Quote:Like dandelions in an untreated lawn, the now infamous Russian dossier apparently multiplied in numbers — and emissaries delivering it to the FBI — the closer Donald Trump got to the White House.

We know from public testimony that dossier author and former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele shared his findings with the FBI in summer and fall 2016 before he was terminated as a confidential source for inappropriate media contacts.

And we learned that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) provided a copy to the FBI after the November 2016 election — out of a sense of duty, his office says.

Now, memos the FBI is turning over to Congress show the bureau possessed at least three versions of the dossier and its mostly unverified allegations of collusion.

Each arrived from a different messenger: McCain, Mother Jones reporter David Corn, Fusion GPS founder (and Steele boss) Glenn Simpson.

Quote:“Our internal system is blocking the site,” Strzok wrote of the document posted on BuzzFeed. “I have the PDF via iPhone but it’s 25.6MB. Comparing now. The set is only identical to what McCain had. (it has differences from what was given to us by Corn and Simpson.)”

The significance of Strzok’s email is obvious to investigators who reviewed it in recent days. The FBI is supposed to be immune to manipulation by circular information flows, especially with sensitive investigations such as evaluating whether a foreign power tampered with an American election.

Yet, in this case, the generally same information kept walking through the FBI’s door for months — recycled each time by a new character with ties to Hillary Clinton or hatred for Trump — until someone decided they had to act.

Quote:The pattern is so troubling that one investigator said this to me: “The dossier and its related dirt was on a circular flight path aboard a courier service called ‘Air Clinton,’ and the FBI kept signing for the packages.”

Quote:The first time Steele met the FBI on July 5, 2016, he got a lukewarm reception.

Then Australian diplomat Alexander Downer in late July recalled a May 2016 conversation he had with Trump adviser George Papadopoulos about possible Russian hacks of Clinton emails, and relayed that to U.S. authorities.

Downer — another “courier” in some investigators’ minds — has his own ties to the Clintons. As Australia’s foreign minister in 2006, he arranged one of the largest-ever foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation, a $25 million grant to fight AIDS.

Strzok quietly opened an investigation of possible Trump-Russia collusion on July 31, 2016, based in part on Downer’s information.
A few weeks later, Clinton allies Sidney Blumenthal, who was paid for years by the Clinton Foundation, and Cody Shearer sent the government dirt on Trump that mirrored the Steele dossier, Congress has been told.

Quote:In October, the FBI submitted and won a request for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against Carter Page, another Trump adviser. In support of the request, it cited a Yahoo News article that, officials admit, was influenced by the Steele dossier.

Around the same time, in late October, Corn wrote an article in Mother Jones about Steele’s Trump-Russia allegations.
In an email to me, Corn said he told the FBI about the dossier before writing that article. After Trump won the election, he shared a version of the document with the bureau in hopes of furthering his reporting. “I tried the FBI again after the election. On my own accord,
I shared a copy of the dossier with the FBI in order to see if the bureau would authenticate the documents and now comment on them. Once again, it would not,” he wrote me.

Quote:It’s all the sort of recycling that, in another context, might make an environmentalist happy. But it’s exactly the sort of circular intelligence-gathering and political pressure that the FBI is supposed to reject.

Quote:The FBI is supposed to be immune to manipulation by circular information flows, especially with sensitive investigations such as evaluating whether a foreign power tampered with an American election.