The Washington Post just ran a breaking story on John Kelly telling Rod Rosenstein and Christopher Wray to anticipate that the White House will agree to the release of the memo compiled by the House Intelligence Committee. At the end of the story is this:
People familiar with the Intelligence Committee’s memo say its main target is the FBI’s relationship with Christopher Steele, a British ex-spy who was hired in 2016 by a Washington research firm to examine any connections between Trump and Russian leaders. The work, which was funded by Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee, led to a dossier of allegations against Trump and some of his advisers — allegations that the president has denied.
Within the FBI, some of Steele’s work was eventually incorporated into a 2016 application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to conduct surveillance on Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser, according to people familiar with the matter. Republican lawmakers have suggested that Steele provided bad information to the FBI, leading to a broader probe of Trump associates.
People familiar with the memo said it does not conclusively say whether Steele intentionally passed suspect information to the FBI or simply made a mistake.
Holy Crap. Talk about burying a lede. This is basically the House memo in a single paragraph and it is admitted to by someone “familiar with the memo,” my guess:
This is a huge revelation…if true. The FBI had to certify to a judge that the information they were submitting was validated. The admission that there is a question over whether the information provided by Steele was bad accidentally or on purpose is totally immaterial. If the information was bad, the FBI certified its validity to a FISA court judge. That, my friends, is a metaphor for the entire Russia collusion investigation.
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