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Carter Page FISA documents confirm Steele Dossier was key

Carter Page FISA documents confirm Steele Dossier was key

With no disclosure who paid for it, or how supportive media reports came from same pro-Clinton operatives

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA_ZlkBe8Kw

The Department of Justice released the FISA documents, 412 pages total (pdf.), related to the surveillance of Carter Page, an advisor to President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

The heavily redacted documents show that officials used “the infamous and unverified Steele Dossier” to receive the warrant in 2016 and the renewals.

The New York Times reported:

“This application targets Carter Page,” the document said. “The F.B.I. believes Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian government.” A line was then redacted, and then it picked up with “undermine and influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election in violation of U.S. criminal law. Mr. Page is a former foreign policy adviser to a candidate for U.S. president.”

Mr. Page has denied being a Russian agent and has not been charged with a crime in the nearly two years since the initial wiretap application was filed. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.

Other pages tell us that the FBI told the court that Page “’has established relationships with Russian government officials, including Russian intelligence officers’; that the bureau believed ‘the Russian government’s efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with’ Mr. Trump’s campaign; and that Mr. Page ‘has been collaborating and conspiring with the Russian government.'”

From what we can see in the documents, the dossier remained unverified. From Fox News:

The FISA records also reveal that a September 2016 Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff was a significant part of the government’s warrant application.

But London court records show, and Republicans emphasize, that Steele briefed Yahoo News and other reporters in the fall of 2016 at the direction of Fusion GPS — the opposition research firm behind the Steele Dossier.

The newly released FISA warrant application, however, seems to indicate the Yahoo News article was an independent piece of corroborating information that justified the surveillance of Carter Page. Republicans question whether the story is an example of circular reporting that merely repeated information from Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that commissioned former British spy Christopher Steele to compile the dossier.

Based on what is visible, the dossier is not described to the FISA court as a political document, as the Democrats have asserted; in fact, the FBI speculates to the FISA court that it was commissioned to damage Candidate 1, who is Donald Trump.

The application used claims from the dossier that while in Moscow in 2016, Page “met with two senior Russian representatives and discussed matters like lifting sanctions imposed on Russia for its intervention in Ukraine and a purported file of compromising information about Mr. Trump that the Russian government had.”

The Republicans blasted the FBI and the courts for relying on the unverified dossier.

The Democrats argued that the intelligence officials used information not in the dossier, which is true, but…that information goes back to 2013:

But Democrats noted that the application also contained evidence against Mr. Page unrelated to the dossier, and an unredacted portion of the application discussed efforts by Russian agents in 2013 to recruit Americans as assets. It has previously been reported that Mr. Page was one of their targets, although any discussion of Mr. Page’s interactions with them in the application is still censored.

Yeah…2013, which is three years before the election. Someone explain to the Democrats how to math.

The fact is the intelligence officials used an unverified dossier:

Reactions

Page appeared on CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper:

Carter Page on Sunday called the accusations against him detailed in the foreign surveillance warrant application released by the FBI “so ridiculous.”

“You talk about misleading the courts, it’s just so misleading,” Page said about the warrant application in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union with Jake Tapper.”

“It’s literally a complete joke,” he told Tapper.

Page on Sunday denied claims that he worked for the Kremlin, and called accusations that he had advised Moscow “spin.”

“No, I’ve never been an agent of a foreign power by any stretch of the imagination,” he said. “I may have, back in the G20 when they were getting ready to do that in St. Petersburg, I might have participated in a few meetings that a lot of people — including people from the Obama administration — were sitting on, and Geneva, Paris, et cetera, but I’ve never been anywhere near what’s being described here.”

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) believes the FBI didn’t do anything wrong:

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) told Bret Baier on Fox News Sunday that “Carter Page is more like Inspector Gadget than Jason Bourne or James Bond.” He also reminded viewers “that the FBI never indicted Page following the investigation.”

Gowdy also believes that that Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) would have leaked any collusion evidence during this 18-month investigation. From The Daily Caller:

“I have not seen one scintilla of evidence that this president colluded, conspired, confederated with Russia, and neither has anyone else, or you may rest assured Adam Schiff would have leaked it,” Gowdy said during an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”

“That’s why they’ve moved off of collusion onto obstruction of justice, which is now their current preoccupation,” he added.

Formal federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy analyzed the documents on Fox & Friends. Trump responded on Twitter:

Others couldn’t believe what McCarthy said, but he explained that unless we see all the blacked out information we’re at an impasse:

Carter Page FISA Documents by Christian Datoc on Scribd

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Comments

Just assume the Steele dossier came from the Mafia.
The FISA court and the investigators decided to see what gives.
They found enough to continue the investigation.
The original source doesn’t matter. It could have been an anonymous tip over the phone…

All that matters is that the investigations turned up enough to continue the investigations, leading to the results we have today.

    userpen in reply to AreaMan. | July 22, 2018 at 12:44 pm

    FISA Court is a rubber stamp.

    Lewfarge in reply to AreaMan. | July 22, 2018 at 12:50 pm

    HORSE SHIT !
    THERE IS NOTHING THAT HAS BEEN TURNED UP
    They used the same FALSE INFO 3 more times to continue this FRAUD !

      Worse, from what I understand of FISA policy is that to fire up a *second* application after the first one is expiring, the applicant has to show evidence collected by the first warrant was applicable, OR that the information used to acquire the first one had been validated in the amount of time between the applications.

      Neither of these qualifications was met. The second and third FISA applications were simply photocopies of the first, based on the same unverified (and unverifiable) dossier and unsubstantiated allegations.

      In short, the DNC used contacts inside the NSA to read Trump’s mail and listen to his phone calls in 2015 until Mike Rogers chopped off that on Oct 26, 2016. The FBI then went a little nuts with flimsy FISA warrants to collect the same information by way of ‘spillover’ from their two (or more) targets until even that became exposed.

      All of this happened under Obama’s watch.

    Do what did it turn up?

    Imagine if obama was subject to ANY investigation, let alone the one going on about Trump?

    FINALLY: Obama admits he was born in Kenya:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQcd41RO25k

    Barry in reply to AreaMan. | July 22, 2018 at 6:07 pm

    AreaMan = another new commie spewing lies on LI.

    johnny dollar in reply to AreaMan. | July 22, 2018 at 6:23 pm

    No, you cannot tap an American citizen’s phone based on an “anonymous tip”, nor can you do so based on information “from the Mafia”, in your words.
    You need probable cause, supported by articulable facts leading an objective person to conclude that a crime had been committed, and that the target of the warrant had a role in that crime.
    You don’t get to “initiate an investigation” to “see what gives”.

    dmi60ex in reply to AreaMan. | July 22, 2018 at 7:43 pm

    The warrant was a title 1 which meant he was an agent of a Foreign govt ,the warrant states this early but later the warrant said they were trying to recruit him.
    This would not be a requisite for a title 1 .
    They were doing the shotgun approach throwing everything and seeing if something would stick.

    SDN in reply to AreaMan. | July 23, 2018 at 2:09 pm

    Except for that little thing called THE LAW. See, if the Mafia had turned up the evidence, they could be prosecuted for the laws they broke to get it.

There’s a whole lot of disinformation swirling around out there, and quite frankly, I believe very little of what the FBI asserts.

Carter Page was an undercover employee for the FBI to spy on Trump world. Then, he wasn’t.

Carter Page is an undercover spy colluding with the Russians while an unimportant member of Trump world. But Page denies it, and all evidence is redacted.

Carter Page has been under investigation since 2013, but has never been indicted. I bet he still has his passport, too.

Hey. Whatever happened to Professor Joseph Mifsud? He has disappeared.

    The idea that Page was ever an undercover employee for the FBI was always a pure invention of the crazy alt-right sewers where some commenters here hang out. There was never even the slightest foundation for it. So you can’t blame anyone else for it turning out to be false.

      Tom Servo in reply to Milhouse. | July 22, 2018 at 2:47 pm

      I’ve watched any Carter Page interviews whenever they’ve been broadcast, and while I have the impression that he’s a big goofy, I also have the strong belief that he has never tried to lie about anything that he has ever been involved in. He’s open about the meetings he went to, he’s open about who he met, he doesn’t try to obfuscate about anything. I know my personal opinion is just that, but after watching all the liars and dodgers and weavers that dominate the airwaves, it’s a breath of fresh air to see someone who is almost so foolishly honest.

      I think the reason he’s never been indicted is extremely simple, and doesn’t take any conspiracy theory to figure out – he has never once done anything that actually violated any US law, and he has never lied to anyone about anything that he did. How else could he have stood up to at least 4 years of investigation into everything that he had had ever said, done, or written?

      The more interesting question is, of course, why would the FBI devote thousands of hours of man hours trying to dig up dirt on someone when every avenue they explore determines that he was absolutely clean?

      (Sure, he talked to some Russians. He’s a private citizen, and we’re not at war. He’s got the right to do that, just like you and I do.)

      Mac45 in reply to Milhouse. | July 22, 2018 at 6:11 pm

      Actually you are incorrect, there.

      While page was not an undercover agent for the FBI, he was an official FBI asset who was assisting them with their investigation of Evgeny Buryokov in 2013 and was still actively assisting them in march of 2016, when Buryakov was convicted. Therefor the FBI KNEW that Page was not an agent of the Kremlin when the FISA application was written. They failed to mention that, in the application, though.

        Milhouse in reply to Mac45. | July 23, 2018 at 1:55 am

        While page was not an undercover agent for the FBI, he was an official FBI asset who was assisting them with their investigation of Evgeny Buryokov in 2013 and was still actively assisting them in march of 2016, when Buryakov was convicted.

        No, he was not. Some nutcase on one of the nuttier alt-right blogs made it up out of whole cloth.

          Mac45 in reply to Milhouse. | July 23, 2018 at 11:06 am

          Actually, it was the NYT, the go-to leak source for the FBI, as well as Rueters which highly intimated that Page was UCE-1 in the DOJ’s indictment of Buryakov. While neither the FBI nor Page has categorically stated that he was UCE-1, the FBI has acknowledged that it extensively interviewed Page in that case and Page has stated that he assisted the FBI.

          Milhouse in reply to Milhouse. | July 23, 2018 at 2:27 pm

          You are not telling the truth. Neither the NYT nor Reuters ever said, implied, or hinted that Page was “UCE-1”. Neither UCE-1 nor Page had anything to do with Buryakov, who was avoiding all visible contact with Sporyshev and Podobnyy.

          UCE-1 was an FBI employee posing as an analyst for an energy company, his Russian contact was Igor Sporyshev, he fed him lots of purportedly valuable information, and Sporyshev thought highly of him.

          Carter Page was “Male-1”, described as “a male working as a consultant in New York City” (not an analyst, for an energy company or anyone else, and certainly not posing as one), whom Victor Podobnyy unsuccessfully tried to recruit, but whom he despised and planned to string along and then dump.

          Two different Americans, connected with two different Russians. Some careless alt-right blogger conflated both the Americans and the Russians.

      dmi60ex in reply to Milhouse. | July 22, 2018 at 7:49 pm

      Milhouse ,you are out to lunch on that one .Page has admit ted doing work for the FBI and CIA .
      In the case with Steele in London Carter Page was outed as a confidential informant in the 2015 .Russian spy case .
      The NYT reported he was the informant and testified against the Russians in April 2016

        Milhouse in reply to dmi60ex. | July 23, 2018 at 1:58 am

        No, he was not. None of what you write is true. His role in that case began and ended with the Russians’ clumsy attempt to recruit him; the FBI informed him who he was dealing with and he took their advice.

If the FISA judges don’t speak up, then they’re part of it.

If I were a federal judge with FISA court responsibilities, I’d be livid if DOJ duped me in this way. Why aren’t they?

    Tom Servo in reply to maxmillion. | July 22, 2018 at 2:54 pm

    Because maybe, just maybe, they were all playing for the same team, and they all knew it. And they all thought they would get away with it.

    I remember when civil libertarians said setting up the FISA courts was a huge mistake. I disagreed then, but boy, was I wrong. Abolish them all, right now. The system is hopelessly corrupt, and was designed to be corrupted from the start.

      Barry in reply to Tom Servo. | July 22, 2018 at 6:14 pm

      “same team”

      Bingo.

      Bucky Barkingham in reply to Tom Servo. | July 23, 2018 at 7:58 am

      Politics and TDS aside it has been demonstrated how the FISA process can be so easily manipulated to violate the civil liberties of American citizens. Where are the ACLU and the Libertarian pundits? Where are the mass media guardians of our civil liberties? All have sold their souls.

Areaman,

It matters hugely where the initial information cane from. If it’s politically inspired dirt digging then that SHOULD have been passed on to the judge so that he could decide on whether the warrent application was justified.

The fact that was hidden from the judge tells you the FBI was sufficiently concerned with the veracity of the source of the information to NOT let the judge know it came from opposition political dirt digging paid for by the Clintons campaign.

So, lack of independence (e.g. journolism) and confirmation bias was the justification for denying Americans their civil rights and a multi-trimester baby hunt.

Well, one good thing about all of the redactions is that we get to fill in the blanks any way we want to. For instance, we “know” that the request was made by (Strzok) even though his name is blacked out. We know that it’s based on information provided to (Hillary Clinton). And so on.

Unless there’s something huge in the redacted parts, this is very very bad. Before a FISA warrant can be issued against a US person there must be actual evidence that something is wrong with him, that the warrant is likely to find something valuable enough to justify the breach of his privacy. There must be a credible witness to something. The application pretends to follow this standard by saying why Steele is trustworthy, but it doesn’t matter how credible he was because he was not the witness. He reported what the witnesses told him, and there was nothing about why those witnesses were credible.

So unless there’s something huge in the redacted parts the warrant should never have been issued. But if there is something in the redacted parts huge enough to justify the warrant then why did they bother mentioning Steele’s information? The fact that they went to such lengths to make Steele’s information seem credible indicates they didn’t have much if anything else.

Question for Senator Rubio;

Can the government pull records (telephone, text, email etc.) from anyone Carter Page had contact with, regardless of the timeframe because the government secured a title I warrant? I believe that anyone in the Trump campaign that even said hello in passing to him, was susceptible to having their records pulled, as well as, anyone they also communicated with.

Therefore, I call BS on not spying on Trump.

Day after day, it’s the same thing: nothing new, just the same old revelations in a different package.

What are the odds that ANY of those involved will be indicted? Will go to trial? Will be convicted? Will go to prison?

Zero, zip, nada, Ø .

Frankly I’m rapidly growing sick of the entire mess. Corruption as far as the eye can see, and NOTHING ever happens to the perpetrators.

I’m 65, and I doubt seriously that in my lifetime I’ll ever see anyone go to the slammer for these obvious crimes. The swamp wins again.

Sigh.

    DieJustAsHappy in reply to tiger66. | July 22, 2018 at 2:42 pm

    Yes, it’s difficult to do when they’re all sleeping in the same bed, unless one of them is caught sneaking off to another one. Then, it’s a matter of how vulnerable is the one caught and just how much damage the guilty one might be able to do.

DieJustAsHappy | July 22, 2018 at 2:36 pm

As swamps go, D.C. has shown that it has it all over the Okefenokee Swamp.

The secondary goal after discrediting Trump is to discredit all on Fellow Travelers and , as Rush asserts, cast permanent suspicion on the election process…. that leads to the appointment of technocrats to run things in the name of the People (“For the People”. Another milestone toward the communist state.

Do what did it turn up?

Imagine if obama was subject to ANY investigation, let alone the one going on about Trump?

FINALLY: Obama admits he was born in Kenya:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQcd41RO25k

regulus arcturus | July 22, 2018 at 5:17 pm

This is devastating for FBI.

Time to start the indictments, including 18 U.S. Code § 1018 – Official certificates or writings

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1018

Methinks the October surprise this year is going to be document declassification.

    assemblerhead in reply to gospace. | July 22, 2018 at 10:46 pm

    I hope you are right. That would be the equivalent of “fishing with dynamite” in the DC swamp.

    That would also probably sink a lot of politicians campaigns. Just in time as well.

    The Packetman in reply to gospace. | July 23, 2018 at 7:29 am

    If Trump wants that by October he’d better do it now to get past all the wailing and gnashing of teeth before a declassification order is actually followed!

ONE QUESTION :
Since we now know,for sure, that the whole thing was started by a FRAUD, doesn’t this make EVERYTHING up to and including the mueller appointment and everything he has done and is doing,
TOTALLY ILLEGAL ???

    Barry in reply to Lewfarge. | July 22, 2018 at 6:32 pm

    YES.

    Do you think they care?

    Milhouse in reply to Lewfarge. | July 23, 2018 at 2:02 am

    No, it doesn’t. There is no such law as you imagine, that would have such an effect.

      Bruce Hayden in reply to Milhouse. | July 23, 2018 at 6:05 pm

      You seem to be forgetting something:

      “Under the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine, the exclusionary rule bars the admission of physical evidence and live testimony obtained directly or indirectly through the exploitation of unconstitutional police conduct.”

      If the Page FISA warrants were fraudulently obtained, as currently appears to be the case, then any search, wiretap, etc obtained pursuant to it of people protected by our Bill of Rights likely violated at least the 4th Amdt. Which would presumably make the Fruit of the Poisonous Tree applicable.

      Lest anyone get overly excited here, keep in mind that the purpose of these FISA warrants was not to catch criminals, or even probably to catch spies. Rather, it was almost assuredly to surveil Page’s confederates and accomplices, which means the Trump campaign and transition. Maybe they found something incriminating with Michael Cohen, but the Mueller team can pretty much credibly point to some other source for the evidence being used against US Persons indicted by Mueller (even Gen Flynn – who apparently was recorded pursuant to a FISA warrant, just not the ones targeting Page, but rather one targeting the Russian Ambassador to the US, whose surveillance has been SOP since FISA was enacted over 40 years ago). In short no harm, no foul.

        Milhouse in reply to Bruce Hayden. | July 24, 2018 at 2:49 am

        The exclusionary rule exists only in courtrooms during criminal trials. There is no such rule anywhere else. Even in courtrooms it doesn’t make anything TOTALLY ILLEGAL, it just makes certain evidence inadmissible.

        The Exclusionary rule is not a law, and certainly not a constitutional principle, it’s merely a rule invented by the courts for their own internal use. Judges use it to decide whether certain evidence can be shown to juries; that’s all. If the object of the exercise is not to bring evidence to a criminal jury then there is no exclusionary rule.

    AreaMan in reply to Lewfarge. | July 23, 2018 at 7:40 am

    If it’s all started by the Devil himself, to make trouble, they can follow up the suggestion quite legally. Then it depends only on what they find.

    If somebody tells the cops my neighbor is abusing his kids, but upon investigation, the cops find the kids are fine, but the neighbor has been selling cocaine — the neighbor goes to prison on the drug charge.

Business as usual for our “superiors”. They are mostly* corrupt, some more than others.

This is the #1 threat to our republic. Not the Russians, not the north Koreans, not MS13, not the fill-in-the-blank. This, the corrupt.

*yes, there are some exceptions. It is difficult to determine with any certainty just who they are.

So what are the odds that Congress will do their jobs and reconsider how FISA works, you know, so this sort of thing can be prevented in the future?

Zero? I’m not sure they’re that high but it would be nice if they would do SOMETHING.

Carter Page was first contacted by the FBI in 2013, helping to convict the Russian spy Evgeny Buryakov in March of 2016. Six months later, the FBI is seeking a FISA warrant to spy on Carter Page. The warrant application claims:

“(U) (s.) Carter W. Page…knowingly engage in clandestine intelligence activities (other than intelligence gathering activities) for or on the behalf of such foreign power, which activities involve or are about to involve a violation of the criminal statutes of the United States, or knowingly conspires with other persons to engage in such activities and, therefore, is an agent of a foreign power as defined by 50 U.S.c. § 1801(b)(2)(E).

This application targets Carter Page. The FBI believes Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian government….undermine and influence the outcome of the 2016 U.s. Presidential election in violation of U.S. criminal law. Page is a former foreign policy advisor to a Candidate for U.S. President (Candidate #1)…”

The application is confusing to say the least, but the above quoted section is especially confusing in that it states that Carter Page is foreign agent of Russia and, at the same time, claims that Carter Page has been “…the subject of targeted recruitment…”.

    Milhouse in reply to MSO. | July 24, 2018 at 2:56 am

    Page had nothing to do with Buryakov. The Russian who tried to recruit him was Podobnyy. Until the FBI busted them, nobody outside the conspiracy knew that there was any connection between the two. Buryakov was deep under cover, taking care not to associate with Podobnyy or Sporyshev, or to be linked to them in any way. It was the FBI’s eavesdropping on Sporyshev, set up by UCE-1 — who was definitely not Carter Page — that revealed that Buryakov was secretly working with the other two.

    So while Page’s testimony played an indirect role in Buryakov’s trial, he couldn’t possibly have had any information directly about him.

Some of you may remember that over a year ago I posited that the NSA/FBI/CIA were conducting electronic surveillance of the Trump campaign long before they obtained the warrant on Page, in October 2016. Now we have found out that “contractors” [attached to the FBI and CIA] were accessing FISA 702 files, held by the FBI & NSA, improperly, if not illegally, since early 2015. When Rogers shut that down at the NSA, the apparat needed some way to collect this intelligence on the Trump Campaign as well as provide cover, in case anyone ever asked how they got the intel. So they threw together something that looked good but was totally lacking in factual foundation. The Page Title 1 FISA warrant was bad enough in its own right and made worse by its repeated renewal. The huge legal landmine out there is the illegal surveillance of the Trump campaign conducted before the warrant was obtained as well as the Obama administration coverup. That is what has these people terrified. High ranking members of the Obama administration may well end up going to prison for substantive criminal acts, if the investigation continues.

Stay tuned. The unexplained “suicides” are likely to begin any minute.

Huge Omission – the warrant to spy on Page included all of his associates.

So, Trimps entire campaign (save Teimp himself thanks only to the FiSa court balking on that point), and later his transition team and then administration.

That’s why the related “unmasking” scandal revealed spying I hundreds of ppl.

Page himself is, and was, a nobody.

The real issue here is the spying on literally everyone Teump employed from early 2015 on – probably to this day and beyond.

I am sick of Trump tweeting about this stuff and doing nothing. He got a letter from Republican Congressmen to release the whole document publicly without the redactions. He should do it for his own benefit if nothing else. Why Trump refuses to take action is beyond me.

    SDN in reply to Jackie. | July 23, 2018 at 2:32 pm

    Trump does not operate in a vacuum.

    0. All of this has NOTHING to do with legal process. It has to do with impeachment, which is a POLITICAL process. 67 Senators can remove Trump from office if they don’t like his toupee. Along the way, they can refuse to confirm judges or any other appointments, refuse to pass legislation, etc.

    1. If he declassifies and unredacts, there will be a mighty chorus of “collusion”, “obstruction”, “reveal sources and methods”, all designed to provide political cover for the political events in #0.

    2. If he fires Mueller, see option 0. Mueller doesn’t have to be replaced, fortunately. It will still allow that chorus to claim that’s what Nixon did in the original Saturday Night Massacre, “and we impeached him!”

    3. However, if he starts firing Sessions, Rosenstein, Wray, etc., he gets all the results from Option #2, plus someone has to take over, requiring Senate confirmation.
    a. He could just move the next Deep State guy in the hierarchy up. That won’t solve his problem, because that person hasn’t been exposed the way the current occupants have. It would avoid a confirmation fight.
    b. He puts up a nominee. Well, last year, Vichy Mitchy said flat out that if Trump fired Sessions or Rosenstein, NO REPLACEMENT WOULD BE CONFIRMED. So now there’s no one to oversee things…. leaving the Deep State DOJ to run wild.

    Bottom line: until Vichy is convinced that he needs to work with Trump 100%, what we’re getting now is the best we’ll get.