The NY Post has historically done some of the most honest reporting out there.

Fair and balanced most of the time.

And they sure did get it right with this one…

Quote:

The FBI knew RussiaGate was a lie — but hid that truth

That’s exactly right!

And that’s the story published by their Editorial Board, which is another way of saying this is what the Editors of the paper believe after seeing all the evidence.

Take a look:

https://twitter.com/Peggyed41450907/status/1569369242226798593

This is for sure true:

some people will be explaining a lot in 2023, for real this timehttps://t.co/d4npnINnpi

— Brian M (@PeterSpenser2) September 12, 2022

The story even caught President Trump’s eye:

https://twitter.com/ZacWasSnipered9/status/1569294524622454786

Here’s a portion of what the NY Post had to say:

The FBI knew the Trump-Russia collusion narrative was utter bunk even as it suggested otherwise to Congress, the courts and the public early in 2017. Evidence revealed by special counsel John Durham proves it beyond dispute.

At RealClearInvestigations, Paul Sperry lays out the case.

Declassified for Durham’s probe, a March 2017 memo prepared by Lisa Page for FBI head James Comey’s meeting with Congress’ “Gang of Eight” — the bipartisan House and Senate leaders who oversee the most classified stuff — was a total cook-up job.

It advised Comey to present accusations that Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort and foreign policy adviser Carter Page were working with the Russian government as coming from a confidential Russia-based source with real intel-community chops. In fact, the FBI had already established that the root source was US-based former Brookings flunky Igor Danchenko’s utterly speculative gossip with an ex-girlfriend and a Democratic Party hack.

That, plus publicly reported info, was all Christopher Steele (a retired British spy who doesn’t even speak Russian) ever had to back up his “dossier.” And the FBI knew it since at least January 2017, when it interviewed Danchenko.

Comey hid all this during his meetings, and after. Yet the public only learned it years later, once the Durham probe began.

The Comey meeting where he served up these nonsense stories prompted both House and Senate Intelligence committees to open probes. But that was hardly the only poisoned fruit.

FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, counterintelligence officer Peter Strzok, analyst Brian Auten and Justice attorney Kevin Clinesmith pretended the Danchenko “intel” was credible to get the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court’s OK for wiretaps on Carter Page and dupe the Justice Department to keep granting approval for Trump campaign surveillance (which did not corroborate the wild claims). Again, all while they knew Danchenko had admitted it was baseless.

And here is a small portion of the full report from Real Clear Investigations:

A seven-page internal FBI memo dated March 8, 2017, shows that “talking points” prepared for then-FBI Director James Comey for his meeting the next day with the congressional leadership were riddled with half-truths, outright falsehoods, and critical omissions. Both the Senate and the House opened investigations and held hearings based in part on the misrepresentations made in those FBI briefings, one of which was held in the Senate that morning and the other in the House later that afternoon. RealClearInvestigations reached out to every member of the leadership, sometimes known as the “Gang of Eight.” Some declined to comment, while others did not respond to queries.

The talking points were prepared by Lisa Page, a senior FBI lawyer who later resigned from the bureau amid accusations of anti-Trump bias, and were used by Comey in his meeting with Hill leaders. They described reports the FBI received in 2016 from “a former FBI CHS,” or confidential human source, about former Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Carter Page (no relation to Lisa Page) allegedly conspiring with the Kremlin to hack the election.

Quoting from the reports, Comey told congressional leaders that the unidentified informant told the FBI that Manafort “initially ‘managed’ the relationship between Russian government officials and the Trump campaign, using Carter Page as an intermediary.” He also told them that “Page was reported to have had ‘secret meetings’ in early July 2016 with a named individual in Russia’s presidential administration during which they discussed Russia’s release of damaging information on Hillary Clinton in exchange for alterations to the GOP platform regarding U.S. policy towards Ukraine.”

But previous FBI interviews with Carter Page and other key sources indicated that none of that was true – and the FBI knew it at the time of the congressional briefings.

The Lisa Page memo anticipated concerns about the quality of information Comey was relaying to Congress and suggested he preempt any concerns with another untruth. The memo advised Comey to tell lawmakers that “some” of the reporting “has been corroborated,” and to point out that the informant’s “reporting in this matter is derived primarily from a Russian-based source,” which made it sound more credible.

By this point, however, the FBI knew that the main source feeding unsubstantiated rumors to the informant, Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to dig up dirt on Trump, was American-based.

The FBI first interviewed that source – a Russian national named Igor Danchenko who was living in the U.S. and had worked at the Brookings Institution – in January 2017. Danchenko had told them that the anti-Trump dirt he funneled to Steele was dubious hearsay passed along over drinks with his high school buddies and an old girlfriend named Olga Galkina, who had made up the accusations about Carter Page and Manafort that the FBI relayed to Congress.

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Danchenko is now under criminal indictment in Special Counsel John Durham’s ongoing investigation for lying about the sourcing for his information. The source to whom he attributed spurious charges against Trump – including his being compromised by a sex tape held by the Kremlin – was a fabrication, according to the indictment. He never spoke with the person as he claimed. Another source turned out to be a longtime Hillary Clinton campaign adviser.

The FBI did not tell the Gang of Eight that Danchenko was working for Steele and did not really have any sources inside the Kremlin, according to the script prepared for Comey, which was recently declassified as part of pre-trial discovery in Special Counsel John Durham’s probe. The FBI also concealed Steele’s identity and the fact he was working for the Clinton campaign.

Adding to the deception, Comey referred to the unnamed informant by the codename “CROWN,” making it appear as if Steele’s dossier was a product of British intelligence, although Steele had not worked for the British government for several years and was reporting entirely in a private capacity. According to the talking-points memo, Comey also withheld from Congress the fact that Steele had been fired by the FBI for leaking information to the media. Instead of sharing that critical information about his reliability and credibility – to say nothing of his political and financial motivations – Comey hid the truth about his star informant from the nation’s top lawmakers.

“If asked about CROWN/Steele” during the briefing, the memo anticipated, Comey was to tell lawmakers only that “CROWN, a former FBI CHS, is a former friendly foreign intelligence service employee who reported for about three years, and some of whose reporting has been corroborated.”

Meanwhile, FBI headquarters officials were duping the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court in similar fashion in order to continue to obtain warrants to spy on Carter Page. They led judges on the secret surveillance court to believe Danchenko was “Russian-based” – and therefore presumably more credible.

Read the full report here.