Three separate DOJ investigations have now found evidence that has discredited handling of FBI informants Christopher Steele and Igor Danchenko in the Russia collusion case and Smirnov in the Biden inquiry.
"When asked by the committee about their confidence in the confidential human source, the FBI told the committee the confidential human source was credible and trusted, had worked with the FBI for over a decade, and had been paid six figures."
The report also found the FBI failed to vet the concerns and continued paying Danchenko large sums despite enormous red flags and using information from Danchenko to try to corroborate another suspect piece of evidence in the Russia collusion probe, the now-infamous Steele dossier.
Even more disturbing, Durham wrote, FBI executives in headquarters and the Washington D.C. field office "Resisted efforts to have Danchenko closed as a source. Instead, management supported continued payments to him, requiring FBI Headquarters approval of sizable amounts of money and insisted that Danchenko was very valuable to the FBI's counterintelligence program."
"The FBI obtained additional information raising significant questions about the reliability of the Steele election reporting, the FBI failed to reassess the Steele reporting relied upon in the FISA applications, and did not fully advise" prosecutors or the FISA court, Horowitz wrote.
There were also CIA concerns that Steele had been infiltrated by Russian intelligence and possible fed disinformation, but the FBI did not readily reassess Steele as a source, the IG wrote in footnotes later declassified by the DOJ. "The FBI received a U.S. intelligence report on January 12, 2017, warning of an inaccuracy in the dossier related to Michael Cohen, and assessing that the material was"part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations," Horowitz noted as one of several missed red flags in the FBI's handling of the Steele dossier.
A year later when the FBI re-interviewed Steele, the British spy clearly told the FBI he and his business partner were motivated by a bias against Trump, a problem similar to what Weiss alleged Thursday about Smirnov and Biden.
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