Evidence released by the Senate this month reveals that longtime Hillary Clinton associate Cody Shearer received anti-Trump dirt in 2016 from a Russian intelligence source and got it into the hands of the FBI through the ex-British spy Christopher Steele.
Shearer’s claim that his information came from a Russian FSB source, experts say, should have alerted senior US officials that the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties Russia was compromised by its sources, Clinton surrogates and alleged Russian spies.
The documents also indicate the State Department played a much larger role than previously reported in shaping the media narrative, and eventually the official Obama administration intelligence assessment that Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win in 2016, lawmakers said.
“Clinton confidantes and campaign surrogates repeatedly sought information from individuals with links to known or suspected Russian intelligence officers and assets,” Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wis, told Just the News. “This demonstrates the double standard and bias of the FBI’s investigation of only Trump campaign officials for their contacts with Russian agents. Americans deserve equal justice, and the FBI has a long way to go before its integrity and credibility is restored.”
The new documents released jointly by Johnson’s committee and the Senate Finance Committee chaired by Chuck Grassley sheds significant new light on the extensive network of Clinton associates who participated and exerted influence on the 2016-17 effort to falsely portray Trump as the agent of a hostile power.
One of Shearer’s reports, alleging that Trump was compromised by Russian intelligence, made its way to the FBI shortly before the 2016 election through a series of Clinton allies. It included Steele, the British ex-spy who authored a now-debunked dossier tying the Trump campaign and associates to Kremlin officials. Steele submitted the Shearer memo, titled “FSB Interview,” to the FBI as a supplement to his own Trump-Russia reporting funded by the Clinton campaign.
In a prefatory note to the Shearer memo, Steele wrote to his FBI handlers that “some of the reporting is remarkably similar” to his own, especially regarding “TRUMP’s compromise by the FSB,” and the “funding of the TRUMP campaign.” Steele dated Shearer’s memo Oct. 19, 2016. Two days later, the FBI obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant on Trump adviser Carter Page based on some of the information from Steele’s dossier.
The Shearer memo echoes Steele’s most scurrilous and never corroborated allegation regarding Trump’s sexual activities during the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Shearer’s sourcing of his information to Russian intelligence also appears to mirror Steele’s. The former MI6 man’s primary subsource has been identified in media reports as Igor Danchenko, a Russian national, on whom the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation in 2009 after he left the Washington, DC-based think-tank the Brookings Institution that employed him as a researcher.
Shearer, whose brother-in-law Strobe Talbott was president of Brookings from 2002 to 2017, claimed in his memo that the source for his reporting was an FSB agent. Shearer began the report: “I asked my FSB (Federal Security Service) source why he was talking to me.” He wrote that his source alleged that “Trump had been flipped in a honeypot operation in Moscow,” and that he’d seen the “sex videos,” which were kept in “Bulgaria, Israel and FSB political unit vaults in Moscow.”
You can read Shearer’s memo here…
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