There is one very small part of the IG report the mainstream media is going to painstaking efforts to avoid.
That would be the role the late Senator John McCain (R-AZ) played in supplying information from Christopher Steele to James Comey.
Christopher Steele
As you may recall, Steele was the author of the dossier that was used in the application of the FISA warrants against Carter Page.
Much of the information in the Steele dossier could not be corroborated and through the IG report, we found that a significant amount of the information was hearsay.
Additionally, Steele was not the reliable source the FBI portrayed him to be.
James Comey debunked the Steele dossier, yet he still used it as the anchor to secure FISA warrants against Paige, an adviser to the Trump campaign.
The McCain Legacy
Where Senator McCain comes into all of this is as a conduit between Fusion GPS, the company Steele was working for, and James Comey.
According to the IG report, McCain provided five separate reports from Steele long after the FBI had terminated Steele as a reliable source.
Just how much McCain knew about Steele’s status is unclear but based on his relationship with Comey, it is hard to believe that McCain was not aware of the situation.
The IG report states, “Several weeks later, on December 9, 2016, Senator John McCain provided Comey with a collection of 16 Steele election reports, 5 of which Steele had not given the FBI.
“McCain had obtained these reports from a staff member at the McCain Institute.
“The McCain Institute staff member had met with Steele and later acquired the reports from Simpson.”
This is a pretty significant add-on to what we already knew about McCain’s participation in this effort to have Trump removed from office.
So, not only was McCain the one that helped put the dossier into the hands of James Comey, but he also supplied further documentation even after Steele had been proven to be an unreliable source.
The fact a McCain staffer was meeting with Steele before any of this happened further leads us to believe McCain was firmly rooted in the effort of people within the Republican party that did not like and did not want Trump in office.
The fact that McCain either did no due diligence on his own to vet Steele or simply dismissed the fact that he was unreliable is even more troublesome.
McCain may be considered a war hero, but this little tidbit from the IG report proves that honor is not one that he deserves to have bestowed upon him as a U.S. Senator.