by John Solomon at Just the News
Christopher Steele, the former British spy whose dossier fed both a media and law enforcement frenzy over now-discredited allegations that Donald Trump colluded with Russia, has resurfaced in a media documentary to argue his work for Hillary Clinton’s campaign law firm was professional and well-sourced.
“I stand by the work we did, the sources that we had, and the professionalism which we applied to it,” Steele told ABC News host George Stephanopoulos in an interview aired Sunday that was part of a larger documentary released Monday on Hulu.
Steele’s defense, however, flies in the face of an avalanche evidence — some of it offered by his lawyer and his friends and his own primary intelligence source — that he had not corroborated much of the intelligence he gave to the FBI during the 2016 election and that he suffered from strong anti-Trump biases.
Steele was terminated by the FBI as a confidential human source on Nov. 1, 2016 for leaking, and his work has been widely discredited and criticized by several subsequent investigations. His own legal team has also claimed Steele failed to aggressively validate the allegations he penned.
In a British court case he lost, Steele’s own lawyer told the judge that Steele simply passed on raw information from sources he knew and trusted but did little to verify, even admitting the information would not pass an accuracy test for a court of law and should not be held to a high. bar of accuracy.
“It is raw intelligence. It is the basis for further investigation by the recipients,” the lawyer argued last year. “So to put the bar too high in terms of establishing accuracy at that stage would be quite wrong in principle.
“We can say the critical consideration is that his confidential human intelligence was not factual evidence to be used in a personal or public report or in court or anything like that. We have just discussed what it was. It was raw intelligence to be passed on as part of a much bigger intelligence picture.”
In fact, Steele’s British lawyer even suggested that the news organization who published his dossier, Buzz Feed, was reckless to publish the information because of its unverified nature. “It was an editorial decision, probably a bad editorial decision, we say it was a bad editorial decision,” the lawyer argued.
You can read the lawyer’s statements here:
The lack of verification was confirmed by an FBI spreadsheet that tracked every statement in the Steele dossier and found that the vast majority were disproven, never verified or Internet rumor. You can read that spreadsheet here:
Likewise, U.S. intelligence warned the FBI within weeks of Steele’s dossier being received that…
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