Mueller Report Likely to Renew Scrutiny of Steele Dossier
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
WASHINGTON — The 35-page dossier, spiced up with tales of prostitutes and spies, sketched out a hair-raising story more than two years ago. Russian intelligence had used bribery and blackmail to try to turn Donald J. Trump into a source and ally, it said, and the Kremlin was running some Trump campaign aides practically as agents.
But the release on Thursday of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, underscored what had grown clearer for months — that while many Trump aides had welcomed contacts with the Russians, some of the most sensational claims in the dossier appeared to be false, and others were impossible to prove. Mr. Mueller’s report contained over a dozen passing references to the document’s claims but no overall assessment of why so much did not check out.
Now the dossier — financed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee , and compiled by the former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele — is likely to face new, possibly harsh scrutiny from multiple inquiries.
Republicans in Congress have vowed to investigate. The Justice Department’s inspector general is considering whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation improperly relied on the dossier in applying to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a warrant to eavesdrop on Carter Page, a Trump adviser. The inspector general wants to know what the F.B.I. learned about Mr. Steele’s sources and whether it disclosed any doubts about their veracity to the court.
And Attorney General William Barr has said he will review the F.B.I.’s conduct in the Russia investigation. His remark that there was “spying” on the Trump campaign has already encouraged Republican accusations of misconduct.
Interviews with people familiar with Mr. Steele’s work on the dossier and the F.B.I.’s scramble to vet its claims suggest that misgivings about its reliability arose not long after the document became public — and a preoccupation of Trump opponents — in early 2017. Mr. Steele has made clear to associates that he always considered the dossier to be raw intelligence — not established facts, but a starting point for further investigation.
By January 2017, F.B.I. agents had tracked down and interviewed one of Mr. Steele’s main sources, a Russian speaker from a former Soviet republic who had spent time in the West, according to a Justice Department document and three people familiar with the events, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. After questioning him about where he’d gotten his information, they suspected he might have added his own interpretations to reports passed on by his sources, one of the people said. For the F.B.I., that made it harder to decide what to trust.
Mr. Steele is a former British intelligence agent who served in Moscow. Credit Victoria Jones/Press Association, via Associated Press
Agents did not believe that either the source or Mr. Steele was deliberately inventing things, according to the former official. How the dossier ended up loaded with dubious or exaggerated details remains uncertain, but the document may be the result of a high-stakes game of telephone, in which rumors and hearsay were passed from source to source.
Oleg D. Kalugin, a former K.G.B. general who now lives outside Washington, saw that as plausible. “Russia has huge experience in spreading false information,” he said.
Mr. Steele declined to comment for this article. But Joshua A. Levy, a lawyer for Fusion GPS, the firm that commissioned the dossier, said the Mueller inquiry substantiated “the core reporting” in the Steele memos — including “that Trump campaign figures were secretly meeting Kremlin figures,” and that Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, had directed “a covert operation to elect Donald J. Trump.”
While The New York Times and many other news organizations published little about the document’s unverified claims, social media partisans and television commentators discussed them almost daily over the past two years. The dossier tantalized Mr. Trump’s opponents with a worst-case account of the president’s conduct. And for those trying to make sense of the Trump-Russia saga, the dossier infused the quest for understanding with urgency.
In blunt prose, it suggested that a foreign power had fully compromised the man who would become the next president of the United States.
The Russians, it asserted, had tried winning over Mr. Trump with real estate deals in Moscow — which he had not taken up — and set him up with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel in 2013, filming the proceedings for future exploitation. A handful of aides were described as conspiring with the Russians at every turn.
The F.B.I. obtained a wiretapping warrant to monitor Carter Page, a Trump adviser named in the Steele dossier. Credit J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
Such shocking claims may have seemed more plausible because of the conduct of Mr. Trump and his advisers. He was outspoken in his praise for Mr. Putin and hostile toward NATO. And a dozen associates, including his son Donald Jr., met or corresponded with Russians, including some with suspected intelligence connections, while failing to report the contacts to the F.B.I.
Mr. Trump’s former lawyer Michael D. Cohen negotiated for a Trump Tower project in Moscow many months into the campaign — and later admitted lying about it to Congress, along with tax evasion and other crimes. But Mr. Cohen did not, as the dossier claimed, travel to Prague to conspire in the Russian hacking of Democrats, the Mueller report makes clear.
Similarly, Mr. Page, a foreign policy adviser, was invited to address a prestigious Moscow institute in July 2016 in what seems to have been a calculated Russian attempt to curry favor. But Mr. Mueller, after a two-year investigation involving roughly 40 F.B.I. agents and other specialists, provided no evidence to support the claim that the adviser had collected a brokerage fee for the sale of a share of the Russian oil giant Rosneft. Nor has any evidence emerged to support the dossier’s claims about D.N.C. moles, Romanian hackers, Russian pensioners — or years of Trump-Putin intelligence trading.
Other dossier assertions remain neither proved nor disproved, notably its claim about Mr. Trump’s alleged dalliance with prostitutes. The Mueller report says a Russian businessman texted Mr. Cohen a week before the election to say that he had “stopped the flow of tapes from Russia but not sure if there’s anything else.” The businessman, Giorgi Rtskhiladze, later said he was referring to compromising tapes of Mr. Trump — but had been told they were fake.
The dossier began as part of a conventional opposition research operation by a small Washington firm, Fusion GPS. During the early part of the campaign, Fusion was paid by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication funded by the billionaire Paul Singer, to scrutinize Mr. Trump, with the evident goal of uncovering dirt to help his Republican primary opponents.
After Mr. Trump emerged as the likely nominee, Fusion kept working but turned to a new source of funding: the law firm representing the Clinton campaign, Perkins Coie. Noticing in May 2016 the Trump campaign’s unexpected affinity for Russia, Fusion hired Mr. Steele, a veteran of Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency, to dig deeper. Mr. Steele has told acquaintances that he did not know the ultimate client was the Clinton campaign.
Former F.B.I. and Central Intelligence Agency officers who knew him respected Mr. Steele, who had served in Moscow before leading the Russia desk at MI6’s headquarters. After leaving government service, he had helped the F.B.I. with an investigation of FIFA, the international governing body of soccer, and with other matters involving Russia.
Mr. Steele, who co-owns a private intelligence firm in London, Orbis Business Intelligence, reached out to sources he had relied on in past Russia-related investigations. Between June and December 2016, he sent Fusion at least 17 reports, ranging from one to three pages, describing raw, unconfirmed information on a wide range of alleged connections between Mr. Trump, his aides and Russian operatives.
Mr. Steele alerted the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2016 to what his sources were telling him. Credit Al Drago for The New York Times
Mr. Steele decided early on that what he was hearing posed a grave danger to the United States. He alerted an F.B.I. agent he knew well, and on Sept. 19, 2016, his reports reached the team in Washington that had started investigating Trump-Russia connections nearly two months earlier.
The F.B.I. assembled a group of analysts to check every line of Mr. Steele’s short memos. Agents hit the streets to find and interview his sources, eventually identifying and speaking with at least two.
By summer 2017, with Mr. Mueller’s investigation in high gear, the F.B.I. still could not vouch for much of the dossier. One often-discussed claim — the detailed account of Mr. Cohen’s supposed trip to Prague — appeared to be false. Mr. Cohen’s financial records and C.I.A. queries to foreign intelligence services revealed nothing to support it.
F.B.I. agents on Mr. Mueller’s team debriefed Mr. Steele himself in London for two days in September 2017, according to a person familiar with the meeting.
F.B.I. agents considered whether Russia had polluted the stream of intelligence, but did not give it much credence, according to the former official.
But that is an issue to which multiple inquiries are likely to return. There has been much chatter among intelligence experts that Mr. Steele’s Russian informants could have been pressured to feed him disinformation.
Daniel Hoffman, a former C.I.A. officer who served in Moscow, said he had long suspected the dossier was contaminated by Russian fabrications. The goal, he said, would be to deepen American divisions and blur the line between truth and falsehood.
“How many times have hearings on Capitol Hill used information from the dossier?” Mr. Hoffman said. “How much damage has it already caused?”
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So, finally the New York Times tells us the Steele Dossier is not true:
"But the release on Thursday of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, underscored what had grown clearer for months — that while many Trump aides had welcomed contacts with the Russians, some of the most sensational claims in the dossier appeared to be false, and others were impossible to prove."
If Trump & Co were too dumb to realize they were being used by Russian State Intelligence Srevices does that mean they were innocent? They were specifically warned. When the Russians came calling the Trump campaign welcomed them. What am I not getting? Trump was still trying to cut a deal with Putin to build Trump Tower Moscow and lying about it. Putin wanted sanctions stopped. Quid Pro Quo. Despite Trump's and Barr's and Putin's spin and ongoing lies about the Mueller Report it is a damning indictment of Trump and Co. Thank goodness Congress is going to dig in. No tables are being turned...
FALSE
What am I not getting?
The substance of the Times article
You cannot fault our CIA noting the Trump campaign's lies about Russia...
How about the topic here? Specifically, the Steele Dossier which was used to get FISA warrants to spy on American citizens?
Obama had access to all this information and failed to warn the Trump campaign. Instead, he OK'ed a spying campaign against Trump using FBI and DOJ assets.
Yep and they warned Dianne Feinstein about having a staffer who was indeed a Chinese spy. Right now I'd like to get some kind of acknowledgement, at long last, that the Steele Dossier wasn't true.
we can thank obama at his trial for that
scandal free administration my ass... LOL
Don't forget, Susan Rice fixed up the minutes of the infamous January 5th, 2017 meeting he had with Comey....Rice added to the notes on Inauguration day, claiming that Obama reminded them (after 8 years of working with them) to do "everything by the book"!
and now? they are going to get the book thrown at them... LOL
Lol, some for sure, I think. We at least have an ongoing investigation of the FBI by the IG and an AG willing to look at it. Some will fall. Will they dare admit that Obama gave them the green light?...we shall see
people have already testified under oath the WH was running this. and they have the texts.
people in obamas doj, fbi, and cia, are currently running for cover when there is none.
patience
We are in for some interesting times. This is the big story the msm missed while peddling a hoax for 2 years
Hello M8 ...
I do not think Obama will ever be touched .. his administration could get a black eye and a punch in the gut or 2, but there is a belief in 'No Drama Obama' .. some believe that he actually got his news the way 'we' did ...
I would like an answer to why, if the Russians were such a threat to the US election, was nothing done to 'stop' said 'meddling' from the Obama administration until December of 2016 … why was no action taken?
I know the official story, and even a few other explanations as to why Obama did nothing … McConnell supposedly prevented Obama from announcing to the states the threat the Russians were to the election … he would have been accused of interfering in an election and some would think he was 'swaying the election' if he had told the American people during the election what was happening .. meanwhile Russia is 'meddling in' said election... so glad someone thought far enough in advance to start an investigation into 'supposed' Trump Campaign 'Collusion' instead of a cyber campaign to stop Russian meddling...
Putting my soap box away... : ) before I go into the 'matter' of emails …..lol
fair enough, but of course I disagree, a president abusing the power of govt to go after a political opponent, overthrow the results of an election, and oust a sitting president? that is going just a tad bit too far. a very harsh message must be sent. anything less is unacceptable and will only invite repeat behavior from future presidents. and that we simply can not allow.
Cannot say that I disagree .. but, in my opinion, former President Obama will be protected, there will be NO proof/evidence to directly link the former president to any wrong doing. It all comes down to intent .. and whether he 'knowingly' did any wrong doings....
I have many questions that I think need to be answered by the former administration .. I would write a book if I thought anyone would read it .. but alas, it would not be read, and Obama would still remain untouchable......
I could be wrong -James Comey
Did anyone else pick up on how many time Comey said that during his testimony? Uphill battle M8 .. but please keep the faith, I will happily eat my words if Obama personally gets snagged up by any wrong doings!
Part of those questions should be aimed at Susan Rice, as I believe she was the one that gave the stand down order in regards to a cybersecurity counterattack/campaign to stop Russian meddling. She is also the one whom outed Trump staffers that were surveilled without a warrant.
How about none of it, until the information was vetted?
Interesting read on the back peddling over the Steele Dossier. FISA warrants were issued because of false reporting in said dossier ………….. and now, it is once again the Russian's did it, the dossier was a campaign of falsehoods and misinformation (wait for it) provided by the Russians? Go figure huh? Meanwhile my fellow American's were running around quoting the dossier like it was fact .. as were 'our' elected officials.
I waited for the Mueller report to come out, I did not speculate what information the investigation had uncovered, which, it turns out was a whole lot of nothing, but it did spotlight that the Steele Dossier contains false information (false information? no way!) HA! what a joke .. there have been those individuals that did not believe the Steele Dossier from the minute it was released .. and they were mocked, now those individuals are owed an apology .. do not worry, although it is owed .. one is not expected...
Happy Easter ...
Thank you for the relevant questions, which need to be answered now.
And a Happy Easter to you as well
One of the things that bothers me most is that Carter Page was known to the DC alphabet agencies .. US intelligence already knew that Page was of NO threat .. he had been surveilled years prior regarding a 'spy ring'... yet apparently could not help themselves from getting a FISA warrant under what I believe that the alphabet agencies knew was false information (if 'US intelligence' did not know that the Steele Dossier was providing false information about Carter Page .. then 'we' need to rethink the definition of 'intelligence' …)
You are so right my friend. Carter Page was used to spy on the Trump campaign, pure & simple. We are going to get into all of that. William Barr and Michael Horowitz must do it for the country. It has to be done or progressives are just gonna keep saying the same insane nonsense theyv'e been saying for over 2 years.
And, the investigation over the FISA warrants and the Steele Dossier needs to be completed and published before October 1, 2020.