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FBI Internal "Talking Points" memo described plan to mislead Senate Intelligence Committee about reliability of sources for Steele memos //
A stunning FBI document was released by the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier today.
The document is titled “SSCI Briefing on Former Employee of Christopher Steele”, and subtitled “Draft Talking Points As Of 14 February 2018.”
A general characterization of the content of the document would be that it lays out ways to address the issue of the FBI’s knowledge of Steele’s “Primary Subsource”, now known to have been Igor Danchenko. A 57 page “electronic communication” detailing the late January 2017 interview of Danchenko, lasting over a period of 3 days, has previously been declassified and released by the Senate. I wrote about the contents of the EC here.
That “EC” revealed that Danchenko’s “network” of sources for the information he delivered to Steele was nothing more than childhood friends and drinking buddies, none of whom were in positions in Russia that brought them into the orbit of Russian intelligence services, or had access to any insider information from the Putin government as was portrayed in Steele’s memos.
Coming a year after Danchenko had been interviewed, and after none of the most meaningfully claims made in the Steele memos based on Danchenko’s reporting had been verified or independently corroborated, to tell the Senate that the FBI had confidence in Danchenko’s information, that his sources had access to the type of information he was attributing to them, and that his work constituted reasonably sound tradecraft is duplicitous and dishonest beyond comprehension.
