By Robert Romano

The intelligence in the dossier by former British spy Christopher Steele, paid for by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign, was not from a well-placed source in the Russian government, but a paid-for employee of Steele’s firm, Orbis, who disputed the findings of the dossier when they were published on Jan. 10, 2017 by Buzzfeed.

This, from the bombshell now declassified Jan. 24, 2017 interview by the FBI with the sub-source that was only undertaken two weeks after the false allegations against President Donald Trump and his campaign — that they were Russian agents who had helped Moscow hack the DNC and put its emails onto Wikileaks — became public.

Those allegations were debunked by none other than former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, but he never included the sub-source interview in his March 2019 report. That would not come until later from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz in Dec. 2019 when he summarized the interview, which has now been declassified by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

According to a Senate Judiciary Committee press release summarizing the interview, “The document reveals that the primary ‘source’ of Steele’s election reporting was not some well-connected current or former Russian official, but a non-Russian based contract employee of Christopher Steele’s firm. Moreover, it demonstrates that the information that Steele’s primary source provided him was second and third-hand information and rumor at best.”

According to the interview, Steele’s sub-source said when he was asked in March 2016 to look into then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, that he and his contacts came up with nothing. Per the FBI, the source “carefully asked around some of his… friends. He said he may have asked friends and contacts in Russia, but he couldn’t remember off-hand. He added that, for this topic, his friends and contacts in Russia couldn’t say very much because they were ‘too far removed’ from the matter.”

The source said when he asked to get information from Russia on Trump “He was nervous and cautious when asking around about the topic in Russia , but he felt like he had to report something back to Steele about it.”

As for President Trump’s supposed encounter with prostitutes in a Moscow Ritz-Carlton, the source, per the FBI interview, “said that he reported Trump’s unorthodox sexual activity at the Ritz as ‘rumor and speculation’ and that he had not been able to confirm the story.”

On validating the material for the dossier, the source, per the FBI interview, said “Steele pushed [him] to try and either follow-up with people or corroborate the reporting, but [he] wasn’t able to do so. Moreover, [he] added attempts at getting corroboration on these subjects made him uncomfortable — he was nervous about the Russians finding out about it.”

Meaning, the source was not talking to the Russian intelligence sources directly — despite the Steele dossier falsely saying he had — but was evading them in pursuit of his own interviews.

Steele said the sources were Russian, but they were not named: Source A was a “former top Russian intelligence officer”; Source B was a “senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure”; Source C was a “senior Russian financial official”; Source D was a “close associate of Trump” (golden showers source); Source E was an “ethnic Russian close associate” of Trump (golden showers source); Source F was a “female staffer of the hotel”; and source G was a “senior Kremlin official”.

Steele had reported, based on these sources, that “there was a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation” between then-candidate Donald Trump and Russia, and that starting in July 2016, “This was managed on the TRUMP side by the Republican candidate’s campaign manager, Paul MANAFORT, who was using foreign policy advisor, Carter PAGE, and others as intermediaries. The two sides had a mutual interest in defeating Democratic presidential candidate Hillary CLINTON, whom President PUTIN apparently both hated and feared… Inter alia, Source E, acknowledged that the Russian regime had been behind the recent leak of embarrassing e-mail messages, emanating from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), to the WikiLeaks platform. The reason for using WikiLeaks was ‘plausible deniability’ and the operation had been conducted with the full knowledge and support of TRUMP and senior members of his campaign team.”

But on that core allegation, the source told the FBI, per the Jan. 2017 interview, “the individual said that the Kremlin might be of help to get Trump elected but [he] did not recall any discussion or mention of Wikileaks.”

According to Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz’ report, released in Dec. 2019, summarizing the interview, “the Primary Sub-source made statements during his/her January 2017 FBI interview that were inconsistent with multiple sections of the Steele reports, including some that were relied upon in the FISA applications. Among other things, regarding the allegations attributed to Person 1, the Primary Sub-source’s account of these communications, if true, was not consistent with and, in fact, contradicted the allegations of a ‘well-developed conspiracy’…”

Meaning, it was not Russian disinformation, it was British disinformation — from Steele.

And yet, per Horowitz, the FBI’s “receipt of Steele’s election reporting on September 19, 2016 played a central and essential role in the FBI’s and Department’s decision to seek the FISA order.”

The FISA warrant requests against former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page and the campaign at large began in Oct. 2016 and went all the way through June 2017.

Without Steele, they had nothing. And without his sources, he had nothing.

Most telling of the disclosures was a separate New York Times article that former FBI Peter Strzok commented on in Feb. 2017, in which Strzok disputed the accuracy of the Times’ reporting. The article was entitled, “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.”

Strzok challenged the central premise, stating in the document, “[w]e have not seen evidence of any individuals affiliated with the Trump team in contact with IOs [Intelligence Officials]… We are unaware of ANY Trump advisors engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials…” and “[r]ecent interviews and investigation, however, reveal Steele may not be in a position to judge the reliability of his sub-source network.”

Meaning, after the sub-source interview in Jan. 2017, Strzok had already debunked the Steele dossier. Therefore, the FBI’s and the Justice Department’s continuing assertion to the FISA court through June that “the FBI believes that Russia’s efforts to influence U.S. policy were likely being coordinated between the RIS [Russian Intelligence Services] and Page, and possibly others” was most certainly false.

If so, an outstanding question now is whether any crimes were committed by the FBI and the Justice Department when the inaccurate warrant applications were submitted to the FISA court. These are discredited and disgraced institutions that blindly pursued false allegations of treason into the opposition party in an election year and wrecked the peaceful transfer of power by secretly carrying the investigation over into the Trump administration in an attempt to decapitate the new President politically and legally. It was a failed coup.

Now, we are only beginning to learn the extent of the damage to the Constitution and the republic, both of which may be beyond saving. If former Vice President Joe Biden — who knew all about the investigations and has a perverse incentive never to get to the bottom of it — wins the election in November, all bets might be off.

Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government.

To view online: http://dailytorch.com/2020/07/the-steele-dossier-paid-for-by-clinton-dnc-was-not-russian-disinformation-it-was-british-disinformation-from-steele/

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ALG Editor’s Note: In the following featured report from RealClearPolitics.com’s Susan Crabtree, the Labor Department has an opportunity to protect private pensioners from investing in non-transparent Chinese state-owned equities:

Labor rule could cost China billions in U.S. investment

By Susan Crabtree

Attorney General Bill Barr ratcheted up the U.S. confrontation with China this week, accusing Hollywood and the tech industry of caving to Chinese censorship pressure in exchange for short-term profits.

“If Disney and other American corporations continue to bow to Beijing, they risk undermining both their own future competitiveness and prosperity, as well as the classical liberal order that has allowed them to thrive,” Barr said during a Thursday speech in Michigan, where he called out Apple for removing a news site from its app store in China after the government complained about it, and criticized Disney for giving Communists a role in managing Shanghai Disney.

But China hawks familiar with the finer details of U.S. labor law argue the Trump administration has the power to do far more than name and shame U.S. companies that opt to work with Beijing in order to gain access to China’s vast consumer market. The Labor Department in the next few weeks has the opportunity to cut off a main spigot of U.S. funds flowing to China by barring private U.S. retirement plans from investing in Chinese companies, an unprecedented step that would cost China billions in U.S. investment. 

In fact, those advocating the bold move argue that the Labor Department has a fiduciary responsibility to do so, as well as the perfect opportunity in a pending regulation governing these investments. The Labor Department is currently finalizing changes to the regulation governing private retirement funds and could simply decide to disqualify all companies that don’t adhere to current U.S. banking and investment transparency laws, which would automatically prevent investment in Chinese companies. In late June the department released changes to the rule for “financial factors in selecting plan investments” and will finalize it in the coming weeks. 

“ … It is sickening to think that American pensions and 401(k) investors are capitalizing [on] the gross abuse of helpless and oppressed Chinese religious minorities and political dissidents,” Richard Manning, a former senior Labor Department official during the Bush administration who served on Trump’s presidential transition team, recently wrote to Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia. “Americans would be appalled to learn that they were effectively providing the capital for the enslavement of their fellow man, and you can stop it.”

Manning, the president of Americans for Limited Government, cited the most recent Labor Department report on goods produced by slave and child labor, which rapped China as one of the worst abusers in the world.

“China is listed not once, not twice, but twelve times in the latest report for using children and slaves to make goods, many of which find their place on the shelves of U.S. retailers like Walmart,” he wrote. “Artificial flowers, bricks, Christmas decorations, coal, cotton, electronics, fireworks, footwear, garments, nails, textiles and toys are all listed as being made with child or slave labor in China.”

A Labor Department spokeswoman told RealClearPolitics she was looking into the matter but did not respond by late Friday afternoon.

The decision to prevent private 401(k)s and other retirements funds from investing in Chinese companies follows logically from other recent U.S. government actions aimed at countering China’s efforts to use American consumers to help it supplant the U.S. as the top economic and military superpower, Manning and other advocates argue. In June, the Pentagon determined that 20 Chinese companies are owned and controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, including Huawei Technologies Co. and Hangzhou Hikvision Technology Co., opening them up to potential U.S. sanctions. The Senate recently voted to require transparency for Chinese firms listed on U.S. exchanges, and several bipartisan bills circulating on Capitol Hill are aimed at preventing goods made by forced Chinese labor from reaching the U.S.

Earlier this month, National Security Adviser Robert C. O’Brien and Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, urged the U.S. Railroad Retirement Board to divest its roughly $4.5 billion in holdings in Chinese companies involved in building missiles, military aircraft and telecommunications goods the government also uses in its repression of religious minorities in China.

The three-member board is an independent federal agency that governs the retirement benefits for railroad workers, which is separate from the Thrift Saving Plan, or TSP, the main federal employee retirement plan. In May, the White House successfully lobbied the TSP, which oversees nearly $593 billion in funds, not to invest in an index fund that included several major Chinese companies, including several under U.S. economic sanctions. 

With tensions running high between Washington and Beijing over Chinese disinformation about the origins and spread of the coronavirus, O’Brien and Kudlow argued that the investments posed a “national security risk to our country.” They also warned of grave risks to investors because the Chinese government has prevented the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and other U.S. oversight boards from gaining access to internal audits of companies with significant Chinese operations, even when they are listed on the U.S. exchanges. With a global backlash against Beijing over its government’s concealment of the coronavirus in the first weeks of the Wuhan-based outbreak, Chinese companies also could face more sanctions and boycotts across the world, making them financially riskier investments. 

Britain earlier this week banned Huawei equipment for use in its country’s high-speed wireless network, following a similar move by the U.S. in May. And the White House in mid-July said a ban on the popular Chinese social video app TikTok could come in “weeks, not months” as concerns mount over its use of user data and surveillance.

“In light of these economic, national security and humanitarian concerns, we ask that you and your board carefully consider whether the [National Railroad Retirement Investment Trust] is currently acting as an appropriate fiduciary for those hardworking Americans and retirees the RRB serves,” O’Brien and Kudlow wrote in a July 7 letter to Erhard Chorle, who chairs the RRB.

If these Chinese investments are too risky for federal retirement accounts, the U.S. government should block private U.S. retirement portfolios from investing in them, proponents of the new restrictions argue.

“The obvious question is if these assets are too risky for inclusion in the federal TSP, why would they be allowed to be included in private 401(k) investments where the same argument directly applies?” Manning wrote. “The answer is that they are not, and under [federal law] it’s the Labor Department’s job to protect private sector retirement-specific investments or pensions from choices that are unsuitably risky.” 

To view online: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/07/18/labor_rule_could_cost_china_billions_in_us_investment.html  

 

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