What is it with the Clintons and their allies? They appear to have an appalling ability to keep their emails. Hillary Clinton deleted some 30,000 communications which were under federal subpoena. Now, long after the 2016 election, the former British spy, Christopher Steele, who compiled the infamous Trump dossier for the Clinton campaign, said his emails were wiped and he no longer has the source material to his shoddy document that birthed the Trump-Russia collusion myth. The Daily Caller News Foundation reported this based on a deposition Steele took in the British court. Not only that, but he also said that these communications were wiped between December of 2016 and January of 2017. Was it wiped with a cloth? The document was political opposition research that has been debunked not by one, but two reports.
Ex-Special Counsel Robert Mueller delivered the first shot, while the Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz provided the double-tap to this piece of garbage. Horowitz’s report dealt with FISA abuses during the Obama administration, whose DOJ used this dossier to secure a spy warrant against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. In this process, it was the DOJ IG documented systematic failures in the FISA process, including DOJ officials either omitting or removing exculpatory information about Page to secure the warrants. And because the document is nonsense, some Russians named in it have decided to take legal action (via DCNF):
Christopher Steele told a British court last month that he no longer has documents and other information from his meetings with the main source for his Trump dossier, suggesting that the former British spy has no way of backing up his side in a dispute with the Justice Department’s inspector general (IG…Steele also told the court that his communications regarding the dossier, including with Fusion GPS, were “wiped” in December 2016 and January 2017, the transcript shows.
The former MI6 officer made the disclosures during a March 17-18 deposition in a defamation case related to the dossier. The DCNF obtained a transcript of the deposition.
Steele suggested in a Dec. 10 statement that he had evidence that would shed light on what his main dossier source told him back in 2016, when Steele was working for the firm Fusion GPS to investigate the Trump campaign.
[…]
It is unclear if Steele made audio or video recordings of the debriefings with the source, or if the retired spy was referring to written or electronic documents. It is also unclear whether Steele got rid of the information himself, or if it was lost through other means. Steele’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.
The status of the information was revealed during an exchange Steele had on March 18 with Hugh Tomlinson, a lawyer for Petr Aven, German Khan, and Mikhail Fridman, the owners of Alfa Bank.
The three Russian bankers are suing Steele for defamation over a memo in the dossier that accused them of making illicit payments to Vladimir Putin.
Fusion GPS’s services were retained by the Democrats and the Clinton campaign. Fusion then hired Steele to dig up dirt on Trump which was trash. If anything, the Clinton campaign could be accused of Russian collusion since Steele used sources that were still active in the Kremlin. This wasn’t counterintelligence work; it was a political fishing expedition. And now key documents are missing. This dossier was a liberal media lightning rod, with hordes of these idiots peddling it as a legitimate document, despite the fact that it was never fully vetted. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who at times is no better than InfoWars when it comes to peddling conspiracy theories, was aggressive on the dossier and it led to her being embarrassed on a grand scale. When you want something to be true, it lands you in trouble.