It’s heavily redacted, but the short version is:
Now they want to see him prosecuted for it.
A few thoughts:
- Well now that I’ve read the redacted document, I think I can fairly say that all loose ends are tied up and we all understand everything perfectly now.
- Kudos to Grassley and Graham for actually having the integrity to ask the DoJ IG to investigate such a serious charge, and for having discretion in making their request.
- Raspberries to them for clearly feeling like they had to further publicize the request, apparently made last month, because that attention hound Devin Nunes was stealing the limelight.
- Interesting that Grassley has a very, very long history of working with whistleblowers and protecting them from prosecution for speaking up about allegations of criminality. Now, he’s doing exactly the opposite. One can only wonder, what has changed?
You think Christopher Steele should be viewed as a whistleblower?
So they reviewed documents from the FBI and then recommend that the DoJ pursue criminal charges. Don’t you think if there were evidence of a crime in these documents that the DoJ would already prosecute? To me, this just looks like another attempt to muddy the waters of the investigation. They should be ashamed, but I don’t think they have any shame left at this point.
There isn’t a single elected Republican who’s capable of feeling shame anymore. They all have their lips firmly attached to the ample shining ass of the human pimple Trump.
And of course, we can’t review those classified documents that contain “materially false statements.”
We just have to take their word for it.
I’d also like to know why false documents have to be classified. If they’re false, there can’t be damaging content, right?
He isn’t the textbook version of a whistleblower, to be certain. But the sense of the claim I get from the memo is that the FBI may have asked Steele if he provided the dossier to the media, and that Steele may not have been truthful on that point. (Leaving out a lot of caveats here for brevity.)
I’m noting the similarity of Steele and whistleblowers, wherein whistleblowers risk punishment by taking charges of wrongdoing to the press, instead of handling them in certain channels. Grassley has a very, very long record of standing up for whistleblowers during both Democratic and Republican Administrations, and trying to have them avoid punishment for attempting to bring malfeasance to light.
Only, in this case, he’s taking the opposite position: it sure appears that the core issue is that Steele talked to the media, and Grassley isn’t affording him the benefit of needing protection. Maybe there’s something in all that blacked-out stuff that would shed more light on this apparent contradiction.
It’s an interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing it.
Well given all of the meat of the document was redacted, its impossible to evaluate the merits of their argument.
So everyone will imagine the the redacted parts are what they want them to be.
For some that will be proof that the FBI is run by a conspiracy of Hippies so strong that even those nominated by Trump himself are turned against him once they enter its ranks.
I on the other hand suspect that the redacted parts point out individual points where the dossier disagrees with other intelligence sources. Which Grassley et al. are trying to point to as Steel deliberately misleading the FBI. But which are probably just due to the general messiness that is the nature of intelligence gathering.
Or it’s all a fucking lie because Republicans wouldn’t know the truth if it bit them in the 'nads, at this point.
Yeah, this is the key point. What new information are they bringing to the table? Or has Inspector Poirot gotten a job in the US Senate?
“Teach your grandmother to suck eggs” is the traditional expression, but “Tell the FBI how to investigate” is gonna have similar mileage.
Or its them pushing ‘Steele talking to teh media’ about bits in the dossier to ‘steele trying to sell the dossier to make money and hurt the election’ – there is ‘shopping’ and then there is ‘discussing’.
If I broke the law and a cop was investigating me, I’d want the cop investigating me fired or charged on some bullshit charge too if I had that kind of power.
Criminals hate cops. What else is new?
Having said that, if Steele actually broke the law then feel free to investigate. But this is just an attempt by the GOP to cover up the treason, money laundering and other crimes that Trump probably engaged in by muddying the waters and creating doubt in the minds of the public.
Also wasn’t this done so that the Senate judiciary committee could hide Steele’s testimony from the public? That didn’t work because Feinstein just released it anyway. I thought that was a major reason the GOP recommended Steele for prosecution, to hide the release of his testimony.
Also
Glenn Simpson’s testimony. As far as I know, Steele hasn’t been in the country to testify, although there have been numerous Pubbie trips to London to talk to him.
There’s way too many of these threads. As I’ve said in two other threads:
To bring charges under 18 U.S.8. § 1001 requires the false statement be told in federal jurisdiction and also be material to the case. Neither applies to Steele.
My mistake, I got the two issues confused.
Pedantic correction - the referral was sent by Sen. Grassley and Sen. Graham, not the entire Senate Judiciary Committee. While Sen. Grassley does chair the Committee, this referral was never apparently put up for a vote before the Committee for whatever reason.
None of it makes sense.
This seems to be a significantly-less-redacted version of the same memo: https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2018-02-06%20CEG%20LG%20to%20DOJ%20FBI%20(Unclassified%20Steele%20Referral).pdf
but I can’t get to the original, so that judgement is based purely on memory.
I feel like they could have at least redacted Grassley’s secretary’s phone number…
That aside, I’ll say that if nothing else, Grassley kicked the hell out of Nunes’ (or whoever’s) ass when it comes to the question of how to write a memo.
As to the contents: Certainly curious.
Grassley’s presentation of the facts sounds factual, informed, and pissed off - not just theatrical for theatrics’ sake. That lends it a certain credence.
I will also admit that Simpson’s statement that Steele panicked when the FBI wasn’t moving fast enough and went to the press seemed out of character for a person who, presumably, once walked the streets of Moscow trying to make contacts with people who could just as well turn on him and have him assassinated as a spy.
But for the moment, I’m inclined to assume that Steele or the FBI’s behavior is better explained by stupidity than malice. Someone had a false memory of asking Steele and kept vouching for Steele, or something.
The besting fitting alternative that I can think of would be that the Clintons hired Steele to use his contacts at the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Department of State to gather opposition research on trump, and the whole Russia thing was his ‘in’. He duped them into giving him information, and he fed that back to the media, it just didn’t hit in time to affect the election.
The problem with that theory, or any other ideas along that line, is that it requires Hillary Clinton to force Donald Trump to hire Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and Michael Flynn, to convince those men and Trump’s close family to get into contact with Russian figures, make them send Page to Russia, force Trump to give shout outs to Russia during his speeches, etc. I think we can all agree that, that’s beyond the abilities of Clinton to accomplish.
To the extent that it may be possible that Steele was an agent of the Clinton’s in a far more active sense than simple information gathering, it still doesn’t exonerate Trump at all. But I suppose it would explain why Putin feared Clinton in the Presidency.
This is a valid point, but it’s important to understand what the significance of the Steele/FBI issue is and what it’s not. As you imply, if Steele and the FBI decided to investigate the Trump people for the absolute worst reasons, the bottom line is that if they got the goods on them then that’s all you need to know as far as Trump is concerned. Granted.
But the real significance is this. As we stand today, “we” meaning those of us who are not FBI insiders or members of Mueller’s team, we’re making guesses as to what information is out there and how reliable it is. So people are assessing the credibility of the various players to make a judgment on what those players thought and what that implies. In that context, many people have said “Steele is a highly thought of guy, so his dossier must be reliable”, or “the FBI thought enough of that dossier to include it in their application so they must have considered it solid”, or similar. To the extent that some doubt is validly cast on the motivations and methods of Steele and the FBI in this regard, then that lessens the extent that you can apply this type of reasoning.