Kimberley Strassel of the ''[[Wall Street Journal]]'' debunked a false narrative of the American [[MSM]] to cover the FBI's illegal activities in the Trump-Russia scandal.
Australian ambassador to the UK Alexander Downer ''did not'' pass to the Australian ambassador in the US, Joe Hockey, information on a meeting Downer obtained during a drunken binge with George Papadopoulos in a London pub. <ref>https://amp.smh.com.au/world/north-america/alexander-downer-interviewed-by-fbi-hours-into-trump-russia-probe-20180517-p4zfrg.html </ref> Anonymous sources in the ''[[New York Times]]'' claimed Downer supposedly passed the information to Hockey to relay to the FBI, sparking an FBI [[counterintelligence]] probe of the [[2016 Trump campaign]]. Mainstream [[fake news]] media in the [[United States]] reported it as the official cover narrative to justify the Trump-Russia probe for six months between January and June 2018.
{{quotebox|Hockey neither transmitted any information to the FBI nor was approached by the U.S. about the tip. Rather, it was Mr. Downer who at some point decided to convey his information—to the U.S. Embassy in London.<br>That matters because it is not how things are normally done. The U.S. is part of [[Five Eyes]], an intelligence network that includes the U.K., [[Canada]], Australia and [[New Zealand]]. The Five Eyes agreement provides that any intelligence goes through the intelligence system of the country that gathered it. This helps guarantee information is securely handled, subjected to quality control, and not made prey to political manipulation. Mr. Downer’s job was to report his meeting back to [[Canberra]], and leave it to Australian intelligence. We also know that '''it wasn’t Australian intelligence that alerted the FBI. The document that launched the FBI probe contains no foreign intelligence whatsoever'''. So if Australian intelligence did receive the Downer info, it didn’t feel compelled to act on it.<br>But the Obama State Department did—and its involvement is news. The Downer details landed with the embassy’s then-chargé d’affaires, [[Elizabeth Dibble]], who previously served as a principal deputy assistant secretary in Mrs. Clinton’s State Department.<ref>https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-curious-case-of-mr-downer-1527809075 </ref>}}