The dossier was just a convenient compilation of information available elsewhere, and independently checkable. It makes no sense to discuss the reliability of the dossier or of Steele instead of the information it contained.
The FBI would have the same information with or without it - all it did was save some time.
Exactly. There may have been some info in the dossier that was unverified. There may have been some info in the dossier that was salacious. There was also some info in the dossier about Carter Page that was neither of those things and that info was used to get a FISA warrant.
[ul]
[li]Carter Page really did meet with Kislyak in Cleveland during the RNC.[/li][li]Carter Page really did take two trips to Moscow in 2016.[/li][li]Carter Page really did meet with high level officials in the Russian government in Russia in 2016.[/li][li]Carter Page really did tell anyone who would listen in the Trump campaign that he could arrange meetings with Russian government officials.[/li][li]etc.[/li][/ul]
Steele saw evidence of a crime in progress occurring and went to the cops with it. It is a horrible idea that ultimately makes law enforcement more difficult to prosecute someone for reporting a crime. Grassley and Graham can make all the referrals they want, but the DOJ and the FBI know how to do their jobs and there is no way they are going to go after Christopher Steele for this.
Question is whether the true - or even the credible - portions of the dossier would have sufficed for a warrant. E.g. I highly doubt if you could get a warrant based on someone traveling to Russia and meeting government officials.
What happened to “If you see something, say something”, “Drop a dime on crime”, and so forth?
That might be a question you have, but I don’t see the relevance. It doesn’t matter what was in the dossier. The evidence, in total, presented by the FBI to FISC was sufficient to obtain a warrant.
The FBI didn’t go to FISC with, “There’s a guy who traveled to Russia and met with government officials. Can we spy on him?” Therefore, I don’t see the point in discussing whether or not that would be sufficient to obtain a warrant.
The FISA application concerning Page was something like fifty pages long.
Then you’re backing off what you yourself just wrote, in the post I quoted. I was responding to that post specifically.
You seem to be confused.
I don’t think so.
Your initial statement was that “There may have been some info in the dossier that was unverified. There may have been some info in the dossier that was salacious. There was also some info in the dossier about Carter Page that was neither of those things and that info was used to get a FISA warrant.” (emphasis added). You then went on to list some of the things which were “neither of those things” (in your opinion).
My response was that since the dossier also contained things which were unverified, then you have no basis for assuming that the FISA warrant was granted based only on the verified parts such as those which you listed.
You then responded that this is irrelevant, and that “it doesn’t matter what was in the dossier. The evidence, in total, presented by the FBI to FISC was sufficient to obtain a warrant”. This contradicts your earlier post which said that the warrant was based on the verified portions of the dossier.
This is the source of your confusion. I posted some things about the dossier and I posted an incomplete list of reasons why Carter Page’s Russian interactions were shady as fuck. You assumed incorrectly that that list came from the dossier. I’m glad I could clear this up for you.
My point stands, regardless of whether those specific items came from the dossier or not.
Your point might or might not stand. It is not relevant to the discussion as far as I can discern.
OK. That’s enough for me, in any event.
Cool. Thanks for stopping by. If you’re ever interested in discussing this topic, this is the thread for it.
I’ve never considered Steele to be much of a player since it rest upon the FBI and special counsel to validate. I care about what they do, not what Steele does or says. While it seemed plausible that some part of the dossier was true - and it has been demonstrated to know a lot of things well before anyone else was aware of it - fundamentally there’s no way for us to know which ones, so putting any eggs in any particular basket seemed unreasonable.
It’s noteworthy in the sense that it needs to be investigated, but in everything I’ve ever read of it, it’s been consistently presented as a thing that is inherently unreliable without further verification, and the reasons that have been given for that are many and reasonable. Anyone who didn’t take that to heart by this point, already, had to have blissfully stepped over the 8 foot wall with a bright flashing neon sign to get there.
But in terms of using it against Carter Page, it seems reasonable. He was already suspected as a Russian agent and an opposition research organization found him infiltrated into an American campaign and floating around Russia, meeting with some of the top names of the country. How do you not investigate that? Obviously, the aspersion of the researcher would be that Page is working at the behest of the campaign. But just the verifiable element - that Page was out of the country - would be sufficient to want to go on a fishing expedition. The FBI is interested in national security, not just fighting crimes. It’s not any better if Russia has infiltrated a campaign than if the campaign is trying to arrange a quid-pro-quo with Russia. In a sense, the former is worse.
Right. But again, at this point the FBI and SC haven’t done anything. So much the conversation and assessment of what’s likely to happen is based on other factors, such as the validity of the Steele dossier. It might be that you personally don’t put much weight on Steele’s credibility, but many others do (including on this MB) so it has a bearing on the assessment for those people.
FWIW, to my knowledge, there has been nothing noteworthy in the dossier which was new. IOW, there were major assertions, which were either already publically known or remain unverified, or there revelations which were all items of little consequence.
Which makes sense. Steele was a guy with contacts in Russia. He wasn’t some guy just reading the papers. It’s to be expected that he could come up with something. But whether the significant revelations were accurate depends on whether there was anything significant to be revealed, and if there wasn’t, then all the contacts in the world couldn’t produce that.
Is that correct? I know that it was suspected that Russians were trying to recruit Carter Page, but not that he was suspected of having been successfully recruited. The fact that he wasn’t wired until an application which relied heavily on the dossier would be consistent with this.
Defend this word choice, please.
See e.g. the Grassley letter, pages 2 and 7.
Thanks, this justifies your use of the word “heavily”. Though I do have to say the word choice in the Grassley letter is really weaselly. E.g.,:
The bulk of the application consists of allegations against Paige that were disclosed to the FBI by Mr. Steele…
Well, the Steele dossier was 17 memos, each 2-3 pages long. So let’s say 40 pages total. When they say “bulk” do they mean by page count? As what does “bulk” mean as a percentage? It clearly doesn’t mean 100%, or they would have said “all”. So what’s the remainder? Is it 40 pages of dossier and one 1-page transcription of Paige admitting he was a spy in a wiretap?
The Grassley letter specifically doesn’t say the FBI relied exclusively on the dossier, so the FBI must have had other evidence. How important was that other evidence? The memo is public but no one is asking for the other evidence to be released. Why?
Page 7 just repeats the language from page 2, with the word “significantly” replacing the word “bulk”. Though it does say the following, which is really weaselly:
The FISA application relied more heavily on Steele’s credibility than on any independent verification or corroboration for his claims.
Notice how the phrase “more heavily” requires that there be *some *independent verification of Steele’s claims? Notice also how the phrase “relied more heavily on Steele’s credibility” applies only to the portion of the FISA application that was comprised of the Steele dossier?
The Graham/Grassley letter should be met with every bit as much skepticism as anything Steele wrote. Without the FISA applications, which are extensive and meticulously researched and documented and likely total something the size of a book, we don’t know how much truth there is to it. The only things we know for a fact about this letter is that it asks the FBI to do something that Graham and Grassley know is impossible and it has been abnormally publicized.
I should have made this point a larger piece of my response: The Grassley letter admits that there was independent verification of (some of) Steele’s claims. That seems huge to me