‘Multiple Levels of Hearsay Upon Hearsay’

Photo: Chad Crowe

What the media doesn’t want you to know about the Horowitz report.

Most news coverage of the Horowitz report has minimized or ignored its most devastating aspects. Granted, the inspector general’s account doesn’t make for easy reading. It’s repetitive to a fault, and its insistent use of vague identifiers—“Case Agent 1,” “Supervisory Intel Analyst,” “Primary Sub-source”—rather than names makes its narrative insistently soporific.

Then again, many journalists seem determined not to explain how the report vitiates the “Steele dossier” and discredits its author, Christopher Steele, a former British spy who peddled third-hand hearsay to gullible paymasters at both the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. With a few exceptions, journalists have eagerly embraced former FBI Director James Comey and former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe as guardians of democracy rather than culpable apologists for dire threats to Americans’ civil liberties.

Every American who cares about civil liberties should peruse at least pages 186-93, wherein the inspector general’s staff shreds the Steele dossier piece by piece and indicts the bureau’s reliance on visibly shoddy work that any unbiased intelligence professional would have quickly discarded.

Mr. Steele confessed in a 2016 FBI interview that one of his top two sources was a “boaster” and “egotist” who “may engage in some embellishment” (page 110). Mr. Steele had asserted to interviewing agents that this person—whom he variously called “Source D,” “Source E,” a Trump “associate” and “Person 1”; we’ll go with P1 for short—was the source for both the dossier’s most salacious claims about Donald Trump and the information on which the FBI relied to obtain a warrant to spy on former campaign aide Carter Page.

Yet Mr. Steele’s “Primary Sub-source”—we’ll abbreviate that to PSS—contradicted those claims, telling the FBI that P1 didn’t furnish any salacious information. Mr. Steele claimed that PSS and P1 had met two or three times, but PSS said their only contact was a single 10- to 15-minute phone conversation.

Read the rest from the WSJ HERE.

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