Declassified footnotes from the Justice Department watchdog report on the FBI’s Russia investigation revealed new details indicating British ex-spy Christoper Steele’s dossier was likely compromised by disinformation efforts carried out by Russian intelligence.
The footnotes, which were previously redacted, were made available for the public to see on Friday through a declassification determination made by Attorney General William Barr at the request of Senate Homeland Security Chairman Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa.
In the report released in December, DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz described “Person 1” as a “key Steele sub-source,” who was attributed with providing information in Steele’s dossier. The newly unmasked details show that a document circulated among members of the Crossfire Hurricane team in early October 2016 showed that Person 1 had “historical contact with persons and entities suspected of being linked to RIS” — or Russian Intelligence Services. The document described reporting that Person 1 “was rumored to be a former KGB/SVR officer.” Further, the declassified footnote shows in late December 2016 DOJ official Bruce Ohr told SSA 1, believed to be FBI agent Joseph Pientka, that he had met with Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, who assessed that Person 1 was an “RIS officer” central in connecting President Trump to Russia.
The newly declassified footnotes also show the Crossfire Hurricane team received information from a still-redacted source “indicating the potential for Russian disinformation influencing Steele’s election reporting” seemingly related to the biggest salacious and unverified claims in Steele’s dossier — that Trump watched prostitutes urinate on a bed in Moscow during the Miss Universe Pageant in 2013 and that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen met with shady Russians in Prague in 2016.
The Justice Department additionally indicated that one footnote that wasn’t declassified related to a foreign government effort to “penetrate” a business associate with Steele, a likely reference to his private research company, Orbis Business Intelligence.
“It’s ironic that the Russian collusion narrative was fatally flawed because of Russian disinformation. These footnotes confirm that there was a direct Russian disinformation campaign in 2016, and there were ties between Russian intelligence and a presidential campaign — the Clinton campaign, not Trump’s,” Grassley and Johnson said Friday.
Horowitz’s lengthy December report criticized the Justice Department and the FBI for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against Trump campaign associate Carter Page and for the bureau’s reliance on Steele’s unverified dossier. Steele put his research together at the behest of the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, funded by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee through the Perkins Coie law firm. Horowitz also criticized the bureau for not sharing exculpatory information from confidential human sources with the FISA court.
The newly revealed footnotes show that a 2017 report relayed information “outlining an inaccuracy in a limited subset of Steele’s reporting about the actions of Michael Cohen.” The redacted source of this information “stated that it did not have high confidence in the subset of Steele’s reporting and assessed that the referenced subset was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations.” The footnotes further reveal that a second report from the same unknown source five days later “stated that a person named in the limited subset of Steele’s reporting had denied representations in the reporting” and the source “assessed that the person’s denials were truthful.”
The now-public footnotes now show that yet another report from a still-classified source in 2017 “contained information about an individual with reported connections to Trump and Russia who claimed that the public reporting about the details of Trump’s [still-redacted] activities in Moscow during a trip in 2013 were false.” That report concluded that the allegations “were the product of RIS ‘infiltrating a source into the network’ of a [still-redacted] who compiled a dossier of information on Trump’s activities.” The source of this newly declassified information in the footnote “noted that it had no information indicating that the individual had special access to RIS activities or information.”
Special Counsel Robert Mueller wrote that “Cohen had never traveled to Prague and was not concerned about those allegations, which he believed were provably false.” Mueller also referred to the existence of compromising tapes of Trump as an “unverified allegation.”
In his dossier, Steele claimed that a “Kremlin insider” provided him with a dramatic tale of Cohen’s meetings in Prague with Putin-linked operatives and foreign hackers. Cohen consistently denied the claims, Mueller noted.
As for the infamous “pee tape,” the recording that Steele alleged Russians possessed depicting Trump with prostitutes at a Moscow hotel, Mueller indicated in a footnote that his team investigated it and found no evidence of its existence.
Still, then-FBI Director James Comey told Trump about the salacious allegations about him during an early January 2017 meeting at Trump Tower.
A letter from Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd to Grassley and Johnson said that one of the four footnotes they wanted declassified could not be uncovered at this time.
“Disclosure of the court and final footnote presents unique and significant concerns,” Boyd said. “Specifically, the redacted information refers to information received by a member of the Crossfire Hurricane team regarding possible previous attempts by a foreign government to penetrate and research a company or individuals associated with Christopher Steele.”
Boyd said the Justice Department “continues to review and consider the possibility of further declassification or summary substitution.”
Ukraine impeachment witness and former National Security Council Russia expert Fiona Hill testified last year that Steele’s dossier was a “rabbit hole” that “very likely” contained Russian disinformation and that Steele “could have been played” by the Russians.
Barr told the Senate last May he was “concerned about” possible Russian disinformation in Steele’s dossier, and former CIA Moscow station chief Daniel Hoffman told the Washington Examiner that the Steele dossier was “likely FSB [the successor agency to the KGB] disinformation.”
As was made public in December, Horowitz’s team found the FBI “omitted information relevant to the reliability of Person 1” in its FISA applications, including that Steele told members of the Crossfire Hurricane team that “Person 1″ was a “boaster” and an “egoist” who “may engage in some embellishment.” The bureau also did not tell the FISA court that “the FBI had opened a counterintelligence investigation on Person 1 a few days before the FISA application was filed.”
Horowitz related that his investigators “learned that Person 1 was at the time a subject of an open FBI counterintelligence investigation” and noted his team was concerned this was not relayed to the FISA court.
Another declassified footnote stated that “when interviewed by the FBI, the Primary Sub-source stated that he/she did not view his/her contacts as a network of sources, [redacted] with whom he/she has conversations about current events and government relations.”
This would seem to conflict with the executive summary in Horowitz’s report that stated as a fact that Steele “relied on a Primary Sub-source for information, who used his/her network of sub-sources to gather information that was then passed to Steele.”
Johnson and Grassley reached out to Barr to aid them in their effort in late January, but the senators said they were meeting resistance from the intelligence community, and therefore, they decided to reach out to acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, who oversees the coalition of 17 spy agencies.
Mueller’s report, released last April, found the Russians had interfered in the 2016 election in a “sweeping and systematic fashion,” but “did not establish” any criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Last year, Barr picked U.S. Attorney John Durham to carry out an investigation of the Trump-Russia investigators. FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who altered a document in the Page FISA filings, is the only person publicly known to be under criminal investigation by Durham.
The Justice Department told the FISA court it believed the final two of four Page FISA warrants were “not valid,” and the FBI has moved to “sequester” all of the information gleaned from the Page surveillance.
FBI Director Christopher Wray agreed there had been at least some illegal surveillance and said he was working to “claw back” that FISA information.
