Newly released documents describe just how involved State Department employees were in British ex-spy Christopher Steele sharing unverified claims about President Trump’s links to Russia with the FBI in 2016.
The records, among hundreds of pages declassified in August and released publicly on Wednesday, draw out the links between Steele and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, showing how the former MI6 officer worked with Clinton allies at the State Department to pass to FBI investigators unfounded Russia allegations during an election year that have cast a cloud over Trump throughout his presidency.
This comes as renewed scrutiny is being given to the role that Steele’s anti-Trump dossier played in 2016, when Clinton faced off against Trump, and how some of President-elect Joe Biden’s picks for top jobs in his incoming administration (such as Jake Sullivan for national security adviser and Neera Tanden for the White House’s budget director) played roles in promoting now-discredited Trump-Russia claims.
Two top Republican senators who have been trying to pry this information out of the government for years, Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Ron Johnson and Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, said the exposure on Wednesday is a victory for transparency as they continue to root out misconduct surrounding the bureau’s inquiry into ties between the Trump 2016 campaign and Russia.
“For years, the American people have demanded answers to questions regarding the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation and its targeting of the Trump campaign, the presidential transition, and the Trump administration. Our committees have sought to uncover and expose misconduct by calling on agencies to declassify and produce text messages, internal emails, and other investigative material, which in turn we have made public,” the duo said Thursday. “Although agency bureaucrats have fought tooth and nail to keep records hidden, our commitment to transparency has never wavered. The documents we are releasing today are the product of our continued fight for transparency.”
One set of records include an FBI confidential human source reporting document on Steele dated Oct. 19, 2016. The FBI attached a memo that Steele had received from his longtime friend and State Department official Jonathan Winer the day before and had quickly passed along to the bureau, noting that Steele “has a business association” with Winer, a longtime ally of Clinton. Steele and Winer knew each other since 2009 — when Steele left MI6 to form Orbis Business Intelligence.
The FBI said the memo passed along from Steele is “apparently from an FSB sub-source” — Russia’s Federal Security Service is the main successor agency to the Soviet Union’s KGB secret police — and “the information describes the FSB efforts at successfully compromising Donald Trump.” Steele said Winer had got the information from longtime Clinton associate Sidney Blumenthal, who received it from Clinton family operative and sometimes freelance journalist Cody Shearer.
“The sub-source, as we understand it, is a Turkish businessman with strong Russian, including FSB links. He is in touch with Cody Shearer, a contact of Sydney [sic] Blumenthal, a friend of the Clintons, who passed it to Winer,” Steele wrote the FBI in October 2016. “We have no means of verifying the source/s or information but note that some of the reporting is remarkably similar to our own, albeit from a completely different sourcing chain, and therefore could be important collateral, especially on the reported Ritz Carlton incident in 2013; Trump’s compromise by the FSB (and knowledge of it); and subsequent Kremlin funding of the Trump campaign (through the Agalarovs).”
Shearer’s memo, written in first-person about his alleged discussions with someone linked to Russian intelligence, makes similar allegations about Trump and the Ritz Carlton at the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow in 2013. The president has denied the “pee tape” allegations, and no real evidence has ever emerged to support the claims that Trump critics not only mocked but also preached about how it raised national security concerns if Russia had blackmail material on the commander in chief.
Although Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation concluded that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election in a “sweeping and systematic fashion,” the team “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government,” according to a report released in the spring of 2019.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a report in December 2019 that concluded Steele’s discredited dossier played a “central and essential” role in the FBI’s effort to obtain wiretap orders against former Trump campaign associate Carter Page. The DOJ watchdog determined that the FBI’s investigation was filled with serious missteps and concealed exculpatory information from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and he criticized the bureau for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions,” particularly for its reliance upon Steele, who had been commissioned by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which itself had been hired by the Clinton campaign’s top lawyer, Marc Elias.
Declassified footnotes from Horowitz’s report indicate the bureau became aware that Steele’s dossier may have been compromised by Russian disinformation, and FBI interviews show Steele’s primary subsource undercut the credibility of the dossier. Horowitz said FBI interviews with Steele’s main source, U.S.-based and Russian-trained lawyer Igor Danchenko, “raised significant questions about the reliability of the Steele election reporting.” Danchenko said the most salacious Trump claims may have been made in “jest.”
A second set of newly public records includes an electronic communication by the FBI’s Washington Field Office dated Nov. 16, 2016, related to the “Crossfire Hurricane” Trump-Russia investigation and the more narrowly focused “Crossfire Dragon” inquiry into Page. The bureau noted that “this communication documents to the file two email strings regarding U.S. Department of State employees aware of FBI relationship with Steele.”
“The first string of emails documents that USDOS employees were not only aware of the FBI’s relationship with Steele, the name of the Special Agent handler [redacted], the CHS’s company name, but also knew of the Crossfire Hurricane team’s planned travel [redacted] on October 3 to meet with Steele. In addition, it also appears an unnamed USDOS employee may have been [redacted] and met with Steele, who is a friend or acquaintance and took notes during the Steele meeting. The notes were not provided to the FBI as the USDOS believes Steele already passed the FBI this information,” the FBI noted in late 2016. “The second string documents that following the FBI’s meeting with Steele on October 3, 2016, Kathy Kavalec, Deputy Assistant Secretary, Bureau of European Affairs, acting on behalf of Victoria ‘Toria’ Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of European Affairs, requested an update from [redacted] Section Chief Steve Laycock regarding the FBI’s meeting with Steele.”
During an early October 2016 meeting with the FBI, Steele said he had also given information to “a longtime friend at the State Department [Winer] to be sure it’s getting to the right place in the USG,” according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report released in the summer. The FBI told Steele to “stand down” on further dossier research dissemination and to deal solely with the FBI, but “the content of this conversation later became a point of contention between Steele and the FBI.”
Steele met with Kavalec and Winer on Oct. 11, 2016, 10 days prior to the first FISA application targeting Page, after which Kavalec forwarded her notes to the FBI. During the meeting, Steele admitted he was encouraged by his client to get his research out before the 2016 election. Kavalec’s notes also show she found flaws with Steele’s allegations and cast doubt on his credibility.
Steele worked for Putin-linked Oleg Deripaska in early 2016, helping recover millions of dollars the Russian oligarch claimed Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had stolen from him when the Republican operative worked for him. Steele sought help in this effort from Fusion GPS, which soon after hired Steele to conduct anti-Trump research. The FBI knew Steele had an anti-Trump bias, his dossier was flawed, and he was receiving funding from Clinton, but it didn’t tell the FISA court, the DOJ inspector general’s December 2019 report found.
The Wednesday disclosure from Johnson and Grassley included a host of new records from the Justice Department, the FBI, and the State Department, along with a new timeline of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the Trump campaign.
