Why destroy all this stuff?
If you believe Team Coup, Steele was actually getting real intelligence. If you believe the more recent information, he was getting Russian disinformation. Or, for all we know, there were no Russian sources and he typed this stuff up on a lazy day in a London pub while browsing Hillary’s emails. Much of this is based on Steele’s claims. And he’s conveniently removing any supporting materials.
Christopher Steele told a British court last month that he no longer has documents and other information from his meetings with the main source for his Trump dossier, suggesting that the former British spy has no way of backing up his side in a dispute with the Justice Department’s inspector general (IG), according to a deposition transcript obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Steele also told the court that his communications regarding the dossier, including with Fusion GPS, were “wiped” in December 2016 and January 2017, the transcript shows.
There are obvious reasons for wiping communications about producing opposition research that was then injected into the government for an investigation by a guy who was being funded by the Clinton campaign. Why delete source material?
The lawyer asked Steele about the existence of the documents and recordings that his attorneys mentioned in their rebuttal to the IG report.
“But none of these documents exist, so they have all been destroyed?” a lawyer asked Steele.
“They no longer exist,” Steele said.
Steele said that a Hushmail account he used in late December 2016 was “wiped” clean. He also said that communications with Fusion GPS on his company’s computer network were scrubbed on Jan. 5, 2017.
Steele has closely guarded the identity of his dossier source, including during the Alfa Bank deposition. But he said the source had done work for his firm for “several years,” and that his firm Orbis paid retainers to sources of between $3,000 and $5,000 a month.
You’re not getting any high level stuff for $5K that’s also being split with whatever his sources are. Not unless the Russians were using Steele as a conduit for leaking information, which is what the declassified footnote from the IG report suggests.
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