Testimony last year before a House task force investigating the Trump-Russia affair confirmed that top Justice Department officials knew about the Trump dossier earlier than first thought, and that among those who knew was Andrew Weissmann, who went on to become the top deputy of special counsel Robert Mueller.

Bruce Ohr, the fourth-ranking official in the Justice Department, told the House task force that he met with Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the dossier, at a Washington hotel on July 30, 2016. At that point, Steele, recruited for the job by Glenn Simpson of the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, had completed a few installments of the dossier, including the salacious and never-verified sex allegation featuring Donald Trump and prostitutes in a Moscow hotel. Ohr testified that shortly after meeting with Steele, “I wanted to provide the information he had given me to the FBI.”