Former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele used to be Mr. Chatty when it came to the allegations of Russia-Trump collusion he had assembled. In the months before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Steele talked with the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Yahoo News, Mother Jones, and CNN, telling them all about the dossier he had compiled detailing candidate Trump’s taste for “perverted” sex, and how Russian surveillance video of Trump getting his kinks out had given the Kremlin the power to blackmail him should he be elected. Steele may have had the dossier in hand, but he says he allowed no peeking: “No copies of the pre-election memoranda were ever shown or provided to any journalists by, or with the authorization” of Steele or his company, the ex-spy said in British court filings.
Steele has reversed course and is now trying not to talk at all. Webzilla boss Aleksej Gubarev is suing Steele for libel in a London court and in Florida, Gubarev is suing BuzzFeed, which published the dossier, for defamation. The dossier, made up of more than a dozen memos, included a December 2016 entry claiming that Gubarav and his enterprises “had been using botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct ‘altering operations’ against the Democratic Party leadership.” Before the British High Court of Justice, Queen’s Bench Division, Steele hasn’t made the case that his claims about Gubarev are true. Instead, he has argued that he couldn’t have libeled Gubarev because he thought the dossier information would be kept secret. He said he had fully expected Fusion GPS—the opposition research company that had hired him—to keep the dossier confidential: “Fusion was aware of the confidentiality of intelligence reports …”
But, of course, this is a fiction. Steele hasn’t been an intelligence agent for years, and the reports he compiles for his clients—though tarted up in the style of spy-agency memos—are not “intelligence reports.” He likes to suggest that his current profession is merely an extension of his previous profession. It obviously helps with impressing the people paying for his services—which in the case of the dossier was the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Who knows, it’s even possible he’s come to believe it himself. Nonetheless, it’s worth remembering that just as there’s a difference between an officer of the law and a private eye, there’s a difference between spies and former-spies-for-hire.
Still, there are certain advantages to creating the impression that one’s work is somehow semi-official. Steele is also being sought as a witness in Gubarev’s Florida lawsuit. Steele had hoped the British court would not enforce the request for testimony sent by the U.S. court, arguing it was just a “fishing expedition.” On March 21, the Queen’s Bench “senior Mmaster” ruled that Steele will indeed have to sit for a deposition, but radically limited what he could be questioned about. For example: “No questions are to be asked which go to the identity of Mr. Steele’s sources.”
The British court is treating Steele’s sources as if they were confidential government sources to be protected for their courageous service to the crown. The court expressed concerned that harm might come to Russians who cooperated with Steele—a not-ridiculous worry given the habit Vladimir Putin has of poisoning those he considers disloyal. But that concern assumes that Steele’s sources were indeed the high-level Kremlin insiders he claimed them to be. Let’s admit, for argument’s sake, that that is possible, if credulity-straining. But there are other possibilities: 1) that Steele’s sources, though from inside the Kremlin, were actually counter-intelligence agents spreading disinformation; 2) that the sources were not nearly as highly placed as Steele had portrayed them to be—a bit of fibbing on Steele’s part, perhaps, to make his reports seem more credible; 3) or perhaps there never were any sources at all, and Steele made it all up—a rather more ambitious magnitude of fibbing meant to entice the FBI or even just to make the Clinton campaign think it was getting its money’s worth.
Assuming that Steele’s sources could be at risk blocks one from weighing all the possibilities in how Steele put his dossier together. Which is why the question of Steele’s sources (if any) can’t help but be at issue in the new investigation being launched by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz. The IG announced Wednesday he will be looking into the FBI and DoJ’s behavior in applying and getting Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court warrants against former Trump adviser Carter Page. Horowitz said in a press release that his office will explicitly examine “information that was known to the DOJ and the FBI at the time the applications were filed from or about an alleged FBI confidential source.”
That “confidential source” is Steele. It’s unlikely that the Justice Department’s inspector general will be in any better position to secure testimony from Steele than Congress, which has been frustrated in its efforts to hear from this central figure in the Russia collusion narrative. But the Russian affair won’t be sorted out until someone figures out who (if anyone) Steele’s sources were.
That “confidential source” is Steele. It’s unlikely that the Justice Department’s inspector general will be in any better position to secure testimony from Steele than Congress, which has been frustrated in its efforts to hear from this central figure in the Russia collusion narrative. Perhaps prosecutor John Huber—named yesterday by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to run a review parallel to the inspector general’s—will make it part of his brief to know what DoJ and FBI figures did (if anything) to verify Steele’s claims. But the Russian affair won’t be sorted out until someone figures out who (if anyone) Steele’s sources were.
