The Daily Comb Over - January 9, 2018

School's back in session and that means a lot of reading is coming your way.  First, there's the #1 Best Seller: Fire and Fury which provides us with an inside look into the debacle of the Trump Regime.  And now, thanks to Senator Feinstein, we have a pdf release of the testimony by Fusion GPS CEO Glenn Simpson.

Glenn Simpson (left) and Christopher Steele (right) have been slandered for their work exposing #TrumpRussia

The main takeaway is that as Steele put together the dossier, it became increasingly clear to him that Trump could very easily be blackmailed via Russian kompromat against him.  That led him to reach out to the FBI:

So he proposed to -- he said we should tell the FBI, it's a national security issue. I didn't originally agree or disagree, I just put it off and said I needed to think about it. Then he raised it again with me. I don't remember the exact sequence of these events, but my recollection is that I questioned how we would do that because I don't know anyone there that I could report something like this to and be believed and I didn't really think it was necessarily appropriate for me to do 15 that. In any event, he said don't worry about that, I know the perfect person, I have a contact there, they'll listen to me, they know who I am, I'll take care of it. I said okay. You know, I agreed, it's potentially a crime in progress. So, you know, if we can do that in the most appropriate way, I said it was okay for him to do that. 

Now bear in mind that we now know that the FBI had already been looking into #TrumpRussia at that time courtesy of a drunken slip by "coffee boy" George Papadopolous.

And we also know that around that time, the NY FBI office was doing favors for Trump surrogate Rudy Guiliani in creating a counter-narrative attacking Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton.

All of this made Steele a little nervous:

On October 31st the New York Times posed a story saying that the FBI is investigating Trump and found no connections to Russia and, you know, it was a real Halloween special. 

Sometime thereafter the FBI -- I understand Chris severed his relationship with the FBI out of concern that he didn't know what was happening inside the FBI and there was a concern that the FBI was being manipulated for political ends by the Trump people and that we didn't really understand what was going on. So he stopped dealing with them. 

After a year of investigation the dossier still looks impeccable.  While not every detail has been corroborated as of yet, not a single fact in the dossier has been proven to be false.  Of course, that hasn't stopped Republicans from demanding the Justice Department arrest Christopher Steele.  House Democratic Whip Ted Lieu said it best today:

Fusion GPS transcript shows that what Senators Grassley & Graham did last week in publicly referring Christopher Steele for criminal investigation was, at best, a partisan publicity stunt and, at worst, intentionally designed to mislead the American people. https://t.co/EWyPsd2vd9

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) January 9, 2018

And as for Trump's response to the release of the testimony? His last comment about TrumpRussia was part of the Stable Genius tweets 3 days ago:

Now that Russian collusion, after one year of intense study, has proven to be a total hoax on the American public, the Democrats and their lapdogs, the Fake News Mainstream Media, are taking out the old Ronald Reagan playbook and screaming mental stability and intelligence.....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018

....Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star.....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018

....to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius....and a very stable genius at that!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018

Catch you on the flip side.