I’m still perplexed as to what Page is other than a doofus, and maybe he really is no more than a doofus, a walking McGuffin.

This may have been covered before, but what’s your hypothesis on how the disinfo suppliers knew what was being sought out and by whom: from the April hacks, from access to Fusion GPS, or just from generally contaminating Steele’s subsource network in the knowledge that people would be looking for dirt? (Or something else…?) We know that Steele’s work probably led people to misjudge the intent of the hack-and-leak operation, and that he was hired soon after the start of that operation and the outreach to Papadopoulos in London, soooooo….

And does that apply equally to the US-based emigre sources as the ones in Russia?

I trust Marcy’s instincts, but I wish I knew whether the contents are complete disinfo, or mostly true facts salted with just enough disinfo that the whole will be dismisssed as fake (“Kerning!!”)

You obviously know all of the details a lot better than I do, but it’s hard for me to see anyone from the Trump campaign being prosecuted based on evidence from FISA wiretaps/surveillance. There may be a mechanism to hold a trial out of the public eye, but you just couldn’t use it for something like this. We’d be seeing “SECRET KANGAROO COURT!!!” tweets for years. The evidence has value as part of a CI investigation that we will probably never know much about, at least beyond the broad strokes. I don’t see any of it being usable in open court.
As for Carter Page being prosecuted AT ALL, however, I think that may still be up in the air. He’s almost as bad as Trump when it comes to telling easily disproven lies. Any jury is going to HATE him. I think he may get hit with charges for something like lying to the FBI about something that won’t require classified intel to prove. I think what’s “protecting” him right now is that he has almost zero value as a witness for Mueller if he flips. He’d have to have supporting documents (or recordings, or something similar) for anything he testifies about. As a potential juror, I’d want a driver’s license or a passport before believing that he’d even gotten his name right. He’s basically a sideshow. He’d be one of the last people I’d indict, probably at the end of the investigation, when I was just tying up loose ends.

It remains unclear to me how you’ve concluded that the entire Steele dossier is disinformation.

The dossier is a raw human intelligence product, and thus is comprised of both accurate intel and disinformation, the ratio of the two being determined by the person compiling the raw HUMINT.  Steele was among the best, though we don’t know how his Russian contacts have held up since he retired.

Steele would have rated the credibility of his sources, but even if his product was 80% accurate, the only way to know what is accurate is to run down each lead.  Which is pretty much the job of FBI counterintelligence.  Thus the dossier may be highly useful as an initial HUMINT survey of the battlefield, so to speak, but worse than useless to the public.

As for the Russians intentionally feeding Steele an entire narrative for his dossier?  They would have to know his entire network of contacts and carefully feed disinformation to each one while not revealing their awareness of Steele’s project.  That stretches belief.  Far more likely, some of Steele’s sources are compromised and the Kremlin feeds those sources a mixed diet of disinformation and real but not very useful intel.  There’s probably also compartmentalized disinformation that’s used by the Kremlin to identify the sources of leaks:  thus the round of cleanup murders that occurred after the Steele dossier was published.

@bmaz
He might still get prosecuted, but unlike Manafort, the case against Page would rely on counterintelligence work, unless someone turned on him. The problem with that is that one expect him to flip on someone higher up, not the reverse. His role in all this has always been quite bizarre – he seems to have been in a go-between type of role, but he’s such a weirdo he seems ill-suited for that very role. Manafort basically got sold out by the Ukrainians, and so you can go after him in more traditional ways. The one parallel between the two is that there are certainly natsec-related charges that could’ve been brought against Manafort, but conspicuously were not.

Simply because there may be errors and/or disinformation in the Steele dossier does not mean that either the warrant is invalid or that anything obtained subsequent to the warrant is a fruit of the poisonous tree. When evaluating the validity of a warrant, a court will look (in legal parlance) to the 4 corners of the document (in other words, what is actually contained within the warrant itself) to determine if the information contained within the warrant is sufficient to establish probable cause for the issuance of the warrant. Challenges outside the scope of the 4 corners of the document are limited to whether the applicant knowingly or recklessly used false information, or whether the applicant him or herself knowingly lied within the warrant request.

If the applicant (or affiant) has knowledge that their source has provided prior valid information, nothing further is necessary at the warrant stage to bolster the credibility of the report. An unknown, or (at the time the warrant is applied for) potentially discredited source would require additional verification.

Steele was a known quantity and had provided good intel in the past. His dossier was, in and of itself, sufficient to establish PC for the warrant – even if parts of it were later discredited. No error in the issuance of the warrant, and no fruit of the poisonous tree.