The Hill: FBI knew Steele had blown up his credibility, kept it from FISA court to get Carter Page wiretap warrant

John Solomon has been doing some excellent writing for The Hill, and give The Hill credit for publishing it because it’s generally a pretty Beltwayesque publication.

Solomon has been chronicling the mounting evidence that the FBI’s 2016 pursuit of a counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign was based on false premises. And it always seems to lead back to Christopher Steele and his discredited, Clinton-financed dossier.

Today, Solomon informs us that the State Department knew Steele was rotten, and told the FBI about it, before the FBI used Steele as its rationale to the FISA court to wiretap Carter Page:

In the case of FBI informant Christopher Steele and the credibility of his now-disproven Russia collusion allegations against Donald Trump, we have some important clarity: Government officials confirm that an October 2016 email revealing that Steele met with State Department officials — a breach of protocol for an informant if it was unauthorized — was sent to an FBI counterintelligence supervisor.

The entire piece is very illuminating, but to cut to the chase:

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Steele wasn’t supposed to be running around talking about any of this outside his contacts at the FBI. That’s how FBI informants work. If you’re only interested in aiding an investigation, then you tell the FBI what you know and then lay low and keep your mouth shut.

Steele didn’t do that. He was running to the State Department pitching his tale. He was running to the media pitching his tale. And he was doing all this because his charge was political. Steele was working for Fusion GPS, which was working for a law firm that was working for the Clinton campaign. His job was to keep Donald Trump from winning the election, and laying low so as to follow the FBI’s rules for informants wasn’t going to get that done.

Yet the FBI knew what Steele was doing and still claimed to the FISA court that Steele was credible. Why? There can only be one reason: The FBI has its marching orders to pursue the Trump/Russia collusion investigation no matter what it had to do. And James Comey knew this was the directive and – whether because he agreed or because he wanted to keep his job, and probably a little of both – chose to follow it.

The fact that a Beltway-centric media outlet like The Hill is publishing Solomon’s work might indicate something encouraging.

We now know the real Trump/Russia story isn’t collusion. It’s that the whole thing was a hoax. The question is whether there is any interest in tracking down how the hoax was perpetrated.

When Devin Nunes was trying to get those answers last year, the mainstream media were decidedly hostile toward his efforts, probably because they still held out hope that the collusion story would be real and they figured Nunes was just trying to cover for Trump. Now that we know the collusion story wasn’t real, we’re faced with the reality that either the Obama FBI or the Obama DOJ or Obama himself wanted this hoax perpetrated and used as the justification for an FBI investigation that never should have happened – or at the very least, never should have gone very far.

And we’re also finding out that some very improper things happened behind the scenes to keep the investigation moving forward, when even at these early stages someone should have recognized the whole thing was a sham. I think they did recognize it, but they went forward anyway because that’s what Obama wanted them to do.

The political class is terrified that Bill Barr is going to uncover and prove that very thing. But maybe at least some of the mainstream media are starting to recognize that they can’t maintain their own credibility if they ignore this.

Because it really is that big a scandal.