Saturday, January 27, 2018

It looks like the ‘James Bond’ behind the dossier let a Putin pawn do all the work

Virtually all of the credibility of the so-called Steele dossier — and the Trump-Russia collusion narrative and investigations it spawned — hinges on Christopher Steele’s vaunted reputation as a former British intelligence agent who spied on Moscow and still maintains a network of sources inside the Kremlin.
But now we are finding out from newly released transcripts that he never even set foot inside Russia to compile his dossier, and that he relied instead on an ex-journalist-turned-p.r. consultant to do much of his investigating there. In fact, this non-intelligence figure may be his main “Russian source” of information.
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-South Carolina) asked Steele’s Clinton-paid handler Glenn Simpson, during the House Intelligence Committee’s Nov. 14 closed-door hearing, if Steele had gone “to Russia as part of this project,” to which Simpson replied, “No, sir.” Steele, at the time he compiled the dossier, hadn’t been back to Russia in 17 years.
So, Gowdy pressed, “How was he able to accumulate information in Russia if he didn’t go?” Simpson claimed that Steele ran a “network of subsources or subcontractors” who traveled around Russia and gathered information for him.

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