Guest post by Joe Hoft
Newly released information confirms that the late Senator John McCain and his longtime associate David Kramer pushed the fake Trump – Russia dossier to the FBI and also to over a dozen left-wing journalists.
In December we reported that John McCain and his associate David Kramer pushed the fake Russia dossier to the FBI and Buzzfeed News. The Daily Caller reported:
A longtime associate of late Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain provided a copy of the infamous Steele dossier to BuzzFeed News, according to an explosive court filing released Wednesday.
David Kramer, a former State Department official who was an executive at the McCain Institute, provided BuzzFeed News reporter Ken Bensinger with a copy of the dossier Dec. 29, 2016, according to a filing submitted Wednesday by U.S. District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro.
Yesterday additional court filings were released that show that Kramer provided the fake dossier to multiple individuals in the media.
Newly unsealed court filings show how the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and an associate shared with the FBI and a host of media outlets the unverified dossier that alleged the Russians had compromising information on now-President Trump.
McCain had denied being the source for BuzzFeed after it published the dossier, which was funded by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, but had acknowledged giving it to the FBI.
In from September, former senior counterintelligence FBI agent Bill Priestap confirmed that the FBI received a copy of the first 33 pages of the dossier in December 2016 from McCain.
In another filing, David Kramer — a former State Department official and McCain associate — said in a Dec. 13, 2017, deposition that the dossier was given to him by author and former British spy Christopher Steele, which he then provided to more than a dozen journalists at outlets including CNN, BuzzFeed and The Washington Post. The details were first reported by The Daily Caller.
The report was also shared with State Department official Victoria Nuland, Obama National Security Council official Celeste Wallander and Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill.
The filings were unsealed as part of an ongoing libel case against BuzzFeed by a Russian businessman.
Jeff Carlson at the Epoch Times provided a list of journalists who were provided the dossier by Kramer –
Kramer, who is an affiliated senior fellow at the McCain Institute, revealed in his deposition that he had been in contact with 14 journalists and producers about the dossier. These contacts included:
- ABC News: Brian Ross, Matt Mosk
- BuzzFeed: Ken Bensinger
- CNN: Carl Bernstein
- The Guardian: Julian Borger
- McClatchy: Peter Stone, Greg Gordon
- Mother Jones: David Corn
- NPR: Bob Little, Rachel Martin
- The Washington Post: Tom Hamburger, Rosalind Helderman, Fred Hiatt
- The Wall Street Journal: Allan Cullison
Kramer, who does not appear to have spoken with The New York Times, noted that both Simpson and Steele were speaking to the Times directly because “they felt it required investigation by a serious news outlet, and they seemed to have chosen The Times at that point.”
Note that Kramer provided the fake dossier to Bernstein from CNN. The same individual who was praised as a hero by the far-left for bringing down President Nixon the Watergate scandal of the 1970’s.