The snakery of Paul Ryan: One of the first to have the Steele dossier in hand as he sent investigators out to probe Trump

 Looks like Paul Ryan is in the SnakeShit Category

What kind of a political leader sends members of his own party on a wild goose chase to find out whether their party leader was a Russian spy while sitting on a phony dossier full of lies and not telling them?

Well, we now know the answer: Former House Speaker Paul Ryan.

I've defended him for a long time and have never been a Ryan-hater, but this is not a pretty picture.

According to Roll Call:

GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger and a longtime aide to Speaker Paul D. Ryan each were given an early look at the final report added to the infamous “Steele dossier,” court documents in a lawsuit against BuzzFeed News show.

Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence agent who compiled the unsubstantiated research booklet in 2016 about Donald Trump’s connections to Russia before he became president, gave the report to Kinzinger and Jonathan Burks, Ryan’s longtime chief of staff, after he completed it on Dec. 13, 2016, according to the court memo.

In addition to Kinzinger and Burks, Steele also handed off the 17th and final report of his dossier, Report 166, to a longtime associate of Sen. John McCain and the top Russia expert on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council.

That's from a court case involving a Russian who says he was smeared by the documents, which of course, were leaked to the press -- but not the investigators.

According to Kash Patel, who, along with Rep. Devin Nunes, both of whom had to get to the bottom of this without the documents Ryan had, just the haze of allegations in the press, speaking with Steve Bannon on one of his broadcasts:

STEVE BANNON: I've got two tweets about you about my beat down of Paul Ryan the other day about talking about character and you know Trump's lacks character. You brought two brutal tweets up about Paul Ryan's character related to the Steele dossier that has not gotten anywhere near the exposure it is. Tell me what you got brother.

KASH PATEL, TRUMP ADVISER: Hey Steve, great to be with you. Thanks. Remember in 2016, let's rewind the tape. It was Russia collusion, Russia collusion, Russia collusion. And then speaker Paul Ryan enlisted me and Devin Nunes to investigate the Russia collusion. Nobody knew what the Steele dossier was in 2016. They had already gone to the federal court and unlawfully surveilled Donald Trump with it.

But what we didn't find out until after we completed our investigation in 2018 was that the speaker, Paul Ryan, who charged us with investigating Russiagate was the first guy to ever get a copy of the Steele dossier in 2016. He never told us. He still never admitted it. It finally was admitted in a British court where Christopher Steele was being sued. Just think about it, Steve. We could have asked, where did you get it? Who did you get it from? How was it paid for? All of these secrets could have come out under this man's very investigation, but he rigged it from the beginning.

So I'm done listening to lectures about the new conservative brand that is Paul Ryan. And anytime he wants to debate me, I'm all in. He charged us with an investigation that he rigged because he didn't want Donald Trump to succeed. He kneecapped him from the beginning.

The issue is important because Ryan knew the partisan origins of the Steele dossier and chose to not reveal that to the investigators. He prefered that the investigators get caught up in the document and in his mind, hopefully come up with the conclusion that the sleazy allegations were true, and not Russian drunkard stuff which is apparently how the invented trash got put together.

In 2020, New York Post found:

Now it turns out that the biggest political scandal of the century was sourced almost entirely to a man with a history of public drunkenness who did little besides traffic in debunked gossip.

The breathless attacks on Trump, as well as the FBI’s spying on his campaign, were largely sourced to the dubious “Steele Dossier.” The author of the dossier was former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, but it’s long been known that Steele relied on a “primary sub-source” to supply him with the substance behind the wild allegations that Trump was engaged in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” with the Kremlin.

Recently declassified FBI information and reporting by my colleague at RealClearInvestigations, Eric Felten, confirms the identity of the source as a 42-year-old Russian national living in America named Igor Danchenko.

The FBI memo recounting the agency’s meetings with Danchenko confirms that the Steele Dossier was sourced with little more than Danchenko gossiping with childhood friends back in Russia — not exactly high-level sources in the know. Some of Danchenko’s most prominent allegations, such as the dossier’s claim that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen visited Prague to meet Russian intel operatives, have been subsequently disproven.

All that for the tens of thousands of dollars Democrats paid in order to get the Steele dossier, in order to distribute it to the press, and apparently people like Ryan, who decided to use members of his own party to go on the goose chase to undermine Trump.

What a sleazy, snaky thing for a party member to do to members of his own party.

And this guy now wants to speak at the Republican National Convention this summer, Mr. Loyalty to ... the Democrats who wanted to destroy Trump. Where's his apology? Anybody who'd let that guy in the room would deserve what he gets.

Meanwhile, maybe he ought to explain to the Fox News board why he instigated this dishonest witch hunt, given that truthfulness is an important thing in the news industry. Maybe he has an honest explanation, but I can't see it with the information out now.

Is anyone going to demand that this guy explain himself? He was right there from the get-go in that swampy extended harassment campaign against President Trump as he assumed his first term. We all know how that extended -- and morphed into a monster. Did that help his party? Or did it help the socialists and Democrats? How does Ryan live with himself?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/06/the_snakery_of_paul_ryan_one_of_the_first_to_have_the_steele_dossier_in_his_hot_little_hands_as_he_sent_investigators_out_to_probe_trump.html