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FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok testifies before the House Committees on the Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform during a hearing on “Oversight of FBI and DOJ Actions Surrounding the 2016 Election,” on Capitol Hill, Thursday, July 12, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Today, Lindsey Graham released some new documents which highlight a few things that many of us have said from the earliest days of the Russia Hoax.’

First, major US media, in particular The New York Times and the Washington Post, used sources they either knew or should have known to be unreliable in reporting on the alleged collusion between the campaign of President Trump and any agent or agency of the Russian government. They did this either out of a partisan desire to damage the Trump presidency or out of callous disregard for basic decency. Either explanation is defensible, but, as a would-be astronaut once famously said, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

Second, the FBI, and by extension, the Department of Justice run by Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein, knew that the Steele dossier that served as the ‘Q source’ for the entire industry that grew up around the Russia Hoax was a fraud from a very early date and yet they continued to use that dossier to justify a FISA warrant on Carter Page.

The last point is that the FBI clearly knew long before James Comey, former FBI director and erstwhile professor of ‘ethical leadership’ ( I’m not making that up), was defenestrated that the entire premise of the Russia Hoax that fueled the appointment of a special counsel and sent a barely animated Robert Mueller and a posse of Democrat activist assclowns stumbling across America, indicting both the innocent and the imaginary. (READ: How Did Robert Mueller Manage to Indict an Imaginary Defendant?.)

First, the dossier.

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In January 2017, as the Trump administration, the FBI conducted a three-day interview with someone referred to the ‘primary sub-source’ for the Steele dossier. If you’re late to the game, Steele didn’t actually interview anyone. Rather he relied upon a network of ‘sub-sources’ to gather rumors for him to tart up in officialese and sell to the Clinton campaign. The whole process of how the dossier was assembled has always struck me as something that was bound to produce a product that was inaccurate or deliberately misleading. Steele was unable to travel to Russia because of his MI-6 employment. He was unable to ask questions or render judgment on the veracity of sources. Instead, he had to rely on paid stringers to find sources, and we can assume that if you didn’t produce information that you didn’t’ get paid. Plus, what is the over/under in how long it took the FSB to find out that people were asking questions about the actions of a US presidential candidate during an election?

The Steele Memo Is Much More Likely Russian Dezinformatsiya Than It is Intelligence
Here’s Why We Should Be Hoping That the Steele Dossier Was Written By the Russians
Key Russian Sources for the Steele Dossier Are Identified and They Will Blow Your Mind
FBI Knew Russian Intelligence Was Monitoring and Probably Influencing Christopher Steele’s Dossier and Still Used It

This is a summarized transcript of the debriefing but there are some major issues:

Next up is the FBI, in the person of no less Peter Strzok, being aghast at the malicious reporting by The New York Times. The story in question is Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence by Michael Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti, and Matt Apuzzo. The byline is important because Schmidt basically served as a conduit for FBI information throughout the Russia Hoax.

Here are some of the paragraphs with Strzok’s annotations beside them.

Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.
American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.

The officials said that one of the advisers picked up on the calls was Paul Manafort, who was Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman for several months last year and had worked as a political consultant in Ukraine. The officials declined to identify the other Trump associates on the calls.
The call logs and intercepted communications are part of a larger trove of information that the F.B.I. is sifting through as it investigates the links between Mr. Trump’s associates and the Russian government, as well as the hacking of the D.N.C., according to federal law enforcement officials. As part of its inquiry, the F.B.I. has obtained banking and travel records and conducted interviews, the officials said.
…
The officials would not disclose many details, including what was discussed on the calls, the identity of the Russian intelligence officials who participated, and how many of Mr. Trump’s advisers were talking to the Russians. It is also unclear whether the conversations had anything to do with Mr. Trump himself.

The F.B.I. has closely examined at least three other people close to Mr. Trump, although it is unclear if their calls were intercepted. They are Carter Page, a businessman and former foreign policy adviser to the campaign; Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative; and Mr. Flynn.

These are some other items Graham brings up:

This is how Graham’s committee staff sums it up:

Read the whole document here.

So, no later than February 14, 2017, the FBI knew the information in the Steele Dossier was bogus and they knew that there were no ties linking anyone on the Trump campaign to Russia. And yet, as someone said, they persisted. They also knew that someone inside the FBI was feeding bogus information to The New York Times and yet took no steps to correct what they knew to be false information being pumped into a very poisonous political debate. In fact, the FBI had enough information to shut down the Russia Hoax before it got started.

The unanswered question is who in the FBI would be feeding The New York Times information that was so wrong that even a Trump-hater like Strzok was appalled.