Embattled FBI admits it can’t verify dossier claims of Russia, Trump campaign collusion

From the Washington Times:

The FBI is declining to repudiate the Russia dossier on which it partially relied to start an investigation into the Trump campaign, but it concedes the document’s major core charges of election collusion remain unsubstantiated....

Republicans believe they have unearthed a scandal inside the bureau’s top echelons over its determination to target Trump associates based on flimsy evidence and improper Justice Department contacts.

Republican committee members pressed Mr. McCabe about a dossier that was financed by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign based on gossip-tinged information from paid, unidentified Kremlin operatives.

Mr. McCabe declined to criticize the dossier’s 35 pages of salacious and criminal charges against Donald Trump and his aides, but he said it remains largely unverified, according to a source familiar with ongoing congressional inquiries....
Fox News and the Washington Examiner reported that Republicans asked what parts of the dossier the FBI had confirmed. Mr. McCabe said the only substantiated collusion-related incident was that Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page traveled to Moscow in July 2016.

The answer surprised Republicans: Mr. Page’s trip to deliver a speech at a university was widely publicized at the time....

Most recently, The Washington Post reported that James Baker, the FBI’s general counsel and a close associate of fired FBI Director James B. Comey, was being transferred. Politico reported that Mr. Baker during the election had contact with the Mother Jones reporter who interviewed Mr. Steele via Skype and gave much credence to his dossier.

“This is really problematic for the FBI and DOJ right now,” said the source familiar with the congressional investigations. “They realize stonewalling is not going to work anymore, but they haven’t decided on a new strategy to manage the deluge of information spilling out about top officials’ conflicts of interest, their use of the Steele dossier and their own connections to Fusion GPS.”