FBI colluded with Steele on Russian hoax attacks?

Eric Felton:

A month before the 2016 presidential election, the FBI met Christopher Steele in Rome and apparently unlawfully shared with the foreign opposition researcher some of the bureau’s most closely held secrets, according to unpublicized disclosures in the recent Justice Department Inspector General report on abuses of federal surveillance powers.

What’s more, Steele, the former British spy who compiled the “dossier” of conspiracy theories for the Hillary Clinton campaign, was promised $15,000 to attend the briefing by FBI agents eager to maintain his cooperation in their Trump-Russia collusion investigation codenamed Crossfire Hurricane.

That investigation was so closely guarded that only a handful of top officials and agents at the FBI were allowed to know about it.

The report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz details how a team of FBI agents in early October 2016 shared with Steele extensive classified materials, just weeks before the bureau cut off ties with him for leaking his own research to the media. The secrets included foreign intelligence information still considered so sensitive that the IG’s report refers to it even now only as coming from a “Friendly Foreign Government.” In fact, this is a reference to Australia. That country’s ambassador to Britain sent the United States a tip about loose talk by junior Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos. The FBI has described that as the predicate for its Trump-Russia investigation.

The IG report also discloses that FBI agents knew Steele worked for Glenn Simpson, whose opposition research firm Fusion GPS was paying Steele to dig up dirt on Trump for the Clinton campaign, and that Steele informed the FBI that the “candidate” – Clinton herself – knew about Steele’s work. Steele did not keep to himself the classified material he had learned from the FBI. Shortly after the Rome meeting, Steele briefed Simpson on what the FBI had disclosed to him.
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The FBI’s decision to share classified information with a partisan operative and private foreign citizen is all the more curious because the team investigating figures associated with the presidential campaign of Donald Trump made extensive efforts to keep the very fact of Crossfire Hurricane a secret from their own colleagues at the bureau.
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Much of the public reporting regarding this meeting has focused on the information Steele shared with the FBI – and the many reasons agents should have doubted its credibility. But largely neglected has been the opposite side of the equation – what the FBI told Steele. The Inspector General reports that the bureau revealed to him much of the highly classified information that it had gathered regarding alleged Trump-Russia links.

The FBI had every reason to expect Steele to share information with Glenn Simpson, whose client was the Clinton campaign. Steele claims to have been “candid” with Gaeta about who was writing the checks for his Trump-Russia research. Steele took notes of the July 5 meeting he had with the “handling agent.” According to the Horowitz report, those notes state that Steele told Gaeta "Democratic Party associates" were funding his Fusion GPS work, that the "ultimate client" was the Clinton campaign, and that "the candidate," as the IG report puts it, “was aware of Steele's reporting.”
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There is more.

It is more than remarkable how easily the FBI was complicit in the fraud being produced by the Clinton campaign and their paid operatives at Fusion GPS.   The Obama DOJ appears to have gone along with the scam.  This is the same DOJ that tried Roger Stone for lying to Congress and has not tried any of its agents who lied to coverup up their collusion with the Clinton campaign to smear Trump and his campaign with the Russian collusion hoax.