Brennan will be 1st to flip

The Steele Dossier: A Retrospective (2018)
www.lawfaremedia.org

... Not all of the material in the dossier has been proven. But none has been disproven. As a raw intelligence document, the Steele dossier holds up well. ...

The dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele remains a subject of fascination"or, depending on your perspective, scorn. ...

The dossier is actually a series of reports"16 in all"that total 35 pages. Written in 2016, the dossier is a collection of raw intelligence. Steele neither evaluated nor synthesized the intelligence. He neither made nor rendered bottom-line judgments. The dossier is, quite simply and by design, raw reporting, not a finished intelligence product.

In that sense, the dossier is similar to an FBI 302 form or a DEA 6 form. Both of those forms are used by special agents of the FBI and DEA, respectively, to record what they are told by witnesses during investigations. The substance of these memoranda can be true or false, but the recording of information is (or should be) accurate. In that sense, notes taken by a special agent have much in common with the notes that a journalist might take while covering a story"the substance of those notes could be true or false, depending on what the source tells the journalist, but the transcription should be accurate.

With that in mind, we thought it would be worthwhile to look back at the dossier and to assess, to the extent possible, how the substance of Steele's reporting holds up over time. In this effort, we considered only information in the public domain from trustworthy and official government sources, including documents released by Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office in connection with the criminal cases brought against Paul Manafort, the 12 Russian intelligence officers, the Internet Research Agency trolling operation and associated entities, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos.

We also considered the draft statement of offense released by author Jerome Corsi, a memorandum released by House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Ranking Member Adam Schiff related to the Carter Page FISA applications and admissions directly from certain speakers.

These materials buttress some of Steele's reporting, both specifically and thematically. The dossier holds up well over time, and none of it, to our knowledge, has been disproven. ...

" I said it was central."

Then you're still full of bullschittt.

The central reason was Team Trump kept lying about contacts with Russia, while the FBI was seeing meeting after meeting with Russians they were surveilling.

You know, the type of thing that would explode your head if the letters after the name were reversed.

And the idea Obama was SPYING on the campaign?!? FFS, Jeff Sessions walked into the (surveilled) Russian's office, and the FBI kept recording.

Turncoats believe that's when the FBI should've STOPPED recording.

" The investigation would have been halted for lack of intel without the inclusion of the dossier."

Nonsense.

Every time Team Trump lied about contacts with Russians, it added new impetus.

To the larger point: why are you OK with team Trump lying about over 100 contacts with Russians?

How the anti-Trump dossier came to be (2017)
www.pbs.org

... The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative site based in Washington, D.C., confirmed that it hired the firm Fusion GPS to unearth damaging information about President Donald Trump in the run-up to the election. GOP donor and billionaire Paul Singer is one of the site's key backers. ...

The secret funder of a once secret dossier of opposition research on Donald Trump has been unmasked. The dossier, produced during last year's presidential campaign, purported to document possible connections between Russians and Trump Organization business or the Trump campaign.

The Washington firm Fusion GPS had been hired to produce the dossier during the Republican primary season, and it eventually assigned the task to a British former intelligence officer named Christopher Steele. That's all been known for months.

Now, we know who originally hired Fusion GPS. The chairman and the editor of the conservative website Washington Free Beacon confirm they did so for information on "multiple Republican candidates." ...

The Russia probe: A timeline from Moscow to Mueller (2019)
abcnews.go.com

... This timeline is based on publicly-released FBI documents, congressional records and testimony, court filings, and certain media reports confirmed to ABC News by sources with knowledge of the matter. It will be updated as new information becomes available.

Four key takeaways:

-- In the months before the 2016 presidential election, the FBI was uncovering efforts by the Russian government to interfere in the election, and the FBI was trying to assess unverified allegations that Trump's associates were aiding the Russian effort.

-- The FBI's counterintelligence probe was not launched because of the "dossier," but the "dossier" aided the investigation and offered unconfirmed tips for agents to explore.

-- Looking to share the work of a longtime acquaintance, senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr passed on "dossier"-linked information to the FBI. But the first recorded meeting between Ohr and the FBI came four months after the FBI launched its investigation and a full month after the FBI used previously-obtained information from the "dossier" to support secret surveillance of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

-- Russian interference in the 2016 election was "sweeping and systematic fashion," Robert Mueller said in his report, a fact that was evidenced by the indictment last year of the whole Russian troll farm behind much of the social media interference, known as the Internet Research Agency. ...