The author of the infamous Trump dossier admitted to a top State Department official that he was encouraged by a client to get his research out before the 2016 election.
British ex-spy Christopher Steele met with Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec on Oct. 11, along with Tatyana Duran, Steele’s colleague at his Orbis Security firm.
A memo about the meeting was obtained by conservative group Citizens United through open-records litigation and reported by The Hill on Tuesday. Though the notes are redacted, the “Background” section of the document is visible.
“Orbis undertook the investigation into the Russia/Trump connection at the behest of an institution he declined to identify that had been hacked,” Kavalec wrote, appearing to refer to the Democratic National Committee, which was hacked during the election.
“The institution approached them based on the recommendation of [Fusion GPS co-founder] Glenn Simpson and [Fusion GPS partner] Peter Fritsch (specialists in economic crime, formerly of the [Wall Street Journal]) and is keen to see this information come to light prior to November 8. Orbis undertook the investigation in June of 2016,” Kavalec added.
The timing of the meeting is notable, as it is 10 days before the FBI used Steele’s unverified dossier on President Trump’s ties to Russia to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to wiretap campaign adviser Carter Page. Three renewals would follow.
House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said it appears the memo was not provided to the panel when he was chairman and leading its investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. “They tried to hide a lot of documents from us during our investigation, and it usually turns out there’s a reason for it,” he said. Senate and House investigators told The Hill they too were unaware of the document, and one member of Congress referred the memo to the Justice Department inspector general, who is investigating alleged FISA abuse.
A memo from the House Intelligence Committee in February 2018 alleged Steele was paid over $160,000 by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign through the Perkins Coie law firm and opposition research group Fusion GPS to “obtain derogatory information on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.” The memo also said the FBI never informed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of the dossier’s Democratic benefactors or Steele’s anti-Trump bias when it applied to spy on Page, who was investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller over his interactions with Russians but was never charged.
In a rebuttal to the House Intelligence GOP memo, Democrats argued the Justice Department and FBI “met the rigor, transparency, and evidentiary basis needed to meet FISA’s probable cause requirement.”
Fusion GPS recently insisted to the Washington Examiner that “nothing in the Steele memoranda has been disproven,” despite special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report refuting at least one of Steele’s bombshell claims and casting serious doubt on many others.
Steele viewed his research as “raw intelligence” that “needed to be analyzed and further investigated/verified.”
In addition to contacts with the U.S. government, Steele and Simpson allegedly gave some of the dossier research to the media and worked with one-time Sen. John McCain’s aide, David Kramer, who in a recent deposition said he provided roughly a dozen journalists a copy of the dossier. BuzzFeed published the dossier in early 2017.
