Declassified Documents Show ‘Bitter Argument’ Between CIA and FBI over Steele Dossier

The latest batch of declassified documents reveal that the CIA started a “bitter argument” with the FBI over whether or not to use Christopher Steele’s “very unvetted” material in an important Intelligence Community Assessment. The spooks were totally furious with the political instigators over the nasty things they did with Steele’s dirty dossier.

A bitter argument

A fresh pile of declassified documents hit the street on Tuesday and the first thing the pundits found was evidence of a “bitter argument” between the CIA and the FBI that happened right after President Donald Trump won the 2016 election. The Federal Bureau of Instigation wanted to use the totally made up Steele dossier in “an Intelligence Community Assessment regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election.” They bullied and intimidated the intelligence community until they got their way. They also illegally “continued using information from Steele to conduct surveillance against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.”

The originally classified Senate Intelligence Committee report released to Congress on April 21, “detailed the creation of an ICA released on Jan. 6, 2017.” Just before Christmas, on December 20, 2016, FBI anti-Trump conspirators stunned CIA analysts when they insisted on including information from Steele, that’s what started the argument.

Specifically, FBI director James Comey and his deputy Andrew McCabe sat down with “their counterparts at the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.” They swore up and down that Steele’s fantasies were “relevant to the question of Russian interference in the 2016 election.” The argument started quickly and grew heated.

The CIA called it bullsh*t

The declassified reports are full of bureaucratic language which boils down to the CIA knew it was bullsh*t. That’s why they were so angry in the argument. They had “deep reservations about the dossier” That means “seems like a set-up.” What they really told the Senate was “we would have never included that report in a CIA-only assessment because the source was so indirect.” They also noted, “we made sure we indicated we didn’t use it in our analysis, and if it had been a CIA-only product we wouldn’t have included it at all.” They would have tossed it in the trash where it belonged.

A boiled down version of Steele’s freaky file was “included as a two-page annex to the ICA.” One CIA analyst told the Senate committee in July of 2017, that the agency had “a bitter argument” with the FBI over whether to use that information in the annex. “I can tell you that there is no information coming from [redacted] sources that would corroborate any of that.” He also declared “Steele’s Trump-related information was ‘very unvetted.'”

John Brennan, who was CIA director at the time and sat in on the argument, reports that “the CIA ‘pushed back’ against Comey’s requests to include Steele’s information in the body of the ICA.” One deputy director of analysis “was very concerned about polluting the ICA with this material.” Brennan admits that they caved in and “the CIA eventually agreed with Comey to include the information.” Another interesting side note is Brennan also told the Senate that while they were working on the ICA, he got a weird call from “someone in the British government.” The U.K. wanted the U.S. to know they had nothing to do with Steele’s madness, and he was out in the cold on this one.

“He wanted to make sure that I understood and that others in the senior officialdom of the U.S. government understood that that officer, Steele, had been a former [redacted] but had no current relationship with [redacted] and that dossier was not put together in any way with [redacted] support,” Brennan said. “So he wanted to make sure there was a separation there.”