A recently released Senate Intelligence Committee report detailed the business relationship that Christopher Steele had with a Russian oligarch close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, raising further questions about the British ex-spy’s discredited dossier.
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s 1,000-page report, published last week, found that wealthy Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska “conducts influence operations, frequently in countries where he has a significant economic interest,” and “the Russian government coordinates with and directs Deripaska on many of his influence operations.” Steele and his company, Orbis Business Intelligence, were working for Deripaska in the lead-up to 2016, helping recover millions of dollars the Russian oligarch claimed former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had stolen from him when the Republican operative worked for him.
Steele sought help in the money recovery effort from Fusion GPS, which hired Steele to conduct anti-Trump research soon after. Deripaska is mentioned 64 times in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, and the U.S. intelligence community reportedly believes the Kremlin relied on Deripaska to spread disinformation casting doubt on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The report revealed that Steele started working on behalf of Deripaska through the Russian oligarch’s lawyers beginning as early as 2012 through part of 2017. The investigation found “multiple links between Steele and Deripaska” and “indications that Deripaska had early knowledge of Steele’s work” just a few months before he began compiling his now-discredited dossier. Steele’s continued relationship with Deripaska “provid[ed] a potential direct channel for Russian influence on the dossier,” the report said.
An email from Steele in February 2016 claiming that Deripaska “is also aware of the thrust of our new intel” raised concerns with the senators. The email went on to suggest that Deripaska “is not the leadership tool [of the Kremlin] some have alleged.” But the Senate report revealed that investigators “found ample evidence to dispute Steele’s assessment” and stated that Deripaska “is a key implementer of Russian influence operations around the globe.”
“Multiple witnesses,” including Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, and Deripaska’s D.C.-based lawyer Adam Waldman “either told the Committee or implied to the Committee that Steele had a business relationship with Deripaska,” the report said.
The Senate committee said Steele “was adamant” with DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz that Deripaska had no influence on the dossier and said that Steele told the committee he “had no information indicating the oligarch knew of his investigation.” And yet, “Steele declined to answer the Committee’s direct questions on whether he worked for Deripaska, but he said no client would have known about the dossier or provided input, other than Fusion GPS,” the report said. Simpson refused to give the Senate details on why he thought Steele and Deripaska worked together.
The Senate report noted gaping holes in Steele’s dossier related to the Putin ally, writing that “Steele and his subsources appear to have neglected to include or missed in its entirety Paul Manafort’s business relationship with Deripaska, which provided Deripaska leverage over Manafort and a possible route of influence into the Trump Campaign.” Manafort is mentioned around 20 times in Steele’s dossier, but Deripaska “is not mentioned once,” and neither is “Manafort’s right-hand man in Kyiv,” Konstantin Kilimnik, “who himself has extensive ties to Deripaska.” The Senate report noted that “despite Steele’s expertise on Ukraine and Russia, particularly on oligarchs, the dossier memos are silent on the issue.”
Simpson wrote in his 2019 book that “weeks before Trump tapped Manafort to run his campaign, Christopher Steele had hired Fusion for help investigating Manafort.” But Simpson “did not tell the Committee about this business arrangement,” according to the Senate report.
The Senate panel “sought to understand the reasons for apparent omissions in the dossier.” Investigators said one explanation was “that Steele was compartmenting his work between clients,” though that was “partially refuted” by Steele’s October 2016 FBI interview where he “presented some information as stemming from his past work” targeting Manafort. Other explanations were “that Steele was self-censoring his findings, in an attempt to protect his own business relationship with Deripaska,” or that “Deripaska or his associates could have requested that Steele shape the content of the dossier.” The report also speculated that “Steele could have judged that the information on Manafort and Deripaska was somehow unreliable or irrelevant” but concluded “this seems unlikely” because “Steele would have known that Manafort’s debts and ties to Ukrainian political figures could — and eventually did — prove a problem for the Trump Campaign and an entry point for Deripaska to attempt to exert influence.”
Jonathan Winer, an Obama administration State Department official who helped disseminate Steele dossier allegations inside the U.S. government, also admitted he’d previously worked on behalf of Deripaska.
Horowitz’s December report criticized the Justice Department and the FBI for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the FISA warrants against Trump campaign associate Carter Page and for the bureau’s reliance on the Democrat-funded, discredited dossier compiled by Steele, and FBI interviews show Steele’s primary subsource undercut the credibility of the dossier.
Horowitz noted the possibility of Steele’s dossier being compromised by Russian disinformation, noting that “sensitive reporting” indicated that a “person affiliated” with Deripaska was “possibly aware” of Steele’s election investigation by July 2016 and that an early June 2017 U.S. intelligence community report indicated that two people affiliated with Russian intelligence “were aware of Steele’s election investigation in early July 2016.” The DOJ watchdog also said red flags were raised when a 2015 FBI report “noted that, from January through May 2015, 10 Eurasian oligarchs sought meetings with the FBI, and five of these had their intermediaries contact Steele.”
Ultimately, the Senate committee “was unable to establish a clear picture of the access and credibility of Steele’s subsource network due to Steele’s unwillingness to talk to the Committee, other than through written questions.” But the Senate investigation found that “the tradecraft reflected in the dossier is generally poor relative to IC standards.”
Daniel Hoffman, a longtime CIA veteran and former Moscow station chief, told the Washington Examiner that Steele’s dossier was likely compromised by Russian disinformation, though he didn’t know what role Deripaska may have played in the dossier saga.
“That was a well-played Russian disinformation effort. I mean, what would you want to do if you’re the Russians? Use the retired MI6 guy who has a lot of gravitas — that’s your best conduit to disseminate propaganda,” Hoffman said of the dossier, adding of Deripaska, “Steele worked for him. He was Steele’s client, so they had a relationship, and I don’t know the extent to which he was doing Oleg Deripaska’s bidding.”
The Senate report was also unsparing in its assessment of Manafort in regards to his close relationships with Deripaska and Kilimnik, who the senators concluded “is a Russian intelligence officer.” During 2016, Manafort “directly and indirectly communicated with Kilimnik, Deripaska, and the pro-Russian oligarchs in Ukraine,” and “on numerous occasions, Manafort sought to secretly share internal Campaign information with Kilimnik.” The senators also claimed they “obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the GRU’s hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.”
“The Manafort stuff was very disconcerting about how the Russians were playing him,” Hoffman said. “There’s every expectation that the Russians recognized that Manafort was vulnerable … What Kilimnik is doing in my estimation based on my reading of this is, get Manafort in for a penny in for a pound … Get him to tell you stuff that’s easy to tell, like polling data, and then down the road you’re going to get him into that whole comfort zone where you’re tasking him and he’s responding — and the next question might not be so easy to answer.”
Caught up in Mueller’s investigation, Manafort was convicted in Virginia in 2018 on five counts of tax fraud, one count of concealing his foreign bank accounts, and two counts of bank fraud, and pleaded guilty in Washington, D.C., to charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States and witness tampering a month and a half later. U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis sentenced Manafort to 47 months in prison, and U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced him to another 43 months behind bars. Manafort was released from prison in May to serve the remainder of his sentence under home confinement amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Mueller’s investigation concluded that the Russian government interfered in a “sweeping and systematic fashion,” according to his report that was released in April 2019. Mueller’s team also “identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign” but “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
