Mikhail Gorbachev speaks during the 28th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Moscow, July 2, 1990.
Photo:
TASS/Zuma Press
The reason didn’t find its way into any obituaries, but
Mikhail Gorbachev
helped prime this columnist to be skeptical when the Steele dossier surfaced three decades later.
The year was 1990. A recently fired investment banker handed me the reason for his firing: a binder full of faxes testifying to what he believed (and his employer didn’t) were legitimate offers to buy and sell vast quantities of deeply discounted Soviet rubles and related financial instruments supposedly kicked loose by Gorbachev’s world-changing reforms.
These offers proved fraudulent and delusional (as I expected) but the mystique of “documents” has been a red flag for me ever since. I bring it up because the same meretricious mystique of documents points to a truth today nobody wants to admit: In both its Clinton email and Trump collusion investigations in 2016-17, the FBI knowingly relied on false and easily faked information—which it called “intelligence”—to justify its actions.
Let this sink in. The FBI never would have behaved as it did if it didn’t have written documents to hide behind, however bogus.
Events show the FBI knew the Steele dossier was fraudulent even as it promoted it as valid evidence to a U.S. surveillance court. Unknown to most Americans, the FBI also exploited an equally fraudulent document in the Hillary Clinton email case.
This part of the story is covered in the so-called classified appendix of the Justice Department inspector general’s reports into the FBI’s doings, the only part that remains withheld from the American public. If there’s truth to repeated reporting that Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago stash contained papers related to FBI actions in 2016, the ex-president might yet perform a service if his latest scandal helps bring the withheld facts to…
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