Court declarations show that Steele’s dossier was heavily relied upon in the Trump probe but contained no verifiable information of any import, and it included gossip. They also show the FBI ignored all that, although they knew about it. Despite the obvious exculpatory evidence, the FBI continued to investigate the President and his campaign. They had no predicate for it, and there was no cause for the four wiretaps on Carter Page. The FBI probe relied on the Carter Page warrants.

THE STORY

Christopher Steele, the creative writer of the dossier, is scheduled to stand trial in mid-May in a defamation case, and the declarations arose out of this case.

FBI agents ignored 2017 court records as they wrote the last of four dossier-based wiretap warrants on Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page in June of that year, The Washington Times reports.

Steele gave a sworn declaration in a London court on April 3, 2017. He admitted that one of his 17 memos was raw intel — gossip.

It should have set off alarms.

Without the dossier, there would have been no wiretap warrants on Carter Page, according to Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

Mr. Horowitz said that although there had been “open-source reporting … We found no evidence that the FBI made any attempts in May or June 2017 to obtain the filings to assist a determination of whether to change the FBI’s assessment …”

In addition, the FBI’s General Counsel unilaterally decided to ignore Steele’s Apri 3 filing.

The DOJ Inspector General found 17 significant inaccuracies or omissions of exculpatory evidence when agents fed information to the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence. It screened the evidence and wrote the four Page affidavits from October 2016 to June 2017.

Subsequent to the April 3 filing, Mr. Steele signed a second declaration in May 2017 spelling out how he came to Washington and briefed a number of journalists on Trump allegations in September 2016.

The FBI Ignored the Facts and Did What They Wanted

His dossier accused President Trump of heading a far-reaching conspiracy with the Kremlin to interfere in the election. Mr. Mueller found no such conspiracy, and no Trump associate was charged in such a plot.

In the face of Mr. Steele’s court declarations, the Horowitz report said, the FBI continued to assess his information as “reliable.”

Mueller obviously found nothing.

Taken together, the Mueller and Horowitz reports eviscerated Mr. Steele’s anti-Trump claims.

Mr. Horowitz said the FBI dismissed Steele in that much of the material in his election reports, including allegations against Mr. Trump and his campaign relied on Carter Page’s FISA apps and they could not be corroborated. The only thing that could be verified were some information related to time, location, and title information, nothing of any import.