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Nov. 10, 2021 - Kash's Corner
30:28
Kash’s Corner: Timing of New Steele Documentary ‘Not a Coincidence’
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Hey everybody, and welcome back to Cash's Corner.
Here we are on the rooftop near the United States Capitol.
We got a great episode for you today.
And just a heads up for next week's episode, we're going to be talking to Rick Brunel on Cash's Corner in Southern California.
So stay tuned for that as well.
Cash, we both watched a very, very interesting little documentary that came out recently.
Painfully watched it.
Out of the shadows, the man behind the steel dossier.
Gosh, it really made me go back and look at some material.
Let's call it.
The Spygate infographic that we put together, of course.
I mean, the timing of this is really interesting because, you know, it's kind of following on the legs of the Michael Sussman indictment by Durham.
And then like the following day, and I mean, of course, it could be a complete coincidence, but Oleg Darabaska's home is raided by the FBI.
And of course, Steele worked for this Russian billionaire oligarch at one point.
Fascinating stuff going on.
There are no coincidences when it comes to the FBI.
So, well, okay, listen, before we start here, okay, tell me this, okay?
I couldn't help but think about, you know, how you started to work on the House Intelligence Committee, which, you know, of course, led to the Nunes memo, which was focused on exactly this dossier, which is covered in this documentary.
But I remember you told Congressman Devin Nunes something specific, right?
You said, we have to follow this wherever it goes.
You might not like it.
Tell me a little bit about that before we start.
Yeah, so the agreement I made with Devin was I didn't necessarily want to go to the Hill.
It's no surprise.
I wanted to go to the White House.
But when I met Devin and he introduced me to this investigation that they were talking about, I said, okay, I agreed.
I said, sure.
Because of my background as a federal prosecutor and a public defender and an intel guy, he was like, we need someone to help navigate that landscape.
But I made him a deal.
I said, whatever we find, good, bad, ugly, I wasn't a political guy.
I wasn't a political appointee in the administration.
I said, we put out.
No matter what we find, we put out.
He said, absolutely.
We will put out everything we possibly can.
We will declassify everything we can and we'll follow all the facts wherever they go.
And he stayed true to his word.
One thing that really struck me, so you can tell me what you think, but it kind of comes across in this documentary.
I mean, basically, Steele portrays himself as this patriot coming to the FBI to report a very troubling information that he's gotten, so to speak.
How do you read that?
I read this as a basically a continuation of what Fusion GPS did back in 2015 and 16 when they hired Christopher Steele and paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars to pump out fraudulent and false information and feed it to the FBI and the media.
I think, I believe this is a continuation of that campaign to resuscitate Steele.
It's one of those government speak type things where you're like, maybe if you say something false over and over and over again, people will believe it.
Well, this guy has now been caught, not by us, not by a House Intel Committee, not by Devin, but by the FBI's own documents as having lied to a federal court, having proven fraudulent information to the media, having lied about his relationship and who was paying him.
And all those facts have come out from the FBI and DOJ's own documentation of Christopher Steele.
So I think this is a last-ditch effort to try to save face.
And then he hits national TV and he says he's some sort of hero, when in fact it's the total opposite.
You know, it's really interesting because he basically says I'm kind of nonpartisan in all of this, right?
And I mean, I mean, I couldn't.
I got to stop you right there.
Okay.
So one of the sentences I remember the most from our investigation was something Christopher Steele himself told the FBI when he was being run as a source, and it's now all declassified.
He literally said, I quote, I hate Donald Trump and I'm desperate for him not to be president, end quote.
I don't know how that a person who says that can then go on to say, I'm an apolitical, non-political guy.
It's his own words.
And that's why we put that out to the public, because his own words destroy his credibility back five years ago.
So for him to say that now is the height of hypocrisy.
And this was, of course, to his handler, Bruce Orr.
Yeah, a whole nother right at the FBI.
And this was kind of one of the key points, I guess, of the Nunes memo.
Yeah, so what actually happened was, you know, if you're a source for the FBI, the cardinal rule is don't tell anyone, especially the press.
It literally violates the agreement you sign when you become a source.
And I ran a lot of sources in my career.
And so what did he do?
He literally, right before the application for the first FISA warrant, he, Christopher Steele, went to the media, broke the cardinal rule.
And then what did he do after that?
He lied to the FBI about whether he had contacted the media.
So he gives the FBI the same fraudulent information in lane A. Concurrently in lane B, he gives the media the same fraudulent information, leaks it, could be classified information.
The media writes an article and the FBI then says, look, we have corroboration with what Christopher Steele is saying.
That's how atrocious his conduct was.
And the FBI, when they finally caught him, said, okay, we're going to eliminate you as your source.
But their conduct after that was almost as bad as Chris Steele's own.
What they did was the FBI went to Bruce Orr, a DOJ official who had a relationship with Christopher Steele and used Bruce Or as a cutout.
One of the senior most attorneys at the Department of Justice was used by the FBI as a cutout to a source who was terminated for lying to the FBI and breaking their agreement.
They still thought this guy could be credible.
That's how outrageous his conduct was.
So what about the timing, right?
You said there's nothing's a coincidence.
Why is this coming out right now as we speak?
And is it connected with these two events, I guess, that I just described?
Look, I believe so.
Look, when I was at DOJ running national security cases, doing FISA applications, the FBI on high-level cases communicates regularly with DOJ.
Leadership knows when you're going to do a takedown of a high-value target, when you're going to get a search warrant, when indictments are coming.
So look, Rewind, two weeks ago, three weeks ago, Michael Sussman gets indicted.
Michael Sussman's indictment rests upon the work of Fusion GPS, the same guys that paid Christopher Steele.
So Fusion is trying to resuscitate their credibility for putting this guy out as a source.
And then Christopher Steele comes on the air and says, my work is still good, but without providing any facts to support it, because he can't, right?
The DOJ themselves, if you recall, Jan, as a result of our investigations, reversed two of the FISA warrants that Christopher Steele provided information to.
Reversed.
That means they canceled them.
That almost never happens in the history of the FISA court.
That's how bad Christopher Steele was for the FBI and DOJ.
And it's finally coming out.
What he's trying to do right now is make more money and say he's the international hero, the James Bond, if you will, of this saga, when in fact he is the complete opposite.
He's the biggest crook the FBI has ever employed.
Well, and so, I mean, it was the Steele dossier and this Michael Issakoff piece that went into Yahoo News that was sourced from the Steele dossier that were the kind of the two key pieces that were of, I guess, evidence that were used to get the first FISA warrant on Carter Page in the first place.
One person feeding the same information to two different outlets to say, corroborate me.
I told the FBI and I told the media, violating my agreement.
But since they're both true, the FBI then unbelievably said, oh, look, someone else in the media of all places is reporting it.
Let's take that to be true and present that to a federal judge as if that's ever the appropriate way to get a surveillance warrant, let alone a FISA warrant on an American citizen.
Well, and this is, it also made me think, you know, sometimes people, the thing that Kevin Kleinsmith, the lawyer who was, you know, charged and convicted in making a false statement, how important that one little change he made, right, was in kind of building this false case, right?
Yeah, that's a great point.
The Kevin Kleinsmith was the first indictment that most people forget that John Durham has done.
So he's on his second one with Sussman.
I mean, just picture this.
You have an American lawyer in the mid-levels of the FBI who's involved in the FISA process.
Search warrants of the most sensitive kind for the most sensitive surveillance operations that the United States government conduct.
And this individual, this lawyer, doctors evidence and literally says about Carter Page the opposite of what he presented to the court.
Carter Page had relationships with other government agencies, and he wrote Carter Page did not, changed it, then presented that information to the court.
If that had been done by any other person in the FBI for any other target that wasn't related to Trump campaign, that individual would be in federal prison right now.
And that's the kind of hypocrisy that ticks off, or the lack of accountability, I believe, that ticks off the American public.
But I believe John Durham is using that as a stepping stone to Michael Sussman and then further using that because he built out that whole conspiracy style case that we talked about a couple weeks ago.
And this is why, to answer your question more poignantly, why Christopher Steele's documentary is timely.
It's not a coincidence.
Because they want to use it to destroy the Sussman indictment and the cases that John Durham's building.
So I actually took a few notes about the things that Christopher Steele basically says, well, I still think there's some credibility here.
And just to be clear, there's nothing in this documentary that I saw that seems to have any sort of substance.
It's all kind of conjecture and ambiguity and so forth.
But I don't even like saying it.
The P-tape?
Okay.
That's, I mean, I don't even like, I don't like thinking about it.
I don't like saying it.
The other one is, of course, Michael Cohen traveling to Prague, which, of course, he didn't, which the Inspector General, Horowitz, found that he didn't.
And, you know, it seems like Steele is kind of doubling down that these things may have happened.
Well, let me tell you why that's so significant.
And I'm glad you brought up those two points.
Steele's the source for the whole investigation for the FISAs against Carter Page and everything else.
He's resting his credibility, which is what you always look at in a FISA application, the credibility of your source and the biases of your source.
We talked about his bias, his hatred of Trump, and the fact that he was paid by his political opponent.
Now let's talk about his credibility.
The two most salacious things in, or the one most salacious thing in the Steele dossier is the P-tape.
I know we don't like talking about it, but let's talk about it for a second, okay?
When we were investigating this, I told Devin, I said, look, he described the location of where this incident happened.
A very specific hotel, the Ritz-Carlton, in Moscow, and he had the name of the room that it happened in, according to his dossier.
Let's call the hotel, Devin.
So it was just that easy.
You look up the hotel online.
The Ritz-Carlton does not have that named room in its hotel.
That named room doesn't even exist in that entire complex.
Wouldn't you think an MI6 agent, an FBI source, 20-year MI6 agent who worked in Moscow, would know the name of the room he's saying the salacious conduct occurred in so that he could tell the Bureau to maybe look at tapes, maybe look for witnesses.
No, it doesn't exist.
He made it up.
So now he's doubling down on something he made up and was totally disproven.
Let's put the P-tape aside.
How about Michael Cohen, Trump's former lawyer, going to Prague?
This is, I told Devin, one of the easiest things to do, right?
It's an international flight.
There's travel records.
This isn't even that hard to figure out.
If he was in Prague or anywhere near there, also, I don't know, a thousand people would have seen him.
So we looked into the travel records.
There were none.
Then the inspector general did the same thing, looked into the travel records.
And he also found and corroborated that Michael Cohen was in California the time that Steele says he was 10,000 miles away in Prague.
So if you look at these two pieces of credibility for Christopher Steele and now that he's doubling down in this atrocious new documentary, I think that speaks for itself in terms of this guy's actual credibility.
If he had any better legs to stand on, I think he would have put him forward.
He picked the two worst because there's nothing else left.
Well, and frankly, there's a third thing that he doubled down on.
It seemed to me anyway, is that just the idea that Carter Page was somehow working with the Russians.
Oh, yeah.
Right.
And of course, we know that Carter Page was actually working for the CIA, bringing in intelligence from Russia.
And this was, of course, again, how the Kevin Kleinsmith email, the email that Kevin Kleinson kind of changed to make it look like that wasn't the case.
Now, that's a great point because, as everyone knows, Carter Page was the target of the FISA applications.
They know that now for the four FISA applications that Christopher Steele was sourcing.
So the crux of a FISA, what you have to show the target to be, is they have to be shown to be an agent of a foreign power.
So Christopher Steele was saying this guy, Carter Page, is colluding with Russia because he's having these meetings, which he never had, and that he's on the take getting paid by the Russians to then exchange information from the Trump campaign.
I don't even know where to begin with this guy on this claim, but basically every instance that he says Carter Page was working with the Russians proved to be false by the FBI's own documentation.
The FBI withheld that information from the FISA court.
Second, to your point, Carter Page was working for not just the FBI previously, but other government organizations.
That means he was assisting U.S.-based investigations and U.S. intelligence organizations to further our national interest.
The FBI withheld that information from the FISA court because, why?
I don't know.
Probably because if they've produced it, and probably if Kevin Kleinsmith hadn't changed the document, they would never have gotten a FISA.
And here's one of the most crucial lines from my entire investigation during the Russia Gate hoax.
Andy McCabe, the deputy director of the FBI, who signed off on one of the Carter Page FISA applications, said under oath, without the Steele dossier, there would have been no cause for a FISA warrant on Carter Page.
You have to hit pause there and say, wait a second.
So no Steele dossier, no warrant, ever.
This is how much the FBI, by the deputy director's own admission, relied on the Steele dossier, and it shows their bias in saying, what's Christopher Steele is telling us, we have to corroborate.
We have to prove true.
Otherwise, we can't surveil a presidential campaign and a president.
That's how shocking the behavior at the top of the FBI was, and not just Kevin Kleinsmith, but it goes to Lisa Page and Peter Strzok.
And the whole narrative is actually best outlined in the plot against the president.
It's a fantastic.
It's an actual real documentary that's credible versus whatever this nonsense is that Christopher Steele put together.
And Stephanopoulos asks him about his sources, like kind of to name his source.
And like everyone, I think it's generally known now that Igor Danchenko was the primary, was his primary source.
And, you know, and frankly, all of Igor, and he calls him, I mean, I'm assuming this is who he's talking about, he's the key collector.
I don't have a key source, I have a key collector, but all of the people that if it was Igor Danchenko was collecting from, have basically disavowed what was in the Steele dossier that apparently he collected on top of everything else.
So, no, that's a great point.
So, right.
We have to remind everyone, Christopher Steele hasn't set foot in Russia in over 15 years.
So, how is he getting all of this Russian information from the ground that was supposedly true and credible if he hadn't himself been in country?
You have to have a credible source network like you were alluding to.
The problem that Christopher Steele has run into now is that in British courts, he's been sued.
And Christopher Steele's entire sub-source network basically came out and said the information, the multiple levels of hearsay this sub-source network from Moscow provided Christopher Steele, they said was bogus information.
And Christopher Steele actually had to pay, pursuant to a judgment in British court, not these individuals, but the folks over at Alpha Bank, who basically they said they brought a lawsuit in England that they said Christopher Steele smeared their reputation.
So his, not only has his, he, Christopher Steele, has a source, his credibility been destroyed, but the information he relied upon that he got from the world's longest game of telephone from Moscow to America, that entire network themselves have come forward and said the information was bogus.
How the FBI couldn't have figured that out, it's not a question of actually how, why they didn't figure it out.
It's that they didn't want to figure it out.
Those, those pieces of information as a prosecutor, as a national security prosecutor, did five cases.
Looking at the credibility of your sources in your sub-source network is very easy to do.
We have a huge network that we can rely on.
We can call people.
We can go to England.
We can go to Russia and we can look at these things.
They rushed this thing through the process.
They got people at DOJ and FBI involved.
And James Comey led the charge and said, no way, we're going to spy on an American presidential candidate.
I mean, it's incredible.
Actually, another thing that just basically comes to my mind is one of the commentators actually concedes that, you know, basically the IG report kind of eviscerates, Horavitz's report eviscerates, I think they say that, right?
Yeah.
And the Steele dossier and gives him a chance to respond.
But there's no mention of, for example, this Alpha Bank court case in England, which has some pretty relevant information that one might want to include in a documentary like this.
And there's a court case in America that Alpha Bank brought against Christopher Steele that's still ongoing, and it's probably going to have the same results.
So you might want to mention that too.
Right.
So what about the timing of Derrick Pasca's properties, or I think it's a family property being raided by the FBI the day after this documentary comes out?
I just, I mean, as you said, don't believe in coincidence.
I don't know.
It's not obvious to me why that might be the case, but.
Well, maybe it's John Durham.
You know, we never we didn't.
We weren't told by the media who the FBI rated those houses for.
Maybe it's John Durham, you know, and he's been known to be pretty tight-lipped and people have been trying to figure out what he's been doing for two years and it hasn't leaked.
So I'm hopeful that it's that because to me, all the investigating we did ties Derrick Pasca directly to Christopher Steele.
And so I would think maybe they want to know finally what this guy was, this guy, Christopher Steele, was actually doing with Russian oligarchs and find out the truth of it and maybe prosecute Christopher Steele for lying to the FBI.
You know, this would be a lot easier to stomach somehow if it didn't leave like a trail of broken lives.
Yeah.
That's the part that gets me the most.
I mean, Carter Page being the most obvious, but by far not the only.
Sure, no.
I agree.
I mean, Christopher Steele actually left a trail of wreckage through his bogus reporting.
Carter Page's life obviously destroyed, as you said, four FISA applications.
I don't think there's a person on planet Earth that the world knows more about currently than Carter Page because of all the investigations that went into him improperly now we know.
But there's others, and I don't want to name them because I want to protect their privacy.
But when we were doing the investigation, we had individuals that would come to us during our investigation and tell us the damage that they had done, that had been caused to their lives by Christopher Steele's false reporting.
And one of these individuals, I remember to this day, said his daughter, who had been sober and recovered as a drug addict for five years, after what they did to her father and put him in the media, she relapsed.
And he had to spend his entire life savings on his daughter again because of what his daughter had to read about her father, which was false, but had to read it.
And it made her relapse.
And most of the people in this building, the likes of Adam Schiff and company, they didn't care about that.
And that wasn't the only one.
But can you just imagine what that does to someone, not to mention the money that these guys have to spend on lawyers?
And those targets weren't the only lives that were impacted.
The investigators' lives were impacted.
You know, Devin's life, my life.
To this day, the news has been writing false articles about me to this day.
They've attacked Devin's family, personally, his 89-year-old grandmother.
They went after her, if you can believe it.
And all we cared about was getting the American people the truth.
So it's nice that Christopher Steele wants to do a decumentary with George Staffanopoulos, who, by the way, is a former Bill Clinton advisor.
There's some irony in that.
But maybe it would have been nice if he was actually truthful and addressed issues like, what about the people's lives you destroyed while getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do it and to pump false information in?
And you say you're one of the world's best spies.
I think you're one of the world's biggest frauds.
So you mentioned, you know, Congressman Schiff, and I did look at the Schiff memo, you know, from February 2018, late February following the Nunes memo, which of course you had a huge hand in authoring.
And there's just, you know, there's a whole bunch of stuff in there.
It's worth revisiting, which is just kind of simply untrue based on, you know, the Horowitz report and other reporting.
One of the key points was that there just wasn't even information that was omitted by the FBI and DOJ in obtaining the SPISA work.
I mean, it just, it kind of goes on and on like this.
Yeah.
And here's something I haven't really talked about ever.
We knew that what we put in the Nunes memo was facts from the FBI's own documents and sworn Witness testimony like Andy McCabe, like we talked about earlier.
It wasn't our language.
It was theirs.
It's the best way to run an investigation against who you're investigating is to use their own words and findings.
That's what we did.
Adam Schiff, remember, we wanted him to write his response memo.
We baited him into doing it because we knew he would go overboard and write a memo that was 10, 12 pages long that had false information in it.
But we knew at the time the media would protect him.
And over time, the inspector general came in and said, actually, Mr. Schiff, your memo is wrong.
And not only on Bruce Orr, not only on Fusion GPS, not only on bias, not only on credibility, but omissions to the FISA court as well that you just alluded to, that the DOJ and FBI intentionally withheld information such as who was paying Steele, his hatred of Donald Trump, that his sub-source network was totally garbage.
They knew all this information at the time, and that's the key point.
People keep saying, and Christopher Steele's now trying to say, oh, maybe we didn't know it back then.
The FBI knew it back then.
Steele knew it back then.
These two memos show, the newness memo shows that it was proven by us.
Schiff's memos show that he was perpetuating one of the biggest frauds on the American public through a willing media.
And I encourage people to go in and I challenge them to find one true piece of information in the Schiff memo.
Well, okay, so in the Steele, talking about what's actually truthful in the Steele dossier, you know, there is truthful information in the Steele dossier.
So, I mean, to be fair, the IG report found that the truthful information was all basically publicly sourced information, information that could be easily publicly sourced, like I guess in Google search or something like this.
Yeah, some of it was like these people were real human beings.
You know, Christopher Steele and, you know, Carter Page was a real person.
And Carter Page, yes, did go to Russia, just not for the stated purposes that Christopher Steele said.
And that the underlying Michael Cohen was a real person, sure, and also talked about Manafort.
But all of the activities Steele charged these people with doing proved to be false.
And you brought up the IG report, and I think that's really important.
People should read the Inspector General Horowitz's IG report, at least a summary, because what it says was there were 17, 17 errors and omissions by relying on the Steele dossier in the FISA application, any one of which alone would have been sufficient to prevent the FISA court from issuing a FISA warrant.
That is a huge piece of information that the media isn't covering and Steele isn't addressing.
So there's one line, you know, as we're talking here, there's this one line that I caught that I actually noted down for myself in this interview.
This is Christopher Steele.
The line was, I think there's an element of theater in all of that, an element of unreality in all of that.
Right?
Maybe that's the only true thing he said during that entire interview.
I don't think he was referring to what we were talking about, but it was, it definitely struck me.
I mean, to say that a foreign national like Christopher Steele, who purports to now just want to help America in a time of crisis because Donald Trump decided to run for president, is absurd on its face.
Now we've proven the House Intel Committee, the Inspector General's reporting multiple times over, Senate Intel Committee's report all have proven that Christopher Steele and his reporting is total fraud.
So I don't put stock in anything he has to say.
I don't give any merit to George Stephanopoulos's trying to resuscitate Christopher Steele in the fusion GPS operation.
I go back to what I said earlier.
I encourage people to read the documents for themselves.
See what's true now versus what was written in 2016, 2017, 2018 by us.
Our information was proven true by the FBI and DOJ's own words.
What's worse is that they permitted Christopher Steele to continue reporting to the FBI for over a year.
And we, the American public, never found out the extent of that because they shut down our investigation in Congress once Mueller got appointed.
So we were never able to get more details out.
And that's the other thing I want the American public to know.
We got out a lot of information, but I believe there's still 30, 40% of information regarding the whole Russia gate hoax that has never been released.
And we should call for its immediate release and declassification if we want to restore faith in not just the FBI, but the surveillance apparatus of the Pfizer Corps.
So one of the things that's mentioned again and again in the documentary is that there was, in fact, Russian interference.
And this is something that I found really interesting because in the media over the last several years, the idea that there was interference was conflated with the idea that there was collusion, right?
Because as far as we know, there was interference.
And not that that would necessarily be surprising either, but your thoughts.
Yeah, so look, in any major U.S. election, multiple countries try to interfere with us.
We put that in our Hip C report that there was Russian interference in the U.S. election.
And it was de minimis.
We also went and researched whether or not that information or that, excuse me, that interference caused votes to be changed.
And we couldn't find any evidence to support that that misinformation campaign by the Russians or any other country caused votes to be changed at the polls.
Now, that's not to say that they're going to stop now because we caught them.
We have to guard against it heavily.
And we worked on that, especially when I was over at DNI to help install more election security integrity measures.
But that sort of misinformation campaign, Russian meddling, is totally different than what Christopher Steele did.
What Christopher Steele did was, and he's not James Bond, make no mistake about it, and calling him a villain is calling him, is actually paying him a compliment.
This guy was a wrecking ball for a United States presidential campaign.
He made hundreds of thousands of dollars off of it by pumping in false and fraudulent information that he knew was false because he hated one candidate.
And he got the FBI on board and conspired with them to perpetuate the biggest fraud in U.S. presidential history.
And that's what he should be remembered for.
He's not a savior.
He's not a saint.
He's a crook and a criminal.
And someone should be investigating him.
So to your point, Stephanopoulos asks Steele in the documentary, would you consider what you're doing meddling?
I don't remember the exact wording.
And he says, well, I'm a British national.
Seems to perhaps avoid the question of it.
That's a tragic and great way to bring this thing full circle for people who want to know about Christopher Steele.
A foreign national who perpetuated this fraud and got paid to do it.
Is now this past week on national TV saying just because he's a British national, he didn't interfere with the U.S. election.
Let's just leave it here on this.
Christopher Steele interfered and meddled with the U.S. election with fraudulent information 10 times more than Russia and China combined ever have done in U.S. history.
And that's what he should be remembered for.
And when he says something like that, it highlights his own hypocrisy and his desperate efforts to resuscitate his credibility.
And they should all fail.
Well, so I think it's time for our weekly shout out.
That's right.
And so this week's a little different.
So our shout-out this week goes to Rick Riddell, former ambassador to Germany, former acting director of national intelligence, and our next guest on Cassius Corner next week in Southern California.
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