Durham vs. Horowitz: Tension Over Truth and Consequences Grips the FBI's Trump-Russia Reckoning

Instead, according to the FBI Electronic Communication that opened the Trump-Russia probe, the FBI only heard that Papadopoulos, in his conversation with Downer, "Suggested" that "The Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia" that it could "Assist" the Trump campaign "With the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to Mrs. Clinton."

If the FBI felt that it had "An insufficient basis" to spy on Papadopoulos, how could the FBI deem him to be a sufficient basis for investigating and spying on members of the campaign that he worked for?

Although Horowitz took the FBI at its word that Steele played no role in triggering Crossfire Hurricane, he did so after documenting multiple instances of FBI lies - including about Steele's role in the probe.

These abuses included embellishing Steele's established reliability as an FBI source; omitting information that undermined the credibility of Steele's main source, Igor Danchenko, and the fanciful claims he told Steele about prostitutes and billion dollar bribes; concealing that Steele was a source for a Yahoo News article that the FBI also cited as source material; omitting that both Page and Papadopoulos had made exonerating statements to FBI informants; and, most notably, omitting that the Clinton campaign was paying for Steele's services.

According to the FBI's prepared talking points, the Senate was erroneously told that Steele's main source Danchenko "Did not cite any significant concerns with the way his reporting was characterized in the dossier." Danchenko, the FBI additionally claimed, also "Maintains trusted relationships with individuals who are capable of reporting on the material he collected for Steele." The FBI also said that its discussions with Danchenko "Confirm that the dossier was not fabricated by Steele."

The FBI resorted to more deception: In an explosive Jan. 31 statement aimed at thwarting the Nunes memo's release, the FBI claimed that it had "Grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo's accuracy."

That Horowitz has already uncovered so many inconsistencies in the FBI's account - and that Durham has gone out of his way to question the FBI predication that Horowitz accepted - suggests that the Steele dossier and the Alfa Bank "Secret hotline" story are far from the only fraudulent Trump-Russia activity in Durham's sights.

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