A high-level dispute over which senior government officials pushed the unverified Steele dossier amid efforts to surveil the Trump campaign has broken out into the open again, after it emerged that Attorney General William Barr appointed a U.S. attorney to examine the origins of the Russia investigation and determine if the FBI and DOJ's actions were "lawful and appropriate."



Sources familiar with the records told Fox News that a late-2016 email chain indicated then-FBI Director James Comey told bureau subordinates that then-CIA Director John Brennan insisted the dossier be included in the intelligence community assessment on Russian interference, known as the ICA.



Fox News was told that the email chain – not yet public -- referred to the dossier as "crown material," but it was not clear why this apparent code was used. On Tuesday night, former GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy said on Fox News' "The Story with Martha MacCallum" that "Comey has a better argument than Brennan, based on what I've seen."



A day earlier, Gowdy told Fox News, "Whoever is looking into this, tell them to look into emails" from December 2016 involving Brennan and Comey. Gowdy, who is now a Fox News contributor, said his assessment was based on sensitive Russia records he reviewed as then-chairman of the Republican-led House Oversight Committee.



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“To everything there is a season,” the Good Book counsels, and for diehard critics of Donald Trump, clinging to their belief in his sinister designs, it’s always open season on the president. To “a time to be born, a time to die” they have added “a time to accuse, a time to face accusation.” For the president’s adversaries, that time has arrived.



James Comey, the former director of the FBI whose firing set off the futile Russia collusion investigation, took to the stage at a CNN townhall the other day to persuade an audience that he, and not President Trump, is on the side of the angels. He’s still determined to find that unicorn in the garden who will smoke out the perpetrators of interference in the 2016 presidential election.



When the moderator asked whether he thought Mr. Trump acted with corrupt intent, he replied that “it sure looks that way.” Despite the inconvenient fact that the president was cleared of colluding with the Russians, Mr. Comey now says the president ought to be indicted for obstructing the Mueller probe once he leaves office.



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In all Washington investigations, the essential questions become who knew it and when did they know it.



In the case of FBI informant Christopher Steele and the credibility of his now-disproven Russia collusion allegations against Donald Trump, we have some important clarity: Government officials confirm that an October 2016 email revealing that Steele met with State Department officials — a breach of protocol for an informant if it was unauthorized — was sent to an FBI counterintelligence supervisor.



Multiple sources confirm to me that the recipient of the State Department email was Special Agent Stephen Laycock, then the FBI’s section chief for Eurasian counterintelligence and now one of the bureau’s top executives as the assistant director for intelligence under Director Christopher Wray.



The email to Laycock from Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec arrived eight days before the FBI swore to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that it had no derogatory information on Steele and used his anti-Trump dossier to secure a secret surveillance warrant to investigate Trump’s possible ties to Moscow.



Officials tell me that Laycock immediately forwarded the information he received about Steele on Oct. 13, 2016, to the FBI team leading the Trump-Russia investigation, headed by then-fellow Special Agent Peter Strzok.



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The Justice Department inspector general has determined the three Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant extensions against onetime Trump campaign aide Carter Page were illegally obtained, attorney Joe diGenova said on Thursday.



In an investigation that began last year, Inspector General Michael Horowitz is examining the Justice Department's and FBI's compliance with legal requirements as well as policies and procedures in applications filed with the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court related to Page as part of a larger counterintelligence probe into Trump's campaign.



The inspector general inquiry is expected to be completed in either late May or June, and diGenova, a former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said Democrats on Capitol Hill are working overtime to investigate and discredit President Trump.



"They are doing that as a diversionary tactic away from the inevitable conclusions of the DOJ inspector general, Michael Horowitz, who, by the way, we have learned has concluded that the final three FISA extensions were illegally obtained," diGenova said on Fox Business. "The only question now is whether or not the first FISA was illegally obtained."



He pointed to memos, obtained by conservative group Citizens United through open-records litigation, that suggest the FBI might have misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in the first warrant application about an unverified dossier.



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WASHINGTON (SBG) - On October 21, 2016, the FBI, then led by James Comey, filed a 422 page FISA application to place former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page under surveillance.



As evidence, the application cited a dossier of salacious and unverified allegation about then-candidate Donald trump that was compiled that spring by former British spy Christopher Steele.



He had been hired to dig up the dirt on candidate Trump by a law firm paid by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. But the FBI never mentioned that in its application.



Now, a document obtained by the Conservative activist group "Citizens United" suggests the FBI may have known that to be false.



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A recently discovered memo written by former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec reveals stunning information that FBI informant and former British spy Christopher Steele planned to release the unverified information in his dossier before Election Day. He also admitted to Kavalec in a meeting that his research was political, according to the memo first obtained by Citizen’s United through a Freedom of Information Act request. Steele was paid by the embattled research firm Fusion GPS through the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.



It is the first piece of solid communication that reveals Steele’s true intentions for the dossier. The Hill’s John Solomon first published the report of the memo on Tuesday, saying the memo has been turned over to the Department of Justice by a congressional official. The official is concerned that it is information that has not been seen by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz or other DOJ investigators.



In Kavalec’s written account of her Oct. 11, 2016, meeting with Steele that he “is keen to see this information come to light prior to November 8,” the date of the 2016 election. According to Solomon, Kavalec summarized her meeting with Steele and his coworker Tatyana Duran. Duran worked at Steele’s Orbis Security firm.



Citizen’s United obtained the memos last week ago through open-records litigation, according to David Bossie, head of Citizens United. Bossie, who is also an information Trump advisor, noted that his conservative group Citizen’s United has been a leader on using FOIA litigation to uncover a treasure trove of documents from Hillary Clinton’s emails, to Benghazi and now what appears to be the framing of Trump by a former British intelligence officer.



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Documents released by the State Department indicate the discredited Steele dossier containing alleged accounts of Donald Trump’s sexual peccadilloes while colluding with Russians officials was always intended as a political document for the Hillary Clinton campaign to discredit the presidential candidate.



The fanciful account was designed to be used as political mud to be slung during the 2016 presidential campaign, and had to be finished before Election Day, The Hill reports.



That conclusion is revealed in a written account from Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec’s Oct. 11, 2016, meeting with former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. Steele reportedly acknowledged that his intelligence-gathering mission was nothing more than a political job for the Hillary Clinton election campaign. 



The correspondence came to light recently after the conservative activist group Citizens United successfully argued for the documents to be released pursuant to the Freedom Of Information Act. They were delivered in a highly redacted form.



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If ever there were an admission that taints the FBI's secret warrant to surveil Donald Trump's campaign, it sat buried for more than 2 1/2 years in the files of a high-ranking State Department official.



Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec's written account of her Oct. 11, 2016, meeting with FBI informant Christopher Steele shows the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded British intelligence operative admitted that his research was political and facing an Election Day deadline.



And that confession occurred 10 days before the FBI used Steele's now-discredited dossier to justify securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and the campaign’s ties to Russia.



Steele's client "is keen to see this information come to light prior to November 8," the date of the 2016 election, Kavalec wrote in a typed summary of her meeting with Steele and Tatyana Duran, a colleague from Steele's Orbis Security firm. The memos were unearthed a few days ago through open-records litigation by the conservative group Citizens United.



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David Bossie, who served as the deputy campaign manager for Donald Trump, says former Vice President Joe Biden must answer for the "lies" of the Obama administration.



Bossie made his comments in a column posted on the Fox News website Wednesday.



"Once you get past the warm and fuzzy nostalgia for Biden – the elder career politician chosen by the youthful Barack Obama as his running mate – reality slaps you right in the face," he said.



Bossie cited Biden's strong support for the Affordable Care Act.



"Biden, one of the prime supporters of the disaster that was disingenuously marketed as the Affordable Care Act, must answer for the lies told by the Obama team to sell the plan to the American people," he said.



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Over at Fox, conservative analyst David Bossie had a different perspective. "As partisan Democrats and the liberal media hyperventilate" over release of the Mueller report, he wrote, "they’re willfully ignoring the fact that they already know what the report concludes. Two years and $35 million were spent investigating a lie."



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