Fiona Hill testifies to the House Intelligence Committee on November 21, 2019. (Credit: Chip Somodovilla/Getty Images)
“Delivering in his final days on one of his last unfulfilled promises, President Trump is declassifying a massive trove of FBI documents showing the Russia collusion story was leaked in the final weeks of the 2016 election in an effort to counteract Hillary Clinton’s email scandal.
The memos to be released as early as Friday include FBI interviews and human source evaluation reports for two of the main informants in the Russia case, former MI6 agent Christopher Steele and academic Stefan Halper.
(…) The probes found the FBI wrongly continued to rely on the allegations of Russia collusion to target Trump campaign figures for investigation and failed to disclose major flaws in their investigations to the courts that had authorized surveillance warrants.
The investigation also found that Steele’s primary source of Russian intel later disowned or distanced himself from the claims attributed to him in the Steele dossier and that U.S. intelligence had concerns the source was tied to Russian intelligence.
The soon-to-be-released records also expose a tantalizing connection between Steele, his primary source, and one of the Democrats’ key impeachment witnesses in the Ukraine scandal, former Trump National Security Council Russia expert Fiona Hill.
Steele divulged to the FBI that he was introduced by Hill to his primary sub-source of information for his anti-Trump dossier and that he later told Hill that the source had provided information for his now infamous memos. (Read more: JusttheNews, 1/14/2021) (Archive)