International cooperation at its best, the FBI and FSB working together towards a common end //
One of the areas of my commentary that has aged particularly well has been my assessment of how the FISA process was used to spy upon the Trump campaign and the Trump transition team, how Carter Page was falsely targeted, and how, more likely than not, the Steele Dossier was actually a Russian disinformation product rather than mere opposition research. I’m going to quote at length from my February 2018 post, The Steele Memo Is Much More Likely Russian Dezinformatsiya Than It is Intelligence. Keep in mind this was written at a time when the prevailing wisdom on this site was that if Trump was not actually Hitler he was a Putin stooge and it was just a matter of time until ‘Mueller Time’ took place and drove #OrangeManBad from office. //
The FBI was not duped, they knew they about Steele’s sources and were willing co-conspirators to launder his Russian disinformation to the FISA court.
DOJ official Bruce Ohr called a meeting of several federal agencies to discuss ‘working with’ a Russian oligarch because of his belief, premised on the unverified Steele dossier, that Trump was corrupt. //
A previously unnoticed passage in Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on federal surveillance abuse suggests Bruce Ohr and his compatriots were willing to bargain with a Russian oligarch to take down Donald Trump.
Two-hundred-plus pages into the IG report, while discussing former Associate Deputy Attorney General Ohr’s continued contacts with Crossfire Hurricane dossier author Christopher Steele, Horowitz revealed a significant detail that to date has been overlooked: “On December 7, 2016, Ohr conveyed an interagency meeting (including representatives from the FBI) regarding strategy in dealing with Russian Oligarch 1.”
The IG report added that after the meeting “one of Ohr’s junior Department colleagues who attended the meeting” asked “Ohr about why the U.S. government would support trying to work with Russian Oligarch 1”—the moniker used in the IG report to refer to one of Vladimir Putin’s closest confidants, the aluminum oligarch Oleg Deripaska.