The former British ambassador to the United States, who turned in his resignation last week following the release of private communications harshly critical of President Trump, said he believed that dossier author and ex-British spy Christopher Steele was “absolutely” credible, according to the leaked cables.
Sir Kim Darroch, the long-time senior British diplomat who had served as their representative in Washington, D.C., since January 2016, “is said to have vouched for the credibility of Christopher Steele, the author of an explosive dossier of claims about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, in conversation with at least one US official” according to a new article by the Sunday Telegraph, which has reviewed the documents.
The British newspaper reported: “Asked whether Mr. Steele, a former MI6 officer, was ‘legit’, Sir Kim replied: ‘Absolutely.’”
The leaked cables from Darroch covered a broad range of topics beyond just Steele, but it was his critiques of Trump that garnered the most attention and cost him his job. “We don’t really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept,” Darroch wrote.
The new piece from the Sunday Times on Steele backs up previous reporting on Darroch. An article by the New Yorker in 2018 claimed that “as word of the dossier began to spread through Washington” back in 2016, “a former State Department official recalls a social gathering where he danced around the subject with the British Ambassador, Sir Kim Darroch … After exchanging cryptic hints, to make sure that they were both in the know, he asked the Ambassador, ‘Is this guy Steele legit?’ The Ambassador replied, ‘Absolutely.’”
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz and his team have been looking into whether the FBI and the Justice Department abused the FISA process when they filed four applications and renewals beginning in October 2016 to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. The applications relied heavily on the unverified dossier compiled by Steele, who was hired by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which itself was hired by Marc Elias of the Perkins Coie law firm at the behest of the Clinton presidential campaign.
A letter from Horowitz to Congress last month revealed the Justice Department watchdog has “received and reviewed over one million records” and has “conducted over 100 interviews, including current and former Justice Department and FBI personnel” during its inquiry into alleged abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
One of the interviews that Horowitz’s team conducted was of Steele himself, whom investigators interviewed in London for hours last month and whose new information may have extended the Justice Department inspectors general inquiry even further. Attorney General William Barr had originally predicted that Horowitz would be finished in May or June.
Horowitz had reportedly been homing in on Steele for many months.
Republicans in Congress have long cast doubt on the credibility of Steele’s dossier, but they are not the only ones. Watergate journalist Bob Woodward has been calling it “garbage” for more than two years, and former CIA Moscow station chief Daniel Hoffman told the Washington Examiner that “I called what bullshit the dossier was a year-and-a-half ago … It’s likely FSB [the successor agency to the KGB] disinformation.”
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team reportedly met with Steele twice in September 2017, and Steele also provided a written statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee in August 2018. A number of Steele’s biggest claims, including the allegation stemming from “Kremlin insiders” that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had met in Prague with Putin associates and foreign hackers, were knocked down in Mueller’s report.
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Sunday promised his own “deep dive” investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation. And Trump has empowered Barr with “broad declassification authority” to get to the bottom of some of these questions too, with Barr in turn selecting U.S. Attorney John Durham as his right-hand man in the effort.
