Remember that dossier released last week by Buzzfeed? There was a report included in it about Russia using pension payments to Russian nationals living in the United States as a way to move payments to their hackers and other operatives working on Donald Trump's behalf.
It turns out the FBI was onto that long before Mr. Steele wrote his report. In fact, they opened an investigation as part of a joint task force with five other agencies to investigate these payments and how they might link back to the Trump campaign's contacts with Russia. In the SPRING of last year, according to a report by McClatchy.
The informal, inter-agency working group began to explore possible Russian interference last spring, long before the FBI received information from a former British spy hired to develop politically damaging and unverified research about Trump, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the inquiry.
...A key mission of the six-agency group has been to examine who financed the email hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. The London-based transparency group WikiLeaks released the emails last summer and in October.
The working group is scrutinizing the activities of a few Americans who were affiliated with Trump’s campaign or his business empire and of multiple individuals from Russia and other former Soviet nations who had similar connections, the sources said.
Oh. So when David Corn reported on aspects of the dossier without publishing it and the New York Times stepped on it before the election, why didn't anyone from the FBI step up?
Wonkette has the timeline:
But that was for Hillary Clinton. As we ranted back in November, when it came to Donald Trump, and the bombshell report by Mother Jones‘s David Corn alleging that according to a British spy man, the Kremlin had been cultivating Donald Trump as an asset for years, the Times couldn’t light a fire under its own ass fast enough to clear Trump of all crimes past, present and future.
How is that story, by the Times‘s Eric Lichtblau (who also wrote those “questions raised” stories about ties between the Clinton Foundation and Hillary’s State Department), holding up?
Oh, quite poorly. Quite poorly indeed!
Yes, as it turns out, very poorly. How did it come to pass that the New York Times led the Vapors Brigade against Hillary Clinton while not even a hint of this joint agency investigation came to light that was begun months before any DNC emails were published on Wikileaks?
Curiouser and curiouser.
