The FBI left the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approved the application, in the dark about the fact that the information was paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
The source of the information, identified as Source #1 in the documents, was former British spy Christopher Steele.
The information became publicly known as the “Steele dossier” and consists of a series of uncorroborated and salacious claims mostly from Kremlin-linked sources.
Nevertheless, the FBI was able to secure a spy warrant based on the Steele dossier, which was commissioned in April 2016.
The same dossier was also a driving force behind the media narrative that then-candidate Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.
During the election campaign, Steele and Fusion GPS representatives gave secret briefings to prominent media organizations, court documents in the United Kingdom reveal.
Isikoff’s report was in turn used by the FBI as additional evidence in its FISA application to spy on Page, without disclosing that it was the same information from the same source.
CNN eventually found a way to report on the dossier in early January 2017, when it was provided information by then-director of national intelligence James Clapper.
The investigation of the House intelligence committee revealed that Clapper had lied to Congress about his contact with CNN.
It states that after first denying having made contact, Clapper admitted that he spoke with CNN’s Jake Tapper a day before the network ran a controversial article saying that President Barack Obama and then-president-elect Trump had been briefed on the contents of the dossier.
The leaked information of the briefing provided the news hook that CNN—and, by extension, other news organizations—needed to report on the unverified information contained in the Steele dossier they had sat on for months.
Buzzfeed News went as far as publishing the entire dossier online, which in turn allowed the public to see the shoddiness of the claims.
Nevertheless, wild accusations such as the so-called “Trump pee tape” contained in the dossier have now been widely spread.
Besides the FBI and the media, the same disinformation was also spread among politicians.
Information contained in the dossier was also provided by then-CIA Director John Brennan to the so-called “gang of eight” in Congress. Following the briefing from Brennan, then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid wrote a public letter to Comey accusing Trump of colluding with the Russian government and calling on Comey to investigate this and make the investigation public. Media then reported on Reid’s accusations.
To this day, most of what we hear from politicians and media organizations when it comes to the alleged collusion between Trump and the Russian government can be traced back to the same source—the unverified Steele dossier.
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