There were many news outlets and people hyping the validity of the FISA warrant on Carter Page based on the now-officially-discredited Christopher Steele dossier. However, few defended it with more fervor than CNN's Chris Cillizza as he lectured President Donald Trump how wrong, wrong, WRONG he was for daring to cast aspersions on that FISA warrant.
This is one instance in which it is an absolute must to not only read the transcript of Cillizza's July 23, 2018 lecture on CNN Newsroom but also to watch the video because it reveals via body language and, especially, the tone of righteous certitude in his voice on just how wrong it is for anybody to cast the least amount of doubt upon the validity of the Carter Page FISA warrant:
...Now again, Donald Trump saying that this all began with the Steele dossier. NO! This is from the FISA warrant. A lot of this is redacted. Page lived in Russia. During this time Page he began a dealings with a gas company. A giant oil and gas company with ties to Putin. So there was concerns about Carter Page prior to this Steele dossier. Let's go to the next line.
And as we have found out from the IG report, the unverified and fraudulent Steele dossier played a "central and essential role" in obtaining the Page FISA warrant . We now return to Cillizza's FISA validity lecture which now laughingly serves to mock him from the July 2018 space/time continuum:
Remember this was authorized once, the FISA warrant was authorized once, and reauthorized three more times by federally appointed judges. Now who were they appointed by? George W. Bush, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan. In case you didn't notice the similarity, there people are all Republicans. All Republicans picked these judges.
And none of the judges were informed that the Steele dossier was unverified garbage as revealed by Steele's primary subsource who claimed it was all based on just wild bar talk rumor that even he didn't believe.
And finally, as comedic icing on the cake from Cillizza, he concluded by declaring that Trump is just not presenting facts. Facts that ended up being proven true, unlike the "facts" that Cillizza presented that turned out to be fiction:
So again, Brooke, time and time again, whether it was that tweet that you read or that Donald Trump says sort of more broadly on Twitter and elsewhere, he is just not presenting facts when it relates to the FISA warrant, Carter Page, the FBI investigation, the Special Counsel. He is making a lot of connections that facts don't bear out that they exist.
And as it turned out, Chris, the FISA warrant was proven to be fraudulent. Carter Page did NOT work for Russia although the FISA warrant was altered to make it appear so. The FBI investigation, as Michael Horowitz revealed in his report, was fraught with errors. Oh, and the Special Counsel, Robert Mueller, after his finding of NO Trump-Russia collusion proved himself to be something less than fully cognitive.
