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FISA shocker: DOJ official warned Steele dossier was connected to Clinton, might be biased

trixare4kids said:
No, Fenton is right.
Steele was hired after the Free Beachon term.their contract with Fusion GPS.
Take a look at the timeline, and stop guessing...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/politics/steele-timeline/
Click to expand...

Well I may misspoke there. Yes it's true that Steele was not formally contracted until Perkins Coie took over the project. But Simpson was already in the process of engaging Orbis's and Steele services to investigate what the status of Trump's business engagements were with Russia. But republican/conservative client had baled before he could pitch the idea of funding it. So he pitched that idea to Perkins Coie to initially fund it. The initial contract being for like 30 or 60 days. This how he described how Steele came to be hired in his testimony before Congress.

"MR. GOWDY: How did he come to work on this project?

MR. SIMPSON: As I said, I mean, we've done other things together. And
over - well, at the very beginning of this project, one of the very first things that I
focused on was Donald Trump's relationship with a convicted racketeer named Felix Sater, and who was alleged to have an organized crime, Russian organized
crime background.

And over the course of the first phase of this or the first project, we
developed a lot of additional information suggesting that the company that Donald
Trump had been associated with and Felix Sater, Bayrock, was engaged in illicit
financial business activity and had organized crime connections.

We also had sort of more broadly learned that Mr. Trump had long time
associations with Italian organized crime figures. And as we pieced together the
early years of his biography, it seemed as if during the early part of his career he
had connections to a lot of Italian mafia figures, and then gradually during the
nineties became associated with Russian mafia figures.

And so all of that had developed by the spring of 2016 to the point where it
was not a speculative piece of research; it was pretty well-established. And Mr.
Trump had, quite memorably, attempted to downplay his relationship with
Mr. Sater in ways that I found, frankly, suspicious and not credible. Saying he
wouldn't recognize him on the street, but there were pictures of them together.

And the other people around Bayrock were also from the former Soviet
Union and also had associations suggestive of possible organized crime ties. One
of them is a guy named Tevfik Arif, A-r-i-f, who it turned out his real name was Tofik
Arifov, and that he was an alleged organized crime figure from the central Asia.

So there was all that. And then, you know, we also increasingly saw that Mr.
Trump's business career had evolved over the prior decade into a lot of projects in
overseas places, particularly in the former Soviet Union, that were very opaque, and
that he had made a number of trips to Russia, but said he'd never done a business deal there. And I found that mysterious.

And so I had the perfect person to go see if they could figure out what was
going on there. And so that's how I decided to ask Chris if he could look into it for
me. And I had - the initial engagement with Chris was much like we do. I didn't
hire him for a Jong-term engagement. I said, take 30 days, 20 or 30 days,· and
we'll pay you a set amount of money, and see if you can figure out what Trump's
been up to over there, because he's gone over a bunch of times, he said some
weird things about Putin, but doesn't seem to have gotten any business deals.

So that was the initial assignment. It was pretty open-ended. I didn't say,
find me this or get me that. I just said, see if you can figure out what's going on·
over there."
 
bubbabgone said:
ewwww, I wish you hadn't said that cuz now I have to ask you to show on what fronts the dossier has been shown to be true and you won't be able to. No one can.
That's one thing.
The other is that they didn't let the FISC Judge know exactly where the dossier came from.
“We certainly consider it our obligation, because of our trust relationship with federal judges, to present evidence that would paint a materially different picture of what we're presenting,” Comey testified on Dec. 7, 2018. “You want to present to the judge reviewing your application a complete picture of the evidence, both its flaws and its strengths.”​
Click to expand...

Bruce Ohr in your article doesn't claim to know 'exactly where' the dossier came from. What the warrant did do was label it opposition research, as you know, from which any moron can then conclude that it was funded by pro-Hillary forces, either the campaign, DNC, or any number of above and below board orgs pushing Hillary for POTUS.

If you remember, it took a lawsuit or threatened lawsuit to get Perkins Coie to disclose the client's identity, which makes sense because no doubt the law firm is bound by client confidentiality.
 
First off, the OP title is very misleading. It reads as if Hillary Clinton's campaign originated the Steele dossier when everyone knows (or should know by now) it was initiated by then Senator McCain who passed it on to the Hillary campaign.

Second, the bias against Trump was clearly evident as coming from Christopher Steele per his conversations with FBI agents and not necessarily Hillary. That said, I can certainly understand how people would get the impression that the dossier was, therefore, produced with malice. But given Steele's reputation within British intelligence as being a thorough and reliable investigator I think we can give him some leeway here. I mean, when you think about it if Steele's bias began to show after he compiled his report as opposed to before, it would make sense that he didn't find Trump to be very trustworthy based on the information he'd gathered. From my reading of the dossier, I'd be very skeptical of Trump, too.
 
trixare4kids said:
I don't think so...The dossier was used to obtain the FISA warrant but as we know now from Bruce Ohr's testimony, it was deemed biased opposition research summer 2016 prior to the time it was subsequently used anyway to obtain the FISA warrant, fall 2016.
On Oct. 21, 2016, the wiretap was approved based on “evidence” including the Yahoo crazy news article speculating that Carter was some dangerous Russian spy, and parts of an anti-Trump “dossier", paid Clinton Campaign opposition research's attorney, Cole Perkins who disguised the costs for the dossier as legal documents. Do you really think the FISA wiretap would have been approved if the court was told of Bruce Ohr's truthfulness as outlined below?

FISA shocker: DOJ official warned Steele dossier was connected to Clinton, might be biased

Even that narcissist Comey said the dossier was salacious and unverified but used anyway to obtain the FISA warrant.
Try harder because none of it has EVER been verified except by partisan fake news "experts"... :lol:

Trump was always right about all of this... "nothing but a witch hunt"
Click to expand...

One guy says one dossier might be biased -> illegally obtained FISA warrant?

Yeah ok. How much further can you people stretch before you break?
 
I can't believe how many right wingers here think the FISA court wasn't aware of the dossier's origins.
 
trixare4kids said:
I don't think so...The dossier was used to obtain the FISA warrant but as we know now from Bruce Ohr's testimony, it was deemed biased opposition research summer 2016 prior to the time it was subsequently used anyway to obtain the FISA warrant, fall 2016.
On Oct. 21, 2016, the wiretap was approved based on “evidence” including the Yahoo crazy news article speculating that Carter was some dangerous Russian spy, and parts of an anti-Trump “dossier", paid Clinton Campaign opposition research's attorney, Cole Perkins who disguised the costs for the dossier as legal documents. Do you really think the FISA wiretap would have been approved if the court was told of Bruce Ohr's truthfulness as outlined below?

FISA shocker: DOJ official warned Steele dossier was connected to Clinton, might be biased

Even that narcissist Comey said the dossier was salacious and unverified but used anyway to obtain the FISA warrant.
Try harder because none of it has EVER been verified except by partisan fake news "experts"... :lol:

Trump was always right about all of this... "nothing but a witch hunt"
Click to expand...

The dossier was just one part of the FISA warrant. There was plenty of other indications from Carter Page's past and present behavior, statements, writings and travels to establish the level of probable cause or reasonable suspicion that Page was or may be acting as an agent of a foreign power needed to obtain a warrant. And Comey said that a "part" of the dossier was salacious in nature. But the other parts of the dossier have held up well as it had accurately depicted the scale and depth of the Russian interference operation and the level of hidden contacts and communications that were taking place between associates of the Trump campaign and Russian operatives.
 
Atomic Kid said:
Well I may misspoke there. Yes it's true that Steele was not formally contracted until Perkins Coie took over the project. But Simpson was already in the process of engaging Orbis's and Steele services to investigate what the status of Trump's business engagements were with Russia. But republican/conservative client had baled before he could pitch the idea of funding it. So he pitched that idea to Perkins Coie to initially fund it. The initial contract being for like 30 or 60 days. This how he described how Steele came to be hired in his testimony before Congress.

"MR. GOWDY: How did he come to work on this project?

MR. SIMPSON: As I said, I mean, we've done other things together. And
over - well, at the very beginning of this project, one of the very first things that I
focused on was Donald Trump's relationship with a convicted racketeer named Felix Sater, and who was alleged to have an organized crime, Russian organized
crime background.

And over the course of the first phase of this or the first project, we
developed a lot of additional information suggesting that the company that Donald
Trump had been associated with and Felix Sater, Bayrock, was engaged in illicit
financial business activity and had organized crime connections.

We also had sort of more broadly learned that Mr. Trump had long time
associations with Italian organized crime figures. And as we pieced together the
early years of his biography, it seemed as if during the early part of his career he
had connections to a lot of Italian mafia figures, and then gradually during the
nineties became associated with Russian mafia figures.

And so all of that had developed by the spring of 2016 to the point where it
was not a speculative piece of research; it was pretty well-established. And Mr.
Trump had, quite memorably, attempted to downplay his relationship with
Mr. Sater in ways that I found, frankly, suspicious and not credible. Saying he
wouldn't recognize him on the street, but there were pictures of them together.

And the other people around Bayrock were also from the former Soviet
Union and also had associations suggestive of possible organized crime ties. One
of them is a guy named Tevfik Arif, A-r-i-f, who it turned out his real name was Tofik
Arifov, and that he was an alleged organized crime figure from the central Asia.

So there was all that. And then, you know, we also increasingly saw that Mr.
Trump's business career had evolved over the prior decade into a lot of projects in
overseas places, particularly in the former Soviet Union, that were very opaque, and
that he had made a number of trips to Russia, but said he'd never done a business deal there. And I found that mysterious.

And so I had the perfect person to go see if they could figure out what was
going on there. And so that's how I decided to ask Chris if he could look into it for
me. And I had - the initial engagement with Chris was much like we do. I didn't
hire him for a Jong-term engagement. I said, take 30 days, 20 or 30 days,· and
we'll pay you a set amount of money, and see if you can figure out what Trump's
been up to over there, because he's gone over a bunch of times, he said some
weird things about Putin, but doesn't seem to have gotten any business deals.

So that was the initial assignment. It was pretty open-ended. I didn't say,
find me this or get me that. I just said, see if you can figure out what's going on·
over there."
Click to expand...

Thanks for your concession that you were wrong about the timeline.

James Comey said, after the fact, that the unverified and salacious dossier was used anyway to obtain the FISA warrant.
DOJ official Bruce Ohr warned the FBI summer 2016 that the Steele dossier was connected to Clinton, might be biased but used anyway to obtain the FISA warrant. That information was NOT given to the FISA court, which makes the application for the warrant a lie by omission.
Please don't give me any probable :bs that Carter was a Russian spy either. If he were... he'd be locked up.

All this amounts to is a witch hunt, a conspiracy to prop up Hillary Clinton via the use of oppositional research, and subsequently used to unseat a duly elected president.
This fiasco which also began the crazed Mueller investigation, will forever be a stain on the FBI... In fact, this should be a warning to deescalate the FBI's power. IMO, anyone who had anything to do with obtaining the FISA warrant should be fired or resign, (oh wait, they were and did), and/or spend some serious jail time behind bars.
COLLUSION, my ass.
 
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trixare4kids said:
Put the :bs aside, and look at the facts that pertain to the thread premise:
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-h...arned-steele-dossier-was-connected-to-clinton
Click to expand...

Please just stop with the distortions. How is it that everyone else but conservatives can't see the obvious? You don't take Dick Tracy to figure out this out. There are only 2 major political parties. So even you would have at least a fifty fifty chance of being right. And since this was being done after Trump had a lock on the nomination one would have to be a hopeless idiot to not be able to figure out that well it must be the opposition party that sponsored it, the democrats then. All Ohr did was state the obvious. I mean DUH!
 
JasperL said:
Bruce Ohr in your article doesn't claim to know 'exactly where' the dossier came from. What the warrant did do was label it opposition research, as you know, from which any moron can then conclude that it was funded by pro-Hillary forces, either the campaign, DNC, or any number of above and below board orgs pushing Hillary for POTUS.

If you remember, it took a lawsuit or threatened lawsuit to get Perkins Coie to disclose the client's identity, which makes sense because no doubt the law firm is bound by client confidentiality.
Click to expand...

It's pretty obvious Bruce Ohr did know where the unverified biased oppositional research dossier came from since Glen Simpson was in touch with Ohr back in the summer of 2016.

 
Atomic Kid said:
Please just stop with the distortions. How is it that everyone else but conservatives can't see the obvious? You don't take Dick Tracy to figure out this out. There are only 2 major political parties. So even you would have at least a fifty fifty chance of being right. And since this was being done after Trump had a lock on the nomination one would have to be a hopeless idiot to not be able to figure out that well it must be the opposition party that sponsored it, the democrats then. All Ohr did was state the obvious. I mean DUH!
Click to expand...

Refute the facts above, or concede. :surrender
 
trixare4kids said:
It's pretty obvious Bruce Ohr did know where the unverified biased oppositional research dossier came from since Glen Simpson was in touch with Ohr back in the summer of 2016.
Click to expand...

Glen Simpson is Fusion GPS, and they were NOT the ultimate client.

DNC (I think) ===> Perkins Coie ===> Fusion (Simpson) ===> Steele.

Wouldn't surprise me if Fusion wasn't informed about who the ultimate client was because it was not relevant to the work - it was opposition research and whether it was DNC or the Campaign or Hillary's (c)(4) or some other org pushing Hillary doesn't change the job of opposition research.

What people are doing is crying FRAUD!!!! because FBI didn't disclose exactly who the client was, but the fact is they probably didn't know for a fact who the client was, and wouldn't subpoena Perkins Coie to find out/confirm because it wouldn't matter to FBI either. The bias inherent in oppo research is what was important and that was disclosed to the FISC, in the warrant application.
 
trixare4kids said:
Thanks for your concession that you were wrong about the timeline.

James Comey said, after the fact, that the unverified and salacious dossier was used anyway to obtain the FISA warrant.
DOJ official Bruce Ohr warned the FBI summer 2016 that the Steele dossier was connected to Clinton, might be biased but used anyway to obtain the FISA warrant. That information was NOT given to the FISA court, which makes the application for the warrant a lie by omission.
Please don't give me any probable :bs that Carter was a Russian spy either. If he were... he'd be locked up.

All this amounts to is a witch hunt, a conspiracy to prop up Hillary Clinton via the use of oppositional research, and subsequently used to unseat a duly elected president.
This fiasco which also began the crazed Mueller investigation, will forever be a stain on the FBI... In fact, this should be a warning to deescalate the FBI's power. IMO, anyone who had anything to do with obtaining the FISA warrant should be fired or resign, (oh wait, they were and did), and/or spend some serious jail time behind bars.
COLLUSION, my ass.
Click to expand...

Why would Carter Page have to be locked up? He's not going anywhere. Counter-intelligence operations, especially those focused on gathering information, often don't end in or produce arrests. And also the fact that he hasn't been charged yet doesn't mean that he won't be. Heck they may not even need to charge him with anything in order to get leverage on him. Because they may already have all they need to know from Mr Carter and his cooperation isn't needed. Carter was probably in all likelihood what they would call in intelligence parlance a "useful idiot".

Comey said no such thing about the dossier forming the basis for the FISA warrant. In fact far from it. He said that in his experience FISA warrants are quite detailed and extensive. Usually ending up being a stack of papers as thick as your wrist or forearm. There's no way that a 3 page dossier was all there was. That's so illogical as to be silly. And it was his firing that prompted the creation of a special counsel. That dossier did nothing to prop up Clinton. She didn't know of the existence of it until everyone else did. Simpson when he saw what Steele had produced was flabbergasted. It wasn't at all what he was expecting. One look at that and he knew there was no way something like this could be used in a campaign. It was waaay too sensitive and sensational. He wasn't sure what the hell to do with it at first.
 
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bubbabgone said:
"When the annals of mistakes and abuses in the FBI’s Russia investigation are finally written, Bruce Ohr almost certainly will be the No. 1 witness, according to my sources.

The then-No. 4 Department of Justice (DOJ) official briefed both senior FBI and DOJ officials in summer 2016 about Christopher Steele’s Russia dossier, explicitly cautioning that the British intelligence operative’s work was opposition research connected to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and might be biased.

Ohr’s briefings, in July and August 2016, included the deputy director of the FBI, a top lawyer for then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and a Justice official who later would become the top deputy to special counsel Robert Mueller".​

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-h...arned-steele-dossier-was-connected-to-clinton

Why does it matter?
From the article ...
“I certainly told the FBI that Fusion GPS was working with, doing opposition research on Donald Trump,” Ohr told congressional investigators, adding that he warned the FBI that Steele expressed bias during their conversations.

“I provided information to the FBI when I thought Christopher Steele was, as I said, desperate that Trump not be elected,” he added. “So, yes, of course I provided that to the FBI.”

When pressed why he would offer that information to the FBI, Ohr answered: “In case there might be any kind of bias or anything like that.” He added later, “So when I provided it to the FBI, I tried to be clear that this is source information, I don’t know how reliable it is. You’re going to have to check it out and be aware.”​
and

And the FBI knew the motive of the client and did not have to speculate: Ohr told agents the Democratic nominee’s campaign was connected to the research designed to harm Trump’s election chances.
Such omissions are, by definition, an abuse of the FISA system.
Don’t take my word for it. Fired FBI Director James Comey acknowledged it himself when he testified last month that the FISA court relies on an honor system, in which the FBI is expected to divulge exculpatory evidence to the judges.
“We certainly consider it our obligation, because of our trust relationship with federal judges, to present evidence that would paint a materially different picture of what we're presenting,” Comey testified on Dec. 7, 2018. “You want to present to the judge reviewing your application a complete picture of the evidence, both its flaws and its strengths.”​


Besides suggesting FBI and DOJ FISA abuse the stories suggest Adam Schiff was telling fibs to the public too.

Here are a couple of other reports on the subject.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/key-doj-officials-mueller-knew-about-dossier
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/br...ier-author-with-justice-department-colleagues

I didn't see any WAPO headlines on the story today.
Click to expand...

If I'm not mistaken (and I may be; I'm a busy guy and there's so much info out there these days), the full, unredacted FISA warrant application has never been made public. Indeed, what has been made public has been heavily redacted. So it's pretty hard to know whether the FISA court was advised by the FBI of the points brought up in this editorial or not. Even if the entire warrant were available, we wouldn't know whether the information had been made available to the FISA court in oral argument or testimony.

More importantly, it seems to me that the editorial relies on a kind of equivocation or ambiguity in concepts. Christopher Steele may have been "desperate to not have Trump elected" because Steele disliked his proposed policies and stated positions on the political affairs of the day. He may also have been desperate to not have Trump elected because he strongly suspected Trump was/is working for the Russians, and would cause irreparable damage to the United States and hence the rest of the Western World. The former is potentially a kind of bias, though it need not be (example: candidate A might be for summary executions of everyone whose name begins with the letter J. Despite this being a political position, it would not be bias to oppose that view, since it is fundamentally unreasonable). The latter is really not bias at all.

For these and other reasons I don't have time to go into, the argument presented in this editorial fails to sufficiently support its conclusion, even by the standards of inductive reasoning, and hence should be approached with some skepticism.

All of this said, let me emphasize one final point: none of this means the argument's conclusions are incorrect. They may be correct. All it means is that there's not, at present, sufficient reason to put much stock in them.
 
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trixare4kids said:
It's pretty obvious Bruce Ohr did know where the unverified biased oppositional research dossier came from since Glen Simpson was in touch with Ohr back in the summer of 2016.

Click to expand...


Everybody knew where the dossier came from. That was never a secret. There's no conspiracy here.
 
JasperL said:
Glen Simpson is Fusion GPS, and they were NOT the ultimate client.

DNC (I think) ===> Perkins Coie ===> Fusion (Simpson) ===> Steele.

Wouldn't surprise me if Fusion wasn't informed about who the ultimate client was because it was not relevant to the work - it was opposition research and whether it was DNC or the Campaign or Hillary's (c)(4) or some other org pushing Hillary doesn't change the job of opposition research.

What people are doing is crying FRAUD!!!! because FBI didn't disclose exactly who the client was, but the fact is they probably didn't know for a fact who the client was, and wouldn't subpoena Perkins Coie to find out/confirm because it wouldn't matter to FBI either. The bias inherent in oppo research is what was important and that was disclosed to the FISC, in the warrant application.
Click to expand...

The FBI made it exceedingly clear that the dossier was a product of political biased research. At least an entire page and a half in addition to testimony before the court was devoted to that disclosure. It's standard practice not to use proper names in a FISA warrant so as to protect the innocent. Which is essentially everyone involved at that point. Even Trump and Clinton were referred to "candidate 1" and "candidate 2". But do you really think for one moment that anyone there didn't really know who candidate 1 or 2 actually were? So if the FBI says to the judge that this document was initialized as political opposition research on candidate 1 and therefore politically biased that anyone with half a brain wouldn't be able figure that was produced at the behest and for the benefit of candidate 2?

Come on, stop being so obtuse about this.
 
trixare4kids said:
Bruce Ohr testified under oath that he told the FBI that the oppositional Clinton campaign funded dossier was full of anti-Trump bias, aka unverified :bs but they disregarded his warning anyway.
Try for some reading comprehension and you no doubt will come to the same conclusion and yes the facts are relevant.
Click to expand...

Suddenly the detestable man that Trump wanted fired has become a darling folk hero of the dossier divas.
 
Vern said:
You should find new sources of information because the current ones seem to have shielded you from the facts.
Click to expand...

So Vern, I asked "on what fronts the dossier has been shown to be true"?

What are they?
 
JasperL said:
Bruce Ohr in your article doesn't claim to know 'exactly where' the dossier came from. What the warrant did do was label it opposition research, as you know, from which any moron can then conclude that it was funded by pro-Hillary forces, either the campaign, DNC, or any number of above and below board orgs pushing Hillary for POTUS.

If you remember, it took a lawsuit or threatened lawsuit to get Perkins Coie to disclose the client's identity, which makes sense because no doubt the law firm is bound by client confidentiality.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure what your point is.
Are you suggesting that Ohr, whose wife worked for Fusion, met with Steele who authored the dossier for Hillary and the DNC through Fusion, but he and his wife and Steele and the FBI had no idea who was paying the freight?
 
JasperL said:
Glen Simpson is Fusion GPS, and they were NOT the ultimate client.

DNC (I think) ===> Perkins Coie ===> Fusion (Simpson) ===> Steele.

Wouldn't surprise me if Fusion wasn't informed about who the ultimate client was because it was not relevant to the work - it was opposition research and whether it was DNC or the Campaign or Hillary's (c)(4) or some other org pushing Hillary doesn't change the job of opposition research.

What people are doing is crying FRAUD!!!! because FBI didn't disclose exactly who the client was, but the fact is they probably didn't know for a fact who the client was, and wouldn't subpoena Perkins Coie to find out/confirm because it wouldn't matter to FBI either. The bias inherent in oppo research is what was important and that was disclosed to the FISC, in the warrant application.
Click to expand...

I am not sure if this is the concern? I am assuming is the verification of information insuring that the information is factually based to SUBMIT to the FISA court as evidence be it partial or bulk. THE DOSSIER is regardless of who paid for it and who sanctioned it. The Question at hand is the information within the dossier Factual. THE By-product of concern is that, THE Dossier was never verified and had some outlandish claims with that the concern then came in of why was it sanctioned (DNC/HRC funded) And then would the information be "bias" because of the person who paid for it.

BUT ultimately the timelines that are in question

1) A Dossier was created (WHO Cares who paid for it)
2) A Dossier was USED as part or bulk of a FISA Warrant to SPY on an American( THE American may have been flagged, BUT if the Dossier was in fact the bulk then we have great concerns about vetting and usage of a FISA warrant/ Court)
3) FBI was advised PRIOR that the Dossier (IF USED IN BULK) May be bias and unverified. Either out of negligence or malice was the Dossier used? BOTH are likely questionable crimes?


Source #1 is the ONLY source un-redacted in the 1 FISA App and 3 subsequent Renewals. If there were more sources, WHY NOT un redact "Source #2", "Source #3" in words BUT not the actual details this would tell us if there are in fact additional sources. BUT I have read all 400+ pages and have NOT seen a "SOURCE #2 or #3" in the app or the renewals. ODD? NO?
 
ashurbanipal said:
If I'm not mistaken (and I may be; I'm a busy guy and there's so much info out there these days), the full, unredacted FISA warrant application has never been made public. Indeed, what has been made public has been heavily redacted. So it's pretty hard to know whether the FISA court was advised by the FBI of the points brought up in this editorial or not. Even if the entire warrant were available, we wouldn't know whether the information had been made available to the FISA court in oral argument or testimony.

More importantly, it seems to me that the editorial relies on a kind of equivocation or ambiguity in concepts. Christopher Steele may have been "desperate to not have Trump elected" because Steele disliked his proposed policies and stated positions on the political affairs of the day. He may also have been desperate to not have Trump elected because he strongly suspected Trump was/is working for the Russians, and would cause irreparable damage to the United States and hence the rest of the Western World. The former is potentially a kind of bias, though it need not be (example: candidate A might be for summary executions of everyone whose name begins with the letter J. Despite this being a political position, it would not be bias to oppose that view, since it is fundamentally unreasonable). The latter is really not bias at all.

For these and other reasons I don't have time to go into, the argument presented in this editorial fails to sufficiently support its conclusion, even by the standards of inductive reasoning, and hence should be approached with some skepticism.

All of this said, let me emphasize one final point: none of this means the argument's conclusions are incorrect. They may be correct. All it means is that there's not, at present, sufficient reason to put much stock in them.
Click to expand...

You're right, the unredacted FISA warrant requests have not been released. Which is all the more curious how anyone can assert that the majority of the contents of the dossier have been corroborated.
One other point - the FISA request used the dossier as support, as well as a news source that was based on the dossier, but presented them as separate corroboration. Self-corroboration is a no-no

As for bias, if it had been your typical noble I-don't-like-his-policies bias there would have been no sense of urgency for Ohr to warn the FBI boys about it and stress that the dossier needs to be verified. But he did.
 
bubbabgone said:
I'm not sure what your point is.
Are you suggesting that Ohr, whose wife worked for Fusion, met with Steele who authored the dossier for Hillary and the DNC through Fusion, but he and his wife and Steele and the FBI had no idea who was paying the freight?
Click to expand...

Read your own source - Ohr denies knowing specifically who paid for the dossier.

Everyone knew the obvious - that DNC OR Hillary's campaign OR some other org working to elect Hillary paid for oppo research. The identity of which of many possible entities cut the check isn't relevant
 
bubbabgone said:
You're right, the unredacted FISA warrant requests have not been released. Which is all the more curious how anyone can assert that the majority of the contents of the dossier have been corroborated.
Click to expand...

Well, the claims that the dossier makes are in the public view, aren't they? I would agree that, in fine, those claims are not sufficiently corroborated for any public action against Trump to be supported (that is, I don't think people should be rising up or storming the White House or anything like that). However, Trump's own actions and words to the press--without any editing or commentary added, form a fairly strong argument that there's something rotten in the state of Denmark. For my money, each of the following, especially taken all together, raise some very large questions about what's going on:

1. Trump surrounded himself during his campaign with people who had strong ties to Putin or pro-Putin Ukrainian oligarchs.
2. Trump had business ties to Russia.
3. Trump's associates have repeatedly lied about their involvement with pro-Putin individuals/organizations.
4. Trump held private meetings with Putin, and took extraordinary measures to ensure the content of those meetings remained private, even from members of his own cabinet and his close advisors.
5. Trump fired Comey and then stated openly he did so "because of the Russia thing" (which was downright stupid).
6. Trump was fairly clearly hoping that Sessions would at least "manage" the Russia investigation. To be clear on this point, I'm not aware of a statement Trump has made directly to that effect, but he was obviously angry that Sessions recused himself from handling the investigation, and it's difficult to see why that would anger Trump unless such were his hope.
7. Trump's geopolitical moves, and his suggestions about what we ought to be doing, have favored Russia--even while he maintains that his policies are tough on Russia (some of those policies are indeed economic sanctions, but Putin cares far less about that than about the geopolitical moves being made).
8. There's the famous "Trump tower meeting."
9. Of course, all of this plays out in context of the fact that Russia did try to influence, probably successfully, the 2016 election in Trump's favor.
10. Now it appears that Trump directed Cohen to lie to Congress about his business dealings in Russia.
11. And so on.

The above patterns do not prove (however much some liberals/democrats/Trump opponents like to think otherwise), but do strongly suggest, that Trump has been up to something.

bubbabgone said:
One other point - the FISA request used the dossier as support, as well as a news source that was based on the dossier, but presented them as separate corroboration. Self-corroboration is a no-no
Click to expand...

Again, in principle, sure. However, this also has to be understood in context. This point has been made public by those who want to see the FISA warrant discredited, and then use that (if achieved) to discredit the entire Russia investigation. We do not know whether the FBI took other steps to corroborate the dossier, or whether they had other corroborating evidence already by the time the dossier was presented to them.

bubbabgone said:
As for bias, if it had been your typical noble I-don't-like-his-policies bias there would have been no sense of urgency for Ohr to warn the FBI boys about it and stress that the dossier needs to be verified. But he did.
Click to expand...

Yes, correct. The proper inference, then, is that Ohr at least thought Steele's bias was more about Trump being a potential Russian asset.
 
Manc Skipper said:
Suddenly the detestable man that Trump wanted fired has become a darling folk hero of the dossier divas.
Click to expand...

"Ohr was later demoted by the Department of Justice amid the Senate Intelligence Committee’s discovery of his meetings with Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Ohr

However, it was only this week that we learned he was 'sort of' one of the good guys when warning about how the dossier came out; paid oppositional research by the Clinton campaign.
His demotion appears to be warranted as he concealed meetings with Trump dossier figures; Steele who equally held an enormous bias against DJT.
 
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