To Keep Russiagate Hoax Alive, FBI Lied to Senate Intel Committee

Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing to examine the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, on Capitol Hill in Washington on Aug. 5, 2020. (Carolyn Kaster/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

Commentary

On Aug. 9, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) went on the “Sunday Morning Futures” show hosted by Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network and dropped a bombshell.

Graham revealed that in February 2018, FBI briefers had intentionally lied to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) when they claimed former MI6 spy Christopher Steele’s main source still vouched for the allegations used to obtain a surveillance warrant on the Donald Trump presidential campaign through former adviser Carter Page.

In fact, Steele’s source for most of his fake dossier and the Carter Page allegations, a man named Igor Danchenko, had strongly disavowed the Page allegations to the FBI more than a year earlier, in January 2017.

That Steele’s top source had repudiated the Page allegations was first revealed last December when Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz released his stunning FISA abuse report.

Not until now, more than three years into the Spygate scandal, has the full depth of the FBI’s commitment to promoting the Russiagate hoax been revealed.

How Far Were Spygate Plotters Willing to Go?

Let the truth fully sink in: The numerous Spygate plotters who were spread out among the Obama White House, the DOJ, the FBI, the CIA, the U.S. Congress, the State Department, and perhaps even foreign governments were so determined to advance what is now known to be a massive hoax that several top FBI officials deliberately deceived the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Graham is now loudly demanding the names of the FBI briefers who engaged in this deception.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has been rocked by one scandal after another, from former SSCI security chief James Wolfe caught leaking classified information to news reporters to the more recent embarrassing departure of the committee’s chairman, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), following a raid on his home by the FBI as part of an insider trading investigation.

It was just two weeks ago when it was revealed that the FBI’s supposed “defensive briefing” of Donald Trump and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn was, in fact, set up as part of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign, called “Crossfire Hurricane.”

It’s certainly enough of a scandal by itself that the FBI obtained its three renewals of the Page warrant by hiding from the FISA court the very relevant disavowal of the information by the person who supposedly gave it to Steele. But now the scandal has only grown worse because of the disclosure that the agency also made deliberately false claims about Steele’s source to the U.S. Congress.

The question must now naturally arise: If the DOJ/FBI officials involved in this scandal were willing to engage in this kind of behavior to keep the spying moving forward, up to and including deliberately lying to U.S. senators, what else were they doing that hasn’t come to light yet?

As I noted in a recent column, it’s looking increasingly like the Trump/Russia election collusion hoax was merely a cover story for something far more sinister.

At every crucial juncture where it could have been stopped by the normal checks and balances of the regular oversight process, the hoax—and the “legal spying” it engendered—was advanced and maintained only through acts of deliberate fraud and suppression of evidence.

In their recent testimony before congressional committees, former Deputy Attorneys General Rod Rosenstein and Sally Yates both insisted they were kept out of the loop by their subordinates. Both also admitted that if they had known then what they know now, neither would have signed the Page surveillance warrant.

The top officials supposedly supervising this unprecedented government spying operation targeting a presidential campaign—and subsequently a presidential administration itself—asserted under oath that their own subordinates went rogue and left them in the dark.

Steele’s Most Amazing Magic Trick

Looking back to the early days of the Spygate scandal and all the patently absurd hype that surrounded supposed “James Bond Super Spy” Christopher Steele, it all now strikes me as comical.

When he wasn’t grabbing names off unverifiable anonymous blog posts on the internet to stick them into his dossier (such as he did with entrepreneur Aleksej Gubarev), Steele was pontificating nonsense, such as when he babbled to State Department official Kathleen Kavalec that payments for Kremlin influence operations were being run out of the Russian consulate in Miami.

There is no Russian consulate in Miami, an anecdote that has come to pretty much summarize the quality of the work that Steele was doing for both the FBI and the Hillary Clinton campaign.

That’s nice work if you can get it, being paid big money by both the U.S. government political campaigns for opposition research nobody seems to bother to really check before running with it.

Of all the deceptive magic tricks Steele performed to help launch the Russiagate hoax, it appears his biggest was taking a low-level research assistant at the Brookings Institution and transforming him into a highly connected Kremlin source, supposedly deep in Putin’s confidence.

Like Steele himself, Danchenko seems to have spent little, if any time, in Russia for the past several decades, an issue I touched on in a recent column.

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe stated under oath that the warrant to spy on Page wouldn’t have been granted without the information supplied to the FBI by Steele, which he claimed came from Danchenko. There appears to have been no discernible effort made by the FBI to verify Danchenko’s allegations before the warrant was submitted to the court in late October 2016.

It wasn’t until three months later, in January 2017, that FBI agents tracked him down for an interview and learned that, at best, Steele had grossly exaggerated idle speculative gossip over drinks in a bar.

At worst, Steele had made it all up.

The mainstream media is still determined to pretend that Spygate is just a wild right-wing conspiracy theory. In fact, as the emerging documentary evidence continues to show, it’s the biggest political scandal in world history.

Their attempts to ignore it only calls their own journalistic credibility into serious question.

Brian Cates is a writer based in South Texas and the author of “Nobody Asked For My Opinion ... But Here It Is Anyway!” He can be reached on Twitter @drawandstrike.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.