The Justice Department released a 26-page interview that the FBI conducted with British ex-spy Christopher Steele in September 2017, but the bureau’s lengthy notes of its two-day questioning of the dossier author were completely redacted aside from one paragraph that provided scant details about the interviewing agents.
The release was part of nearly 1,000 pages publicly released by the DOJ at the end of October as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking access to the FBI interviews, which were tied to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, that had been brought by CNN and BuzzFeed. The small portion of the FBI interview notes that were not entirely blacked out consist of two somewhat-redacted sentences, which note that the former MI6 agent spoke with a supervisory special agent and a supervisory intelligence analyst on Sept. 18-19, 2017, in which he was joined by his Orbis Business Intelligence partner Christopher Burrows for between 45 minutes to an hour the first day. The rest of the more than two dozen pages remain fully redacted, with the DOJ citing a host of FOIA exemptions to justify concealing the contents of Steele’s claims.
