"Unverified!"

Andrew McCarthy writes at National Review,

...In the stretch run of the campaign, Fusion — which, again, was being paid by the Clinton campaign (through lawyers) — induced Steele to brief Clinton-friendly media about his findings. Steele provided this information to the New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo News, The New Yorker, CNN, and Mother Jones. In so doing, he appears to have conveyed the same tone of certainty in which the dossier is couched — the same confidence about his informants and alarm about their Trump allegations.

...Things changed, though, when Steele was sued for libel after the dossier was published in early 2017. Suddenly, when he was in a forum where it was clear to him that making exaggerated or false claims could cost him dearly, he decided his allegations were not of such “huge significance” after all — as Rowan Scarborough detailed in a Washington Times news story.

...One of the libel suits against Steele was filed in London by Aleksej Gubarev, whom Steele accused of participating in Russian intelligence hacking. To defend against the suit, Steele and his attorneys had no choice but to respond to interrogatories. In answering, Steele markedly downgraded the seriousness of his dossier reports.

According to Steele’s courtroom version, the dossier is merely a compilation of bits of “raw intelligence” that were “unverified” and that he passed along because they “warranted further investigation” — i.e., not because he could vouch for their truthfulness. He gave them to American and British government officials, he maintains, only because they raised potential national-security threats, not because they actually established any such threats. That, he now says, was for government investigators to figure out. In sum, Steele’s defamation defense is not that what he wrote was true but that his reports “must be critically viewed in light of the purpose for and circumstances in which the information was collected.”

There is laugh-out-loud stuff here: Steele’s declamation of his profound commitment to discretion and secrecy lest his “raw,” “unverified,” and possibly false reports defame anyone. He claimed that he and Fusion GPS had a solemn agreement not to disclose his work . . . except for whenever they decided to disclose his work — including to Fusion’s clients and to major press organs during the stretch run of a contentious presidential election. But not to worry: These discussions were “off the record,” a term Steele claims to have understood to mean “to be used for the purpose of further research but would not be published or attributed.” Right. Somehow though, when his briefings to journalists about his reports were published, he kept doing the briefings.

It would be another five months before we learned that the Clinton campaign was paying for this Trump–Russia narrative. Here, then, is the problem for the FBI: Even if Steele had represented that his shocking information about Donald Trump was ripe dead certain, that the dossier had come down from Mount Sinai, the bureau would still have been obliged to treat it as unverified gossip.

Yet, Steele says his information was unverified, and the FBI has acknowledged that Steele’s information was unverified. So . . . what did the FBI and the Justice Department represent to the FISA court to get a surveillance warrant against Page? Or, to put it another way, if the Obama administration did not hesitate to urge Steele’s uncorroborated claims on Congress, would it have resisted urging them on a federal judge?

Read more here.