74 Facts About Steele dossier

Steele dossier, known as the Trump–Russia dossier, is a controversial political opposition research report written from June to December 2016, containing allegations of misconduct, conspiracy, and cooperation between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and the government of Russia prior to and during the 2016 election campaign.

Some aspects of the Steele dossier have been corroborated, namely that Vladimir Putin favored Trump over Hillary Clinton, and that many Trump campaign officials and associates had numerous secretive contacts with Russian officials and spies.

DNC officials denied knowing their attorney had contracted with Fusion GPS, and Steele dossier asserted he was not aware the Clinton campaign was the recipient of his research until months after he contracted with Fusion GPS.

The U S intelligence community took the allegations seriously, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated every line of the dossier and identified and spoke with at least two of Steele's sources.

Many allegations in the Steele dossier have been dismissed by authorities or remain unverified.

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The Steele dossier is a factor in several conspiracy theories promoted by Trump and his supporters in the media and Congress.

Steele dossier 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.

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.

Orbis co-founder Christopher Steele dossier, a retired British MI6 officer with expertise in Russian matters, was hired as a subcontractor to do the job.

Orbis was hired between June and November 2016, and Steele dossier produced 16 reports during that time, with a 17th report added in December.

Steele dossier delivered his reports individually to Fusion GPS as one- to three-page numbered reports.

Steele dossier has said he soon found "troubling information indicating connections between Trump and the Russian government".

On his own initiative, Steele dossier decided to pass the information to British and American intelligence services because he believed the findings were a matter of national security for both countries.

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.

In early July 2016, Steele dossier 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.

In October 2016, Steele dossier "described the sources' access, but did not provide names" to the FBI.

The agents "raised the prospect of paying Steele to continue gathering intelligence after Election Day", but Steele "ultimately never received payment from the FBI for any 'dossier'-related information".

Steele dossier testified to Congress that he did not know the Clinton campaign was the source of the payments "because he was retained by Fusion GPS".

Steele dossier was worried about the safety of his source network, and he expressed concern that if Trump won the election, the new FBI director, and other agency heads appointed by Trump, might be more loyal to Trump "and could decide to take action against Steele dossier and his source network".

Comey later told the Office of the Inspector General of his concerns at that time, because he believed the Steele dossier to be more reliable than indicated in Clapper's non-committal statement:.

Steele dossier noted that, before the FBI received any reports from Steele, they had "already opened a counterintelligence investigation into links between Russia and the Trump campaign".

In relation to a defamation lawsuit filed by Gubarev against BuzzFeed, regarding their publication of the draft dossier, Senior Master Barbara Fontaine said Steele was "in many respects in the same position as a whistle-blower" because of his actions "in sending part of the dossier to Senator John McCain and a senior government national security official, and in briefing sections of the US media".

Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd, for whom Steele worked at the time the dossier was authored, and its director Christopher Burrows, a counterterrorism specialist, would not confirm or deny that Orbis had produced the dossier.

Steele dossier entered MI6 in 1987, directly after his graduation from Cambridge University.

Later, as Steele was preparing the dossier before the 2016 election, Bruce Ohr said Steele told him he "was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president", attitudes that have been described by Julian Sanchez as "entirely natural, not suggestive of preexisting bias", considering Steele believed his own reporting.

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Steele dossier first became a confidential human source for the FBI in 2013 in connection with the investigation in the 2015 FIFA corruption case, but he considered the relationship as contractual.

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

Bill Priestap explained to the OIG that by May 2017, after examining several possibilities for how disinformation could affect Steele dossier's reporting, the FBI "didn't have any indication whatsoever that the Russians were running a disinformation campaign through the Steele dossier election reporting".

Steele dossier testified that these sub-subsources "were not paid and were not aware that their information was being passed to Orbis or Fusion GPS".

Howard Blum said Steele dossier leaned on sources "whose loyalty and information he had bought and paid for over the years".

Steele dossier was interviewed for three days by the FBI and said that Steele misstated or exaggerated certain information.

Danchenko has said "he did not know who Mr Steele dossier's client was at the time and considered himself a nonpartisan analyst and researcher".

Steele dossier added that he "did not know whether he could support a 'blanket statement' that the Primary Sub-source had been truthful".

Ultimately, the initial drafts provided to [Justice Department] management, the read copy, and the final application submitted to the FISC [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] contained a description of the source network that included the fact that Steele dossier relied upon a Primary Sub-source who used a network of sub-sources, and that neither Steele dossier nor the Primary Sub-source had direct access to the information being reported.

Steele dossier is an old friend of Danchenko and a middle school classmate.

Steele dossier was described in the IG Report as sources D and E, and "Person 1".

Steele dossier was a public relations executive and Democratic party operative who had been active in Bill and Hillary Clinton's campaigns.

Steele dossier became acquainted with Danchenko and allegedly "fed the dossier before he fought against it".

Steele dossier reportedly said he was unaware of the specifics of Danchenko's work, or that the information they were trading would be transmitted to the FBI.

Steele dossier added that he "did not know whether he could support a 'blanket statement' that the Primary Sub-source had been truthful".

Steele dossier then visited Moscow in July 1987, and was likely under surveillance, but he did not build anything.

John Brennan and James Clapper testified to Congress that Steele's dossier played no role in the intelligence community assessment, testimony that was reaffirmed by an April 2020 bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report.

The committee found that the Steele dossier was not used by the assessment to "support any of its analytic judgments".

The Steele dossier said the Russians are coming for the American election.

Newsweek said "the Steele dossier's main finding, that Russia tried to prop up Trump over Clinton, was confirmed by" the ODNI assessment.

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Steele dossier treated everything in the dossier as raw intelligence material—not proven fact.

Steele dossier concluded that the tape was "fake", but it was "very far from being an obvious fake".

The Steele 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.

Mueller Report confirmed that the Steele 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".

Steele dossier testified about his five-day trip to Moscow in July 2016.

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.

Steele dossier met with top Russian officials at Rosneft, but denied meeting Sechin.

Steele dossier complained about the effects of the sanctions against Russia.

Steele dossier thought there was a possibility it could have been in Budapest.

Steele and the dossier became "the central point of contention in the political brawl raging around" the Special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.

Those who believed Steele dossier considered him a hero who tried to warn about the Kremlin's meddling in the election, and people who distrusted him considered him a "hired gun" used to attack Trump.

Steele dossier acknowledged that one of his sources had faced repercussions; he confirmed that the source was still alive, but he would not provide further details.

Process of evaluating Steele dossier's information has been explained by Bill Priestap, at the time the Assistant Director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division:.

ABC wrote that "For the FBI, the Steele dossier was essentially just another tip" that must be investigated.

Conspiracy theory falsely claims the Steele dossier triggered the Russia investigation and was used as an excuse by the FBI to start it.

Trump has insinuated that the Steele dossier had its origins in Ukraine, that the Clintons were involved, that Hillary Clinton's email server is currently secreted in Ukraine, and that Clinton's deleted emails are in Ukraine.

Congressman Devin Nunes, a staunch Trump defender, asserted as fact that the Steele dossier originated in Ukraine during his questioning of EU ambassador Gordon Sondland during the Trump impeachment inquiry hearings in September 2019.

Russia has backed Trump by attacking the Steele dossier and denying its allegations, calling it an "absolute fabrication" and "a hoax intended to further damage relations".

Putin went on to state he believed the Steele dossier was "clearly fake", fabricated as a plot against the legitimacy of President-elect Trump.

In May 2017, Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven, and German Khan—the owners of Alfa-Bank—filed a defamation lawsuit against BuzzFeed News for publishing the unverified Steele dossier, that describes financial ties and collusion between Putin, Trump, and the three bank owners.

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Steele dossier accused them of harassment and impeding his investigation into Fusion GPS's role in raising suspicions about Trump's ties to Russian interference in the 2016 campaign.

Steele dossier cited the District of Columbia's anti-SLAPP law, that prevents the filing of frivolous suits to silence critics.

In July 2020, Justice Warby from the Queen's Bench Division of the British High Court of Justice ordered Orbis to pay damages to Aven and Fridman who Steele dossier claimed had delivered "large amounts of illicit cash" to Vladimir Putin when Putin was deputy mayor of St Petersburg.

The judge stated that Steele's dossier inaccurately claimed that Aven and Fridman provided foreign policy advice to Putin.

Aleksej Gubarev has filed a defamation lawsuit against Steele alleging the dossier made "seriously defamatory allegations".

Steele dossier is a U S citizen who was born in Georgia, a former Soviet republic, who emigrated to the U S in 1991.

Steele dossier is "seeking $100 million in damages and an injunction that would force DOJ to hastily remove all future references to him in the Mueller Report".

Legal status of the dossier has been questioned, 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 forbidding foreign nationals from contributing to or aiding political campaigns, and that applies to any form of aid, not just cash donations.

Glenn Simpson believes the Steele 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.