And, in turn, anti-Trump FBI officials were applauding the useful media coverage. On the night the news broke, Peter Strzok texted Lisa Page to report that he was with a colleague watching CNN and added: “Hey let me know when you can talk. We’re discussing whether, now that this is out, we use it as a pretext to go interview some people.”26
If the target is anyone but Trump, how do most media people feel about cops being so comfortable employing leaked rumors against their targets that they put in writing that they are using them as a pretext to investigate?
FBI boss Jim Comey, for his part, wasn’t done with dossier deceptions. The day after the CNN and BuzzFeed stories, January 11, 2017, Comey emailed Director of National Intelligence Clapper to urge him not to say in a public release, “The [Intelligence Community] has not made any judgment that the information in [the Steele election reporting] is reliable.…” Comey wrote:
I say that because we HAVE concluded that the source [Steele] is reliable and has a track record with us of reporting reliable information; we have some visibility into his source network, some of which we have determined to be sub-sources in a position to report on such things; and much of what he reports in the current document is consistent with and corroborative of other reporting included in the body of the main [Intelligence Community] report.27
Washington political operators like Comey are not known for being forthright, but this one could go down in the annals of deceptive bureaucratic memo making. His short note directly contradicted the evidence his own bureau had been collecting for months. That same day Comey wasn’t any more honest in a phone call with President-elect Trump. The Justice Department inspector general notes:
They discussed a media report that had disclosed the “salacious” information, and Trump’s concern about how that had been “leaked.” Comey said that, among other things, he remembered telling Trump that the source of the information was “not a government document, and it’s not classified.” Comey also remembered telling Trump that to “speak of it as a leak doesn’t make sense” because “a lot of people in Washington had [the information],” and Comey said he told Trump that he had previously warned Trump that it might soon be published by the media.28
As Comey’s own correspondence shows, he was well aware that serious news outlets would not run with the Steele rumors unless they had a hook—like leaked news that someone like Comey had somehow managed to get unverified rumors added as an attachment to a presidential briefing.
To clarify, this report from the inspector general was not included in his work showing how Comey’s FBI abused the FISA court and withheld exculpatory evidence in its anti-Trump surveillance. This material comes from a separate inspector general’s report that concluded that “Comey’s retention, handling, and dissemination of certain Memos violated Department and FBI policies, and his FBI Employment Agreement.”29 It is also not to be confused with still another report in which the inspector general excoriated Comey for his mishandling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Serial abusers of power like Comey keep government watchdogs employed.
Anyway, two nights after CNN and BuzzFeed used the Comey-created news excuse to share allegations about Trump, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius showed up on MSNBC and made the preposterous argument that if the intelligence chiefs had not included Steele’s unfounded gossip in their assessment, then they could have been accused of violating “standard procedure.”30
Protocol demands that presidents are briefed on every half-baked conspiracy theory circulating in Washington? This was too much for program host Chris Matthews, who responded, “But we know what happened, David! You’re a journalist. What happened was this gave license to the blog—to the Web site out there to take it. Buzzfeed grabbed this as license. It was a catalyst for them. OK, you’re going to give a two-page attachment out, we’ll show the whole 35-page dossier.”31
Ignatius insisted that including the Steele material in the briefing was “appropriate.” He probably did not realize that the very day he was making this extraordinary claim, the Crossfire Hurricane team at the FBI was receiving an intelligence report identifying a specific inaccuracy in the Steele reporting and assessing that it was “part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations.”32
Not that this intelligence assessment or the huge volume of exculpatory evidence on Carter Page would be included in submissions to the FISA court that day as Comey signed the first wiretap renewal application.
The huge unreported story was the abuse of FBI powers, but the next day’s Washington Post simply provided more assistance to the abusers. David Ignatius, fresh off his MSNBC appearance, called for a “full investigation” of the dossier claims, seemingly unaware that the FBI had been investigating and accumulating mounting evidence of their falsity.33 Ignatius also wrote about Michael Flynn, the retired Army general preparing to become national security adviser in the Trump White House:
According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking. What did Flynn say, and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions? The Logan Act (though never enforced) bars U.S. citizens from correspondence intending to influence a foreign government about “disputes” with the United States. Was its spirit violated? The Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Someone in the U.S. government had committed a felony by leaking Flynn’s name from a wiretapped conversation. Not as outrageous but highly disturbing was that a newspaper columnist, of all people, would question whether a U.S. citizen had violated the “spirit” of the Logan Act. As noted previously and as Ignatius should have known, the appalling “spirit” of the Logan Act was to criminalize free speech. Only when targeting a
