Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Turning a Sow's ear into a Silk purse

George Papadopulos was not considered a FISA candidate because Department of Justice had already turned a thumbs down on that. Paul Manafort was subject of another Investigation and General Flynn was about to be charged. That left Carter Page. There had already been problems getting a warrant approved because FISA judges were growing increasingly suspicious that earlier attempts were politically motivated. Something had to be done to beef up this iteration of the FISA application.

The Horowitz report states, "...electronic surveillance targeting Page, is among the most sensitive and intrusive investigative techniques. As we describe in Chapter Five, the FBI ultimately did not seek a FISA order at that time because OGC, NSD's Office of Intelligence (OI), or both determined that more information was needed to support probable cause that Page was an agent of a foreign power. However, immediately after the Crossfire Hurricane team received Steele's election reporting on September 19, the team reinitiated their discussions with OI and their efforts to obtain FISA surveillance authority for Page, which they received from the FISC on October 21."

As noted above, the FBI and others, (including Sally Yates), revealed the DOJ was having problems with the FISA court and that more information was needed to show that Carter Page was "... an agent of a foreign power." This changed when somebody got the bright idea that the election reporting from Christopher Steele might be just the ticket. While everybody should have known it was all BS, somebody must have pointed out that with a little cherry picking and sanitizing it might be "word smithed" into something usable. At least two members of the team were well aware of what they were looking at. The Agent handling the first election reports that arrived in July of 2016, understood the Fusion GPS connection. "It was obvious to him that the request for the research was politically motivated." The intelligence analyst who supervised the analytical team efforts also understood the political implications. Heck, everyone on the team must have understood that the material was biased against Trump, yet they spun it to make Carter Page look like a Russian spy. To heck with "The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," forget that it was described as "Salacious and Unverifiable by" then FBI Director James Comey. At best those who supervised turned a blind eye, giving tacit approval to what was unfolding. In a climate, rife with partisan bias, agents decided to creatively mine the election reports and spin the usable nuggets into the warrant applications.

Assistant Director of the FBI, Andrew McCable would go on to say that without the Dossier, there would have been no FISA on Carter Page. This conflicts with then Director Comey's claim that the warrant application was part of a broader mosaic. The Horowitz Report makes clear that the election reporting (The Steele Dossier) was center stage in obtaining the warrant.

The Dossier contained an assortment of reports, among which, those numbered 80, 94, 95 and 102, seemed to offer the required essential elements of information needed to shape the FISA application. These were called "Election Reports" and were provided by Steele, Bruce or Nellie Orr, or perhaps Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS was an opposition research firm that found and developed "DIRT" for political Campaigns. Christopher Steele and Nellie Orr worked for them. The money to pay for this Opposition Research came from the Democratic National Committee and/or the Clinton Foundation. It was funneled to Fusion GPS through the law firm of Perkins Cole. Steele provided his material to the FBI, as a certified informant, pitched it to various news outlets, freelanced it to anyone who would listen, and sold it to Glenn Simpson, his employer at Fusion GPS. Steele's role as a CHS with the FBI continued until he was fired for leaking to the press. After that the salacious reports found their way to the Crossfire Hurricane team through Bruce Orr, a ubiquitous high ranking Justice Department official.