Defending the Indefensible (the Steele Dossier)

Hat tip American Greatness

“The dossier holds up well over time, and none of it, to our knowledge, has been disproven,' wrote Chuck Rosenberg and Sarah Grant in a judgment that did not hold up well over time." 
-Chuck Rosenberg and Sarah Grant
December 2018

I am cross-posting an article by Julie Kelly  in American Greatness. It regards a December 2018 report published in Lawfare, a project of the liberal Brookings Institution think tank which actually defended the notorious Steele dossier. The report was authored by Chuck Rosenberg and Sarah Grant.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/23/brookings-institution-a-key-collusion-collaborator/

Mr Rosenberg, as noted by Kelly, was a US Attorney (Eastern District of Virginia), a high-ranking FBI official under former director James Comey, and later was appointed acting administrator of DEA. At odds with the Trump Administration, he stepped down in 2017. More recently, he has been one of MSNBCs legal contributors.

While I was long-retired from DEA when Rosenberg took over, I do know that he was not well-regarded within the ranks of the agency. Not only is he not missed since his departure, he seemingly doesn't even want to be identified as having served as DEA administrator.

Perhaps, Rosenberg and Grant should have waited until Robert Mueller came out with his report in April 2019 because we now know that the Steele dossier has not held up well over time. It was the product of a highly biased ex-British spy named Christopher Steele, who, by his own admissions, hates President Trump, and who under oath in a British court, could not attest to the accuracy of his own report. His work, which was based on sloppy, uncorroborated hearsay from dubious Russian sources, was actually financed and paid for by the DNC and Hillary Clinton's campaign.

The FBI, even though they had ample reason not to trust the dossier and Steele himself, used it as a basis to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page, who was connected to the Trump campaign. The architects of that warrant (Comey, Peter Strzok, Andrew McCabe and others) were colluding to destroy Trump as a candidate then as president-elect and finally as sitting president-all based on the lie that he and his campaign were colluding with Russian efforts to meddle in the 2016 election. Mueller's investigation failed to support any of the alleged charges. Subsequent revelations through release of FBI documents showed far worse details of what the FBI and Justice Department did to try and bring down a duly-elected president. That is just the first course. We now await the report of investigation by Attorney General William Barr into government misdeeds.

In all, time has shown that the article by Rosenberg and Grant is embarrassing-to themselves. As for Rosenberg, it buttresses my opinion of him as a partisan political hack. MSNBC is a fitting place for him.