Vichy Republican John McCain Gave FISA Dossier to FBI and Media Outlets One Month After Trump’s Election

The great Billy Joel sings “We didn’t start the fire”.

Well, according to those in the know, the late Senator from Arizona, John McCain, did.

FoxNews.com reports that

Newly unsealed court filings show how the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and an associate shared with the FBI and a host of media outlets the unverified dossier that alleged the Russians had compromising information on now-President Trump.

McCain had denied being the source for BuzzFeed after it published the dossier, which was funded by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, but had acknowledged giving it to the FBI.

In a newly unsealed declaration from September, former senior counterintelligence FBI agent Bill Priestap confirmed that the FBI received a copy of the first 33 pages of the dossier in December 2016 from McCain.

In another filing, David Kramer — a former State Department official and McCain associate — said in a Dec. 13, 2017, deposition that the dossier was given to him by author and former British spy Christopher Steele, which he then provided to more than a dozen journalists at outlets including CNN, BuzzFeed and The Washington Post. The details were first reported by The Daily Caller.

The report was also shared with State Department official Victoria Nuland, Obama National Security Council official Celeste Wallander and Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill.

The filings were unsealed as part of an ongoing libel case against BuzzFeed by a Russian businessman.

In his deposition, Kramer said that McCain gave a copy of the dossier to then-FBI Director James Comey on Dec. 9. Kramer told investigators that it was the sense from Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson that “having Senator McCain provide it to the FBI would give it a little more oomph than it had had up until that point.”

“I think they felt a senior Republican was better to be the recipient of this rather than a Democrat because if it were a Democrat, I think that the view was that it would have been dismissed as a political attack,” he said.

Kramer also described how BuzzFeed News reporter Ken Bensinger came to get hold of the dossier, before the outlet became the first to publish it in its entirety.

He said that he showed Bensinger the dossier in December at the McCain Institute, but did not allow him to take pictures of it. But Kramer said he left Bensinger alone to read the memos and, in that time, Bensinger took photos of the dossier.

Kramer said he panicked when he saw that BuzzFeed News had published the document in its entirety online on Jan. 10, and immediately sought to have it taken down.

“I called Mr. Bensinger, and my first words out of my mouth were ‘you are gonna get people killed,’” he said.

The FBI extensively relied on the dossier in its warrant applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court in seeking to surveil Trump aide Carter Page — even though some of the dossier’s claims have been called into question, including a claim that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen traveled to Prague to pay off Russian hackers and other more salacious claims about Trump himself.

Back on February 1, 2018, TheHIll.com relayed a slightly different story…

“The fact that half to three-quarters of the evidence the FBI used to unleash the most awesome of surveillance powers upon Donald Trump’s inner circle came from sources tied directly to his Democratic opponent should worry us all, especially when that happened during an election,” said one senior Republican directly familiar with the evidence, describing the party’s core concerns.

“The FBI allowed itself to be used by Clinton partisans to parlay single-sourced, mostly unverified evidence into a counterintelligence probe with clear weaknesses that weren’t disclosed,” the source added.

Sources in both parties and in law enforcement say the emergence of Steele and his dossier in the summer of 2016 gave the FBI the jolt to open a full counterintelligence probe into alleged Trump-Russia collusion. 

Steele, a British intelligence officer for decades, had provided reliable evidence that helped the FBI in a prior foreign corruption case and his early package of information contained multiple allegations of Trump-Russia collusion organized and sourced liked real raw intelligence, sources said. 

So the FBI put great credence in Steele’s work product when it approached the courts for legal surveillance authority, even though much of what Steele provided could not be immediately corroborated, the sources said. 

Steele was employed by the research firm Fusion GPS, which was in turn being paid to do opposition research on Trump by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

Fusion GPS was initially hired by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website backed in part by Republican donor Paul Singer, to dig into Trump. As Trump was clinching the GOP nomination, the Free Beacon told Fusion GPS to stop doing research. Fusion GPS was then hired by Clinton and the DNC through the law firm Perkins Coie.

(Now, pay attention to these next few paragraphs. Here’s the interesting part.)

Republican investigators say they have evidence that Steele first approached the FBI with his allegations on July 5, 2016, the same day then-FBI Director James Comey announced he would not pursue criminal charges against Clinton for passing more than 100 classified documents through her private email server.

Republicans believe the date of Steele’s approach to the FBI is evidence of politics, since his employer was being paid by a Clinton campaign that for months was angered by the bureau’s probe of the email controversy.

Republican investigators say it is unclear exactly when the FBI learned that Steele was being paid by Clinton’s campaign. But by late July 2016, just weeks after he first contacted the FBI, the formal counterintelligence probe was opened, the sources said.

The late Senator John McCain spent most of his political life playing both ends against the middle to his own advantage.

The fact that he facilitated the FISA Dossier getting into the hands of the Obama Administration’s FBI is not a shock to me.

And, neither is the fact that, according to the discrepancies between what the “Republican Investigators” told The Hill.com and what the newly-released transcripts reveal, some of McCain’s fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill were covering his duplicity.

McCain’s hatred for everything that Trump represented, in terms of upsetting the Washingtonian Status Quo either blinded the Senator from Arizona to the fact that he was doing Obama and Hillary’s dirty work or he knew the source of the funding for the FISA Dossier and he just didn’t care.

The second scenario would not surprise me at all.

McCain was an Old School Politician, a Vichy Republican who would screw his own political party in a heartbeat.

The word “populism” first reappeared in the American Lexicon, when Sarah Palin almost dragged John McCain’s RINO Rear across the Finish Line, in the Presidential Election of 2008.

The Grassroots Movement, which began back then, through the hard work of average Middle Class Americans, like you and me, led us to a seminal moment in American Politics. on the night of November 8, 2016.

A “Citizen Statesman”, such as our Founding Fathers envisioned, became the Republican Candidate for the Presidency of the United States of America.

Trump know that he had to build a coalition, in order to win the Presidency.

Ronald Reagan, and, I am not comparing Trump to Reagan, figured out in 1980, that, in order to win the presidency, you had to bypass the Republican Establishment and go directly to the American People.

That is exactly what Donald J. Trump did.

Looking back, I are pretty sure that the “upstart” Trump’s candidacy angered the late Senator from Arizona.

And, what better way to make sure that the Status Quo in Washington, DC would be maintained than to sabotage the presidency of a rank outsider?

Now, I realize that Senator McCain is no longer here to defend himself….but…

“At this point, what difference does it make?”

Until He Comes,

KJ