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Post by Admin on Jul 25, 2019 17:33:49 GMT
Towards the end of Robert Mueller’s testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, the former special counsel indicated that the FBI is currently investigating matters of blackmail and compromise involving those who were in President Donald Trump’s orbit.
During his allotted time, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) noted that because it was outside the Mueller investigation’s purview, the final report did not reach any counterintelligence conclusions regarding “any Trump administration officials who may be vulnerable to compromise or blackmail by Russia.”
“Those decisions were probably made in the FBI,” Mueller, himself a former head of the FBI, replied. “We referred to the counterintelligence goals of our investigation which were secondary to any criminal wrongdoing we could find.”
Krishnamoorthi, meanwhile, pointed out that the report also did not address whether Russian oligarchs engaged in money laundering through the president’s businesses. “And, of course, your office did not obtain the president’s tax returns, which could otherwise show foreign financial services, correct?” Krishnamoorthi added.
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Post by Admin on Jul 27, 2019 17:50:41 GMT
Christopher Steele’s infamous dossier is as much a story about the media as it is about Russiagate, the monumental scandal that it both spawned and richly informed. The dossier, after all, was being whispered about among Washington journalists—some who’d been briefed off the record—for months before it exploded into the open. After BuzzFeed made the controversial decision to publish it in early 2017, Steele himself became a media phenomenon, garnering mouthwatering profiles from the likes of The New Yorkerand Vanity Fair, and inspiring best-sellers like Luke Harding’s Collusion and David Corn and Michael Isikoff’s Russian Roulette. In certain quarters of the resistance, the dossier was a sacred script, the secret history of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s alleged malfeasance. But there were just as many doubters, on the far left and the hard right alike. (Did anyone really believe in the existence of the pee tape?) Steele, meanwhile, became the target of libel lawsuits, even though Steele himself was reportedly as dismayed about the dossier’s publication as anyone. (He has privately emphasized that it was not gospel, but rather a compendium of raw intelligence with an accuracy rate, according to the background sourcing in certain press reports, between 50 and 80 percent.) Now that Robert Mueller’s findings are mostly out in the open, the dossier and its author are perhaps facing their biggest close-up yet. In a front-page story this past Saturday, The New York Times reportedthat “F.B.I. agents had tracked down and interviewed one of Mr. Steele’s main sources, a Russian speaker from a former Soviet republic who had spent time in the West . . . After questioning him about where he’d gotten his information, they suspected he might have added his own interpretations to reports passed on by his sources . . . that made it harder to decide what to trust.” A higher-stakes moment will arrive with the results of a Justice Department probe, conducted by Inspector General Michael Horowitz, into the F.B.I.’s reliance on the dossier in applying for a FISA warrant to eavesdrop on former Trump adviser Carter Page. “That’s gonna be the ballgame on this: what does Michael Horowitz find?” said Isikoff, the chief investigative correspondent for Yahoo News. “If you read recent stories closely, there’s a lot of nervousness that he’s gonna come out with a critical report that reflects badly about the way the F.B.I. used the dossier. That is something a lot of us are going to be studying very closely.”
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