According to a report from Mark Hemingway of The Weekly Standard, the FBI is now investigating a second Trump “dossier,” this one complete with information allegedly compiled by Clinton crony Cody Shearer. Natasha Bertrand of The Atlantic says that she’s seen the memo, and that it covers “a range of allegations concerning the president’s personal behavior and financial transactions.” According to Bertrand, Obama State Department special envoy to Libya Jonathan Winer passed the information from Shearer on to British spy Christopher Steele, who was busily compiling opposition research on Trump on behalf of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton, via Fusion GPS.
Shearer was close compatriots with the dirtiest man in politics, Sidney Blumenthal — a longtime Hillary hatchet man so completely disgusting that the Obama administration refused outright to allow Hillary to staff him at the State Department; this week, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) all-but-admitted that Blumenthal had passed information on to Hillary’s State Department, with the goal of passing on that information to Steele — who would then presumably funnel that information back to the FBI.
Hemingway adds that Blumenthal wasn’t the only Hillary-circle source linked to Blumenthal’s “secret spy network” in Libya. That team also included former CIA agent Tyler Drumheller, “another checkered character who was attacked at length for his dishonesty in former CIA director George Tenet’s memoir …” Together, Blumenthal, Drumheller and Shearer worked to use Hillary’s connections in Libya to rake in the cash.
Hemingway rightly sums up:
If the Guardian report is accurate, the FBI had better have a very good answer for why it’s looking at information compiled by the likes of Cody Shearer. And if Steele otherwise incorporated Shearer’s information into his own dossier, it raises even more serious questions about what the FBI knew about the reliability and provenance of Steele’s information.
All of this makes the Page FISA request look shoddier and shoddier. If the FBI knew that Steele’s information came from Hillary’s buddies, funneled through Hillary’s State Department, that’s obviously damning stuff — particularly if that information remained unverified by the FBI. We certainly need to see the FBI application for the FISA warrant on Page at this point. There’s no excuse for Trump not to simply declassify it. Enough is enough.