FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
Steele’s Intelligence on Putin Contradicted the CIA, but DOJ and FBI Used It Anyway
Nov. 20, 2018 (EIRNS)—John Solomon, a competent intelligence contributor to The Hill, revealed there yesterday that Fusion GPS’s British intelligence instigator Christopher Steele knew nothing about what was going on in Russia at the time he authored the “Steele Dossier” for the DNC in February 2016. While establishing contact with the Justice Department and FBI, “former” British MI6 agent Steele emailed some intelligence reports called “Orbis Russian Leadership Reporting” from his Orbis Business Intelligence security company to a potential client in the private sector. Steele’s cover email made a bizarre and dead-wrong claim: “Russian leader Vladimir Putin might be losing his grip on power.”
Solomon says it is not clear if Steele shared these same reports with his handlers at the DOJ, the FBI, or the State Department, but at that time, he was in contact with DOJ No. 4, then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr.
In fact, Steele’s February 2016 report that Putin was weakened, directly contradicted the CIA’s own analysis of Moscow, given in the same month to Congress in the CIA’s annual global threats assessment. The CIA declared on Feb. 9, 2016, just a day after Steele sent the email, as Solomon reports,
“that Putin appeared emboldened fr a ‘more assertive foreign policy approach’ and a Western disinformation campaign because his popularity was soaring in his homeland.”
The CIA wrote: “President Vladimir Putin has sustained his popular approval at or near record highs for nearly two years after illegally annexing Crimea.”
Steele’s correspondence with the business associate, Solomon writes, is the latest piece of evidence suggesting that Steele
“may not have been as well-versed or-sourced in Russian intelligence as he was portrayed when the FBI used his now-infamous anti-Trump dossier to support a request for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant against Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.”
Both the DOJ’s Inspector General and multiple Congressional committees are now investigating whether the FBI properly handled the Trump collusion case. The FBI has an obligation to supply only verified information to support a FISA warrant, which it failed to do. But Solomon says his sources say that FBI counterintelligence analyst Jon Moffa recently told Congressional investigators in a transcribed interview that the Bureau was still trying to verify the Steele dossier when it was submitted as evidence for the FISA warrant. Moffa told House investigators: “Our work on verifying facts of the FISA would have been—facts of the reporting would have been ongoing at the time the FISA was generated,” according to the transcript.
Even Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson had his doubts. In a December 2016 meeting with Bruce Ohr, Simpson told the then-Associate Deputy Attorney General that Steele’s main source wasn’t in Moscow, but was a former Russian intelligence figure in Washington, Ohr’s notes show.
Solomon concludes,
“Steele’s intelligence was hearsay collected a continent away from Moscow....
“If the FBI had reviewed it and compared it to the CIA’s own assessment, there might have been reason to doubt Steele’s Russia expertise....
“We know now, two years later, that Putin wasn’t on shaky ground but, rather, had solidified his power. And we know that, after two years of probing, the FBI has not turned up any public evidence of collusion, either.
“There’s a good chance Steele was wrong about both.”
