The Senate Intelligence Committee said in a long-awaited report released Tuesday that there was no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government to influence the 2016, affirming the findings of other investigations into a possible Trump-Kremlin conspiracy.
The report, which clocks in at 966 pages, also offered a scathing assessment of the FBI’s handling of the Steele dossier, which was a key document in the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory.
“The FBI gave the Steele Dossier unjustified credence, based on an incomplete understanding of Steele’s past reporting record,” the report says.
“The Committee found that, within the FBI, the dossier was given a veneer of credibility by lax procedures and layered misunderstandings.”
The report, crafted by both Republicans and Democrats, describes a series of roadblocks and hurdles that the Senate committee faced in investigating information from Steele, a former MI6 officer hired to investigate Donald Trump on behalf of the DNC and Clinton campaign.
The report says that Steele “repeatedly refused” to meet with the panel, though he ultimately submitted written responses on Aug. 16, 2018.
The special counsel’s office also refused to provide information about its investigation into the dossier, the report says.
The report said it was limited in its investigation of the dossier because of the “the centralization of information regarding the dossier” at the special counsel’s office, and prosecutors “decision not to share that information with the Committee.”
The committee interviewed several Steele associates who helped disseminate the dossier, including Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, former State Department official Jonathan Winer and David Kramer, a former associate of the late-Sen. John McCain.
The FBI relied heavily on information from Steele to obtain warrants to conduct surveillance on Carter Page, a Trump campaign aide who is accused in the dossier of masterminding a conspiracy between Trump associates and the Kremlin.
“We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election,” Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the acting chairman of the Senate panel, said in a statement.
The panel raised concerns over Steele’s links to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with close ties to Vladimir Putin. Steele had “multiple” links to Deripaska, having worked for the Russian’s attorneys from 2012 through 2017.
One section of the report also addresses the possibility that Russian intelligence operatives fed disinformation to Steele that ended up in the dossier.
A Justice Department inspector general’s report released on Dec. 9 said that the FBI received evidence in early 2017 that Russian operatives may have fed false information into Steele’s network of sources.
The committee did find “irrefutable evidence” that the Russian government meddled in the 2016 election, and identified several Russian attempts to cozy up to Trump associates during the campaign and presidential transition period.
“The existence of a cadre of informal advisors to the Transition Team with varying levels of access to the President-elect and varying awareness of the foreign affairs presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities,” the report says.
Gosh… the very committee Greg was just citing. Another bombshell THUD.
But greg says it is truce that Putin put President Trump in office and McConnell went along with Putin in the senate to keep President Trump in office. Having accomplished successfully putting Trump in office during the 2016 election , Putin is hellbent in keeping Trump in office by meddling again in the 2020 election.
What they did find was that the head of Trump’s 2016 campaign organization represented “a grave counterintelligence threat” to the United States of America.
They also found that multiple highly placed members of his campaign organization—some of which still serve in the Trump administration—were interacting closely with identified operatives of the Putin government. They stopped short of characterizing this as collusion or knowing cooperation to further Putin’s objectives, stating that it might have been because of naiveté, inexperience, or ineptness.
Here’s a link to the report, if you want to read what it says rather than being told what it says. You can find the conclusions summarized very near the top, immediately following the Table of Contents.
Free people make up their own minds. Sheep believe what someone else tells them to believe.
@Greg: Remember, they fired Manafort. But, Hillary PAID the Russians for dirt on Trump.
So, who is the most despicable?