The FBI admits the Left’s electoral collusion conspiracy theory is unsubstantiated but still refuses to distance itself from the discredited Russia propaganda dossier Democrats paid Fusion GPS to create to undermine President Trump’s candidacy.
Testifying behind closed doors in Congress the week before Christmas, embattled FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe reportedly “declined to criticize the dossier’s 35 pages of salacious and criminal charges against Donald Trump and his aides, but he said it remains largely unverified, according to a source familiar with ongoing congressional inquiries.”
According to the Washington Times, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chaired by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) is broadening the scope of its investigation into the collusion theory. The panel is looking at who funded the dossier and whether it was used by the FBI. It is also examining recent misconduct inside the Justice Department and the FBI, as well as the Obama administration’s unmasking of Americans caught up in foreigner-surveillance.
As for McCabe, his entanglement in Democrat politics has had President Trump crying foul. McCabe has said he will retire from the FBI in the spring. He served as acting director of the FBI from May 9 when President Trump fired then-director James Comey until Aug. 2 when new director Christopher Wray took over. While serving as acting FBI director, McCabe was involved in the email investigation.
McCabe’s wife, Jill McCabe, was a Democratic candidate in 2015 for the Virginia State Senate. Her campaign received nearly $675,000 in donations from the Virginia Democratic Party and Common Good VA, a political action committee of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), a slippery longtime Clinton flunky. Mr. McCabe failed to recuse himself from the Hillary Clinton email probe until Nov. 1, 2016, which was four days after Comey, then the FBI director, announced the agency had reopened the investigation into the emails after finding new data on computer hard drives belonging to former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), the now-imprisoned sex-offender husband of Hillary’s top lieutenant, Huma Abedin. It was also eight days after the ties between Mrs. McCabe and McAuliffe became public knowledge.
Whether McCabe should have recused himself from the email investigation is now being examined by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz.
Trump attacked McCabe on Twitter on Dec. 24.
.@FoxNews-FBI’s Andrew McCabe, “in addition to his wife getting all of this money from M (Clinton Puppet), he was using, allegedly, his FBI Official Email Account to promote her campaign. You obviously cannot do this. These were the people who were investigating Hillary Clinton.”
The dossier is the salacious report commissioned by opposition research firm Fusion GPS. The statements, among them that Donald Trump hired prostitutes to urinate on a bed, were in the partisan hit job compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele and published by cat video website BuzzFeed. In October 2016 Mother Jones reported Steele had boasted to the magazine that he pressed the FBI to begin probing the Trump campaign based on the dossier.
On Dec. 26, President Trump took to Twitter to denounce the dossier:
WOW, @foxandfriends “Dossier is bogus. Clinton Campaign, DNC funded Dossier. FBI CANNOT (after all of this time) VERIFY CLAIMS IN DOSSIER OF RUSSIA/TRUMP COLLUSION. FBI TAINTED.” And they used this Crooked Hillary pile of garbage as the basis for going after the Trump Campaign!
McCabe’s reluctance to condemn a tainted political opposition research paper could be construed as a kind of admission that FBI agents used the dossier to justify the unprecedented investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged electoral collusion with Russia. The FBI has reportedly used information from the dossier in applications for court-ordered wiretaps.
The dossier was just one of many outrageous dirty tricks by Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the 2016 election cycle. Clinton used the Democratic National Committee to snuff out Bernie Sanders’ bid for her party’s nomination, Clinton also personally authorized the illicit efforts of socialist felon Bob Creamer and organizer Scott Foval who fomented violence at Trump campaign rallies, as James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas group revealed in undercover videos.
The dossier, which BuzzFeed admitted is littered with errors, claims the Russians and the Trump campaign worked closely together, yet provides only unsourced evidence and rumors. The dossier is dominated by statements identified as coming from unnamed sources in and around the Trump team, the Kremlin, and the business community. Seemingly undermining a key contention raised in the case made against Trump, a dossier document claims Russians tried, but failed, to bribe the man who later became the 45th U.S. president.
Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel has called the dossier a joke, saying “we do a disservice when we even refer to it as a ‘dossier. That gives it too much mystique. This is an oppo research document but of lower quality than even oppo research documents.”
And yet this silly, sloppy dossier threatens to continue to be the focus of the Trump-hating mainstream media for years to come.
This article by Matthew Vadum first appeared Dec. 29, 2017, at FrontPageMag. (photo at top of Andrew McCabe from government)