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DEEP STATE: Steele's Sources Found, a Lot Closer to White House Than to Russia

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A new document released by the Senate Judiciary Committee indicates that Christopher Steele — the former MI5 agent who assembled the infamous Trump dossier at the behest of Fusion GPS with funds from the Clinton campaign and the DNC — received information fed to him by Hillary Clinton operatives and Obama’s State Department.

The document, released Monday, was actually part of a criminal referral written to the Department of Justice by committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, both Republicans, asking the DOJ to consider investigating Steele on criminal charges.

They contend that Steele lied to FBI investigators about his contacts with the media or had been misrepresented, the document contends.

However, perhaps the biggest revelation in the referral, which was originally sent to the Justice Department at the beginning of January, was that Steele had information passed to him by intensely political sources — sources that have been a lot closer to the White House then supposed shadowy agents in Red Square.

The document notes the existence of an additional memo not included in BuzzFeed’s original release of the Trump dossier, in which a “foreign sub source is in touch with (name redacted) a friend of the Clintons, who passed it to (name redacted),” the Washington Times reported.

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“According to the referral, Steele wrote the additional memo based on anti-Trump information that originated with a foreign source,” the Washington Examiner reported.

“In a convoluted scheme outlined in the referral, the foreign source gave the information to an unnamed associate of Hillary and Bill Clinton, who then gave the information to an unnamed official in the Obama State Department, who then gave the information to Steele.

“Steele wrote a report based on the information, but the redacted version of the referral does not say what Steele did with the report after that.”

The existence of another memo as well as sources within the White House and the Clinton circle was reported with a relative muted response from the media, but it’s not exactly minor news.

Do you think Christopher Steele will be indicted?

The first major takeaway is that Steele’s firing by the FBI for lying to them about his contacts with the media could have broader repercussions than they may have originally intended. In particular, there’s the fact that the he may have broken the law by not being entirely truthful about his relations with the media.

The second takeaway is that before this, we were always told that Steele’s sources had been primarily Russian. While there were other problems with this — paid sources, relying on third-party information — it still seemed that part of the dossier investigation had remained sealed off from Democrat taint.

Now, it looks like the information was coming from the State Department when President Obama was in the White House, as well as by the inner circle of Hillary Clinton, the one-time White House resident who was ruthlessly trying to manage a return to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

On one bit of info (which, in all fairness, we don’t know the importance of), Steele was fed the information via two very political actors. And this comes right on the heel of the Nunes memo, which indicates Steele’s dossier was used to obtain a FISA warrant, with only a desultory footnote identifying the dossier as a political document. According to Rep. Jim Jordan, that footnote also made it unclear who had actually paid for the memo — a rather important bit of information, one might think.

In other words, there is a lot of explaining to do on the Democrat side. We’ll see if the Schiff rebuttal memo manages to dig the party out of the hole it’s created for itself, but that’ll certainly take a whole lot of explaining — particularly since this is going to have those who use the phrase “deep state” frequently up in arms.

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C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014. Aside from politics, he enjoys spending time with his wife, literature (especially British comic novels and modern Japanese lit), indie rock, coffee, Formula One and football (of both American and world varieties).
Birthplace
Morristown, New Jersey
Education
Catholic University of America
Languages Spoken
English, Spanish
Topics of Expertise
American Politics, World Politics, Culture




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