[Just the News] From its earliest moments, the FBI's Russia collusion probe was always fraught with warning signs.Agents were told Christopher Steele provided faulty information, had likely been compromised by Russian intel disinformation, wanted to defeat Donald Trump, had leaked to the media and was being paid by Hillary Clinton, who herself might be carrying out an epic dirty political trick to vilify Trump with false information to distract from her own scandals.
Those intelligence reports alone should have given agents pause. The fact that Steele had been terminated by the FBI as an informant for leaking also should have weighed heavily.
But if ever there were red lights screaming for the FBI to end the counterintelligence probe, they were flashing during a harrowing 20-day window in January 2017 as Barack Obama was leaving office and Trump was coming in.
Between Jan. 4, 2017 and Jan. 24, 2017, nearly every major assumption of the FBI's Russia collusion theory was gutted, according to recently declassified evidence reviewed by Just the News.
Months of investigating Trump adviser Mike Flynn had turned up "no derogatory information," and agents recommended shutting down that part of the inquiry after concluding Flynn wasn't aiding Moscow. Two separate informant recordings of Trump adviser Carter Page — the target of an ongoing FISA warrant — produced stunning evidence of innocence.
U.S. intelligence had concluded a key allegation in the Steele dossier was Russian disinformation. And Steele's primary sub-source — whom the FBI assessed was likely tied to Russian intelligence — discounted much of the information attributed to him in the dossier. Even Director James Comey was telling colleagues there wasn't much corroborated in the dossier.