Jonathan Turley — The Steele Dossier and the perils of political insurance policies

This is legal in the US? If not, where was the line crossed? Even if legal, it appears that a line was crossed when participants lied to investigators and the press about it. There are also questions raised about politicization of the US intelligence services, perhaps assisted by British intelligence.

Even if is legal, it proves that HRC was preparing to do exactly what she was accusing DJT of planning to do–contest the result if he lost.

There is a very bad smell about this. In fact, it is beginning to stink.

The Democrats had better get out in front on this or the party apparatus will be even further discredited.

The Hill
The Steele Dossier and the perils of political insurance policies

Jonathan Turley | Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University

Larry Johnson — Felix Sater and the Steele Dossier

The most important take away from the Powell piece is that it gives us some critical pieces of evidence for evaluating the Steele Dossier and exposing that document as a fraud. I want to focus on the what Christopher Steele claimed about Trump and a Trump Tower project in Moscow....

Was the apparently bogus Steele dossier part of an attempt to frame Donald Trump?

Sic Semper Tyrannis
Felix Sater and the Steele Dossier

Larry Johnson

Publius Tacitus — Taking a New Look at the Unverified Steele Dossier

Trumpgate busted and the plot outed. Long and detailed.

Sic Semper Tyrannis
Taking a New Look at the Unverified Steele Dossier
Publius Tacitus

Moon of Alabama — The New Yorker Attempts But Fails To Boost The Steele Dossier

Setting the recored straight.

Marcy Wheeler aka Emptywheel, with whom I have exchanged views on this, details several of the factual errors in the piece:

Moon of Alabama
The New Yorker Attempts But Fails To Boost The Steele Dossier

See also

A look into the propaganda machine.

Sic Semper Tyrannis
White Helmet Films, Inc. ?
Col. W. Patrick Lang, US Army (ret.)

At the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lang was the Defense Intelligence Officer (DIO) for the Middle East, South Asia and counter-terrorism, and later, the first Director of the Defense Humint Service. At the DIA, he was a member of the Defense Senior Executive Service. He participated in the drafting of National Intelligence Estimates. From 1992 to 1994, all the U.S. military attachés worldwide reported to him. During that period, he also briefed President George H. W. Bush at the White House, as he had during Operation Desert Storm. 

He was also the head of intelligence analysis for the Middle East for seven or eight years at that institution. He was the head of all the Middle East and South Asia analysis in DIA for counter-terrorism for seven years. For his service in the DIA, Lang received the Presidential Rank Award of Distinguished Executive. — Wikipedia

Publius Tacitus — Who Is Lying? John Brennan or James Comey?

Publius Tacitus responds to TTG's response (if you are following this debate).

Sic Semper Tyrannis
Who Is Lying? John Brennan or James Comey?

Publius Tacitus

Peter Van Buren — Christopher Steele: The Real Foreign Influence in the 2016 Election?

His dossier was more than opposition research, it was part of a full-spectrum information operation.

The American Conservative
Christopher Steele: The Real Foreign Influence in the 2016 Election?

Peter Van Buren, 24-year US State Department veteran

Publius Tacitus — Pieces of the Coup Puzzle Fall Into Place

Most people, including many of you, have the memory of an Alzheimer's patient when it comes to putting events into their proper historical context. So let me help....

Sic Semper Tyrannis
Pieces of the Coup Puzzle Fall Into Place

Publius Tacitus

Soon the investigative crosshairs will settle on Brennan. He’d better have the right answers.

The Unz Review
Is John Brennan the Mastermind Behind Russiagate?

Mike Whitney

Related

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly blocked Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., from briefing President Donald Trump about a meeting he had in London in August with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Rohrabacher told The Intercept.

Rohrabacher claimed Assange had shown him and his traveling companion, Charles Johnson, definitive proof that Russia was not the source of the Democratic Party communications that WikiLeaks published during the 2016 campaign. Assange was willing to share that information with American officials, Rohrabacher said, but he was never able to present the offer to the president....

The Intercept

Congressman Says He Tried to Brief Trump on WikiLeaks and Russia After Meeting With Julian Assange, But John Kelly Blocked Him

Ryan Grim

Stephen F. Cohen — Russiagate or Intelgate?

The publication of the Republican House Committee memo and reports of other documents increasingly suggest not only a “Russiagate” without Russia but also something darker: The “collusion” may not have been in the White House or the Kremlin.

The Nation
Russiagate or Intelgate?
Stephen F. Cohen | Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies, History, and Politics at New York University and Princeton University

David P. Goldman — Trump triumphs with release of House FBI memo

The House Intelligence Committee memo on abuse of power by the Federal Bureau of Investigation appeared just after 12:00 pm Eastern time, and American political life never will be the same. The House Republicans make a persuasive if not prima facie case that senior FBI officials used a fake dossier paid for by the Democrats to get a court order for electronic surveillance of the Trump campaign. If the charge sticks, America will have a real life instance of the sort of scenario found in pulp thrillers—a rogue intelligence agency operating in the darkness and abusing its power to manipulate elections.

This is political plutonium.

"Political plutonium" indeed.

Asia Times
Trump triumphs with release of House FBI memo
David P. Goldman

Also

Sic Semper Tyrannis
The FBI and CIA Failed Coup Against Trump Unravels

Publius Tacitus

also

Consortium News
Nunes Memo Reports Crimes at Top of FBI & DOJ

Ray McGovern

also

Given all that, I imagine that i) those believing that the Trump collusion story is made-up nonsense, and the President is a victim of a conspiracy of Democrats and their allies in the ‘deep state’ will feel vindicated; while ii) supporters of the collusion theory will see the release as further evidence that Republicans are just trying to divert attention because they have something to hide. The primary result, therefore, will simply be a hardening of positions on both sides and an accentuation of the already sharp divisions in American politics. In short, the show will go on.

Irrussianality
My thoughts on that memo
Paul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

This is far from over. It's only the beginning of the dénouement. Both sides are lining up their positions and the result portends to divide America along a gigantic fault line with the tectonic plates violently striking each other.

Example.

"Nothing-burger."

VOX
The Nunes memo is a dud

Zach Beauchamp

Also

Putin did it.

Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) said Friday that President Trump's attacks on key U.S. institutions are tearing at the seams of the country's democracy in the same vein as Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"If you look at the institutions that the president has attacked – the Department of Justice, the FBI, the judiciary and the media – I mean, I would argue that all of those institutions are part of what makes this country free," Speier said on CNN.

"And the democracy is going to start to erode, and you got Vladimir Putin there smiling. I mean, it's like he gave Donald Trump the script."...

The Hill
Democrat: It’s like Putin gave Trump a ‘script’
Max Greenwood

Also

NYRB does a hit job on Vladimir Putin. Not quite "Putin is Hitler," but close.

New York Review of Books
Putin: From Oligarch to Kleptocrat
Ruth May | professor of global business in the Satish & Yasmin Gupta College of Business at the University of Dallas, and a King fellow of the university

Ruth May is behind this one, too.

Verified Politics
Dallas News Just Published A Bombshell Report Linking Trump, McConnell, Ryan to Putin
Benjamin Locke

Strong on innuendo and inference, weak on evidence. 

Andrew C. McCarthy — Anatomy of a Farce

In-depth analysis of the Trump dossier. Much ado about nothing, but it's the ado that's interesting and relevant, as Andrew McCarthy shows.

Maybe on a conspiracy against a presidential candidate and then president in the legal sense, but close and likely some would call it a conspiracy in the colloquial sense. 

It certainly was collusion among people determined to undercut Trump owing to their own biases and affiliations.

This appears to be the real threat to American democracy rather than Trump-Russian collusion.

The National Review
Anatomy of a Farce
Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review

See also

It's the US playbook.

US National Security Advisor McMaster claimed that Russia is meddling in the upcoming Mexican elections.

This explosive news was shared by Reuters, which in turn was reporting on a mid-December video of a speech that McMasters gave to the Jamestown Foundation and which was just posted on a Mexican journalist’s Twitter account over the weekend. In it, one of the US’ most influential security figures says in relation to the unsubstantiated claims of Russian interference in foreign elections that “you’ve seen, actually, initial signs of it in the Mexican presidential campaign already”, but to Reuters’ credit they added that he didn’t elaborate on this afterwards and even cited an expert who remarked that “so far, it’s just speculation”.

That said, Reuters attempted to propel the paranoia forward by remarking that the leftist populist-nationalist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, commonly known by his abbreviated initials as AMLO, is “seen by some analysts as the Kremlin’s favorite, given the positive coverage he has received from government-funded media outlets like Sputnik and Russia Today”, thus relying on the conspiracy theory that everything on Russia’s publicly funded international media outlets is apparently aired on direct orders of the Kremlin, which isn’t true at all. Nor, for that matter, is the inference in the report that Russia is backing AMLO because of its desire to sow problems between the US and Mexico.

There’s credence to the forecast that AMLO’s potential victory would complicate US-Mexican relations because of the contradictory visions of their two leaders in that case, but this, as well as Russian international media’s detailed coverage of the leftist populist-nationalist candidate, don’t in and of themselves “prove” anything about Moscow’s alleged meddling in the upcoming elections. Rather, McMaster’s hysterical claim seems to be part of a preemptive infowar designed to discredit AMLO’s potential victory just like the Clintons tried to do with Trump’s over the same issue of alleged “Russian interference”, thereby suggesting that the US’ permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (or “deep state”) assess his odds of winning to be much higher than is publicly being reported.

That would explain why one of the top decision makers in the Trump Administration is already rolling out the weaponized narrative that Russia is supposedly backing AMLO, since they also want to add ammunition to the right-wing’s arsenal of personalized attacks in order to scare the electorate away from voting for him. Thus, it’s actually the US that’s openly interfering in the Mexican elections, just as it always has to one extent or another, and not Russia, with McMaster’s clumsily blatant hypocrisy emphasizing just how high Washington believes the geostrategic stakes to its security to be if “the wrong guy” gets into power and how desperate the US is to stop that from happening....

Oriental Review
The US Is Meddling In Mexico’s Election By Accusing Russia Of Doing So

Andrew Korybko

But I have a warning for Democrats, and indeed for all Americans. For God’s sake, don’t elevate the likes of former CIA directors Michael Hayden and John Brennan and the former director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, to the position of “senior statesmen.” They are not the voices of reason, either for the Democrats or for anybody else. They are monsters who have ignored the Constitution, the US code, and international law. They have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. We should shun them, not celebrate them....

RSN
A Warning for Democrats, and Indeed for All Americans
John Kiriakou, former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act – a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.

Publius Tacitus — The Trump Dossier Timeline, A Democrat Disaster Looming

When the entire episode about the creation of the Trump dossier (by former Brit spy, Christopher Steele) and its dissemination (by Steele and the Democrat hired contractor, FUSION GPS,) to the FBI and the press, is fully exposed, the American people will be confronted with the stark dilemma of how to deal with the fact that there was a failed domestic coup attempted by members of the U.S. intel and law enforcement community. The facts will show that the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the CIA and the FBI conspired and meddled in the 2016 Presidential election. They lied to a Federal judge about the origins of the dossier and used those lies to get permission to spy on Trump and members of his campaign staff.

Here are the facts as we know them now. (Please note, these facts are sourced and are not my opinion).

PT concludes that yes, folks, there was collusion to influence American politics.

The failure of the FBI and the CIA to disclose to members of Congress and the President that the information they briefed from the dossier had been paid for by the Clinton campaign is much more than gross negligence and incompetence. It is prima facie evidence of collusion and meddling in a U.S. domestic election. Only the culprits weren't the Russians. As Pogo once said, "we have met the enemy and he is us."

Sic Semper Tyrannis
The Trump Dossier Timeline, A Democrat Disaster Looming

Publius Tacitus

Publius Tacitus — Looks Like FBI or McCain May Have Paid for the 16th Report of the Steele Dossier

The plot thickens.

Sic Semper Tyrannis
Looks Like FBI or McCain May Have Paid for the 16th Report of the Steele Dossier

Publius Tacitus

Andrew McCarthy — Was the Steele Dossier the FBI’s ‘Insurance Policy’?

In conclusion, while there is a dearth of evidence to date that the Trump campaign colluded in Russia’s cyberespionage attack on the 2016 election, there is abundant evidence that the Obama administration colluded with the Clinton campaign to use the Steele dossier as a vehicle for court-authorized monitoring of the Trump campaign — and to fuel a pre-election media narrative that U.S. intelligence agencies believed Trump was scheming with Russia to lift sanctions if he were elected president. Congress should continue pressing for answers, and President Trump should order the Justice Department and FBI to cooperate rather than — what’s the word? — resist. —

This is longish and detained, but important in light of the implications. Was the crime actually an attempted by the deep state to influence the election and afterward to negate it? This suggests it was on the part of the FBI.

Did CIA director John Brennan and DIA chief James Clapper know about it. Seems unlikely they would not.

This would be the real undermining of American "democracy" if so. If this is even plausible, the Trump administration and Congress should find out and inform the American public.

That is unlikely to happen since the ruling class never outs itself. A few people might be implicated, but the whole thing is likely to go the way of the G. W Bush administration policy of torture.

National Review
Was the Steele Dossier the FBI’s ‘Insurance Policy’?
Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review

See also

Consortium News (Dec 15, 2017)
The Scary Void Inside Russia-gate
Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University and a contributing editor of The Nation