Steele dossier

==

merri ok

NOT DISCREDITED

SEE RUSSIA- GATE BS LIE GASLT REVISION NAVARRO

SEE NUNES KASHYAP

SEE WFB singer

SHILLENBERGER?

SEAMUS B ANTIFA WH BS

hard to keep BS conspir theory straight, DNC server in Ukraine = crowdstrike; Chalupa?

It doesn’t matter that 73% of Steele’s findings have been completely or partially confirmed by press releases and the Mueller report

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context

an 5 26

President Donald Trump lost his appealof a personal lawsuit he launched against former Secretary Hillary Clinton, former FBI Director James Comey, the Democratic National Committee, the law firm Perkins Coie, LLC and others he blames for the Russia investigation.

Politico's Kyle Cheney reported on Tuesday that the 11th Circuit declined to rehear Trump's case, leaving his only option an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Trump and lawyer Alina Habba in 2023 were sanctioned $1 million for the "frivolous" lawsuit. Florida has rules that allow defendants to ask that a court decide whether a lawsuit is "bogus," the Associated Press reported.

At the time, U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks wrote in the ruling that Trump has a "pattern of abuse of the courts" for filing such lawsuits specifically for political purposes. He said that the move "undermines the rule of law" and "amounts to obstruction of justice."

"Here, we are confronted with a lawsuit that should never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, both factually and legally and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose," he wrote.

Chief Judge William Pryor, a George W. Bush appointee, along with Trump appointee Judge Andrew L. Brasher and Joe Biden appointee Judge Embry Kidd, denied Trump's demand to rehear the case.

They added the detail, "... no judge in regular active service on the Court having requested that the Court be polled on rehearing en banc," which means none of the judges had any interest in weighing in on rehearing the matter. On the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, six of the 12 judges were appointed by Trump.

Lawyer Marc Elias commented on BlueSky, "I was a defendant in Trump’s frivolous lawsuit. I did not settle. I did not compromise. I did not stop speaking out. We fought and won."

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NYT 4 20 26

As a sprawling inquiry expands into whether former federal officials committed crimes in investigating President Trump, two unusual factors could ease the way toward securing the indictments he craves.

A former lawyer for Mr. Trump’s campaign, Joseph diGenova, has been selected to lead the inquiry after a career prosecutor in Miami was removed from that post this week, a senior law enforcement official said on Saturday.

And at least part of the investigation appears to be using a grand jury based in Fort Pierce, Fla., overseen by a federal judge, Aileen M. Cannon, who issued rulings favorable to Mr. Trump during the classified documents case against him, the official added. Mr. diGenova is expected to split his time between Miami and Fort Pierce.

Together, the moves show how the Justice Department under Mr. Trump’s control has been willing to embrace politically charged tactics and unorthodox personnel decisions in its efforts to satisfy his demands to prosecute his perceived foes — even as other prosecutors loyal to him have encountered forceful pushback from courts against his wide-ranging retribution campaign.

Mr. diGenova, 81, who served as a U.S. attorney in the Reagan era, has been given the title of counselor to the attorney general and detailed to the Southern District of Florida, where the U.S. attorney, Jason A. Reding Quiñones, another Trump loyalist, is supervising the inquiry.

Mr. diGenova’s appointment comes after Maria Medetis Long, a senior career prosecutor in Miami who had been in charge of the investigation, was abruptly removed from the case. Ms. Medetis Long, who leads national security investigations for Mr. Quiñones’s office, is said to have objected to moving forward with a portion of the inquiry focused on John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director.

The law enforcement official familiar with the matter spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive internal issue.

Because Judge Cannon is the only federal jurist in the Fort Pierce courthouse, she could be in a position to make critical decisions if Mr. diGenova uses the grand jury there to subpoena documents or witness testimony and the recipients balk, asking her to quash the demands.

Judge Cannon was criticized by an appeals court in 2022 after she effectively stalled the investigation into Mr. Trump’s mishandling of classified documents by appointing a so-called special master to sort through reams of materials seized from Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida. Later, Mr. Trump praised her lavishly, calling her “strong” and “brilliant,” after she tossed out the indictment altogether, ruling that Jack Smith, the special counsel who filed the charges, had been improperly appointed.

In another unusual move, Christopher-James DeLorenz, who worked as a law clerk for Judge Cannon during the documents case and later served as an aide to Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, was sent from the Justice Department’s headquarters in Washington to Mr. Quiñones’s office earlier this year and is working on the portion of the inquiry that is focused on Mr. Brennan, the official said.

Mr. diGenova will work on the Brennan matter, too, but also the broader inquiry.

Last year, Mr. Trump’s allies began pushing for what they referred to as a “grand conspiracy” case that would portray all of the criminal inquiries of Mr. Trump as a unified plot to violate his constitutional rights. The conspiracy, by their telling, began with the investigation into Russia and its potential ties to the 2016 Trump campaign, then extended to the classified documents and 2020 election indictments.

That far-fetched theory would allow the Justice Department to scrutinize in a single case matters that would normally be barred by the five-year statute of limitations. It would also give Mr. diGenova and Mr. Reding Quiñones the authority to scrutinize events that took place in Washington from their jurisdiction in Florida.

The Justice Department has also given Mr. Reding Quiñones special authority under a statute known as Section 515, the official said. That would enable him to bring indictments in jurisdictions where he is not the U.S. attorney.

While many details remain unknown, Mr. diGenova is inheriting an inquiry whose most developed portion appears to be focused on trying to find a basis to charge Mr. Brennan with lying to Congress over a January 2017 intelligence community assessment. It concluded, among other things, that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election in part because Moscow hoped to improve Mr. Trump’s chances of winning.

As the top federal prosecutor in Washington in the 1980s, Mr. diGenova secured an espionage conviction against Jonathan Pollard, a former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who passed sensitive information to Israel. He later became a political commentator who gravitated toward Mr. Trump during his first term in the White House.

Mr. diGenova has claimed the Russia investigation was a law-enforcement plot to frame Mr. Trump and keep him out of the White House during his first presidential campaign. In 2020, as part of the legal team for the Trump campaign, Mr. diGenova said that Christopher Krebs, a cybersecurity official who had contradicted false pro-Trump claims of election fraud, should be “shot.” (Mr. diGenova later apologized.)

A special counsel appointed by Attorney General William P. Barr in Mr. Trump’s first term, John H. Durham, already scrutinized the actions of senior law enforcement and intelligence officials involved in the early stages of the Russia investigation.

Image

John O. Brennan testifying during a 2017 Senate hearing on possible Russian interference in the 2016 election.Credit...Al Drago/The New York Times

When that inquiry began in 2019, Mr. diGenova was among the Trump supporters who celebrated, telling Fox News that he believed people like Mr. Brennan, James R. Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, and James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, would go to prison.

“James Comey, Brennan and Clapper have said to themselves, ‘Which one of us is going to pay the Barr bill?’” Mr. diGenova said, adding, “This conspiracy began with John Brennan and ends with John Brennan.”

But Mr. Durham, who completed his investigation in 2023, did not find a basis to prosecute any of them, and Mr. Barr later said the Durham investigation found that the C.I.A. had “stayed in its lane.”

Grand jury subpoenas already issued under Mr. Reding Quiñones have sought records related to the 2017 intelligence community assessment. The effort appears focused on trying to build a perjury case against Mr. Brennan over a 2023 deposition to Congress. At the time, he discussed the relationship between the assessment and the Steele dossier, a compendium of later-discredited political opposition research making various claims about Mr. Trump and Russia.

The F.B.I. had wanted to include information from the dossier in the intelligence community assessment, but C.I.A. analysts balked. Mr. Brennan, in his testimony, told lawmakers that “the C.I.A. was very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the Steele dossier in the intelligence community assessment.” Ultimately, as a compromise, a summary of the dossier was attached to the assessment as an appendix, as Mr. Brennan had long said.

Documents the Trump administration declassified last year complicated that account by showing that a sentence in the main body of the assessment alerted readers to the existence of the appendix, although they also showed the appendix had a header stating that its claims did not contribute to the judgment. Released files also showed that C.I.A. analysts had objected to the appendix, too, but portrayed Mr. Brennan as having pushed back in support of the compromise arrangement with the F.B.I.

Last October, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and a Trump ally, made a criminal referral, saying Mr. Brennan’s statement about the C.I.A.’s opposition amounted to a false statement. Mr. Brennan’s lawyer, Kenneth L. Wainstein, has said it did not.

Last December, Mr. Wainstein wrote to the chief federal judge in South Florida, Cecilia M. Altonaga, urging her to block the Justice Department from steering the case to Judge Cannon. The Justice Department, he wrote, appeared to be planning to “manipulate grand jury and case-assignment procedures” to put the investigation under her.

It has not been clear whether Judge Altonaga took any action. But the broader investigation has since expanded, including with subpoenas issued earlier this year for documents about the F.B.I.’s investigation into ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.

Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.

Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.

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DEM DOCL

A former Trump campaign lawyer who backed President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss has been appointed to a Florida-based U.S. attorney’s office leading a sprawling probe into a slate of former federal officials who investigated Trump.

Joseph diGenova’s appointment to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida comes shortly after journalistsreported that he is taking over the “grand conspiracy” investigation into intelligence and law enforcement officials, against whom Trump has long vowed to seek retribution.

In announcing the appointment Monday, Jason Reding Quiñones, U.S. attorney for southern Florida, said on social media that diGenova would be “stepping into a senior advisory role on key legal, policy, and enforcement matters.”

“With decades of experience—including serving as U.S. Attorney for D.C. under Ronald Reagan—diGenova brings deep expertise in federal prosecution and high-stakes investigations,” Quiñones said.

DiGenova’s appointment to oversee the conspiracy probe marks another significant blow to the DOJ’s longstanding independence from the White House. It comes just over a week after acting Attorney General Todd Blanche publicly claimed that Trump has a “right” to order investigations into his enemies.

Though Quiñones said that diGenova would help “advance the Department’s mission to protect Americans, enforce the rule of law, and ensure impartial justice,” the grand conspiracy investigation into Trump enemies features many hallmarks of past politically motivated probes initiated by Trump.

Jason Reding Quiñones (right0, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, shaking hands with former Trump campaign attorney Joseph diGenova in Florida on April 20, 2026. (Photo: U.S. Attorney’s Office Southern District of Florida)

DiGenova joined the U.S. attorney’s office after Maria Medetis Long, the previous senior federal prosecutor overseeing the probe, was removed from the case. She had questioned the legal viability of future charges, the New York Times reported.

Specifically, Medetis Long objected to moving forward with a portion of the inquiry focused on John Brennan, the former CIA director.

Her removal echoed personnel changes that placed Trump’s former personal attorney at the helm of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia before it pursued criminal charges against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Both of those criminal cases were dismissed by a federal judge last year.

Comey, whom Trump has branded a “dirty cop” and “leaker” for initiating the FBI’s probe into alleged links between his 2016 presidential campaign and Russia, has received a subpoena in the grand conspiracy investigation.

The exact parameters of the investigation are unclear, but prominent allies of the president and Quiñones have said it centers on the far-fetched claim that the former officials allegedly conspired to prevent Trump from exercising his constitutional and federal rights starting from his election in 2016 through his federal indictments in 2023.

While the statute of limitations on most federal crimes is five years, Quiñones’ office has been able to scrutinize actions beyond those limits by alleging a conspiracy against Trump.

In total, prosecutors overseeing the sprawling investigation have issued over 130 subpoenas so far.

Part of the investigation appears to be using a grand jury seated in Fort Pierce, Florida, overseen by Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who showed the president unusual deference while presiding over special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents investigation against the president after his first term in office.

In 2020, DiGenova and his wife, lawyer Victoria Toensing, were part of a legal team that included Rudy Giuliani, then Trump’s personal attorney, challenging the results of the 2020 election. He also pushed conspiracy theories alleging election fraud during that vote.

Before that, diGenova and Toensing reportedly collaborated with Giuliani in efforts to extract compromising information on Joe Biden from Ukrainian officials during the last years of Trump’s first term. At the time, Toensing categorically denied their involvement.

That attempt to undermine Biden’s candidacy in the 2020 vote would eventually lead the House of Representatives to impeach Trump.

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report-three-russiagate-grand-jury-subpoenas-sent-today-brennan-page-and-strzok-up-to-30-subpoenas-pending

BS

:REPORT: Three Russiagate Grand Jury Subpoenas Sent Today, Brennan, Page and Strzok – Up to 30 Subpoenas Pending](https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2025/11/07/report-three-russiagate-grand-jury-subpoenas-sent-today-brennan-page-and-strzok-up-to-30-subpoenas-pending/)}:

November 7, 2025 | Sundance | 184 Comments

Fox News is reporting that three grand jury subpoenas were issued today for John Brennan, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

Brennan was the former CIA Director during Russiagate, who created the fraudulent Intelligence Community Assessment. Strzok was the lead FBI counterintelligence agent in charge of Crossfire Hurricane, and Page was the former DOJ lawyer assigned to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Strzok and Page worked both the Clinton email investigation and the Trump-Russia investigation.

Fox News also reports that up to 30 grand jury subpoenas are anticipated to be served on former government officials involved in “Spygate” and/or “Russiagate.” [SEE FOX REPORT HERE]

There has been a tremendous amount of external pressure being applied, and thankfully this year a significant amount of key internal pressure has joined that effort. For the issues surrounding former CIA Director John Brennan, Fox News is citing a declassified “Annex A” of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) which highlights John Brennan including the Steele Dossier in the ICA at the request of former FBI Director James Comey.

Apparently, according to Fox News, the most significant citation against Brennan is an issue we outlined at CTH five years ago [SEE HERE] when we wrote about Annex-A and the implications therein. President Trump was still in office in 2020 when Annex-A was released. The good news is that Annex-A found its way into evidence that a prosecutor can present to a grand jury.

The outcome of a grand jury subpoena means the primary Russiagate officials will have to lawyer up, spend money and go plead the 5th amendment, the most likely outcome.

From my frame of reference, the evidence against the targets clearly exists and does not need them to make any admissions or denials. However, putting them on record in court individually, possibly compelled to testify or invoke the 5th, would perhaps narrow down their options if they were eventually indicted and face a criminal trial.

EXCLUSIVE:A federal grand jury has subpoenaed former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, among others as part of the Justice Department’s investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, Fox News Digital has learned.

Sources told Fox News Digital Brennan; Strzok, the FBI’s former deputy assistant director of counterintelligence; and Page, a former FBI lawyer, were served with federal subpoenas on Friday.

Law enforcement sources told Fox News Digital that up to 30 subpoenas will be issued in the coming days relating to the investigation.

The grand jury is out of the Southern District of Florida. U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida Jason Reding Quiñones is supervising the probe. Fox News Digital first reported this summer that Brennan was under criminal investigation.

[…] As for the criminal investigation into Brennan, CIA Director John Ratcliffe referred evidence of wrongdoing by Brennan to FBI Director Kash Patel for potential prosecution, DOJ sources told Fox News Digital.

[…] But back in June 2020, Ratcliffe, while serving as director of national intelligence, declassified a footnote of the 2017 ICA, which revealed that the reporting of Trump dossier author Christopher Steele had only “limited corroboration” regarding whether then-President-elect Trump “knowingly worked with Russian officials to bolster his chances of beating” Hillary Clinton and other claims.

[…] The footnote, also known as “Annex A” of the 2017 ICA, exclusively obtained by Fox News Digital in June 2020, spanned less than two pages and detailed reporting by Steele, the former British spy who authored the unverified anti-Trump dossier — a document that helped serve as the basis for controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants obtained against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. (read more)

I also find it interesting they begin with “Russiagate”, and I wonder if they will find the “Spygate” that preceded it {GO DEEP}.

Then again, I am thankful for the change and recognize Spygate might just be a little too uncomfy for those who seek to retain continuity of government.

Posted in Big Government, Big Stupid Government, CIA, Conspiracy ?, Decepticons, Deep State, Dept Of Justice, Donald Trump, Election 2016, Election 2020, FBI, Lawfare, media bias, President Trump, propaganda, Russia, Spygate, Spying, THE BIG UGLY, Uncategorized, White House Coverup

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TREEH

# Fox News Says Justice Dept About to Issue Subpoenas to John Brennan from DC and FL Grand Juries

November 6, 2025 | Sundance | 132 Comments

I would not get too spun up about this yet because investigators and reviewers in/around Washington DC, have a ton of catching up to do on the material evidence against former CIA Director John Brennan.

Additionally, there is an institutional aversion to targeting anything to do with the CIA because the information needed for most direct evidence is behind a legislative authorized locked door.

That said, Fox News is reporting that a grand jury in DC and/or FL is potentially going to be used to issue subpoenas against John Brennan.

The primary issue surrounds Brennan telling congress in 2023 the “Steele Dossier” was not used in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), and current DNI Tulsi Gabbard releasing evidence proving it was.

*(Fox News) – Justice Department officials in Miami and Washington, D.C., are actively preparing to issue several grand jury subpoenas relating to an investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan, Fox News has learned.

*U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Jason Reding Quiñones is supervising the probe; Fox News is told.

{Last month, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, referred Brennan to the DOJ, saying that the former CIA chief “willfully and intentionally” made false statements to Congress.*}:

Jordan accused Brennan of lying in his 2023 Judiciary Committee testimony by denying that the CIA used the Steele dossier in prepping the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russian election interference, and falsely claiming the CIA opposed including the dossier. (more)*

President Trump’s January Executive Order says in part, “*The Director of National Intelligence, in consultation with the heads of the appropriate departments and agencies within the Intelligence Community, shall take all appropriate action to review the activities of the Intelligence Community over the last 4 years and identify any instances where the Intelligence Community’s conduct appears to have been contrary to the purposes and policies of this order, and prepare a report to be submitted to the President, through the Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and the National Security Advisor, with recommendations for appropriate remedial actions to be taken to fulfill the purposes and policies of this order.”{source}:

DNI Tulsi Gabbard has been working on this for nine months.

Tulsi Gabbard retrieved and released a host of documents relating to the fraudulent ICA construct, including the use of the Steele Dossier. Gabbard also declassified and released the email from former DNI James Clapper who was pressuring NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers to go along with the team goal, and blame Russia:

“Understand your concern. It is essential that we (CIA/NSA/FBI/ODNI) be on the same page, and are all supportive of the report -in the highest tradition of “That’s OUR story, and we’re stickin’ to it.” This evening CIA has provided to the NIC the complete draft generated by the ad hoc fusion cell. We will facilitate as much mutual transparency as possible as we complete the report, but, more time is not negotiable. We may have to compromise our “normal” modalities, since we must do this on such a compressed schedule. This is one project that has to be a team sport.”*

DNI James Clapper, December 22, 2016

fox nation vid strm

Remember, on July 20, 2025, DNI Tulsi Gabbard gave this interview. Within the interview, Tulsi Gabbard emphasizes how important it is for the people who engaged in a treasonous conspiracy to be held accountable. Gabbard notes there are now whistleblowers from within the IC agencies who have come forward to discuss how the intelligence apparatus was intentionally weaponized.

In her opinion as expressed, there is enough direct evidence now available to the Dept of Justice to begin criminal indictments against all of the participants.

DNI Tulsi Gabbard outlines how the documents released show how the Obama administration actively engaged the Intelligence Community to fabricate a false and malicious conspiracy against the incoming Trump administration.

I like how within the interview Director Gabbard emphasizes within her role she is able to reach into each of the eighteen intelligence agencies and extract documents that pertain to singular issues, in this case the role of Russia in the 2016 election. This cross-silo investigative ability is why the DNI office is so important to revealing information from within individual silos.

Posted in Big Government, Big Stupid Government, CIA, Deep State, Dept Of Justice, Donald Trump, FBI, Lawfare, media bias, Notorious Liars, President Trump, propaganda, Russia, Spygate, Spying, THE BIG UGLY, Uncategorized

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Patel: FBI Thwarts 'Potential Terrorist Attack'

Home | Politics

Tags: peter navarro | walter giardina | donald trump | fbi

Navarro: Fmr FBI Agent Drove Partisan Cases Against Trump

By Jim Thomas | Wednesday, 20 August 2025

Former White House adviser Peter Navarro has called for a full investigation into retired FBI agent Walter Giardina, accusing him of orchestrating politically motivated operations against President Donald Trump and his allies, including Navarro himself, Breitbart reported.

Navarro, a senior trade adviser in Trump first administration, urged Congress and federal authorities to launch an inquiry into Giardina, whom he describes as the central figure in a long-running campaign of "weaponized justice."

Navarro's accusations are detailed in his new book "I Went to Prison So You Won't Have To," in which he argued that Giardina played a pivotal role in nearly every major investigation into Trump over the past decade, from the Steele dossier to special counsel Robert Mueller's probe and beyond.

"I still feel the cold steel of the handcuffs Giardina and his gaggle of armed agents slapped on me at Reagan National Airport," wrote Navarro, recalling his 2022 arrest. "I will never forget the sight of my fiancee being perp-walked out of that same terminal as part of the circus arrest Giardina staged for maximum humiliation."

According to Navarro, Giardina was among the first FBI officials to review the Steele dossier in 2016.

He claimed that whistleblowers told Congress that Giardina vouched for the dossier as "corroborated" despite its most explosive allegations later proving to be false. The document became central to the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane probe and helped justify secret surveillance on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz's 2019 report found 17 errors or omissions in the bureau's applications for surveillance warrants, including exaggerated claims about Steele's reliability. Navarro argueed Giardina's actions directly enabled what Trump has long branded the "Russia hoax."

Navarro also ties Giardina to the Mueller investigation, alleging the agent improperly wiped his government-issued laptop, potentially erasing key records from the inquiry. Despite that, Giardina reportedly received an internal award for his work on the team.

Whistleblower disclosures to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, further implicated Giardina in a separate 2017 case known as Crimson River, which pursued claims that Egypt funneled $10 million to Trump's campaign. That investigation, Navarro said, never produced evidence but was classified in a way that restricted oversight.

Navarro accuses Giardina of using the Constitution's Emoluments Clause as a "political fishing license" to target Trump's business dealings and later spearheading Operation Arctic Frost, a Jan. 6-related probe that led to the seizure of phones from both Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence.

The most personal chapter of Navarro's allegations centers on his own 2022 arrest. Navarro said the bureau turned his indictment into "political theater," even subjecting his fiancee to a public walkout, though she was not accused of wrongdoing.

Navarro was held in contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the House committee that investigated Jan. 6. Sentenced to four months in prison, he described his conviction as the "partisan weaponization of the judicial system."

Navarro insisted that firing politicized FBI officials is insufficient.

"That's why Giardina, along with a long list of alleged lawfare perpetrators, must be investigated," he wrote. "Because if they are not, they will do it again.

"If they can come for me, they can come for you," Navarro said.

Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.

Jim Thomas ✉

Jim Thomas is a writer based in Indiana. He holds a bachelor's degree in Political Science, a law degree from U.I.C. Law School, and has practiced law for more than 20 years.

Related Stories:

• WSJ: Russia Balks at Ukrainian Security Guarantees
• Volker to Newsmax: Putin 'Still Going to Play Games'

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WOW NO TALK 10 25

Steele dossier - Wikipedia

:{:{The Steele dossier, also known as the Trump–Russia dossier,^[1] is a controversial political opposition research report on the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump compiled by counterintelligence specialist Christopher Steele.^[2] It was published without permission in 2017 as an unfinished 35-page compilation of "unverified, and potentially unverifiable"^[a] memos that were considered by Steele to be "raw intelligence – not established facts, but a starting point for further investigation".^[4][5][6]}:

The dossier was written from June to December 2016 as reports from his sources were received, and contains allegations of misconduct, conspiracy, and cooperation between Trump's presidential campaign and the government of Russia prior to and during the 2016 election campaign.^[7] U.S. intelligence agencies have reported that Putin personally ordered the whole Russian election interference operation,^[8] that the Russians codenamed Project Lakhta.^{[9][10][11][12}]}:

:{:{:{While the dossier played a significant role in initially highlighting the general friendliness between Trump and the Putin administration, the corroboration status of specific allegations is highly variable.

The following allegations have been publicly corroborated by U.S. intelligence agencies, the January 2017 ODNI report,^[13] and the Mueller report:^[14] "that the Russian government was working to get Mr. Trump elected";^[b] that Russia sought "to cultivate people in Trump's orbit";^[b] that Trump campaign officials and associates had secretive contacts with Russian officials and agents;^[15][16][17] that Putin favored Trump over Hillary Clinton;^[13][18]}:}:

...that Putin personally ordered^[8] an "influence campaign" to harm Clinton's campaign and to "undermine public faith in the US democratic process";^[13] and that he ordered cyberattacks on both parties.^[13] Some other allegations are plausible but not specifically confirmed,^[19][20] and some are dubious in retrospect but not strictly disproven.^[21][22][23]}:

:{:{The dossier was based on reports from initially anonymous sources known to Steele^[24] and his "primary sub-source", Igor Danchenko.^[25] Steele, a former head of the Russia Desk for British intelligence (MI6), wrote the report for the private investigative firm Fusion GPS, that was paid by Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).^[26] The dossier's 17 reports allege that there was a "well-developed conspiracy" of "cooperation" between Trump campaign members and Russian operatives to aid Russia's election interference efforts to benefit Trump.^[27] It also alleges that Russia sought to damage Hillary Clinton's candidacy.^[28]}:

It was published by BuzzFeed News on January 10, 2017, without Steele's permission.^[3] Their decision to publish the reports without verifying the allegations was criticized by journalists.^[29][30] However, a judge defended BuzzFeed's action on the basis that the dossier was part of an official proceeding, and therefore "protected by fair reporting privilege".^[31]}:

The United States intelligence community and most experts have treated the dossier with caution due to its unverified allegations.^[32] While compiling the dossier, Steele passed his findings to both British and American intelligence agencies.^[18][33] The U.S. intelligence community took the allegations seriously,^[34] and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated every line of the dossier and identified and spoke with at least two of Steele's sources.^[4] The Mueller report contained passing references to some of the dossier's allegations but little mention of its more sensational claims.^[4] Both the 2019 OIG report^[35]: 172  and the 2023 Durham report^[36]: 99  raised doubts about the dossier's reliability and sources, with the latter stating that "the FBI was not able to corroborate a single substantive allegation contained in the Steele Reports".^[36]: 99 

While the dossier played a central and essential role in the seeking of FISA warrants on Carter Page,^[37] according to James Clapper, John Brennan, and Robert S. Litt, it "played no role" in the January 6, 2017, intelligence community assessment of the Russian actions in the 2016 election,^[38][39][40] and according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the dossier was not used to "support any of [the assessment's] analytic judgments".^[41] Also, it was not the trigger for the opening of the Russia investigation into whether the Trump campaign was coordinating with the Russian government's interference in the 2016 presidential election.^[42] The dossier is a factor in several conspiracy theories promoted by Trump^[43] and his supporters.^[42][44] Many mainstream sources have described the dossier as "discredited".^[c]

History

Two research operations and confusion between them

The opposition research conducted by Fusion GPS on Donald Trump occurred in two distinct phases, each with different clients:

• The client for the first phase was The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet, which funded research into multiple Republican candidates, including Trump. This phase, from October 2015 to May 2016, was focused on Trump's domestic business and entertainment activities; was performed by Fusion GPS and used public sources and investigative reporter Wayne Barrett's files.

Immediately after the publication of the dossier, the media sometimes falsely assumed that the dossier started as a product of this research, so the Free Beacon released this statement: "none of the work product that the Free Beacon received appears in the Steele dossier".^[45][46] what did they get and what did they do with it?

• The clients for the second phase were the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign. This phase, from April to December 2016, was focused on Trump's Russian connections; it was subcontracted by Fusion GPS to Steele and Orbis Business Intelligence and used Steele's own source network and public sources. Only this second phase produced the dossier.^[47][48]

From April to early May 2016, The Washington Free Beacon and the DNC/Clinton Campaign were independently both clients of Fusion GPS. This overlap contributed to the media's confusion.

The Washington Free Beacon operation does not produce the dossier

In October 2015, before the official start of the 2016 Republican primary campaign, the founders of Fusion GPS were seeking political work and wrote an email to "a big conservative donor they knew who disliked Trump, [and] they were hired". He arranged for them to use The Washington Free Beacon, an American conservative political journalism website, for their general opposition research on several Republican presidential candidates, including Trump.^[49][50] It is primarily funded by Republican donor Paul Singer.^[50] The Free Beacon and Singer were "part of the conservative never-Trump movement".^[51] Although Singer was a big supporter of Marco Rubio, Rubio denied any involvement in Fusion GPS's initial research and hiring.^[45]

This phase used public sources, but early in their investigation, they also received help from Wayne Barrett who gave them his files on Trump. They contained findings about "Trump's past dealings, including tax and bankruptcy problems, potential ties to organized crime, and numerous legal entanglements. They also revealed that Trump had an unusually high number of connections to Russians with questionable backgrounds."^[49]

For months, Fusion GPS gathered information about Trump, focusing on his business and entertainment activities. When Trump became the presumptive nominee on May 3, 2016,^[52] the conservative donor stopped funding the research on him.^[24][53]

Due to media confusion over who produced the dossier, the Free Beacon issued a statement in October 2017 to debunk some false assumptions:^[45]

All of the work that Fusion GPS provided to the Free Beacon was based on public sources, and none of the work product that the Free Beacon received appears in the Steele dossier. The Free Beacon had no knowledge of or connection to the Steele dossier, did not pay for the dossier, and never had contact with, knowledge of, or provided payment for any work performed by Christopher Steele. Nor did we have any knowledge of the relationship between Fusion GPS and the Democratic National Committee, Perkins Coie, and the Clinton campaign.

Although the source of the Steele dossier's funding had already been reported correctly over a year before,^[24][53][54] and the Free Beacon had issued a statement to this effect in October 2017,^[45] a February 2, 2018, story by the Associated Press (AP) contributed to confusion about its funding by stating that the dossier "was initially funded" by The Washington Free Beacon, so the AP posted a correction the next day: "Though the former spy, Christopher Steele, was hired by a firm that was initially funded by the Washington Free Beacon, he did not begin work on the project until after Democratic groups had begun funding it."^[55]

By the spring of 2016, researchers at Fusion GPS had become so alarmed by what they had already learned about Trump that they felt the need "to do what they could to keep Trump out of the White House".^[56]

Democratic Party operation produces dossier

Hiring and initial reports

The second operation of opposition research was indirectly funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, working through their attorney of record, Marc Elias of Perkins Coie.^[26] In an October 2017 letter, Perkins Coie general counsel Matthew Gehringer described how, in March 2016, Fusion GPS approached Perkins Coie and, knowing the Clinton campaign and the DNC were its clients, inquired whether its clients wished to pay Fusion GPS "to continue research regarding then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, research that Fusion GPS had conducted for one or more other clients during the Republican primary contest."^[57] In April 2016, Elias hired Fusion GPS to perform opposition research on Trump.^[26][57]

Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn R. Simpson had some reservations, as he did not like the idea of helping Hillary Clinton. In an email, Simpson said, "The only way I could see working for HRC is if it is against Trump."^[58]

In June 2016,^[24] as part of its work for Perkins Coie, Fusion GPS hired Orbis Business Intelligence, a private British intelligence firm, to look into connections between Trump and Russia. Orbis co-founder Christopher Steele, a retired British MI6 officer with expertise in Russian matters,^[24] was hired as a subcontractor to do the job.^[59] Prior to and during some of his work on the dossier, Steele had been a paid confidential human source (CHS) for the FBI^[60] for information unrelated to the Russia investigation.^[61]

The DNC and Clinton campaign treasurers reported they paid Perkins Coie a total of $12.4 million for legal and compliance services during the 2016 campaign.^[62][63] This led Trump to claim the dossier had cost $12 million,^[64] although the actual cost was far less.^[65] According to Fusion GPS, Perkins Coie paid them $1.02 million in fees and expenses, and Fusion GPS paid $168,000 to Steele's firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, to produce the dossier.^[64][66] Despite that, Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. continued to claim for more than a year that Steele was paid "millions of dollars" for his work.^[67]

Orbis was hired between June and November 2016, and Steele produced 16 reports during that time, with a 17th report added in December.^[68] The reports were like "prepublication notes" based on information from Steele's sources and were not released as a fully vetted and "finished news article".^[69] Steele believes 70–90 percent of the dossier is accurate,^[70] a view shared by Simpson.^[69] In litigation, it was revealed that:^[71]

Steele took the information he found credible and wrote a total of seventeen reports, which became the Dossier. Id. ¶ 9. In deciding what he found credible, Steele weighed the possibility that his sources might try to provide false information.

Steele delivered his reports individually to Fusion GPS as one- to three-page numbered reports.^[24] The first report, dated June 20, 2016, was sent to Washington by courier and hand-delivered to Fusion GPS. The names of the sources were redacted and replaced with descriptions to help Fusion GPS judge their credibility.^[72]

Luke Harding wrote:^[73]

At first, obtaining intelligence from Moscow went well. For around six months—during the first half of the year—Steele was able to make inquiries in Russia with relative ease. It got harder from late July, as Trump's ties to Russia came under scrutiny. Finally, the lights went out. Amid a Kremlin cover-up, the sources went silent and information channels shut down.

Passing reports to intelligence agencies

Steele has said he soon found "troubling information indicating connections between Trump and the Russian government". According to his sources, "there was an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit".^[74] According to Harding, "Steele was shocked by the extent of collusion his sources were reporting", and told his friends: "For anyone who reads it, this is a life-changing experience."^[70] Steele felt what he had unearthed "was something of huge significance, way above party politics".^[75] American reporter Howard Blum described Steele's rationale for becoming a whistleblower: "The greater good trumps all other concerns."^[75]

On his own initiative, Steele decided to also pass the information to British and American intelligence services because he believed the findings were a matter of national security for both countries.^[18][33] In 2018, Steele told a UK parliamentary investigation that Theresa May's British government covered up the evidence he provided them of Trump's Russian ties and took no actions, and that Boris Johnson suppressed a report about the intelligence in the dossier that was prepared by Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee.^[76] After long delay, the report was published on July 21, 2020.^[77]

According to Simpson's testimony, Steele, who enjoyed a good working reputation "for the knowledge he had developed over nearly 20 years working on Russia-related issues for British intelligence,^[78] approached the FBI because he was concerned that Trump, then a candidate, was being blackmailed by Russia,^[79] and he became "very concerned about whether this represented a national security threat".^[18] Steele believed the intelligence community "needed urgently to know—if it didn't already—that the next possible U.S. president was potentially under the sway of Russia".^[80]

In early July 2016, Steele called seasoned FBI agent Michael Gaeta, who was stationed in Rome, and asked him to come to London so he could show him his findings. Because he was assigned to the U.S. embassy in Rome, Gaeta sought and was granted approval for the trip from Victoria Nuland, who was then the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. When he arrived in London on July 5, 2016, he met with Steele at his office,^[79] and he was given a copy of Steele's first report, dated June 20, 2016 (Report 80).^[35]: 95  His reaction was "shock and horror".^[81][79] Alarmed by what he read, Gaeta remarked, "I have to show this to headquarters".^[82]

Shortly after, in July, the report was sent to an agent with expertise in criminal organizations and organized crime at the FBI's New York field office—essentially, the wrong person to handle a counterintelligence investigation.^[83][82] According to Nancy LeTourneau, political writer for the Washington Monthly, the report "was languishing in the FBI's New York field office" for two months, and "was finally sent to the counterintelligence team investigating Russia at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C." in mid-September 2016.^[84][85]: 897 

In August 2016, the FBI asked Steele for "all information in his possession and for him to explain how the material had been gathered and to identify his sources".^[73][74] In October 2016, Steele "described the sources' access, but did not provide names" to the FBI.^[85]: 897  By August 22, 2017, Steele had provided them with the names of the sources for the allegations in the dossier.^[86]

Meanwhile, in the July to September time frame, according to The Washington Post, CIA Director John Brennan had started an investigation with a secret task force "composed of several dozen analysts and officers from the CIA, the NSA and the FBI". At the same time, he was busy creating his own dossier of material documenting that "Russia was not only attempting to interfere in the 2016 election, they were doing so in order to elect Donald Trump. ... [T]he entire intelligence community was on alert about this situation at least two months before [the dossier] became part of the investigation." The "Steele dossier has so far proven to be fairly accurate", LeTourneau wrote.^[84]

In early August, which was after the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was opened,^[87] Steele was summoned to Rome where he gave a full briefing to four American FBI officials about the report.^[88][81] At that time, he handed over the June 20 and July 26 reports.^[87]

:{:{During its intense questioning of Steele, the FBI mentioned their own discoveries of connections between the Trump campaign and Russia^[88] and asked Steele about Papadopoulos, but he said he knew nothing about him.^[72] The agents "raised the prospect of paying Steele to continue gathering intelligence after Election Day",^[88] but Steele "ultimately never received payment from the FBI for any 'dossier'-related information".^[61] }:

In October 2022, during questioning from Special Counsel John Durham, Brian Auten, a supervisory counterintelligence analyst with the FBI, testified that, shortly before the 2016 election, the FBI offered Steele "up to $1 million" if he could corroborate allegations in the dossier, but that Steele could not do so.^[89][90] Steele has disputed this description: "And to correct the Danchenko trial record, we were not offered $1 million by the FBI to 'prove up' our Trump-Russia reporting. Rather, we were told there were substantial funds to resettle sources in the US if they were prepared to testify in public. Understandably they were not."^[91]}:

After public release

The subsequent public release of the dossier in January 2017 stopped discussions between Steele and the FBI.^[78] The Inspector General's report later confirmed that the FBI had initially offered to pay Steele $15,000 for his trip to Rome, but when the FBI dropped Steele as a CHS because he had shared information with a third party "in late October 2016" (Mother Jones magazine), the payment was halted.^{[35]: 173 [54}] Peter Strzok reported that:^[35]: 173 

the FBI closed Steele "because he was a control problem. We did not close him because we thought he was [a] fabricator." According to Strzok, Steele's decisions to discuss his reporting with the media and to disclose his relationship with the FBI were "horrible and it hurt what we were doing, and no question, he shouldn't have done it."

In September, Steele met with Jonathan Winer, who was then the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement, whom he had known since 2009. In a 2018 editorial for The Washington Post,^[92] Winer recounted that during their meeting in Washington, he was allowed to review Steele's reports, but not to keep a copy: "I prepared a two-page summary and shared it with [Victoria] Nuland, who indicated that, like me, she felt that the secretary of state needed to be made aware of this material", he wrote. Later in September, Winer discussed the report with Sidney Blumenthal, who revealed he had received similar information from Cody Shearer, a controversial political activist and former journalist who was close to the Clinton White House in the 1990s. Winer met with Steele again in late September and gave him a copy of Shearer's report, later known as the "second dossier".^[93]

On September 19, 2016,^[d] after the report had been "languishing in the FBI's New York field office" for two months,^[84][83] Steele's handling agent sent six of Steele's reports (80, 94, 95, 100, 101, and 102) to the Crossfire Hurricane team, that had been operational since July 31, 2016. This was the first time^[d] they and their leader, Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI's Counterespionage Section, Peter Strzok, received any of Steele's reporting.^{[35]: 100 [d][94][85]}: 896  Strzok cautioned his colleagues: "[The dossier] 'should be viewed as intended to influence as well as to inform' and whoever commissioned it was 'presumed to be connected to the [Clinton] campaign in some way.'"^[95] Some reports referred to members of Trump's inner circle. After that point, he continued to share information with the FBI.^[74][73] The IG Report says this material "became an important part of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and the FBI seeking FISA authority targeting one of the Crossfire Hurricane subjects, Carter Page".^[35]: 80 

On October 28, 2016, days before the election, Comey notified Congress that the FBI had started looking into newly discovered Hillary Clinton emails. Simpson and Fritsch described their reaction: "Comey's bombshell prompted the Fusion partners to decide they needed to do what they could to expose the FBI's probe of Trump and Russia. It was Hail Mary time."^[80] The founders of Fusion GPS were very upset by a misleading November 1, 2016, New York Times article "published a week before the election with the headline: 'Investigating Donald Trump, FBI Sees No Clear Link to Russia'. In fact, Russia was meddling in the election to help Trump win, the U.S. intelligence community would later conclude."^[56]

Simpson later said that "Steele severed his contacts with [the] FBI before the election following public statements by the FBI that it had found no connection between the Trump campaign and Russia and concerns that [the FBI] was being 'manipulated for political ends by the Trump people'."^[96] Steele had become frustrated with the FBI, whom he believed failed to investigate his reports, choosing instead to focus on the investigation into Clinton's emails. According to The Independent, Steele came to believe there was a "cabal" inside the FBI, particularly its New York field office linked to Trump advisor Rudy Giuliani, because it blocked any attempts to investigate the links between Trump and Russia.^[33] He "grew concerned that there was a cover-up in progress".^[53]

What the DNC, Clinton campaign, and Steele knew

According to Fusion GPS's co-owners, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, they did not tell Steele who their ultimate clients were, only that Steele was "working for a law firm",^[72] and they "gave him no specific marching orders beyond this basic question: 'Why did Mr. Trump repeatedly seek to do deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun?'"^[97] In testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Simpson said that "it was Fusion GPS's idea to pursue overseas ties—that research was not directed by Perkins Coie, the DNC, or the Clinton Campaign".^[85]: 847 

Jane Mayer reported that when the Clinton campaign "indirectly employed" Steele, Elias created a "legal barrier" by acting as a "firewall" between the campaign and Steele. Thus, any details were protected by attorney–client privilege^[72] and work-product privileges.^[26] "Fusion briefed only Elias on the reports, Simpson sent Elias nothing on paper—he was briefed orally", Mayer reported.^[72] In its application for a FISA warrant to survey Carter Page, the Department of Justice told the FISC that Simpson had not informed Steele of the motivation behind the research into Trump's ties with Russia.^[61] Steele testified to Congress that he did not know the Clinton campaign was the source of the payments "because he was retained by Fusion GPS".^[98][99] By "late July 2016",^[35]: 93–94  "several months" after signing the contract with Fusion GPS, Steele became aware that the DNC and the Clinton campaign were the ultimate clients.^[72]

A spokesperson for the DNC said neither Tom Perez nor "the new leadership of the DNC were ... involved in any decision-making regarding Fusion GPS, nor were they aware that Perkins Coie was working with the organization."^[57] A spokesperson for Perkins Coie said the campaign and the DNC were unaware Fusion GPS "had been hired to conduct the research".^[100] The Washington Post reported that it is not clear how much of the research Elias received from Fusion GPS he shared with the campaign and the DNC. It is also not clear who in those organizations knew about the roles of Fusion GPS and Steele, but one person "close to the matter" said the organizations were "not informed by the law firm of Fusion GPS's role".^[26] The New York Times revealed that earlier in 2017, "Mr. Elias had denied that he had possessed the dossier before the election."^[100][57] The Clinton campaign did not know about Steele or that he was sharing his findings with the FBI, and "one top Clinton campaign official" told Jane Mayer that "If I'd known the F.B.I. was investigating Trump, I would have been shouting it from the rooftops!"^[49]

:{The firewall was reportedly so effective even campaign principals John Podesta and Robby Mook did not know Steele was on the Democratic payroll until Mother Jones reported on the issue on October 31, 2016, in an article that did not name Steele.^[72] When the Mother Jones story broke, John Podesta, chairman of the Clinton campaign, said he was "stunned by the news that the FBI had launched a full-blown investigation into Trump, especially one that was informed by research underwritten by the Clinton campaign." Although they knew Perkins Coie had spent money for opposition research, neither Podesta nor campaign manager Robby Mook knew Steele was on the Democratic payroll. Mayer said they both maintain they "didn't read the dossier until BuzzFeed posted it online".^[72]

When Donna Brazile, interim DNC chair, later heard rumors of the research on Russia, she asked Elias about it. According to Brazile, he brushed her off and said "You don't want to know."^[51] Mayer also said that "the Clinton campaign never learned that Christopher Steele was on their payroll until it [the dossier] was in the press."^[101] "Far from a secret campaign weapon, Steele turned out to be a secret kept from the campaign."^[72] In their 2019 book, the founders of Fusion GPS wrote "that no one from Fusion ever met or talked with Clinton and that she herself 'had no idea who they were'."^[56][49]}:

Philip Bump wrote that the dossier "has never been shown to have informed the Clinton campaign's approach and that was not made public until shortly before Trump was inaugurated."^[102]

On February 15, 2022, The Washington Post reported: "So far, there is no evidence that the Clinton campaign directly managed the Steele reporting or leaks about it to the media."^[103]

Hints of existence

When Fusion GPS first hired Steele, "they thought that 'no one would ever find out' about the discreet work Steele would perform. That prediction proved naive",^[56] and the founders of Fusion GPS have described how they soon did not hide the fact that they were researching Trump and Russia: "Fusion and Steele tried to alert U.S. law enforcement and the news media to the material they'd uncovered. The firm's office in Washington's Dupont Circle neighborhood became 'something of a public reading room' for journalists seeking information about Trumpworld."^[56] In September they arranged private meetings at the Tabard Inn, in Washington, D.C., between Steele and reporters from The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, ABC News, and other outlets.^[72] The meetings were "at staggered times, to ensure that the journalists didn't bump into one another".^[104] Jane Mayer attended one of the meetings. None of these news organizations ran any stories about the allegations at that time.^[72]

Although BuzzFeed was not invited to these meetings, Ben Smith, editor of BuzzFeed, wrote that "We were hardly the first journalists to get the document—but we may have been the first to get it without promising to keep it secret ... [the journalists at the Tabard Inn meetings] had promised Simpson that they wouldn't write about the dossier itself, its author, or its path through the American government, [and] they couldn't report on these things either."^[105] BBC correspondent Paul Wood was allowed to see "a dozen" pages of the dossier in October 2016.^[14]

Before the election, only two news sources mentioned allegations that came from dossier reports. Steele had been in contact with both authors. These were a September 23, 2016, Yahoo! News article by Michael Isikoff that focused on Carter Page,^[106] and an article by David Corn on October 31, 2016, a week before the election, in Mother Jones magazine.^[74]

At the time, the FBI had assumed that the source for the Yahoo! article was someone, other than Steele, "who had received a copy of the dossier". The 2019 DOJ report by Michael Horowitz criticized the FBI for failing to ask Steele if he had a role in that Yahoo! article.^[107]

Mother Jones story

By the third quarter of 2016, many news organizations knew about the existence of the dossier that had been described as an "open secret" among journalists but chose not to publish information they could not confirm.^[24][108] Mother Jones was the first to report the existence of the dossier and that it was exclusively funded by Democrats.^[109][110]

By October 2016, Steele had compiled 33 pages (16 reports), and he then passed on what he had discovered to David Corn, a reporter from Mother Jones magazine. On October 31, 2016, a week before the election, Mother Jones reported that a former intelligence officer, whom they did not name, had produced a report based on Russian sources and turned it over to the FBI.^[74] The article disclosed some of the dossier's allegations:^[74]

...

The legal status of the dossier has been questioned,^[165] but, because of the legal difference between an "expenditure" *by* a campaign and a "contribution" *to* a campaign, it does not run afoul of Federal Election Commission laws (52 U.S. Code § 30121) forbidding foreign nationals from contributing to or aiding political campaigns, and that applies to any form of aid, not just cash donations.^[165] The dossier (prepared by a British citizen indirectly hired by the Clinton campaign and DNC) and the 2016 Trump Tower meeting (involving a direct offer of aid by the Russian government to the Trump campaign) are frequently contrasted and conflated in this regard.^[165][166]

Philip Bump has explained "why the Trump Tower meeting may have violated the law—and the Steele dossier likely didn't":^[165] "Hiring a foreign party to conduct research is very different, including in legal terms, than being given information by foreign actors seeking to influence the election. What's more, Trump's campaign did accept foreign assistance in 2016, as the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III determined."^[102][167]

...

After due investigation, and some conciliation negotiation, in March 2022, the FEC dismissed most of the charges (including all alleged violations of 52 U.S. Code § 30121).^[171][unreliable ^source] However, the FEC did find "probable cause to believe" that the DNC and the Clinton campaign (and their treasurers) had "[misreported] the purpose of certain disbursements".^[171] In a settlement, the FEC fined the DNC $105,000 and the Clinton campaign $8,000 for misreporting those fees and expenses as "legal services" and "legal and compliance consulting" rather than "opposition research". The DNC and the Clinton campaign agreed not to contest the fines, but did not admit having broken the rules.^[172][173]

Steven L. Hall, former CIA chief of Russia operations, has contrasted Steele's methods with those of Donald Trump Jr., who sought information from a Russian attorney at a meeting in Trump Tower in June 2016: "The distinction: Steele spied against Russia to get info Russia did not want released; Don Jr took a mtg to get info Russians wanted to give."^[174]

Jane Mayer referred to the same meeting and contrasted the difference in reactions to Russian attempts to support Trump: When Donald Trump Jr. was offered "dirt" on Clinton as "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump", instead of "going to the F.B.I., as Steele had" when he learned Russia was helping Trump, Trump's son accepted the support by responding: "If it's what you say, I love it."^[72]

Legacy

Glenn Simpson believes the dossier interrupted a planned renewal of relationships between the United States and Russia that was "not in the interest of the United States"; that it supported the existing FBI investigation into Russian interference; and that it furthered understanding of the hidden relationship between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.^[175] Jane Mayer believes the dossier is "perhaps the most controversial opposition research ever to emerge from a Presidential campaign",^[49] and Julian Borger described it as "one of the most explosive documents in modern political history".^[176]

T. A. Frank has described the dossier as a "case study" in media manipulation.^[177] In his 2021 book Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies, former New York Times journalist Barry Meier commented: "media organizations didn't conduct internal postmortems or public reconstructions about how they handle the dossier story [because] it would have required them to disclose the toxic relationship that had developed between journalists and private spies."^[178]: 242 

Journalist David Corn of Mother Jones described the dossier as "a convenient foil, their false flag" for the "Trump gang":^[179]

It was a clever ploy on the part of the Trump gang: Deny the unfounded—that Trump was caught on tape consorting with urinating prostitutes and that he conspired directly with Putin—to sidestep the damning reality that Trump and his aides betrayed the nation by both encouraging the Russian attack and trying to cover up Putin's sinister intervention.

According to Tommy Vietor, "once a narrative enters the media ether, it can become uncontrollable ... once a rumor gets some traction, it's almost impossible to fix it, even if it is false. The problem with the pee tape allegation is it is so graphic, it is so memorable, that it doesn't matter how many times you knock it down – people are going to remember it."^[180]

As long as it is not released, the alleged pee tape has a lasting effect. When Steele was asked why the Russians had not released the tape, he replied "It hasn't needed to be released. ... I think the Russians felt they'd got pretty good value out of Donald Trump when he was president of the U.S."^[181]

The founders of Fusion GPS have written: "Ultimately, whether the incident detailed in the dossier is true or not is likely not of paramount importance. The Russians had ample kompromat against Trump and his top aides with or without any pee tape."^[80]

...

Risk of contamination with Russian disinformation considered

The dossier has been attacked by Trump supporters, especially Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, with claims it contained Russian disinformation. Those claims were rejected: Under the heading "Crossfire Hurricane Team's Assessment of Potential Russian Influence on the Steele Election Reporting," the Inspector General's investigative team examined how seriously the FBI Crossfire Hurricane team had considered "whether Steele's election reports, or aspects of them, were the product of a Russian disinformation campaign" and rejected the claims.^[35]: 193 

Senators Grassley and Johnson claimed that some previously redacted footnotes in the IG report 'confirmed' that the dossier "was the product of a Russian disinformation campaign". Later press releases toned down their language and did not repeat their exact claims.^[196] Legal experts at Lawfare examined the unredacted footnotes and pushed back against their claims:^[196]

The footnotes do not confirm that the Steele dossier was the product of Russian disinformation. But two footnotes do indicate that the FBI received reports alleging that portions of Steele's evidence were the product of a Russian disinformation plot—though the footnotes do not establish that these reports were credible. The other two footnotes offer further reason to question the veracity of Steele's reporting, but they do not necessarily implicate the existence of a Russian disinformation operation.

LawFare includes a direct quote from a footnote affirming that, as of June 2017, the FBI had no evidence that Steele's network had been "penetrated or compromised":^[196]

Footnotes 342 and 350 most directly implicate whether the Steele dossier could have been part of a Russian disinformation operation. ... the footnote's final sentence reveals that "an early June 2017 [U.S. intelligence community] report indicated that two persons affiliated with RIS were aware of Steele's election investigation in early July 2016. The [FBI] Supervisory Intel Analyst told us he was aware of these reports, but that he had no information as of June 2017 that Steele's election reporting source network had been penetrated or compromised.

Lawfare rejected the two Senators' claims: "The new information in the two footnotes does not support the senators' initial claim that the footnotes confirm the existence of a Russian operation to disrupt the FBI's investigation. The footnotes only establish that the FBI received certain reports. The veracity of the information also remains unconfirmed."^[196]

It is a fact that Steele and Oleg Deripaska ("Russian Oligarch 1") have had dealings with each other. While Steele was working for a law firm hired by Deripaska to track down money allegedly stolen from him by Paul Manafort,^[49] Steele was also working between 2014 and 2016 with the FBI and Justice Department in an unsuccessful classified effort to flip Deripaska so he could be an FBI informant.^[226][227] This Deripaska/Steele association has been touted as a means whereby the Russians could get disinformation inserted into the dossier. The FBI rejected this theory as Priestap found it implausible,^[35]: 194  and Steele has denied that Deripaska knew of the dossier's existence.^[228] The IG report stated:^[35]: 194 

According to an FBI memorandum prepared in December 2017 for a Congressional briefing, by the time the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was transferred to the Special Counsel in May 2017, the FBI "did not assess it likely that the [Steele] [election reporting] was generated in connection to a Russian disinformation campaign." Priestap told us that the FBI "didn't have any indication whatsoever" by May 2017 that the Russians were running a disinformation campaign through the Steele election reporting. Priestap explained, however, that if the Russians, in fact, were attempting to funnel disinformation through Steele to the FBI using Russian Oligarch 1, he did not understand the goal.

Bill Priestap further explained that "the Russians ... favored Trump, they're trying to denigrate Clinton ... [and] I don't know why you'd run a disinformation campaign to denigrate Trump on the side."^[35]: 194 

Jane Mayer describes how^[49]

Trump's defenders have claimed that Steele fell prey to Russian disinformation, and so, therefore, it is he, not Trump, who has been a useful idiot for the Russians. But Steele tells the authors, 'These people simply have no idea what they're talking about.' He emphasizes that his network of sources 'is tried and tested' and has 'been proven up in many other matters.' He adds, 'I've spent my entire adult life working with Russian disinformation. It's an incredibly complex subject that is at the very core of my training and my professional mission.

The IG Report said Steele explained how sophisticated the Russians were at planting and controlling misinformation, but Steele "had no evidence that his reporting was 'polluted' with Russian disinformation".^[35]: 193–195  The inspector general's report ultimately concluded "that more should have been done to examine Steele's contacts with intermediaries of Russian oligarchs in order to assess those contacts as potential sources of disinformation that could have influenced Steele's reporting".^[35]: 386 

In 2019, during Trump's first impeachment inquiry, national security expert Fiona Hill stated Steele may have been "played" by the Russians to spread disinformation.^[49][229]

...

FBI's attempts to investigate allegations stopped

The FBI's attempts to corroborate the dossier's allegations stopped shortly after Trump came to office in 2017, a fact criticized later by the Senate Intelligence Committee.^[85]: 902 

The veracity status of many allegations is still somewhat unknown, with the FBI's inadequate attempts to corroborate them being criticized by the Senate Intelligence Committee:^[85]: 902 

FBI Counterintelligence Division's efforts to investigate the allegations in the dossier were focused on identifying Steele's source network and recruiting those people to serve as sources for, or provide information to, the FBI. FBI also made efforts to corroborate the information in the dossier memos, but the Committee found that attempt lacking in both thoroughness and rigor.

This lack of "thoroughness and rigor" leaves many allegations with an uncorroborated status. Lawfare wrote: "There is also a good deal in the dossier that has not been corroborated in the official record and perhaps never will be—whether because it's untrue, unimportant or too sensitive," but "none of it, to our knowledge, has been disproven".^[23]

After a slow progression in the winter and spring of 2017, the FBI stopped all efforts to corroborate the dossier in May 2017 when Mueller's Special Counsel Office (SCO) took over the Russia investigation.^[e] As for the Senate Committee itself:^[85]: 846 

The Committee did not seek to prove or disprove the assertions in the dossier. Instead, the Committee explored Steele's methodology, explored the information available on Steele's subsources, examined how the FBI handled Steele as a source, and sought to understand how the FBI investigated the assertions in Steele's reporting.

The Committee also "lost access to all relevant information regarding FBI's efforts to verify the dossier, as it did with all information the SCO declared to touch its 'equities'."^[85]: 903 

...

Corroboration status with passage of time

The following allegations have been publicly corroborated by U.S. intelligence agencies, the January 2017 ODNI report,^[13] and the Mueller report:^[14] "that the Russian government was working to get Mr. Trump elected";^[b] that Russia sought "to cultivate people in Trump's orbit";^[b] that Trump campaign officials and associates had secretive contacts with Russian officials and agents;^[15][16][17] that Putin favored Trump over Hillary Clinton;^[13][18] that Putin personally ordered^[8] an "influence campaign" to harm Clinton's campaign and to "undermine public faith in the US democratic process";^[13] and that he ordered cyberattacks on both parties.^[13] Some other allegations are plausible but not specifically confirmed,^[19][20] and some are dubious in retrospect but not strictly disproven.^[21][22][23]

In a December 2018 Lawfare report titled "The Steele Dossier: A Retrospective", the authors described how, after two years, they "wondered whether information made public as a result of the Mueller investigation—and the passage of two years—has tended to buttress or diminish the crux of Steele's original reporting." To make their judgments, they analyzed a number of "trustworthy and official government sources" and found that "These materials buttress some of Steele's reporting, both specifically and thematically. The dossier holds up well over time, and none of it, to our knowledge, has been disproven." They concluded with:^[23]

The Mueller investigation has clearly produced public records that confirm pieces of the dossier. And even where the details are not exact, the general thrust of Steele's reporting seems credible in light of what we now know about extensive contacts between numerous individuals associated with the Trump campaign and Russian government officials.

However, there is also a good deal in the dossier that has not been corroborated in the official record and perhaps never will be—whether because it's untrue, unimportant or too sensitive. As a raw intelligence document, the Steele dossier, we believe, holds up well so far.

Simpson has described his own and Steele's confidence in Steele's work: "Nothing that I have seen disproves anything in the dossier. Which isn't to say I think it's all true. I don't think Chris thinks it's all true, either. But there's a difference between things being fake or a hoax or a fraud or a lie and things being incorrect."^[85]: 867  Steele, the author of the dossier, said he believes that 70–90% of the dossier is accurate,^[70][51] although he gives the "golden showers" allegation a 50% chance of being true.^[51] As of August 2024, Igor Danchenko "still believes ... that there's a pee tape".^[210]

The following sections describe how some allegations have been corroborated, while others remain unverified because they may be "untrue, unimportant or too sensitive".^[23] There are sometimes conflicting reports for or against their veracity, and, in some cases, there are discrepancies between sources and their allegations.

...

Corroboration status of specific allegations

See also: § Discrepancies between sources and their allegations

Certain allegations have been corroborated, and the public knows which ones, but the public does not know the status of some other allegations that may have also been corroborated ("portions of the material were corroborated"^[267]).

When Reince Priebus questioned Comey about why he told Trump about the dossier's salacious allegations,^[267] "Comey revealed that elements of the dossier had been confirmed":^[268]

I explained that the analysts from all three agencies agreed it was relevant and that portions of the material were corroborated by other intelligence,' he wrote. Though parts of the memo are redacted, Comey seems to note that some information 'was consistent with and corroborated by other intelligence, and that the incoming president needed to know the rest of it was out there.'

Cultivation of Trump through time

Source(s) for Report 80 (June 2016) alleged that the Kremlin had been cultivating Trump for "at least 5 years".^[73][233]

According to former KGB major Yuri Shvets, Trump became the target of a joint Czech intelligence services and KGB spying operation after he married Czech model Ivana Zelnickova^[269] and was cultivated as an "asset" by Russian intelligence since 1977: "Russian intelligence gained an interest in Trump as far back as 1977, viewing Trump as an exploitable target."^[270]

Luke Harding writes that documents show Czechoslovakia spied on Trump during the 1970s and 1980s, when he was married to Ivana Trump, his Czechoslovakia-born first wife. Harding writes that the Czechoslovakian government spied on Trump because of his political ambitions and notability as a businessman. It is known that there were close ties between Czechoslovakia's StB and the USSR's KGB.^[271]

Harding also describes how, already since 1987, the Soviet Union was interested in Trump. In his book Collusion, Harding asserts that the "top level of the Soviet diplomatic service arranged his 1987 Moscow visit. With assistance from the KGB." Then-KGB head Vladimir Kryuchkov "wanted KGB staff abroad to recruit more Americans". Harding proceeds to describe the KGB's cultivation process, and posits that they may have opened a file on Trump as early as 1977, when he married Ivana. "According to files in Prague, declassified in 2016, Czech spies kept a close eye on the couple in Manhattan, ... [with] periodic surveillance of the Trump family in the United States."^[272][273]

Jonathan Chait has written that 1987 is a year when Russians courted and praised Trump by inviting him to consider building in Moscow. He then visited Moscow in July 1987, and was likely under surveillance, but he did not build anything.^[274]

Russian assistance to the Trump campaign

On April 26, 2016, George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign foreign policy advisor, held a breakfast meeting with Joseph Mifsud,^[275][276] a man described by James B. Comey as a "Russian agent".^[277] Mifsud, who claimed "substantial connections to Russian officials",^[275] said he had "just returned from Moscow, where he had 'learned that the Russians had obtained 'dirt' on then-candidate Clinton." Mr. Mifsud said he had been told the Russians had "thousands of emails".^[276] This occurred concurrently with the Hillary Clinton email controversy, and long before the hacking of the DNC computers became public knowledge on June 14, 2016.^{[278][275][279}]

Papadopoulos later bragged "that the Trump campaign was aware the Russian government had dirt on Hillary Clinton". According to John Sipher, "court papers show he was, indeed, told by a Russian agent that the Kremlin had derogatory information in the form of 'thousands of e-mails'."^{[28][275][279][276}]

On May 4, the Russian contact with ties to the foreign ministry wrote to Mr. Papadopoulos and Mr. Mifsud, saying ministry officials were 'open for cooperation." Mr. Papadopoulos forwarded the message to a senior campaign official, asking whether the contacts were "something we want to move forward with.'

Papadopoulos sent emails about Putin to at least seven Trump campaign officials. Trump national campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis^[280] encouraged Papadopoulos to fly to Russia and meet with agents of the Russian Foreign Ministry, who reportedly wanted to share "Clinton dirt" with the Trump campaign.^[281][282] When Donald Trump Jr. learned of the offer, he welcomed it by responding: "If it's what you say, I love it."^[72] Later, on June 9, 2016, a meeting in Trump Tower was held, ostensibly for representatives from Russia to deliver that dirt on Clinton.^[283][284] Instead, the meeting was used to discuss lifting of the Magnitsky Act economic sanctions that had been imposed on Russia in 2012,^[261] a move favored by candidate Trump.^[106][285]

In February 2018, a formerly classified memo was released by Democrats on the House intelligence committee. The memo connects the offer of help made to Papadopoulos in London with a similar offer of help made to Carter Page when he met with Igor Divyekin in Moscow. Steele had told the FBI that he knew nothing of Papadopoulos^[72] when preparing the dossier, so this was independent confirmation of the Russian offer of help to the Trump campaign. The dossier alleged that when meeting with Carter Page, Igor Divyekin raised the possibility of releasing "a dossier of kompromat the Kremlin possessed on Democratic presidential rival, Hillary CLINTON ... to the Republican's campaign team". The memo stated that "This closely tracks what other Russian contacts were informing another Trump foreign policy advisor, George Papadopoulos. In subsequent FISA renewals, DOJ provided additional information obtained through multiple independent sources that corroborated Steele's reporting."^[252]

BBC correspondent Paul Wood wrote:^[14]

Steele was first to warn that Russia was mounting a covert operation to elect Donald Trump. Fusion GPS – his partners in Washington DC – have called this the dossier's 'foundational initial assertion' and it was correct. Much later, the Mueller inquiry would state that 'the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome.' Steele wrote about what was happening as early as June 2016...The US intelligence agencies...did not publish their findings until December 2016, too late to prevent the effort to influence the election.

On January 6, 2017, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released the intelligence community assessment (ICA) of the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. It stated that Russian leadership favored Trump over Clinton, and that Putin personally ordered the whole interference operation,^[8] codenamed Project Lakhta,^{[9][10][11][12}] including an "influence campaign" to harm Clinton's electoral chances and "undermine public faith in the US democratic process", as well as ordering cyber attacks on the Democratic and Republican parties.^[13][286] John Brennan and James Clapper testified to Congress that Steele's dossier "played no role" in the intelligence community assessment about Russian interference in the 2016 election,^[40][38] testimony which was reaffirmed by an April 2020 bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report that found the dossier was not used to "support any of its analytic judgments".^[41]

There were conflicting opinions between the FBI and CIA on whether to include any of the dossier's allegations in the body of the ICA report, with the FBI pushing for inclusion, and the CIA countering that the dossier "was not completely vetted and did not merit inclusion in the body of the report". After much discussion, the CIA prevailed,^[287] and the final ICA report only included a short summary of Steele's reporting in the "highly classified" Annex A.^[288][289]: 7 

There were also other reasons to not include it, and CNN wrote that:^[290]

The intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA, and the FBI took Steele's research seriously enough that they kept it out of a publicly-released January report on Russian meddling in the election in order to not divulge which parts of the dossier they had corroborated and how. ... And if that report included the dossier allegations, the intelligence community would have to say which parts it had corroborated and how. That would compromise sources and methods, including information shared by foreign intelligence services, intelligence officials believed.

In July 2025, when the second Trump administration resumed attacks on the dossier, John Brennan, and others who contributed to the ODNI assessment, Brennan and Clapper responded in The New York Times:^[292]

[T]he dossier was not used as a source or taken into account for any of its analysis or conclusions. At the Federal Bureau of Investigation's insistence, a short summary of the dossier was added as a separate annex only to the most highly classified version of the document that contained the assessment. That annex also explained why the dossier was not used in the assessment.

Chuck Grassley provided that explanation: "We have only limited corroboration of source's [Steele's] reporting in this case and did not use it to reach the analytic conclusions of the CIA/FBI/NSA assessment."^[293]

The New York Times said "Parts of the dossier have proved prescient."^[230]

Its main assertion – that the Russian government was working to get Mr. Trump elected – was hardly an established fact when it was first laid out by Mr. Steele in June 2016. But it has since been backed up by the United States' own intelligence agencies – and Mr. Mueller's investigation. The dossier's talk of Russian efforts to cultivate some people in Mr. Trump's orbit was similarly unknown when first detailed in one of Mr. Steele's reports, but it has proved broadly accurate as well.

Newsweek said "the dossier's main finding, that Russia tried to prop up Trump over Clinton, was confirmed" by the ODNI assessment.^[233] ABC News stated that "some of the dossier's broad implications—particularly that Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an operation to boost Trump and sow discord within the U.S. and abroad—now ring true."^[18]

The Mueller Report backed "Steele's central claim that the Russians ran a 'sweeping and systematic' operation ... to help Trump win".^[2] James Comey said:^[294][120]

The bureau began an effort after we got the Steele dossier to try and see how much of it we could replicate. That work was ongoing when I was fired. Some of it was consistent with our other intelligence, the most important part. The Steele dossier said the Russians are coming for the American election. It's a huge effort. It has multiple goals. ... And that was true.

Lawfare has noted that the "Mueller investigation has clearly produced public records that confirm pieces of the dossier. And even where the details are not exact, the general thrust of Steele's reporting seems credible in light of what we now know about extensive contacts between numerous individuals associated with the Trump campaign and Russian government officials."^[23]

In The New Yorker, Jane Mayer said the allegation that Trump was favored by the Kremlin, and that they offered Trump's campaign dirt on Clinton, has proven true.^[72] Mayer also wrote that the CIA had a Russian government official working as "a human source inside the Russian government during the campaign, who provided information that dovetailed with Steele's reporting about Russia's objective of electing Trump and Putin's direct involvement in the operation."^[49][295][8] The spy had access to Putin and could actually take pictures of documents on Putin's desk. Because of the dangers imposed by Trump's recent careless disclosures of classified information to Russian officials, the CIA feared their spy was in danger, so the government official and his family were discreetly exfiltrated during a family vacation to Montenegro.^[296][297]

In February 2019, Michael Cohen implicated Trump before the U.S. Congress, writing that in late July 2016, Trump had knowledge that Roger Stone was communicating with WikiLeaks about releasing emails stolen from the DNC in 2016.^[298][299] Stone denied this and accused Cohen of lying to Congress.^[300] Stone was later convicted before being pardoned by Trump, and it was confirmed that Stone had been in contact with WikiLeaks.^[301][302]

At the Helsinki summit meeting in July 2018, Putin was asked if he had wanted Trump to win the 2016 election. He responded "Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal."^[303]

"That the Russians interfered in the election in hopes of helping Trump win" has been described as the dossier's "core theme – later widely accepted by the news media and the U.S. intelligence community".^[104]

Fake news and social media misinformation

Source(s) for Report 166 alleged that "hackers ... had worked in Europe under Kremlin direction against the CLINTON campaign".

The Internet Research Agency (IRA) conducted an extensive campaign, including fake news and misinformation in social media, to undermine Clinton's campaign. On February 16, 2018, the IRA, along with 13 Russian individuals and two other Russian organizations, was indicted following an investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller with charges stemming from "impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions of government".^[304]

John Sipher reported on this dossier allegation and the documentation of the Russian efforts to harm Clinton.^[242] A January 2017 Stanford University study found that "fabricated stories favoring Donald Trump were shared a total of 30 million times, nearly quadruple the number of pro-Hillary Clinton shares leading up to the election."^[305] Researchers at Oxford University found that "An automated army of pro-Donald J. Trump chatbots overwhelmed similar programs supporting Hillary Clinton five to one in the days leading up to the presidential election."^[306] In March 2017, former FBI agent Clint Watts told Congress about websites involved in the Russian disinformation campaign "some of which mysteriously operate from Eastern Europe and are curiously led by pro-Russian editors of unknown financing".^[307] Aaron Blake examined two studies that indicate these efforts "made a significant difference...[and] may well have cost Clinton the presidency".^[308]

Manafort's and others' cooperation with Russian efforts

See also: Mueller report § Conspiracy or coordination vs collusion, and Mueller special counsel investigation § Conspiracy vs collusion

Dossier source(s) allege that Manafort, who had worked for Russian interests in Ukraine for many years,^[285] "managed" a "well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between [the Trump campaign] and the Russian leadership".^{[249][176][235}] The "conspiracy" is not proven, but the "co-operation" is seen as proven.

While the Mueller investigation did not "produce enough evidence"^[309] to prove the existence of a formal written or oral "conspiracy",^{[310][311][312}] some consider the actions of Manafort,^[313] Trump's welcoming of Russian help,^[314] and the myriad secret contacts between other Trump campaign members and associates with Russians^[220][15][16] to be the alleged "co-operation" with the Russian's "'sweeping and systematic' operation in 2016 to help Trump win",^[2] that The Guardian's Luke Harding and Dan Sabbagh describe as "Steele's central claim".^[2][294]

CNN described Manafort's role in its report of intercepted communications among "suspected Russian operatives discussing their efforts to work with Manafort ... to coordinate information that could damage Hillary Clinton's election prospects. ... The suspected operatives relayed what they claimed were conversations with Manafort, encouraging help from the Russians."^[315]

These reported intercepts are considered "remarkably consistent with the raw intelligence in the Steele Dossier ... [that] states that the 'well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between [the Trump campaign] and the Russian leadership ... was managed on the TRUMP side by the Republican candidate's campaign manager, Paul MANAFORT'."^[313]

Russian conversations confirmed

On February 10, 2017, CNN reported that:^{[17][266][290}]

For the first time, US investigators say they have corroborated some of the communications detailed in a 35-page dossier compiled by a former British intelligence agent, multiple current and former US law enforcement and intelligence officials tell CNN. ... The dossier details about a dozen conversations between senior Russian officials and other Russian individuals. ... But the intercepts do confirm that some of the conversations described in the dossier took place between the same individuals on the same days and from the same locations as detailed in the dossier, according to the officials. ... The corroboration, based on intercepted communications, has given US intelligence and law enforcement 'greater confidence' in the credibility of some aspects of the dossier as they continue to actively investigate its contents, these sources say.

Kompromat and "golden showers" allegations

Ashley Feinberg, journalist for Slate magazine, has described the "unproved" verification status of the rumor:^[316]

The public first became aware of the item and/or concept we're referring to as the pee tape on Jan. 10, 2017 when BuzzFeed first published the dossier, a collection of then-unverified intelligence memos alleging various connections between Trump and Russia. A number of the claims have since proved true, thanks to the Mueller report; others have not.

The most salacious of the allegations—that Trump had had a urine-soaked run-in with Russian sex workers while staying in the presidential suite at the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow—falls into the unproved category.

After years of scrutiny, the rumor remains unproven: "neither conclusively corroborated nor conclusively disproven".^[317][318]

Moscow weekend, November 8‍–‍10, 2013

Dossier source(s) allege that Trump "hated" Obama so much that when he stayed at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Moscow, he hired the presidential suite (Report 80). Igor Danchenko alleges that "Trump was with some powerful Russian oligarchs, who brought the sex workers."^[210] There he had "a number of prostitutes to perform a 'golden showers' (urination) show in front of him"^{[136][233][241}] in order to defile the bed used by the Obamas on an earlier visit. The alleged incident from 2013 was reportedly filmed and recorded by the FSB^[242] as kompromat.^[243][244] The 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee report assessed the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Moscow as a "high counterintelligence risk environment" with Russian intelligence on staff, "government surveillance of guests' rooms", and the common presence of prostitutes, "likely with at least the tacit approval of Russian authorities". A Marriott executive told the committee that after Trump's 2013 stay at the hotel, he overheard two hotel employees discussing what to do with an elevator surveillance video they said showed Trump "with several women" whom one of the employees "implied to be 'hostesses'". Committee investigators interviewed the two employees, but they said they could not recall the video.^[319]

Thomas Roberts, the host of the Miss Universe 2013 pageant, confirmed that "Trump was in Moscow for one full night and at least part of another."^[320] According to flight records, Keith Schiller's testimony, social media posts, and Trump's close friend, Aras Agalarov, Trump arrived by private jet on Friday morning, November 8, going to the Ritz-Carlton hotel and booking in.^[321]

The night of November 8–9, he attended Aras Agalarov's 58th birthday party at 10:00 p.m.^[322] He then left the birthday party early Saturday morning and, at about 1:30 a.m., Moscow time, returned to his hotel room with his bodyguard, Keith Schiller.^[323] While Trump and Schiller were walking back to Trump's hotel room, Schiller said he told Trump about an earlier offer to send five prostitutes "to Trump's hotel room that night",^[323] and Schiller said he told Trump he had rejected the offer. After Trump went to bed alone, Schiller said he stood outside Trump's door for a time and then left.^[324]

During later testimony, Schiller was unable to provide an alibi for Trump's later activities during the early morning hours of November 9,^[324] hours described by Rob Goldstone as a "five-hour window" of time that Trump was afforded to sleep early Saturday morning".^[325] This time is suspected by several writers of possibly being the time of the alleged salacious incident,^[f] and the Senate Intelligence Committee found evidence of "additional social activity" in Trump's room at that time.^[85]: 292 

Trump later repeatedly lied to Comey by claiming he was not in Moscow the night of November 8–9.^[326][327] Comey later said: "It's always significant when someone lies to you, especially about something you're not asking about. It tends to reflect a consciousness of guilt."^[328] Jennifer Rubin described Trump's fake alibi as "strong evidence of guilt".^[329]

The morning of November 9, Facebook posts showed he was still at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel,^[330] and other sources document that he then had a busy day with various meetings and tours of Moscow.^[321] That evening he attended the Miss Universe pageant, followed by an after-party that started at 1:00 a.m. Then, without returning to his hotel, he flew back to the U.S.^{[322][85]: 300 [323][331}]

Legacy of "pee tape" rumor

James Comey wrote in his book A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership that Trump asked him to have the FBI investigate the "pee tape" allegation "because he wanted to convince his wife that it wasn't true".^[332] The sincerity of Trump's denials was doubted by Comey who, after Trump repeatedly lied to him about the alleged incident, came to believe the incident may have happened.^[327]

Regarding the "golden showers" allegation, Michael Isikoff and David Corn have stated that Steele's "faith in the sensational sex claim would fade over time. ... As for the likelihood of the claim that prostitutes had urinated in Trump's presence, Steele would say to colleagues, 'It's 50–50'."^[51] The book Russian Roulette says that Steele's confidence in the truth of "the Ritz-Carlton story was 'fifty-fifty'. He treated everything in the dossier as raw intelligence material—not proven fact."^[333][334] In their 2019 book, the founders of Fusion GPS report that Steele received the "hotel anecdote" from seven Russian sources.^[155]

Slate journalist Ashley Feinberg investigated the pee tape rumor and linked to a 25-second video of the purported occurrence. She concluded that the tape was "fake", but "very far from being an obvious fake". A key "discrepancy", according to Feinberg, was that the video apparently showed the presidential suite as it appeared after a 2015 renovation, despite the purported occurrence being in November 2013, before the renovation occurred. The video had been in circulation since at least January 26, 2019.^[316]

Describing the leaked Kremlin papers mention of kompromat on Trump, John Dobson, former British diplomat, wrote: "[T]he report confirms that the Kremlin possessed 'kompromat' on the future president, which the document claims was collected during 'certain events' that happened during Trump's trip to Moscow in November 2013."^[335]

Marc Bennetts, correspondent in Russia for The Times, also wrote about that mention:^[336]

There was also apparent confirmation that the Kremlin possesses compromising information about Trump, 75, relating to 'certain events' during a visit to Moscow. A dossier compiled on Trump by Christopher Steele, a former MI6 officer, alleged in 2016 that Russian spies possessed video of him with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel. Trump has denied the allegation.

On August 25, 2024, Rolling Stone revealed that Danchenko "still believes – despite never having viewed it, despite his evidence really only being rumors and innuendo that he gathered but that many discredit – that there's a pee tape":^[210]

The rumor Danchenko says he heard during his half-dozen trips to Russia in 2016 goes like this: ... Trump, in Russia for the Miss Universe contest, was staying in the presidential suite at the Ritz-Carlton. It was the same suite Barack and Michelle Obama once stayed in. Trump was with some powerful Russian oligarchs, who brought the sex workers. According to Danchenko, several sources in Russia – sources he still won't reveal – told him rumors about what Trump did next: He instructed the sex workers to pee on the bed. ... 'They kind of had a laugh about it,' Danchenko continues. 'To me it sounds like this stupid college prank.' ... [He believes the] pee tape hijacked the dialogue of serious allegations about Russian influence with huge geopolitical importance. ... 'I still think there's some leverage they hold against Trump. You want to call it pee tape? Call it pee tape.'

Trump's previous knowledge of compromising tapes

[](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Trump_dossier#/media/File:Exhibit_38,_HPSCI.jpg)Exhibit 38. Texts between Rtskhiladze and Cohen starting on October 30, 2016.^[337]

:{The Senate Intelligence Committee report^[85] indicates that in late 2013 Trump learned of rumors about tapes of himself with prostitutes in Moscow, and "Footnote 112" in the Mueller Report suggests that Trump may have already heard that Russia had incriminating tapes of his behavior.^[310] "Footnote 112" describes how, on October 30, 2016, Michael Cohen exchanged a series of text messages ("Exhibit 38") with Giorgi Rtskhiladze, a friend and businessman who had worked with Cohen on Trump's real estate projects.

Rtskhiladze reported that he had successfully "Stopped flow of some tapes from Russia but not sure if there's anything else. Just so u know. ..."^[338] Rtskhiladze told Mueller's investigators that these were "compromising tapes of Trump rumored to be held by persons associated with the Russian real estate conglomerate Crocus Group, which had helped host the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Russia." Cohen told investigators "he spoke to Trump about the issue after receiving the texts from Rtskhiladze".^[310][339] Rolling Stone reported that "Rtskhiladze's description of the tapes' content tracks with the unverified information included in the Steele dossier".^[340]}:

Mueller's office "twice interviewed Rtskhiladze" (April 4, 2018, and May 10, 2018),^[310] and his story changed between interviews. "Footnote 112" covers both interviews. The footnote shows that Rtskhiladze later (May 10, 2018) changed his previous (April 4, 2018) testimony to Mueller^[341] by claiming that the "tapes were fake", but District Judge Christopher R. Cooper cast doubt on that claim. He said Rtskhiladze "undercut" his claim by speaking as if getting recorded was a real consequence of indiscretions committed around Agalarov/Crocus,^[342] and because Rtskhiladze's own words indicated "that the tapes may have been real":^[342]

As for Rtskhiladze's professed belief that the tapes were fake, that suggestion is somewhat undercut by Rtskhiladze's statement, only present in the Senate Report, suggesting that the tapes may have been real, and that they were 'what happens when you visit crocus I guess.'

Both Judge Cooper^[342] and the Senate Intelligence Committed seemed skeptical of the claim. The Senate report notes the lack of evidence for that claim in the partially blacked-out "Footnote 4281" that says "did not identify evidence of a later call from Khokhlov".^[85]: 660 

Cohen was deposed by the House Intelligence Committee, and he provided a history of the alleged tapes. He described the tapes stopped by Rtskhiladze as "the infamous pee tape when Mr. Trump was in Moscow for the Miss Universe Pageant". Cohen testified he became aware of the tape in "late 2013 or early 2014, shortly after the Miss Universe 2013 pageant and significantly prior to the 2016 U.S. election cycle" and told Trump about the rumor at that time. The Senate Report added that "Cohen ... would have been willing to pay [$20 million] ... to suppress the information if it could be verified, but Cohen was never shown any evidence."^{[85]: 659 [343}]

In "2014 or 2015", after learning of the rumor, Cohen asked Rtskhiladze for help "to find out if the tape was real",^[85]: 658  and on October 30, 2016, Rtskhiladze contacted Cohen with news that he had succeeded in stopping the tapes.^[339]

When Representative Jackie Speier asked Cohen about the tape: "It wasn't infamous then, was it?" he replied: "Yes, yes. That the tape – the conversation about the tape has gone back almost a couple months past when they were there for the Miss Universe Pageant that that tape existed." When Speier asked "So you're suggesting you've known about the rumors about this tape for many years before October 30th?" he replied that he had talked to "many people" about the pee tape over the years.^{[338]: 225–229, 235–236, 254 [344}]

It was only after the Steele dossier's publication in 2017 that Trump publicly mentioned the rumor and focused his ire on the dossier as if it were the creator of a new rumor. Some other sources did the same.^[345][346] Trump and some sources falsely claim Steele "made-up"^[346] the rumor or that it was "born" because of the dossier.^[345] In fact, Trump already knew about reports, "separate from" the much later Steele dossier, of "alleged compromising tapes of him in Moscow":^[85]: 945 

The Committee's Report also shows that prior to and during the campaign, Trump was informed of alleged compromising tapes of him in Moscow. These allegations are separate from Christopher Steele's reports, which were not used to support the Committee's work. The Committee found that the Russian intelligence services clearly engage in the collection of compromising information for leverage, and that there may be substance to some of the allegations regarding Trump, which leaves open an ongoing concern about Russian influence operations.

Role of Agalarovs

The Senate Intelligence Committee report implied that Aras Agalarov and his Crocus Group were part of a Russian intelligence effort to compromise and gain leverage over Trump.^[344]

On June 15, 2013, five months before the 2013 Miss Universe contest in Moscow, Trump was accompanied on a visit to the Las Vegas nightclub "The Act"^[333] by Crocus Group owner Aras Agalarov, his son Emin, Ike Kaveladze, Rob Goldstone, Michael Cohen, Keith Schiller, and others, where Trump was photographed^[323] and the group stayed "for several hours". The club featured "risque performances"^[334] and, according to Cohen, Trump watched a golden showers performance "with delight".^[347]

The Agalarovs were also linked to several other events involving Trump, including the invitation to share "dirt" on Clinton at the Trump Tower meeting^[348] and knowledge of Trump's alleged sexual activities in Russia, both in St. Petersburg and the Moscow Ritz-Carlton. The dossier's sources reported that Aras Agalarov "would know most of the details of what the Republican presidential candidate had got up to" in St. Petersburg.^[244] In 2013, when Trump stayed at the Ritz-Carlton hotel, "multiple sources" reported that the offer to "send five women to Trump's hotel room that night"^[323] came from a Russian who was accompanying Emin Agalarov".^[349] A footnote in the Mueller Report describes how Giorgi Rtskhiladze reported that he had successfully stopped the "flow of ... compromising tapes of Trump rumored to be held by persons associated with the Russian real estate conglomerate Crocus Group" [owned by Agalarov].^[339]

Trump viewed as under Putin's influence

The press conference at the 2018 summit in Helsinki, Finland, on July 16, 2018 (English version) 46 minutes

Dossier source(s) allege that the Russians possess kompromat on Trump that can be used to blackmail him, and that the Kremlin promised him the kompromat will not be used as long as he continues his cooperation with them.^[234][247] Trump's actions at the Helsinki summit in 2018 "led many to conclude that Steele's report was more accurate than not. ... Trump sided with the Russians over the U.S. intelligence community's assessment that Moscow had waged an all-out attack on the 2016 election. ... The joint news conference ... cemented fears among some that Trump was in Putin's pocket and prompted bipartisan backlash."^[229]

At the joint press conference, when asked directly about the subject, Putin denied having any kompromat on Trump. Even though Trump was reportedly given a "gift from Putin" the weekend of the pageant, Putin argued "that he did not even know Trump was in Russia for the Miss Universe pageant in 2013 when, according to the Steele dossier, video of Trump was secretly recorded to blackmail him."^[350]

In reaction to Trump's actions at the summit, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) spoke in the Senate: "Millions of Americans will continue to wonder if the only possible explanation for this dangerous and inexplicable behavior is the possibility—the very real possibility—that President Putin holds damaging information over President Trump."^[351]

Several operatives and lawyers in the U.S. intelligence community reacted strongly to Trump's performance at the summit. They described it as "subservien[ce] to Putin" and a "fervent defense of Russia's military and cyber aggression around the world, and its violation of international law in Ukraine" which they saw as "harmful to US interests". They also suggested he was either a "Russian asset" or a "useful idiot" for Putin,^[352] and that he looked like "Putin's puppet".^[353] Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper wondered "if Russians have something on Trump",^[354] and former CIA director John Brennan, who has accused Trump of "treason", tweeted: "He is wholly in the pocket of Putin."^[355]

Former acting CIA director Michael Morell has called Trump "an unwitting agent of the Russian federation", and former CIA director Michael V. Hayden said Trump was a "useful fool" who is "manipulated by Moscow".^[356] House Speaker Nancy Pelosi questioned Trump's loyalty when she asked him: "[Why do] all roads lead to Putin?"^[357]

Former KGB major Yuri Shvets asserts that Trump has been cultivated as an "asset" by Russian intelligence since 1977: "Russian intelligence gained an interest in Trump as far back as 1977, viewing Trump as an exploitable target."^[270][269]

Trump was not viewed as an actual agent (spy) but as an asset: "We're talking about Trump being a self-interested businessman who's happy to do a favour if it works to his own best interests."^[358]

Ynet, an Israeli online news site, reported on January 12, 2017, that U.S. intelligence advised Israeli intelligence officers to be cautious about sharing information with the incoming Trump administration, until the possibility of Russian influence over Trump, suggested by Steele's report, has been fully investigated.^[359]

Max Boot^[360] described what he sees as more "evidence of Trump's subservience to Putin", and he tied it to new government confirmations of rumors about Trump's alleged "dalliances with Russian women during visits to Moscow" that leave "him open to blackmail", rumors mentioned in the 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee report: While the Senate Intelligence Committee report extensively explored the possibility of Russian kompromat, much of the discussion was redacted in the public version of the report. Ultimately, the Senate Intelligence Committee "did not establish" that Russia had kompromat on Trump.^[334]

On the subject of kompromat, Bruce Ohr testified to the House Judiciary and Oversight committees that on July 30, 2016, Steele told him that "Russian intelligence believed 'they had Trump over a barrel' ... [a] broader sentiment [that] is echoed in Steele's dossier".^[361][362] Paul Wood described the source as "another Danchenko contact, a 'former senior intelligence officer now a Kremlin official'. This was later said to be no less than a former head of Russia's foreign intelligence services. This source did not talk specifically about the "pee tape" but, Danchenko told Steele, he said they had sexual kompromat on Trump going back years. 'We've got him over a barrel.'"^[14]

Kremlin's "Romanian" hackers and use of WikiLeaks, and Trump campaign reaction

Dossier source(s) allege that "Romanian hackers" controlled by Putin hacked the DNC servers and that the Trump campaign cooperated with Russia.^[118][68]

Russian hackers used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and claimed to be Romanian, like Marcel Lazar Lehel, the Romanian hacker who originally used the "Guccifer" pseudonym.^{[363][364][365}]

The Mueller Report confirmed that the dossier was correct that the Kremlin was behind the appearance of the DNC emails on WikiLeaks, noting that the Trump campaign "showed interest in WikiLeaks's releases of documents and welcomed their potential to damage candidate Clinton".^[339] It was later confirmed that Roger Stone was in contact with WikiLeaks.^[301][302]

Timing of release of hacked emails

Dossier source(s) allege that Carter Page "conceived and promoted" the idea of [the Russians] leaking the stolen DNC emails to WikiLeaks during the 2016 Democratic National Convention^[251][240] for the purpose of swinging supporters of Bernie Sanders "away from Hillary CLINTON and across to TRUMP".^[251][250] (Reports 95, 102)

In July 2016, in an "error-ridden message", WikiLeaks urged Russian intelligence to act swiftly to reach this timeline goal: "If you have anything hillary related we want it in the next tweo days prefable because the DNC is approaching, and she will solidify bernie supporters behind her after."^[364] The New York Times reported that Assange told Democracy Now! "he had timed their release to coincide with the Democratic convention".^[366]

The leaks started the day before the DNC national convention, a timing that was seen as suspicious by David Shedd, a former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who said: "The release of emails just as the Democratic National Convention is getting underway this week has the hallmarks of a Russian active measures campaign."^[367]

Manafort and kickback payments from Yanukovych

Dossier source(s) allege that Russia-friendly president Yanukovych, whom Manafort advised for over a decade, had told Putin he had been making supposedly untraceable^[27] kickback payments to Manafort.^[27] After Yanukovych fled to Russia in 2014 under accusations of corruption, a secret "black ledger" was found in the former Party of Regions headquarters. It showed that Yanukovych and his ruling political party had set aside $12.7 million in illegal and undisclosed payments to Manafort for his work from 2007 to 2012.^[368] Manafort has denied receiving the payments.^[369] Manafort was accused of receiving $750,000 in "illegal, off-the-books payments from Ukraine's pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych before he was toppled".^[370]

From 2006 to at least 2009, Manafort had a $10 million annual contract with Putin ally and aluminum magnate, Oleg Deripaska, a contract under which Manafort had proposed he would "influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and former Soviet republics to benefit President Vladimir Putin's government".^[371]

Page met with Rosneft officials

Carter Page (2017)Igor Sechin (2016).

On November 2, 2017, Carter Page testified, without a lawyer, for more than six hours before the House Intelligence Committee that was investigating Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. He testified about his five-day trip to Moscow in July 2016.^[372] According to his testimony, before leaving he informed Jeff Sessions, J. D. Gordon, Hope Hicks, and Corey Lewandowski, Trump's campaign manager, of the planned trip to Russia, and Lewandowski approved the trip, responding: "If you'd like to go on your own, not affiliated with the campaign, you know, that's fine."^[261][373]

Dossier source(s) allege that Page secretly met Rosneft chairman Igor Sechin on that July trip.^[236] Page denied meeting Sechin or any Russian officials during that trip,^[374][375] but he later admitted under oath that he met with Sechin's senior aide, Andrey Baranov, who was Rosneft's chief of investor relations.^[376][54] According to Harding, Baranov was "almost certainly" "relaying Sechin's wishes".^[377] David Corn and Michael Isikoff wrote that the FBI was not able to find evidence that Page met with Sechin or was offered a 19 percent stake in the giant energy conglomerate in exchange for the lifting of U.S. sanctions and that "Mueller's report noted that his 'activities in Russia ... were not fully explained'".^[179] Newsweek has listed the claim about Page meeting with Rosneft officials as "verified".^[378]

Jane Mayer said this part of the dossier seems true, even if the name of an official may have been wrong.^[72] Page's congressional testimony confirmed he met with Andrey Baranov, who was Rosneft's chief of investor relations,^[376] and Page conceded under questioning by Adam Schiff that the "potential sale of a significant percentage of Rosneft" might have been "briefly mentioned".^[72][379] However, Page insisted that "there was never any negotiations, or any quid pro quo, or any offer, or any request even, in any way related to sanctions".^[380]

CNN noted that his admissions to the House Intelligence Committee did confirm the Steele dossier was right about Page attending high-level meetings with Russians and possibly discussing "a sale of a stake in Rosneft", even though he denied doing so at the time.^[381][382] In April 2019, the Mueller Report concluded that their investigation did not establish that Page coordinated with Russia's interference efforts.^[382]

On February 11, 2021, Page lost a defamation suit he had filed against Yahoo! News and HuffPost for their articles that described his activities mentioned in the Steele dossier.^[383] According to Jeff Montgomery in Law360: "Judge Craig A Karsnitz ruled that the articles ... were either true or protected under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act." Mike Leonard, writing for Bloomberg Law, quoted Judge Karsnitz: "The article simply says that U.S. intelligence agencies were investigating reports of plaintiff's meetings with Russian officials, which Plaintiff admits is true."^[384]

Brokerage of Rosneft privatization

Dossier source(s) allege that Sechin "offered PAGE/TRUMP's associates the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatised) stake in Rosneft" (worth about $11 billion) in exchange for Trump lifting the sanctions against Russia after his election.^{[259][239][234][260][261}]

According to Harding, Sechin and Divyekin set this offer up as a carrot and stick scheme, in which the carrot was the brokerage fee ("in the region of tens and possibly hundreds of millions of dollars"), and the stick was blackmail over purported "damaging material on Trump" held by the Russian leadership.^[377]

About a month after Trump won the election, according to The Guardian, Carter Page traveled to Moscow "shortly before the company announced it was selling a 19.5% stake" in Rosneft. He met with top Russian officials at Rosneft but denied meeting Sechin. He also complained about the effects of the sanctions against Russia.^[385]

On December 7, 2016, Putin announced that a 19.5% stake in Rosneft was sold to Glencore and a Qatar fund. Public records showed the ultimate owner included "a Cayman Islands company whose beneficial owners cannot be traced", with "the main question" being "Who is the real buyer of a 19.5 percent stake in Rosneft? ... the Rosneft privatization uses a structure of shell companies owning shell companies."^[386]

Michael Horowitz's 2019 inspector general report "said Steele's claims about Page 'remained uncorroborated' when the wiretaps ended in 2017".^[223][387]

Trump's attempts to lift sanctions

The dossier says Page, claiming to speak with Trump's authority, had confirmed that Trump would lift the existing sanctions against Russia if he were elected president.^[234] On December 29, 2016, during the transition period between the election and the inauguration, National Security Advisor designate Flynn spoke to Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, urging him not to retaliate for newly imposed sanctions; the Russians took his advice and did not retaliate.^[388]

Within days after the inauguration, new Trump administration officials ordered State Department staffers to develop proposals for immediately revoking the economic and other sanctions.^[389] One retired diplomat later said, "What was troubling about these stories is that suddenly I was hearing that we were preparing to rescind sanctions in exchange for, well, nothing."^[390] The staffers alerted Congressional allies who took steps to codify the sanctions into law. The attempt to overturn the sanctions was abandoned after Flynn's conversation was revealed and Flynn resigned.^{[389][391][242}] In August 2017, Congress passed a bipartisan bill to impose new sanctions on Russia. Trump reluctantly signed the bill but then refused to implement it.^[392] After Trump hired Manafort, his approach toward Ukraine changed; he said he might recognize Crimea as Russian territory and might lift the sanctions against Russia.^[285]

Among those sanctioned were Russian oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska, "who is linked to Paul Manafort", parliament member Konstantin Kosachev, banker Aleksandr Torshin, and Putin's son-in-law. Preparation for the sanctions started already before Trump took office.^[393] In January 2019, Trump's Treasury Department lifted the sanctions on companies formerly controlled by Deripaska. Sanctions on Deripaska himself remained in effect.^[394]

Cohen and alleged Prague visit

Dossier source(s) allege that Cohen and three colleagues met Kremlin officials in the Prague offices of Rossotrudnichestvo in August 2016,^{[258][234][119}] to arrange for payments to the hackers, cover up the hack,^[118][68] and "cover up ties between Trump and Russia, including Manafort's involvement in Ukraine".^[27] McClatchy reported in 2018 that a phone of Cohen's was traced to the Prague area in late summer 2016.^[395] The April 2019 Mueller Report states "Cohen had never traveled to Prague".^[396] The December 2019 Horowitz Report stated that the FBI "concluded that these allegations against Cohen" in the dossier "were not true".^[35]: 176 ...

---

DEEP STATE BS 2 25

mma

February 19, 2025, edition of The Benny Show, streamed on YouTube

BENNY JOHNSON (HOST): Julie, good morning to you and a very lovely morning. We are one step closer to Kash Patel. Let's begin with that. A very squishy 48-45 vote to — for cloture and to bring an executive session forward. Do you have any reporting that says that we may need to do extra work or arm twisting in the Senate for Kash?

JULIE KELLY (GUEST): Not that I see, but, of course, something like that is always possible. You do have — look, this is the appointment, Benny, as you know that the deep state, the ruling class is most afraid of. So I'm sure they are twisting arms as heavily as they possibly can to get some, defectors, Republican defectors, but they will pay a price if anyone prevents the confirmation of Kash Patel.

Because as you noted, he himself has been a victim of the lawfare, political lawfare by the previous Department of Justice. He has had a front row seat to all of this dating back to his work on, Devin Nunes' intelligence committee. He is the one that really found the ties between the DNC, Hillary Clinton campaign, Fusion GPS, all tied to the Steele dossier. So he's got — but he's a professional, as you know, Benny. He's a very serious individual. He was a public defender and a prosecutor. So, he is going to exhume all the skeletons out of the FBI, hold people accountable, and clean up that agency to the extent that it's even possible.

---

---

newsweek

Joe Rogan Fact Checks Himself Over His Hillary Clinton Remark

Published May 24, 2024 at 1:42 PM EDTUpdated May 24, 2024

Joe Rogan Rips New York Governor Over Black People Remark

By Shannon Power

Pop Culture & Entertainment Reporter

Joe Rogan decided to tread with caution during a recent episode of his podcast when he made an accusation against former presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton.

He was discussing politics and corruption with his guest and comedian Dave Smith when he referenced the "Steele Dossier" that alleged her 2016 presidential opponent Donald Trump had nefarious links to the Russian government. The opposition research report has largely been discredited.

In the conversation on The Joe Rogan Experience, the podcaster alleged that research for the dossier had been paid for by Clinton herself. Newsweek has contacted Rogan's podcast via email.

"How about the fact that Clinton funded the Steele Dossier?" asked Rogan as he laughed. But before continuing with the conversation, Rogan asked his producer to check. "Let's confirm that the Clinton campaign funded the Steele Dossier."

A few minutes later, Rogan's producer pulls up an Associated Press story from March 31, 2022. Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee agreed to pay $113,000 to settle a Federal Election Commission investigation into whether they violated campaign finance law by misreporting spending on research that eventually became the dossier, the AP reported.

The Steele Dossier was released in January 2017, days before Trump was sworn in and alleged that Russia had been cultivating him for years. The dossier also alleged that Trump campaign figures worked with Russian officials to find damaging information about his opponent. Large portions of the report have not been substantiated.

It was an unfinished report compiled by the former British spy Christopher Steele and published by Buzzfeed News. Steele was hired by Washington political research firm Fusion GPS after it was reportedly employed by an unknown GOP client during the primary.

Fusion GPS was also hired to investigate Trump's ties to Russia by law firm Perkins Coie, which was engaged by Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

READ MORE Hillary Clinton

In the years since its release, there has been much scrutiny over the report's accuracy, with some parts found to be inaccurate or untrue, but other parts have been proven to be true. Those verified portions of the dossier include Russia's meddling in the 2016 elections and its obtaining compromising information on Clinton and the DNC, which was released through WikiLeaks. It found that Russian President Vladimir Putin directly ordered foreign interference in U.S. elections to explicitly help Trump and that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort received payment for Ukraine lobbying efforts.

In 2022, the FEC found that Clinton's campaign and the DNC had obscured payments through Perkins Coie and by publicly disclosing the payments to the firm as legal costs had covered up the true purpose of those payments.

===

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2 24 an

former President Donald Trump was just handed another loss in court – this time in the United Kingdom.

Bloomberg reported Thursday that a judge in the UK ruled against the former president in his lawsuit against former MI-6 agent Christopher Steele and his intelligence firm, Orbis, which assembled a 2016 dossier alleging Trump and his campaign were compromised by Vladimir Putin's regime.

Trump filed the lawsuit seeking both compensation for "significant damage and distress" as well as a statement from the court that the allegations in the dossier were false. However, Judge Karen Steyn was unmoved by his argument, stating that the ex-president was "seeking court findings to vindicate his reputation in circumstances where has not been able to formulate any viable remedy which he would have a real prospect of obtaining."

The Steele dossier — commissioned by a firm contracting with the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign — famously included allegations that Trump paid Russian sex workers to urinate on a bed that former President Barack Obama had once slept on. Even though the media has since moved on, Trump has continued to revive the "golden showers" rumor on multiple occasions. New York Magazine reported that Trump insisted he was "not into golden showers" during a Senate Republican retreat, though no one had brought up the subject.

Late last year, as he was in and out of the courtroom for his civil fraud trial in New York, Trump again referenced the rumor on the campaign trail.

"It started with Russia, Russia, Russia, remember that?" Trump said. "He was with four hookers. You think that was good that night to go up and tell my wife, 'It's not true, darling, I love you very much. It's not true!' Actually, that one she didn’t believe, 'cause she said, 'He’s a germophobe; he’s not into that. He’s not into golden showers, as they say they called it, he’s not.'"

Orbis lawyers shrugged off Trump's unsuccessful lawsuit as a "vendetta" by a plaintiff with a penchant for "harassing perceived enemies and others against whom he bears a grudge."

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an 10 23

in addition to four criminal indictments, Donald Trump is facing a variety of civil lawsuits. But the former president has filed some civil lawsuits himself. One of them is in the U.K., where Trump is suing British ex-spy Christopher Steele's companyOrbis Business Intelligence because of the hotly debated Steele Dossier of 2016.

The Steele Dossier is controversial even among Trump's critics, alleging that Trump was seriously compromised by his connections to Russia. Steele once ran the Russian desk for MI6, the U.K.'s foreign intelligence division.

The Guardian's Haroon Siddique, in an article published on October 18, reports that according to a British court document, Trump's "decision to declassify evidence" given by Steele about Trump's "alleged links with Russia led to the disappearance of two Russian sources."

"Trump is attempting to sue Orbis Business Intelligence in England over the dossier, which alleged that he engaged in 'perverted sexual behavior' and paid bribes to Russian officials to further his business interests," Siddique explains. "The former president is claiming breach of his data protection rights and says the dossier's claims against him were 'false' and 'phony' and caused him reputational damage and distress."

Siddique continues, "In his witness statement, Steele said the decision to declassify his testimony, taken on Trump's last day in office, resulted in several Russian sources being exposed and suffering 'varying consequences.'"

Buzzfeed published the Steele dossier in 2017, the year Trump was sworn in as president. Trump, according to Siddique, "accepts" that "Orbis was not legally responsible for this and is suing over the company's dissemination of it to three individuals."

Siddique reports, "Orbis, which is seeking to have the claim struck out before it goes to trial, argues it has been brought too late and for the 'illegitimate' purpose 'of harassing Orbis and Mr. Steele and pursuing longstanding grievances.' Robert Mueller's report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election made clear that the Trump campaign was 'receptive' to offers of assistance from the Russians, but it did not find evidence of a criminal conspiracy."

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does not state what was false?

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wow, contrast fox:

Senate Intel says FBI gave 'unjustified credence' to Steele dossier, Russia 'took advantage' of Trump trans...

The Senate Intelligence Committee found that the FBI gave the unverified anti-Trump dossier “unjustified credence,” and that Russia “took ...

5 hours ago

Washington Post

Trump’s 2016 campaign chair was a ‘grave counterintelligence threat,’ had repeated contact with Russian intelligence, Senate panel finds

The Senate Intelligence Committee has released the fifth and final volume of its report into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

---

wapo: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/senate-intelligence-trump-russia-report/2020/08/18/62a7573e-e093-11ea-b69b-64f7b0477ed4_story.html

no lnx

National Security

Trump’s 2016 campaign chair was a ‘grave counterintelligence threat,’ had repeated contact with Russian intelligence, Senate panel finds

By

Karoun Demirjian and

Ellen Nakashima

August 18, 2020

President Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman posed a “grave counterintelligence threat” due to his interaction with people close to the Kremlin, according to a bipartisan Senate report released Tuesday that found extensive contacts between key campaign advisers and officials affiliated with Moscow’s government and intelligence services.

In its report, the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee states that Trump’s then-campaign chair Paul Manafort worked with a Russian intelligence officer “on narratives that sought to undermine evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election,” including the idea that purported Ukrainian election interference was of greater concern.

It found that a Russian attorney who met with Manafort, along with the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and his son-in-law Jared Kushner at Trump Tower in 2016, had “significant connections” to the Kremlin. The information she offered them was also “part of a broader influence operation targeting the United States that was coordinated, at least in part with elements of the Russian government,” the report stated.

But the panel also concluded that the FBI’s handling of Russian threats to the election was “flawed” and that the bureau gave “unjustified credence” to allegations about Trump’s Russia ties made in a dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, “based on an incomplete understanding of Steele’s past reporting record.”

Document: Read the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election]

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s three-and-a-half year investigation stands as Congress’s only bipartisan examination of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The panel, significantly, agreed that the FBI overestimated Steel’s reliability and that Manafort and other aides exposed the campaign to undue Russian influence. But its leaders were noticeably divided along party lines in how they interpreted the report’s significance, and several committee members — including its acting chairman Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — endorsed dissenting conclusions about Trump’s own culpability.

The partisan divisions are a sign that the panel’s tome likely will not put to rest the political wrangling over how seriously to treat foreign interference in U.S. democracy as the country heads into its most divisive election in modern history.

“After more than three years of investigation by this Committee, we can now say with no doubt, there was no collusion,” a group of six panel Republicans, including Rubio, wrote in a statementinstead accusing the Democratic Party of coordinating with foreign actors to produce Steele’s dossier.

“In 2016, the Democratic Party, using a series of arm’s length transactions, hired a foreign citizen to seek out dirt on a political opponent, provided by foreign sources,” the Republicans wrote, attacking the FBI for “sloppy work and poor judgment.”

Five Democrat senators ­— including Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), the party’s 2020 vice-presidential nominee — asserted the report “unambiguously shows that members of the Trump Campaign cooperated with Russian efforts to get Trump elected.” Referring specifically to their findings on Manafort, the Democrats wrote, “This is what collusion looks like.”

The intelligence committee’s vice chairman, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), who did not sign onto the Democrats’ dissenting views, noted “a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives that is a very real counterintelligence threat to our elections,” and he encouraged “all Americans to carefully review the documented evidence of the unprecedented and massive intervention campaign waged on behalf of then-candidate Donald Trump by Russians and their operatives and to reach their own independent conclusions.”

The committee’s past chairman Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who oversaw the bulk of the investigation and also steered clear of the GOP’s dissent, struck a position in the middle.

“One of the Committee’s most important — and overlooked — findings is that much of Russia’s activities weren’t related to producing a specific electoral outcome, but attempted to undermine our faith in the democratic process itself,” he said in a statement. “Their aim is to sow chaos, discord, and distrust. Their efforts are not limited to elections. The threat is ongoing.”

Senate panel told Justice Dept. of suspicions over Trump family members’ Russia testimony

Burr and Warner launched the committee’s probe before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 and sustained the bipartisan investigation over the following three and a half years, even as other Congressional investigations into the same matter faltered along partisan lines. Since the Senate Intelligence Committee began its probe, former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III also released a 448-page report on Russian interference in the 2016 election — and Trump was impeached and acquitted after Democrats accused him of coercing Ukrainian leaders to interfere in the 2020 election.

Though the committee’s probe covers much of the same turf as Mueller’s investigation, it was different in nature. Mueller was running a criminal probe; the Senate committee was conducting an intelligence investigation — a distinction that helps to explain some of nuanced differences between their conclusions.

The Senate panel’s probe, which was mostly driven by the committee’s bipartisan staff, included more than 200 witnesses and considered evidence relating to Russian disinformation, Trump’s personal, business and campaign contacts with Russians and the transition period following the 2016 election.

At one point, the document all but concludes that Trump aides were duped and manipulated by Russian interests they were too callow to understand.

“Russian officials, intelligence services, and others” acting in concert with the Kremlin “were capable of exploiting the transition team’s shortcomings,” the report concluded. “Based on the available information, it is possible — and even likely — that they did so.”

The report also presents a damning portrait of the Trump campaign’s hasty move in March 2016 to assemble a foreign policy team, asserting that it had recruited inexperienced people without thoroughly vetting them and thus potentially exposed itself to Russian influence.

“Ultimately,” the committee wrote, “the foreign policy team exposed the Trump Campaign to significant counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”

The committee pointed to Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos, who attempted to secure a face-to-face meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin through “highly suspicious” contacts with people close to the Russian government. Ultimately, investigators concluded, Papadopoulos “was not a witting co-optee of the Russian the Russian intelligence services. The panel also found that while Russia seemed to show an interest in campaign adviser Carter Page, investigators “found no indication that Page had useful Campaign information for the Russian intelligence services to extract, nor meaningful influence for them to exploit.”

The committee did find however that Putin personally directed the 2016 hack-and-leak campaign targeting the Democratic Party, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Clinton campaign. The anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks “actively sought and played a key role in the Russian campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort,” the report stated, surmising that a Russian military spy agency, known as the GRU, transferred hacked emails to WikiLeaks likely because it offered a more effective platform for publicity than the GRU’s own methods.

Yet investigators could not “reliably determine the extent of authentic, nonpublic knowledge” Trump’s friend Roger Stone had about WikiLeaks’s coming releases and shared with the campaign.

The panel noted that its investigation was hampered by several witnesses’ refusing interviews and to produce documents, citing Fifth Amendment rights that protect against self incrimination. These included Stone, Manafort and Rick Gates, the campaign’s deputy chair at that time. The panel’s request to interview Julian Assange was rebuffed.

The committee also outright accused Blackwater founder and Trump supporter Erik Prince of stonewalling its investigation, saying that it was “hampered by a lack of cooperation” and that his account of a controversial 2017 meeting in the Seychelles alongside a Russian official was “brief and deceptive.”

The committee previously released other volumes detailing aspects of its inquiry. Those reports focused on U.S. election security, Russia’s use of social media in disinformation campaigns, the Obama administration’s response to the perceived threat in 2016 and the intelligence community’s joint assessment that Russia had interfered in an attempt to tip the scales in Trump’s favor.

Yet the panel’s effort to maintain a bipartisan approach has not saved it from partisan scrutiny. Last year, the panel came under fire from Senate Republicans after issuing a subpoena for Donald Trump Jr. to come in for a second round of testimony.

After his testimony, Trump Jr. was one of several witnesses that the panel referred to the Justice Department for closer scrutiny over discrepancies between their testimony and that of Gates, the ex-deputy campaign chair who was a key witness in Mueller’s probe.

Earlier this year, Burr stepped aside as panel chairman after coming under scrutiny over stocks he sold in industries hit badly by the coronavirus pandemic. Rubio has been serving as acting chairman in his place.

===...

...dismissed as a tissue of fabrications by allies of President Donald Trump after its publication in January, but the infamous Trump-Russia dossier continues to generate controversy.

In recent weeks, the dossier containing lurid claims about the president's alleged ensnarement by Russian intelligence has again become the subject of fierce contention between Democrats and the GOP.

Republicans have claimed the document, compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, had been exposed as a partisan smear after evidence emerged that the Clinton campaign had funded its research by Washington, D.C., firm Fusion GPS. But on Friday,*The New York Times*reported that GOP super donor Paul Singer's Washington Free Beacon website was the first to engage Fusion GPS to probe Trump's background.

Singer's involvement has reportedly enraged Trump. Populist firebrand and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon promised the president in a telephone conversation that he was going "off the chain" to attack Singer, Axios reported Sunday.

The development lays bare the conflict at the heart of the Republican Party, with Singer one of several establishment party figures Bannon has pledged to wage war against in his capacity as Trump's enforcer. GOP opponents of Trump were the earliest funders of the research behind the dossier, *Mother Jones* reported in October, 2016, and renegadeSenator John McCain has confirmed in a January statement that he passed a copy of the dossier to the FBI.

Billionaire hedge fund manager Singer is a longtime GOP activist and has donated tens of millions to Republican groups, candidates and causes. He donated $24 million to Republican and conservative groups in the 2016 election alone, with $10.6 million donated in 2014 and $2.8 million in 2012, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Singer backed MarcoRubio in the 2015 Republican primaries, and after Trump's election he made peace with the president, donating $1 million to the inaugural committee and significant sums to groups lobbying for Trump's Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch.

At a Bloomberg event in June, Singer enthused about the president's fiscal policies and saidhe and Trump "chatted a bit about taxes and economic policy" during a White House visit.

The Free Beacon denies funding research that contributed to the Russia dossier and said it told Fusion GPS to stop researching Trump when he clinched the Republican nomination in May 2016.

Friday's report, however, may mean that he is now in the crosshairs of Steve Bannon, as back at the helm of the Breitbart news network he wages "war" on the establishment GOP he accuses of being out to derail the president's populist agenda.

---

==

https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/11/21/devin-nunes-bills-taxpayers-63000-for-a-jaunt-to-europe-chasing-lev-parnas-disinformation/

NUNES BILLED TAXPAYERS $63,000 FOR A JAUNT TO EUROPE CHASING ACCUSED FRAUDSTER LEV PARNAS’ DISINFORMATION

November 21, 2019/35 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, 2020 Presidential Election, Impeachment /by emptywheel

Betsy Woodruff Swan just put the maraschino cherry on the impeachment sundae with this story describing how Lev Parnas served as tour guide for a trip Devin Nunes, failed NSC staffer Derek Harvey, and two other House Intelligence staffers took to Europe last year.

Lev Parnas, an indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani, helped arrange meetings and calls in Europe for Rep. Devin Nunes in 2018, Parnas’  lawyer Ed MacMahon told The Daily Beast.

Nunes aide Derek Harvey participated in the meetings, the lawyer said, which were arranged to help Nunes’ investigative work. MacMahon didn’t specify what those investigations entailed.

Nunes is the top Republican on the House committee handling the impeachment hearings—hearings where Parnas’s name has repeatedly come up.

Congressional records show Nunes traveled to Europe from Nov. 30 to Dec. 3, 2018. Three of his aides—Harvey, Scott Glabe, and George Pappas—traveled with him, per the records. U.S. government funds paid for the group’s four-day trip, which cost just over $63,000.

The travel came as Nunes, in his role on the House Intelligence Committee, was working to investigate the origins of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian election meddling.

There’s much that’s crazy about the story: The inclusion of Harvey, a Mike Flynn loyalist who got fired from NSC; the role of Parnas’ lawyer, Ed MacMahon (who seems to be aiming to discomfort as many of the powerful people Parnas interacted with as possible); and the release of this story at the end of a week during which Nunes offered debunked conspiracy after debunked conspiracy in a bid to defend Trump.

But it’s the timing of the trip I find most interesting. While I’m sure Swan has a reason to invoke Nunes’ efforts to undercut Mueller, the trip actually comes long after HPSCI had moved on from trying to confuse about the Russian investigation. The effort had been picked up by a joint House Judiciary/Oversight effort; and even that was largely over by December 2018. Just as interestingly, the trip came after Republicans got shellacked in mid-term elections but before Democrats took over in the House. That is, this seems like a last ditch effort to chase down something that accused fraudster Lev Parnas was dangling in front of easy marks, while Nunes still had unfettered ability to squander taxpayer funds.

Devin Nunes has spent 2.5 years squealing that a respected Russian expert, Christopher Steele, shared information with DOJ with our own experts on organized crime, because that information was paid for by DNC. But he’s now billing taxpayers to chase after disinformation from an obvious grifter.

Tags: Derek Harvey, Devin Nunes, Lev Parnas, Mike Flynn

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ref

https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/11/14/devin-nunes-calls-an-experienced-organized-crime-researcher-funded-by-paul-singer-a-democratic-operative/

blog?

NUNES CALLS AN EXPERIENCED ORGANIZED CRIME RESEARCHER FUNDED BY PAUL SINGER A DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVE

November 14, 2019/64 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, 2020 Presidential Election, Impeachment, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

There’s a key part of Devin Nunes and Mark Meadows’ defense of the President yesterday that deserves far more attention, both for the way it distorts the factual record and how it suggests that simply being an expert on Russian and Ukrainian organized crime makes one a Democratic operative.

At issue is their bid to make the impeachment inquiry about Nellie Ohr, whom they’ve past falsely suggested had a role in mainlining the Steele dossier into DOJ and FBI. They’ve brought Nellie, the spouse of a key DOJ expert on organized crime, Bruce Ohr, back into their narrative by claiming she testified to Congress that Fusion GPS relied on Ukrainian sources. The idea is that Ohr’s testimony would prove that Trump had good reason to think Ukraine had it in for him in 2016, so could rightly ask Ukraine to investigate whether that amounted to tampering in the election.

Here’s how Nunes laid it out in his demand that Ohr be called to testify:

Nellie Ohr, former contractor for opposition research firm Fusion GPS. In a 2018 interview with the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees, Ms. Ohr stated that, during her work with Fusion GPS that ultimately assisted in the production of the Steele dossier–comprising false allegations against then-candidate Trump–Fusion GPS used information from sources in Ukraine, including Serhiy Leshchenko who recently lost his post from the Ukrainian parliament. Given President Trump’s documented belief that the Ukrainian government meddled in the 2016 election to oppose his candidacy, which forms the basis for a reasonable desire for Ukraine to investigate the circumstances surrounding the election and any potential Ukrainian involvement, Ms. Ohr is a prime fact witness who can assist Congress and the American public in better understanding the facts and circumstances surrounding Ukrainian involvement in the 2016 election.

In his demand, Nunes helpfully provides a footnote, to make it easy to see how many errors he makes in this paragraph. Here’s the passage of Ohr’s testimony before Congress that, Nunes falsely claims, backs his insinuations that Ohr tampered in the 2016 campaign.

GOP counsel Ryan Breitenbach is questioning her.

Q Was there indication from [her boss at Fusion GPS, Jake] Berkowitz or [Glenn] Simpson that they had any inside information as to whether there were suspicious connections with any of President Trump’s orbit of individuals including his family?

A What do you mean by “inside information”?

Q I would say any information that they specifically gave you, in terms of your employment with Fusion GPS, that would indicate that there were some level of connections with President Trump’s family and Russia?

A They would give me leads based on their open-source research and, you know, legal documents and other things.

Q Did they ever indicate that any of their leads were based off of sources of theirs?

A I don’t remember get- — regarding the Trump family, no.

Q Regarding any of the research during this year, 10-, 11-month period, was any — was any research based off of sources of theirs that you were aware of?

A Yes.

Q And who were the sources?

A I recall a — they were mentioning someone named Serhiy Leshchenko, a Ukrainian.

Q And did they give you any indication as to Leshchenko’s connections with them, how they got to know him? Were they doing work for him?

A With Fusion GPS?

Q Correct.

A I am not aware of how they —

Q Were you aware of how they had a connection with him?

A I am not aware.

Q But you were aware that he was a source of information that was leading to information that they had, that they were then presenting to you as reasons for following up on opposition research or what research —

A Yes.

Q — that is, on President Trump or his family?

A My understanding is that some — yes. And — yes, it was not necessarily on his family that Leshchenko’s research was on.

Q Are you aware of what his research, or what his source information included?

A His source information, I am not aware.

Q You are just aware that he was a source of —

A Yes.

Q — Glenn Simpson? Or was it a source of Mr. Berkowitz? Or both?

A I am not aware of a differentiation between them. Just a source for Fusion GPS.

Q That is one source. Were there any other sources that you were aware of?

A I don’t think so. I don’t recall that there were.

Q And were you aware of Mr. Leshchenko prior to him being mentioned to you as a potential source of their information?

A Yes.

Q In what way?

A He is very well-known, Ukrainian, anti-corruption activist. So I had read about him in the press.

Q Had you studied him before?

A What do you mean by “studied”?

Q Performed independent research for any prior employer.

A No. I followed him in the — you know, if I saw him mentioned in the press, I read — I read about it.

Q And previous to this particular incoming knowledge from Mr. Simpson or just from Fusion GPS, were you aware of any connections between Mr. Leshchenko — am I saying that name, by the way?

A Yes.

Q — Mr. Leshchenko and President Trump, or anyone in President Trump’s familial orbit or even friendly orbit?

A I was unaware of any connections before that. [my emphasis]

Before this colloquy, Ohr had already testified that she had “no reason to believe” that her work was integrated into the Steele dossier at all. Democratic staffers walked her through passage after passage in the Steele dossier and asked her if her work had provided background for it, which she said it did not. She also had already explained (to both Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows in separate interactions directly) that she, “did online open source research using Russian sources, media, social media, government, you know, business registers, legal databases, all kinds of things.” Ohr’s testimony was backed by Glenn Simpson’s earlier appearances before Congress — including an appearance before HPSCI that Nunes attended; Simpson also said his own research was based off open source research.

Moreover, both the reports Nellie did (PDF 216 to 299) and a table she put together on Trump and his flunkies’ ties to suspect Russians show that the bulk of her research for Fusion preceded the time when Christopher Steele was working on the dossier. Significantly, that means much of Nellie Ohr’s work was paid by GOP billionaire Paul Singer, not the DNC.

So in this passage, Nellie Ohr is talking leads she got from her boss at Fusion, Jake Berkowitz, based off open source research he had done, that she would use to do more open source research, for a project mostly paid for by a Republican billionaire interested in the ties between Trump and Russian organized crime.

And what the passage shows is that:

• Ohr said the information from Berkowitz came from open source reporting
• She described herself getting information on Serhiy Leshchenko’s efforts, because he was a very well-known anti-corruption activist who was covered in the press
• She twice said she was not aware of how Berkowitz and Simpson got their information from Leshchenko
• She also said she didn’t know where Leshchenko got his information
• Ohr said that Leshchenko’s reporting wasn’t focused on the Trump family (it almost certainly was focused on Paul Manafort, about whom Ohr wrote a detailed timeline)

In short, the transcript Nunes says supports a demand that Ohr testify does no such thing. Instead, it shows that this side of Fusion’s work relied on open source reporting, and that information on Leshchenko’s efforts was available via open sources. It also shows that Ohr repeatedly denied knowing whether the Fusion focus on Leshchenko was based on anything but open source reporting.

This transcript also shows that if Republicans really wanted to know about how Leshchenko’s work informed Fusion’s work, they should ask Simpson or Berkowitz to testify, because Ohr was only ever working from open sources — that is, doing research, mostly paid for by a Republican billionaire.

That background is all critically important for how Nunes ended yesterday’s testimony. In his closing statement at the hearing, Nunes restated his demand that Schiff permit Republicans to call their chosen witnesses, which he listed as:

• The whistleblower
• The folks that he spoke to
• Numerous Democratic operatives who worked with Ukraine to meddle in the election

Obviously, Nellie Ohr — an experienced researcher on Ukrainian and Russian organized crime — must fall into the latter category.

So on top of all the ways Nunes misrepresented the Ohr’s testimony (or her ability to testify on the issues he claims to want to hear), there’s this. The Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, believes that an expert on Ukrainian and Russian organized crime being paid to do open source research by a Republican billionaire must be a Democratic operative.

Tags: Bruce Ohr, Christopher Steele, Devin Nunes, Glenn Simpson, Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, Nellie Ohr, Paul Manafort, Paul Singer, Serhiy Leshchenko

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trumpista?!

https://www.salon.com/2019/10/29/former-trump-aide-who-now-works-for-devin-nunes-reportedly-leaked-ukraine-whistleblowers-name/

former Trump aide who now works for Devin Nunes reportedly leaked Ukraine whistleblower’s name

Derek Harvey, a former Trump adviser who now works for Nunes, outed the whistleblower who reported Trump's call

IGOR DERYSH

OCTOBER 29, 2019 

Atop aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., leaked documents identifying the Ukraine whistleblower’s name in an attempt to out him, The Daily Beast has reported.

Derek Harvey, a former adviser to President Trump who now works for Nunes on the House Intelligence Committee, handed notes to House Republicans identifying the whistleblower’s name ahead of closed-door depositions in the Trump impeachment inquiry in hopes of getting the name in the record of the proceedings, which Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff vowed to release, sources told The Daily Beast.

The allegation follows a Saturday Washington Post report that Republican lawmakers and aides have “repeatedly” used the whistleblower’s purported name during the secret depositions. The Post reported that Harvey was “passing notes the entire time” one former Trump official was being questioned, suggesting that he was feeding Republicans questions.

Mark Zaid, an attorney for the whistleblower, warned that exposing his client’s identity would put him and his family at risk.

“Exposing the identity of the whistleblower and attacking our client would do nothing to undercut the validity of the complaint’s allegations,” Zaid told The Daily Beast. “What it would do, however, is put that individual and their family at risk of harm. Perhaps more important, it would deter future whistleblowers from coming forward in subsequent administrations, Democratic or Republican.”

Far-right news outlets like OANN and the Gateway Pundit have identified an official they claim to be the whistleblower.

The whistleblower’s account has long since been corroborated by witnesses from Trump’s administration.

Harvey has also spread a false story claiming that the whistleblower contacted a Democratic staffer on the Intelligence Committee before submitting his complaint about Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the subsequent cover-up. Harvey was apparently attempting to “discredit” the whistleblower as a partisan, a source told The Daily Beast.

Democrats grew so “alarmed” at Republican lawmakers’ “eagerness” to go after the Democratic staffer in question that they reached out to Republican leaders about the matter.

“We are aware of these unsupported and false attacks on a respected member of our staff,” a senior Intelligence Committee official told The Daily Beast. “It is completely inappropriate, and we have previously urged the Republican leadership to address this situation.”

This isn’t the first time Harvey has passed similar information to conservatives. Harvey compiled a set of documents that contained a list of State Department officials he suspected of being disloyal to Trump, The Daily Beast reported in March. Harvey previously worked at the White House as a member of the National Security Council, where he washired by former national security adviser Mike Flynn during the latter's brief tenure. Harvey was laterfired by Flynn's successor, H.R. McMaster.

Harvey is not the only Nunes associate doing the White House’s dirty work. Politico reported that Kash Patel, a former Nunes staffer who now works on the National Security Council, fed Trump damaging information about Ukraine.Patel got his White House position after leading Nunes’ effort to discredit the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

Nunes himself has been using his time at the closed-door depositions trying to defend Trump by repeatedly citing theSteele dossier,The Daily Beast reported earlier this month. The dossier is at the heart of the Republican conspiracy theory that operatives of the "deep state" had conspired to stop Trump in 2016. It was completely irrelevant to the topics discussed at the depositions, sources told the outlet, describing Nunes’ questioning as “nutso.”

On Monday, Nunes appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News prime-time show to declare the impeachment inquiry, which has uncovered damning revelations from members of Trump’s administration, the “Ukraine hoax.”

Despite near-daily revelations from Trump staffers, Nunes claimed that the “hoax” is based on “conspiracy theories” and bragged that he won’t discuss them with reporters.

“These aren’t real reporters. They are assassins,” Nunes said. “They are assassins that are taking information from the Democrats on the Intelligence Committee and they are spreading it out there.”

Schiff, who replaced Nunes as chairman of the Intelligence Committee after Democrats won a House majority last year, hit out at Republicans for ignoring the mounting evidence against Trump and for their criticisms of the investigation.

“It will be said of House Republicans,” Schiff tweeted, “When they found they lacked the courage to confront the most dangerous and unethical president in American history, they consoled themselves by attacking those who did.”

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IVANKA WAS FRIENDS WITH MAN BEHIND TRUMP DOSSIERIvanka Trump was once friendly with Christopher Steele, the former British spy behind the dossier full of reports alleging ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign. [HuffPost]

==

Sergei Millian

Belarus-born businessman

Reportedly an unwitting source for the Steele dossier. Worked to gain access to the Trump campaign through Papadopoulos.

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1219  BS

Judicial Watchannounced today that U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg denied a Justice Department effort to block the release of any communications between former FBI General Counsel James Baker and Michael Sussmann, a Perkins Coie law partner and former DOJ attorney, who reportedly met with Baker to share information targeting Donald J. Trump during the presidential campaign.

While at Perkins Coie, Sussmann represented the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the time Perkins Coie secretly paid for the development of the anti-Trump dossier theDOJ used to obtain FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. The court specifically rejected the FBI’s argument that it needed to protect the “privacy” of Hillary Clinton’s lawyer.

Read More: http://jwatch.us/wUnVQS

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nunes 11/20/19 djt had right to be concErned about ukraine, out to get him

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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/09/30/democrat-strategist-alexandra-chalupa-goes-on-bizarre-rant-after-devin-nunes-mentions-her-during-hearing/

no lvx twt

democrat Strategist Alexandra Chalupa Goes on Bizarre Rant After Devin Nunes Mentions Her During Hearing

Alexandra ChalupaFacebook

KRISTINA WONG

30 Sep 201929

3:50

Ukrainian-American Democrat strategist Alexandra Chalupa, who sought dirt from Ukraine on Trump campaign officials during the 2016 election, went on a bizarre Twitter rant after House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-CA) name-checked her during a recent committee hearing.

During his opening statement at a hearing last Thursday, when Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire testified, Nunes drew comparisons between the Democrats’ campaign to smear Trump through Russia collusion allegations and the current allegations about Ukraine.

Nunes began:

The current hysteria has something else in common with the Russia hoax. Back then, they accused the Trump campaign of colluding with Russians when the Democrats themselves were colluding with Russians in preparing the Steele dossier. Today, they accuse the president of pressuring Ukrainians to take actions that would help himself or hurt his political opponents.

He brought up six times when Democrats pressured Ukraine to do something, including when Chalupa — while a Democratic National Committee contractor — asked Ukrainian officials for dirt on Trump campaign officials and tried to arrange for the then-Ukrainian President to comment on the Trump associates’ alleged ties to Russia:

— Joe Biden bragged that he extorted the Ukrainians into firing a prosecutor, who happened to be investigating Biden’s own son;

— Three Democrat senators wrote a letter pressuring the Ukrainian general prosecutor to reopen investigations it reportedly froze on former Trump campaign officials;

— Another Democratic senator went to Ukraine and pressured the Ukrainian President not to investigate corruption allegations involving Biden’s son;

— According to Ukrainian officials, Democratic National Committee contractor Alexandra Chalupa tried to get Ukrainian officials to provide dirt on Trump associates and tried to get the former Ukrainian President to comment publicly on their alleged ties to Russia.

— Ukrainian official Serhiy Leshchenko was a source for Nellie Ohr, wife of Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr, as she worked on the anti-Trump operation conducted by Fusion GPS and funded by the Democrats.

— And of course, Democrats on this very committee negotiated with people they thought were Ukrainians in order to obtain nude pictures of Trump.

Chalupa, about an hour later, made bizarre accusations against Nunes — who exposed that the DNC and the Clinton campaign paid for the dossier used to smear Trump with allegations of Russian collusion.

Chalupa accused Nunes of “character assassination campaigns” against the U.S. intelligence community, the FBI, and witnesses. She claimed without explanation that he was “key in obstructing justice and gaslighting Americans.”

She claimed he “made public lists of American (sic) on Putin/Trump’s enemies list.”

Alexandra Chalupa

@AlexandraChalup

• Sep 26, 2019

Few have done more to help cover up for the crimes Vladimir Putin committed against the United States than @DevinNunes.  This includes character assassination campaigns against our Intel Community, FBI, & witnesses. He’s been key in obstructing justice and gaslighting Americans.

Alexandra Chalupa

@AlexandraChalup

Days before the secretive meeting Putin and Trump held in Helsinki in July 2018, Rep Nunes, then Chairman of the House Intel Committee, made public lists of American on Putin/Trump’s enemies lists.  It was an intimidation tactic and witness tampering. It put Americans in danger.

2,135

6:36 AM - Sep 26, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

705 people are talking about this

She claimed Nunes held “secretive meetings” in Montenegro in April 2017. She then said without clarifying what she meant that the “‘Ukraine collusion’ narrative is fake.”

“They’re the ones who planted it – Manafort and Giuliani. They’re worried now because they were hoping it would give them cover in the Russia probe & a pardon for Manafort. Instead they left a two year trail of collusion,” she said.

She did not clarify whether she was referring to her efforts to seek dirt from Ukraine on former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort:

Alexandra Chalupa

@AlexandraChalup

• Sep 26, 2019

Replying to @AlexandraChalup

The media should look into the secretive meetings Rep. Nunes held in Montenegro in April 2017, including what proxies of Manafort’s or the Kremlin were there. Same month when Deripaska was worried about sanctions. Nunes has chosen protecting the Russian mafia over Americans.

Alexandra Chalupa

@AlexandraChalup

Republicans know the ‘Ukraine collusion’ narrative is fake. They’re the ones who planted it - Manafort and Giuliani. They’re worried now because they were hoping it would give them cover in the Russia probe & a pardon for Manafort. Instead they left a two year trail of collusion.

2,004

6:36 AM - Sep 26, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

665 people are talking about this

She then made sweeping claims that “Republicans hate [and] smear whistleblowers” and “love foreign hostile adversaries”:

Republicans hate & smear American whistleblowers who have urgent information to protect U.S. national security.

Republicans love foreign hostile adversaries who attack America’s democracy, steal Americans’ private communications & make them public to help Republicans steal power

Alexandra Chalupa

@AlexandraChalup

Republicans hate & smear American whistleblowers who have urgent information to protect U.S. national security.

Republicans love foreign hostile adversaries who attack America’s democracy, steal Americans’ private communications & make them public to help Republicans steal power

2,028

6:59 AM - Sep 26, 2019

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746 people are talking about this

Follow Breitbart News’ @Kristina_Wong.

2020 ElectionPoliticsAlexandra ChalupaBruce OhrDemocratic National CommitteeDNCFusion GPSJoseph MaguireNellie OhrPaul ManafortRussiaRussia collusionSteele dossierUkraine

./..

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Nunes: Whistleblower Complaint Is Another Steele Dossier

[](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nunes%20chalupa%20steele%20dossier+site:www.breitbart.com&atb=v31-5__ "Search domain www.breitbart.com/2020-election/2019/09/26/devin-nunes-on-whistleblower-complaint-what-we-have-is-another-steele-dossier/")https://www.breitbart.com/2020-election/2019/09/26/devin-nunes-on-whistleblower-complaint-what-we-have-is-another-steele-dossier/

Sep 26, 2019

House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-CA) called the whistleblower complaint involving President Trump and Ukraine "another Steele dossier" and accused House Democrats of running an information warfare operation against the president.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/it-was-nutso-devin-nunes-reportedly-made-himself-look-ridiculous-by-obsessing-over-the-steele-dossier-in-ukraine-hearing/

no lnx

‘It was nutso’: Devin Nunes reportedly made himself look ridiculous by obsessing over the Steele Dossier in Ukraine hearing

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes speaking at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland.]

Written by Cody Fenwick October 18, 2019

While the House Intelligence Committee is spearheading impeachment with its investigation into President Donald Trump’s Ukraine scandal, it seems Republican Rep. Devin Nunes of California can’t stop obsessing about the Steele Dossier.

According to the Daily Beast, the ranking member of the committee launched into an exchange during the closed impeachment inquiry hearings about the dossier on Thursday with Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union who is at the center of the Ukraine scandal. He was a point person in Trump’s efforts to get the Ukrainians to announce an investigation into the 2016 election as well as former Vice President Joe Biden in exchange for favorable treatment from the White House.

Sondland, the Daily Beast found, was “perplexed” by Nunes’ focus on the dossier, which is itself another matter entirely from the subject of the inquiry. But Nunes has been obsessed for years with the dossier, which was compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele and documented a series of claims, many unproven, about Trump and his aides’ ties to Russia. Though Republicans like Nunes have tried to smear the FBI’s entire Russia investigation and the subsequent work by Special Counsel Robert Mueller by associating it with the dossier, theprobe’s final report revealed that the investigation began long before the bureau received Steele’s findings on another basis entirely.

The Daily Beast tried to explain why Nunes might bring up the dossier in the hearing:

The context, according to three sources familiar with the episode, was [Nunes’] effort to explain why President Trump might be “upset” about Ukraine.

Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee that is leading the impeachment probe, said some of the dossier’s contents dealt with Ukraine, and that the Clintons paid for it. Some attendees said it seemed oddly divorced from the topic at hand–namely, whether Trump pressured the Ukrainian government to investigate one of his political opponents.

A Nunes spokesperson told the outlet that he has made similar comments publicly. But apparently, those in the hearing were still baffled.

“It was nutso,” said of the sources told the Daily Beast of Nunes’ exchange. “It was awkward.”

==

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mueller sum 719  AN

...According to Fox News reporter Chad Pergram, Nunes also said that Democrats refuse to accept reality because they live in an alternative universe.

It doesn’t much matter to Nunes that, during the primaries, prior to DNC law firm Perkins Coie hiring the company Fusion GPS, it had been paid by the conservative Washington Free Beacon to conduct opposition research. It doesn’t matter that Steele didn’t write the first memo in his collection of intel reports until over a week after the Russia investigation had already begun. It doesn’t matter that 73% of Steele’s findings have been completely or partially confirmed by press releases and the Mueller report. It doesn’t matter that when Steele made his discoveries, he didn’t deliver them to Perkins Coie, the DNC, or the Clinton campaign—he gave them to the FBI. If the plan had been to release a bunch of made-up negative information about Trump, giving it to the people who ultimately fired him as a source because he had talked to the media and didn’t reveal anything until months after the election wasn’t the smoothest move. It doesn’t matter that the DOJ inspector general just this week revealed that he had found Steele to be credible after interviewing him for 16 hours.

Nope. Even though James Comey is a Republican, Rod Rosenstein is a Republican, and Robert Mueller is a Republican, this was all a “Democrat-generated hoax,” even though there are outstanding indictments for 13 Russians who are either members of the GRU or work for the Internet Research Agency. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, has been prosecuted for lying about his contacts with Russia. Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, has been prosecuted and imprisoned for lying about his contacts and business deals with Russia and for campaign finance violations. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, has been prosecuted and imprisoned for lying about his business deals with Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs, while also being in contact with someone with ties to Russian intelligence and sharing internal polling information with them. Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates, has been prosecuted for his financial ties to Russia and Ukraine. Attorney Alex Van Der Zwaan, who has links to Manafort in Ukraine, has been prosecuted and imprisoned for lying about communications between Rick Gates and Russian intelligence. Trump’s longtime friend and Manafort’s former business partner, Roger Stone, is currently being prosecuted for lying about being in contact with Russian Intelligence, WikiLeaks, and the Trump campaign while sharing information back and forth between them.

All of the lies, deletion and destruction of documents, obstruction, and witness tampering carried out by these Trumpsters may have been a cover-up conspiracy that ultimately succeeded and blocked Mueller from gathering the evidence he needed to make his case. It’s not that there wasn’t any collusion or conspiracy on the part of the Trump campaign; it’s that theobstruction itself may have prevented the special counsel’s office from proving conspiracy.

==

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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/did-washington-free-beacon-forget-its-own-role-in-russia-investigation/

Did Washington Free Beacon Forget Its Own Role in Russia Investigation?

:{:{ByAdele M. Stan | July 24, 2019}:

If you went to front page of The Washington Free Beacon during today’s hearings in the House of Representatives that featured former Special Counsel Robert Mueller as the star witness, you’d barely know that the story that riveted the the nation’s capital was taking place. Instead, the Beacon ran as its lead story a piece about “pro-Israel” legislation that passed the House.

Perhaps that’s because it was the Beacon that commissioned FusionGPS to conduct the opposition research on then-candidate Donald Trump (as well as other Republicans who ran in the 2016 presidential primary) that ultimately led to the collection of the raw intelligence complied by former MI6 spy Christopher Steele that was later characterized as “the Steele dossier.” After the Beacon abandoned its oppo project, the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee engaged Fusion GPS for research on Trump, which built on the work already done for the Beacon by Fusion GPS, which then brought in Steele to examine Trump’s relationships with Russian oligarchs and others with links to the government of the Russian Federation. As reported in The New Yorker:

But in September or October of 2015—Simpson was vague about the exact date—a client hired Fusion GPS to investigate Donald Trump.(The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative Web site that has received funding from the hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer, has acknowledged hiring Fusion GPS to investigate candidates during the Republican Presidential primaries.) Simpson said the mandate was to carry out an “open-ended” examination of Trump’s business record, including his bankruptcies, and, he added, “it evolved somewhat quickly into issues of his relationship to organized-crime figures.”

Passing as Mueller-hearing analysis at the Beacon is a piece calling Mueller’s testimony “bad news” for Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders—because his lackluster performance looks bad on old people.

From today’s edition of The Washington Free Beacon, in a piece by Andrew Stiles that is labeled as ‘analysis’:

Many pundits are suggesting that Mueller, who will turn 75 in August, appears to be suffering from a lack of physical stamina and intellectual agility due to his advanced age. That’s bad news for 2020 Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden, 76, as well as socialist challenger Bernie Sanders, 77. Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who has not definitively ruled out another White House run in 2020, is also very old.

The 73-year-old Donald Trump, on the other hand, is described by Stiles as a “man of legendary stamina whose formidable intellect has laid waste to countless inferior opponents in the past,” noting that “Trump has been described as ‘the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.'” 

Of course, that assessment of Trump’s health comes from a letter on the stationery of Trump’s gastroenterologist, who later admitted that Trump dictated the letter himself.

Tags: Andrew StilesBernie SandersChristopher SteeleDonald TrumpHillary ClintonJoe BidenMatthew ContinettiRobert MuellerFusion GPSWashington Free Beacon

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https://www.**newsweek.com/2017**/12/29/donald-trump-russia-secret-deutsche-bank-753780.html

no lnx many

It sounded like an exhausted parent scolding a tantrum-prone toddler with a penchant for tossing toys from his stroller.In November 2008, Steven Molo, an attorney for Deutsche Bank, wrote a letter to the Supreme Court of New York about one of the company's most troublesome clients. At issue was $640 million that client had borrowed in 2005 to fund construction of a new hotel in Chicago. The client had personally guaranteed the loan, but a few years later, the Great Recession devastated the economy, and he defaulted on his payment, with $330 million outstanding. Deutsche was seeking an immediate $40 million from the client, plus interest, legal fees and costs.The debtor in question: Donald Trump, the future president of the United States.Instead of paying up, the New York real estate mogul countersued, claiming the 2008 crash was a force majeure event—one that Deutsche had helped precipitate. Therefore, he argued, he wasn't obliged to pay back the money. Instead, he claimed Deutsche owed him money—about $3 billion in damages.In response, Molo drew up a withering document, contrasting Trump's frivolous writ with his long career of boasting about how rich he was:

Trump proclaims himself "the archetypal businessman, a deal-maker without peer." Trump has stated in court he is worth billions of dollars. In addition to substantial cash, personal investments and various other tangible assets, he maintains substantial interests in numerous extraordinary properties in New York and around the country.Those assets included hotel projects in seven U.S. cities, as well as in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Canada, Panama and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, the lawyer noted. There were also casinos and golf courses scattered all over the world.The same day Trump argued that the Great Recession meant he didn't need to pay back his debts, he gave an interview to The Scotsman newspaper. After a two-year fight, he had gotten approval from the Scottish government for a new resort near Balmedie in Aberdeenshire—and he was thrilled. "The world has changed financially, and the banks are all in such trouble," he told the paper, "but the good news is that we are doing very well as a company, and we are in a very, very strong cash position." Trump said he didn't have any exposure to the stock market, had bought the Scottish land for cash and was now well placed to build "the world's greatest golf course." Two weeks later, George Sorial, a Trump Organization executive, assured The Scotsman that the tycoon had a billion dollars earmarked for the course.

If those statements weren't damning enough, Molo's affidavit cited the real estate tycoon's literary works, which summarized his insouciant attitude toward paying back other people's money. Trump, the attorney observed, provided extensive advice on how to do business in his half-dozen or so books. In How to Get Rich, Trump advises readers to use the courts to "be strategically dramatic." In Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and in Life, he boasts of how he "love[s] to crush the other side and take the benefits." Trump's strategy—honed during his terrible financial struggles with lenders during the 1990s—"was to turn it back on the banks…. I figured it was the bank's problem, not mine," Molo quoted him as saying, in connection with unpaid debt.As a result of these maneuvers, by the mid-2000s, U.S. financial institutions had stopped lending to Trump for his building projects. Deutsche was the only one still willing to work with him.

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Trump Denies Russia Collusion—Again and Again

After Trump burned the bank, Deutsche shunned him as well. But Trump soon found a creative way to get off its blacklist—and return to solvency.'Are You Fucking Kidding Me?'Two years after Molo wrote his letter to the court, Trump settled his feud with the German bank. How he did it was bizarre: He paid back Deutsche with a massive lifeline—from Deutsche. Only this time he eschewed its real estate team—which wanted nothing to do with him—and got a loan from its private wealth division. This group typically deals with high-net-worth individuals, not real estate transactions, but in 2010 it not only lent him the money he owed its real estate team but also reportedly gave Trump another $25 million to $50 million in credit.

Deutsche employees in New York were surprised by the bank's decision. When asked whether it was normal to give more money to a customer who was a bad credit risk and liked to sue, one former senior staff member at the bank put it succinctly: "Are you fucking kidding me?"Over the next few years, the money kept rolling in for Trump. He took out two mortgages against a resort in Miami and a $170 million loan to finish his hotel in Washington, D.C. According to Bloomberg, by the time Trump was elected president of the United States in November 2016, he owed Deutsche around $300 million, an unprecedented debt for an incoming president. (His June financial disclosure showed he owes the bank $130 million, which is due in full in 2024.)The loans to Trump weren't the only abnormal behavior at Deutsche. Around the same time he received his new line of credit, thebank was laundering money, according to the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS). Russian money. Billions of dollars that flowed from Moscow to London, then from London to New York—part of a scheme for which European and American regulators eventually punished the bank.

Was the timing of this illicit operation and the loans to Trump coincidental? Or evidence of something more sinister—a critical chapter in the president's long history of suspicious business deals with Russian and post-Soviet oligarchs? In January, Trump claimed the former, tweeting in his usual bombastic style: "I have nothing to do with Russia—no deals, no loans, no nothing." But the president's refusal to accept the assessment of his intelligence agencies—that Moscow meddled in the 2016 election—has, among other things, fueled suspicions about his ties to Russia.Robert Mueller is now trying to find out the truth about those suspicions. The special counsel is investigating Russian interference—from the hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to alleged coordination between the Trump campaign and Moscow. So far, his team has charged key Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates with money laundering, as well as other offenses. He's also gotten two former advisers, Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos, to plead guilty to lying to the FBI and cooperate with the probe.

Now, however, Mueller appears to be following the money, trying to determine if Trump has a financial connection to Russia—one that might at least partly explain his behavior. In December, the German newspaper Handelsblatt reported that the special counsel's office has subpoenaed Deutsche Bank, demanding data and documents related to people or entities tied to the president and those close to him. The White House says the subpoena doesn't directly pertain to Trump or his family's accounts. But if the president has a dark Russian secret, the German banking giant's money-laundering scandal may be key to finding out what it is.Friends With Kremlin Benefits

The story of how Deutsche became embroiled in the Trump-Russia probe dates back to 2005, when the German lender bought UFG, a boutique investment bank, to acquire an entry point into Moscow. UFG's co-founder and chairman was Charles Ryan, a charming American banker with libertarian views. Ryan's partner was Boris Fyodorov, a finance minister under former Russian President Boris Yeltsin. The bank straddled West and East, and was international and local.

The man behind Deutsche Bank's aggressive expansion was Anshu Jain, its future co-CEO. He persuaded Ryan to stay on and head up Deutsche's new Moscow office, and he came up with a controversial strategy to tap into potentially huge Russian profits:forge relationships with state partners. He wanted, in effect, to become friends with the Kremlin. One way of doing this was to hire people with connections. Among them: Russia's most powerful banker, Andrey Kostin, who had served as a Soviet diplomat in Sydney and London. (Intelligence sources think he was a KGB spy. Like many others who spoke to me for this story, they did so anonymously because they weren't authorized to talk to the press.) In the 1990s, he became head of Vnesheconombank (VEB), a state development institution described by one former CIA analyst as the "Kremlin's cookie jar." 

Then Vladimir Putin made Kostin head of Vneshtorgbank (VTB), another state-run bank, after which Kostin expanded it to operate in 19 countries.VTB worked in many countries with minimal oversight, which meant the Kremlin could use it for espionage. In 2005, VTB absorbed two banks traditionally used in Soviet times for spying and shifting currency to Western communist parties. These were the Moscow Narodny Bank, based in London, and Euro-bank, in Paris.

Meanwhile, Jain and Deutsche Bank recruited Kostin's 20-something son, Andrey. In spring of 2007, the young Kostin moved from a posting in London to Deutsche Bank in Moscow.Suddenly, Kostin's son got massive flows of business, a high-level banking source told me. And it appeared his father may have helped: Deutsche did a series of lucrative trades with VTB. According to the source, the German bank's Moscow subsidiary began posting profits of $500 million to $1 billion a year, with VTB generating somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of all revenue.

Jain came up with a controversial strategy to tap into potentially huge Russian profits: forge relationships with state partners. He wanted, in effect, to become friends with the Kremlin.

Other investment banks based in Moscow were chagrined and suspected that Deutsche owed its success to its alliance with Russian state interests. "They were doing some very curious things," says Christopher Barter, the CEO of Goldman Sachs Moscow at the time. "Nobody could make sense of their business. We found the nature and concentration of their business with VTB quite galling. Nobody else could touch VTB."Everyone in Moscow understood that VTB was more than a bank. It had ties to Russian intelligence. Putin's Federal Security Service (FSB) spy chief, Nikolai Patrushev, and his successor, Alexander Bortnikov, both sent their sons to work at VTB. The bank's deputy chief executive, Vasily Titov, chaired the FSB's public council.

VTB may have also had contacts with Trump associates, according to The New York Times. In November 2015, a few months after Trump announced he was running for president, one of his business partners, Felix Sater, wrote an email to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, saying VTB had agreed to bankroll a Trump Tower Moscow project. Trump signed a letter of intent for the deal. When the project stalled, Cohen tried reaching out to Putin's spokesperson, Dmitri Peskov, to help jump-start it. But it ultimately failed.

Kostin, the VTB banker, says he doesn't know Sater and never had any role in the real estate deal. "We never, ever heard about this case," he told the Times. "It's absolutely wrong information; it's absolutely fake news."During those negotiations, Sater—the son of a Russian mafia boss—saw things differently. "Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it," he wrote to Cohen about the Trump Tower Moscow plans. "I will get all of Putin's team to buy in on this, I will manage this process."

Shady Trades and Endless Vodka Shots

Well before Sater went looking for a deal there, the Russian capital was awash with petrodollars and opportunity. At the start of the new millennium, Moscow was an alluring destination for Western expatriates. Especially for young single males. There were the devushki—long-legged Russian girls, some from Moscow, some newly arrived from the provinces—who were keen to meet foreigners and practice their English. There were the nightclubs, the parties, fueled by toasts and endless vodka shots. And the friendships, always more intense than those at home.But there was a dark side to this new Russia—as one of those attracted by its offer of riches discovered. Tim Wiswell grew up in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, about 100 miles northeast of New York City. He was more of a repatriate than an expat: His father had worked in oil and gas in Russia. When he was 17, Wiswell spent a year at the Anglo-American School in Moscow and then returned to the United States for college. In his mid-20s, Wiswell went back to Moscow and got a job with Alfa, the private bank owned by the oligarch Mikhail Fridman.From there, he moved to Deutsche Bank. By age 29, he was head of Russian equities.

He found a Russian girlfriend—Natalia Makosiy, an art historian whom he met at a Moscow dinner party and later married.In the wake of the 2007-2008 crash, profits from the bank's Russian business plummeted. Traders were now under pressure to increase revenue. But after Wiswell took over around 2009, business was suddenly improving. And Barter suspects that "something nefarious" was going on at Deutsche during that time period.After the crash, Barter says, he was approached by "broker types, not very senior," seeking to do large, unexplained volumes of trades with Goldman Sachs.These were on behalf of major Russian clients. The brokers declined to identify their counterparties. Their names were concealed beneath "shell company after shell company," Barter says, making a due diligence impossible. He turned this business down "in five seconds."The same entities approached Wiswell and company, and got better results. Between 2011 and February 2015, Wiswell presided over a money-laundering scheme run from the equities desk of Deutsche Bank's Moscow office, according to a report from the DFS, and more than $10 billion was shifted from Russia to the West.The method was simple but effective. In Moscow, a Russian client bought blue-chip Russian stocks from Deutsche Bank Moscow in companies like Gazprom or Sberbank. The payments were in rubles. The size of a typical order was $2 million to $3 million. Shortly afterward, a non-Russian "customer" sold exactly the same number of securities to Deutsche Bank in London, paying in dollars.

[Deutsche Bank AG’s regional head office on Wall Street.] Deutsche Bank sued Donald Trump in 2008 for defaulting on a $640 million loan. Deutsche later bailed Trump out through its own private wealth division.

There was no economic logic to these "mirror trades," the DFS report found. The buyers and sellers were ostensibly different, but in reality, one in the same. At least 12 entities used the scheme to surreptitiously convert rubles into dollars. The money was interred in offshore accounts. Those involved moved billions out of one Deutsche location in Moscow to another location in New York through offshore territories such as Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands. There were nearly 6,000 of such transactions, and nobody in New York, London, Frankfurt or any other international financial centers seemed to notice.When outsiders raised concerns—like a European bank, for example—Wiswell swatted them aside. The DFS report said he told the European bank not to worry. Wiswell approved the trades with anonymous Russian clients. He "threatened" and browbeat his colleagues on several occasions, a New York regulator said, according to the report, "when it appeared they had not moved quickly enough to facilitate transactions."

In Moscow, Wiswell's 20-person equities desk was made up of Russians and Americans. One of its duties was to keep clients happy. That might mean extravagant skiing trips and visits to elite nightclubs. One of Wiswell's business (and skiing) partners was Dmitry Perevalov, the owner of a Moscow fund called Lanturno. About seven years ago, for his 40th birthday, Perevalov flew a group of people on a private jet to Mauritius. The jet belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church's most important bishop, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, but Perevalov chartered it for the occasion. His guests stayed at the luxurious Four Seasons hotel in Anahita, on the east coast of the Indian Ocean island. Some invitees scarcely knew their host, a former bartender. Those who were his friends—including Wiswell—called him Dima.One guest who met Wiswell at the party described him as charismatic and charming, a tall, handsome, all-American guy.

This person also said Wiswell came across as a "major lightweight" in terms of banking and finance. "He had nothing special going for him. I remember him speaking pretty poor Russian. We wondered whether he was doing kosher business."Perevalov flew in a popular performer to crown his birthday celebration—the Russian rapper Timati, who gave a concert. Under a starry sky, guests danced to Timati's hit "Welcome to St. Tropez":Too much money in the bank accountHands in the airMake you scream and shout Drinks, private villas, waterskiing in the lagoon—everything was taken care of. "I was wondering: Who the fuck is paying for all this?" the guest told me. "It was crazy."Lightweight or not, Wiswell was getting rich. While the mirror trades were happening, Wiswell's wife became the owner of two offshore companies—one in the British Virgin Islands, one in Cyprus. In 2015, a counterparty paid $250,000 into her account. This was for "financial consulting." Similar payments, totaling $3.8 million, were made through two companies in Belize. These payments were "undisclosed compensation," the DFS found—"a bribe." Which bank cleared them?

Russia’s most powerful banker, Kostin, had served as a Soviet diplomat in Sydney and London. (Intelligence sources think he was a KGB spy.) Vladimir Putin made Kostin head of state-run VTB Bank, after which Kostin expanded it to operate in 19 countries.

According to journalist Ed Caesar, there were further payments made to the Wiswells. The idea of the money was "to hook you, so you are not going to do unexpected things," one Moscow broker told Caesar in an article published in The New Yorker. These payments were always made in cash and always delivered in a bag.The end of this scheme came in August 2015, when Deutsche Bank suspended Wiswell and then fired him. After that, he disappeared. There were Facebook postings from Southeast Asia and Bali, where the Wiswells went with their two small children. (He is now allegedly back in Moscow.) His lawyer, Ekaterina Dukhina, declined to comment on his case, but in his wrongful-dismissal suit against Deutsche, Wiswell said he was merely the fall guy for the bank's wrongdoing. He also claimed that around 20 colleagues, including two senior managers in London, knew all about the trades.The scandal was a grievous blow to Deutsche Bank's reputation. And an expensive one. About 10 days before Trump's inauguration, the DFS—which has the power to suspend any bank with a branch in New York—fined the bank $475 million. London's Financial Conduct Authority imposed a £163 million ($218 million) penalty. (The Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York are still investigating the bank's role in the scandal.

The bank carried out an internal review, which didn't identify the Russians behind the scheme. It's still unclear who they were or where the billions went. Or where the money came from in the first place.What is clear, however, from the DFS report and conversations with sources in Moscow is that a Kremlin bank, VTB, run by proxies of the FSB, had seemingly captured Deutsche Bank's Moscow outpost. The German bank's London and New York divisions were economic beneficiaries of this arrangement, as they facilitated the illegal flight of capital by some well-connected Kremlin insiders.While this was going on, Deutsche Bank in New York was lending hundreds of millions of dollars to the future American president, a man known to be litigious and a credit risk.My Guardian colleague Nick Hopkins and I wanted to find out if Trump's loans and the money-laundering scandal were connected. But Deutsche Bank stonewalled us; its policy was to say nothing about its clients, including the president.

The Russian Laundromat

In late 2016, that question and others led Hopkins and me to a man now at the center of Mueller's inquiry: Christopher Steele.This was before the world knew he was behind the famous dossier, raw intelligence alleging, among other things, that Russian intelligence had years of compromising information on Trump, some of it sexual in nature. Hopkins knew Steele, but neither of us were aware of what he was sitting on in that dossier.We met on a Thursday afternoon, weeks before Christmas, when London's streets were crowded with shoppers. Steele had agreed to chat over 4 o'clock tea. We tried a café and wine bar called Balls Brothers—and found a tucked-away table. I went to the bar and came back with drinks: beer for Steele, Coke for Nick, pot of tea for me.Steele clearly likes being in the shadows, away from publicity or fuss. In the world of corporate intelligence, the fewer people who know what you are doing, the better. "Have you heard of me?" he asked.I confessed I hadn't.

I knew most of the people in London who were focused on Russia, but not Steele."Good," he said. "That's how I like it."

For the next 45 minutes or so, we asked Steele about Trump's connections to Moscow.He offered helpful hints about following the money but little more.In addition to questions about Deutsche Bank, we inquired about another Russian money-laundering operation, one that involved Putin's cousin Igor. Between 2010 and 2014, Moscow bankers were sending cash out of the country through something called the Global Laundromat—a scheme that cleaned at least $20 billion, according to investigators in Moldova and the Balkans, though the true figure may be much greater.This is how it worked: Shell companies in the United Kingdom "lent" money to one another, at least on paper. Russian businesses underwrote these "loans." Company A would default on paying back Company B. Typically, a Moldovan citizen was involved. The companies would obtain a court judgment in Moldova asking the Russian firms to settle the debt. 

And voilà! The Russian businesses would legally transfer hundreds of millions of dollars to a bank in Moldova's capital, Chisinau.From Chisinau, the money went to a bank in Latvia, Trasta Komercbanka. From there, the cash went everywhere, to 92 countries, much of it vanishing offshore.The Latvian bank required a corresponding Western financial institution to process its dollar-denominated transactions.

Most U.S. banks, including JPMorgan Chase, refused to offer banking services to Trasta, given the city of Riga's reputation as a European money-laundering hub. Only two Western banks agreed, according to Moldovan and Latvian investigators. Both were German: Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank. Once again, Deutsche was the entry point for criminal Russian money into the global financial system, the investigators found. (The bank severed its relationship with Trasta shortly before Latvian officials shut down the bank in 2016 for money laundering.) According to the DFS, Deutsche was reluctant to classify Russia as a "high-risk" location for money laundering.

Sergei Gorkov, chairman of Vnesheconombank (VEB Bank), which Andrey Kostin had run and whom Putin had promoted. Gorkov met directly with Jared Kushner in New York.

When Hopkins and I asked Deutsche Bank about the scandal, we were rebuffed. So we talked to current and former Deutsche Bank staff. According to one senior ex-employee, who worked in equities in Asia and New York, the bank's problems went way beyond these scams. The 2008 crash hit Deutsche Bank hard, the employee said. In order to cover up holes in the balance sheet, a few members of staff took part in risky, complex and possibly illegitimate forms of finance.These practices were extensive, the person alleged. They might have involved innovative and opaque ways of getting outside parties to underwrite risky loans, the banker added, using structures to disguise who ultimately are the lenders and the beneficiaries.Such impenetrable structures have led some to wonder whether Deutsche's unusual loans to Trump and its Russian money-laundering schemes were connected.

Adding to the intrigue: the statements of Trump's own children. In May, for instance, golf writer James Dodson said that during an interview more than three years ago, Trump's son Eric boasted that his father's company had access to Russian money. "We don't rely on American banks," Dodson said Trump told him. "We have all the funding we need out of Russia." (Eric Trump later denied he made this claim.) Years earlier, at a real estate conference in 2008, Donald Trump Jr. said, "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets." He later added, "We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia."

In an interview with Prospect magazine, Richard Dearlove, the former head of British secret intelligence service MI6, summed up the suspicions surrounding the alleged connection between Trump, Russia and Deutsche Bank. "What lingers for Trump may be what deals—on what terms—he did after the financial crisis of 2008 to borrow Russian money when others in the West would not lend to him."According to our sources inside Deutsche Bank,Trump's bid to become president made him a politically exposed person, or PEP. Banks scrutinize such individuals carefully because they're often targets for illicit financial schemes.Deutsche reviewed its lending to Trump and his relatives. Its goal was to discover if there was a Russian connection to Trump's loans. The DFS also requested information from the bank about its dealings with Russia. The sources were vague about the review, who carried it out and what its precise conclusions were. But they insist that no trail to Moscow was ever discovered.Other sources suggest the review was cursory, but Deutsche hasn't released any information about it, so there's no way to evaluate either claim. Meanwhile, Trump refuses to release his tax filings, breaking decades of precedent.

Over the past year, U.S. lawmakers such as Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, have urged the bank to privately hand over its internal review—along with information about Trump's accounts—but Deutsche declined to do so, citing privacy rules.Now, nearly a year after BuzzFeed published Steele's dossier, the bank is handing records over to Mueller, as the special counsel tries to figure out if there is a connection between the Russian laundromat and the president of the United States.They Went to Jared The special counsel's inquiry could also reach people in Trump's orbit. Many were clients of Deutsche Bank—and also credit risks. Among them is Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, who is trying to salvage a massive—and reportedly imperiled—investment in 666 Fifth Avenue, a prominent piece of Manhattan real estate. His relationship with Deutsche emerged in 2013, when he apparently ordered a flattering profile of Trump's wealth manager, Rosemary Vrablic, by his newspaper, The New York Observer.

In a letter this spring to Bill Woodley, Deutsche Bank's U.S. CEO, Senator Chris Van Hollen expressed concerns about the bank's lending to Kushner, who had a $25 million line of credit with the German institution. In October 2016, it loaned him $285 million. The cash was used to replace an existing loan on the old New York Times building, which Kushner had bought the previous year from Lev Leviev, a businessman from the former Soviet Union.

The bank made the loan at a time when Kremlin representatives were eager to speak to Trump's son-in-law, according to a timeline laid out in Kushner's testimony to Congress. In April, he first met Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, when Trump gave his foreign policy speech at D.C.'s Mayflower Hotel—just a handshake and pleasantries, Kushner said. Next came a meeting at Trump Tower with Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Moscow lawyer who sat down with Kushner, Manafort and Trump Jr. They talked about dirt on Hillary Clinton and repealing the Magnitsky Act, an Obama-era law that leveled sanctions against Russians accused of human rights abuses.

Then, on November 16, Kislyak got in touch again. By this point, it was clear that Kushner would become senior adviser to the president.There was another Kushner-Kislyak meeting, on December 1 at Trump Tower. Flynn, Trump's adviser, was present too, as Kushner made an unusual proposal: He asked Kislyak if it would be possible to set up a secret and secure communications channel between the Trump transition team and the Kremlin. The purpose, it seems, was to keep their conversations hidden from the outgoing Obama administration and U.S. intelligence. Could this be done, Kushner wondered, by using Russian diplomatic facilities in the United States? The inquiry was staggeringly naïve.

If Kushner or Flynn were to drop by the Russian Embassy, U.S. intelligence would certainly notice.The FBI hadn't bugged that conversation but learned of it when Kislyak reported to his superiors back in Moscow. According to FBI intercepts of those Russian communications, Kislyak was taken aback by Kushner's request. It was unlikely Moscow would allow any American to use its encrypted networks. The Trump transition team said nothing about these secret negotiations. One person who knew the details was so alarmed he sent The Washington Post an anonymous note about it, explaining what had happened.Russia, it seemed, didn't need to expend much effort to get close to Trump's aides.

Kislyak came up with a suggestion of his own, according to Kushner's testimony. Perhaps Kushner would like to meet with another person from Moscow, someone with "a direct relationship" to Putin?  During a meeting between Kislyak and Kushner's assistant, Avi Berkowitz, on December 12, they agreed on the details of this meeting. Putin's emissary turned out to be a banker, or, more accurately, a banker-spy. His name was Sergey Gorkov, and he was the head of VEB, the state development bank, which Kostin had run, and whose board Putin had chaired during his four years as prime minister. He had trained in the 1990s at the FSB's academy before joining energy company Yukos and state-run Sberbank. Like VTB, Sberbank was allegedly an arm of the Kremlin. It was the official sponsor of the 2013 Miss Universe contest in Moscow, attended by Trump andhosted by Emin Agalarov, the pop-star son of Aras Agalarov, who worked with Trump to bring the pageant to Russia. Eight days after the contest, Sberbank announced it was lending Agalarov $1.3 billion to finance new projects. One of those under consideration was Trump Tower Moscow. In February 2016, Putin promoted Gorkov to VEB chief.

Deutsche Bank loaned Jared Kushner $285 million to replace an existing loan on the old New York Times building, which Kushner had bought from Lev Leviev, a businessman from the former Soviet Union. The bank made the loan at a time when Kremlin representatives were eager to speak to Trump’s son-in-law.

The bank's mission was to support Moscow's political programs. It provided capital to build facilities at the Sochi Olympics and fund secessionist rebels in eastern Ukraine. These top-down ventures lost money. VEB had large debts. The United States had included VEB, VTB and Sberbank in the sanctions it passed in 2014 after Putin annexed Crimea. And Gorkov's job was to restore the bank's fortunes.Gorkov was well prepared for his meeting with Kushner. He was, after all, a graduate of the Dzerzhinsky Higher School, a KGB training center. He flew in from Moscow bearing gifts. Among them: soil from the town of Novogrudok in northwest Belarus, where Kushner's paternal grandmother grew up. In 1941, the German army arrived, and the town's Jewish inhabitants were rounded up and forced to live and work in an agricultural college. Around half were executed. The survivors dug a tunnel, and in September 1943 they crawled out, fleeing into the forest.This information and much more would have been included in the FSB's Kushner file.

Gorkov's presents were chosen to remind the young Trump adviser of his origins in a part of the world that once belonged to the Soviet Union, and of his spiritual roots. (This subtlety was wasted. In his written testimony to Congress, Kushner said Putin's messenger had given him a "bag of dirt." It came from "Nvgorod," he wrote, spelling his grandmother's birthplace incorrectly.)

This meeting occurred on December 13, and according to Kushner, Gorkov introduced himself and "made some statements about the Russian economy." The banker said he was friendly with Putin, expressed disappointment about the state of U.S.-Russian relations under President Barack Obama and "his hopes for a better relationship" in the future, Kushner told congressional committees.There was no discussion of lifting sanctions, Kushner said. Nor was he offered any commercial deals. Kushner characterized the encounter as brief, meaningless. But there's no official record of what was said in the meeting, so this is hard to verify. After all, it was difficult to discuss the Russian economy without mentioning its depressed state. Gorkov then flew directly from New York to Japan, where Putin was attending a summit. He would likely have reported the details of the meeting then.Kushner's official account to Congress on his dealings with Kremlin representatives is 11 pages long.

It's a flat, sterile document, clearly reviewed by his lawyers. In his version, there was no wrongdoing, just a series of inconsequential meetings during a hectic campaign. Kushner said in written evidence to Congress that he even forgot Kislyak's name. There was no secret channel. Nor did he rely on "Russian funds" to finance his business. In short, a nothing burger with Russian dressing.Despite these protestations, it's clear Russian intelligence found it easy to access Trump's inner circle. Ambassadors, lawyers, bankers...all made their way to Trump Tower in 2016. All were welcomed and listened to. Gorkov was part of them, but the cast also included Kislyak, Veselnitskaya and the Agalarovs and other unknown actors working behind the scenes.

Targeting Kushner was logical. He was soon to become a federal employee. His White House portfolio included tax policy, the military and international affairs. In a protean White House—where anyone could be fired—Kushner's status as the president's son-in-law made him unfireable.

During his meetings with Russians, Kushner apparently said nothing about Moscow's attack on American democracy during the presidential campaign, nothing about hacking the Democratic National Committee or circulating fake news on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. He also kept his meetings with the Russians secret. So did the Trump administration. In his security clearance form, Kushner didn't mention Gorkov or Kislyak. (Kushner said this was an accident, an administrative error by an underling.)The American public found out about these meetings only because of a steady stream of leaks—leaks that would eventually offer Mueller some important clues.

Ursa Major

Today, the questions Mueller is asking seem to be the same questions that led us to meet with Christopher Steele last year. Namely: Was Trump hiding a connection to Russian money? And if so, was Moscow blackmailing him with that information? And how?On the campaign trail—and well before he became a candidate—Trump's praise of Putin was effusive and unwavering. He called him a strong leader and claimed they'd spoken and gotten along well. His fidelity to Russia's president has continued in the White House, even as he lambasted other world leaders, turned on aides and allies, fired the head of the FBI and publicly humiliated his attorney general. Shunning Putin would have been the savvy political move, but he has refused to do so.

Robert Mueller, then FBI director, testifies during a hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee on Capitol Hill, on May 16, 2013. Mueller appears to be following the money, trying to determine if Trump has a financial connection to Russia.

Republicans have criticized Steele's dossier because the DNC and Clinton campaign helped pay for it. But the document offers a compelling explanation for the president's unusual behavior vis-à-vis Russia. First, there was Moscow's alleged kompromat operation against Trump going back three decades. If the president had indulged in compromising behavior, whether sexual or otherwise, Putin likely knew of it. Second,there was the cash from Russian oligarchs that went into Trump's real estate ventures—and the prospect of a lucrative deal to build a hotel and tower in Moscow, a project that was still being negotiated as Trump addressed adoring crowds on the campaign trial. Finally, there were the Deutsche Bank loans that rescued Trump after the crash. They had come from a bank that was simultaneously laundering billions of dollars of Russian money. (Though parts of Steele's dossier remain unverified, some of his claims have been substantiated. The former spy told his friends he believes the document is about 70 to 90 percent accurate.)

And then there are the people in the president's inner circle. Wherever you look, there is a link to Russia. His pick for secretary of state? Rex Tillerson, a figure known and trusted in Moscow, and recipient of the country's Order of Friendship. Former national security adviser? Flynn, a beneficiary of undeclared Russian money. Campaign manager? Manafort, longtime confidant to ex–Soviet oligarchs. Foreign policy adviser? Carter Page, whom Russia tried to recruit as a spy. Commerce secretary? Wilbur Ross, an entrepreneur with Russia-connected investments. Personal lawyer? Cohen, who sent emails to Putin's press secretary. Business partner? Sater, who sent Flynn a plan to lift Russian sanctions. And so on.It was almost as if Putin had picked Trump's Cabinet. The U.S. president, of course, did the choosing, but the pattern of all these individuals, and their alignment with Russian interests, forms a constellation. Call it Ursa Major. A big Russian bear Robert Mueller is now hunting—at Deutsche Bank and beyond.

This article was adapted from Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Trump Win by Luke Harding

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AN

...Taibbi includes a helpful synopsis of the Russiagate timeline:

By June and July of 2016, bits of the dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, which had been funded by the Democratic National Committee through thelaw firm Perkins Coie (which in turn hired the opposition research firm Fusion GPS),were already in the ether.

The Steele report occupies the same role in #Russiagate the tales spun by Ahmed Chalabi occupied in the WMD screwup. Once again, a narrative became turbo-charged when Officials With Motives pulled the press corps by its nose to a swamp of unconfirmable private assertions.

The opposition “research” that Clinton bought then needed a “hook” to be leaked for public consumption:

Comey was right. We couldn’t have reported this story without a “hook.” Therefore the reports surrounding Steele technically weren’t about the allegations themselves, but rather the journey of those allegations, from one set of official hands to another. Handing the report to Trump created a perfect pretext.

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refhmmn

the hill

ho would have thought that, this deep into the Russia collusion probe, we'd be learning about yet another dossier connected to Hillary Clinton? And, as it turns out, it was sort of a family secret.

By his own account, senior Department of Justice (DOJ) official Bruce Ohr played an essential — and unorthodox — role, carrying politically tainted allegations of Donald Trump-Russia collusion to the FBI during the 2016 election.

First, it was unverified intelligence starting in July 2016 from Trump-hating former British spy Christopher Steele,the author of the infamous Russia dossier.

Next, it was sketchy intelligence starting in August 2016 from Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, an opposition-research contractor who hired Steele and was paid to help Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign develop political dirt on Trump.

And now we learn, from testimony that is still being kept secret from the public, that Ohr admitted to Congress last year that he also took Russia information that his wife, Nellie, assembled against Trump on a computer drive and delivered that to the FBI in 2016 — a revelation that has raised fresh concerns in Congress about a possible conflict of interest.

Nellie Ohr worked for Fusion GPS and, for a time, worked on the same Clinton-financed Russian research project as Steele, according to the testimony.

DOJ ethics rules forbid department officials from working in cases where a spouse has a financial interest, a prohibition that Bruce Ohr said he knew about when he forwarded his wife’s evidence to the FBI.

The way Ohr described it, his wife’s research was like an additional dossier assembled from Fusion GPS research to augment what Steele was separately providing the FBI.

“She (Nellie Ohr) provided me with a memory stick that included research she had done for Fusion GPS on various Russian figures,” Ohr told congressional investigators.

“And the reason she provided that information to me is, my understanding was, it related to some of the same — it related to the FBI’s Russia investigation. And she gave me that stick to give to the FBI.”

Ohr’s revelation about his wife adds yet another example of people connected to the Clinton machine flooding the FBI with anti-Trump Russia research during the 2016 election.

Steele’s dossier was the opening salvo. A document sent to the State Department by Clinton proteges Cody Shearer and Sidney Blumenthal was another. A thumb drive given by Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman to FBI general counsel James Baker was a third. Simpson's thumb drive given to Bruce Ohr was a fourth. And Nellie Ohr’s thumb drive would be a fifth. At least three of those work products — those from Steele, Shearer/Blumenthal and Nellie Ohr — resemble what many people might consider a dossier.

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 cell phone signal obtained by Eastern European intelligence suggests that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen was near Prague during the summer of 2016. The cell phone records were first reported…

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A cell phone signal obtained by Eastern European intelligence suggests that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen was near Prague during the summer of 2016.

The cell phone records were first reported by McClatchy on Thursday.

According to the report, “Michael Cohen briefly sent signals ricocheting off cell towers in the Prague area in late summer 2016, at the height of the presidential campaign, leaving an electronic record to support claims that Cohen met secretly there with Russian officials, four people with knowledge of the matter say.”

During the same period of late August or early September, electronic eavesdropping by an Eastern European intelligence agency picked up a conversation among Russians, one of whom remarked that Cohen was in Prague, two people familiar with the incident said.

The phone and surveillance data, which have not previously been disclosed, lend new credence to a key part of a former British spy’s dossier of Kremlin intelligence describing purported coordination between Trump’s campaign and Russia’s election meddling operation.

Although President Donald Trump has referred to the dossier as a “pile of garbage,” much of it has been authenticated by news and intelligence services.

The cell phone signal intelligence has reportedly been shared with special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

Read the entire McClatchy report here.

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/devin-nunes-turned-away-british-intelligence-officers-after-trying-dig-dirt

House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) is at it again. And his latest scheme to undermine the Russia investigation ended in laughable failure.

According to a new report from the Atlantic, Nunes traveled to London earlier this month, seeking a meeting with MI5, MI6, and GCHQ regarding information on Christopher Steele — the former British spy hired to compile the infamous dossier into President Donald Trump's alleged dealings in Russia.

...

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https://www.alternet.org/justice-department-releases-fisa-applications-accused-trump-adviser-carter-page-conspiring-russian

no lnx

Justice Department Releases FISA Applications That Accused Trump Adviser Carter Page of 'Conspiring With the Russian Government'

"That the FISA materials hurt the GOP narrative is not surprising since Rep. Devin Nunes admitted he never read the source documents on Carter Page. In fact, the first Nunes memo was such a disaster that I can't wait for the second one."

By Jake Johnson / Common Dreams July 22, 2018, 2:42 AM GMT

In an unprecedented and unusually timed document dump Saturday night, the Justice Department released a 412-page, partially redacted version of the FBI's 2016 FISA application requesting authorization to wiretap former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page.

"The FBI believes Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian government," reads the FBI's application, which was ultimately approved by a federal court. The application goes on to accuse Page of "collaborating and conspiring with the Russian government."

The documents can be viewed here.

As Common Dreams reported, the FBI's surveillance of Page became a subject of "partisan sniping" earlier this year when Democrats and the GOP latched onto competing narratives about how Obama's Justice Department obtained permission to wiretap the former Trump campaign adviser.

Aligning with President Donald Trump, Republicans alleged in a memo drafted by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) that the FBI's surveillance of Page amounted to an abuse of power—an abuse Republicans don't typically care about when the privacy rights of ordinary Americans are at risk.

But as Splinter's Dell Cameron and Jack Mirkinson note, the Nunes memo "turned out to be self-defeating for the GOP for several reasons." They explain:

First, it charged that in seeking the secret surveillance warrant, federal investigators had failed to inform judges that key evidence was obtained from a biased source—the so-called Steele dossier, which was initially written by former British spy Christopher Steele on behalf of Democrats. But a response memo published by the Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee later debunked the accusation, revealing that the court had in fact been informed of the source’s political bias.

The memo also backfired by inadvertently confirming that the Steele dossier was not the primary factor jumpstarting the Russia inquiry. Instead, it acknowledged events previously reported by the New York Times: A former Trump foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, came under the scrutiny of investigators in July 2016 after boasting that Russia had dirt on then-candidate Hillary Clinton to an Australian diplomat in London.

Responding to the newly released FISA documents on Saturday, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) wrote: "That the FISA materials hurt the GOP narrative is not surprising since Rep. Devin Nunes admitted he never read the source documents on Carter Page. In fact, the first Nunes memo was such a disaster that I can't wait for the second one."

In a tweet early Sunday morning, Trump asserted—citing the right-wing advocacy group Judicial Watch—that the documents actually prove that the GOP's narrative was correct, and that the FBI "misled the courts."

"Witch Hunt Rigged, a Scam!" Trump added.

The FISA documents were released on Saturday in response to Freedom of Information Act requests by numerous news outlets and advocacy groups.

As Charlie Savage of the New York Times observes, "The spectacle of the release was itself also noteworthy, given that wiretapping under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, is normally one of the government's closest-guarded secrets. No such application materials had apparently become public in the 40 years since Congress enacted that law."

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/steele-dossier-says-information-went-both-ways-between-trump-and-russia

no lnx

Associated Press has compiled a list of the information provided in the list of memos authored by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, and compared it with what has been revealed through court filings and public statements. And while the AP finds what they believe to be “snippets of fiction” in the pages, they also find that a great deal of what Steele produced is proving to have a basis in fact.

What has turned out to be true is the primary narrative thread that runs through all the memos — The Russian government set up an “elaborate operation” to damage Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election through social media, propaganda, and by stealing Democratic information and providing it to Trump. And the Russian government sought to aid Donald Trump, whose campaign responded eagerly to Russian offers of help.

The Kremlin set out to harm Clinton and help Trump. Trump jumped on the opportunity. That makes Trump a colluder, conspirator, and any other c-word that comes to mind.

Steele’s memos were also accurate in many details, such as laying out Carter Page’s meeting with Russian officials at a time when it wasn’t otherwise known, possibly even to the FBI who had been watching Page for years. But there’s another key area of the memos that often gets obscured by the focus on some of the more sensational … yellow elements.

One of the primary claims of the Steele memos is not just that Russia sought to help Trump, but that the flow of information went both ways. Part of the price for Putin’s help, according to Steele’s sources, was that Trump help Putin in ways that he could address even if he didn’t win—by providing the Kremlin with information on wealthy Russians in the United States. It’s not clear whether this information from Trump to Russia has been substantiated. Those portions of the investigations in the House and Senate that have been exposed to the public don’t even seem to have ventured into this territory,

The idea that Donald Trump was providing something to Vladimir Putin in exchange for his assistance months before the elections is certainly intriguing. Trump’s habit of selling property to Russians and other former Soviets would position him to provide this information if asked. So far there doesn’t seem to be anything to indicate that this part of the memos has been verified … but if it were, that would seem to put the final nail in any idea that Trump was not fully on board with efforts to cooperate with Russia.

The AP also notes that the memos have some critics who are not currently in the US House of Representatives — a group of Russian “businessmen” who have sued Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS who hired him to research Trump, and the news site BuzzFeed which first published some of Steele’s information, The Russians in question are owners of a Moscow holding company called Alfa Group, The four men involved are named in a pair of Steele’s memos that don’t seem to be very connected with other memos, and which are primarily focused on internal issues within Russia. Which brings up the possibility that one of Steele’s Russian sources was trying to use the opportunity to attack rivals.

However … the four men involved in these suits have definite Kremlin-connections. And the comments made in the memos seem a lot less ludicrous now than when Steele first handed them over in 2016.

The Gubarev memo said his business “had been using botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data” in an operation against Democratic Party leaders.

It’s clear that Russian operatives in 2016 (and today) did use botnets. It’s clear they did use malware to gain entry into Democratic systems and steal data. The only question would be whether or not Steele’s sources fingered the right company when they pointed to Alfa Group.

And if that’s all that Steele got wrong … Donald Trump should be extremely worried about the possibility of other memos being confirmed. For all the attempts Republicans in the House have made to discredit Steele’s work, and to suggest that the whole Russia investigation was tainted by association with these memos, Steele seems to have been far more right than he was wrong.

As for nailing down Trump, forget the pee tape. Find the evidence that Donald Trump was feeding information back to Putin.

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ref

https://apnews.com/55b8a55d5a7545b99d0f915affb7d852

Some questions in Trump-Russia dossier now finding answers

No one has painted a more vivid or lurid portrait of a purported alliance between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia than a quiet, nondescript former British spy named Christopher Steele.

Steele’s once-confidential campaign memos were published just before Trump’s inauguration, unleashing tales of cavorting prostitutes and conniving campaign aides on secret sorties with agents of the Kremlin.

Ever since, the credibility of these Democratic-funded memos — the so-called Steele dossier — has remained the subject of both official investigation and political sniping.

In the 18 months since the dossier’s release, government investigations and reports, criminal cases, and authoritative news articles have begun to resolve at least some of the questions surrounding the memos.

As a whole, the Steele dossier now appears to be a murky mixture of authentic revelations and repurposed history, likely interspersed with snippets of fiction or disinformation, an Associated Press review finds.

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MIXING FACT AND FICTION?

At the vortex of all the arguments is Steele, often described as a buttoned-down, earnest defender of Western interests, who spied on Russia for the British government and later founded a business intelligence firm built on his network of confidential informants.

Steele’s 17 memos laid out an extraordinarily detailed narrative of how the Russian government supposedly collaborated with the Trump campaign in an elaborate operation to tilt the 2016 presidential race in his favor.

Some of the dossier’s broad threads have now been independently corroborated. U.S. intelligence agencies and the special counsel’s investigation into Russian election interference did eventually find that Kremlin-linked operatives ran an elaborate operation to promote Trump and hurt Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, as the dossier says in its main narrative.

The dossier first told of a clandestine partnership between the Trump campaign and Russian officials in a memo dated June 2016, the month before the FBI began investigating that very possibility.

Steele laid out details of a secret Moscow meeting between the Russians and Trump adviser Carter Page months before FBI suspicions about Page and news reports about just such a meeting forced him to leave the campaign.

The dossier’s portrait of a cooperative campaign also has been bolstered by developments it did not specifically foretell: Legal cases and authoritative reporting have exposed Trump’s son Donald Jr. and another aide as receptive to Russian overtures to supply dirt on Clinton.

However, the dossier makes other sensational, unverified claims. It reports that Trump provided intelligence to the Kremlin on wealthy Russians in the U.S. The Russian government, in return, was said to supply Trump with secrets about his political rivals while collecting compromising information on him, including recording him with prostitutes who supposedly urinated on a bed in a Moscow hotel.

It remains unclear if the Trump campaign, in the end, secretly acquired Russian information, and if so, whether Trump himself was aware and involved.

For his part, Trump has dismissed the memos as “fake news” and turned “no collusion” into the Twitter tagline of his presidency.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has denied his government meddled in the election.

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DEFAMATION CLAIMS

Four wealthy Russians take more specific exception to the dossier: They say they were libeled.

In four separate lawsuits filed as recently as April, the Russians sued Steele and BuzzFeed, the online news outlet that published the memos in January 2017. Three of the Russians — all owners of a Moscow-based financial-industrial conglomerate called Alfa Group — also have sued Fusion GPS, the research company that enlisted Steele under a contract with a law firm connected to the Democrats.

Russian tech entrepreneur Aleksej Gubarev and the Alfa Group’s owners — Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven and German Khan — all say they had nothing to do with the events described in the dossier. In cases playing out in state, federal and British courts, they say they took unfair hits to their reputations.

The four men are named in two separate Steele memos, both of which are seemingly out of alignment with the rest of the dossier, as their legal teams have stressed in court filings.

Their questionable relevance raises the possibility that they were motivated by someone with a different agenda who perhaps fed false information to the former spy. Indeed, Gubarev’s lawyer has repeatedly suggested his client might have been framed by a competitor or someone looking for a scapegoat in the computer business.

In the Alfa Group memo, the billionaire owners were said to perform unspecified political favors for Putin. Fridman and Aven allegedly sent “large amounts of illicit cash” to Putin in the 1990s when he was still a city official in St. Petersburg.

The Gubarev memo said his business “had been using botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data” in an operation against Democratic Party leaders. He was purported to have been recruited under duress by Russian security agents.

Any actions ascribed to the four Russians have never been independently confirmed by official investigations or authoritative news reports.

The Alfa Group owners do have ties to the Kremlin. Aven is a former Russian foreign trade minister, and Fridman has been said to be close to Putin. Like Fridman, Khan is Ukrainian-born and one of the original founders of the Alfa Group. However, their financial and industrial empire has also waged bare-fisted battles with other powerful Russian interests, leaving adversaries who might want to take them down.

Gubarev, who lives in Cyprus, also is a possible target for scapegoating as the owner of a Luxembourg-based digital services business with thousands of customers, subsidiaries around the world, and business relationships in Russia, the U.S. and elsewhere.

Unlike the other memos, Steele’s Alfa Group write-up concentrates on internal Russian affairs, with no direct connection to the U.S. election. The only tie is an unsupported inference in the memo’s heading that it somehow involves the topic of “Russia/US Presidential Election.”

“Mr. Fridman, Mr. Aven and Mr. Khan have absolutely nothing to do, in any way, with the issue that is the theme of the dossier — alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign,” the trio’s lawyer, Alan Lewis, said in an interview.

Oddly, the memo about Gubarev is dated five weeks after the election.

“Why the heck did he even bother to continue writing this stuff?” Gubarev’s lawyer, Valentin Gurvits, asked in an interview.

Steele has said the Gubarev memo came from unsolicited details that continued to trickle in after Trump’s election, and his lawyers have acknowledged that the memo “needed to be analyzed and further investigated/verified.”

BuzzFeed has issued an apology for publishing Gubarev’s name and redacted it in response to his complaints.

Representatives for both Steele and Fusion GPS chief executive Glenn Simpson declined to comment for this story.

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POSSIBLE MISTAKES

In a filing in the Alfa Group owners’ lawsuit, Steele’s lawyers say that memo “came from a network of vetted sources known to Mr. Steele ... and resources developed over a lifetime of Russian intelligence work in public and private service.”

However, testifying to Congress, Simpson quoted Steele as saying that any intelligence, especially from Russia, is bound to carry intentional disinformation, but that Steele believes his dossier is “largely not disinformation.”

Both men deny giving the documents to BuzzFeed.

BuzzFeed’s legal arguments don’t rely primarily on the truth of the memos. Instead, they cast the dossier as something that was under review by multiple layers of government and thus subject to news coverage as an official document, whether true or not. Judges have decided to allow that argument.

BuzzFeed News spokesman Matt Mittenthal said “the fact that these allegations were being taken seriously at the highest levels of government was in itself a real story here.”

BuzzFeed’s lawyers have acknowledged that Gubarev’s involvement could have been tangential, simply “turning a blind eye” to wrongdoing by websites he hosted.

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GUBAREV’S WORLD

Even before the Steele dossier, a 2014 lawsuit filed against Gubarev’s company in Florida opened a window on how readily associates can become adversaries in the post-Soviet business world.

The suit, dismissed last year, was filed by Depicto Commercial Ltd., a little-known company registered in the British Virgin Islands. The company contended that it lent $627,000 to Gubarev’s business and that he failed to repay as agreed; Gubarev’s side contended it repaid what was owed.

The lawsuit identifies Depicto Commercial’s principal figure as Victor Lukashenko, a Belarusian digital services businessman.

Lukashenko spent time in prison in 2010-2012 in that former Soviet republic, according to his lawyer, Rolandas Tilindis. He said Lukashenko, who is now in hiding, was accused of improperly exchanging cryptocurrency for real money as a service to customers, not realizing the currency was the product of fraud.

Gurvitz, Gubarev’s lawyer, said his client “had absolutely no relationship” with Lukashenko beyond the loan.

The Depicto Commercial lawsuit gives little detail about that company. However, a company with that name has been identified in previously leaked corporate documents from the Bahamas, with a director named Emilios Hadjivangeli. Hadjivangeli runs a corporate services business in Cyprus, Gubarev’s home and a haven for well-to-do Russians and their money.

Hadjivangeli has been listed as an official for hundreds of companies. Many appear to be so-called shell companies, where wealthy Russians and others often list intermediary strawmen as executives to hide the actual ownership.

Hadjivangeli did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Gurvitz said that his client has never heard of Hadjivangeli and that there is no reason to believe that he or Lukashenko was involved in any way with the Steele dossier.

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Dossier timeline: https://interactives.ap.org/steele-dossier-timeline/

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-everything-you-need-know-about-right-wing-theory-fbi-planted-spy-trump

Here's Everything You Need to Know About Right-Wing Theory That FBI Planted Spy in Trump Campaign

The claim relies upon the testimony of a co-founder of Fusion GPS.

By Grace Bennett / Media Matters May 18, 2018, 6:26 AM GMT

In recent days, many on the right have pushed the claim that the FBI "infiltrated" President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign with a "mole." The claim relies upon the testimony of a co-founder of Fusion GPS, the research firm that hired a former British agent who compiled an intelligence dossier about Trump’s connections to various Russians. The claim also builds off of a recent squabble between the Department of Justice and the chairman of the House intelligence committee, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), over the release of classified information. Here is what you need to know about the story’s origins:

On January 2, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, the founders of the research firm Fusion GPS, claimed in an op-ed that the FBI had a source “inside the Trump camp” during the 2016 election.

On January 9, the transcript from Simpson’s August 2017 Senate testimony was released, revealing that he had told the Senate Judiciary Committee it was his “understanding” that the bureau had an “internal Trump campaign source.” Simpson also testified during the hearing that conversations he had with the author of the dossier about Trump’s Russia connections, Christopher Steele, led him to believe that the FBI had “a human source from inside the Trump organization.”

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The same day, reporters tweeted that the Trump campaign insider Simpson referred to was George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the campaign, and that the FBI's source was an Australian diplomat who informed U.S. officials that Papadopoulos had mentioned to him receiving Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton in May 2016.

Between January 9 and January 10, both The New York Times and The Washington Post reported that the “human source” Simpson had mentioned was allegedly the Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer.

On January 18, however, a lawyer for Simpson sent a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) asserting that Simpson “stands by his testimony.” The lawyer stated that Simpson was not withdrawing his claim that Steele had “believed the FBI had another source within the Trump organization/campaign.”

On May 8, The Washington Post reported that the DOJ was refusing to hand over information requested by Nunes because it could “endanger a top-secret intelligence source.” The source, according to the Post, had developed information that was “provided to the Mueller investigation.”

Two days later, The Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel published an op-ed in which she speculated that the FBI may have secretly had a source “who used his or her non-FBI credentials” to interact with the Trump campaign.

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Strassel wrote in the Journal that the DOJ and the FBI “outright hid critical information from a congressional investigation," which could mean that the FBI had a spy linked to the Trump campaign.

Strassel wrote that “When government agencies refer to sources, they mean people who appear to be average citizens but use their profession or contacts to spy for the agency,” asserting that the FBI could have secretly planted a source who interacted with the Trump campaign.

According to Strassel, any such move on the FBI’s part would “amount to spying.”

Strassel also concluded that "Now we find [the FBI] may have also been rolling out human intelligence, John Le Carré style, to infiltrate the Trump campaign."

Strassel doubled down on her assertion during a May 11 appearance on Fox News, claiming, “The FBI was using human intelligence to spy on a presidential campaign.”

Right-Wing Media Is Pushing the Spy Theory

Radio host Rush Limbaugh claimed he knows “who the spy is” and that this person was “like an operative employed by the FBI to basically entrap somebody who worked with the Trump campaign in a peripheral way.” He also said that Papadopoulos “was entrapped by three people, including the person who is reputed to be the spy."

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Fox’s Sean Hannity argued that there was a spy embedded in the campaign and called the Strassel op-ed a “stunning new development” that raises “serious concerns and questions about the possibility [of] the F.B.I. planting a mole inside the Trump campaign.”

The hosts of Fox & Friends devoted multiple segments to Strassel’s op-ed and also highlighted Limbaugh’s theory that the FBI planted a “spy” to “entrap” Trump associates. Fox’s Pete Hegseth argued that Limbaugh is “on to something,” and co-host Steve Doocy asked, “Was the FBI out to frame candidate Donald Trump?”

Trump sycophant and Fox Business host Lou Dobbs tweeted: “#ExposeTheMole- FBI & DOJ planted an spy in @realDonaldTrump’s 2016 campaign & didn’t tell congressional investigators.”

During an appearance on Hannity’s radio show, Fox’s Sara Carter claimed, “It appears [the FBI] had somebody that was reporting back on information inside the Trump campaign, which would mean that they had a mole connected to people in the Trump campaign or within the Trump campaign.” Carter repeated the report on Hannity’s prime-time Fox News show, claiming, “Yes, I believe [the FBI] did have an informant, somebody that was reporting back to them.”

The Daily Caller pushed the narrative in an article about Rep. Ron DeSantis’ (R-FL) appearance on Fox News: “Ron DeSantis Says He May Know Who Was Spying On The Trump Campaign: ‘There Needs To Be Follow Up’.”

Pro-Trump site The Gateway Pundit ran multiple articles by founder Jim Hoft that pushed the claim, including one in which Hoft claimed to know the “probable” identity of the “spy,” and another that argued there were multiple “deep state” sources.

Far-right fringe blog Zero Hedge posted Strassel’s op-ed with the headline, “WSJ: The FBI Hid A Mole In The Trump Campaign,” even though Strassel never claimed the “mole” was actually inside the campaig

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%E2%80%93Russia_dossier

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