The FBI embraced the Russian collusion hoax and violated the Constitution and the law

Adam Mill:

One can imagine the unspoken question hanging in the darkness during the January 2017 ride back to the airport. A small gaggle1 of FBI agents had just concluded their long-overdue interview with Christopher Steele’s primary sub-source. The silence must have been deafening. Steele had tried to conceal2 his source from the FBI. But the FBI knew his identity and set up an interview behind Steele’s back, and the interview contradicted several Steele assertions. The downcast agents waited for somebody to ask the question on all of their minds: “Now what?”

The right answer would have been to admit to the court that Steele was an unreliable source who exaggerates and lies and put an end to spying on Americans in pursuit of the mirage of Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia.

When presented one last opportunity to do the right thing, the FBI instead pushed harder for their now-discredited hypothesis justifying the investigation. Peter Strzok had promised his lover, Lisa Page, he would “save” the country from Donald Trump. Given a choice between bringing the FBI back into the light of the Constitution or the darkness of blind hatred of Donald Trump, the conspirators choose darkness. It was at this precise moment that the FBI left behind any plausible deniability of “mistake” or “sloppiness.” From this point on, the FBI’s participation in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax became willful and intentional.

This is the FBI’s darkest hour. The next time the FBI prepared a warrant renewal application, it misrepresented the interview to make it appear as though the source confirmed Steele’s fairytale. It wasn’t a mistake. It was a deliberate defrauding of a court.

According to the recent inspector general’s report on the conduct of the FBI’s collusion investigation, several agents met with Steele’s primary source in early 2017 in order finally to get to the bottom of the Russia collusion claims Steele initiated. It would be another four months before then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would launch the reign of terror known as the “Mueller investigation.” Countless Americans would have their privacy invaded by 500 search warrants, 2,800 subpoenas, and 500 FBI interrogations.

Every one of those 500 search warrants must have been supported by an affidavit swearing the FBI had probable cause to suspect Trump was conspiring with Russia to affect the outcome of the 2016 election. Since we now know the FBI deceived the court in the Carter Page warrant applications at the dawn of the Trump/Russia collusion investigation, we have reason to wonder about the next 500 warrants issued in the same investigation.

Remember when Roger Stone was dragged from his house at gunpoint to search for evidence of Russia collusion? That was one of 500 warrants executed. The probe terrorized its political enemies at a rate of approximately one warrant per business day.

Even before Steele’s primary sub-source disavowed the entire smear against Trump, there had been signs.

The inspector general recounted how the FBI’s spies (confidential human sources) already had approached Papadopolous, Page, and at least one unnamed high-level Trump campaign official.3 Without knowing he was being interviewed by an FBI informant, Page said he never met4 Manafort and didn’t know two of the three Russians5 with whom Steele accused him of conspiring.

Papadopolous, who also didn’t know he was being interviewed by an informant, insisted6 that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. These revelations directly contradicted Steele’s reporting. Which is why the FBI kept them from the FISA court.

The FBI had gone out on a limb, betting that evidence would materialize like a lucky card completing the inside straight laid out by the too-good-to-be-true Steele reporting. But these increasingly slim hopes were completely dispelled in January 2017. And the bad news came shortly after the FBI filed the Carter Page FISA Renewal. The FBI/Steele source interview should have happened before the first warrant application to spy on Carter Page. But the FBI wanted so badly to believe Trump was guilty that it didn’t bother taking this basic corroborating measure until after the first Page warrant renewal in January 2017.
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There is much more.

The media was also co-conspirators in pushing the Russian collusion hoax and like the FBI, they desperately wanted it to be true.  Some still bitterly cling to the hoax to this day.  You would like to think that the people in the upper echelons of the FBI are smart enough to sniff out how screwy the Steele dossier was, especially since those at the top knew how desperate Steele was to defeat Trump.  Their problem was that they were equally as determined to stop him rather than sniff out the truth.

They should have been more suspicious of Steele and of Fusion GPS.  They turned out to be unreliable sources.