Former FBI General Counsel James Baker met with House investigators on Wednesday, and he shared that he had met during the campaign season with an attorney from Perkins Coie, which was on Clinton's payroll in 2016, John Solomon, former editor-in-chief of the Washington Times, writes in The Hill.
"This is a bombshell that unequivocally shows the real collusion was between the FBI and Donald Trump's opposition — the DNC, Hillary and a Trump-hating British intel officer — to hijack the election, rather than some conspiracy between Trump and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin," a source knowledgeable about what happened at the closed-door hearing told Solomon, he reported.
Perkins Coie is the law firm used by the Clinton campaign to pay former British spy Christopher Steele to compose the "golden showers" dossier that alleged Trump went to the Ritz Carlton in Moscow and paid prostitutes to engage in urination games.
The FBI relied on that salacious dossier to obtain a warrant to spy on Americans working for the Trump campaign, though it is becoming clearer and clearer that much of their "evidence" was a political document paid for by the Democratic presidential nominee's campaign. Notably, former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was put under FBI surveillance because of his alleged connections to Russian spies.
Mounting evidence suggests that the FBI relied on politically motivated materials to support the probe into "collusion" between Trump's campaign and the Russian government, giving the bureau cover to spy on officials inside the Trump campaign. As a result, Republicans have pleaded with the president to declassify key materials from the investigation, such as the unredacted text history between FBI lovers Lisa Page and Pete Strzok, both of whom were involved in the probe. (Lisa and Carter have no known relation to each other.)
"I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in [McCabe's] office — that there's no way he [Trump] gets elected — but l'm afraid we can't take that risk. lt's like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you're 40," Strzok texted Lisa Page in mid-August 2016.
To bolster the image of the Russia probe, Strzok and Lisa Page worked on a "media leak strategy" that resulted in the New York Times and Washington Post reporting that Carter Page had been spied on by the American government.
Having viewed the classified materials, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) offered a preview of the text correspondence between Strzok and Lisa Page in a letter from last month: "April 12, 2017: Peter Strzok congratulates Lisa Page on a job well done while referring to two derogatory articles about Carter Page. In the text, Strzok warns Page two articles are coming out, one which is ‘worse' than the other about Lisa's ‘namesake.' Strzok added: ‘Well done, Page.'"
An article published in the New York Times on April 12, 2017, cites one anonymous government official supporting its report that the DOJ obtained approval to wiretap Carter Page "based on evidence that he was operating as a Russian agent."
The FBI's surveillance of the Trump campaign, which included a US intelligence community attempt to infiltrate the campaign through an informant who had previously been directed by the CIA and George HW Bush to spy on the Carter administration during the 1980 election, is growing into one of the bureau's most infamous scandals.