nd in a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray in January, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said that based on a Senate Committee on the Judiciary review, the Page FISA application “appears to contain no additional information corroborating the dossier allegations against Mr. Page.”
In lieu of corroboration, the FBI appears to have relied heavily on dossier author Christopher Steele’s credibility as a reliable source. The FISA application stated that “based on [Steele’s] previous reporting history with the FBI, whereby [Steele] provided reliable information to the FBI, the FBI believes [Steele’s] reporting to be credible.”
“In short, it appears the FBI relied on admitted uncorroborated information,” reads the Grassley-Graham letter.
So if FBI guidelines explicitly state that facts laid out in FISA applications must be verified, how could the bureau still rely on Steele’s unverified claims in order to obtain the warrant to snoop on Page?
One former FBI special agent says that the relevant fact that had to be verified was that Steele was a source of the information, not that his allegations were fully accurate.
“If you are including source reporting, you must accurately state that it is source reporting and characterize what the source said,” Asha Rangappa, the former agent, said in a recent Twitter exchange with TheDCNF.
“You would typically have a separate source file against which it would be checked. The ‘fact’ is that it is information reported by a source,” she said.
http://dailycaller.com/2018/03/04/fbi-dossier-verified/