BUT USED BY “LAW-ENFORCERS” TO OBTAIN SURVEILLANCE WARRANTS ON THEN-TRUMP ADVISER
by Sharon Rondeau
(Aug. 29, 2018) — In his opening monologue on Wednesday night, Sean Hannity said that “his sources” informed him that the Trump-Russia “dossier” was known not to possess enough validity to be used “in a court of law.”
However, the dossier was the main piece of “evidence,” if not the only evidence, submitted by the FBI and DOJ to the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court (FISC) to obtain four warrants to surveil former Trump adviser Carter Page.
Hannity compared the “fraud” he said was wrought on the court to that which occurs in “banana republics,” not the United States, whose government is a constitutional republic.
The four warrant applications were reportedly signed by former FBI Director James Comey; former FBI Deputy Director and one-time Acting Director Andrew McCabe; former Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates; and current Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
On Tuesday, DOJ official Bruce Ohr, who exchanged numerous text messages and met in person with dossier author Christopher Steele both before and after the 2016 presidential election, testified privately to members of the House Judiciary Committee, reportedly revealing stunning details about DOJ activity leading up to the election. Hannity made the point, as he did on Tuesday night, that Ohr’s wife Nellie was employed by the company paid to commission the preparation of the dossier, Fusion GPS, at the same time that Bruce Ohr acted as a conduit to convey the dossier information to the FBI.
In January of last year, shortly after the inauguration, Comey told Trump that the dossier was “salacious and unverified” but not that it was used to obtain surveillance warrants on one of his campaign advisers. Trump fired Comey in May 2017 to the outrage of many congressional Democrats who had previously said he needed to be fired for his handling of the Hillary Clinton private email server investigation.
Ohr reportedly told Judiciary Committee members Tuesday that the DOJ and FBI were known to have leaked information from the unverified dossier to the media, then used the media’s reportage as a basis upon which to justify the counterintelligence probe launched into the Trump campaign in July 2016, if not earlier.
Steele was paid by not only Fusion GPS, but also the FBI, Hannity reported, although his total earnings from the “dossier” project and the “law-enforcement” agency have not yet been revealed.
On Tuesday morning, Trump tweeted the question as to how Bruce Ohr continues to be employed by the DOJ. He has reportedly been demoted twice since the discovery that he apparently collaborated with Steele, an activity not within his purview at the DOJ.