Just when you start to think the FBI couldn’t be exposed as any more corrupt, another revelation drops and ups the ante. That happened on Tuesday after a new report showed that the FBI wasn’t content with just following the facts as they had them prior to the 2016 election.
While it’s long been known that the bureau was desperately searching for something to stop Donald Trump’s election, things apparently went much further than just mining badly sourced intelligence. According to the report, which is based on testimony from Igor Danchenko’s ongoing trial, the FBI attempted to pay Christopher Steele up to $1,000,000 to “prove” his discredited dossier was true. All of this happened prior to election day in 2016.
Shortly before the 2016 election, the FBI offered retired British spy Christopher Steele “up to $1 million” to prove the explosive allegations in his dossier about Donald Trump, a senior FBI analyst testified Tuesday.
The cash offer was made during an October 2016 meeting between Steele and several top FBI officials who were trying to corroborate Steele’s claims that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia to win the election.
FBI supervisory analyst Brian Auten testified that Steele never got the money because he could not “prove the allegations.”
Auten also said Steele refused to provide the names of any of his sources during that meeting, and that Steele didn’t give the FBI anything during that meeting that corroborated the claims in his explosive dossier.
Ultimately Steele couldn’t prove his claims because the claims weren’t true. That’s not exactly noteworthy given we’ve known the dossier was garbage from nearly the moment it became public. Steele was a grifter, pedaling claims fed to him by Russians who knew they were spreading disinformation. That was one of the great ironies of the entire ordeal. While the FBI has constantly screeched about Russian election interference, they are the ones who got suckered by it.
I think the big thing that’s revealed here, and disturbingly so, is exactly how far the FBI was willing to go to try to clear the deck for Hillary Clinton. They weren’t just taking the facts as they came, waiting for a case to be built organically. Instead, they were taking taxpayer money and attempting to pay off a foreign spy to provide campaign-destroying information on Donald Trump. For all the talk about Watergate over the years, that’s infinitely worse and more corrupt.
You can’t even draw a parallel with prosecutors paying people for tips because in that case, there’s already a crime that’s been committed and pinpointed. Here, the FBI was just shooting into the dark with no basis whatsoever, desperately hoping to come up with anything that could stop Trump’s rise to the White House. That’s the only motivation that could have existed given the lack of any evidence at all of Steele’s salacious assertions.
Will anyone be held accountable, up to and including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton? Of course, they won’t be. I don’t even expect any lower-level FBI agents to take the fall here. The bureaucracy protects its own, and with John Durham stuck dealing with D.C. judges and juries, there will be no justice served. Once again, those who recognize the corruption that went on are left hoping that one day, someone will enter the White House with the strategic ability and courage to tear the FBI down brick by brick. Until then, the pain will continue.