FBI documents were released on Friday after the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch sued to get access to them under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The release consists of fifteen FD-1023 source reports, thirteen FD-209a contact reports, eleven FD-794b payment requests, a FD-1040a document severing the bureau’s relationship with Steele, and a FD-1057 form showing Steele was “verbally admonished” by the FBI for an unspecified transgression.
The FBI just released 71 pages of documents on its relationship with Christopher Steele. Here is what 70 of the pages look like. #whitewash https://t.co/L3BWou7rLO pic.twitter.com/XzMIeDkpgS
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) August 3, 2018
The FBI has released 70 pages of documents related to contacts with British spy Christopher Steele, author of the notorious Trump-Russia dossier. Though almost entirely whited out, the documents still show FBI paid Steele.
The documents, while almost a “literal whitewash,’ align with the claims by US President Donald Trump and his supporters that the FBI’s Russia investigation was politically motivated.
Despite its complete redaction, it does confirm part of Trump’s narrative that the FBI was colluding with the Clinton campaign, because we also know that Christopher Steele was employed trough Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm and the contract was taken out by Perkins Coie, which is the law firm of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
The FBI needed Steele to dig at Trump in the first place because some agents with a bias against Trump, which was later laid bare in their emails, wanted to create an impression of objectivity.
There were partisan officials inside the FBI who’ve gone on record saying they feared Trump’s selection and that they were trying to establish plausible deniability working through a third party that was funded by the Clinton campaign.
As documented in the memo by the House Intelligence Committee’s Republican majority, Steele’s “dossier” was used as the primary basis of a FISA surveillance warrant against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, obtained by the FBI in October 2016. Even though the bureau cut Steele off within weeks of the initial application, the dossier continued to be used to secure the three subsequent renewals.
11 payments were made to Steele, although Trump is the one being investigated not Hillary Clinton. Problem is, who do you get to investigate the investigators investigating the investigators. There should be no internal redacting of documents, it should be up to a judge to decide what is a national security issue and what is not.
The FBI colluded with Clinton and paid people to invent allegations against a presidential candidate, n o surprise there. It is clear why the Democrats and their fake news media are drooling on about ‘Russian’ collusion – it is to distract the people from the very much more sinister attempt by the security services to rig the US election for Hillary.
