Not for a Million Dollars

Shortly before the 2016 election, the FBI offered retired British spy

Christopher Steele

“up to $1 million” to prove the explosive allegations in his dossier about Donald Trump, a senior FBI analyst testified Tuesday.

The cash offer was made during an overseas October 2016 meeting between Steele and several top FBI officials who were trying to corroborate Steele’s claims that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia to win the election.

FBI supervisory analyst Brian Auten testified that Steele never got the money because he could not “prove the allegations.” …Auten was testifying at the criminal trial of Igor Danchenko, a primary source for Steele’s dossier, who is being prosecuted by special counsel

John Durham.

Danchenko has pleaded not guilty to five counts of lying to the FBI about his sourcing for some information that ended up in the dossier. His trial kicked off Tuesday at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia.

Not even a million dollars dangled in front of a questionable source could pry corroborating evidence out of him—yet FBI officials still insisted on promoting his story? Remember, a million dollars went a lot further in 2016 than in the Biden era.

Also remember that the FBI went a lot further than just promoting the false story within the intelligence community—disgraceful as that was. The bureau also used the bogus dossier to mislead a federal court into approving the use of government surveillance powers against a U.S. citizen participating in politics. Salvador Rizzo of the Washington Post has more:

Under questioning from Durham, Auten said multiple times that the FBI sought to corroborate a report of a “well-developed conspiracy” between Trump and Russia at the height of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign — an allegation taken from the Steele reports — but was unable to do so.

The FBI used the unconfirmed report, Auten testified, to seek court approval of a secret surveillance warrant to monitor

Carter Page,

a Trump campaign adviser, and then successfully got that warrant reauthorized on three occasions, based in part on the same, uncorroborated claim.

“Was this an important piece of information that was included in the [warrant] application?” Durham asked.

“Yes, it was,” Auten said.

“And it was uncorroborated?” Durham asked.

“Yes,” Auten replied, adding later that the passage in question from the Steele dossier “was carried over into subsequent applications.”

The fact that even a million dollars hadn’t been able to shake any verification out of Mr. Steele in 2016 makes the 2017 actions of the FBI’s then director James Comey even more appalling. In January this column noted that in early 2017 Mr. Comey was promoting the collusion story even though the CIA viewed it as mere “Internet rumor.”

As the dossier story was raging in the press, Mr. Comey mounted an unsuccessful effort to stop Director of National Intelligence

James Clapper

from publicly acknowledging that U.S. intelligence agencies had not deemed the dossier reliable and were not relying upon its claims.

According to the Obama-appointed Justice Department inspector general who reported on the government abuses in this case in 2019, Mr. Comey’s Jan. 11, 2017 email to Mr. Clapper included the following:

I just had a chance to review the proposed talking points on this for today. Perhaps it is a nit, but I worry that it may not be best to say “The IC has not made any judgment that the information in the document is reliable.” I say that because we HAVE concluded that the source [Steele] is reliable and has a track record with us of reporting reliable information; we have some visibility into his source network, some of which we have determined to be sub-sources in a position to report on such things; and much of what he reports in the current document is consistent with and corroborative of other reporting…

In January this column asked:

In the long history of Beltway bureaucratic maneuvering, has a government memo ever included so much inaccuracy in so few words? Mr. Steele had already been fired by the FBI as a confidential source, and his story was falling apart.

This week’s court testimony shows that the conduct of the FBI was even worse than previously reported.

But one thing hasn’t changed. There’s still no real accountability for the FBI officials who abused their power and poisoned our politics.

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On a Happier Note
Far from the fetid Beltway swamp, the Hawkeye State is being recognized for a bumper crop of reform. This column has previously noted how Iowa’s Republican governor,

Kim Reynolds,

pushed back against the Covid lockdowners in public education and also stood up for taxpayers.

Today the Cato Institute is out with its 16th biennial fiscal report card on the governors and announces:

Kim Reynolds of Iowa has been a lean budgeter and dedicated tax reformer since entering office in 2017. She receives the highest score on this report. Iowa general fund spending has risen at just a 2.3 percent annual average rate under Reynolds. In 2018, she signed into law corporate and individual income tax cuts. In 2021, she abolished Iowa’s inheritance tax. In 2022, she approved a tax overhaul that simplifies and lowers Iowa’s individual income tax structure. Under Reynolds, the income tax is being converted from a nine‐​bracket system with a top rate of 8.98 percent to a 3.9 percent flat tax. Recent reforms also phased in a corporate tax cut from 9.8 percent to 5.5 percent.

Could Grade A governance come to Washington in 2025?

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James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.”

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