Adam Schiff may be the biggest loser of Russia probe declassification

Review of Democratic House Intelligence Committee chairman's public statements finds many contradicted, some linked to Russian disinformation.

In a packed hearing room two months into Donald Trump’s embattled presidency, Rep. Adam Schiff played the willing protagonist by dramatically reading into the congressional record some of the most explosive claims from Christopher Steele’s dossier.

At the time, Steele’s dossier had recently burst on the scene, and the Trump White House was under siege as a far-reaching FBI investigation examined allegations — later disproven — that former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and others tried to collude with Russia to hijack the 2016 election.

“According to Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who is reportedly held in high regard by U.S. intelligence, Russian sources tell him that Page has also had a secret meeting with Igor Sechin, CEO of Russian gas giant Rosneft,” Schiff declared at a March 20, 2017 House Intelligence Committee hearing.

“Sechin is reported to be a former KGB agent and close friend of Putin’s. According to Steele’s Russian sources, Page is offered brokerage fees by Sechin on a deal involving a 19 percent share of the company,” the California Democrat added.

Schiff’s decision to embrace the dossier and read it into a government proceeding gave the document enhanced public credibility with the media, just weeks after it had been leaked to the news site Buzzfeed and before its funding origins and accuracy were determined.

Three years later, Schiff is the House Intelligence Committee chairman. But his claims that day, and many others like it over the three years of the Russia scandal, have fallen into grave discredit, directly contradicted by intelligence evidence in recently declassified or released FBI and Justice Department memos and reports, a Just the News review has found.

For instance, Schiff claimed this about the Steele dossier in a Nov. 15, 2017 interview with The Wall Street Journal: “The bigger factor is how much of it can you corroborate and how much of it is true. A lot of it has turned out to be true.”

By the time Schiff made that remark, the former FBI Director James Comey had publicly warned the dossier contained "salacious and unverified material" and the bureau’s own spreadsheet had shown the dossier possessed several errors and mostly uncorroborated evidence, Justice Department memos show. Significant errors or contradictions with Steele's sources had been flagged already by January 2017.

“Despite the FBI’s efforts to corroborate and evaluate the Steele election reporting, we were told by [an FBI employee] that, as of September 2017, the FBI had corroborated limited information in the Steele election reporting, and much of that information was publicly available. Most relevant to the Carter Page FISA applications, the specific substantive allegations contained in...

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