{"id":121622,"date":"2019-04-27T16:03:28","date_gmt":"2019-04-27T20:03:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=121622"},"modified":"2019-04-27T16:04:59","modified_gmt":"2019-04-27T20:04:59","slug":"why-didnt-mueller-investigate-whether-steele-dossier-was-russian-disinfo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=121622","title":{"rendered":"Why Didn&#8217;t Mueller Investigate Whether Steele Dossier Was Russian Disinfo?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><!--more-->ZeroHedge.com<\/p>\n<p>Since the release of special counsel Robert Mueller&#8217;s redacted report, several questions have been asked as to why certain things were not investigated, and key players were never interviewed, according to President Trump.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Isn\u2019t it amazing that the people who were closest to me, by far, and knew the Campaign better than anyone, were never even called to testify before Mueller. The reason is that the 18 Angry Democrats knew they would all say \u2018NO COLLUSION\u2019 and only very good things!<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/realDonaldTrump\/status\/1120409894799253504?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">April 22, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Perhaps the most glaring omission\u00a0<strong>is Mueller&#8217;s failure to consider that the infamous &#8220;Steele Dossier&#8221; &#8211; which used Kremlin sources &#8211; could have been Russian disinformation itself.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Asking that very question, the\u00a0<em>Wall Street Journal&#8217;s\u00a0<\/em>Kimberly Strassel opines on this &#8220;stunning omission.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/the-russians-and-the-dossier-11556232721\"><em>Kimberly Strassel via the Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Politicians keep reminding us not to lose sight of special counsel Robert Mueller\u2019s broader assignment: to investigate Russia\u2019s interference in the 2016 election. If only someone had reminded Mr. Mueller.<\/p>\n<p>One of the biggest failures of the Mueller probe concerns not what was in the final report, but what was not. Close readers will search in vain for any analysis of the central document in this affair: the infamous \u201cdossier.\u201d It\u2019s a stunning omission, given the possibility that the Russians used that collection of reports to feed disinformation to U.S. intelligence agencies, sparking years of political maelstrom.<\/p>\n<p>The dossier\u2014compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele on behalf of Fusion GPS, an opposition-research firm working for the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee\u2014fed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the media the principal allegations of the \u201ccollusion\u201d narrative. It claimed Paul Manafort was at the center of a \u201cwell-developed\u201d Trump-Russia \u201cconspiracy\u201d; that Carter Page served as his intermediary, conducting secret meetings with a Kremlin official and the head of a state energy company; that Michael Cohen held a clandestine meeting in Prague with Vladimir Putin cronies; and that the Russians had compromising material on Donald Trump, making him vulnerable to blackmail. The dossier was clearly important to the FBI probe. Its wild claims made up a significant section of the FBI\u2019s application for a secret surveillance warrant on Mr. Page.<\/p>\n<p>The Mueller report exposes the dossier claims as pure fiction. Yet in describing the actions of the Trump campaign figures the FBI accused, the report assiduously avoids any mention of the dossier or its allegations. Mr. Mueller refers to Mr. Steele and his work largely in passing, as part of the report\u2019s description of how former FBI Director James Comey informed Mr. Trump of the dossier\u2019s existence. The dossier is blandly described several times as \u201cunverified allegations compiled\u201d by Mr. Steele.<\/p>\n<p>Once Mr. Mueller established that the dossier was a pack of lies, he should have investigated how it gained such currency at the highest levels of the FBI. Yet his report makes clear he had no interest in plumbing the antics of the bureau, which he led from 2001-13. Instead, he went out of his way to avoid the dossier and give cover to the FBI.<\/p>\n<p>The special counsel had another, more pressing reason to look at the dossier: It fell within his core mission. Since its publication by BuzzFeed in January 2017, we\u2019ve learned enough about Mr. Steele and Fusion GPS to wonder if the Russians used the dossier for their own malign purposes.<\/p>\n<p>In the first telling, Mr. Steele was described by friendly media as simply a \u201cformer Western intelligence official\u201d with a history at Britain\u2019s overseas intelligence service. It turns out he worked in Russia. Mr. Steele spent his first years of service under diplomatic cover in Moscow, later in Paris. And in 1999 he was among 117 British spies whose covers were publicly blown by a disgruntled ex-MI6 officer.<\/p>\n<p>The former spy, known to the public and therefore to Russia, also became known for sending reports to the U.S. government. Last year former Obama State Department official Jonathan Winer explained that in 2009 he became friendly with the self-employed Mr. Steele, and starting as early as 2013 ensured that \u201cmore than 100 of Steele\u2019s reports\u201d on Russia topics were shared with the State Department. Given that the dossier is largely based on Russian sources, some supposedly connected to the Kremlin, did the Kremlin know about this arrangement and see an opportunity to spoon-feed the U.S. government disinformation?<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019ve also learned more about Mr. Steele\u2019s and Fusion\u2019s connections to Russians. Mr. Steele sent a series of emails to Justice Department employee Bruce Ohr in 2016 inquiring about the status of a visa for Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch with Kremlin ties. Fusion GPS was working alongside Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who arranged the infamous meeting with Donald Trump Jr. in June 2016. Fusion was hired as part of a team to help Ms. Veselnitskaya undermine Bill Browder, the man behind the Magnitsky Act, a law that imposes sanctions on Russians for corruption and human-rights violations.<\/p>\n<p>How did Mr. Mueller spend two years investigating every aspect of Russian interference\u2014cyberhacking, social-media trolling, meetings with Trump officials\u2014and not consider the possibility that the dossier was part of the Russian interference effort?<\/p>\n<p>Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz and Attorney General William Barr may answer some of the questions Mr. Mueller refused to touch. Thanks to the special counsel we know Republicans weren\u2019t playing footsie with Russians. But thanks to BuzzFeed, we know that Democrats were. America deserves to know how far that interaction extended.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/video-api.wsj.com\/api-video\/player\/v3\/iframe.html?guid=FE7D028A-4E84-4903-84A0-40E1D3144D64&amp;shareDomain=null\" width=\"512\" height=\"288\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>Write to\u00a0<a href=\"mailto:kim@wsj.com\">kim@wsj.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>___<br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/news\/2019-04-27\/strassel-why-didnt-mueller-investigate-whether-steele-dossier-was-russian-disinfo\">https:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/news\/2019-04-27\/strassel-why-didnt-mueller-investigate-whether-steele-dossier-was-russian-disinfo<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=121622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121622\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=121622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=121622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=121622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}