Trey Gowdy says the FBI used information from Hillary Clinton’s ally Sidney Blumenthal to corroborate the discredited Steele dossier.
“I have seen each factual assertion listed in that dossier, and then I’ve seen the FBI’s justification. And when you’re citing newspaper articles as corroboration for a factual assertion that you have made, you don’t need an FBI agent to go do a Google search,” the former member of the House Intelligence Committee said in a Fox News interview.
Washingtonexaminer.com reports: “And when the name Sidney Blumenthal is included as part of your corroboration, and you’re the world’s leading law enforcement agency, you have a problem,” Gowdy said.
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In 2018, Gowdy hinted that Blumenthal was responsible for the creation of the dossier.
“When you hear who the source or one of the sources of that information is, you’re going to think, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve heard that name somewhere before. Where could it possibly have been?'” Gowdy said in February 2018.
Blumenthal worked with the Clinton Foundation and was an informal adviser to Hillary Clinton during her stint as secretary of state. Blumenthal has been a controversial figure, helping out with a “secret spy network” to give Clinton information on Libya.
He was responsible for giving another dossier containing some of the same salacious content on then-candidate Trump to a State Department official. The dossier was compiled by another Clinton ally, Cody Shearer, and was eventually given to the FBI to substantiate its own investigation.
In an interview released Wednesday with the “Skullduggery” podcast, former FBI General Counsel James Baker said the FBI took the Trump dossier “seriously” but “not necessarily literally.”
