MSNBC’s Chris Matthews inexplicably referred to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as an “ethnic sort of person” during a “Hardball” segment Monday night.
During his earlier speech in Ohio, President Donald Trump attacked Pelosi for calling $1000 bonuses for workers “crumbs,” asserting that Pelosi is the GOP’s “secret weapon” to winning elections.
On top of mocking Speaker Paul Ryan for tweeting about a school secretary receiving $1.50 more in her weekly paycheck — which the woman said would allow her to cover her yearly Costco membership — Matthews suggested that Trump attacks Pelosi because she is “ethnic” and “from the coasts.”
“Picking on somebody from the coasts, usually ethnic, and making them the poster person of the Democratic Party is old business for the Republicans,” Matthews claimed. “They did that for Tip O’Neil, they did it after Teddy, and now they do it after Nancy Pelosi.”
“They take an ethnic sort of person from one of the coasts and make them the banner person,” he concluded.
Pelosi is white and was born in the United States, so it is unclear what Matthews meant when he referred to her as “ethnic.”
Matthews also alleged that Republicans like to attack Pelosi because she “looks well-off, she’s well-dressed, she seems like somebody who comes from pretty good circumstances.”
Twice failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is finally admitting her campaign paid for the Russian dossier on Donald Trump, albeit by default, and is calling it typical “opposition research.”
During an interview with The Daily Show Wednesday night, Clinton argued the Trump campaign colluded with Russian officials to win the presidential election and denied any wrong doing in hiring Fusion GPS and a foreign spy.
Not surprisingly, Clinton misrepresented the original hiring of Fusion GPS by a Republican donor. That donor was Peter Singer, who hired the firm on behalf of the Washington Free Beacon to do research on all of the GOP candidates during the primary, including Trump. Fusion GPS did not employ Christopher Steele, a British spy, to do any of this work. When the Clinton campaign hired Fusion GPS after Trump won, Steele was hired and worked with Russian officials to come up the infamous and salacious dossier.
Keep in mind the Clinton campaign and DNC officials have denied paying for the dossier for nearly a year, but were forced into an admission after a subpoena from House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes revealed both entities had in fact employed Fusion GPS to create the dossier.
Today Fusion GPS confirmed $168,000 of the estimated $12 million total went directly from the Clinton campaign to Steele.
A Washington research firm paid a former British spy’s company $168,000 for work on a dossier outlining Russian financial and personal links to Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, the U.S. firm said in a statement on Wednesday.
Although it was public knowledge that Fusion GPS paid for the work, the amount had not been disclosed. Fusion GPS hired former MI6 officer Christopher Steele to collect information about Trump and his advisers.
Fusion GPS’ statement said it had told Congress about how $168,000 was paid last year to Orbis Business Intelligence, Steele’s company.
The money paid to Orbis was taken from $1.02 million it received in fees and expenses from the Perkins Coie law firm, the statement said. The law firm represented the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, although initial research by Fusion into Trump and other Republican primary candidates was commissioned by a conservative website.
It’s just opposition research…that Team Clinton denied existed as a result of their actions.
It is sad that so many nurses are dying from opioid overdose.
Tami Cleveland was terrified as she drove to her parents’ house in Veradale on a September evening in 2012.
Her stepmother, Beth, who suffered from debilitating migraines, hadn’t answered her call that morning. Cleveland hurried over after work to check on her, her anxiety growing when no one answered the door.
She let herself in and found Beth upstairs.
“She was sitting in her chair and her head was leaning against the headrest, and her mouth was open, and her eyes were open,” Cleveland said. “I went and shook her. She was cold to the touch.”
In her bathroom, Cleveland found a bottle labeled with a prescription for 300 hydrocodone pills, filled the day before. It was empty.
It’s a story that’s all too common across the United States, where more than 50,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses in 2016.
But Beth was different from most of the deceased. She was a registered nurse. A 53-year-old equipped with knowledge about the dangers of the powerful painkillers she was taking. And she was far from alone.
A Spokesman-Review analysis of Washington death records, health care provider licenses and Department of Health disciplinary records found at least 33 medical professionals in the state have died from opioid overdoses from 2010 to 2015, the most recent year that overdose death data is available.
Most of the deceased are not physicians. They’re nurses, pharmacy technicians and, in some cases, chemical dependency counselors.
None were disciplined by the Department of Health for suspected drug or alcohol abuse or diversion before their deaths, records show, though a Cowlitz County nurse died in 2014 before a pending investigation into his drug use could be completed. His death certificate listed nine drugs, more than any other professional on the list.
Two others were reported, but both had their cases closed. A Port Townsend nurse practitioner had a complaint of drug and alcohol abuse, falsifying records and mental disorder dismissed in 2010 due to insufficient evidence. She fatally overdosed in 2015 with fentanyl, morphine and hydrocodone found in her system.
A Longview chemical dependency counselor accused of drug or alcohol abuse in 2011 also had his case closed with no recorded discipline. He died of a heroin overdose in September 2013.
Most overdose deaths are quiet
Some of the deaths made headlines. A Tacoma doctor, Nick Uraga, had been charged with kidnapping and harassing his ex-wife shortly before he was found dead in his Gig Harbor home of what was described at the time as an apparent suicide. The medical examiner later ruled it an accidental drug poisoning with oxycodone, according to his death certificate.
But most, like Beth Cleveland’s, went unnoticed outside of the family, friends and coworkers struggling to make sense of a sudden death.
The deceased include a Wenatchee-area hospital pharmacist who died at 58 with six prescription drugs, including methadone and hydromorphone, in her system. A Mukilteo pharmacy technician, devoted Irish-Catholic and diabetes advocate, died at 34 from a hydrocodone overdose.
Almost none used heroin or other illegal drugs, a marked contrast to the 4,020 Washingtonians who died of opioid overdoses during the same time period.
Heroin is by far the most common drug on death certificates, and methamphetamine is in the top five statewide. But medical professionals tend to use prescription painkillers. Oxycodone, hydrocodone and fentanyl top the list.
Without exception, the obituaries do not mention a cause of death. They speak only of people who “passed away suddenly,” often leaving behind surviving parents, siblings, spouses and children.
Violet Smith, a nursing assistant from Colfax, is among the few who were commemorated. Smith, 33, died January 6, 2015, with an unprescribed fentanyl patch on her back and morphine in her system. Fentanyl is a powerful painkiller about 80 times stronger than morphine.
Smith had worked at Paul’s Place, an assisted living facility, before her death. Her supervisor, nurse Chanda Jones, said Smith was a dedicated worker.
“She loved her people, took good care of them,” Jones said. The residents affectionately named her “Duckie” because of the way Smith waddled around when she was pregnant.
The Moscow-Pullman Daily News featured her in a series about Whitman County residents younger than 50 who had died.
Smith’s twin sister, Valerie, told the Daily News her sister was struggling with painful acid reflux and had sustained an injury while trying to help a patient who’d fallen.
Jones said staff suspected she might have been struggling. Smith was open about the fact she’d abused drugs in the past and had been calling in sick to work more and more during the last year Jones worked with her.
But her death still came as a shock. Jones said nobody was sure where she got the fentanyl.
“We didn’t have anybody at our facility who used those, so who knows where she got them,” she said.
Smith left behind two young sons after her death.
Easier access to prescription drugs
Cleveland said her mother’s nursing license made it easier for her to get hydrocodone prescriptions, even as doctors were cracking down on the availability of powerful pain medication.
“She knew what to say and how to say it,” Cleveland said. “Knowing that she was a nurse, they didn’t question her at all.”
Beth’s prescribing nurse practitioner, Susan Bowen-Small, had her license suspended by the Department of Health in February 2014, almost a year and a half after Cleveland’s death. Three of her patients had died after taking painkillers she prescribed, according to the Department of Health, between January and March of 2013, after Beth was already dead.
The medical profession has long struggled with how best to handle providers struggling with drug addiction.
Though doctors, nurses and pharmacists are among the people best-equipped to see the consequences of drug addiction, they’re also susceptible to drug abuse thanks to an intersection of factors: high-stress jobs, odd hours and a belief that they know how to stay in control of the drugs they prescribe or administer routinely.
Doctors with an addiction problem tend to abuse alcohol most frequently, said Chris Bundy, the director of the Washington Physician’s Health Program, which helps doctors get treatment for addiction and mental illness.
Nurses are far more likely to abuse opioids or other prescription drugs. Most seeking treatment in Washington through the Department of Health have either an opioid addiction or an addiction to multiple substances, including opioids.
“A lot of that is because they have direct hands-on access to those medications,” said John Furman, director of Washington Health Professional Services, a group within the Department of Health that treats nurses for drug addiction.
Cleveland’s father married Beth when Cleveland was about 9, when the family lived in Southern California.
Though Cleveland mostly lived with her mother, she saw Beth regularly and grew closer to her as the years passed.
Cleveland believes Beth’s addiction started shortly after her marriage, when her migraines began getting worse. She would be in so much pain that she’d have to sit in the dark in bed all day, unable to look at lights or a screen.
“They tried everything. They went to multiple neurologists and doctors. They tried acupuncture, they tried naturopaths,” Cleveland said.
Cleveland believes it’s possible another option could have worked in the long term, if Beth had stuck with it. But pain pills provided immediate relief, and she had doctors willing to write her prescriptions.
“Those are extremely addictive and she already had an addictive personality,” Cleveland said.
She believes Beth’s childhood contributed to her addiction, causing her pain she never fully dealt with.
Her dad died when she was young, and her sister also struggled with drug and alcohol addiction. Her mother liked to play favorites, which made her childhood difficult, Cleveland said.
Art and fantasy helped her. She loved “Lord of the Rings,” “Harry Potter” and other books that let her escape into new worlds. But sometimes, that wasn’t enough of an escape.
In retrospect, Cleveland said Beth’s addiction was worse than her family wanted to believe.
“We knew she had a problem when we were fairly young,” Cleveland said. As a child, she remembered being told Beth wasn’t feeling well or had a headache for days when she’d be sick in bed.
In 2011, Beth had a grand mal seizure at work while she was in California and lost her driver’s license for six months as a result. She told Cleveland it was from her pain medication: she’d taken three or four pills when she was only supposed to have one at a time.
“That should have been another red flag,” Cleveland said.
Beth went to rehab once in Napa, California, and had periods where she’d try to get better or kick her addiction.
When she moved to the Spokane area, she lived with Cleveland in Rosalia while searching for her own place. A few days into her stay, she hadn’t come upstairs all day. Cleveland went to check on her and found her in bed, watching Netflix and saying she had a migraine.
Cleveland had leftover pills from a hydrocodone prescription when she’d gotten knee surgery in 2012.
“She found out I had them and came up and said, ‘Hey, do you think I could have a couple pills?’ ” Cleveland remembered. She gave her stepmother two.
“A couple of hours later, she was asking for more,” Cleveland said. Eventually, she had to lie and tell Beth she’d run out.
Carrot and stick approach
State law requires medical providers – anyone with a Department of Health license – and health care employers to report license holders who are unable to work “with reasonable skill and safety due to a mental or physical condition,” including drug or alcohol addiction. Providers are also supposed to self-report.
A total of 558 health care providers were sanctioned by the health department from 2010 to 2016 for drug or alcohol violations, and the department took 1,023 reports of suspected drug and alcohol violations involving 843 individual providers during the same period, according to data obtained through a public records request.
Washington Health Professional Services takes a carrot and stick approach to suspected substance abuse among nurses, including nurse practitioners.
WHPS, a part of the Department of Health, handles referrals from family, colleagues and nurses themselves who may be struggling with drug addiction.
If the program finds a nurse is abusing drugs, they’ll be put on a monitoring agreement and be expected to comply with a treatment program. If they comply with counseling, group therapy and pass drug tests, they’ll be able to keep their license and continue practicing once it’s deemed safe.
“If they’re successful in the program, the nursing commission will never know that they participated and that’s an incentive,” Furman said.
That’s the carrot. The stick? Screw up, and the program can report nurses to the nursing commission for non-compliance, and they could lose their licenses and jobs.
A similar program exists for doctors: the Washington Physician’s Health Program. Unlike WHPS, it’s completely independent from the Department of Health, and deals with any issue making it difficult for a doctor to practice safely, including mental or cognitive illnesses.
“We want to encourage early intervention and treatment without creating a safe harbor for people who are potentially putting patients at risk,” Bundy, the program director, said.
The physician’s program has a higher success rate than the nurse’s, but providers in both fare better than the general public in addiction treatment.
During the 30 years the doctors’ program has existed, 81 percent of graduates have stayed clean after five years, based on random drug tests, Bundy said.
Among nurses who graduate, an average of 79 percent were employed in 2017, according to the program’s annual report. Fewer than 1 percent of nurses who graduate return to monitoring later for new violations.
Typically, 40 to 60 percent of people treated for drug addiction will relapse, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the federal government’s main funder of addiction research. They define relapse as “recurrence of symptoms that requires additional medical care.”
Still, many health care providers already fear reporting colleagues out of concern that they’re “tattling” or going to get someone in trouble.
And reaching out for help remains difficult, even when nurses and other professionals are aware of resources.
Anne Mason, director of Washington State University’s doctoral program in nursing, said nurses are aware of WHPS and are taught that anyone, from any background, can become addicted to narcotics.
But that’s not always enough to make people willing to seek help.
“There’s so much stigma around addiction whether you’re a health care professional or any other professional,” Mason said. “There’s oftentimes a message that addiction is about people making a choice, a bad choice, and people could choose not to be addicted if they wanted to but they don’t want to.”
Jones said in her career as a long-term care nurse, Smith is far from the first professional she’s seen struggle with addiction.
Nursing is stressful across the board, regardless of the type of nursing someone is doing, she said. For long-term care nurses like her, it’s hard becoming close to patients and watching them have bad days or go downhill.
“They become family so when they’re not doing well, we’re not doing well,” Jones said.
The idea that nurses should know better keeps them from seeking help.
“As a nurse you have a certain amount of pride and responsibility, and to go to someone to tell them you’re having a problem or in the weeds a bit, it’s just not done,” Jones said.
Those concerns may be heightened because the nurse’s program is part of the Department of Health, not an independent group.
“I think that there’s fear and that fear is heightened when there appears to be less of a separation of church and state,” Bundy said.
Most reports of drug abuse to both the physicians’ health program and the Department of Health don’t result in discipline or monitoring.
“We often hear after the fact that there were others who knew that individual, often several others, who knew that individual and had a concern and failed to act,” Bundy said.
In 2016, Bundy said they had 216 people referred to them and had 70 end up in monitoring agreements. In 2017, they had 189 referrals and 80 monitoring agreements. Most doctors are able to return to work.
WPHS, the program for nurses, had 371 nurses participating in the program for some part of 2017, and 83 new nurses sign monitoring agreements.
Searching for the right intervention
Cleveland tried to help her stepmother, Beth, more times than she can count. Though she’s a phlebotomist and works in the medical field, she said she didn’t know there was a program that treated nurses, or anywhere she could have called for help.
Beth often lied to her husband, Cleveland’s father, about her drug use. She would say she wasn’t taking pills anymore and went to different doctors to get prescriptions, not telling them what she was getting elsewhere.
“She was trying to hide it from my dad, she was trying to hide it from everyone,” Cleveland said.
On the day she died, Cleveland believes Beth had a migraine and just kept taking pills.
“She probably took the initial medication and it didn’t work, and you’re loopy anyway so you just keep taking it,” Cleveland said.
Her death certificate would list three drugs: hydrocodone, Xanax and benadryl, as contributing to her death.
After her stepmother overdosed, Cleveland said she didn’t sleep for about a week. She couldn’t forget seeing the body of someone she loved looking so empty.
Cleveland still keeps Beth’s paintings at home, and remembers how much Beth loved to decorate for holidays.
“She had decorations for every holiday under the sun. She has dish towels, I mean. Everything,” Cleveland said.
At times, it’s hard for Cleveland not to see Beth’s death as a betrayal of her father and the rest of her family.
Sometimes, she thinks nothing could have saved Beth. But maybe the right intervention – from the nursing commission, or a co-worker, or someone – could have helped.
Sometimes, she blames herself for not doing more.
And sometimes, she’s left with the thought that she knows doesn’t capture the full picture, the thought that has made addiction such a taboo topic in the medical field.
An Oregon jury convicted a previously deported Mexican national of sexually assaulting a nine-year-old girl. The convicted child-rapist has a history of crimes in the U.S.
The little girl’s mother told law enforcement officials in Clackamas County last year that a man broke into their 9 and 5-year-old daughters’ bedroom. The man came through the window of their apartment at night on February 25 and sexually assaulted their daughter. Although he escaped through a window, law enforcement officials were able to find his fingerprints, KATU2 in Portland, Oregon reported.
Breitbart Texas reported that federal officers arrested 48-year-old Santiago Flores-Martinez when he was trying to cross back into Mexico in late April. The port’s Anti-Terrorism Contraband Enforcement Team (A-TCET) apprehended the Mexican national at the San Ysidro port of entry. San Ysidro is a district within the City of San Diego and is on the California-Mexico border near Tijuana.
Officials identified Flores-Martinez when they retrieved biometric information on him via the “Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System” (IAFIS).
Police began searching for the accused child rapist on April 25.
Fox 12 Oregon reported the jury found Flores-Martinez guilty on charges that include first-degree sex abuse, attempted rape, burglary, and coercion. His sentencing hearing is scheduled to begin on Monday.
The convicted child rapist has used the aliases “Felipe Coeto” and “Isidro Ramos Flores.”
The previously deported Mexican national has a criminal record in the U.S. that dates back to 1994. Immigration officers deported him in 2001 after serving two years in prison in Oregon.
Clackamas County is located just southeast of Portland, Oregon. The county is listed by the Center for Immigration Studies as being a sanctuary jurisdiction that has policies prohibiting local law enforcement officials from cooperating with federal immigration officers.
Nixon was destroyed and he did not even order the bugging of the buildings. Obama order the unmasking of a PRESIDENT Candidate, plus the FBI and DOJ helped obtain wiretapping. All of this based on a salacious and unverified dossier.
In its partisan zeal to protect the ongoing witch hunt against President Trump, our Nixonian media went into hyper-drive last week to ensure that the unethical and un-American behavior of President Obama’s FBI and Justice Department remained covered up from the public.
After this cynical effort failed with the release of the Nunes memo Friday, the media quickly switched tactics and is now working feverishly to muddy the waters about the horror show revealed in the memo.
To begin with, it is obvious that a hysterical talking point about declaring the release of the memo a “Constitutional Crisis” has been spread far and wide… Naturally, the “constitutional crisis” in question is not the wrongdoing committed by federal law enforcement. Instead, because we are now deep within the head of the media’s fabricated reality where wrong is right and up is down, the “constitutional crisis” is that government wrongdoing was uncovered.
One way the media are hoping to shield the federal government from accountability for its indefensible lies, cover-ups, and civil rights violations is to muddy the waters; to distract us with nonsense so that we lose focus on the sins committed by an FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) that abused its power and public trust in unprecedented ways.
Here are 16 things the media do not want you to know about the Nunes memo:
The so-called Russian Dossier, the creation of Fusion GPS and former British spy Christopher Steele, is a political document — namely, opposition research, created for the Democrat National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Using what it knew was opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign, in October of 2016, the FBI and DOJ obtained a FISA warrant from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to install a wiretap to spy on Hillary Clinton’s opponent — the Trump campaign, specifically Carter Page. This spying would last for a year.
It should be noted that the FISA court was set up to stop foreign terrorists. The fact that the FBI and DOJ would use this court to not only wiretap an American but to wiretap a presidential campaign belies belief. Why Obama’s FBI and DOJ used this court as opposed to a normal court is obvious. As you will see below, a normal court probably would have denied the wiretap.
Worse still, in the summer of 2016, Obama’s DOJ had already opened a counter-intelligence investigation into the Trump campaign. The fact that nothing from that months-old partisan investigation was used to obtain the Page wiretap is revealing.
According to the Nunes memo, an “essential” part of the FISA wiretap application was the Steele dossier, which again is a partisan political document created for the Clinton campaign.
So essential was this partisan dossier, Andrew McCabe, the disgraced former-Deputy Director of the FBI, admitted in December that “no surveillance warrant would have been sought” without the dossier.
Not only did the FBI knowingly use a document from a partisan campaign to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on the competing campaign, the FBI knew the dossier was mostly “salacious and unverified.” We know this because disgraced former-FBI Director James Comey told us so in June of 2017.
According to the Nunes memo, “Steele told [former FBI official Bruce] Ohr, he ‘was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.’”
Ohr, who was part of the FBI’s anti-Trump Russian investigation, was not only friendly with Steele, Ohr’s own wife worked with Steele at Fusion GPS doing opposition research (the dossier) against Trump for the Clinton campaign.
Despite a) knowing the dossier was opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign b) knowing the dossier was “salacious and unverified” c) knowing Steele was desperate to destroy Trump d) the breathtaking conflict of interest in having an investigator’s own wife working on the dossier, the FBI still went to the FISA court to obtain permission to spy on Hillary Clinton’s opponent.
In order to obtain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, all of the conflicts of interest above were withheld from the FISA court — an indefensible (and possibly illegal) lie of omission.
Even worse, in order to legitimize a warrant request based on a piece of partisan opposition research they knew was “salacious and unverified,” the FBI and DOJ used a media report to bolster the findings in the phony dossier. The FBI and DOJ told the court that the media report was independent verification of the dossier. But this was not true, and, according to the Nunes memo, the FBI and DOJ knew this was not true. The truth is that the phony dossier was the source of this media report.
Also hidden from the FISA court was the fact that the FBI obtained Steele as a source but had to fire him in October of 2016 when, in a bid to use his phony dossier to derail the Trump campaign, he leaked his information to the far-left Mother Jones.
Although the FBI and DOJ were willing participants in pushing a “salacious and unverified” narrative against a presidential candidate (primarily through media leaks), this was all hidden from congressional investigators. To begin with, for months, while under oath, Comey said he did not know where the dossier came from — meaning from the Clinton campaign. The Wall Street Journal explains:
We also know the FBI wasn’t straight with Congress, as it hid most of these facts from investigators in a briefing on the dossier in January 2017. The FBI did not tell Congress about Mr. Steele’s connection to the Clinton campaign, and the House had to issue subpoenas for Fusion bank records to discover the truth. Nor did the FBI tell investigators that it continued receiving information from Mr. Steele and Fusion even after it had terminated him. The memo says the bureau’s intermediary was Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, whose wife, incredibly, worked for Fusion.
All of this dishonesty occurred under Comey, the man our media now hold up as a living saint, a man so desperate to destroy Trump, he not only oversaw those committing the above abuses, he leaked classified information to the news media in order to see a Special Prosecutor appointed against Trump, which his pal, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, immediately did.
The House Intelligence Committee released its classified memo detailing alleged abuse by senior FBI and Justice Department officials on Friday, after the president approved its release.
Among the memo’s findings are:
The anti-Trump dossier funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee formed an “essential” part of the initial and all three renewal surveillance applications against Trump campaign adviser Carter Page;
The political origins of the dossier were “known to senior DOJ and FBI officials,” but those origins were not included in applications to obtain the warrant;
Also used to justify the surveillance warrants against Page was a news story supposedly corroborating the dossier, that was pushed by the dossier author Christopher Steele himself — yet the FISA application incorrectly says Steele did not provide the information in the article;
Perkins Coie — the law firm for the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee hosted a meeting with Steele, Fusion GPS and media (this revelation makes it harder for the Clinton campaign and the DNC to deny they knew about the dossier, though Clinton and other top DNC officials at that time have denied knowing about it);
Steele was “suspended and then terminated” as an FBI source, after the FBI learned that he made an authorized disclosure of his relationship with the FBI to liberal media magazine Mother Jones, and he lied to the FBI about his previous media contacts with Yahoo! and other outlets;
Steele — although portrayed as a “boy scout” by Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson — had personal bias against candidate Donald Trump, telling senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr that he was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president”;
Ohr’s wife Nellie Ohr assisted with the dossier, but the FBI or the DOJ did not disclose this connection in the application for the FISA warrant, even though Bruce Ohr worked “closely” with Deputy Attorney Generals Sally Yates and then Rod Rosenstein;
At the time that the FBI used the dossier to obtain the spy warrant on Page in October 2016, head of the FBI’s counterintelligence division Bill Priestap had assessed that the corroboration of the dossier was still in its “infancy,” and after Steele was terminated as a source, an FBI unit assessed his reporting as only “minimally corroborated”;
FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe acknowledged to the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017 that no warrant would have been sought without the dossier;
The FISA warrant also mentioned information related to another Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, even though there was no evidence of cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos;
The memo does not state what the information about Papadopoulos was, but said that information was the trigger to the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation on Russian meddling and collusion in late July 2016 (he had told an Australian diplomat at a London bar that a Maltese professor connected to Russia had told him he had dirt on Clinton in the form of emails);
Peter Strzok, the No. 2 at the FBI’s counterintelligence division opened the bureau’s investigation on Russian meddling and collusion (text messages between him and fellow FBI official and lover Lisa Page show that he held an anti-Trump bias).
The memo was released without any of the redactions sought by the FBI and the DOJ. Read it below:
