British ex-spy Christopher Steele was upset that his now-discredited anti-Trump dossier was included in the classified annex of the intelligence community’s 2017 assessment on Russian election interference during the 2016 presidential election, newly declassified FBI interview notes show.
The revelation was part of hundreds of pages Russia investigation documents declassified in October and released publicly last week thanks to the efforts of Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Ron Johnson and Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley.
The heavily redacted nine pages of FBI notes appear to have been attached to an Oct. 4, 2017 email written by a “Supervisory Intelligence Analyst” with the subject line “My notes re: first day” and the attachment titled “Steele London Debriefing Part B Draft.” The notes were taken about the first day of a Sept. 18-19, 2017 interview with Steele, where he was joined by his Orbis Business Intelligence partner Christopher Burrows.
“They were certainly frustrated by the inclusion of their reporting in the ICA annex. I explained that the ICA (which included the annex) was based on POTUS Obama’s [U.S. intelligence community]-wide call for information on Russian influence and 2016 election. Their reporting, as it was provided to the FBI, was part of the overall material that fit with that call for information. They felt that they should have had advance warning that their information was going in the ICA,” the FBI agent wrote. “They said that the use of their information, and the subsequent public leak of the annex, put [Christopher Steele’s] name out there and had a ‘massive impact on our lives.’ They wanted to know how the U.S. [redacted] worked this out – i.e. was [redacted] told that this information was going in the ICA?”
The FBI agent added, “They brought up the inclusion of their material in the ICA annex multiple times – almost to the point that it felt like fishing for information about how the ICA was constructed. In the end, I made the point that I wasn’t going to get into how the ICA was put together, how the annex came about, etc.”
FBI Director James Comey and FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe fought to include the dossier in the intelligence community’s early 2017 assessment on Russian election interference in the 2016 election, and a summary of it was eventually included in a classified annex.
The January 2017 assessment from the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the FBI concluded with “high confidence” that Russia worked to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate former Secretary of State [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency” and “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.” Adm. Mike Rogers of the NSA diverged from CIA Director John Brennan and Comey on one key aspect, expressing only “moderate confidence” rather than “high confidence” that Putin “aspired to help” Trump’s election chances by “discrediting” Clinton.
Brennan wrote in his new book that he overruled two CIA officers who disagreed with him during the creation of the assessment about his high level of confidence that Putin interfered with the specific goal of helping elect Trump.
The Senate Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan report in April defending the 2017 assessment, saying it “presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference.” The senators also found that “the differing confidence levels on one analytic judgment are justified and properly represented.”
The Senate findings clash with a 2018 report from the House Intelligence Committee, chaired then by California Republican Devin Nunes, which concluded that “judgments on Putin’s strategic intentions did not” employ “proper analytic tradecraft.” The report said it “identified significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments regarding Putin’s strategic objectives.” That report was not bipartisan.
Attorney General William Barr confirmed this summer that now-special counsel John Durham’s inquiry into the Russia investigation includes a deep dive into the assessment.
Durham has interviewed Rogers and Brennan and is looking into whether the CIA director took politicized actions to pressure the intelligence community to match his conclusions about Putin’s motivations. The prosecutor is reportedly reviewing Brennan’s handling of a secret source said to be close to the Kremlin. Durham is also said to have scrutinized Brennan along with the FBI in relation to Steele’s dossier. DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report noted the CIA had dismissed the dossier’s claims as “internet rumor.”
The newly disclosed FBI notes state that Steele apologized for speaking the press in 2016 but said he found himself “riding two horses” and, after Comey’s October letter reopening the Hillary Clinton emails investigation, Steele had to pick “one horse” and chose the business “horse” over the “FBI” horse, and so he did what Fusion GPS wanted and spoke to the media. Steele called it a combination of “your fault” and “our fault.” The bureau notes said Steele and his business partner “had strong statements about POTUS Trump — registered Trump as their ‘main opponent’ and registered fear about how Trump negatively impacted the historical U.K.-U.S. alliance.”
Horowitz’s report criticized the DOJ 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 the Steele dossier. The former MI6 agent was hired by Fusion GPS in June 2016, and the opposition research firm had been hired by the Perkins Coie law firm, which was working for Clinton’s campaign. Horowitz concluded Steele’s discredited dossier played a “central and essential” role in the FBI surveilling Page, and the DOJ watchdog determined the FBI’s investigation was filled with serious missteps and concealed exculpatory information from the FISA Court.
Declassified footnotes from Horowitz’s report indicate the bureau became aware Steele’s dossier may have been compromised by Russian disinformation, and FBI interviews show Steele’s primary subsource undercut the credibility of the dossier.
Robert Mueller’s special counsel report concluded Russia interfered in 2016’s election in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” but “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government.”
