Thursday on his syndicated radio program, Mark Levin reviews the facts about reports that the Steele Dossier was used by the Obama administration to gain approval for a FISA court warrant to surveil Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Circa News reporter Sara Carter reported this week that the dossier “certainly played a role in obtaining the warrant” that was used to spy on members of Trump’s campaign.

MARK LEVIN: This is a massive scandal, the likes of which we’ve not seen.
The bastardization of our intelligence agencies and federal law enforcement by a sitting Democrat administration aimed at destroying and defeating a Republican nominee — the opposition party.

And after the election, his transition. This is a big deal. This is the sort of things that happen in s***hole countries.
Representatives of four committees… the House Intel Committee, the Senate Intel Committee, the House Judiciary Committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee have been able to review documents in a secure room at the Justice Dept. according to the Washington Examiner’s Byron York.
They were not allowed to take the documents out of the room or copy them, but they could take notes. They thus know the answer to the was the dossier used to spy question.
The answer to the question is classified, however, as of yesterday morning, no one had yet leaked it. However, late yesterday, according to reporter Sarah Carter, multiple sources told her that the dossier was used along with other evidence to obtain the warrant from the FISA court.
Our old buddy Fox News’s Sean Hannity corroborated the news on his show that night, saying that three separate sources told him the same thing. This dossier, a 35-page hit piece of opposition research was put together by former British spy Christopher Steele for the liberal opposition research group Fusion GPS, which was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democrat National Committee.
According to Carter, the sources suggest there will be more information in the coming weeks regarding systemic FISA abuse.
‘(The dossier) certainly played a role in obtaining the warrant,’ added another senior U.S. official, with knowledge of the dossier. ‘Congress needs to look at the FBI officials who were handling this case and see what, if anything, was verified in the dossier.’
The law enforcement source said the broader question is why did the FBI use a Democrat-paid-for dossier to actually surveil another campaign.
To show you how utterly and thoroughly corrupt the media is, most of the media are ignoring this. Most of the media are ignoring this. This is such a massive scandal, we can not live in a free society when administrations of one party are surveilling candidates of another party, or transitions of another party.

President Donald Trump, concerned that investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections cast doubt over his legitimacy, has consistently dismissed and denigrated such probes. The decision by Dianne Feinstein, as the Senate Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, to unilaterally release the transcript of closed testimony by Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson adds a measure of much-needed transparency in the still-unfolding investigations. A careful—and apolitical–reading of the more than 300 pages sheds light on the work of the political research firm and the credibility of revelations thus far.

The primary impetus for the nine hours of Senate staff questioning of Simpson was the so-called “Steele Dossier,” a series of raw intelligence reports collected by former British MI-6 officer Christopher Steele, many of which paint Trump and his organization in a highly negative light.

Unfortunately, partisan politics are overshadowing the content of the dossier and the veracity of Steele and Simpson. Information in the transcript contributes significantly to the public’s ability to understand Russia’s goals for the election, as well as the level of professionalism not only of Fusion GPS but also of Steele and, indeed, the FBI.

So it is difficult to ascribe anything but political calculation to Republican opposition to making the transcript public. A spokesperson for Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said the release “undermines the integrity of the committee’s oversight work and jeopardizes its ability to secure candid, voluntary testimony.” These complaints do not appear to be serious, given that the committee presumably could subpoena witnesses if it so desired. And in today’s leaky Washington, there is only an even chance that a transcript would remain confidential.

Simpson himself called for release of the transcript in a recent op-ed in The New York Times. Certainly no classified information was discussed, a valid reason often used to conduct closed hearings. Given all of this, Grassley’s opposition to the release of the transcript appears to be first and foremost a political decision, designed to keep Simpson’s comments out of the public eye.

Motivations for the Initial Research

Many believe the Democratic Party hired Fusion GPS to use Steele to get Russian dirt on Trump, and that this was a key goal from the outset. In fact, according to Simpson, his firm started its research on Trump the same way it did when researching anybody else, Republican or Democrat – using public sources.

The research “wasn’t really a Russia-focused investigation for the first half of it,” he told the committee staff. This is important because Simpson noted to the staffers that most of Fusion’s employees were former journalists, and as such, were used to conducting research using publicly available information.

It is also interesting that Simpson’s initial focus was on Trump’s business activities, not just in the U.S. but worldwide. As we will see in a moment, some of the business that caught Fusion’s attention was in Russia and countries of the former Soviet Union.

Simpson indicated that only when public records had been exhausted did he contact Steele, someone he had known for years, in an attempt to obtain additional information, especially in regard to Trump activities in and around Russia. Portions of what Fusion researchers uncovered led them to suspect Russia played a significant role in the Trump story – suspicions that later seemed to be validated by Steele’s work with his Russian sources.

A Long History of Questionable Business Deals

This is a theme that arose several times during Simpson’s questioning. The Fusion CEO indicated that his initial research focused on identifying links between Trump’s business empire and organized crime worldwide. While the research did turn up non-Russian activity (the Italian mob is mentioned, for example though without detail), Fusion began to find more and more Russia-centric organized crime connections.

Felix Sater, whom Simpson describes as having ties to Russian organized crime, was an example. Simpson said that Trump stated under oath at some point – Simpson didn’t specify the context) that he did not know Sater well. Simpson indicated that “this was not true,” and that Trump “continued to associate with [Sater] long after he learned of Felix’s organized crime ties.”

Trump had business dealings all over the world, and trying to track them proved difficult, Simpson said.

“We became interested in his (Trump’s) [Trump’s] overseas business dealings particularly because they were so opaque and seemed to involve … to say the least, colorful characters,” Simpson said.

As Fusion dug further into Trump’s deals in the former Soviet Union –Kazakhstan, Georgia and Azerbaijan, for example – Simpson became concerned.

“What came back was something … very different and obviously more alarming … which outlined a political conspiracy and a much broader set of issues than the ones we went looking for,” Simpson said. “Initially, we didn’t know what to do with this.”

Fusion’s research into the Trump businesses apparently revealed not only ties to Russian organized crime, but also possible darker intentions on the part of the Russian government. Now Fusion found itself unable to use public information, and so Simpson brought in Steele as a contractor to dig deeper, using the human intelligence techniques Steele had learned as an intelligence officer.

Simpson’s Trust of Steele

The Fusion CEO told the Senate staffers that he had known and worked with Steele for “eight or nine years,” and that, in a business where “a lot of people make stuff up and sell baloney,” Steele stood apart. Simpson made the common-sense business argument that good research and reporting, such as what Steele had provided in the past, made it more likely that Fusion and Steele would get additional business in the future.

Steele is “well-respected in his field, and, as I say, everyone I know who’s ever dealt with him thinks he’s quite good,” Simpson said. “That would include people from the U.S. government.”

So convinced was Fusion of Steele’s skills that Simpson believed Steele would be able to sort out what might be Russian disinformation, should one or more of Steele’s sources be under the control of the Russian government. Simpson reasoned that, given Steele’s long career as an intelligence officer focused on Russia, he would be able to identify false information provided by his Russian sources, and either omit them or include disclaimers in his reporting. This would be standard practice for any professional intelligence officer.

Reporting to the FBI … or Not

One of the more fascinating portions of the transcript describes Simpson and Steele wrestling with how to manage the information that began to flow in regarding the Trump organization’s cooperation with the Russian government. It is clear from the transcript that neither man was initially sure what to do with the bombshell information.

According to Simpson, it was Steele who first raised the issue of passing some of his information to the FBI, given Steele’s concerns that the Russians were attempting to influence the U.S. presidential elections. Simpson at first demurred, saying he needed to think about it. But Steele persisted, and when Steele said he had an old friend who was an FBI officer serving in Rome who could be used as a conduit, Simpson posed no objection to sharing the reporting with him.

“Let’s be clear,” Simpson also told the staffers, “this was not considered by me to be part of the work that we were doing … To me this was, like, you know, you’re driving in to work and you see something happen and you call 911.”

The transcripts reveal Simpson to be a convincing character, one whose firm had been hired over the years to do opposition research on both Republican and Democratic candidates. Fusion GPS’s modus operandi regarding such research seems consistent with Simpson’s journalistic roots and the skills he honed while working as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

On several occasions, Simpson highlighted the need to remain professionally and politically neutral when doing his job, not just because of the ethics of his work, but also because he (and his contractor Steele) understood that being an honest broker in his line of work would mean more clients would hire him in the future.

A question that isn’t answered in the hearing is what Steele told Simpson about who his Russian sources were, and how he obtained information from them. On multiple occasions, Simpson declined to answer questions about the sources in order to protect them; at one point, Simpson’s lawyer, Joshua Levy, pushed back at staffers’ questions on this by saying that one person in Russia had already died as a result of the release of the dossier.

Simpson was clearly focused on the reliability of Steele’s sources. But in the end, he put his trust in Steele’s expertise running Russian agents when he was an intelligence officer.

Much of the information discussed in the Simpson transcripts was already known. But in stark contrast to Trump and, apparently, Republicans on the committee, Simpson and Steele were so troubled by the information they collected that they decided to approach the FBI.

“I mean, for both of us, it was citizenship,” said Simpson. Perhaps citizenship is a concept worth remembering in the future when dealing with questions of Trump and Russia.

Tom Nichols, Opinion contributor Published 12:59 p.m. ET Jan. 11, 2018 | Updated 6:41 p.m. ET Jan. 11, 2018

The transcript of the Senate intelligence committee’s interview with Fusion GPS director Glenn Simpson is now in the public domain, put there by a frustrated Sen. Dianne Feinstein in the wake of ongoing Republican conspiracy theories about what Simpson did or did not tell the Senate.

Somehow, GOP critics of the Trump-Russia investigation have tried to put a positive spin on these materials, as if Simpson’s answers prove their point that the whole business is a witch hunt.

In fact, there are only two ways to read the Simpson interview: either it says nothing, or it has blown up months of carefully constructed conspiracy theorizing.

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Let’s start by piecing together, as best we can, what various critics of the investigation, including the most vociferous Trump supporters, think is going on.

By now we’re all familiar with the “Steele dossier,” a raw — in every way — report from a British spy who was engaged by an opposition research firm called Fusion GPS. It makes sensational claims about years of Russian operations against President Donald Trump.

If not for Steele’s file, the GOP reasoning goes, the FBI would never have started down the path of investigating Trump, which would never have led to FBI Director James Comey approaching Trump about the file; absent this, Comey would never have been fired, there would be no Mueller probe, and all would be right with the world.

But what about Trump officials meeting with the Russians during the campaign? Indeed, in the telling of at least some Trump defenders, these were the result of orders issued from Clinton’s volcano lair for Fusion to lure Donald Trump Jr. and others into a room with shady Russians for meetings that were unwise — or even “treasonous,” if banished Trump advisor Steve Bannon is to be believed. Somehow, after all this slick tradecraft, Clinton’s people never saw it coming when the Russians betrayed them and hacked the DNC anyway.

Think about the size of the claim here: the Clinton campaign, which was convinced it was going to beat Trump in a landslide, funded an espionage-laden high-wire act with a firm whose clients included some unsavory Russians themselves, in which a highly experienced British spook got suckered by the Democrats into weaponizing some Russian disinformation. (Steele could outplay the Russians, but he couldn’t outplay Robby Mook?)

There are other variations on this theme, but central to all of them was the idea that without Fusion there would be nothing, and that we would know this if only we could know what Simpson said to the Senate investigators. But since the Senate intelligence committee wouldn’t release the transcript, we couldn’t know just how much Simpson had spilled his guts.

So now we know, and none of it supports the rickety Jenga pile of Republican conspiracy theories.

Instead of being the source of the FBI investigations, Simpson claimed that the FBI was already on to the Russians, not least because our Australian allies warned us that the Russians claimed to have dirt on Clinton, which they learned because George Papadopoulos, a Trump advisor, was bragging about it to an Australian diplomat.

Also, according to Simpson, Steele was so horrified by what he was finding that he contacted the FBIinstead of just reporting back to his Clintonian masters. Worse yet, Simpson describes Steele as finding the FBI so in the tank — not for Clinton, but for Trump — that Steele stopped cooperating with them.

Now, it’s possible that Simpson is a cool risk-taker who’s willing to lie to Senate investigators. If that’s the case, then we’ve learned nothing. If Simpson, as critics of his testimony insist, is that untrustworthy, then so be it, but that would mean that we do not know anything more today than we knew a week ago.

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But if Simpson is telling the truth in only two central contentions — that the FBI investigation predated Steele’s work, and that Steele was concerned about the FBI’s lean to Trump, rather than to Clinton — then his testimony unravels what was already a conspiracy theory of gigantic proportions.

The beauty of conspiracy theories, and the reason people find them irresistible, is that they are impervious to facts. If evidence emerges to support the theory, then the conspiracy is confirmed. If contrary evidence surfaces, it’s not really evidence — or it’s misinformation planted by the masters of the real conspiracy to hide their misdeeds. And if there’s no evidence at all, then the arid silence itself proves that the conspirators hid their tracks perfectly.

Both Republicans and Democrats seem determined to make all three of these logical errors in their war over the Trump presidency. But for now, the strange spinning of the Simpson interview as supporting the tangled Clinton-Fusion-Steele story puts critics of the Trump-Russian investigation in the lead for conspiracy theorizing’s gold medal — or perhaps one made of tin foil.

Tom Nichols, a Russia specialist and professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College, is the author of The Death of Expertise. The views expressed here are solely his own. Follow him on Twitter: @RadioFreeTom.

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