The FBI received numerous red flags about the dossier and its author, former British spy Christopher Steele, who was paid, through intermediaries, by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the 2016 presidential campaign of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.Īlready in 2015, the FBI’s Transnational Organized Crime Intelligence Unit (TOCIU) recommended that Steele should be vetted again as an FBI informant because of his numerous contacts with Russian oligarchs. The FBI later confirmed that at least two of the warrant’s three renewals were invalid and thus resulted in illegal surveillance. The IG reviewed the probe and found more than a dozen problems with the Page warrant, at least one serious enough to prompt a referral for criminal inquiry. The investigation ultimately was unable to establish any such collusion. The FBI used it to obtain a highly intrusive FISA warrant to spy on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. The dossier claimed collusion between the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald Trump and the Russian government to sway the 2016 presidential election. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who released them on April 15. That contradicts what the former head of FBI counterintelligence, Bill Priestap, told the IG: that by May 2017, the bureau “didn’t have any indication whatsoever” of disinformation in the dossier.Ī number of footnotes in the IG report were partially declassified at the request of Sens. The FBI learned in January 2017 that a part of the dossier was assessed by a certain source to be a product of Russian disinformation, according to a previously redacted footnote in a December report ( pdf) by the Justice Department’s inspector general (IG). A claim by a former senior FBI official that there was no indication of Russian disinformation in the 2016 Clinton campaign’s anti-Trump dossier has been contradicted by newly declassified information.
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