Originally published Jan 7 2019

The intent of the Steele dossier plot was to generate defamatory, unconfirmable BS about Trump — claiming that his campaign was plotting treasonously with the Russian state to kneecap Hillary - and then to filter it through a retired MI6 agent, Christopher Steele, who, according to Comey, had a “good reputation” with the Deep State. In this way, the derived “dossier” could be distributed to American officials and the corporate media as an “intelligence product”, and Comey could claim to view it as credible because Steele was considered reliable. Steele took care to remain at arm’s length from those who actually generated the lies — he used sources who in turn asked others to write imaginative slanders against Trump and Russia. So Steele was never in a position to directly question the sources of the claims, and could shrug when asked about its reliability.

A Ukrainian former diplomat friendly with Lee Stranahan, Andrii Telizhenko, has stated that he has talked with Ukrainians who were approached by a representative of Orbis Intelligence (Steele’s company) and paid to simply “make stuff up” that defamed Trump.

https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201808281067517362-Steele-Sought-Bogus-...

In other words, there was never any good faith effort to produce reliable intelligence on Trump — it was a hit job from the get go.

It has been credibly speculated that Skripal was involved in this scam — Skripal is close to Steele’s Orbis colleague Pablo Miller — and that the effort to assassinate him was intended to insure that he never talked to the press about how the dossier was produced. Moreover, the attack was also employed by the British government as a false flag incriminating Russia — a twofer! Since Skripal remains incommunicado to this day, it is reasonable to suspect that the British Deep Staters who are now silencing him are the same people who undertook to silence him by poisoning him. It’s also notable that Skripal has ties to Ukrainian intelligence — and Ukrainians were used to generate some of the dossier content. While we don’t yet have hard evidence linking Skripal to the dossier hoax, these hypotheses at least make better sense than many of the improbable fables that the British government has asked us to swallow about the Skripal affair.

Although Steele and colleagues made diligent efforts to convince the US mainstream media to publish the dossier’s contents (some of which were inherently absurd) prior to the 2016 election, they had little success in this regard prior to Michael Isikoff’s article for Yahoo News in September of that year, which focused on its allegations regarding Carter Page. Meanwhile, our Deep State used the dossier as the primary basis for achieving a FISA warrant against Page, which effectively enabled surveillance of the entire Trump campaign team through the “two hop” rule. They knew that, if they couldn’t prove the dossier’s allegations, at least they could likely dig up some other dirt that could used to damage Trump and his associates. This “witch-hunt” strategy was greatly amplified early in Trump’s presidency, when Comey’s firing and his subsequent leak of self-drafted memos gave Rosenstein an excuse to appoint Comey’s longtime pal Mueller as Special Counsel. To aid the vendetta against Trump, Rosenstein allowed Mueller’s probe a very broad scope (a possibility that would have been foreclosed if Trump’s feckless Attorney General Jeff Sessions hadn’t recused himself from involvement in the inquiry just as soon as he was confirmed.) Mueller then proceeded to assemble a corps of highly partisan Democratic lawyers dedicated to taking down Trump, who continue to pursue their prey to this day.

Incredibly, the perpetrators of the “Intelligence Community Assessment” of Jan. 2106 — the unclassified version of which is essentially evidence free, as even the New York Times has acknowledged — chose to include the Steele dossier in the Appendix of the classified version of the Assessment. This fact, as well as Comey’s briefing of some of the dossier’s contents to Trump — and the leaking of this info to the press, likely by Clapper — established the predicate for Buzzfeed’s subsequent publication of the entire dossier. The inherent imbecility of the dossier will be evident to anyone unwilling to believe that Putin had been grooming Trump as his Manchurian candidate for years prior to his 2016 nomination. Yet the Deep Staters who employed this as the key evidence in the Page FISA application attested to its accuracy before a federal judge — a felonious lie. The applicants also failed to inform the FISA judge that the Clinton campaign had paid for the dossier, cited the Isikoff story as seemingly independent confirmation of the dossier’s allegations, and purposely omitted exculpatory evidence favorable to Page.

Moreover, at least until recently, those afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome have maintained that “much of the dossier has been confirmed”. (Indeed, the authors of the dossier cleverly crafted several of their lies around facts in the public domain — such as the fact that Page had made a recent trip to Russia.) To this day, many TDS sufferers still believe that Trump conspired treasonously with Russia to block Hillary’s election, and that Russian hackers were the source of the Wikileaks DNC/Podesta releases (despite the absence of any public evidence confirming this claim, and the firm denials of Assange, a purveyor of inconvenient truths who is surely a thousand times more credible than the Deep State perjurers and war criminals accusing him of acting as a tool of the Russians.)

The Steele dossier hoax was of course only one of the legally dubious and blatantly partisan strategies which the Deep State, in both the US and the UK, employed to spy on Trump’s campaign and entrap his associates in seeming “collusion”. These included rampant unmasking of the communications of Trump associates with foreigners, sharing of British intelligence with their American counterparts (thereby doing an end-run around the 4th Amendment), and use of agents provocateur (likely including Stefan Halper, Joseph Mifsud, Alexander Downer, Henry Greenberg, and Rob Goldstone). Trump had committed the unpardonable sin of expressing a desire to get along with Russia, and as an untutored and shoot-from-the-lip bumpkin, he couldn’t be expected to use the proper deceitful lies to justify American Empire. Whereas Hillary was the Deep State’s wet dream — and the possibility and then the fact of Trump blocking her ascension to power doubtless drove them up the wall.

There are many sound bases for criticizing Trump and a number of the counterproductive policies he has implemented or supported. But by going down the Russiagate rabbit hole with unbridled enthusiasm and a total lack of intellectual integrity, Democratic pols and their allies in the mainstream media may only succeed, in the long run, in boosting Trump’s popularity with much of the American public. And the mean-spirited slanders of the Russian government that are the essential predicate for the Trump collusion fantasy, are helping to gin up an unwarranted Russophobia in much of the American public. This puts the safety of the entire world at risk, and helps to keep our money flowing down the Military-Industrial Complex rat hole —the result being that our government will continue to lack the money needed to provide our citizens with the range of humane social benefits that most sane civilized countries take for granted.