British ex-spy Christopher Steele defended his dossier while leveling criticisms against the president during a rare appearance on Friday.
Steele, a former MI6 agent and the one-time head of the United Kingdom’s Russia desk, spoke at a “members only” event at Oxford Union in England. The organizers state, “Steele was made the subject of media stalking and investigation by Republican senators, and had to go into hiding with his family.” The only remarks released from the closed-door discussion were tweeted out by the group’s account.
“I stand by the integrity of our work, our sources, and what we did,” Steele told the audience on Friday, adding, “Trump himself doesn’t like intelligence because its ground truth is inconvenient for him.”
The former spy noted, “The reality check is that Russia is a hostile state as it is run at the moment. It is out to destabilize the West, and it is nefarious in the way it goes about its business.”
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded in December that the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation was flawed. The watchdog criticized the Justice Department and the FBI for 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to its targeting of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page through a warrant and three renewals through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Steele was hired by opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee through the Perkins Coie law firm. Perkins Coie was paid more than $12 million between 2016 and 2017 for its work. Fusion GPS was paid $50,000 per month from Perkins Coie, and Steele was paid roughly $168,000 by Fusion GPS.
Following Horowitz’s report, the Justice Department told the FISA court it believed the final two Page FISA warrants were “not valid.“ The FBI told the court it planned to “sequester” all the information obtained through the Page FISA orders. The report noted that FBI meetings with Steele’s sources “raised significant questions about the reliability of the Steele election reporting,” and bureau officials said Steele “may have some judgment problems.” The CIA referred to Steele’s dossier as “internet rumor.”
James Boasberg, the presiding judge on the FISA court, said on Wednesday the flawed applications left “little doubt that the government breached its duty of candor to the Court with respect to those applications.”
Boasberg noted, “All four Page applications relied on information from reports prepared by Christopher Steele.” He described four broad unsubstantiated and disputed claims made in Steele’s dossier: that the Kremlin fed dirt on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Trump’s campaign, that Page discussed lifting sanctions against Russia in a secret 2016 Moscow meeting, that Page was the go-between for Russia and Trump’s campaign in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” overseen by then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, and that Russia released the hacked Democratic National Committee emails to WikiLeaks at Page’s suggestion to swing voters to Trump.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report stated the Russians interfered in 2016 in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” but that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government.”
Horowitz said the FBI concluded “much of the material” in the dossier “could not be corroborated” and added that “certain allegations were inaccurate or inconsistent” with evidence gathered by the FBI and that the “limited information that was corroborated” was often “publicly available.”
The judge said, “Steele obtained this information from a primary sub-source, who had, in turn, obtained the information from his/her own source network.” But the FBI “did not advise DOJ or the Court of inconsistencies between sections of Steele’s reporting that had been used in the applications and statements Steele’s primary sub-source had made to the FBI about the accuracy of information attributed to ‘Person 1’ who the FBI assessed had been the source of the information.” The government also did not disclose that Steele himself undercut the reliability of “Person 1,” calling Person 1 a “boaster” and an “egoist” who “may engage in some embellishment.”
Boasberg noted that “information bearing on Steele’s personal credibility and professional judgment was also omitted or mischaracterized” by the government. The judge said the government also failed to disclose the FBI had learned Steele had been the direct source of information in a September 2016 Yahoo! News article that was cited in all four applications.
During a lengthy impeachment acquittal speech in February, Trump criticized Steele.
“Hillary Clinton and the DNC paid for, millions of dollars, the fake dossier,” Trump said. “And now, Christopher Steele admits that it’s a fake.”
Trump also said, “We were running against some very, very bad and evil people with fake dossiers, with all of these horrible, dirty cops that took these dossiers and did bad things.”
Steele’s private company, Orbis Business Intelligence, called these claims “false” last month.
