Revealed: The Criminal Referral for Christopher Steele

I believe the existence of this criminal referral made the news (barely) on January 4th, but now you can read the heavily-redacted criminal referral itself.

Steele is being referred to the prosecutorial arms of the government for a possible violation of 18 USC 1001, which makes it criminal to lie or to mislead or conceal by trickery any material fact to a federal tribunal or inquiry. There are so many redactions I can't quite make out what he's being accused of misleading the FBI about, but it seems to be either:

1, the timing of when he told the FBI he gave briefings to the media, that is, he claimed these briefings occurred at the end of October 2016 but in fact he has now admitted some occurred in the summer/early fall of 2016,

and/or

2, that he remained in close contact with Clinton associates [Redacted] and maybe also [Redacted], who were feeding him "intelligence" which he in turn passed off, maybe, as his own intel. Those redacted names would belong to, most likely, non-intelligence-officers/longtime Hillary "fixers" and smear merchants Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer.

A possibility occurs to me: What if Steele is just the Front Man hired to put a presentable face on the detestable, dishonest mercenaries Blumenthal and Shearer? What if most of the crap in the "Steele Dossier" in fact originated with this repellent pair, with "widely-respected British spy" Christopher Steele hired just to do a very low level of checking on the claims and then slap his own much-more-credible name on the shoddy "research"?

What if Steele's involvement was mostly limited to telephoning wannabe-007 Sidney Blumenthal's dodgy contacts and talking with them for a bit?

What if Steele is really just a cut-out?

You know -- Dezinformazioniya. Maskarova. Plus various other Russian espionage terms gleaned from Le Carre.

Open thread. Jeeze Lousie, I'm dead tired.

posted by Ace at 07:36 PM

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