The FBI lawyer who altered the record is named Kevin Clinesmith. He’s among a number of anti-Trump staff who later joined the Mueller investigation and then left after the exposure of a series of texts demonstrating extreme bias against Donald Trump and his supporters. After the Trump victory in the 2016 election, Clinesmith had texted a colleague, “viva la resistance.”21
The falsifying of evidence against Page was among the reasons Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued a public order on December 17, 2019, demanding that the FBI report on what it was doing to ensure accurate applications that include all material facts.22
That description certainly didn’t apply to the FBI’s applications to wiretap Page. Officials never told the court that Clinton and the Democrats paid for the dossier and never fully disclosed Steele’s Russian connections. The FBI also falsely suggested that Steele had not been the source of a Yahoo! News report about Page, so the story appeared to corroborate Steele’s claims.23
From the fall of 2016 until the early summer of 2017, the FBI requested and received a series of surveillance authorizations on Page without telling the court that the thin, misleading evidence it had presented was becoming even less believable.
Steele never told the FBI who had actually collected the information for his dossier. But the FBI did manage to find this person by January 2017 and in the course of conversations over several months learned that the information was garbage. In the language of intelligence, this person was the “Primary Sub-source” who had drawn on a “network of sources”—which may have sounded authoritative, but when the FBI found this person, the source said it wasn’t so much a network of sources “but rather friends with whom he/she has conversations about current events and government relations,” according to a footnote from the inspector general’s report, which was finally declassified in April of 2020.24
Even if one were inclined to believe this anonymous person passing on comments from anonymous friends, it turned out that the whole anonymous crew was being misquoted. In January of 2017, according to the inspector general’s office, “the Primary Sub-source told the FBI that he/she had not seen Steele’s reports until they became public that month” and indicated that “Steele misstated or exaggerated the Primary Sub-source’s statements in multiple sections of the reporting.” For example, one story described as “confirmed” by Steele was, in the words of the source, “rumor and speculation.”25
During a March 2017 interview, “the Primary Sub-source said he/she made it clear to Steele that he/she had no proof to support the statements from his/her sub-sources and that ‘it was just talk.’ ” An FBI agent reported that the Primary Sub-source said the information came from “word of mouth and hearsay,” conversations “with friends over beers” and that comments about Trump’s alleged sexual activities, were made in “jest.”26 Looking back now in 2020, current Attorney General William Barr observes that “the dossier pretty much collapsed at that point—and yet they continued to use it as a basis for pursuing this counterintelligence investigation.”27
The Steele information wasn’t credible, but it wasn’t necessarily the result of fun and games in 2016. U.S. intelligence later reported that Russian intelligence services were aware of Steele’s effort to compile his dossier material as early as July 2016.28 The FBI was warned as early as January 2017 that Russian intelligence appeared to be feeding false information to Steele.
A recently declassified footnote from the IG report states:
A January 12, 2017, report relayed information from [REDACTED] outlining an inaccuracy in a limited subset of Steele’s reporting.… The [REDACTED] stated that it did not have high confidence in this subset of Steele’s reporting and assessed that the referenced subset was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations. A second report from the same [REDACTED] five days later stated that a person named in the limited subset of Steele’s reporting had denied representations in the reporting and the [REDACTED] assessed that the person’s denials were truthful. A [U.S. Intelligence Community] report dated February 27, 2017, contained information about an individual with reported connections to Trump and Russia who claimed that the public reporting about the details of Trump’s sexual activities in Moscow during a trip in 2013 were false, and that they were the product of [Russian Intelligence Services] “infiltrat[ing] a source into the network” of a [REDACTED] who compiled a dossier of information on Trump’s activities.29
Essentially the collusion case had collapsed by early 2017, its core evidence exposed as discredited barroom humor or worse. Yet the FBI leadership continued to seek wiretap renewals without telling FISA judges the truth—and continued to feed reporters an empty conspiracy tale.
Despite the collapse of the case as Trump was taking office, former Obama administration officials and Trump adversaries in Congress would spend years misleading the public with televised allegations and dark conspiracy theories even as many of them were admitting privately under oath that they hadn’t seen any collusion evidence. A parade of former senior intelligence and law enforcement officials from the Obama administration took turns condemning Trump on CNN and MSNBC. But when the cameras were turned off, their stories changed.
Current director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe was in Congress at the time trying to get to the bottom of the collusion con. In September 2018 he would appear
