flynn should be held to a higher standard.

    “He was a high-ranking government official, advising the president of the United States,” Sullivan said. “I’m not hiding my disgust, my disdain, for this criminal offense.”

    Edited from: “Veteran Judge Upends Hopes Of Trump Allies As He Spotlights Flynn’s Misdeeds”

    This evening’s WASHINGTON POST

    2. RE: ABOVE STORY

      It was only yesterday that Professor Turley posted a column suggesting that Judge Sullivan might take a dim view towards Flynn’s prosecutors and the FBI agents who questioned Flynn. The professor could not have been more mistaken. It was ‘Michael Flynn’ Judge Sullivan took offense to, as described above.

      Then today Professor Turley posts a column based on a Washington Times story regarding former British spy Christopher Steele and the dossier he compiled on Donald Trump. Turley’s post seemed to indicate a new development concerning Steele who is being sued in London by Russian bankers named in said dossier.

      But a careful reading of that story reveals very little by way of new developments. Indeed, The Washington Times story was deceptively edited to hide the fact that nothing new has developed. A Google search shows that The Washington Times story is the only one concerning Steele that was published recently.

      Yet all day Trump supporters have been posting comments to this blog expressing their bewilderment that Steele has “gotten away with fraud”. It suggests that Professor Turley is simply functioning as arm of right-wing media by throwing periodic bones to Trump supporters. Perhaps Professor Turley should employ his teaching skills to explain why Donald Trump keeps lurching from one legal crisis to another.

    4. While I agree with you that lying to the FBI is a crime, it is not prosecuted equally. Multiple Clinton aids lied to the FBI, and nothing happened to them. In addition, the FBI allowed Hillary Clinton to have 9 lawyers with her when she was interviewed, and it was made very clear to her that it was an official interview, in which lying is illegal. She also used Bleach Bit on her servers, and took a hammer to her Blackberries. Since she destroyed thousands of official emails, there is no way to tell if she lied to the FBI. She destroyed the evidence. Again, no consequences.

      Everyone should be held to that high standard, not just Republicans.

      The FBI should have informed General Flynn, and White House Counsel, that this was a formal interview, giving him the option of having a lawyer present. Instead, Comey bragged about pulling a fast one on him with an administration too green to know any better, making him think it was a buddy buddy meeting. He still should have told the truth.

      I will always and forever be bitter when the law is applied harshly to conservatives when Hillary Clinton got away multiple felonies with the aid of the FBI and the DOJ. If she would to be fairly charged, then I would have no problem with the law also applying to conservatives. As it is, the government agencies have become weaponized against conservatives.

  5. Turley is ignoring the obvious — the dossier was ruled reliable enough on 4 separate occasions by 4 different judges to justify FISA warrants.

    While Carter Page hasn’t been charged, the investigation isn’t over, and in fact seems to reinvigorated.

    Steele, a former British intelligence officer, is well-regarded in Europe and NATO for being thorough and competent.

    1. Miles you sure talk like a prosecutor. If the cops swear to it then it MUST be true. LOL.

      Defense lawyers don’t believe everything they read. I don’t practice much criminal law but a little here; and wow have I seen some probable cause affidavits with some really big whoppers in them.

      Testi-lying goes from the local cops up to the tops.

      1. Mr. Kurtz,..
        I’m not sure what his occupation is, but here’s some background info on Miles Edgeworth.

          1. Tom Nash – do I translate this correctly? Miles Edgeworth is a fictional anime character.

            1. PC Schulte,
              – Yes, a fictional character.
              I think “Prosecutor Miles” was having a little fun with that username.😄
              I haven’t read enough about the character to know what “the story” is.
              It looks like the character may have originated in Japan, or at least there’s a Japanese connection with the character.

              1. Tom Nash : The anime community is angered by the unauthorized use of Prosecutor Mike Edgworth’s name on this blog. We will be watching closely and may have to take punitive steps.

                1. Vampire Hunter,..
                  It’s too late to do anything about it now, but I never gave either Dr. Kimble or the producers of The Fugitive permission to use my name for Kimble’s alias.😡

                  1. Tom Nash – It is Vampire Hunter D. We are monitoring this site from now on.

                  1. Tom Nash : the unauthorized use of your name is your problem, but the anime community is tight-knit and vigilant.

                1. Anonymous : today is the the first day that the anime community learned that the name of a beloved character was being used without permission of the author.

    2. I don’t know if there is consensus in NATO and Europe about the competence and integrity of Christopher Steele…..there may be, but I haven’t seen NATO weigh in with an opinion about Steele, or a European consensus.
      In any case, the confidence in Steele is not universal, and even if he had a great reputation in the past, his involvement in the 2016 American election changed his image.

      1. The Mueller investigation has clearly produced public records that confirm pieces of the dossier. And even where the details are not exact, the general thrust of Steele’s reporting seems credible in light of what we now know about extensive contacts between numerous individuals associated with the Trump campaign and Russian government officials.

        1. The Mueller investigation has clearly produced public records that confirm pieces of the dossier.

          If fantasy helps you feel better, fine.

          1. The dossier reports:

            Over the period March-September 2016 a company called [redacted] and its affiliates had been using botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct “altering operations” against the Democratic Party leadership. Entities linked to one [redacted] were involved and he and another hacking expert, both recruited under duress by the FSB, [redacted] were significant players in this operation.

            Additionally, it reports: 

            the Russian regime had been behind the recent leak of embarrassing email messages, emanating from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), to the Wikileaks platform.  The reason for using Wikileaks was “plausible deniability” and the operation had been conducted with the full knowledge and support of Trump and senior members of his campaign team.

            The indictment of 12 officers of the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU) corroborates these allegations from Steele’s sources.

            2. You are misusing the name of a famous anime character without the permission of the author. This is your first and only warning.

      1. nobody with a clue about espionage can really think that sticking out like a sore thumb is any way to practice tradecraft. james bond is a fantasy about a dashing british gentleman not a spy. steele is a goof and a selfish jerk and a spoiler who was played by Putin as a disinformation agent, if anything

      1. “why write No Comment. If you have no comment just dont write anything.”

        Says someone who wants to dictate what people say.

  8. As an organization and along with many in its leadership the federal Democrats are corrupt. Unfortunately there is insufficient alarm and demand for reform at the grass roots level and the party will continue to act as it does unabated and unchallenged.

      1. The appointment by Rosenstein was erroneously based on an immaterial act of foreign counterintelligence alleged by President Trump’s political opponents, not a crime and certainly not on even an iota of probable cause.

        America the Corrupt!

  9. 1. The FBI is a domestic police force. It doesn’t need a foreign adversary to ‘justify’ its existence and counter-intelligence is only a modest part of its book. Its budget isn’t ‘massive’. It is shy of $9 bn.

    2. The business of the NSA / CSS is cryptography and cryptology. It doesn’t require for its justification any particular adversary, merely adversaries troublesome enough that we benefit from encrypting our communications and seeking to crack theirs.

    3. The ‘National Intelligence Budget’ is currently about $59 bn and covers the NSA / CSS, CIA, and two other agencies. The budget of the USDA is about $140 bn.

    1. thank you yet again for your moderation and details.

      1) if the FBI didnt need justifications for its invasive powers than why did it lose so many after the Church hearings, and gain so many back after 9/11?

      2) if the NSA doesn’t need an adversary then why did it escalate its dragnet of domestic surveillance massively after 9/11?

      https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/government-elections-politics/united-states-of-secrets/the-frontline-interview-william-binney/

      3) Putting aside for a moment the fact that FBI has its own sourcing methods, starting with asset forfeitures, both on and off the books; and putting aside all the speculation about how CIA may “supplement” its own official budgets with creative financing– one can only wonder— but the intel service honchos very much want to justify a bigger budget.

      Clapper who is in this anti Trump Deep State combine, was big on escalating his own budget. That was obvious and this article details it.

      https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/black-budget-summary-details-us-spy-networks-successes-failures-and-objectives/2013/08/29/7e57bb78-10ab-11e3-8cdd-bcdc09410972_print.html

      The document describes a constellation of spy agencies that track millions of surveillance targets and carry out operations that include hundreds of lethal strikes. They are organized around five priorities: combating terrorism, stopping the spread of nuclear and other unconventional weapons, warning U.S. leaders about critical events overseas, defending against foreign espionage, and conducting cyber-operations.

      In an introduction, Clapper said the threats facing the United States “virtually defy rank-ordering.” He warned of “hard choices” as the intelligence community — sometimes referred to as the “IC” — seeks to rein in spending after a decade of often double-digit budget increases.

      The current budget proposal envisions that spending will remain roughly level through 2017 and amounts to a case against substantial cuts.

      “Never before has the IC been called upon to master such complexity and so many issues in such a resource-constrained environment,” Clapper wrote.

      An espionage empire

      The summary provides a detailed look at how the U.S. intelligence community has been reconfigured by the massive infusion of resources that followed the 2001 attacks. The United States has spent more than $500 billion on intelligence during that period, an outlay that U.S. officials say has succeeded in its main objective: preventing another catastrophic terrorist attack in the United States.

      The result is an espionage empire with resources and a reach beyond those of any adversary, sustained even now by spending that rivals or exceeds the levels at the height of the Cold War.

      The current total budget request was 2.4 percent below that of fiscal 2012. In constant dollars, it was about twice the estimated size of the 2001 budget and 25 percent above that of 2006, five years into what was then known as the “global war on terror.”

      Historical data on U.S. intelligence spending is largely nonexistent. Through extrapolation, experts have estimated that Cold War spending probably peaked in the late 1980s at an amount that would be the equivalent of $71 billion today.

      Spending in the most recent cycle surpassed that amount, based on the $52.6 billion detailed in documents obtained by The Post plus a separate $23 billion devoted to intelligence programs that more directly support the U.S. military.

      Lee H. Hamilton, an Indiana Democrat who chaired the House Intelligence Committee and co-chaired the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, said that access to budget details will enable an informed public debate on intelligence spending for the first time, much as Snowden’s disclosures of NSA surveillance programs brought attention to operations that had assembled data on nearly every U.S. citizen.

      “Much of the work that the intelligence community does has a profound impact on the life of ordinary Americans, and they ought not to be excluded from the process,” Hamilton said.

      “Nobody is arguing that we should be so transparent as to create dangers for the country,” he said. But, he added, “there is a mind-set in the national security community: ‘Leave it to us, we can handle it, the American people have to trust us.’ They carry it to quite an extraordinary length so that they have resisted over a period of decades transparency. . . . The burden of persuasion as to keeping something secret should be on the intelligence community, the burden should not be on the American public.”

      Experts said that access to such details about U.S. spy programs is without precedent.

      “It was a titanic struggle just to get the top-line budget number disclosed, and that has only been done consistently since 2007,” said Steven Aftergood, an expert at the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington-based organization that provides analyses of national security issues. “But a real grasp of the structure and operations of the intelligence bureaucracy has been totally beyond public reach. This kind of material, even on a historical basis, has simply not been available.”

      The only meaningful frame of reference came in 1994, when a congressional subcommittee inadvertently published a partial breakdown of the National Intelligence Program. At the time, the CIA accounted for just $4.8 billion of a budget that totaled $43.4 billion in 2012 dollars. The NSA and the National Reconnaissance Office, which operates satellites and other sensors, commanded far larger shares of U.S. intelligence budgets until years after the Cold War ended.

      During the past decade, they have taken a back seat to the CIA.

      The NSA was in line to receive $10.5 billion in 2013, and the NRO was to get $10.3 billion — both far below the CIA, whose share had surged to 28 percent of the total budget.

      Overall, the U.S. government spends 10 times as much on the Defense Department as it does on spy agencies.

      “Today’s world is as fluid and unstable as it has been in the past half century,” Clapper said in his statement to The Post. “Even with stepped up spending on the IC over the past decade, the United States currently spends less than one percent of GDP on the Intelligence Community.”

      IE WE WANT MORE MONEY… the GWOT was the last excuse, what’s the next? oh, hell, why not RUSSIA?

      1. 3) Putting aside for a moment the fact that FBI has its own sourcing methods, starting with asset forfeitures, both on and off the books;

        Again, FBI expenditures amount to < $9 bn a year. That's not a reference to revenue streams.

        Asset forfeitures net the federal government $1.6 bn in 2017. Most of the manpower to execute those forfeitures was provided by the Marshall Service. Less than 4% was provided by the FBI.

        The sum of the budgets of the intelligence agencies grew from $26.6 bn in 1997 to $63.5 bn in 2007, or a 91% increase in real terms. As a share of gross domestic product, the expenditures increased from 0.31% in 1997 to 0.44% in 2007.

        The rest of your remarks are Gish Gallop.

        1. i dont know what gish gallop is but it means something to you i guess

          budgets for the bloated intelligence agencies are pretty far afield from the topic but the point was you like to go down the rabbit hole with trivial details.

          my point was that they want a bogeyman and Russia is the bogeyman of the day.

          my article was an excellent exposition of this point but you selected some minutiae to quibble with, punctiliously

  10. What this, and most, articles fail to mention is that the “dossier” was first initiated by a REPUBLICAN opponent of Trump’s in the primary but it had not been completed. It was then picked up by the Clinton campaign. It was nothing out of the ordinary in terms of how opposition research is acquired. What is unusual is that despite the fact that much of the information in the report was not taken seriously by the media during the campaign, it was suddenly credible and the subject of nearly constant reporting once the campaign was over. Nobody in the regular, corporate media was buying the dossier as a reliable, credible report while the campaign was going on. The entire episode is a blot on the nation’s history starting with Trump being the worst, most damaging blot and then the absurd, pathetic conduct of the Clinton camp upon being defeated by the keystone cops.

    1. And God began the entire universe, lo these many years ago, so he must be the true original source of the “dossier.”

      Are you implying that it was the Republicans, not the Democrats (i.e. anti-Constitutional parasites and leeches) under color of authority as the FBI, that criminally submitted the “dossier” to the FISC?

    2. 1) if the FBI didnt need justifications for its invasive powers than why did it lose so many after the Church hearings, and gain so many back after 9/11?

      The Church committee was concerned with the conduct of the CIA.

      1. Do you mean the CIA of the Dulles brothers et al., which, in conjunction with Carlos Marcello, the Mob, the Cuban exiles, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, LBJ, the Texas oilmen, etc., conducted the assassination of JFK?

      2. “This is absurd” wrote:

        “The Church committee was concerned with the conduct of the CIA.”

        …and the FBI. (Get your facts straight.)

          1. i dont know who said that but yeah he or she was right, it was the FBI too

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

            all thrown aside after 9/11 unfortunately and the FISA warrant process a flawed part of new system, and it was finally abused at a high level even up to the victor of an election and still nobody finds a fault with it as such. pathetic. 4th amendment receding into irrelevance!

    3. The dossier was not initiated by Paul Singer, the Republican backing Mark Rubio.
      He no longer funded Fusion’s opposition research after Trump had the nomination in hand by April-May 2016.
      Steele was retained after that, and the funding went from the DNC/ Hillary Campaign to Perkins-Coie to Fusion to Orbis, Steele’s British company.
      Prior to the 2016 campaign, the use of foreign agents/ resourses in opposition was avoided; it was considered to be “crossing a line” in even the sometime-sleazy area of op. research.
      The claim that “it was nothing out of the ordinary” is not correct.
      That is one reason why there was a string of intermediaries used for funding/ comtacts, why it took a year to determine who funded the Russian Dossier, why individuals in the Democratic Party are not stepping forward to take responsibility for authorizing and funding the Russian Dossier, and why there was a violation of campaign finance rules by masking the opposition research expenditures as “legal fees”.

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