Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz is investigating the FBI’s reliance on the unverified dossier produced by British ex-spy Christopher Steele in the surveillance of a Trump campaign associate “despite questions about [Steele’s] credibility.”
Citing unnamed sources, the Wall Street Journal reports Horowitz “is homing in on” and “has been asking witnesses about” the FBI’s “treatment of information” provided by Steele, described as a “key source”, who was used to obtain Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page.
This is part of Horowitz’s broad investigation into alleged FISA abuse and more.
Steele’s dossier was funded in part by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign through the Perkins Coie law firm and opposition research group Fusion GPS, which had reached out to and contracted Steele.
The new Wall Street Journal report says the inspector general’s office “has been asking why the FBI continued to cite Steele as a credible source in the renewal applications.” And a specific focus of Horowitz’s team is apparently “a news report cited extensively in the [FISA] applications that appeared to bolster Steele’s credibility… [which] said U.S. intelligence officials were investigating allegations similar to those Steele had raised.”
The “news report” was written by Yahoo News journalist Michael Isikoff, who said he was stunned when he learned that his September 2016 article for Yahoo News was used in the FISA applications targeting Carter Page to bolster Steele’s credibility, despite his source being Steele himself. Iskoff said “it’s self-referential” and “it seems a little odd that they would cite the Yahoo News story about the matter they are investigating themselves based on the same material that had been separately presented to the FBI.”
Isikoff personally met with Steele in person in September 2016. Also at the meeting was Isikoff’s “old friend” Glenn Simpson, the co-founder of Fusion GPS. The three of them talked about Trump and Russia and Steele provided him with some of his research.
Isikoff now admits that everyone should have been more cautious about Steele’s information. “I think it’s fair to say that all of us should have approached this, in retrospect, with more skepticism, particularly when we didn’t know where it was coming from,” Isikoff said. “We knew that Steele compiled it, but that Steele did not hear these allegations himself. Somebody else heard them from others and then passed them along. That’s thirdhand stuff, which is not usually the kind you want for publishing.”
In the FISA renewal applications, which spanned until June 2017, the FBI continued to insist that it didn’t think Steele was Isikoff’s source even though Steele himself had said that he was by the spring of 2017.
The Wall Street Journal report says “investigators have also asked about an internal FBI evaluation of Steele’s credibility that found his reporting had been ‘minimally corroborated’ even as it also said he had provided information ‘of value’ to the U.S. intelligence community.” The report says “the evaluation was reflected in a ‘human source validation report’ written by a unit of the FBI after the bureau cut off its relationship with Steele in October 2016… because of his disclosures to the media about his work for the FBI.”
Heavily redacted FBI records unearthed through Freedom of Information Act litigation in 2018 show that Steele was cut off as a confidential human source because of his improper disclosures to third parties and that his “handling agent advised [Steele] that [Confidential Human Source] was not to operate to obtain any intelligence whatsoever on behalf of the FBI.”
According to a New York Times report from April, the FBI reached out to some of Steele’s foreign sources in an attempt to determine their credibility, and as early as January 2017 agents had reportedly concluded that some of the dossier’s contents may have been based upon “rumors and hearsay” which were “passed from source to source.” The agents believed that some of Steele’s information may have even been based upon “Russian disinformation.”
For its part, Fusion GPS told the Washington Examiner that it stands by Steele’s dossier, claiming that “to our knowledge, nothing in the Steele memoranda has been disproven.”
Journalist Bob Woodward has been calling Steele’s dossier “garbage” for more than two years. And former CIA Moscow station chief Daniel Hoffman said: “I called what bullshit the dossier was a year and a half ago… It’s likely FSB [the successor agency to the KGB] disinformation.” A number of Steele’s biggest claims — including its allegation from “Kremlin insiders” that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had met in Prague with Putin associates and foreign hackers — were knocked down by special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
Attorney General William Barr told Congress that the Justice Department has launched an investigation into how the DOJ and the FBI handled the Trump-Russia investigation, and he said that “the people helping me with my review will be working very closely with” Horowitz.
Horowitz, who launched his investigation in 2018, said he would “examine the Justice Department’s and the FBI’s compliance with legal requirements, and with applicable DOJ and FBI policies and procedures, in applications filed with the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court relating to a certain U.S. person [Carter Page].”
Horowitz stated that he would “review information that was known to the DOJ and the FBI at the time the applications were filed from or about an alleged FBI confidential source. Additionally, the OIG will review the DOJ’s and FBI’s relationship and communications with the alleged source as they relate to the FISC applications.” This “alleged FBI confidential source” is Steele.
Barr has said Horowitz’s investigation should be completed in either May or June.
