(1) Deep State Triumph over Trump: CIA & FBI keep secrets about JFK assassination(2) Harry Truman: Limit CIA Role to Intelligence - WaPO, December 22, 1963 - page A11(3) PBS Vietnam Series glosses over JFK’s plan to withdraw from Vietnam - James K. Galbraith(4) That Other Plot: to Bring Down Trump - PAT BUCHANAN(5) Clinton campaign, DNC paid for research that led to Russia dossier - WaPo(6) Steele's reports are based on hearsay from anonymous Russians - Robert Parry(7)  FBI agreed to pay Steele at the same time he was being paid by Clinton supporters - WaPo(1) Deep State Triumph over Trump: CIA & FBI keep secrets about JFK assassinationhttps://consortiumnews.com/2017/10/30/the-deep-states-jfk-triumph-over-trump/October 30, 2017Exclusive: Fifty-four years after President Kennedy’s assassination, the CIA and FBI demanded more time to decide what secrets to keep hiding – and a chastened President Trump bowed to their power, observes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.By Ray McGovernIt was summer 1963 when a senior official of CIA’s operations directorate treated our Junior Officer Trainee (JOT) class to an unbridled rant against President John F. Kennedy. He accused JFK, among other things, of rank cowardice in refusing to send U.S. armed forces to bail out Cuban rebels pinned down during the CIA-launched invasion at the Bay of Pigs, blowing the chance to drive Cuba’s Communist leader Fidel Castro from power.President John F. Kennedy in the motorcade through Dallas shortly before his assassination on Nov. 22, 1963. (Photo credit: Walt Cisco, Dallas Morning News)It seemed beyond odd that a CIA official would voice such scathing criticism of a sitting President at a training course for those selected to be CIA’s future leaders. I remember thinking to myself, "This guy is unhinged; he would kill Kennedy, given the chance."Our special guest lecturer looked a lot like E. Howard Hunt, but more than a half-century later, I cannot be sure it was he. Our notes from such training/indoctrination were classified and kept under lock and key.At the end of our JOT orientation, we budding Agency leaders had to make a basic choice between joining the directorate for substantive analysis or the operations directorate where case officers run spies and organize regime changes (in those days, we just called the process overthrowing governments).I chose the analysis directorate and, once ensconced in the brand new headquarters building in Langley, Virginia, I found it strange that subway-style turnstiles prevented analysts from going to the "operations side of the house," and vice versa. Truth be told, we were never one happy family.I cannot speak for my fellow analysts in the early 1960s, but it never entered my mind that operatives on the other side of the turnstiles might be capable of assassinating a President – the very President whose challenge to do something for our country had brought many of us to Washington in the first place. But, barring the emergence of a courageous whistleblower-patriot like Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, I do not expect to live long enough to learn precisely who orchestrated and carried out the assassination of JFK.And yet, in a sense, those particulars seem less important than two main lessons learned: (1) If a President can face down intense domestic pressure from the power elite and turn toward peace with perceived foreign enemies, then anything is possible. The darkness of Kennedy’s murder should not obscure the light of that basic truth; and (2) There is ample evidence pointing to a state execution of a President willing to take huge risks for peace. While no post-Kennedy president can ignore that harsh reality, it remains possible that a future President with the vision and courage of JFK might beat the odds – particularly as the American Empire disintegrates and domestic discontent grows.I do hope to be around next April after the 180-day extension for release of the remaining JFK documents. But – absent a gutsy whistleblower – I wouldn’t be surprised to see in April, a Washington Post banner headline much like the one that appeared Saturday: "JFK files: The promise of revelations derailed by CIA, FBI."The New Delay Is the StoryYou might have thought that almost 54 years after Kennedy was murdered in the streets of Dallas – and after knowing for a quarter century the supposedly final deadline for releasing the JFK files – the CIA and FBI would not have needed a six-month extension to decide what secrets that they still must hide.Journalist Caitlin Johnstone hits the nail on the head in pointing out that the biggest revelation from last week’s limited release of the JFK files is "the fact that the FBI and CIA still desperately need to keep secrets about something that happened 54 years ago."What was released on Oct. 26, was a tiny fraction of what had remained undisclosed in the National Archives. To find out why, one needs to have some appreciation of a 70-year-old American political tradition that might be called "fear of the spooks."That the CIA and FBI are still choosing what we should be allowed to see concerning who murdered John Kennedy may seem unusual, but there is hoary precedent for it.  After JFK’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, the well-connected Allen Dulles, whom Kennedy had fired as CIA director after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, got himself appointed to the Warren Commission and took the lead in shaping the investigation of JFK’s murder.By becoming de facto head of the Commission, Dulles was perfectly placed to protect himself and his associates, if any commissioners or investigators were tempted to question whether Dulles and the CIA played any role in killing Kennedy. When a few independent-minded journalists did succumb to that temptation, they were immediately branded – you guessed it – "conspiracy theorists."And so, the big question remains: Did Allen Dulles and other "cloak-and-dagger" CIA operatives have a hand in John Kennedy’s assassination and subsequent cover-up? In my view and the view of many more knowledgeable investigators, the best dissection of the evidence on the murder appears in James Douglass’s 2008 book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.After updating and arraying the abundant evidence, and conducting still more interviews, Douglass concludes that the answer to the big question is Yes. Reading Douglass’s book today may help explain why so many records are still withheld from release, even in redacted form, and why, indeed, we may never see them in their entirety.Truman: CIA a Frankenstein?When Kennedy was assassinated, it must have occurred to former President Harry Truman, as it did to many others, that the disgraced Allen Dulles and his associates might have conspired to get rid of a President they felt was soft on Communism – and dismissive of the Deep State of that time. Not to mention their vengeful desire to retaliate for Kennedy’s response to the Bay of Pigs fiasco. (Firing Allen Dulles and other CIA paragons of the Deep State for that fiasco simply was not done.)Exactly one month after John Kennedy was killed, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Harry Truman titled "Limit CIA Role to Intelligence." The first sentence read, "I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency."Strangely, the op-ed appeared only in the Post’s early edition on Dec. 22, 1963. It was excised from that day’s later editions and, despite being authored by the President who was responsible for setting up the CIA in 1947, the all-too-relevant op-ed was ignored in all other major media.Truman clearly believed that the spy agency had lurched off in what Truman thought were troubling directions. He began his op-ed by underscoring "the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency … and what I expected it to do." It would be "charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without Department ‘treatment’ or interpretations."Truman then moved quickly to one of the main things clearly bothering him. He wrote "the most important thing was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions."It was not difficult to see this as a reference to how one of the agency’s early directors, Allen Dulles, tried to trick President Kennedy into sending U.S. forces to rescue the group of invaders who had landed on the beach at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 with no chance of success, absent the speedy commitment of U.S. air and ground support. The planned mouse-trapping of the then-novice President Kennedy had been underpinned by a rosy "analysis" showing how this pin-prick on the beach would lead to a popular uprising against Fidel Castro.Wallowing in the Bay of PigsArch-Establishment figure Allen Dulles was offended when young President Kennedy, on entering office, had the temerity to question the CIA’s Bay of Pigs plans, which had been set in motion under President Dwight Eisenhower. When Kennedy made it clear he would not approve the use of U.S. combat forces, Dulles set out, with supreme confidence, to give the President no choice except to send U.S. troops to the rescue.Coffee-stained notes handwritten by Allen Dulles were discovered after his death and reported by historian Lucien S. Vandenbroucke. In his notes, Dulles explained that, "when the chips were down," Kennedy would be forced by "the realities of the situation" to give whatever military support was necessary "rather than permit the enterprise to fail."The "enterprise" which Dulles said could not fail was, of course, the overthrow of Fidel Castro. After mounting several failed operations to assassinate Castro, this time Dulles meant to get his man, with little or no attention to how Castro’s patrons in Moscow might react eventually. (The next year, the Soviets agreed to install nuclear missiles in Cuba as a deterrent to future U.S. aggression, leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis).In 1961, the reckless Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom then-Deputy Secretary of State George Ball later described as a "sewer of deceit," relished any chance to confront the Soviet Union and give it, at least, a black eye. (One can still smell the odor from that sewer in many of the documents released last week.)But Kennedy stuck to his guns, so to speak. A few months after the abortive invasion of Cuba — and his refusal to send the U.S. military to the rescue — Kennedy fired Dulles and his co-conspirators and told a friend that he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds." Clearly, the outrage was mutual.When JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters came out, the mainstream media had an allergic reaction and gave it almost no reviews. It is a safe bet, though, that Barack Obama was given a copy and that this might account in some degree for his continual deference – timorousness even – toward the CIA.Could fear of the Deep State be largely why President Obama felt he had to leave the Cheney/Bush-anointed CIA torturers, kidnappers and black-prison wardens in place, instructing his first CIA chief, Leon Panetta, to become, in effect, the agency’s lawyer rather than take charge? Is this why Obama felt he could not fire his clumsily devious Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who had to apologize to Congress for giving "clearly erroneous" testimony under oath in March 2013? Does Obama’s fear account for his allowing then-National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander and counterparts in the FBI to continue to mislead the American people, even though the documents released by Edward Snowden showed them – as well as Clapper – to be lying about the government’s surveillance activities?Is this why Obama fought tooth and nail to protect CIA Director John Brennan by trying to thwart publication of the comprehensive Senate Intelligence Committee investigation of CIA torture, which was based on original Agency cables, emails, and headquarters memos? [See here and here.]The Deep State TodayMany Americans cling to a comforting conviction that the Deep State is a fiction, at least in a "democracy" like the United States.References to the enduring powers of the security agencies and other key bureaucracies have been essentially banned by the mainstream media, which many other suspicious Americans have come to see as just one more appendage of the Deep State.But occasionally the reality of how power works pokes through in some unguarded remark by a Washington insider, someone like Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-New York, the Senate Minority Leader with 36 years of experience in Congress. As Senate Minority Leader, he also is an ex officio member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is supposed to oversee the intelligence agencies.During a Jan. 3, 2017 interview with MSNBC’S Rachel Maddow, Schumer told Maddow nonchalantly about the dangers awaiting President-elect Donald Trump if he kept on "taking on the intelligence community." She and Schumer were discussing Trump’s sharp tweeting regarding U.S. intelligence and evidence of "Russian hacking" (which both Schumer and Maddow treat as flat fact).Schumer said: "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.  So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this."Three days after that interview, President Obama’s intelligence chiefs released a nearly evidence-free "assessment" claiming that the Kremlin engaged in a covert operation to put Trump into office, fueling a "scandal" that has hobbled Trump’s presidency. On Monday, Russia-gate special prosecutor Robert Mueller indicted Trump’s one-time campaign manager Paul Manafort on unrelated money laundering, tax and foreign lobbying charges, apparently in the hope that Manafort will provide incriminating evidence against Trump.So, President Trump has been in office long enough to have learned how the game is played and the "six ways from Sunday" that the intelligence community has for "getting back at you." He appears to be as intimidated as was President Obama.Trump’s awkward acquiescence in the Deep State’s last-minute foot-dragging regarding release of the JFK files is simply the most recent sign that he, too, is under the thumb of what the Soviets used to call "the organs of state security."Ray McGovern works with the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington.  During his 27-year career at CIA, he prepared the President’s Daily Brief for Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, and conducted the one-on-one morning briefings from 1981 to 1985.  He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).(2) Harry Truman: Limit CIA Role to Intelligence - WaPO, December 22, 1963 - page A11http://www.maebrussell.com/Prouty/Harry%20Truman%27s%20CIA%20article.htmlThe Washington PostDecember 22, 1963 - page A11By Harry S TrumanINDEPENDENCE, MO., Dec. 21 — I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.I think it is fairly obvious that by and large a President's performance in office is as effective as the information he has and the information he gets. That is to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions, and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people, he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.Of course, every President has available to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what's worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department "treatment" or interpretations.I wanted and needed the information in its "natural raw" state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions—and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.Since the responsibility for decision making was his—then he had to be sure that no information is kept from him for whatever reason at the discretion of any one department or agency, or that unpleasant facts be kept from him. There are always those who would want to shield a President from bad news or misjudgments to spare him from being "upset."For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about "Yankee imperialism," "exploitive capitalism," "war-mongering," "monopolists," in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.I well knew the first temporary director of the CIA, Adm. Souers, and the later permanent directors of the CIA, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg and Allen Dulles. These were men of the highest character, patriotism and integrity—and I assume this is true of all those who continue in charge.But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.(3) PBS Vietnam Series glosses over JFK’s plan to withdraw from Vietnam - James K. GalbraithThe Ken Burns-Lynn Novick PBS Vietnam Series glosses over JFK’s exit strategy (Full Withdrawal From Vietnam)    Gary Kohls<ggkohls@mydutytowarn.org>10 October 2017 at 03:29JFK Had Ordered Full Withdrawal From Vietnam: Solid EvidenceThe Ken Burns-Lynn Novick PBS Vietnam Series glosses over JFK’s exit strategyBy James K. Galbraith - September 25, 2017http://portside.org/2017-10-06/jfk-had-ordered-full-withdrawal-vietnam-solid-evidenceThe Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary series on Vietnam, currently airing on PBS, skates very lightly over one of the war’s most contentious questions: Did John F. Kennedy intend to pursue the fight or to pull out?The second program alludes almost in passing to a withdrawal plan in 1962, conditioned on a then-optimistic assessment of how the war was going. But it also reports Kennedy’s qualms, expressed to a friend, as "We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at any point. But I can’t give up that territory to the communists and get the American people to re-elect me." From this point, the program moves quickly to events in Saigon, to the November 1, 1963 South Vietnamese coup, and to Kennedy’s own assassination three weeks later.But this presentation is highly misleading. In fact, Kennedy’s feelings about Vietnam went beyond mere qualms: he had already reached a decision and acted on it. In National Security Action Memorandum 263, dated October 11, 1963, Kennedy articulated his decision to withdraw all US military forces from Vietnam by the end of 1965 — with the withdrawal to be completed after the 1964 election. This was the formal policy of the United States government on the day he died.Evidence of JFK’s Decision to Withdraw from Vietnam.The evidence is massive and categorical. It includes:Robert McNamara’s instructions to the May 1963 SecDef Conference in Honolulu to develop the withdrawal plan.  A detailed account of the McNamara-Taylor mission to Vietnam that returned with the withdrawal plan, drafted in their absence in the Pentagon by a team under Kennedy’s direct control.An audiotape of the discussion at the White House that led to the approval of NSAM 263 (National Security Action Memorandum), which implemented the plan; this audio was released by the Assassination Records Review Board at my request.The precise instructions for withdrawal delivered by Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to his fellow Chiefs on October 4, 1963, in a memorandum that remained classified until 1997.Taylor wrote:"On 2 October the President approved recommendations on military matters contained in the report of the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The following actions derived from these recommendations are directed: … all planning will be directed toward preparing RVN forces for the withdrawal of all US special assistance units and personnel by the end of calendar year 1965. The US Comprehensive Plan, Vietnam, will be revised to bring it into consonance with these objectives, and to reduce planned residual (post-1965) MAAG strengths to approximately pre-insurgency levels… Execute the plan to withdraw 1,000 US military personnel by the end of 1963…"False Narratives.Why do so few Americans know that President Kennedy, a few weeks before his assassination, had decided to get the US military out, and avert what would later become the "quagmire" of a full-scale American war in Vietnam?Because for three decades following these events, many historians adopted a false narrative which assumed an absolute continuity in policy between Kennedy and Johnson. By no coincidence, this was the line of the government at the time.But a small minority of historians — beginning with Peter Dale Scott in 1972, followed by John Newman in his 1992 book JFK and Vietnam — were able to tease out the truth from the record. Their work was supported by a key witness, Robert McNamara, in his 1995 memoir In Retrospect.The historian Fredrik Logevall has provided a chapter to the companion volume for The Vietnam War. [The Vietnam War: An Intimate History by Geoffrey C. Ward, Burn’s collaborator.] Logevall does not acknowledge the withdrawal plan, although he gives the following personal view:"…the better argument is that JFK most likely would not have Americanized the war, but instead would have opted for some form of disengagement, presumably by way of a face-saving negotiated settlement."This is an improvement over the long-standing official story, but still misleading. Logevall states that "withdrawal theorists" have made their judgments "hastily," with "evident reluctance," based on "scant hints" in the documentary record.In fact the record is rich and decisive. The issue has been debated many times. I would refer readers seeking a full account to the second edition of Newman’s JFK and Vietnam, which appeared in 2017 after a hiatus of 25 years following suppression by the publisher of the original book.A good summary of arguments is Virtual JFK, an account of the 2005 Musgrove conference of historians and participants on this matter. My articles appeared in Boston Review and Salon. For those who would like a compressed version, I reproduce my letter to the New York Review of Books, dated December 6, 2007."A presidential decision requires a plan. The elements of a decision must include: (a) previous planning, reflected in military documents in this case; (b) discussion of the plan; (c) a decision to accept or reject the plan, reflected in a decision document; and (d) steps to implement the plan. In the case of JFK and withdrawal from Vietnam, all these elements are present."We have records of the 8th Secretary of Defense conference in Honolulu on May 6, 1963, which tell of a ‘Comprehensive Plan’ for Vietnam, including: ‘plan to withdraw 1000 US personnel from RVN by December 1963.’ McNamara also ordered that ‘training plans’ be developed for the Vietnamese to permit ‘a more rapid phase-out’of the remaining US forces."On October 2, 1963, these plans were discussed at the White House. We have the tape. McNamara states to Kennedy: ‘And the advantage of taking them out is that we can say to the Congress and the people that we do have a plan for reducing the exposure of US combat personnel to the guerilla actions in South Vietnam.’"On October 5, 1963, at a meeting at 9:30 AM, Kennedy made the formal decision to implement the withdrawal plan. Again, we have the tape. On October 11, the White House issued National Security Action Memorandum 263, which speaks of ‘the implementation of plans to withdraw’ troops from Vietnam."A memorandum conveying the decision, from JCS Chair Maxwell Taylor to his military colleagues, had already been sent. It states: ‘All planning will be directed towards preparing RVN forces for the withdrawal of all US special assistance units and personnel by the end of calendar year 1965. The US Comprehensive Plan, Vietnam, will be revised to bring it into consonance with these objectives….’ "As a coda, the distinguished economist Francis Bator replied to my letter on January 17, 2008. Bator had served Lyndon Johnson as Deputy National Security Advisor; he cannot be accused of being what Logevall calls a "withdrawal theorist." Bator’s opening sentence: "Professor Galbraith is correct that ‘there was a plan to withdraw US forces from Vietnam, beginning with the first thousand by December 1963, and almost all of the rest by the end of 1965…. President Kennedy had approved that plan. It was the actual policy of the United States on the day Kennedy died.’"To be fair, Bator goes on to argue that the plan was conditional on military success — the same caveat offered by Burns and Novick in the documentary series when they refer to a 1962 withdrawal plan. But this is a case that McNamara contradicts and Newman has rebutted in detail.There was no full withdrawal plan as yet in 1962, although Kennedy remained firm throughout that combat troops would not be sent, and he did instruct McNamara to develop a plan to remove the advisers who were there. McNamara — portrayed in the PBS film as the villain technocrat, a role that he played all too well — actually agreed that US forces should be withdrawn, whether or not the war could be won.The full development of the plan, including the final timetable, came during the summer of 1963. By that time, official reporting — previously falsely optimistic — came into line with Kennedy’s own understanding, as he expressed it, that "we don’t have a prayer."As of October 2, 1963, the decision had been made. The plan existed. It had been approved. It had even been announced, albeit low-key, and by McNamara rather than Kennedy himself.Could it have been reversed later? Yes. But Kennedy gave no sign of wavering in the few weeks that remained to him, despite the Saigon coup. And he could not in 1965 have faced the same dilemma that Lyndon Johnson did when, following the Tonkin Gulf incident, the North Vietnamese began to escalate the war. With withdrawals having progressed through 1964, only a small force would have been left by then. It would have been in Hanoi’s interest to wait until they were all gone, and the North Vietnamese leadership was nothing if not patient. And even if the Vietnamese had not waited, the die, by that time, would have been cast.When Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency, many things were different, immediately. To get Kennedy’s role right is not to demonize LBJ, even though Johnson’s decisions led to catastrophe for Vietnam and for America, including for Johnson’s dream of the Great Society. But LBJ’s actions in Vietnam cannot be understood without first understanding what Kennedy did, and how policy stood on the day he was killed.James K. Galbraith is a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin.(4) That Other Plot: to Bring Down Trump - PAT BUCHANANhttp://www.unz.com/pbuchanan/that-other-plot-to-bring-down-trump/That Other Plot -- to Bring Down TrumpPAT BUCHANAN o OCTOBER 31, 2017Well over a year after the FBI began investigating "collusion" between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has brought in his first major indictment.Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort has been charged with a series of crimes dating back years, though none is tied directly to President Donald Trump or 2016.With a leak to CNN that indictments were coming, Mueller’s office stole the weekend headlines. This blanketed the explosive news on a separate front, as the dots began to be connected on a bipartisan plot to bring down Trump that began two years ago.And like "Murder of the Orient Express," it seems almost everyone on the train had a hand in the plot.The narrative begins in October 2015.Then it was that the Washington Free Beacon, a neocon website, engaged a firm of researchers called Fusion GPS to do deep dirt-diving into Trump’s personal and professional life — and take him out.A spinoff of Bill Kristol’s The Weekly Standard, the Beacon is run by his son-in-law. And its Daddy Warbucks is the GOP oligarch and hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer. From October 2015 to May 2016, Fusion GPS dug up dirt for the neocons and never-Trumpers. By May, however, Trump had routed all rivals and was the certain Republican nominee.So the Beacon bailed, and Fusion GPS found two new cash cows to finance its dirt-diving — the DNC and the Clinton campaign.To keep the sordid business at arm’s length, both engaged the party’s law firm of Perkins Coie. Paid $12.4 million by the DNC and Clinton campaign, Perkins used part of this cash hoard to pay Fusion GPS.Here is where it begins to get interesting.In June 2016, Fusion GPS engaged a British spy, Christopher Steele, who had headed up the Russia desk at MI6, to ferret out any connections between Trump and Russia.Steele began contacting old acquaintances in the FSB, the Russian intelligence service. And the Russians began to feed him astonishing dirt on Trump that could, if substantiated, kill his candidacy.Among the allegations was that Trump had consorted with prostitutes at a Moscow hotel, that the Kremlin was blackmailing him, that there was provable collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.In memos from June to October 2016, Steele passed this on to Fusion GPS, which passed it on to major U.S. newspapers. But as the press was unable to verify it, they declined to publish it.Steele’s final product, a 35-page dossier, has been described as full of "unsubstantiated and salacious allegations."Steele’s research, however, had also made its way to James Comey’s FBI, which was apparently so taken with it that the bureau considered paying Steele to continue his work.About this "astonishing" development, columnist Byron York of the Washington Examiner quotes Sen. Chuck Grassley:"The idea that the FBI and associates of the Clinton campaign would pay Mr. Steele to investigate the Republican nominee for president in the run-up to the election raises … questions about the FBI’s independence from politics, as well as the Obama administration’s use of law enforcement and intelligence agencies for political ends."The questions begin to pile up.What was the FBI’s relationship with the British spy who was so wired into Russian intelligence?Did the FBI use the information Steele dug up to expand its own investigation of Russia-Trump "collusion"? Did the FBI pass what Steele unearthed to the White House and the National Security Council?Did the Obama administration use the information from the Steele dossier to justify unmasking the names of Trump officials that had been picked up on legitimate electronic intercepts?In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Clinton campaign chair John Podesta and DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz claimed they did not know that Perkins Coie had enlisted Fusion GPA or the British spy to dig up dirt on Trump.Yet, when Podesta testified, the lawyer sitting beside him in the committee room was Marc Elias of Perkins Coie, who had engaged Fusion GPS and received the fruits of Steele’s undercover work.Here one is tempted to cite Bismarck that, if you wish to enjoy politics or sausages, you should not inquire too closely how they are made.Thus we have Free Beacon neocons, never-Trump Republicans, the Hillary Clinton campaign, the DNC, a British spy and comrades in Russian intelligence, and perhaps the FBI, all working with secret money and seedy individuals to destroy a candidate they could not defeat in a free election.If future revelations demonstrate that this is what went down, it is not only the White House that has major problems.If you wish to know why Americans detest politics and hate the "swamp" that has been made of their capital city, follow this story all the way to its inevitable end. It will be months of unfolding.The real indictment here is of the American political system, and the true tragedy is the decline of the Old Republic.Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, "Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever."Copyright 2017 Creators.com.(5) Clinton campaign, DNC paid for research that led to Russia dossier - WaPohttps://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/clinton-campaign-dnc-paid-for-research-that-led-to-russia-dossier/2017/10/24/226fabf0-b8e4-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.htmlClinton campaign, DNC paid for research that led to Russia dossierClinton’s campaign helped fund the research that led to the Russia dossierThe Washington Post’s Adam Entous looks at the role that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee played in funding the research that led to a dossier containing allegations about President Trump’s links to Russia. (Video: Bastien Inzaurralde, Patrick Martin/Photo: Melina Mara/The Washington Post) By Adam Entous, Devlin Barrett and Rosalind S. Helderman October 24 at 7:21 PM The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said.Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the company in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Before that agreement, Fusion GPS’s research into Trump was funded by an unknown Republican client during the GOP primary.The Clinton campaign and the DNC, through the law firm, continued to fund Fusion GPS’s research through the end of October 2016, days before Election Day.Fusion GPS gave Steele’s reports and other research documents to Elias, the people familiar with the matter said. It is unclear how or how much of that information was shared with the campaign and the DNC and who in those organizations was aware of the roles of Fusion GPS and Steele. One person close to the matter said the campaign and the DNC were not informed by the law firm of Fusion GPS’s role.The dossier has become a lightning rod amid the intensifying investigations into the Trump campaign’s possible connections to Russia. Some congressional Republican leaders have spent months trying to discredit Fusion GPS and Steele and tried to determine the identity of the Democrat or organization that paid for the dossier.Trump tweeted as recently as Saturday that the Justice Department and FBI should "immediately release who paid for it."Elias and Fusion GPS declined to comment on the arrangement.A DNC spokeswoman said "[Chairman] Tom Perez and the new leadership of the DNC were not involved in any decision-making regarding Fusion GPS, nor were they aware that Perkins Coie was working with the organization. But let’s be clear, there is a serious federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, and the American public deserves to know what happened."Brian Fallon, a former spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said he wasn’t aware of the hiring during the campaign."The first I learned of Christopher Steele or saw any dossier was after the election," Fallon said. "But if I had gotten handed it last fall, I would have had no problem passing it along and urging reporters to look into it. Opposition research happens on every campaign, and here you had probably the most shadowy guy ever running for president, and the FBI certainly has seen fit to look into it. I probably would have volunteered to go to Europe myself to try and verify if it would have helped get more of this out there before the election."  Marc E. Elias of Perkins Coie represented the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post) Some of the details are included in a Tuesday letter sent by Perkins Coie to a lawyer representing Fusion GPS, telling the research firm that it was released from a client-confidentiality obligation. The letter was prompted by a legal fight over a subpoena for Fusion GPS’s bank records.People involved in the matter said that they would not disclose the dollar amounts paid to Fusion GPS but that the campaign and the DNC shared the cost.Steele previously worked in Russia for British intelligence. The dossier is a compilation of reports he prepared for Fusion GPS. The dossier alleged that the Russian government collected compromising information about Trump and that the Kremlin was engaged in an effort to assist his campaign for president.U.S. intelligence agencies later released a public assessment asserting that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to aid Trump. The FBI has been investigating whether Trump associates helped the Russians in that effort.[FBI once planned to pay former British spy who authored controversial Trump dossier]Trump has adamantly denied the allegations in the dossier and has dismissed the FBI probe as a witch hunt.Officials have said that the FBI has confirmed some of the information in the dossier. Other details, including the most sensational accusations, have not been verified and may never be.Fusion GPS’s work researching Trump began during the Republican presidential primaries, when the GOP donor paid for the firm to investigate the real estate magnate’s background.Fusion GPS did not start off looking at Trump’s Russia ties but quickly realized that those relationships were extensive, according to the people familiar with the matter.When the Republican donor stopped paying for the research, Elias, acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC, agreed to pay for the work to continue. The Democrats paid for research, including by Fusion GPS, because of concerns that little was known about Trump and his business interests, according to the people familiar with the matter.Those people said that it is standard practice for political campaigns to use law firms to hire outside researchers to ensure their work is protected by attorney-client and work-product privileges.The Clinton campaign paid Perkins Coie $5.6 million in legal fees from June 2015 to December 2016, according to campaign finance records, and the DNC paid the firm $3.6 million in "legal and compliance consulting’’ since November 2015 — though it’s impossible to tell from the filings how much of that work was for other legal matters and how much of it related to Fusion GPS.At no point, the people said, did the Clinton campaign or the DNC direct Steele’s activities. They described him as a Fusion GPS subcontractor.Some of Steele’s allegations began circulating in Washington in the summer of 2016 as the FBI launched its counterintelligence investigation into possible connections between Trump associates and the Kremlin. Around that time, Steele shared some of his findings with the FBI.After the election, the FBI agreed to pay Steele to continue gathering intelligence about Trump and Russia, but the bureau pulled out of the arrangement after Steele was publicly identified in news reports.The dossier was published by BuzzFeed News in January. Fusion GPS has said in court filings that it did not give BuzzFeed the documents.Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that Steele was respected by the FBI and the State Department for earlier work he performed on a global corruption probe.In early January, then-FBI Director James B. Comey presented a two-page summary of Steele’s dossier to President Barack Obama and President-elect Trump. In May, Trump fired Comey, which led to the appointment of Robert S. Mueller III as special counsel investigating the Trump-Russia matter.Congressional Republicans have tried to force Fusion GPS to identify the Democrat or group behind Steele’s work, but the firm has said that it will not do so, citing confidentiality agreements with its clients.Checkpoint newsletter Military, defense and security at home and abroad. Sign up Last week, Fusion GPS executives invoked their constitutional right not to answer questions from the House Intelligence Committee. The firm’s founder, Glenn Simpson, had previously given a 10-hour interview to the Senate Judiciary Committee.Over objections from Democrats, the Republican leader of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.), subpoenaed Fusion GPS’s bank records to try to identify the mystery client.Fusion GPS has been fighting the release of its bank records. A judge on Tuesday extended a deadline for Fusion GPS’s bank to respond to the subpoena until Friday while the company attempts to negotiate a resolution with Nunes.Julie Tate contributed to this report.(6) Steele's reports are based on hearsay from anonymous Russians - Robert Parryhttps://consortiumnews.com/2017/10/25/what-did-hillary-clinton-know/What Did Hillary Clinton Know?October 25, 2017Exclusive: With the disclosure that Hillary Clinton’s campaign helped pay for the original Russia-gate allegations against Donald Trump, a new question arises: what did Clinton know and when did she know it, reports Robert Parry.By Robert ParryThe revelation that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped pay for the notorious "Steele Dossier" of hearsay claims about Donald Trump’s relations with Russia is not surprising but is noteworthy given how long the mystery about the funding was allowed to linger.Another mild surprise is that the Clinton campaign would have had a direct hand in the financing rather than maintaining an arm’s length relationship to the dossier by having some "friend of the campaign" make the payments and giving Clinton more deniability.Instead, the campaign appears to have relied on its lawyer, Marc E. Elias of Perkins Coie, and a confidentiality agreement to provide some insulation between Clinton and the dossier’s startling claims which presumably helped inform Clinton’s charge in the final presidential debate that Trump was Russian President Vladimir Putin’s "puppet." Indeed, how much Clinton personally knew about the dossier and its financing remains an intriguing question for investigators.Ultimately, the facts about who commissioned the dossier were forced out by a congressional Republican subpoena seeking the bank records of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that hired former British intelligence operative Christopher Steele to compile the opposition research, known as "oppo," against Trump.As part of the legal wrangling over that subpoena, the Clinton/DNC law firm, Perkins Coie, wrote a letter releasing Fusion GPS from its confidentiality agreement.After that letter, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday night that the Clinton campaign and the DNC had helped fund the Steele effort with attorney Elias retaining Fusion GPS in April 2016 and with Fusion GPS then hiring Steele.The Post reported that "people familiar with the matter" disclosed that outline of the arrangement but still would not divulge how much the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid to Fusion GPS. One source told me that the total amount came to about $1 million.‘Trash for Cash’An irony about Hillary Clinton’s role in funding allegations about Trump’s connection to the Russians, including claims that he cavorted with prostitutes in a five-star Moscow hotel while Russian intelligence operatives secretly filmed him, is that the Clinton camp bristled when Bill Clinton was the subject of Republican "oppo" that surfaced salacious charges against him. The Clintons dismissed such accusations as "cash for trash."Nevertheless, just as conspiratorial accusations about the Clintons gave rise to the Whitewater investigation and a rash of other alleged "scandals," which bedeviled Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Steele Dossier provided a map that investigators have followed for the ongoing Russia-gate investigation into President Trump.Much like those Clinton allegations, Steele’s accusations have had a dubious track record for accuracy, with U.S. government investigators unable to corroborate some key claims but, I’m told, believing that some are true nonetheless.In the 1990s, even though the core allegations of wrongdoing about the Clintons and their Whitewater land deal collapsed, the drawn-out investigation eventually unearthed Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky and led to his impeachment in the House although he was acquitted in a Senate trial.Some Democrats have openly hoped for the impeachment of President Trump, too, and they have hitched many of those hopes to the Russia-gate bandwagon.There is also no doubt about the significance of the Steele Dossier in spurring the Russia-gate scandal forward.When Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, offered what amounted to a prosecutor’s opening statement in March, his seamless 15-minute narrative of the Trump campaign’s alleged collaboration with Russia followed the trail blazed by Steele, who had worked for Britain’s MI-6 in Russia and tapped into ex-colleagues and unnamed sources inside Russia, including supposedly leadership figures in the Kremlin.Steele’s MethodsSince Steele could not reenter Russia himself, he based his reports on multiple hearsay from these anonymous Russians who claim to have heard some information from their government contacts before passing it on to Steele’s associates who then gave it to Steele who compiled this mix of rumors and alleged inside dope into "raw" intelligence reports.Besides the anonymous sourcing and the sources’ financial incentives to dig up dirt, Steele’s reports had other problems, including the inability of FBI investigators to confirm key elements, such as the claim that several years ago Russian intelligence operatives secretly videotaped Trump having prostitutes urinate on him while he lay in the same bed at Moscow’s Ritz-Carlton used by President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.That tantalizing tidbit was included in Steele’s opening report to his new clients, dated June 20, 2016. Apparently, it proved irresistible in whetting the appetite of Clinton insiders. Also in that first report were the basic outlines of Russia-gate.But Steele’s June report also reflected the telephone-tag aspects of these allegations: "Speaking to a trusted compatriot in June 2016 sources A and B, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure and a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin respectively, the Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting US Republican presidential candidate, Donald TRUMP for a least 5 years."Source B asserted that the TRUMP operation was both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir PUTIN. Its aim was to sow discord and disunity both within the US itself, but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance which was viewed as inimical to Russia’s interests. … In terms of specifics, Source A confided that the Kremlin had been feeding TRUMP and his team valuable intelligence on his opponents, including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary CLINTON, for several years. …"The Kremlin’s cultivation operation on TRUMP also had comprised offering him various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia, especially in relation to the ongoing 2018 World Cup soccer tournament. However, so far, for reasons unknown, TRUMP had not taken up any of these."Besides the anonymous and hearsay quality of the allegations, there are obvious logical problems, especially the point that five years before the 2016 campaign, virtually no one would have thought that Trump had any chance of becoming President of the United States.There also may have been a more mundane reason why Trump’s hotel deal fell through. A source familiar with those negotiations told me that Trump had hoped to get a half interest in the $2 billion project but that Russian-Israeli investor Mikhail Fridman, a founder of Russia’s Alfa Bank, balked because Trump was unwilling to commit a significant investment beyond the branding value of the Trump name.Yet, one would assume that if the supposedly all-powerful Putin wanted to give a $1 billion or so payoff to his golden boy, Donald Trump, whom Putin anticipated would become President in five years, the deal would have happened, but it didn’t.Despite the dubious quality of Steele’s second- and third-hand information, the June 2016 report appears to have impressed Team Clinton. And once the bait was taken, Steele continued to produce his conspiracy-laden reports, totaling at least 17 through Dec. 13, 2016.Framing the InvestigationThe reports not only captivated the Clinton political operatives but influenced the assessments of President Obama’s appointees in the U.S. intelligence community regarding alleged Russian "meddling" in the presidential election.Still, a careful analysis of Steele’s reports would have discovered not only apparent factual inaccuracies, such as putting Trump lawyer Michael Cohen at a meeting with a Russian official in Prague (when Cohen says he’s never been to Prague), but also the sort of broad conspiracy-mongering that the mainstream U.S. news media usually loves to ridicule.For instance, Steele’s reports pin a range of U.S. political attitudes on Russian manipulation rather than the notion that Americans can reach reasonable conclusions on their own. In one report dated Sept. 14, 2016, Steele claimed that an unnamed senior official in Putin’s Presidential Administration (or PA) explained how Putin used the alleged Russian influence operation to generate opposition to Obama’s Pacific trade deals.Steele wrote that Putin’s intention was "pushing candidate CLINTON away from President OBAMA’s policies. The best example of this was that both candidates [Clinton and Trump] now openly opposed the draft trade agreements, TPP and TTIP, which were assessed by Moscow as detrimental to Russian interests."In other words, the Russians supposedly intervened in the U.S. presidential campaign to turn the leading candidates against Obama’s trade deals. But how credible is that? Are we to believe that American politicians – running the gamut from Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren through former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to President Donald Trump – have all been tricked by the Kremlin to oppose those controversial trade deals, which are also broadly unpopular with the American people who are sick and tired of trade agreements that cost them jobs?Of course, the disclosure that the Clinton campaign and the DNC help pay for Steele’s opposition research doesn’t necessarily discredit the information, but it does suggest a possible financial incentive for Steele and his collaborators to sex-up the reports to keep Clinton’s camp coming back for more.(7)  FBI agreed to pay Steele at the same time he was being paid by Clinton supporters - WaPohttps://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/fbi-once-planned-to-pay-former-british-spy-who-authored-controversial-trump-dossier/2017/02/28/896ab470-facc-11e6-9845-576c69081518_story.htmlFBI once planned to pay former British spy who authored controversial Trump dossierHow the FBI is linked to the author of the controversial Trump dossierWashington Post reporters Tom Hamburger and Rosalind S. Helderman explain the story behind a controversial dossier on President Trump.By Tom Hamburger and Rosalind S. HeldermanFebruary 28 2017The former British spy who authored a controversial dossier on behalf of Donald Trump’s political opponents alleging ties between Trump and Russia reached an agreement with the FBI a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work, according to several people familiar with the arrangement.The agreement to compensate former MI6 agent Christopher Steele came as U.S. intelligence agencies reached a consensus that the Russians had interfered in the presidential election by orchestrating hacks of Democratic Party email accounts.While Trump has derided the dossier as "fake news" compiled by his political opponents, the FBI’s arrangement with Steele shows that the bureau considered him credible and found his information, while unproved, to be worthy of further investigation.Ultimately, the FBI did not pay Steele. Communications between the bureau and the former spy were interrupted as Steele’s now-famous dossier became the subject of news stories, congressional inquiries and presidential denials, according to the people familiar with the arrangement, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.At the time of the October agreement, FBI officials probing Russian activities, including possible contacts between Trump associates and Russian entities, were aware of the information that Steele had been gathering while working for a Washington research firm hired by supporters of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, according to the people familiar with the agreement. The firm was due to stop paying Steele as Election Day approached, but Steele felt his work was not done, these people said.Steele was familiar to the FBI, in part because the bureau had previously hired him to help a U.S. inquiry into alleged corruption in the world soccer organization FIFA. The FBI sometimes pays informants, sources and outside investigators to assist in its work. Steele was known for the quality of his past work and for the knowledge he had developed over nearly 20 years working on Russia-related issues for British intelligence. The Washington Post was not able to determine how much the FBI intended to pay Steele had their relationship remained intact.The dossier he produced last year alleged, among other things, that associates of Trump colluded with the Kremlin on cyberattacks on Democrats and that the Russians held compromising material about the Republican nominee.These and other explosive claims have not been verified, and they have been vigorously denied by Trump and his allies.The FBI, as well as the Senate Intelligence Committee, is investigating Russian interference in the election and alleged contacts between Trump’s associates and the Kremlin.On Tuesday, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) told reporters that he had seen "no evidence so far" of Trump campaign contacts with Russia but said a bipartisan House inquiry would proceed so that "no stone is unturned."The revelation that the FBI agreed to pay Steele at the same time he was being paid by Clinton supporters to dig into Trump’s background could further strain relations between the law enforcement agency and the White House.A spokesman for the FBI declined to comment. Steele’s London-based attorney did not respond to questions about the agreement.White House press secretary Sean Spicer declined to comment.Steele, 53, began his Trump investigation in June 2016 after working for another client preparing a report on Russian efforts to interfere with politics in Europe.U.S. intelligence had been independently tracking Russian efforts to influence electoral outcomes in Europe.Steele was hired to work for a Washington research firm, Fusion GPS, that was providing information to a Democratic client. Fusion GPS began doing Trump research in early 2016, before it hired Steele, on behalf of a Republican opposed to the businessman’s candidacy. The firm declined to identify its clients.Steele’s early reports alleged a plan directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin to help Trump in 2016."Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years," Steele wrote in June.Steele’s information was provided by an intermediary to the FBI and U.S. intelligence officials after the Democratic National Convention in July, when hacked Democratic emails were first released by WikiLeaks, according to a source familiar with the events. After the convention, Steele contacted a friend in the FBI to personally explain what he had found.As summer turned to fall, Steele became concerned that the U.S. government was not taking the information he had uncovered seriously enough, according to two people familiar with the situation.In October, anticipating that funding supplied through the original client would dry up, Steele and the FBI reached a spoken understanding: He would continue his work looking at the Kremlin’s ties to Trump and receive compensation for his efforts.But Steele’s frustration deepened when FBI Director James B. Comey, who had been silent on the Russia inquiry, announced publicly 11 days before the election that the bureau was investigating a newly discovered cache of emails Clinton had exchanged using her private server, according to people familiar with Steele’s thinking.Those people say Steele’s frustration with the FBI peaked after an Oct. 31 New York Times story that cited law enforcement sources drawing conclusions that he considered premature. The article said that the FBI had not yet found any "conclusive or direct link" between Trump and the Russian government and that the Russian hacking was not intended to help Trump.After the election, the intelligence community concluded that Russia’s interference had been intended to assist Trump.In January, top intelligence and law enforcement officials briefed Trump and President Barack Obama on those findings. In addition, they provided a summary of the core allegations of Steele’s dossier.[Intelligence chiefs briefed Trump, Obama on unconfirmed Russia claims]News of that briefing soon became public. Then BuzzFeed posted a copy of Steele’s salacious but unproven dossier online, sparking outrage from Trump."It’s all fake news. It’s phony stuff. It didn’t happen," Trump told reporters in January. "It was a group of opponents that got together — sick people — and they put that crap together."He later tweeted that Steele was a "failed spy."The development marked the end of the FBI’s relationship with Steele.After he was publicly identified by the Wall Street Journal as the dossier’s author, Steele went into hiding. U.S. officials took pains to stress that his report was not a U.S. government product and that it had not influenced their broader conclusions that the Russian government had hacked the emails of Democratic officials and released those emails with the intention of helping Trump win the presidency."The [intelligence community] has not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable, and we did not rely upon it in any way for our conclusions," then-Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said in a statement in January.The owner of a technology company identified in Steele’s dossier as a participant in the hacks is now suing Steele and BuzzFeed for defamation. BuzzFeed apologized to the executive and blocked out his name in the published document.Comey spent almost two hours this month briefing the Senate Intelligence Committee. Democrats in the House have informally reached out to Steele in recent weeks to ask about his willingness to testify or cooperate, according to people familiar with the requests. Steele has so far not responded, they said.-- Peter Myerswebsite: http://mailstar.net/index.html